The First Stain

by Dakota Rayne et al.

  Pax had started out a pragmatic and cynical Initiate, but over time, had come to truly believe in the Inquisition’s purpose, its mission. Replacing the search for his father with something that truly mattered, and that gave him purpose. It was an institution dedicated to pushing back the Terminator, and safeguarding the lives of children growing up all on their own. That was something Pax could believe in without reservation.

  But the incident in Cairn had removed his blinders. Yes, the Inquisition would protect men, women, and children, but only those fettered to the Inquisition’s uncompromising ethos. Pagans—innocent or otherwise—had made their decision, or so Pax’s fellow Inquisitors were fond of saying. They were beyond saving.

  No; what the Inquisition demanded of him, he couldn’t give. Wouldn’t. Mastus had to know as much, had to know that Pax no longer believed in what they were doing. Things must be pretty desperate for the old cyclops to consider him worthy of becoming a Judge.

  Another gust of wind whipped at Pax’s robes.

  More coughing. High-Inquisitor D’Nai’s robes swished as she came around the altar to whisper something to Mastus. He grunted. “Our time is short, Pax. We must hurry if we are to excoriate the darkness Nil stretches across Cre’.” The Arch-Inquisitor was racked by sucking wet coughs once more. Pax made to rise, but heard an acolyte come forth, then the sound of a chalice being slapped away. It landed with a series of clangs upon the tiled floor.

  His master wheezed. “You still seek him, do you not, Pax? Some part secreted away from even yourself searches for the man who abandoned you.”

  Pax raised his head to look at Mastus. His skin lay fallow against crumbling cheeks, brittle fingers clenching the throne he now seemed a part of. It made Pax’s heart ache. He tried to break his gaze with that single eye but couldn’t; there was something deep within it. Some irrational gaze hypnotizing him.

  “Your father.” The Arch-Inquisitor sighed, the sound tapering away; its rasp left Pax feeling as barren as the miserable town he’d left as a boy. “I’ve kept secrets from you, Pax. So many secrets. You shall be the last Inquisitor to enter the Conventus. Once you arrive, assuming the Chain holds strong, you shall find the man you’ve sought all these years.” Mastus dabbed at the sweat beading his brow. “It is not what he wanted for you, and I promised to leave you be, but things have changed. Nil’s servants have killed all other potential Judges, and Her foul influence poisons the Conventus itself.”

  Another stiff wind sent languid streams of incense smoke whorling.

  His father was inside the Conventus? That could mean only one thing. . . and what did Mastus mean by other ‘potential Judges’ having been killed? Pax had so many questions, but Mastus’ gaze was a powerful thing, magical somehow. All he could do was listen, eyes transfixed.

  The Arch-Inquisitor’s words seemed to come from some far-off place. “His very soul is in danger, Pax, and only you can rescue him.”

  Cleansing Fane

  Those that impede the Inquisition shall not be spared by virtue of innocence. None shall elude purification.

  Pax had been in the appropriated shack for what he suspected was some time now.

  The slaughter had exhausted itself. Like concentrated fuel, it had burned hot and fast, consuming the Initiates’ zeal, but not before reaping all that they had sown. Pax had eventually managed to wrangle them in, but by then, it was too late.

  He’d ordered them to leave him be in the shack, door closed.

  The rocking chair Pax sat on seemed to creak beneath the weight of his failure. Tamlin lay slumped over the table, weeping, arm still pinned in place by that golden nail. The wound was a bloody, inflamed mess.

  Pax had woken him with smelling salts. Had felt compelled to tell him what had happened outside. The boy had wept over losing so much so soon. Two worlds ruined in as many months. Tamlin would grow up convinced he was a cursed thing. That was, assuming he or anyone in Cre’ lived long enough to see the next few years.

  More effectively broken by the news than any amount of torture Pax could stand to deliver, Tamlin had confessed that he had indeed been in the woods. Had snuck away in the night, but not for what he’d been accused of. It was to rendezvous with a girl.

  A girl. Blue dress. Blonde. Gangly limbs; the way teenagers tended to be. That was all Tamlin had said through quivering lips. Tamlin then laid his head down, and despite still being pinned to the table, whimpered, whispered, and bemoaned his fate. Pax hoped the boy was telling the truth so he could remove the nail and give him some modicum of relief. Another of his bitter gifts.

