Weekly Drabble #328: Purity (Patreon)

This week's prompts come from AS900 with 'kiss of the flame' and LystAiP with 'legacy of the torch'. We have here a story involving both of those things. Enjoy!

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Purity:

It was a rare condemned soul that didn’t break. Sometimes they broke during questioning. Other times, when there was a public trial, that was when it happened. They couldn’t bear the weight of the accusations levied against them or the evidence piled before them. The verdict was another common point, but in Kristov’s experience, the most common moment in which a penitent’s will finally shattered was this.

It happened as the young woman was led from her cell and saw what was waiting for her in the town’s center square. She would have known already, of course. But knowing a thing and seeing it before you were entirely different things. A pyre built high with wood and straw and secured in its center was a stake. She screamed. She begged. She wept. She pleaded. She kicked and fought, but it was to no avail. She was dragged across the square and up the mound of wood and kindling, her limbs tightly bound to the pole as she sobbed. She called out to those in the crowd, neighbours and former friends, but if they answered, it was only with jeers and curses.

She did not look at Kristov, for she knew she would find no mercy in the inquisitor’s eyes. He held a brazier firmly in one gloved hand, the bright orange flame casting the face beneath his wide-brimmed hat into shadow.

“Sir,” Father Gremble, the town’s priest said, carefully approaching the taller man. He cast, furtive, anxious looks to the other members of the inquisitor’s retinue. “I ask one final time. I beg you to reconsider-”

“I hear your words,” Kristov answered him. “I have heard them each time you have spoken them. My judgement stands. The corrupt must perish.” He turned his head slightly to look Gremble in the eyes. The priest could not hold his gaze for long and flinched away from the cold iron of Kristov’s grey eyes. “You were there when the malignity within this creature was revealed.”

“I was, but...” the priest faltered for words. He looked to the sobbing, pleading wretch upon mound of kindling. “I knew Sasha since she was a little girl. I gave her God’s Blessing. I watched her grow. I know what I saw, but... there is no evil in that child’s heart.”

“Evil wears the false face of innocence for a reason, Father,” Kristov answered. “It turns the admiration and trust of good men against themselves. It revels in the discord its guise causes. Only by lifting its mask can we see the rot and loathsomeness beneath. Only by remaining firm in faith can we steel ourselves to expunge it.”

“Yes,” Gremble’s voice trembled as he looked back to the young woman upon the stake. “But you have said these tests are not foolproof. What...” he paused, knowing that challenging a holy inquisitor’s word could be deemed heresy in and of itself. “What if you are wrong? What if she is not the source of the corruption in this town?”

There was a noticeable pause from the inquisitor before he spoke again. “I have been wrong before,” he admitted. “But not this time. This child is not the innocent you say she is, father. Her soul has been gutted and something far worse than witchcraft or heresy lairs in its place. We must burn it out.”

“But you could be wrong,” the older man pushed. “Please, inquisitor. If your judgment is to stand, at least allow her the mercy of a clean death. Grant her that much, I beg of you.”

Kristov stared at him silently. In answer to the priest’s pleas, he stepped towards the pyre, accompanied by his loyal, if zealous, friar. He stared up at the condemned woman. When he spoke, his voice was clear and strong, carrying across the square, the jeers and the shouts of the crowd melting away before it.

“Suffer not the witch and their ungodly presence,” he began. “Abhor the infidel’s and the heretic’s lies and faithlessness. Cast out the demon for its maleficence and corruption. These are the tenets of God’s Sword, the means by which we defend ourselves from their perversions. Your town has suffered blights and deaths, but we have found the source of your pain. This creature-” he pointed to Sasha, a wave of wordless hate rolling through the mob around him. “-played upon your trust, beguiling and mocking you as it caused your town to wither and starve, slaughtering innocents to hide itself and for its own amusement. Now its mask has been revealed and it will pay the price for its transgressions.”

“Please,” the woman begged in final, fearful desperation. “Please don’t do this I’m not a demon I don’t want to die please please don’t please I beg you...”

“Attend,” Kristov said to the crowd. “And watch God’s justice.” He touched the brazier to the kindling and the fire caught, spreading quickly across the pyre.

He stepped back, his eyes never leaving the young woman as the flames rose towards her. “Do you know why we burn them?” he asked of Father Gremble.

The priest couldn’t look away from the sight in front of him either. “What?” he managed to squeak out.

“Do you know why we burn the condemned?” Kristov asked again. “Or drown them, or break them upon the wheel? Do you know why this is done instead of offering the mercy you beg me for?”

“No,” the older man confessed, his voice shaking and horrified. “No, I don’t.”

“We let it be said that this is justice in hopes that such a fate will deter those who would stray from God’s light,” Kristov continued. “That they may reconsider their path if they know the pyre, the water or the wheel awaits them, but the truth is far darker. Some say that it is because we wish to see the suffering of those we condemn, that it provides us a measure of unclean satisfaction, or that inflicting torments is our reason in and of itself. They are wrong.”

“They why do you do it?” Gremble whispered. The flames had nearly reached Sasha’s feet and she was wailing in fear. Pain would follow shortly. “Why do this?”

“When you tear a wineskin open, the contents spill and spray everywhere, do they not?” Kristov asked. The priest didn’t respond, but the inquisitor continued nonetheless. “You cannot control where it goes, nor predict who, if anyone will be splashed. But if you poke a hole in that container and let the wine drain slowly...”

Gremble wasn’t listening. The girl was screaming now as the flames licked at her feet, crawling up her dress. It was a slow, agonizing end. The stench of burning hair and roasting meat began to fill the square. Some of the crowd closest to the pyre began to back away, but Kristov and his retinue did not.

Covered in flames, Sasha writhed on the stake, howling and shrieking in agony as she burned to death. Finally, Gremble could bare it no longer. With a burst of speed and strength at odds with his aged frame, he hit one of Kristov’s men across the jaw and pulled the hunter’s crossbow out of his hands. He lifted it towards the screaming girl, but before he could squeeze the trigger, Kristov seized him, forcing the crossbow down. “No,” the inquisitor hissed as he pulled the weapon out of the priest’s hands. “Watch.” Then, softly. “It comes.”

Gremble stared back at the horror in front of him, wondering what the inquisitor meant and then he saw it. At first, for several moments, he thought it was just a trick of the smoke and flame, a shape moving just above Sasha’s now-silent form, an oily darkness amidst the thickening smoke. Her burning body jerked and twitched in a way it no longer should have been able to.

The shape grew larger, pulsing and shuddering. The priest fell his blood turn cold as he realized this was no trick of his mind. Amidst the flames, something was alive, crawling and pulsing out of Sasha’s corpse. Gremble was put in mind of a parasite larvae slithering out of the caterpillar it had infested and consumed. As the dark form emerged farther, it began to take on a more distinct shape, though the shifting smoke and licking flames made it hard to discern. The priest thought he saw tattered wings, too-long limbs, burning red eyes and a mouth that opened far, far too wide...

It let out a soul-piercing shriek that sent the crowd staggering back. Gremble himself might have fallen save for Kristov holding him upright. The shadowy form finally pulled itself from its host, letting out another awful, hateful shriek before it was swept up into the pillar of smoke, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

Gremble was sweating and shivering. He looked to the inquisitor, horror and awe in his eyes. “The girl on who’s behalf you begged for mercy died well before she was put to the pyre,” Kristov told him. “All that was left was the demon wearing her innocence as its false face.” He raised his head to the pillar of smoke, dispersing in the summer wind. There was no sign of the demon. Forced from its host, it had been sent back to its infernal domain.

“I have been wrong before,” he repeated his words from earlier. “But not this time.”