It wasn’t cold in the room, not exactly. Or rather, it was, but that wasn’t the largest part of it. It was damp; perhaps the word dank might be applicable. Stuffy, stale, dead, and decaying were better. But it wasn’t dead; there were things about this place that lived. That watched. That predated.
There were few places like it. Whatever the case, Aloram hunched his shoulders and suppressed a shiver, steeling himself against the supernatural unpleasantness of the place. Dim LED’s shone white from overhead, casting the grey concrete room in a sterile sort of purgatory. Many were shattered and dark, and the few that remained flickered every so often, adding to the desultory miasma of the place. Whisps of smoke drifted about and clung to the ceiling. He’d been here dozens of times before, but never alone. And it never got any more tolerable.
The stone floor was cool beneath his feet, clammy skin treading on cold, dusty concrete. Instead of walking in the usual sense, Aloram slid his feet across the ground, careful of nails, screws, shattered glass, and other debris that littered the ground. Kicking or stepping on anything would make noise, and drawing too much attention in this place was fatal. Scanning the floor ahead of him would have been easier, but his father had trained him never to take his eyes away from the door, not even for a moment.
The low murmur of voices wafted to him from the far side of the chamber, seeping in from beneath the bottom of the closed door at its end. Aloram took a cautious, sliding step towards the door, then another, careful to keep his breathing slow and controlled. In his bare feet, his movements didn’t make a sound, but the beating of his heart sounded to him like the heavy thudding of a drum. The loud blood coursing powerfully through his veins was evidence of his aliveness, and it condemned him.
Unintelligible whispers surrounded him, and what sounded like the rustle of clothing sounded from his right. It took everything in him not to spin around and face whatever or whoever was there, but he didn’t. He’d planned for this. Expected it. Don’t draw their attention—don’t look at them, whatever you do, his mother had said, or they will consume you. So he didn’t look, though his skin prickled with the sensation of being observed. Watched. Stalked.
Ever so slowly, he breathed in, breathed out, slid his feet across the ground, and drew another few inches closer to the door. As he approached, the rise and fall of the voices from beyond the door grew louder, as did the whispering. He was not supposed to come here alone.
The voices—the human voices from beyond the door—were chanting. Not a loud chanting like one might hear at a sports game stadium, but a low, persistent chanting that moved through scripture in a foreign tongue, ebbing and rising as it gained speed and intensity, slowly approaching a gothic crescendo. Aloram bit his tongue to regain control of his thoughts. Damn them. Damn them all. If they did it, I swear if they did it... His body vibrated with the intensity of his emotion, images of a body draped in white cloth splotched with blossoming patches of red lying on a stone table filling his head. That table only meant one thing, and though dreams could lie, his rarely did. The face of Aloram’s father floated into his mind’s eye, harsh, stoic, and unsmiling. There was nothing he would put past him, but this was cruel. He knows what he’s doing to me. If he does this… Aloram clenched his jaw, flexing the muscles in his hand, tightening his grip around the knife.
The glacial pace of his movements grated against the fiery anger of his thoughts. Aloram shivered again, with rage rather than fear, squeezed the hilt of the knife in his right hand, and fought back the urge to sprint towards the door. That would be too exciting for the watchers to resist, and he couldn’t risk them attacking him before he found out for sure.
Finally, Aloram reached the door. It was thick metal, windowless, and colder than the rest of the room. Scratches and dents, though none deeper than a few millimeters, etched and pitted its surface. Aside from a simple turning rod of a handle and a keyhole below it, the door was utterly unadorned.
No “Keep Out” or “Danger” signs hung to ward off intruders; any that made it this far in would already have known far more than they could bear to live with. Delving deeper into the bowels of the church could bear no additional risk to the uninvited: their life would already have been forfeit. It would have made far more sense to place the temple on their estates—space was certainly no issue—but his father had said that “devotion doesn’t choose.” Aloram’s mother said it had something to do with population and that metropolitan areas were better grounds for their purposes than secluded villas. But ultimately, they hadn’t constructed this place. It had been here long before they’d started using it, and Aloram was convinced that it was the ground itself, this insidious basement, that called them here.
Hushed quiet fell over the room, the watchers doing whatever their equivalent of holding their breath was, silent in their anticipation for his unprecedented trespass and its inevitable fallout.
