The Priesthood

Drifting and wandering. There is neither aim nor destination, not one that he quite knew that he’d reach. It was so late by now; most of the streets were dark and empty, and only some roamed so late in the night. It was so late that it would soon be another dawn.

In his arms, there was a piece of cloth that he held like one would hold a baby. It was precious. He can’t drop it; he can’t get rid of it. He had to bring it with him. He had to carry it somewhere. Somewhere that was not here, somewhere far away from where he had gotten it from. He should’ve never left the safety of their little cottage in the middle of nowhere. He should’ve never been so eager to please or try to prove himself.

Where was he even? These streets—he couldn’t focus on them; they were there, but he barely noticed them. Not the buildings that he walked past, not the people that still found time to enjoy the night.

His head was confused. Why did he do it? Why would he ever do something like this? Why? What the hell was wrong with him? Had he lost his mind? There is a word for what he had done, and it wasn’t just murder; it was patricide.

Why couldn’t he be that weapon in Kalma’s hands? The one that felt no emotion, the one that did as was expected of him to do. There was a city around him, but was there really one? He walked, and it was as if on either side of him there was a void, and he walked on a thin line, trying to keep a balance so that he would not falter and then fall into that nothingness.

He had been here before. Not just this city, but this thought, this image. To his knowledge, he had never contemplated the embrace of such a void; he had only ever looked further into it. Further and further, until one could only see nothing. Until he would become one with it.

Somewhere past the horizon, the sun was rising. With it would come another morning, a new dawn, and a new beautiful day. But it was so cold. He needed to find warmth. He needed to feel alive again. He needed to not be the man that he had become.

Men are nothing more than their actions. Their words hardly matter; their beliefs are just that—beliefs; everything and all that matters not unless an action brings it forth as a reality.

He had claimed that he did not believe in gods, yet he kneeled before one. He believed that there would never be a reason to kill and that his garden of thoughts, values, and beliefs would be one where no weed could ever grow, yet he had killed another man.

He had believed many things; he had said many things; but those things matter, for actions have shown the world what men really are and what kind of man he really is.

Is there a world in which he was in the right when taking the actions that he had taken? Was there a world where his actions didn’t make him a coward and a hypocrite? Perhaps only if one believes in gods.

It is easy to say that you could do nothing else; that the choices made were the correct ones, where for every direct attack toward your own beliefs, you had not yielded but kept those beliefs intact. Deep beneath the horrid actions that you have committed, you are in fact not a coward but a man who did what he had to do. As if there were no other options.

But isn’t there always another option? Some of those other options just might lead to death. But when choosing between one option and another, the one where you yield, where you kneel before God, where you then go ahead and do his bidding, where you then kill... And then the only other option given is death. You have to choose between two deaths. Should he not protect his own ego and his own life? When someone else gives their life willingly to save yours?

He stopped. Before him were the gates to Kalma’s palace. Multiple guards stood before him; they looked past him, but Ignar knew that they keenly observed him and made sure that if he were a threat, then he’d be promptly dealt with.

He had walked the fine line between abysses. And through his thoughts, he found two solutions to deal with the betrayal of his own beliefs:

One, he must give himself in; he must pay for the crimes that he has committed. Otherwise, he will never be released from the regret and guilt that he feels.

Two, you lie to yourself and make yourself believe that the evil that you’ve committed was not wrong; in fact, it was not evil at all, and if it were evil, then that evil had to be done, for there was no other way. The actions that he has committed must become just, or else he will falter and be consumed.

But there was an issue with both of these rationales. To whom could he, in a situation like this, admit his faults and his crimes? He was the only one to think of such deeds as crimes. And if he were to lie to himself, would that not slowly change him—the very core of his values? Wouldn’t that make him more like the criminal that he thought himself to be?

How does one rationalize murder? How does one, in any line of argumentation, make it completely just? Laws and such barely mattered, for laws can often be different from the subjective view of morality that one has. A thing might be legal or illegal, but a person could always see it differently. One could easily, in their own mind, think that stealing in certain situations is hardly immoral, yet another could easily think that all forms of stealing are equally immoral.

