MAWD IS ODD

You had not seen it open once since the day you arrived. Ever since you stepped foot inside, it had remained shut tight. So when the hinges creaked and a lance of brilliant light slanted across the sleeping Offerings, you noticed. It was impossible not to. Everyone sat up, scrambling, hands finding hands and eyes so wide they became more white than iris, and the Offerings swept you up with them. Someone pulled you from the cushions upon which you’d fallen asleep and tugged you against the windows on the other side of the Waiting Room. Shafts of light from the freshly risen sun pierced the filigree shades and placed points of illuminated panic in the huddled Offerings’ eyes. It glistened off their bared teeth. It dazzled you and scattered your wits and left sleep-gummed disorientation in its wake.

You weren’t sure what was happening. But you sensed the Offerings’ fear well enough to know that you, too, should be afraid.

Of the two men who entered the Waiting Room, you recognized only: Garling, the man who had marked you different. He appeared unchanged since last you spoke. His towering blond hair, bored expression, and garish armor were exactly as your memory described. He was just as tall, just as strong, just as handsome…though the expression of disdain-edged boredom on his features ruined any potential appeal.

The other man, meanwhile, was new to you. Visibly older than Garling, he carried a cane made of rough wood with a bulbous head, which he gripped in both hands when he came to stand inside the Waiting Room. He wore all black, and ringlets of grey hair stuck out from under his close-fitted black cap. A beard lined his jaw with snow. A scar ran across his temple beside his hooded eyes, which scanned the Offerings without expression. He was dressed plainly, but the cut of his clothes was perfect. Apart from his impressive height, he appeared rather…ordinary. Certainly not as impressive as Garling in his opulently gauche clothes.

And yet, it was not at Garling the Offerings aimed their terrified stares. When the man rapped the tip of his cane against the floor, they all flinched as one.

The old man said in a voice of rusted swords, “Who will it be this time?”

No one spoke. No one quite dared, you suspected. But this did not seem to surprise the man, because he mopped a hand down his beard and sighed as if he had done precisely this many times before. And perhaps he had, because he seemed bored enough when he glanced at Garling.

“Would you like to do the honors?” he asked.

“No, Saint Saturn.” Garling bowed at the waist. “The honor is all yours.”

“Very well.” Saint Saturn cast his eyes once more toward the Offerings. “Let’s see…”

Like the blade of a guillotine pulled aloft, he lifted the tip of his cane from the floor. He pointed it at the Offerings. It panned across the knot of you in a slow sweep. Tension moved with it, rippling through the Offerings like a fin cutting still waters. When the cane passed over you, the tension invaded your chest. It snared tight and only released you when the cane ceased to point at your stammering heart.

The tension ratcheted high when the cane stopped somewhere to your left. Relief stole over you — and when Saint Saturn next spoke, the relief turned swiftly to hard guilt.

“You,” he said. “You will do.”

A cry. A choked sob. A gasp from your periphery, followed by movement, and someone stepped forward: an older fellow whose name you suddenly could not recall. He emerged from the gaggle to stand before Saturn with his head held high. Light dappled his wispy hair in sugar-spun gold and settled on his wrinkled face like honey.

“I’ll return just before sunset.” Saturn’s cane rapped against the floor again, a whip-crack strike of wood on stone. “Be ready. You know what is expected of you.”

The older fellow nodded.

Saturn and Garling retreated.

The ebony door creaked first open, then shut.

The moment it closed, the Offerings swarmed. They descended upon the chosen one and tangled him up in their arms, grasping him tight and holding him within knot of voices voices swelling with love and grief alike. You heard comfort. You heard tears. But most of all, you just heard love — desperate, broken love rendered in cracked sobs and fractured words all cobbled together into something close to whole.

You tried to recall what you knew of the chosen one. Scant little came to mind. You remembered that had had been behind the ebony door for some time. Years, in fact. He probably had grandchildren of his own somewhere in the great, wide world. You remembered his gentle voice and warm eyes. He’d said something kind to you over dinner late one evening. Beyond that, you knew little about him.

