Books for the Blood God

[Macabre]

Spring 18, 512 AV
The Cribellum.

Vesirio’s palms had scoured the leathery faces of books, almanacs, and accounts, every one older than he was. Curious fingers roved between their covers, wide eyes pored over a patchwork of ink and penmanship. Every few seconds, the boy would clear his throat or slurp at a hanging bottom lip.

It was grating on his older sister’s nerves.

“Stop that; go home to your father, I’ll be there soon.”

“Nes,” a mouth sprung open, tongue poised with grievances, “Come on. Please. Just let me do one page. One.”

Dra-Nesyria’s eyes rolled ceilingward, and she made a show of sagging her shoulders in an exasperated sigh. “Fine, if you stay here, you may as well work. One page, and then we’re both done.” She stood, stretching her legs. They had spent much of the day holed up in one particularly dust-riddled wing of the Cribellum, fingering through pages of texts whose ink had begun to run and fade and want for new, crisp pages.

Vesirio eagerly began to scratch a quill into new white parchment with a deep indigo ink he had chosen himself. The twelve-year-old was never far from his much older sister, since she had returned from above—he was voracious for her knowledge, and she thought him a ward more than the half-brother he was.

“I’m going to put these back,” she scooped the remaining texts into her arms, casting a brief glance over the boy’s shoulder. “Make sure you’re spelling everything right—the Common, too. Don’t go guessing at it and scratching it out later. Ask me, okay?”

“I knooow,” Always with the drama, typical Plicata.

The halfblood turned and left him, scraping a path with sandaled feet down a stony corridor, armful of books in tow.

[Mara]

Encrusted opalgloams bathed the mixed blood's illumined sheath in a yellowed glow, the dog-eared preserved pages and shelf-covered barriers could be seen retaining a comparable shade. The daylight of Kalinor could be misleading, never flickering from dawn to daylight or dusk to darkness, but suspended in an ever-present intermediate. It was this quirk that kept Dra-Marvasa from being sure just how much time had elapsed since he had laid claim to his seat in the Cribellum. The only gauges were his cramping limbs and whittled fingers that had been liberally scrapped from tip to nail bed by a restless onyx talon.

A forefinger rubbed over the unraveling rind to iron it back into place over the exposed pink that lay beneath before reaching to his tensing crown to assume the same responsibility. It was a rather uneventful day, overflowing with drab mediocrity. There was no more advancement to be made. He was not uncovering what he looked-for and he could only assume more than a couple chimes had passed since he had completed his shift at the Purging.

His back arched, cracking his cemented and crumpled posture with an audible crack of his curving vertebrae. Raking fingers scrapped over scalp through a field of dull and disheveled tresses with a noiseless groan of a stretch. He rose from his seat, with prickling extremities and mindlessly wiggling toes within the barricade of his rawhide boots.

Mara shut his manual and folded into his jacket. He required new material, there was no urgency, he could have picked up the following day or any day subsequent to that one, but he was lingering, bidding his time. He boosted up upon his toes, considering the crumpled leather between the pleats of his bending toes and then took a step headfirst. He surveyed with dull fascination the pattern of each step dipping over the configuration lain across the floor. He had not seen a person on the flank of the library where he had taken up reference information, so he assumed no one to be present and decidedly to not pay attention to what was right before him.

The looming shadow was only a bobbing circlet, barely expanding past each clopping foot, but he had spotted it just in time, before slamming right into the other and her stack of materials. He stumbled backwards from his unsteady halt and arms stretched to catch his balance against an undetectable shove. "Ahh, sorry I was-"

Before he could get much further he took in the subtly of her features and was only moderately surprised. Her slightly stunted, but still willowed limbs, and skin less apparently decorated in grayish vines, all features he could easily pick off his own studied reflection. "Not paying attention." his voice trailed off by the end of his statement leaving in its wake the flat space of his stare. She was a half-blood, like him, looking rather well burdened by her cargo. It meant little to nothing besides the novelty, he could not recall meeting another so far, and though he was well aware he was not the only one. His interest was piqued. "Would you like some help?" he offered judging her stack of books before dragging back to her surface.

OOCGo ahead and date it for the 18th of Spring

[Macabre]

She cursed a string of Common beneath her breath that would make a Svefra blush, but kept her head down—they tended to like you more that way, no matter what came out of your mouth.

