“Were you nervous, my pet, at your Turning? I imagine it must have come naturally to someone as capable as you.” Lillian answered him but Eldrin did not hear it, for it was all lies. She had been so nervous that she had cried in his bed the night before, terrified of what would happen. They had been the first people to survive the Turning. The very first test subject - for that was what all they were, guinea pigs to the Order - had failed violently. The blood had splattered on Lillian’s face that day, and the realization that she would likely die petrified her.
They had been sixteen, if that. Elana’s age.
The volunteer was slammed onto the slab rather unceremoniously, for he had been shaking too badly to do it himself. His eyes were wide, so much so that Jasper could see the whites. He was scouring the crowd frantically, looking for someone to save him. It took everything within Jasper to not break their cover and sensing this, Eldrin dared to briefly touch his hand, stopping him.
Was this villainy?
“It begins.” The leader was chanting something in Elder Ereachian - everyone knew the words intimately except for Jasper, who only barely recognized vague words that had survived in Modern Ereachian.
Soleki himself approached with a goblet full of black liquid, holding it to the volunteer’s lips. “Open, boy, and let me in.”
He wanted to look away, even as the blade touched the man’s sternum, piercing to the bone with a wailing shriek.
The man - no, the boy - struggled against the restraints as blood ran down the stone, first red, then black, then nothing at all. The chanting stopped and the only sound for miles was the steady drop of the blood, and Eldrin inhaled sharply.
“It’s wrong,” he whispered.
A low rumble filled the air and Soleki cocked his head, though he didn’t look surprised. He looked amused, even as the boy’s eyes shifted frantically from green to white, as if his body were fighting itself. He looked at the leader, who was slowly shuffling back, to Soleki, and finding no solace, feared for himself.
“I - I don’t feel right,” he muttered, voice shaking.
A corner of Soleki’s mouth turned upwards. He almost looked excited. “Then don’t fight.”
The cut down the boy’s abdomen did not heal like how Eldrin had described. Instead, it seemed to deepen, bringing more blood to the surface as the boy winced, his skin pasty white and glistening with sweat.
He was shaking, and Eldrin nudged Jasper with his foot - urgently. “Don’t look.”
He looked away just as a wet ripping sound filled the air, unmistakable gore drowning out the final screams of the boy as the unbound serus emerged, humanoid and wrong and angry. It lunged forward, still covered in the blood of the body it had destroyed, only for monstrous black claws to grip its throat - not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to stop it in its tracks.
It would not have been shocking if it had been Lillian, but even Eldrin froze at the sight of one of Soleki’s hands outstretched, warped with magic until it looked as though he were the serus. His hair stood a little on end as he grinned at it, his eyes full of admiration and madness.
“Ah,” Soleki said, stepping forward with the writhing serus and not even noticing the blood on his feet. “Beautiful.”
The entire cult seemed to breathe at once, energy stirring in the air as they all collectively realized that he was real, for only the Shadowmaker could have grabbed a serus with such power. The serus, new and hungry all at once, even calmed under his grasp, almost as if it could recognize something similar in them, be it monstrosity or a corrupted holiness.
“Someone usually dies at your Turnings, do they not?” Soleki asked the leader, not looking away from the serus.
“Ah - y-yes, my Lord.” The leader seemed to shake himself for sounding so frightened, for even Soleki noticed and raised a brow. “My apologies, my Lord. If I may risk offense, watching your power firsthand is - shocking.”
“As if I’m now more real to you, yes?” Soleki smiled, though it was nothing warm. “You all have held your faith for so long with no reward. Of course it would be shocking to see me returned. Should your faith falter now, however, the consequences must be more severe.”
“Perhaps an example must be set.”
Soleki grinned as if it had been his plan all along. He idly walked with the serus, straightening his arm as if holding a talisman out to people. “Feast upon the unfaithful, then.”
He flung the serus outwards and all at once, time seemed to slow until all Eldrin could hear was his heartbeat in his ears, panicked as the thing without a human shape barrelled towards him - no, towards him. Jasper took a startled step back, unsure of whether to run or fight or let another serus attack him-
The blade of the scythe sliced the serus in half, turning to dust the moment the silver blade cut through its waist. Eldrin stood in front of Jasper despite the way everyone looked at him. Maybe they had not yet pieced together who he was, but they all knew that this was a betrayal.
