Before the night had fallen, and after the storm exhaled its last gale, the total count of misshapen captured for the sacrifice climbed to thirteen. Gleur boasted that the storm had brought the vermin out of hiding. The cages were filled, and Ald’s ordeal not gone unnoticed. Now, after everyone else had been dismissed, taking care of the beasts in the cages and preparing for a long night, Gleur sat on the old table, sipping at a tereptes.
“So, ald, I didn’t ask before to not cause a commotion. Everyone was tired and I am sure they noticed, but didn’t comment on it. Where’s she?”
“Ehavi deserted.” Ald said, not turning to look at his interlocutor,a s the creature inside one of the cages had caught its attention. Its looks reminded to a mangled baby and it sobbed like a mourning mother. “She got scared of a flock.”
“A flock… of ravens?” Gleur asked, taking another sip from the grind. “Of, maybe, ravens that speak and like to perform acts unbecoming of birds?”
“Yes, I was visited by her. I’d recommend dropping the line of questioning, though. No offense given, brother, I am just too tired to—”
“Forget it, Ald. You don’t want to talk about Unkindness, and I don’t wish to hear about her.”
“She spoke heresy,” Ald said, still paying attention to the tarantula-like legs of the creature.
“Live long enough and that becomes the only thing worth speaking aloud.” Then Gleur took a long sip of the tereptes. “Or that’s what she would say, anyway.”
“The mother aided us in the battlefield today, right?”
“She gave Halge an aliquot of pain, but spared us from a loss as terrible as any. Such are her ways, or so they say,” he said, lowering his gaze.
“You think The Celestial Mother forsook us?”
“You need to have been in her grace once to be forsaken, Ald. So… no, I don’t think she forsook Felsians,” he said, his wide fingers tapping on the side of the Tereptes cup.
“Which of your experiences was it? the one that sowed so much disdain for Mother, I mean.”
“Living,” he limited himself to answer. Because he could talk of the brothers and sisters he had lost to the misshapen, of the times his prayers to ease the inclement weather during a campaign were only answered with hail and thunder. He could talk about the summoning of Father, and how every single time it reassured him that no goddess of good and light could love such a voracious evil. But what would it accomplish? Counterarguments from Ald, most likely. Starting an argumentative line to justify each of those tiny details, and he considered vagueness was preferable to that. Some battles were not worth to be fought for the umpteenth time.
“I don’t want to talk about deities, boy. Let’s talk about grown men things.”
Ald turned and looked at Gleur, almost bewildered.
“The hunt? Caretaking? Gambling?” he asked, as for Felsians, that last phrase Gleur had spoken meant little more than nothing.
“Plants. Animals. The mundane, in opposition to the divine.”
Ald sat to the table and Gleur passed him the tereptes, already refilled.
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“Birds, right? You like birds, Gleur. Why?”
He smirked, relaxed against the back of the chair, and began talking. “Because I envy them. Not due to the delusions of freedom associated with them, no, don’t take me for a hopeless dreamer. What I admire is their families.”
“Like how a rook defends his group of hens?”
Gleur gestured with disdain.
“None of that. There several kinds of fowl that are… I swear I have the word at the tip of my tongue… anyway, that get a single mate in their lives, and care for them and their offspring. The privilege to grow safe, coddled by the hardworking parents. That’s what their chicks get. I find it soul-soothing. To see these creatures be what we could never.”
“And what bird would you compare Felsians to? Or animal, what animal.” Ald made the question Gleur feared.
And he feared it not because he had no answer, but rather because Ald would not like the question. Ants. It all went back to the Mother: after all, to speak of the mundane was to speak of the divine. Ants lived among siblings, and followed orders blindly. Ants worked for a careless mother that birthed them to do her bidding. But he could not say that.
“I think the best of us can aspire to be compared to dogs. Loyal, ready to serve, capable of being the kindest or the most brutal of creatures. Yes, I believe dogs are…” he trailed off while looking at the ceiling. “Do you have dogs?”
“Elvisat owned one while raising me. It was a small critter, whom tried by all possible methods to garner my hatred. I also had some shepherds when setting the farm. Those were kind dogs, but they had an endless supply of energy. Once they died, I decided it was time to move on with life, so I waited for the next rain and caught Kali. The last rain…” Ald finally drank from the tereptes, mainly as an excuse to silence his train of thought.
“I cannot promise you it will rain again, brother. But we are doing what we can,” Gleur reassured with a sour expression on his face. “And that will have to be enough.”
“And if it depends on me, Gleur?”
Gleur broke in a hearty laugh, hitting the table so hard with his fist that Ald had to keep the tereptes from spilling over. “It depends on someone, or a group of someones. It could be any Felsian, any misshapen, any deity that solves the crisis. I wouldn’t have delusions of chosen one if I were you.”
“Unkindness told me… she told me that it depended on me if there were felsians here one thousand years down the line."
Any fun Gleur may have derived from Ald’s previous statement dissipated.
He straightened his back and crossed the fingers of both his hands in front of his chest.
“Do you remember the exact words?”
“No.” Ald admitted, not without a bit of shame. “Does it matter?”
“It never matters more than when Unkindness speaks. She is no liar, yet she likes to hide what she truly means into the nooks and crannies of language. She is vague in purpose, the annoying witch. We once tried burning her in a pyre, and she said the flames would rise higher than ever on the day of her burning. Any guesses on what happened?”
“The whole place caught fire?” Ald ventured before taking another sip from the drink.
“No, I wouldn’t be telling you this if something so… verisimilar had happened. She turned the flames into red, long tailed ravens, and they elevated into the sky, flying in spirals, following the smoke. Getting lost into the very clouds. And yet, the birds consumed her flesh, turned her to ashes as if fire they still were. And when her last bone crumbled into a sorry pile, she appeared applauding from behind a nearby tree. ‘Again! Again! I love magician shows!’ she mocked us as we looked at her with trembling jaws.”
After Gleur finished, Ald looked around, at the cages, wondering if some of those misshapen could have even a fraction of the power of a Masterwork, and, if they did, if they were aware of it.
“I take that wasn’t the only time you tried to kill her.”
“No, but it was the last we did. Until that day we thought she took a year to return after every time we managed to kill her. It turns out the first three times she was just doing it annually just for fun, to give us some sick hope. Truth being that she is impossible to kill with any weapon a mortal can wield.”
“How old were you then?”
“Younger than you are right now. Every other piece of bad news in my life is delivered by her.”
“And yet you have a pet parrot… or raven,” Ald said, smiling.
“Bad news are better than no news. I have come to appreciate her like a farmer appreciates the cloudcries that catch him unaware in the middle of the plains.”
This time, Ald was the one to laugh. “At least the trees are well-watered.”
And so they spent the rest of the night, caring for the vermin, laughing as they drunk tereptes. The next dawn would find them tired and drowsy, and the prisoners alive, they would make sure of that.