11 - 2 [Fool] Of Bonds and Breath, The Twin Doused in the Waters of Death The Tunnel Rat Mageling - 4th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

Eiden breathed heavily, his chest heaving and nostrils flaring, as he let go of the will invested into his telekinesis cantrip.

The halo-limned cloth fell to the marble ground, the light-made-solid that lined its form dissipating in wafts of essence-vapor back to the World of Spirit.

He had run himself ragged without even walking half a span, stuck inside the inn’s room as he practiced his magicks. Eiden had only ventured out to throw away the contents of his chamber pot.

He didn’t even need to walk much, one of the many servants employed at the establishment having taken the pot from him and quickly returned a clean one. The nice lady had said that the pots were collected twice a day, for morning and dusken ablutions both.

The evening was starting to give way to night, the moons long since appearing as faint omens on the horizon.

Even after being sequestered to just the inn’s room for the whole day, Eiden was not even close to boredom. The ability to move things with just his will was as entertaining as any kirkos troupe or street “magician.”

Most often, these performers were not magickers at all, as far as the tunnel rat knew. They used a mixture of sleight of hand and minor chemicking of one sort or another to perform their tricks.

Eiden still remembered the explanation given to him by Lisa, her voice clear in his mind. Had she not been so far down the River of Souls and had he himself not possessed a sense for spirit, the tunnel rat would’ve thought the lass were but a span behind his back, whispering.

They make little artifices called smoke bombs or “grenados”. Little pockets of pyrrhic salts and milk powder are separated by thin layers o’ parchment that tears as easy as fresh-baked bread. A good shake or just throwin’ it to the ground is enough to make the grenado fizzle and spew out its smoke.

From what Eiden could remember of other explanations that Lisa had given, street magicians were mostly those that did not get their proper seals from the Guildam Arkanum; the magicking guild.

Would-be alchemists that failed to get their certifications from the Academy and were left destitute thusly, wandered and plied a pale imitation of their trade.

A good deal of these “magicians” were persecuted by Iron and High Law both, be it by the local bailiff and guardsmen or by the traveling inquisitors that wandered King’s Kedwen.

Now that Eiden thought of it, was he one of these “warlockes” too?

Can’t be, he told himself to assuage worries of being hanged, drawn, quartered, and then rendered to ash to be spread to the four winds. Fin’s an exorcist from Vitae. He’s got ‘imself a seal and all. Even the local lordling recognized that.

Slowly, with a few hiccups nonetheless, Eiden refocused his thoughts on less… dreadful things.

He took his bath after having a whiff of his pits. It was an accidental self-punch to the nose, the stench a strong contender against the Hell of Seifourath; the King of Rot and Revulsion; the Deatheater and Maggot-Headed Vulture.

His caste—that of “tunnel rat” as said by both the sunchildren above and Undercity folk below—had been often compared to the devils of this especially impure rung of the Hells.

It wasn’t even a half-decent comparison; most Undercity folk took baths given their very currency used dregs and rendings of soap. It was only when caught in the middle of venturing from cavern to cavern or during work that a tunneler was dirty and ashen from the marmon stone.

Eiden took in a breath equal parts liberating and grand. He had not breathed so well for far too long. The bad, stagnant air and dust from the Tunnels was not conducive to proper breath. It gave its dwellers a malady called stone-rot lung or blood-cough.

Their insides turned dry and cracking into puss-ridden, bleeding lesions. Smoke-leaf gave a temporary reprieve, but that too brought forth further price paid and made the blood-cough worse still.

To say Eiden was glad to be rid of that place was an understatement.

The soap did good things for his skin. The scratchy layers and rough patches that colored his knees and elbows ashen were lifted away by each passing of the bar of seifar.

Eiden had taken a decent bath yesterday, but he had not invested the time in a deep cleaning of his callous wrinkles; where his hide had cracked open from the dryness of rock-dust and heat o’ the earth, and then healed-over in a messy rumple of scars and thick hame like cheese melted over a spit and then left to harden.

As the tunnel rat washed away the asheness from his skin, he could not help but feel a bubbling sort of gratitude towards the Exorcist; the second or third time in but two day’s span.

The fact that the bar of seifar in his hands was not the hue of plaque-ridden teeth—endemic to the Soap-Maker’s Pit at the bottom of the Undercity—was not taken for granted.

Thankfully, the “improper” images on the seifar had long since been worn away by his vigorous scrubbing—his frayed and rugged skin would not be cleaned otherwise. The gods and goddesses in their throes of passion were enough to make his cheeks redden even when alone.

Why’s they gotta make ‘em fucking? Why?! Couldn’t they have just carved a bloody dog or flowers or something?

Eiden dried himself off and went to his chest at the foot of the bed. Atop the lid lay a stoppered bottle sealed by wax with some paper underneath.

Huh, Fin left his stuff in the wrong place. Best I don’t jostle this around too much, might never know how magicking materials react.

Eiden had heard o’ the tales of street magicians and even budding alchemists blowin’ themselves up in a blast of fire from the improper handling of magick substances.

Though he did not understand even a lick of alchemy and its differences from his own spirit-magicks, the tunnel rat had still felt the dull thud and shakes that spread all-throughout the Undercity when the local alchemist’s apprentice blew up half the shop in the Upper Pyre.

With a steady hand and shaky nerves, Eiden put the bottle and parchment on the bare floor afore he opened the chest and put on a fresh set of clothes. Not knowing whether or not it would be worse to leave the stuff on the floor, he carefully returned them to the top of his chest.

Eiden took five steps back, just in case.

Okay, I should be safe here.

