Archive of Our Own

When Reynauld came back, Dismas was gone.

He had a grave, but what was a grave without a body to fill it? A hole in the ground and a lie engraved in stone.

His absence gnawed at Reynauld as he walked from the sanitarium to the barracks, ears straining for his light step and the swish of his coat behind him. It mocked him as he passed by the tavern, where his rough voice should be breaking out into drunken songs. It stared at him, ugly, as he walked through the common room of the barracks, where Dismas should be peering over the top of his favorite overstuffed chaise lounge.

In their shared room, it was unbearable.

Dismas’s side of the room was a wreck. Stained sheets half on the bed and half on the floor. Empty bottles of whiskey and rum on the nightstand. Burnt out candles melted into useless, misshapen stumps. His spare set of clothes scattered like leaves after a storm. There was a mustiness in the air, which spoke of unwashed bodies and cloth and stagnate smoke. He had always been messier than Reynauld, that was true, but never like this.

But Reynauld’s side… it was untouched, as though he had only stepped out for a moment.

The sheets were still tightly tucked, his pack was neatly stowed. Even the candle on his nightstand had remained unlit, the only survivor in the entire room. The only sign that any time had passed at all was the thin layer of dust over his bedding.

Like a shrine. 

What was a shrine if it had no dead to remember? A hoarder's lair, half-filthy and pitiful.

This was not a room fit for a reunion.

Reynauld stripped Dismas's bed and shucked his pillow of its yellowed case. He stuffed Dismas’s soiled clothes into that, then tossed the entire bundle into the hall by their door. He threw open the curtains, coughing at the dust that swirled up, and pried open the lopsided window. The new spring air rushed inside, driving out the old sullen gloom. He collected the empty bottles and burned out candles and set them outside in a neat row. He scraped the wax from where it had dripped and congealed on the furniture and floor. He wiped down the grimy washbasin. He borrowed a broom from the kitchen and swept away the worst of the dirt and dust that had settled over the floorboards.

Reynauld sat down on the freshly bare bed. The room was clean, but all the more barren for it.

He looked at his palms, then the backs of his hands. They were exactly as they should be, wrinkles and scars and calluses and all. Warm. Healthy. Alive. As if they had always been that way, although somewhere, at some point, surely bony fish had nibbled at these worn fingertips and waterworms had played hopscotch between the lines of these sturdy palms. This skin had bloated, fat and sagging with seawater, pudgy and bluish-grey. And, if the nurses were to be believed, it had been that way for…

Six months.

It was inconceivable to him. He had gone, then a force no one could explain to him had brought him back, and there had been nothing in the interim.

Nothing.

No flash of light. No glimmer of warmth. Even damnation might have been a comfort.

Nothing at all.

The fear... no one had warned him about the fear. It had been all-encompassing, destructive and transformative, morphing him into a senseless, groveling animal, capable of anything if it meant he could gasp down one more breath. Priests and chaplains and clerics had led him to believe that death meant a final communion with the Light, if you were righteous, and eternal torment in the Pit if you were not. Reynauld had let that belief lead him right into the void.

And now he had returned to more nothing.

Reynauld's fingers twitched, seeking out the familiar weight of his prayer beads. He hadn't been able to find them while he had cleaned. That was a shame.

The silence pounded at his ears. Absence breathed like a living thing.

Reynauld left their room and closed the door on that awful nothing.

+

His legs moved without direction from his mind, which wandered in a syrupy haze, thinking of nothing, of everything. As he neared the bridge, he sighted the sorcerer - Alhazred - coming the other way, from the barracks, talking with the arbalest, Missandei.

Lord Sartre’s brisk totalling of the events leading up to Dismas’s disappearance came back to him:

Tardif, Alhazred, and Missandei were with him. They are all competent fighters but, well… It was an invasion. A total surprise. None of us were ready.

They had been there. They had witnessed it.

Reynauld curled his hands into fists.

They had let it happen.

Their conversation lapsed into silence as they neared him. They walked a little faster, making a point of not looking at him. They were going to pass close by him, they had no other choice unless they wanted to divert their course to the other side of the street. Reynauld locked his eyes on the sorcerer and brushed his hand against his silk sleeve as he passed.

Alhazred stopped at once and snatched his arm away like Reynauld's touch had burned him through his clothes, whirling to face him. Missandei stopped as well, something like concern creeping over her face at the sight of him. Alhazred’s indignant expression faded.

"You." Reynauld’s heart beat hard. "I need to talk to you." He flicked his eyes to Missandei, who was twisting the strap of her crossbow between her hands, an oddly childlike gesture for the notoriously level-headed markswoman. “And you.”

"What is it, Reynauld?" Alhazred's tone was brisk and almost professional, but Reynauld could see the pity collecting at the corners of his mouth. It made him sick.

"You were there. Both of you.”

"Yes, I was there." Despite his calm tone, he held himself like he might bolt at any moment.

“A terrible thing, it was.” Missandei’s eyes looked over Reynauld's left shoulder, at something only she could see. “A shame.”

"Did he..." No, that wasn't right.

"Was he..." That wasn't it either.

He pressed his tongue against a sore on the inside of his cheek.

"Reynauld." Alhazred's voice softened, his shoulders relaxed. "I understand what you must be experiencing right now, but there's nothing I could tell you that would-"

“He died well,” Missandei interjected. Her hands stopped their twisting, but still clutched tightly at the strap. “Have no fear of that. He was a hero all the way to the end. As brave as any soldier I ever knew.”

