Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Ashara
The Goodbye
The restlessness swelled into an excitable buzzing. Something sliced through the damp air, zesty and sharp, cutting through the tang of blood and salt. It wasn’t relief, not quite, but it was something—something foolish…something dangerous. I didn’t allow myself the indulgence of it.
The laurel at the foot of the tree rotated his hand, holding it aloft to the light and inspecting the small wound.
He must have posed a question to Falstaff, who answered with a firm nod of his helm, and the sound of tentative laughter fluttered into the blood-soaked air.
It was a strange thing, something that couldn’t survive in the dark for too long.
It soon faded to nothing, replaced by a cautious silence.
It was almost unnoticeable at first, the small puddle of red encircling his feet.
I assumed it was the blood, a small mire of it, that had dripped from the leaves of the Blood Tree above.
The laurel certainly didn’t notice, intent on his hand, examining it this way and that. But it didn’t stay a puddle for long.
A hand reached for mine, fingers fidgeting until they found the tips of my own.
It was not the claw of an acolyte, but something softer and warmer than their clammy, frigid touch.
The acorn-haired laurel’s fingers threaded through mine, and a tear slid down my cheek.
It was a tender thing, her hand in mine.
More tender than my mother’s comb in my hair, or even Demetri’s hand between my thighs.
Despite that tenderness, her grip was unyielding as we watched the blood plague take root and rise.
It was the first one I’d ever seen, though raised on stories of their ruin.
It unfolded in an age of its own, both endless and fleeting, crusting over the laurel’s body like frost coating a flower.
His screaming started when it reached his knees.
Body thrashing, he tried to lurch away from its tendrils but remained melded to the spot. It crystallised his thighs first, then his waist and shoulders.
“Accept this act of divinity, laurel! Let it take you!” Druid Falstaff stepped to the side, the tips of his boots retreating from the plague’s edge.
“This has been ordained, and so it shalt be. Look upon ye Lord’s works and despair not, but rejoice!
” Lifting his bony arms to the canopy, his helm tilted skyward, glinting yellow in the sun’s singular ray.
The laurel screamed.
Oh, how he screamed.
“It burns! It burns! It bu—” His anguished cries gargled to nothing as the blood plague crawled into his open mouth, pouring down his throat. It bled across his jaw and smothered his nose, a red mass gushing into his eyes and blanketing each strand of hair.
Upon the dais now stood a statue of bloodstone.
Twisted in the throes of agony, his body was frozen into a terrible, awful thing, pain etched into every angle.
It was there in the jut of his hips, the clench of his jaw, the bend of his crumpled waist. It was pain made immortal, and it was coming for us all.
Our entwined hands shook, but I refused to let go, and neither did she as the realisation hit us both.
There would be no salvation; we would not be spared.
Demetri’s body would petrify, just like all the rest. Something nuzzled deep into the base of my skull, formless at first, limbless.
But then it grew arms, legs, and it raced to the forefront of my mind to sit alongside the vision of Falstaff and the statue of stone.
Where are the bodies?
There should be thousands, millions, of statues like the First. Enough to line every wall of the templum’s vast reach. Every chappellum. Every street. Every mountain, valley, and lake. Yes, bodies rotted, shrivelled to nought but mulch and dirt. But bloodstone…
“A testament to the Blood God’s power,” Capriche had preached. “Blood Stone is eternal, incorruptible to flame or blade. The First is eternal.”
The drag of something clunking up the roots drew my gaze.
Lugged by acolytes, their thin arms bulging with veins the colour of figs, were two hammers.
Hammers with heads not of iron or rock, but of deep, red stone: bloodstone.
They stood on either side of the crystallised laurel, raising their mallets.
With a deafening crack, the hammerheads descended upon his torso, splintering him from navel to neck, sending fissures cascading outward.
He crumbled to pebbles, the whole of him reduced to nothing but rubble.
Falstaff tipped his helm to the sun, his body quaking as he heaved a lungful of air.
His fingers followed the swirling plumes of dust from the bloodstone, the tips of them tracing each loop.
Producing small brooms from the folds of their robes, the acolytes swept the laurel’s remains from the dais, leaving the rest of the dust to drift into the shadows below.
With sickening clarity, it dawned on me this is how my father, Adelaide, my mother, had met their end: demolished and wrecked, as if they’d never even existed at all.
***
With each laurel offered, a part of me sundered—splinters catching like kindling, burning what was left of me from the inside out.
I was certain there would be nothing left for the Other to take by the end, not when the Blood God had demanded so much.
The ritual’s consumption of us had a rhythm, near-melodical in its ability to keep time, keep beat: stairs, needles, plague.
Hammers, brooms, stairs. Falstaff and his acolytes rendered dues with the inhuman speed of a god, and the ruthlessness to match.
