sab writes

Phase: Sacrifice

It was the eve I prayed would never come.

My wedding night.

Bare and bewildered, a pale moonface floated in watery darkness. Hovering, foreign and distant, in a lone, oval mirror, pitted by an age of sand and rust.

A passive indifference belied by the dark rings beneath sandy eyelashes, blinking back the flood that sought to drown me. A dour reflection, swallowed by the draping, shapeless white of my dress. More death shroud than bridal gown.

“You are exquisite, Liesl,” the Sublime Sister reassured in her hushed tones, combing gingerly through my tangled locks, the same way she had done for me as a child, brushing salt from my tawny curls. Though there was little comfort to be found in the same gesture now. “How pleased He will be to receive you.”

I could hardly fathom what the Sublime Sister saw then, staring back at her through the smeared mirror, orange candlelight sputtering between us, the grim shadows carving out the harsh lines of her face, illuminating all of my softness.

My unending sadness.

Did my suffering suffice in love's stead?

Stepping back to admire her handiwork, the Sublime Sister surveyed me with a cold reverence and pride, her stark eyes matching the matriarchal grey of her robes, the only indication she was much older than I. "Exquisite," she repeated, a white and crooked smile like a crescent moon.

Trembling, lips wavering, blanched and stiff as my starched matrimonial gown, I looked nothing like a bride.

I looked like a corpse.

Bloated.

Bedraggled. 

Fitting, perhaps, since I was to wed a god this night.

The Sublime Spirit, the Celestial Tide, the Transcendental Ocean. In unyielding and eternal matrimony.

To quell His rage and sait His unquenchable thirst.

To stop the Great Flood from drowning us all.

Whispered psalm swelled behind me, while my sisters splashed their faces with seawater, stinking of seafoam. Taking turns to dip their foreheads into shallow copper basins, into a baptism of dark, frothy brine.

They each bore flowers and stones as offerings, painted with the inky, ancient marks of the faith. Leaving tributes at my feet, uttering their private adulations, they had transformed the dingy, damp bridal suite of our convent into a glowering shore of a shrine.

Transfixed by my presence within their sacred chambers, pious and god-fearing, my sisters stared expectantly from the light of flickering sconces. It was the highest of honours for our House, to prepare me for the Sublime One. A Holy reward for their unshakable devotion.

Surrounded by their reverent love, suffocated by the heady fog of incense, sandalwood, lavender, the sickly scent of their bodies pressed tightly together in prayer, a faintness washed over in a crashing wave.

“Now, now,” the Sublime Sister hushed again, cutting through the high chime in my ears, cupping my face in her hands, the sharp pang of her nails kept me conscious. “You must be strong for the Celestial One, my girl.”

I nodded, fervently, if only to relieve her claw-like grip from my jaw. “Of course, sister.”

"He will send us all to watery graves should you fail.”

Her words stilled in me, envisioning a great tide, tall and white as the cliffside, breaking every draughty beam, bursting through the ancient brickwork, a swelling maelstrom collapsing the convent, while my sisters screamed and clawed at their clothes, their skin pale, turned blue, eyes bulging in their sockets like air-drowned fish, fighting for the last pocket in the domed ceiling…

"I will not fail you. I will not fail us," my words fumbled, as though my mouth was full of stones.

"May I?"

A sisterling stepped forward, wrapped in the deep ocean blue of youth. Presenting another gift for the pile. With a wide and innocent smile, she bowed her head low, took to her knees and raised a wreath, handcrafted by the youngest members of our Gnostic Order. “For the Sublime Spirit’s bride,” she said with breathless excitement. 

An offering.

As I was. 

With a curt nod of silent thanks, a fluttering wrist to usher the young girl away, the Sublime Sister placed the wreath tenderly upon my head. A crude coronation, their wreath my royal crown.

I did not feel regal.

I was rootless.

...Detached.

Driftwood floating in a turbulent sea.

The wreath the final piece to my bridal ensemble and the most decorative. Swirling creams and earthy browns, adorned with spiny coral and fanlike scallop shells. Two strings of pearls curved like curtains at my hairline, meeting at a central oyster shell, shimmering iridescent. I shrank beneath the romantic beauty.

