Sin
In 1957 within Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, Ezekiel Lamb entered into the world marked in rejection and shame. The unnatural silence of the child upon their birth only sated the superstitions of the mother, a woman so deeply religious that pregnancy had been possession and birth the expelling of an evil seed. The father was not known, or rather not recognized for dubious connection to the church; for the mother had in fact taken the vow a year prior at the age of sixteen. Sister Franziska had a suffering grasp on reality before entering the convent, one tampered with by the solicitous advances of her own father and the foul disregard of a knowing mother. She had believed desperately when the priest promised to rid her of her “evils,” her “sins.” To her, the infant result of this was merely the demons being driven from her physically. Ezekiel, named so by the nun midwives, was to be kept as an orphan to the convent under the close supervision of the church like a guarded stain on their legacy; one of too many in their history.
Sister Franziska was not to raise the child, and interaction between the two was in fact heavily avoided. This however was an impossible consistency to keep and soon the woman had become a horrifying specter in the memory of Ezekiel, a presence leering from the corridors and glimpsed betwixt the crack of a door in her private quarters. She was a shadow, a shape, a looming presence for which Ezekiel could not comprehend the reason for her haunting. Whispers through the halls between the other sisters carried with them a fearful gossip toward their Sister Franziska and the evil child; she carried the stigmata, the child was ill of mind, the sin could not be washed from him, the father was the true sufferer of his legion. Ezekiel’s silence since birth carried on through adolescence, the cold disposition upheld between them and the monastery was ever present and the discomfort toward their unspoken malignancy was palpable. Ezekiel was regarded first as an unwanted reminder of guilt; this strange, uncanny, staring, mute creature with a crown like sheep’s wool and eyes of blessed silver. They were the visage of something mocking the angelic, a cherub that could look into the eyes with such innocent malevolence that the nuns went about the sign of the cross when speaking their name at times.
Ezekiel left the convent at sixteen just as their mother had entered at that age, stepping into the world and taking with them that continuous vow of silence as they did. They observed life from afar, at the edges of a fuzzy vision distorting and morphing in front of them in a society brimming with new experiences and sensations abandoned within the cloister. Here that command of the superstitious however did not exist; truly Ezekiel was odd to those about but not so in the way that existed with the knowledge of that dark history and unclean descent. Now their manipulations came in the sheer mystery of them, the overpowering unknown that emanated from a cavernous internal nihility. Spoken only as an author of dark philosophies and distorted concepts of existentialism, Ezekiel had a firm hold on the lost generations and stragglers of humankind. It was never enough though, their existence was infinite vacuity; hell was a spiritual tar pit they could not rise from. It rendered their tongue stiff and still, it sent their mind careening over vast expanses of the fragility of humankind and the secret pull of something opaque and hungry.
They were twenty-four in 1981, living in Berlin and staring down the meaninglessness of their future upon a thin plane of reality. As bitter a silence as ever bore down on Ezekiel as they walked into a desolate forest, their car abandoned on an empty road and their trek for solitude taking them deep. The sharp teeth of winter reddened their nose and cheeks, a brilliant shade against the barrenness of their pale pallet. They walked with a calm intent to spill with greater vibrancy hot crimson over the snow. Ezekiel wished to face their mortality, to make it a tangible reality just to know it existed. They found instead mortality embodied. Tangled in a rash of thorns and brush was a body, lifeless and serene. Her black hair sprawled across the twisting mangle of thorn branches like a plume of feathers in the aftermath of a hunt; her skin tinged in the grey-blue shade of the frigid environment; her eyes laid open and jet beneath sharp and unusually neat bangs. There was an unspeakable morbidity that beckoned Ezekiel to the dead thing, something illimitable and grotesque. There was no finality there, only yawning eternity in the stillness of a permanent state. Ezekiel left the forest that night, they brought death with them like the crumpled game of a forbidden poaching in their arms. The silence of this action was perhaps better than any words that could not describe for the human any reasonability for it; nor for the tenderness with which they rested the vacant body on their table once returned home. There was such a severe jealousy for her, a curious coveting of her lifelessness eternal. Ezekiel studied the dead one a long time before resting that night.
It was such a soft sound at first, the shift of weight pressing down onto the bed beside Ezekiel; just behind them. The air about the form was chilled, the hands drifting up to hook with searing edge into the human’s chest like claws of ice.
“Prophet.” Her voice emitted no breath, yet it drifted weightless into sound.
Absolution, rapture, the embrace. Ezekiel was reborn, torn through the veil and tossed to sink into the ocean of ink that had marked them lifelong. The vow was broken and breathlessly as their sire they spoke; curses to god and to man, blessings of hell and of havoc, consent to the bidding of an eternal night.
Salvation
The freshly sired Entity was set upon the task of proving their will at the threat of absolute end in final death at the hands of the sire, Jezebel. They pulled upon their strengths with conviction, pouring into their philosophies and theories to form cults of mankind; small though with violent result. Ezekiel had become a sacrificial priest of a god yet to come, cleansed in darkness and promised to chaos. Carved into their flesh, embedded with an inky blackness from within were its words of faith; a painstaking process committed the night of the embrace. All that was unholy in Ezekiel as a human was now poured out upon the world like oil bubbling up from the earth, they were every superstition laid onto them and a vengeful Devil for it.
There were still yet gods to be conquered though; those all adorned in benediction and sealed away in their tombs of gold, clothed in the purity of their robes and impurity of hearts. Father Immanuel, the progenitor of that spiteful, angelic, monstrous thing rested well in power of the congregation through which Ezekiel’s upbringing left them exiled from all that could be hallowed and good. The nuns were at first dismissive when Ezekiel came to ask for confluence with the father, protecting even then the secrecy of his sins waged against the young sister Franziska twenty-some years prior. However when Jezebel requested the Father’s services in exorcizing that which had blackened the eyes of her Entity spawn an exception was made, the nuns having realized this was a matter of business and the secret perhaps still remained as it had been kept from Ezekiel religiously in their upbringing. There was a relief amongst the monastery, the comfort that the demons put into that orphan of Lucifer would finally be driven out, washed away; the torment of the sin would be forgotten for Father Emmanuel, so they thought. So they thought.
The exorcism was a harsh affair at the very least for Ezekiel, an Entity of spiritual bane. A willing torture, a means to an end as that dormant evil played along with the Father. It was of course a mockery, a trap to bind Father Emmanuel with the false hope that through this act he could save his soul from the bastard offspring’s stain of lineage. Upon the assumed final hour of the exorcism Jezebel stepped in for the kill, crucifying the priest alongside her Entity. Like an unholy sacrifice to the shadows, a darkness was pulled over the monastery that night. Sister Franziska wandered the halls and rambled of hell on earth, the faith was lost within those walls, the bell tower was left silent on the hour to ring no more. In the wake of the Lasombra pair there was a putrefying stillness about the place. Ezekiel had proven themself worthy in the birthright of the new god for another night.
