Cracking the Dam [Poison]

[Mara]

It was disconcerting to have his mother's point of view tossed about so insouciantly, but he had to have confidence in it was his last chance. Lest he was to run into another half-blood as he had previously. His eyes flickered away searching uselessly for a silhouette of flaxen threads, one he was unconfident he wanted to see again, but had been caught searching for repeatedly. It was doubtful, and the sand in his hourglass was running thin. He would need to extort his answers, find what he could and complete the composition of his plans by the season’s end. There could be no more suspension.

"Yes, it was a well collaborated name by my parents, my first from my mother, and my last of my father." A well thought out intermingling, meant as an honor, but in many places it would be spat as a profanity. Those close enough to receive it, called him Mara. Marvasa was a cold and hardened title, one that steadily set the mask of forced emotions upon his dulled expression, one that had long ago lost its warmth when uttered.

The squints that pricked the back of Sarya's head were ones that soon untiringly landed upon him. The librarian needed very little reason to aim his soured expression at the healer. He paid it no mind just as she had seemed to. His voice remained fixed and forgiving, a soothing whirr hoping to continue to preserve her favor. He offered her more than he would another, easing into conversation as he would a patient. He recognized her significance. "Yes, I was trained from childhood under my father so I do what I can when I am asked. As for Hellebore, he is quite traditional..." a coy smile slipped over his side cast features to lighten the statement. "But I can't complain."

"That sounds fine, I was meaning to visit the temple again as it is." A thick claw flicked over the filleted edges of his cherished possession before it slipped from his reaches. His face collapsed into previous stiffness, a canine hooked the metal rung through his lip and tugged. "Please take care of it." It's all I have left of her

[Poison]

Three days later Mara would find Sarya in front of the temple as she had said. The young woman was dressed quite differently than during their last meeting. She wore a beautiful blood red robe – her way of showing that she belonged to Viratas – and her feet were bare. Her hair was pulled away from her face now so that her features were more visible. She held his mother’s journal close to her chest as if it were some kind of treasure.

As she saw him, she smiled and walked up to him.

„Dra-Marvasa! It’s good to see you again. I’ve studied the journal extensively during the past couple of days. I thank you for the opportunity to read it. I’ve rarely read something as interesting. Did you know that your mother had been marked by Viratas? When I found that out, I went to Daratur and talked to him about it. I hope you don’t mind. It turns out that he knew her! They weren’t particularly close – they were more like colleagues – but still …“

She fell silent for a moment as she realized that she had been talking too fast, and that she had said too much at once. Her excitement had gotten the better of her.

„Sorry“, she murmurred, somewhat embarrassed. „I was just about to ask you whether you wanted to talk to Daratur about your mother. Are you interested? Oh, and here’s your journal.“

She handed it back to him.

[Mara]

Slackened shoulders loped down his sides and disappeared into the lent lined pits of his jacket. He was not cold, he never was, but long sleeves usually hung down over pale inked knuckles. Leather worn soles skated along wound streets until a vivid scarlet silhouette bounded toward him before he could even reach the entrance. Owlish eyes blinked up at him with ashy beating lashes. She was a harshly contrasted picture of fair and sable shades. His eyes climbed from landmark to landmark across her exaggerated features, trying to find somewhere to land.

He found no time to form the needed reply of a smile or 'hello'. The moment she was in earshot she began to natter, long spun sentences that marched into his mind word by word. Her pause gave him enough time to think and sort through the excretion of information.

An open palm twisted free and swayed before him. A stringent arch carved between chin and nostrils. "Please don't apologize. It is good to see you again as well Sarya." the same hand laid out for the journal to flatten upon. "Thank you for taking such good care of this." he gripped its creased bindings and tucked it inside his coat.

"I'm very interested. Whatever you can tell me as well. I'm sure you know her better than I at this point." He bowed toward the door, his feet swinging after him in fluid stride. So far all she had leaked from her fountain of answers was that Senesea had been marked by Viratas. It seemed appropriate enough, two parents favored by their respective gods, his adopted gods. What had she done to receive such a blessing, how had she lived her life? He wondered if Atric may have offered her blood to keep her with what little life she held, enough to continue to inhale and exhale from her mollycoddled cradle. He nipped at the tip of his zealous tongue. He needed to feel something more than anger or despondency.

