[2.15] Unsanctioned Salvation

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

The world went dark, so abruptly that I feared the poison had knocked me out. In the next moment, however, the sea of clouds surrounding the platform of Selene’s heart flared to life once more—brighter than before, and with a narrow focus.

Many-colored vapors still hung heavy in the air, but they drifted in purposeful streamers that blocked off the mountains overhead like vast psychedelic curtains. I could see Griffon sitting beside me again, and I could see the center of the dais even more clearly than before. In fact, the lights and the vapors drew my eyes towards it.

In the split second that the darkness had overtaken her heart, the scene had changed. The honeycomb tripod was gone, and where there had been one young Saint of Scarlet Hearts before, there were now three.

Each of them was Selene, but it was clear that they all intended to play a different role.

The first of the three was the only one to not have visibly changed anything but for her location in that shifting of scenes. She was still the same younger version of the woman I knew, swimming in her sunray silks. She stood tall and proud, her sacred spear held tight in her right hand. Her expression was calm, but her stance was just a bit too rigid, and the knuckles of the hand holding the spear bled white, giving away her uncertainty.

The second Selene was a quivering mess, slumped over on her knees and clinging desperately to a lonely limestone column that was riddled with stress-line fractures. Her fingers were bleeding, and her tattered Raging Heaven attire was so mudstained you could hardly see the indigo in it. She wore a theater mask of the same young woman’s face that I had seen carved into the surface of that very limestone pillar. The mask was frozen in a singular moment of betrayal realized.

The third and final Selene lounged on a plush couch, one hand propping up her head while the other idly swirled the contents of a golden cup round and round its rim. This third Selene was dressed the most ostentatiously of the lot, and it wasn’t close. She wore a many-layered robe of amethyst and gold, and every one of her ten fingers was heavy with the weight of rings and the gemstones set into them. This Selene wore a mask as well, but it had no features at all—only a flat, blank surface.

Griffon leaned forward eagerly, and I found myself being drawn into the anticipation of the atmosphere myself. The Saint of Scarlet Hearts had set the stage, and now the play was ready to begin.

“It is an oracle’s sacred duty to ease the burdens that heaven heaps upon the hearts of mankind,” spoke the Selene that wore no mask, save for a younger version of her own face. She didn’t move, not yet, and neither did the quivering wreck of a woman clinging to an unsteady pillar. Only the blank-faced lush moved at all, and only then to swirl the drink around in her cup.

“Mortals and cultivators alike seek them out for succor, offering up the bounties of their lifetimes in exchange for just a few moments of an oracle’s time. They lay bare their broken hearts, their battered spirits, their befuddled minds, and their blasphemous hungers. It is not necessarily the case that every visit to an oracle bears fruit, but rather that some fruits can only grow amidst the holy smoke.

“The oracles are not what they once were, or so the oldest of them tells me,” the unmasked Selene continued, still motionless beneath the glaring lights. “But a sanctified oracle still has her little majesty. She’s capable of things that an ordinary cultivator is not. She cannot always make miracles, but she can soothe the scarlet hearts brought before her–if she so desires.”

The scarlet light emanating from the clouds pulsed, and Selene sighed.

“But I was never sanctified, and I have never been taught the lessons that every oracle must teach her daughter before passing on her mantle. The others did what they could to help raise me, but even then, there are some lessons that only the Scarlet Oracle can teach her successor. I was no Scarlet Oracle then, just as I am not now—not in the ways that truly matter.”

Finally, the stage shifted into motion. The quivering wretch clinging to the pillar suddenly lurched forward, collapsing to the scarlet marble and retching black bile all over herself.

“But that did not stop them from coming to me with their troubles,” the unmasked Selene whispered, and somehow the acoustics of her heart made it echo. “It did not stop them, and in their desperation, they showed me such terrible things. Cultivators in the second and third realms, men and women that were decades my seniors—the specifics mattered not. They all groveled at my feet and begged me for a salvation that I had no way of providing them. I was only a girl, but the children of the sun hadn’t lost their need for an oracle when my mother fell into her coma.”

