Chapter Text
Where spring air in the Pillars carries the scent of blossoming cherry trees, primrose, and the perfumed well-to-do, the Brume ever smells of dampness and soot.
Aymeric has grown accustomed to it over his years in service to the faithful here in the city’s lowest rungs. That, and the dark shadows cast by towering spires and bridges above, which are so grand and impressive when strolling the Arc of Triumph but less so when peering up at them from a hundred fulms below, where bats gather and dark water perpetually drips.
Having been adopted into a noble house at a very young age—and then shuttered away in the Scholasticate and seminary training—Aymeric’s reassignment to the Brume had been something of a slap to the face, a ringing in his ears, a startling opening of eyes.
He’d initially bound himself to the Ishgardian Orthodox Church in the hopes of meeting with his rumored father but strangely enough found comfort in the ritual of the Faith, the people in the community he shepherded and protected as he could, and the promises of Halone’s justice and righteousness. Nevertheless, such verses are hard to square against the bleak realities of Ishgard’s rigid social strata, Church politicking, and callous clergy more in love with power than Halone.
Aymeric yet tries.
In the kitchens of the clergy house he shares with several other priests assigned to the Brume, he bakes and cooks and tries to make sure no visitor to his small church goes unfed. He spends handsome Borel coin on wool yarn and blankets and firewood to help his congregation limp through winter. He vouches and pleads on behalf of his congregants when the temple knights come down hard upon them. Though he was reassigned here as something of a punishment, Aymeric resents it not—he is glad of it, even, having found somewhere he is truly needed.
And yet, when he is gripped by hands like cold iron on his late night walk home to the clergy house, Aymeric’s first thought is of becoming yet another body found in a Brume alleyway or vanished into the mist-covered crags below. His second is to wonder whether the hands that pull him back on his heels belong to inquisitors sent by the Archbishop.
The empty bread baskets in his hands tumble to the ground. The cry in his throat is cut short by a palm sealed tight to his lips and a piercing stab into his neck.
Prying in vain at the arm coiled around his chest and the hand muffling his every word and whimper, Aymeric is dragged deeper into the lightless tunnels that lead to the catacombs woven underneath Ishgard.
Though the pressure against his neck is cold as winter, the blood—his blood—spilling down under his collar is warm. 'Tis warm enough that he feels dizzy, his knees buckling and his vision dimming and the fight in him beginning to wane.
In his ear, he registers a murmur. An apology.
His eyes open to the sight of a grimy wall—not Halone’s frozen halls but not Her frozen hell, either.
Aymeric shifts where he sits slumped against the side of a decrepit tavern building. His neck is throbbing and his skull is pounding. The night chill has worked its way through the wool of his robes and down to the bone. Whoever had attacked him must have relented... strange, too, that they left Aymeric's family ring upon his finger and made no attempt to dump him over a railing. Rare mercies in these parts of Ishgard.
Disoriented and dead tired, he limps his way through the mostly quiet pre-dawn Brume, sticking to the shadows to avoid further attention.
Back in the clergy house, he sprawls over his narrow bed and heaves a deep sigh. He ought to wake the others and tell them of his perilous encounter. Or should he? Though his wounds seemed dire at the time, he’s made it this long… perhaps it seemed worse than it is? Aymeric’s eyes slide shut as exhaustion wins out over him.
It seems like mere seconds later that the door creaks open and wakes him.
“It’s not like you to miss morning lauds,” Father Renault says as he enters, his doleful eyes opening wide at the sight strewn upon Aymeric’s bed. “You—you look like you just went through a tribunal. What happened? Can I help?”
Aymeric gently blocks the hand that tries to check the tacky bloodstains that cover his long, blue-trimmed cassock. “I was grabbed last night on my way back from the church and… and they struck me,” he says, moving to cover his neck without thinking. “All the blood makes it look worse than it is. But I am fine. Well, not fine … but I will be once I am cleaned up.”
“It is quite a lot of blood,” Renault observes in his soft, flat way of speaking, a hand covering his mouth as he takes in the darkening stains that transferred to the bedspread. Brow still furrowed, he pours from the pitcher on Aymeric’s desk and sets a glass of water on his bedside table. “I will cover your Masses for the day and ask Mother Wilfrid to bring you some tea. You really do look awful, though, Monsignor… are you certain you don’t want a chirurgeon to attend you? You wouldn’t go amiss seeing one, I think.”
“Thank you, Renault. I think I can manage, though,” Aymeric says, grimacing as he sits up straight. Everything aches. Nausea swirls around his stomach like snow eddies. His neck is like a wellspring for the pain felt everywhere else. “Ah, I made some gilbassier yesterday. Take them with you and hand them out, won’t you? I would hate to see them left to go stale.”
