Coloring (20)
Coloring (20)
Day came.
Morning or afternoon—impossible to tell.
In the dark, time loses all meaning.
Clang.
The door swung open.
Priest Matthias.
He wore the same immaculate white vestments as two days prior.
Two large soldiers stood behind him, faces blank.
"It is time."
Matthias spoke placidly, as if bidding me good morning.
The guards hauled me upright.
My legs had no strength left after sitting so long.
I staggered, and they propped me up.
A body missing an arm is hard to balance.
The stump of my wrist throbbed steadily. A feverish dizziness clung to me, as if I'd caught a cold.
They dragged me down a long, dark corridor.
Torches set into the walls flickered, twisting the shadows.
At the end, a barred wagon waited.
A foul reek wafted from inside it—rot and old blood tangled into a stench.
A man was curled up inside the wagon.
His body had been brutalized past recognition. Shreds of flesh hung loose. Bone showed through in places.
The smell of a corpse already clung to him.
Likely the same heretic who had screamed briefly last time, then gone silent.
The guards shoved me roughly into the wagon.
I collapsed to the floor. My eyes met the man's.
His gaze was unfocused, glassy.
The wagon lurched forward with a creak.
When we surfaced above ground, the light was blinding.
Sunlight. I hadn't seen it in a long time.
I squinted on reflex.
And with the sunlight came a deluge of voices.
"Burn the heretics!"
"Kill the servants of Satan!"
As the wagon rolled forward, things pelted the bars—food scraps, rotten eggs, the occasional stone.
The stones, at least, clanged off the iron and bounced away.
But one overripe tomato squeezed through the gaps and burst across my face.
Red juice and seeds smeared over my skin. Sticky. Lukewarm.
I shut my eyes without a word.
The man beside me spoke, his voice frayed and hoarse.
"...Nice weather. Perfect day to take a boat out."
I opened my eyes and looked at him.
He was forcing the corners of his torn lips upward into a smile.
"A boat?"
I took the thread because I wanted to forget, just for a moment, that we were about to die.
"How'd you end up in here? You're in better shape than me."
He glanced at my bandaged arm.
"Hard to say. I was a fairly prominent noble, I suppose. They spared me the torture, at least."
"Lucky man."
He let out a hollow laugh.
Every time he laughed, dark blood seeped from his wounds.
"Were you taken by the Saintess too? That insane—cough!"
He couldn't finish. A fit of coughing cut him off.
"...Something like that, I think."
There was no chance to talk further.
The wagon stopped in the center of the square.
The door opened. Guards pulled us out by force.
The square was packed.
Mania, excitement, and contempt churned together in the crowd's eyes.
They behaved as if they were enjoying a grand festival.
They pointed at us and screamed.
Every single face was flushed with a joy disguised as righteous fury.
Two wooden posts stood in the middle of the square.
Beneath them, dry firewood was piled mountain-high.
They bound each of us to a post.
The coarse rope bit into flesh.
Priest Matthias ascended the platform, opened the Scriptures, and began reciting our crimes in a solemn voice.
Smuggling heretic goods across the sea and plunging the faithful into grief. Murdering priests with those same heretic artifacts. And a great many other charges I was hearing for the first time.
At least, I didn't think I'd done anything quite so grandiose.
The crowd roared at every word the priest uttered.
The noise clawed through my skull.
Then, among the crowd, I saw Serepina.
Pale-faced, staring straight at me.
Her expression was twisted with pain and guilt.
She looked ready to faint on the spot—close to death herself.
She'd worn that exact expression once before, when she'd beg me to somehow undo our broken engagement and ask every morning if she could come by my room.
I should've told her to cut the shit and get lost.
All she ever did was show me those expressions, those feelings. She never did a damn thing.
My thoughts churned. Our eyes met.
And at the same moment, the priests set the wood alight.
Whoosh!
The flames roared up in an instant.
The dry firewood caught like oil-soaked kindling.
Searing heat swallowed my body whole.
"Gyaaaaaaaah!"
"Aaaaaagh! Fuck! Aaagh!"
The man beside me and I screamed in unison.
Flesh cooked. Fat melted and oozed, carrying the stench of charred meat.
