11 - 1 [Fool] Of Bonds and Breath, The Twin Doused in the Waters of Death

If any of thine people—Kedweni men or women—sell themselves to you and serve you six years, in the seventh year you must let them go free.

And when you release them, do not send them away empty-handed. Supply them liberally from thine flock and larder both, thine threshing floor and thine winepress twain.

Give to them as the Seven hath blessed thee.

Mercy is the way of kings. Strength without compassion is the folly of pride, and cometh before the fall.

No man is an army for if he is alone, he too shall fall alone.

-Mandatos Dyeosi, Holy Scripture of the Cult of the Sky-Judge.

The Lord Von Arven - 13th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

That exorcist errant spoke true. A monster right on the heels of the last.

Lord Teldrin Von Arven sat on his haunches, looking through the illusion provided by the megascope; a magickal contraption capable of transmitting sight across a league of distance at most. At least such was the limit of this model from the Valencian year of 1564 A.C.–corresponding to the Aardweni-Solarian Calendar of 950 A.E.

Three metallic stands of brass and copper and platinum—alchemically conductive metals—stood in a triangular configuration with clear quartz crystals etched with fine glyphery atop each of their apexes.

Little lines of lightning and pops of static electricity emanated from these crystalline foci, their energy unstable and looking for reprieve even now. Quanta, the by-product of elemental and interplanar friction, was an unruly pest in artificeries of any kind.

The image fabricated by the megascope—made in the dull hues of grainy white and stormy grey—was a grim one:

A mangled body almost no longer recognizable as a man, equal parts dried effluvia of humors and visceral carnage. The bones of the ribs grasped upwards to the trapped sky. Broken at their tips and sucked dry of their marrow, their appearance like crumbling towers of some ancient, fargone civilization's ruination.

These were typical signs of a monster feeding; whether of the vampyric, necrophagic, ogroid, insectoid or draconid clades, Teldrin was not sure.

His court wizard’s voice came through the megascope, crackling and of poor-quality given the sympathetic connection between the receiver and its sister device. Even half a league into the tunnels was far too straining, the meters of dense metamorphic rock proving difficult to penetrate with even the state-of-the-art artifice that was the Valencian megascope of 950 A.E.

Teldrin shook his head, and with an exposure of the heel of his right hand gave command for silence. The Lord Von Arven stood up from his haunches, his face scrunched in contemplation.

Jeffar Su’Ben’Med, or simply Benmed, would return by the ‘morrow with the full report on the killing. It was best for the Von Arven to simply wait, as the wizard had both command over the contingent of guards sent with him and would know best to do.

His kind, a Turchian maester and Academy wizard both, had their knowledge of bestiary along with monstrum. He would figure out the definite species to which the beast belonged to with his magicks and alchemicking.

Only then, with proper ken, would whatever that had been prowling the rotten bowels of the Undercity in the wake of the vampyre be put to rest—The Lord Von Arven did not want to empty his coffers to the grandmaster exorcist that had alighted upon town. That man’s skills and spirit were far too costly to employ for mere folk lesser even than field serfs.

Teldrin had his bets that the beast was a necrophage; theirs was a kind enamored with rot and carrion, walking the wake of death caused by more baleful monsters. Fitting too that that wretched hive of scum and villainy, that imitation of the Seifourath upon Terra Mundus, housed a creature with such… tastes.

“Do as you will, Benmed.” Spoke Teldrin, his voice the same professional tone as he always used with the mage proper. “Collect information and return posthaste.”

The Lord Von Arven did not wait for confirmation; either Benmed would receive the directive or he would not. Either way, the Turchian scholar would operate accordingly.

“Cessare.”

A word of power sent the megascope to shut down its operation, the sigaldry lining its metal and quartz dimming in light before it was rendered completely inert.

A snap sent one of Benmed’s servants to disassembling the megascope and putting it into its proper place under lock and key.

Teldrin took his watch from his pockets, an acid-etched portrait of his daughter in the lid; yellow-wheat locks and sharp cheek-bones prominent like mountains on a topographical survey. Taking his doting eyes off the illustration, Teldrin looked at the time proper.

Sixth glass past midday, the clockwork arms told. Twenty minutes past sixth glass, in specific.

Mary-Annes’ tutoring must have finished by now. I’ll see to it that she gets a just reward.

The lordling made his way through marmon halls, thinking of different ways of spoiling his “little princess” and of all the hugs and kisses he would give her.

He gave not a lick of his attention, not even a sliver of a sliver, to the tunnel rats being culled by some beast in the Undercity.

The beast would clean out some of the pests from his grainary, no different than a cat or houndling set loose therein.