“Of course. Feel better, Monsignor.”
Once the younger priest leaves, Aymeric forces himself up onto his feet and staggers to the basin of water in the far corner of the room.
He is partly reluctant to see the damage in full. His eyes slide up to the mirror expecting to see his own bloodied and bruised face looking balefully back at him.
Aymeric only sees the bookshelf behind him.
His whole body tenses the longer he stares—the longer he does not find himself where he most certainly ought to be. Almost frantic, he stoops over the basin and splashes himself soaked. He scrubs at his skin and sees the clear water turn dark and darker with red. And when he lifts his head, convinced there was just something in his eye or he was yet half-asleep, fright nearly takes him off his feet. There is still nothing but the shelves on the far wall behind him. Even with a trembling hand pressed to the mirrored glass, nothing shows.
Shaking, Aymeric stares down at his palms. There is still dried blood in their creases.
It all feels unreal, dreamlike, distant. He strips off his blood-drenched clothing and frantically examines himself, confirming that he is still solid and quite visible, if not in the mirror. His fingertips prod the aching wound on the side of his neck as he gently washes it clean. It’s not the gash he expected—just two sore little stabs, like he’d been assailed with a carving fork.
Aymeric only feels sicker after Mother Wilfrid brings him his usual tea and gives him the same chiding about seeing a chirurgeon, her eyes worriedly going to the linens wrapped around his throat. He gives her the strongest smile he can muster.
The worrisome feeling does not pass. The lancing pain in his neck worsens, if anything. His stomach responds in kind, knotting up so badly he must set his favorite tea aside. And, Halone help him, opening the curtains of his window immediately makes his skin crawl and sting, a few seconds direct light leaving bands of raw red skin across his arms and chest.
There is only so long he can pretend something deeply wrong is not at work here, but it is all too much and too terrible to acknowledge. Perhaps it is just a rash and a slight bit of madness come over him. Or perhaps the shock and some sudden illness are taking their toll. Perhaps if he ignores it, he will wake tomorrow with all things as they should be.
But as Aymeric speaks aloud his homily at a predawn Mass the next morning, he looks upon the members of his poor congregation—young and old and in between, all people he has counseled and comforted and broken bread with—and feels a twinge in his belly that frightens him. Under the sound of his own words, he can hear the heartbeats of so many bodies filling the church’s cold air, amplified by the stone walls and glass around them. He can tell them apart by scent alone.
His appetite returns.
Aymeric wonders if, from the pews, they can tell his teeth have grown a mite longer. Can they see the change in how he looks upon them? Do they notice him swallow as his mouth waters between words?
For the next fortnight he manages by telling his superiors he is fatigued, ailing, and in need of time for quiet contemplation and worship. His eyes ache at the columns of bright light slanting through windows. His head aches constantly, a stuporous fog clouding him. His stomach is too sensitive to take supper or breakfast yet the smell of raw meat in the kitchens leaves him salivating.
He abruptly leaves his much loved congregation in the hands of Father Renault before that ugly need kept clenched behind his teeth becomes too much to bear.
In the dead of night, alone before their chapel’s beautiful, stone-faced Fury, Aymeric kneels and prays for Her to absolve him of this monstrous curse. The changes in his body and the twisting of his desires cannot be Her doing. It cannot be Her will. And if anything or anyone could cleanse this voidsent, nightkin taint from his blood, it would be She.
He says the words in his heart, lest other ears hear. O Halone, hear my cry. Guide me through the blackest nights and steel my heart against temptations of the wicked.
More than a bell passes with him on his knees, a litany of pleas moving over this lips. But Halone grants him neither answer nor comfort.
Aymeric finds himself well and truly alone.
Were he to tell his aged parents of his unfortunate circumstances, they could well be frightened to death. Neither can he confess to his fellow clergy, lest the inquisitors drag him out to be burned and cast aspersions against his family, too. Even his few friends in higher places would be smeared with guilt by association if his condition was ever publicly exposed.
And the longer he is left to sit with the weight of what he is becoming, the more Aymeric ponders if this is divine punishment rightly meted out—if, as snowmelt and glaciers inexorably move downhill, his father’s sins have sunk their way down into him as well. Though the man now sits upon a throne and bears the famed Fury’s Grace, as a bishop Thordan had broken his vow of celibacy and seduced one of his own flock. He’d misused the authority granted by the Church, first to sway the girl to his side, and then to cover up the scandal that would surely have ensued after.
Or so Aymeric has gathered over years of listening to gossip and snooping through records at the Scholasticate. Perhaps there is some sort of corruption in the blood they share. Maybe Aymeric is simply damned to do the same and take advantage of those who trust him most—in the form of ever more violent and unsavory thoughts that leave his hands twitching and his lips wet from hungry want.
