#bone deep hatred for ongoing series | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

red-will · 3 years

Link

This is how we can envision Black freedom

For the U.S. to untangle itself from its legacy of white supremacism, we must live like we understand what our true history teaches us, from Emmett Till to George Floyd.

PUBLISHED MAY 25, 2021• 20 MIN READ

On June 27, 2015, Black artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina statehouse and took down the Confederate flag that had flown above the people of that state for over 50 years. This act came 10 days after a white supremacist murdered eight Black parishioners and their pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Grown from a congregation first organized by enslaved and free Blacks in the late 18th century, Emanuel is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the American South. It is a church where Black freedom has been envisioned and practiced throughout the entirety of its existence, from the 19th-century congregant Denmark Vesey—who bought his own freedom and helped plan a revolt of his fellow human beings who were still enslaved—to the 20th-century civil rights marchers and leaders who regularly gathered within its sacred space.

As she expected, Newsome Bass was arrested as soon as she rappelled down the statehouse flagpole, Confederate flag in hand. Her act memorialized Emanuel’s pastor and parishioners. It also made an ephemeral but indelible monument to Black freedom.

When asked why she did what she did, Newsome Bass answered, “I did it because I am free.”

What does it mean to be Black and free in a country that rejects Black freedom?

II.

I am an educator who teaches students about submerged histories, revelatory art, and the critical thinking that sharpens questions that move us toward truth. I am a poet, and my poet’s tool is the word. The word is holy and bears the heft of human experience; the poet must wield it as precisely as possible. I have found that writing poems brings me closer to understanding my fellow human beings—individually and in community—in our many contradictions and complex histories. Poems give form to truths and understandings that might otherwise be lost.

As leader of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I am privileged to help support artists, thinkers, researchers, and other kinds of builders who illuminate stories and experiences that have often been hidden, overwritten, or mistold.

In a year darkened by loss, their light shone with particular power through the work we are supporting with the largest initiative in our history, the Monuments Project.

We have found inspiration in monuments like artist Judith Baca’s “Great Wall of Los Angeles,” a vibrant mural more than half a mile long that has brought together dozens of community members over 40 years to paint a richer, more inclusive history of California.

We supported a new memorial to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who, when visiting family in Mississippi in the summer of 1955, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His mother brought his body back to Chicago for an open-casket funeral to “let the people see what they did to my boy,” and Jet magazine published photographs that would widely spread the word of a terrifying story that was not isolated.

Till became an emblem of the racist violence that Blacks were still subject to and helped to catalyze the civil rights movement. The site sign that marks where his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi had to be replaced many times because it was riddled with bullet holes.

As an educator and fieldbuilder in African American studies, I believe that the knowledge from this field sits at the center of any genuine understanding of the United States, holding the legacy and ongoing existence of anti-Black enmity in its unflinching gaze alongside the knowledge, philosophy, and creativity that emerges from this American history of struggle and endurance.

The lynching of Emmett Till and the mass murder of the Emanuel parishioners—among countless other acts of anti-Black terrorism down through the generations—underscore this truth about our country: It was built in part, and is still being built, on anti-Black hatred and violence. How do we move forward with this contemptible knowledge and its antidotes as our guides?

III.

On January 6, 2021, domestic terrorists carried out a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol. Incited by the president and some in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, this armed and organized mob brutalized law enforcement; killed a police officer; terrorized democratically elected representatives, their staffs, and some of their family members; assaulted journalists; erected a gallows; looted offices; stole documents and laptops, including that of the speaker of the House, which the thief allegedly planned to sell to Russian agents; smeared human feces through the building; and extensively defaced commemorative displays and works of art, including a memorial placard to Congressman John Lewis, the recently deceased civil rights icon.

Also on that day: A Confederate flag, which had never before breached the heart of Congress, was waved in its halls by one of the terrorists. This flag memorializes white supremacy, commemorates the lost cause of those who fought a war to keep Black Americans enslaved, and instructs race-based hatred.

After hours spreading savagery and chaos through the halls, the terrorists were largely allowed to depart the Capitol unfettered. Photographs showed Black and brown custodial workers cleaning up the wreckage the mob left behind.

IV.

Years ago, I wrote a series of sonnets in the voices of young Black women who studied at Quaker educator Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in the 1830s. White parents pulled their daughters from the school because they did not want them educated alongside Black students, but Miss Crandall continued educating those young Black women and girls despite the violent opposition of Canterbury’s white residents. Those residents ultimately burned the school to the ground. Miss Crandall’s unwavering courage could not keep the schoolhouse safe. But in the sonnets’ vision, the rare quest for education for Black women was “the one perfect religion” that the townspeople could not destroy.

Without learning, without knowledge, without the voices and the experiences and the insights gained from a determined excavation of our country’s past, we will never eradicate racism and racial violence. If we are to stop weaving white supremacism into the fabric of our country, then we must learn our full histories. We must live like we understand what that history teaches us.

In a poem, I once portrayed the great poet Robert Hayden in the 1940s as he dedicated himself, “stoop-shouldered,” to sifting through the records of the slave ship Amistad, extracting history’s hidden insights and the story of resistance from that ship’s log. “Blood from a turnip,” I wrote of his daunting and exhausting process of deep research to tell the story of “this / protagonist-less / Middle Passage” from the perspective of the captives rather than solely that of the captors.

Ultimately the “slavers’ meticulous records” revealed the determination of the Africans on board to resist being dehumanized as property. That gave Hayden, in turn, the knowledge he needed to tell us the story too few had contemplated: that there were many Black people who challenged slavery as their fate and fought back for their freedom, as well as white people who were their allies.

To return to Miss Crandall: After her school was destroyed, in 1834, one of her students, a young Black woman named Julia Williams, moved to New Hampshire to study at an integrated school. There, as in Canterbury, the act of teaching Black and white children together drew a violent response from white people in the community. I researched the history and then described, in the conjured voice of Miss Williams, an unforgettable true scene:

From the town and neighbors came three hundred armed men, ninety oxen teams.

They dragged the school building utterly off its foundation. I have twice seen bloodlust and ignorance combust. I have seen it.

Bloodlust and ignorance combust. I continue to return to those words.

New York City, where I was born, is a city that exists in the mind and in the matter-of-fact corporeality of day-to-day New Yorkers as one definition of freedom—freedom of expression, freedom of belief, and the power of a multicultural metropolis.

The identity emerges from complexity. More enslaved Black people lived in New York City in the 1700s than in any city other than Charleston, South Carolina. Many free Black people lived in New York as well, in places such as Seneca Village, where residents were forced out by eminent domain in 1857 before the community was razed to build Central Park. Those enslaved and free Black people’s stories still speak to us through material clues such as the coins, beads, coffins, and shrouds left behind in subterranean sites like the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.

In Brooklyn, in 2001, five corncobs laid out in a distinct shape were found in a crawl space of a house. Those corncobs formed a star, scholars determined, that suggested a West African cosmogram, one that conveys two worlds of the living and the dead, both eternally connected in a West African vision of the cosmos in diaspora.

When I read about that archaeological discovery, I envisioned the moment when the rumor of freedom was made real, in a poem called “Emancipation”:

Corncob constellation, oyster shell, drawstring pouch, dry bones.

