The Conciege
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(TLO) Chapter 52: A Better Vice Than Weakness
🕑 Added 2023-08-27 20:26:11 +0000 UTCThe conclusion of the first test left their numbers dwindled. For the first month after it, Seth and his brother whispered amongst themselves. Murmurs and mumbles were the event of every night before lights out.
Borriovani never returned from Igor’s grasp, not that they were truly surprised. And Norman’s death was taken like the taste of medicine; bitterly but quietly.
Josiah, however, had somehow survived. He held the title of being the only one to be taken out of the room and returned. But he never spoke of what had happened when he’d been taken away. Bringing the topic up was the fastest way to bring the child to silence.
When the second month came by, the test was all but forgotten. It eased away like a case of chicken pox, a memory that was never addressed but ever present, sleeping in the back of all their minds. But in truth, it wasn’t the death of their brothers that worried them, it was the vivid representation of it. They had all heard the rumors of priests long before finding themselves here. There was not a single one of them that did not know these rumors. Stories abounding always whispered of deaths in the training of priests. They whispered of savagery and cannibalism. Discord and evil. The forbidden and the abominable.
Rumors whispered of a lot of things. It sowed a certain level of fear in all who heard. But to confront it, to walk into its presence and find it true, this does not birth fear; it breeds dread.
In their second month, Seth and his brothers watched the admission of new entrants, young children brought to suffer the curse of the seminary by priests who would not leave the world free of their pain. They all seemed so small, too tiny to survive what was to become, despite all being taller than Seth.
“Was I that small when I came?” Seth asked absently.
Jason chuckled lightly while Forlorn barked in laughter like an overenthusiastic dog.
“You looked like you’d topple over from one push,” Jason answered.
“If the first thing we saw hadn’t been your spar against Igor, we’d have had a field day with you,” Fin added.
Seth took that piece of information to mind.
They’d never known why the older children rarely ever bothered with them except on the few occasions when they would accuse them of having stolen from their rooms. Now they were older, with juniors, they understood why. The children were simply to small, for any association may or may not lead to violence. And none of the new children walking into the seminary knew violence.
The months that followed left them unable to bask in their seniority. Reverend Clint’s instructions took a significant increase in time so that his lessons encompassed the entirety of their Saturdays, displacing their lessons with the healer, much to the priest’s satisfaction, they surmised.
Clint trained them more rigorously than was usual. He forced them to hunt larger prey with arrows and knives. They crafted traps and learned to conceal their presence from animals. They learned to hide and slither, to sneak up on their prey and bring death with the flash of steel. He taught them how to react in the presence of greater foe, to show submission designed for survival, to feign superiority to a creature that would end them with a single strike. And when they thought themselves finally growing accustomed to this, he introduced them to a new opponent.
He taught them how to hunt reia beasts.
His choice of reia beast was a rabbit with hidden claws sharper than razors and as long as knives when revealed. He taught them how to approach the creature, how to differentiate them from those native to earth, because, as they came to learn, they looked no different with their claws retracted.
When Clint deemed them fit to hunt this specific creature, he moved them to larger prey. They hunted deer much evolved from the presence of reia and any larger reia beast they could find. They began with reia beasts that were herbivores with no taste for meat, then after four months of this, they hunted reia beasts that would actively seek them out. This, they came to realize, was a lesson in cruelty.
Clint would stand off to the corner, letting them find fresh tracks of animals they did not completely understand. Then he would follow as whoever found one of greater interest to him led. Whatever creature they would then come across was one they would handle themselves. Always it was something carnivorous. Something hell bent on hunting them back.
Graciously, each beast had no rank of their own. It reminded Seth and his brothers that while the seminary was willing to put them through tests capable of killing them, it wasn’t actively seeking to kill them.
Yet, how they survived each time was knowledge beyond their power.
At nightfall Clint would bring them together, gathered around a lit flame in gentle almost nonexistent mist. Each time Timi would seat beside Seth, Fin and Josiah would beside Jason, Salem and Bartholomew would pick wherever their mind led him, and Barnabas would always huddle so closely to Forlorn that Clint would often spare them questioning glances.
Surrounding the flame, he would regale them with theoretical lessons. He would tell them how to feel more like predators than preys in the presence of greater foe. He would teach them the signs of weakness to be found in reia beasts. He would point out mistakes made during their individual and group hunts; why he had been forced to step in, why they had been forced to flee, why their opponent had merely lost interest in them, why they had suddenly become the hunted when they had started out as the hunters.
Each correction, they would take as the religious do their holy books: without question.
There was a new addition to his lessons, however. Something he called notes from the seminary’s compendium of monsters. In this lesson he taught them of the different monsters the world was aware of. Some of them were knowledge only available to the seminary, others available to the world. He taught them of soul beasts and reia beasts. Of mutated monsters indigenous to earth, tainted with the arrival of reia. He taught them of the regular and the irregular, of reia beasts with neither soul fragment nor core that possessed skills. Of beasts that could teleport short distances, blinking through reality to cross distances unhinged by the laws of physics.
“Aren’t those skills only the souled should have?” Salem asked.
“Humans get their skills from the fragments they absorb,” Clint answered. “At Barony we become capable of much more than the skills we possess. A man with the skill to summon lightning from the skies will find himself capable of harnessing lightning within himself once he becomes a Baron. What that means is that if this same man decides to call down lightning using his skills as a Baron, it will be vastly more devastating than what he was capable of before Barony. How would a soul fragment from a beast give us skills if the beasts themselves never have one?”