Still, he cannot resign himself to it. He will not. If this is a trial to prove himself better than the man who sired him, he would sooner starve than give in.
Out of pure desperation, he feeds upon himself first. Needle-sharp teeth sink into his own wrist. Bitter tears stream down his face from both the pain and how little satisfaction it brings. It is like trying to drink mist or breathe the thinnest alpine air—so much effort for the barest of returns.
As his parishioners come to the clergy house to offer what food and drink they can spare for their pallid, under-the-weather priest, Aymeric’s stomach knots with vicious desire and thirst entwined. It takes every grace Halone has ever given him to keep from pinning one of his kindest congregants to the table and fastening himself to her throat.
In the hopes of indulging and quelling the cravings, he ventures to a butcher early one morning and buys a full bucket of karakul blood. The smell is not as sweet as what he scents in other elezen and hyur, but it’s still tempting enough that Aymeric staggers to an alley not three streets from the butcher, falls to his knees, and plunges half his face into thick, sticky blood.
In the moment, it is better than communion wine, better than his favorite sweets, better than his own mother’s cooking. Shame and bitterness aside, it fills his stomach full and relieves his desperation. He has to shed his blood-soaked robes and carry them home, bundled tight and out of sight. In the privacy of his room, he washes himself clean and feels, for the first time in almost a moon, like himself again.
It does not last.
Having finally been served a true meal, this thing inside him yearns to be fed more. And while the excuse of making blood sausage works on several butchers in Ishgard, Aymeric knows it will draw suspicion soon enough—if not of being a blood-sucking nightkin, then of committing some other sort of dark heresy in the eyes of the inquisitors.
Once a long season of fasting begins and the butchers’ supply ebbs accordingly, Aymeric’s hunger grows to the point that he eyes his chocobo, loose hunting dogs, and even rats. Resisting the heartbeats of those around him, man and animal both, is surely some sort of penance, a trial that makes his skin crawl and his veins shrivel.
With a hasty letter to his superiors, he announces that he is very ill and locks himself in his room, refusing the chirurgeons his fellow clergy bring to his door.
He languishes there in conflict with the beastly part of himself that desires to crawl out his window and into another… onto the bed of Renault or Wilfrid, and bury his teeth into their neck the same way some creature had done to him. When Aymeric at last thinks he will simply perish from the force of his hunger, he closes his eyes and tries not to think of his parents.
And when he opens them again, the room is dark. The yearning for blood is abated, yet he can taste it on his own lips. The fluid is already turning tacky where it stains his chin and coats his front.
The door is still locked, presumably with some attendant waiting outside of it, but the window… the window is open, its frame and the surrounding wall smeared with blood, marked with handprints.
His own palms are red with it, too.
The realization is enough to make Aymeric retch, though nothing comes up from his stomach. Those thoughts he’d had before… were they mere fantasies, or did he act upon them? Whose blood fills his belly and sticks between his teeth? One of his flock? Another priest? And what does he do now, undoubtedly a murderer and a monster both?
With trembling hands, he scrubs at his skin, tosses his stained clothing in the fireplace, and wipes the blood from the door. With sick, mortifying relief, he realizes the scent is unfamiliar. It is the stuff of nightmares, the way it stains the white trim and crusts under his nails. He still tastes them between his teeth, his stomach turning even as it wants for more.
Bells go by and no fists come hammering on the rectory door to see him. No one shouts. No one brings torches. Somehow, it gives Aymeric little relief. No one he knows well has perished, but someone has. And he himself is to blame.
Aymeric despairs at first, in quiet contemplation wondering if he ought simply to drop himself into the Sea of Clouds the way the inquisitors do the guilty and unfortunate alike. But the thought of what his death would do to his mother in her sick bed, to his father’s pride, to the family name they so generously gifted to him…
He cannot confess without risking the same. But he can go before his bishop and plead to be removed from the clerical state and dispensed of his vows.
From there… from there, perhaps he can retire to the Borel country estate and dismiss its resident servants. Alone among fields and forests, no soul but his will be harmed.
“I have heard of your recent ailment and struggles,” Bishop Chrisjen answers after they’ve finished evening vespers and everyone else has left the chapel hall. “Your illness, whether spiritual or physical, shows plain on your face, Monsignor Borel. But to leave the holy order…”
Aymeric waits with held breath—or perhaps he simply does not need air quite like he used to.
“I could not justify it to the archbishop.” She shakes her head and squints her eyes at Aymeric. “You have ever been a kind shepherd to the poor entrusted to your care and a clarion voice for their charitable needs. The Fury surely made no mistake in beckoning you to the clergy. Your calling is to serve.”