“Yes.” Alhazred let out a slow breath through his nose. “A hero. That's the best way to put it.”

Empty words, empty comfort. Not what he wanted, not even close to what he needed.

"You left him," Reynauld forced out. That was it. He wanted anger, a fight, a reckoning. An accounting of all that he and everyone else had done and left undone. 

Missandei took a breath and then, with a slow and deliberate effort, let go of the strap and lowered her arms.

“I’m sorry.” Missandei’s hand twitched up by her hip, like she might try to touch Reynauld, before thinking better of it and relaxing. “Truly, I am. I didn’t want to - none of us wanted to - but-”

"We had no other choice," added Alhazred.

Missandei nodded, her face tight. “You’re a soldier yourself. Surely you must understand… When the tide of a battle turns, decisions must be made. Terrible decisions, decisions no one wants to make, but must be made all the same.”

“And is that it? That's all you have to say for yourselves?” An echo of the commander he had once been leaked into his voice.

“You don’t understand.” Missandei’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “He asked us to leave him. He… He'd taken a knife between the ribs and... He knew he’d die a hero’s death, at least, and I think that brought him some comfort, at the end. To know that it wasn’t in vain. If he hadn’t stayed behind, we never would have escaped.”

“I’m certain the Lord loved that story when you told it to him. I’ll bet he even shed a tear or two. Such an inspiring tale of heroism and tragedy.” Reynauld spat at the ground between them. “Fie! If soldiering has taught me anything, it's this: when the sword cuts too close, those with weak spirits will always do anything to save themselves. Anything.”

“What are you saying?” Missandei squared her shoulders, but her eyes were watering. 

“You’re cowards, both of you. All of you,” Reynauld growled. He was dizzy with anticipation. He blinked hard. “Playing at being tragic heroes to hide your faint hearts. For shame. You leave a man for dead, then call him a hero to spare your conscience.”

Missandei flinched, as though Reynauld had struck her. 

“That’s quite enough!” Alhazred snapped. He drew himself up to his full height, stepping forward and slightly in front of Missandei as though he could shield her from Reynauld’s words.

“You’re wrong…” Missandei tried, but her voice gave out, wavering into nothing.

"You abandoned him because you value your own skin over all else." Reynauld loved the weight of those words as they left him and he loved the hurt and anger that rippled over their faces even more. “And now you stand before me and have the gall to lie to me about it.”

Missandei broke. Her calm face screwed itself up into a grimace, skin blotching. Tears brimmed, then rolled down her cheeks. She stepped around Alhazred to move still closer to Reynauld. Her hands curled into fists and she took in a ragged, painful breath.

“Fine! You’re right! I didn’t want to die there! Is that what you wanted to hear?” An angry sob pierced her words. “When Dismas said he’d stay behind, I was relieved. And damn me if that hasn’t haunted me every day since! So maybe I am a coward! But don’t you dare say he wasn’t a hero!”

It was what he had wanted to hear, but it changed nothing. Dissatisfaction crept through him, thin and cold and apathetic. 

She stepped closer still, tears flowing fast now, and lifted her hands and for one breathless moment Reynauld thought she might swing on him. It had been many years since Reynauld had taken a blow without his armor, without a sword within reach. Many years since he had felt this defenseless. 

But, no. Her hands reached behind her neck and unknotted something with jerky movements. She pulled it out from beneath her breastplate. “Here! Take it, then! A coward like me certainly doesn’t deserve to have it!”

Reynauld stared at the thing in her hand. It was a sad little scrap of red cloth. Utterly meaningless, ragged and stained. He wondered if it still smelled like him.

When Reynauld made no move to take it, or any move at all, Missandei balled it up and threw it into his face. He caught it on reflex, just barely hooking its corner between forefinger and thumb before it could whirl to the ground. He pulled it into his palm. She turned abruptly on her heel and marched off, stiffly, wiping at her face and swallowing down her cries.

"You’re pathetic.” Alhazred stuck out an accusing finger, his dark eyes flashing, his lips pulled tight in a snarl. Reynauld realized then that he had never seen the sorcerer angry before. And he was certainly angry now. Furious, even. “Taking out your grief and anger on a hurting girl! Have you no shame? No decency? I didn’t think you could sink much lower, crusader, but I should have known that a worm will always find a way to reach new depths.”

Reynauld stared at the stained neckerchief. He was holding all that was left of him. It was barely enough to fill up his hand.

“You let me die.” It was the last thing Reynauld could think of to say. To stave off the humiliating defeat that would swallow him as soon as the sorcerer left him alone with the cloth. “You were there when I died, and you were there when he...”

“And just what is it that you want from me?" Alhazred tipped his chin back to narrow his eyes at him, his nostrils flared. "An admittance of guilt? An apology? I assure you that you will not receive either. I have made my peace with what happened. With you and with him and with all the others. I suggest you do the same."

Alhazred turned to leave. Panic seized Reynauld then. He grabbed Alhazred's shoulder, easily stopping him in his tracks.

"Unhand me, you filthy savage," Alhazred hissed, baring his teeth. His right hand reached for the hilt of his dagger. Reynauld thought about Alhazred lashing out at him with that tiny thing and decided he wanted it to happen, that he would maybe allow him to get a few slashes in before wrestling it from his thin hand. 

