They hated him as a symbol of broken rules. Because he raised his voice and pointed at them. Because he had obviously never gone to school, but argued as if he were a studied member of the High Church of the Bastard.
They hated him because they were out of arguments. Because he showed – publicly – that they had never had any. Because all their efforts to rear the High Members by tradition and money had but resulted in this unmasking voice coming from somewhere else.
He came from the desert, his hairless skin white as a pearl despite the relentless sun. His tongue was split like a serpent’s, never long enough hidden in his mouth to ignore it.
The tower birds had announced his arrival as he walked straight through the city and right onto the hill where the Great Temple was since the world’s first morning. Every move his body made was reminiscent of something else, something foreign and strange, and the gathered spectators felt their hair rising in disgust. His long and sharp claws where of their kind, as where his feet, but his eyes were slits of darkness in circles of burning fire, and most terrifying of all was his air-licking tongue. He clearly was a child of the worst of sins, when a High Wolf falls to passion and dishonours his seed.
As he walked by, almost naked, only his middle covered by a dirty cloth, he was the living and breathing proof of an unholy creation.
When the stranger startet to bear witness about his life as a child of deamons, about his brothers and sisters in the desert, about the cruelty of the Wolfes, who killed their own for beeing fathers and lovers, the crowd didn’t protest as loudly as expected, and the members of the Church of the Bastard withdrew from the Great Temple and gathered in council.
Many of them had begat desertchilds, and all of them who had, sacrificed the children right after birth as yet another failure. The Church of the Bastard demanded at least the attempt to bring forth the saviour, and there were no »others« other than the captive serpents: the Wolve’s slaves and objects.
That did not mean, a wolf and a wild serpent from the desert could just mate as lovers. The wild serpents where taboo as long as they were not slaves, thus not wild anymore. Wild serpents didn’t kill desertchilds, they raised them, thus threatening the Truth of the Church, that the arrival of the Bastard was a future yet to come.
The council meeting was short, there was no debate about what to do. The town forces where send off. As they led the bastard away, his white body flanked by their wolfish hairyness, he did not try to flee. Instead, he smiled, and his tongue licked the air.
Two days later they crucified him in the field outside the city, over the bones and rotten flesh of the others who had died there before him. Right at his feet lay the corpse of the old Wolf they had torn from the cross to make room for him.
He seemed to die like all before him, his head drooped, the tongue grey and dry, and after some hours in the heat the crowd lost interest and went home.
Later that day it began to rain, and the tower birds screamed about serpents spotted at the eastern gate. The next morning came with sunshine and there where no serpents, if they ever had been there.
Three days after his death, it seemed someone had taken the bastard’s body. The cross was empty. No one cared. After a week, they forgot that he had ever existed, and they lived on as the Mighty Wolfes of the Curch of the Bastard yet to come, with their peace and their slaves, their honor and their tradition and their gold.
Title illustration: Screenshot from The Talos Principle, Croteam, 2014, available on GoG
der cleaning wummens tale 
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