He stands there silent, guilt weighing all the heavier for his own self-serving purpose in choosing the priesthood.
The bishop clucks her tongue and gives him a concerned, thoughtful smile so slight that it barely moves her lips. “The villages nearest the Dravanian border are, as you know, ever in dire need of Halone’s grace and clergy to guide them to it. One in particular has been begging for a priest of their own for more than a decade now. I believe you should go.”
Aymeric startles, his sunken gaze darting up to meet hers.
The fringe lands may be fertile and free of highborn lords that demand a hefty share of the crop, but the cost of living at far edge of Ishgard's protection is steep. What child hasn’t grown up with stories of the voidsent horrors and scalekin abominations that creep in from Dravania? Little wonder they’ve had trouble retaining a permanent priest.
“I believe the country air and pastoral life will do you well. I know the unyieldingness of certain Church traditions vexes you, and our holy brothers and sisters born of higher houses can be… unkind,” the bishop sighs, pulling a slight face. “Perhaps some time apart from the pressures of dealing with both will prove curative for you. Your new flock will be yours to guide and to care for as you will, for you will be the sole link to the Orthodox Church for Ferndale’s faithful. And they will be ever so grateful to have you.”
Grateful for him? When he loses his mind and devours the first helpless person to cross his path? Aymeric dreads it.
“And once you are recovered from this anxious illness, we can then consider bringing you home.”
“Your Excellency,” Aymeric starts—and then stops, unsure of what or how to protest.
At least he will be far from Ishgard and its throngs of innocents. In Ferndale, he’ll be near wilds rife with animals to hunt and feed from, sating his appetite on them instead. And perhaps it will be good for him, if only the folk there do not discover his strangeness. He may have to abandon any hope of confronting the Archbishop for answers, but the vocation he’s found purpose in may yet continue.
“As you say, Your Excellency.”
Aymeric departs in darkness and travels by the stars. By day he wraps himself tight and clings to shadow.
He arrives in Ferndale before the birds are chirping or the roosters crowing, his stomach filled with the blood of wild game. The few early-risen farmers and shepherds he passes along the road welcome him, all the more excited upon spying the priestly robes under his dark cloak.
The mist here is thinner than that of the Sea of Clouds but the way it pools into the dips between foothills reminds Aymeric of frothing cauldrons. Pastureland stretches for malms on either side of the packed earth road. Beyond tilled earth and uneven fences, the forest begins—and then sprawls on and on, uninterrupted. Even in the pre-dawn dark, the jagged peaks of Abalathia’s Spine cast long, deeper shadows across the land around them.
The village itself is quaint, albeit a bit somber.
Plump dairy cows low from their barns, their heavy bells clanking. The air smells of verdant forest pine and damp earth. Everywhere there are signs of the late summer harvest: tall fields being reaped, herbs hung to dry, half-barrels filled to the brim with wine-making grapes. All these signs of life and bustle take place in the shadows of collapsed towers, crumbling walls, and what looks to be a stone mansion with a caved roof. Ages ago, Ferndale must have been a fortress town, a country lord’s seat to hold the border here against Dravanian incursions.
Now, it is home to some hundred or so souls. And why they cling still to a place like this, trapped in the shadows cast by Dravania's Abalathian peaks, Aymeric is not quite certain.
He leaves his chocobo with the local keep, gathers up his belongings, and wanders to the church on the far side of the village, set a ways apart from all else. The grounds are home to a graveyard, its worn headstones protected by wrought iron bars and the foliage that grows over them. The church building is narrow and tidy, its stone recently whitewashed and wooden eaves painted. And, set behind it and off to one side, there is the rectory he was told of.
The door is unlocked, of course—and brand new, its wood a brighter shade than the rest of the cottage house. It’s clear from the wear and the smell that this place sat disused for many a year, but before that the place was well-lived in. The villagers must have hurried to dust away the cobwebs and sweep the stain-splotched, scratched up floors. The linens are all fresh. There are summer flowers in a jar by a window.
A knock sounds as he is getting settled and, upon meeting one of Ferndale’s small governing council, Aymeric must unfortunately answer her excitement and eagerness to socialize with nervous excuses: that he is weary from the journey, that he must needs rest a while, and that bright summer sunlight does not well agree with his eyes or skin.
If she is taken aback at all, it does not show. These people have clearly been so desperate for a priest to keep their church that even his oddities are quickly brushed aside.
For the first sennight, Aymeric is gifted with anything and everything his new congregation guesses he might possibly need: baked goods, local wines, blankets, dishes, and baskets of freshly picked vegetables. If only he could still stomach such solid food! Alas, what he cannot consume he tries to subtly pass along to the more needful families in the area. The rest he repurposes into meals that he can in turn serve to the very people who seek to feed him.
