Schneider delved into Kall-Su's library with a fanatical passion. Pulling down a volume he thought he wanted and scouring its pages for some hint of the spell making he wanted. Carelessly he tossed priceless books aside if they offered nothing he wanted. In others he found passages he thought might be useful and read and reread them, marking the places for future reference. He found bits and pieces of things that would be of use to him. Various positions of the stars which made some spell casting more potent. Various components without which a proper casting could not be achieved. He had never cared a whit about where the stars were. Had never bothered with the mundane mechanics of lowbrow witchery. He had always made his own moments and man and demon and angel be damned if they didn't like it.
He sat behind Kall's desk with the collected volumes of several mortal lifetimes strewn around him, witchlight glowing eerily over his shoulder, writing notes occasionally on a fine piece of parchment he'd found in the desk. He summoned the old woman once, needing her lore in herbcraft to clarify a point for him. She looked at his scribblings, at the dark path his search for a casting seemed to take and her rheumy eyes paled in fright.
"Only the dark gods will respond from such a casting as this." She murmured. "No witch with a shred of reason would risk their notice."
"I'm not a witch." He said offhandedly. "Let them notice me. Who's to say I haven't already trafficked with them?"
She looked spooked then and scurried away. Arshes came later, when the night had been driven away by the first dregs of morning. She stood in the mess he had made of the immaculate study and he hardly noticed her.
"What are you doing?" she finally asked. "Reduced to herb lore and spell crafting?"
He half glanced up at her from under his bangs, then back to the book he was studying.
"This is useless." She admonished him. "A waste of time spent better elsewhere. What use have we ever had for this kind of magic?"
"Go away, Arshes." He turned a page.
"What if he's dead, Darshe? It's been nearly a month. He was probably dead within the day. That's why we've not been able to sense him."
"Then I'll find his corpse. If you've nothing to offer, then leave me alone."
She went silent for a moment, then said low voiced. "What if he's in hell, Darshe? Will you go there after him? Haven't you had enough of that?"
He didn't respond. She left eventually, but he tapped his fingers on the page of a book thoughtfully in the echo of her words. If the spell he concocted succeeded, it very well might take him to the depths of hell, if that was where the scent led. He did not particularly relish the notion of revisiting that realm. Not just a spell of locating then. Not just a reverse summoning, which was what he mapped out, bit by bit, but another layer of magic on top of that binding his physical form to this place. He had never under his own power crossed the threshold of space and distance. It was not a magic he possessed. The Prophet possessed it somehow. He could not begin to imagine how he had come across it. Not without preparation and time and the damned annoying inconvenience of having the moon just so and the proper ingredients mixed to perfection and the burning incense of blood. Distorting the fabric of space and place was just not that important.
He wiped everything from the desktop and layered it in parchment. Dipped pen in ink and began to transfer the mechanics of the spell, of the chants of the ingredients into more coherent form. He had taken parts from several invocations, from several schools of thought and began to tedious task of twining them into one whole that would serve his purposes. It might do nothing at all, for all he knew. He might be wasting his time in truth, but once he latched onto an idea, he was like a dog with a scrap of bone with it. Refusing to let go until it was gnawed down to nothing.
He personally went and found old Ayntha when he'd finished the greater part of it and forced her to look at his speculation and the method of his madness, using her skill as a practitioner of herb magics to gauge how accurate his concoctions would be. She clicked her tongue, running a gnarled finger over the parchments.
"You weave a complex web here." She observed. "There are simple things that could be substituted --- and would less demanding of the caster."
"Simplicity is not an issue." He said. "There are wards which no simple counter summoning will bypass. Do you think it will work?"
"I think it is as dangerous a crafting as ever I've seen. I think the scope of it is beyond a simple old woman like me."
"Do you think it will work?" He repeated the question, pinning her with his ice blue eyes.
"I think something will happen. How could it not?"
"Then help find what I need for the spell." He thrust a list of ingredients at her. No simple list, certainly. Her old eyes scanned it, then widened in dismay.
"Here -- in the cold north, some of these things may not be available."
"Then use your years of study in herb lore to come up with acceptable substitutes, but be quick about it. The moon is full in two nights hence and I'll not wait another cycle to try this out."
He could not wait another moon cycle, because it would be too late by then. Because by then, the Prophet would have had more than enough time to accomplish what he wanted and it would mean the ruination of them all more than likely when he did.
There was no escape from the morass that pulled him down. He gave up struggling against it, not because it was easier or the pain washed away his will to fight, but because to a certain degree he just didn't care.