“I died…” Reynauld tried again, his throat becoming thicker and thicker with each word. What was a judgment without a contrite soul to receive it? A piteous whine for sympathy.  “... because of you. And he’s out there now, Light only knows where, because you couldn’t help him either.”

"He’s not anywhere! He's dead! Can't you at least understand that? Dead. His lungs were filling with blood when we..." His voice, which had been building into a self-righteous crescendo, faltered as it reached its peak, then trailed off into a pathetic whisper. Alhazred tightened his lips into a thin line and cleared his throat. "He's gone. And he isn’t coming back."

Reynauld's hand fell from Alhazred's shoulder and hung loose at his side.

"You don’t know what you’re talking about," he thought he said, but his ears were ringing too loudly to be sure. “They searched the hamlet, no one could find-”

“For a holy soldier, you have a poor understanding of what a miracle is,” Alhazred said, his words dripping with acidic contempt. "You were a miracle, although I cannot think of anyone less deserving of one. You might as well pray for lightning to strike the same place twice.”

Reynauld said nothing. He only stared, uncomprehending, the word miracle echoing in the back of his mind.

"Touch me again and I promise you I will not hesitate to gut you where you stand. The rest of the hamlet would thank me for it.” Alhazred pierced him with one last glare, then walked away as fast as he could without breaking into a jog, his robes swirling around his ankles.

Reynauld watched him leave, then kept watching long after he was out of sight. He looked to the road, feeling thwarted, stunted, jostled out of place. Unsatisfied.

The sun was almost at its zenith. He folded the neckerchief, placed it in his pocket, then continued his slow stagger to the abbey.

+

The confines of the prayer closet had once been a comfort to him. Its privacy had allowed him to open his heart fully to the Light without fear of judgment from eavesdroppers. Its sturdy walls, which blocked out all outside noise, had let him clear his mind. Now, the tight space felt chokingly small, the thickness of the walls a prison, the silence an oppressive weight locked around his head.

He had purchased new prayer beads from the abbot. They were not so different from his own. Less worn, with clouded beads instead of clear ones. A slightly different hue. They laid cold between his fingers, a stranger to him, as they had been sitting for uncountable hours.

He had knelt, at first, on the thin cushion before the prie dieu. Then, when that had brought him only a terrible ache in his knees, he had prostrated himself on the threadbare rug. He had pressed his forehead against the rough cloth, beads clutched before him, and prayed aimlessly, his voice fading in and out, forming the words but saying nothing. And it had been a distraction. Of a sort. For a time.

Silence still lurked between his words, lingered underneath his breaths, filled the gaps between every hushed syllable. Silence, always silence, inescapable.

What was a prayer if it received no answer? A madman’s ramblings.

He had gone from a grave to a grave. It was hard to convince himself, as he murmured into the sour-smelling rug, that he hadn't been damned to some hideously subtle hell, that his body wasn't still rotting in some stagnant tide pool. 

Reynauld sat up. He touched the back of his neck. His fingers came away damp. The air was stale and hung heavy in the small space, squeezing him. It crawled back and forth over his tongue, repulsively warm. Prayers he had known since childhood died forgotten on his lips. His mind buzzed at the precipice of a terrible awareness. He thought of hagiographies and missing relics and the repentant thief’s hands cupping his and word-of-mouth accounts of saints’ bodies both immaterial and immaculate and how he had come to him at his very worst moment to deny his own sanctitude, even as he had lifted him out of the blackest pits of despair.

Perhaps… Perhaps he had not received an answer because he had not been praying to the correct divinity.

“Are you there?” he mumbled, staring wide-eyed at the lit candles, burnt nearly all the way down to their holders, their blazingly bright shadows following his every blink. He squeezed the prayer beads. They were slick with his sweat.

There was… something. A flutter, a pulse, a change in pressure. An inconsequential sensation, so miniscule as to escape notice, had he been anywhere but that silent prayer closet. But it had been something.

“Forgive me…” He set the prayer beads on the rug and withdrew the red cloth from the pocket of his trousers. He wrapped it once, twice, three times around his palm, then clasped his hands together. His heart trembled, knowing that he was traipsing along the edge of blasphemy. “...for not being there with you. For not seeing it through to the end.”

He rested his elbows on his thighs. He pressed his forehead against his knuckles. He closed his eyes. Prayers for martyrs skidded across his consciousness and he pulled from them with abandon.

“But for my failings, you would still walk with me. Your strength has gone and left my soul unguarded. Wherever you are, please... I... please...” 

That something, that presence, whatever it had been, did not return.

"Please," he muttered into the old cloth, "Please, please, please..."

He had appeared without warning, like a holy sending, cloaked in moonlights. Despite your failings, he comforted you. But not until you had proved your contrition.

"Anything, anything, anything,” he pleaded. “ Anything but that.”

There was no argument to be had. He was speaking to someone that was already not listening.

His ears rang. His lips felt dry, on the verge of cracking. How familiar it all was. How terrible.

He staggered to his feet, nearly ripping down a faded tapestry of St. Martha in his struggle to force his crackling knees into action. He cast a final accusing glare over the candles, the now askew tapestry, the useless prie dieu.

"As if I ever needed your guidance," he spat at no one and nothing. He left the prayer closet and slammed the door behind him. 

Later, in their empty room, long after the sun had set, he had knelt before his bed and begged for forgiveness until his neck burned and his throat was hoarse.

