Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (3 page)

After that encounter, Catelyn witnessed her mother begin
to dissociate from the essential, vital part of herself in order to
survive, and both her parents took on the look of all the other
people Catelyn had ever seen in her life; broken and hopeless.

Catelyn learned something else from that encounter as
well. She didn’t know how she had come to the conclusion,
whether it was from seeing the tragic lives of her parents or from
reading the contraband books that her parents had hidden
throughout their small home, but she was convinced that despite
his delusions of divinity and righteousness, the Emperor Uriel III
was really no better than a criminal, and his empire a playground
for his own dark desires.

Despite her young age, and ironically in spite of her
physical blindness, Catelyn’s experiences had opened her eyes to
an Empire built on a foundation of corruption and the demented
will of criminals, where chaos and violence were rampant. The
only “order” Catelyn had known came from the Imperial army, a
tyrannical organization that was renowned for putting down any
hint of unrest with brutal swiftness and lethal force. She had
experienced firsthand how fear, sheer numbers and superior arms
did much to control people already made vulnerable by poverty
and abject terror.

Catelyn also knew that Uriel III did much to appeal to his
citizens basest instincts, and in her life, she had witnessed or been
told about myriad forms of abasement such as sexual displays on
every corner, blood sport arenas which hosted daily shows of
barbarism and brutality to animal and man alike, and
encouragement by the Empire for the common people to imbibe
free-flowing drink and drugs. Even Catelyn could see that Uriel
maintained his rule by keeping his people either too numb or too
stimulated to care that they were little more than chattel for the
whims of a madman.

One of the books that her parents had given her to read
told of a different kind of empire; and of the rights of ordinary men
and women to liberation of body and mind. The land of Exeter,
once a free nation with nobility and dignity, was now comprised
mostly of the worst criminals in the history of Ereas.

It was into such a world that Catelyn had been born. It was
the 1,056th sojourn by Imperial Reckoning, of the Grand Cycle.
Her birth was one of several successful births in several sojourns,
Uriel III having instituted rigid population controls after
completion of the Wall of Regret in the 1,034th sojourn.

Her parents had explained not having brothers or sisters
to her one day, as something that had been decreed by Imperial
Order. Her parents had been fortunate enough to be one of two
hundred couples throughout the Empire each sojourn who had
won a lottery that had granted them the right to procreate. Any
unauthorized childbirth was deemed a threat to the Empire and
the entire family was subsequently slaughtered; the parents and
infant made very public examples of. Despite her fortune in being
allowed the chance to live, the early sojourns of Catelyn’s life were
fraught with danger and heartache.

Resentment and jealousy surrounding the rights of the
“chosen”, as the winners of the lottery were called, was rampant
and encouraged by the Emperor himself. The parents who were
given such a chance were often set upon and killed following the
birth of the child, and those children at times stolen by rival
couples who had not been selected for the privilege. Catelyn’s
father had explained that Uriel III believed devoutly in the idea
that such struggles would only benefit his Empire, making the
children stronger future citizens, and that any of the parents who
died were clearly too weak to raise the next generation of Imperial
subjects.

This was the reason that Tomas and Sera moved the
family on several occasions, and why they worked opposite prayers
from one another, so that Catelyn would never be home alone and
unprotected.

Tomas sat Catelyn down one day and tried to explain all of
these things to his young daughter, though he wasn’t sure she
could possibly understand. Still, she remembered every word of
his admonition.

“This cold and unforgiving world view lies at the heart of
everything that is wrong or perverted about the Empire. The
Emperor has taken a truth about our universe, that there is no
inherent meaning or proscribed purpose to the world or to those of
us who live in it, and he has subverted it to fit his own twisted
needs. Rather than see the truth that it is up to each of us to give
our lives meaning, he has given into cold harsh realism as his only
gospel.”

Catelyn was too young to understand those words then,
but she had thought much on them in the six sojourns since her
parent’s deaths. And she was now old enough to see that her father
was only scratching the surface of the problem with the Empire.

A slavish devotion to such a philosophy and the actions
and motives that this philosophy espouses is a complete abdication
of any individual’s value. And such mindlessness is what led to the
death of Tomas and Sera Bereford just ten sojourns after Catelyn’s
birth. It was in that sojourn that her world changed forever.