You were ashamed to admit you could not recall his name.

But you remembered well what Sahra told you: That a man whose name you did not know kills his Offerings come morning.

Just as this horrified realization set in, Sahra strode forward. The others parted like the sea before a prophet, and the chosen Offering emerged from their number. Sahra placed a hand atop his shoulder.

“Edmund,” she said in her clear, strong voice. “My friend.”

“Sahra,” he replied, softer than her but no less clear. “Daughter of my heart.”

They exchanged a long stare. Strangely, they each began to smile. Edmund cupped Sahra’s cheek in his hand, and she returned the gesture. Neither of them wept — not even as the others began to cry and crowd closer, laying their hands along Edmund’s shoulders and arms in a mantle of support.

Eyes affixed on Edmund, Sahra addressed the room.

“Today, we are not princes, princesses, or dignitaries of any kind,” she said in that clear, strong voice upon which you had come to rely. “Today, we are attendants to the chosen one, and we will prepare him for the night to come. We will support him. Feed him. Dress him. And most importantly, we will listen, and we will remember.” She smiled, eyes full of love and bitter sadness in equal measure. “It is the final gift we can give. And we give it with glad hearts.”

The other Offerings nodded.

Thus began Edmund’s final day behind the ebony door.

The Offerings did not go back to bed to sleep the day away, as was their habit. Instead, a new habit emerged, the current of which they dragged you into as surely as any riptide.

Soon, it would become your habit, too.

As the sun climbed higher above Mary Geoise, the Offerings assembled around the burning brazier and turned their eyes and ears toward Edmund. He was small with old age, stoop-shouldered with time. But his face was handsome, and when he made a request, he voiced it with perfect manners and endless gratitude. The Offerings propped him on the highest pillows and served him the choicest foods from the daily spread. They poured him wine, and massaged his shoulders, and catered to every whim he voiced.

And all the while, Edmund spoke.

“I hail from the South Blue,” he said in a voice of soft cotton and sea breeze. “I am the brother of my island’s headman. I could tell you of when I was marked an Offering, but it hardly matters, now. Unless…”

He looked to Sahra. She shook her head.

“Speak on whatever you wish,” she told him. “You lead us, this day.”

His expression settled into wistfulness, eyes as distant as the stars hidden now by gleaming daylight. He said, “Then I will tell you the stories I like the most. The things I want to be remembered — of me. Of my home.” Wistfulness bittered into longing. “Of those I left behind.”

And so he did precisely that. Edmund took the lead. He told the stories of his boyhood on a windswept isle a million miles away. He described the way he and his brother chased sheep and dove into the ocean to gather shells from waters warm and sparkling. He waxed long of the paths of birds migrating overhead in autumn and the crackle of a fire in the night while cold beat at the eaves, trying to find its way in. He spoke of someone he loved. He spoke of someone he did not. He talked of rituals to please the gods of his ancestors and the idioms traded among those who lived under their rule. He rhapsodized of the food his mother made before she died, and of teaching his nieces and nephews the recipes to remember her by.

This was, you sensed in your heavy bones, a sacred sharing. It was a holy thing you witnessed that day behind the ebony door. It was a hallowed practice, one triggered by Saturn’s choice — and one that could have happened earlier, without such a dire trigger.

You wished it had happened sooner. You wished you had paid more attention when Edmund spoke around the fire in nights past. You wished you had remembered his name before he was called. You wished you had listened while you had the chance, and asked questions about his life and home before the opportunity vanished in the opening of an ebony door. You wished you had asked to hear his stories and that you had paid attention when he told them. You wished you had known better than to take the other Offerings for granted.

Most of all, you wished you had had more time.

But Edmund was out of time, and that day was all you had left.

Regret stained your heart red. Sorrow stained it black. In your regret and in your sorrow, you wept silver tears, the colors an accompaniment to Edmund’s final confession to the other Offerings — a tapestry he wove with memory’s myriad hues until the shadows grow long and beams of light tracked from the floor to the opposite wall, and afternoon flirted with evening.