Only not caring didn't make the dreams go away. The last one he had, the last one he could remember assaulting him in this place without windows and hope was a skewered, surrealistic version of the truth. He had traveled that path before, step by terrible step and yet there was nothing he could do to avert it. Nothing he could do to force his mind or body to stop the things from happening that happened. Again and again and again.
Miserable, horrible day. Pushed beyond his endurance by the lot of malicious, foul mouthed boys that always plagued him. Hurt by words and fists, until he fought back the best he could, outnumbered and outwitted by older, more treacherous minds. When he drew blood against them, it drove them into a frenzy and in the dream, as in reality, he had thought they were going to kill him in their rage. And something that he had little control over had surged to the surface and stricken them down. Horribly killed them, the sons of the village's upstanding citizens. And he had been taken, dazed and bewildered by what he had done to stand before the judgment of the town's elders. Of his grandfather. His mother had been a silent witness. She had looked upon it all with mournful eyes, but she hadn't shed a tear. He hadn't until they decreed that they didn't quite know what to do with him. Until they decided to lock him away in the only sanctified place they knew that might contain the evil of his soul. The old church at the edge of the river, half flooded by the crumbling of the shore. Decreed that there he would stay until he died of starvation. He had cried then. But more because his mother could hardly stand to meet his eye when he screamed for her to comfort him. He hardly understood what the banishment meant, in his mind the only punishment they gave him was separation from Mother and she hardly seemed to notice when they took him away.
The priest did. That was the only thing different in the dream. The new priest watched them drag him off with simmering, accusing eyes and a small smile on his thin lips. There was a promise in that smile that Kall did not know how to interpret. So he didn't think about it. All he could think about was the ruined, boarded up interior of the old church that he was thrust into. The slanted floor that dipped towards the encroaching river. The walls coated with mildew and algae. The pews mostly ripped up from the floor to use in the new church, but a few broken seats remaining. The naive was almost submerged. A few statues that had crashed down when the foundation finally gave lay shattered on floor. The one window that had not been boarded was the round, stained glass one above the naive. It let in a tainted, greenish light. A lapping pool of brown water took up the far end of the church. The smell of stagnation was strong in the air.
He whimpered when they slammed the doors behind him. When he heard the crash of the bar and the sound of them nailing it into place. Finality. Something rustled in the debris near the water. Snakes that had slithered in through the cracks to find a quiet, dark place to nest, he thought with a shiver of fear. He sat with his back against the door, desperately wishing that mother would come. He needed her soothing voice and the comfort of her arms so badly.
But no, when she came, a detached part of him insisted, the nightmare would truly begin. That part of him dreaded her appearance. The other part of him, the part that walked consciously in the dream had no choice but to yearn her presence. He went to sleep eventually, curled by the door, and dreamt of snakes crawling out to see what had invaded their domain. Snakes and a dull, throbbing pain that ate through his back to the core of his being. Of hurtful pressure in his shoulders and arms and a seeping numbness in his hands and wrists that would not go away. He came half awake to confusion. His back to a wall, his weight supported by manacles that cut his wrists to the bone. He sobbed, trying to take his weight onto his legs, but the movement grated his back against the wall. It thrust him back into darkness.
And he awoke to the sound of not snakes but rats scurrying across the floor by his legs. He cried out and flailed at them and they scampered, intimidated by his size and the sudden waking furor. The dream scared him. He rubbed his wrists and climbed unsteadily to his feet. It was unclear to him how long he had been here. His legs were weak. With hunger? He could not recall eating in a very long time. He walked down the wrecked, tilted aisle towards the edge of the water, wondering if it were drinkable. The smell warned him away. It was fouled by stagnation. His throat ached from crying -- screaming? He backed against on of the fallen statues and leaned there, praying to the gods for salvation. For forgiveness. But they turned a deaf ear.
And then, when the oppressive silence of the drowning church weighed so heavily upon him that he slept again his prayers were answered and she came.
Part of him panicked. The buried, helpless part that could only watch this dream from a distance. That part of him sobbed, even while the child caught his breath in boundless relief that she had come. That she had not abandoned him after all. The other part of him wanted to wake up so badly even the endless pain of that other existence would be welcome. Anything to avoid this scene from being played.
But he couldn't. He sat up, with tears of gratitude spilling down his face and watched her shadowed figure move up the aisle. Watched the gentle sway of her skirts, the movement of her long hair as she put a hand out on the back of one shattered pew to steady herself. The other hand she held behind her back. Her eyes were in shadow. She said nothing.
He said her name, tentatively. Held out a hand to her, confused by the silence and the unsteady gait. As if she were sick or unwilling to approach him. She had seen what he'd done. Was she disgusted? Did she hate him for it?
