Chapter Text
“We are each burdened by the depravity of the times. Resources are scarce, and we may find ourselves turning away from the light for an easy escape from our turmoil.”
The aging man at the head of the church’s voice echoed on the stone walls unnaturally, each heavily enunciated syllable encompassing all within the structure in the mounting dread his droning speech produced.
“But you mustn’t. The smallest slip can mean an eternity of damnation. Like in the case of Eve, a moment’s hesitation will lead to a brief, empty mortal life, followed by an eternity of damnation.”
With the conviction the wrinkled man threatened everyone in attendance’s immortal soul, you’d think he’d experienced the eternity of suffering firsthand.
The meager crowd of settlers in attendance looked on from the pews with stricken expressions. The thin, scratchy material of their clothing was still damp from the snow flurrying outside, melted slush dripping audibly onto the pavers underfoot. The words the pious man spewed were jargon to them, but any living thing can recognize when they ought to be afraid.
“Only by giving your undivided devotion to our lord will you be offered the opportunity to overcome your profane human form. To become something MORE than a miserable sack of flesh swaddled in dripping, torn linens.”
If Sebastian wasn’t well within the sightline of the prior general where he sat in the first pew, illuminated clearly by the tinted sunlight filtering through the stained glass windows, he’d find it within himself to cut his eyes at his father’s platitudes.
Maybe it was his familiarity with the structure of the performance that thinned his patience. Relate, threaten, and offer an exit. Rinse and repeat for whichever adjacent commune had been ‘encouraged’ to attend that day’s sermon by armed church knights.
Or maybe it was just the nagging sense that it was all utterly untrue.
His father’s pale fingers went chalk-white where they gripped onto the pulpit. To the untrained eye, he seemed to simply be channeling the intensity of his words into his posture, partially hunched against the wooden structure.
But Sebastian knew better. He was bracing himself against it fully, barely managing to stand, all the energy he could spare going into projecting his voice.
If there existed any deity that would offer respite for the frailty that seemed to plague their family, it wasn’t the one the church stood to honor.
The few dozen individuals in attendance were spared the rapidly unraveling spiel as a slight, pale woman stepped onto the raised stage from a backroom, hand placed hesitantly on the preacher’s shoulder. As if a switch flipped, his form slackened, the fanatical energy puppeteering his limbs extinguishing as quickly as it had been stoked.
So his father’s worsening health was just as obvious as Sebastian thought it was. His mother had been forced to reign him in, lest he enter a fainting spell in front of the hopeful converts. A vial full of a murky liquid appears in her lithe hands, plucked from a sachet along her hip and transferred as discreetly as she can manage.
Adjusting where he sat reminded Sebastian of the presence of the very same substance in his pouch as the bottles clinked against each other. He could drink the swill as needed for his own poor humors. And yet he never seemed willing to fight through the dullness it caused his cognition.
“...The knights will remain in contact with your colony. Our records show you’re residing across the river. The monastery encourages you to attend sermons biweekly to showcase your piety.”
By the time he’d zoned back into the lecture, his father was delivering a thinly veiled threat. And not even a particularly intimidating one. The monastery’s knights were hardly even fit to be considered scouts, a far cry from the knight’s templar of old. But the settlers couldn’t know that, only that they were many and they were few. So what other option was there but to attend?
It was difficult to imagine that one day, a day sooner than he'd hope, he'd be the one on that stand, following in his father's footsteps when he could no longer.
Sebastian so envied the outlanders of the continent who were free from the tiresome production of the crusades. The weather and wildlife were more of a risk to any newly arrived settler’s life than the church was.
So much was doubly true given the recent rumors of a crazed beast roaming the area. How convenient that his father neglected to mention that. It’d mean he’d be expected to offer room and board in the empty rooms of the monastery, and that was evidently more courtesy than he could bear.
“You are dismissed. To our monastics in attendance, the remaining prayers of the evening should be held privately in your quarters. Your prior has business to attend to. Collect a breviary from the library if you do not have a copy in your quarters.”
It was a blatant lie, told only in the interest of saving face. His father would simply rest in his chambers and have every herb and tincture the monastery had at their disposal thrown at him until his condition improved. It was a practice becoming more and more frequent, but Sebastian could hardly complain. Not having to be in attendance in the great hall seven times throughout the day allotted him much more freedom for his endeavors.
He didn’t even bother to raise himself from the pew until the heavy wooden doors shut behind the final settler who was in attendance, and even still, he was stopped midstep.
“Sebastian.” His father’s pinched expression, partially shadowed where he looked down on him from the raised pulpit made it clear it was intended to be said with authority, but it sounded anything but. His words were thick, mouth no doubt dry from consuming the offered tincture.
The tincture was nothing more than a primitive, bitter-tasting sleep aid. Despite the evidence of an illness that plagued the men in the family, there was little to be done. The best they could do was mitigate symptoms.
It took great effort to not let his contempt for the slowly declining man slide into his own words. The patriarch had most certainly earned the sentiment in the years he’d used his position to order him around. “Father.”
