Malaak; Inspirit

“This is not the sort of thing I’m usually hired for. I set sigils. I’m not a… bouncer.” She says.

 “Oh, come now, you’re the glyphwarden. Half of this piteous town is already terrified of you. Faith and piety, you make it sound like you won’t take a decent pay.” The preacher smiles a charm. His starched robes look so unfitting against the muddy cobbles, only contextualized into place by the chapel they stand outside.

 He’s not wrong. She does need to pay her landlord. And yet the glyphwarden hesitates, discomfited by the character being constructed out of her. Her enchanted robes and sorcerous demeanor certainly do nothing to help. But her intent coming here was to do right by these people: things like setting wards on chicken coops and drafting runes of safe passage for traders, not this. She sighs, wishing she was cozy in her apartment instead, nose-deep in that book on ancient northerner’s linguistics she’d borrowed.

 But something drew her here anyway, some feeling about the church that allured. And the rent did have to be paid.

 “All right, I’ll do it,” she says. “Though I’ve never tried to spook a holy man.”

 The preacher is already overjoyed. “Not a worry on good June, you’ll be just fine.” He presses a coinpurse into her tattooed right hand, ink of arcane script scrawled along the inside of her thumb. “One moment under that shadowy look of yours and he’ll be at wit’s end. Oh! And draw one of those wicked glyphs for him. It’ll send him packing.” He points towards the cellar door of the chapel. “You’ll find him setting up his asinine ritual just down the steps there. Remember, don’t say I sent you.”

 She nods, hoping against the impact this errand will more than certainly have on her reputation. She heads toward the door and closes herself inside. Street noise blocked out, it’s easier to convince herself that the job won’t affect her social standing.

 The grey stairs are worn and unlit and descend dark strata through the flesh of the earth. A low hint of candlelight turns the corner beyond. She feels the stone on her left, dusty, downward.

 Below is a chamber in the dim glow of braziers. The smell and smoke of devout incense husks the air. On one end of the room two men are shackled by the wrists to twin crosses, moaning softly, though they quit as the glyphwarden enters and look up in surprise. She has some notion of their religion: the men aren’t torture subjects, or sacrifices, but complicit players in whatever ritual the preacher mentioned. At the other end of the chamber is a lesser acolyte before a lectern. Equally shocked as the chained men, he closes a tome in hand and combs through his short hair with the other.

 “Glyphwarden! To, uh, to what do we owe the honor?” The acolyte tries a welcoming look, but anxiety ekes out on the fringes.

 She steps toward him, the mock subjects at the back aweing at her robe as it flourishes in the incense smoke, showing strips of sigils inlaid with gold and yellow stitch in its lining. The holy man almost trips backward. He stands a full head shorter than her. “I’m commandeering this basement.” She says.

 “Uh… ” He shrinks into his neck, eyes bursting. This town really is already terrified of her. “What? A-all due respect, this is a holy place. We’re presently amid a rite. Surely there’s a better room in town for your taking, um, sir.”

 “It’s ma’am.” She lets the shade of her hood darken her features, menacing at him. Perhaps he’ll respond to a display. The glyphwarden flicks up her wrist, drawing back the sleeve of her robe, attracting attention to the row of runes that tattoo her thumb. She curls her index finger and flicks her fingernail up the runes. A mote of flame conjures at the tip of her thumb, sparked by the ink, its heat glowing in front of the man’s nose. He gapes. She points her finger at a set of unlit candles on the back wall, and cocks her hand back at each one, sending them bursts of fire that consume their wicks. The acolyte swallows as the lights jet past him, and turns back to her, meek.

 “Leave.”

 She can hear his heart hammering under his votive garb. But he makes a last effort to steel himself, summoning rage from whatever power on high. “No! I’m an ordained curator of this church, and you have no right of extrication here! Go back from whence you come, ma’am,” he says with derision, “before I call down the other parishioners and—”

 She rolls her eyes. Fine, she’ll scare the shit out of him. She’s already made a mockery enough of her own art. The glyphwarden bites her thumb, paining out blood, and moves to the lectern dais he was preparing at. She draws a crude symbol in her own red, dragging her cut across its stone. The holy man shuts up and gasps.

 “The rune of death is drawn upon your podium. Will you continue to practice here?”

 The man blabbers, looks at her and the mark, and whines. “Euh!” Pitiful. Shaking, he scrapes up his book and incense, then rattles out a keychain, almost jogging over to the two cuffed on crosses to undo their bonds. They’re likewise horrified. Once free, the whole cadre sprints for the steps and makes themselves gone.

 She breathes and sucks her hurt thumb. The symbol is no rune of death, just a lettering meaning “messenger” from her linguistics book on the old northerner’s script. They wouldn’t know the difference. Blood stanched, she turns toward the exit herself, noticing a covering of nailed boards on the chamber anterior.

 That strange feeling about this church… She lingers on the boards. A cool draft leaks through them, musty and older than the cobbles. A sense of energy impresses on her; she’s always had a vague receptiveness to these things. She considers the waiting preacher above who paid her. The wood covering does look rather loose and pliable.

---

Behind the chapel antechamber, a cave tunnel makes its natural way deeper still underground, winding away from the incense smell into untouched cave air. Its lightless path gets slick with watery aquifer the farther her curiosity leads. Unbroken, real rock. Depth of eternity. And that feeling of strangeness growing, a force very unlike her glyphsetting which relies on the cosmic power of stars. It seems of the earth itself. Of June. She feels a rhythm under her feet, like the beat of a heart, a thrum that resonates in tandem with her suspicions. And down another groundwater path there is a soft glow at the tunnel’s terminus. She finds it and stops.

 A cavern of dripping stalactites shines with source-less radiance, alight from nowhere. Each wet ceiling spike drips together, one sound, one motion, counting the seconds with exact, echoing meter. But they do not drip down. Muddy water seeps up from the ground, opposing gravity, and flies straight up to meet the stalactites at their perfect tips, melting into the roof. Hundreds, thousands of dots of chiming, rising sediment. The mud formations start like icicles and slowly shrink into the top of the cave with each wave of synchronized upward liquid. Thrum, thrum, thrum as they impact, slippery cones of earth degenerating into flat ceiling again and again.

 She balks. The echo of it surrounds her. It is glorious, eternal, strange everpresence. How ironic it is, she thinks, to build a church to some departed God on the grounds of actual, present, physical power, the reality of unknowable manifestation right below their feet. This is the true holiness. Divinity all its own, simple and pure, ceaseless. All the worship they need. She watches the cavedrops collect for their own infinite time. Then, allured, she disrobes, and enters the cavern naked.

 In the small room’s center, she lets the waves of mud wash over her. Its motion collects like wax backwards through time, sliding up her figure. Every second it coats her. In the ever-present glow she becomes a wet statue of herself. Thrum, thrum, thrum, the sound of a chant—she can hear it—a monastic, ethereal repetition, a call from the unknown. She lets it grey her out. And she stands there for hours, tattoos covered, worries dissolved, her character pulled out in reverse of time to meld into the ceiling and be gone and grow again and again.