VESSEL
Written on June 20, 2024 (♊︎︎︎︎)
Content Warning: This ficlet has explicit rape and features the abuse of social rank/religious authority.
The chamber was dark—only the faintest trace of rush-light winking through the crack beneath the door. The air was thick with frankincense and summer heat.
Wiegraf Folles, newly consecrated to the service of Mullonde, did his best to endure.
He had known back in Lenalia that he would ill like many particulars of the compact he made, and he had prepared himself all throughout the long voyage from the mainland to meet his new masters' expectations with the semblance of pious humility. Along the edge of the Larner, in the thick of the Viuran plains, in all the coverts and foxholes where he'd sheltered during that fatal Gallione winter: he'd weathered on—made do through privation, hunger, and pain. It was surely no great burden—after that—to suffer through ceremony. Wiegraf could make peace with prayers and oaths, biting his cheek raw between each utterance as he let the words detach from their meaning. "I pledge myself, from now until eternity, in life and beyond it..." He refused to reckon or hear his own voice. "...with this I state my strong and irrevocable intent."
Another man had spoken the rite it seemed. Another man had been washed, anointed, and wrapped in a white alb. Another man knelt in the midst of the blackness and smoke, bowed in supplication as directed, his breath even and unchanging as a hand gripped the back of his neck to force it downward.
"I commend you, Templar Folles." Vormav's voice echoed around him. "You carry yourself with a soldier's stoicism."
He did not respond. He had not been bidden to do so. The hand on his neck moved along his shoulder, tracing the edge of the bone. He did not flinch.
"Tell me once again, Templar, what is the rule by which you are bound?"
"I give my wealth to the Church in Ajora's service." Wiegraf did not pause at the word "wealth" nor let its ironies reach him.
"Good."
He felt the laces of his garment pulled loose.
"I give too my body to the Church in Ajora's service."
"Excellent."
There came the weight of another hand, the slippage of fabric over his skin. Wiegraf closed his eyes, telling himself it was the smoke that stung at them.
"I give lastly my will to the Church in Ajora's service."
"Well spoken."
Wiegraf did not reply. He did not flinch as Vormav pushed him lower, his face breathing in the dust of the stone floor. He allowed his arms to be drawn behind him, tensing once and then going slack as he felt the pressure of a cord twisted around them.
"I believe the sincerity of your oath, Templar." There was an arm suddenly flung against his neck—the burning presence of another body pushed against his own. Wiegraf took one convulsive breath and went still.
Vormav continued.
"It should be no true trial to one thus sworn—of course—to have some test made."
Wiegraf said something then—meant to say something, surely—but his voice fell from him before his words could register even to himself. As the High Templar drew his face close alongside his own, he tried to take himself north, over the sea and into the snowfields where he ought to have died the spring before.
A tongue—rough like a couerl's—darted out to lap at the corner of his eye then, but Wiegraf knew that no tear had fallen.
In all that followed, he did not open his eyes. In that blackness, there was nothing he wished to see. He had heard rumors of those sins Mullonde turned her gaze from, of all the especial indulgences set aside for men of the cloth. Wiegraf, well used to bearing the weight of other men's crimes, bore this new one as well he could. Wealth, body, and will: the Church did not dissemble as the Crown had.
He chewed his lower lip. A bead of sweat fell across the right side of his face. Somewhere behind him, he could feel the pressure of oil-slick digits within him, and he sank into the wild beating of his heart as the bony edge of Vormav's forearm pulled fast against his throat.
Something in the smoke around them turned bitter, and Wiegraf did not try to breathe as he felt the burn of Vormav pushing his short, girthy prick into him—as the dread of what was to happen transformed into the disgust of what was. He thought of Gallione again. He thought of the vast expanse of the Burgross, stretching to a pale line that divided the grey sea from a grey sky. He tried to match his breath the rhythm of Vormav's breath—to not betray any disharmony with the man fucking him.
He was grateful for Vormav's seeming dispassion. He was be no means gentle, but no moan or sigh escaped his lips as he thrust into him. Each snap of his hips seemed perfunctory, mechanical. Wiegraf tried again to recede from it—to think himself somewhere else, someone else. There was a moment when the grip on his throat tightened, and Wiegraf felt the relief of a near swoon come over him. Some part of him must have fled the bound and crumpled form on the floor, for he thought things that could not be true. As Vormav clasped him close, as the tempo of their joined bodies picked up in speed, it seemed to him that the sparks beneath his eyelids took on shape and sense, that the nails digging into his flesh grew bladed, that there sounded the roar of something like a wild beast.
He was unsure when he was free of these phantasies. He later would not recall the particulars of their parting—when it was that he found himself free to collapse against the stones beneath him. He remembered only the hiss of a harsh whisper whose words he had tried not to hear.
"A fine vessel; I think you will hold."
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