They made a path inside, walking close enough for elbows to graze. Some may have seen them and called them friends, or seen a selfless priestess taking pity upon a lowly mite such as himself. The truth was they were using one another, he for answers, her to find divine favor. That was sufficient, in fact it was ideal. They would both receive what they set out for without any furthered explanations into the true nature of their relationship. “You said Daratur and my mother were colleagues." his head tilted toward her to help his hushed tone reach her. "So she worked here, in the Temple?" that was a surprise. She had not offered him information on her beloved god. She had shared so little with him. Did he not deserve to know, or was she hoping he would run from the pieces she had left, the pieces that festered inside of him? Either way, he was reaching out to seize them. If not then, then now, she owed him this much.

[Poison]

"Senesea has become something like a friend to me - or a sister", Sarya replied. "It's unfortunate that you never got to know her like that. Did she never talk to you about her past, back when she was still alive?" After reading the journal, Sarya had a rather high opinion of Mara's mother, but not talking to her son in person was just wrong. To the Symenestra their family, their ancestors were of the utmost importance. How could you really understand yourself if you didn't know where you came from?

Senesea had been blessed by Viratas, but this one decision she had made went against what the god stood for. How was it possible that she hadn't been aware of that? Or had she kept all that information from him on purpose?

"Yes, they were colleagues", she confirmed as she led him into the temple. "She survived here for a while. Tell me, Dra-Marvasa, have you ever visited the Temple of Viratas before?"

~~~

It was surprisingly quiet in the Temple of Viratas. Even though people visited it throughout the day and the night, hardly any sound could be heard. The temple was not a place to meet to each other and talk to each other. The Symenestra of Kalinor visited it to honor their god, to meditate or pay their respects to the dead.

The outer parts of the temple where the dead lay were cool, but it became warmer, the closer one got to the blood pool, the heart of the temple. It never became hot though. The blood in the pool was still the same deep red it had been when it had left the veins of those that had sacrificed it. It was still warm, even though it had been there for decades, for centuries.

Daratur, the one who presided the temple, waited there for them, in front of the blood pool. Daratur of the Violet web was in his late fourties, long past the age where Symenestra were fertile. His hair was coal black and fell to his shoulders while his eyes were a brilliant shade of red, like two rubies. He was not a handsome man, but there was something about him. Just like Sarya he was dressed in crimson silk.

The red chain on his right upper arm was clearly visible. He had been marked three times by his god.

As he saw Mara, he approached him at once. "Welcome, Dra-Marvasa. It's good to meet Senesea's son. I've always wondered what happened to her after she left Kalinor."

[Mara]

"No." he confided, his tongue stumbling past swelling lips. "She stopped saying much of anything by the time I was ever really taking note." his mouth scrunched into an inverted pout, one that shrugged away any real emotion and made the account a jest. "Children are so arbitrary." How could he have predicted that before sprouting to a reasonable height, all decent memory of his mother would have come and gone? Still it was lamentable.

They ambled toward the entrance. Sarya kept his steps steady and his head fittingly vertiginous. It was warm for him, one graced with shelter from the winter, as if the walls were packed tightly with knolls of insulation. Maybe it was only his heart hammering against a shallow cavity, pumping blood too graciously to sticky his palms. His eyes trailed along the entering conduit of red accented thread, upon the silent rhythm of their feet paddling against the malleable surface. Years had really led to this? It seemed too uncomplicated, dauntingly so.

His head bobbed, nails picking against raw fingertips. "I have. I was curious after inquiring upon Viratas, I was graciously provided with a summation of the Viratassa. It offered me hope. Hope in more than Viratas alone, but in Kalinor." he paused to receive her reaction if any, he had not meant to offend. "Soon after I visited." his head curved toward her, but his eyes persisted ahead. "I'm afraid I was too hesitant to approach far beyond the ingress."

....................

Their conversation died, not uncomfortably, but with reverence for their backdrop. His memory recalled his first visit, the thought that had haunted him. His mother was not laid to rest here, as so many Symenestra were. She was in a hole under layers and layers of snow, a grave marker under the name Whitevine. Would she be angry, that he had let her lie there? Even in death she was so far from what she had yearned for in life, he had not returned her to her God. Nothing more than a wobbling recollection, none really knew her, but Atric. He shied away from the thought as soon as it crept inside.