  The Inquisitor kept on rocking back and forth in his chair, contemplating how different his life was compared to the boy’s.

  Pax’s mother had kept and tended to a similar rocking chair in their small home. She never sat in it, and Pax was forbidden from doing the same. She’d caught him on it one afternoon and had belted his backside so many times he’d had to sleep on his stomach three nights in a row.

  She died a few years after Pax had become an Initiate, having refused the request he’d made in his letter to her. Weystacks, the town veterinarian—and mayor—had proclaimed her passing to be the result of an acute case of a bullet to the brain. The man had found her in that coveted rocking chair, surrounded by empty bottles; a pistol clutched within her rictus grip. White Well had been consumed by the Terminator a few months later.

  Back and forth. Back and forth.

  Pax looked the boy over. An orphan with no one to miss or love him, and yet, his ribs didn’t show and his eyes had abstained from going hollow like so many guttersnipes littering Cre’s remaining cities. The people of Cairn had seen to his needs regardless, and raised him as a collective. Good people, those pagans. What few remained.

  Pax had had no such upbringing. Mother had been too lost in her mind, the black dog having sunk its teeth deep into the wound his father had carved into her the day he’d left. Despite growing up in a small backwater town just like Cairn, Pax’s ribs had poked through ill-fitting shirts, eyes peeking past the caves hunger had etched into his sockets. The only people that had ever accepted him were the Inquisitors. Pax had saddled himself atop their righteous mandate since then, but that once reliable leather had ridden itself raw this night.

  A blue girl. Blonde dress. Broken limbs.

  He stood, barely keeping to, his thoughts seeming to stagger from one mutilated image to the next as he approached the door leading outside. Pax tasted ash. Smelled it too. He looked at the door, knowing what lay on the other side. He opened it.

  Corpses.

  Corpses stacked atop one another with no adherence to man’s need to make things fit. An artificial hill composed of gruesome earth whose features consisted of accusatory crags that jutted however they’d been thrown to rest. Pax had seen firewood stacked with more diligence than this.

  The corpus was a marred thing; bearing fleshen furrows and fissures, as though some drunken god had descended from up on high to assail the Inquisition’s joyless monument to slaughter; a profane benediction none had prayed for, but that was required nevertheless. Powder-fueled meteorites had punched through the rind of that forsaken landscape, as if in an attempt to reveal the muscle and bone beneath. Coagulated lakes pooled about the hill that one could dip their hat into and drink from, but those tepid waters reeked of sulfur, tasted of iron.

  Pax stumbled over bodies not yet added to the grisly monument while a pagan choir surrounding it hurled hymnal lamentations into the firmament, but their god of light maintained its mute vigil. Its indifference, their call to action. And so the pagans sang on.

  Punch-drunk, Pax mumbled to himself, using the newly erected bursa like some despised icon around which he circumambulated.

  He found a blue girl wearing a blonde dress stained crimson laying face down in the dirt. Pax crouched, turned her over. She still breathed, but it was a shallow thing. He brushed aside hair covering bulging eyes. Shame. She was pretty. Could’ve been a good wife, raised children, died
peacefully surrounded by loved ones.

  He asked the girl if she’d met with Tamlin at night, waited. She offered bubbling sobs and a creek of blood which was swallowed by the thirsting earth. Eventually, she spoke.

  Lies, she said. All of it lies.

  A cry arose from one of the Initiates, pointing toward the shack. Pax spun to see Tamlin, cradling his hand and sprinting into a forest cloaked in shadow.

  The Inquisitor cursed and gave chase.

  Pax could see his breath in the frigid air of the monastery. Small clouds that puffed into life, then roiled toward infinitude. His mind teetered on some precipice he’d never quite realized he’d been walking as Mastus’ lone eye held him in place.

  Only Pax could save his father. That was what Mastus had said.

  “Pax,” the Arch-Inquisitor wheezed, “the time has come. Time you entered the Conventus. Became what you were destined to be. What we’ve kept from you all these years.” Without warning, he lunged from his throne, seizing Pax’s robes in a way only the dying were capable of. He caught and cradled Mastus as one might a babe.