And yet, no one moved, all turning to Soleki. Even Lillian, who tensed at the sight of a scythe, did not move. She didn’t dare.
“And what is this?” Soleki asked. The crowd parted, no one wanting to be too close to the two guards who dared disobey their god. “Two low-ranking guards, one defending the other. Is this brevity or idiocy? Answer.”
“It’s neither,” Eldrin answered. Jasper could hear the subtle unsteadiness of his voice - he had heard it only once before when they had fallen from the announcement box. He was terrified - of Soleki or of nearly losing him. “Why must we lose our numbers when we have proven ourselves to you already? Are the lives of the non-seruses not worthy, too?”
“Had you been worthy of me, you would have gotten Turned. None of those with my gift have ever betrayed me, boy, but guards often flee from greatness when frightened.”
Everyone seemed to tense - even Lillian and the leader, making Soleki turn to them in curiosity. “Am I wrong, or do you too doubt me?”
Lillian was gritting her teeth, staring at Eldrin and Jasper as if she could see straight through their masks. Both of them tried to not react to it, to only stare at Soleki. The leader broke the silence first. “A God is never wrong, my Lord, but there has been one - only one - that has left us. He was the first to ever survive the Turning. His motives are still unclear to us.”
At this, Soleki looked both curious and disappointed, as if it were impossible that anyone could ever have betrayed him. “And who was this fool? Tell me all, so that this can be prevented. Lillian, you were one of the first to live, I’m told. You knew him, then.”
“His name was Kharis,” she said, so tense that she looked only seconds away from changing, sulfur hanging thick in the air. “We were arranged to be - together. And we were. Until he left. I tried to make him stay.”
It was raining then when Kharis left, feeling the body of the student drop to the ground as their blood mixed with the mud and rain. There was blood on his hands and his face and she only laughed.
And then Kharis became him, or rather, Kharis stopped existing.
Lillian had been speaking but Kharis - Eldrin - was not listening. He was only brought back to the present when Soleki hummed in thought. “So we lack one,” he said, looking at Eldrin and Jasper, a long nail on his cheek.
It was fast. No one knew Soleki could move like that until he was dragging Jasper away, towards the altar. Jasper struggled, his mask falling as he looked back at Eldrin in utter terror.
Eldrin screamed, running for Soleki just as two guards held him back, forcing his scythe from his hand and trying to kick him down, calling him a traitor as he shrieked. Just as Soleki turned, he mustered the words to try to stop his worst nightmare. “Take me!”
Soleki raised a brow, hovering by the altar as someone tried to get the remains off of it. Jasper still struggled under the grasp of his magic, the clawed hand clenching his shirt and nearly piercing his skin. “First you kill my pet, and now you interrupt me. Tell me why I should give you my gift instead of slaughtering you.”
“Because-” Eldrin grew frantic, especially when he saw Jasper’s wide-eyed stare, terrified and unable to help himself. He was depending on Eldrin, even as he reached for the only thing keeping Lillian from recognizing him.
“Stop,” Jasper dared to whisper, unsure of what he was planning and nonetheless hating it. If Jasper was to become a serus or die so be it, but he wanted Eldrin to live. More than anything, he wanted Eldrin alive.
“I - I give myself to you. I killed the serus to prove myself worthy - if someone can outmaneuver a human serus and kill it, perhaps they would make an even better one.” Eldrin didn’t know what the fuck he was saying, but it made Soleki drop Jasper roughly, beckoning him with a finger.
Soleki’s magic pulled him closer, zipping him past Jasper without giving them a chance to even look at each other. “You’re bold to face your God like this. And you’re confident that you’ll survive? That you’re not just killing yourself for a chance of grandeur?”
“Isn’t dying just another darkness?” It was a phrase the priest had once said in a sermon about the Shadowmaker, having tried to convince a young Eldrin and Lillian to be brave for their Turning. It was said to have originated in the grimoire of the Shadowmaker, though he had not believed it - until now.
Soleki grinned. “You’re regaining your favor by the minute.
The two Order members chained him to the altar and Eldrin tried to think of a plan, knowing he had seconds to escape and yet finding nothing. The silver chains began to burn already, to which Soleki raised a curious brow, handing him the vial to drink from.
“How many secrets do you possess?” Soleki asked, watching him as he lifted the mask just slightly.