The same could be said about murder, or a situation where one kills another, be it with purpose, be it an accident, or even a situation where the law sees that the person doing the killing was in the right.

But again, none of that really mattered. It only mattered how one perceived these crimes or actions and the outcomes of those actions. It didn’t matter that, in the eyes of the law, Ignar was in the right. It only mattered that he believed that he had done something that was unacceptable and that he had done something for which he should pay the highest price. But what is such a price? Should he then accept the abyss as his only answer, either through a metamorphosis of the self, by becoming a monster through the deeds that he had committed, or by accepting that only eternal darkness could give him relief from such crimes? For if there was none to whom he could confess his sins, then he could never atone for said sins.

Patricide was one thing, and grief another. He would deal with such things accordingly. He just had to find his way to atonement first.

Everything about him was tired. His eyes were still red from the amount of tears that he had shed, and if one were to meet his gaze, they too could see the sadness that was present, but one could never guess what he carried in his arms as he announced himself to the guards: “I am Ignar Orcun, and Kalma wishes to see me.”

There was no protest from them, and they let him enter the palace grounds, first to a garden and square where Kalma would at times greet some of his armies while looking down on them from the balcony that oversaw everything. Under that balcony was the grand doorway to his palace; the steps into it would lead anyone who wished to grovel before Kalma to his throne hall.

Each step he took with labor, holding tighter the cloth in his arms, not looking at it, and barely even noticing that he held it so tightly. He kept tears at bay as he entered, as he first laid eyes on the man they all called god, their emperor, their king—the dragon.

There were people already in the court, knowing all too well that Kalma never slept, that he was almost always there, and that he would accept visitors from the early morning to the late evening. He did not eat, he did not sleep, he did not crave the touch of women or men, he did not feel tired, nor would he ever feel hunger; there was no lust in his eyes, not in his words or manners. He was a god, and gods don’t feel such things.

But they were all things that Ignar felt far too well and far too often. Above all else, he felt fear. He was afraid. He feared what would happen next—not the disappointment of his god, but the reverence of his own actions.

Everyone had their eyes on him, and he could feel the anticipation in the air. All the questions they would have: why had he come here so early in the morning, and what did he bring with him? By now, they all knew who he was and how he was related to the creature that sat on his obsidian throne.

Ignar’s legs shook, his body trembled as he kneeled, and the bundle of cloth that he so carefully had brought here left his embrace as he offered it toward the throne, not wishing to truly part ways with it. At last, his eyes met the eyes of God.

“Ignar, arise, bring forth the gift that you’ve brought with you,” Kalma commanded, on his face, no expression that could be easily understood or read. If there were such things as regret, grief, satisfaction, or anger, such things could not be seen; this was not the vulnerable god that Ignar had seen for but a moment not long ago. This was the god he remembered meeting when he first arrived here.

Ignar arose, and he felt so sick. Every step that he now had to take brought him closer to that abyss, closer to the man that he did not want to become. The stairs and their steps, veiled with colors and a long carpet, were not much different from the carpet on which he had slain his own father. How is it possible to remove the head from the shoulders of another man? How easy it was to kill. How easy such an action was to take, but how impossible it had been to not do such a thing... He had to believe such a lie.

Again he kneeled, now just in front of Kalma, and he presented him with the bundle that he had carried all the way from that room in that brothel, through the busy street that was Pófos, through the streets of Anavasii, past the gates that lead to the palace grounds, through the garden and the square, all that which was beneath the very creature to whom he now presented it. All this while walking on the thin line that he had chosen for himself to walk, as two different forms of abyss sat on either side, waiting for him to embrace one or the other, to transform or to die.

And now that bundle parted ways with his hands. And it was lifted and then unveiled, the bloodied cloth falling on Ignar’s hands, and the head of his father securely in the hands of the god that had willed his death.

This silence is so palpable. Were they all so surprised that a head was presented to their god? Or was it just because it was a head that most would recognize?