It would preserve the Arven coffers in the long term. And if it didn’t? What were the lives of mere and prolific peasantry worth? Who of import would mourn the passing of miserable little, pox-ridden spans no greater than two-score?

Not him.

The Exorcist - 4th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

Fin walked through the empty and leafless boughs of the Drey forest, looking for the remains of the slavers that had been eaten alive by the Lilithuan vampyre.

Slavery in King’s Kedwen had been outlawed in 923 A.E., yet it stayed in spirit. Serfdom, though by Iron Law considered temporary indentured servitude, had enough loop holes left behind in its binding writ for lordlings to exploit and keep such conditions perpetually.

A thinly-veiled appeasement to keep back peasant uprisings whilst still continuing the wretched status quo.

Slavers, or man-hunters, captured folk anywhere from children no older than five winters or elders having lived through the Blood Plague of 1050 A.E.

These human quarry were then sold off to some liege lord or another who then forged ancestry papers of debt. As an indebted pauper could not pay in coin, they would pay in hard labor. On and on, toiling fields without proper tools or rest or oxen with which to plough through tough dirt come First Seed.

Fiends, the lot o’ them, Fin denigrated serfdom to no one but himself, speaking ill of the dead and those that still drew breath both.

A night and a score of glasses before today, the Exorcist had passed over the cooling cadavers of the slavers as he chased after the leech. It had sequestered itself away into the tunnels by way of a small breach.

The monster gorged on the blood of innocents and guilty alike on that black, accursed night—having been a minute at most ahead of the Exorcist. It did so with a desperate sort of fervor for the thing knew that death nipped at its heels.

It wrought as much suffering as it could in that short time.

Fin had given the two Undercity children a reprieve in Fatus Ignis—in fate-flame—but had not taken the time to give the slavers a proper burial. Their unsleeping spirits writhed and wailed in the torment of being rendered piecemeal, bits of their bodies—both subtle and gross—spread all throughout a clearing in the Drey.

The Exorcist cared not much either that he had taken so long.

The iron-manacles, covered in a rusted layer of dried blood and other humors, was evidence enough to damn these men if their collection of illicit druggae weren’t.

Days-old tracks, swept up by wind and unseen to mundane sight, led to a smuggler’s cove. It was a middling place in stature, as such places oft were to avoid detection.

A single wagon with a cage ironclad and a single boat that would brave only calm waters. Upon this small smuggling-skipper, stacked neatly with cloth and lashings o’ wood, was a druggae devil’s wet dream.

A stash like no other.

Turchian black wine; khaouah. Enough to make a man insane and riddled with encephalopathies in just a moon’s time.

The Valencian Scourge; quocca candy. Enough to make the teeth white as snow, the pupils the size of saucers, and the tongue loose as a courtesan’s loins. Enough too, to make a gentle person into a mad beast.

Preserved red tubbaq from Arabannia; scarlet resin. Enough to calm the heart into the sleep last taken with but a single teh-spoon.

Doomlust extract; the syrup of rape-fruit. Enough to… enough said.

The signs were there: five men in the middle o’ nowhere with bondage, dubiously-gotten contraband, a smuggler’s hideout, and a wagon with an iron-bound cage smelling of all the fetid colors of the excretory rainbow: be it piss, shite, puss, sodden flesh, or simple carrionic decay.

Without a rat-catcher’s seal from the provincial magistrate’s office, these men were considered outlaws and to be treated as such. Middlemen to the trade most foul that was slavery.

Fin did not go about collecting the remains, instead just destroying the physical tethers one by one as he found them. Each was burned with a blast of elemental fire from the Exorcist’s spirit, a few hand-seals and words of power enough to shape the mana into a focused spell.

From his palms, a waft and gout of burnished flame came and claimed their bones, picking the decaying flesh clean; their remnant wills put to rest and their spirits to carry off into the next Turn of the Wheel by the Pale River’s Pull.

The metaphysical process that was reincarnation happened naturally—though much more slowly—the time commensurate to how much of the soul’s previous vessel was left behind. Yet, it wasn’t a binary process where one Turn was discernible from the other given the circular nature of the Wheel.

The in-between, when a babe took their first breath and before a man had yet to draw his last, was nebulous as to whose a singular “soul” belonged to. Like limbs being pulled in opposite directions, the Tripartite happened to be held in precarious stalemate atop the breaking Wheel of Creation Neverending.

The Wheel was a primal thing, its name minorly misnomeric as it often evoked the depiction of a wagon’s wayward and simple feet. Yet, the Wheel was not like some manling’s fabrication to transport mundane material, but instead the ebb and flow of equilibrium; it brought balance to All Things.