Then she heard it. That accent, the faulty cadence that belonged to a tongue too clumsy or unpracticed for the whispering spider-tongue that often echoed through the Cribellum’s book-laden halls. It drove her crimson gaze upward.

“I’m . . .”

The books were forgotten; Nes’ pale pink cave of a mouth hung open, her jaw slack; her pale eyelashes fluttered beneath some weight of realization or regret. How old would he be, now, twenty? Worms roiled in the depths of her belly. His eyes . . . .

Impossible.

As if on impulse, she formulated a stumbling reply in Common.

“I’m fine. Thank you.” A dry tongue clung to her upper lip, when she reached. She saw Zhao in those eyes, and more unnervingly, she saw a face she could never recognize as her own; she couldn’t manage to keep her focus on him long. “You’re like me,” she managed, fingers groping at the floor with a feigned interest for the books she’d lost, “there aren’t many of us around, you know.” She smiled at an unspoken jape, caught his familiar eyes for a heartbeat. “You are a foreigner.”

Born to living mothers, they were little better than the fodder for that which crawled beneath gloaming Kalinor. Boys could still beget fullbloods, girls were acceptable surrogates—had they survived birth defects—everyone had a purpose, in Kalinor, but purpose and importance were two very different things. It had not been any easier beyond the caverns. If blood alone could forge some mutual understanding, it was strongest between the bastards of spiderkin.

Disheveled books found the nearest table. Nes drove a free hand through the short mop of alabaster atop her head and took a breath. Do your job. “I am Dra-Nesyria. Ah, Plicata. I work here. Is there anything you need help to find?”

[Mara]

As her chin slanted to better confront him, he scaled the crests of her softened features. Her very appearance appealed his senses in a way he was staggered by. The flap of each whitewashed lash curtaining the viscous lava behind them, and skin more like eburnean chrism than the pellucid sheen of a full-blood, and a coral dart peeking from between plump gulfs imprisoned his gaze. His jaw tightened, drawing ripe tissue to the overlay of his taut mandible and restraining his tongue from brash questioning.

He nodded in response to her observations, whether her line of vision spotted the token or not. "Yes, I haven't met any others up until now. I suppose we are comparatively exclusive company." there would permanently be some resentment simmering below the surface, passed for indifference or callousness, when speaking of pedigrees. To be neither one nor the other and alienated by both was an atrocious burden to bear. It was matchless to consider a face and for the first time and know they had experienced as he did. It was discovering another mislaid being drifting in the desert. Some relief could be given even in the absence of water for it may very well be in solitude where they found their end.

Mara had nothing to equate her to, aside from himself and it was too unusual an accusation. She thieved intelligent thought and replaced it with an etching erected by the bone of his skull. Weight reallocated to one foot and his head angled to a relaxed slant in unplanned conversation. "I'm sure my accent gives me away. I'm sorry, I don't speak Symenos very well." though his Common was decent, better than his Vani now than it had ever been, it was too different from any Symenos, the airy melody that rounded his syllables composed sentences into a chary lyric.

His sights slipped away from her for the first spell since they encapsulated her. He gazed toward the course of the habitual Librarian on duty when he made his regular visits. He was not shy of his outlooks of the mix blood's relentless stays. A look of revulsion usually escorted his lingered stares upon his arrival. "You work here?" he echoed delicately, with no accusation, as he swiveled by the curve of his heels. A single brow rose from amusement "You must have quite an aptitude then." For the librarian or her work, his meaning was unclear, but the latter could be the only elucidation. It was the only ratiocination behind his job placement. He had some talent and therefor he was tolerated, put to work and kept out of the way. Better, he supposed, than any alternative, he would go as far as to describe himself fortunate.


Upon her introduction he learned, she had a job, a web, and perhaps a family. He felt the fleeting pang of jealousy as a fissure began to tear between them. He then recalled his mother's writings upon her offer, pushing aside his misgivings. He patted along his coat only to recall giving the fruitless quest a breather for the day. Obscenities wedged against his pursed lips threatening to tumble out. Still this opportunity could not be thrown to waste, he had not come across her before, and so another meeting on the optimisms of chance was not one he was willing to gamble on. "There is something. I have been looking for some information on Viratas. I'm afraid much of my time is taken with the medical works I've come across, and I've yet to come across much Common." A half-truth, but trust was earned not given despite their effortless linking, and his hasty lure to her spectral appearance. For now, he coveted her company; it was an unfair emotion, one that enflamed his trunk and left him feeling carved into hollowness.