Selene abruptly cast her spear aside, rushing to the collapsed cultivator’s side and gathering her up in her arms. She wiped the bile from the painted lips of the tragic theater mask, pulling from a fold in her oversized silks a draught of healing honey, which she poured carefully through the gap in the mask’s lips.

“I tried to help them anyway,” she explained as she poured. “Oh, how I tried. Every day I secreted away little treasures that my father had given me to nourish my cultivation, anything and everything that I thought might soothe a cultivator’s broken spirit. I poured fortunes down their throats, offered up to them untold riches in the hopes that it might cure what ailed them.”

The young woman of the Raging Heaven cult thrashed herself out of Selene’s arms, spewing up the healing honey and all four of her humors in addition, dying loudly and messily, like an animal, while the young daughter of the Scarlet Oracle watched in horror.

“Nothing worked. Nothing. There was nothing I could do.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” came the voice of the third and final actress on the stage.

The voice was so sharp a contrast to Selene’s own voice, that for a moment I forgot where I was entirely. I leaned forward with my elbows planted on my knees, enraptured.

It was an exact match to the voice that Scythas had called up with his unique mimicry when we were in Thracia. The voice of a dead man. A mad man.

The blank-face mask of the Tyrant Riot tilted sideways to regard the dying woman.

“There were many things you could have done, even then,” he spoke, and while his blank mask of a face gave nothing of his feelings away, the tone of his voice made them clear—faintly amused, faintly disgusted. Disinterested above all.

“But I didn’t want to just do something,” the unmasked Selene replied hotly, kneeling back. “I wanted to help them. More than that, I wanted to save them. I wanted to do more than just soothe them for a moment. I wanted them to be able to walk free of that place with their hearts made whole again.”

The Tyrant Riot chuckled, and I marveled at Selene’s ability to reproduce such a sinister sound, even here in the confines of her own heart.

“And they say I was greedy.”

The Tyrant Riot beckoned her over with one hand, and raised that golden cup to the spot where the mask should have had lips, tipping it back. Wine that shimmered in the spotlight with a faintly metallic sheen slid off the smooth surface of the mask and splattered onto the marble floor, mingling with the dying cultivator’s humors.

“But I don’t hate the sound of it. So bring me the body, and that spear of yours too. If you have the stomach for it, I’ll show you a little something.”

“Will it help her?” the unmasked Selene asked hopefully, dragging the body over to the couch and scooping up her spear along the way.

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“I suppose you’ll find out, won’t you?”

“It was a foolish thing to try. I’m not so naive that I can’t acknowledge that,” the unmasked Selene confided to the crowd, while the Tyrant Riot helped her adjust her grip on the spear, poking and prodding at her until she had assumed the proper position, with the tip of her bronze spearhead angled just so, hovering over the mystiko’s heaving chest. “But I’ve never claimed to be made of stone. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending my life watching others come apart at my feet. It was too much tragedy for a girl my age to bear.”

“Don’t hesitate,” the Tyrant Riot advised her. “Even a total eclipse only lasts a few seconds.”

The unmasked Selene breathed deeply, until the white faded from her knuckles. She looked down into the death mask of a woman with no hope left of life, and I saw the first spark of that ageless resolve kindle in her heart.

With a sharp exhalation, she thrust her ornamental spear down through the cultivator’s heart, and a fourth actress erupted up out of the marble beneath the fractured pillar.

The fourth actress wore the same costume as the deviated cultivator, with a few key differences. She wore a crown of thorns where the deviated cultivator wore a crown of leaves. Rather than mud, her Raging Heaven attire was stained by blood and the rancid juice of overripe fruit. And most notably, her theater mask was not set in a rictus of pain and betrayal, but one of demonic hate.

She clawed her way up out of the floor like some nightmare undead, ripping through the marble like it was wet-rotted wood. The pillar of the dying woman’s principle tilted dangerously as the heart demon forced its way free of the foundation, all but upending the principle on its way out.