Gris gris in the rafters. Hoodoo in the sleeping nook. Mojo in Linda Brent’s crawlspace.

Nineteenth century corncob cosmogram set on the dirt floor, beneath the slant roof, left intact the afternoon that someone came and told those slaves,

‘We’re free.’

Imagine, the revelation of freedom—two words, “We’re free.” We are still enacting and imagining the aftermath.

VI.

In mid-century Los Angeles, in the Watts neighborhood, an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia built an extraordinary structure by hand. The Watts Towers soar toward the sky in multiple forms, nearly a hundred feet tall at the highest. Rodia envisioned and built the towers day by day over three decades, from durable steel and delicate wire mesh, bottle glass, white seashells, pottery shards, mint chip and maraschino mosaic tiles, shades of lapis lazuli, cobalt, and the thick, bright yellow of a crayoned sun. Like the “corncob constellation” left behind in the crawl space of the house in Brooklyn, each seemingly mysterious object carries power and meaning.

“It shows that we are people too, that we have brains and we can make it too if we put our minds to it,” Carolyn Byers, a young woman from Watts, said of the towers. She was talking to a reporter in 1991, the year Rodia’s vision was designated a national landmark; six months before that, a Black man named Rodney King was brutally beaten by white police officers in the San Fernando Valley, and the officers’ subsequent acquittal sparked five days of riots across South Los Angeles.

Rodia moved to Watts about a century and a half after the Spanish founded the pueblo that became Los Angeles. Many of the Gabrielino-Tongva peoples who were the first inhabitants of the Los Angeles Basin were forced into enslaved labor at the region’s Spanish missions. By 1848 the part of Tovaangar that would become Watts had passed from the Spanish Empire to the Republic of Mexico and then was taken, along with more than half of Mexico’s territory, by the aggressively expansionist United States at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War.

Rodia lived in the community as it changed from one populated mostly by whites and Mexican Americans to a home for African Americans who had left the South in the Great Migration. By the time he completed the towers in 1954, the Watts community was predominantly Black; today, one full century after he first put his hands to steel at East 107th Street, it is majority Latinx, including large communities of Mexicans and Salvadorans. Throughout this time—throughout Los Angeles—descendants of the Gabrielino-Tongva peoples have continued to live in and honor their ancestral homeland. None of these complexities contradict; we must understand them together.

I have always been so moved by the inspirational power and seeming impossibility of the towers that I described them in the poem “Stravinsky in L.A.”: “The Watts Towers aim to split / the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble / nothing less than aspiration.”

To aspire: from the root meaning, fundamentally, “to breathe.”

VII.

When my family moved to Washington, D.C., from Harlem in late 1963, many parts of the city were racially segregated. I grew up a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. My family and I would regularly stroll its meticulously tended grounds and sometimes picnic. Most years on the Fourth of July, we’d lay out blankets in the humid evening and listen to the U.S. Marine Band as fireworks exploded overhead in the summer deep darkness.

The Library of Congress was my childhood library because the Library of Congress is a public library. In high school I would research and write my papers there. Sitting in the glorious rotunda, I would think with excitement how the very building in which I learned held almost every single book on Earth. Anyone who walked through the doors had access to them.

I knew that the Capitol was where the actual business of our country’s governance took place and that it stood gleaming as both a symbol and a site for working out the complexities of millions of different people, with all their beliefs and backgrounds and experiences, living alongside one another in an ever evolving democratic experiment. My parents taught me that the Capitol was built by enslaved Black people, and that reverence for a space that was ours did not erase understanding voter suppression and the three-fifths compromise. They showed me how to hold seeming contradiction with a comprehension of our full history.

At the Lincoln Memorial, the towering marble form of the 16th president might make a child feel dwarfed, just as it made me feel as a child. But I want the child of today to understand that this figure is not merely a shadowing stone statue. It is also a site of powerful community gathering and activation. As the central location of the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and so many marches to follow—the Lincoln Memorial is one of the most significant sites of civic action in our history. When Marian Anderson sang “my country, ’tis of thee” on its steps in 1939, she rebuked the segregation that had barred her from singing in Constitution Hall before the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Monuments and memorials are places where people come together to remember, to collectively mark a moment, to be a “we,” to help identify a new direction, and to make a way forward. This is the case even when the way forward is shaped by grief and not by joyful determination. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by the artist and architect Maya Lin when she was just 21 years old, introduced into the D.C. of my young adulthood a memorial that had no precedent in the D.C. of my childhood. This slash into the earth bears no figuration. It holds instead the ephemeral reflections of those who walk down into the ground to mourn their dead, evoking the true cost of all wars. It does so even as it raises unarticulated questions about the millions of Southeast Asian people who also were killed in that particular war, and whose names are not recorded on the memorial’s black granite.

What would it mean for us to have monuments and memorials that do not teach us to memorialize war or to commemorate fighting against others? What would it mean to enact the enduring spiritual’s words, “I ain’t gonna study war no more,” in our monuments?

VIII.

Tell the whole damn truth, in our history, our art, our words, and our memorials.

Mighty civil rights and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s words are the simple truth: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Fighting for Black freedom means, in the words of Robert Hayden, “visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.” It means understanding 19th-century Black enslavement alongside 21st-century Black mass incarceration; comprehending why Emmett Till’s casket is the most sacred object in the National Museum of African American History and Culture; acknowledging the horror of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders standing in seemingly never ending seriality with so many other murders. Fighting for Black freedom means centering the crucial questions raised by decades and decades of African American studies; they are still the right questions. And recognizing that the bravery of Bree Newsome Bass in June 2015 is more powerful than the violent desecration of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.

Most days I play or hear in my head Nina Simone’s 1967 version of the Billy Taylor song, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” The song has light and delight; it is singable, and in one facet, joyful. But the “wish” is both a commanding action—wish it, make it happen—as well as a word that says we’re not there yet. The conditional tense, “would,” marks that freedom is not fully attained.

The song’s bright music moves us ever forward. But Simone’s voice, in all its coloration and nuance, the dark side it carries in its light, reminds us that freedom—the right of every one of us—is a process. Freedom is work. Freedom doesn’t come by wishing. We must vision it. And we have survived by enacting those visions.

Elizabeth Alexander—poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate—is president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is the author or editor of 14 books and twice was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; her book The Trayvon Generation is to be published this fall. She wrote the poem “Praise Song for the Day” for Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration in 2009 and delivered it there.

This story appears in the June 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.

#black freedom #elizabeth alexander #nat geo #national geographic

0 notes

clansayeed · 4 years

Text

Bound by Choice ― III.ii. The Children of the Made-God

PAIRING: OC x OC x OC (Valdas x Isseya x Cynbel) RATING: Mature (reader discretion advised)

⥼ MASTERLIST ⥽

⥼ Bound by Choice ⥽

Before there were Clans and Councils, before the fate of the world rested in certain hands, before the rise and fall of a Shadow King ― there was the Trinity. Three souls intertwined in the early hands of the universe who came to define the concept of eternity together. Because that was how they began and how they hoped to end; together. For over 2,000 years Valdas, Cynbel, and Isseya have walked through histories both mortal and supernatural. But in the early years of the 20th century something happened―something terrible. Their story has a beginning, and this is the end.

