The Conciege
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(THOB) Chapter 136: Summoned
🕑 Added 2024-01-19 05:47:55 +0000 UTCAuthor's Note: I'm sorry.
Shaking his head in refusal Ezril almost stepped away in disagreement with reality. His throat grew dry, choked up, and his eyes stung. He didn’t fight it. He let the tears well up as he reached his hand to the woman’s face. Her voice had strained to push the words out even as a whisper, and saliva dripped from her mouth when she spoke. She leaned into his touch, blood and dirt staining his palm. He didn’t care.
She was crying from her good eye.
He looked behind him. They had sat there, watching her like those who came to theatres to see the best plays would. Like she was some show. They’d taken amusement in watching her suffer. A prickle grew in his spine like a thousand pinpricks, bidden at the thought.
He looked back at her and she was looking at him, her head cocked to the side, offering him an easy smile that reached her one good eye. By the gods, she was happy.
And it broke him.
He drew his Sunder and hacked at the chain still fastened above her. The link wobbled at the first strike and she jerked. But it didn’t break. Asmidian steel. He scowled as he held her and continued to hack blindly, the sound of metal ringing through the room, and black sparks erupting where Sunder struck chain.
He’d lost count of how many times he’d struck when the chain finally gave and she slumped forward into his arms.
He lowered her to the floor gently, cuddling her against him as he sought to keep her off her feet. She winced in pain as he settled to his knees but her smile never faltered.
“I… I did it Ezril,” she told him between gasps. “I… did it.” Her shoulders shivered in labored breaths, pus leaking from putrid wounds. Her words came out in rasps and her breathing remained arduous. “I… waited… for… you, like I… I said… I would. I knew… you’d come… for me.”
She raised her hand too sluggishly and Tainted he cheek. Blood and grime wiped a tear away, and he knew they had taken her finger nails too. Where was all the fight she’d had when she’d attacked him? Why was she giving up?
“She… wanted to… take me,” she continued. “But… I didn’t let her.” She gasped a strained laugh. “You think… she’ll… be nice… when I meet her?”
He wanted to stop her, to tell her not to speak, to save her strength, but no words could beat his dry throat. He choked. He couldn’t even see her wisps anymore. They’d left her. She had suffered alone. All the while he’d been shedding pointless blood, leaving a trail through the realm.
“I’m sorry they… cut… the hair,” she told him with an apologetic smile, “I couldn’t… stop… them.” She sobbed. “I… couldn’t. I know… how much you… loved it.” Tears choked her words.
He could see it clearly now. What he had thought was the color of her hair was actual muck and blood from a laceration on her head.
Somewhere along the line someone was banging against the door. He ignored the sound, focusing on her. He needed to reassure her. Needed to tell her something… anything.
“I still love it,” he whispered, “I still love it, and you.”
She smiled fondly. “I… love… you … too.” She licked her dried lips, cracked in lines of red. Her tongue was equally dry and when it came away, it had done nothing to wet her lips. “I did good… didn’t I?” She nodded slowly. “Did I… do good, Ezril?”
He nodded back, forcing a tight smile to his lips, tears falling from his face. “You did good, Aria. You did good.”
She raised her bloody fingers to his face again, but this time she Tainted the edge of his lips trying to stretch the smile. When she spoke again, her voice was calm with strained humor.
“Why… so… serious?”
She smiled. Then he saw the satisfaction in her eyes. Then the serenity. Then he saw nothing.
Her fingers fell from his face.
She was gone.
And something in him broke.
The pain and loss became too much. The well of emotions in the waste of his mind swirled with a reckoning. He knew what he was experiencing but couldn’t think enough to focus. Once, he had controlled the experience, now it took him. Everything around him swayed, his vision tightened, and Vayla turned to his right.
Pain. Anger. Rage. Fury. Fear. Terror. Insanity. Loss. Helplessness.
They assaulted his senses. He felt the room, but felt nothing. His senses dulled with the cascade of madness. He felt the door give way as something chopped away at it. The chair braced against it fell away. The crashing sound outside the room as voices threatened retribution… He let himself fall, giving free reign to his emotions where he had once subdued them. He allowed them take him. They drowned him and he felt every fiber of them. Every emotion he’d ever thought to suppress washed over him and he felt all of them in their purest sense; understood them.
Then everything collided.
