2.4 - They're Selling Food in the Cenotaph

     Kyrillos held his torch high above his head, the light from it dancing along the dark black walls of the cenotaph. Dark as a moonless night. A man shuffled past him towards the exit, licking food from his fingers. The sound of children bounced through the corridors from deeper within. Where is she? Kyrillos thought. I hate this place. He turned the corner and entered the first of the three chambers inside of The Cenotaph. The light from his torch reached outward, and dissipated further into the air, unable to illuminate more than a quarter of the room at once. To his right was a stretch of darkness, then another man in the corner, illuminated by a torch resting in a sconce above his head. He was cradling a rabbit. The leftmost wall was lit up by three swinging luminescent plants, like aloe vera, with long flat leaves reaching out over the confines of their four foot wide pots. Carved into the wall behind them were names and birth dates. A young woman was sitting down in front of one set of names, cross-legged, biting at the skin around her fingernails. The far wall ahead of Kyrillos was shrouded in darkness, save a small doorway. A woman stood in the doorway with four arms, a torch in two of them and the other two clutching a large wicker basket. Kyrillos recognized her as Gyda, one of the cenotaph’s three custodians. The man in the corner began to wail and delicately dabbed the tears from his face with the ears of his rabbit, who remained unfazed, and looked quite bored. Kyrillos ignored him and moved forward. 

“Hello there Gyda,” he said. “Care to let me through?” 

“There can be no passage without repentance!” Gyda’s hollow voice echoed through the room. 

“We really have to do this every time?” Kyrillos asked. 

“You cannot fathom the pain of others!” Gyda’s two torch-wielding arms raised high above her head, that of a hound, wearing a silver crown. Kyrillos sighed and reached into the wicker basket. He didn’t bother to look, but he could feel the dozens of metallic eggs and grabbed the first one he had a grasp on. He knew each of them by heart, there was no need to read them anymore. 

“You must feel the weight of them!” Gyda continued her proclamation. 

“Alright, got one,” Kyrillos said. “Excuse me.” he pushed past Gyda, who continued to rant as he turned a corner in the hallway. The hallways in the cenotaph felt infinite. Once inside them, there was nothing but oily blackness in every direction. Even the flames of Kyrillos’ torch shriveled until he could barely see his own hand before him. Hours before, he had been stopped in town by a child dressed in a patchwork robe, made up of the garments of old dead kings. 

“‘Scuse me, milord. Wuld you ‘appen to be ‘Igh Monarch Kyrillos?” The boy put on a dignified front to match his attire. As he strained to stand as tall as he could, Kyrillos caught sight of his feet beneath his robe for a moment. The skin, a gray-brown color, was rotting off around pieces of ivory white bone. 

“Yes, I am. What business do you have with me?” Kyrillos answered. 

“Milady Decima ‘as requested your presence in the cenotaph as soon as you ar’ able.” the boy said. He held out a hand. Kyrillos sighed and dropped a few coins into the boy’s palm, who immediately snickered and put them into his pocket, where they clinked against the coins that Decima had no doubt paid him to deliver the message. He was nothing more than a product of his time.

Kyrillos rounded a corner only to be greeted by a woman in a makeshift stall, pitched against one side of the hallway. Laid out before her were translucent cooked strips of plant matter, peppered with spots of red. Beside her was a small fire, hanging over which were more strips of plant matter, fading from their natural green color in the heat. 

“Can I interest you in a strip of freshly roasted pigskin leaf? Marbled with blood for authenticity of course!” She said, holding up her hand, wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage. “The only food you’ll find in the Cenotaph today!”  

“You don’t have a permit to sell that in here,” Kyrillos said, flashing his bronze armband, emblazoned with the emblem of The Thirty-Four. 

“High Monarch! My apologies, please, I’ll gather my things and go.” she stammered. Kyrillos maintained his pace, storming past her.

“See that you do,” he said. “And stop bleeding on the food. You’ll get the whole city killed that way.” 

The woman mumbled something, surely a curse upon him, but he paid it no mind. The hallway widened before him, opening into the second chamber of the Cenotaph, smaller than the first. Bats careened back and forth along the ceiling, passing through the diagonal beams of light that radiated from round stones in each corner of the room. The walls of the chamber were bare, but the center was a pillar of thick white smoke, pulsing back and forth as it rose upward. For a brief moment, Kyrillos spotted a man in the center of the smoke, standing still, mouth agape. Along the edges of the pillar were three more figures. One woman was seated amongst hundreds of pieces of tanned animal hide, upon which she was smattering all manner of liquids until a face was formed. Another, wrapped tightly in sellsword leathers, took the completed portraits and laid them out on the ground before her, eyed them for a moment, then unsheathed a dagger from her bandoleer and stabbed it between the eyes. The third figure slid the painting around to the other side of the smoke, and with a delicately folded cloth, scrubbed the hide clean before dragging it back around and stacking it next to the first woman. 

Kyrillos gave them a wide berth and approached the exit, blocked by the second custodian of the Cenotaph. Ansgar was indistinguishable from a boy, standing only four feet off of the ground, and with the soft features of a child. Strapped on his back was an iron shield too large for him to wield, and gripped tightly in his hand was a mace made of bone. Only his legs gave him away. At the knee, they split into three sets, two facing behind him and only one facing ahead. 