Bound by Choice and the rest of the Oblivion Bound series is an ongoing dramatic retelling project of the Bloodbound series. Find out more [HERE].

Note: Choice is the only book in the series not based on an existing Choices story. It is set in the Bloodbound universe and features many canon characters.

*Let me know if you would like to be added to the Choice/series tag list!

⥼ Chapter Summary ⥽

That's the problem; the world would rather judge them than seek to understand them. Their love was never about sacrifice. It has always been about survival.

[READ IT ON AO3]

The sun peeks through plumes of thicker smoke hot at his back. Hot as the gluttonous flames that devour the manor; ravenous and with enough awareness of mind to lick their plates clean.

All this heat and yet he is cold. A glacier unrelenting. Chipped away from the mainland and forced out to a sea of lava. Bubbling, boiling, blistering.

Broken.

He is the warrior but she has always been the stronger of Valdemaras’ children. She was born in carnage and supplication to a higher death; with the torn flesh of her enemies between bared teeth as they grew long and unyielding — he was born in the ecstasy of understanding, of being known and knowing in return and of finding a singular answer to all of the questions he never knew he needed to ask.

No one else knows this. No one but the one who brought them into this world so different, so unique… but with the same blood pumping rabid through their hearts.

No one else knows this. No one.

“Let me go!”

“You’re hysterical! Cease this madness!”

“Isseya I will burn you myself let. me. go!”

“I cannot lose you, too!”

The animal of howling anguish he has become — Cynbel stops to turn to her, only able to think of the words that dared poison his lips even if only for a moment. The thought never there, never — never.

But the fire continues to exist. Cares not whether their eyes of desperate mourning are upon it and continues on. A load-bearing column wavers and falls; kicks up a fresh cloud of glowing embers and smoke up to the sky and sends the husk of wall nearby with it.

He looks back in time for the embers to dig into his eyes like little claws. But the tears that come aren’t by their touch. Not at all.

“HH—He…” Words — what fucking useless things. Irrelevant, fucking impossible. They’re never full enough, strong enough… never just enough.

They would waste their lives for his. Oh they would. Their God’s first and final gift and they would soak the ground with it so wet so nothing could burn there ever again. Would build a temple befitting his honor towering so high in the sky it alone would block out the sun.

“I don’t…” she splutters wet with tears, they’re falling at a rate so fast he can’t wipe them fast enough, “Cyn—h-he can’t be—I…”

Imagine a world without him?

Neither can he.

Nothing could have survived such a blaze. That much is certain.

Though there are some that have never put much stock in certainty. The figure that emerges from the crumbling half-ruins of the front threshold being one of them.

They rally her name in a bolstering cry. “Sayeed! General Sayeed!” As though she is their savior. For some of them she perhaps is; the picture of the old goddess Hel wreathed in ruinous wreckage.

She is their savior, he thinks — and is made vengeful for it.

Something writhes in her arms but her grip is one of ages. Well-fed ages, too. She approaches and all gather to meet her. Some in praise, some in awe. Cynbel and Isseya — they are caught in a limbo of their own making and only follow because there is nothing else left.

Kamilah tosses her burden onto the grass gracelessly. The face that looks back up at the enclave of vampires is bloody and bruised; a gaping hole reeking of burning flesh where one eye was supposed to be.

The servant boy from the dinner cowers in fright. Because that is all mortals are good for in the end. Blood… and fear.

A boot comes down upon the child’s throat and everyone revels in the creak of youthful bones before they snap.

“All you have risked in their name… and they abandon you to die in their chaos.” Never in his life has Cynbel been glad to take in the towering sight of the Godmaker, nor is he now. But feeling anger is better than feeling a void.

Gaius’ burned features heal with every word hissed through clenched teeth. Angry, wrathful. “Your loyalty would have been far better rewarded had you made the smart decision not to cross me. But here we are.”

All around them — the faces of strangers. Of a Godmaker and Bloodqueen but none of them him.

Bravery is only brave without the fear that wracks through the feeble mortal. Ready to be ripped limb from limb for the barest scraps of blood and marrow by a starving pack of wolves. But to spit in the face of the Godmaker… that’s just stupidity.

And with Evil’s boot on his throat he intends for his last words to be damnable, perhaps. “Demons from Hell! Let God’s light and holy fire cast you away!”

So much hatred in such a small vessel.

Not that it was ever in doubt this was an attack orchestrated by the Order. But something so large scale…

There are jeers from all around to kill the whelp. To do things Cynbel has done, would do again if it brought him back to them… Distantly he notices a dark-figured silence in the form of Ambrose, watching not the satisfaction that curls in the smirk on the Godmaker’s lips but the way the creature seals his fate. The way he tries to squirm for freedom.

Snap. Technically he brings about his own demise. Writhes so hard in some deluded dream of freedom that all the Godmaker has to do is press down his littlest toe. The look that passes between King and Queen isn’t missed — yet still he reaches out and smooths the soot out of her furrowed brow.

The sight of it feels like dying.

“Where is he?”

Nothing but silence and the crackling of leftover fire. Cynbel swears he can hear his words echoing off the trees.

Augustine lets out a snorting breath. They know him too well — know something passes in his bright eyes hidden by blood-slicked hair before he pushes it back. “I don’t have time for your whining.”

“Make time!”

Not a step forward, then there’s a hand on his chest. Forceful and sure, but younger.

Kamilah’s eyes are long past burning. The storm gathers inside her, ready to douse the inferno. “Cynbel,” she hisses, “do not. You’re a fool if you even think you could.”

He bats her hand away. “Don’t you dare, girl, don’t you dare!”

But he’s too weak. Both of them are; it takes little effort for the Bloodqueen to force what’s left of the Trinity on their knees. Blood trickles from the corner of Isseya’s mouth — she would rather bleed out than cry out.

With her back turned from her Maker and King, Kamilah looks down at the pair of them with warning. Don’t do this, not here. But fuck — what else can they lose? What is it to be whole and lose the entirety of it?

That kind of love…

He shouts through Kamilah’s raised arm and meets the Godmaker’s eyes even from this place of weakness.

“Where is Valdemaras?!”

“You dare demand of me…”

“Bullshit—I refuse to believe you and your bitch —” he spits at her feet for good measure and the act earns him five deep wounds to the face, wounds that will heal in time but he almost wishes they would not, “— were the only survivors!”

He’s a spectacle of his own making. Both of them looked upon with younger eyes; ignorant. Ones who couldn’t possibly fathom the depth of their years, of the emotions threatening to tear him apart until he, too, is ash. They don’t know what we’ve done to get this far. They never will.

Except for perhaps Kamilah though she, too, is made less kind.

“They attacked at dawn. Knew the depths of the compound… of everything.” She speaks soft and all the while his blood drips from her fingertips. “Without warning there was… there was nothing that could be done.”

“Not that you would try.” Isseya hisses. They fumble blind in the growing light for one another’s hands.

Two thousand years up in smoke.

Gaius takes his sweet time approaching them. Revels in their grief, no doubt. All his parading about caring for his people yet they have always seen themselves as different, haven’t they?