"I am Dra-Marvasa-" he scrupled with the admittance of his last name, choosing as of late to exclude it from most introductions. "Whitevine. I work in The Place of Purging. It's a pleasure meeting you Dra-Nesyria." A Dra- accompanied with an alternative name parted his lips to be lapped at by a dry glossing of a tender organ. He deliberated as he sincerely expressed the tidings, if she felt the same.

[Macabre]

“Aye, an aptitude!” The woman barked a lungful of laughter. Her eyes crinkled when she grinned, the only time that smooth marble-white face showed its age. Mischief sparked on a pair of thin crimson rings. “Several years of experience, more like. Come,” she beckoned him, hooked a delicate hand around his elbow to beg his pursuit.

“You can call me Nes, if you want,” she mentioned as two sets of feet scraped the narrow corridor of high shelves and cobwebbed dust. Blood-titles were wasted time on Common tongue. “Whitevine is a northern name; I’ve read accounts. You’re far from home.

“You want the Viratassa. I suspect they don’t have many of those where you’re from—we have a few on hand here. It’s never hard to find. Harder to find translated, mind you, but you’ve come to the right place. Vesirio!”

The woman’s voice rose to a startling pitch when she yelped a word that could have been gibberish, until someone answered the call.

“I don’t need help!” A boy’s voice replied, muffled and irate, but no less beautiful were the words uttered on spider-tongue.

“You have the Viratassa there, Vesirio?”

“Yes.”

“Bring it to me.”

There was a shuffle, a rustling of papers and approaching feet, bare and slapping their purpose against the cold floor. The boy turned the corner, some tiny incarnation of the halfblooded woman but more fierce, proud, forged of wire and silk with a feral gleam to the rubies set deep in his head. The book between his bony fingers was thin and unassuming with its maroon-dyed leather cover and age-worn edges. He stared for longer than he should have at Marvasa, wordlessly handed his sister what she’d beckoned him for, and stole off again with a curious haste in his step.

“It’s in Symenos,” the book hung on the thick air between them, held up by white fingertips, “if anything, it will help your fluency. Though, to be honest, there’s nothing in this book any symenestra couldn’t tell you.” The offer stopped in her throat, and her grin returned as a playful crescent of pale lips and teeth. “I’m a shit teacher, but I suppose I’m a shit symenestra, too.”

[Mara]

Where he may have otherwise politely wormed free, he diligently pursued, following their mismatched steps between the trails of abandoned literature. Their svelte figures effortlessly melted between the narrow corridors. A heavy puff of breath betrayed his amusement as her shoulder rubbed a few inches below his own. He did not usually feel tall. “Then, please call me Mara."

He lapped sticky saliva from hallowed pikes within his humid cavern. Swirling color faded into a sunset smudge of rusty orange and purple with wavering at mention of his home. He dragged his paling irises so they skimmed over dusty spines with dull shimmers of gold wording. "I suppose I am. Occasionally it's the nest that expels the hatchling." fingers stretched to sweep a line through a dusty shelf. "Or maybe I grew tired of the cold." control returned a garnet glint about the pit of inflated pupils. If the mark melting upon his forearm could have been witnessed behind his long sleeves then his meaning may have been clear. If home meant anything, it was epitomized in the boy he left behind.

Mara offered no response waiting for the materialization of the Viratassa. The twisted word would sound stroppy from him. Even if his tongue could roll through the air, the chime his throat offered never quite fit. Living in the constant accent of one place to the next, it would be difficult to place him just based on acoustics alone.

The spew of Symenos that followed only pealed a morsel of understanding. Not enough to comprehend past what he could observe and piece together as the echoing voice skittered before them with tome in hand. Six bloodied sphere's huddled in formation, bumping against one another in silence. The lowest set stamped upon him, before leaving as quickly as arriving. He turned to the half-blood as she looked over the pages in hand. Nes offered no explanation to the boy’s presence, their conversation or their resemblance so his questions trampled no farther than the doorstep of speech.

