#meresti

Deep in the prewar tunnels had once run high-speed passenger subway trains. The damp, decaying walls felt like home already. Now, the metro station housed those who called themselves the Family, who knew of his arrival before he even reached the track-riddled bowels in which they resided. Their leader, Vance, was in his forties, with short dark purple hair and the palest skin he’d witnessed of anyone outside Appalachia. Wearing a leather duster, he stood watch over his adoptive brood from the balcony which overlooked the metro station’s lobby, stern, distant, and ever wary.

Vance already long since knew a great deal about the gangling dark-haired eighteen-year-old, and spoke with him as though a relative he had not seen since the boy was too small to remember him. He knew August had come to speak with someone about the Craving, and they conversed at length regarding the Five Laws of the Family. Ultimately, he left the decision up to August, whether to move in with them, and adopt their ways. As with all who sought shelter among the tunnels of Meresti, their leader sent him to reflect in isolation for three days, with the promise of his guidance if he accepted their ways as his own. In his guest room, he reflected upon his conversation with Vance, and did his best to determine whether belonging both to the Family and the Children of Atom were identities in opposition.

He worked his way in reverse through their tenets, observing a form of catechesis similar to that which he underwent when he first joined the Children. At the very least, the exercise could hone for him his connection with his faith.

The Fifth Law: Kill not our kindred: slay only our enemy. This is our justice.

He could rationalize the respect and unity in not killing Family out of anger or revenge. To not kill one another in any way, though. Confessor Cromwell and Mother Maya both preached the glory of the day Atom--Megaton’s eponymous bomb--would send them all to Division. He’d visited the Apostles of the Holy Light the year before, in the misguided expectation they too might follow the divination of Mothman. The Acolytes of Eternal Light had descended from the original Cult of the Mothman which had inhabited the Lucky Hole almost two hundred years ago. The Apostles, however, were Children who had broken away from Megaton. They believed in purposefully irradiating themselves, gradually, rather than awaiting a single great act of irradiation such as Megaton’s eventual detonation--and that diligent irradiation could bestow ghoulishness upon the faithful. To them, ghouls were the Exalted, angelic agents standing as proof Heaven was the Earth in the wake of the Great War’s Rapture. Their ultimate goal in faith was to remain on Earth as long as possible and serve Atom, past humanity and on to ghoulishness for centuries. Megaton’s Children revered ghouls, such as the bartender’s assistant in Moriarty’s Saloon, but Apostles regarded all ghouls with steep reverence, believing non-feral ghouls’s erratic behaviors and rasping diced language to bear the flame-tongue of Atom which no human can parse.

He very often stifled the desire to slay those who disrespected Gob. The ghoul was only doing his best, and it maddened August to know the ghoul had been bought out of slavery into his current position under Colin Moriarty’s management. Surely, there had to be a better lot for Gob. Maybe the Children, or the Apostles, could amass enough tithes to buy him from Moriarty, and free him altogether...

Since his separation from the Acolytes of Eternal Light, he’d struggled to find any alignment with others’ faith, scavenging bits and pieces from larger movements and amending them to his own. Atom’s path thus far shined brightest to him: Surely, Mothman forever chased Atom’s holy light. To him, also, the vessel was just as vital as the world-soul it contained, a physical manifestation of the galaxy he’d cultivated. He could come to emit the same light he sought in the world, if only he could cement his purpose and faith. In his baptism by Quantum at the bottling facility, he’d accepted Nuka-Cola would be his eventual portent of the great things he knew Atom had in store for him. Perhaps sooner, rather than later, Atom would send him a sign.

Ultimately, he decided it was right that only those who deserved to die, should die, and that lust killing should be consensual. That didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the act--simply that the act needed to serve explicit purpose. He needed to remember to ask Vance whether consuming Family, especially fallen Family, was against their ways. Raised an Acolyte of Eternal Light, he was no stranger to finding food wherever possible, and in many occasions it was the highest honor for them to preserve kindred in such a mode of self-sacrifice. They wasted nothing, not even each other. If it was not by Atom’s guiding hand, the only death he found righteous was for protection of the innocent or himself, or for sole sake of sustenance. It wasn’t up to him when a person’s world-soul might disperse its galaxies.

The Fourth Law: Seek not the sun’s light; embrace only the shadows. This is our refuge.

To find refuge in the dark only served to contrast the Light. August supposed that such an asceticism which could heighten one’s appreciation and acuity for even the smallest Light. The darkness had been as familiar as another relative in his childhood, as his first family had lived deep in the bowels of the West Virginia mine known as the Lucky Hole. Noticing even dim lights, the slightest presage, came easily in such an acclimation. Bright lights did hurt his eyes... and many of his fellow Brothers and Sisters in Atom did find it unusual that he tended to worship in the bomb’s wellspring at night rather than during the day.

