I feel their eyes on me, burning with questions, but the questions are ignorant. They are not questions of what I hope to achieve in finding my target, nor how I came to be where I am now: here, in this dimly lit tavern with its sodden floors and tables of rotted wood, its thick iron doors, colored with rust and locked with three distinct keys, boarded-up windows and gray moss-coated stone walls. Where the incessant odor of festering mildew attaches itself to the air not already claimed by their anticipatory silence.
They are not questions regarding my intentions or allegiances, nor how I, a small-statured woman of nineteen years, managed to survive my journey here with a sword most knights would claim inadequate even for buttering bread.
They are tired questions of small-mindedness and superficiality.
Questions I am used to.
They are not concerned by the cascade of demons that have befallen their world, nor the two straight years of rain they have experienced.
They want to know, “Why does half my body bear the scars of fire?”
From my hairline to my hip, the skin on my right side is a deep venetian red. They see the uneven coloring, like moss on a riverside stone, crawling up from my neckline, smooth in texture, wrapping itself around my cheek and forehead.
They had started at my appearance, then after the shock had settled, this congregation of simple townsfolk, gathered in the cold and lit by candlelight with their unwashed clothes and unclean faces, had wanted to know why.
I observe their mouths, slightly open; their eyes, cold, curious and penetrating; the lines made deep between their eyebrows, and I wonder whether informing them of their shallow ignorance would get me what I want from them.
I have travelled far to get here, traversing drenched pastures made bog by constant rain. I have survived a myriad of horrors along lonely corpse-strewn roads. I feel my goal within sight. It is a fly that has landed in the palm of my hand. It feels as though all I must do is curl my fingers and I will have it. But I know how quickly a fly can move. I must be quick and choose my moment, lest my goals escape my grasp.
To allow my pride to create a vast bridgeless gulf I could have otherwise walked across would punish me more than it would them. I opt instead to humor them.
I pick up a stool, swollen from the damp, place it at the end of that musty table of wet-haired patrons, and begin my tale…
I had been sold to the Bricklayer as a child of two or three. Young enough to have no recollection of my life prior to the arrangement, old enough to receive, in my dreams, flashes of memories depicting my journey there. In truth, I cannot say for certain I was sold. I may have been a gift, or a burden, offloaded to that all-powerful mason.
At seventeen I was as tall as I would be. Fed well and trained. Educated, healthy and obedient. I knew in the days leading up to the anniversary of my birth, that my time was fast approaching. My limbs would stretch no further. I was ready. Unquestioningly, I, along with a few others of my Order, began the slow dutiful march to The Wall.
The Wall was a half-day’s walk from our lodgings at the University of the Bricklayer—as it was known to us. “The Hall of the Witch,” “The Devil’s Lair,” or “The Ruins of Hecate” as it is known to those outside of it. We could not live closer to The Wall. The vision of the dead lain neatly on top of each other, naked and raw, vanishing to a point in either direction, is too gruesome a sight for daily observance. We were keenly aware of what horrors awaited us. We did not desire such a constant and grisly reminder of our fate: that cadaverous structure, kilometers across and now a dozen souls high, with its perfectly preserved corpses, bulging in parts, eyes open, limbs stiff. Even over the distance that separated The Wall from the University, it called to us both in sleep and waking.
We did not wish to see it before the time came, nor did we wish to hear the demonic shrieks and the hellish flapping of eldritch wings that echoed through the wet swamplands beyond it. The reason for our grotesque architecture.
On the day in question, we arrived at The Wall in silence and, without hesitation or grief, obediently removed our tunics.
Finding footholds in the divots of our ancestors and kin, we climbed until we reached the peak and lay prostrate in the place we would remain in death for all eternity. In truth, the greatest of my fears came not from the anticipation of the smoldering mortar which would soon be poured upon our naked skin, but from our proximity to the horrible lands The Wall was built to separate us from.
