Dedicated to Meriah, who is a really good friend and a kick-ass writer. And a very, very big Malik fan. And without whose encouragement ("FINISH THE FUCKIN' THING, ALEX"), I would never have completed this at all.
**WARNINGS**: Blood, self-injury-type stuff, angst (well, duh. If you had shit carved onto your back by your father, you'd be angsty, too), and probably some other stuff I forgot to mention here.
Isis and Malik and Rishid: Now read the fic! ^.^;;
______________________________________________________________________________
Blood Ceremony
Scars are history, indelible, written onto the body as memories are written onto the psyche. Neither can ever heal.
Alone, I look at my own scars in the mirror; a multiple inlay of scar-tissue, browned and darkened by time and my body's own attempts to heal them, formed into hieroglyphics and images of the gods, an intricate, exotic design. Beautiful, almost. Even I would say so, do I not remember them being carved into my living flesh.
My memories. Yes. They run deeper even than my scars, descending into the past, the life I lived before the night I was marked.
All my childhood I lived in darkness. Literally. It feels strange for me to say it that way, but it is the truth. We lived under the ruins, my family and I, tucked safely away from the rest of the world, guarding the ancient fastness of the Pharoah's tomb.
I hadn't much to compare the darkness to, though. Save for the flickering illumination of torches and candles, I didn't even know what light was. I wondered, true, was ever-curious about it, but for a long time I knew no world but this one in the tunnels. The sun and the moon and the sky were nothing more than a legend to me; I never once went above ground 'till I was ten. And all that time, all those years spent in darkness - or the ignorance of it - were the happiest of my life.
My family. They were my world, all I knew and all I really needed.
Isis, my sister, was mother and best friend to me also in the early years of my life. It was she that I first saw, looking down on me with a gentle smile as I lay newborn. It was she who took up the bottle and fed me, cared for me when no one else would or was able to. She was not more than a child herself, four years old, but she did anyway.
It was she that I called to, alone in the night, haunted by shadows and ghosts. And she came. She always did.
She was with me during all my childhood illnesses, by my side through fevered sleep and awakening, night and day, knowing that I would need her.
She was with me when I first stood up and took two shaky steps, and she celebrated with me this achievement, these toddling steps that were the beginning of the end for us - for I would one day walk them away from her.
I loved her, though. She was my joy, the light of my days. My very soul.
And if she was my soul, then Rishid was my heart. He was my brother, or he might well have been. Mother took him in as an infant, found at the entrance to the tunnels, and adopted him as her own. But this was many years ago, before Isis and I, her own children, were born. Before she died.
Though not as suited to the labors of caring for a baby - me - as Isis was, he was a harder worker than either of us, and not so hot-tempered. It was often, in fact, that he found himself the peacemaker, mediator to arguments. And he was fiercely loyal. He was my close friend in the days of my childhood, and the companion who has followed me down all the twisting roads my life has taken since then. He is the only one that has - that ever has.
We had our hard times, yes, we had our trials and our tribulations. But as least we had each other. And in that, we were happy.
Sometimes we would all play together, a chasing game that children have played for millennia before, and will play for millennia more, dashing through torchlit halls and darkened rooms. I was alight with joy then - we all were, I think. And therein lay all the light that we ever needed, all that ever mattered to us. Our laughter, our happiness, rang all around us and rose up like a song to touch the very gates of heaven itself.
It was eternal to us then, this life we lived and our friendship. We took it for granted and we assumed it would never end. For that end was long in coming, and we never really knew it would. But no matter. We have - all of us - paid the price for our ignorance.
As for my mother...she I never knew. She died, giving me life, when I was born. I was washed with her blood before ever I opened my eyes, and I am forever marked with it.
But I never knew her, never knew anything about her. Where she, my mother, should be in my heart and mind, there is only a blank void.
I asked, but my father never spoke of her, and he forced Isis and Rishid to do the same. I looked, but I could find no pictures and I don't know what happened to her possessions - likely as not my father couldn't stand the sight of them, lying empty and listless without her, and burned them.
Ah yes, my father. How could I ever forget him? I loved him when I was young, purely, fully, without reservation. I trusted him as a kitten does, blindly and completely, for I had no reason to think I shouldn't.
When I was young, he was like a god to me; all-knowing, all-powerful. He knew everything there was to know - I was sure of that - and he taught it to us, Isis and I.
From him we learned our numbers, our letters, and other things also, mysteries and truths from a time beyond reckoning, the secrets that the mages knew, that they had fixed into the very Earth and stone so that all who came after them and had the skill and care to read it would know what they had, and would remember them.