Aloram stretched out his left hand, his free hand, toward the door. Embarrassed, then enraged, he realized that it was shaking. Angrily, he bit his cheek hard enough to draw blood. The shaking stopped, and he grasped the handle. Like everything else in this place, it was cold.
***
The child, brown dirt and tacky, maroon blood spattered across his small, stark white face, sat on his butt, leaning back, his arms outstretched behind him, making a tripod with his body. His mouth hung open slightly, and his eyes stared distantly, almost vacantly, at the tableau of corpses that surrounded him. The boy was no older than six or seven and the last survivor. Unlucky kid. Dad had used his words, and the aftermath of that, even to Aloram’s desensitized pallet, was… unpleasant.
Aloram hadn’t been allowed to watch, and so he’d waited outside the laboratory in the hall. Now, staring down into the child’s sky-blue, dinnerplate-wide eyes, he was annoyed. This kid had seen what he’d been denied. He’d witnessed the supernatural gift that had been Aloram’s sole pursuit before he could walk or speak. Even so, Aloram couldn’t help but feel a little bad for the kid. Everyone he’d ever known was now dead, and he was bathed in their blood. Even if they hadn’t really cared about him—he was just the byproduct of genetic experimentation, after all—they were all he would ever have. And now they were gone.
Aloram wasn’t much older than the child himself, but he was bigger. Taller, mostly; he wouldn’t fill out his frame for several years yet to come. Aloram squatted and peered into the boy’s milky, pastel-blue eyes from just a few inches away, trying to imagine what they’d seen. The boy stared through him, past him, distant and unseeing. Were they going to kill him? If they left him here, he’d just die anyways. Burning to death is no way to go. Aloram glanced up. He heard, rather than saw, his father and Arron sifting through filing cabinets, the wheels of metal drawers rolling on extending rails and sheaves of paper and envelopes shifting as methodical hands scoured their contents.
I should be helping, he thought, but the boy was too fascinating. The two older men had simply come out to the hall, called him inside, then stepped over the bodies and began searching through records. Have to find the money. Have to find the connections. A tree is more its branches and roots than its trunk, after all. They hadn’t given the boy more than a second glance, save for his father’s momentary confusion as to why he was still alive. Not that he was likely to make Aloram privy to his thoughts on the subject, though.
Aloram laid a bare finger on the boy’s exposed shoulder where his shirt sleeve had been torn away by whatever force his father’s words commanded. The skin there was cool and clammy as if he’d recently been sweating. There was no reaction to his touch; the boy just kept looking off into the distance, mouth ajar, tears rising silently to his eyes and sliding down his grime-encrusted cheeks. “What’s your name?” Aloram asked, not really expecting an answer. The boy gave no indication that he’d heard.
Aloram frowned, then moved his hand from the boy’s shoulder to his chin, taking it in his fingers. He turned the nameless boy’s face towards his own and stared deep into his brilliant blue eyes. Aloram remembered the Japanese word for “Sky,” and it seemed to fit.
“Sora,” he said. “That’s your new name.”
A glimmer of recognition rose to the surface of the boy’s face, not at the name, but at the realization that he was being spoken to and, perhaps, that he still existed, and his eyes momentarily seemed to fix on Aloram’s own. The moment passed, and Sora’s eyes drifted shut, his head lolling limply to his chest. He’d fallen fast asleep. Aloram lifted him to his back and bound him with a stretch of rope under his butt and around his shoulders to keep him securely fastened, then joined Aaron and his father. A quarter-hour later, smoke engulfed the laboratory as fire consumed it, and the greedy flames devoured the home and life’s work of their most recent mission. It was hard to get used to the scent of crisping flesh, but by eleven, Aloram’s nose had grown accustomed to the malodorous tang of burning hair and cooking skin. Mounted on Aloram’s back, in the night, Sora slept.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
***
Their stables were located on the eastern side of the estates, set fifteen feet apart from the main house on a flat terrace cut into the sloping hill atop which the mansion sat. Adjoined to it by a short hallway was the stablemaster’s residence and a townhouse where two stable boys lived together, each in their own room. Sora had grown fond of them over the years, and only since the younger boy’s introduction into his life had Aloram ever ventured into the house.
Aloram waited at the foot of the stairs, absently twisting a strand of his long black hair. The thundering of heavy steps descending the wooden stairwell marked Sora’s imminent return; he was the only one in the whole family who made so much noise as a whisper when he walked, and Aloram smiled at the thought of his innocence.