He plucked the book from her clutches. Bony digits traced the cover, slipping over grooves that spelled out curving font spelled in Symenos. He nearly chuckled, he was still a stranger in Kalinor, it did not matter what his parentage was. He was hardly offered more than a suspicious or displeased pass over, much less netted concessions. "At least you've had your ‘years of experience’, yes? It couldn't have made you any worse a Symenestra than I," his smear of stretched lips met hers “but I suppose I was a shitty Vantha as well.” A hum of a laugh purred free with a rise of narrow shoulders. "I'd prefer to hear what you have to say about it, if you don't mind. There are not many who could offer your perspective," his sights dipped back to the book “none that I know of, in fact.” He opened the book, fanning slowly through crisp pages scripted over in words he hardly recognized. “If you’re busy now, I can come back. My next shift isn’t for several hours.”

[Macabre]

“Stay.”

A candid hand swept out and wrapped the curve of the boy’s ear. Her palm was warm and her laughter warmer; something lingered there, like an unspoken tease. “My blood-father was from the north. Some trader, come for silks.” The hand broke away, leaving cold where warmth had only begun to settle. She was fond of touching, it seemed, weaving intimacy between her words. She could have been a hunter once.

“He fell,” her brows seemed to shrug and her chin dipped, as if she could see the yawning darkness that haunted Kalinor through the floor, “or so they say.”

Nes’ bare toes curled against her sandals, and for a moment, she looked all-together childish. Then her countenance fell, and she straightened.

“Virsas,” she began, pressing a finger against the spine of the book, “brother. Viratas is rooted in our very language—even our names for family reflect His own. He is our virsas, and He loves us. All of us.” Nes’ finger grew into a hand that splayed across the book, obscuring strange letters as if to draw Mara’s gaze. “Don’t let anyone tell you differently. They praise Him in His temple, and spit upon those whose blood they deem unworthy, but all blood is worthy, Mara.”

There was a pause, and her eyes crinkled as a wince flashed on her face.

“Living in Kalinor will be hard. Was living in the north so hard, that you risked your life to come here?”

[Mara]

The walls of dusty shelves closed in on them, pressing them together. The balminess that arched about the face, held him stagnant like a wide-eyed youth struck with something new and foreign. It charred his icy cheek drawing blood to his face and collar. A moment of fragility and he tended into the caress until it fled from him. The back of his hand wiped against the skin that suddenly felt bare and exposed, scrubbing away the reminiscence of forgotten touch and the yearning for a mother.

"I'm sorry." it barely sliced through the silence of the room. His chest ached to look at her, but he followed her past the foundations of the city into the depths bellow. His thought often toured the possibility of being tossed with rubbish to meet the obscene creatures below. He did not put it past the city to dispose of his body in such a manner, in fact he counted on it. It was a terrifying thought, almost as disheartening as being stranded at sea.

The word she uttered next rung in his ears. Virsas. His eyes caressed the word in its winding font as her finger underlined the word for him to see. Tireless hours of flipping through writing and never had this word’s meaning meant anything to him, and now that it did he was unsure of what to make of it. So was he to understand that to look down upon a 'Dra' or any other form of being as so many did was to go against Viratas, or was it simply frowned upon? It was a romantic idea, as bolstering as it was wounding. Her fingers fanned across the words pulling his questioning gaze to her. As soon as her sentences were complete his eyes shied away from her, finding a dusty mantelpiece to rest upon.

Not even he believed those words. Even if they were true, what did that mean? That they were entitled to life or to respect? Each answer was divided by a vast valley in their implications. The lines were faint on what choice was the better of the two at times.

He nodded and picked at unpeeling skin along his fingers. He could contort his structure into apathy, hold his expression in a mask, but his eyes blanched without request into the unnatural shade of lavender thistles. "I know and it is hard. I had no idea how it would be when I set out for Kalinor. I barely knew more than of its existence." a dishonest grin gathered resembling a newly threaded bowstring secured at wooded ends. "It is odd, I'm sure, to know so little about an entire half of yourself. It was not for many years that I heard of or encountered another Symenestra besides my mother. I grew up with the regurgitated rumors children perverted from their parents. Harvest and the murderous Widows, that was all I ever knew." a laugh coughed from a cottoned mouth. He grew up with a stigma in his core, of himself. He could see the sick irony of it. "Despite that Avanthal was not so cruel to me. I was given a home and occupation to accompany my name."

