[Mkguild] Divine Travails of Rats - Pars III. Descensum (c)

[C. Matthias]

Metamor Keep: Divine Travails of Rats
by Charles Matthias and Ryx

Pars III: Descensum

(c)

Tuesday, June 22, 724 CR – Early Evening


His sire sat on a long bench with his back to the 
door. His fingers retied the laces of his tunic 
while his tail shifted about on the floor. His 
scalloped ears lifted at the creak of the door 
hinge. “Father?” He turned his head to the left, 
and what had been an expectant expression faded 
like butter left in the sun. His features drooped 
as one as his eye met Charlie, softening but 
never leaving him. His voice, soft and sad, could 
only murmur, “No; son. Come in... and shut the door.”

Charlie took a step closer, pushing the door shut 
behind him. He did not take another step into the 
room. The chamber was wide with a series of 
raised platforms like steps in a ladder for the 
choir to stand on, cabinets for instruments, 
robes, candles, and music. The walls were more of 
the same gray stone familiar in Metamor, though 
the surface of several walls had been covered by 
plaster and painted with intricate frescoes 
depicting scenes from the Canticles. Charlie's 
eyes did not linger on them long enough to 
discern which ones. All he could do was return his sire's regard.

Baron Matthias let his gaze lower to the floor 
and his tail. He sighed. “I suppose you are here 
for an explanation of what you saw in my dreams.”

Charlie knew he should mention how he had also 
come to apologize, but those words would not 
leave his throat. His fingers trembled and he 
felt his claws pricking his palms again. “Aye. My 
father,” he emphasized the word with an iciness 
he knew he should not feel, “has told me some of 
it. But there was a lot he did not know. If I 
want the truth I must hear it from you.”

His sire nodded and sighed. Slowly he turned so 
that he was half-facing Charlie. The top half of 
his tunic was still open, and there where the 
laces were undone, he could see a sliver of 
granite marring his brown-furred chest. The 
banded steel from the ruin of his shield had 
pierced him there moments before his sire had 
changed to stone, grabbed his arms and forced him 
to his knees. His claws dug further. “Your chest.”

Charles lifted one hand and touched the bit of 
stone in his flesh. “It is nothing for you to 
worry about. I am sure you saw Abafouq leave me a 
moment ago. He and my other friends will help 
solve this mystery. They understand you know, my 
son, what happened that night better than anyone 
else. They went through the same thing themselves.”

“They gave up their children too?”

Charles winced and shook his head. “Not like 
that. Please, Charlie, I love you and have always 
loved you. But what happened to me back then, 
what I almost became... it is too horrible to 
contemplate and so most of the time I try to 
forget it. But I cannot shut it out of my dreams. 
I hoped you would never stumble upon it and would 
grow up knowing you were loved by two fathers, 
one who gave you life and loved you from afar, 
and one who formed your life and loved you up 
close. This is... this is the most painful thing I have ever had to do.”

“More painful than giving me up?” Charlie found 
his gorge rising and he had to force himself to 
unclench his hands lest his claws draw blood. 
“Explaining yourself to the son you wronged is 
more painful than selling me for a favor from a god?”

“No. What is so painful is making you share what 
I had done. I did not bargain you away because I 
did not love you. I bargained you away because I 
was a monster who would tear the world apart from 
heaven to hell and leave it in ruin for one more moment with Ladero.”

Charlie wanted to sneer but there was something 
in his sire's voice and manner that kept his 
tongue in check. He had heard his sire boast 
before, and had heard him tell foolish tales to 
children who were easily swept away by his 
lyrical gifts. But this time he heard only an 
earnest seriousness in his sire's words. 
Ludicrous exaggeration it may have seemed, but 
the baron meant it exactly as he said it.

“You are not hiding anything from me anymore. 
What happened sixteen years ago? Why did you 
bargain me away like you did? I deserve to know the truth.”

“Sit then and I will tell you everything.”

“I do not want to sit.”

“Please come and sit, Charlie. It is a very long 
tale and you will regret it if you try standing for its length.”

Charlie took a deep breath and then walked toward 
the other end of the bench. He straddled the 
bench, letting his tail slip off the side facing 
the door, so he could face his sire. The baron 
resumed lacing his tunic and then slipped a fresh 
red vest over both shoulders. Once he finished, 
he offered Charlie a faint smile, but one that 
did not expect anything in return. He then 
reached into a pouch dangling from his side and 
withdrew a pair of short chewsticks. “You will want this as well.”

He accepted the chewstick, smelled that it was 
fashioned from cherry, and muttered his thanks. 
Even though his teeth ached he did not gnaw right 
away; his eyes and thoughts were too fixed on his 
sire. The Baron took a deep breath and then 
asked, “Do you remember three years ago, after 
returning from Sutthaivasse with your father, how 
you spent a week in the Narrows with your 
brothers and sisters and finally cajoled the 
story of my adventures from the year of your birth?”

