She was one of his favorites. The cat had dark gray fur and blue eyes – a beauty, once the sickly beast was fed, and her ribs no longer rippled with starvation. For weeks she cautiously sought scraps Rhun left on the roof outside his window. Their first encounter frightened the cat away. Week after week he watched her cautious approach to the open sash, sniffing for the scent of fish or meat pie. Each time she approached, he stood a little closer. In time she let him near. In time, she took food tentatively from his hand. In time she purred near his pillow.
Rhun held the cat’s right paw as delicately as he could in his left hand and struggled to loop the small wire over it as he held her struggling body against the plank with his right forearm. She hissed and scratched not understanding the betrayal, and Rhun winced with each bite as he secured her in place. He dared not disobey, and as the shadow leered over his shoulder in expectation, Rhun lifted the knife to the cat’s chest and swept the blade in and down. The cat opened her mouth to howl in agony and gushing forth came a woman’s scream.
***
Rhun snapped awake in a cold sweat, heart pounding in his chest. The dream was always the same. He looked across the rooms to where Liadan sat in meditation, still and tranquil as ever in the dead of night. He shuddered and rose from his palette on the floor and stalked quietly to the forechamber where a small bowl of fresh water was kept. He pooled the water in his hands and placed them to his face feeling the shock of cold clearing his senses.
Stepping outside into the cool night, the stars were unusually bright above the forest, the air crisp and clean. It was a refreshing change from the stale mansion air in which he’d spent most of his youth. He wondered who might be sleeping in his childhood quarters now.
After his training, they had named him “Friend of the Church” and thanked him for donating the hospital and the estate. In those lonely years before, isolated in that enormous house, it was only the clerics at the asylum who kept him sane. They were kind and taught him of the optimism and healing power of the Dawnflower. But they did not know what worship took place in the deep chambers below them. They did not know about the woman.
His father was dead. He had returned to the embrace of Father Skinsaw. His father had never suffered for his crimes. But Rhun did.
Rhun grimaced in disgust. He watched for the coming of light, but it was far off yet. The forest home of the elves sat quietly in union with their surroundings, his home now of several years. It was these folk who had brought an end to the horror. Who, having learned of the dark ritual and the whereabouts of their missing kinswoman, infiltrated and destroyed the torture chambers, the madmen, and the assassin cult his father so carefully cultivated during his overlong life. Why they didn’t accuse the man of his crimes was still a mystery to Rhun. The elders would not explain. Perhaps they found his political connections too powerful. Perhaps they didn’t want to horrify the good clerics of Serenrae who worked tirelessly to ease suffering in his father’s hospital. Perhaps they were unsure.
In his father’s final days sick in his room, Elad ab Ordin – though Rhun no longer believed that could be his true name – cackled and coughed and leered at his only son while the clerics, not knowing the true nature of their patron, tended him with gentleness he did not deserve. The woman had long been moved. The chamber in which she had been held was empty when Rhun sought it out in the aftermath of the cleansing. None of the healers in the chambers above new anything of it. They certainly knew nothing of the ritual.
For that, Rhun was grateful. The only healer Rhun confided in was named Verin – but she vanished shortly after he asked her about the woman in the cell. Rhun was a young man then, and he had long been brought to the depths where the mad woman sat huddled on her cot behind the thick iron bars of her door. His father pointed at the cell and proclaimed, “This is for those too sick to be helped,” as his eyes narrowed, and the small, cruel smile foreshadowed all Rhun would soon learn of his father’s practices. They never entered the cell, and Rhun only heard the woman’s voice once … wailing as his father made Rhun destroy the cat. The cat that Rhun loved. That day, that terrible day of which Rhun still dreamed.
And Rhun remembered when his father showed him Verin’s body stretched tight across the rack, eviscerated with maggots crawling through her eyes. Though Elad had taken every pet Rhun had ever adopted, he had not known until then his father’s role in their deaths and the malicious glee with which he slew them… the same malicious glee with which he slew Verin.
From then on, Rhun took every chance he could to escape into the safety of the hospital’s upper levels, taking succor in the kindness of clerics who discovered in him a talented and earnest healer. He never again dared ask about the chambers below, but when his father overheard him quietly voicing a prayer to Sarenrae, the punishment was so severe that Rhun felt he might have died of the beating before his father hurled a potion at him and forced him to drink. “It won’t do having a noble son beaten black and blue,” he scoffed.
Rhun looked up again to find a brightening hue in the East. The sun would soon rise, and it was time to prepare for morning oblations. The Healing Light was rising and the darkness falling away. As he gathered his prayer robes from the outer chamber, he reflected on the woman in the cell. He had never learned the fate of the many prisoners from the asylum’s depths of whom he became all too familiar during those dark years. Of that the elders would not speak. Of the insane servants of Rhun’s father, they would simply reply, “Dead.”
Rhun faced the east and began prayers to the Dawnflower, feeling the redemptive powers of the Everlight flow through him. The sun poured over the trees warming his face, drawing him away from the abyss, away from the madness, leaving him striving, striving toward the light.