He shrugged and propped against the book-lined dividers. "But I found that eventually you can wear out your welcome." It was tragic really, a series of pitfalls that if altered in the slightest may have made him a well-adjusted man. "Kalinor was the only place I could think of to go when I left, to understand what I really was."

"Is it really so foolish? Have you never ventured to the surface? Were you never curious about the things your father left you, left within you?" he was careful not to raise his voice, but the question was almost desperate as if looking for validation in her bloodied eyes.

[Macabre]

“Always.”

The book thumped shut between her long, thin fingers. “While blood is important, so is connection.

“Here,” she gestured, as if to sweep her small hand across all of Kalinor. “Those who raise us are our parents. That is the way, because many of them—us—kill our blood-mothers before we’ve even opened our eyes to the world. My father does not share my blood, but he is my father because he raised me with my mother. The man, my blood-father, he’s gone. I knew some things about him, but there are no holes in my heart for him.”

Nes’ thin brows seemed to shrug; she’d caught the boy’s eyes, seen how crimson whorled with pale lavender and back again as he spoke. The vantha were cursed with honesty, while the symenestra were so dependent on deceit—it seemed perverse to mix the two. Her fingertips fussed with small and jagged grooves between pages before opening the book again.

“I’ve been beyond Kalinor; I’ve seen the mountains that rise up out of the forest and I’ve travelled their winding roads to the north, to Lhavit. I lived there for some time, before—,” she paused, fumbled for words, “before I realized my foolishness and came home.”

She needed a change of subject. “You will write for us, yes? About Avanthal? We have accounts, of course, but each one is different. I’ll teach you more of the Viratassa, and in return, you will teach us of your Avanthal.”

The halfblood smiled.

[Mara]

It was not difficult to sieve through Nesyria's sentimentalities, even her mishap of pronouns was one he personally struggled with often and noticeably so. But though he understood them, his relations to those truths were restricted. He was raised by his mother for the first seasons of his life, eventually it was he that took over the position of tending to her, until his father was the only family he had left. There were no replacements or stand-ins to fill the void that ploughed the breaches into his heart. That is until a certain Vantha extended to him his family. It became a place in which he would find worthy of protecting enough to leave Avanthal altogether. In the end the hole had done nothing but burrow deeper and broader, until it felt irreparable. There was no remedy he could formulate to rectify the unfilled plot. Some wounds he simply learned to live with, work around, conceal.

The pause in her succeeding statements is what raised his suspicions, perhaps there was a hole suppressed within her that a replacement had not filled, covered with a tarpaulin, but never sealed. He stuck to the pages, even as she continued on. Raveled in his own thoughts; a concoction of things that had dissolved beneath his own tarpaulin. He wanted to ask her What foolishness did you find? Instead he simply encouraged their discussion onward, “I’ve heard Lhavit is a city high above the clouds, it must have been very different than being here. I can only imagine. I found everywhere was dissimilar to Avanthal when I left it. I feel, now that I have been here, the same could be said for Kalinor.” He minded her shift, a search for an escape on fidgeting toes. He drew away, cautious of driving her away with further intrusion into a delicate station of what secrets were her own left upon the surface. “Now with the delivery of the spring storm, I feel that everywhere is expectedly very different than as it once was.”

He pursed his lips together, rolling the moist cushions against each other like kneading dough. "I had not really thought of it, but of course. I'm sure I can add enough on the subjects of Avanthal and Morwen, to fill a chapter's worth at least. However, I'm not sure how much will be repetitive of your previous accounts.” He took pause with the recollection of how long after the storm his eyes had shifted to an inky gray and remained, as had his foul mood. What had become of Morwen’s city? “I fear Avanthal may not be as I left it since the storm came to pass either.” The half-blood hesitated. He knew it was noticed, but he had never confided that it was presumably the storm that had frozen his eyes, that in his pit he felt something amiss on the surface long before the news had reached the shadowy grotto. “In fact, I’m sure some adversity has befallen the city. It is as if I felt it.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I know it sounds ridiculous.”