+

A week passed.

From dawn until dusk, Reynauld lurked in the abbey, locked in that prayer closet he had come to hate, praying and pleading for another path, any path. And still, without fail, every time his mind stilled and his heart calmed and he let his thoughts wander where they willed, they always returned to that night, and the same answer always came to him. After that first day, he had left the neckerchief behind, neatly folded on Dismas’s bed, unable to bear such blatant heresy. Still, even without that relic, he could not delude himself into thinking he was spending his days talking to anyone else. He left the prayer closet each day, sweaty, agitated, and exhausted, stumbling down the main thoroughfare like a drunkard, his joints on fire and his muscles melting down to the bone. He found himself pausing by the bridge that led out of the hamlet for longer and longer periods, staring at the point where the old road curved away into the twisted woods, eyes straining in the twilight for…

From dusk until dawn, Reynauld lay awake in their room and listened. For his careful step down the hallway, avoiding the creaking floors. For the clunk of the rusted lock as he opened it. For the rough cadence of stories he only half-believed, told out of the corner of his mouth. So that he would not have to go through with this. Sleep came for him occasionally, and forced him down into a restless doze. Then, and only then, while tossing fitfully over his still-tucked sheets, he sometimes heard a nasally rasping voice say his name like it meant something, and he would wake up in a sweat, staring at the darkest corners of the room. Those were the worst nights.

He was aware, dimly, of the other hired fighters. All those people, coming and going. Some who knew him and some who did not. Fresh faces and old faces. He took little notice of them. Few had tried to speak to him since his return and those who had, had quickly learned not to bother.

It was lonely, but it was a deserved loneliness. A necessary solitude. A final testing was upon him, one that he dreaded to undergo, one that he feared succeeding as much as he feared failing it. It was not something these mercenaries could understand. Except, perhaps…

+

Their first meeting was an unintentional one. The flagellant found him doubled over on one of the stone benches just inside the abbey’s doors, his head cradled in his miracle-hands, muttering to himself and pretending it was a prayer, and he had sat down next to him.

Reynauld ceased his prayer, suddenly self-conscious, and stared at the stone underneath his boots. Though he bristled at the intrusion, he knew it had been inevitable. All the signs had pointed him here. This was a calling. And he had been a fool to deny it for as long as he had. Now the calling was coming to him.

The flagellant reeked of old blood and dried sweat. Reynauld suspected that he did not smell much better. Around them, the sanctuary held its breath, the vaulted ceilings drawing all warmth up into its rafters, leaving behind only cold air and filmy candle smoke. 

“I’ve been watching you.” The flagellant’s accent was careful and refined. Not at all the voice Reynauld had expected from a man who belonged to a sect that was rumored to practice self-amputation, put out their own eyes, and sustain themselves through pain alone.

“What?” 

“You are hard not to notice. You are absent from most services, yet you spend your days here. You seem to constantly be in prayer, but what I can hear you mumbling is like no prayer I have ever heard before.”

The cracks in the floor squirmed beneath Reynauld’s gaze, writhing like worms on hot coals. He blinked and they fell still. He sat up and cast a weary eye over the man sitting next to him. He took in his heavy iron collar, the scars that revealed a dizzyingly brutal history of penance, the spiked bracer at his wrist, caked with blood, and the stained hood drawn tight over the upper half of his face. The flagellant did not turn his head as Reynauld moved, only tilted his ear closer.

“You’re blind.” So at least one rumor was true. 

“I have no eyes,” the flagellant confirmed, “but I am not blind. Those who have the true sight have no use for earthly vision. And one does not need either to tell that you are in dire need of grace.”

“And you think you can give that to me?” He kept his voice as steady as he could manage, even as his heart quickened, trepidation threatening to give way to hope. 

“I know I can guide you to it,” the flagellant replied with absolute conviction, “if you would let me.”

“Who are you?”

“I am called Damian. And yourself?"

"Reynauld." His mouth was dry. "Why do you think you can help me, Damian?"

"I think I can help you, Reynauld, because I know what it is to be where you are now. Lost and without hope.” Damian’s preacherly tone ebbed, a soft genuineness leaking through. “Searching for something you don’t understand. I, too, lived so many terrible years with a dying soul. Now, I allow my flesh to die so that my soul may live.”

"You tempt me to self-destruction," Reynauld replied flatly.

"No!" Damien curled one hand into a fist. "No. Destruction? How ugly... I do not destroy myself. I remake myself. I want to offer that to you. The body is the vessel and it is the vessel that sins. The spirit within is pure, but it must be freed."

“You think I have any interest in what your sect calls worship?” Light help him, damn him, he did. He could not give in so easily, though. Let the flagellant make his case, though the outcome of this conversation had been determined long ago.

“I think that you have tried everything else. And that it has failed you.” Damian relaxed his hands and placed them on his knees, which stuck out through his torn robes like rocky hills. Even the backs of his knuckles were criss-crossed with lumpen scars. “I am only here to offer you guidance. Whether you decide to take that offer is up to you.”

“What does it feel like?” he asked, after a stretch of silence, dreading the answer. Aching for it with his entire heart.

“Everything. Every meaningless sorrow and terrible joy you could possibly imagine and like nothing at all. And when it is over it leaves behind the most beautiful clarity. I promise you, you have never felt such peace."

"And... the Light... you feel Its presence while engaged in such... worship? Truly?"