He grabs Cynbel’s chin and forces him to look upward. It feels as though even the flames still around them. Not that it stops the Golden Son from trying again; even if it is in vain.

“How did you survive… and he…”

Because I am stronger. Because I am smarter. Because I am better. The Godmaker could say all of these things and more. Could behead them for their insolence and none, not even Sayeed, would raise a hand to stop him.

Cynbel braces himself for the onslaught… that never comes.

Gaius releases him, lets his hand fall down and because the Trinity know better they won’t call the look in his eyes remorseful so much as mockery.

“The man who stands upon your slumbering bedside with shackles does not intend to kill you. No, that is the man who holds the torch.”

He sees the grieving lovers, the words so ready to spill from their tongues, and stops them with a simple gesture. A finger over his own lips, a “ssshh…” that does not ask for silence but demands it. “Your lover, my ill-minded progeny — he refused my every attempt to feed him this night. ‘Not without them,’ he said—the fool. No doubt he was as starved as yourselves, as weak.

“Hunger can make easy prey of even the proudest of predators… as you well know.”

Isseya squeezes his hand. Were he to look over he’s sure he would see the same look reflected back at him.

Instead she’s fixated on Augustine. “The Order isn’t the type to take prisoners.” Prisoners are worth keeping. The Order would see them all burned.

It dawns on Cynbel, then. Spine rigid and eyes sweeping across the lawn, the road leading back to the heart of town and further; to the trees and their singed cover that would do them no good when the breeze decided to toy with their lives.

The Order would see them all burned… yet does not. They flee—cowards—back to where they think they are safe.

This revelation of Cynbel’s is something the Godmaker already knows.

“They took him.” Cynbel breathes.

Gaius nods. “Likely, else you must not have thought very much of him all these years—that you would survive and he would not. Valdemaras… he is as crafty as he is defiant.”

“You know where.”

“I have an inkling. Close enough for them to take advantage of such a window of opportunity.”

There are still so many questions. The ebb and flow of emotions on his weakened state has Cynbel in a fit, has him doubting every word he speaks, every one he hears. He is gone. The Devil wears so many faces…

And that his darling girl, his beloved Isseya chooses then to hold him tighter can’t be anything less than a sign.

Enough to bring Cynbel from his knees. To pull Isseya up beside him and hold her tight lest she, too, disappear from him on the fading smoke.

Gaius laughs at the sight of them. “I never understood his fascination with you two. But I’ll give him this — he knows how to make them loyal.”

All it takes is one glance to Sayeed behind him, the look in her eyes strange and foreign on her expression usually so calm and sure, for Cynbel to bite his tongue.

“Tell us,” only his darling could ever make a plea sound so strong, “please, Godmaker. We’ve done all that you asked —”

“And you will continue to do so. But I am… fond of Valdemaras. He should prove useful in the days to come.”

The Godmaker surveys them as a farmer might his stock. His next words almost an afterthought; “All of you should.”

It is an undertaking for them and them alone, the Trinity understands that. And though every moment spent breathing is one breath that may be their lover’s last to rush into it would be suicide. And he’ll be damned before he lets his death be at the hands of some worthless Order bastard playing soldier.

Charlottesville has finished burning. But the screams of her people last well into the night. They don’t stop for the setting sun or the moon and her stars. In fact they only get worse.

He drinks for strength and nothing more — unable to take enjoyment even in the way the young man’s body slumps to the ground, twitches like a fish out of a pond, and is still.

He’s barely had the time to wipe the remains of his meal from his chin when two pairs of boots come into his field of vision. Looks up just in time for Sayeed to toss a sheave of paper at his lap. He just barely catches it without letting the contents spill onto the blood-soaked dirt.

“Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more foolish.”

Cynbel barks a laugh and directs his sneer to the pages rather than the woman herself. “Just you wait, little lotus. You’ve not seen the depths of my stupidity…”

The eyes that finally meet hers are red of hellfire, of blood and fury.

“Especially when it comes to my Lord and Light.”

Ambrose beside her looks as if to say something but thinks better of it and resigns himself to watching. They are an unusual pair, Cynbel knows. But how else does one describe two thousand years of finding middle ground on opposite sides?

Unusual is about the only word that could even breach the depth of them.

He sighs and holds up the folder, ash smearing over his skin at burned edges. “What is this?”

“A peace offering.”

“Peace, in times of war?” The weight on Cynbel’s heart is immediately lessened at the sound of Isseya’s voice — she approaches around the stocky build of their unwelcome voyeur and clings to her lover just as ardently. “Cut the shit.”

Kamilah’s teeth grind in her jaw.

“On this rare occasion, Trinity, you and I desire the same thing. With the safe return of your Maker you will, I hope, follow in the pattern you always have at the slightest sign of trouble.”

They raise eyebrows at her and Kamilah continues, convicted; “You will leave.”

“Virginia, oh yes.”

“No,” Kamilah shakes her head, “not just Virginia. In your hands you hold all that my King has gathered on the Order’s operations… I trust I don’t have to warn you they are likely to be more armed than the reports give.”

Isseya takes the papers and shuffles through them. Names of scouts, soldiers tabbed in Sayeed’s careful script along the edges. Cynbel stops at one marked ‘RAINES’ and pulls it free from the stack with one word holding him spellbound.

Shackles.

“The Godmaker mentioned shackles — did he mean this?”

There’s a grim moment where she almost looks as though she will not answer. “Perhaps,” she says finally.

The sketch is rudimentary but the notes around it are neat and tidy. It’s been ages since he’s actually read anything; something Cynbel hadn’t realized until just then.

What? He’s always been better with tongues than words.

But is Sayeed really only going to give them half of a gesture? Apparently his face is transparent; the sight of it deepens the furrow in the woman’s brow.

“I will tell you the rest.”

Isseya waves her off. “Yes yes, we know how this goes. ‘In exchange for,’ and all that. What do you want?”

“Your word.”

She asks for one but those two press down on their already so fucking heavy shoulders. Make the Trinity—a word that means three… are they even still such when only two remain?

Her lips on his neck don’t ease either of their burdens but, as always, her touch is enough. It isn’t hunger that makes him weak enough to grasp onto some—any—part of her… but sometimes weakness is just weakness.

“Your word,” Kamilah continues, “that you will tuck your tails and run the moment you are reunited.”

Which — he’s very much in favor for. But that isn’t Cynbel’s decision to make. “It was the Godmaker who sent for us. Who made us stay to fight his battles for him, payment for…”

He can’t seem to say the words. Lucky the Bloodqueen understands.

“And anyway — he will hunt us down if we break our word now.” Isseya raises a good point, yet Cynbel keeps his selfish protest inside his chest. If we break our word now everything will have meant nothing.

“Leave Gaius to me.”

“Mmm.”

“Enough of this. You want to leave and you are being given a free chance to do so. Why not take it?”

“Nothing with the Godmaker is ever free.”

Rather than continue to argue her rather her rather strange case Kamilah just extends a hand. Notices his reluctance only in that the last time they shook on anything Cynbel had been left with one less hand to hold. Ah, Columbia. Good times. Better than these.

