Poisons: Seeds of Doubt.
I've been spending a lot of time hiding in the lab a lot lately. It's easier when it's just me and the chemicals, my beloved plants, and my outbursts of musical inspiration. I did find a merchant, and a practise violi piece, and in these long days and sleepless nights I've spent hidden away it's been less and less time collecting data or distilling essences
and more time writing Grigor's song
because I can hide from the living but I can't hide from the dead.
Few of my superiors had misgivings about my ability to remain detached from the Cultists. The years I spent as a Courier of Compassion had engendered in me the certain callousness that a soldier requires. Not the •. most stable man in Her service perhaps but I had all the qualities the mission required, and some none others did.
Perhaps we should not have dismissed the possibility of emotional involvement out of hand. But who could have known...?
I've mentioned the serum the Cultists drink that robs them of their will and ensures their loyalty; and I've mentioned the process of creating abominations. Neither is perfect; neither is foolproof. Sometimes, for some reason or another, it just doesn't quite take.
The cell was nearly a hundred strong, counting only the living. There was a young man among them - a human - who stood out to me. Grigor.
I've never met a human quite like him.
I first came to suspect something was amiss around the time that I put together who what we were being fed. There was something in his eyes that the others lacked: a spark of will, a glimmer of hesitation or revulsion. It was as if somewhere inside him he was screaming THIS IS WRONG, screaming for help and rattling the bars of the prison his body and mind had become.
So very much like myself.
Some foolish, crushingly-lonely part of me leapt for joy. I wanted to befriend him confide in him, question him, subvert the cell with him. These things were not to be. Tarethayel was no blind optimist. I tested him. Grilled him on the basic tenets the Cult holds sacred, on and in its strange language (not Common, no; it feels older, as though it leans heavily on Eredun - though it doesn't hurt to speak or hear like Eredun does, not quite), and every time he faltered, I remembered.
Never once did he directly state his doubts. Most times he was just like any other I worked beside - any other nameless wretch I've cut down before and since. But I knew. Tarethayel knew. It manifested in little glances and hesitations. In the way he stared at me, stricken, when he made the tiniest slip (that terrified look that begs Please don't tell please don't kill me). In the way he responded to the fact that I would only smile and change the subject. In the fact that over time he grew increasingly at ease around me
and less at ease around our superiors.
Grigor remembered fear.
One night, deep in the caverns our the cell used for lodgings, he came to me and confessed. Simply this:
"Fear is a failure. A defect of the living only overcome by death." And he looked at me with a weight that said everything his voice could not.
This could be a trick, Tarethayel thought. This could be a test set forth by our leaders to see if I could be enticed into disloyalty. But his eyes-
I said only this: "You are not alone."
And Grigor smiled, as some of that fear fled him.
And damn us both for fools- we talked, in the quietest of whispers, until damn near dawn.
I pray you are at peace, Grigor
and that you can forgive me for calling you friend.
We both should have known what a mistake that would turn out to be.
(( Suggested listening: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/s/Something+I+Can+Never+Have/OOt5 ))
the poisons that lurk in the muck
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