The floors of Varonian's temple at the Cavalcade were a dark, cherry stain, so deep and so black that a man could feel the hum of a thousand heartbeats beneath his bare feet, an echoing stampede radiating from Va'ronian's bonfire. When it had first been built, smoothly sanded cedar had been the material of choice-- for scent and for longevity. And even though the scent of cedar still tinged the air with its companion cassia, kyphi, myrrh,
there was something more human in those floorboards oily in the grooves of the nailheads.
Even now, a fresh splatter of that human scent sparked the fire as a body skittered across the floor, stopping just shy of Orin's flame gate.
Starke's bone feet smeared the boy's saliva blood into the eye of Va'ronian on the floor. So he could witness Calisto's child pride, his cowardly toughness that bloomed in an absense of humility.
"You've brought shame on me, boy," the prophet's voice echoed as he dropped the ruined tome on the boy's head. "Shame on me, shame on me for not throwing you home to Orin as soon as you walked in that door."
Seeds sewn from naivety, from loneliness, from a great black demon dwelling in his heart. Tearing his insides asunder. Leaving him wrecked within himself. Flourishing into the blooms of recklessness. He should have anticipated word would travel.
It always does.
Echoing, reverberating through person, to person, to person. It reached the Prophet's ears, and he was not forgiving.
He never was.
Calisto took all of his punishments and did, earnestly, try to grow from them. Each blossomed bruise, each dripping gash. Every ivory bone snapped out of place. All of this, he knew, he had earned. He swallowed each punishment, he took the bulk of them in still
silence
and tried to improve upon himself. He wanted so badly to prove to the Prophet that he could learn. That he would be worthy of taking more and more responsibility upon himself. But this. This... mistake he'd made. Had set things back. He knew it.
The Prophet's words. Shame. That stung worse than any of the damage done at his aggressive hands.
He knew it would likely be best if he stayed silent. As he usually did. Though the boy with the big brown eyes who had always depended so greatly on the approval of those he idolized...
Deep brown eyes, glistening with the very beginnings of tears. “I know I am unworthy of this mercy you've paid me. You have done much for me, allowing me to study here, and I have... taken it for granted, my actions were careless, brash, I would never intend to reflect you, our people or this place in anything but a respectable light and I've failed...” exhale. Bleeding crimson lips shoved together. Nervousness.
Va'ronian's Book of Glass, that inked tome of man skin and machine guts grabbed the attendant by his hair and drug him upright, rough enough to snap a crack from the popping of Calisto's vertebrae aligning after the blows that had already been rained upon his head, beaten into his shoulders, his back, his belly.
Already the bruises were yellowing.
"On your fucking knees in my house, boy."
His voice echoed through the high rafters, bounced around the heavy pillars before resolving in the center of the room once more. He rubbed at his temples as his voice evaporated, rain in their desert of a home, silent save the crackle of the fire and the shiverring shock of Calisto's pain wracked frame. The prophet paced the fire, one bare foot before the other, till he addressed Calisto through Va'ronian's flame.
His voice was calm, now. Almost quiet-- but still, it commanded.
Still, he would be obeyed.
"Pick up the book."
A strained gasp shivered out from parted, quivering lips. The boy pressed his weight into his legs, to assist the Prophet in righting himself to a preferable position. The boy's broken, leaking flesh held still as a statue. Calisto endured what was bestowed upon him, as was customary for someone who had royally fucked up as he had. However, for all of his faults, Calisto was nothing if not
strong.
Strong body, strong will. It tended to get in the way every now and again. Emphasis on the now. He was impassioned, a wonderful student, but so wrought with this damn will that betrayed him. As much as he loved his mother, even, this little streak of rebellious nature. Like a snag in the cloth. Slowly unraveling.
Everything.
The attendant’s gaze held firm on the ground below him. Littered with splatters of his own blood, seeping into the cracks in the floorboards. Given the chance, he likely would have studied it for several minutes, as that beaded crimson dot, glistening in the firelight, made its slow crawl along the floor of the temple. The blood appeared as if it were drawn to something. It did not come as a surprise.
This was, after all, a holy place.
He heard the Prophet's voice – deep and chilling – cut through the tension and he immediately did as told. Large hands curling around the thick volume, he lifted it as the Prophet had requested. “What would you like me to do with it, sir?” He forced his voice to maintain an even tone throughout, though it threatened to crack and break with the pressure of the pain eating away at it.
Starke held his hands out to the flame, heat radiating onto Calisto's arms from the prophet's proximity to the fire. It was heat but it wasn't pain--
it wasn't pain, yet.
"You wanted that book so badly," Starke said, terse and chiding, almost the reprimand of a parent. "The book is yours now. I have paid for it. And now, you will pay me."
He dropped one arm to his side before he opened his left hand to the flame and took a step closer.
Then, the blisters came.
The sickly smell of burning hair was the first thing that erupted from the fire, tempered by Va'ronian's spices and the fragrant trespassers, honeysuckle and amber.
"This is not a sacrifice, boy. This is not an honour. There is no ceremony, no prayer, no feast for what I take from your body." The prophet turned his arm over in the flame. "You will give me what I am owed in blood. You will pay me in flesh. And when I have been paid, you will take your bloody carcass to the Docks and you will find this La'akai Journeyman and you will give him what is yours. You will surrender that book to him with humility and you will apologize."
Calisto's gaze jerked upward at the Prophet's announcement regarding this book. A story he had enjoyed reading and re-reading since he was a boy. Mother never allowed him to keep works of fiction, and as such, he would sneak off to the library to enjoy it in secrecy. Tucking the book in a special place, a hollow in the shelf, where no one else's eyes would know to look.
Many fond memories laid in that book, a seemingly insignificant, mundane object. He was never allowed to talk much to others, at least not when in the company of his mother – but in these books, he could have a hundred different lives. Lost to the boundlessness of the human imagination.
As Calisto grew older, as his studies became more and more rigid, he'd had less and less time for leisure reading. As such, that book had remained forgotten for a great long while. Until earlier that day. It had come to him as he lay in bed, very early in the morning. Stirring in the darkness.
In the loneliness.
Looking forward to this comfort. And seeing that comfort had been stolen away from him.
With all of the dark, nasty emotion that had been boiling hot and dangerous stifled deep within.
It could have been worse. He wouldn't attempt to explain any of this. It meant nothing to the Prophet. And why should it? Calisto's feelings meant nothing, to anyone. They never had.
The payment came in a vibrant flash. The sensation assaulting his limb. A cry of agony finally came bounding from his lungs, jaw clamped shut to swallow down the rest of the sound. But the pain. Tears bubbling and streaking down the blackened, bloodied angular lines of his face. Fingers writhing and twitching but the boy
still tried. To hold firm.
And he couldn't.
He screamed, body collapsing onto itself, huddled into a ball of furious suffering. The Prophet's words, for as much as he struggled to pay him all of his attention, were clouded and distant. His ears rang with all sickening crackles and pops. “I... understand.” Choking on the words. Caught in his throat. They finally fell free and wriggled in the air between them.
A few more seconds passed before Starke removed his arm from Va'ronian's cleansing flame and he watched his attendant through the fire that lapped at his vision, engulfed in the crackling of the cassia and the intermittent sobs of the boy smeared across his floor.
"Now do as you've been told."
The prophet, in the wake of his fury, was calm as he exited the temple's main floor and retired to his chamber.