“The stand helps a man understand himself by understanding his emotions, but it serves a greater purpose: it seeks to find something all men possess but fail to display.”
Cyrinth’s words echoed at the back of his mind… or at least at some part of it. He doubted there was truly an apparent recess anymore.
Bequeathing Lenaria to the ground, he rose to meet the Venin guild as the door came down. She lay serene behind him, and though he knew the feeling it invoke in him and understood it, he didn’t feel it. All that was left was a knowledge of his duty. He stepped towards eight men as they rushed at him, carrying weapons, and he knew he would have to deal with the emotions he’d been feeling moments ago, eventually. Until then...
He pushed the throbbing in his bones out of him, and it spilled forth.
The men buckled before they met him, collapsing forward, eyes rolled back into their heads. He stepped aside easily, avoiding a man with a battle axe too big for him.
Outside the door he leaned to the side, swayed like a tired man, and evaded a stray arrow that cracked against the wall. Sunders coming free, he flung one through the room with a whisk of his hand to pin a man with a cross bow at the back of the new group to the wall.
Who uses bows indoors?
The irony wasn’t lost to him, even though it was not his thought. Leaning forward, he stepped into the midst of the rest of his assailants. Enemies attacked, weapons swung, Sunder swished, blood flowed, and bodies dropped as he made his way down the stairs. Almost at the lowest floor, the barrage of attacks ceased. He held both Sunders in grips sleek with blood. He knew when he’d retrieved the second from the dead man but wasn’t sure how. Like most other things, it didn’t matter.
At the foot of the stairs he came face to face with a dark sitting room packed with men and women carrying weapons of varying specialties, from maces to clubs, short swords to broad swords. One man even held up a stick. And the shadow he cast from the light behind him spilled into the darkness before him. If this was what the Venin guild was capable of, it was surprising how they’d existed so long.
“So you’re the priest the seminary sent.”
Ezril turned his head to the woman who owned the voice. She stood at the back of the group.
She was a woman somewhere in her late fifties but she stood tall behind the crowd of fighters. The mole above her lip twitched as she spoke and the black hair on her head bobbed as if she chewed something.
“I wasn’t sent here,” he told her. “I was summoned.”
She shrugged, nonchalant, and her hair bobbed with the action. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll hold you here.”
With that, Ezril’s back itched and he shrugged off the warning. The Tainted among the fighters were too many to count, but he didn’t need to. If they were that much, then it meant he didn’t have to worry much about brute strength.
His gaze settled on a man in the crowd. The wisps around him shivered then ghosted forward, dispersing, only to rearrange right in his face in a perfect outline of the man’s profile, and then, the man burst into smoke.
Ezril caught the knife by the blade before it met his abdomen and saw the shock in the assailant’s eyes, already striking him down with one swing. Blood sprayed where Sunder met skin and Ezril felt the warmth when a few drops splashed on his cheek.
This seemed to serve as a signal for the cacophony of war cries that followed as the fighters ran at him, thinking themselves concealed in the dark. Wisps ghosted forward, specters of violence, heralds of an arriving carnage that was certain.
Ezril moved, slipping between ghosts replaced by humans in a heartbeat, striking them down, ending lives in one or more blows. He found himself going through sword stances Father Talod and Darvi had ingrained in him many years ago. His footing was undisturbed, his movements fluid. And as had happened in the floors above, men fell where he passed.
And death followed in his wake.
He stood at the center of a river of corpse, the battle ended in moments. It had been as the previous, but these men had been stronger, and the Tainted, annoying. He’d sustained injuries and had cuts in his cassock were his blood spilled, mingling with spatters from the others.
The woman, all the while looked at him in terror. “You’re a monster,” she spat, unable to take her eyes away from the scene. “Your seminary has raised an abomination.”
Perhaps…
He took a step towards her and stopped. He could feel the weight of her fear rolling over his. It did naught to prickle his skin. His eyes cast to a door in one of the walls as it swung outward.
“Ezril!” Alanna ran out screaming.
The woman turned to her in a panic. “Alanna, don’t—”
In a beat Ezril stood before the woman, silencing her. His Sunder flashed across her face in a blur, leaving her to crumple to the floor like a wet rag.
He returned his attention to the nun who’d stopped. “Alanna.”
Alanna seemed too stricken to move, simply staring at the anarchy before her, her mouth hanging open in shock.
