I have this book called Wolfen. It was released in 2014, and ever since, readers have been asking me to write a sequel. I guess it’s one of those stories that resonates. I get that. And I have been wracking my brain about it for over a decade now. It’s not about writing more. It’s about writing more in a way that won’t cheapen or undermine the original story.
There is a book 2 in my head. It’s dark, heavy, traumatizing in some parts. It’s the first story I ever started writing for which I knew right away I would need a very clear trigger warning in the intro. The story is half-written already. And it’s been stuck in that stage for years now because I am missing half of the perspective.
I still want to finish this in a way that hurts my soul every time I think about that half-formed manuscript sitting in my files. But, the way things are going, I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get it all the way done, or whether I’ll still be able to publish it when I do. That’s how bad my current outlook is.
Still, I am a writer at my core, and I want to hold onto that for as long as I can. So, come what may in the (near of far) future, I wanted to at least share this little part of the story titled Infensus.
That is all.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” the old prayer used to say. There used to be more of them, a prayer for every occasion, and then some. But that was a long time ago. Before people accepted that God had abandoned them.
Sometimes, when the setting sun lights the sky on fire, I remember the old churches with their stained glass windows. I remember how, even back then, I never saw a hint of divine glory in them. Funny, how a thing as beautiful as stained glass can lose all its magic when cast into the shadows of modern world architecture.
A prism in a box becomes nothing more than a piece of glass. Dead weight to carry around until it becomes a burden.
Faith is like that. It makes sense only as long as you can look around and find evidence that it’s working for someone somewhere. Even if you’re struggling, you can convince yourself God is still hard at work out there when your neighbor gets that job he was praying for, and your second cousin’s breast cancer miraculously goes into remission. You can tell yourself that your turn will come, as long as you keep the faith, keep praying.
But, as long as your hands are folded in prayer, they will never be free to do what needs to be done. And the more people fall on hard times and die around you, the more they cry out for you to use your hands to help them—help yourself—the harder it becomes to hold on to faith. Soon, God Himself becomes a burden, forcing you to let Him go, fade into the past as nothing more than a fairy tale you enjoyed as a child, just so you can keep going.  Â
Unanswered hope is too painful to carry for very long. Faith is not a self-sustaining force. Like the magic of a stained glass window, you can snuff out the strongest of beliefs simply by taking away its light.
“Now I lay me down to sleep.”
Humanity’s thoughtless dependence on an external source of light and hope represented in a few short lines of a children’s rhyme. How utterly morbid and misguided.
I have my own version of that prayer. I whisper it every night as fervently as any child of the Old Era who ever dug under the covers for protection from the dark. I’ve lived long enough now to know better. I have learned the lesson most people turn away from: ignorance is a precious gift you refuse at your own risk.
Sometimes it’s better not to see what’s eating you.
And so—
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Now I lay me down to sleep
And pray the dark of night to keep.
And if I die before I wake,
I thank the night for my lucky break.
Excerpt from Infensus. Copyright ©2016 Alianne Donnelly. All Rights Reserved.