Graduation; The Btehror’s Stone

The candles quivered as she finished her speech. Their lights flickered in the autumn dark, shining off her professor’s pupils as the man reclined in the front row of the lecture hall. No-one filled any other chairs. She stood tall, fighting to ignore the chilly air from open windows that raised goose bumps on her forearms. It was an effort not to shake. She made it. She could not afford any marks on her composure; the man in the front row, her professor, watched as she straightened her back. He might not pay so much attention to others, but she knew he did for her. He wanted any reason he could get to fail her. A shiver out of line. A bad slouch. She stood tall, reaffirming her posture atop the podium. Tonight was a night for perfection. “Don’t let the doubt seep in,” she thought, “don’t let it tell you that you screwed everything up, don’t let it tell you that he hates you and has no reason to let you pass…”

 She’d screwed everything up. She wouldn’t make it. It was an effort not to shake.

 Her professor stood abruptly and walked towards the podium. “Come down from there.” He said. “Stand right in front of me.”

 She didn’t let her breath go as she climbed down the worn wooden boards. He hadn’t said if she had passed. Why was he hiding the verdict? “Don’t let the doubt seep in,” her eyes were on the floor as she approached, “Don’t let it tell you that he’s upset over how disgraceful your speech was. Don’t let it.”

 They stared at one another. He looked down at her without speaking for an uncomfortable second. “The extension I gave you strengthened your piece. You performed very admirably.” Her professor paused again. His lips flattened. “You make it very easy to pass you, Velvet.”

 Velvet forgot to blink. She forgot to breathe; remembering, she sucked in air so fast she choked. “Um, what?”

 “You passed. You did perfect.” He stepped up to her, angling his neck down towards her face. “You are the most fantastic student in my classroom. In that speech you professionally outthought one of history’s most well-valued philosophers in the past two thousand years whereas you are thirteen.” She backed into her own chin as he bent down eye-to-eye. “You did perfect. Are you proud of yourself?”

 “Don’t let it tell you he’s messing with you,” she thought. “Am I… What?”

 “You know you excelled. You have no reason to believe otherwise. Do you understand that you’re this monastery’s prodigal child? Have you ever stepped back and noticed that?” The bridge of his nose pressed to her face. Velvet’s lip quivered with anxiety. “This is the last class you need to pass to attend graduation and I am the last instructor you will see before you do. Have you ever wondered how this all happened? How you flew through monastery so quickly?”

 “Uh…”

 “They are afraid of you, Velvet.” He gripped the sides of her head. “The bishops here are afraid of what you would become if they did not pass you. They fear you.” He frowned, at the edge of tears. “Are you’re too smart to deny them that. So smart it’s scary.” The professor rose, shaking his head, and turned to excuse himself.

 “You pass.”

---

Velvet sniffed outside the stone doors of the ceremonial chamber. The fall air made her nose run. She was barefoot, to make matters worse, and the white tunic they made her wear had no sleeves or leggings. The tunic was ritual. Tradition. There were no other clothes offered. Gravel pinched her toes as she shifted on the balls of her feet, feeling nervous, the wet of earlier rainfall seeping through the ground. She sniffed.

 Two men staring off into the foggy darkness guarded the chamber doors. She was not to enter until the previous graduate finished his ritual, which had left her waiting for the past three hours. Velvet wiped her nose. Three boys had been before her; none had passed. She had seen both leave out the back door of the chambers bloody and purple-black bruised. The second was on a stretcher. The third was still inside.

 One of the guards spoke while looking forward. “You all four didn’t know what you’re getting into. Bishops went and managed the roughest graduation yet. Nobody’s making it. You saw. Kid in now won’t either, my bet.” The guard next to him nodded.

 That was the twentieth odd time he’d tried to intimidate her. It was working. Her doubt was listening. She stared at the damp gravel, frowning, cold, miserable, trying to distract herself… “Don’t let it tell you he’s right. Don’t let it tell you that you won’t make it. Don’t let it tell you you’re as dead as the boy in ceremony now. Don’t…” She shivered in the mist-cast moonlight. Why did she even show up? Family was allowed to witness graduation; she’d invited her mother. Invited her mother to a performance she was fated to fail. She cringed. Her mom, her mom was a good distraction, she thought. She thought of her mother and the farm at home. She thought of the gardens and fields Mom labored over, the forest she cut back every summer, boulders pickaxed and sod ripped, vegetables thrown at her father while he cooked… She found reason to smile at her cold feet, remembering her, imagining her mom in the stands of the ceremonial chamber for Velvet’s graduation. Her mother was a protective woman. She remembered the monsters she’d warned Velvet against as a baby, the evils she’d later read diagrams on in anatomy books. “Beware the caves, my sweet,” she’d say. “And watch for eyes that glow in the dark. The great Btehror dwell in the mountains here. Gods bless your soul against them, vile demons that they are…” Velvet saw the fingers her mother curled on her sun-tanned face like fangs, heard the way she said Btehror, with its silent ‘b’. “They’ll eat you up without magic to protect you. Like this!” Velvet would scream with fairytale fear and childish love at her mother as she tickled her, giggling, yelling, not old enough yet to see Btehrors in her head and magic cast to slay them. She cherished those infant memories, the wonderful years before she first thought she’d be eligible for monastery. Before she first thought she’d be eligible for monastery. Before…

