Chapter Text
Isaiah 1:18
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
One night, an hour past the appointed end time of his evening theological studies, Silas comes back strange.
This in itself is not unusual. Colum’s necromancer is so often withdrawn and strange these days. The once turbid stream of his childish questions has dried up over the years, and the boy who before had trusted Colum with his every thought has now become an enigma to him. As Colum watches, Silas floats like a dreamer from the door to his desk and stands there a long minute. His usual ramrod-straight posture is slumped as though under some massive weight.
The finer points of soul magic are beyond Colum, but sometimes he thinks an excess of contact with the world of spirits might bring one closer to becoming a ghost himself. It would explain the way that every passing year seems to render Silas more translucent and ephemeral.
“Master.”
His joints sing their displeasure as Colum rises from his knees to greet Silas; the stiffness is always worst in the evenings, and he’s delayed taking his nighttime medications. He usually waits to swallow them alongside Silas in the bathroom, where the neat little ceramic cups await with both their dosages of capsules and pills. His torn cuticles sting with the citrus cleaning solution he’s been using on the window panels of their shared bedroom.
Still his necromancer does not respond.
“Is everything alright?”
His question seems to awaken Silas from his reverie, and he gives a nod.
“I am well,” says Silas, his voice an ever-deepening tenor, but he elaborates no further upon what might have caused his lessons to extend so far beyond their usual hour. Nor does he deliver any orders to Colum that might prompt their typical nighttime routines.
“Shall I run you a bath?” Colum offers instead, and again, Silas nods. He remains there as Colum leaves the room, gazing out the freshly cleaned windows. The reflection of his thin face in the glass is haunted.
Earlier, the implements of their bathroom had required autoclaving, and the chamber still smells faintly of hot, disinfected metal. Colum turns his back on the rising water in the tub to set a towel by its rim. The tile floors are sterile, the grout recently scrubbed to a pleasing white. The tickling feeling of unease at the back of his mind cannot be attributed to an unclean environment.
Silas is stiff and quiet as Colum removes his embroidered stole and cassock to hang them in the closet. He averts his eyes when Silas sheds his plain shift and hears behind him the faint rustle of cloth, then the sound of stirring water. Silas settles into the tub up to his neck, one hand daintily holding his braid aloft. The steam of the bathwater renders his hollow cheeks a healthy pink.
Colum’s bones ache for the cleansing spray of the sonic, but first comes the unbraiding of Silas’s hair. As his fingers work their practiced patterns in silence, Colum contemplates asking again about Silas’s whereabouts, then thinks better of it. If his master hasn’t seen fit to tell him by now, he likely won’t change his mind.
“Colum.”
The sound of his name breaks through the mindless routine of unbraiding. Silas has shifted in the water to view him out of the corner of one eye. The outline of his nose is slightly hooked near the bridge, a narrower version of Colum’s own.
“Yes?” His hands reach the ends of Silas’s braid, and Colum drapes the loose hank of cornsilk hair over the edge of the tub.
“Can I ask you something?” The question comes with some hesitance. Silas is out of the practice of asking Colum much of anything these days.
“Of course.”
His hands rest upon the white islands of his knees in the bathwater, and Silas turns his gaze away from Colum.
“How do you endure pain?”
The question could hardly be less expected. “Physical pain?” Colum feels the need to clarify.
“Yes,” says Silas. “As it is relevant to a cavalier.”
The House of the Eighth disdains and eschews physical suffering in its populace. Fetuses are carefully engineered to exclude any genetic or epigenetic causes of disease and disorder. There are, however, those cases where pain is necessary for the goals of the Templar Order and, thus, the glorification of the Emperor.
It usually goes unsaid that a cavalier’s pain falls under this category.
“I suppose,” Colum says at last, “that I distract myself from the pain. I focus on my task. I take away the psychological component for as long as I can.” He thinks of the Tome’s teachings, of the Book of Truth, his favorite of its texts. “Sometimes I remind myself that my pain serves a higher purpose.”
Silas appears to mull this over.
“I see,” he says quietly.
Then he sinks below the water, and all that is left of him is the swirl of his long hair, like strands of white kelp skimming the surface.
-
The office of Archimandrate Octava is spartan and pristine. The bleached walls are undecorated but for a framed portrait of the Emperor as Necrolord Prime, below which is mounted her polished rapier. Colum has only ever seen it on her hip before; its current place seems a nod to the more administrative role she’s taken on in her later years.
“Brother Asht. It’s been a while.”
When Colum extends his hand, the Archimandrate clasps it companionably. The calluses on her palm rival his own.
“It is good to see you, Sister Octava,” he tells her. “I think I was around twenty-six when you last called me here.”
Sister Octava rolls her broad shoulders as she releases his hand, wincing at an audible crack. “I never spent much time in here until recently. That’s what happens when they decide you’re too old for anything but desk work, Asht,” she adds with a scoff. “Lord willing, you’ll get a more dignified treatment.”
The short-buzzed hairs near Sister Octava’s temples are tinted gray, and the weather-beaten skin of her face is heavily lined over the pocked scars that mark it. Considering the symptoms that so frequently plague the cavaliers of their House – word-finding difficulties by the fourth decade of life, the beginnings of memory loss in the fifth, gait instability in the sixth – she has held up admirably well.
He takes the high-backed chair across from her. She sits and leans forward, her hands folded beneath her sharp chin.
“How have you been?”
Honesty is the essence of the plainspoken rapport that occurs between cavaliers of the Eighth, and Octava expects a truthful answer, not some thoughtless deflection. Colum respects the clergy and all they do for this House, but their language is lofty and theoretical, adapted for scholarly debates and court proceedings rather than mundane conversations.
He’s missed the company of his kin, Colum realizes.
“As well as I can hope for,” he concedes. “My dose of immunomodulators hasn’t increased in nearly fourteen months now. They’re thinking this might be my maintenance level.”
She nods approvingly. “Good. I don’t envy you those side effects. Hopefully the immunologists have made improvements since my active years.”
“And yourself?”
“Keeping busy with the occupation efforts. The Cohort’s been busy,” she remarks. “Lots of cleanup to do in their wake to make sure the inhabitants keep the faith.”
Though he was deployed nearly a decade ago, Colum’s memories stay close at hand. His service is written into his body; he can still recall the way Silas's young face had crumpled into tears at the sight of his amputated finger when he’d returned.
“Is it the war effort that you wish to discuss?”
A shadow of discomfort flits across Octava’s face. On her, it mostly looks like a deeper shade of exhaustion. Her arms lift from the desk to settle across her chest.
“It’s not that,” she starts. Her age-worn voice falters. “What I’m about to tell you is going to be the worst news you’ve heard in a while.”
Immediately, Colum’s nervous system flares with panic. He sits bolt upright, the muscles of his thighs tensed and ready to propel him from the chair and straight out the door.
“Where are my brothers?”
Octava’s gray eyes fly wide. “What?”
Ram and Capris’s deployments on their respective shepherd planets haven’t kept Colum awake at night for some time now, but an even worse thought has just infected his mind. “Or my mother–“
“Take it easy, soldier.” She flaps a hand at him. “No one’s dead or dying. It’s not that kind of bad news.”
With a muted sigh of relief, Colum settles back into his chair.
“Maybe I could’ve phrased that a touch more thoughtfully,” Octava offers by way of an apology. “It’s… well. It’s a bit of a sensitive topic.”
There’s a reason she’s summoned him here during his necromancer’s afternoon theorem studies. Colum’s racing thoughts subside into a sickly certainty.
“It’s about Silas, then,” he says. The dread that had only barely begun to ebb from him starts to leak back in. “Isn’t it?”
The thin line of Octava’s mouth tells him everything he needs to know.
“Your necromancer is to lead the upcoming Rite of Purification. I say lead,” she adds ruefully. “It’s more that he’s to be… host to it.”
“It’s a trial,” Colum intuits. “Like the ones he’s done before.”
Octava’s brows crease further at the note of hope in his voice. “In a way. This one’s not exactly public knowledge. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
Naturally, it is not the cavalier primary but rather the Master Templar who must familiarize himself with the sacred necromantic traditions of the Brotherhood. Silas informs him of his role in these matters, and, unfailingly, Colum fulfills his duty.
