1THALO CHILD
Three Years Ago
Thalo Child, not yet age twelve, One Who Belongs to the Eye of Gerome, took his place in line behind the three Thalo children, age six.
The members of the procession, only a dozen of them in all, walked in careful, halting steps through the darkened hall that lead to the door of Ritual Way. Blue-gray incense smoke curled upward from small crucibles set atop iron braziers, which lit and warmed the hall. The scent of moldering spices and dried leaves made Thalo Child’s head fuzzy and his eyes watery. The slippers on his feet were thin, and the cold of the stone floor aggressively seeped into the pads of his feet with each step.
Before him, at the front of the procession, two adults in black hoods chanted, “I am one with the dark; the dark is one with me,” and the three six-year-olds echoed the chant back in a small, high lilt.
Each smaller child wore a purple robe, and around their neck a choker of blue flowers set on a tight, black ribbon of satin. The ends of the ribbons trailed down to the floor, and Thalo Child hoped no one would misstep.
With a pit growing in his stomach the closer they came to the door—the door that was half a dozen persons tall, but as narrow as any leading to the cot rooms—Thalo Child looked into the chalice cupped stiffly between his hands. The sickly yellow paste he’d mixed for the ritual was already beginning to separate, the edges of it wetter and the center a half-congealed blob. He longed to sneak a finger over the edge, to swirl the paste, make sure it was the correct consistency so that Gerome would not look upon him with his Eye and find reason for … disappointment.
But such a slip while they marched would draw the ire of the priest behind him. And their ire would draw Gerome.
The thin door seemed to stretch as they approached, disappearing into the opaque gloom of the ceiling. It loomed, lorded. Felt as watchful as any of the priests or Possessors. It seemed an agent of the Savior in and of itself.
Black, red, and purple inverted triangles covered its polished surface. A long, golden crossbar, set vertically in the wood, running the length of it from floor to ceiling, was the only means of moving the great door.
The lead priest brought out a key—a small disk of the same metal as the crossbar.
Metals were the means of transition. They shifted the nature of things. They were the keys of the soil, the padlocks of stone, the passwords for leaves.
If one had tried to open this door without the proper key, the crossbar would reject them, would channel great sparks from the sky and focus a spiteful, painful—at one time, lethal—bolt of righteous lightning into the offending body.
No other lock was needed. No mere mechanical means worked half as well as enchantment.
As the crossbar accepted the key, the priest pulled open the door.
Thalo Child involuntarily took a step in reverse as the great hinges creaked, treading on the robes of the priest behind him.
They hissed—a terrible sound, inhuman in its rage.
Thalo Child skipped forward; a graze of sharpened nails graced the back of his neck, snagging at the collar of his deep-blue robe.
“Keeper, desist,” came another priest’s voice from behind. “Decorum in Ritual Way. Lest a Possessor take offense.”
The nails did not return.
The six-year-olds continued to chant as they passed over the threshold and into Ritual Way, though the priests leading them went quiet. Tiny voices bounced between the crags of sharply hewn black granite. Flecks of quartz made the walls sparkle as though with stars, even as real stars shone overhead.
The Way was a borderland of existence. Between annihilation and invigoration. Undiluted God Power undulated overhead, keeping the sky in perpetual, aurora-filled night. One could not remain in Ritual Way for more than an hour before absorbing a lethal dose of that Power. And yet to serve the Savior meant one needed to be exposed to the searing of God Power, needed to have their body strengthened and their being set alight.
It was how they were able to excavate the secrets of others—of those they kept safe and ordered, on the Valley floor far below.
Like a small replica of the Valley, the Way was widest at its middle, narrowest at the far end, where a crack perhaps wide enough for someone to squeeze through zigzagged off. There was no way to know what lay beyond that, what lay immediately beyond the walls, or down the mountainside beneath the Savior’s Keep.
Not for one such as Thalo Child, anyway.
Five black stone altars lined the center of the Way. Inlaid atop them were uncut rapturestones. One bore the chalk-white blast pattern of a person who lay too long atop the altar. Someone who had overstayed their time in Ritual Way, absorbed too much. Their body had burned to ash from the inside out.
A few feet in, another ugly swath of ash made a crescent against the base of the left wall, as though a supplicant had huddled there. A few feet after that, more ash a story up, where someone had climbed and then expired. And the crack—the crack was caked in many layers.
The ash would never be cleaned.
The ash was a reminder.
Greed for too much God Power carried only one penalty: self-destruction.
Each six-year-old was led to an altar. Thalo Child cringed as one was given the ash-stained stone.
The children lay faceup on the flat of the altars and the priests arranged the ribbons of their chokers so that they flowed down over the black rock, the ends curling around the base of the pillars.
The little ones looked so small on the slabs. Delicate, with chubby fingers and cheeks—baby fat Thalo Child was only beginning to lose himself. They had only just received their first needle’s worth of color a year earlier. Each sported a tattooed swirl of blue—each a different shade against their different skin tones—on the back of their neck. The pattern was particular to their cohort. Marked them as Thalo of a certain generation.
Thalo Child looked at his chalice again, at his hands, the way the tattoos curved between his thumbs and forefingers, allowing him to form a perfect, unbroken circle of robin’s-egg blue around the mouth of the cup.
A circle, round and round. When one Thalo ended, another began. The Savior brought each back, began them over again from birth. Raised them. Taught them to find their magic once more.
And when they were ready, He would look upon each, search their past, their death, and bestow their true name upon them.
Thalo Child startled when the leader of the procession, the one with the key, let out a great shout.
It had begun.