Thinking about her family, as always happened, triggered
the memories of that last day with them to wash over her like a
flood. She had long since moved past the point of being
overwhelmed by the emotions, but the memories still buffeted her
like a chaotic storm.

Lying on the roof, with the heat bearing down from above
and the turmoil in her heart worming its way out from within, her
fingers and toes gripped the coarse wood slats as she prepared to
relive the worst moment in her life.

It began as a morning like any other. Her mother sat at
one side of their kitchen table, numbly scrubbing the paint from
her face, having just returned from the soldier’s camp. While
Tomas stood over their metal stove stirring a kettle of warm gruel
and toasting a heel of moldy bread for the three of them. Catelyn
was sitting at the table opposite her mother, reading one of the
forbidden books her family had managed to hide from the
Imperial soldiers, when the pounding began on the door of their
hovel.

It was not a knocking, but the unmistakable sound of
someone trying to smash the door down. The door itself would
have splintered in one solid shove, if Tomas hadn’t wedged a
sturdy chair beneath the door handle, a precaution that their
family had taken to enacting since the incident with the Imperial
officer and her mother, as well as other minor scares over the
sojourns.

Tomas sprang up immediately, all too aware of the danger
to his family. He dropped the wooden ladle he held to the floor,
and ran to the cabinet and withdrew his sword, a rusty, thin
longblade. Illegal though it was to have weapons, after the
Imperials had come calling that day, both her parents had been
awakened to the dangers of being completely defenseless, and so
he kept this contraband weapon stashed behind the cupboards. As
he moved with his weapon drawn to the front door, which sounded
to Catelyn as though it was just about to give, he called out.

