Critical Condition
Drowning.
It always felt like drowning.
Even after ten years, Kadenja Toriet always opened The Altar with water in his lungs. It bubbled and frothed from his mouth with the desperation of breathing, the necessity of obedience under guise of miracle trickery, survival treason.
He used to fight and claw to clear his lungs, to ease the hemorrhage in his thorax that pressed ever inward. The pressure used to crush him, disintegrate the pleura that held his parts in human form. These days, however, he understood he was a vessel. He was simply a book and every sermon was a reading etched into his sleepless body, his somatoform mind.
In his executioner's arena turned theater replete with last resorts and dead ends, he opened his arms to the screams of an audience who only wanted half the story. They rose to greet him, upturned faces a field of red lit masks that shielded the world from their blood hungry mouths, their worship of the greatest cost.
“You are tired,” he lamented for his murderous flock with the weight of his body heavy in his voice. “You are sick. Your doctors can't fix you. They can't find that seed of suffering in your belly, can't fix the decay in your bones. This is your story they tell you. This is how you live the rest of your life. This is how you die.”
When the pyre exploded into a bonfire center stage and the music pulsed through the ring, Kadenja straightened to his full height, commanded them be comforted by this truth he'd composed, this book he was chained to, this magic he sold.
“I'm here to rewrite your story. So let's make a sacrifice.”
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