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  GOD’S LIONS

  THE DARK RUIN

  John Lyman

  ALSO BY JOHN LYMAN

  God’s Lions – The Secret Chapel

  God’s Lions – House of Acerbi

  PRAISE FOR THE FIRST TWO BOOKS IN THE “GOD’S LIONS” SERIES

  Editorial reviews for “God’s Lions – The Secret Chapel” (The first book in the “God’s Lions” series)

  “Readers who enjoy religious tales filled with symbols and mysteries will find themselves well-supplied.”

  J.C. Martin, Arizona Daily Star Newspaper

  “A thrilling ride through fact and faith. Lyman skillfully blends scientific facts and religious mythology to propel the reader through a marvelous story to a satisfying, if startling conclusion. He paints realistic characters and puts them in terrific binds. Excellent fiction that I waited too long to read!

  Ron Franscell, Bestselling author of “Delivered from Evil”

  What readers are saying

  “Well researched and masterfully woven, this novel will glue you to your seat and have you hanging on with your fingernails.”

  “Books like this make one think outside of what you think you know about the world.”

  “I could not put this book down – absolutely unpredictable.”

  Reviews for “God’s Lions – House of Acerbi” (The second book in the God’s Lions series)

  “Simply thrilling! If you read anyone this year, put this author on your short list.”

  “In a sequel even better than ‘The Secret Chapel’, John Lyman has put forth an exhilarating tale filled with twists and suspense. If you believe the Bible hides important codes about the future of mankind, or love a Crichton-esque drama, ‘House of Acerbi’ will exceed your expectations. You won’t want to put it down until you’re done.”

  “God’s Lions- House of Acerbi” was the perfect sequel to “The Secret Chapel”. Whether you’re into religious fiction or techno-thrillers, this one has it all ... another terrific spiritual thriller that I couldn’t put down.”

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  © 2012 John Brooks Lyman

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

  ISBN: 978-1-4800-0472-6 (print)

  [email protected]

  Cover art by Travis Schmidt

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First and foremost I want to thank my wonderful wife, Leigh Jane Lyman. Without her help you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now. I also want to thank all of my test readers for their valuable feedback and support, especially Chuck Autrey here in the United States, and Shaneese Robinson, my test reader across the pond.

  For my grandmother, Evelyn Kingery Wehling

  “A Beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”

  George MacDonald

  PREFACE

  Writing a sequel is always difficult. After I wrote “God’s Lions-The Secret Chapel”, it was evident from the amount of email I received that readers wanted more, thus the “God’s Lions” series was born. Although I have endeavored to make each book a stand-alone novel, I wanted to provide an historical perspective relating to the Cathars who featured so prominently in the second novel in the series, “God’s Lions-House of Acerbi”. Therefore, I have decided to include a brief history of the Cathars to provide some background for readers who haven’t read the first two books, and perhaps serve as a refresher for those who have.

  The origin of the Cathars remains something of a mystery. They were a religious group that suddenly appeared in the Languedoc region of southern France in the 11th century long before the days of the Protestant Reformation that eventually changed the face of religion in the Christian world forever. The Cathars had been a separate religion from Catholicism—the word Cathar coming from the Greek Katharoi, meaning “pure ones”. Unlike other medieval movements, they had formed their own system of religious beliefs centered on kindness to others, the rejection of material wealth, and the promise of universal redemption inspired by Christ and his disciples.

  They alleged that the physical world was evil and created by the Satan-like god they called Rex Mundi. He was known as “the king of the world” who ruled over all that was physical, chaotic, and powerful. The other god, the one whom the Cathars worshipped, was a higher god—a god of love—a pure spirit that embraced his human followers. They believed that Jesus Christ was his messenger and referred to themselves as Christians, but the Catholic Church called them something else. To the medieval Catholic Church, the Cathars were heretics.

  At the time, the Languedoc region of southern France that the Cathars lived in was not really considered a part of France. The culture of the area was still rooted in the feudal system, but the enlightened Cathars refused to swear an oath to any feudal lord. By the early 13th century, the tolerant and liberal beliefs of the Cathars had become the dominate religion in the area, much to the annoyance of the Catholic Church which was being held up to public ridicule when its bejeweled abbots and priests, dressed in their best finery, preached poverty and demanded tithes to be paid to them in the name of the Church. The Cathars referred to the Catholic Church as the Church of the Wolves, while the Catholics countered with accusations that the Cathars belonged to the Synagogue of Satan.

