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<sup>[source](http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/16054713/images/1314259621791.jpg)</sup>
*<sup>[Part 1](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-1)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 2](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-2)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 3](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-champion-of-the-little-people-part-3)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 4](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-4)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 5](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-5)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 6](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-6)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 7](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-7)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 8](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-8)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 9](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-9)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 10](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-10)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 11](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-11)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 12](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-12)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 13](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-13)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 14](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-14)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 15](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-15)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 16](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-16)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 17](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-17)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 18](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-18)</sup>*
*<sup>[Part 19](https://steemit.com/writing/@alexbeyman/original-novel-pariah-of-the-little-people-part-19)</sup>*

How richly and intensely I despise them. To the very core of my being. Language does not suffice to express this feeling. If “hate” were written in letters one millimeter tall over and over on my bones until all surface area is covered, it would capture perhaps a tenth of it. As if, should I undertake to wipe them from the surface of the Earth and be struck down in the attempt, my corpse would rise from the grave and resume killing. 

I had nothing to say to the psychologist. He’d heard about Tyler’s death and sought to comfort me, a hopeless endeavor. I just sat there, turning further and further inward, as if traveling far enough in that direction might reveal some permanent escape from all this. I nodded periodically whenever I heard a silence, and after enough of that, he released me. 

Mom’s turn to pick me up this time. She noticed I’d been awfully quiet a few minutes into the drive home, but I was no more responsive to her questioning than I had been to the therapist’s. Only when I was finally in my room with the door closed did I allow myself to cry. I’d not really been suppressing it until then so much as not allowing myself to experience any emotion other than anger. 

I could still only wrap my head around it in an academic way. Any time I tried to connect that part of my brain with the part responsible for sadness, it threatened to destroy me. That imbalance only continued to build with no means of equalizing it until I finally surrendered. All I could do was weakly thrash on the floor, harsh tears stinging my red, puffy eyes. 

No. This can’t work. I could feel my insides being shredded. If I allowed myself to collapse completely this time there’d be no possibility of rebuilding afterwards. I’d simply renounce the world, my life and every illusory, fleeting moment of happiness in it. I determined I could only survive if I denied it. At the very least, I had to go see for myself that he was really gone. Had to be sure.

With the sun low on the horizon, my body plowing through the clouds of little flies which come out to mate at dusk, I biked to Tyler’s house. The fence doesn’t completely encircle it, and at one point is fairly easy to vault over from a pile of rocks I recognized as having been taken from the quarry. Had to leave my bike behind, which made me nervous I’d be found out. But I didn’t expect to be long.

The woods had a completely different feeling in the dark. Not quite so dark I couldn’t navigate them, but neither could I see clearly. My imagination filled every ambiguous shadow with terrible things. Monsters, machinery and bodies. I stumbled several times on logs, fallen vines and all manner of other obstacles, wondering if I’d perhaps gotten turned around until I came upon the quarry. 

Tyler’s house was just visible from it. The window I knew corresponded to his room was dark. He might just be sleeping, I thought. But as October approached it was getting dark earlier and earlier. I checked my watch. He shouldn’t be in bed already. As I sat there, I began to feel foolish. 

The part of me which knew the truth berated the rest for holding stubbornly to the fantasy that I’d heard wrong. That it was some manner of prank, or social experiment. That even now Tyler was somewhere in that house, preparing to return to school the next day. The tears returned, and this time refused to be restrained. 

I sat at the edge of the quarry begging for that window to light up, well into the night. The sun now gone, darkness enveloped me. The familiar song of crickets chirping and frogs croaking tried, but failed, to drown out my sobs. But again as I mourned, my sadness mutated into rage. I fumed, boiled and seethed in place, imagining how I’d avenge Tyler if only I had the power to. 

Not only Tyler, but everyone like him in those camps. Staring up wistfully at the same night sky as me even now, feeling alone in the world and without hope. Were I not equally alone, if I only had ten or twenty others like me, I could topple that fence. I could storm that camp, free those children and punish their captors. 