“I remember,” Charlie admitted with a long sigh. 
It had been the longest stretch he had spent with 
his birth family since his first trip to 
Sutthaivasse with his father at the age of seven. 
It hadn't been intentional; violent storms had 
washed out the road and made travel hazardous. 
He'd enjoyed the chance to go exploring in the 
caves beneath Matthias Keep with Erick and 
Bertram, to play songs for his younger siblings, 
and to have a break from all of his studies. But 
his sire's tale of that great evil in Marzac had 
been mesmerizing. He had heard many of the 
details before, but just as his father could 
weave a tapestry for the heart with his songs, 
Master Murikeer an illusion for the eyes with his 
magic, and his mother a festival for the tongue 
with her delicacies, so too could his sire 
conjure adventure for the soul with his words. “I 
still think you should let some bard immortalize it in verse and song!”

The baron's smile increased, a genuine smile 
pleased with his son's enthusiasm for the tale 
even three years later. But it faded before his 
next words left his tongue. “I did not tell you 
all of the story. Marzac, the power within it, 
did not die with the destruction of the Chateau. 
Nor with the destruction of the three weapons. It 
lingered on in my friends and I. It was a... 
corruption that had touched all of us who went to 
Marzac. This corruption took on different forms 
in each of us, but its goal was the same. What 
had been there, spilling into our world and 
killing it, wanted us to open a way for it to 
come back to our world and do it again.”

Charlie frowned and nodded. “Master Rickkter has 
told me some of this two years ago.”

“He did?” His sire's expression filled with 
surprise and confusion. “Why did he do that?”

Charlie grimaced and narrowed his eyes. His sire 
had managed, without even beginning his tale, to 
relax him with a few words of introduction. He 
was not going to be so easily lulled by a 
storyteller! “A hyacinth. I brought one back with 
me from Sutthaivasse at his wife's suggestion. He 
did not take kindly to the surprise gift.”

His sire's expression almost brightened into a 
laugh. “I had not heard about that! I can imagine 
Rick's ire. So you have heard of the hyacinth 
that nearly destroyed Jessica. Well, that same 
corruption that poisoned her mind against her 
friends and sought to take new life through that 
hyacinth struck all of us. It tried to convince 
Lindsey it was the child of the man who she had 
wanted to take as a husband. It came to Kayla in 
the form of a dead dragon and attempted to get 
her to place him in control of Rickkter's body. 
It appeared to James in the form of a bell; nine 
tolls against a man and it would have been born 
from their flesh; eight were struck against me 
before he was stopped and rejected its evil.

“For Jerome...” His eyes grew distant and he 
quickly drew the sign of the yew from forehead to 
chest. “For my friend Jerome it came as enemies 
chasing him into darkness. It wanted him to hide 
from everything, and would have convinced him to 
pull all the world asunder to find some place to 
be safe. In the end he turned away from that to 
return to his duty as a Sondecki and he nearly 
ended up a mindless beast. As it is...” Matthias 
shook his head and sighed. “No more of that. Who 
have I missed? Ah, Abafouq who was just here!

“My friend Abafouq was tempted to destroy his own 
people in order to make them take him back. He 
would have crushed all of their councils and 
traditions and set himself as arbiter over a new 
Binoq culture, one based entirely around the 
darkness growing inside of him. And Guernef, ah, 
the one who saw me tempted by mountain dreams, he 
was tempted to give Abafouq a home by forcing him 
to walk the Paths of the Sky as he once did. A 
surprise that none of us would have expected of 
the Kakikagiget of the Nauh-kaee! In the end 
Abafouq accepted the judgment of his people, 
painful as it was and still is, and returned here 
to Metamor. Guernef gave up his desire to have 
his friend at his side in a place inhospitable 
for him and brought him back to Metamor. I hope 
he visits again soon; he is missed.

“You know of Jessica and what the corruption made 
her do. It tempted even the Åelf, ancient and 
wise, with dreams of returning his people to what 
Prince Yajakali considered their rightful place 
above humankind. And yet at every stage of the 
corruption doing as it wanted seemed to us the 
right thing to do. With unerring cunning and 
cruelty it clouded our judgment until friends 
became enemies, goodness seemed to us as evil, 
and the acts of evil seemed righteousness itself. 
And always, like all corruption, it used something that was good against us.

“For Lindsey it used the love of a mother for her 
child to enslave her. Kayla's love for Rickkter 
blinded her to the dragon's malfeasance. James's 
unrequited love for Baerle turned into obsession 
and a belief that his dearest friends were 
stealing her from him. Jerome's desire to protect 
our family from the other Sondeckis made him 
paranoid of everything around him. Abafouq's love 
for his home brought him to the brink of 
destroying that home. Guernef's love and sympathy 
for his friend nearly made him destroy his 
friend. Andares's love for man drove him to the 
brink of asserting domination of man. And 
Jessica's heartfelt desire to help those 
suffering with ruinous curses nearly made her 
make all who suffered the curse her slaves.