“Thank you, dear one,” was all I could manage, swallowing hard at the film of tears in the girl’s admiring gaze, mistaking my grief for something awed.

How I wanted to say this was not spousal. This was sacrificial.

“You are ready.” It was an unwavering statement.

One I did not feel.

Not at all.

With a violent hiss, an icy gust swept away the warm glow of candlelight. Jolting at the boom of the convent doors, thrust wide open. Hazy moonlight spilled into the windowless chambers, a spark of far-off lightning flashed across the ribcage beams, dark clouds rolling waves in the distant sea. Swollen, heavy, like one giant silvery eye, the wyrm moon hung low in the sky. 

The wyrm moon threatened flood.

"It is time."

Numbly, nodding limply, I followed my sisters to the entrance, where a crowd had gathered to bear witness to our House parade. They huddled, barefoot and bitten by cold, in white blouses and cerulean skirts, the modest uniform of our faith.

Flushed, worn and weathered, men and women alike. Eyes raked along the procession to find me and pin me, the murmur of their curious mutterings swept up in the wind.

“Is that the bride? The Lord's chosen?”

“She is larger than His last.”

"The sooner she sinks, love, the better for all of us -"

"May you satisfy our Lord, the Sublime One and spare us!"

My world opened and closed simultaneously, the moment I stepped out into the bitter breeze and onto the stony cusp of Stranding Bay.

The Sublime Sister accompanied me, her cloaked arm linked in mine, holding the wreath secure, tangled in the tugging wind and whipping my hair awry. The sky rumbled in response, almost mocking the toil of fear and rage that writhed in the pit of my gut, rippling beneath a solemn surface.

“Can you feel the tremble of our Lord's excitement?” The Sublime Sister crooned, curving into my ear.

“Excitement?” Almost a laugh. To me, it was nothing but wrathful.

“It would be wise not to keep you from Him for much longer,” she cried out over the sound of the coming storm, a spark in her slate-grey eyes. "He senses your presence on these shores! The Sublime Spirit grows impatient!”

My answer was swallowed by the bitter sea spray.

We moved in single file along the beach, led by my sisters and followed by the ambling lessers. Our shins splattered with mud, skirts soiled by the pendulous surf. My bridal attire weighed down like an anchor, clung and wound to my figure, snagging over slimy rocks and jagged shells. The spray flecked my arms, painfully, numbingly cold, teeth chattering till my jaw ached with it. Thighs raw, red and chafing.

Trudging through the broken, sodden harbour of Stranding Bay, we passed numerous empty homes nestled oddly into man-made caves. It was said the founders of the Gnostic Order had blasted into the cove many years ago, carving steep and slippery staircases along the ivory cliffside. Building their settlement as close as they could to such sacred ground.

Cursed ground.

Bleached by sun and stripped by sand, battered rowboats littered the lonesome beach, leading up to a single, gaping, natural cave. A deep ravine in the chalky earth. The Church of the Gnostic Deluge was buried a mile deep into the rockface. Accessible only at low tide, if one was brave enough to descend onto the narrow, slippery steps into stifling darkness. A trial and testament to those most faithful.

I faltered at the wide berthing mouth, sucking in through my teeth, tasting the tang of brine bellowing up from below. Watching, frozen with horror, as my sisters slipped blindly into the swallowing blackness.

“I can’t-”

“Liesl, you must.”

The Sublime Sister nudged me and I clung all the tighter to her slender frame.

“Please -”

“Liesl,” she said softly. “You are holding the line.”

Glancing back over my shoulder, I was met with the many absent stares of the lessers, silently and patiently waiting behind us. An eerie pilgrimage that voiced no complaint. There must have been a hundred, or more. In their silence, I had forgotten they had followed at all.

I had nowhere to go.

Nowhere but

d

o

w

n

Into the Church of the Gnostic Deluge.

The beginning of the end.

I don’t know for how long we walked, sinking step by step in the moist darkness, but I was relieved when we finally reached the dull, spattering light of candles. Iron sconces blazing gusts of welcomed warmth, fluttered across my face, drying the sore streams of my tears. The stairway snaked off into winding corridors, chants echoing like long lost ghosts, trapped on the deep ocean floor.