He could find peace in the reflected light of a full moon.

The Third Law: Feed not for pleasure; partake only to nourish. This is our dignity.

He wondered whether indulgence could be divided in such a way. The flesh had needs, and pleasure was a need. The Acolytes had always taught this, and it been an uncomfortable patch of adjusting to the meek ways of the Children. He could see dignity in abstaining from killing solely for sport, but no dignity in denying oneself due sustenance or denying oneself the satisfaction in it. He earned his meals, worked hard for them. And he should savor them.

Some needs held priority over others--and pleasure. Pleasure of every kind did seem to him the greatest obeisance one could make to the Eternal Light. It was pleasurable, to act on its behalf, to add to his world-soul, to become the greatest galaxy he could in his lifetime; pleasurable, to savor adding those unworthy of their world-souls to his own. And it was pleasurable, to admire what his faith had given him, to worship what Atom had made of him... like the limb that following Moira Brown’s guidance, alongside that of the Confessor, had bestowed upon him.

As with the fifth law, he understood the difference between murder and killing. The Children made no room for either. They made sharp distinction between self-preservation and self-defense... and denied themselves a majority of pleasures altogether.

The Second Law: Bear not the child; welcome only the exile. This is our fate.

With August’s predispositions, this preclusion would be the least trying law to live by, and the simplest to understand the logic behind. He’d once heard the aphorism, that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

Blood, thicker than water.

Consanguinity. Through condition, not through breeding.

The Acolytes and the Children both upheld this ideal. Virtue and ideal offered magnitudes beyond mere birth rite.

Only just recently eighteen, August only had a few years’ personal understanding of coitus. He had asked Vance whether abstaining from fathering children meant a total abstinence. The Family’s father figure had replied in affirmation, that they did not self-populate, but were not expressly celibate. They did not force induction through marriage, and did everything it could to avoid passing down the Craving through lineage. August simply was forbidden from fathering children in this law, but Vance had every enthusiasm for welcoming anyone with the Craving into the Family, as a sibling, or a cousin, or even an avaunt or parental figure. The Family sustained itself solely through adoption, regardless of the familial role an individual came to fulfill.

The Family existed to accept the forsaken and afflicted, and help them overcome their shame. In recent years, while it had made them somewhat less of a secret to the Capital Wastes, they’d found greater purpose in protecting Arefu. They did not consider Arefu or Meresti a holy ground, yet protected both inexhaustibly. Megaton and the Lucky Hole were holy, were they not? He’d protected them. He could defend Arefu and Meresti in kind, if they would have him... and perhaps, in effect, come to understand their sanctity. Though, he wondered whether he’d ever find anyplace that felt as vastly holy as Appalachia, or as potently holy as the crater.

The First Law: Feast not on the flesh; consume only the blood. It is our strength.

While he could make broad peace with the other four tenets, the first and greatest roiled in his heart. For the first two days of his isolation, he’d worked his way ascending and descending the rules of this refuge to exhaustion, trying to find an understanding for how the Family might justifiably live in such a way. Here, again, it beset him in a grimace as he lay back on the bare mattress in thought.

Within his cobbled-together faith, he had found his most current definition for the Craving which had compelled him since childhood. The world-soul resided in the blood, and he could appreciate an ideology which upheld its sanctity. Consuming blood consumed the world-soul, added its constellations and systems to one’s own galaxies, the sacred geometry of strangeness, charm, and nobility. To waste blood was unspeakable.

Yet, Vance had told him, consumption of the flesh is unclean. Filthy. Humans treat us like animals when we consume their flesh. We are not animals. We are the Family. We do not eat the flesh of those we kill for food.

He had been raised in a holistic fashion. Waste nothing. Use everything. The Acolytes of Eternal Light had taught him to tan, to butcher, to cook and preserve. If one had to kill, or if one had to die, if at all it could be helped the life taken should not be in vain.

Unlike the Savage Divide, such meats were a rarity in the Capital Wastes. For the past two years, he’d made do in Megaton knowing how to discern between iguana and other wasteland meats when they happened to crop up in the various craterside establishments. He would take an errand from Moira as an excuse to step out and cut down a convenient raider, anytime only a fresh kill could sate him; the Super-Duper Mart was a favorite nearby hunting ground of his. No one in Megaton, Children or otherwise, had indicated they took kindly to purposeful cannibalism of any sort. The local raider-turned-mercenary Jericho may have noticed his preference for iguana at some point, but said nothing, when he’d spent time with him so the old man could teach him to use a rifle.