In this way they learned of creatures once thought lost to myth. They learned of those hidden in mountains, of the basilisks in the northern mountain peaks thought to be immortal in some way simply because no one had found a way to kill them. They learned of the gryphons and the wyverns, the drakes and the salamander. They learned of creatures that breathed fire and were mistaken for dragons, of monsters with aura so thick it required at least a Baron to fight them, despite not being of Baron rank.
He regaled them with tales of his experience as examples of when to run and when to fight. He told of his time facing monsters as an unsouled during the first world crack and they began to understand that Barony had done the man a great deal of good in the realm of mortality. It begged the question of the true age of the man sitting before them. He did not look a day over thirty-five. Now they knew he was significantly older.
It made them wonder just how old their instructors were.
They learned every Saturday evening, and Seth always liked to think they grew better for it. But he knew there was little truth in it. After all, by the time their second year was closing on winter only one of them had achieved a feat truly worth commending.
And worry came to them on a demanding Saturday evening
……………………………..
The afternoon air was cold with the seduction of the coming winter, cold enough to feel it but not enough to find snow. It was somewhere in the late days of October or the early ones of November—time here being subject to the seasons rather than actual calendars—when it happened.
On one of their hunts Timi had gone missing. He’d stepped off somewhere between their discovery of a reia-boar and their chase after it. At first they had not worried, a wandering Timi in the wild outdoors was nothing new. However, a wandering Timi was a Timi Seth had grown to naturally keep his eye on. He allowed the boy’s curiosity drag him a distance away, but always kept him present, like a leash on a particularly active pet. After all, he was the only one of his brothers the boy listened to.
But this time Timi hadn’t wandered, Seth knew this as certainly as he knew he had voices in his head. His brother had simply vanished. One moment he had been there with them, chasing after the large beast, and then he was gone.
The terror was in the fact that Clint proved unable to find him, too.
It was in the darkness of the night when Clint had called them away from the forest. Whether it was to go and return with priests better equipped to find the boy or simply counting him as a loss, Seth would never come to know.
“Careful now,” Clint said with particular frustration as he led them through the forest, mists swirling about their feet. “More caution should be exercised today.”
Somehow Seth felt his frustration was born more from their forced abandonment of the boar he’d had them chase than their loss of Timi.
We swear we had our eyes on Fatso, Seth’s minds assured him as he followed behind Clint, last in the line of his brothers. He just… vanished. We’ve never seen the likes in anyone but the priests.
And Jason… sometimes, another mind added.
Seth held his tongue. The mingle of annoyance and guilt building in his stomach was new to him. Since joining the seminary he’d felt annoyance countless times. The emotion was no visitor to him. But guilt, this was so absent it had begun to feel anathema. Its presence now left him bereft of wisdom in its management. He wanted to blame his minds, but he was his minds, and he knew it—regardless of how much he refused to admit it to them.
We lost him twenty trees to the left and ninety trees back, another mind reported.
If we go back, another thought, we might be able to find him. Track him down.
Seth scoffed. “You want us to accomplish what a Baron could not?”
He does not have what you have?
“And what’s that?”
Us.
Seth chuckled bitterly, derisively. “Yet where’s Timi?” he asked. “Clint’s been keeping tabs on all of us, but I had only Timi to keep tabs on. And with all of you, where’s Timi? Tell me!”
“Blame helps no one here, Jabari.”
Seth paused to find his brothers staring at him. In the darkness, on the other side of them, Clint had spoken. His voice had been soft, almost comforting. His forest green eyes were bright enough to be seen even in the darkness across the distance.
“You did not lose your brother,” Clint continued. “And to blame yourself would be wrong. We will find him.”
There was guilt in Seth’s mind as one of them asked, and if we don’t?
“And if we don’t?” Seth echoed it.
Clint frowned slightly.
“Then we will be better,” he said, resigned. “If we don’t, we will be strong enough to ensure it never happens again.”
Seth thought he heard pain in the priest’s voice as the man turned away and continued leading them but couldn’t bring himself to care for it.
Clint’s answer wasn’t good enough.
Remember the story of the lost sheep? One of his minds asked.
Seth nodded soberly, tears pooling in his eyes, heralds of pain and loss. “From the holy book of the Christians Josiah hides under his bed,” he answered quietly. “Missing sheep was sought out.”
Their God left ninety-nine behind to find a single one, a mind clarified.
Seth nodded, following his mind’s logic, though he knew enough to know it was not the Christian God in the parable. Then again, the shepherd had been a representation of him, and the sheep his followers.
They…
“…Are our ninety-nine,” Seth finished for the mind, looking ahead at his brothers.
“Assure me we can find him,” he added, a moment after. He wasn’t the best tracker amongst his peers. In fact, that title had belonged solely to Timi. Clint had often commented that the boy seemed born for the wild.
But this was important.
“Assure me,” he demanded.
We can track hi—
“I want him found,” he interrupted. “Not just tracked.”
He slowed as he waited patiently. His minds were silent but he knew they were contemplating. He felt the contemplation because he felt as if he, himself, was contemplating.
When their answer came, it was all he needed.
We’ll find Fatso, a mind assured him. There was false confidence in the thought, but it carried certainty.
Seth was willing to bet on certainty no matter how much falsehood backed it. Sometimes, in the absence of confidence, arrogance was a better vice than weakness.
“How many trees left?” he asked more quietly than ever, gauging his steps, slowing even more.
Thirty, his minds answered together.
Seth nodded. “Good.”
Then he fell farther back. He turned, and ran.
Clint might’ve given up on Timi, but that didn’t mean he had to.
