Free A Warrior's Redemption (The Warrior Kind) by Guy Stanton III

that had been created so perfectly had now been reversed into shameful self degradation of an individual’s created glory and purpose.
    It was as if in the height of immoral decadence, which was on display all around me, that the beauty and rightness of one man and one woman enjoying each other had been twisted into a thousand disgusting lesser forms of affectation. Why would a man hunger for something other than the beauty of a woman, and why would a woman settle for the affection of another woman, when only a man could ulti mately fulfill and complete her deepest needs?
    I thought of my mother and father and the way they had been with each other. My mother had been a beautiful woman too, but she would have looked completely out of place in this hall. Not for any lack of beauty on her part, but simply because she wasn’t the kind of person to share herself with anybody else other than my father, who she had sworn herself to. Often as a boy I had covertly observed instances where she would simply look deeply at father or say some thing softly to him, which usually resulted in an unexplained absence by both a short while later, that would often last hours.
    Witnessing how they had been with each other had both relaxed me and made me want the same in a relationship one day. My mother hadn’t had to dress as these women did or display half the open eroticism that they displayed to com pletely overwhelm my father. I had never seen him once regard another woman other than my mother. What they’d had was special in a way that wouldn’t and couldn’t be understood in a place of such moral reversal and discontentment with what was naturally ordained to be.
    The beauty of these women only went skin deep and knowing that helped me to disregard any earlier desires I’d had for them. The women that had drawn seductively toward me seemed to sense the change in my demeanor towards them, and like candles extinguished their looks of open invitation disappeared and were replaced with disinter ested looks of hostility as they moved away to partake in pleasures elsewhere.
    Feeling the weight of the spirit of the place lift off of me with my denial of it I noticed something about the place that I hadn’t seen before. In the bare open areas of exposed wall between the rich tapestries, shadows danced.
    The shadows numbered many more than the people moving in front of the light given off by the many fires through out the great hall. There were thousands of them! A sudden chill swept through me as I heard the sound of terrible laug h ter ring throughout the hall drowning out all else. The sound of it almost paralyzed me during mid step so frightful was I at the sound of the laughter.
    “Peace Roric, you can hear them, but they can’t touch you as I have sealed you to My purposes as long as you remain faithful to My will.”
    I felt peace settle over me at the words I felt pour into my innermost being, even as the sound of laughter grew louder and more hateful in its pitch all around me.
    Curiously I looked around the place. The laughter was deafening, but no one here seemed to be hearing any of it. Not even the guards, who prodded me along gave any indi cation that they were hearing what I was. Were they all so unaware of the foul spirits they were keeping company with?
    There was no peace in this place, other than the peace I felt within my own soul at the steady words of encourage ment spoken into me by my Creator. What must hell be like when all those lost and led astray, by their own desires of self-gratification became aware of where their paths of pleasure had taken them and whose will they had been so busy accomplishing while alive? What must the full weight of the emptiness of their lives and actions feel like, when it became clear to them as to what they had missed out on for all of eternity?
    It was scary to know how close I had come to making the same mistake myself. It was even scarier to think of falling back into my errant