Bernard and Clare sat in the orchard with Lady Zina, as she rested and enjoyed her day.

“I don’t understand why Lord Shiva grows so angry at certain things Satan does. Didn’t he know that already?”, Clare mused.

“I think I understand it, but I am open to our Lady’s correction”, Bernard smiled. “I think he grows especially angry when Satan commits crimes against innocence, as he sees himself as the ultimate protector of the innocent”.

“You are completely right”, Zina smiled back. “I’ve seen what the Turks are doing. They are using strength to intimidate, they target the innocent and the most vulnerable, and they also target the most virtuous ones, making an example out of them by subjecting them to a particularly cruel and torturous death. They enslave women and children. They treat innocence as a weakness to be exploited, and they bow to Satan for his strength. In hindsight, what traumatised me was the attack on innocence and this terrible boastful attitude that behaved as if strength is on their side, and its purpose isn’t to protect innocence, but exploit and destroy it. That’s also what traumatised Lady Hypatia – when an innocent, virtuous family was attacked by Satan from a position of worldly power, as if God can’t help them and he’s the only God”.

“And Lord Shiva sees himself as the power in service of goodness, kindness and innocence; a wall of ultimate strength that protects them and allows them to flourish and express themselves, and doesn’t take kindly to villains and bullies”, Bernard nodded approvingly. “Also, he knows that if something brought a Goddess to tears, it’s a serious problem and then he immediately deals with it. I love his decisiveness in dealing with evil, and also his measures to repair the damage and strengthen the good and the innocent”.

“What do your new jewels feel like, and what are they doing?”, Clare changed the subject.

“They are allowing me to feel empathy and kindness without taking emotional damage”, Zina’s sight turned inwards. “In essence, they are a shield that protects me when I make myself vulnerable, giving me perspective that corrects for the drawback of the process; they light up with great power as I am exposed to terrible things, and this shields my soul from injury”.

“Why didn’t the elders give the Judges such protections to begin with?”

“I don’t know, but I suspect they didn’t expect terrible things of this magnitude to be taking place so frequently, that we couldn’t handle ourselves. After all, our work strengthens us – it gives us experience, perspective and straightforward spiritual magnitude, from all the virtuous karmic actions that we perform, and from all the small injuries we take, and heal. It’s a very rewarding work. But occasionally, we encounter things that traumatise us. It used to be once every long while, but as of recent, it’s been a barrage of terror; imagine looking at a soul that enslaved children, raped their mothers and impaled their fathers as they rose up to protect their families. And not once every five centuries, but every hour. The inability to protect the innocent feels terrible, which is the reason we all love Lord Shiva so much. He is the ultimate wall around us, that allows us to sit here in peace and be kind and vulnerable without fear, instead of being under armour and weapons all the time”.

“I think I understand now. He is the ultimate male power”, Chiara nodded. “He builds a wall around the innocent, and kills a prowling wolf. Then, when the innocent ask what he was doing, he says he was out fishing”, she giggled, as Bernard grinned and nodded in approval.

“I approached my work with the same sentiment. I would identify the wolves that prowled and tried to seduce the innocent, and I would make an example out of them. Seeing Lord Shiva deal with evil and shield the good makes me feel the power of righteousness of God”, he nodded. “The children can only giggle safely in the grass if the wolf is cowering in fear. Righteousness needs to have teeth, lest it become a mockery”.

“About the wolf; I don’t expect the Turks to suddenly become any better?”, his wife wondered.

“No, but they will feel deep instinctive terror when they think about doing evil deeds. It was there before, but it is much stronger now, and Satan’s attractors can no longer mask it. There is a terror of ultimate doom that looks at them from the place where they used to feel power and safety before”, Zina shrugged. “If that doesn’t work, I will throw them into hell when they arrive, and hell now has teeth and will devour them permanently, instead of merely storing them safely, and the terror of that hell feeds that feeling of doom that the Lord linked deeply to the world”.

“I fear worse forms of spiritual corruption than the Turks”, Bernard mused. “And Satan might exploit the new developments in order to whine about God not allowing free will because the souls get punished if they don’t do as he likes”.

“You’re probably right about both”, Zina shrugged. “The Turks rule with fear, but something attractive yet poisonous will likely prove more destructive. And about freedom, I think he misunderstands its meaning. Freedom isn’t ability to do whatever you like – for instance, go to this place and crucify and impale the innocent souls and laugh at their cries. Freedom is a state when the innocent souls can sit here in peace, have coffee and love each other in complete safety from him and all else that is evil”, she smiled. “Freedom is a state where God is manifested in his true nature, and the wolf trembles in fear, in dark places”.