“It’s not out of shame that we conceal it,” Octava continues with the practiced composure of her station, “but rather the sense that it can be easily misunderstood. You know how the other Houses struggle with the simplest of spiritual concepts. Best to keep knowledge of the most vital rituals safe at home, where it can’t be corrupted.”
“Silas passed all his other tests with flying colors. I remember. I was there,” Colum is quick to remind her. “What could be so different about this one?”
Octava’s shoulders slump in a small, restrained sigh. She passes a hand over her own close-cropped skull as her eyes slide off his face. Colum imagines he can detect a grain of guilt within them.
“It’s just unfortunate timing,” she murmurs reflectively. “He’s the youngest to hold this position in centuries. But they don’t make exceptions.”
Tension creeps up his spine. The blunt, straight-talking Archimandrate has yet to describe this ritual, and Colum is shamefully afraid to find out why.
He tries to number the kinds of horrors that might warrant this sort of hesitance from his senior cavalier. Perhaps Silas will be made to sacrifice a part of himself: a memory, or a part of his body. Maybe an eye.
“Sister Octava.” He inhales deeply, preparing for the worst. “Please explain.”
The older cavalier lets her eyes fall shut.
“The nature of the rite is absolution,” Sister Octava intones with all the emotion of a liturgical sermonist. “Records describe its purifying nature on the participants, which include the sacrists and the high elite clergy. The role of the Master Templar is that of vitrifier, the furnace through which the sand of iniquity is poured, the source of the holy White Glass itself -”
“Don’t do that,” Colum interrupts her. “Don’t speak like them.”
She flinches, chastened, and her eyes flick open. “Sorry. Sometimes it's easier to just rattle off the script.”
Octava’s fingers twist and untwist upon the polished plex of her desktop. The upside-down heading of the stack of flimsy before her reads South Umbriel Station 3A-2 Requisitions.
“There’s no good way to say it.” She looks more conflicted than he’s ever seen her before. “The ritual involves a… a purging of sin, Colum. I could go on about all the theory behind it, but I doubt it would matter to you.”
She’s right. He couldn’t care less, and his impatience is rising.
“Just tell me how it involves Silas.”
Sister Octava is silent for a long moment.
“It’s a purging of fleshly sin.”
Colum opens his mouth, then shuts it. His realization is slow, dulled by disbelief.
“You can’t,” he says slowly, “be insinuating what I think you are.”
“It’s exactly what you’re thinking.” Archimandrate Octava’s expression is of one being made to walk over hot coals. “They’re going to… inflict themselves upon him, Colum.”
A frigid needle of terror slots itself deep into Colum’s spine.
“All of the priest-class will be cleansed one by one,” she continues, “and the Master Templar will take on the burden of their sins of the flesh. That’s the purification they speak of.”
His fingernails etch deep crescents into the palms of his own hands.
“You– “
Stupidly, a part of his mind simply refuses to process what he’s being told as anything other than a joke in abysmal taste.
“You’re saying,” Colum manages, “that he’s going to be… gang-raped.”
“They wouldn’t call it that.”
He’s on his feet, abruptly, with no recollection of having gotten there.
“You think I care what they’d call it?” Explosive rage, the sort Colum had thought himself no longer capable of, singes the inside of his chest. “I don’t care what bullsh*t justifications they throw out–“
“Brother Asht.” Octava extends one swell-jointed hand in his direction in a clear reprimand. “Recall yourself.”
Trembling with impotent fury, Colum stares her down. Resignation crosses Sister Octava’s face when she realizes that he isn’t about to humbly retake his seat.
“Do you think this is my first time being the bearer of bad news?” Her lips, pressed together, are hard marble. “I had to relay the same message to the former cavalier primary, nearly thirty years ago, and I know she never forgave me, not until the day they set her spirit free. Her necromancer was twice Silas’s age then.”
Colum is numb down to the root of his tongue. It’s a crime, what Sister Octava is describing to him. It’s a form of desecration that belongs only in the most ancient and lurid accounts of martyrdom deep within the Octavian’s crypts.
“The former Master Templar?”
“Not just her. They’ve all gone through it, Colum, ever since the Rite was established millennia ago. Silas won’t be the last.”
She heaves another sigh when he fails to respond, letting the seconds drag on. The chair scrapes as she pushes back from the desk, maneuvering around its edge to place a hand on his shoulder. Nauseated as he is with horror, Colum stubbornly refuses to meet her gaze.
“The situation is far from standard. I can admit that,” says Octava from above his right ear. “Normally, I’d tell you that it’ll be far worse for him than for you, so buck up, but… well. I know how you are with him.”
Her words are salt in the wound. I know how you are with him.
As if it’s so obvious. As though any stranger could know from a glance that here is a cavalier primary who got a little too attached, whose devotion surges past the appropriate and plunges headlong into the shamefully enmeshed.
As if Colum had ever had a chance to be anyone but the man who loves Silas most.
“He’s not doing it.”
Colum brushes off Octava’s attempt at comradely comfort, stepping back from her outstretched hand and towards the door.
“It’s not– “ she starts, but he’s already speaking over her, a clear violation of the respect that any cavalier should have for a woman of her years and expertise. In the moment, he can’t bring himself to care.
“I don’t care. It's wrong, it's inhumane. I can talk sense into him.” Colum’s hand is on the doorknob. He cannot be here a second longer. “This is an overreach of the Order, and Silas has every right to turn it down.”
“Colum.”
When he finally turns to meet her eyes, the face of the Archimandrate is etched with nothing but pity.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “but your adept has already agreed to the proceedings.”
-
The magnified light of Dominicus outlines a lone figure at the writing desk. The spotless sleeves of Silas’s robes are pushed studiously up to his elbows, and there’s a small divot between his brows as he pores over a thick stack of flimsy, a pen held in one raised hand.
The greeting that is only beginning to shape itself on his lips is cut off when Colum strides wordlessly to him and falls to his knees before Silas.
“Colum!“ Silas’s hands flutter like confused doves in the air, intending to wrench him to his feet.
Colum knows Silas hates it when he debases himself to beg like this. He does it anyway, his hands clasped beseechingly at Silas’s knees, in the fervent hope that it might catch him off-guard enough to actually hear Colum out.
“Don’t do it. Please. This isn’t worth it.”
“What are you– “
“The Rite of Purification.” His voice sounds strained and desperate even to his own ears. “Call it off. Take it back. They’ll listen to you.”
Flustered bewilderment clears from his necromancer’s thin face only to be replaced by cool resignation. His legs shift under Colum’s hands.
“They told you, then.”
When were you going to, Colum yearns to say, or had you planned to spring it on me at the last minute like every other one of your terrible, impulsive ideas?
He swallows down the bitter lump of his uncharitable urges.
“Silas, this is insane,” he says in what he considers a very level tone. “No one can expect this of you.”
“Of course they can,” says Silas airily. “The Emperor himself expects it. I am chosen, as it is written in the holy scriptures from which this ritual is discerned.”
The invocation of God’s title is a reliable sign that Colum is about to lose this argument. Still, he makes a wild bid to grasp Silas’s hands between his own, holding them firmly in place when Silas tries to pull away.
“It’s not right,” says Colum despairingly. “You know it isn’t. It’s not fair.”
“Fairness is not a factor in my decision.” His necromancer’s voice is more sorrowful now than ever, no matter how he tries to disguise it. “The Master Templar must prove himself as many times as is demanded, no matter his age. I must rise to the occasion without complaint, Colum. I must take on the burden of these sins.”
“Then delay it.” The weakness of this compromise stings like stomach acid in his throat, and Colum resents the way he bends so readily to the steely will of the boy he’s sworn himself to. “Tell them you’ll undergo it when you’re older. They can’t begrudge you that.”
Silas’s deep brown eyes flick thoughtfully to the side, and Colum feels a dizzying spike of hope, if only at the prospect of delaying this same conversation a few years.
A frown returns to Silas’s face.
“I would remain illegitimate.”
“Not– “
“Incomplete, then,” Silas amends. “It would be as though I had failed. There is a progression to these trials,” he explains, not unkindly. “To refuse one is to mark myself unworthy.”
