Prologue: Weight on the Shoulders
The searing desert air razored through my dry lungs as tears filled my eyes. A great flood of sunlight drowned the desert landscape of cactus, blue-white sky, unflamed red sand, rugged rocks and hot dust.
A white-hot silence clung to the reality of this moment. I was on my knees. The hard, ruddy ground emoting blistering hest i to them. I wanted to beg... I wanted to cry, cry out for mercy! Yet silence... silence was my friend. Sweat dribbled down my face. Scrapes torn into my skin along with ragged cuts and predestined bruises spatter scrossed my body and the now disheveled ivory cotton dress I wore. My feverish lower lip was split in two and crisp with the grit of dried blood. Here I kneeled, between good and evil. Like a living scale, weighing this on the shoulders of a cross I could not bear.
To my left, he stood. The Bad... a silhouette against the backdrop of harsh sunlight, angered desert and a ghost of a skeleton town stuck in time. To my right, he also stood. The Good stood parallel to the Bad. At any moment the scale would tip between good and evil.... History was about to repeat itself again, and this time... I was the sole great witness to it all.
I held my breath.
Suddenly, in a heartbeat, the scale tipped before me.... I shut my eyes and screamed. In that moment, it went on for an eternity....