Kalma received the head of his son and lifted it to be equal to his own sight. He observed the severed head and smiled. “You’ve done well, Ignar.”

Then he presented it to the crowd; his voice was triumphant as he announced, “Behold, the head of a traitor, the head of a man who once was Kalla, my only son.”

Silence was the only response.

“But he is no longer fit to carry my name or my legacy.” His voice was filled with passion that one seldom would hear come out of his lips; their god was happy, their god was filled with this ruthless emotion that he now presented to all of them, and in a form so clear that even the most aloof men could hear it, they could all feel it.

A smile. A toothy smile on the face of that creature, as he then, with his other hand, forced Ignar to stand up; he forced Ignar to face the crowd; he forced him to take their admiration as he then announced, “Now this is my only son. From the very moment in which I laid my eyes on him, I could tell that we weren’t that different, that we were more than kin. We are the exact same. Formed from the very same blood that calls for us; forged from the necessity to become great, far greater than anyone."

“He too will one day become a god.”

“He will receive that which Kalla denied.”

“He, Ignar, shall carry my name; let him be then called and revered as Ignar Orcun, the son of God!”

The silence of the crowd was subdued; it was forcefully removed; it was broken and ripped apart as the hundreds of people at the court roared and filled the hall with their cries of reverence. His name was chanted along with the name of Kalma, and damnation was wished on the memory of Kalla, a traitor.

All this, all these deafening screams. All this, which he wanted none of. All this made him feel more disgusting than he was. All this made him a criminal who had no path toward atonement. For him, there would be no redemption, only apotheosis, through the reverence of all these people and through the wishes and plans that Kalma had for him.

The rest of the day was a vortex, as he was forced to sit beside Kalma as he accepted those who had come to see him, those who had come for his guidance, and those who had now come to see the head of the traitor and the new son of their god.

This lasted for hours until Kalma commanded him to go to the quarters that had been prepared for him in the palace. The rooms, which were once Kalla’s, are now his. A set of servants guided him through the palace, to the higher floors of it, through many corridors, halls, and rooms, all of which were like a blur to him. They led him to a large apartment that was part of the whole complex that was Kalma’s palace. An apartment that was the size of the Adrian Estate. A place where one could get easily lost.

Perhaps the servants could easily tell that their new master was beyond tired, so they led him to his new bedroom, where a familiar woman sat on the bed with a fearful expression on her face.

The servants dismissed themselves and announced that they would hear his summons and that they would come and serve him if he ever just called for them. Ignar was now left with the woman from the brothel. The woman who had given him the number to Kalla’s room and who had then comforted him when tears would not stop flowing.

She got up from the bed, and she seemed rather nervous; her fear was still there, and she dared not speak unless spoken to.

Ignar stared at her, asking in his head questions about her true involvement in the whole ordeal, but instead of asking any of them, he asked the only other question that came to his mind: “Why are you here?”

The woman conjured a brave smile on her face. “I was ordered here to serve you.” She then glanced at the bed.

Ignar let out a long sigh and navigated his way to the bed. First, he sat down, and then he let his body relax; he was too tired to do anything. He was too tired to argue with anyone. He was too tired to think or even grieve.

“You don’t have to.” He announced, and his first words were muffled by the yawn that forced its way through him.

He stared at the ceiling for a few moments, but soon his eyes forced themselves shut. In his mind, there were no thoughts or memories that would beckon him to investigate them further; there was just darkness that wanted to claim him for the rest of the day.

He could hear the woman moving, perhaps walking away, so he gave up on everything else but sleep. But soon he felt a soft touch as sheets were pulled over him, his head was lifted slightly, and a pillow was placed beneath his head. It was comfortable, but either way, he forced his eyes open, and all he could see was the worried expression on the face of the woman.

Deep within, he felt bad about it. Perhaps he should offer her words, commands, or whatever. But he could not; he again closed his eyes and entered the darkness of sleep as a soft hand gently caressed him, welcoming him to the dreams or nightmares that might be. And when the darkness at last takes him to the lands of dreams, tears break the mask of his serenity.