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To Hell and Back

A

Test of Faith

By

VL Parker

Part One:

Before We Live, We Die

Prologue:

Something that’s Worth Dying For 

            “Between shadows and death we will reach out for the light.” Catherine once told me this in the dark of the night, but I didn’t believe her. In the darkness there is no shadow and in death there could be no life, and yet like a moth drawn to the flame I was compelled to follow her.

      Our lives were separate as were our paths, still destiny determined they would become entwined. As a plant longs for the sun and the rain, as the desert thirsts, and as we require air to breathe, so too I came to need Catherine. I wanted her to save my soul; to restore my faith in humanity, for she was my last great hope, to resurrect all that had died in me.

I felt some deep force within me forcing me to follow her and yet she was a believer in a god I did not know and a leader of a group I did not understand. Their faith was blind, being led by prophecy and dreams, but I refused to be a pawn of the gods. I would choose my fate and control my own destiny. This is what I had always clung to, but now the world had changed.

 I was lost and alone; I was perplexed and confused, as chaos made me victim to circumstance. Catherine would become my cause, she became my dream and I would follow her to the ends of the Earth. For her I could live; for her I could die.

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(Part of Prologue continued)

...I vowed to defend democracy. I would live and die for this ideal. I was always sure of whom the enemy was. There was never any doubt about what was worth fighting for; it was only a matter of which side you’re on.

Our allies and our own spies supplied us with ample evidence against terrorist cells and the nations who supported them. We had the technology and the will to destroy them. Then the world began to change as truth was portrayed as lies and our great American nation soon became despised.

The world had long fallen into darkness and chaos as a result of the never-ending bloodshed. It was a world I could no longer understand. The atrocities of war were no longer worth dying for. I was a soldier without a cause, a man without a soul, desperate for some hope, but with a heart that had grown cold.

I had lived for freedom and I was willing to die for democracy, but what was I to do when democracy ceased to exist? I could not give up on this dream. It was in my blood. It was a part of my being. I had to find a way to defend it, to save it from the reign of dictators who swayed the nations of the world.

There was one woman who shared this dream, or at least she shared the same enemy. We were kindred spirits, compelled to fight and die for, if necessary, that which we believed.

Peter Roberts

Captain, USN