 Before, when her brother thought he was eligible, too. She lost her smile, freezing outside the grey chamber doors, feeling her mist-damp tunic stick to her scratchily. Her brother. He would have been graduating now, too, waiting in the frigid evening, standing ahead of her. He’d probably graduate. She looked a couple feet ahead, imagining his height. He’d be a few inches taller than her by now. He’d turn around, smiling smug, and stick his tongue out, teasing her for even trying to make it out of monastery school. He’d pinch her cheek. Push her shoulder. Velvet looked away from the two guards, hiding moonlit tears on her cheeks. He’d spit at her, call her a curse, then go for the pieces of gravel under their feet. That was his favorite. Throwing stones. There was one day, so many years ago, the day she’d found out she’d been accepted to monastery, and she paraded around the house with her letter, shining at the appreciation of her mother and father, laughing, jumping. She had never been so happy. She ran laps around the farmhouse, careened through the back door, leapt over chickens, climbed hay bales, sprinted through the barn…

 Straight into her brother. She stopped, letter in hand, and lowered her head.

 “What’s that?” His eyes were on her paper. Velvet couldn’t help noticing he had a stone in his hand.

 “I just…” She hesitated. “Um, I just…”

 “Give it to me.” He snatched the parcel from her fingers, ripping it, a triangle of it left behind in her smaller hands. He only read the first words before crumpling the paper down to nothing. “You idiot,” he said, throwing it away. “You child. You don’t deserve to go. You hear me?” He stepped up to her, raising the rock above his head. Velvet fell to the ground. “I deserve it! I DESERVE IT!” She raised her hands above her head. The stone fell.

 In order to be eligible for monastery, one had to show special aptitude for magic, or an incredible ability to learn. Velvet had been accepted under special circumstances.

 She raised her hands above her head. The stone fell to pieces. Her brother screamed. The skin splintered around his fingers. The bone under them stripped away, fraying, splitting to strings. His eyes rolled back in his head. Velvet laid back in terror. Blood squirted on the hay-covered ground as his skin peeled back and opened, showing his decaying bones, displaying his fractured body as the magic sped up his arms to his shoulders and neck. Pieces of him trailed the in the air and stained the barn light like colored glass. The boy exploded. What was left of his limbs fell around her as tears failed to clear away the maroon splattered on her cheeks.

 Velvet sniffed outside the doors of the ceremonial chamber.

 She felt the rainy gravel under her toes and could not forget the feeling of blood on that hay. “Don’t let it tell you he’d still try to kill you if he was here, too.” She shivered harder.

 “Turn.”

 She looked up. One of the guards was staring straight at her. He waited. She turned her head.

 “Your turn. You deaf? It’s your turn. Time to go in.” The chamber doors were open. Velvet thought she might vomit. The guard looked at his partner, then back at her. “Go in.”

 “Don’t let it tell you that your brother would have passed where you’ll fail.”

 His letter had come a day late.

 Velvet entered the chamber. The doors closed behind her.

 Water cascaded down the black stone walls. This was ritual. Tradition. “Don’t let it tell you you’ll fail. Don’t let it tell you you’ll die tonight.” She started forward, her feet splashing in the icy water of the unlit passage, soaking the breeches of her tunic, adding to her shaking. “Don’t let it tell you you’ll pay for what happened to your brother.” The sound of a waterfall echoed at the end of the tunnel.

 The dark pressed in on her, asked to become another anxiety, asked to scare her with what it hid. She could not let it. She could not turn back. Her feet splashed towards the end of the tunnel.

 “Halt.”

 She stopped. A guard was somewhere in the darkness, cloaked in the corner of the invisible night, watching. “Wait there,” he said. A little witch-light rose in the channel, dim and barely useful. It showed cascading water over a hole in the floor. The clear stream fell from the ceiling straight through the ground, endlessly, making a sound of water meeting water maybe hundreds of feet down. The water hole was a chasm. The guard stepped into the magical light he raised.

 “You come to the water of the womb to be reborn. Repeat: I wish to taste the water of the womb.”

 Ritual. Tradition. “I wish to taste the water of the womb.” Her shaking vibrated the puddles around her numb toes.