Surprisingly, the people of Ferndale do not mind the odd Mass schedule he sets. Most are humble farmers who work from dawn until dusk, meaning evening and early morning Masses fit rather well with their schedule. And after repeated invitations to join the villagers at the tavern—he’d worried his somewhat authoritative presence might sour their leisure time—Aymeric finally sighs and comes along, in truth heartened to be accepted so quickly.
He nurses a cup of sweet mead, taking the shallowest sips to blend in among everyone else drinking and cavorting. Surrounded like this, Aymeric can scarcely believe that just a moon ago he was so isolated and despondent within Ishgard’s crowded walls.
“You should head back to the church right after this, Monsignor,” Michel, one of the shepherds, tells him as the tavern’s laughter and conversation begins to wind down for the night. “You’re not from around here, else you would have waited for daylight before riding into Ferndale. It’s dangerous to walk alone around these woods at night.”
“It’s true,” a farmhand just arriving chimes in. “This is not like Ishgard proper. You ought to be careful. Let Ser Gabriele or Ser Jacques walk you back home,” she adds, pointing to two of the retired soldiers paid to reside in and defend tiny fringe villages like Ferndale.
“Oh, don’t let them frighten you, Monsignor.” Gaspard, one of the village’s few merchants, takes down the rest of his grain liquor and thumps the table. “Our resident knights scarcely have to lift their swords these days. Even the wolves only venture close enough to kill an aged ox or two.”
“Aye, but still… I’ve seen things,” Michel insists, more to Aymeric than Gaspard. “We all have. Eyes in the woods and such. Shrieks.”
“Because you lot sit around and terrify yourselves with tales of monsters in our midst. Right, Monsignor?” the merchant adds, gently giving Aymeric a nudge with their elbow. “I’m sure no eyes in the woods are a match for a priest chosen by Halone Herself.”
“I should not like to find out,” Aymeric half-jokes, fiddling with the gold ring on his finger as he tries not to think of that night in the Brume. “But I believe I can manage the walk from here to the church myself. I appreciate your concern on my behalf, though.”
There is a chorus of agreement and laughter and little murmurs. They’re too kind to him here… too trusting to imagine their new priest is as awful as anything that stalks their forests.
Aymeric is not halfway out the tavern door when he feels a hand clap him on his shoulder, nearly startling him out of his skin.
It’s… Marceau? Yes, Marceau, a carpenter he’s not yet come to know well.
“Take care, Monsignor,” the man whispers, fingers briefly clasping his shoulder tight. “If we lose you, too, they’ll never send us another.”
On the darkest of overcast days, Aymeric finds he can flip up the hood of his dark, gold-trimmed robes and walk out among the rest of the villagers. When such opportunities arise, he visits the market for wool yarn and carrots for his chocobo. None of his congregation press the issue of his aversion to sunlight, simply chalking it up to a personal peculiarity or sensitive constitution. For who would question a servant of Halone?
By night, Aymeric sheds his Halonic cloth and dresses in his old hunting leathers.
He’s always been a fair shot, even in the wan light of dawn and dusk. During their stays at the Borel country estate, he’d brought home hares, pheasants, and deer for their dinners. But something in his eyes has changed now, peeling back the fog of darkness that once could blind him. Even on moonless, starless nights, he can follow tracks, weave through trees, and kill swiftly.
Tonight he stalks silently after a young, wary doe. Aymeric holds his breath as he takes aim—his body barely wants for air, anyway—and shoots.
The deer falls where it stood, an arrow pierced cleanly through its eye. Even from yalms away, Aymeric can smell the first fragrant trickle of blood in the air.
Not unlike an animal himself, he crouches over the felled deer and tears into its slender neck with fangs better suited to a wyrm. Without fear of being witnessed this deep in the wilderness, he drinks with greedy, noisy abandon, relishing the satiation that comes with filling the pit of his stomach and quieting its calls for the trusting hearts of Ferndale.
Regret does slither its way through him as he looks upon the deer after, a hand cupped under her head and palm pressed to her cheek. He has never wept over venison before but… it truly feels such a waste, so much blood spilt and flesh left to rot for his sake alone.
Aymeric wipes his mouth on his sleeve and thanks Halone for the meal, if Her gaze even still follows him. Out here, so far from the marble likenesses of the Fury and grand cathedrals made in Her name, the thread of Aymeric’s faith stretches thin. His burden weighs on him all the more: it is his duty to make Ferndale’s church a beacon alight with the Fury’s presence, but a sullied nightkin-priest makes for a poor emissary. How can Aymeric extend the Fury’s grace to these faithful if he himself does not possess it?