The trials of the White Glass are not unknown to Colum. He had been the one to pluck his uncle’s birdlike little body off the cathedral floors when he had fainted during the extended fasts. He had opened the cloister door onto Silas’s wide-eyed face after a week’s worth of solitary contemplation of the Tome, and he had personally attested to his soundness of mind after the ordeal.
He had told no one when a nine-year-old Silas, fresh from that cramped and soundless room, had tugged on his sleeve and asked if Colum had been real.
“There were none like this,” Colum utters. “Never like this.”
Silas attempts a brave countenance.
“Just as my mind and spirit must be pressed and found capable, so must the flesh.”
The fingers he holds move to lace themselves with Colum’s own, sending an unwelcome thrill through his body. He could almost believe it a gesture of true reassurance were it not for the stifled fear in his necromancer’s expression.
“It must be done,” says Silas softly. “There is no other way.”
Colum’s knees are numb against the hardwood floor. He has knelt on unkinder surfaces for far longer periods of time, so this detail seems unusual to him until he realizes that the numbness stretches over his whole body.
The cavalier’s suffering is the currency of their society, expected by God and borne ungrudgingly by His servants. If only it were him to be put to this test, and not Silas, Colum thinks he could one day come to forgive the House of the Eighth.
Carefully, Colum extracts his fingers from his adept’s.
“You’ve found my breaking point.” He directs his words to Silas’s folded hands, unblemished by scars or calluses. “I can’t be party to something like this, Si. I can’t stand by and watch you be hurt.”
There is a heavy, airless pause.
“Then don’t.”
Silas’s face is a mask of fiery devotion when Colum lifts his head. His jaw is set, and his gaze is pitiless in its zealotry.
“Refrain, if you see fit,” Silas continues. “The trial is mine alone. Your presence is not strictly required.”
Colum’s chest spasms painfully.
“Silas, you have no idea what you’re signing up for.”
“Of course I do,” Silas sniffs. “It was explained quite comprehensively. I was given copies of the original texts with more details.”
“That’s not– ,“ Colum falters at the horrifying realization that Silas has been given texts on this topic.
“I’ll speak plainly,” he tells Silas, cutting short that line of thought before it can grow any darker. “You have no experience with this kind of physicality. You don’t have any idea of how they can harm you, the ways they’ll do it, or the sort of damage they’ll inflict.”
It was the wrong thing to say. There’s little Silas resents more than accusations of naivety.
His necromancer’s face shutters. “I am no fool. I harbor no delusions about the,“ and here Silas’s upper lip curls with disgust, “the bodily elements of the ritual. It will be uniquely burdensome.”
“You have no idea– “
“I can endure it.” His eyes flash dangerously. “I will endure it.”
Silas’s bleached robes swirl as he stands, affording him a modest height advantage over Colum’s still-kneeling form.
“There are already those who doubt me.” Silas’s voice quickens, growing breathless with paranoia. “Even in the innermost circles of the Order, we have enemies who would see me demoted, replaced with some steward until they see fit to either set me up as a figurehead or depose me entirely. And does my own cavalier have so little faith in me, Colum?”
His accusation rings off the high, whitewashed walls. Despairing, Colum lets his hands sink into his lap.
“I’m on your side, Si. Always.”
Silas’s expression softens minutely at this reassurance.
“Then be at my side when I am put to this test,” he urges. “Where you belong.”
“That,” Colum tells him quietly, “I cannot do.”
The silence that follows is more damning than any verbal judgment. He watches the hem of Silas’s robes swish out of his field of view.
With a sudden exhaustion, Colum levers himself to his feet, leaning heavily upon the back of the abandoned chair. Silas pauses, one hand on the doorknob when Colum turns to him.
“The Rite is scheduled for three days from now.” His voice is chill glass. “The preparations are already being made. And I will be there as its host, with or without you.”
The door shuts behind him with a small puff of frigid air.
-
Colum’s necromancer avoids him the following day, which proves an impressive task given the sheer quantity of time they typically spend together. Silas invents excuses – meetings with scholars of the Tome, prayer ceremonies with the clergy, trials and legal sessions – and coldly shuts down Colum’s requests for more details about the Rite of Purification.
“You won’t be there,” says Silas flatly, “as per your own admission, so I fail to see how the matter concerns you.”
“You’d think it would lend some legitimacy to this whole event,” Colum retorts, “if anyone could actually tell me what goes on during it.“
“Are you so unfamiliar with the codes of secrecy, Brother Asht?”
It would be inaccurate to describe the ensuing didactic on White Glass protocols an argument. The Master Templar and his cavalier primary do not argue. When they disagree, it is the Master Templar who decides when the conversation is ended, and it is Colum who inevitably submits to Silas’s will.
So he finds another audience.
Colum has known Brother Entu since his early childhood; well-liked and a friend to the Asht family, the priest had risen through the ranks to be appointed as a bishop by Silas’s predecessor. He too has watched Silas grow from an intense, curious child to a young man of steely devotion and immense necromantic potential. If any of the clergy might understand Colum’s doubts about this rite, it would be him.
He finds the clergyman leaving a voting assembly. The priest-class file by in their birettas and caps, often nodding or bowing slightly to Colum, who waits by the door. He manages to distract Brother Entu from the continuation of some debate and pull him aside into a quiet alcove in the Octavian’s administrative wing.
“I need to talk to you,” Colum tells him, halting the bishop’s blithe pleasantries in their tracks. Behind round glasses, the blue eyes widen slightly. “It’s the Rite of Purification. You’ve heard of it?”
A flash of some indistinct emotion crosses the bishop’s face before it settles into a mask of professionalism. “I am aware of it.”
Will Brother Entu be in attendance? He can’t waste time wondering right now.
“It’s just… I’m so concerned,” Colum confides, “about making Silas go through with it.”
The priest’s eyebrows lift. “Has he faltered in his resolve? The ceremony can hardly be delayed further…”
“What? No.” Colum backtracks frantically. “He’s willing, he has total faith. But I worry about the… damage that could be done to him.” Here he pauses, praying his voice stays level. “He is still so small.“
Emotion threatens to choke him, but Brother Entu is nodding sympathetically, thin lips pursing.
“I understand,” he says warmly. “You cavaliers are more familiar with injury than most. It’s only natural that you would worry. You have always been so good to him, Brother Asht."
He smiles the pleasant smile of one who has reassured many young faithful. As Colum sputters some thanks, the bishop continues. "I have been assured, however, that there will be a medic on site to tend to any possible wounds sustained during the cleansing process.”
“That’s…” Colum struggles to keep his voice even. The perfect calmness with which the bishop discusses the need for a medic is making him feel like the only sane man in a house of lunatics. “I appreciate that, Brother, but what of the potential for damage outside the physical?”
“A mental weakness? Imposed by the ceremony? No, no.” The bishop shakes his head now, making the tassels of his hat dance in the air. “This is a holy sacrament, Brother Asht, not some base exploitation. Many of the historical Masters have written of the spiritual heights achieved through this very Rite.”
“But he’s so young–“
“I understand your doubts, Colum, I truly do.” Brother Entu folds his hands over his midsection, his gaze thoughtful. “You should know that many of the clergy chosen to partake in the Rite also struggle with conflicts of the spirit in the days leading up to it, even crises of faith. May I offer you some advice?”
Colum can only gape at him. The bishop does not wait for a response.
“Do you love your Master?”
The question is preposterous. Brother Entu may as well have asked if the chambers of Colum’s heart pump blood or if his alveoli exchange oxygen. The love he has for Silas is just as helpless and automatic. It has been so since the day Silas was born.
“Of course,” Colum replies, stunned. “Of course I do.”
The priest smiles gently and sets an over-familiar hand upon Colum’s shoulder. The paternalism of the gesture is rendered absurd by their notable height difference; the man is only a few inches taller than Silas.
“Then I can only recommend,” he continues, bizarrely and infuriatingly conspiratorial, “that you lean hard upon that love, Brother Asht. Draw upon your every reserve, and the Lord will guide you through this trial. For it is as much a trial for you as it is for your Master, and you shall be blessed for it.”
-
Colum wakes to the sound of violent retching echoing off the bathroom walls. The bedroom he shares with Silas is still dark, save for a bar of light emanating from beneath the bathroom door. A quick glance confirms that the bed positioned at a right angle to Colum’s own is empty.