Would my own voice join theirs? 

Would I haunt this ancient hall forever?

Fingertips sliding into the grooves of ancient carvings, centuries of religious fervency embedded the walls. Dripping stalactites above, pale, bloated corpse fingers that pried open the gigantic church cavern, until the steps levelled to a carpet of kelp and fossilised shells. The smears of dirty wax and endless ritual scuffed the slimy cave floor.

And in the distance, rising up towards the high ceiling and engulfing the room entirely, was the colossal obsidian statue of the Sublime Spirit, the One.

Yatan.

With the mighty head of a gargantuan wyrm, damp and gleaming. Iridescent mineral tracks ran like glistening tears from thousands of bulbous black eyes. Staring outward, in all directions, from all-seeing stone sockets. A vast, roaring mouth lined with shimmering crystal teeth. Pillared tentacles reached out from the knot of the long body, twisted and tangled against the canyon walls. Yatan clinged to what He had been carved. Was He holding the Church high or thrashing to tear it all down?

The Faith, my sisters and the lessers of the commune alike worshipped this unfathomable monstrocity.

The very same monstrocity to whom I was betrothed.

Dowdy, subdued by their dreary descent, my sisters trudged the open space, bare feet rumbling like thunder, dwarfed under the magnitude of their leviathan deity.

Swaying at the Grand Altar were the Elders of the Order - the Daughters of Sublime One - cloaked in black and swamped by the folds of their religious garments. Their faces concealed by masks, whittled from driftwood, rotten and barnacled.

My scalp prickled at the mere sight of them, those morbid, eyeless headdresses tilting my way.

“Liesl.”

My name reverberated off of every wall and winding passage. Stumbling back into the arms of the Sublime Sister, I veered from the swelling cacophony.

“Speak the Words of the Faithful.”

The Sublime Sister pinched my wrist lightly and squeezed.

“I am the wave of -” she offered under her breath, realising I had frozen, rigid, terror clamping my jaw.

“I am the wave of -”

The cave hummed with prayer, whispered in unison. 

“I am the wave of the Sublime Spirit, Yatan,

He who swims the celestial seas,

He who is the ceaseless tide of transcendence,

He who is infinite and immeasurable,

Priest of foresight, emersion and illusion,

Please grant me Sublime consciousness,

I am a wave of the astral ocean.”

A recital of the same words I had been repeating since childhood. Over and over and over again. A shiver rippled up my spine at the final word, at the sound that ushered in from the disciples. The last, longing syllable. Pressing their tongues to the roofs of their mouths, breathing slowly and harshly, in and out. A chorus of coarse breath filled the space, a haunting likeness to the crashing waves at high tide, marking the end to Gnostic prayer.

“You have been summoned to the Grand church and altar, to behold the boundless, incorporeal union of the Sublime One, Priestly Yatan, the Celestial Tide and Endless Sea” - the pause lingered - “and Liesl of House Petcher.” 

Sublime Sister squirmed at the fleeting mention of our House.

“Divine praise, offered to you by our magnificent and most wise Lord of the Seas, a show of His Supreme benevolence. Liesl, do you accept this unmatched gift and honour?”

A single dewy tear escaped through my squeezed lashes, cool and stinging, it glided down to my chin.

“I accept this gift, Sublime Daughter.”

My sisters were crying, awash with elation, a huffing sigh of relief. My heart sank like a ship at their wavering smiles. The waves would not come for them.

"Then we shall begin."

Approaching the altar, padding the floor, slow and uncertain, I was guided gently by Sister Sublime in a funeral march of a wedding waltz. Shrinking, smaller and smaller, under the constant, incalculable gaze of Yatan’s idol. Dizzied by the sheer magnitude and malevolence of the violent thrashing wyrm, captured, lifelike in stone.

“Leave her,” barked an order through the gnawing hole in the centre of the High Daughter's mask.

