12th of Cylus 720, Break unknown
Blood, flesh, and bone, how did it come to this?
Rakvald could scarcely track the days since he'd been lured into that den in the Lair. He entered the house of ill-repute, seeking a bit of fun like any in the lair. Then, he saw the red candles, the crimson flames and blood lights, and the sigils. Bones, the sigils! They were everywhere, and may as well have been painted in blood for the smell of copper and shit that permeated that den.
Since then, he'd been drugged, magicked, and spirited away to a second location. Here he waited, shackled against cold stone, with a bit of bread and water tossed his way every now and again through a rat's door in the bottom of his cell entrance.
He didn't know why they'd bagged him, or much less who they expected to come searching for him. He did know they had dreamwalkers among them. Men and women who could find him in the veil, so he couldn't very well escape that way. Not without revealing his devotion to Unity. So he'd kept himself awake, counting the grains of dirt on the floor, or the rat turds, or the hairs on the rats that were his only companions.
He sat on that dirty, cold floor, whiling away the cycles since the Masquerade Ball, that vision of opulence and wealth that one so rarely sampled in Quacia. He'd met many promising people back then, people who had ventured an interest in his work. As a sculptor of flesh and the very energies of life. How he'd missed Quacia without knowing it! The blood and gloom and booze. But most of all, the exuberant acceptance of all things magical.
He sighed in the darkness of his cell, looking to either side, and hearing the squeaks of the rats.
He was in his Lotharro totem, of course, as was appropriate. It was possibly why he was fingered as an enemy. He remembered vaguely the torture he'd suffered at the hands of the Herald Dosan. All for the treachery of a woman who wanted his farm.
He vowed to himself he'd see her blood spattered before his hands. Until Llyr persuaded him against violence. That was probably for the best. Death was not the way to render repayment or revenge. There were fates far worse than death.
His horizontal-slit eyes squinted as the cell door opened, revealing a row of bloodlights in the hall beyond. A few large men entered, flanking the lithe figure of a woman in the dress of an herald of the Theocratum.
"Greetings, heretic. We've been awaiting your return for some time." One of the guards spoke, not the woman. She just stood there, just beyond Rakvald's reach.
"My name is Rak..."
SMACK!
The guard unsheathed and slapped Rakvald across the cheek in one motion, with the flat of his blade.
"Heretics must not be heard!"
As the flat scraped against the side of his cheek, it nevertheless cut a gash across it. The gash began to heal over the next few bits, his spark working spontaneously to knit the marred flesh. Rakvald dared to stare up at the guard, and then beyond to the woman standing beyond the threshold. She stood out in the dark, her porcelain skin and ivory hair nearly shimmering in the darkness. Pearlescent eyes, glossed over by whatever magic had transformed her thus. She was otherwise a beauty by anyone's standards if it weren't for the Herald's garb that she wore in colors of scarlet and white trimmings.
Presently she came forth, and knelt before Rakvald, just out of reach of his chains. She stared at him for a few moments. It was then he began to feel something pulling, tugging at the edges of his mind. Some kind of magic? One he hadn't encountered yet. But as he knelt there, fighting the urge to reach out and throttle the Herald, he could feel a sudden calmness welling up from deep within his mind. A calmness that eluded him in almost any other circumstance other than dreams or idyllic fields where his herds could eat and play to their heart's content.
His scowl disappeared, and he began to see someone he could trust in her. It was the strangest sensation, like a strong webbing wrapping its way around his mind and pulling, turning, wrapping it in a cocoon. He tried to fight it, but the deprivation of food, water, and warmth had driven all thought of resistance from his mind. He could not see the woman as anyone else other than a caretaker.
Her voice was like sweet milk on his ears, "Rakvald, we know you. You have sinned against our cherished Theocratum, but there is salvation."
"We offer absolution if you wish to confess..."
Rakvald fought against the idea, but the wrappings of emotional calm kept him still in his mind. He could do ought but listen and absorb the information. His will was all but broken.
"Come with us, to the antechamber. There we will see what the Wounded God has in store for you."
Rakvald gritted his teeth, turning his gaze from the ivory woman down to the floor.