Staring into the sun, I was thankful for its ability to blind, and yet, still I could see in my peripheries the many-legged creatures scurrying about in the noxious fog of the wasteland, their limbs possessed of elbows too numerous to count, each leg springing from a fat swollen body full of faces. The creatures moved swiftly, devouring smaller monsters with each of their mouths, insatiably hungry, acid saliva dripping in feverish anticipation of every meal. I saw, too, even these great beasts fall prey to those who stood above them in that horrible food chain.
The lava-hot mortar could not come soon enough.
Lying atop that rigid stack of sacrifice’s past, I stared up at the fault-line in the sky, where day and night met in divine definition; these heavenly tectonic plates rubbing against one another to create deep tremors in the sky. I lay there and listened as the Bricklayer delivered her blessings through tears, paving my friends into that mystical wall of protection. Each of us, her children, the fruit of her life, finally grown ripe enough to pluck.
We had all sworn, late at night, in our simple book-filled dormitories, that we would not scream when it happened. That we would enter the darkness in stoic silence.
Few were able to keep that promise, and as the pained screams drew closer, I knew it would not be long before it would be my turn to be fastened in place by the deadly witchcraft of our all-powerful mother—the Bricklayer. It would soon be my turn to become a glorious brick in that defensive barrier for the good of a kingdom that benefited from our sacrifice, but that did not understand it, nor respect it. It would soon be my turn to scream.
The glare of the sun was blocked by her ceremonial cauldron of mortar, and I saw her above me—red-eyed from crying, mouth dry from persistent chanting. I steeled my courage and offered the smile I could afford. I was ready. Then, as she dipped her enchanted trowel into the mixture of limestone, crystal, blood, and tears, I heard a sound I did not immediately recognize. It came from the green Eden-like pastures of the kingdom to my right. I had always had an uncanny ability to perceive sound; a gift at times, a curse at others. I did not know which it was at this juncture. Amidst the cracking joints of the demons to my left and the bubbling flesh of my obedient allies, I heard the galloping of horses and the trampling of sunlit grass beneath the heavy hooves of the King’s Guard. I heard voices, shouts of horror, gasping. I heard the sounds of stolen breath, of grown men and women sickened by the sight of a thousand dead younglings stacked upon one another in a wall, kilometers long and ten feet high. I heard tears and retching, frantic voices calling out orders, disquieted equines, and the chaotic shuffling of leather-bound feet.
Would that I could control this gift, that I could focus on a single sound, but in my stillness and agony, I heard it all.
I heard the unmistakable sound of a bow drawn tight, then the soft airy rush of an arrow as it sailed over my head.
The Bricklayer, despite her over 300 years, appeared ageless. She was omnipotent in many ways. However, even she was confined by certain laws of mortality. The arrow hoped to uphold those laws.
For many years, I thought they had.
I gritted my teeth and swallowed my screams as I felt liquid hit my face and chest. But it was not the scorching mortar I had been anticipating, had been fearing. It was the warm thick blood of my teacher splashing upon my naked body.
I had been saved, as it were, by these men and women on horseback. A wretched, pitiable thing, I was pulled from The Wall by them, and they gave me a cloak to hide my nudity as I was stolen from the place I had spent my youth.
They had forced me to fail at my role as the Kingdom’s hidden protector; a dirty necessary secret, thrown into the light and deemed unsavory. The King had judged it time to abolish this place of barbarism and “meaningless” cruelty. To bring his kingdom into the light. What a fool he was. For, in this act, it was not the dark, but the light itself that he was unwittingly abolishing. I was dragged screaming—mad, they had said—into the kingdom proper, to begin a life free from slavery and servitude and imminent meaningful death.
Over the years, I heard, in scattered conversations, rumors: the hideous wall, a blight upon our civilized ways, had been torn down. Each ghastly human brick laid to rest below the ground, to rot uselessly below a landscape that, over time would become more hellish, dark and wet, thanks to their removal.
Then I heard another rumor: the Bricklayer still lived.