“G’day Kyrillos.” He said. 

“Ansgar,” Kyrillos nodded. “Is Decima in the third chamber?” 

“She is.” 

Kyrillos made a motion to move forward, but Ansgar stepped in front of him. 

“You know the laws, Kyrillos,” he said, as he held his mace out. Kyrillos sighed, but secured his torch in the sconce on the wall and took the mace in both hands. The weight of it was nearly unbearable. Ansgar turned his back to Kyrillos and braced all six feet beneath him. Kyrillos swung the mace as hard as he could at the shield on Ansgar’s back. He took the entire hit without moving an inch, but the bone mace splintered into a dozen pieces around him. 

“Proceed,” Ansgar said. Kyrillos nodded, took his torch from the sconce, and moved into the final hallway of the Cenotaph. As he did, Ansgar gathered up the shattered pieces around him, humming a gentle tune to himself that Kyrillos hadn’t heard since he was a boy. As they often do, the memory splashed about, difficult to calm. He remembered his father humming the same tune and pulling the frame of their home together around a fleeting feeling of ease. Building a nest for their halcyon, that would inevitably fly off to the woodlands where it belonged. 

     She’s going to leave. Kyrillos thought, rounding the corner and finding himself in the oppressive darkness of the halls once more. This isn’t what she wants. I don’t know if it ever has been. I’m not going to be able to stop her this time. It’s going to be quiet without her. No, not quiet. Silent. The only sound worth listening to comes from her. The noise of children blundered through the hall, growing louder and louder as Kyrillos neared the third chamber. The hall twisted one last time, and the opening to the heart of the Cenotaph revealed itself, bleeding gray light into the vein that Kyrillos trudged through. Sitting against the wall before the opening with their head leaned back, looking straight up, was the last custodian of The Cenotaph. Kyrillos heard that long ago, Iovita’s face was perfectly intact, and stretched tight over their skull as it should be. Over time, they pulled it, and pinched it, and loosened it enough to droop down before them. As they laid back, it fell awkwardly over their head like a painted bag. Tied to one of their fingers was a leather ball that they bounced against the wall opposite of them. Due to their state of being, catching the ball was nigh impossible, so when it flew by their open hand, they would give the string a tug and bring the ball back to them. 

“Hello Iovita.”

Iovita said nothing, but stopped tossing the ball and pulled their outstretched legs in towards them to allow passage. Kyrillos said nothing more, walked past Iovita, and entered the warm gray center of the Cenotaph. There were no discernible sources of light in the chamber, it simply was. More so the absence of dark than the presence of any light. A structure stood in the center, broken and crumbling. Piles of rubble surrounded it and even more were being created as it continued to break apart. Two men frantically placed stones back atop the structure in reckless spiraling patterns. Along the wall to the leftmost side of the room, a group of children gathered. They spit and howled like dogs as they battered the corpse of a man long dead. 

“Begone!” Kyrillos shouted. He marched towards them. 

“What’s it to you?” One of the children said, turning from the body to face Kyrillos. “This one’s dead, it don’t matter.” 

“He was you once,” Kyrillos said as he pushed the child aside and began to pull the others off of the body. One of them snarled and bit his hand, drawing blood. He winced and glared at the child, but did nothing more. 

“None of you should be here,” he said, wiping the blood on his robe.

Another child stepped forward from the body, holding a splintered broom handle. 

“Where else are we supposed to go? This is all there is anymore!” he smacked the broom handle emphatically against the wall. Kyrillos looked at the boy, muddy, skin rotting, wearing what appeared to be the clothes of his mother, which reeked of ale. 

“Do you know the old watchtower on the hill outside of town?” Kyrillos asked. 

“Aye.” one of the children responded. 

“Go there.” 

A third child stepped forward. 

“And do what? It’s been cleared out, there’s nothing inside of it.” 

“Beyond it, there is a half-moon of hills, and beyond that, a valley split in two by a slow-moving river.” Kyrillos continued. “Go to the valley. The land is clean and fertile, and the water is safe to drink. Forget everything you’ve seen here, and everything we’ve taught you. It means nothing. Cling to each other and build something out there.” 

“Build what?” the first child said. 

“That is not for me to decide. I’ve spent too much time in the shade of this beast. Just go.” 

The children begrudgingly tossed their crude instruments along the wall, and one by one, began to file out of the room, mumbling to themselves about what they would find beyond the watchtower. 

“What do you think will happen out there?” Kyrillos turned to see Decima behind him. There was a shadow curling around the edges of her legs, and her shoulders, and her neck. It had settled in more than ever before. He shrugged his shoulders. 

“The worst that could happen is nothing. Maybe they’ll fix what we’ve done.” 

Decima tilted her head back, looking up into the infinite haze above them. 

“It’ll bring them back, sooner or later,” she said. “You know it will.” 

“It may,” he said, looking up as well. “Perhaps they are young enough to resist. I have a feeling we will never know.” 

He looked back at Decima, who was still staring upward, and fingering the stopper on a glass vial hanging from her belt. 

“Is there enough for two?” 

She looked at him. 

“Yes, if you’d like there to be.” 

He paused for a moment, then nodded at her. “No time like the present.”