Some time during the trek back to Ferndale, Aymeric realizes that he’s gotten himself turned around. The dense trees and brush aren’t familiar at all; the game trail he’d been treading has thinned out to nothing. He’d left a few wood-carved markers for himself around his hunting spots, but he can’t remember the last time he saw one…
Just on the verge of turning around and pacing back the way he came, Aymeric hears the snapping of branches in the distance. He holds in place until he hears another, and then his bow is back in his hands with an arrow drawn, uncertain what might be headed toward him. He’s seen bears and direwolf tracks out here. He remembers the warning in the tavern, too.
With his sight lined up along the arrow, Aymeric trains his eye on the underbrush rustling as something moves through it, expecting to see a furred head with toothy jaws emerge
Instead, there is just a man.
“Oh.” Aymeric lowers his arms, feeling foolish for having been so fearful. It is only once he recognizes that this is not one of his villagers—and that they are far from Ferndale’s relatively safe borders—that he brings up his bow again. “Who are you? Why are you out here at such an hour?”
“Could I not ask you the same?” The stranger cocks his head to one side, the sway of his pale hair highlighted by the wan, silvery moonshine. His expression is nearly as startled and mistrustful as Aymeric feels. “You’re a long way from Ferndale.”
“As are you.”
“I don’t live there. I am guessing you do, though.” He squares himself, making sure Aymeric sees the breadth of his shoulders and the firm set of his stance. “Lost?”
“I can find my way, thank you.” Aymeric neither wishes to admit in so many words that he is indeed lost nor to inconvenience him with some obligation to guide him home.
For a long moment, the lone woodsman stares, his eyes just a faint glint from the shadows pooled under his brows. His scent carries on the breeze, so peculiar that it nearly pulls all of Aymeric's attention. It's strong, sharp, even amid the pine and woodrot-smell that swirls around them and the trees; under the notes of salt-sweat and heartwood, oak moss and earth, there is something that rings strangely familiar. It makes the hair along Aymeric's nape prickle and his insides tense, his skin suddenly sensitive to every shift of the air or his clothing against it.
For the briefest, guiltiest of moments, Aymeric wonders what sort of taste pairs with a smell like that.
“Suit yourself, then,” the stranger says, apparently having had his fill of studying Aymeric in turn.
“Wait!”
The man pauses, hand wrapped around the trunk of a sapling as he turns his head and gives Aymeric a look over his shoulder.
“Where do you reside, if not Ferndale? We're malms from another village. I was told there are no watchtowers out here any longer, either.” Not that this man looks like a temple knight, of course.
“There aren’t.”
Aymeric is still in want of answers when the stranger begins tromping away once more.
“I… I am the new priest, Monsignor Borel. Or Monsignor Aymeric. I mind not either way,” he calls out, worried and a bit perplexed at never having seen the woodsman in Ferndale, even at the markets. Surely the woods are too dangerous a place for him to be so casually exploring at night? “If you should ever wish to come worship with the rest of us or even to pray alone, the church is always open.”
The offer earns him a longer, more weighted look.
“You should head that way,” he flatly tells Aymeric, pointing, “until you reach a creek. You can follow it until it disappears into an underground cavern. From there, you cross three or four hills and you’ll start seeing pastures.”
Aymeric is slow to follow the sudden sharing of directions, distracted by how stark his features are—pale in the moonlight, severe under shadow, wariness carved into the downturn of his thin mouth and narrowed eyes.
By the time his ears register the instructions, the woodsman has already turned and disappeared.
Aymeric should think himself quite ferocious—he is, after all, a predator to all the living, a bloodthirsty killer stalking in the shadows. Judging by the tales he’s heard of nightkin and their vile tastes, he is one of the most frightening of voidsent abominations.
Yet, as he drops his knitting project to the floor at a sudden rap on his door, he feels the same jolt of uncertainty which any mortal living alone might.
With a head full of worries, he moves to the door and unlocks it. Had one of the villagers passed in the night? Were they suddenly ill? Had something more terrifying than he broached Ferndale’s borders?
The oak slab swings open and Aymeric startles at the sharp, serious face peering back at him.
“Father.”
“You…” It takes a moment to recover a smile and play off his surprise. “Forgive me. I do not believe I ever heard your name when last we met.”
“It matters little.” At Aymeric’s slight inhale—and perhaps sensing more questions to come—the man relents and offers, “Estinien.”
“Estinien,” Aymeric repeats aloud, then once more under his breath. “And why have you come so late at night, Estinien?”
That severe stare flits off toward the humble church and then back again. “You said it was always open.”