  And so it went, back and forth, until finally, the Church had had enough. After the French King, Phillip Augustus, refused to intervene, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc and formed a Holy Army. The first military leader of this army was a Cistercian abbot by the name of Arnaud Amaury, a churchman with a sadistic penchant for terror and killing. He is best remembered for a command he shouted to his troops before they entered the town of Béziers in 1209. When asked by his soldiers how they could differentiate between the Catholics and Cathars, he said “Kill them all ... God will know his own!”

  During this period of history, a war of terror was waged against the indigenous population of the Languedoc by the Church. An estimated 500,000 Languedoc men, women, and children were massacred—Catholics as well as Cathars. During the attack on Béziers, the doors to the church of St. Mary Magdalene were broken down, and over 7000 men, women, and children were reportedly dragged out and slaughtered. Thousands of others in the same town were blinded, mutilated, dragged behind horses, burned at the stake, and used for target practice before the holy crusader army burned the city to the ground.

  After the siege, Arnaud proudly wrote to Pope Innocent III, “Today, Your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.” Later, after the massacre at Béziers, Simon de Monfort, an especially dangerous and cruel baron who had successfully laid siege to the walled city of Carcassonne, was designated as the new leader of the Crusader army. The war against the Cathars continued on and off through the 14th century, setting the precedent for the various church-sponsored inquisitions that were to follow. In the end, an entire culture had almost been exterminated from the face of the Earth in what can only be described as church-sanctioned genocide. The crusade against the Cathars of the Langued
oc has been described by historians as one of the greatest human disasters in history on par with that of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  THE FERTILE CRESCENT – 10,000 B.C.

  On the day the entity returned, a small gathering of primitive nomadic tribesmen were sitting on a crude stone floor, staring up at a massive limestone monolith that towered above their heads. The men were looking at the carved image of a snake, its forked tongue flicking outward, and in a bas-relief tableau that wrapped around all four sides of the gigantic block of stone, they could see other creatures, mostly predators, including leopards, wolves, and scorpions.

  Encircled by twelve similar monoliths, a blackened area on the floor marked the spot where a fire had burned overnight, keeping the darkness at bay while the men moved the last stone giant into place. Now, with the sun peeking over the horizon, no one dared to speak, for even though they knew the thing was coming, they feared their words might anger the dark apparition that had haunted their dreams for so long.

  For the past two years the men had toiled under a blazing sun to do what the entity had commanded of them. They had worked day in and day out, hacking gigantic blocks of stone from a nearby hillside to be used in the construction of something that was a total mystery to them, and already a dozen of their number had been killed—crushed to death before they had learned the finer points of moving heavy stone objects that weighed over sixteen tons.

  In the years preceding the appearance of the entity, this tightly-knit band of hunter-gatherers had roamed the land at will, sleeping under the stars while maintaining a close bond with Mother Earth. They had moved from one place to another following the herds of animals that provided their food and clothing, and like their ancestors before them, they had drunk clear water from free-flowing rivers and wandered through vast green forests where the game was always plentiful and fresh.

  Compared to their modern-day brethren, they had lived a relatively idyllic life, but on a warm spring day, as they camped on a grassy plain beneath a potbelly-shaped hill, something had happened—something that was so frightening to these people that they had suddenly ceased their wandering ways to begin construction of something that was completely useless to them.

  Where before their life had been one of fluid motion and play, these nomadic tribesmen now toiled beneath an unyielding sun to build something that had never before been seen on the entire planet, and had it not been for the instructions given to them by the entity, they never would have considered building such a thing in the first place.

  As far as they could tell, this circle of stone served no obvious purpose. It just sat there, a constant reminder of the seemingly endless days spent in back-breaking labor. A full seven millennia before the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza had even begun, these men had broken with thousands of years of tradition to build a complex stone structure by hand, all without the benefit of metal tools, wheels, or draft animals. The only question was—why?

