He will seek solace but will find none. He will be a slave first before a master. This is the path to be preserved.—Author unknown.
Some part of him, mild, wished to be chosen. A desire so hot the heat warned of danger—a terrible risk. Yet, whatever the sisters needed was surely better than the dread awaited behind those gates. He thought this with true surety.
They were a part of the Church—how bad could they be?
This brought an enactment of thought, his step slowing with deliberate pauses. The conception frightened him, anxious such that the servs, orange, floated about in gentle sways. However, many such threw themselves to others; different slaves Merrin imagined were far more anxious than he was.
Just then.
Teeth clenched to the tension, legs a vision of solidness that stole away all motion. He wanted to move—to free himself from the sudden halt—but could not. His body, beyond his command, felt sunken in sand—unmovable. He forced it. Willed against the cognitive block. It worked. Slowly, he took steps. Measured ones—but steps all the same, an advance from before. Then it didn't.
A chill gripped his heart.
This was it, wasn't it…Merrin stared at the shattered earth, stones forming an uneven land. He realized there, the deception he drowned in. Strength? He had none of that. In the face of fear, apprehension, he froze like anyone.
Nothing special.
The imagined weight was crushing, a block against mobility. He had to move, lest the line halted. And here, frozen in dread, Merrin refused the reality of that consequence.
He denied the outcome urged in the line disruption.
Unfortunately, the time for rumination faded. A figure walked down the forefront; an Exubitor. The man—if he was, wore clade in precise black armor. Black plates layered over a body that moved strongly, black boots grinding in deliberate strides. A sword of obsidian black, sheathed at his back, shone with a dark warning. His helmet, a round glass face, reflected Merrin's own, erasing identity, replacing it with the illusion of omnipresence. The excubitor was faceless. Inhuman.
A guardsman of Clan Noctis. House of Night.
The voice that issued from the oval helm was stripped of warmth, refined into a tool of cold disquiet. "Why have you stopped?"
Merrin swallowed. His hands rose of their own accord, trembling, unsure whether they sought supplication or defense. No words came, only breath, shallow and hectic. Was this silence an answer? Or an insult? The blade at the excubitor's back could resolve the question in an instant.
He both shuddered and delighted at the thought.
A fist clenched within the black gauntlet, the course deliberate, portentous. Merrin's body reacted before thought could intervene. His stance shifted, weight adjusting, feet spreading just so, wrists angled, arms poised. A dance of combat, instinctual, but forbidden. A slave had no right to such movement, no right to such grace—especially so against a guardsman.
The excubitor paused as if amused by the bravado echoed in the revealed stance. Much from a slave? Merrin realized this and shifted his mind to the crime committed. To dance was forbidden. A slave to dance was death. Two delicts in a moment. If that didn't bring death, nothing would.
Merrin lingered a bit but felt the stance fall away, every muscle screaming as he forced his knees downward, pressing into the scorched ground. Palms too met the heated earth, the pain a dull counterpoint to the whirlwind in his mind. His eyes closed, body quaking, caught between survival and wanted surrender.
He did not want to die.
And yet, a part of him did.
What a conflict.
The queer faced Excubitor passed a gaze, Merrin felt it, and pain followed. The guardsman raised him by the hair, pain surging through his scalp. More, too, as a consequence of the dryness. He groaned.
Such strength the man had; Merrin hung in the air, held solely by the grip of the guardsman. He pushed his face towards his, a reflection of a person gleaming on the helm. He saw a pale face, flat over taut skin, dark eyes pressed with a furious gaze. A defiant expression.
Is that my face? Merrin thought, mind refusing consolidation with the internal and external self. There was a difference to be found here—an aspect that mirrored wrongly what was within. He wanted death, he knew this, but the face—that one spurned it.
This is not true…
That awareness rebounded on the external. His face, before his gaze quelled, became placid…defeated. This delighted the Excubitor as he, in a move, uncaring, tossed him aside. He slammed the wall's base, a lamp breaking behind. A jolt came—a shock of slittering current bringing a moment of spasm.
