Within the swirling Mist (IC) > Biographies

Azazel's Sacrifice

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Iridni Ren:

Prologue
And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket….It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.
--The Brothers Karamazov


Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window.
--“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
In the beginning was the Pain. A child’s unimaginable shrieks filled the air like the Word of God commanding light to pierce the void of dark creation.

Stop! Please....Please please...please....Oh please stop!

Then the smell of cauterized flesh...and still the screams continued for the child’s capacity to endure agony was great.

After, the holy omens on her back had all been eviscerated and the gouges covered over through burns and injected ink with new marks to prevent the former from ever returning.

The robe-clothed figures stepped back from their work and observed. The child only moaned and whimpered like some small, wounded animal.

Wiping the bladed tool he held on his dark robe, the taller of the two sniffed critically. “Cover her. There’s a chill, and I prefer not to waste such artistry on a corpse.”

Iridni Ren:
Spoiler: showHappy Halloween!

When the child awoke, she was wearing a short, black undershirt that left her limbs bare. The monk who had flayed and illustrated the flesh of her back had returned to standing over her, much like a cat over an unmoving mouse. All his visible skin was scarred, marked, and tattooed. His face was, in her short life, the most unattractive she had until then ever seen, as every inch was roughly pierced with numerous jagged barbs, rivets, and hooks.

Her fearful expression pleased him. "Ahh, little one, I have only begun to use you as my latest canvas. But this," he flourished a self-referential gesture, "This is my masterpiece. If you have the ability your bloodline promises, I will take you as my apprentice. Then I will teach you to provide this service for yourself...and others."

He leered with covetousness at the pure and unblemished pearly skin of her lithe arms and legs. His gnarled fingers seemed to itch for the tools at his belt, and he rubbed his yellowed, dingy nails against his palms, licking his lips with a dry, lizard-like tongue. "But first we must re-educate you on the fundamental principles."

She watched him in silent terror, her back still a seething sea of pain from his butchery—and the alchemy he had afterward applied to her wounds.

"Let me show you something," he beckoned with a crooked smile to her, a bony hand waving her to rise from the dais upon which she reclined. Although she wanted nothing more than to run from him, she feared what punishment any disobedience would bring. They passed from the small, windowless room into a larger.

“Do you yet recognize them?”

The child drew back, her face distorted with an inarticulate horror. Stretched out on twin slabs were her mother and father, all the skin below the neck peeled from each of their bodies. They resembled cattle carcasses waiting to be butchered. Flies buzzed and settled on their exposed organs.

As the girl stumbled backward, the man’s arm swept down swiftly to restrain her and twist her again toward the nightmare. “No, you must take it in, my child. Embrace the truth. Do you see through the illusion?”

She began to sob and clenched her small fist to her mouth.

“Are your eyes opened, all deception wiped away? They are nothing more than meat!”

She could not loosen herself from his grip.

“Only in transcending the pain do we transcend the prison that is flesh.”

He pulled her hair to snap her head back to meet his gaze. “They...they were not able to transcend. Can you?

“Physical agony—for those who survive it—is a spiritual awakening! We learn to despise this rancid vessel and glorify the manifestation of god that is within each of us!”

She was not listening as she could think of nothing but her parents and her desire to escape from the mad man as quickly as possible. His smell as he clung to her was that of the charnel house.

“Seeing this once is not enough, however,” he chuckled. “Until you absorb the lesson, you must be reminded daily.”

As she struggled, he pushed her effortlessly to the floor and walked to a bloody sheet. “Here is your daily reminder, my dear child.” With another gesture he whipped the sheet back to reveal a pile of leathery garments, stitched in the same size and proportion as she.

“Your new wardrobe awaits!”

She looked from the leathery clothing to the bodies of her parents and then back to the clothing. She knelt on all fours as her stomach erupted.

Iridni Ren:
Shanti Ovion.

That was the child’s true name, and she must not forget it as the cultists took everything else from her. The monk who had draped her in her parents’ hide—he who from that night called her always “apprentice”—was correct in that they used pain as an instrument of her education but did not seem intent on killing her. They refrained, for example, from breaking any of her small bones. They also never paid her any injury that caused her to lose any function. Other than the mutilation of her back that had been necessary to remove the wing buds and feathers, they (for now) did no more permanent damage.

They left her starving for days, however, and then presented her with strange, uncooked flesh to eat and blood to drink. Whenever she resisted their commands or otherwise required discipline, two of them would hold her down while a third rained blows on her torso with a leathery, liquid-filled sack, the size of a man’s forearm. Or they lofted her legs over her head and plunged her face again and again into a bucket of icy, gray water. Or they put her on a carefully calibrated rack that would stretch and stretch her slight form until she felt as though surely she would rend asunder, that her limbs would wrench completely from their sockets—and at that extreme they would leave her. Until she absorbed the lesson and the futility of resisting their curriculum.

In the beginning, she prayed. She begged that someone or something would find and release her from her degradation, terror, and agony. Later, she prayed simply for death. This last prayer was answered, as slowly Shanti began to die.

Iridni Ren:
"They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever...."

Digging with the point of his barbed kama, Og-Nedi scraped some dried blood from under his yellowed fingernails and frowned, his lizard-like tongue coiled pensively against the tips of his canines. Perverting an Aasimar into an instrument of betrayal and bloodshed was a delicate operation—analogous to the stretching of young Shanti on the rack. Too little pressure, and she might revert like an elastic band to her angelic predisposition; too much and they would snap her. Dead, she was useless to him and his order.

He had to confess he enjoyed the game and challenge of it. Longtime hallmarks of his sadistic prowess—such as removing a living victim’s skin in only one piece—now bored Og-Nedi, which distressed him.