He wept that he was sorry. Pledged that he would never do it again. He hadn't meant to!! She stared down at him, face frozen and impassive.
"It is my fault." She said. "My sin. You never should have been born."
Part of him stared with incomprehension, another part of him wailed to hear those words because he knew them to be true.
"I'll burn in hell because of your existence." She said and swung her hand out from behind her, clutching the gleaming curved length of the Falchion. There was nothing he could or would do but stare as she brought it two handed down upon his head.
It didn't hurt, surprisingly enough. Just drove him to his knees, and blinded him with blood streaming into his eyes. She stumbled back, begging for the gods to forgive her. To save her soul from the taint of having let him live so long. And the power that dwelled within him coiled and ripped out of its bonds, lashing out into the solid world of reality, ripping into the living flesh that had killed him. Tore her body to sheds as if she were nothing more than unconnected flesh and muscle without the benefit of a skin to keep it together.
The Falchion hit the floor. The power caught him in its grip and repaired the damage done without him ever being aware of the intricacy of the task. It was a living, malevolent thing that took control of its vessel when the vessel could not summon the will or rational to move on his own. All he could do was stare at the bloodied, ravaged corpse of his mother. He bent down numbly and picked up the blade she had used to destroy him. It was large in his small fingers. Blood made the hilt sticky in his grip. The doors were closed, locked behind Mother so she could do her duty. The powers gathered to blast them open, to blast all of their self-righteous faces into the same bloody pulp it had made of mother.
In reality it had happened. In the dream something was altered. The new priest stepped into the path of the greenish light from the stained glass window. There was in the priest's eyes a gleaming inferno of triumph. His lips stretched in satisfaction.
"Look what you've done, wretched creature."
Kall screamed and wanted this man dead so bad he felt it consume his reason, his memory, every physical sensation in his body. The power responded, it welled up in a wave of hate and guilt and devastation and crashed down upon the Priest. And the priest lifted a hand and batted it aside. Lifted the other and closed the fingers like a fist and clamped down upon the source of it, obliterating it as easily as he might squash an ant underneath his thumb.
He stared in dismay, the fury that the power had summoned within him dwindling away to nothing now that it was gone. All he could see now was the inescapable walls of the drowned church, the desecrated body of Mother and the man that hunted him. The man that would finish what his mother had not been able to accomplish.
He took a step backwards, trembling so hard he had to clutch his hands to hold them still. The priest smiled. A feral, animal smile that promised nothing but hurt and death.
"She was the last. The last of anyone who ever wanted to help you. And look what you did to her. What punishment a matricide?" The priest slithered towards him, a snake in godly vestments. He bent and picked up the blade. Ran his fingers down the length of the blade, then licked the blood from them.
"The taste of your blood is sweet, boy."
The child scrambled to get away, mindless panic in his huge eyes. Over the charred corpse of his mother and he sobbed hysterically. The priest circled him, pacing his awkward flight, holding that bloody blade in his hand. He pointed it at Kall and said between breaths that were becoming labored in his agitation. "There's no way out for you now. Different ending this time, my pretty, pretty little monster."
"Nonononono." He moaned and curled against the splintered remains of an old statue. No place to run in this drowned place. No place to hide from those mad, gleaming eyes and that grin that dripped saliva with its owner's fervor. The priest raised the sword and slammed it down over Kall's head. He whimpered and covered his face with his hands. The blade sunk into the stone of the statue and quivered there. The priest reached down for him ---
-----Slash! The lash crossed his skin and took all his breath away. His eyes stared blindly at the gray wall before his face. He could see the drowned church so clearly in his mind that he almost believed he was there. Almost, save for the crack of the arcane lash that ripped his flesh to shreds. She was dead. She was dead. She was dead. And he'd sent her to hell. The demons had devoured her soul. Taken her to eternal torment and all because of him. From his birth to his living, to his evil, betraying magic that had taken her life, when his was the one that should have ended. Worthless, this life, if it had cost so much. He wanted to die. He wanted so badly to die and take the coward's way out ---
--- and the priest crowed in victory, caught at his pale hair and the collar of his tunic and jerked his small body up from against the statue, glaring into his grief and fear etched face. "You will. You will, boy. But not yet."
He tried frantically to twist away and the tunic ripped. He slithered out of it and the priest pounced on him, slammed him down into the rubble littered floor and sought to restrain his twisting, writhing body. Caught his wrists and pinned them over his head and crouched over him, shaking with a maniacal light in his eyes while he ran his free hand down Kall's narrow chest. "Pretty, pretty monster."
