The Red Priest led a cadre of elders by torchlight to his door one night and gravely announced, “It is time.” Hamar was ordered to strip to his loincloth in total vulnerability, and kneel, none of them speaking as they stood waiting for him. As his hands trembled with fear he felt the last protest in the depth of his gut, but when the men held out a goblet filled with a stinky black potion, Hamar tilted his head and drank. Then, when his shaking stopped,“Rise,” he was told in Aktiarh’s coldest voice
He druggily rose to his feet, his eyes unable to focus, a sense of speed carrying him, and he was calmly guided along with the other bare candidates to enter the Dark Hall.
It took him only another goblet to begin the entry into sacred murders. In a mystic blear Hamar was taught the sequence when death and torture supposedly overcame the last physical barriers of earth-life for his victims. Power he could see, shone out of them when stabbed. He learned how to prolong pain and terror for the largest release of soul power from the dying adept, and for the most favour from the demi-gods, – and his own best harvest of spirit-energy as their spiritual extremis, too, came into him and flared his own aura. Then he thought he saw his victims released to go further up their spiritual journey into the realms above, their discarded bodies snatched away for other uses. With each killing and infilling throughout that night, Hamar’s power level grew.
That night each novitiate was handling the ultimate power over anyone. The high authority to time the last-ever exhalation of a fellow human was too lofty for him or for the others, indeed for most mortals, to resist commanding. The moment of extreme animation in the person’s face before it suddenly went blank and lifeless, – one minute more, one second less? – at his discretion, worked its iron hold of power-mindedness on him. Worse, the desire to witness it again and again, controlled by one’s own hands alone, placed him outside of all else around him, above any constraint, and was like a further heady drugging which even created a dilettance in him. Each trainee knew themselves more formidable than they’d ever been, far above their victims, at last of more magnitude than mere mortal men.
Besides, once done, the doer of the lethal blow had no place to go with the horrific reality of what they’d just done, once another drug cruelly cancelled their trance in an instant and dropped them into their normal mind, other than to either embrace the murder with their whole heart as having been rightful, or else having it finish off their heart and mind altogether!
Submission to the black arts was complete in all of them by the end of the night. Those who couldn’t stand to make the lifelong commitment to such travesty either went insane there and then, or volunteered to be used in the next ritual themselves as the only way out of such hell!
Hamar presented the precious blood that night, invoked the favour of the Invisibles to suspend himself between life and death. Large volumes of soulish and spiritual energy went free and available for majic via the ritual, entering into the sacrificers and the attendant sky-creatures alike so that they were energized beyond themselves, all spiritual abilities enhanced.
When he came up from his drowning, the instructors tied back his thick wet hair and etched a wave tattoo down each side of his nose. After he did the passing into and out of a bonfire, they brushed away his charred eyebrows to etch a fire trail across his forehead from ear to ear. After suffocating, when he at last sucked breath into his ashen-grey body, they finished his tattooing with a snake image whose head sat between his eyes. It comprised his formal entry into the elderhood and marked him as able at last to hold to the intensity of maximum death-dealing, the start toward his highest call of all. That night, at the darkest moment before dawn, yellow rays were inked coming out from the sunburst on his forehead, uniting the mural of his face. Then the terrible night was over.
Red Priest Aktiarh’s work, nearly done.
Hamar knew nothing of the Heavenly mercy that went on reaching the remnant of his heart to preserve it, even there, even then. It may not have had enough hold, perhaps, to prevent his captured will from making its awful choices against all that Heaven holds holy, but it was enough to cut short, as surely as an intervening hand cancels the law of gravity on a falling stone, the extremes his fallen lusts would have gone to after that.
Or the worst that could have been done to him had evil been aware of that grip!
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