<html> <body> 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 </body> </html>