When the shadows stretched all the way across the Waiting Room, Sahra rose. As one, the others joined her. They escorted Edmund to the bathing chamber, where Offerings prepared the water with fragrant oils and flower petals. Others arranged fine clothes beside the pool. Still more brought food and wine, waiting on Edmund hand and foot while he was bathed, pampered, and prepared for the night to come.

Once he had been polished to perfection, he rose from the bath and was anointed in unguents and perfumes. He dressed in expensive fabrics and fine shoes, and once so clad, he looked every inch a royal — every inch the brother of an island headman with his head held high and his eyes clear and his shoulders set with pride.

Sahra looked him over once he had been prepared. The Offerings followed when she took him by the hand and led him to the far end of the bathing pool. There she handed him something strange: a broken shard of pottery, edges rounded white and face a rich shade of deep blue.

Edmund weighed it on his palm. He gripped it tight. No one spoke. Sahra gripped the curtain covering the wall.

“Edmund of the South Blue,” she said. “Do you wish to be remembered?”

And Edmund answered: “Yes.”

Sahra pulled the curtain back. You knew what lay behind it all too well: thousands of names, a memorial to the fallen and a record of all who had come before you. The names stretched up to the ceiling and to the sides, hidden by more drapery and the shadows of the evening. So many names. Too many to number, each one a life that had come and gone before you were even born.

And more, you knew, would only follow.

A hush fell over the steam-filled room. helped by the other Offerings, Edmund knelt on creaking knees and pressed the shard of pottery to the wall. With care he dragged it against an empty bit of space, stone rasping over stone in short, swift strokes, until his name joined the endless others upon the wall.

Another name added.

Another life taken.

Another Offering lost to time and the gaps of recorded history.

But Sahra’s voice cut your thoughts in a blade of satin: “Edmund of the South Blue. Your name has been recorded,” she said with the command of a queen without her crown. “Your memory will live on. We will tell your stories until we can no longer draw breath. We will remember you.”

“Edmund of the South Blue,” the other Offerings chorused, “we will remember you.”

Edmund rose to his full height. His eyes were clear, determined, and poised. Sahra stepped back to let him address the Offerings in her stead. Whether this side of him was a matter of habit or a matter of the moment, it did not matter, because his voice carried through the echoing chamber and into the rafters above with all the surety of a king addressing subjects most beloved.

“I have been here for some time,” said Edmund of the South Blue. “Longer than any of you. Longer, perhaps, than some of you have walked this world. And what I have learned in my time here is this: We are all that we have.”

The declaration reverberated through the humid air. It curled under your skin, into your marrow, in eddying increments. Someone’s hand found yours; you did not see whose. You only had eyes for Edmund, because soon, you would lose him entirely.

“We are all that we have.” Edmund’s voice was softer now, though no less potent. Earnestness draped every syllable in gauzy solemnity. “We are all that we have, and so we must be good to one another. We must be there for each other. We must listen with our hearts as well as our heads, and take care of those we hold dear.” Edmund smiled, sun piercing clouds and scattering them with sunshine. “In this place, we are all that we have. We must stand together lest we fall into despair.” He wagged a finger at the Offerings, grandfatherly affection writ in his wrinkled skin. “So be good, everyone. And remember me when I am gone.”

He extended his hands. Sahra took one. Ariadne took the other. Hands found hands until no one stood alone and the Offerings formed a ring that wrapped around the pool in the middle of the bathing chamber. Fingers entwined, blue ripples undulated across their faces and swam in their tear-soaked eyes. But Edmund’s eyes remain clear as he held his head aloft and led the Offerings in a call you had come to know all too well by then.

“Today, we are alive.”

“Today, we have survived.”

“Today, we saw the sun rise.”

“And for today, that is enough.”

By the time you finished, tears had fallen down every cheek in the Waiting Room…every cheek save for Sahra’s, that is. She alone remained strong after the echoes of the Offerings faded into silence.

But not even Sahra could remain unmoved.

