Chapter 13: Chapter 13: A Touchy Lot

Something pressed up against his stomach, bringing discomfort with every waking moment. Seth came awake multiple times, slipping in and out of consciousness as some ethereal part of his mind dictated, thoughts coming to him in sudden bursts of nothingness, interspaced by lengths of nothingness.

He remembered death and carnage, destruction and massacre. Somehow his mind had expected much of a war but knew there had been no such thing. While there was massacre in war, sometimes it was truly one sided. Even the concept of an execution was nonexistent. All he knew was that there had been death and he had been close to it. This he knew with an oddly detached apathy, unable to sympathize with a concept that had not impaled itself upon him. Everyone dies, a fragment of his mind whispered.

He wondered if it was simply enlightening him on a concept or if it was mocking him. He failed to come to a conclusion before nothingness took him again. Whether it was a burst or a length of it, he would never know.

When Seth came awake again, without the plague of nothingness, his mind went first to the pain in his side. He remembered it vividly, the last sensation before everything had gone dark. The pain forced him to move, to lean to the side so that he didn’t put so much weight on it. He obeyed with the vigor of a starving peasant offered a loaf of unleavened bread and failed. His body refused him answer, ignoring him as a lover scorned.

He pressed his eyes shut in perseverance only to realize they had never been open in the first place. He was awake yet stuck in the world between waking and sleeping, conscious and unconscious. He was lucid enough to recognize it and was glad for it. He was still asleep but not beholden to sleep, his body still rested while his mind was awake. His self-awareness had returned but strength was yet to slip into his muscles and bones. He was, in all ramifications of the term, a hostage in his own body.

He was distracted from the pain in his side a moment later by the pain in his head. It wasn’t the steady thrum of the headache he’d spent his life with, neither was it the cacophony of madness it tended to throw itself into like a particularly despoiled child goes into a tantrum on being refused one insane request or the other. No. This was eerily similar to the pain in his side, and he panicked at the thought of brain damage. The possibility that from it stemmed the reason he could not come fully awake scared him.

With the fear and panic came exhaustion. He didn’t know how long he laid there with his worry. It could’ve been minutes or hours, perhaps even days.

Dwelling on it was something he didn’t want to engage, and he fought against his own mind as he forced it to other tasks. There was none. While aware of the waking world, only both spots of pain proved information to his mind, bursts of focus like bonfires to his senses. Everything else, he noticed, was void.

Darkness was not the word to describe it, merely nothingness. If the pain was taken away from him he would easily believe himself dead despite his awareness. So he held on to the pain for dear life, struggling to endure it as much as he did ignore it. It kept his mind sane as much as it struggled to break it.

He didn’t know how long he held on, but he knew it became harder to focus on both bursts of pain at the same time. Where it had been easy mere moments or eons ago, it became difficult, each pain drifting away from the other till it was like keeping each eye on two separating targets drifting farther apart in opposite directions.

Slowly he felt none of the pain, only the need to keep his attention on them. The need to split his mind so that he didn’t lose them. It forced a pressure between his eyes, eyes he wasn’t even using, and he fought that back too. It was as if it sought to pull his eyes into one, make a cyclops of himself in the process. He could not allow such mutation corrode him, so he fought it while he watched his pain, splitting his attention thrice.

The pressure did not let up; it did not balk at his superior skill or his nigh perfect control. It did not give into his delusion of strength nor his phantasm of government. It was here to stay even if it meant waging war against his concept of ownership. Of all three points of attention, this one threatened to drive him to madness. So he fought as a wounded animal for survival.

A breath later he heard a crack just as much as he felt it and knew he had succumbed to the pressure, failed with an adeptness he did not know he even possessed.

As his mind cracked under itself, splitting thrice more than it had once been, he knew with a child’s certainty that madness stared at him beyond the veil that kept humans separated from concepts. If he ever came fully awake, the headaches would be worse and his faculties dimmed. Certainty had never been so clear.

Oddly, the pressure was gone now, leaving a caress of itself where it had once been an indomitable mountain. In its wraithlike presence he found focus on both points of opposing pain easier. With the ease, exhaustion snuck up on him like a snake hunting a blind rodent in the darkness of pale moonlight. Pulling him into a suffocating embrace the likes of which was new to him.

It took him quietly. In its hold he failed to put up any resistance.

His self-awareness washed away like wet paint under the touch of acid.

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When Seth woke again it was to the sound of wood snapping. There was a crack then a pop. His mind focused on the pop, convincing him it had been the sound to wake him as he opened his eyes.

Everything was lit with the tiny pale blue and touch of white only born from the symphony of stars and the moon. Besides that, the world around him was dark and he saw only by the orange light of a camp fire burning off to his side.

