“You don’t mean that, do you, son?” Eleanor asked pleadingly. She had gotten down on her knees and was stroking his leg with her palm. “Please, son, say you don’t mean those things.”
It was enough to melt his heart at last. “Of course not, Mom.” He took one of his hands and wiped the tears from her eyes. Then he stared long and hard into them. “But I’m still not becoming a priest.”
“Oh, honey, I would never make you do something you didn’t want to if I could avoid it, but this has been preordained. I can’t help it. Please, just try not to think about it and have a good night’s sleep, okay, honey?” she pleaded.
He sighed. He knew any further argument would be pointless at this juncture. “Okay, Mom,” he said at last, defeated. “I’ll do that.”
Lyrad walked up the stairs quietly, retiring to bed earlier than usual so he could continue to think of some way out of this whole ordeal. He quickly got angry, not able to think of anything, and he hit his head against his pillow hard. Afterward, he rubbed his head, hoping it wouldn’t bruise. Then he laid down and tried to sleep.
Not that it was working. He tried every trick he could think of – counting sheep, structured breathing, but none of it made a difference.
While he laid there in his bed, trying to sleep, he caught what looked like movement out of the corner of his eye. It was brief, but he was certain someone or something was in the room with him in that moment.
His blood chilled and he quieted his breathing as much as he could like he’d been trained. He closed one eye fully and the other most of the way and tried to remain as still as possible to get a jump on this new foe.
Over by his closet, he heard the sound of raspy, labored breathing. As slowly as he could, he turned his head just a little to get a better look. A flash of a crimson cloak clouded his vision for a brief second, then it was gone again.
Lyrad shot up out of his bed and lunged for the closet, hoping to catch the villain off guard. He rammed head-first into a bundle of sheets and blankets, getting tangled in the process.
He got up and undid the tangled sheets, then darted his eyes about the quiet room. There was nothing there.
At his feet lay the culprit – a reddish bedsheet partially hidden amongst the pile, laying there long-forgotten from his childhood. He chuckled a little and put the sheets and blankets back in his closet in a neat stack.
Now that he was fully awake, he decided to pack for his trip, seeing as it was fairly well set in stone that he would be going no matter what else he did. The Seminary would take sinners, after all, they’d just ‘purify’ them before they started the training, a process he did not care to go through. And they could teleport him there even if he ran away, so that was out, too.
He rummaged around for his traveling sack and got it out. Then he started by putting some clothes in, mostly white, since they preferred white clothes at the Seminary. They would let you wear anything, but they seemed to be nicer when your clothes were white. Next, he packed a few candles and candleholders, a bit of money – just a few bleedars’ worth of gredles and snickrats that he’d scrounged together over the years – and some sentimental knick-knacks.
That’s when he stumbled upon a portrait of himself. It was from his third birthday, and it was a fairly rough sketch his parents had done for him. His cake had been in front of him, a total mess after he had demolished it, and he was in the middle of it all, beaming up at his parents.
The slightly-fading picture served to lift his spirits for a moment, but it also ended up turning his thoughts to his early days in training that had started just two years later. The memories were painful at first, and he tried to flush them out by humming different tunes, but they came flooding back anyway.
There was the first time he’d ever held a real weapon, or the first time he ever drew the blood of an opponent. He had only drawn a solitary drop, but that had been plenty to impress his instructors. He could remember the look on his teachers’ faces when he would master a new technique and could defeat the other trainees with it, and the times he was scolded for doing something bad with said skills like use his stealth to steal a fellow trainee’s lunch.
Oh, I can still remember everything about that first day. They never taught you any real combat skills, not for the first few weeks, but that didn’t matter. It meant everything to me just to come home and tell Mom and Dad what I had learned, and to see their joy for me. And to think, Mom probably knew full well what I was to be back then, and she said nothing. She said nothing all throughout the training. Why couldn’t she have warned me earlier to avoid this senseless torment I’m in now?
He agonized over this and got angry once more with his mother, an anger that soon faded when he remembered the most basic rule of Priesthood training – one was never to be told about their fate until the date of their eighteenth birthday. Candidates were to live a normal life to that point to heighten their connection with the world outside Seminary, then give it all up as part of the grand sacrifice of becoming a priest.
Undoubtedly, this is what she had been trying to talk to him about all this morning, it being his eighteenth birthday