The tunnel rat swore he saw the even liquid inside the bottle move a bit—maybe a trick of the light, maybe not.

He took another few steps back until he stood in Fin’s side of the room.

Better safe than sorry.

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

The Exorcist made his way back from the Drey forest, taking his time to meditate and unwind his frayed nerves. He wanted nothing more than to be back with his charge and instruct the lad in magicking, but he would not return with such a wound to his soul.

The sight of those children—the kith and kin of Eiden—still burned in his mind in the night. He did not truly slumber as was his strange nature, and so made false sleep from the stuff of dreams.

From the essence of hypnogogic beasts he had slain long since past, Fin gave himself anaesthesis from the waking world.

A man could not keep himself sane otherwise, for slumber did much more than physically revive.

It was a balm to the psyche, a cleansing water to wash away all that built up, be it on the humoric level of cortisol and other corporeal dross or the psychological level of memory consolidation.

Fin walked, his steps slow as a mortal yet far more steady and far more light. The snow had yet to evaporate in the clearings of the Drey, and so he trod upon them as if they were stone instead of mostly air and ice-crystals.

The Exorcist rode on the etheric winds of the World of Spirit, his aura a sail to part its subtle waters and transport the vessel of himself. The lad would learn a variation of the technique soon enough; a cantrip suitable for his newborn spiritual wits.

When Fin reached the White Cliffs proper, he let out a breath, his mind no longer collected and undwelling, but instead left to be lost amidst itself. He did not discipline his thoughts, letting them run loose and wreak havoc to the foundations of himself.

His inner turmoil resonated well with the waves battering against the Cliffs, their crashing audible even so far away—even with his preternatural sense of hearing suppressed to the level of mudanity, Fin still heard the violence of sea against land.

It was a mixture between dissonance and harmony where the chaos and order fit into the cracks of each other to form something greater than their parts; a gestalt of melody bound by the glue of conflict.

The calm of meditation and of acknowledgement but eventual let-go of rumination was necessary. But so too was the chaos of worry and self-doubt, the festering unease of a mind left unchecked a necessary thing.

Without such, the wits became soft and unhardened. For a hunter and slayer and fighter of the Exorcist’s ilk, such an outcome would be a sentence of death.

His quarry were the stuff of myths and hushed, whispered legends in the dead of night. Nothing but the perfection of a honed blade would be enough to cut through the hides and hames of his opposition. And so, he had to make himself as such.

Honed to perfection. The blade of his mind passed again and again over the rough grit of acerbic self-criticization.

Fin exhaled in a hissing, trembling, sican fit.

His breath came out not in the waft of vapor as it did for a mortal man in the dead of winter, instead the same temperature and moisture as the dry, cold air.

He breathed a dead man’s breath.

For pneuma was a mirror of the empty without. And as this was the main essence amalgam that Fin Tempered his spirit with, so too would his physical body show its signs and properties.

He breathed; he ruminated, chewing the inner mouth of his mind.

Bastir, The Lady in the Blade - 4th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

She had thought binding the boy’s fate to her own would have helped.

It had not.

Fin lay on his bed, awaiting the dawn and stewing in his own iniquity. Bastille, his familiar spirit housed in a blade of magicking silver, attempted to pierce through the man’s malaise.

Her attempts yielded no worthwhile fruit and so she returned to the confines of her physical form; the oathbinder. Bastille knew well enough that any further tries at appeasement would be met with indifference stronger still.

Yet still, she peaked through with her aura, letting its spiritual weight settle comfortingly on the Exorcist’s mind; he was not ready to speak and wanted not direct help. Yet, he would know that she stood by his side nonetheless.

She was here and that was the best Bastille could do.

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

The Exorcist thought of himself as a man of action. As one that acted when others stood still from either indecision or base cowardice.

He was oh so very wrong. For what did it matter when another lay paralysed in fear if he himself lay without recourse? It was of no import the origin of inaction but simply inaction itself.

He was left bereft of his Power as his charge had slept—soul-dreams being no easy things to penetrate given their esoteric nature. The Exorcist felt as feckless and lacking as any mundane, as any mere mortal.

He spat the word with no small amount of self-loathing, as if the name were bitter on his tongue. For though did held no animosity to those he protected, the Exorcist hated the very association of weakness bound to Man.

Di Inferni, Fin was not even a man any longer, so he was wrong on both fronts. He had been elevated beyond all but the form and guise of humanity; he wore its skin, but was something decidedly other beneath.

He did not sweat, any sort of exocrine glands and even the entirety of the endocrine system having been subsumed into the perfected soma or massa confusa that composed his body; mana-made-physical took place of flesh and bone and humors sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric.

His heart raced only by his command, a skald drum to his beat—any remnant bodily functions under the heel that was the Exorcist’s waking mind.

He required not sleep of any kind, required not breathable air, nor even mortal food—his intestines, pancreas, gallbladder, and liver had been subsumed into the soma like many other organ systems, his guts all but gone for his spirit took their place.

He suckled upon the teet of the Living Universe Itself no different than the Diabblein Tree, eating of the fleshly insides of reality-in-between. Mana was all the sustenance he required, the juice of elixir his only need.

And Eiden would become as he soon enough, molded in his image to slay monsters in vengeful wake—such was their Path, that of an exorcist errant or exorcist-avenger.

A blade to fell all that made bump in the night. A predator of predators, a monster of monsters, so that they too would remember.

For such was their namesake, monstrum; remembrance of the punishment of the gods; examples to show what happens to those who transgress; to remind of the hand behind the olive-branch.

Fear sown by seed of irony and punition most strange.

Such was the ethos of a monster. Worst still was that of the monster-slayer.