It cast a soft strong glow in a haphazard circle, encompassing him and the man who sat beside it, poking it with a tiny stick. The flame blazed, a crackle following it as another piece of wood burnt, contributing to the embers, bright orange motes ascending from within the flame.

Seth’s attention swiveled to thehe man beside the fire and found him of dark skin. His complexion reminded Seth of dark chocolate made with a touch of milk but left too long to burn. It wasn’t as deep as the night but its brown was significantly deep. His face was without scar nor blemish, and his hair, cut short atop his head, though black as the night, was riddled in a smattering of grey, leaning more on the side of white.

The man spotted a beard cut short across his jaw. It was short enough to not look bushy but long enough to cover the skin of his jaw in its entirety. This, too, was a sturdy black smattered with greying white. Its only difference from the hair on his head was its silver shine in the fire light.

But what held Seth’s attention most was the man’s eyes. From the distance, he saw them with the aid of the firelight, finding them to be a deep silver. Perhaps it was due to the distance but he could not discern if the man had any pupils at all.

It took him a moment to look away from the man’s eyes, glad that his attention was elsewhere. His faculties returned to him as his attention wandered further and noticed he was in the woods; lost somewhere he didn’t recognize.

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Seth flexed his hands, doing his best not to make a sound and found he wasn’t bound. It was a good sign, if anything. He found his head ached but that was nothing new. There was a steady throb in his side. He had no idea the reason for it so he moved on. There was a soreness in his shoulders as if he’d gone through a few drills but nothing too painful. It would not hinder use of them so he gave them not much in the space of attention.

Certain his body would not fail him, Seth calculated the distance between him and the darkness of the woods. He didn’t believe he would outrun a souled which the man certainly was from the odd color of his eyes, but he could hope.

It was when he was making calculations, gauging the distance between him and the man, that he noted the man’s attire and froze.

Hope failed him immediately.

There were only so many delusions a child could work themselves into. The delusion of escaping a priest, no matter how grand, was not one of them.

“You’re awake,” the man said, as if he’d been waiting for Seth to realize his position.

Seth held his breath at the sound. The statement was precise, lacking in doubt of any form. The priest was not guessing, he was stating. Still, Seth gave no response, neither movement nor sound came from him.

“Don’t worry, child.” The man’s voice was an odd baritone. It was smooth, lacking the coarseness most soul mages have after a few years of fighting soul beasts. “You will not die today.”

Seth didn’t take any consolation in the words. That he would not die today meant he would die another day.

But everybody dies one day.

The man scratched at something in the dirt and Seth was forced to look. When he did, he saw nothing. The dirt was undisturbed, and so was the fire.

The priest sat as he always had, unmoved and unbothered, save the wandering in his eyes. Those eyes were odd to look at, but from the distance Seth couldn’t make out what exactly made them so.

“Do you know what I am, child?” the priest asked after a moment of silence.

“A priest,” Seth was forced to answer. When the priest said nothing, stretching an awkward silence, he added, “of the holy seminary.”

Though, there was nothing holy about the seminary. They were simply a mockery of what priesthood was. But he assumed they would call themselves holy out of a self-righteous need to not sound depraved.

“They would like to think so, wouldn’t they?” the priest replied, and it took Seth a moment to realize he wasn’t being spoken to.

No one called the seminary holy. Even in the rumors it was not. And Seth had no recollection of it ever being called holy. He’d only called it so because the catholic church liked to call their seminaries holy, whether they were or not was a different story entirely. He’d simply assumed that if the reverends were willing to go as far as naming their school after that of the catholic church’s, it was only safe to assume they’d call it holy as well.

The priest poked the fire with his stick again, setting it to a crackle and a fizz, sparks flying with a reckless abandon found mostly in infants.

“There’s nothing holy about them.” With the stick, the man set aside a particularly red piece of wood from the fire, his attention not even wandering to it. “They are not unholy either. Just a group of men who’ve learned the soul arts better than most. It has helped them garner power faster and they will one day grow drunk on it.”

Seth’s mouth dropped open, and from it spilled the silence of shock. Something about a priest berating the seminary felt abhorrent. It was like a man looking down on his own principles, or a bird refusing to fly.

The priest turned his attention to him for the first time and offered him a gentle smile. It shocked Seth more than waking up in the middle of nowhere in the dark of night.

“But don’t tell them that,” the priest said. “They are a touchy lot, those ones.”

There was no correlation to be found, no point where axis met or lines collided, nothing that gave Seth any idea of the truth. However, when he met the priest’s smile, watched his eyes crinkle at its edges in a sign of age he was now realizing the man was doused in, everything clicked in his mind and he knew. He killed them. He killed them all.

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