Madness in the priest's eyes -- and something more that the boy could not comprehend -- but froze him with terror nonetheless ---
-- The lash stopped and the echoes of the nightmare, delusion, fever dream, blended with reality. Angelo's hands ran down the bloody mess of his back. The man's breathing was harsher than his own. Fingers caught in his hair, pulled his head back and the blood coated hand smeared a line of crimson down the side of his cheek to his neck. He couldn't think, couldn't reason. Couldn't do anything but pulse with the hurt and wish over and over that it would end forever. Death was the only escape from this.
"Sinner. Sinner. Sinner." Angelo hissed in his ear. "You even try to taint me with your wretchedness. But you're almost there, aren't you. Almost mine."
He sobbed, not even having a voice to beg for death. The Prophet's lips pressed against his jaw, his tongue flicked out to lick the blood away, his hands moved around his ribs to trail down the muscles of his stomach. Horrified trembling shook him, mind balking in revulsion and horror at what he had seen in Angelo's eyes and heard in his voice. One last overpowering shame to destroy him. Ridged, punishing flesh pressed against him and he couldn't even find the breath within his lungs to scream for it to stop ---
--- The child screamed. And screamed. And the priest hit him repeatedly to quiet them, damning him to hell for his sins. Damning him for making the priest fall into sin himself. All the while he hurt him, he blamed it on the child for tempting him into it. Demanded that the child admit it was so. Hadn't his poor dead mother said as much when she'd tried to rectify her own sin and died by the hand of her son? The priest was a holy man, a good man and look how he had been tainted by the evil in Kall's soul. And the child lay with his face pressed into the rubble and begged for forgiveness, because it was the only way he knew to make it stop. Because he knew, deep down in his soul that the priest was right. That he was the cause of all the bad and horrible things that had happened in his small world and he wanted to die for it ---
--"Damn you to hell." Angelo screamed in his ear, spittle hitting his neck, cheek. "You make me do this, demonspawn. Say it! Say it!"
He couldn't get the blood and the tears out of his mouth. The child in the drowned church screamed in bewilderment and shame, desperate to say anything to make it stop.
"I made you. I made you do it."
"Repent, sinner." Tearing. Ripping, pain that ate at the core of him. That shredded the last vestiges of armor that had protected what was left of pride and honor and vitality.
"REPENT!" Angelo screeched.
"I'm sorry. I'msorrysorrysorry." He couldn't say it enough. It echoed in his mind until it was all he could think and see and feel. Pain and guilt. Guilt and pain. And he hardly even felt the pain in the spinning, detached place he retreated to. The man curled into that place and closed himself from the world, mortally wounded. And the child, as children are wont to do being less brittle and fixed than adults, took up residence, huddled in a corner of a church so long gone as to be forgotten, crying over the hurt done to his body and the ravaged corpse of his mother.
The Master summoned her. She crept into his chambers hesitantly, lyre clutched in her hand while he paced, muttering incoherently to himself. There was such a look in his eyes, they boiled with such -- unease, that she almost bolted. But to not appear at his command would be suicidal. So she slipped into the room and knelt where he could see her if he wanted, waiting. There was blood on his hands. Her eyes caught it in one of her hesitant glances up at him and she caught her breath on a surge of dread of what he had done to draw it. What he had done to cause himself such apparent anguish.
He whirled to her, as if he had just spotted her after she had sat there for five minutes awaiting his pleasure.
"Sing the scripture I taught you. The one asking for atonement."
She brought the instrument to her thighs, positioned her fingers to strum the simple chords and sang the hymn. More a reverberation of appeal to the holy gods, words of redemption clothed in the shards of humbleness to ease the guilt of the righteous. She sang it and he mouthed the words with her, calming himself. He went to the alter and symbol of his god and dropped to his knees, breaking with the hymn and offering up his own prayers of redemption. He shrugged his shoulders out of the loose neck of his robes, then pulled off the tunic underneath. Lily stared in shock, faltering in the hymn. She had never seen the master without his robes. His body was stringy and rawboned, despite the breadth of his shoulders. White, dead looking skin.
He reached for a short handled, leather whip and she shuddered, a dozen fears going through her mind. But he seemed to have forgotten her entirely. With slow, savage intensity he brought the whip down across his own shoulder, leaving a red welt.
"Forgive me, God, my transgression." He gritted out and hit himself again.
"Forgive me my weakness." Again.
Lily clutched the lyre to her chest, inching back towards the wall. The slap of leather against flesh was mesmerizing. Blood leaked down from the welts in tiny rivulets, scarlet against his white skin. He never cried out or even grimaced. As if he longed for the pain, for the redemption his own flogging would bring. As if such a simple thing ever could redeem him of the things he had done.