“Ah… so I did.” Aymeric had not meant it quite so literally, but there is nothing wrong with making midnight prayers. “The doors are unlocked, so you ought to be able to pray at your leisure.”
“No one was home and no lights were lit. I felt I was intruding somewhere I’m unwelcome.”
“No, never. You are always permitted in the house of Halone. She is hardly in the habit of turning people away.” After all, Aymeric has yet to be struck down with a spear from the heavens and he is a monstrous thing that hungers for Her faithful. “Here, I shall come with you.”
It is not until he steps out that Aymeric realizes he still wears his light sleeping robe and satin slippers. Sheepish of how prim he must look, Aymeric leads Estinien to the church with a lit candle in hand and a face so burning that it might well be glowing in the dark.
The embarrassment rather swiftly gives way to curiosity. For someone all on his own, Estinien seems comfortable traveling the woods in the dark. And alone, too. Where must he live? And how far was the journey here?
The church was freshly redone before his arrival, its sturdy stone washed white and the mark of the Fury retouched in a rich, expensive blue. Inside, Aymeric lights a few votives and the tall, tapered candles arranged at the altar before Halone’s stone figure.
“Sit wherever you please,” Aymeric tells him. “Or kneel. I do have a few floor cushions if you intend to stay a while.”
“No. Not so long,” Estinien answers, more interested in walking down the aisle and staring at the worn, empty pews, the opaque, colored glass of the windows, and the incense holders still smelling of juniper and stone pine.
“Is it your first time here?” His tone is politely inquisitive but his mind is already quite set. The way Estinien’s eyes and fingers trail over aged wood and stone is too familiar, too much a reverie; he likely knows this place better than Aymeric.
“No. It’s been a few years, though,” Estinien says, quiet enough that the rising nighttime wind buffeting the church’s steep roof nearly drowns out his voice.
“I see.” Aymeric twists the ring upon his finger, uncertain what had driven Estinien away—from the faith, from Ferndale, from any sort of company at all, by the sound of it. “I could pray with you, if you wish, and recite some devotionals. Or read aloud some verses of the Enchiridion to reflect upon together. Or I could sit with you in perfect silence. Whatever you like.”
The shadows thrown by the candles play dark over Estinien’s features, pooling around his deep set eyes and shrouding his lean figure. “Do as you will.”
Aymeric sighs and picks up a tome from behind the altar, smaller and less ornate than the one he reads from during Mass. Once seated on a wooden pew up front, he opens to a well worn page and reads under the dimmest candlelight, the printed word still as clear as to him as it would be at noonday.
“Blessed are they who stand before the corrupt and the wicked and do not falter. Blessed are the peacekeepers, the champions of the just, the righteous, the lights in the shadow.” Aymeric pauses there, the moan of the wind outside and the creaking of wooden roof beams rising like a voice of their own. “In their blood Halone’s will is written.”
When Estinien merely continues to watch and listen, Aymeric flips to verses on the next page.
“For foundations built of stone, marble, or precious metal are worthless if faith in Her Fury is absent. O Halone, hear my cry. Guide me through the blackest nights and steel my heart against temptations of the wicked. Make me to rest in warm places and bear me unto Your halls.”
“Favorite passages of yours?”
After listening to only the wind and the sound of his own voice these past few minutes, Estinien’s few words have him sitting up straight in the pew.
“They serve as meaningful reminders, yes.” Aymeric closes the book in his lap, a palm pressed to the speared dragon etched into its leather cover. “I find myself repeating them to myself more and more. And you? Is it nostalgic, being here again?”
“No. Not really.”
As Estinien crosses before the altar—neither bowing nor kneeling before Halone as he does so—the candlelight illuminates his lean silhouette. A long sliver of his chest is bare, as pale as his face and the tangles of hair that fall between his shoulder blades. But what draws Aymeric’s eye are the dark stains that mar the rolled up cuffs of Estinien’s sleeves, so familiar in color to the kind he himself regularly scrubs out of his clothing.
“The priest we had then was a bore, to put it nicely,” Estinien continues, voice a bit less harsh than what Aymeric recalls from the woods. “I’d crawl under the pew and sleep until he finished droning on.”
One corner of Aymeric’s mouth pulls into an amused half-smile, only mildly scandalized as Estinein steps up onto the dais and circles the altar space.
“The bishop of the cathedral my family attended was quite the same. He could go for hours, nary a care for the slow wilting of the faithful before him. Would that I could have stolen a nap in such times, too, but as an altar server I was obliged to suffer through it all.”
“Mm. You’re more devout than I, even as a child.” He folds his arms atop the altar railing and leans his weight down against it. “Would that Ferndale’d had a priest with a voice worth listening to back then. Might be I would’ve shown more interest.”