"Oh," Damian sighed, like a noblewoman recalling the scent of her lover's cologne. "Yes. Beyond what you could ever imagine. 'Open, sacred blood-steeped wound, in Thee I would be transformed. Make my heart throb with Thine own - wholly changed - with self quite gone. To one who loves Thee, what is pain?' From the Trial of Saint Bartholomew of Kyrie. I believe he wrote that verse the night before he was to be executed for heresy. But, of course, by the time he was due to be burned at the stake, he had already ascended. 'One single prolonged cut,' as the account goes."

"Bartholomew of Kyrie was denied canonization." It was a decades-old controversy, one Reynauld had heard the patriarchs of the holy land argue over in passing, though the specifics had gone over his head at the time. He had had more pressing matters on his mind, anyways.

"Only because the greedy swine that corrupt the good name of our Holy Church feared what he offered." Damian gritted his teeth. "Imagine it: absolution that requires no passage of gold between palms. Merely the mortification of one's own flesh, which any contrite soul can offer, should they have the will."

"I fear I do not have the will," Reynauld admitted to his hands, hardly above a whisper.

"It is a crippling burden to take up on one's own," Damian agreed. "But you need not do it alone."

Reynauld said nothing. Old, meaningless words from a long-gone man rolled around his head.

"Should you decide to accept my guidance, you can find me in the first penance chamber at the end of every week."

And with that, the flagellant stood, and walked away down the aisle, one hand brushing against the tops of the pews. Reynauld waited until he had exited the sanctuary through a wooden door to the right of the altar. His head fell into his hands and he let out a long, shaky breath.

"Anything, anything, anything," began the familiar mantra. "Please, anything but that."

But there was nothing else.

+

Reynauld lasted one more week before he truly accepted that he had no other choice.

True to his word, Damian was exactly where he had said he would be. He had left the door open and was arranging unseen items on a low wooden table.

The chamber was dark and cramped. The stone floor, grooved to guide the flow of blood, was smooth from decades of bristle brushes. It was cold, there below the sanctuary, with only curdling screams and sweating flesh to warm the walls. The cell was barren, save for a small table shoved against the right wall. Damian moved away from it, revealing three flails and a bucket. The acrid stink of old blood thickened in the stagnant air, seeming to curl from the very walls.

Reynauld cleared his throat. Damian turned at once, staring in that strange and sightless way of his.

"Who's there?"

"Reynauld."

"Ah. Good. I had hoped you would come." Damian's face relaxed like he might smile, then stiffened once more. "Please, come in."

Reynauld entered. His breath quickened. 

“Close the door.”

Reynauld closed the door. His chest tightened.

Damian was dressed in rags, as always, and the stench of his unwashed body and congealed wounds was almost suffocating in the cramped cell. Reynauld had smelled worse than the cloying fetidness of one man – much worse, it was a struggle not to recall the smell of corpses bloating in the midday sun - but he breathed through his mouth all the same.

“Remove your shirt and kneel.” Damian gestured to the floor.

Reynauld’s body remembered beatings and whippings and days spent sleeping on his stomach. His hands refused to do anything more than grip the hem of his shirt. 

“Why do you hesitate?”

“I…” Reynauld’s ears burned. He felt petulant, like a child refusing to bathe. “This is… not what I am accustomed to.” He hated the little pleading tone he could hear in his voice, the desperate waver of it, but it was too late to hide it.

“Obviously. That is why you are here, is it not?”

“Must I kneel?” His knees trembled, remembering a stone floor in a different cold basement, and his wrists ached, remembering the bite of ropes.

“You will either kneel now or collapse on the stone when your body gives out. Make your choice.”

Reynauld knelt in the center of the chamber. Blood rushed in his ears.

“I want you to be certain that you truly wish to undergo this. That you understand the importance of what I am about to reveal to you.”

“I understand.” 

“I don’t think you do.” There was a cold edge of patrician disdain to Damian’s voice. “This isn’t a path one takes lightly. It is no mere fork in the road, or a detour to forget your troubles for a time. It is a total separation of the flesh from the spirit. It is the closest to absolute communion with the Light a living man will ever achieve. Understand that this is not easily turned away from."

"I understand,” Reynauld lied again. What other choice did he have but to lie? Even a man such as Damian would throw him out on his ear should he tell him why he was really there. Sometimes, in his clearest moments, he felt the insanity of it all close in around him. To think that he could use his flesh as a bargaining chip, his pain as proof of his dedication. Now he was at a place where it almost didn’t matter to him if this worked or not. He was due a punishment regardless.

“Then explain to me why you are here.”

“This body… has sinned. It has faltered. I… I deserve this pain and more.” The words tumbled out stilted and awkward, painfully ingenuine. “I crave the sting of the whip.”

Damian was silent for a heartbeat, then two, his lips pursed together.

When he spoke, it was in a low warning tone. “Do you take me for a fool?”

“No, I-‘

“I am not some raving madman that mutilates himself out of some decadent masochistic urge.”

“I didn’t-“

“I am a holy man,” Damian thundered, with such righteousness and steel-clad resolve that for a single stunned moment, Reynauld believed him. “You talk of deserving pain! Please! As if any of us deserves the ecstasy of the burden! I do not punish my body by scourging my flesh! I liberate it! If you seek to punish your body, perhaps you should lose yourself in the depravities the tavern has to offer.”

