15 - 2

[Fool]

Five Ways To Skin A Dog

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

Fin saw Eiden staring at him as he went through the motions of general maintenance and gestured his apprentice ‘come hither’. The Exorcist had not called the boy over before as the honing of his oathbinder was a volatile thing; to guarantee safety to a near-mortal was… difficult while working with fifth-order magickal materials, the substances’ properties being highly reactive and downright caustic.

The Exorcist had even used his aura earlier to transmit caution to his apprentice, warning him not to come too close before now; to Eiden’s spiritual senses, the air around Fin had been greyen omen o’ the storm, all dark portent and forbidding. Now, the skin of his spirit may as well have been open arms.

Eiden sat in front of his mentor, cross-legged in conjunction with the Aged Man. There he learned not a scrap of magick proper, but instead the mundane kind of artificery.

Fin explained each step as he descontructed his crossbow, lecturing about the functions of the pieces and parts of the gadget and their proper care: oil, springs, gears, machinery and all that sort of artifice. There was no magicking evident therein but that was not apparent if looking by Eiden’s ensorcelled and wonder-filled eyes. Trying to teach an orphan mechanics and introductory engineering was a surprisingly easy feat given the lad’s neverending need for knowledge.

It was a hunger fit for demons, that curiosity.

Many would’ve thought such a vicious statement about a simple and innocent emotion unwarranted, but Fin knew better.

Most monsters were not the preternatural kind but instead the mundane. The Lilithuan vampyre had been an exception o’ sorts, as all magickal beasts oft were in this age.

His Order had hunted such down to near-extinction, afterall.

The monsters of today were much simpler: the lawman that looked the other way, lining his pockets in paid ignorance; the bystander adamant that it was ‘not their business’, too scared to do anything of import when another suffered before them; the vagabond without recourse that got caught up in the local gang so as to not starve come the seremonths.

A monster was made in the simple choices or lack thereof, in the everyday acts and labors one partook in or in the injustices set upon them . And no worse maker of men into monsters than want, than need.

‘Just a little more.’

‘They don’t need it.’

‘I should have it.’

An empty void that ached to be filled. Unwhole that it was, it desired futilly for fulfillment, yet such wishful dreams were never to be realized. Not for lack of attempt but of a simple truth: to chase contentment everlasting was to chase the drakon’s tail; nothing would ever be enough.

Appétit prophane was as the Erastoi saying went. Beyond a character flaw, the chase of fleeting, unfulfilling things to the detriment of others became peccatto; transgression; sin.

Fin had witnessed many lives brought to the edge of desolation or further still by want unhindered and greed unfettered. Those that sought their ambitions and volitions too closely without care for any hurt they would cause were but disasters waiting to happen.

They reminded the Exorcist of a particular type of vampyre endemic to the Northern Realms:

A botchling; stillborn that wanted to be brought to bear.

The sins of the father made manifest in the form of twisted corpulae and fleshe-most-foul. This breed of cursed one was “borne” after a man, either father or some sort of patriarchal figure in regards to the victim, beat a pregnant woman to either miscarriage or death.

For this curse to take hold, it had to coincide within three days of quickening; when a foetus became a babe proper and could be felt by the mother via movement in the belly.

If the woman survived the miscarriage, but the dead babe was not buried—mores and all—and the father did not try for reconcilement of any sort, it would rise again.

Few botchlings were left to fester, the rightful fear of letting one ripen such so that warding songs spread far and wide beyond and beneath Ydden.

‘Without given name,

‘Lost of hearth and home,

‘Without the grave’s hame,

‘Beware that which is dead by birth yet stalks on four legs all the same.

‘Bury with wood o’ wode,

‘Neath the eaves of a willow at river shore,

‘Giveth the one Arisen proper mores.

‘Laid to dug cove by the blamed,

‘And down the Pale shall the nameless go and in rest remain.’

Funeral rites were often exorcisms made by peasant-folk; they warded off would-be monsters. In the case of the babe left unburied without proper rest, a vampyre would come in its wake should a bond be formed.

Emphasis on ‘should’.

An unwanted babe did not rise again.

For it was through wayward wish and frayed bond karmic of want that made bear botchlings to the world. In cases of rape, this specific strain of vampyrism would not manifest, for such was an unwanted gestation—no karmic bond, no anchor for the curse to take root. The taking of abortives did not spawn botchlings either if the druggae was taken willingly.

Curses had to be cast by somewhat conscious persons in the midst of great turmoil and negative emotion; the relief of a farmer’s wife in the seremonths not having to bring another child into their poverty and famine was not conducive to spawning a botchling. Much the opposite.

Now, the tanner’s daughter having been thrown down a ditch by her lover and survived by the skin of her teeth, all the while she had gone to him with good news of the quickening? That was fertile soil for a botchling. So much so that towns were quick to ferry pellars and priests to conduct mores should such a crime be found out; no expense was spared lest the mores be theirs instead.

These peasant exorcisms, funeral rites and such, were cures for a problem they themselves created; concentrated belief of any kind gave rise to curses and blessings both, the power of the collective mind a potent thing.

Potent enough to bend reality in certain quantities.

To birth not just dead foeti but gods from the otherwise unthinking and vegitative interstitial-planes of the Living Universe. By the catalytic spark of want and held up by the fundament of bheidhian thread, They came to be.

They were thought of; therefore, They were.

Things, alive and yet without need for physical embodiment, dwelt everywhere and nowhere twain; the godplace. Where time does not pass, where a breath is an eon and an age is but a blink.

Such was Their cradle, the Womb in the Sky: The Wellfont, The Place Where The Watcher Sleeps Awake.

If concentrated belief was enough to manifest divinity from the fickle blood ephemera of reality-in-between, then it could damn well make middling monstrosities from the leftover spit.

It could damn well bring to bear beasts, living and yet unalive, from the emotional qualia of those that hoped and were betrayed. From the corpses of frayed relationships and foeti twain.

These abominations of nature, reanimated through the unsanctimonious twisting of fate, fed upon the blood of pregnant women in the dead of night.

It would be the closest thing to gestation a botchling would ever witness. Want left unfulfilled, their basal animal cunning not enough to understand the suffering they wrought.

Man was no different to botchlings in such manner, in the lack of understanding, of empathy; most did not care, either putting themselves above what they deemed other—what they deemed no longer person but thing—or veiling themselves in the thick gauze of apathy.

Fin had seen it a thousand-thousand times twice-over: the pogroms, the warmongering, the needless suffering. The Exorcist would see it again a thousand-thousand times twice-over again in the places where he had arrived too late or had no sway over.

He would not see it in the lad before him, not if Phineas still drew vital breath and possessed free will in the bosom of his soul. Be it the categorization of others into lesser or even the disregard for the middling spark of goodness in the blackhearted, Eiden would not fall into either moral ditch.

Though too late had the Exorcist arrived that accursed night, the sway to mold another right and proper was his.

The boy would become a blade, but one with a scabbard; the edge would not cut without reason. Without need.

And so, the Exorcist made time to explain basic ethics to his apprentice as they dismantled the crossbow. He gave tiny lectures, used fables both Kedweni and Vitaen in origin, all in an effort to engender a moral framework that the lad could fall back on.

When his apprentice’s eyes weighed heavier than lead, parchment leaf with etchings held tightly to his breast as he dozed off, did the Exorcist call it a night.

They had much to learn on the ‘morrow.