Aymeric feels the fresh blood in his veins rise to his cheeks.
It’s far from the first such compliment he has received. In fact, during his first assignment to an ornate church in the Pillars, he’d received quite a few lectures from his superiors for apparently being the cause of a number of besotted, indecent confessions from his congregants. Between that and so many young noblewomen approaching him after Mass for private pastoral counseling, he was swiftly and unceremoniously re-assigned to the Brume.
It is still nice to be flattered, though. At least Aymeric can say he has never had to struggle to keep his congregation awake and attentive.
“I am glad that I seem to be exceeding Ferndale’s expectations.”
“To be fair, you could not do much worse than your predecessor.” At Aymeric’s questioning look, Estinien adds, “He considered himself shielded by the Fury. Too holy to fall prey to voidsent visitors, unlike we unlearned folk. But Ferndale could be so protected too, he preached, if only their faith was stronger. If only they faced the trials Halone set before them and trusted in Her grace.”
“Ah.” Aymeric slumps a little in his pew, familiar with the type.
“If nothing else, he truly believed his own words.” Estinien rolls his eyes, the extent of his respect—and sympathy—for this holy man clear. “With half the village watching, he wandered out into the woods one night to show that the worthy faithful need have no fear.”
“And he was never seen again, I take it?”
“Mm… he was. Briefly. But he was no longer himself,” Estinien answers, trailing the tip of a finger back and forth along the railing. “He crept back in the night, dug up a recently interred body, and locked himself in the rectory with it. Not very holy, what he started to do then."
Aymeric dare not ask for specifics. Memories of his open, blood-smeared window cross his mind's eye unbidden and he hates what he sees of himself in this tale. There was a wretched time he could have done the same—when even days old, congealed blood would have stolen his senses and rendered him just as bestial. His discomfort must show, for Estinien swiftly moves on.
"Something else followed him from the woods, though. Something worse. It got inside the rectory. It got him before he could get his hands on anyone living.”
Aymeric thinks of the bright hue of the building's new door. He recalls those deep scratches along the rectory’s floorboards. He’d attributed them—and various dark stains upon the wood—to the wear and tear of time and living. He grimaces.
“That is how Ferndale lost its previous priest?”
Bishop Chrisjen certainly could have mentioned a few such details.
“Aye. And had he not felt invincible enough to go traipsing around these parts alone at night, he need not have died so gruesomely,” Estinein mutters, his stare sliding over to meet Aymeric’s. Before Aymeric can make light of the insinuation in Estinien’s voice, the woodsman adds, “Did you kill that deer, Father? The one I found shortly after we met.”
Cold burns through Aymeric’s veins. He worries with the ring around his finger and begins speaking before he even knows what to say. “It’s… it’s ‘monsignor.’”
Estinien makes a soft, close-mouthed sound. “Apologies, Monsignor. So, was it your kill?”
Aymeric licks his dry lips. “I was hunting, yes.”
“Hunters don’t usually leave their catch behind. Waste of meat and hide.”
“It was more than I could carry over such a far distance,” Aymeric lies—and under Halone’s roof, before Her stony visage. It does not roll from his tongue as smoothly as words usually do.
“Mm.” Estinien lingers a moment before the altar and the armored statue of the Fury who stands in an alcove just above it. “Poor creature had nary a drop of blood left. Was that an attempt to make it lighter, Monsignor?”
Seated in a pew and peering up at Estinien on the altar dais, Aymeric is struck by the feeling of judgment—of being recognized at last for what he is under his clerical robes and fang-backed smile, and not by Halone or Her servants or the congregants he sees after each sunset and before each sunrise.
He is wrested of all words, too stricken to even muster an excuse. What right has he to try? People have been lashed to a pyre and burned for doing less than what he has done and being less than what he is, and Ferndale surely has no shortage of pitchforks and torches.
“You ought to be wary of venturing out there again. Strange things slip into the woods from Dravania,” Estinien continues, as if he hadn’t just made it clear he suspects Aymeric of being one of them. “I don't always catch them before they get close to Ferndale.”
His look settles heavily upon Aymeric, who cannot meet it for more than a moment.
With his chin tucked down to his chest and his gaze firmly fixed on the clasped hands in his own lap, Aymeric listens as heavy footfalls draw near…
…and then pass down the aisle, Estinien leaving as unexpectedly as he came. Though no words were spoken, some sentiment lingers in the air after him: he knows what Aymeric is and he just may slay him for it.
It is near dawn by the time Aymeric stands and blows out the almost-spent candles. As he shuts the doors and makes the brief walk back to his humble lodgings, his heart hangs in his throat.
He knows not the night nor the hour but he will be seeing Estinien again.