His layers clung as they approached, a heat pulsing from the center of the room, the vat of presented plasma. Adam's apple bobbed in his throat as his eyes locked with the surface, a sea of thick magma. He could smell it, the scent was familiar, and one he could sniff like a blood hound from years of exposure. It was captivating. The still and uncurled shell was abnormal and pulled chills of exhilaration along his arms.

It took a long moment before he pulled away toward Daratur, long and elegant, a stretched version of a painted saint. He was poised in a way only age could provide. Marvasa’s skull tilted with a gaze skyward of childish apprehension. A smile tugged against his lips contrasting against dipping brows. "It's good to meet you as well. I'm sure if my mother were here she would be glad to hear you recall her so well." He turned to Sarya with a milder beam “Or that you’ve brought up such a fine apprentice.”

[Poison]

„I wonder why she stopped talking“, Sarya murmurred. „She had so much to tell. She led such an interesting life. I haven’t found anything in her journal that was so terrible that she had to hide it. She never murdered anybody. She never stole. She was just … not content with the way things were run in Kalinor.“ She shrugged her shoulders somewhat helplessly.

As he told her that he had visited the temple before, she smiled again though. „Reading the Viratas is comforting, isn’t it? We are all one, Dra-Marvasa. We are all descended from the same ancestors, and after our death we will be reunited again. Nobody is ever truly lost. Do you know that the pool contains a drop of blood of everybody that has ever lived in Kalinor?“

„If you touched it, you would discover that it is still warm. In a way a part of them is still alive.“

~~

„Nobody that met Senesea could forget her“, Daratur replied. For a moment the priest seemed to be lost in the memories of the woman he had once known. „She was extraordinary. Had I not already been married …“ He shook his head and smiled slightly.

„Senesea and I had the same goals. We both thought that Kalinor should be a little more open, that people should be allowed to choose their own fate, that there had to be another way besides sacrificing ourselves or abducting woman after woman. We were both idealists.“

„She couldn’t bear the constant pressure. Her family, her friends, even members of the temple, there were so many people that were against her, against us. She was always the more sensitive of the two of us. And I, I eventually gave up some of my goals.“

„It was necessary“, Sarya replied. „They would have made it impossible for you to remain at the temple otherwise. And you only had a single mark back then.“

He nodded, and then he turned to Mara again.

„I'm sure you've already heard enough of the constant dilemma our race is in. Is there anything in particular you would like to know about her?“

[Mara]

An anomalous sense of dispiritedness rapt him at the thought of Senesea and Daratur together, cohorts or otherwise. It was not that he assumed her to be out of his reach, he assumed nothing. It was simply challenging to imagine her affection with more than the forlorn looks to his father, Atric. There were none left, until now, that could attest to where her mind had endured. What had essentially happened to her farther than dissatisfaction? It was stinging to think of nothing else as her undoing, simple unhappiness. His tongue rolled over the dry ridges along the roof of his mouth, and huddled saliva to his tonsils to drench his opinions.

It was not by Daratur's words, but the considerations it evoked that made him wall off. Love was difficult to picture in his mother’s life, though many seemed to define her by it, the love her son, of her family, of her beliefs. Had he become so jaded, that he cared for nothing less but the hardened facts? Had all else tumbled somewhere into the filing system labeled “unnecessary”? His skipping pulse and twitching toes alleged otherwise, as he squirmed in a tight sweater of his own casing grinding over stretched sore muscle. Blood that pumped and flowed as warm as the living blood stagnate in an outsized rotund basin. A life that never died, life that was equal; it was still a new concept. To him, the life that passed only lived on in the permanent scribes along his limbs fumbling trimmings, or not at all.

He watched the elder priest, his stature not lost as the light of reminiscence guttered in the windows of his unwavering pupils. As he continued and Sarya comforted his failing stands, they shared the substance of the story, the one he desperately wanted to piece together. Mara was standing amidst the wreckages, broken pieces of what his mother had left behind. The slivers of what living pieces curled around lungs that still inflated with the deep sigh of her passing.

The nod was returned. It was a courtesy and the talk of dilemmas rounded his gaze to the well of cherry. "I don't mind. It is refreshing to hear a disparate outlook, or at the very least to hear it spoken of fondly. I suppose I have been enlightened on the both extremities of the disagreement that runs so deeply within this city. I am also sure I was meant to be some testament left behind as to what my mother's beliefs on the dilemma entailed." his smile softened and rubbed over snow imprinted design below a sleeved arm.

His throat cleared, and he fluttered his lashes from the cloudy view his thoughtful gape had left behind. “Anything you can tell honestly I would be eager to gather. If there is a starting point I suppose I would ask: What was it that made her leave Kalinor to begin with? How did all of this begin?” All of what led me here.