If only I were strong. If only I did not live in a world already largely under their control, or the control of some effectively identical religion descended from theirs. If it’s one against ten, there is hope. If it’s one against a hundred, surely there’s at least a slim chance. But one against billions would be defeated before he could accomplish anything. 

That’s when her words again returned to me. That real strength is fighting for what you care about, even when you know you cannot win. I resolved then to devote my life to fighting them wherever I find them. 

At this late stage, no satisfactory reconciliation is possible. The only thing which will truly set my heart at rest is when the day comes that they’re the ones in those camps. Not learning how to be straight, but being deprogrammed. 
 
I’ve heard them fearfully predict such a day on the radio many times. Even as they eagerly subject young people, whose only crime is to love each other in a way forbidden by cult teachings, to the same fate. Dreading the prospect that someday they’ll no longer be in control, and what they’ve done to so many others for the past twenty centuries will at last be done to them.

How I would love to operate such a camp. How I’d look on with relish as they perform back breaking labor in the hot sun. How I’d chase them, whipping at their legs with a switch as they run laps, and put them in isolated confinement if they refused. As they did to Tyler, I would do to them. An eye for an eye, as they might put it. Nothing more or less. 

Instead, they’ll get away with it like they always get away with everything simply because they’re the ones in control. At best, we might fight them until the camps are abolished. But there will never be any payback. The minute, the exact microsecond you finally fight your way out from under their boot, their rhetoric suddenly changes. 

Where before they were haughty and self righteous, now they urge you to be civil, high minded and forgiving. Qualities they advocate, but never embody. We’ll be told it’s enough that the practice has ended, we should be satisfied with that and forget the whole business. 

As if two thousand years of murders, chemical and surgical castration, harassment, exile and professional ruination can be swept under the rug just because they’ve finally been forced to stop. “The important thing”, they’ll say, “is not to take out your anger indiscriminately on Christians who after all are the finest, gentlest folks there are.” Loosely translated, the important thing is that they be allowed to get away with it like they always do. A slap on the wrist at most.

As if they ever cared which specific gay man or woman they targeted. As if they’ve ever shown a shred of mercy until the exact moment their boot slipped and the fellow who’d been stuck under it picked himself up, wiped the blood from his face and put up his dukes. How? How can there be no retaliation? It’s not a matter of punishing the son for the sins of the father, as they haven’t even stopped doing it. 

Even if they do, should it be possible for centuries of persecution to go wholly unpunished just because the most recent generation of persecutors has at last been overcome and conveniently claims remorse for what’s been done, even while they continue to do it? Is that all it takes to get away with multigenerational perpetuation of grinding, brutal misery? 

The last time I came here, the forest felt gentle. Welcoming, surrounding me as it always does in a protective cocoon. I’ve always felt safest in the woods until now. Something about the tone and air of the forest had changed. As if hostile, pushing me out. As you might spit out something bitter and poisonous. 

I tried to brush it off my skin, but it settled there again almost as soon as I was done. I might’ve focused on that longer, but was captivated by the lights of the settlement at the bottom of the quarry. Work never ceases here, it seems. Day and night the ore carriers traverse the sands, little electric bulbs guiding them into the refineries as a lighthouse might guide a ship.

Here and there, even about my head now and again, flit the little ones with the wind-up winged backpacks. Also carrying their own little electric lights to prevent collision. I might’ve mistaken them for lightning bugs if I didn’t know better. 

I gasped as one collided mid air with an unseen insect, tumbled for a few feet, but then deftly recovered. It took my mind off Tyler, however briefly, and I could at last breathe. I remembered a saying; that anger is an acid which does more to corrode the vessel it’s in than whoever you mean to pour it on. 

The acid of my anger had been at work all this time dissolving me from the inside. But however I tried to reverse the reaction, I couldn’t. Not after what they did. Even then, my brain knew I was destroying myself. But my heart wouldn’t let me put a stop to it. 
 
Just then, a blindingly bright flaming mass arced overhead and came down explosively in the middle of the settlement. At once most of it was on fire, little men hurriedly dashing about slapping at their bodies to extinguish the flames. I cried out in astonishment, and searched for the source of the projectile. 

