Arc 1, Chapter 32

Sleep crept slowly over me, its shadowy fingers digging into my mind and blurring the bloody scenes. In the liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, a stray memory floated to the surface.

I was about eight years old. Most of my time was spent in lessons with Kielan or studying, but I used my remaining hours in the library under the pretense of studying to improve my prophecy interpretations. Even then I knew I was making excuses. I just wanted to hide, to hide from Kielan behind the library’s door and from my own anxiety within the pages of the books.

That day, I had been studying the lives of past Saints. I was excited at first, eager to see something in their stories that might help me understand what I was supposed to be. Ever since I had come to the temple I the adults around me had drawn vivid lines between me and others. I had been redefined. Before, I had belonged to a categories of many - children, citizens, family, friends, people. Upon my arrival and canonization I was plucked neatly from that nexus of identities and placed into a new, isolated category, one that I inhabited alone. When my teachers told me I needed to learn about my predecessors, I realized that while I was currently the only Saint, I was not truly alone in that classification. Dozens had come before me, and perhaps learning about them could help me fix… something.

The notion was quickly crushed. Records of the Saints were impersonal, cold, and worst of all they were all written by priests. No Saint had left any of their own words behind, only stories others told of their piety and power. That day, I was particularly overwhelmed by disappointment that I did not know how to articulate, not even to myself. If those records described what a Saint was supposed to be, then why was I so useless? The desperate knowledge of my own inadequacy drove me into the darkest corner between the stacks. 

After an hour or so of hiding in that corner, I decided to search for a book to read, worried someone would come check to make sure I was really studying. As I stood up from where I was sitting, I stumbled slightly, almost crashing into the wall, and  I found a small book wedged between the wall and the massive ebony bookshelf. A thick layer of dust coated the book, obscuring the cover. I distinctly recalled the uncomfortable feeling of the dust on my hands when I brushed it away to reveal the book’s title, On Mosses. Curious, I opened it, only to find it was indeed a book about moss. It was a dreadfully difficult book to read, but the diagrams and illustrations of the different type of moss captivated me. That day, I paged through the entire book, understanding nothing but intent on reading every word.

At the end of the book, after the last page and scribbled onto the yellowed flyleaf, where two short paragraphs. They looked like nonsense; the punctuation, spelling, and capitalization were haphazard, and the lines were broken in strange places. The odd words burned themselves into my mind like heated iron on a bull’s hide.

run, run, run, 

run

for the Wolf, wolf, 

the wolf has come. its Chains have snapped, its Teeth 

are bared. Her skin is broken, Blood flows freely, it burns with 

sin. Walls fall and we cannot run

flee, hide, search, die

the Path is set and will not Change. Her skin is Broken,

We are Lost. The woods are Dark, for the Shadows

have come.

Her Blood burns us and the Wolf has come –

A faint scent of smoke tickled the back of my throat, and I coughed slightly. I returned the book to the crevice I found it in and left. 

A strange fever boiled in me that night, leaving me weak the next day. I never looked for that book again.

Later, I learned about poems, and I thought those words were some strange poem. Perhaps a bored acolyte had scribbled a bit of poetry they fancied when they were supposed to be studying. Hopeful that was the case, I searched for those words elsewhere, looking through all the literature and poetry I could find for any similar text or reference, but my resources were limited. After a few years, I decided it must have been a work of boredom and put it out of my mind. Occasionally, it returned against my will, vivid, the words as they were written engraved in my memory. With it came a familiar certainty that someone wrote those words out of despair, then left them in that place alone, authorless and strange, for me to find.

Wolves snapped at the heels of my memory as sleep washed over me completely, but despite my exhaustion, my mind refused to let me rest.

Instead, I dreamed again, memories overlapping with my fears.

I am four, in a cold, unfamiliar building made of polished white marble. I hold my father’s hand as tightly as I can, but my fingers, still a bit chubby with baby fat, are too short. I can only grip three of his long, callused fingers. My father speaks with strangers dressed in blue robes. 

I stare at his face. I feel anxious, and I need to know everything is okay. If father is calm, then I will be safe. But no matter how long I stare at him, I cannot see his face. Perhaps he looks like me, but I will never know.

I am seven. My knees are cold, and they hurt. I kneel before Kielan. He is tall, so very tall, and his eyes are glittering with an emotion I recognize from my work during prayers. It scares me. I do not know the name of what glitters in his eyes. 

Contempt. Right. This is a dream. The realization does nothing to shake the fabric of the memory, but it makes me notice the obscurity of my dream’s reality. Details are blurred, and some fragments of the images and sensations are strangely over-saturated. Kielan looms over me, the angles of his face shadowed with an indistinct but overwhelming light shining behind him and lit by a soft golden glow from below. The effect distorted his features within the dream, making them appear two-dimensional, like a badly done watercolor of a child’s nightmare.

His voice is garbled, the words lost to time in my memory. One word creeps through, steps light as a spider on its web but indelible. 

 “…disappointment…” 

My gaze falls to the stone floor in front of me. There is something there, a splotch of black tinged red against the pale grey.

Ah. Today is that day. 

One day in my third summer at the temple, an acolyte had caught me sneaking into the courtyard to feed scraps to a cat. I begged the acolyte to keep it a secret, and they agreed. I was very happy.

At my next lesson with Kielan, he asked me to heal. A Saint should be able to heal, but ever since I came to the temple, I had failed. The cuts Kielan made on me healed slowly with the passage of time instead of with Holy Power. The little scars they left were badges of shame, Kielan explained; wounds healed by Lumina’s grace left no scars.  Every time I failed, I marked myself with that failure. Today was a day he had to make a new cut again.

Like I had every time before, I failed, the basin of Holy Water I was meant to draw power from glowing uselessly in front of me. 

“Try again,” he ordered, and I did. 

And again.

The pattern was familiar consistent. On the fourth try, Kielan would take out a flask of diluted Holy Water. Since I was too weak to resonate with the Holy Water even when it was right in front of me, he would apply some to my skin, careful not to touch it himself.

Again.

Again.

Again and again and again and I failed every time. This was were it should end, where it always ended it, when I was crying and my forearms were burning from the Holy Water.

“…disappointment…” 

That word, a word he said every time, but on this day, on the day I am watching and living again in this dream, he smiles. I remember. I am not supposed to see it. I wait for him to let me go back to my room and to Emilia, but he turns away and I see him smile. The smile catches the light all wrong, dark and strange.

Then he turns back and puts something on the ground. It is the cat, its small leg cut and bleeding.

I stop crying. There is no one willing to hear it. I kneel on the floor. I am scared.

I fail, and I fail, and I fail. I cannot heal like he wants, and the cat stays hurt.

“…disappointment…” 

Merciful, my mind splits, and I am watching the dream now, not living it. I am Ianthe, twenty-three and no longer in the temple, and the child kneeling on the ground lives in a place that was a long time ago.

“…disappointment…” 

I hear Kielan say the word again, and I am confused. The child’s forearms still burn from the Holy Water. She cannot heal as a Saintess should, but Holy Water does allow her to understand what Kielan’s feeling, much like when she listens to people’s prayers. At the time, when I was that child, I was too frightened and angry and ashamed to pay attention, but I remember now. Kielan was neither disappointed nor surprised.

I had forgotten about this. 

What was he feeling? It was too long ago to remember the feeling and I did not recognize his emotion at the time, but he was not surprised. Everything that day had gone the way he expected and wanted.

The child starts crying again, and I turn away. My lucidity fades as I fall into a different dream.