Of these things he taught us, of their legacy and ours, the transcendent, gritty civilization that rose up out of desolation into dominion and eternity, not only of this world, but of the next and the others beyond it.
He taught us of the beauty and wisdom and infinite sadness of the tombs and the secret rooms of the pyramids, the final resting places of the Pharoahs, they who were not only kings to their people but gods made flesh, and of the things lying dormant within them that even death - not only of a Pharoah but of an entire era as well - could never touch.
Of these things he taught us, of this civilization that was once great and is now nothing more than dust.
He taught us these things because, as he said, "It is our born duty, the bane and blessing of our lineage to remember these people and all that they were, lest it be lost to the winds and the desert sands.
"We remember, for who else remains to?"
Yes, my father was always a man of his duty. He had, I suppose, little else to live for after my mother died.
In retrospect (and regret; I could have saved myself the grief, if I had realized it then), I don't know if he ever really cared for us, Isis and Rishid and I. Yes, true enough, he raised us, but more out of duty than personal choice, I think, and more out of my mother's wishes than duty. I think his heart always belonged to her.
He never spoke of her, as I have already said, as if he could pretend away her death by denying she ever existed. But sometimes, when it was very late and he thought himself alone, he would sit up and simply look into the fire, the dance of light and searing heat, as if therein he saw all the things that had been dear to him, the things that he had loved...things that were now forever lost to him. And a great sadness would enter his eyes then, a sadness to deep for bearing.
Perhaps, then, it was from grief that he got his short temper. From pain is born anger, after all, and it was oft and easily that he flew into a rage. And when he did, he took it out on us. All of us, but Rishid the worst.
I never knew why; Rishid worked hard and obeyed my father, and never did anything to anyone, became more slave than anything else. My father justified his abuse of Rishid in that way, by declaring him not a person and a member of this household, but a possession, a slave. My father cared nothing for him, not being my mother's child.
Yes, I myself had my turns under the whip and club, but it wounded me worst when Isis or Rishid was the one suffering. Seeing them, friend and family both, beaten and bloodied...and I, helpless to save them.... It haunts me even now.
I think the first shadows of what would one day become a great darkness were born then. It was the first time I felt the cruel forces of fury and helpless rage, forces that would one day come to dominate my life.
But for that time, at least, I forgave him and forgot it, cast it aside as children will. It never really occurred to me to hate him for it, not then. He was still my father, and I still loved him.
He never showed any regret about it, though, even then. I should have known. I should have seen it coming. I knew the tradition, didn't I? I knew the truth. I knew why he led me, one day - alone - to that strange stone room I had never seen before. I knew what he would do.
The blood ceremony, it is called. An ancient rite. My father bore scars like these, and his father before him. The blood was to mark me as a man, and the scars as the heir to the Ishtar line and the guardianship of the tombs. The Pharoah's memories carved into my very body, my blood and bone, my duty forever a part of me.
The blood ceremony.
The blood - my blood, I remember - everywhere. In my hair, staining white scarlet, sticky and hot and wet, coursing down my sides to splash against the stone. The is something unclean on my hands. I look at them. They are covered in blood.
I fought, of course, though perhaps more out of instinct and raw terror than conscious thought. I thrashed and kicked and even tried to claw my father, mad as a trapped animal. But he just pushed me back down again, the weight of the world on my back.
Screams - screams that were my own - seared the air, rang off the raw stone of the walls and ceiling, and fell like shattered glass to the floor. The room was filled with screams then, demons in the air. Pure agony given voice, though voice alone could not ever express all that I felt then.
The pain. God, the pain. If I die and remember nothing else about my life, I will remember that.
How can I even begin to describe it to one who has never known it? It was blinding, deafening, crushing. The blade, a ceremonial thing dulled by millennia of use, scraped through skin, flesh, and muscle, down to the bone. It nearly wiped out my consciousness...nearly. But not quite. It would have been a mercy if it had.
The terror, too, and the rage. There is nothing more terrifying and enraging than being made helpless as your body is taken and used, ignorant of the soul within it. To be able to do nothing as it is torn and broken, and cast aside like a thing sucked dry of all worth. It is no longer your own then, no longer really a part of you; it is an alien thing, marked by another and their territory now. The soul is split from the body, they are one no longer and will never be again.
But even then, all of that - the pain, the terror - I could have survived. For it was only in the body, and the suffering of the body always comes to an end, in some way or another. The same cannot always be said of the suffering of the soul.