 “As you pass through, you become a m—” He paused to clear his throat. “As you pass through, you become a woman. Once you jump this gap, the monastery cannot account for your safety; you are an adult, you account for yourself. Repeat: the magic is my mother; I trust her with my life.”

 “The magic is my mother; I trust her with my life.” Would she tell her mother that?

 “Repeat: in the blood of the occult I am reborn.”

 “In the blood of the occult I am reborn.”

 “You may pass.”

 She breathed. “Don’t let it tell you you’ll fall. Don’t let it tell you you’ll slip and fail like the senseless child you are.” Idiot. Child. She leaned back on her feet and then got a running start, pounding towards the waterfall.

 Its touch was a wall of needling pain. Her hair slammed against her head, sopping, and the shock of the overwhelming water dug straight to into her bones. She yelled on the other side, clearing the gap, feeling the agony of its lingering touch on her skin. Once through the falls, she fell on her knees.

 “Rise.”

 Velvet looked up. The witch-light had hued red as its light crossed the waterfall; she had leapt into another room, lit in crimson. Its floor sank, as if hollowed. Like a bowl in the earth. At the edges of the bowl were carved stadium seats, lined with people: many monks and professors, some civilians. Her professor sat in the mix. His stare was the same.

 At the crowd’s center, opposite velvet, a handful of old men stared down at her. She spasmed under the cold jabbing though her tunic.

 “Rise.”

 The old men were the board, the ceremony-holders. They’d see if she graduated. She could finish whatever they put her through, follow their orders to the letter, but whether she’d make it was up to their opinion in the end. For hundreds of years they had only ever passed boys. Velvet rose.

 The men swayed and murmured in their seats. The bowl below them was empty, littered with pebbles and plain boulders, walled on all sides. She strained to see in the low light, picking out any details she could, but there was only a shut gate against the far wall. She was alone down there so far. The bishops’ murmuring slowly quieted.

 “Velvet Starh-Len.”

 She squinted towards the raspy voice form the stands.

 “Fight.”

 The gate opposite her grated, making a metal sound that ground throughout the arena. People above cringed and spoke with agitated voices. Velvet convulsed wildly, trying to restrain herself against the terrible chill that remained from the waterfall and failing. She watched the gate as it slid open.

 Two motes of fire appeared in the darkness, like eyes. They glowed in the blackness.

 Her heart dropped.

 The Btehror fixed on her. It slunk out of its cage, feet clicking on the stones, gaping mouth dripping spittle and drool on the rocks. Velvet had only ever seen them in books. The thing crawled into the sorcerous light, bones loosely held together by bloody muscle, spiky spine glistening with slime and sinew that slopped against the floor as it swayed. She searched for recognition. Like a bear but too big, like a man but hunched and without a bottom jaw. Like a skeleton with fire and gore for eyes. The Btehror retched, choking on itself, calling towards Velvet with gasping breaths that puked saliva and brownish fluid. It stood at least as tall as two men. No arms, all fours, chest cavity low to the ground and open; it dangled its own organs and entrails for the audience to gape at.

 “Fight!”

 The Btehror screamed and jumped at Velvet. Stones flew as its claws left the ground, its wet body flying in the air, and blood plastered her face even before the thing had come close. Flying shadows of rocks made the magical red light in the room strobe.

 “Don’t let it tell you it’s going to kill you,” doubt said. It sounded smug and tall. “Don’t let it tell you you’re fated to die in front of this audience. Don’t let it tell you that you came all this way to die.” The Btehror fell a shrinking dozen yards from her, in moments a half-dozen, then feet. “Don’t let it tell you it’ll eat you alive and turn your brains to meal.” She heard the voice and felt the sting of water. She heard the voice. “Don’t let it tell you you’ve failed,” doubt said. “Don’t let it tell you that you should die.” The Btehror was inches away. “Don’t let it tell you to give up.”

 She could not give up. She was too smart for that. Velvet raised her hands above her head.

 The Btehror’s mouth descended on her.

 A shower of bones slammed the audience.

 Thousands of fragments of demon sparkled in the air, catching in the were-light, intestines and monstrous flesh flying a thousand different ways. Masses of body fell on the watching people as they cowered and gasped. The stones of the arena blew away, too, flying up into the air, shaking the chamber with a huge noise of calamitous earth.

 Velvet lay in a pool of blackish liquid and sticking ichor. She heaved and shook. All the shaken attendees could see were the whites of her eyes, searching, struggling to find comfort in their scared collection of people. She needed something to bring her back and make her feel safe.

 She found her mother in the stands. The older woman cowered. She had not looked at her daughter the same way after her brother. The same fear looked through her eyes tonight.

 “Velvet Starh-Len, you pass.”