  It was a question that would cause archaeologists to scratch their heads in wonder when, in the 20th century, the Stonehenge-like circle of stone was finally unearthed in modern-day Turkey. But unbeknownst to these present-day finders of ancient artifacts, even the primitive men who had labored so long and hard to build it had no idea why they had done it other than the fact that they had been told to do so by something that terrified them.

  Now, sitting on a crude stone floor, the men waited, and in the afternoon, as the sun began to beat down on the grassy slope with a fiery stillness, the sound of a dog barking in the distance heralded the arrival of dark clouds that began to flow in from the east. They were roiling black clouds; the kind that brought strong winds and blotted out the sun, and right on cue the winds began to blow.

  Huddled inside the circle of stone, the men lifted their fur skins over their heads in an attempt to shield their eyes from the swirling dust, all the while hoping against hope that the structure they had been ordered to build would somehow appease the thing they knew was coming.

  Without so much as a whisper, a dark shape began to materialize in the center of the ring. It wavered in and out of the earth plane like a fluctuating hologram from another dimension, until finally, as a hot, sulfur-infused wind continued to blow, a leathery-winged apparition stood before them, swinging it’s monstrous head from side-to-side as its blood-red eyes fixed them with an otherworldly stare.

  As the frightened men began to scuttle backward, the ground began to quiver, and as the shaking grew stronger the stone floor became transparent, revealing a black crystal abyss that fell away into the depths of the Earth beneath the feet of the terrified men.

  Above their heads, a pillar of bluish light carrying two objects resembling large seeds suddenly descended from the base of the dark clouds, and as soon as they touched the transparent floor, the black surface seemed to liquefy, embracing the objects and pulling them into its depths. For a moment the ground seemed to quiver, as if Mother Earth had been struck by something she wanted to reject. Then all was quiet as the liquefied stone slowly returned to its original solid state.

  Frozen in place by fear, the petrified men continued to shrink from the gaze of the hideous winged creature that towered above them, for their instinct for survival had kicked into overdrive, alerting them to avoid its demonic stare. Somehow they knew that if they gazed into the burning red orbs, it would only bring an end to lives that were already too short.

  Please leave us! The terrified men covered their eyes and began to call out in an instinctive plea for deliverance, for even though they had no true concept of God, they had come to believe that if the dark apparition standing before them existed, then surely its opposite must also exist somewhere, and maybe it could help them. If there was a spirit of darkness, then there must also be a spirit of light—one that could intercede on their behalf and deliver them from this evil. Just like day and night, where the night was to be feared because it cloaked the predators that stalked them in darkness, the light was to be welcomed, for its b
rightness illuminated their path and revealed those creatures that lay in wait to rob them of their lives.

  But there was also another thing these men had figured out. The apparition wavering before them had come from somewhere, but it was not of this earth, which meant that there was another realm out there—one that was invisible to them. If this monstrous thing had come from a world of darkness, which surely it did, then that meant there had to be a world of light—and therein lay their salvation. It had to be!

  On the day the entity had first appeared to them standing inside a pillar of fire on the hillside above, the tribesmen had quickly agreed to do whatever it asked of them on the condition that it would spare their lives. They had kept their part of the bargain. They had built the structure it had commanded them to build ... now go! Leave us in peace!

  Peering out from under his animal-skin hood, one of the men fell to his knees. The entity was gone! High overhead, the roiling black clouds were already disappearing over the horizon, while on the ground, the wind had descended to a gentle breeze, leaving the shaken men in a state of bewildered relief as the shrieking wind was replaced by the sound of dry leaves rolling across the still-warm stones of the temple floor.

  In the days that followed, the men and their families decided to bury the temple as best they could and flee toward the coast, lest the entity return. In their exodus, these people and the generations that followed them began to spread out over the land, taking with them their newfound knowledge of the two opposing forces of darkness and light. It was a revelation within the human psyche that soon began to spread across an area of the ancient world that would one day come to be known as the Fertile Crescent—the very cradle of civilization.

  Over the course of the next several millennia, thousands of temples dedicated to various gods representing both darkness and light would rise across the region in homage to the forces of both good and evil, until finally the world’s three dominant monotheistic religions would spring forth, surpassing all others in the belief of a single god of light. It would be from this area of the world that a beacon would eventually shine over billions of people around the globe, giving mankind hope that the god of light would prevail and the thing of darkness would be held at bay—at least for awhile.