  “Seek—”

  A seizure gripped the Arch-Inquisitor. He bucked and shuddered as it came and went. His breath surviving in truncated gasps as he attempted to speak once more. “Seek the Chain!”

  Mastus’ back arched as another round of convulsions took hold. Bones cracked and popped beneath thin flesh, frothing bile billowing between his clenched teeth as Pax held the only man he cared about amidst his agonies.

  Please, please don’t you leave me too.

  The Arch-Inquisitor’s eye settled on Pax despite his convulsions.

  Pax stared into that singular globe, the iris a swirling pattern of white, red, and black. He felt himself hypnotized by those colored connotations as his sense of self evaporated. He stared deeper into the eye. So deep into that space that, when he finally blinked his own eyes, it took Pax a moment to realize he was no longer in the monastery, but on some barren shore.

  Looking up, the typical pantheon of constellations Pax had always reckoned by had been deposed by a dismal canopy concealing a singular, anemic light.

  Looking down, Pax saw that he was naked, that his legs were buried to the ankles in coarse sand colored onyx and freckled pearl.

  Looking ahead, he saw a carmine ocean ferrying congealed colonies of blood. The thick waters slapped the sand like excess skin against wet marble, ushering forth a choir of hushed voices across the benighted shore. The water lapping at Pax’s ankles was warm. Too warm.

  The wave receded, sighing like the death rattle of a thousand souls upon stillborn winds. Pax looked down once more to see reflectionless black leeches sucking at his pallid skin. The next wave deposited more leeches on sand and flesh while dragging others back into the sea’s jellied embrace.

  Pax noticed that with each wave, his body sank further into the sand. He remained in place, still, without volition.

  The whispering waves came again, sifting and sucking Pax deeper into the cursed coast. Then again, slapping and licking at his waist. Another wave, up to his shoulders. Whispers preceded the subsequent wave just before its gelatinous force slammed into Pax’s face, forcing blackened masses into his mouth, up his nose. A thousand-thousand souls hissed in accusatory, pleading, and churlish tones. The wave receded and so too did they.

  He wretched, gagged. Gasped for air.

  Another wave.

  Its force was too great even for the sucking sands. It slammed against Pax, unmooring him from the sterile earth into a sea bereft of water. Movement somehow restored, Pax tried to swim back to land but felt himself caught within some primeval undertow.

  The whispers slithered across Pax’s mind, prying at his sanity as he attempted to keep his head above the surface, but he could not. The fluid was too thick to tread. He made to take in air and instead inhaled thickened waters, gnashing on bloated leeches as he was sucked beneath the viscous veneer.

  The whispers overwhelmed his mind, their speech as swollen as infected tongues. Other voices shouldered through that multitudinous chatter, begging for freedom or salvation, but from what, Pax knew not.

  He screamed, the precious air birthing a malignant bubble which was quashed by the pressure and forced back down his throat.

  Through his terrors, Pax saw wavering points of light; pure and unmitigated spectra that suffused the red sea. Only those close enough were visible, and even then, were obfuscated by the passing of clotted shoals whose profiles were as nightmarish as the hellscape they navigated.

  It was then that Pax laid eyes upon the first leviathan. It was a thing felt before seen, its mass churning the waters through sheer existence. The pale light from the surface casted a pallor upon its scales and puckered flesh; its fins, tentacles, and other appendages a maligned assemblage of cancerous colonies. The horrid creature’s beleaguered movements through those defiled waters defied practicality. It swam from sight, the currents of its passing tossing Pax about like some ragdoll.

  Pax watched as, close by, another glowing point of light illuminated a behemoth before it; a comorbidity of divergent teeth and cankerous flesh. He heard the calcified pop of clacking molars as the light was swallowed by the behemoth, illuminating its maw from the inside out. The light was swallowed, digested, and shat out in some infantile semblance of its misbegotten parentage.

  Pax inhaled and choked, sinking deeper; the pressure crushing his frail form. He was tossed about by another current as some immense presence loomed before him. So large was it, that through his bloodied sight, all Pax could perceive was what he believed to be but a fraction of its visage: a thousand eyes—black irises punctuated by lucent, bone-white pupils—observing his thrashings. Each eye moved autonomous of its convex neighbor; a shivering wall of pale, glaring moons.