He rises to attend to his necromancer.
Silas’s pale head whips up the moment the bathroom door opens with a creak to reveal Colum. One hand is fisted around his own hair, holding it back from the bowl of the toilet. Within it is nothing but thin bile, of course. Silas had fasted all day in preparation for tomorrow.
“I am fine, “ he starts, but Colum is already kneeling by his side and brushing sweat-damp strands of hair away from his face.
“Hush now,” Colum murmurs. He wraps one hand around the heft of Silas’s hair and clears it from where it sticks to his temples. His other hand rubs gentle circles on Silas’s back, an automatic gesture of comfort from his own childhood.
His necromancer hiccups miserably. Colum can feel Silas’s prominent scapulae shuddering under his palm. The marrow-deep impulse to protect him, to make him well, is as strong as ever.
“It is nothing.” Silas’s voice is hoarse when he speaks again after another feeble retch. “Just nerves. Disgusting.”
Silas loathes the unclean functions of the body. One week, when they’d contracted the same gastrointestinal virus within days of each other, he had scarcely allowed himself to be touched by Colum, to say nothing of the physicians.
It’ll make tomorrow all the more unbearable for him.
Colum’s right thumb traces over the bumps of his cervical vertebrae. “You’re scared,” he says softly. “It’s normal.”
Silas’s eyes, streaked red with burst capillaries, fall shut. Colum decides to risk it all on one last plea for reason.
“It’s not yet too late, you know.”
Only silence ensues, which Colum chooses to take as an encouraging sign.
“You can call it off. It’ll be alright. The priests respect you already,” Colum pleads. “You’ll lose no standing. Maybe they’ll see it as a demonstration of your strength.”
“Strength?”
Silas raises his head to stare at Colum. He looks awful, Colum notes with a painful twinge of sympathy. Purple crescents hang heavily under both eyes, and his skin is clammy and paler than usual.
“There is no honor to be found in refusal,” Silas states. “If I cannot summon the necessary strength from myself for the completion of this trial, I do not know where I will gain it.”
In his words is a veiled question.
“Don’t make me do it alone.” Silas’s voice is very small now. “Please.”
Colum feels his stomach sink.
“Of course.” Unable to deny Silas this small solace, he rests a hand on his adept’s shoulder. “I’ll be there with you, if that’s what you truly want.”
The relief that settles across Silas’s face is so blatant that Colum feels instantly guilty for ever having refused him. They’re both still kneeling, but Silas turns to clutch Colum by both shoulders. The whites of his eyes flicker with something fearful and unstable.
In all their years together, Colum has never seen him so obviously frightened.
“You were right,” says Silas haltingly, “about me. I don’t know what it will be like tomorrow. Will it hurt very much?”
Even if he did lie, Silas would recognize it immediately. He knows all of Colum’s tells.
“Yes,” Colum admits. “It probably will.”
Silas emits a tiny sound of panic like a chained bait-animal. His blue-veined hands tighten on Colum’s biceps. Their faces are very close, and Colum can smell sour bile on Silas’s shallow breaths.
“You could help me.”
Those wide, frantic eyes skitter across Colum’s face.
“You could… do it first,” Silas breathes, unthinkably. “You could do it to me here, now, before anyone else. So I’ll know what it’s like. So I’ll be ready.”
This last, fervent plea delivered from the tile floor leaves Colum reeling. He jerks back, wrenching himself from his necromancer’s desperate grasp.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he chokes out.
“I know what I ask,” Silas is saying now, “and I know it would weigh greatly on our vow, but if you would only ready me for what’s to come–“
Colum stands so quickly that his knees pop in painful unison, leaving Silas to grasp at empty air.
“– I know you would take care of me as you always have, Colum.“
He stands over the pitiful figure of his uncle now, hearing his own breath shudder in and out of his lungs.
“You’re not thinking straight.” Any other conclusion is beyond the limits of what his conscious mind is willing to consider.
“Are you not my cavalier?” Even like this, bedraggled and shivering with cold sweat, Silas manages to draw himself up with dignity. “Does it not fall to you to blunt what harms may come my way?”
Silas hasn’t employed such transparent guilt trips since he was a child, yet the accusation still spears through Colum’s weary heart just the same way.
For a brief second, he commits an indelible sin: he allows himself to imagine what it would be like to give in.
In his mind, brief and heated visions flash: Silas in his arms, carried to bed; warm, clumsy lips wrapped around his fingers; pale thighs held apart in the span of his palms; a dearly familiar body unraveling in ecstasy beneath him.
Silas is right: Colum would take care of him in this way as he always has. He could make it good. He could make it feel like love.
It would stand a chance of approximating the sacred far better than the events of tomorrow.
But Colum has been silent too long in his stunned, guilty reverie. Silas’s gaze has grown steely and cold.
“Return to bed.” The bitterness in that three-word order is sharp. “I will take what rest I can once my body has ceased failing me for the night.”
Colum’s last attempts at intervention go ignored; Silas has already turned from him to bow his head low and murmur rapid prayers to the white-tiled floor.
In his despair, he cannot help but obey. Eventually the bathroom light extinguishes, and Colum can hear the soft pad of Silas’s feet across the floor followed by the rustle of crisp sheets.
He listens for the slowing of breath that marks Silas’s slumber. It is a long time before he thinks to close his eyes.
-
The dawn is relentless in its arrival. When the time comes to rouse Silas, Colum finds his necromancer already awake and bleary-eyed, evidently having rested as little as Colum himself. Silas secludes himself in the bathroom as Colum dresses and prepares his robes for the day, all the while battling thoughts of the fine white fabric being torn from Silas’s body.
Silas exits the bathroom, his breath fresh and his cheeks pink with the friction of scrubbing. He takes his place on the edge of the bed and permits Colum to kneel before him and draw his stockings onto his narrow, cold feet. Up comes the soft pintucked sleep shift, down comes the shapeless white robe of office, shielding the pale body beneath.
Colum’s treacherous eyes linger on all the places that will surely be defiled today: the flat chest, never to be filled out with a non-necromancer’s teenage muscle, the curved jut of a hipbone, the pubescent dusting of light hair below his navel.
Will he ever see this body the same way? More importantly, will Silas?
For his part, Silas speaks little all morning, takes only a cup of black tea at breakfast, and wobbles slightly upon standing from the table. Colum mentally counts the hours since Silas’s last proper meal and wonders if Silas might be benefited by a loss of consciousness during the events of today. Such luck is unlikely.
Fear permeates their rooms in the hours before. Colum watches Silas wring his hands and pace ceaselessly from wall to wall in their sparse living space, his lips moving without pause in barely audible prayer. At one point, he kneels before the painting of the Kindly Prince mounted on the wall and addresses him under his breath. Colum only catches snippets of his words, but a few repetitions of my suffering for your glory are enough to make him retreat, sickened, to the inner bedchamber.
Before the windows, looking out beyond the walls of the capital, Colum entertains the impossible fantasy of spiriting Silas somewhere far away from here. Knowledge of the Rite of Purification is not widespread. Most of the Templars would instantly defer to Colum, the cavalier primary to the Master, if he insisted upon emergency use of a shuttle. Maybe he could even commandeer some eager-to-please young pilot and spare them both the risk of his inexperience behind the controls.
But Silas, in his stubborn, useless teenage pride, would never consent. Short of knocking him out and keeping him unconscious until deep space ate away his necromancy, Colum cannot envision a means of coaxing him into his own rescue.
At last, at some unremarkable time in the mid-afternoon, there comes a knock upon the door.
“Brother Asht.” The messenger bows deeply to Colum, then to Silas behind him. “Master Templar. It is time.”
Colum turns to Silas, who gives a tight-lipped nod.
“Lead the way,” says his young uncle.
As he follows in the wake of Silas’s fluttering cape hem down the spiral staircase from their rooms, Colum belatedly comes to the realization that he has no idea where or how this macabre event is supposed to occur. Everyone he’d asked had been disturbingly sparse with the details. How many priests will be in attendance? Will there be – a chill shoots down Colum’s spine – an audience?
At least one question is answered when they arrive at the vestibule of the Chapel of the Forgiving Saint. The structure tucked into the corner of the larger cathedral complex is far smaller and less grandly decorated than the Octavian itself, intended mainly for private services for the Master and the most elite of his clerics. Through the open doors, Colum peers down the nave and sees that the chapel is empty.