With the two servants, Tom, and Bear, in tow, the four of them made their way to the stables. Sora wrinkled his nose at the smell, he’d been distracting the stable hands from their duties, and Aloram laughed at his scrunched face. Aloram touched Silver’s cheek, closing his eyes as he rested his forehead against hers. Besides Sora, Aloram didn’t get along well with people. His guard was always up, and any inborn inclination to human empathy he’d once possessed had been carefully extricated from him. Animals, particularly horses, dogs, and cats, had become his sole friends in the world.
As they galloped over the verdant lawns of the Addler estate, Aloram thought of how easily he’d convinced his father to allow Sora to live with them. “It is the core principle of our practice, Aloram, to do as we please. You must only be strong enough to secure the fate you wish for yourself. Anything you desire is yours until you’re too weak to grasp it.” Later, Aloram wished that he’d seen the challenge, the trap, in those words.
Wind tousled Sora’s hair, causing it to leap and throw as he rode, brown locks bouncing and billowing behind him. His face was enraptured by a smile that knew no sadness, no grief, none of the loss that’d brought them together. The Addler methods of brainwashing and memory alteration were wonderful. And terrifying.
Sora turned in his saddle to look over his shoulder at Aloram, his infectious smile inviting one of Aloram’s own to his lips. The green grass, the blue sky that was Sora’s namesake, and the white clouds above: these things with the sweet scent of sweat and dirt and horse and leather were the stuff of Aloram’s dreams and the idealistic gilt of his childhood memories. For a while, anyway.
***
Aloram pulled the door open. Its hinges were well-oiled and silent, but the susurrus chanting rose to a deep, bass rumble that drifted up the staircase, which extended into the abyss below him and filled the room. The watchers chittered, lapping up the noise, drinking in the life of voices. The language was foreign and unknowable, terrible in its intonation, yet familiar as a mother’s scent.
Aloram descended. There was little light. A burning torch set into the wall every twenty steps doused the stone staircase in an orange glow and filled the narrow passage with acrid smoke which suffused his nostrils and throat and threatened to bring tears to his eyes. The watchers were behind him, but now Aloram maintained his silence for another reason. He squeezed the knife in his hand. Blades had always reassured him. Knives and swords weren’t the most archaic of the weapons he’d been trained to use, but with the prevalence of firearms, poison, and electronic hacking that made killing as easy as pulling a trigger or typing a few keys on a keyboard, he rarely got to use them in actual combat. Regardless, the weight and simplicity of a good sword or reliable knife made them favorites in his personal training regimen.
The white and black obsidian knife Aloram held in his right hand, the fifninal, their order’s version of an Aztec tecpatl, the sacrificial knife, was the only weapon allowed on the premises. Even his stature as the patriarch’s son didn’t waive that rule. That he hadn’t been questioned for carrying it might’ve confirmed his suspicions, but a part of him, a foolish part of him that he thought should’ve been buried or lost, had been exhumed from the dead pit of his heart, and he hoped.
Step after step, Aloram descended into the bowels of the sepulcher that was their most holy place of worship. The chanting grew louder and louder until it filled his ears and engulfed him like a physical cloud. Aloram knew the purpose of those words, and it took an effort of will to stop himself from sprinting down the steps and bursting into the chamber, screaming for them to stop. But he had to know. And if he was right, then he had to be silent. A trained ear would hear the quickening of his breath, and a trained nose would taste the scent of his fear. And there wasn’t a single one among those below that hadn’t been raised in the ways of their order.
Finally, Aloram arrived at the foot of the steps. He shrunk into the shadowy recesses of stone, still as the statues that encircled the chamber, their hands folded in front of them, tentacled faces peering out from under upraised hoods. Aloram had mastered the art of stillness at five years old, of masking his existence to the world so completely that even in full view of an attentive eye, he seemed to hardly be there at all.
Shrouded figures stood in a circle, heads bowed, hands raised palms up in supplication before them. Between the cloaked shoulders of his extended family, in the center of the ring, atop the rectangular stone table that was the centerpiece of the room, lay a naked figure draped in a white cloth. The cloth covered all but his head and face. Long, lustrous brown hair spilled over the grey stone tabletop, and sky-blue eyes stared into the dark emptiness of the high ceiling above.