  A singular voice scattered the whispers, like some apex predator treading amidst carrion packs of yipping opportunists. It was the voice of a woman. Fear not, Brother.

  Pax’s terror was amplified by the grinding of ancient bone and sinew, those jittering eyes watching him be pulled toward some unseen groaning inhalation.

  It was then that the muted clang of steel cut through the miasma. A whipping of chain swirled and struck out at the stygian edifice. Another barrage assailed the monstrosity until its mottled eyes rolled back into some unseen head.

  A singular whisper tore at Pax’s mind, promising they’d be reunited soon, then the behemoth departed with a titanic sweep of its body, sending Pax deeper into the sea. He raged against his narrowing vision, the voices harrying his mind one raring nip at a time.

  Something solid brushed his fingertips. Chain.

  A light burst to life before Pax in the shape of a faceless body. It wrapped links of chain around both of his wrists, as though it were binding a prisoner. Though his lucidity sloughed away by the moment, Pax did not miss the pod of horrors angling for the two of them.

  Chain fastened, the light embraced Pax. Without warning, the two were hauled up through the sea, past abominations too slow to react but whose whispers still pried at Pax’s mind.

  They broke through the surface and into a ruinous sky whose horizon was bereft of curvature. Pax’s arms hung above him like some bloodstained supplicant as he vomited into the waters below. The sea roiled and swole beneath them, but no cruelties burst forth to drag them back down into those purulent waters.

  Pax looked to the suffocating clouds above, gazing upon the same impotent light from what seemed a lifetime ago. On some unheard command, the clouds parted to reveal a singular eye colored white, red, and black—the source and destination of the chain Pax and the figure clung to. He knew that eye, it was the same eye that had sized up Pax as a child. The same gaze that had observed and guided his training as an Initiate. The tortured sphere that had sent him to this wretched place beyond legitimacy. And it was a pacifying thing, scraping away the whispers crawling across his mind.

  Pax looked into the gleaming face of the figure holding him tight.
>
  You found me . . . Son.

  He gasped as the two were reeled into the eye of the beholder.

  Tireless Resolve

  Those that run die tired.

  Pax thundered through the forest, branches bowing and snapping beneath the weight of his momentum.

  He saw Tamlin dodge and weave through the darkened forest before leaping through dense bramble and out of sight while Pax stumbled over a knot of roots before righting himself and pressing on. He followed through the intertwining branches and into what appeared to be the town cemetery. Long-burning torches stood vigil over the newer additions; a tradition backwater folk in Cre’ kept to. Even the dead deserved some light.

  “Stop, boy!”

  Tamlin kept running, weaving between tombstones old and new.

  Pax unholstered a pistol, steadied his aim, and let the roar of gunpowder shatter the cemetery’s silence. One, two, three shots flew before the fourth punched through Tamlin’s calf. He tumbled to the ground.

  The Inquisitor approached, pistol at the ready.

  The orphan dragged himself away from the Inquisitor until a tombstone pressed against his back. A torch illuminated the pain twisting his features.

  Pax stepped up to the boy, clicking his tongue. “Only the guilty run.”

  Tamlin panted, looking from Pax, to his wounded leg, then back to the Inquisitor. He spoke past trembling lips, “I haven’t been truthful, sir.”

  “No, boy. Reckon you have not.” He waved his pistol at Tamlin, “Something about you’s wrong. Knew it the moment I smelled your blood. Stank somethin’ awful.” He let the words hang, the moment ready to loosen its bowels of any truths bottled up.

  Tamlin winced as he tried moving his leg. Despite the torch, a shadow slithered across the boy’s face. Tamlin spoke as he wiped tears away, “I’m sorry, I—” He gasped as his body was wracked by some unseen pain.

  “I bet you are.” Pax took a few steps back, reloading his pistol. He’d packed plenty of powder made to deal with cultists, but always kept a few surprises in his duster should things get interesting. Pax loaded a special round last into the chamber of his pistol now that he knew what he was up against.