The Color of Devotion

You raise your nose at me in the wake of victory and choose to wear defiance. And yet, your rebellion is my favorite performance.

My time here has filled my head with colors; the most vivid and bright of them I’ve been forced to live in is The Red. When I close my eyes, I see the Red Room. I know He’s in there, but He refuses to be seen. His only wish is to be felt. Not with words, but with the weighted presence that leaves me breathless and begging for a less addictive and smokeless air. His message reaches my spine and settles at the nape of my neck, making it so He’s never perceived as absent. My time with the color Red is my time with the color of Him.

I find myself embodied in the Red Halls beneath my lids. I carry physical form when my legs wade through a dense river of water, and the tips of my fingers glide across the slick, tiled walls.  The water ripples, and tiles tremble when I feel His word slip beneath my skin and dance on my spasming muscles, and I stop cold, trying to decipher the hateful feeling He’s sent this time.  I try not to shed so much as a cold shudder when The Room’s air sharpens, and its intensified pulse moves behind my ribs to address me directly. 

“Keep winning,” it hums, “The Room only becomes Redder when you do.”

I shake a shiver through my limbs when I hear a faint wailing beneath my feet.

The pulse is thrilling. When mine races, the rhythm of The Red Room sets itself, and I can feel mine and hear His in tandem. The room reveals itself only in increments. I can’t tell if it’s my eyes or the flicker of a shorted light that starts to go in and out. Luckily, there isn’t a path other than the one He’s presented to me, although The Red Hall seems to narrow the further I trek into it. Eventually, I’m able to hold both walls closely with each hand as I trace the tiles’ grooves with my pinkies. I wonder if time reverses when droplets on the wall roll upward instead of down.

I turn a corner and walk into an open room, tiled in ceramic. The echo of my footsteps rumbles longer than I expect as I walk toward the sink and the mirror reminiscent of a public bathroom at a rundown nightclub. I lean on the sink and try to make out my own reflection in the shattered mirror. I narrow my eyes and look at my features, split and sectioned off across cracks and canyons in the glass. I look down at the pants of my jumpsuit, absorbing the river at my knees. The red in my jumpsuit still camouflages me in the light, but the smell of sulfur begins to replace itself with a new smell so pungent that suddenly, I can taste iron.  

My ears pop. Then silence.

"You chose to stay.”

He stands behind me. The room almost feels real.

“I have a deal to reverse,” I say.

“Might I remind you… Returning to your life was never guaranteed,” the echo in His voice falters, and the speech that bounces from ceramic to my ears begins to sound… human. “What makes you so sure you’ll be on the winning end of my trials?”

“I’m not.”

I’m still not sure why I walked away. The path home felt cold and blistering. I could feel its dreadful breeze; unwelcoming familiarity. There must be a reason I chose to be here, so I didn’t have to be there.

Going back meant choosing the reality I agreed to after our handshake deal. A reality where He gives Lillith new life… only for her to take that new life and decide it still wasn’t enough.

“You are also not guaranteed to find her here,” he projects. He knows what I’m thinking. It’s unnerving to know He hears my thoughts. He hears my uncertainty, my pain, and the limits of what I’m willing to risk, and my willingness to throw away what might have been a smart decision in a smarter person’s mind.

But in that promised reality, my eternal path still led me right back to this place. So if I’m to come back here at the end of a life I’m hardly willing to live, why not extend my stay and finish what I started?

“So it’s a possibility?” I retort.

“Your devotion to damnation and uncertainty is awfully… optimistic,” he prods.

“Maybe the course I’m on is more guaranteed than you think.”

“You maneuver yourself around my domain with a comfort and familiarity about you that confirms to me that you dare paint your delusions as confidence. Well, allow me to remind you,” His voice then sounds as if it comes from inside my head.

“... Even when you leave… 

She will still be mine.”

I’m in the cell. My mind starts to clear like an episode of sleep paralysis is fading away.

I can hardly tell what’s real and what’s an illusion anymore. I grab at the blanket on my bed and scrunch it between my fingers to ground myself, and when I do, I stop floating. Reality sets in.

If he wanted me dead, he’d have done it by now. But he needs me – the way I need him to hate me. He keeps me alive, not out of mercy, but curiosity. I keep living to prove his curiosity wrong. I think sometimes He admires me – but only in the way a storm admires what refuses to drown.

I’m here for her.

Lilith.

I’m here to set her free. To avenge the sacrifice she never intended to make. However, when he speaks… When he looks at me, I question my own motive: am I still fighting for her, or am I fighting to outlast Him… to be the first soul he can’t break?