“Your backlog of manuscripts is close to completion, I trust.”
Sebastian couldn’t help the twitch in his face at that. It was his responsibility to perform scribe duties for the monastery, copying over any documents ‘collected’-- more like stolen– from recent immigrants to the surrounding area. This process, naturally, included ‘revising’ texts to exclude any mentionings of pagan gods.
He made crude copies of the originals, too. Such rich mythos deserved to be preserved. But there was no reason to share as much with his fellow members of the church. “Of course.”
Gustav offers him a curt nod in return, extending his arm feebly to accept the assistance his wife offers in helping him down from the stage. “I’ll come by to collect them in the morning. And do be sure to have the original parchments arranged and prepared for destruction the first time I check. The discipline has seen your flesh enough for a lifetime.”
His duplicity in his duties hadn’t gone wholly unnoticed. Luckily, his father wasn’t certain of his deceit.
The plausible deniability didn’t save him from the preemptive punishment he suffered if he gave his father any reason to doubt his fealty. His back stung, partially healed wounds psychosomatically agitated. He could practically feel the coiled rope of the discipline in his palm, feel the prior’s watchful gaze boring into him, ensuring he didn’t pull his strikes against himself. He was more than familiar with doing penance– in his case, ‘self’ flagellation.
He forces a humorless laugh through clenched teeth. “They’ll be arranged together with the revised copies by first hour.”
Sebastian and Gustav shared a tense matched gaze until his parents disappeared into the dim doorway at the back of the room, and the gasp of relief as the door shut was wholly involuntary. The moment they were out of sight, he was all but sprinting through the main room of the priory. His feet slip on the wet cobbles, but he doesn’t allow himself the time to steady his footing.
It was frowned upon to walk with haste in the monastery. But it was explicitly forbidden to be outside of the monastery after dark, lest the malevolent creatures that lurked in the moonlight followed in behind. The wide, high windows confirmed his fears. The sun was setting.
His lungs already ached by the time he arrived at his scriptorium across the complex, vision flashing faintly. Most assuredly a consequence of his fragile constitution. He’d take one of his tinctures before he slept. Maybe. There was no time for that, now, though. He needed to be clear of mind for this.
The sight that awaited him as he threw the door open to his room was underwhelming. The room was scarcely decorated, if you could even describe it as such. A small scribe’s desk sat pushed into the corner beside a bookshelf, and his sad excuse for a bed sat on the opposite.
He wasn’t eager to return to his room to appreciate the furniture, though. He’d been blessed enough to have a room in the east wing, where the slope of the hill allowed him to crawl from his window and into the field below without risking snapping his ankles. If anyone had ever noticed the shoeprints that inexplicably appeared on occasion on the thin shelf of the raised desk, they’d never mentioned it to him.
The unadulterated copies, the personal copies, lived behind the desk. His hand fit in the crevice between the stone walls and the wooden surface easily, fishing out the hastily scribbled documents with haste and stuffing them into the upper section of his robes before mounting the desk awkwardly.
By the time he’d thrown himself from the windowsill onto the snow-covered ground below, the sun was already kissing the horizon.
Navigating in the lowered light wasn't a concern. Sebastian could find his hiding spot with his eyes closed if he had to. But the knights began their patrol around the monastery after dark, and they'd turn the corner towards his wing sooner than later.
He threw his cowl up over the wild mess of his hair as the cold winter air stung his face. There was no time to fret over the frightful conditions, and so he didn't, stepping as lightly as he could along the surface of the snow and hoping he'd remember to cover the tracts later before climbing the thick creeping vines up towards the security of his windowsill.
The rich pink and orange tint of the sunset reflected on the snow-dusted foliage that blanketed the area surrounding the monastery. Each crunching step through the layers of snow underfoot made the faint whooshing of the nearby river, still flowing beneath the layer of ice, all the clearer in his ears. It may as well have been an auditory map, the blonde monk adjusting himself minutely to follow the curvature of the river that ran along the perimeter of the monastery with practiced precision.
Before long, the pine tree that served to stow his most forbidden of possessions peeked out above the treeline. The snarled, snaggled mess of roots trailed out far beyond the tree itself, and Sebastian stepped carefully, mindful of any partially hidden root bundles beneath the blanket of snow.
The tree had seemingly been struck by lightning long before Sebastian had discovered it on a stroll, a long, thick bark-bare strip tearing from the tip to the bottom. Most importantly for himself, however, was a small, easily concealed bundle of roots near the base of the tree. Behind the fist-sized opening hid an internal cavity. The perfect hiding spot for folded parchment.
He checked first, as he always did, hand pushing brusquely into the opening in his haste. His shoulders lowered instinctively as his long fingertips brushed several thick, folded squares of parchment. It was still secure.
The transition of the most recently copied pages– a series of fables about a transplanted Asian mother goddess named Cybele– from his robe into the crevice was mercifully uneventful.
It was only as the panicked rush of blood in his ears began to subside that he heard it. The weak, shrill, agonizing whelping, like a wounded animal caught in a trap. Disquietingly, the noise was almost melodic, with a strange intentional quality to each shriek.