“And people like myself will hunt him even there”, Bernard nodded. “Because there must be no safe place for evil to hide and gather strength”.

“I think I will go see the elders and ask to serve as a Judge myself. I kind of miss my old job”, he smiled.

“And wherever you go, I will follow”, Chiara nodded and embraced him.

“It’s a literal hell on Earth”, Zina shivered, venting to her husband. “I mean, I’ve been around for a long time”.

“Since the times of Gilgamesh?”, Buddha smiled.

“More-less”, she nodded. “And I’ve seen violence, and cruelty, and ignorance, and madness, and evil”. Her face was dark. “Islam was always a great evil, but the Turks, they are probably its worst manifestation. The Assyrians were extremely cruel, but these, if anything, are taking the crown. Do you know what their version of a national pastime is? Impalement. They are out-doing each other, inventing more cruel ways to do it, for instance how to make the victim live longer. Their actions are turning them into such monsters, I had no alternative to throwing them all to hell. The problem is, this spiritual disease is spreading. I recently had to deal with a Wallachian ruler, Vlad Dracula, who not only adopted this pastime of the Turks, but elevated the practice to a whole new level. At one point he impaled twenty thousand people as a deterrent to the Turks. He was so obsessed with it, that when he was imprisoned by the Hungarians, in the dungeon he used to impale rats, birds and other small animals. Satan is really turning people into his own image there”, she cried. “They learn to be so cruel and evil, that nothing can be done to repair the damage. Their victims, traumatised as they may be, are quite easy for me to heal. The perpetrators of those evils, on the other hand, are so spiritually warped, that it is fortunate that there’s no shortage of space in hell, for it would be overflowing with those I dumped in there recently. It’s a tragedy, but it is also their choice. Each of them had the option to rather die than do evil. I have seen many who did just that, and such choices made them wonderful, regardless of the terrible suffering some of them went through”, she sighed.

“The Turks, they are abducting Christian children. They call it devshirme, a tribute in blood. The boys are trained to be an especially cruel infantry force for the empire, the Janissaries, or they are castrated and put to service in the harems. They are raised in Islam, taught to be cruel and evil. The eunuchs in the harems enforce cruel discipline upon the women, whipping their feet for disobedience or strangling them to death with a silken scarf when the order comes. When there’s a change of a Sultan, the new one usually ‘refreshes’ the harem, ordering all the girls to be murdered and the ‘fresh’ ones brought in. They treat living people like furniture”, she sobbed.

Lord Buddha embraced her. “Satan must be smiling at them, for they are creating the kind of a world and are being the kind of people he desires – warped, cruel and without God”.

“It’s interesting how they think they are all about God – Allah this, Allah that, they are constantly praying, bowing and other nonsense, while turning into Satan incarnate”, she noted. “I’m seriously traumatised, I need time off to heal from this”.

“What we need”, he nodded, “is to elevate this problem to the higher-ups”.

…

“You are not the only Judge who is traumatised by the recent surge of cruelty and madness”, Lord Shiva comforted Lady Zina, kissing her hand. “But something needs to be done about this, as it is getting out of hand”, he nodded to himself. “We need a final punishment, and a deterrent”. He lifted a finger, and black lightning flashed. “I killed everybody in that hell where you’ve been putting the cruel and merciless bastards. And now…”, his sight turned inwards and a flash of gold went through the world. “Now a warning has been placed in that world. Treat others cruelly and mercilessly, become a subject of Satan, become an expression of his will in the world, and your fate is sealed. Eternal death, no mercy”, he nodded. “I modified that hell, as well. It is now destructive. We used to keep them there in case we found a way to rehabilitate them. I kept my eye on them there – there was no rehabilitation, no desire to do better and be better. Just resentment, evil, a desire for vengeance upon the Gods, and the only regret they had was for things not ending well for them. There is no place for that kind of beings in any world. They had their free will and they chose to be thus. Now God is manifesting His free will not to allow them to exist. Cleanup will eventually have to be done, but Earth is going to be a serious cleanup job in any case, so this doesn’t make much of a difference”, he grinned. “As for you, sweetheart, I am sorry you had to witness all that evil. This goes for all the other Judges as well. Let me make it up to you, at least somewhat”, he smiled and a golden light flashed, replacing their spiritual injuries and weariness with jewels of highest energy density, that would protect them from all similar damage in the future.