“Sera, grab Catelyn, and run. We’ll meet where we agreed.
Go!”
Her mother simply nodded and ran towards her. Catelyn
was ready, their family having practiced and prepared for this
moment. It was no use however. As Sera reached her, preparing to
flee to the alleyway behind their home, more pounding came from
the rear of the hovel and the sound of splintering wood echoed
through the tiny space. As the rear door gave way, a rough looking
man burst in, and Tomas turned to face him, Sera holding Catelyn
to her with one arm, and the other now brandishing a dull bread
knife. Before the man did anything other than glare at them with
desperate eyes, the front door finally smashed inward, the chair
cracking under the continual pressure. Tomas and Sera stood their
ground, but as more people entered their hovel, they knew it was
no use.
Yet despite the odds, they refused to give up.
“Get out of our house!” her father yelled, lunging at one of
the men, hoping to end him quickly and maybe cut a path for them
to escape.
Tomas, despite his trade, was still a slender and gentle
man at heart, and there was no contest between him and the
attacker, who was rugged and burly enough to look as though he
regularly challenged handfuls of men in physical contests. The
other man sidestepped the thrust easily, and grabbed hold of
Tomas’ arms.
“We’re taking the child. If you let us, maybe we’ll let you
live” the man declared as he pinned Tomas’ arms to his side,
keeping the sword point away.
Sera launched her own verbal assault on the four
intruders.
“Why are you doing this? We have a life here. You can
always…”
Her mother never got to finish that sentence, as both of
the other strange women rushed at her, one grabbing for the knife
in Sera’s outstretched arm, the other ripping Catelyn away, until
she dropped to the floor. Once Catelyn was no longer in the middle
of the melee, the strangers attacked in full force, raining blows
down on her parents. Catelyn tried to fight back, but the attackers
simply shoved her aside easily, like a doll.
Within whispers, Sera and Tomas were huddled and
sprawled on the floor of the main room, beaten and bloody, with
their faces pressed to the dust and dirt and their arms clutching
desperately to the spindly legs of their daughter, unwilling to let
go. Catelyn pulled at them, urging them to get up, to fight back, to
take her away from this place, to save her.
The four strangers stood leering jealously at the child
kneeling and weeping over her parent’s limp forms.
“Just do it,” the oldest man commanded.
The younger man bent over and picked up Tomas’ sword,
which had fallen to the ground during the beating. He then strode
over to the prone forms of Catelyn’s parents, while one of the
women grabbed Catelyn by the collar of her shirt and yanked her
away.
Tomas and Sera, unable to continue to defend themselves,
were swiftly gutted by the man now brandishing Tomas’ sword as
Catelyn looked on in horror, screaming and crying uncontrollably.
Catelyn might have only seen ten sojourns, but her parents
were everything to her. They had shown her love and compassion
unlike anything she could have expected to find in a world as cold
as the one they lived in. They had taught her well in those
sojourns, exposing her to knowledge that many had forgotten
through the books that they found and smuggled home to her.
They taught her how to read and write, a skill that was forbidden,
and so mostly forgotten, by the Empire. They had given her the
best life possible in such extreme conditions, and she loved them
more than anything in the world. And now here they were, dying
before her eyes.
“Catelyn...darling...we love you. We…” Her father’s last
words.
“We’re sorry.” Her mother’s.
She wanted them to remain with her. She wanted more
moments with them, more time to be with them, but just like that,
it was over.
As she watched each of them draw their last breath, she
truly felt as though her world had ended in that moment. But in
truth, her trials were only just beginning.
The two couples, despite having cooperated long enough
to carry out the initial assault together, now turned on each other
for possession of the weeping girl.
“Now, let’s settle this part,” one of the men said.
The man who had taken Tomas’ sword lunged for the
other man, trying to take the other by surprise. He presumed that
the other man was unarmed, and that he would have the
advantage, but he was wrong. The other man reached into his shirt
and retrieved a grimy glass vial filled with a thin, oily red fluid.
“Get back! I’m warn-” he began, but the other man,
despite his size, was faster.
As the sword found its home in the second man’s
abdomen, the vial flew from his grasp, the stopper pulled free in
one last desperate attempt to defend himself, and proceeded to
release its contents directly into the first man’s face. The crimson
fluid sprayed in wild jets around the room as the man flailed in
obvious pain and suffering, acting almost alive, almost as though it
sought out living flesh to consume.
“That’s bloodfire!” the woman who was partnered with the
swordsman shouted, as she watched him in horror, trying
desperately but futilely to remove the fluid from his upper body.
The substance covered the swordsman’s face and upper
body, causing his skin to blister and dissolve. He dropped to his
knees, screaming in agony and clawing at his face as he tried to
wipe the liquid away and only succeeded in getting it on his hands,
which spread the liquid further. It was the most horrifying thing
Catelyn had ever seen.
The other man, the one who had released the volatile fluid,
was also near death, slumped on the floor with the sword impaling
his stomach and a stream of blood pouring from the wound.
Catelyn turned to see the two women collide now, and she
saw that they were struggling over a sharp piece of wood that had
broken off when the door had splintered open.
“You’re not...taking her...you bitch!” the younger woman
growled.
The woman who controlled the makeshift weapon was
gaining the upper hand, and she managed to jab the sharpened
piece of wood into several places on the unarmed woman’s chest
and shoulders, but not enough times to incapacitate her. Both
women were fighting for their life, and for possession of Catelyn,
who could only watch from her knees.
