DROWNING

Written on October 15, 2021 (♎︎)

Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2021 for prompt No. 11: Just Keep Swimming (Drowning).

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Every youth born at Mullonde had to consign himself to the sea or the See—or so Simon had once been told. You either took on the cloth or took to the mainland. He had thought it a settled matter once. As a young man, he had little love of scripture and less fear of drowning; it was only when word came that Varoi's men were marching east that his cowardice found him out.

When war finally arrived, he had the protection of cloister walls around him. His wanderlust could be confined to the edges of a folio, and he taught himself to reckon the ocean scarcely deeper than a scriptorium ink pot. He could drown in either just as readily. Other youths could tilt on towards Viura, and he would remain, eyesight blunted by midnight reading and fingers blackened with writs and reports. He finally saw the other side of the Burgoss when an Inquisitor had need of a scribe.

He later considered that he'd drowned in many things during that voyage. Fear ran deep; hypocrisy seemed bottomless. If he drowned in the minutiae of his work or drowned in blindness to its consequences, it was to the same end. He remained safe from soldiering. Still, there was for many decades what seemed a weight against his chest—a desperation to breathe. It was only when his lungs were filling with his own blood that he had relief of it: a shock of clarity before the dark.

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