“Wow”, Zina mouthed silently.

“You really do get shit done”, Buddha grinned at Lord Shiva.

“Kindness and mercy are my first, second and third choices”, the Great Lord smiled back. “But when someone laughs at mercy, and thinks cruelty is their strength, I’m here to remind everyone that mercy is not here because I lack other options”, black fire flashed in his eyes.

“Submission to Satan is not a safe choice. It’s a death sentence. And I made that message ring loud and clear”.

“They are free to fuck around, but I am also free to make them find out”.

“What is happening down there?” Padmasambhava and his wives were, quite expectedly, overrun by the millions of confused newcomers who were more interested in the bare fundamentals of their new situation, than complex theory. As a result, they felt as if they’re forced to teach kindergarten. Of the kind where ‘children’ were all raving lunatics.

“You know about the plague”, Kay smiled at her friend and handed him a cup, which he gratefully accepted. “The physical issues with the interruption of lives and destruction of the sophisticated aspects of the European civilization are obvious. However, there are also sociological and geopolitical ramifications. The Mongol empire seems to be collapsing because of the plague. Constantinople is half-empty, because half the population died. It is not going to be able to resist Muslim invasion, which is going to be either very bad or outright terrible, depending on the level of resistance Europe will be able to field to counter their advance, but Constantinople was the last heavily fortified position. On the positive side, Spain seems to be gaining ground and will likely oust the invaders from their part of Europe”, she made a dispassionate delivery.

“The worse problem is that Europe went mad. There seems to be a biological reason why infectious disease and xenophobia and paranoia are very tightly correlated. Obviously, strangers tend to introduce pathogens your group doesn’t have immunity for, and getting rid of strangers is a biological instinct for dealing with epidemics. Unfortunately, it almost never seems to work right. And also, they don’t have an intellectual understanding of infectious diseases. Their theories are all completely wrong as they don’t understand the concept of microscopic organisms that cause infection. They think it’s caused by a combination of impure environment and personal moral weakness. So, as the Catholic clergy assisted the sick and the dying, they disproportionally got infected and died, which people interpreted as a sign of moral corruption of the Church, and not a sign of compassion, which it was. On the other hand, as some group didn’t get sick, people interpreted it as a sign that they are the ones who ‘poisoned’ them, and persecuted those minorities – the Jews, for instance. Also, as neither the official medicine nor the Church could help them, people asked all sorts of weird groups for helps – remnants of Paganism, village herbalists, various heretical groups hiding from the public eye, and outright witches; you know the kind, usually some old woman making potions and powders that contain all sorts of dangerous substances that can kill you if you mess up the dosage, and are hallucinogenic in the best of cases. So, you have a population that is already more than half crazy. You have a witch that gives someone a strong hallucinogen prepared from plants, toads and fungi. That person hallucinates Satan and demons. Everybody concludes that the witch is in league with the Devil if she can summon him to torture the poor person. Occasionally the victim of poisoning actually dies due to overdose. People decide that the witches caused the plague because they are in league with the Devil, and they invent all sorts of stories, and it soon becomes completely insane and loses almost all touch with reality. They torture the witch until she would confess that she personally killed Jesus, and use ‘confession’ as confirmation of their insane theories. They bring that to the Inquisition, which tells them that they are insane and it’s all in their heads, but they don’t accept the answer because the Church is ‘discredited’ and they go to the worldly authorities, which burn the woman at a stake as entertainment for the crazy mob. Also, they burn the Jews and the occasional heretic for good measure. In addition to that, the Church has a problem, because so many monks and clerics died from the plague, that their monasteries are empty and they try to fill them with people who are sorely unqualified compared to the cream of the crop they used to collect earlier. As a result, the standard of education of the clergy is greatly inferior and the reputation of the Church degrades further. All kinds of things try to fill the vacuum, from the developing sciences to outright nonsense; but mostly outright nonsense. The top of the Church handles mostly politics. Since there is a serious drop in the spiritual level of the whole civilization, various complaints form against the Church, and there is increasing talk of need for reformation, but there’s nothing concrete yet. There is, however, abundance of prejudice, paranoia, xenophobia, hatred and spiritual darkness. There’s going to be a terrible century at least, and then, I’m afraid, Satan’s actual plans are going to start coming to fruition, and we’ll see his attractors starting to match or even overpower the Divine light we managed to permeate the world with”.