But it’s always Valdas who makes these choices; who has a right to decide for the three of them. He is their God, their Maker, their guide. Who ferried them from one world into the next and… and he just isn’t that man. Could never be — he could never be…

And thanks to their beloved Valdemaras. For bringing Isseya into his life then so she could be here for him now. A decision made together to assuage the guilt.

Cynbel and Kamilah shake on it. He tries to contain his look of surprise when he pulls back the same number of fingers he’d offered.

He’ll hold up his end of the bargain. So she holds up hers.

“It wasn’t supposed to get this far. There wasn’t supposed to be a war.” And she’s right. He still remembers Valdas’ honeyed words that got him to agree to this shit in the first place. All of them resting on one thing.

This would be simple. It would be fun. It would take no time at all.

“And for a while things were in our favor. We had decades of resources, we had information, we even had the numbers. But they were like…” she shudders an exhale, “they were like dominoes. First the numbers fell. A fluke — luck to keep a cosmic balance. Turning to bolster our own worked in the beginning. But with each line branching off into the next the blood became… diluted.

“It was a risk worth taking. Until it wasn’t. Put a dozen soldiers in the ground and only two of them would wake up sound of mind. There was a small outbreak—an uncontrolled and unsanctioned Turning…”

Kamilah trails off, the stoic figure beside her takes up the mantle with astonishing gravitas. “My men and I put down just over twenty Ferals across Indiana. Countless more casualties in our wake, then the humans started blamin’ each other for the killin’s. We had to let it rest or the Order’s doctrine would become all but gospel.”

“Unless the next part of your story has anything to do with either one of you taking up blacksmithing, perhaps we should be moving on.” While Isseya glowers at the pair they’ve already lost Cynbel. His focus is back on the page in hand — trying to catch the whispers of a memory dredged up by a sigil traced at the corner.

Kamilah’s nostrils flare. Ambrose chooses to keep the peace. “Well — see — at the beginnin’ of the year it was quiet, a little too quiet. Found out then about a little excavation the Order had goin’ ‘round near old Salem.”

“Hypocritical bastard.”

Cynbel launches the folder carelessly and the papers within begin to scatter on the dead evening air. Isseya, knocked back by his outburst, looks ready to snap his neck for the trouble. But when she realizes it isn’t a tantrum, that true distress wracks through him violently, she just… holds on.

“What’s with you, beloved…?”

“A series of cursed objects were made for the trials that took place there. One man by the name of Corwin, the leader of the hunters and a member of the Order — we discovered this much later, too late perhaps. He led the witch hunts and needled out from the masses those with a true affinity for the craft.

“Corwin promised that should the witches create for him a series of tools and weapons for the Order’s crusade then they would be spared.”

She doesn’t have to say the rest. The implications are clear enough.

Isseya can’t help her disgust. “They preach of cleansing humanity in one breath and further themselves with witchcraft in another. Actually — can’t fathom why I’m even surprised.”

But despite what they now know their minds haven’t changed. Kamilah sees this and knows it to be true.

The surprised one between them is the New Blood, Ambrose. He looks between the vampires and though he’s come to understand the language of their silent gazes he can’t seem to believe his eyes.

“You still intend to go after your Maker?”

Foolish for him to even ask.

There’s a new rigidity to the man’s spine as he inhales — looks at Kamilah with all the respect of a soldier to his general. “Then allow me to accompany them — allow me to bring my men to fight at their backs.”

“We have no use for cannon fodder.”

Even Kamilah tries to stifle some aged amusement; a knowing the youngest among them does not yet covet. “Your intentions are noble, Ambrose, but you and your men are best served here. Should the Order attack again —”

“Will their mission not ensure there won’t be another attack?” And though he raises a fair point Cynbel still can’t believe his eyes when Sayeed actually considers his proposal.

His darling’s growls rumble deep in Cynbel’s bones. “Your pity will earn you no honor.”

“‘Tis not pity, milady,” dark eyes level on those of the Trinity open, honest; a strangeness neither of them are familiar with outside of their own covenant, “but another life lost to the Order — especially one so highly praised between Old Blood like yourselves — is another victory I will not abide. ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.’”

Isseya’s doubt and disregard claw at him, make his new skin still pinkish in its rawness itch uncomfortably. Wordlessly Cynbel reaches back and cards his fingers through her hair. Comfort found as much as it is given.

“Better to have cannon fodder than to be confronted without it, my beloved.”

He seals her protests with his lips; swallows them down greedy and reminds her with every twist of his tongue that they do this for something far more important than they. They do this for Him.

But he has the decency to wait until he feels the yield of her under his fingertips. Pressed-together foreheads and meals not shared but tasted against the familiarity of two thousand years.

Cynbel regards Ambrose… and nods.

Though her ‘peace offering’ has found its way across the packed earthen floor and in a few cases fluttering out glasses windows, Sayeed seems contented with the outcome. She rests a hand on Ambrose’s shoulder and finds the gesture returned. “On your own head be it.”

But, truly, no threat seems to deter him. “May the light of the First guide us.” So focused on his own altruism, he misses the recoiling shudder of the Trinity.

Kamilah takes her leave of them — one last look to Cynbel like fresh ink on a contract. She has upheld her end… and will ensure he does the same.

“Be ready come midnight, the absent will be left behind.” Already Cynbel allows the tension to ease out of him at Isseya’s touch. The way she clings to him — not desperately but with just as much intention in the matter.

“Of course.”

Cynbel makes sure to wait until the man is several strides gone before calling back. “Oh, and — Ambrose, was it?” Balancing the scales of power even now to make the man turn back to them. “Leave your First shit among your belongings here. Salvation does not come in those who pray on bended knee even as the sword comes down upon their necks. The only person who can give you precious salvation is you.”

An entire sermon goes unspoken across Ambrose’s hard-worn frown. “It was merely a prayer to faith.”

“We are of a different faith.”

“Which would that be?”

He doesn’t deign to answer. Dismisses the man instead by turning bodily from him and allowing himself to fully embrace her — to try and touch her as though she is not all he has left in the world. He can feel her struggling with the same mindset with every kiss, every caress.

As He delivered them from their mortal confines they, too, will deliver Him from the hands of the Order. And if they are too late…

No gods, martyrs, saints will keep them safe. Not the Order, not the Godmaker, not even Sayeed. And dear Ambrose will learn the hard way that his precious First will never come. No matter how hard he screams at the end.

The Order will expect retaliation to come when their enemies are safest. So they plan their strike for midday.

Three of the twelve men that make up Ambrose’s brigade back out before they can say another word. They look to their leader for permission but he stays silent — and fools that they are the men take silence as permission.

Cynbel and Isseya watch as, with an almost imperceptible nod, three of their brothers-in-arms take aim and fire on the mens’ backs at thirty paces. Thirty, he knows, because he counts each step they take before they are beheaded with their own sabers.

It makes the Golden Son look at the New Blood with different eyes. A sight Ambrose must notice even if he doesn’t look away from the ritual of execution. “There’s no place in my men for cowards,” is his only explanation. It’s more than enough.

One of the few humans left in town—who takes that he has not yet been devoured as a sign that some night he might join their ranks, the fool—agrees to drive their caravan. The winds taste of an early winter and have blown away the smoke up high in favor of a bleak, almost colorless day.