She shed one tear, and one tear only, when Saturn and Garling returned just before sunset and took Edmund away. It fell down her cheek in a diamond track as Edmund stepped into the hall. As the ebony door began to close, he turned his head over his shoulder, gleam of his bright eye shining through the ever-closing crack.

“Be good to each other,” he whispered.

Your guilty heart reached for him and said, Wait, wait, please don’t go —

But like twilight turning to night, the ebony door fell shut, and he was lost to you forever.

The way the other Offerings had leapt to prepare Edmund spoke of habit. They had prepared an Offering before. They knew the steps of this habitual dance with practiced ease. To you, however, the tide of this habit was unknown and terrifying. But once the ebony door shut and the Offerings returned to habits you recognized, you eased.

As much as you could under the circumstances, at least. Believing you had said your last goodbye to Edmund, grief’s fatigue stole over your limbs like ash after a fire. You crawled onto the cushions by the brazier and breathed the perfumed air as the sun set, watching through heavy lids as the shadows blended into night itself.

But while some joined you, not all of the other Offerings retired as you did. Some paced. Others stood by the door. Some lingered by the windows. A few ate themselves silly. Some crawled into the sleeping cubbies and cried, sobs muffled by muslin and velvet. And when night once more descended in full, Sahra stood by the brazier and raised her voice in a call.

“Come, everyone,” she said. “Let us tell tales of Edmund tonight. Tonight, we will — ”

“It isn’t fair!”

You jolted upright, head turning, eyes drawn to Matthias standing by the cloistered windows. Brown eyes fever bright, he dug his hands into his hair and ripped, tearing first at it and then his shirt. All the while his eyes streamed thin years; teeth gnashed behind his lips in audible, sickly grinds.

“It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair!” he wailed. “Why can’t it just be over!?”

Sahra started toward him. “Matthias — ”

“No!” The word was a feral howl, a wolf screaming to the moon. “I just want it to end! I just want — ”

His eyes lit up; he tugged at his collar. The others swarmed him, coaxing his hands away from the inert explosive, but something kindled in his eyes and he pushed them aside, running headlong for the ebony door.

“Out, out, let me out!” Matthias screamed. He beat his fists upon the door until his knuckles bloodied. “Let me out, damn you! Let me out so this collar can kill me — kill me, kill me, just let this all be over!”

The others were upon him. They pulled him away from the door and dragged him to the pillows. They smothered him in kind words and soft shushes, stroking at his hair, petting at his sodden cheeks and heaving chest. Your stupor waned when you smelled the salt of his tears. You started to go to him, to help or to commiserate, to try and lend your voice to the throng and offer what little comfort you could provide.

You stopped when you saw Sahra. Normally, she was the first to speak. She was the first to offer wisdom to guide a struggling Offering through the darkness of this place and its stony destiny. She was the first to lead, the first to brace, and always the first to love.

But now?

Now she stared, silent, from across the room. At her side, her fists clenched. She watched Matthias without speaking. Dark hair fell against her cheeks in heavy curtains, and in her eyes shined a light you thought you recognized.

It sent a chill down your back, right there where the nerves connect.

You swallowed. Through throat dry with uncertainty, you murmured, “Sahra…?”

But Sahra only shook her head.

“Let him cry, if he must,” she said in a voice that only you could hear. “But I fear it will change nothing.”

You felt even colder than before. You joined Sahra’s silent vigil, watching until Matthias’ sobs turned first to whimpers, and then to heaving breaths in the almost-dark. Only once his tears stopped flowing did Sahra lift her chin.

“Come,” she said. “Let us remember Edmund together.”

Drawn into the pull of her magnetic orbit, you settled with the other Offerings around the sobbing Matthias. You took turns stroking his hair and letting him use yours laps for his pillow. The Offerings told stories of Edmund as the stars reeled overhead and the brazier spat perfumed smoke to the distant heavens.

It almost (almost) felt like habit.

It felt that way until it didn’t anymore.

