Hymn to a Satyr

by TheSematary'sProgeny

Rewritten! Ancient Roman AU. Over a century after Godric commits a terrible crime, he returns to his hometown in pursuit of Eric's mortality and affections, even as he is haunted by memories of his own Maker. A life apart would be certainly safer for the slave and the soldier, but love is rarely so wise.

5. The Memorial: The Burning

The state of being bound with ropes that chafed my wrists and ankles was a condition with which I was very familiar by the time I had been Master's property for five months. Though our door was always locked during the day, Master persisted in tying me up before he went to bed, just before dawn, in the only room in the apartment that possessed no windows. (As in most apartments, the major chambers were lined along an outer wall of the building, so that they might catch as much sunlight as possible.) Aside from being a prevention of my somehow locating the key to the front door of the receiving room and escaping, this trussing of my person was, I had learned, only one of Master's many pleasures.

I rested my head against the wall, my mouth twisting at the screams of my neck and shoulders, muffling the cries that might have fled through my lips.

I only ever left the house in Master's company, and two nights ago I thought we were merely making a trip to the market, to buy a week's meager supply of food for myself. But those streets that had just begun to appear familiar to me had instead been avoided, in turn for those that led to a small, dark shop overflowing with the pungency of ink.

Master had removed my tunic and forced me, facedown, onto a table. "He is a freedman," Master, knowing full well that my comprehension of the language he spoke was increasing, had whispered in my ear of the man approaching us with a needle and bottle of ink in his hands.

My stomach lurched. How could someone who had once been a slave do something that would most likely be extremely unpleasant to another slave?

Master's cold hands had held me down while the freedman had drawn a serpent down my neck and spine with the needle, and dissimilar bands around my upper arms, and a spiked collar across my clavicles. Those hands did the same the next night, in another place with another man who was once a slave, when a branding iron pressed a circle containing a maze of lines into my right shoulder blade.

Now, against the wall farthest from the window and the gentle sunlight it offered, my back was nonetheless caught in flames, and I wept.