The Reward of The Oolyay Read Online Free Page B

who surrounded the Necrologist.
    They seemed so troubled by these words, words for strange weapons that Inlojem didn't understand. They looked like old men, if only for a moment, in their ponderous, concerned gazes. It led the old Vesh to invite a moment of doubt into his own mind, as he looked back beyond the town towards the distant smoldering wasteland that had been created by the falling alien ship. Even though he had already known, for the first time he understood that this was happening throughout the world; alien ships were crashing and eviscerating villages, towns and whole cities.
    Inlojem watched The Ulgayir fade into the horizon of smoky ash and disappear as the truck struggled up the mountain paths, almost throwing him from the bench at each bump in the road. Inlojem knew that next to him, The Prophet Iogi stared at him with what seemed to be longing, keeping the child within his peripheral vision.
    “You are the death-priest?” Iogi asked.
    “Yes,” Inlojem replied coldly, keeping his eyes squarely on The Ulgayir as its points vanished. Inlojem had learned to detest child prophets because they had been so deeply corrupted by the Hagayalicks, who spoiled them and pampered them for every muttering line of tripe that came into their vacant, materialistic minds. Those children were undisciplined, royal and vicious, lying about someone they hated so that person would be killed by the Hagayalicks. Other times they simply spun myths out of their own creativity, and established new rituals just because they could. Eventually they would turn into Necrologists who killed, raped and tortured anyone who they proclaimed an enemy.
    They were nothing like the child-prophets of Oolyay, whose very existences were predicated around suffering. In the early days, in the days of The Shades, when Shades would prowl from town to town and spread their plague across the land, the children of the Oolyay were brought forward through mishap and terror. The joy of those who received them, to see children spared by the vicious Shades was intense, but the suffering of their bodies was equally miserable. Their flesh were blighted with an unquenchable hunger at first, which would have to be fed until the fever subsided. Afterwards there was always dementia; a bout of sheer insanity where the deepest, unknown secrets of the Oolyay spewed forth into the cold world of Veshmali through the child’s unfiltered lips and betrayed the cruel God.
    Visions of the future seeped into the demented eyes of these young, malformed children, and were muttered from their whispering mouths, consumed with awe. Their only surcease from suffering came from the old Necrologists, from roots and medicines that only slowed the process but quickened the hallucinations. Inlojem had treated twenty of them and remembered each little face. He remembered watching them rock back and forth, side to side, their eyes losing their vital redness each day. The color was obfuscated with black, with the Oolyay’s darkness, until finally out of their mouths would come the muffled mentions of another dimension, where they could see the whole future as clear as a tri-moon-lit night.
      Then the Uyor Sevoign had arrived with their cure. Their doctors, dressed in beige sanitary robes and wearing latex gloves, dispersed like lurking tethaguls through the town and pricked the arms of child prophets with needles. Those doctors looked at Vesh like Inlojem and Quantelenk and asked them questions like “how could you,” and “Did you know this was happening?” assuming he had the intellect of a child. He had brought Vesh back to life before. He knew.
    It wasn’t long before the eyes of the remaining Oolyay child-prophets cleared and, exceedingly bothered by the bastard children of their makeshift Hagayalick allies, they had disappeared. They wandered out to the outskirts of the town and then over the mountains and simply ceased to exist. One or two took their lives with their own