You weren’t sure when you fell asleep. Voices soft with bitter love lulled you into dreams between one story and the next. One moment you were listening, and the next you were waking to hands on your shoulders, pulled once more to your feet and herded to the windows before you had even finished opening your eyes to the dawn.

But when those eyes at last beheld the day, they found the ebony door standing open once again.

Independent of your mind, your body seized. You knew in your brain that it was too soon for another Offering to be called, but your body did not know this, and it reacted as a hare scents a wolf in the underbrush — but the others were not fearful. As you came to yourself in panic, they simply cried. They held each other in a knot of trembling arms as Sahra and a few others approached the door. Words bubbled on your tongue. You wanted to reach out and grab them, pull them back, take them away from that portal to the unknown and whatever might lie beyond it —

Something shoved through the door: a long cart draped in black. The door shut once it rolled into the room. Deathly silence followed. For a time, no one moved. You started to ask what was happening, what the cart meant, why everyone stared at it with such awful, mounting dread —

The Offerings moved forward. They surrounded the cart. You started forward, too, but a hand grasped your your elbow. At your side, Ariadne shook her head.

“Don’t,” she said. “Not this time. Not your first.”

You looked back at the cart.

Blood had pooled on the floor below it.

Something in you numbed and thawed and numbed again. Your brain and body fell out of rhythm. Rich carmine smeared under someone’s foot, and a gap opened between the assembled Offerings, and the black sheet on the cart peeled back. Only the sheet wasn’t black at all. It was sodden red, red so saturated it had gone dark, dark, dark —

— and below it, Edmund.

He was not as you remembered him.

Gone were the kind smiles and warm eyes. Now his eyes were simply gone. His mouth was a silent scream, jaw broken, face pale where it wasn’t streaked with ichor. There was a hole where his heart should have been under an ivory fan of displaced ribcage, and one arm hung limp over the side of the gurney — limb held in place by a scrap of muscle, and nothing more.

You turned away and vomited onto the floor.

Thanks to Ariadne’s mercy, you were spared what happened next. Led by Sahra, the others left you in a cold and shaking ball on the floor while they washed and dressed Edmund’s body for burial. They arranged his face, reset his bones, and scrubbed his flayed skin clean. They covered him with a new sheet and dressed him in fine clothes. They were his attendants in life as well as in death, first his maids and manservants and now his undertakers, too.

“He will be delivered to his family,” Ariadne whispered in your ear. “That is why we prepare the bodies. So their families might believe they died in peace.”

This comforted you, but only for a moment.

Your parents had not seemed to know the destiny of the Offerings.

Had an Offering’s remains been returned to the country you had once called home, surely they would have known you had been sent to your death.

No one discussed this incongruity when the body was taken away. Silent but for the occasional sob, the Offerings scrubbed Edmund’s blood from the floor under the scarlet light of the setting sun.

Habits develop slowly.

But this one would sink its riptide teeth into you immediately, and when the next Offering was called, you fell into deep-water habit like a sailor overboard.

There was little talk around the fire that evening. Most of the other Offerings slept. None of you had slept much in the last two days. To care for Edmund, you had remained awake through the daylight hours you’d normally spend dreaming. Now Edmund had been put to his final rest, most everyone fell asleep soon after sundown.

You, however, did not.

Neither did Sahra.

As the others dreamed, the pair of you sat in silence to watch the brazier burn. Above, the stars wheeled, paths as uncertain as they were incomprehensible. Inside you, something churned. A slow current of dread morphed slowly into energy, driving your limbs to tremble and your chest to ache.

“Surely there must be more than this.”

The word slipped from your lips unbidden. Sahra lifted her eyes to yours. Sparks of fire burned in their depths. A reflection of the brazier, perhaps…or something more potent still.

“Surely you must know something else.” Awash with frantic purpose, you nevertheless kept your voice pitched low. “Something that can help us leave this place. Something. Anything.”

But Sahra cast her eyes to the floor and said, “There is nothing.”

Your teeth gnashed; your stomach clenched. “But surely there must be someone we can speak to. Someone — ”

“There is no one,” Sahra replied with a bite you had not yet heard from her. “There is no ‘someone.’”