"Forgive me to succumbing to his foul temptation. I am unworthy to serve You." Slap, slap, slap.
"Cleanse the filth from my mind. Forgive me my trespass."
She covered her face, shutting out the sight of him, but not the sound of the whip or the madness in his voice. What had he done? What had he done to drive him to such guilt? Fear pulled at her ruthlessly. A chilling, empty fear that made her chest pound and her head spin. On her rump, with one hand holding the lyre and the other on the floor to support her, she slipped to the door. Crawled backwards out of it and even out of his personal chamber could not find the strength to gain her feet. So she crawled to the outer door and only climbed to her feet outside it, her shoulder shored up by the wall, her teeth chattering so hard she bit her tongue and tasted blood.
She ran down the hall then, her bare feet a soft patter on the floor. To the door a floor down from this one from where she knew the Master had come. She expected it to be locked. It had been the last week, but it stood half open, as if the Master had been in too much of a rush to shut it properly. She hesitated on the other side, her back pressed against the stone jamb, fearing to go in and see what the darkness and the silence hid.
She had no right here. She had no right meddling in her master's affairs. She was nothing but a slave and slaves had no business with anything not of their owner's choosing. She would get in trouble leaving the Master's rooms without his permission. She slipped into the cell. The door let in enough light for her to see him against the wall. She gasped and tears began in earnest down her cheeks. The blood was not an unfamiliar sight, nor the wounds of his flesh, but he hung from cruel manacles like he was dead. She didn't know that he wasn't. The only thing that made her hesitate in touching him was her own fears of inadequacies. Her own self-assurance that she had not right to lay fingers upon him. But she pushed those aside and pressed her fingers against his neck to see if a pulse beat there.
It did. She tried to shore up his weight, reckless now that she had committed to him and this madness, and reach the cuffs that imprisoned his bleeding wrists. She could barely reach them with her finger tips when she stood on tip toe, much less trying to hold him up at the same time. She murmured a curse under her breath, trying to think how she might get him down and came up stymied. She hadn't the key anyway. Stupid, stupid slave girl, she called herself and bit down on the side of her mouth to stifle a sound of despair.
The sound of boots in the hallway outside made her freeze. For one second she stood frozen beside him, trapped with no way out that would not be seen by whoever walked that hall. Then she darted for the cot and shimmied under it, pressing against the wall in fear of discovery. She could just see the faint light made by the door. Beside, it lying in the dirty straw of the floor was her lyre. Her breath stopped in her throat. She was lost, surely. The door swung wide open and she saw black boots. No acolyte then, for they all went bare of foot with long robes covering their ungodly flesh. Not even the Master, for he too wore robes. Which meant it was the master's shadow. Sinakha.
He paused at the door and stood for a moment, unmoving. Had he seen her lyre? Was he even now searching the cell with his strange green eyes for her? He stepped forward, strode towards the wall and Kall-Su. There was the sound of metal grating against metal. A body slumped bonelessly to the floor. She could see him sprawled there, a glint of pale gold hair, pale skin amidst the blood and lashmarks. Sinakha crouched, pulled him up as if it were no effort at all and dumped him ungracefully on the cot. It groaned in protest of the sudden weight and Lily shut her eyes, fearing it would come crashing down upon her. Then Sinakha turned and walked out of the cell, not seeming to see her lyre at all. He was out the door and for a moment her head swam giddily with her narrow escape before he shut the door behind him and she heard the rusty grate of key in lock.
She wanted to moan. She kept it back. The cell was plunged into darkness. The only sounds were the faint rustle of his breathing. Hers was a silent, fearful trickle of breath. She stayed where she was for a long while, imagining Sinakha would realize something was amiss and come back. But nothing disturbed the endless dark, stillness. Eventually she scooted out from under the cot, feeling her way to the edge and his body that lay so quietly upon it. Her fingers found an arm. Ran up his shoulder to touch his face, to brush at his hair.
"Are you there?" she whispered. "Please wake up."
He made no response. No slightest tremor to suggest he lingered anywhere near consciousness. She rocked back and forth, trapped in this darkness with him. A few breaths to calm herself and she made her way to the door, tested its strength and found it resolute. Softly she hit her forehead against the wood. They would find her here, where she was not supposed to be and the master would be furious. She didn't know if her worth to him was enough to make the punishment survivable. He could find other minstrels surely. She slid down the door, searching in the darkness for her lute. Found it and hugged it to herself. It made a hollow thrumming sound, almost a complaint when she squeeze it tight. She had sealed her own fate by having concern for a man she had no power to help.