This is Absolution

by Audrey

What happens between the time that Ashley last sees Sydney and when he shows up at the Duke's? What does he think about the loss of his Rood? /Please/ R&R!!!

this is absolution.

The little girl skips among the dead and half-buried, the dark dismal streets of ashes to ashes to dust to dust singing its long gone hymns. The voices, rising from the ground in myriads and hosts and flocks, trail after her like the gray, gray remnants of a corpse's disintegrating wedding veil. Her feet beat against the dirt in her own haunting dance, taptapshake, taptapshake, a child whose movements seem choreographed to the clatter of bones or the moans of the not really there. The girl's feet step spiral and stir the rising dust so that a castle takes form around her. Her hand touches the doorknob, and scrying eyes see "Ashley, I...I'm..." then the dust falls away once again, and the girl is left taptapshaking alone in the street. She knows. She witnesses a scream, a fall, a dusk, and still she dances, until, from the true castle of stone and blood the figure appears, slim and small, crippled and staggering towards her while the City cries with him in defeat. "They took my skin," he gasps to her, grabbing her by the shoulders as if to suck the sympathy out of her. "They took my skin. My Sin. My skin." His face contortes, and the girl sees the ghost of a little boy crying in her embrace. "Daddy told me we are all made of 4 things," he cries with child's eyes into her soft shoulder. "Skin and flesh and bones and soul." The little girl holds an armless deity with bloodstained tears in her arms. "They took my skin, my soul with it. I am... only flesh and bones," he says softly, a miniscule howl into the black-orange night air, tearing at the truth with claws formed only by glory. Dreamily, "I have no face they took the skin from my back my mark they took my face, I... the eyes are the windows to the soul." He stops and stares blankly at the girl, and, arms around him, she feels the sticky warm ooze, moving with waves, that are the bare bloody muscles of his back. He stands up stiffly. "They strip me," he says quietly. "Of all that I had to be stripped of. Bones and flesh, I'm no more than any rotted corpse of this catacombic city." The little girl puts her hands on his waist and turns him around and presses her soft lips to the gore of his back. Glory. An image of white unharmed skin seals over his massive naked wound. A kiss from soft pink lips of flesh and blood and soul. But not skin. "Go," she says quietly, the voice of perfect love and hate. "I will watch the dark. For all you have been stripped of you may think yourself forgiven." He clutches at his innards as if her words have torn them out, or as if perhaps she has torn off the skin of his belly as well, and walks off seemingly perfected. Clean. Bloodied. Absolved of his sin, he cries. Absolved of his Sin, he dies. The dagger runs true from his father's hand and the snowflies flicker and whisk back to the girl as she stands taptapshaking on the corpses of millions. And when one more body of flesh and bone is thrown on top of the columnic stack to green away like moss, eaten by their own mournful flies, the girl's face changes to the Knight and the Inquisitor and the Riskbreaker and the Lover and the Traitor and the Wretch, and, for just one glimpse of a fateful second, the Goddess. Then Mullenkamp cradles the sacrificed arms of her boy, tears off the skin in a fit of Blood and Sin, and, as always, disappears into the Dark.

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