“But what do we do?”

“We wait.”

The energy inside you blazed, shifting for a moment into anger. But soon the fire cooled, because it had no tinder to catch upon.

Sahra was right: There was nothing to be done. You were impotent and helpless and trapped in a place that did not care if you lived or died. No one answered the door when Matthias beat on it and cried for mercy. There was no mercy here. You could not delude yourself that help would come now that you had seen the truth.

You already knew everything there was to know.

You already knew that he, whoever he was, killed his offerings come morning, and that you would share that fate with the Offerings who had come before.

Now all you could do was wait to be chosen, and wait for the end to come.

“We wait,” Sahra murmured — and then her voice dropped into something low, and soft, and urgent. “We wait, and we plan.”

You looked up. Sahra stared at you. The brazier placed fire in her eyes — only it could not be something as small as the brazier that placed such burning calamity in her irises. No, it was Sahra’s spirit that sparked so brightly, her inner fire ready to ignite the dry tinder of this place and burn it to the ground. Emotion so hot it blazed white, raw and searing, burned in the depths of her gaze more brilliantly than any distant star or rising sun, and it threatened to burn you the minute you beheld its glow.

It was familiar, that emotion glowing in her eyes. You recognized it because the same burned in you — the same fire eager to sink its raging teeth into this place, the Saints, the people of Mary Geoise who supplied a monster with fresh meat. It placed its fire in your limbs and soul alike and compelled you to match Sahra’s gaze with yours so your fires could combine into a blaze so ferocious, no one could ever hope to put it out.

It was hate that fueled you both. It limned Sahra’s every word with power and savagery, her strong voice rising with the smoke to the firmament above, witnessed by the stars and your ears alone in this most desecrated place.

“This carnage. This place. This system. It is not sustainable,” Sahra spat from between bared teeth. “More blood will be spilled. More Offerings will die. More horrors will be wrought unless we do something to stop them.”

“But what can we do?” you asked her.

“More,” she replied at once. “We must do more with the time we have left. Murasaki gave us a clue, one that has given us hope thus far. But from this moment forward, I will find a new path for all of us. I promise you that.”

Your heart beat heavy in your chest. Sahra turned her gaze to the stars.

“We cannot simply stall the man who devours us,” she murmured. “I cannot simply stall him. I must accomplish what none before us has achieved.” Her fists clenched atop her thighs. “I must survive long enough to change something.”

The impossibility rendered you breathless, but still you asked, “But how?”

“I do not yet know. But I will. And soon.” Sahra’s hand covered her heart, where the fires reflected in her eyes surely burned the hottest. “With the stars above as my witness, I vow to bring an end to this cycle of pain and death. This I promise you and all the Offerings who came before.”

For the first time since you entered the Waiting Room, the riptide of hope broke you from the habit of sorrow and threatened to carry you to other shores.

But there were currents deeper and more deadly than hope in the dark waters of Pangea Castle, and though you did not know it then, Sahra had just spoken the only lie she would ever tell you.

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chapter notes: sorry for the delay on this one. chronic pain slowed me down.

I lost somebody not long ago, and this chapter hit me in way I didn’t expect. The regret of not taking advantage of the time you have left, realizing you wasted what you were given, the knowledge you should’ve done more, that they’re lost to you and it’s your own fault for not being more curious sooner…it’s real, and it’s raw, and I realized while writing that this story has so much of my grief woven into it, it might as well be autobiography.

For the first sacrifice, I purposefully chose an Offering we had never really heard of before. The regret of not treasuring everyone before it was too late was something I wanted to hit, and it felt fitting to use a character we hadn’t come to know yet. I hope you, too, wished in that moment that we had spent more time with Edmund before he left us.

You might recognize some of Sahra’s speech there at the end. It parallels things Mythweaver said in chapter 7. Now, perhaps, we’re starting to get a sense of where Mythweaver got some of their ideas...that wasn't the only callback to a previous chapter, either, and things are starting to subtly connect across the various chapters. on my side of things, its' very fun to write!