The circular headpieces were sculpted into a spiralling, toothy, jagged mouth. Fleshy human lips muttering within a tunnel of fangs. A mimic of an ever-hungry and gaping maw, the Daughters' ritual masks were horrific up close, sending a rush of vicious tingling over my skin, as if dropped into a sea of writhing, hungry lamprey.

"Now!"

Sister Sublime flinched away from the spittle, inching back to the shoal of disciples, to my sisters and lessers watching with macabre fascination.

Left, shuddering, to the eyeless judgement of three, and the thousands upon thousands of intricately carved iris, glaring ominously and deathly cold, from the high cavern roof. The impossibly humongous, wicked serpentine shape of my betrothed.

“Liesl, you shall repeat these words in their entirety, in both mind and spirit.”

“I am the wave who is one with His ocean.”

Who is one with His ocean.

I am the wave…

“I offer up all worldly delights to the Sublime Spirit, the transcendent, stupendous, undying Master of the cosmic seas, Yatan”

Stammering, I struggled to speak the verse aloud. Strange and otherworldly, it rolled like an ancient spell off my tongue.

“I renounce my earthly appetite, purifying my astral spirit for the elysian Lord Yatan-”

I renounce....

My earthly appetite… Purifying…

A breathless sob.

“Purifying my astral spirit for the elysian Lord -”

Where other vows could be broken in death, mine would be tied by it.

For eternity.

To a monster.

Procuring a small bowl from the slab of stone, the Priestess thrust it into my open, shaking fingers. Dry and delicately preserved, I twitched at the sudden needle-like twinge in my palms. In the dank lowlight I had mistaken the basin for wood, but by the twang of its sting, felt the brittle, hollowed out shape of a sea urchin, spines clipped into splintering stubs. A shallow pool of stinking liquid sloshing at the edges.

“You will bathe in these infinite waters and be reborn as Yatan's bride.”

The High Daughter brandished a sponge from the creases of her robes, yellowed and riddled with holes. Hard as bone, she dropped the fossil into my urchin pail, an elaborate flaunt of long, crooked fingers. A flash of translucent, veined skin between.

The splashback spattered my lips. Sea water. Slickness. Bitter squid ink. She continued to delve, weighing the pail in my hand until the urchin's spines were forced into my flesh. Deep enough to draw blood. My toes curled on hard, wet stone, watching in horror as beads of maroon dribbled in threads along the curves of my wrists.

My blood.

Satisfied, at last, by my wince of pain, the Daughter retrieved her sponge, sopping with the dark, sickly ichor. Squeezing it over my head, soiling my shell-wreath in rivulets of black, over my hair, face and stinging eyes, I choked on the steady stream of thick ink.

His waters.

Soaking my dress and plastering the gown to my ribs, the paleness of my own skin was stained grey with the filth. Hair soaked, face coated, my body bared before the faithful, before the entire commune of Stranding Bay. My gown bunched and slick, a meagre layer of grey-white film. My breasts, my nipples, coral pink smudges, hardened from cold. Thighs clamped together in fear. I clasped the bowl possessively to my chest with a gasp, desperate to hide my sudden wetness, my translucent nakedness.

The inhale and exhale of a hundred faithful filled the room at the sight, a choir of death rattles. The sound of the sea. My heart ebbed in my throat, thoughts swimming, dazed. The gazes were countless. Endless. My sisters, the lessers. The rising statue of the Sublime One, innumerable in number.

“Priest and Eternal Master of the seas, Lord Yatan! Hear us! Liesl of House Petcher offers herself to you, for your glory in most-sacred matrimony! She is bound to you in salt, in bone, and in blood!”

The High Daughter beckoned me to her side.

Stumbling forward, encumbered by the weight and tightness of my dress, I didn’t feel my steps on the damp cave floor, nor the bitterness of the howling breeze. Half-blinded by tears, limbs numb and frigid, I stood at the base of the shrine and idol. Beneath the gigantic sea-beast.

My mortal soul entwined for eternity.

The Daughters forced my frozen hands together in prayer, one against the other, threading thick sailor rope in a knot around my bloody wrists. Wrenched downward by a foreign heaviness, I gagged at the vision of the stone bauble netted to the end, swinging back and forth between my pale, silt-smeared feet. A pendulum of death.