The Children had taught him shame alongside humility, blurring the notions indiscreetly. He had not known shame until he traveled outside the Savage Divide, and he’d hoped to find pride and modulation here with the Family.

For a time, blood was the one thing from a kill he didn’t consume, instead favoring crafting Stimpaks from it. It was easier to obtain blood packs from Moira or Doc Church, under the premise of medical provisions, than ever actively seek out iguana in town, though. In his adolescence, he’d learned how to craft Stimpaks from human blood, as well as how to craft something they called Skeeto Spit from the mixed blood collected from Bloodbug sacs. Stimpaks healed the injured after ceremonial wasteland battles as well as after defensive encounters, while Skeeto Spit increased the longevity of those who stood for sake of the cult. Such that non-human blood might function in kind with the chemistry required of the intravenous prewar healing device, he had taught himself how to refine the compatibility between the two formulations, only to later develop in this practice the deepest ritualism he would ever find. Up until the cult’s demise, he had kept his technique to himself, noticing in his own self-experimentation that the use of Wasteland Stimpaks magnified the Craving--a trait that, while not shunned by the Acolytes, not all Acolytes exhibited, nurtured, or actively invoked as wholly as he did.

It wouldn’t be for many years of regular use of his dark craft that other side effects would manifest.

The Acolytes had not believed in world-souls, purely upholding the very present, corporeal, preternatural vitality Interlopers might bestow, and it was of his own spirituality adjunct to that of the Children that he had come to the understanding that Stimpaks surely held some key to discovering how the civilization that came before tangibly interacted with their world-souls. The Capital Wastes didn’t have Bloodbugs, however, and most of its wildlife didn’t have blood to collect directly either. It had been two years since his last synthesis of Wasteland Stimpaks, and he nearly left the area on several occasions just to resume his observances, now that he understood the greater connection of The Blood and The Life. He wasn’t sure what kept him in the Capital Wastes. He supposed he disliked the idea of straying too far from the crater, though entertaining a trip back to Appalachia under the premise of pilgrimage didn’t seem so fractious perhaps.

He had never found another who seemed to pursue personal growth in the same way he did, and it didn’t seem anyone in the Family held overlapping beliefs with him either. Vance agreed with him, though, that those with the Craving were either not born human, or became that way--and that the Craving was a deficit of soul. The leader had a word for those who drank blood and abstained from the flesh: vampire. For August, cannibalism was a form of transubstantiation, a transfusion by which he could feed an incomplete or once-absent spirit, and as an extension, Wasteland Stimpaks posited a way to add world-souls of wasteland creatures to his own--or at the very least, modify his vessel to be that much more capable of containing the world-soul he cultivated through piousness. Perhaps they were both right, and August’s aspirations sought to right that he had not originally had any world-soul to cultivate in the first place.

The Family tempered the Craving by drinking only the blood, and leaving the body for ceremony. Acolytes with the Craving tempered it by consuming only the body, and leaving the blood for ceremony.

A Child of Atom could belong to the Family, and a Child of Atom could belong to the Acolytes of Eternal Light... but an Acolyte could not belong to the Family.

He couldn’t make peace with the thought of one kill providing only one meal. One kill in the Savage Divide had provided easily a week’s worth of meat and offal, a good bit of leather and bone for crafts, and the blood... The blood couldn’t be the only thing taken from a kill. Yet, some of the Family preferred not to kill at all, and sustained themselves on blood packs donated from Arefu’s settlers in exchange for the Family’s protection. August perceived such an act as a communal blood pact. In this exchange between the Family and Arefu, he understood why they had grown so close so quickly. In a way, they were slowly acquiescing into one overarching shared world-soul. The idea of it harbored a deep dread in him, and even as his second day in Meresti closed, he still couldn’t discern whether the dread compelled or repulsed him.

He would stay one more day, to make sure he still felt the same by then, and then find a way to estrange a slaver from Paradise Falls before returning to the Church. His means of tempering his cravings as a way of protecting the wasteland’s innocents sufficed. The world-souls of raiders and slavers would be his, and he would use them properly in Atom’s sight. People who wasted their world-souls debasing others and sowing suffering were the greatest affront of all to the Holy Light, and if that was the purpose that drove the Craving, he could find peace and identity in it.

Perhaps after this visit with Vance, August could make better sense of whether he belonged under the guidance of Confessor Cromwell and Mother Maya, or under that of Mother Curie.