Over the far rise appeared an army unlike any I’d seen before. Little ones, certainly, but decked out in red robes and armor. They were busily resetting a trebuchet they must’ve used to hurl the incendiary mass. The armies of the quarry quickly massed and set out for the ridge, scaling the boulders effortlessly with their spider-like exoskeletons and flight packs. 

Back in the settlement, those not killed by the blast were feverishly spraying water on it, battling back the flames, struggling to save whatever could be saved. The red robed fellows parted to make way for a battalion of what, as I crawled closer, I realized were bombardier beetles. The sort which spray a mixture of chemicals from their abdomen that ignites on contact with air.

The beetle riders descended the boulders and met with the brown robes partway. There were rapid, scattered flashes of light as the beetles blasted their targets with flaming chemical spray. I could barely make out the high pitched screams of the brown robes as it melted their flesh. 

Most of their artillery seemed to be repurposed fireworks. Several were simply roman candles on wheels, aimed towards their attackers and set off. The successive fireballs each one spewed missed their targets for the most part, but when one happened to connect, it was devastating.

As I looked on, the quarry dwellers revealed the ace up their sleeve. A building at the center of the settlement split open to reveal some sort of piston like apparatus...which began to resonate. Imperceptibly at first, but soon it exerted a noticeable pressure on my eardrums. Then a mild pain.

The sands all around the settlement tossed and shifted. But then, somehow, began to organize. As if by vibration alone it was being made to take a particular shape. In this case, an ever-growing protective dome which raised up around the settlement, fires now mostly extinguished. Even when stray shots from a roman candle impacted the dome, the hole was quickly filled with more sand. 

I clapped, tearfully, then clasped my hands over my mouth. I dare not breathe. The second massive flaming projectile was hurled and impacted the dome. It sunk partway in, but the sand surrounded it, smothering the fire. 

The sand dome continued to build itself up until the very top of it closed. Then the sand abruptly stopped moving, solidified in that configuration, though the vibrations were now stronger than ever. I never taught them anything remotely like this. It must simply be one of their inventions. How marvelous when they put their minds to protection rather than murder! 

But no sooner than I finished the thought, something began to rise from the sand near the edge. A mound of it rose, sand sliding to either side to reveal the body of the thing as it clawed its way free from its buried hiding place.

A great mechanical scorpion, as long as my body is tall, pulled itself bit by bit from the sand. Then once finally free, began to trudge towards the fellows in the red armor, still perched on the rim of the quarry. I could see them mill about nervously. Another incendiary mass was loaded, then fired. It struck true. The scorpion was now coated in flaming, sticky gunk. But it didn’t appear to so much as slow it down.

I recognized the joints as based on the ones their ancestors devised for the metal Tyrant. The movement so smooth, if you squinted you could mistake it for a living thing.They readied another flaming load, but the scorpion stuck the tip of its long, articulated tail into the sand. Then it began to vibrate. 

I laughed with delight as a shield began to form in front of it out of sand, by the same manner as the dome. When finally they let loose the missile, it impacted the shield harmlessly. Destroying most of it in the process, but then it already served its purpose. So it went, the great crawling machine summoning a shield before it each time the red robes hurled another flaming mass. 

I could tell they’d not counted on this. Something the brown robes kept close to their chest until now. As it began to climb the rocks towards them, the red robes panicked and broke rank. Before they could get the catapult moving, the scorpion was upon it. In a single swift motion, it brought the tip of its tail down on the contraption, shattering it into a contorted mess of splintered wooden wreckage. 

I followed close behind as the scorpion trailed them into the woods, eager to glimpse what sort of civilization they built around combustion based technologies. After a few minutes, the metal scorpion turned back. Satisfied, I suppose, that the red robes were powerfully spooked and would not soon return. My own curiosity would not be so easily sated. 

As I groped blindly through the darkness, I began to feel a strange force pulling me onward. Like the invisible energies I recently felt while observing the various tribes play out their rituals. I’d crossed a threshold of some kind, though I couldn’t yet describe the nature of it. As I proceeded I began to hear a distant thumping rhythm.

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*<sup>Stay Tuned for Part 21!</sup>*