A powerful, surging revulsion swept over me.

An angry ocean bellow answered from somewhere far away.

The storm.

“Hurry,” the High Daughter uttered, a glimpse of her twisted mouth inside rows of lamprey fangs. “You must experience Emersion, before it is too late.”

“Emersion?” I croaked, barely a sound. I had never heard of the term, in all my life in Stranding Bay, in the texts, teachings and glyphs of the convent.

The High Daughter's conjoined fingers dusted away at a petroglyph carved into the suckers of the Great Yatan’s tentacles. Scars etched into suction-cups the size of wagon wheels. It depicted a monstrous snake, swallowing the moon, figures dancing forever beneath it, spears flying from miniscule arms.

“What must I do?”

The Daughters worked together, pressing their whole weight into the circular stone. The draft on my face whipped into a gust. Sucking at my hair, tugging at my dress, a tiny crawl space opened up in the rock, revealing a pitch tunnel, boring deep, winding into the wall.

No.

No -

Bile burned in the back of my throat.

“Our mighty, empyreal Master awaits you.”

No.

Not this.

A sickening twist of my intestines, straining like rope on a mast.

They wished for me to crawl into this tiny hole without knowing where it led.

If it led anywhere at all.

The prayer-noise was overwhelming, mind reeling as I drifted towards the blackness, blasted by raw, ocean air. It smelled fresh, pulled in from somewhere above. The cove? To the outside? I clung to the thought for the little comfort it offered. A slither of bravery to keep me from mind-numbing terror.

Shrieks erupted from the crowd, rushing from the first, foamy sloshes of water trickling down the stairs of the Church.

“The tide has returned!” A sister cried out, hollow and fearful.

With it, the Great Flood would come.

I joined, subconsciously, instinctual, with the Gnostic prayer of the Order.

“I am the wave of the Sublime Spirit, Yatan…"

With nothing but my wet shroud, anchor and lovingly-made wreath, I clambered into the space, crouched on my hands and knees.

“He who swims the celestial seas…”

Horror strangled my words at the raucous stone scraping stone, the candlelight glower. A half-moon drifting into an eclipse.

“He who is infinite and immeasurable…”

The last blot of light dissipated, the phase of the crescent.

“Priest of foresight, emersion and illusion, please grant me Sublime consciousness -”

The voices peetered, my own cracking. A slither left as they sealed me inside.

Then, nothing.

Blackness.

The haggard mess that I was, wailed until I was coarse. Hammering until my knuckles bled, against the dark side of the stone door. Clinging to the cold side of the glyph for what felt like eternity. The impenetrable blackness was suffocating. Visceral. Thick and tangible. The density of the cave became physical. Touching, pressing, probing. I lost sense of whether my eyes were open or closed. It made no difference.

I laid, crumpled, sobbing, at the threshold of invisible markings.

Begging.

Pleading.

Screaming.

Praying.

Elbow-deep in sludge and crusted with wet sand, I succumbed to the twisting path of the tunnel, entrenched in mud. Following the moan on the briny wind, blinded and bumbling. The further I crawled, the stranger the sounds. The howling consumed my senses. Ravaged them. Hallucinatory in the absoluteness of the inky channel. The idol of Yatan flared in my mind, to a gale-like call. Sad, distant loneliness. A desperate cry into the reaches, I pictured the stars and aeons of the deepness of space through the cracks of the cave.

It was only the wind.

Wriggling through a particularly tight curve, panic struck again. Hips caught in the steep bend, mud squelched beneath my tearing fingers, scraping nails, knees burning as I pulled and pulled. And pulled. Twitching, fidgeting. Flailing turned to screaming and thrashing. A single moment of chaos and fury trapped in nothingness.

Then, I heard it.

A breath.

A smooth, calming inhale.

Followed by a grumbling release.

The deep, trembling vibrations shifted me free.

Spotting a pinprick of light that signalled the end of this nightmare, my resolve was reignited. I tore on through the tunnel, numbed and blind to all else but reaching the light, drawing close to the exit, towards the orange glow of fire. Dropping down into another room, my fear turned to rage in a flash. Disappointment dragging like a fisher’s hook. I was still inside the cave. Too shocked to cry. Too exhausted. Too fearful to try and go back the way I had come.