Sora was paralyzed, as was the usual practice, but not restrained. For that, he was as helpless as a lamb led to slaughter and twice as condemned. Aloram’s hands shook, and his jaw trembled with fear, misery, and rage. Facing him, a hood over his head and eyes downcast in prayer, Aloram’s father stood over Sora’s immobilized body.
Flashes of color, emotion, and visceral waves of heat and cold rippled over him as Aloram’s mind began to blank. His vision swam, became exactingly clear, then narrowed. Anyone that’s been in a car accident or on the verge of death, or murder, knows the feeling.
Aloram’s short obsidian knife plunged into the spinal column of the woman in front of him, just above the point where the shoulders met at the base of her neck. His fingers covered her mouth, and as he lowered her to the ground, her hood fell away, revealing her beautiful nose, cheeks, and eyes. The small mole below her eyebrow. Nadia, his cousin. She’d taught him how to bake lemon bread just six months ago. The thought entered his mind, lingered for a breath, then drifted out, carried away on the current of his task.
The tip of his knife glided across the throats of the two men standing to either side of Nadia’s recently vacated spot in the circle of worshippers, and he hugged them together as they collapsed, lowering them to the stone floor beside their sister. The twin brothers Ren and Rin, who’d instructed him, to their demise, in the ways of stealth and stalking when he’d been just a babe. Their youngest sister, Rebeca, was nine and not yet old enough to participate in sacrifices.
Ritual sacrifice was the most sacred of their traditions, and all but a select few were required to attend. Those on domestic missions were called back to share in the blessing, and only the extremely elderly and young were omitted. Those Aloram would deal with after.
He’d never liked the church, and he’d made his stance clear to his father: to the order. Sora was his. To stake a claim at thirteen years old was young for the Addler clan but not unheard of. His father had staked his at ten. “To rule.” Or so his mother told him. Aloram’s father never spoke much on the subject.
Aloram slipped a hand under the next man’s hood, his uncle Aloren, and planted a kiss on his lips. Aloram lowered him to the floor as he died, the poison killing him near instantly. Swift steps and silent strokes of his knife and strikes of his needle brought Aloram around the ring, leaving a trail of dead in his wake. He’d made it halfway around before the trance of prayer was broken, and his cloaked family members began to raise their hooded heads, blinking as if coming out of a daze. None shrieked, nor did they scream or cry out in any way. They simply threw back their hoods, lowered their weight, and drew their own fifninals from their cloak pockets, black glass glinting in the orange firelight. Of them all, only his father remained enraptured in the trance of his task.
If they had been anywhere else, Aloram would have died then, as surely as the sun sets and the moon rises to take its place. But here, to use one’s words was a taboo blacker than all others, and any Addler would sooner die, would sooner see their families die than to break it. Alight with the cold fury of his rage, Aloram swam between them like a black breeze. He didn’t spin and dance, nothing so gaudy. His knife did sing, however, howling lustily at the blood it drank as he plunged and tore and cut into his kindred flesh. And then there was only his father.
Aloram’s robes were wet with blood and sweat, sodden with the weight of killing, and he shivered in them, his whole body thrumming, jackhammering with the intensity of his emotion. Blood dripped from the hem of his clothes, spattering droplets on the ground. It drip, drip, dripped as he stood, listening to the crackling fire of torches and the ceaseless stream of eldritch words from his father’s lips. Then there was silence.
His father opened his eyes, raised them, and stared into Aloram’s own. He smiled, his perfect teeth startlingly white in the grim darkness, and Aloram felt his heart pounding in his chest. Slowly, so slowly, his father raised his own knife, shining black and terrible, above Sora’s chest. Tears poured from Aloram’s eyes, but he couldn’t move. His father’s gaze gripped him like an icy vice, holding him in place, forcing him to watch.
As the blade descended towards the white sheet across Sora’s solar plexus, a brilliant pain blossomed in the back of Aloram’s skull like an icepick driving itself into his brain. He gasped, his mind and body convulsing with the orgasmic, searing resplendence of it, and in a flash of divine inspiration, he knew the words. His words. It was as if he’d always known them, the sound and taste of them inscribed onto his soul, etched into his very being.
He spoke them, a deafening, pervading roar of sound and intent, and all ceased to be.