“Please,” Reynauld gasped out, and oh, how the tremor in his voice should humiliate him, but all he could feel was that yawning hopelessness. That black despair, already thick around his neck and shoulders, now threatened to close over his head. “I need…” He flattened his lips, forcing himself to cut it off there.

“What?”

Reynauld shook his head.

“If you cannot at least be honest with me, I do not see why I should bother helping you.”

“I… I need…” Reynauld thought about the folded red neckerchief waiting for him on that unmade bed. He thought about how he couldn’t remember the last words they had said to each other. “I need..." He shuddered and, though Damian could not see it, clasped his hands together and bowed his head. “Please. Help me.”

Damian considered Reynauld's small humiliation, rolling his tongue over his cracked teeth. 

“I see. I think I understand now.” He shook his head and scoffed. “You are a weak man, Reynauld.”

"I know," he whispered.

Reynauld watched Damian’s bare feet prowl over the stones, circling him. So sure of himself for a blind man. As though he had been born into these rotten flagellation cells and knew them as intimately as his own body.

Fingers touched the nape of Reynauld’s neck. His muscles seized and his head jerked up to stare, wide-eyed, at the bolted wooden door.

"What -"

"Be still." Where had Damian learned that self-assured, commanding tone? And why was it so easy for Reynauld to obey it? "Let me see.”

Damian’s fingertips lingered at his neck for a moment more before trailing down his spine. Reynauld arched away from it - with it? - like a wisp of smoke curling over and around ashen timbers.

"Ah," Damian breathed. It was a gentle, pleased sound. “Reynauld... these are… beautiful.”

The fingertips became a full palm. A second hand joined the first. His hands splayed over Reynauld’s skin, exploring row upon row of whip scars. Reynauld had earned many scars during his time spent crusading, but the ones Damian touched now were different. These had been carved into his skin while his flesh had still been forming. He could not remember what his body had been like without them.

Reynauld bit his lower lip to suppress a cry.

A violation, his body shrieked.

But he did not move away. The slightest shiver of cold followed the trail of those unusually warm fingers.

“I may have misjudged you, sir crusader." Cloth rustled as Damian knelt behind him, so his hands could press against every bit of Reynauld's back. They stopped just above his hips, then traveled back up to his shoulder blades.

"Most do." Reynauld forced the words out between clattering teeth. Sweat beaded in the hollow of his lower back.

“Why didn’t you tell me? All of that before… the testing… it hardly would have been necessary, if I had known you had sought this out already."

“I have never sought this out.” The words punched their way out through a clenched jaw, the weight of them threatening to snap Reynauld in two.

Finally, finally, Damian lifted his hands from Reynauld's back. Reynauld shuddered, trying to shake off the ghost of his touch.

“I am sorry.”

Sorry.

Reynauld tried to laugh. All that escaped him was a low, choked sound.

Damian stood and walked to the rough-hewn table. His back was trim, every inch of unnecessary fat burned and cut and scraped away to reveal corded muscle. His scars were so thick they pushed away from the healthy skin beneath them, piling up on each other like shiny mountain ridges. This was not a body, but a temple of terrible worship.

Damian lifted a flail in his left hand. It was made of tightly woven leather, a thick knot embedded with sharpened metal studs dangling at the end of each arm.

With his right hand, Damian dragged the bucket off the table. It was full, judging by the way his powerful arm fought against its weight. Damian returned to Reynauld and set the bucket down next to him. Water sloshed over its rim and rushed gleefully away.

Damian knelt in front of him. Reynauld flicked his eyes over that stained, ragged hood. Somehow, Reynauld had the sense that Damian met his gaze.

The flail's handle was in Reynauld's right hand now. Reynauld looked down. Damian curled his fingers over Reynauld's showing him how to hold it. There was a tenderness in the gesture that Reynauld couldn't understand. When Reynauld looked up again, Damian was smiling.

"You honor me," Damian whispered. Their heads were so close that his breath curled, warm, against Reynauld's face, like a caress. Reynauld tightened his neck to keep himself from leaning in. "I am honored to guide you down this path, now that you have chosen it. To show you the beauty behind the burden and how freeing it can be when one accepts it with a willing heart.”

Damian grabbed the edges of his hood. "It would be an insult to you to hide my face while you allow yourself to be cleansed down to your very soul."

He threw the fabric back.

Two ruined, reddish sockets met Reynauld's gaze. They were old wounds, but no amount of time could erase the savagery that had inflicted them. The skin had made some effort at regrowing itself, resulting in patches of shiny pink at the edges of the pits. And there, deep in those deformed recesses, were two bluish strips, glinting in the sallow light. Utterly mutilated. Collapsed. Sightless.

"Are you ready?"

Reynauld's free fingers curled into his palm, which prickled at the memory of the hands that had once held them in a moment much like this. With that came certainty. If he could only endure this, then…

"Yes."

"Start with the flail at your hip, the one opposite of the side you wish to purge.” Damian guided Reynauld's hand into place. "Then, pull your arm up into a full arc, the end of which shall terminate itself on your flesh. Imagine that you are trying to hit a place within yourself. The flail will dig in deeper that way. Do this one time on each side."

"How many times?" Reynauld gripped the flail's handle tighter. His knuckles ached.

"Until your flesh is cleansed," Damian said, as though it was the most obvious answer in the world.

Reynauld let out a long, low breath. Damian stood and took two steps back.

