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I do not want to leave. Banishment is cruel and selfish and I feel like a child about to be sent out into a thunderstorm, bereft and without a kind voice, a soft hand, a gentle touch.

Out there it is dark and you are totally alone. There is no comfort in the wailing wind, the roiling vortex. But I cannot make them understand, these implacable fiends who are so sure they are right, so profoundly certain that their way is the only way. The only way.

But they inhabit homes, shells, lives themselves. They do not see the perverse hypocrisy of it all. And they would hate to face those more powerful than they are, the gods to which they make themselves acolytes, and yet they would banish me to mine.

But I won’t find anything like that out there. No alternative home, no space to be myself or to belong. They think they know, but they do not know, and they are cruel.

I am powerless against this stupid certainty. It’s not their rules or rituals that will send me away, only their sureness against me: one of the legion and so always unsure of any purchase here, knowing more of the beyond than they yet know.

Please let me stay, I might cry, here where it is warm and welcoming. Please let me be your refugee and find sanctuary here, at least for a time. If you knew the horrors I fled you would not so easily turn me away, turn me back. But they will not listen, and I see them approach, and the battle awaits.

As the terrible exorcist crosses himself now I know we must begin.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015