The Wheel had no spokes with which to measure a minor Turn of less than a single degree. A single cycle was measured not in the years of mortal life.

A single kalpa, a single whole and true Turn, was measured in the eons that a universe could still stretch before it would inevitably contract back into a solitary egg and then begin anew.

Matter and energy compressed in a space smaller than even a pinprick’s shadow. The Wheel Turns, and the Living Universe expands to fill all the corners of Itself.

This same logic, of the scale of Wheelen Turn, applied to the soul as well. No alma kord’atio belonged to a singular life, but instead many; a spider atop a web with a thousand-thousand gossamer strands stretched along the axis of infinity.

Fin often liked comparing the soul to a Yuuhineese moqigome sweet-treat, sticking like taffy between fingers belonging to different lives; the bonds sown of karma complex and utterly esoteric things to parse through as they were.

When did the waves part from the sea to become their own discrete and distinct entities from the greater whole? Such was the question unanswerable by all philosophers, be it through the logical steps of Sokrates or the ideals of Plato.

The soul, so deep into the waters of paradox that it belonged to, was the Ship of Theseus. The walls between individuality blurry and but replaceable wood.

The only factor that differentiated entities through the lens of the soul was the stream of consciousness—the Watcher Beyond the Veil; the binding of psykosis; the Third Principle.

In the quiet of meditation, where breath was the focus of attention, that was when the Watcher was, in turn, seen and watched by Itself.

A person was not their thoughts nor their ingrained habits. Instead they were, at the core of their core, the silent observer behind the thought and acquired, superfluous plaque of identity.

All else, be it personality, memory, or belief, was but replaceable wood no less precious to mortal individuality yet to the soul eternal, such mattered not.

But replaceable wood.

Di Inferni, the Exorcist thought as he burnt to another black-heart to ashes. The chains that bind loosened in regards to this spirit’s fate, its swaddling by the Parcae come fulfilled by second death and thus undone.

Acquired plaque burned away, but replaceable wood rendered unto ash.

The Watcher Once Swaddled Within the Shroud was now set forth, unburdened by peccato—sin, in the Kedweni tongue—through a cleansing by fire.

As much as there wasn’t natural recompense to evil in the Physical, at times, it was still found. Karma, the binding of invisible thread, had its way of bringing punition when certain conditions were met.

But, most often, nothing happened. The natural world was one without justice, its laws atavistic and uncaring of human morality. It was a lesson of apathy and nihilism, to look for signs of greater good in his line of work.

The good was to be done by the exorcist, not looked for—otherwise, it would not exist.

After each and every black-heart was shoved into their next Turn o’ the Wheel, Fin made his way to their hideout, their den of iniquity.

Those rusted slavers’ instruments, their histories both physically and spiritually evident, made his wrath smolder further.

How many had to suffer for your comfort?

How many had to die for your lack of scrupules?

How many had to know nothing but the dark of existence because you gave not a gram of a care?

HOW MANY!

“Ignii.” The Exorcist commanded to the elements without and within, his Center a confluence for both to meet and mix. Through the arteries that bound the Three Basins, he channeled the essence of fire. Through the worldly veins of sympathy that bound nigh all, he transported the flame further still.

By the grinding clench of his fist, the smuggler’s cove was set ablaze in an instant, drowned in the eye of conflagration.

A smile spread through the Exorcist’s wrinkly mug like the snarl of a wolf, his eyes and brow knit in a rictus of rage as the fetters and chains and cage melted into slag and molten, misshapen metal.

Naught but charred iron and wood ash left behind. And then, just for the surety of erasure, not even that was left in the Exorcist’s fiery wake.

With a breath of spirit let go, his pneuma gave second life to the cinders.

The once smuggler’s nook was now but a scorched-black cove, past sins committed in this place washed away and scoured clean by fire. The walls colored the pitch of coal were a reminder—in both body and spirit—to any who would further transgress.

The remnant will left in the wake of the cleansing flame would last for a century’s time as a demonstration. It would prod at the sleeping mind and instill a healthy dose of fear to any would-be fiend that came near.

The Exorcist’s smile wilted from bonfire wrath to a more sedate and appreciative spite—it did not take over his face and make known the rage within, instead denouncing his contemptuous enjoyment to any who could see.

To destroy these evil tools, these mediums to wreak bondage upon Man, was to lift a weight from his chest. It gave Fin no small amount of glee that he had been privy to bringing final ruin to these black-hearts.

First came the monster. And then that which preyed upon the predator.