Ravenloft: Prisoners of the Mist

Within the swirling Mist (IC) => Biographies => Topic started by: Wine-Stain on May 03, 2020, 07:11:41 AM

Title: Tagliare
Post by: Wine-Stain on May 03, 2020, 07:11:41 AM
In the burial yard of Caina, Borca, a small plot in the potter's field is marked by a time-worn stone.
Though it is decrepit and stained with lichen, fresh lilies are often laid down before the marker. The inscription reads as follows:
Quote
HERE RESTS THE MEMORY OF A BELOVED SON
NICOMEDE MORELLO
747 BC - 752 BC
FIRSTBORN OF SANSONE & NORA MORELLO
ABDUCTED FROM THE VILLAGE OF CAINA, PRESUMED SLAIN

MAY OUR LADY IN THE MISTS GUIDE HIS SOUL TO REST
†

The grave is empty.
Title: Re: Tagliare
Post by: Wine-Stain on January 06, 2021, 03:28:59 AM
I


'...baptize you 'Florin[1]'. May you flourish in Ezra's garden as you were not permitted to in this life.'

         The droplets fell down upon the child's crown and dribbled in rivulets across his temples. Vessels throbbed beneath his vellum-thin skin, and his cracked lips twitched at the corner. Every time his breath had rattled with death, it had steadied again, and stubborn signs of consciousness had come from his broken body. Yet, he would not wake. Warden Rossi had kept watch over the child since midnight. He wondered at who the boy had belonged to, and what repugnant individual had brought him to such a state. The bandages were packed thick about his loins where he was cut. It had not been a meticulous castration. Everything had been hacked away in a perverse frenzy.

'He will not live,' Warden Visconti declared without reserve, cutting through her subordinate's thoughts. 'There is scarcely a drop of blood left within him.  If weakness does not take him, a fever will. Let him pass quietly, now that he has come into Her protection.'

Vasco Rossi turned an embittered gaze unto his compeer.  'She has made Her will clear, for he clings to life yet. I will not forgo tending him. If he is to die, then at least he will have had no agony bleeding into his conscious.'

'The only thing bleeding, Warden Rossi, is your heart. At least the hospice is not inundated at present... but he will be yours. Either to bury or to burden yourself with,'  She uttered frigidly, turning to the curtain. Furrowed fingers curled around the burlap. A pause. 'Where was he found?'

'A refuse pit behind the tannery. I thought him to be a doll at first. His skin was as white as porcelain. But then I came closer, and saw that it was a boy buried under the dross,'

Without laying her eyes upon him, Warden  Visconti spoke on. 'One wonders what business a venerable warden has in a back alley after dark.'

Vasco's words became wax in his throat, and his posture wilted.

Visconti continued, not stalling a beat for a response. 'Do not rouse me again for the sake of a waif. They are a hemlock a dozen, and this little Lucciole[2] must have upset the wrong punter.' The curtains raked together as the woman departed briskly, clutching her woolen bed shawl about her shoulders. Her features gave the impression that she had spent a lifetime sucking upon lemons: a tidy complement to her callous nature.

         Warden Rossi ran his fingers through the child's tawny hair. It was as soft as down. A tendon twitched at the fragile being's throat and his eyes moved rapidly beneath their translucent lids, illuminating sickly blue veins.
The child must have belonged to someone, for he had endured his nursing years. Six Summers at most, Vasco wagered; and, irony of ironies, he had been saved by the young warden's creeping vice. Had he not sought solitude to partake in the tar[3], the boy would have bled dry long before dawn.
With first light pealing in through the arrows slits, putting the sputtering tapers to shame, Vasco was able to take a better look at the child. He took note of ligature marks around his wrists and ankles, tumescent and angry from the cord that had bound them.
'The sick game of a pervert?' Vasco wondered aloud, daubing a damp cloth along the wounds in a fruitless effort to soothe the raw flesh. The child was markedly clean. No grime embedded itself beneath his fingernails, and his bare skin was pure and unblemished. Captives were seldom kept in such an immaculate state. It was almost ritualistic. Or perhaps it was as Warden Visconti had said: a boy-whore belonging to a house of ill repute would have frequently been scrubbed from head to toe. As Vasco cupped his palm around the boy's neck to measure the flutter of his pulse, his attention was captured by a discoloration at the corner of the waif's mouth. Vasco tilted his head, and his thumb tugged at the upper lip. The muscle was taut like a burial shroud. With some prying, he was able to peel it back over the dainty milk teeth. They were stained a violent shade of green, along with the gums[4]. This was not the residue from a meal.
Vasco moved swiftly, opening his leather kit and taking a tin of powdered charcoal. He pressed a black-coated finger against the child's lips, and a divine word was uttered, conjuring forth Ezra's grace to expunge the toxins from the child's veins. The effect was immediate. A tremor wracked the boy, his back arching and his chest rising towards the ceiling. Brown eyes shot open, and met with Vasco's in muted panic.