Merrin winced and tore away. His hands kissed the floor, and a twirl of flared heat shot through. He pulled out, gritting through the pain. Now, he knelt, an action permitted as a means to dull the present pain.
More pain to calm pain. How stupid.
Very few regarded him—those that did wore a mix of varied faces: Confusion, mocking, awe. The Excubitor bore none, though a sense of pride beamed from him. From the way he raised his shoulders, paced his steps. There was glee in that—an excitement for the steered humiliation.
He said, "Stand!" And the voice broke with violent intrusion. Merrin shuddered. This tugged at his strings. Like a puppet, against all contradicting wills, he rose, in salute even. The pain remained still, his back, a layer of itchy irritation. Who knew the lamps did that? Akin to the froststones.
"Move!" The Excubitor commanded, and the natural defiance to such broke. Merrin, in silence, joined the queue—a slave in the true sense of the word—a disgusting submission.
Not long after, he stood before the gates. What giant masses they were—like mountains pressed against the world. Rippling with uneven waves. Yet, Merrin saw this and disregarded it. His eyes instead were locked on the darkness within. A pulsing blackness breathing with metallic warmth. It fumed across his cheeks. Tepid.
He watched it, and the Gresendent sisters watched him.
Would they choose him?
Envy grew. A sickening heat at the slaves rooted behind the Veiled sisters. This birthed the awareness of the chances of no better future than expected, still, the certainty of a sounder life enticed him. They had it. He didn't. Why?
He wished to be among them. Free from this place. This spot. How easy it would be to just slip in. An ashman was hardly unrecognizable by one with required knowledge, but here, they were the same. Slaves had a sameness that made them unidentifiable to the normal eye.
How easy it would be to just…Merrin realized then the slowness with which he moved. A cognitive outcome brought from his desires, no doubt. However, that did nothing. The sisters spared not a chance glance. Not to his form. As though he didn't exist.
Merrin frowned but sighed in lowered self. What exactly did he hope for? He knew this eventuality. But he hoped. What a deadly thing that was. Hope. The occurrence would have happened regardless. He was a sinner. They were the servants of god. Surely, they sensed the taint on him.
But this now meant he was indeed forsaken. By god. By the Almighty.
The chill of emotions flowed in. Cold. A sensation that forced his breath, caging it like the strains now upon his reality. He looked into the darkness and lowered his gaze. This was an end, he knew this now. A finality with terror, pain, and despair as the next beginning.
His people had renounced him; the Ash and steam had forsaken him. And now, the Almighty had also shunned him! What then remained?
He considered the question, but the answer would not gather—not before, at least, a sudden impact drove into his back. His body fell without thought, stumbling forward into the pulsing dark. Likely, the blow came from an irritated guardsman. Merrin thought this.
He entered the black hollow with gasped breaths. The sigh escaped him before he could stop it.
The space that admitted him was nothing like the caves of the Ash Mountains—those clustered, living tunnels that breathed. This place was a deliberate vastness. Purposeful. Oppressive. A conclave carved for something unnatural: slaves, excubitors, and the infrequent passage of a Gresendent Sister— unknowable in their silence.
Above, the ceiling jagged downward, an inverted terrain of stone fangs poised above the men. Chains hung loose, singing their silent dirge in the stale air. Below the ceiling, the ground was desecrated. Craters bloomed like dots of blackness—unnatural, spiraled, reaching down to depthless points.
His eyes, too.
They were not of water's shaping, these chasms. They were raised by power, by will. By casters. And so, they were sacred, in that natural way the Almighty's touch was meant to be.
Merrin cringed at the Caster's bravado with the power. Almighty power.
Around the pits, slaves clustered like bugs, each hollow-faced, forced into iron manacles, and cast into the deep. The guards—excubitors, clad in the black of Clan Noctis—stood silent and stern. They did not speak often. They did not need to.
Structures dotted the terrain, some pressed into slopes worn down, others perched like slabs on the walls. The air smelled of iron, of eltium—the metallic tang so thick Merrin's nostrils stung. It coated the back of his throat. Itchy.