Eyes itchy and red, irritated by motes of powdered bloodstone adrift in the air, I watched it all. I watched how some went to their deaths silent and resolute, while others were dragged, screaming and thrashing. I watched as each met the same fate—rock turned to pebble turned to dust.
Hand still in mine, I watched alongside her.
I needed to blink. Gods, how I needed to blink, but I kept my eyes wrenched open until I could stand it no longer, intent on witnessing every one.
Hands slick, we inched closer to the tree, clinging to each other.
It was a small lip at first, a nip under the sole of my slipper, a stumbled step here, a wobbling ankle there.
The soil underfoot was now almost all root, writhing over the ground like serpents.
With my thumb, I traced small circles on her wrist, and she squeezed mine, our heads angled up towards the bloodied tree that loomed ever closer.
Another laurel, then another. Another. Each body another foot closer, for me, for her, for Demetri.
A broad, chestnut-haired laurel ascended the dais to stand before Falstaff.
I convulsed. Her gentle thumb caressing my knuckle did nothing to quell the rising tremors, my fingernails embedding into her skin, enough to draw blood. But she held firm through it all, her rod holding mine aloft, though my knees threatened to buckle.
Eyes hazed with tears, I looked. I looked at his elbows, his waist, his thighs, then his feet, half-swallowed by the twisting roots.
Gone was that playful saunter of his gait, and only a rigidness remained, so unlike Demetri.
His head stayed dipped, as if resigned to his fate.
The boons in my chest were no longer a gift, but a woe, each pump more wretched than the last.
Falstaff raised the needle.
“Turn,” I whispered, voice lost to the song of the acolytes and the beating in my chest. “Turn.”
He didn’t look back, not even for one fleeting glance. Falstaff pricked the needle to his thumb, a pearl of blood blooming on its tip before falling to the roots at their feet.
The blood plague pooled, as it had done to all those before—as it would do for the acorn laurel, as it would do for me.
It grew and grew, crimson tendrils slithering up to his face, still angled away from my gaze.
With my free hand, I curled my fingers to reach for his button, pulling and tugging as if it could do something, anything, to stop what was happening.
But the magic of buttons was no match for the Blood God.
“Goodbye,” I breathed, the word little more than a brush of air from my lips.
It was not to spare me the belt, because it was only for him.
Always for him. I would tell him in the beyond how I had looked, how I had looked at it all, until the very end, and he would be so proud.
“Darling,” he’d say. “You were so brave. So, so brave.”
He was silent as it happened—no scream, no cry for mercy, no plea for salvation. Only the rattle of air in my lungs, and the froth of a blood plague bubbling up from the roots.
Demetri was gone, and in his place, a body of bloodstone.
The acolytes raised their hammers, and still, I looked. I looked and looked and looked, as the future we could have shared turned to dust with their swing.
Not a splinter, but a chasm opened inside me, cracking alongside Demetri’s body under their mallets.
I would not go to my death as a whole…not after my mother, not after this.
From its gaping centre spilled warmth, magma surging through my chest and stealing my breath.
I huffed through it, half expecting smoke to plume into the air with every exhale.
The line shortened and shortened, and before long, we were standing at the foot of the stairs, the acorn-haired laurel next to be offered.
She trembled like the last leaf of autumn, clinging to its branch—to my hand—desperate to stay despite the cruel winter wind. But that was not the way of things.
The acolytes descended.
As her collar clicked open, her hand slipped from mine, and something stirred within me, a piece fusing rather than breaking. I didn’t wish to let her go. Not yet, perhaps not ever. But with patient fingers, she unpicked them from mine. Hand slickened with sweat, she slid from my grasp.
Foot upon the first of the root-wrought steps, she defied Falstaff’s order and turned.
Our eyes met, and her cerulean irises, large and round, glittered with tears that mirrored my own.
I had hoped for a promise. An instruction.
An oath to pass between us. But in the breath or two that we held each other’s gaze, there was only silence—the words we should have spoken unspeakable, the knowledge we carried heavier than chappellums, templums, and mountains.
A vicious swipe from an acolyte’s belt forced her forward, blood painting the steps in a shower of red. As she rose, she peeked behind once more and smiled, her teeth webbed crimson. I returned it, wide enough to ache.
A smile for her. For Demetri.
I was still smiling when the hammers fell and her body crumbled alongside all the rest. Unlike the others, her head had not succumbed to the mallets and instead lay decapitated on the dais, hewn from her body.
An acolyte scooped up her face, still etched in a smile, and brought her to his nose.
My mouth dropped as he sniffed her cheek, inhaling deeply, his chapped lips parted.
“To His Eminence.” The acolytes’ glassy eyes shot open at Falstaff’s demand. Descending the dais, he stashed her head in his robes, the bulk of her jutting from under the cloth like the swollen stomach of a mother heavy with child.
“Bring forth the laurel.”
I returned to Falstaff, to the tree, to the blood. It was time. It was time to make good on my due.