Isseya leans over and whispers in his ear; “Does the world really look like that, or is it that no beauty is worth finding without Him?” Whispered as though she’s afraid saying it will make her day-mares come true. He doesn’t answer with words — throws an arm over her shoulders and pulls her in tight so that she may feel the tremors that wrack him still.

So that she may know her fear is not a sole burden to bear.

If they had the tools, the resources, the time to prepare they would. This is not something they undertake lightly — this life that means more to them than their own shouldn’t be left up to chance. But they don’t. No time to scout, no time to strategize.

A thought that has Cynbel wheezing a laugh while hunched over the woefully barren map of where the Order might have based their operations.

The pair of boots at the edges of his vision shuffle, unwittingly drawing his attention up to Ambrose’s carefully-masked confusion.

“Indeed even in this slop I know my beauty is striking — but if it hasn’t yet dawned on you, New Blood, I am spoken for.”

Ambrose’s gall is quickly smothered at the sight of Cynbel’s lips; barely tugging at the edges. The only smile he will ever grace again, says that fear the Trinity shares, but he ignores it.

“Such a terrible tragedy, I’m sure. But you’re not exactly my type.”

“Men?” He scoffs. “Give it a century or two.”

“No, not men.”

He doesn’t respond until Cynbel meets his gaze fully. Impressive man… he’ll give credit where (and when) it is due. “Then…?”

“Self-servin’ and more than a tad off your rocker.”

Point the second for the New Blood. Fascinating. And not entirely wrong.

Cynbel goes back to his map. Ambrose leans back against the rattling caravan beam and closes his eyes.

“I was thinking of the risks involved here. And what he would say if he could see me here lamenting over a plan.” Outside they can hear the pacing a mile off — Cynbel would know the sounds of Isseya’s waif-play anywhere. Whatever it takes to get them food before they strike.

“I should be grateful for the opportunity to forgo the rigidities of war. All this officers and commanders and following orders horse-shit. I should be reveling in the chance to do this my way.”

“An’ what way would that be?”

“The way of the hunter. Knowing only what will ensure your survival. Passion in the kill… in the feed.”

“Doesn’t sound like a very informed way to go into battle.”

Perish the thought. “Battle used to be an intimate thing. Death must come by the might of your own hand or not at all. And my hands have caused so much death.” Cynbel’s damnable voice cracks against his permission. “Yet he always treated them with such care; such reverence. As though I was made of glass.”

He doesn’t know if the other man stays silent on purpose or not — but he appreciates it nonetheless. Under normal circumstances he would only allow Isseya to see him so vulnerable. Surely she will forgive him this trespass, for these are not normal circumstances.

The smell of fresh blood is much closer when the new blood finally speaks again.

“This Maker of yours must be somethin’ special to inspire that kind’a loyalty.” And it’s a testament to how far this war has made them fall, isn’t it.

He could hold courts, give lectures, preach to the craven masses over the divine beauty of his lover and God. He has done, actually. A long time ago and an ocean away… Why is it now that words fail him?

Must be the hunger.

“You never knew your Maker, did you Ambrose?” asks Cynbel, but such a statement is telling — he already knows the answer.

“No, I didn’t. Can’t even put a face to ‘em.”

“Such a shame.”

“Why’s that?”

His fingers drift absently to his shoulder. To where Isseya usually rests like a perch — to the skin under his touch where his devotion was burned into him with fire and brimstone.

“A shame that you will never know the fulfillment that comes with that bond. I mean no offense —” he smirks at Ambrose’s immediately skeptical furrowed brow, “— I know, I’m just as surprised as you. But I would say such to any of our kind orphaned from the start. Isseya, my darling, she was blessed to have our Divinity and myself as guides. Before her — I know with certainty I would not have survived this long had the hand that pulled me into life not been the same one that felled me.

“Look to Augustine and Sayeed. I may wish to smear the Godmaker’s ashes across the known world but even I will not deny the strength of their connection. It has kept them alive for all this time at the very least. The sigils our Makers give us bind our minds to our bodies, yes, but they also serve a higher purpose.”

Fascinating then; the way something close to captivation changes so quickly. Not even hidden — no trace of it left on the suddenly worn, suddenly tired lines that tell but a drop of Ambrose’s vast story.

“Call ‘em what they are, Old Blood. They’re brands. And no way was I spendin’ my new life the way I spent my old one.”

It’s enough to pique Cynbel’s interest further.

“You weren’t marked after you Turned?”

“No.”

“How long ago?”

“Goin’ on twenty five years,” he raises his chin with much-deserved pride, “I’d like to think I’m proof a good, strong will is enough to do it. To keep you sane.”

In the Golden Son’s chest stirs an unfamiliar emotion — the only comparison he can muster being that of the sight of his lovers victorious. Respect, perhaps?

“I…” he doesn’t need preternatural hearing to catch Isseya’s growls of ill-content approaching the caravan; how easily he could let his words die—let the feeling die with it… and how strange that he does not.

“I cannot say I would have shown the same strength.”

Not a moment later one of the woven flaps is pushed aside to reveal Isseya in the closest thing she will ever allow to be called shambles; hair usually so carefully tucked away hanging in inky strings in front of her eyes or plastered in sweat on her brow, the hunt burning outward from her soul in crimson eyes and the fresh kill on her breath.

She sits beside Cynbel and immediately Ambrose and the map are things forgotten in her presence. He pulls the cap from her and makes careful work of combing her hair with his nails. She appreciates the gesture, says so in her half-smile, but they both know there is so little time for these moments.

After all, they may very well have only those moments left if they are too late.

“Go,” she pushes him back by the chest; urges her lover to stand and take his turn, “the pickings were scarce — you’re lucky I was able to stop myself.” Then, because she knows he will ask, she holds up a hand to stop their company before Ambrose can even open his mouth.

“Better to share than to have nothing.”

“You learn to take what you can get in times like these.”

She hums. “Indeed… they’ll be along shortly. New Blood could hardly keep up.”

The lovers reach out together. Take hands together and lock eyes together. Find comfort in one another together.

Cynbel turns and departs the caravan alone.

Augustine’s scouts were only half-right. Much like the Shadow King and his occupied town of human-chattel to ensure things were kept neat and tidy—or seemingly so—to the governors at the capital, the Order too has kept up appearances of some form or another.

It’s a small farming community — much like the outskirts of Charlottesville in barns dotted on the midday horizon. The one closest to the tree line is burned down, Cynbel notes. The trial run for their surprise attack no doubt.

And perhaps a more skeptical man would assume the children that run over the roads to the love of their mother’s skirts were no mere innocents — that they, too, were a part of the Order of the Dawn’s grand scheme to rid America of their kind. That every hobbling crone and well-bred young man is there because they choose to be; because they believe in the cause.

But Cynbel knows them too well to give in to paranoia.

One of Ambrose’s men, one who played executioner on his blood brother, makes the mistake of questioning that knowledge.

“I come from a town like this myself,” he says, “I know how deep the roots of faith go in these kinds’a places. Maybe… I mean maybe you’re rushin’ into this.”

