Tome of the Undergates

from the apothecary to the common floor where the elder priests tended to the sick and the dying, forced to look upon men, women and children as they coughed out their last breath so that she might know why she served the Healer.

Taire was never shy, never afraid, life never seemed hard for her. She was always the first to peer curiously into the open corpse, the fastest to get the medicine to the common floor while greeting every patient that walked in, the only one who would hold someone’s hand as they left the world on Talanas’s wings.

Taire had taken Asper’s hand and placed it on the dying. Taire had helped her fumble with the medicine. Taire had stayed up reading the tomes on the human body, late into the night, with Asper. Taire was not the reason Asper had entered the temple. Taire was the reason she served the Healer.

Taire had begged.

Her disappearance was officially marked down as ‘lamentable’, never pursued with any particular interest. Children fled from the temple all the time, even the brightest and most enthusiastic students occasionally finding it too stressful to continue with the training. The gravedigger had looked half-heartedly about the temple grounds. The high priest sighed, gave a prayer and made a note in the doomsday book. Taire’s belongings were folded into a bundle and put into storage in the bin marked ‘unclaimed’.

There was no corpse, no suicide note, nothing to indicate she had ever existed besides the sooty mark on the floor of the dormitories.

And Asper.

No one had asked the shy little brown-haired girl who was always rubbing her left arm where Taire had gone. No one had paid attention to the shy little brown-haired girl who cried in the night until long after Taire was forgotten by all.

All except the one who knew that she had begged, like the longface, like the frogman.

She hadn’t forgotten any of them. She hadn’t forgotten the pain she felt, that they shared, as her arm robbed them of all. She could still feel it, would feel it long after whoever kept track of such things forgot that the longface in Irontide had ever existed. She would hear them scream, hear their bones snap, hear their bodies pop, hear them beg.

Her arm was one part of the curse. That Asper would never forget was another.

And she hadn’t forgotten that, for as many times as she looked up to the sun and asked, ‘why?’ no one had answered her.

‘It happened again,’ she whispered, choked through tears brimming behind her eyes.

Asper turned. The pendant did not look particularly interested in what she was saying as it lay upon the rock. The forest danced, shifted overhead, casting a shadow over the silver-wrought phoenix. Its carved eyes turned downcast, its gaping beak resembled something of a yawn, as though it wondered how long her weeping confession would last.

‘It happened again,’ she repeated, taking a step closer. ‘It happened again, it happened again, it happened again.’ She took another step with every fevered repetition until she collapsed upon her knees before the rock, an impromptu altar, and let her tears slide down to strike upon the pendant. ‘It happened again.

‘Why?’

The pendant did not answer her.

‘Why?’ she said, louder.

‘Why, why, why, why?’ Her knuckles bled as she hammered the symbol, straining to beat an answer out of it. ‘Why does this keep happening to me? Why did you do this to me?’

She raised her hand to strike it again. The phoenix looked out from behind the red staining its silver, uninterested in her threat. Like a parent waiting for a child to burn itself out on its tantrum, it waited, stared. Her hand quivered in the air, impotent in its fury, before she crumpled beside the rock.

‘What did I do to deserve this?’

Asper had asked that question before, of the same God, on her first night in the temple. She had knelt before his image, carved in stone instead of silver, far from the loving embrace of her father and mother, far from the place she had once called home. She had knelt, alone, and asked the God she was supposed to worship.

‘Why?’

And Talanas had sent Taire.

‘Because,’ the young girl who was always smiling had spoken from the back of the chapel, ‘someone has to.’

And Taire had knelt beside her, before the God that seemed, in that instant, better than any parent. Talanas was loving, cared for all things, sacrificed Himself so that humans might know what death was, what sickness was, and how to avert them. Talanas cared for His priests as much as He did His followers, and in the instant Taire had smiled at her, Asper knew that Talanas cared for them both, as well.

‘Has to what?’ she had asked the girl then.

‘Has to do it,’ Taire had replied.

‘Do what?’

‘That’s why we’re here,’ the girl had replied, reaching out to tap the brown-haired girl on the nose before they both broke down into laughter.

‘I don’t deserve this,’ Asper whispered, broken upon the forest floor. ‘I didn’t do anything to deserve this.’ She raised her left arm, stared at it as it grinned beneath its pinkness, knowing it would be unleashed again. ‘You gave this to me.’

She rose to her knees, thrust her left hand at the pendant as though it were proof.

‘You did. It isn’t what I wanted. I. . I wanted to help people.’ She felt her tears sink into her mouth as she clenched her teeth. ‘I want to help people.’

‘To serve mankind,’ Taire had said as they flipped through the pages of the book. ‘To mend the bones, to heal the wound, to cure the illness.’

‘What for?’ Asper had asked.

‘You’re weird, you know that?’ Taire had stuck out her tongue. ‘Who else is going to do it?’

‘Talanas?’

‘You don’t pay attention during hymn, do you? Humanity was given a choice: free will or bliss. We chose free will and so it’s up to us to take care of ourselves. Or rather, it’s up to us, His faithful, to take care of everyone else.’

‘Why would anyone not choose bliss?’

‘Huh?’

‘I would forsake free will in a heartbeat if it meant I didn’t have to feel pain any more, if I didn’t have to cry any more.’

‘Well, stupid, you’d be a slave, then.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘What’s wrong. .’ Taire had sputtered, looking incredulous. ‘What would be the point of life if you never knew pain? How would you even know you were alive?’

Asper had felt pain. Asper had felt Taire’s pain, that night in the dormitories. Asper had felt it as her friend begged and she could do nothing about it. Asper had felt it for the years after, as she had grown up, told herself it was an accident, told herself that she needed to atone for it by following Talanas.

‘Well, I have followed you,’ she whispered to the pendant. ‘And you’ve led me to nothing. I. . I always wondered if I was doing good, being amongst these heathens. Never once did I suspect I was doing wrong.’ Her tears washed away the blood on the silver. ‘Never, you hear me?

‘But what am I supposed to do with this?’ She grabbed her arm, its sleeve long since destroyed. ‘What good can come from this? From leaving nothing to bury? From robbing someone of everything? What good? ’

The pendant said nothing.

‘Answer me,’ she whispered.

The wind shifted. The pendant shrugged.

‘Answer me!’

She turned her arm, levelled its fingers at her throat.