“Ezril,” she beckoned. Her mouth moved without making words as she looked for what to say. “I’m sorry,” she finally finished. “I wanted out. I was born in the guild. But from the day I met you, I wanted out. My mother…” she glanced at the crumbled woman with so much blood pouring from her face over unfocused eyes and winced. “She promised me I could go wherever I wanted,” she continued, “with whoever I wanted, all I had to do was bring Sister Snow. They wanted to turn her, bring her over to the guild. She was to be my replacement.”
The wisps around her thrummed in what Ezril could only assume was fear, but apart from that, it remained still. He agreed with it; she wasn’t lying.
“… I just wanted out,” Alanna continued, unaware of his observation, or perhaps it was part to blame for her fear. “When it was over I was going to find you and then we could escape. The seminary. The church. The realm. All of it. Together.”
A few things she’d said in the past were beginning to make sense. And with it came a sense of anger, but it was without direction, blazing out without focus. So he gave it focus.
He moved towards her; a single true step to cross the distance. He let his Sunder drop and took her by the face. It made no sound and he knew it had fallen on a corpse. He pinned her against the door she had come through and watched the fear eat away at her. It could always be seen in the eyes. The feel of it though, he ignored, as he’d done the older woman.
His anger ebbed as he held her, his hand securely over her mouth, her face scrunched up at the grip, her cheeks pushing up her bottom eyelids. She looked fine, healthy even. He hadn’t seen it hours ago when he’d seen her with Grit but she was very healthy. They had taken good care of her.
He wasn’t surprised.
But he could see where she was coming from. A need to escape the life she was born into. Finding a friend that gave her the courage to. How many times had she tried to tell him? How many times had he refused to allow himself hear? How many times had he been elsewhere when he knew she needed a friend?
He realized he understood her. How she felt. How she could have believed the lies they’d fed her. So he told her in the simplest words.
“I understand.”
He saw the hope in her eyes, then the sudden shock as her body recoiled involuntarily.
He was partly responsible for what she had done. If he had paid more attention to their friendship, perhaps she would have confided in him. If he’d shown her he could be not only a friend but a trusted one, maybe he could’ve stirred her away from this path.
He shared the fault.
But that was that. And this was this.
He slid his Sunder a finger length deeper into her abdomen gently, and her mouth moved against his hand as tears welled up behind her eyes. The least he could do was hear her last words. He eased his grip.
She was pleading.
“Why?”
The answer was simple.
“They hurt Aria,” he told her. “And you stood with them.”
She gave no response, and death took her gently.
Convinced she had passed, he took out the Sunder, let her crumple as her mother had, retrieved the Sunder he’d discarded, and went up the stairs.
Lenaria had suffered a terrible fate. Sadly, the people around him had not. They’d gone swiftly, and they’d gone down fighting. Which was more than they deserved.
........
Morning met Ezril as it always did. He stood before a burning pyre under its sun. His eyes were swollen from weeping through the night and all he wanted to do was sleep. But Lenaria had waited too long.
It had taken two days to get her out of the city. He had cleaned her the best he could, wiping her down with a wet cloth and dressing her in his hooded cassock. He’d found none of her things at the mansion but didn’t feel too bad about sending her off with nothing from her holy service.
He’d almost ministered her funeral rites. But thinking better of it, he simply set her to flame. She wouldn’t have wanted a last rite, to her, gods deserved no recognition. He hoped Rin would not be too harsh on her soul as he watched her burn, his only consolation the wind and the forest trees forced to attend her burning alongside him while Shade watched from a distance. It had howled so loud through the night that he’d feared men would be upon them by morning. But he hadn’t silenced it.
Everyone grieved in their own way.
The realm taught that shadow fire only burned the living, and that once the soul was extinguished, the flames would die out without fuel to keep it alight. It had cost him, but as he watched what was left of the woman he loved burn in darkness, he knew they taught wrong. They simply didn’t know how to use the flames.
He stood in silence for hours as shadow fire consumed fabric, flesh, bone, and wood. And when all was naught but cinders, he left, unsheathed his Sunders from the dirt, and returned them to their scabbards. Having nothing left to him on the face of Vayla, he made his decision.
He was going home.
Comments
SAB
Damn.
Javek Redhand
Wow! What a poignant chapter. A heartbreaker! The mark of a good story is when we, the readers, become invested in the characters’ lives.
Dawid Mitura
Nah man