Isseya’s hand twitches just shy of her lover’s. He holds her back only in that he will demand understanding of the fool before she strikes.

He leans in close and whispers low — for a moment Ambrose looks as if to pull the young man back; suspicion for the Trinity and their intentions clear even in the caravan’s shadow.

But the look passes, gone as quickly as it came.

He could grow to like this one.

“Are you suggesting that their faith is stronger?”

The creature pales; begins to understand what he’s done — and that he only has himself to blame. “No—no I —”

“Correct.” Not even at their full strength and his beloved is still faster, still better. Rounds upon him with the same hands that forced pagans to weep blood, to behold their God until it killed them. “What have they, Cynbel, numbers?”

She smirks up at him and for a moment all this suffering is undone. They are back in the halls of Versailles, the temples of Jaipur, the battlefields of the Old Days.

“Perhaps,” he nods to answer.

Her nails dig through the thick wool of the vampire’s uniform. Blood begins to bloom through the dark grey fabric. “What have they, Cynbel, weapons?”

“Perhaps,” he repeats.

“What have they, Cynbel, conviction?” If the fool were to scream all would be lost — their position discovered and their plan ruined before it could even begin. Though he might find screaming properly a difficult task as he watches in horror—not Cynbel, no, his eyes shine nothing short of worshipful—while Isseya swallows the meat of his tongue.

Let not her pretty face deceive… Isseya of the Veneti is the creature that judges all souls at the end.

Isseya smiles bloodstained, vicious; victorious.

“Let them turn to their God — we were here first. The Made-God Valdemaras with dominion over death-into-rebirth had altars drowned in the blood of his supplicants.”

Cynbel raises his chin with pride. Pride at their Divinity, pride at her ferocity. “Blood we spilled — his progeny, his lovers.”

She takes his ear next. Fleshy and red but Cynbel swears he can hear the crunch when her teeth come together.

The remaining battalion witness in silent horror. This is how his Priestess should always be revered.

“We don’t need numbers — for each body is an army unto itself. Strong, swift, one mouth gorging on an army’s feast.” His other ear she takes too — spits it to the wagon base at his boots. “We don’t need weapons — we are the weapons!”

Don’t play with your food, Valdas used to tell her under harvest moons and cloudless skies with the entire universe laid bare as their bodies. He would guide her; show her to feed with grace. And when his back was turned Isseya would continue to tear and mutilate with those bright eyes staring right at Cynbel. Daring him to keep her secret. Something only they could share.

He did. He has… all this time.

Going for the throat is the end of the game for their kind; same as the heart. The moment her righteous hand plunges through the front of him, palm open as a red flower blossoming, he has only moments until… poof.

“As for conviction…” The priestess’ voice softens. She watches her fingers drip blood as if in a trance… as if she doesn’t quite know the hand belongs to her. “We have two thousand years’ worth of conviction. Fuck their Almighty, and fuck your First Vampire. I choose to believe in a God who walks beside me. Who will answer when I call.”

The cloud of ash that follows her words plumes against the floorboards. Sticks to her wet hand and turns that beautiful flower into the gore that it truly is. Isseya holds them all under her thrall as she brings two fingers to her lips and sucks the fallen from them. But she only has eyes for Cynbel.

Valdas must be alive, he’s sure of it. Hell could not stand to suffer her wrath if it were otherwise.

“Anyone else hesitant?” Cynbel asks when he finally recovers himself. And all around him come varied degrees of submissiveness. Well… all but from Ambrose — but he will take the compliance in inaction.

Had they the time he would praise her, exalt her even. But there will be time for that later. There must be.

The smart thing to do would have been to wait until the night. But fortune lies with them as clouds gather overhead — not enough to blacken the sun but enough to burn, not kill.

Their driver gets them as close as he can. Cynbel pays him a broken neck as thanks.

He demands a handful of Ambrose’s men to go first. They look to their leader for guidance but he has remained uncharacteristically silent. But they have seen the lengths the Trinity will go to now and make the smart decision not to earn their ire.

Ambrose moves as if to join them. Cynbel darts a hand out against his chest — holds him back for reasons his mind has yet to even tell his body.

Luckily Isseya knows his body better than any. “Noble for an officer to join his underlings in battle. But there is no need for it here.” The blade she draws is, like her mistress, stained with the blood of their enemies.

“They’re my men. How can I expect them to go where I would not lead?”

“Cannon fodder goes first.” There’s a glee to her words that leaves Ambrose paling even as the rest pour out to spread their wrath. He glares at Cynbel with eyes of red wrath. The Golden Son backhands him for good measure.

“You’re sending them out there without any artillery!”

The Trinity exchange amused looks. Cynbel reaches out — cares little for how the other man flinches at even the possibility of his touch — and pats his cheek like a scolded babe.

“Have you ever seen what really happens to us in the sunlight?”

“Come, come!” Isseya cackles, delighted, and rushes out in a blur of motion to witness carnage on both sides.

Admittedly he’s a little disappointed the first one combusts before they clear the caravan. But just as he shoves Ambrose into the day—following close behind—a second catches flame right before their very eyes. Cannon fodder, indeed.

If the soldier has any thoughts of arguing they’re dashed as soon as he sees the satisfaction in Cynbel’s eyes. “You insisted,” he reminds Ambrose, and of course he had taken advantage of the only weapons available to him.

His satisfaction is short-lived as the sun takes its hold on him. Smoke hissing along his skin, a thousand daggers as he turns his head up to bask in the glory of it.

Panic has taken hold of the disposable soldiers. The thing about catching fire is it fucking hurts and tends to inspire irrational acts. Why else would they have kept it from them? They scatter across the wooden cabins on every side and run as blurs of burning flesh to the fields of wheat and cotton around. An endlessly burning sea.

See how it feels. This is but a day in the century of suffering he will inflict upon each and every soul. There are no innocents here.

“Rrragh!” A man comes running out from around a burning cabin with a gardening scythe above his head and a death wish written all over his fearful face. Cynbel spares him little effort; grasps his scrawny face in a single wide palm and twists it backwards so he doesn’t have to look at it.

Two burning vampires fall upon a woman before her crossbow can take proper aim. All these years later and the Order still sticks to the classics. It’s almost nostalgic.

Then her hand is in his — fascinating, really, the numbing quality of a lover’s touch. She cannot take his pain away, as he cannot take hers. But together it is easier to endure. That’s love though, isn’t it.

Every place the Order has hidden has one constant; the one thing Cynbel was sure of even when all else remained uncertain.

The church is a tiny thing, but well-maintained. Where every else building was falling to disrepair this chapel smells of fresh paint; the garden lining the entrance well-cared for and loved.

How terribly predictable the faithful were.

The lovers rest their free hands on either door; turn to look at one another in the light and she, too, holds back tears in her eyes. Tears of loss, of love, of the pain that is no longer content to prick at them and now seeks to peel their flesh from their bones.

They rip the doors from their hinges and enter.

The bulk of the Order’s soldiers stand before them. Weapons drawn, faces grim, determined; resolute. Back in the old days armor was worn in place of silly cloth uniforms — but Cynbel will admit he rather enjoys that the fools haven’t found a suitable replacement for helmets. He enjoys watching their faces while they scream.