“Master Templar.” The messenger nervously extends her arm to indicate one of the side rooms before the chapel. “You will find your attendants waiting to prepare you here.”
Colum casts a panicked look at Silas, but his necromancer is already striding confidently toward the doorway.
“Brother Asht.” His head whips around to find the messenger looking at him with an expectant expression. “If you would be so kind as to await the Master in the chapel as he is readied.”
Colum takes a seat in the front row. The chapel is insulated against outside sounds, making it impossible to tell, once he has passed through its doors, how many people might be gathering outside. He is familiar with the trappings of the sanctuary: the carved lectern, the draped altar, the arched apse and the high windows of glittering textured glass. The air is perfumed with the scent of incense.
He stiffens when the doors open, but it is only Silas hurrying down the center aisle. With some alarm, Colum notes that he is no longer wearing his usual robes of office and that his neat braid has been undone.
“What was that about?” Colum dares to ask. His necromancer’s skin glistens oddly, as though he’s been sweating profusely, and the new robe he wears is made of shockingly sheer fabric. It ties at the waist, exposing a deep V of pale skin at his chest, and its hem ends just above his knees. Even his sleep garments are more modest than this strange vestment.
“Just some technical considerations.” Silas sounds harried as he passes Colum and genuflects before the altar. “Anointing with oils, a few words of prayer.”
“And the change of clothes?”
“Necessary for the proceedings.”
Silas paces the ambo, checks the lectern once as if anticipating delivering a homily, then looks to Colum.
“This way.” He gestures to the right side of the altar, where a padded cushion evidently awaits Colum’s knees. “The cavalier kneels here.”
The last time Colum had knelt here in the sanctuary was on the day they made their vows to each other, almost ten years ago. The memory brings with it a wave of guilt at failing to protect the boy to whom he’d sworn his life that day.
He kneels, eyeing the altar. A sinister sort of picture is beginning to form in his mind as to the setup of this ordeal before Silas passes him a strip of white cloth.
Colum stares at it stupidly. “What’s this?”
“You’re to tie it on me.” Silas then takes the unexpected step of hoisting his body onto the altar, legs dangling over the side as he looks down at Colum. “Over my eyes.”
“You want me to… blindfold you during this?”
At the implication of any personal volition on his part, Silas’s mouth twists. “It is specified in the Tome. Her sight stolen, her hands restrained, a faultless receptacle of our iniquity.”
With that, Silas lifts his legs gingerly onto the altar, careful not to dislodge the white drape that covers it. Colum watches him wriggle around, hands tugging at the too-short hem of his ritual garment. His loose hair spills over the edge of the altar.
“Silas…”
“Don’t.” His necromancer’s eyes are already shut. “Just don’t, Colum.”
Colum bites his tongue. His hands clench upon the strip of fabric in his lap, straining it nearly to tearing.
“Lift your head,” he says instead of a number of other things.
Silas obliges, and gently, Colum lays the fabric over Silas’s twitching eyelids. He wraps the ends behind his head and secures them in a knot.
“Like that?” he asks, and Silas nods.
“You will have to… hold on to me.” Silas’s low voice trembles ever so slightly. “When the Rite of Purification starts, you will restrain my hands, just as is written in the Tome.”
Colum lets his forehead rest against the edge of the altar. He takes in a few quiet, deep breaths.
“How long do we have before they arrive?”
“Minutes.”
“And do you know–,” Colum swallows, “– how long it will take?”
Without his eyes visible, Silas’s face still manages to be expressive. His lips purse contemplatively.
“I am not sure,” he says. “It will depend upon the participants who come to purge their spirits.”
With that ominous declaration, the doors of the chapel open on well-oiled hinges, and a stream of figures enters in silent single file. Their footsteps are a hushed shuffle upon the white marble floor as they make their way down the center aisle. The figure that leads them is indistinguishable from the others in appearance, but they hold some sort of ornate silver container.
It could almost be a normal processional in a normal mass were it not for the grim silence: no organ music heralds their arrival, and as they draw closer, Colum notices that they, too, do not wear their daily regalia but rather robes of a similar design to Silas’s. Their faces are concealed beneath simple white masks and veils.
Upon the altar, Silas has co*cked an ear to the aisle. “Are they–?”
“They’re here,” Colum murmurs bitterly.
The white-robed assembly has congregated in a cluster before the ambo. Someone is passing around a long-stemmed chalice, and each masked member is taking turns to lift it to their lips beneath the veils that hang from their cheekbones to below their chins.
“They’re drinking something,” Colum murmurs to Silas, his eyes intent upon the crowd. “There’s a cup, and they’re all handing it around. What is it?”
His adept angles his head in a way that might allow him a peek under the very edge of the blindfold before sagging back against the surface of the altar.
“It is a representation of temptation,” says Silas. “The chalice is among the oldest artifacts our House possesses. It harkens back to the sins of the pre-Resurrection and the debt we owe the Lord.”
“Alright,” says Colum carefully. “Can you tell me what’s actually in the cup?”
Silas’s thin mouth twists.
“Wine,” he answers with reticence, “laced with a potent aphrodisiac.”
Colum shuts his eyes.
Oh, God.
He realizes, too late, that he’s spoken aloud.
“It serves a purpose,” Silas mutters almost defensively. “Every impure urge must be dredged up and purged efficiently, or else this whole rite is pointless.”
Colum bites back what he’d like to say about the pointlessness of this entire affair and, through his panic, re-strategizes. If there had been any hope of the ordeal being cut short by the collective erectile dysfunction that probably plagues the older men of the group, it’s gone now. No part of his education as a cavalier has included details on how long an aphrodisiac lasts, nor the strength of its effects. The possibility that they could be stuck here for hours while various aging clergy plow away at Silas is enough to make Colum feel abruptly ill.
One of the assembly reverently sets the chalice back into the hinged box the leader had carried, then shuts the lid before drawing a white drape over the container. No one speaks. Perhaps their voices would make them too readily identifiable.
Colum wonders, briefly, if any cavalier primary of the Eighth had ever thought to take bloody revenge against the participants after witnessing this travesty.
“Silas,” he hisses.
Figures shuffle awkwardly about as the beginnings of a line form within the congregation, which is steadily drawing nearer.
“Silas, listen to me.” Colum speaks in the lowest of whispers, his mouth bare inches above his adept’s face. “Take my hands.”
The hands that had lay folded over Silas’s ribcage twitch, then lift hesitantly over his shoulders. They grope blindly in the air there until Colum takes them in his own, entwines their fingers, and sets them flat, palm to palm, against the covered stone above Silas’s head. Two of Silas’s slender fingers slot into the space left by the missing digit on Colum’s left hand.
“If it’s too much,” Colum tells him quietly, “if you need to get out, at any time, for any reason, I want you to squeeze my hands three times. Show me how you’d do it now.”
Silas’s brow furrows, but he obliges after a second’s consideration. His palms are clammy with sweat.
“What would you even do?” He sounds skeptical. “You’re unarmed, and there are so many of them.”
He is momentarily grateful that Silas cannot see him flinch at this blunt recognition of his uselessness.
Silas is right, of course. Few options remain to him now, and while he doesn’t doubt he could punch his way past a few of the participants if he caught them off guard, but short of Silas siphoning him, their chances of escape are low. That’s to say nothing of the consequences of attacking a few of the priest-class.
“I’ll find a way,” Colum promises him with a confidence he does not feel.
He owes Silas that much. What justification is there in his living, in being born and bred for the role of protector, if he cannot fulfill it when it matters?
Someone pulls the chapel doors shut and bars them.
Colum wants to say: it will be okay, which would be an inexcusable lie. He wants to say: I love you.
Instead, because he is a hopeless fool for Silas and always will be, and because he does not care who sees him now, Colum ducks his head and presses his lips to his necromancer’s forehead. It must catch him off guard, because when he pulls back, Silas’s lips are parted in a little o.
Then his face crumples beneath his blindfold, and Colum thinks to himself, with a bolt of shock: he’s going to cry.
It’s been years since he last saw Silas weep. His heart leaps and judders in the cage of his chest.
He’ll call it off now.