Enough for Lillian to see the scar on his cheek, making her flinch. “I’ve plenty,” Eldrin said, drinking with ease.
He didn’t think he was breathing as his shirt was removed, and he tried to not look at how Jasper was watching with utter helplessness.
The leader raised the knife to the cue of the chants.
Eldrin finally looked at Jasper, thankful that Jasper couldn’t see the terrified tears threatening to spill. He didn’t know what would happen, but he knew Jasper wouldn’t have survived the Turning.
The blade pierced into his skin-
-and something else answered.
We are angry. We are angryweareangryweare-
“What the fuck is that?” Soleki asked, staggering back as the body on the altar did not shift, but rather, deconstructed. His eyes split into far too many, white pupils all staring at its creator with a look of hunger. Jasper watched as the thing with the ripped open, wide mouth smiled, and Soleki could do little but shudder.
Soleki held the monster down with magic but it was not enough, its joints creaking under the pressure as if it knew how magic worked. It would not last. He turned to the leader, eyes wide. “What the fuck is that?”
“I - This has never happened before,” the leader fretted, clearly trying to find what went wrong, how someone could have taken monstrosity and made it too far. Jasper could no longer see Eldrin within it, and almost guiltily, he was glad that it was focused on Soleki.
“He was already a serus.”
Everyone turned to Lillian, then, as she stared at the mangled scar on his cheek, mostly covered by inky black streaks of hellish magic, tendril veins on stony grey skin. The monster’s long, black hair did not end in shadow like the other human seruses, allowing her to see the same hair that another man once had - a man that was now perhaps dead, consumed by the thing that had his body.
“He acted out of line, and the scar-” She swallowed, unable to look away from the monstrosity despite how it repulsed her. Every instinct screamed too much when looking at it - at him. “If that was Kharis in disguise-”
She looked up at Jasper, her expression wild with something he did not want to understand, though it looked too much like blame. “You’re a traitor, too. You’re from the Academy.”
Jasper did not speak for he didn’t know what to say, though it was too late. The magic snapped like a gunshot echoing in the air, and then the thing was descending on Soleki with an animalistic shriek. Soleki only barely managed to throw it off of him before moving for the woods. “Kill the other one!” He ordered, dragging another guard with him as they dashed into the woods, the serus that he could not control hot on his heels.
No one seemed to notice how human it was for a god to run from its creation, for everyone was scattering - trying to protect Soleki and take the leader away, though Lillian stood still amidst the chaos, holding two sickles in her hands. She did not blink, not even as Jasper drew his sword.
“You’re not an elf,” she noted. “It’s filthy you thought to taint these grounds.”
“You’re no more elf than I,” Jasper said, looking at her rounded ears. She snarled at him, all sharp teeth. Already she flung a sickle at him, pulling it back with its chain as he parried it.
“Do not speak as though you’re above me - as though we’re anywhere near equals. You took him from me.”
“He was never yours,” Jasper argued, swinging at her in a desperate attempt to disarm her, wanting to know that Eldrin would be okay and that he wouldn’t be stuck as whatever the fuck he was. Taking his place had been idiocy - he had to have known.
“Kharis didn’t like men!” Lillian said, shifting far more easily than Eldrin ever had. One second she was human, and the next she wasn’t. “He wasn’t fucking soft! Have you met him as Kharis, or did you only ever know the name he faked?”
He didn’t answer, but it was enough for her to grin, suddenly moving behind him and kicking his knee in. She jolted when her foot hit metal, though it was enough to knock him off-balance. He grabbed her arm, using the momentum to throw her and balance himself out. She landed with a hard thud, rolling before he could swing at her.
“Do all Guardians fight like you? His last victim didn’t, though she was young.” Jasper’s brows furrowed in surprise, and she merely kept going. “Did he not tell you why he left? Did he not tell you that he wouldn’t even wash the blood off before we-”
“Shut up!” Jasper pleaded, not wanting to imagine it - not wanting to believe that his Eldrin was the same man as Lillian’s Kharis, someone bloodthirsty, cold, capable of whatever monstrosity Lillian was hinting towards. “You know nothing of him. You’ve only met the boy that was brainwashed to follow a dead man - I’ve met Eldrin as the person he really is.”
“Did your Eldrin rip the head off an Academy student to kill her? Her name was Amity.”
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