His gaze sweeps across the enemy fierce and takes in the now-familiar symbol that rests like a false guardian over their breasts. The embroidered fleur-de-lis as persistent as those who wear it. But beside the golden threads he comes to recognize with no small amount of surprise the patchwork they create as a united front. A quilt of officers, commanders; those who have taken it upon themselves to stitch a count of their kills on arms and collars. The Order’s finest all gathered in one place.

Yet they must be, too, the Order’s most foolish. For they face their enemy as one and turn their backs to the true evil they hold captive at the pulpit.

The very sight of Valdas again is a relief that cannot be put into words. His head hangs weak, gaping wounds across his bared flesh trying desperately to close themselves — but he’s too drained. He’s just left there, bound in a wooden chair with rusted shackles, looking like his skin is alive and breathing.

The relief passes and the void left is quickly filled with rage, ferocity. Isseya’s hand clenches his hard enough to break bone and may very well do so but nothing so simple as his own agony would stop them now.

“See,” barks one with a collar littered in crimson thread, “told you some’d be fools enough to come!”

Around them come murmurs of agreement, the clicking of wooden bolts being pulled back into place on crossbow springs, sabers drawn and the smell of gunpowder freshly packed.

Cynbel inhales it deeply. Doesn’t scent nearly enough fear in the air but give it time… give it time.

“The only fools I see are the mortals who court death so readily.”

Valdas’ head snaps up at the sound of Isseya’s voice; seeks them across the room with the fire that claimed him trapped in his eyes. “You should not be here,” he growls — struggles against the shackles that bind him to a simple wooden chair seemingly in vain.

But his lovers know better — know their Lord and Light does nothing without divine intention. The smell of his burning flesh assaults Cynbel’s nose but the more they know in these few precious moments of stillness the better.

“What, not having any fun?” Cynbel calls with a half-hearted chuckle; knows he will pay for it later — when they are far from this place.

“You know I have always preferred to inflict the pain, beloved.”

When Isseya steps forward the Order spurs into action with raised weapons and fingers poised on triggers. “Patience is a virtue, Valdas.”

His laugh is weak, more a wheezing exhale than anything else, but it’s enough for them. “Not one of mine…”

Outside their attack rages on but in here the stillness is almost fateful. It clings to the human’s necks in sweat and growing agitation and keeps the Trinity divided. But it is so very brittle. So easily broken.

All it takes is finding the weakest link — a trembling figure near his back, a brave lamb who thinks to prove herself worthy. Her shuffled footsteps are deafening.

She fires her pistol before Cynbel can even turn his head. And lodges itself wetly in the belly of an Order member across the room.

And really he should be considered gracious that he gives the lamb the chance to see her mistake, to watch the man cry out and clutch his bleeding side as he falls to his knees — they are in a church after all. She should know the risks that come with crossing them; crossing him.

“Now look what you’ve done…” Cynbel’s hands fall on her shoulders and hold her still just long enough; to watch the tears horror that pales into sour fear on her face that he sacrifices seeing for the thrill of the hunt.

He snaps her neck and all hell breaks loose.

It is the violence Cynbel has been denied since the beginning. Long years of agony tasting of carnage and destruction but not given the chance to really revel in his actions — not before they were called to move onward. The humans are on the precipice of their own war, said to him once, but it must come in its own time.

He feels the sting of a bolt in the meat of his arm; cries out a raging behemoth and swipes the offender’s head clean from his shoulders.

Across the aisle Isseya rips her blade across a man’s belly and opens him from the inside out. His organs made a bloody procession for which she steps on.

Blood splatters the walls, the pews. The certainty of seeing their God driving the lovers forward in the destruction of this gathering of butchers. They don’t know the meaning of the word — but they will now.

In his mind’s eye Cynbel remembers the map on Augustine’s wall and undoes the threads of it in every movement. Battles unwon in every man torn limb from limb, the tides of war changed as they grow stronger with every feed. They carve themselves a path to their Maker and, with it, rip the victory the Order had so foolishly thought they could claim from their feeble and mortal hands.

It’s a kind of bloodlust he hadn’t felt in over a thousand years. Beautiful, bright; blinding.

Just enough for him to miss the half-faceless man who charges towards the altar with a war cry on his missing lips and a splintered railing of wood clutched in his fist.

“DIE! FOR THE OR—!”

The Children of the Made-God would have been too late. A knowledge they carry like a burden; a stain on their souls for what short time they would have remained in the world of the living together… before they sought to join him in whatever comes after death.

Cynbel drops the heart wrenched from a general’s chest. Doesn’t even look as it beats it’s last inches from the owner’s face. Isseya, too, with her mouth shoved into a wayward throat pulls back and in doing so shreds it to ribbons. The bloody mask she wears twisted wretched beyond compare. Her terror, his desperation.

They witness — as they have done everything since the moment Valdas left their side — together that the human falls to his knees; silenced by his own hand.

No, not his.

Valdas licks at the blood speckled fresh on his starving lips. The clarity is gives him is immediate; the color rushing to his cheeks. He looks to meet the eyes of his lovers but instead finds them fixated on something — someone — at his back.

His anger was the only thing holding the Golden Son on two feet; a fact he comes to terms with as his knees buckle and he collapses on all fours. There’s a wailing echoing ghastly from rafter to rafter overhead and he realizes quickly the voice is his own but it isn’t enough to make him stop.

And it is with the same uncertainty as before that Ambrose looks upon the Order’s congregation and slaughter. His blistering skin is made new in the church’s shadow, so little blood staining his coat that it could only have come from the dead soldier at their feet.

There’s nothing else Valdas can do but take in his lovers and their weakness. The ache it brings to his heart only matched by the physical pain that comes when unfamiliar hands grasp at the manacles that hold him victim.

Ambrose grunts with the effort but finally wrenches one free; holds his wounded palms close to his chest but it is more than enough.

At once they are upon him. Cynbel at his ankles and Isseya on his other hand, both of them weathering the pain because they cannot imagine doing otherwise.

When he is finally freed Valdas stands over them. Wavering, but alive. Made whole in the mere presence of one another.

Then there’s a soft thud and the noise forces open eyes Cynbel hadn’t realized he closed. No longer above them, Valdas too rests on his knees to look at them not on high… but as an equal.

Isseya reaches out first. Touches the edges of a gaping wound on Valdas’ cheekbone with trembling reverence. It’s a movement he mirrors on her, then upon them both. He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out. Unable to find—or manage—the words that may not yet exist.

His gaze says enough.

I thought I’d lost you.

What is he supposed to say to that? Cynbel finds himself looking to Isseya for answers but she’s just as lost. Just as vulnerable and a breath, a touch away from crumbling to dust.

Two thousand years. One hundred and thirty seven fights. Eight months altogether spent apart and too many acts of love to count. Five excruciating times he nearly lost them — now six.

And in a rare first Cynbel looks into the eyes of what is by all accounts a complete stranger and whispers “Thank you.”

#bloodbound #playchoices #playchoices fanfiction #kamilah sayeed #gaius augustine #oc: cynbel #oc: isseya #oc: valdas #oc: ambrose #oblv: bound by choice #oblv: new chapter #; my fics

2 notes · View notes