Pillar of Salt

Lot's Wife. Mount Sodom, near the Dead Sea.

(Fiction. TW for horror, gendered violence.)
 

For the longest time, this pillar of salt has been a landmark. I have, it goes without saying, visited it myself. It stands on the side of the hill of limestone, clay and salt on the corner of the Dead Sea, overlooking the plain, vaguely human in aspect. Shoulders. Half of a head if you look at it from some angles. It's maybe thirty feet tall. It used to look more like a human, be smaller, but the salt from the saturated breeze builds up over the centuries, has collected around it, made it higher, wider, with an unnatural speed as if every urge of nature is to hide what lies beneath.

Lot's Wife, they call it.

The Prince of Exiles, 26

The cargo ship has gone, and the sky dock is all but uninhabited; the slaves who would have loaded have gone to work; both guards, also slaves, abandon their posts as soon as we appear over the edge of the still-slippery platform and Makara levels her cannon at them.

Written in Water #9: A Dream of Magnus Maximus

The Welsh epic, the Mabinogion, includes in its middle section a short romance that begins like this:

Macsen Wledig was Emperor of Rome, and he was the handsomest and wisest of men, and the best fitted to be Emperor of all who had gone before him.

The Dream of Macsen Wledig, trans. Gwyn Jones

Written in Water #8: Why Aren't You Dead?

Yes, that's right. This is an icon of Lawrence, smiling, with the barbecue grill that killed him.

So the Great Persecution ends, and the Church breathes a collective sigh of relief. But those years of hiding. Two attempts to extirpate the Christian faith entirely in living memory. The death of any number of brave, good, honest men, women and children, yes, children.

You don't get over that in a day. You don't get over that in a lifetime.

The Prince of Exiles, 25

It's through the sky dock we'll get in, scaling the side of the steps, avoiding the lights. Everything stinks, everything is slick with blood and slime, and the obsidian walls are slippery, hard to grip.

Written in Water #7: Taller than Jesus

I'm not talking about stature. I'm talking about literal height.

What if I were to tell you that there was another Jesus? Another influential teacher, born about the same time, who did miracles and rose again from the dead, who imparted spiritual truths? Whose stories may even have been, although a pagan, the inspiration for some of the stories imputed to Christ? What would you say then? What would you think?

A bit over a hundred years ago, people began to ask those very questions. They had rediscovered Apollonius of Tyana.

The Prince of Exiles, 24

"Your hair's growing back." I am mildly surprised; it's grown back an inch since I saw her a couple hours ago, thick, glossy.

Makara gives a little half-shrug. "Wanted it to."