His hand tore back out from the hiding place before he could even cognitively process it, heart chilling behind his ribs.
If he could hear the odd cries, surely, the knights would, too.
They'd come and investigate. See the fresh prints in the snow, a path leading directly from the chambers of the prior’s only son to a strange tree. The prints of his Sebastian’s knobbly knees where he knelt before it. They'd surely find the copies, expose his secret.
He'd never see the world outside the stone walls again.
“Devil,” he spat under his breath as he brought himself to a stand, pointedly ignoring the burning of his muscles at the movement.
He forced himself to walk towards the cacophony, he could almost convince himself that the melodic crying was suitably hidden behind the faint rush of the river. But then the creature would struggle anew, some horrible gnashing of teeth and scuffle of limbs. No doubt, some idiotic animal had found itself ensnared in the dried, felled branches along the bank. If Sebastian was lucky, he could free the thing and be on his way before anyone was the wiser, giving the knights no incentive to investigate deeper into the clearing on the outskirts of the monastery grounds.
But the figure he eventually spotted thrashing along the bank, only just barely illuminated in the moonless night, was much bigger than any creature he’d ever seen roaming the area. He only halted in his steps for a moment, only briefly did the hushed whispers of a raging beast plaguing the countryside cross his mind. Whatever consequences that could befall him for hushing this thing’s whining would be insignificant in the face of what he stood to lose.
Sebastian’s resolve was tested as he stepped carelessly onto a stick as he continued his march towards the creature, and immediately, it stilled. The monk’s hand twitched with alarm, wishing he’d had the forethought to grab a ceremonial dagger before entering the woods alone. His eyes strained in a fitful attempt to make out the figure before him, agonizingly aware it was doing the very same to him.
As he expected, the creature was caught in the dried brambles along the riverbank, partially hunched in a way that confused his best effort to identify it as biped or quadruped. A limb was submerged in a thin break in the icy surface of the river, the rest still on land. The sight alone sent a sympathetic shiver up Sebastian’s spine. In the current weather, plunging into the river was a death sentence, yet the way the being’s body was contorted implied it had been attempting to move closer to it, not away.
Belatedly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the blurry shapes before him sharpening. To his confusion, it was no unknowable fairytale beast that lay before him, but a man.
A man utterly immobilized by a rope cord affixed to his neck, dragged taut along his Adam’s apple, tangled firmly in a branch behind him.
Sebastian would bark a shocked laugh at the sight if it wasn’t for the adrenaline still coursing through his system. He allowed himself a few more steps forward, moving to untangle the thing. “I’ve never heard a man make that sort of… hideous racket!”
The strained, stilted movements of the figure before him as it turned to better face him was decidedly unlike any human he’d ever encountered before, and Sebastian tried not to let his mind run wild with the tales of maneaters he’d read about in his treacherous occult studies. There were deep black shadows where eyes should be, a dark red liquid trailing along his front.
Maybe he’d been hasty in calling it a human.
Why was that thought so invigorating?
“LEAVE,” the man rasped harshly, voice choked.
Sebastian jerked at that, basic self-preservation kicking in. Every observation he made of this thing seemed conflicted. Was it cognizant? “I can’t,” he landed on in response. It wasn’t particularly elaborative, but neither was the mysterious figure’s order.
The man’s face pinched, something like exacerbation coloring his features. And then he lunged, not towards the blonde standing on the snowy bank, but away, only becoming all the more thoroughly entangled in the overgrowth as a result.
“What are you doing?” The monk really shouldn’t have been surprised when the inquiry only caused the figure to wail more, something broken and desperate in the cries. “You’ll kill yourself!”
Whatever the thing was, it didn’t seem to have the cognitive capacity for properly navigating the tumultuous terrain it was trapped in. Nor for being reasoned with.
Whatever strange fascination Sebastian held, the damning noise had to be dealt with before anything else. He sincerely found himself considering knocking the beast forward through the shrubbery into the partially frozen water behind him.
It’s what he wanted, right?
What did it matter what he had to do to stop that incessant squalling?
And then a particularly strong gust of wind stung his exposed skin, the bottles of hemlock slurry stowed away in the pouch along his hip clattering against each other in the breeze. And a convoluted, nonsensical, illogical plan only someone utterly delirious from panic and inexplicable excitement could concoct occurred to him.
The ensnared man didn’t seem to process as Sebastian ripped the stoppers from the neck of the bottles one by one behind him. Even as the monk captured his stubbled chin and coaxed his mouth open, he seemed almost disinterested, continuing his disorganized writhing against the brambles and wailing.
It didn’t take long for the questionably high dose to begin to take effect, the man’s body slackening. As he fully lost consciousness and ducked his head, the necklace that trapped him utterly in place slid down from the branch it was knotted in with ease, his body slowly slumping entirely until it came to an unbecoming heap along the ground.
Sebastian crossed himself as he prepared to haul the man back to his quarters.