"Begin."

Reynauld stretched his arm out as Damian had instructed. A long, thin scar snaked up and around his inner elbow. A hundred memories competed to claim ownership of it.

His head throbbed. He closed his eyes. He breathed in.

The flail dug into the meat of his lower back. A ragged grunt fought against tight lips. He pulled his arm up. The metal studs scraped through tender flesh, carving out weeping lines. There was a gap, a half of a heartbeat, where there was no sensation. Only his slanted breathing, his singing blood, and the warmth leaking down his back. And then the pain rushed in to fit itself to the flail's imprint, digging deep and making its home there.

Reynauld's arm returned to his side. He opened his eyes. Blood pattered against stone. He clamped down on a rush of nausea that threatened to surge out and over his lips.

"Now the other side."

Reynauld jerked. He had almost forgotten Damian's presence. He glowered at him, each breath a strained hiss. But he did as he was told.

This time, he cried out. It wasn't quite a scream. It was lower, heavier, more brutish. The sound tumbled out again as the flail carved out another set of lines before returning to its resting position. There was defiance in the sound. Reynauld's shoulders curved, expecting to hear a harsh reprimand for his weakness and feel more pain, as terrible as a lightning strike. 

Neither came.

Damian had not moved.

"Again."

Reynauld obeyed. And, oh, how terrible it was on his ravaged skin. Now that the first layer of skin had been scraped away, the flail could dig deeper. It kissed a place that was softer and wetter, a place that was all raw nerves and sputtering blood. Now his cry echoed off the walls, bouncing between his ears and making his head ring like a broken bell. He flinched at the mere sound, chest contracting around empty breaths. He bit his tongue before it could come again.

Silence. Bear it in silence. Or...

"Why are you clinging to your composure?" Damian tilted his head.

Reynauld could have cried at the subtle chastisement in his voice, if that luxury hadn't been beaten out of him lifetimes ago. Though Reynauld himself held the flail, he knew he was at the zealot's mercy, if such a concept even existed for him, and he had shown punishable weakness. Reynauld could not speak, so he only shook his head and hoped Damian would understand his silence.

"You are using your pride as a shield. But there is no battle here, soldier. No front line to hold. No citadel to conquer. No victors or victims. There is only the flail and your flesh. Your soul and your guilt. Let it all - all of it - be tested. Everything you hide will only fester."

This time, as the flail bit into his skin, Reynauld let the sound come as it pleased. It tore out of his mouth like a difficult birth, the inside of his throat twinging at its passing. Despite that... There was a kind of relief in the concession, even as the pain in his back compounded, doubled, folded in on itself with every ragged beat of his heart. His lungs twitched. His sweat singed the edges of his wounds. The stench of his own exposed viscera, heated and cloying, made him gag.

"Good, that's very good."

Reynauld's ears ached, anticipating vitriol that had not come, but should. Why was he speaking so kindly? The corners of his eyes pricked. His lower lip trembled.

No. Not that. Anything but that.

His right side again, to drive away the weakness. The flail laid claim to a bit of new territory this time. Reynauld screamed. His voice broke midway through, threatening to shatter into something so humiliating, so repulsive, that Reynauld bit his cheek hard enough to taste iron, in a last-ditch effort to hold it back. With a lopsided yank and another chest-shaking howl, he forced the flail through already weeping furrows, and back in front of him once more.

"Let go, Reynauld." Damian was kneeling in front of him again. His hands cupped Reynauld’s damp face. "I see it squirming in you. It wants to leave you. Let it go."

Reynauld let go.

It was not the weeping of a soldier, facing his final moments in some inglorious pit of mud and blood. Nor was it the wailing of a man hunched over a grave, mourning a departed loved one. No, it was nothing so noble. It was like the thin and selfish sobbing of a child. It was a sound without understanding, without care for honor or decency, senseless in its impotent rage, spilling over purely because the body could no longer contain it. Reynauld heaved, still fighting it despite everything, and then it came again, twice as vengeful, smashing through his resistance like parchment, threatening to break his breastbone in two.

He could not see, could not breathe, could not speak. Damian's deformed face, the cell, all of it, swirled into gobs of scarred-pink and soot-black and sickly-yellow. He was caught between the convulsions of his soul and the ruined pulsing of his back. His awareness stumbled, then slipped, sliding back into a hyacinth-and-brimstone past. His head floated as it once had, below a different church, under the weight of a different agony. The pain was still there, but it was happening to a different body in a different time.

"No." Damian's voice yanked Reynauld back into himself. He whimpered at the sudden nearness of it all, the inescapable reminders of his present. "Stay, Reynauld. You are here. You will let this consume you, as you are in this moment. You will not allow yourself to hide from this like a frightened animal. Meet it head-on. Live in it. Allow it to own you." 

Damian's hands left him, and he shifted away. "Once more."

Reynauld shook his head.

"You are not finished, Reynauld."

"I caaaa-ah-ah-aaaan't," he moaned and hiccuped. His mind was spilling like an overturned slop trough. "Please, I can't! "

"You can! Let the pain sear you! Let it tear as deeply as it likes! Feel it, every bit of it, as it burns away what you once were, then rejoice in what is left! Reject the false idol of your body! Allow yourself to live, awash, in divine pain! In purest love! For that is the essence of Light itself! " Damian spoke in the cadence of a sermon, high and frenzied, building himself to a near shrieking climax. 