The clergy are near now, an arm’s breadth from the foot of the altar. The leading figure carries a little pot of some ashen substance. A few masked faces peer curiously at the tableau of necromancer and cavalier.
Colum’s eyes fall to find Silas still and serene, as though he had only hallucinated that brief heartbeat of weakness. He comprehends then, with terrible certainty, that Silas’s pride will not allow him to take any escape offered to him.
The lead figure in the queue seems to take in the scene before them. When their gaze lands upon Colum, kneeling by the head of the altar, they give an approving nod as Colum, brimming with cold fury, stares them down. Their mask and veil render them utterly impassive.
The metallic container, holding a teacup’s worth of something black and powdery, is set on a pedestal. The first of the clergy to approach extends two fingers and drags them through the contents of the little pot. Up close like this, Colum can hear Silas’s teeth chattering despite the humid warmth of the chapel. A fine pebbling of sweat is visible on the exposed skin of his chest.
The first priest hesitates only a moment before approaching the altar, footfalls muted by the carpeted steps. The veil hanging from the white mask sways lightly with motion. The eyes, or what Colum can see of them, are unreadable.
The clergy member extends their hand and, with reverence, touches their blackened fingertips to Silas’s sternum. Colum’s blinded necromancer makes a faint noise of surprise at the sudden contact.
With the tips of their first two fingers, the priest draws a sigil that Colum does not recognize on Silas’s chest before drawing back. The charcoal design is as dark as if it had been tattooed onto him.
Then the priest, among the holiest men and women of the Eighth House, drops their hands to their silken belt and fumbles there. The hands that take his necromancer by the thighs and tug him roughly to the edge of the altar are brusque and efficient. The body that leans over Silas’s is indistinct under its vestments, but the belly and groin made visible by the belt’s removal are covered in coiled, silvery hairs.
The older man takes – oh, God – his engorged co*ck in one hand and pumps it lazily. He aligns himself between Silas’s spread legs, presses against the virgin flesh there. Colum’s heartbeat trips and fibrillates in his throat.
The sight is grotesque, voyeuristic. He shouldn’t watch this. He cannot permit himself to look away.
And the priest pushes in.
The sound that Silas makes is a torn-off animal scream. It tapers painfully to a high keening as the man looming over him shoves his hips forward without even a moment’s merciful pause.
The deep grunt of satisfaction emitted by the robed priest is almost worse, somehow, to Colum’s ears. When he seats himself all the way inside Colum’s virginal young uncle, it’s without hesitation. There is no mistaking the pleasure in that sound for holy enlightenment.
Beneath him, Silas’s spine arches off the altar in agonized tetany. His coltish legs kick out uselessly, trying to gain traction upon the altar to push himself away, but the priest seizes his thighs with ease and drives himself to the root, eliciting a sharp cry from Silas. The masked figure exhibits only a moment’s annoyance as he effortlessly repositions Silas before withdrawing to set a bruising pace.
Through his paralyzing horror, Colum parses the scene in surreal fragments. There is the wet, obscene slap of flesh on flesh timed to each thrust of the priest’s repulsive member. There is the distant sharpness of Silas’s short fingernails pressing crescents into the backs of Colum’s hands. There is the sound of the priest’s huffs of pleasure, overlaid with Silas’s high cries of pain.
It is so much worse than Colum ever could have imagined.
What little dignity the gauzy ritual robe might have provided Silas is stripped away by his own struggles. The waist ties hang mostly open now, and the priest f*cking him has done an efficient job of exposing Silas’s lower body to the open air. Colum has seen his necromancer naked before, had even helped to bathe him up until a few years ago, but somehow the sight of Silas naked and wholly defenseless is what undoes him.
Silas’s limp little prick bounces against his belly with every thrust; his ribs heave with his gasps. The translucent robe has slipped far enough down his chest that his small pink nipples are now bared for all to see. What had been lovable and beautiful in another context is rendered vulgar here, in this place where Colum has failed utterly to protect his necromancer.
In the absence of any useful emotion, hot anger rises in Colum’s throat. The priest spreads Silas’s thighs wider as he f*cks him with eager, sharp thrusts, and still Silas writhes and makes those pitiful noises of uncomprehending pain.
You did this, Colum thinks, unforgivably, as he stares down at the blindfolded face on the altar. You put us up to this, and now we both get to suffer for it.
No sooner has the cruel thought passed through his head than the priest is driving in deep, hips pumping erratically as he groans with completion. The realization that he is ejacul*ting inside Silas, inside the heretofore untouched body of Colum’s beloved, is enough to snap him out of his momentary resentment. Colum finds himself recoiling physically, choking down bile.
Panting, the priest draws back at last, his co*ck spent and glistening with his own emission. Colum catches a flash of crimson staining the white altar cloth before Silas’s legs collapse weakly to cover it. He shuts his eyes against the oncoming wave of nausea and lets his head hang low until his forehead brushes Silas’s.
“Colum,” Silas whispers.
“Still here,” he manages. His own voice sounds more wrecked than it truly has any right to.
Silas’s lips twist, reddened and swollen from where he must have been biting them. Colum had hardly noticed. It had been difficult enough to watch his body, let alone his face.
“I’m sorry,” Silas whispers, but the next priest is already advancing upon him before Colum can interrogate this nonsensical apology.
The figure that bares himself between Silas’s spread legs is taller and broader than the last, and the member he pulls from his robe is sized proportionally. Cold horror runs through Colum at the sight of it, long and curved and flushed nearly purple with blood. He anticipates the yelp of shock even before it leaves Silas’s mouth, feels the automatic full-body flinch as the man slots the bulbous head of his co*ck into Silas’s hole.
The first savage thrust sends Silas sliding backwards on the altar, closer to Colum, before the priest takes him by the hips and drags him bodily back onto his co*ck. Silas makes a sound like he’s been punched in the stomach. Colum’s own guts twist in horrible sympathy. It’s clear that the priest is too big for him, too big for just about anyone, yet he handles Silas with utter disregard for the way he’s splitting him open. Maybe the holy man has done this before, had his way with some other poor soul through blackmail or bargaining or sheer force.
The priest settles into a rhythm, each pump of his hips eliciting a bitten-off whimper from Silas. Colum’s eyes land upon a spot below Silas’s navel that bulges with each agonizing thrust. He realizes, fighting back disbelief, that this priest’s co*ck is so large within Silas’s tiny body as to actually distend his belly from the inside.
The priest seems to take note of this, or perhaps he only catches the way Colum’s eyes are glued to that spot. He relinquishes his bruising grip on one protruding hipbone to stroke lovingly over the bulge formed by his own brutishly large co*ck inside a body too small to take it. Appallingly, this seems to be what draws him over the edge. His hips piston only a few more times before he slows to a halt.
Inch by slow inch, the second priest’s monstrous co*ck slides free of Silas’s hole with a wet pop, and Silas gives a small, despairing groan. Colum yearns to speak to him, but anything he could say would ring empty with false comfort.
The line of clergy simmers with movement, not only from the next priest already stepping forward as Silas’s most recent violator retreats but from the awaiting priests. Colum watches as they whisper to one another and – unbelievably – grasp and rub at their own groins in libidinous anticipation. Revulsion roils his stomach.
The approaching robed figure, smaller than the last, doesn’t hesitate before climbing onto the altar itself and straddling Silas. The labia beneath those white robes are pink with blood and already glistening with slickness. She settles, crushing the breath out of Silas with a wheeze, and immediately begins to grind herself against his skin.
From Colum’s point of view, this assault seems almost like a reprieve. The priest has no qualms about leaning her full weight on the smaller body beneath her and rutting wildly against him, but anything must be better than the painful way the first two had penetrated and used Silas.
Yet the protests Silas emits would seem to indicate an even greater distress than prior.
“No,” Colum hears him mutter, “no, stop, please–“
His blindfolded face contorts, teeth tugging at his lower lip. Colum desperately searches for some new injury inflicted by the woman atop Silas, something that might warrant calling off the rite at least for the sake of medical treatment, but her hands are placed flat against Silas’s chest, squeezing what little flesh exists there. It is only her hips that move beneath her robes in quick, back-and-forth motions right against–
Oh.