[Poison]

„It began with her parents, your grandparents“, Daratur replied. „I assume Sarya already told you that they are Esterians?“ Sarya nodded, essentially answering the question for Mara. „They wanted her to bear her own children which would have killed her. Theoretically we have freedome of choice - we can choose whether we want to take that risk or use surrogates - but in practice that is often not the case. Senesea was afraid that they would force her, despite the fact that she had been marked by Viratas – a sign that she had done something right.“

„They are still alive“, Sarya interrupted Daratur. „Daratur wasn’t clear about that. Your grandparents – as well as your mother’s brother and his children – still live in Kalinor. I think you should know that you have family here, even though it is probably the wrong kind of family.“

Daratur nodded. He was alright with her telling Mara. „I’m not sure how much you know about the way that Kalinor and our faith works, Dra-Marvasa“, he continued. „There are a few different factions, even in this city of less than one thousand people. Some followers of our god have become more radical in recent years, violent even. Senesea left Kalinor because she was worried that there would eventually be more than just threats.“

„She was afraid that they would hurt her.“

„Maybe I could have supported her more. Maybe I could have found a way to protect her, I don’t know …“ Daratur shrugged his shoulders somewhat helplessly. He wasn’t happy about the choices he had made then. Maybe he should have convinced her to stay. If he had taken her to the temple … surely nobody would have dared to threaten a woman who bore Viratas‘ mark there.

[Mara]

The half-blood flinched with mechanically rigid joints congealing in their clenches. Even he had no warming welcome, and despite the forewarnings, most simply left him be. He could not say until of late, that he feared for his life. To think his mother’s situation was punishing enough that she truly felt she was in imminent danger. His sympathy to a Symenestra woman's plight was far underdeveloped.

He was quiet. A stern look scrawled across his face, even as Sarya oozed the evidence, he was not sure how he felt. He had family, family he was unlikely to meet. Senesea had never even spoken of any siblings, no hint to an ache of leaving him behind. Did that mean that her falling out had relayed on to her brother. Was he of the radical mindset of their parents? How old could he have been when she became absent in his life? It was a wholly unalike discussion to begin. One that was strenuous just brewing it over in the passing moments he had learned of it.

"I'm sure you did all you could." he assured with an uneasy smile. "My mother established a life outside of the city, and though my time with her was brief, I'm sure she would have befallen a similar fate had she been forced to hide within her own city." at least this is what he told himself, that it was the nature of her life not the content that had been her undoing.

It was her life that he wanted to know, her death he knew all too well, "What was it that my mother did to earn favor with Viratas?" his lids shuffled toward the basin of blood, searching for the change. Their three bushy shadows swayed in the undisturbed pool, rippled by some current that was unfathomable, but entrancing. "How old was she when she received the mark?"

It was still foreign to learn of the blessings from other gods. He had known of his mother's, but it was rarely discussed. He had obtained his mark for purely being born in a certain city, to a certain parent, under the love of an openly existent goddess. Written accounts were muddled and inconclusive, unless by the true religious writing of scholars and the devoutly religious. Many of these manuscripts seemed out of reach and his interest fell into a very different standard of education.

[Poison]

As Mara said that he was sure he had done all he could, Daratur nodded even though he had his doubts. He didn’t know if he had really done everything he could. He should at least have tried to find out what had happened to her after she had left Kalinor, to make sure she led a long and happy life on the surface. Viratas was the god of community, so shouldn’t he have tried to protect all members of this community, even those that had left?

„She didn’t do anything as grand as saving somebody’s life“, he replied, remembering how he had received his first mark. He had saved a woman of mixed blood from torture. „But she was kind. She believed that all people who bled were equal, regardless of their race. When they made fun of or hurt a halfblood, she stepped in and told them it wasn’t right. She showed honest interest in the human traders that came to Kalinor and in their way of life. She treated the surrogates with respect and made the last months of their lives a little easier to bear.“

„She never lied, never kept her opinion to herself to make her life a little easier – until her own life was in danger. That was why our god marked her. She was still young when she received the mark, younger than most. I believe she was only fifteen, a girl, not yet old enough to get married. Her family saw her as an annoyance at the best of time, but it is good that somebody – our god no less – appreciated her.“

„Your mother, Dra-Marvasa, was a very brave woman.“