"NOW, PURGE YOURSELF!"

Reynauld's arm moved without his bidding. Another scream pierced through the thick fog of his sobs. The agony, so terrible it almost crept back around to blissful relief, surged over him and through him. His consciousness pulsed in time with it for a single heartbeat, a single moment of suspended harmony, as dull and unthinking as an unhewn slab of stone. He slipped out of it with the next torn breath.

Reynauld purged the other side. The wet smack-tear of the flail, amplified by the gore it slid through, was almost enough to drown out the lancing pain that followed. He wailed and he sobbed and he gnashed his teeth and he did it again and again and again until there was no distinction between the hits, only a tear-choked eternity of torturous euphoria, repeating forever on Reynauld's weeping skin, burning so bright, suspending him in the center, where he felt nothing and everything at once.

The regret, the longing, the guilt, the wars, the laughter, the tenderness; it all tore through him, scorching his heart to the quick, then left him totally. And in its wake was...

Love.

Reynauld smiled.

"Enough."

A hand wrapped around Reynauld's wrist and stopped his arm in mid-arc. Reynauld struggled against it, at this interruption of perfection, but he had no strength left to fight. The flail was taken from him. Reynauld would have begged for it back, had his voice not been so hideously mangled. The pain turned on him in that pause, overwhelming him instead of sheltering him. He shuddered underneath its onslaught, still sobbing, still shaking.

"It's done. You made it through." Damian knelt before them again and pressed their foreheads together, cupping the back of Reynauld's head. Their breathing mingled, Damian's steady exhales against Reynauld's desperate, staccato puffs.  "Breathe. All you have to do now is breathe."

Reynauld breathed. Damian's thumb rolled up and down his neck. Slowly, his chest decompressed and his throat widened and his lungs cleared. He pulled down as much air as he could stand, then blew it out on the back of a whimper. The tears were still flowing, warm, down his cheeks and it felt as though they might never stop.

"Stay." Damian pulled away from Reynauld and disappeared behind him.

Blankness stretched between his ears. Unlike the nothing that had once lurked there, his was a true and total respite. It was a buzzing, sheltering sort of nothingness, the sort he could lose himself in, like falling backwards into a freshly fallen snowbank.

He flinched as water coursed down his back, following the path the flail had laid out for it. Then a cloth, daubing away the worst of the water and the blood.

"Be still."

Though the scrape of the rag against the open wounds made Reynauld gasp, he remained still.

His eyes slipped halfway closed. This lightness... this relief... his decades of guilt and shame felt like little more than a nightmare, already fading into an unseen horizon. Damian returned to his front with a fresh cloth and wiped at the mess of itching tears and drying snot that clung to his face and beard. The shape of Damian's fingers through the fabric drew out a quiet sigh.

"Stand."

Reynauld looked up. The wrong man stood above him.

Damian tossed the rag aside and gripped Reynauld's biceps. He helped him to his feet, and Reynauld went, as mindlessly as a puppet. His knees were feeble and, had it not been for Damian's strength, he surely would have collapsed back onto the stone.

Damian guided him out of the cell as though he was an invalid. And perhaps he was. His legs trembled and his eyes, filmy, blinked at the narrow hallway, struggling to understand how he had ended up here and where he was going.

It was a blessedly short walk. Damian oriented himself with his right shoulder against the lichen-encrusted wall and stopped when his skin met a wooden door. He opened it and led Reynauld into an even smaller cell. It was just large enough to contain a platform, suspended by rusted chains, and a small cloth bundle Damian shut the door behind them with a soft kick. What little illumination had come from the hallway was at once extinguished.

Damian helped him sit on the edge of the platform, which Reynauld now understood to be a bed, in the loosest sense of the word. It was little more than a thin sheet of linen stretched over a lumpen pad, supported by a plank of old wood. Then, with careful touches and quiet murmurs of encouragement, Damian eased him down onto his stomach. Reynauld cushioned his head with folded arms. He listened to his breathing as he stared out into the blackness.

Reynauld made no attempt to discern shapes or trace motions in the dark. He was content to simply exist, without fear, without guarding.

A sigh, the rustle of cloth. The quiet pop of a lid. A piercing herbal scent, strong enough to make his nose burn. Reynauld's skin tightened in anticipation, knowing what was about to come.

The salve was cold, so cold, against his back. Underneath it was the warm press of Damian's hand, working it carefully into the furrows. It hurt, but this pain was an entirely different creature. It was not nearly as fierce, wholly dispassionate and yet crueler somehow. Reynauld shifted, letting out a breathless whine.

"Stop that. Bandaging can wait until sunrise, but this salve is necessary to keep the rot away. The beaked physician swore by it."

Reynauld wrapped his hands around his forearms and stilled. He focused on his breathing, like Damian had instructed, all those eons ago in that penance chamber.

"Good. You've done very well. I'm almost finished."

Damian's words worked themselves in deep, deeper than the salve, and soothed his ragged core. Reynauld lost himself in the motions of Damian's hands on his back, drifting in a place between consciousness and oblivion. Damian withdrew his hands. Numbness had replaced the worst of the burning.

"There. Sleep now, and awaken whole."

Below him, cloth shifted. Metal clanked lightly against stone. Skin scraped against itself. Then stillness.

What was love without wounding? An unfulfilled promise.

Reynauld closed his eyes and when sleep came for him, he was not aware of it.