Work Text:
A single spider-silk milk line of incense smoke draws up to the rafters, perfectly straight, masking the cloying reek of salt rot, bitter sweat, iron blood, and putrefaction with its holy, medicinal scent. A red smear of fire turning the resin to ash creeps downwards to the censure basin, the movement invisible, but unrelenting. Cvstodia is a land become an infirmary, a nation congregation united in their sufferance and in a solemn, dragging procession towards death. So it will be no surprise, then, to hear of a man dying, alone but not alone, speechless but not silent.
He has swallowed his tongue, they said.
His Pain has made him beautiful. Sweat comes off him like the tide; makes his body gemlike, gleaming. It soaks his shadow into fine, pale linen. This is what is left of his face. His muscle is bound in sailors knots, his spine a lockjaw steeple. His breath domes the drenched cloth; the Sisters have ceased to daub his forehead - he has soaked through sheets and straw, his sweat staining the old oak boards beneath his cot. It will not be his for much longer; but perhaps his scent will remain. Perhaps in their delirium they will find written into it the words he has now left unsaid. Look at the body. Is it not fit to break?
Images pour through the sieve of his font mind. The body is built from water, you know? The miracle once wept for us, and where those tears hit the dust the first men were formed. We were made for weeping. We were born to sweat. He lives this death and ten thousand others. He drowns in the darkness of his life, is hooked from it for brief moments and cast into memory. When his face betrays him they lay hands upon him - they know the end is near. Speak to us, o penitent one, they say. Do not pass to the other side of the Dream in sin.
His teeth are breaking under the pressure. They are building a ship of his ribs. They are weaving ruin with every strand of muscle in his body. They are carving effigies from his bones, and painting them with viscera. Beneath his eyelids the pupils move with the entire weight of the world.
There is no honour here, they are saying. He is thinking it too.