Another gust of wind scattered my hair, knocking the wreath from my head. Hitting the floor with an echoing crack, shards, shells and coral dashed at my feet. I had no tears left to grieve it, but my body wracked at the loss. The gift of my sisters, our convent House. Broken. Lost forever in a lonesome cavern.

Still, I couldn’t ignore the briny scent in the air. A vague hope. 

It wasn’t a breath.

Waves.

The rushing and rolling. In and out. I trailed the path illuminated by spitting flames from torches. Shadows danced over the thick, moist mineral. Veins of crystal, refracting and reflecting. Winking starlight on a murky night. I found the swell of a lapping pool in a sparkling grotto. My suffering shrunk into insignificance at the painful beauty of it all.

Glowering blue plankton gathering at the edges of the surf. The icy bite of the sea nipped at my toes, submerging my feet, stripping away at the grime. If there was such a thing to be found in Stranding Bay, then this place alone was our sacred ground.

There were no other tunnels leaving the site.

No way out.

Flames licked and hissed at the walls, illuminating petroglyphs like the one hacked into Yatan's idol. A similar depiction of a beastly snake, arching and tangling over a curving ocean, the hulking head obscured beneath the water. The thick tentacles open, fanned. It was diving. Diving into the pool that stroked at my feet.

Blood throbbed in my ears at the impending and uncomfortable understanding. An unpleasant ringing ricocheting. I braced myself, ribs aching, wading into the water, reaching my shins, then thighs. The current pulled at my abdomen and lapped at my shoulders. Gasping, the cold squeezed the air from my lungs.

Heaving the anchor of the rock tied to my wrists, to wind a shaking finger along the engraving, carefully tracing the mighty wyrms head. Someone had carved this, in intricate detail, in the absence of light and warmth, so far from the sun. Every impossible, shimmering scale. Each and every vivid all-seeing eye.

With a sucking breath, I followed it under.

Shocked again by the frigid, terrible coldness, it stung to open my eyes. Swamped by sea-water, I could barely make out the rest of the stark chalky image, the wyrm deeper than it had felt by hand. Wavering. Distorted. Speckled with eyes, inconceivably detailed and real in their likeness. And beneath the hideous art, an open passage. An underwater cave, branching from the tiny pool.

Breaking the surface, gasping, rubbing salt from my streaming eyes, spluttering, choking on a pained and mournful sob. To my despair, I knew what the symbol instructed. Swim down into the duct, I knew, without knowing how far or how long I would be under. Take a dive of faith into the great unknown.

This was the Emersion.

Sacrifice.

The ceiling ebbed in the watery light, shadows shrinking the sparkling prison in upon itself. I could feel the weight of the earth, the rock, the cliffs above, a sudden longing to be groundside, within the confines of the commune, away from this suffocating chasm. As terrifying as it was to think of all the dangers, the death, that lurked in the cloudy waters, I sought freedom from this forsaken cave.

Taking one last breath of air, one which coursed through my chest and veins, I plunged.

I dragged my anchor through the rugged passage. Chest tight from the cold, watching little bubbles leave my mouth with every struggling stroke. Though I could swim, and quite well, my dress billowed out like a jellyfish, my stone anchor hanging down at my flailing ankles.

My lungs burned. My eyes. My blood. The sea throbbed against my eardrums, a war beat with every ragged thump of my heart.

The tunnel growing darker and darker. 

There was no end to it's winding path.

There is no end.

There's nowhere to go.

Limbs alight, scrabbling wildly for somewhere to surface.

It was too late to go back.

Too late.

I was going to drown.

I am going to die.

Down here.

Far from all I've known.

A stranger.

In the

deep.

The shaft shook with a deafening groan, almost splitting my skull. Swallowing a lungful of searing saltwater, the swell of my dress caught the current, whipping me through a swirling labyrinth. Colliding with the tunnel walls, I was thrown like a doll in the surge and spat out into an endless ocean.

A black abyss.

S

i

n

k

i

n

g…

I am dying.