I screamed again, my body arching in a reflex of agony. My father pushed me back down, leaning heavily against my wounded back. But for a moment - a heartbeat - before he pinned me back down once more, I twisted around far enough to see his face.
There was no malice there, but...no regret or pity, either. Only indifference, as though I was nothing more than a canvas or carving upon which he did his work.
It struck me then.
He did not care. My father, the man I had loved and respected all my life...who had taught me and taken care of me...simply did not care. And he never had.
All I had known, all I had loved...all had been a lie.
For the first time in all my remembered life, I wept. Tears fell, clear but cruel, to blend with the opaque crimson on the indifferent stone below.
Something broke in me that night. My innocence, perhaps, or my soul. Such happens when all you believe in crumbles and falls to dust.
Nothing was ever the same after that. It was as if all things bright and beautiful in my life were really nothing more than an illusion, a covering of skin on which pretty pictures are painted. And now it had snagged and been torn away, revealing the brutality and ugliness of reality. The truth does not always set you free.
There was no joy, no comfort and reassurance in the company of those I had loved. There was nothing. All had turned to strangeness.
Isis and Rishid were lost to me - or I to them, as may be more truly said. They were still there, but I was too far away. They reached out to me, offered love, but what was there left in me that could love?
Besides, they were traitors, or seemed so in my eyes. They had abandoned me in my time of need, left me. They could have saved me (couldn't they?), but they hadn't. And they knew, for they seldom spoke to me anymore and never looked me in the eyes, never could bear to see the hell of suffering in them - the suffering that they had condoned. Or perhaps it was I who would never let them, who could never bear to realize it myself....
And, through and past it all, no regret ever entered my father's eyes.
I do not hate him for it. How could I hate him for fulfilling his duty? But I do not forgive him, either, and so the situation will never be resolved or redeemed, for him or for myself. The rage and the darkness will remain in my heart, growing, seething, taking control. For it is a rage without regret or end; a rage that devours all it touches in its quest for fulfillment, though that fulfillment can never be, for even if it could be found, the rage would just devour it along with all the rest and be left alone, left to turn on and chew apart from the inside out the only one it can anymore - itself.
And it had its fulfillment, I my revenge, and my father his comeuppance; it was I who killed him. I and my darkness, my demon, my hate. I killed my own father.
But even in death, I do not - can not - forgive him. Him or myself. Revenge can't always render justice, for some things cannot be undone. There are wounds inside, infected and festering, wounds that cannot ever heal.
And then I remember - and it haunts me that I do - what the voice...what I...(was it me that said it? Or only my hate...?) said before I killed him....
"Time for your blood ceremony, Father."
I looked into his eyes then, if only for a moment in my madness...and I saw there, trembling and beyond shame, the raw helpless terror of my own on the night he marked me.
Then the blade came down, fell and sliced, and all life went out of them.
I felt then and still feel no joy, no relief or redemption. Only horror, despair. Nothing lay in his death but death itself - and not only for him. Because when one takes a life, part of their life is taken also.
No, it eased nothing. Only cut the wounds in deeper. For some things cannot be undone.
I return to the present, to myself, to this body that is forever lost to me. To the scars that this brooding began with, and that it ends with now.
I meet the eyes reflected in the mirror. My eyes. I've never had the time or the care to notice it before, but they are pale and fierce as though all color was burned out of them long ago by the fire of the soul behind them. They are, like my scars, beautiful in a dark, terrible way, beautiful as blood or pain.
Fixed with this gaze, lovely, chilling - my own - I look away. Back to my scars.
They are my past, my history, my personal hell. And the past always creates the future, so....
Their pattern burns into my eyes, rends my mind. I can't look at them, can't take it anymore, yet I cannot look away.
Rage, pain, seethes. The darkness is growing again, taking control.
My fist collides with the reflection in the glass. The mirror falls around me like screams, slicing open my hands and arms.
Blood - hated and courted, but above all, familiar - gathers in shallow trenches carved from flesh and drips away, falling like spring rain or teardrops to the floor.
My blood, my scars, my darkness. They are, in the end, all I have left to call my own.
~*FINIS*~
______________________________________________________________________________
Valie: I'll be yours! *______* :::tackles him:::
Malik: *^^* Sexy chicks! Yay! :::tackles her back:::
Erm...yeah O.o;; Give them some privacy. And review, please. I hate writing all these fics that no one reviews.
Isis: :::To Alex::: Hey there ^.~
^__________________________^ :::tackles her:::
(Yeah, I'm an Isis fangirl. Yes, I like Isis. And I'm a girl. Fuck off. And review! *^^*)