They said the city had to be reborn. The ancient ways cast aside. The blood of generations spilled for naught; too many lives exhausted in the service of an order that no longer held the same sway, in the name of a god they proclaimed to be false. They would heal the land, they said, they would cast aside traditions and beliefs now deemed inhumane, unnecessary, brutish, vile. No more blood would wet the long-forsaken soil under Quacia.
And who, demanded Inzse, were they?
The foreigners spouting commands in the common tongue?
The heretics, the worshippers of false, deceiving idols?
The champions and children of Immortals?
How far Quacia had fallen, to listen to them.
Every man, woman, and child had once served a purpose. Pain and sacrifice were ways of life, means of survival. Prayers of devotion. Gratitude. Faith.
For generations they had awaited the return of the Wounded God, and gave themselves over completely to the will of his mortal servants. Why then, when he had finally returned to them, as they had begged and pleaded and prayed for so fervently for so many arcs, did the knees of Quacia buckle at the demands of an Immortal’s champion?
Inzse would not give in. He would not lower himself to that. There could be no degradation worse than following the very ones that his entire way of life was built against. They had survived the war, but the Mortells would not remain embers while Quacia’s masses were reduced to moral ash. Nowhere else in the world, Inzse knew, would return to them the way of life they had lost after Ruin’s Dawn, but he and his descendants would not linger in the twisted mess of Immortal influence that had infiltrated Quacia.
Like his father, and his father’s father, and ancestral fathers for generations past, Inzse Mortell was born beneath the thumb of the Theocratum and shed blood for the Wounded God from the day that he was born. Their line was not one furnished with wealth nor had higher status ever graced a Mortell, but they were strong. They were steady. Above all else, they were devout. It was the fault of Inzse’s great-uncle that they lost their generational home in Gleam when he was but a child, and his own flesh and blood became the first heretic he witnessed suffer the punishment of anathema. It was clear to him then that the blood shared between kin did not matter at all; blood mattered only when spilled in service of the Wounded God.
And, as he grew older, he learned how far that service could be stretched.
Inzse, living then with the rest of his relatives in a crowded hovel in Shanty, never questioned his faith in the Scarlet Belief nor in the Theocratum’s power to interpret and enforce it. Even when, as he grew into a violent and ill-natured young man, he ran into scuffs with red-robed Tribunals more than once, his faith in them did not waver. He married the lovely sister of a scarlet priest, Sorella Cardos, and whisked her away from her family in Gleam to live in squalor with him.
Hypocrisy became second-nature to Inzse Mortell, and every outlawed and immoral thing he filled his time with was justified in his mind – while he demonized like-minded men without question. He revelled in Lair, enjoying other women while his wife’s health declined in their overcrowded home. He started fights in defense of his pride, yet finished just as many for the sake of his beliefs, when anyone dared utter a blasphemous word within his presence.
He was overjoyed when Sorella bore a son, for it meant the continuation of his name and a new child to serve the Wounded God. Inzse, the only able-bodied man still living among the Mortells, sent the rest of his kin away to make room for his firstborn son in their shabby home. And when the child did arrive, he was perfect.
The boy, Leosze, became the center of Inzse and Sorella’s worlds. A perfect son. A devoted believer. The legacy that Inzse had always wanted. Sorella’s health impaired her from bearing more children, but he had no need for a second son, not when he had Leosze, and his wife’s wishes for a daughter went ignored.
So, when a wretched woman happened one trial upon Inzse with a babe in her arms, a second son born to him – he had no need of it.
Born in the dark back chambers of a brothel he often frequented in Lair, the baby was presented to Inzse with two choices on the prostitute’s lips. He could take the child and do what he wished with it, whatever that may be, or end the infant’s suffering then and there with his own hands.
Mine are clean, the mother said,
and now the burden falls to you.
The ruination of a perfect legacy. The only true stain upon his name. Had his firstborn been any less exemplary it would have mattered to him less. But this, the crying child in his arms – Inzse would have none of it, and he would not allow the son of a prostitute even the smallest fraction of what belonged rightfully to Leosze. Inzse departed Lair, never to return there to that iniquitous place, and with Sorella’s aid devised a plan.
It was his intention to rid himself of the boy completely, to spill his dirty blood for the Wounded God that his sacrifice might soothe the pain of his hypocrisies. Yet, despite the hatred that brewed and boiled over within Sorella at the sight of her husband’s bastard child, she could not stomach it. She posed a solution instead: she could carry no more children, and the Wounded God had bestowed upon her the chance for something that she had always wanted.
They would raise the child as their own. Sorella would return to society with her health, and when she and her husband were asked for the reasons behind her absence, they would speak only vaguely, briefly of the pitiful, sickly daughter she had birthed and now kept at home – and shift the conversation back to their prized Leosze.
The babe was confined. Raised by the spiders and the centipedes that crawled up from the ground into their collapsing home. Inzse was cruel, and Sorella only marginally kinder. Leosze was the worst of them all.
Daughter and son, raised together but worlds apart. Astasia, as the daughter of Lair was named, fed from the scraps Leosze deemed undesirable on his plate and learned of the world through the filtered information her family gave her. She was kept inside to tend to their house; making the beds she was not allowed to sleep in, dusting the handle of a door she could not exit. On occasion she was brought to the Temple, and these were days she cherished most, when she was allowed to bleed alongside her brother and prove her faith to the Wounded God.
Astasia was not kept secret, but she was kept hidden, and very rarely interacted with anyone but her own kin and the Theocratum’s priests. She was not unhappy with her life – she knew no other ways, and she had faith that all was right.
She was alone at home when the foreigners destroyed Quacia.
She felt the tremors deep beneath the ground, she heard screams outside, shrieks in the distance. She fell to her knees and prayed for breaks, shedding blood until she grew too weak. She only knew what happened in the Temple because her father and Leosze told her, when they returned bloodied and defeated after the fact, curses on their tongues for the likes of Faith Augustin and the others. Sorella was dead, they told her. Killed in an Aukari interloper’s crossfire.
Fear. Hatred. These were the things Astasia was raised to feel above all else. Fear of blasphemy, of doing wrong, of disobedience to her family or her God. Hatred for heretics, for other lands and other people, for Immortals and their champions and progeny alike. Now she learned of more to fear: that the Wounded God would abandon them, abandon
her,; that the city would dissolve in blasphemy; that she would be forced to turn her back on the Scarlet Belief and integrate with the very heretics that sealed away her God, that she would be made to show
gratitude to them.
Astasia hated them.
For a while after the events of Ruin’s Dawn, the Mortells laid low. Not daring to stick their heads out of the dark, lest the light of an Immortal’s grace reach them. Astasia cared for Inzse and Leosze until they were well enough to venture out, and waited anxiously at home for their return, weeping each night at the news they brought back to her. They could not stand to remain there any longer and watch their way of life be destroyed.
And so they left. Imposing exile upon themselves, driven out of a new society by the ties they kept bound too tightly to the old. Securing passage with a group of other Quacian citizens fleeing the destruction that’d been wrought upon their home over the past several arcs, Astasia and the remaining Mortells turned their backs on the new dawn rising over Quacia.
But Astasia will never leave behind that ancient darkness.
![[Approved by Pig Boy]](.//images/icons/cs_ok.png "[Approved by Pig Boy]"){kind=icon}