“This corruption spoke to us in words, feelings, 
impressions, and in ways so subtle that none of 
us realized what was happening to us until it was 
nearly too late. Even knowing what had happened 
to our friends was not enough. We still fell 
victim to it. We still fell short. We still 
showed our weakness and our need for redemption.” 
Matthias closed his eyes and shook his head. His 
claws dug into his trousers at either knee and he 
flecked his jowls as if he wished he were gnawing.

“The first time I heard it speak to me, it wasn't 
in words, but a sense, an impulse. It was the day 
I returned from Marzac. Garigan led me to your 
brother's grave and in my weeping I knew deep 
down, some horrible possibility. As I put my 
hands on his grave, as I felt the grooves and 
roughness of the stone marker, I knew as if it 
had been seared into my heart like the Shrieker's 
hand seared into my face, that what had happened 
was not the way things should be. The injustice 
was so gross that it could not be allowed to 
stand. This was not the misery and wailing of a 
father in grief; this was the certainty of a god thwarted.”

Matthias took a deep breath and turned away for a 
moment, staring off behind and to his left, as if 
he expected his eyes to pierce the stone blocks 
to where the altar and tabernacle reposed. In a 
very quiet voice he added, “Your mother told me, 
Lady Kimberly that is, that in the last hours of 
Ladero's life she sought the aid of Lothanasa 
Raven. Raven arrived in the final minutes, and 
even though Garigan valiantly struggled to hold 
your brother together, no aid came from Akkala 
until the moment after he was sundered.”

His sire's eyes dampened and he rubbed them with 
the back of one hand, “Forgive me, son. Just 
thinking of it...” Charlie nodded, preferring 
silence to any other acknowledgment. The few 
times he had seen either his sire or his real 
mother speak of Ladero they had always begun to 
cry. A part of him wanted to reach out and clasp 
his sire on the shoulder to steady him and show 
empathy. But then a scowl crossed his jowls and 
he remained where he was. His paws reached for 
the chewstick Charles had given him instead. 
Through lowered lids, cool and distant, he 
watched his sire regain his composure while his 
incisors worried at the end of the cherry stick.

After several long seconds of eye rubbing and 
deep breathing, Baron Matthias let out a sigh. “I 
suppose you are wondering what this has to do 
with what you saw. I will get to that soon. A 
little more and I will describe it. After Akkala 
appeared she told your mother that Ladero had to 
die to save me. When she told me this that 
February, I was filled with a wrath that, if not 
for my family and friends there at my side, would 
have seen me tear the trees of the Glen apart. 
But that was only the beginning. The corruption 
took its time to prepare me. Its efforts were 
focused on Kayla at the time, and after her it 
went after my other friends in turn. But all the 
while it was twisting my mind and readying me for how it wished to use me.

“During the plague I was separated from you, your 
siblings, and your mother. I was heartbroken and 
mad with fear that I would lose all of you too. 
Every morning I would find myself before Ladero's 
grave. I would turn myself to stone and merge 
with his marker as if I could bring him back that 
way. I didn't understand why I couldn't let go of 
my loss, but it was the corruption making his 
death more and more present to me, and making his 
absence more and more painful for me.

“It was abated some after Jessica remembered that 
she could speak to Misha through a spell gem and 
we used it so I could see you and the rest of our 
family. But it was not gone. During my 
convalescence after James cracked my ribs and my 
jaw, I had plenty of time to ponder what could be 
done to return my family to the way it should be. 
At first I just believed that it was about 
bringing all of you home, but even after the 
quarantine was lifted and we were reunited, I 
felt that ache the corruption had planted in me. 
I felt an emptiness even in my family. Slowly, 
even you and your siblings, and even your mother, 
meant nothing to me as long as Ladero was dead.”

Matthias lowered his snout and traced the sign of 
the yew slowly from forehead to chest and 
shoulders. “My new duties as a knight for the 
Glen and surveying the Narrows gave me ample time 
to continue to ponder away from all of you. But 
it was not until the corruption of Marzac failed 
to ensnare Jessica and the second hyacinth was 
destroyed that all of its preparations came to 
terrifying fruition. On the fifth of May, 708 
Cristos Reckoning, Jessica destroyed the hyacinth 
root and branch. One week later I made the 
bargain you glimpsed and challenged the powers of 
Heaven and Hell for Ladero's soul. It only took 
seven days for the corruption of Marzac to turn 
me into a loathsome and murderous beast.”

Charlie bit through the chewstick, splinters 
showering his breeches and landing even on his 
tail curled about his feet. Simmering in his 
anger, he nevertheless leaned forward as his sire began his tale.

----------

May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love,

Charles Matthias
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