The eight adults, keepers and priests, raised their arms, lifting their palms toward the flairs of God Power. An incantation—seemingly wordless, in a language Thalo Child was not yet privileged to learn—slowly seeped from them. Low at first, quiet. So soft—and their lips barely moved. But the fervor rose. The crescendo built.
A bolt of lightning erupted over the edge of Ritual Way, striking a long metal spike set high in the rock, and Thalo Child shrank from it. An unsettling scent fell over the Way, like something both burnt and frosted.
Thalo Child hurried to his place: two shallow grooves set in the path of the Way near the base of the center altar. They were the footprints of ages; for centuries, Thalo children his age had stood in this exact spot, waiting to perform this exact rite.
The six-year-olds shivered on their slabs. With fear or anticipation, rapture from the stones or simple chill, he could not say. The trio’s eyes were wide, unblinking. They focused on the flashing overhead—one of the last things they would see in a long while.
“Be brave,” Thalo Child whispered. Mostly to them. Partially to himself.
He reached out lightly with his mind, hoping not to draw the priests’ attention. He was not yet permitted to use his magic outside of lessons. If they caught him …
His role in this ritual was a great honor. Out of all of his peers, Gerome had chosen him, had put away the Eye and touched his shoulder and told him how proud he was. How, soon, Thalo Child would earn his naming.
Using his magic put that in jeopardy.
But he remembered, starkly, this moment from before. When he was the young one on the rock.
Six was so small. Six years were so few.
He’d been so scared. So terrified, despite the enchanted stones working their emotive magic on him.
So, he sent out the smallest tendril of intrusion, letting the mouth of it seek the small ones’ secrets. Happy secrets. Things they loved that they kept only for themselves.
One, fey loved insects. Especially the glittering beetles that shone green and gold. He filled feir mind with a false memory—a flash that would not stay, that would disappear the moment he stopped pushing the image, for he was not yet skilled enough to make the untrue become permanent—where the beetle sat on feir knee and revealed its rice-paper-thin wings.
Feir shivering momentarily ceased. Fey became calm.
He moved on to the next. She loved the smell of corn cakes—a love intimately tied to the memory of her first tasting—and he filled her mind with the scent.
The third, the one in the ash, kept a buried memory of a smile. And it was buried—deep. A remarkable achievement for one of his age. But Thalo Child’s skills were stronger; he’d trained twice as long. He pried at the memory, attempting to pull the smile out of obscurity and resolve it into a full face.
Many Thalo children treasured the smiles of the ones who’d guarded them when but babes. It was not typically treated by the mind as a secret, not typically a retrievable notion by Thalo magic.
But as he forced the information to come forth, he realized why this boy had kept the smile so close, pushed it so deep.
The face appeared to be a woman’s. But it was strange. Dark, unblemished skin covered her entire face. Not a single tattoo. Not one mark of the Savior. Nothing in which to absorb and channel the God Power to ensure one’s magic was strong.
Only the Savior Himself could walk out onto the brim of the world and not need the tattoos to give Him strength and stealth and substance.
Who was she?
Before he could pry further, before he even had a chance to falsify the smile in the boy’s consciousness, the door to Ritual Way opened once more.
Through it, carried by two of the lowly Mindless on a narrow, open litter, came Gerome.
He sat with his legs crossed akimbo and tied, the two of them woven over and knotted in gold- and milk-colored silks. His feet were propped on top of his legs, each heel in a hard-soled sandal with iron spikes attached. The points of the spikes dug into his sides, bloodying the silk, splattering his finery—a sacrifice required of him for the rite. Four small, round scars framed the top and bottom of his blue-painted lips. Similar scars flanked his cheeks, his jaw. His hair—long and black against his pale skin—was plaited down his back and stuck through with spikes of different blessed metals. He wore a copper headdress that fell low over his forehead. It had a high, curving crest that spanned from ear to ear, and small, sharp horns that jutted out just above his eyes. Small strings of diamonds hung from its edge, obscuring his gaze behind their glitter. Each took on a red sheen as it reflected the sky above and the blood on his torso.
Long cerulean stripes, each a finger wide, trailed down his cheeks and his chin. His expression was blank. No obvious pain from the spikes. No irritation. No frustration.
In each cupped, clawed hand he held a small pile of salt.
Thalo Child did not see the Eye, but it was never far.
“Thalo Child,” Gerome said stiffly, his voice always deeper than Thalo Child expected, always grander, even, than his countenance. “Thalo Child, One Who Belongs to the Eye of Gerome, aged nearly twelve years beneath the roof of our Savior, have you prepared for this day?”
“Yes,” he replied, trying to keep the quiver in his throat from snaking its way onto his tongue.
“Will you do well for these, those beneath you? Have you mixed the cement soundly, to ensure the closure, to ensure you protect their sight?”
“Yes,” he said, fearing another glance at the separated paste.
“Then bestow upon them their years-long darkening, so that they too may carry the honor of One Who Belongs to the Eye of Gerome.”
Thalo Child took steps on wobbly legs toward the first child. Fey had already closed feir eyes, were at ease, ready. “I welcome you,” he said, dipping two fingers into the chalice, swirling them quickly, shielding the movement with his body, to be sure the cement was the proper consistency. “We are proud of you this day,” he told fer. Gently, he caked the mixture over feir delicate eyelids. “When this dries and your lashes cannot be lifted, you will belong to the Eye of Gerome. You will be our family. You will walk in the darkened way and learn to trust in that family. Learn to trust your other senses. Learn to trust Gerome.”
He packed the cement generously, smoothed it out, so that beautiful, circular disks of it covered feir eyes.
It would harden within minutes. Become stone within the hour. Eventually, it would fall free of the small child’s face, but not for many, many moons.
Copyright © 2023 by Little Lost Stories LLC