“No wonder I’ve been getting all sorts of weird questions from the newcomers”, he nodded. “And by weird, I mean all sorts of nonexistent demons and nonsense which they treat as if they were fact and not hallucination. Their grasp on reality is tenuous at best, which makes our work here twice as hard as it ought to be, because we first need to dissuade them of outright nonsense, which is hard, and only then can we teach them anything true and useful, which is all taking a toll on us. Imagine trying to talk to a person who thinks the Jews caused the plague by consorting with all sorts of demons to poison wells, and that their madness and base urges are caused by succubi, incubi and other sorts of nonexistent demonic beings sent by the Jews and the witches. And if you convince them it’s all nonsense, then they think absolutely everything spiritual is unreal and nonsense as well”, he sighed in exasperation. “We are tired of this”.

Kay just hugged him. “Please try to hold on. Hopefully it will get better, but until then, I can buy you breathing room by freezing local time for those crowds, so that you can take some time off whenever you feel overwhelmed, which seems to be now”. Her jewel flashed, and the masses of disturbed souls froze in place. “Go take the girls somewhere and meditate. Or swim in a pond. Or tickle Jess and Mandy for me”, she giggled. “They won’t even know you were missing until I release them”.

“Thank you, sweetheart”, he sighed deeply and managed a smile. “You are a life saver”.

The Inquisitor walked towards a woman who set alone in the orchard, resting. “Lady Zina”, he bowed and sat across her. “I don’t want to bother you, but there’s something I have to tell you”.

“Hello Bernard”, she nodded and smiled back.

“I want you to know how much of an impression it made upon me when I saw you yesterday; so tired you were about to pass out”, he smiled. “I know how much effort you put into explaining things to me as you judged my life, and so I can imagine how much it must have taken to get you so exhausted, and yet, you kept going, because it was your duty, and because you’re an embodiment of God’s love”.

“When we first met, you jested that you are no more Christian than Christ is Zinian. I just wanted to know that as of yesterday, I consider myself ‘Zinian’, if that is a word”, he grinned. “I talked to the Tibetans and Christ about it, and they explained how those things work so I’m no longer confused. I now consider you my primary spiritual allegiance. You are the Goddess I worship; and of course Christ and his holy parents, but yesterday it clicked for me, when I saw you here in the orchard, half dead from exhaustion, but holding yourself together in firm discipline because you felt bound by love and duty. It is as if my soul reacted to you and told me: this is what God feels like, and I said ‘yes’”, he finished, as the teary eyed Goddess approached to hug him in silence. The light in his heart exploded, and all impurities on the lower elements left him, and he crystallised into vajra, and continued growing, then and there, drinking devotion to his Goddess of love and duty.

…

Two women sat in comfortable silence. It was good here. No worldly people with discordant thoughts to bother them. Nature was more beautiful than anywhere on Earth, and free from all the impurities and annoyances such as ants, mud or animal droppings.

“I’m sorry you had to arrive just after the worst of the plague, when all the Judges were dropping off their feet with exhaustion, Catherine”, Clare of Montefalco finally broke the silence. She saw it as her duty to help the newly arrived woman adjust, although she herself was here only of recent, as well. And it was not a hard duty by any means, since they became friends instantly.

“It is fine”, Catherine of Siena smiled at her new friend. “I was incredibly lucky to be assigned to Lord Buddha. He immediately saw the symptoms of my ongoing spiritual transformation, and believe it or not, while talking about my life, he guided me through the crystallisation process with his peerless expertise. He did look tired, but it took nothing from the absolute dedication with which he took care of me. He guided my mind through the exact steps it needed to take, and adjusted my devotion to Christ to be focused in just the right way, and it took me one long breath, or should I say, swallow of the devotion energy, to complete the process. The purity and depth of his soul were such, that I must admit mixing devotion to him with devotion to Christ, and he immediately told me that it’s all right, since the two of them are brothers, so that my concerns wouldn’t interfere with my meditation”.

