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Messmer can hear it — the subtle and vindictive tapping of the rain.
Enormous smoldering candlesticks and ornate candelabras line the circumference of his chambers. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling. They stain the walls with black soot as they burn steadily, perennially, to keep the chill at bay. The cold-blooded Serpents lie dormant, and are appeased for now.
In his high chambers, Messmer sits all alone under thick velvet curtains. A ripple of gray scales shimmers across the back of Messmer’s hand, as the second Serpent settles across his ankle. The canopy keeps out whatever faint light might reach them.
He has confined himself like this more often than naught. He cannot bring himself to wander his decrepit Keep anymore. Messmer and the Serpent, both, prefer to roost at the foot of Mother’s altar.
Messmer only has to stretch his neck to look up at her.
Surely, Mother has seen better days.
Spiders have trapped her white dress of stone in thick webs, yet she has survived these depredations, amongst countless others. The halo of her pale hair are leached of color, drooping around her face in gray tendrils. Her baleful eyes are directed downwards towards her bosom, where she swaddles the babe she has pulled from between her legs, crusted with blood and meconium.
The downtrodden stony likeness of her mouth does not move, but Mesmer hears her distant, sonorous voice in spite of it. Dooming him into ruin. Shunning him to the place of his annihilation. Soothing his tantrums, with a song.
-
Pain spasms across his back, and Messmer jerks from his stupor.
The Serpents have rucked Messmer’s robes around him. They stretch themselves to their fullest lengths and scent the air with their forked tongues. Their bodies strike together as they rear back and forth in rising hysteria, and they do not settle even as Messmer scratches his long nails underneath their bellies to redirect their attention.
“Hush.” Messmer manages to draw himself to his full height as they thrash and writhe. He braces the shaft of his spear, and brings it across his body as he rises. “Hush, you blasted things.”
A cursory inspection reveal his chambers to be undisturbed. The doors are sealed shut. The floor is uprooted in places, as it always was, and caked with dust. Acrid, phlegmatic wax pools at the foot of the untended candelabras that burn perpetually.
In his haste Messmer nearly forgets, but he returns to the altar — only for a moment — and draws the curtains securely over Mother’s form. He steps down from the altar and inspects the room. The Serpent emerging from the juncture of his sixth vertebra constricts itself around Messmer’s waist, impeding Messmer’s slow trudge to the doors.
It is just as Messmer pushes the doors open and emerges from his chambers, and into the narrow antechambers, that he tastes it. Just as readily as the Serpents do. A rich, brassy tang that floods his mouth and makes his nostrils flare.
The taste of blood, freshly spilled.
His Keep is a somber, solitary fort, yet the clamor of his troops stationed at the base has always reached him where Messmer makes his final stand. The equine chorus of hooves striking pavement, bows twanging; releasing volleys upon volleys of fire, and trumpets heralding his great ancestral crimes. Now, through archways and open doors, Messmer glimpses the chthonic, stifling silence that has suddenly blanketed the Keep. His garrison, his men, are no more.
Messmer climbs down from his dark eyrie, taking the stairs apace.
His Knights do not patrol vaulted chambers and narrow aisles. Neither specters nor shadows emerge from dark corners, as they once did. Rushes of wind blow through open windows, charged with the rainstorm that had recently passed. As Messmer draws closer, the Serpents at Messmer’s shoulders swing deliriously, raised on their bellies, half-mad with the scent of that blood. Messmer knows their agitation. The blood they taste is near, and it is as piquant as it is potent.
Messmer finds the source of the Serpents’ agitation at a landing that overlooks the Storehouse. Shelves of dark wood line the landing, with rows upon rows of calf-bound scrolls with gilt letterings. The floorboards creak noisily under Messmer’s weight.
As Messmer approaches the first of the blood-stains, the Serpents flail backwards, suddenly repulsed by it.
The blood pools at an odd place, as if the bleeding creature stood and took stock of where it had wandered to — a fledgling, lead astray. From there the it had meandered deeper inside. The trail streaked outwards from where the blood had pooled, dripping steadily as it went.
Come daybreak, the pool of blood will resemble naught but a water stain left by the storm. Messmer hunkers down, moves a clawed finger through it, catches it. The blood becomes viscous, and then separates into threads. Clings to him, shimmers and twines around his finger with a lustrous, golden sheen.
Messmer has only seen blood this Golden, once before.
Messmer follows the bloody trail that stretches beyond the diptychs and scrolls that line the walls.
There, a limb lies crooked on the floorboards.
A hand, a forearm, an elbow, all in one piece; severed indeterminately where the meat of the arm met a shoulder. The reckless regard with which it has been dismissed brings to Messmer a fleeting image of levity: of a huffy nobleman strapping off kidskin evening gloves but lopping off an arm in haste.
The limb is clothed in sheer bodice, bird-boned, with soft, fat fingers that droop against an unmarked palm. Unadorned, without bracelets or rings. The flesh is as incandescent as it is pale; ever so pale, suffused with the brilliance of Gold. As Messmer stands over it, it seems to shift and wane. Incorporeal, sourced from the bountiful vessel that had nurtured it. Soon it will become something else entirely, as all things holy yearn to.
And yet that cannot be all.