'Maestro?'

 1. Florin means 'to flourish'.
 2. Lucciole is a term for a prostitute. It translates to 'firefly'.
 3. Opium.
 4. Chewing leaves from the Abfalduz Vine long-term stains the mouth green. They have a sedative effect, and are often used as an anesthetic in their processed form.
Title: Re: Tagliare
Post by: Wine-Stain on April 14, 2021, 03:32:41 AM
II


                     After his sole utterance, Florin had become entirely mute. He would do nothing more than shake or nod his head, and point. Indeed, Vasco suspected that the child was dim. For hours he would sit in the warden's cell, staring at the wall in silence. Vasco provided him with a thumb of chalk, that he might communicate his needs, yet all he ever drew were circles on the stone. So many, in fact, that the white rounds came to remind Vasco of dozens of white eyes peering down at him.
                     To his credit, he was at least able to perform menial tasks in the cathedral; sweeping the floors, lighting the candles, and polishing the glass. He executed these chores in a methodical, mechanical fashion, as though obeying dry arithmetic in his mind. The only thing that stirred his fascination was the occasional fresco, and choir practice on third day mornings. When the latter was in session, he would observe the singers and the instructor with a reticent hunger, trailing his birch broom back and forth over the same flagstone dozens of times. Sometimes, he would mouth the words in time with the vocalists, imitating the way their chests distended. Yet nothing came from him but the wisp of his breath and the scritch-scratch of his besom.

                     One afternoon, Vasco stumbled upon Florin rooting through the trunk of his belongings in the cell. Books, clothing, and opiate paraphernalia were strewn across the floor. The boy had discovered a painting of Vasco's estranged bride. He dragged his finger back and forth across the surface sternly, tracing the shape of the woman's face.
The warden seized the oaken frame, but it was too late. The boy's nail had scratched the oil pigment from the surface, defacing the likeness.
'Little bastard! Look what you have done!'
Vasco slapped Florin sharply upon his cheek. The child did not flinch, nor did he emit a mewl of pain. There was nothing but that hollow stare, focused off into the empty corner of the room. A crease in his brows as though he was trying to puzzle something out. And piercing silence.
'Say something! Apologise!' Vasco snarled, wrenching the child by his hair to meet his eyes. He found no remorse there. Only fear and bewilderment.
                  
                     Inquiries about the child's background, or the events leading to his mutilation, were met with the same vacant gape. There had been no investigation, as he could not articulate the details of his ordeals. Likewise, no one had declared him missing, either for lack of funds to blandish the condotierri with, or lack of interest.
And so, Vasco became Florin's assumed guardian, feeding and clothing him from his share of the tithe. Though the child demonstrated a disturbed nature at times, he was not unruly or petulant. To conserve this relative tranquility, Vasco took pains to entertain Florin's unusual fixations.
For example, Florin refused to drink anything but milk. Sometimes, he would leave the table with a white line across his upper lip, and his food untouched. As a treat, Vasco took him to visit a dairy, where he was allowed to milk the cows. The milk-maids were tickled when the child worked the butter churner with gusto, and sent him out with four pinta of milk.
Knowing that Florin balked at the sight of shears, Vasco let him grow his hair so long that he was frequently mistaken for a girl-child. It only occurred to him later that this may have been the tool used to mutilate him.
Resultant of his injury, Florin was utterly incontinent, and to prevent soiling of the linens, was confined to a pallet of wood and straw for his slumber. His rest was fitful, and he would often wake thrashing and gasping for air. Yet there was never a cry from his lips.

For almost a year this routine continued.

                     A night came in the frigid season when the sound of slamming wood pierced Vasco's unconscious as he slumbered. He woke with a start, and when his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that the door to the cell was ajar.
Something was not right.
Groggy, Vasco stumbled out of his cot, and patted Florin's hay bed. It was dry and empty. A thorn of panic in his bosom. His feet fluttered across the flagstones, and followed the passages out of the clergy house and into the cathedral proper. There was a strange keening from the nave that chimed throughout the great hall, ricocheting from one stained glass window to the next. There, pale and ethereal in the beams of moonlight, stood Florin. He sang a hymn in crystalline castrato, innocent to the pain it would bring him when he fell upon manhood. In a flurry of dust and down, five pigeons swooped down from the clerestory, landing around the boy to hear his lament.


I absolutely hate this piece of writing. It's terrible and I will probably refurbish it later.