Disclaimer

Hello, everyone! I hope you’re all well.

This chapter is going to be just a disclaimer because it occurred to me (a bit late, but… better late than never) that my chapters, especially the more recent ones, may sound (or may already have sounded) offensive to someone with a Judeo-Christian belief system. That is definitely not my goal. My portrayal of the mystical figure of Jesus, or “the Nazarene,” is intentionally more humanized, reflecting a sense of the breaking of transcendence that seeks to resonate with Moradin’s physical destruction on Earth in the previous chapters and Reneé’s feeling of loneliness. Above all, I hope you enjoyed it and, if possible, I would like you to have asked yourselves some questions that I had in mind when I wrote this chapter. In this death, which is one of the most famous in the history of myths and religions, is there some kind of affirmation and resistance of life as a material entity? When and under what circumstances did the brutal death of a first-century rabbi come to sound so similar to the narrative of Socrates’ death? How did the communities that followed this rabbi’s thought transform themselves from communities that so closely resemble a utopian socialism into a religion of such grand proportions? And, for those who happen to see in this rabbi a figure of salvation, to what extent does a Christian want to be saved from hell, and to what extent does he want to be saved from life itself? Where is, and what actually is, this terrible hell? Where is, and what actually is, the kingdom of heaven?

Finally, the only question that matters in the entire previous chapter, and the one I hope Reneé answers for herself at the end of her adventure: “What do you do when the heavens close, when the angels do not come to your rescue, when life falls silent, when the gods are, for all intents and purposes, dead?”

That’s all for now, thank you for reading, and I’ll try to write more soon.