“I underwent a similar process during life, but I don’t think it was quite finalised until I came here”, Clare replied after a deep consideration. “I was judged by Jetsun Albert Rimpoche, who is a strange combination of a Christian, who is devoted to Lady Hypatia, and a master of Tibetan Buddhist spiritual energetics, so I can sympathise with you being devoted to both Christ and Buddha. It seems to be normal, as multiple persons of God are ubiquitous here, and they are all so wonderful one just falls into devotion to God by merely seeing one of them in passing. Albert saw how my spiritual energy works, explained everything immediately, and told me how to breathe and meditate, and I now consider myself his student and a humble servant. He was so gentle and considerate with me, and so skilled and powerful, it never ceases to amaze me. I was so used to nobody having a coherent idea about what I was going through on Earth; everybody was talking in terms that meant nothing clearly defined, and they had no experience with mystical ecstasy, so when I came to him and he immediately knew everything and taught me what to do, I almost melted into a puddle at his feet”, she giggled. “It’s unfortunate that he is married, but he told me to keep meditating and my true spiritual husband will come, as God will arrange our meeting”.

“I used to think it was Christ, but on Earth, Christ was all we knew, so everything of God that felt human enough to bond with had to be Christ”, Catherine smiled. “And of course Christ too is married”, she made a sour grin.

“Have faith in God’s providence, holy sister”, Clare chided her with a blessed smile. “He led us thus far; he will lead us to our eventual destiny as well”.

“Let us pray together for God to guide us on the next part of our spiritual journey”, Catherine nodded in assent, and they held hands and prayed together in silence.

…

“Good morning, Ladies”, a kind female voice raised them from the ecstasy of prayer. “I heard you loudly enough”, Lady Zina grinned blissfully, holding a man by the hand. “Chiara, I have someone I want you to meet. This is Bernardo Guidoni. Bernardo, this is Chiara da Montefalco”, she introduced them. “And you, Caterina, come with me”, she took the woman by the hand. “I wish to introduce you to Apostle Paul. He was recently praying as you did now, and it is time for you two to meet”.

“What’s wrong?” Kay felt that her husband was inordinately quiet. Something was obviously bothering him.

He was quiet for a moment, as if considering whether to say anything.

“You know when I said that Sanat Kumar hated women, never loved and never married?”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid that I later thought of something that contradicts that. I think he actually did marry, in his own way”.

“What do you mean, in his own way? How many ways are there?”, she smiled weakly.

“I think we even saw his wife, or at least what goes for wife in his head”, he frowned darkly, and she saw the muscles of his jaw harden. “It’s Anthea”.

Kay’s mouth opened, and she reflexively put her hands in front of her face as tears streaked it in silent shock.

Zee nodded gravely.

“Yes, the broken angel, whom he enslaved, tortured and ordered to be repeatedly raped and then beaten until she miscarried, and then he fed her aborted fetuses to the dogs, and repeated the process until she was his willing slave, obedient, terrified and completely, irrecoverably insane. That’s the relationship he wanted to establish with a woman, and considering how she is bound to him, I think it’s the closest to her being his wife”.

Kay looked at him with red eyes wide open in horror, silently mouthing a word.

“Why? Because that’s who he is. People think I was joking or exaggerating when I described how much it shocked me to look inside his mind and truly know him. That’s what he truly is, in his heart of hearts. He’s someone who wants to have a wife so that he can have a broken, tortured, serially raped slave with a destroyed soul, who calls him ‘Master’ and pisses herself when he makes a sudden movement”.

“People are starting to treat his world as a legitimate place for spiritual evolution, a place where you go when you want to speed things up in your evolution, purposefully reincarnating there, sometimes with excellent results, but they don’t know who they are dealing with. He may be putting on an act in order to evade punishment. It may even be God’s will to allow him to do what he’s doing for a while because it serves a legitimate purpose. However…”, he shrugged, looking his wife straight in the eyes.

“Others should know”, she managed to use words finally. “They should know what monster they are dealing with”.

“Lord Shiva knows”, Zee nodded. “I think he got it when the bastard tried to buy Berfrid’s soul by starving his family to death, so that he could tear it apart and use it as bait to destroy more souls; I never saw him that angry, not even when he killed people. I think he, too, is keeping that knowledge to himself, because there’s no point in alarming people. When I see how you took it, I wonder if I should have told you anything at all. We would just traumatise them, and they wouldn’t do anything differently anyway. But I wanted you to know what I think because you’re my wife and I have no secrets with you”, he managed a smile.

“Thank you. It’s horrible beyond measure, but thank you for telling me”, she nodded. “I needed to know, so that when Father tears him to pieces as he promised, not a single thought of compassion would go through my mind”.

He hugged her and kissed her hair. “Let’s go comfort and teach people”.