Silas twists uselessly beneath the priest and fails to dislodge her even slightly from his groin. Colum can detect a different note in his panting breaths now, something taut and rising beneath the fear and panic. The priest grinds down hard, thighs tensing, and the sound that slips from Silas’s lips is very nearly a moan. Colum’s cheeks burn hot.
The noises emanating from beneath the woman’s robes are wet and lewd. There’s no way she’s actually taking Silas inside her, not with the state of him, but there’s no denying that the way she’s rutting against his prick is doing something to him.
It’s only natural, Colum tells himself. It’s not Silas’s fault. How could it be? No one has ever touched him there. If Colum had to guess, and if it were at all an appropriate line of thought to have about one’s own necromancer and uncle, he would imagine that Silas doesn't even masturbat*.
The priest’s rocking motions become erratic and forceful. Silas is chanting no no no under his breath when her nails fasten around one nipple, drawing a high keen from him. When his attacker’s pace reaches a peak, Silas throws his head to the side and, as Colum stares, transfixed, sinks his teeth into his own upper arm. A grunt of pain escapes him, but he ceases his tormented squirming.
Soon enough the priest is backing off him, sighing with satisfaction as she draws her robe shut again, and Silas’s body is laid bare once again. His thighs draw futilely together as a shivering exhale leaves his lips. The next person to step forward is quick to shove his legs open again, co*ck twitching with eagerness even before he lines himself up to sink inside.
By the time the fifth or sixth clergy member finishes on or in his body, Silas’s cries have grown automatic, more mechanical than animal. The grasp of his fingers clutched in Colum’s has slackened, and his lips hang parted, chewed nearly bloody.
But the pace of the assault has grown feverish with urgency, and Colum realizes the aphrodisiac must only now be reaching its peak effect. Any hint of reluctance in their movements has vanished, and the priests now grope Silas’s defenseless body with lustful abandon. They cup his soft prick, squeeze lazily at his balls, straddle his hipbones and even slot their co*cks between his skinny thighs, now spattered with ropes of their come.
It’s too much to hope that they won’t think to use Silas’s mouth.
The first one to settle on the idea draws a few soft sounds of surprise when he maneuvers himself up onto the altar to straddle Silas’s chest. Instinctively, Colum surges forward, ready to defend against this new assault, but the priest holds up a single hand too close to Colum’s face. The movement is as thoughtless as a gesture to a dog and just as confident in his total obedience.
Stop that, it says. This too is permitted.
Helplessly, Colum cranes his neck to watch the other priests in line for gasps of shock or a shaken head or two, but not one of them makes to give voice to their disapproval.
Beneath the man, Silas gives a hm? of heartbreaking confusion at the sudden warm weight on his body. His neck twists; he lays his cheek against the altar’s surface in instinctive avoidance.
The priest is undeterred. His left hand fastens itself around Silas’s jaw and drags his face back to midline. One thumb presses between his lips to pry open his mouth.
It is evidence of Silas’s staggering inexperience that he doesn’t seem to realize what’s about to happen until the head of the man’s co*ck is already prodding at his lips.
“Don’t –“
His blindfolded head rears back, which succeeds only in knocking his occipital bone against the marble with a loud crack. The priest takes advantage of Silas’s ensuing cry of pain to force his way into that opened mouth.
Somehow, Colum experiences this as worse than all the prior violations of his necromancer’s body. The proximity to Silas’s attacker is unbearable; the man’s hands clutch at Silas’s face as he pushes down his throat with not the slightest consideration for angle or comfort, and Colum can smell the tinge of wine on his breath.
Most awful of all are the horrible choking sounds Silas makes in the process. He’s panicking, his breaths growing frantic and quick with air-hunger; he still hasn’t figured out how to breathe through his nose, for all the good it would do him. The intrusion of this man’s genitals in his face and mouth seems to trigger a primal instinct to get it out, but his struggles only strengthen the priest’s resolve. He pins Silas by the throat and rams in hard, making him gag and drool thick saliva.
Silas attempts to raise his arms in some attempt at defense. He pushes weakly against Colum’s hands, and Colum tightens his grip automatically. Stay put, he begs his necromancer wordlessly, endure it, please, you’ll only make it worse if you fight, can’t you tell he’s almost done –
The priest gives a long sigh, testicl*s pressed firmly against Silas’s chin as he sheathes himself to the hilt, and his shrouded body shudders with release. Beneath him, his eyes clamped shut, Silas bucks and chokes wetly on his emission, but the man atop him does not grant him the mercy of withdrawing until Silas has swallowed every drop.
Silas’s voice is wracked with hoarseness, and Colum strains to hear what he asks in that brief period of reprieve before the next in line comes to take him.
“How many more?”
Dazedly, Colum lifts his head to survey the waiting queue. His body is still and numb as stone, yet his vision is strangely blurred.
“Six.”
From deep in Silas’s throat arises a quiet, despondent cry.
Another man steps up to grasp his hips and fill his hole, stretching him wide with his grotesquely swollen length. His rabbit-quick thrusts punch such gasps out of Silas as to give the impression of compressing his lungs. In his ecstasy, the priest’s head dips to Silas’s flushed chest to sink his teeth into one small nipple, then the other, leaving them crimson and erect. When he withdraws, he puts his thumb to the place where his co*ck had been and hums with satisfaction at what he sees.
A woman pries Silas’s mouth open, fits her fingers around his tongue, and proceeds to rut against the entire area between the tip of his nose and his chin, nearly suffocating Colum’s little uncle with the heaviness and heat of her c*nt. Silas splutters and sucks in huge, uneven breaths when at last she detaches from his face, leaving behind a slick mess.
One figure rubs wildly at the indistinct genitals beneath their robes with one hand and takes great delight in fitting five fingers of the other into Silas's raw, used-up hole. At first it seems an impossible task, and Colum fears this will be what finally breaks Silas, but with a great twisting and scissoring of fingers, their hand slides in up to the knuckles, then, shockingly, to the wrist, Silas sobs brokenly with each gleeful shove of their forearm into him, and Colum cannot help but envision how cruelly he must have been gaped when that hand finally pulls free with a horrible sucking noise.
The second-to-last priest reaches to bend one of Silas’s thighs to his chest and drag his tongue along one delicate ankle, drawing several toes into his mouth as he slides smoothly inside Silas. With great effort, Colum tears his eyes away from the sight to gaze up at the chapel’s windows, which feels like looking through a sheet of watery plex.
Has the light changed? How long have they been together in this hell? Aside from the gradually decreasing number of clergy in line to inflict themselves upon his necromancer, there is no indication of the merciful passage of time.
Only Silas’s anguished groans serve as proof that he is still alive. His body lies limp, legs held aloft and obscenely spread, like a party favor at one of those rumored Third orgies. He makes little uh uh uh noises with each thrust into his guts but neither reacts nor resists when the priest finally pulls out to decorate his bruised and bitten chest with thick ejacul*te.
The last priest leans over Silas, inspecting him thoroughly before laying their hands upon him. Their mask dips so close to Silas’s face that Colum, for a terrified moment, imagines they might kiss him and, in doing so, rob him of the last fleshly pleasure he might yet experience.
For all it’s worth, the priest relents, having found whatever they hoped to find in the face of Colum’s necromancer. They lean back to grind against one of his unmoving thighs, and one hand slips low between his legs. Silas barely twitches as their fingers enter him and begin to curl in and out. When at last their hips judder to a halt atop him, those fingers withdraw, dripping with the seed of too many clergy to count.
Before Colum can do much more than make a scandalized noise of objection, the last priest lifts their soiled, come-soaked fingers to Silas’s mouth and drags them over his lips. Silas recoils, retching, at the taste. He coughs weakly.
The figure dismounts, straightening their robe. The unreadable eyes within the mask glance back at Colum and the ravaged body of his necromancer upon the altar, and the priest nods with seeming approval.
Then they are gone.
Silas’s labored breathing is the only sound in the chapel. Something hot and liquid has fallen from Colum’s eyes to stain Silas’s blindfold in spots. With great effort, Colum manages to pry his fingers free of Silas’s, recognizing and regretting his own bruising grip. The points of Silas’s knuckles are pure white with strain.
Weakly, Silas’s head lifts a fraction of an inch.
“Are they gone?”
Colum’s hands won’t stop shaking. “Yes.”