Unease stirs within Messmer, gripping him with trepidation. He will remain the sole castellan to his hereditary domain, yet.
He follows the carnage well beyond where the landing ends. Its trail leads to the very edge, and then even further. He understands, with sudden clarity, that the bloody trail goes past the Storehouse, leading down to where Messmer has forbidden his Knights to descend.
An intruder wanders the western ramparts of Messmer's stronghold.
-
In Messmer’s infancy, Mother had plucked out their eyes.
There had been a disease, a curse at the hour of their accouchement. It matters little, which.
Messmer was first born, ebullient and bandy-kneed, delivered over hay-colored grass. But his sister had been birthed under the sapling that Mother had fed with her own Golden blood. She was born with a tawny fuzz of hair, and an ulcerated mark that had been gouged onto her eyelid. It was a brand under which the sickness writhed. The sickness was a suppuration that crept from her closed eye— a black, corrupted, granular matter.
Perhaps Mother had thawed with tenderness, before she had been seized with terror. Perhaps Mother had left them tethered to her body by their navel strings when she had begun to brandish her instrument of mutilation, and hence, salvation of her children.
And perhaps, Messmer wishes this to be true more than anything else, they had been born in the dark — unlit by any star that might have blessed them — and their flame of ruin had assuaged Mother, illuminated her, if only for a brief moment.
A miserable, wretched thing. Not only for Mother but for the whole of her dominion, as she was, for Messmer, the measure of all things.
-
A thick mist encroached Messmer as the corridors winded downwards.
It seemed to be seeping steadily from the walls, and was tinged indigo. It had a camphoraceous, earthy stink, never truly sweet, but on the cusp of it. The lamps that burnt underneath the fog wept a melancholic light that showed Messmer the trail of blood, leading him westwards.
The corridors opened up to the central wards, lined with narrow pallets and beds. Swollen, engorged jar-saints drooped over stained linen, their limbs recumbent over mouths of ritual jars. They did not scream or moan in pain. They did not jump at Messmer in their agony. They did not move at all.
They appeared to be sleeping, rid of their sufferings, at long last.
“Brother.”
A high voice, soft and frank, beckoned Messmer. It sounded farther than it was, like reverberations in a cave underwater, echoing from the other end of the Wards.
Messmer drew his spear, and faced it. He knew not what manner of creature he gazed at, until it moved.
It was not the walls that wept this strange, violet dew, but the comely child. One with the fog, ephemeral and slender. Flaxen hair floated around it in long tendrils, with chaplets of golden braids fastened around the head.
A beauty that was devoid of imperfection, were it not for the mutilations.
The child’s sweet face was streaked with flecks of flesh, murky and golden, like it had wept them. The child had no corporeal arms left, but several ghostly ones that emerged from its sides, as if it had grown them on an innocent whimsy. One of these ghostly arms emerged from the child’s shoulder, clasping a short sword that glowed with the same violet light but was sullied with gore. A yet more horrible distortion plagued it; its flank almost entirely disemboweled, hacked at with abandon, trailing entrails. Two ghostly legs, supported by tiny, bloodied feet.
A gruesome godling, dancing about Messmer’s Keep.
“Brother.” The child’s mouth moved, soft and youthful. “I wish thee and thine no harm. I only beseech thee for passage to the ancient ruins.”
Children true to Mother’s Golden flesh have come to make a spectacle of Messmer with their histrionics. Godlings of substance, cosseted and divine, with their grand overarching designs.
Messmer grew weary, wearier, by the second.
“Thou…” Messmer began, muddled, the mist, he realized, taking root into him. The Serpents, confined to his flesh, becoming docile. “Thoust are all lying knaves. Mother Marika…and ye. I will have nothing to do with thine wretched lot.”
The mist rose and swelled at that like a tremendous tide, hemmed between him and the child’s blade. Slumberous, and pungent.
“Yes. That is well within thine right.” The child murmurs, lugubrious, somber, before it continues. “Thine curse. A boon our Mother gave to her children, all of us. It is through no fault of ours.”
Messmer’s reflexes have dampened, his vision addled. He cannot advance to cut down the child down if he willed it.
“I have journeyed long to thine tower enshrouded in the shadows, Lord Brother, to bury the original sin, the whole of it.” The child moves, drawing closer just as Messmer begins to sink to his knees. Its cherubic face, stained with all manners of cruor, hovers over Messmer. A beatific smile moves the child's luscious mouth. “I know what thou'st desire. Devoutly thou wish to sleep; perchance, even to dream.”
A ghostly hand rests upon Messmer’s cheek. It is warm, and gentle as gentle.
“Sleep, Brother. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
-
Messmer dreams.
A stupendous, magnificent Golden tree with bejeweled dew dripping from its boughs — a far cry from how it once was as a sapling. Honeyed rays lighting up wastelands of snow, acres of woodland, legions of water. An epoch, worthy of Mother’s name, glistening with life.
At the base of the tree, a figure rises.
She is slender, swaddled in a plain sable cloak. Matted rufous mop of hair and a pale, pinched face. Her boots are muddied and the hem of her dress is dirty. Insignificant and puny though as she is, she demands an audience with the Golden Tree, stretching her arms heavenward as she faces it.
And as she begins to smolder, limned with fire, the Golden Tree bursts into flames.