The secret to corrupting Shanti, he knew, lie in rooting in her another emotion toward him besides respect and fear (although both of those were also essential). Consequently and after her initial marking, he removed himself from her subsequent torture. True, he did make her wear the skins of her mother and father, but he would bring the grotesque hides to her only once she had spent many hours alone and shivering in the cold darkness. When he fed her the cult’s blasphemous diet, it was to relieve her starvation.

He also operated her stretching rack, not trusting anyone save himself to have the light touch such meticulous infliction of pain required, but he did so hooded and from the shadows so that Shanti might never suspect. When it was time to release her, he would pretend to enter with great show and command the others to loosen her from her suffering, as though he had not been the agent by which it was ordered. He enjoyed both the cruelty of the first and the exhilarating deception of the second. How he with anticipation relished the moment when he would reveal to his apprentice his treachery! He hoped she would have the capacity to appreciate the genius of it.

He also often hid in the darkness at night and listened to her grieving prayers. He liked to think of her lamentations as petitions to himself because he intended to be—if not her outright god—her prophet and intercessor. He foresaw when she would grow to venerate and perhaps even love him as the physical incarnation of the one the Drow called Vulkoor.

Og-Nedi wiped the kama on his robe, having decided the next treatment in Shanti’s regimen: Daelkyrian tongue worms. When the Aasimar began to pray for her own death, he knew that she was ready.

Iridni Ren:
Shanti awoke bound, gagged, and with a thick hood pulled tightly against her head. She sensed she was moving, but in some form of fast transport that traversed the terrain more smoothly than would a wheeled wagon. Her last meal must have been laced with a soporific because otherwise she could not have slept through the rough binding that now lacerated her wrists and ankles or the insinuation into her mouth of the knot of cloth that threatened to choke her.

When the earth sled’s motion ceased, she felt a strong arm hoist her without effort, and then she was dangling over someone’s shoulder. The putrid smell of the person’s flesh as her face pressed and jostled against his back penetrated even the suffocating hood so that she was certain who bore her: Og-Nedi. She felt him poise and then make a small leap before landing on what she assumed was either the ground or a platform of some kind. The monk chuckled and exchanged a few words with someone in a language she did not know. Then he began to jaunt, bouncing her along as he did so.

By now, she was no longer surprised at Og-Nedi’s athleticism, despite his likely age and decrepit appearance.

How long had they travelled while she slept? She could not guess, but wherever they were, the climate was pleasant. She could feel sunshine warming her, and this stoked the Aasimar spark within her momentarily as she had not been outdoors since...since the death of her parents. Once she thought she heard the chirrup of some songbird, and she whimpered around her gag.

Og-Nedi slowed, stopped, and set her down with surprising gentleness on what was too flat and even to be the ground. She heard a key turn a latch. Then she was brought upright, and she felt a tug as something knifed through the bonds of her feet.

“Walk, my child.” Guided by the monk, she stepped forward and sensed a door closing behind her, then the latch once more turning.

Abruptly, the hood was off, her eyes blinking as they adjusted to the light of the room around her. It was rustic but charming, with great wooden beams running along the ceiling, a stony fireplace, and walls lined with knotty-pine cabinets. In the middle was a massive oaken table surrounded by sturdy chairs. Diagonal from her a small stairway climbed upward and out of sight.

Og-Nedi grinned at her. “Welcome to your new home, my young apprentice.”

She could only nod.

“Oh…let me take that gag from you. It was necessary I’m afraid to keep you from accidentally alerting your captors when we fled.”

As her stretched jaw felt the obtrusion of the gag expelled, she again nodded, not knowing what to say but fearing that any wrong word would be punished.

“You are likely very confused right now. So let me explain something to you about the nature of the Mockery, which is the religion—nay, principles!—practiced among us at the temple.”

He guided her to a chair as he spoke, not yet releasing her arms. “Our faith—the faith you will soon embrace—is not entirely about pain and suffering. That through agony—experiencing it…and inflicting it---one transcends mortal existence is our highest achievement…the truth that we will in time spread to all mankind. But just as we learn that the physical is insignificant when compared with the spiritual, well, then, what follows?”

She hesitated, lost several places behind his rapid expostulation against all the goodness that had always drawn her, instinctively, like an aery and vulnerable moth to a consuming flame.

“Oh you don’t need to answer, dear. I would be astounded if you already grasped so much this early in your retraining. What follows is that we must also learn how to injure the spiritual. That is the next step in the path to godlike power. When you can disfigure and maim another’s spirit as easily as you can mutilate his body, then, then you will be truly releasing the infernal being that resides shackled in us all!”

She started to shake her head in disbelief at the horror he was describing, but she had learned better than to disagree with anyone from the monastery. Why, though, had he brought her here? After weeks of despair, Shanti could not help but hope that any change in her circumstances might be for the better.

“The Mockery teaches that the supreme method of injuring another spiritually is through betrayal,” Og-Nedi continued. “Nothing else is as effective at establishing your own dominance and crushing any decency in others as returning their naïve trust with treachery. Trust—believing in it, keeping to it—all of that is for the weak who must rely on some craven morality for their protection. The strong do not need to trust, and do not let the bond of trust constrain their own behavior!”

He paused and looked at her, his eyes almost benevolent but yet retaining something predatory. He sighed. “You won’t believe this truth, however, based on my words alone. No one learns through words.”

She heard a movement upstairs, and a door opening.

“You shall have to experience it, my child. I have warned you now, have I not? Are you wise enough yet to heed my warning?” He pursed his lips in a mournful mien and shook his head with exaggerated slowness. “I don’t think you are.”

Her gaze went to the stairs where a shadow fell, followed by the creaking of steps. Someone was coming down.

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