Silas lets his head drop back against the altar. “Then it is over.”
Pressing his traitorously unsteady hands between his knees, Colum stares emptily down the center aisle. The part of his mind most prone to obsessive fear has latched onto the idea that more of those priests might stride through the doors, unsheathe a sacrificial knife, and split his necromancer open from sternum to pelvis, spilling his blood over the altar in view of Colum and God himself.
“Colum.” Silas’s voice calls him back to what remains of himself. He finds Silas half-propped up on his elbows, wincing. “My blindfold.”
Colum nearly stumbles in his eagerness to untie the fabric strip. Silas’s eyes are exhausted and shot through with broken capillaries when he opens them, but there is nothing recognizable to Colum in the umber-ringed blackness of his pupils.
“Help me stand.”
Colum makes to put an arm beneath Silas’s knees and lift him entirely from the altar, but the boy waves him away with irritation. He slings an arm over Colum’s shoulders like some injured comrade evacuating the battlefield, spidery fingers flexing with the effort of clutching at Colum’s bicep. When his hips slide off the altar, Silas gasps sharply and nearly crumples at the knees like a puppet with its strings cut. His torn ritual vestments hang halfway off his shoulders.
“Are you sure it’s over?” Colum can’t help but ask.
“Do you see anyone else here?” Silas snaps. His eyes blaze with sudden fury, and for a moment, red-lipped and ruined, he resembles some vengeful martyr returning in spirit to see the undoing of their foes.
Then he sags again in Colum’s arms, and the fire goes out from him.
“It’s done,” Silas murmurs. “They’ve all left.”
Barefoot, he stumbles from Colum’s grasp, catches himself against the altar, and begins to tug from it the cloth he had lain upon. It is nearly transparent in places with sweat, streaked in others with come and slick. Worst of all are the smears of blood, impossible to ignore. Silas seems to detect Colum’s stricken gaze upon him, and he redoubles his efforts to peel away the altar cloth.
“Let me help you,” Colum offers, but Silas flinches violently away.
“Don’t touch it!”
The outburst catches Colum by surprise. Silas turns away hastily, bundling the bloodied cloth against his bare body.
“It’s filthy,” Colum hears him mutter. “I will burn it later.”
Empty-handed, Colum can only watch uselessly as Silas gingerly kneels before the altar, still clutching the stained sheet. He bows his head to whisper some incomprehensible prayer. Colum’s nerve endings seem to be reactivating after a period of hibernation, and his own body now sings its slow hymn of pain and stiffness. He ignores it.
“We may leave,” says Silas at last, having concluded his prayer. He accepts the support of Colum’s arms to hobble back down the aisle through which the priests had entered and retreated.
When they reach the doorway, Colum dares to suggest a visit to the medic. The combination of the blood on Silas’s inner thighs and the way he stumbles more than walks makes him deathly afraid of what any doctor might find, but Silas flatly refuses.
“I can tell I am unharmed. In essence,” he qualifies.
“That’s not true,” Colum tries, but Silas waves him off.
“Just get me to our chambers.” Silas must see something in Colum’s expression that softens his tone when he next speaks. “If I begin to feel worse later, you may call a doctor to me then.”
They hobble their way up the spiraling staircase from the chapel vestibule to their chambers. Silas keeps one clammy arm over Colum’s shoulder as the other clasps the befouled altar cloth to his chest. He flinches at the brush of Colum’s hand against his bare hip which, to Colum, seems all too understandable.
“Easy,” Colum murmurs to him as they move slowly from step to step. “Lean against me.” More than anything, he wishes to sweep Silas up in his arms and carry him the rest of the way, the way he had when his child necromancer had fallen asleep in the library or at the dinner table and needed returning to his bedroom.
But those days are long gone.
They’re about three-quarters of the way up the stairs when Silas, panting with effort, leans heavily against the wall.
“This is taking too long,” he murmurs, seemingly to himself. “Go ahead and run a bath. I will join you as soon as I am able.” Silas straightens, though still barely upright on his own limbs, as he delivers this command.
“Master, –“ Colum starts, but the doubts he has about Silas’s capacity to do as he says must show on his face, and Silas shakes his head before he can even finish the sentence. It should be impossible for Colum to feel any more wounded, to be made even more aware of his utter uselessness as a cavalier primary, yet this order still manages to sting.
“Please, Colum.” His eyes are downcast. “All I want now is to be clean.”
And Colum cannot refuse him.
The automatic lights in the bathroom are dim when he enters; it must be the evening. Colum turns the handle of the tub, then rifles through the cabinets to retrieve bandages, antibac ointment, isopropyl alcohol, and soft swabs of gauze on the presumption that Silas will allow him to actually use them. The diagnostic unit on the wall would require only a prick of Silas’s finger to send the readings on his blood directly to his physician. Colum readies a needle just in case.
He very determinedly does not allow his mind to wander in the completion of his tasks. Years of cavalierhood have trained him well in shutting down disloyal, emotional, or otherwise unproductive thoughts.
At last, he catches the light pad of Silas’s bare feet upon the floor. Colum finds him leaning heavily in the doorway, legs shaking, the altar cloth in a heap upon the ground.
“Come,” says Colum softly, as though soothing some wild creature. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
The ritual robe joins the bloodied cloth. Silas clings to Colum’s outstretched hand as Colum leads him into the bathroom. The bathwater is much hotter than Silas typically prefers, a distracted oversight on Colum’s part, but even after testing the water with his fingers, Silas doesn’t hesitate to clamber jerkily over the edge and submerse himself.
Immediately, there comes a choked-off shriek from somewhere behind Silas’s gritted teeth. He curls, uncurls, clutches the edges of the tub in a stark grip and hisses, face screwed up with pain.
“Si!” Colum falls to his knees, already reaching for him.
“I’m okay.” When Silas opens his eyes, they are shiny with fresh, unshed tears. “I’m fine, Colum.”
“No, you’re not.” Colum’s voice cracks. “You need medical attention.”
“You can tend to me yourself,” says Silas. “Later.” He gestures vaguely to the assortment of first-aid items on the counter and sinks lower in the water. Colum watches as he trembles with pain. The sight of Silas's tangled, unbraided hair makes his fingers itch.
“You should wash first.” Colum starts at the sound of Silas's voice. His eyes had fallen shut after a long minute, leaving Colum unsure of whether it would be riskier to touch him or to simply let him pass into blessed unconsciousness. “I can still smell incense on you.”
-
After Colum’s skin is scrubbed to stinging redness in the sonic, and after he has lifted his uncle’s wrecked body from the bath and toweled him dry upon the bed, and after he has obediently documented every heartwrenching abrasion and bite mark and tear upon the whole of Silas’s body, Colum lays his heavy, aching husk of a body down on his cot.
He does not sleep for hours. He stays alert, listening for the reassurance of Silas’s steady breathing. They had not spoken of the ritual except for one singular utterance by Silas, which Colum had not pursued any further.
“I had thought…” Silas had said in his strange, deep voice as Colum dried his feet, then cleared his throat hoarsely. “I had thought I would feel different.”
And that had been all.
When exhaustion finally takes Colum, it does not bring with it the escapism of some abstract dream. He has not earned that sort of mercy.
No, when he drifts off, Colum is back in the sanctuary of the Chapel of the Forgiving Saint, and his necromancer is laid out naked on the altar. They are surrounded by masked and white-robed priests whose numbers seem uncountable, and the air is full of pungent incense and the stench of sweat and sex.
But this time, Colum is on the altar, too.
Colum is the one driving into Silas, pushing into the hot clutch of his little body. Colum’s own weathered hands pin Silas’s wrists to the marble. Colum’s own co*ck disappears into him with each rabid thrust. His whole body simmers with the heat and arousal of the laced wine. Lust blinds him.
He knows what he is doing is wrong, but he cannot bring himself to care. All that matters is that inevitable release, that glorious peak of redemption, when he can spill all his sins into another body and be redeemed. Silas is crying out, pleading, but Colum only f*cks him harder, deeper, savaging his soft red insides until he finally crests that peak and –
He awakens hard and panting in his cot. The room is dark. Somewhere on the other, larger bed, Silas lies asleep - bloodied, bruised, used, but asleep at last.
In the silence of midnight, Colum finally lets himself weep.