"My name is Laora Sequeira. Will you do something for me, Rakvald?" She asked, and then her hand reached out to touch his left hand, which lay sprawled out on the floor. She lifted his large hand with both of hers and brought it to her bare throat. "Look with your Augur's Eyes, and what do you see, Rakvald?"
The Lotharro's mind stewed at this turn, all it would take, all he had to do, was just tighten his hand around her throat. Tighten it just in the right spot, and crush her air pipe and squeeze. He could kill her now. Then he would have murdered a Herald. Yet, her trust touched something in him, something which rose ever more willingly to the surface of his thoughts and feelings as it came into being.
He could not kill this woman, who trusted him.
Instead, he did as he was told, and felt, looked into her makeup. Her blood, her bone, her flesh, whatever made the woman what she was. He would delve into the secrets of the flesh once more, and come out with...
Darkness, an oily sinking quagmire that pulled him under, blinded him and stole his strength. His slit-pupils dilated, and his mind started and failed. He fell to the ground, still in chains.
Then he was picked up by several men, and born away toward whatever fate they had in store.
When he came to, Rakvald was chained four ways. Front and back by a collar and chains on the neck. Left and right by long shackles tying him to iron rings far to either side. He was knelt in the middle of a stone seal. A carven image of one of the Theocratum's sigils, with grooves cut into the stone. There, he noticed several un-fed bloodlights decorating the sigil. It didn't take much brain power to deduce what they were there for.
Laora was stood at the far end of the chamber, genuflecting and performing her Theocratic exercises before a throng of followers, bearing long knives. Rakvald's eyes blearily adjusted to the gloom of the place, to where he could make out their features. They might as well be anyone's children, he knew them not. But Laora, he could not forget the darkness that her ivory flesh betrayed once delved into. She was one of the shadow women, one of the Naer.
Rakvald had know perhaps one other Naer in recent memory, a nice woman albeit rather depressed and listless, who’d stayed at his Farmhouse in Desnind. This one, however, was quite a different creature. Full of untold power and charisma, he knew now that she must have been a mage. To have stayed his hand when by all rights he should’ve crushed her throat, the unnatural feelings bubbling up to the surface and reinforced. She was some form of Empath.
He was still clothed in his vest, breeches, boots, and arm wrappings when they came to him with their knives. In a few moments, they tore away at the leather vest, and threw it aside, revealing his torso, and the spiny hairs that decorated the thick hide of his back. There, laid plain was the sigil of repentence, that Dosan had carved into his flesh and left as the marking of a corruption as he had tried to heal the wounds. Forever a reminder of the Scarlet Beast’s wrath.
The acolytes drew back from him, he could hear their footsteps. Their breath caught in their mouths. Then, one of them spoke to Laora, ”Herald! He has the sigil of Penitence! On his back!”
Laora nodded, and then shrugged the sheer crimson silk robe she’d been wearing, leaving her bare to all eyes. She turned around, and approached Rakvald, taking a longknife from one of the acolytes in her stride.
Rakvald fought against his binds, the clinking of chains the singular reward he had to gain for his efforts. Presently, she knelt beside him, and, unexpectedly, drew the knife across her forearm, revealing blood that gave light as it was exposed to the air. This, she held over Rakvald’s forehead, allowing it to trick down his face, into his nose, his mouth. ”Drink, Penitent.” She whispered to him.
He let the blood seep into his mouth, tasting its strange oily texture. His face was glowing with her blood, and the light radiated as he shut his eyelid against the fluid.
Without warning, she drew the knife across his own wrists, one by one. In vertical slashes so as to maximize the bleeding into the grooves. The Inheritor reacted to this blood-letting, and began sealing the wounds as I would. Yet it’d take bits for the stitching to complete.
”Drink…” She whispered once more, pushing her glowing wound to his mouth.
As his blood flowed through the grooves, and toward the bloodlights, they began to glow themselves with the same luminescence as the Naer’s exposed blood.
He became dizzy with the taste of her oily blood, it didn’t taste good. The Inheritor incorporated the blood, trying to meld it with his own. Yet he began rejecting the foreign fluid, and before long was convulsing, collapsing onto the ground as he continued to heal.
The circle lit up in bloodlights, spreading out to the rest of the make-shift Prayer Chamber.
There he would lie, until he was ready to hear the truth, as Laora knew it.