I soon learned that this all-powerful mystic, with the knowledge and power to banish the dark wet things, had taken a false-name and was living in secret exile as a recluse in the woods that border this hamlet. Gathering what few possessions I had; a sword, a simple bow, a quiver of arrows, and a small napkin filled with food, I left the mold-ridden convent I had made my home and began the journey here…
The horror-stricken faces of my audience slowly morph into confusion. Their issues, small-minded as they were, not with the ethics of the order, nor the implications of my tale, but with my failure to address the one thing which had so forcefully tugged on their curiosity. “But you said the splash you felt was that of the Bricklayer’s blood. The mortar never touched you?”
I nod. “The mortar never touched me.”
“But…” another begins, their lips quivering. Perhaps they are scared of me, perhaps it is a generalized fear, a common symptom in a world sick with horrors such as ours. It was a miracle they had opened each of the three locks on the tavern’s heavy door and allowed me entry to begin with. “…Your scars.”
I have scars, it is true, a thin raised line as light as coral, where an arrow from a desperate thief had grazed my neck, a haphazard crisscross of warped flesh on my reddened cheek from being shoved to the ground and held roughly against the uneven gravel of a convent footpath. The nuns hoping to rid my head of its obsession with my past. I had heard their whispers from my room, the low fearful voices of their quorum, fretting that I was permanently tainted by my trauma. Along my back, the memory of whips and planks of wood that wished to beat that trauma out of me.
There is no magic reason for the twists and tangle of my flesh, nor to the coloring this thickened tissue rises from.
I lean ever-so-slightly forward and raise my finger to the right side of my face. Without touching it, I trace a path down past my chin, over my right breast, and to my hip. “This is a birthmark,” I tell them, feeling a strange contentment at the anticlimactic nature of my explanation despite my intent to humor them. “I was born this way. It is not fire. It is not magic. It is me.” I watch their confusion grow. “I like it, and beyond aesthetics, it is not part of my story. It is simply an overabundance of pigmentation. It is of no concern of yours. A benign vascular malformation.” I hear their dry lips part, the heavy swallow of their throats, the soft sigh of held breaths released. “There are bat-winged creatures snatching babies in the night, many-faced monsters stalking the streets, stretched above treetops, hunting for prey. I am not here to talk of beauty standards and physical anomalies to a crowd of damp strangers.”
No acid has touched my body, the only acid is that which is on my tongue as I explain my appearance yet again to people who cannot listen like I can, and never even try to.
An uneasy silence follows. Then an older woman with gray teeth, her left arm scarred by the memory of jaws, asks, “Why are you here?”
“I am looking for the Bricklayer.”
“Do you wish to finish the job the arrow started?” she asks.
I do not expect for her to understand.
Though it is often cruel, there is a love I feel for this world. A duty. Though they are frequently ignorant, there is a tenderness I feel for the people. I have a yearning to feel sunlight on my naked body once more. To see the blue of the sky, to walk in dirt, not mud. To be dry and safe. To not hear the flapping of those wings, the hellish shrieks in the night. To walk as human, not merely as prey.
We had been plied with books at the university, kindling to light the fire of our understanding. We had our eyes opened to the beauty of the world, the fragility of it. From the weeds to the people, the soft dirt of the paths to the hard stone of the houses. The harmony of it, the improbability. There is shadow and there is light, and while light can create shadow, the shadows born without light are even darker.
The people are suffering. So too are the trees and the beasts that once found shade beneath them. The lives The Wall had protected far outnumbered the lives that had been sewn into it. For the magic to work, each brick must be willing. We were told nightly of our freedom, our ability to walk away. Our choice. We were educated, not only in the arcane, but in consent and self-worth. We were taught to think critically, to think for ourselves. We were presented with the facts and instructed to decide our own fates. We were loved. We were mourned. We were useful.
“Do you wish to kill her?” the old woman asks, repeating her question.
I hear the question echo in the silence of that mildew infested tavern. I feel it in the judgmental eyes of its inhabitants, their eyebrows knitted together. It bounces between them, hanging heavy in the damp air.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I wish to reinstate her.”