“She’s ours. We’re taking her!” the wounded woman was
insisting.
As the adults struggled, Catelyn looked on from where she
knelt as the four attackers engaged with each other, and as she did
the bloodfire,which had pooled onto the floor near her, somehow
splashed up and onto Catelyn’s face. Her last thought before the
pain seared away all rational reasoning had been that it looked as
though the bloodfire had leapt from the man to the floor and then
onto her, almost as though it had moved with a will and a life of its
own.
And then the bloodfire went to work on her, and instantly
her terror transformed into unadulterated agony.
The pain was all that registered to Catelyn from that point
on and she shut her eyes against it. She had felt what she had
thought was excruciating pain once before, when she had burned
herself with a hot ember that she had tried to pick up when her
father was making a fire for them in the winter.
This was not even remotely like that, it was far, far worse.
Hundreds of times worse. The intensity of this pain was
unbelievable.
Within breaths, the pain seemed like it was all that existed
in the world. And then, just when she thought the worst of it was
over, the bloodfire would spread further and it felt to her as though
it was setting new parts of her face and upper body on fire.
After what seemed like sojourns, finally, mercifully, the
pain began to subside, either because the bloodfire had burned
itself out or because it had succeeded in eradicating the entirety of
her face. She imagined herself with no skin, her face a fresh white
skull screaming in abject misery.
She never passed out from the pain, while the bloodfire
stole her eyesight and much of the skin from her face and chest.
She lay in the combined blood and gore of her parents and the two
strange men for prayers, now completely numb to everything both
within and without.
She no longer heard the two women, and presumed that
they had fled upon seeing what the bloodfire had unleashed on the
girl they had come to steal.
Catelyn remained in that room, with the dead and the
dying, for four prayers before someone arrived. Four prayers spent
in complete darkness, with only her four remaining senses to tell
her what her world was like now. Her parents were cold, silent and
still below her, the gutted man lay unmoving three paces to her
left, while the other man lay whimpering and sputtering just half a
pace away on the right.
The sounds of the earlier conflict, or the screaming, or
both, must have drawn someone’s attention at some point that
morning, though Catelyn imagined that her screams must have
been horrific sounding to have kept even the scavengers and
looters away for so long.
Eventually, she heard the tromping of boots on the stairs
below, and then the sound of people entering her family’s home. It
sounded to Catelyn like three, maybe four, men. She smelled their
sweat stink, heard their plate and mail armor and the metallic
jangle of weapons. The Imperial army, she reasoned, and she
decided to remain silent.
“What a mess,” someone muttered under their breath.
Catelyn listened as one of the men stopped at the spot
where the wounded man lay.
“Divines, what…” a young man’s voice said, and then she
heard him stumble away to the corner of the room and evacuate
his stomach.
“Ugh. Bloodfire. I’ve seen this before. Nasty stuff from the
Before,” one of the other men said.
“Yeah, that stuff eats right through anything,” a third man
offered. “Look, you can see right through to his brain an’ all.”
At the comment the first man began to heave into the
corner again.
“Enough,” a grizzled voice said. “We’re here to
investigate.” And then the sound of a sword unsheathing, followed
by a wet squelching sound, and one last sputtering breath from the
man on the ground.
“That was a mercy,” said the second man.
“That was convenience” the grizzled voice said, annoyed.
“No skin off my bones,” the second said.
The men went around the room, doing one thing or
another. Catelyn heard them opening and closing drawers, looking
through cupboards, and dragging the bodies away to the corner of
the room where the first man had sicked up. None of the men
mentioned or approached her. She began to wonder if they would
simply step over the dead bodies and slit her throat.
Catelyn wondered if they just didn’t see her for some
reason, and she coughed.
She heard one of the men nearby stop, but he didn’t make
a move towards her.
“Can you...help?” she managed to say, her voice cracked
and quiet.
The footsteps resumed their pattern of moving about her
home, and then finally, the grizzled man spoke once more, but still
not to her.
“Alright. You three, take the bodies and report in. I’ll be
right there. I’ve just got to take care of this last thing.”
“Sir,” the other men responded in unison.
She heard the heavy footsteps of the other men as they
walked to the corner, groaned as they picked up a body each, and
headed downstairs.
“Please, don’t take my family…”she started to say, and
then the sadness overwhelmed her and she collapsed to the
ground, sobbing uncontrollably.
The footsteps of the remaining soldier came straight
towards her, and then stopped.
“Please…” she started to say, when a hand gloved in
leather and metal pulled on the bottom of her chin, turning her
face up to the ceiling. She felt a hot stinging where the bloodfire
had been and she winced in remembrance of the pain. The grizzled
man spoke.
“Bloodfire took your eyes, girl. But you probably already
know that. And you’ll never make a living servicing my men
looking like that. You’re useless now.”
The hand left her chin and she felt like dying. He grabbed
her roughly under the arms and pulled her to her feet. Then she
heard him kneel down before her and felt his hard, gloved hand
grip her shoulder tightly, hurting her as he spoke in his rough
voice.
“I believe in the Empire. This isn’t a fatal wound. If you are
strong enough, you will live and become something hard, and cold.
You will become a benefit to the Empire. If you are not, then you
will die and the Empire will be stronger for it.”
He released her shoulder and she listened as his mailed
boots thumped their way over to the corner, heard him shoulder
the last of the bodies, and out of the room. When they were gone,
all that remained to her was darkness and silence.