When it became clear I could do nothing—nothing at all—I wept like a fool and looked up at the sky.
The ash-gray sky held nothing.
"Levina! Levina! Save me! Serepina! Save me! Aaaaaagh!"
I screamed names like a madman.
Names of people I couldn't even see.
"Estelle! Estelle...!"
The fire only grew fiercer.
At some point, my voice gave out.
The last thing I saw was Estelle, holding me tight whether I burned or not.
* * *
From far away, the roar of the crowd drifted in.
At that hour, Estelle was riding back toward the city.
Exhaustion lined her face, but so did satisfaction.
She had just returned from burning a heretic nest.
A fleeting thought crossed her mind—someone seemed to be calling her name.
"The city's in an uproar. What's happening?"
She asked the knight riding beside her.
"The word is that a burning is taking place in the square today. A heinous criminal who murdered several priests, and a heretic the Saintess herself once captured—both are to be executed."
At her adjutant's dispassionate words, Estelle's face hardened.
She yanked the reins.
The horse whinnied and reared.
She vaulted off the saddle and broke into a run toward the square.
She shoved through the crowd, clearing a path by force.
People screamed and scrambled aside.
In her eyes, only the burning post at the square's center existed.
"Stop."
Priest Matthias blocked her way.
His face was pale. His eyes were firm.
"Your parents, Saintess, would surely be proud to see you return after purging the heretics. For their sake, I ask you to remain calm."
He spoke with infuriating composure.
Estelle stared at him, silent.
She looked at Ravin—still burning—and back at Matthias once, twice.
Her face was expressionless.
The next moment, her fist flew at Matthias's face.
Crunch!
With a dull impact, his head shattered and scattered in every direction.
Brain matter and bone fragments rained down.
The square went deathly silent.
The crowd recoiled in horror.
Estelle leapt into the blazing pyre.
She paid no mind to whether the flames caught her own body.
Whenever the fire licked her skin, it charred. Whenever it charred, the flesh regrew, leaving nothing but an endless reddening.
Yet she showed no sign of pain. She wrapped her arms around what remained of Ravin—what hadn't yet burned black.
Light enveloped the body. The scorched skin mended. New flesh bloomed.
But Ravin did not stir.
What lay in her arms was merely a lump of meat shaped like him.
Estelle knew this perfectly well. She could not let go.
She didn't cry.
She didn't scream. She didn't show a trace of emotion.
She just sat there, dazed, holding a Ravin whose body was now unblemished, and murmured to herself.
"Seems like it's always been this way."
No matter how the crowd stared, no matter what ruin Matthias's corpse had become, no matter what the surrounding priests said as they closed in around her—she sat as if she heard nothing at all.
"Whenever something seemed like it might finally happen... he always vanished like this."
Vacantly, she gazed down at Ravin's body and stroked his face.
"I wanted to hear someone say they loved me. No one ever told the Saintess they loved her."
Ravin was right in front of her, but his face kept blurring, kept slipping from her sight.
The way Etoile's face had vanished from her memory.
When she stared into a mirror, she'd only ever guessed at her own face.
In her memories, the faces of the people she loved always faded away like this, soft and indistinct.
She kept stroking Ravin's blurred face.
Because sensation—sensation always stayed.
Estelle searched for the fault inside herself.
She hadn't been able to save him because she'd done wrong, because she wasn't enough.
Not this time, though.
She refused to believe his death was her own failing.
Looking around, she saw countless people who had taken pleasure in watching Ravin die.
Their faces had been full of twisted joy.
She couldn't make out their expressions, couldn't see their faces at all—as though someone had scribbled them out—but they had definitely been smiling.
Estelle laid Ravin down and, blank-faced, looked at the holy knights encircling her.
They were saying something. None of it reached her.
Just a muffled droning, like sounds underwater.
One of the holy knights moved closer to calm the Saintess. In an instant, his head burst apart.
Only then did the crowd start fleeing, screaming.
The square descended into chaos.
Estelle drew her sword but didn't charge. She looked at the remaining holy knights one by one.
Then she lifted Ravin from the ground and walked away.
Not a single person followed her.