Before I was set to descend to Bedlam, I met my uncle. He was the last priest of Bedlam and most recently turned Markayuq.
He stood on the dais of the monastery, petrified. He likely wouldn’t wake for a few more decades. He had a low brow and an expression of frozen concentration, as though he’d been pondering something interesting before he finished the transformation.
I’d never had a problem looking at the Markayuq. They were sacred and worshipped here. I cared for them as part of my service; waxing the leather robes, keeping their stone skin clean of dust, and making offerings. I couldn’t look at him though. It was the future’s fingernails scratching down the back of my neck.
When the two guards brought me down to the forest, my ears ached from the altitude change. My eyes adjusted to the dark below in the shade of the canopy. When I moved, I was taken aback when the air around me glowed. I waved my hand through it, leaving a golden afterimage that stayed until the wind swept it away.
‘Pollen,’ one guard explained. It was the first time either of them had spoken to me on the way down.
The walk to the village was a long one. By the time it got dark, I was shivering and had a hard time picking my way through the mangled roots of the forest floor. I tripped several times, and the guards were kind enough to pick me up.
It took two hours to reach the stacks, and seeing it made me uneasy. The buildings were visibly old and ramshackle, patched hastily in ways that were sure not to last. After growing up in pristine monasteries above the mountains, this place felt like it was made from splinters.
The paths of the village were lit with lamps whose light resembled the pollen from the forest. Inside the case, instead of a metal burner for fuel, there was a mechanism that spun to keep the pollen churning.
Walking canes and chairs outfitted with wide wooden wheels were leaned against the little houses. There were no stairs anywhere, only shallow ramps.
A line of salt was drawn on the ground. If I turned my head both ways I couldn’t see where it ended in either direction. At least three Markayuq had gathered at the salt, facing the village with their backs to the forest. I stepped over, careful not to disturb the grains. When I turned around to see if the guards would follow, they stayed well behind the line.
In the darkness, they were statues. ‘We were told to take you only this far.’
The steeple of the church was the tallest point in the village. The cross topping the tower loomed over me and I felt a roll of unease. I wasn’t Catholic the way the villagers were — they truly believed and I only practiced for the role, but if there was a God like they there was, I hadn’t heard from him yet.
The garden and the graveyard were overgrown and made shadowy limbs in the dark. Pulling my arms close, I took care not to touch them as I watched the guards retreat silently back into the treeline. I stood there until my fingers were numb from the cold before turning back to the church.
Inside, the air was stale. I groped around in the dark for something to start a fire or a lamp, knocking my hip painfully into a table corner as I went. My uncle had left ample firewood behind, and I tossed too much of it into the hearth without thinking that it was a waste. As the fire grew, I found one of those pollen lamps and fumbled with it for a minute before turning a key that made the metal parts churn the pollen to life.
With light to see, I wandered through the halls of the church. On one long stretch of walls by the first row of pews, there were fifteen portraits of Jesus carrying his cross to Calvary. I only managed to study four of them before the phantom ache in my shoulders forced me to move on.
There was a kitchen and a dining table in the same room as the hearth and past that, there was a chapel turned into a makeshift spare bedroom with two cots on either side of the room. I climbed up to the belfry and found only a bed and an empty shelf. I put my things on the mattress, stole the musty blanket, and clutched it around my shoulders. The bell was enormous, three times my size and swayed eerily above my head when a draft blew up from the church.
When a branch banged against the stained glass window I jumped and turned the lamp brighter, but all it did was lengthen the shadows of the room. Back home, I used to keep a lamp burning all night until I fell asleep because I hated the dark. I slept in the same room as my mother even when I started to be told that I was getting too old for it, but she never minded.
She was still there, probably in that room right now. I wondered if she would still keep a lamp on for me. I tucked my knees to my chest and cried into them, feeling swallowed by shadows and stricken by the fear of being alone for the first time.
Beyond the church, a house on the stacks turned the lights down. I watched the brightness in their window fade to dark until I couldn’t see the shape of the village against the mountains. All those people down there were mine to look after now.
I was twelve years old, all on my own and the only one of my kind. When I looked out the window the Markayuq guarding the salt line stared back at me, both lifeless and not.
read the rest on ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47615128
