The Blood of the Precursor

Chapter 1 - Saturday, July 8, 2017

“You will bathe in the blood of the Precursor, and you will accept our God.”

The private words of her mother reverberated through Scarlet’s fuzzy head as she kneeled at the altar, forearms on display, fists tightly clenched against the pain of the wounds, red satin gown bunched at her thighs.

Blood—her own—crawled from her body, swirling in curly patterns and trickling down her sliced open forearms as if searching for something. Bronze planters with blood pink dianthus lined the walls of the sanctum and circled the altar, forming concentric circles with their pentagonal flowers the color of bright arterial spray over darker oxygenated spikes. Their stamens whipped out like lizard tongues to lick the drips of blood that fell from her arms.

She knew this day would come. Knew what it meant to be a part of her family, a part of her carefully orchestrated bloodline. Knew that she very well could be the last of that bloodline and their religious order. The Dama S’Dar.

She knew all this but still didn’t believe.

Dim lights laced twinkling amber trails around the hidden faces of the maroon-cloaked followers floating above the kite-shaped red and black mottled carpeting. Only darkness filled the space outlined by the hoods. Shadows that extended past the opening, farther than seemed real, as though the robed figures emitted the inky absence of light or consumed it. Scarlet felt as though she could look through the dark to where their features should be but weren’t. The faces of stark white ghosts projected from the shadows of the dark hoods, flashed bright before disappearing. Knowing it wasn’t real—only the Substance of Connection playing tricks on her—she stared at the faceless cloaked creatures gathered around her to bear witness. Stared beyond them to the dark wooden paneling that lined the room completely like a dense forest, letting in no natural light, offering no doors to escape. Just the idea of the outside world on the sides of the solid walls.

An auburn horse’s head with vibrant red feathers radiating from its brow stood beside her. Close enough that Scarlet could see the individual hairs on its mouth. Close enough that she had no choice but to imagine for the millionth time the severing of the head from the once-living horse by her Scythian ancestors, only to be preserved and maintained for ceremonial purposes for thousands of years.

High One Marko Stefanov loomed beneath the horse, dragging the akinak across his palm, splitting the flesh to fill a hammered bronze goblet with his thick, crimson blood.

“The blood of those who came before.” Marko’s voice spoke from the mouth of the horse and filled the room as he offered the dagger, tan leather hilt first, to his counterpart, High One Leila Ilievski. Her own black horse’s head was fitted with a woven red and gold angular patterned shawl. She immersed the blade in a clear liquid for a moment, then watched as the fluid evaporated, and with it, the blood of her counterpart. She sliced the akinak across her own palm with one quick unflinching motion and filled a second matching bronze goblet as she echoed, “The blood of those who came before.”

Scarlet’s gaze danced back and forth from horse-headed parent to horse-headed parent, looking for any hint they could discern her lack of belief. Leila’s eyes, through those of her dark horse’s head, seemed to meet Scarlet’s. A reverent hush had fallen over the witnesses as they waited for the only daughter of the High Ones to fulfill the blood rite and become one with the God of the Dama S’Dar. Her chest shook in the rhythm of her heart, rattling the bones of her ribs to create a hollow clacking sound in her ears.

“We have something special for you,” Leila said, reaching into her velvety-black robe until her arm disappeared from view and returned with a shining silver ampule no longer or wider than her slender finger. The silver turned to flesh in Leila’s hand, becoming a sixth finger complete with a pointed, red-tipped nail. Scarlet blinked at the warped image as the finger returned to its true silver vessel form. “Passed down through my family line, the last remaining part of the Precursor.”

A gasp expelled from a hooded member of the encircling audience, but to Scarlet, it was the hiss of a multi-headed beast. A beast that was coming for her.

“Our God works in mysterious ways,” said a smaller, maroon-cloaked figure at Marko’s side, hand with blood-tipped fingers raised in supplication. The voice creaked on the edge of change.

Marko’s tan, powerful hand, now bound with a strip of white cloth, gripped the shoulder of the figure, drawing them closer to the altar, closer to Scarlet. A smile crossed Marko’s face beneath his horse’s head, showing pride in his protégé as Falu Samaras drew nearer to Scarlet’s side. A place he was often found.

“Indeed, our God works in mysterious ways,” Leila repeated with a slow nod.

Marko unwound the writhing, braided cord from a distressed leather journal and, as he gently flipped open to a marked spot using care to only touch the edges of the pages, he removed a slip of semi-translucent vellum; he spoke the ancient words. “B’dameinū me’chatthīn, nhī chad.” Then recited them in English. “With our blood combined, we become one.”

Leila and Marko poured the blood from each of their bronze goblets into a larger vessel surrounded by a ring of squat, flickering candles. Scarlet watched as the flame from the candle jumped to her flesh, dancing around the pulsing, trickling blood on her arms. She felt no heat.

“We become one,” the followers repeated. The sound amplified like booming speakers in Scarlet’s head.

“One family, one mind, one intention, just as our ancestors before us. We honor our God with this step of faith and commitment so that it may come into this believer and unify them with the body just as it unified the families of Madyes and Sopolis, bringing peace, strength, safety, and fortune. Anointed, unconquerable, holy.” With the completion of the words, the tan horse’s head above Marko nodded to its counterpart.

Leila held the narrowed tip of the silver ampule in the flame by the leather grips of long tongs until the seal boiled and spilled, quenching the flame. She flipped the ampule, emptying the blood of the Precursor into the vessel containing the combined blood of the High Ones.

Scarlet braced herself for the next step in the ritual, blinking through the swirling colors and coronas encircling her parents. She focused on the pain in her arms to distract from the hallucinations, trusting the hospital just across town to save her from whatever was in that two-thousand-year-old blood, wondering how well her lies would hold, how strong her own mask could be, especially in the state she was in.

Surrounded by a dozen people in hooded velvet robes—a dozen people she had known her entire thirteen years of life—Scarlet considered Falu’s words after his own blood rite. “I’ve never felt so complete. So worthy.” Tears had spilled from his eyes. He believed—somehow believed—more than Scarlet ever could.

She was raised to believe in their deity, instilled with the morals and causes of their secret faith. She even at times wanted to believe, waited for her heart to change the way it had seemed to in Falu even before his blood rite.

Kneeling on the soft cushion, blood spilling from Scarlet’s wounds, her parents placed their hands on the bronze vessel and poured the mixture over the sliced flesh of her forearms. She again waited for something to stir in her, some revelation, some spark, some belief. But it never did. Despite the drugs present in her system to open her mind to connection, nothing came, nothing happened.

Her mind flashed to the girls’ bathroom at her prep school. Guttural sobs had penetrated the metal walls of the stalls. She sent a tentative, “Are you okay?” into the space and waited. The sobs cut off like someone merely hit the stop button and three seconds later, a polished blond in her perfectly fitting navy and green plaid uniform sauntered from the stall, brushed a stray tear from her otherwise unaltered face, stared at Scarlet in the mirror and said, “If you don’t show it, they can’t see it.” The older girl flashed her icy blue eyes, cocked her brow and strolled out, no longer distraught over whatever had induced it in the first place.

Scarlet had never seen that girl again, but the words stuck, replayed in Scarlet’s head over the last and final year of her pre-teen existence. She had tried those words on like they were a new sweater that didn’t quite fit but might be grown into.

In the sanctum, auburn and black horse’s heads gazed upon her. With Falu closer, she could see his face beneath the shadows of the hood, grasping for some measure of adulthood, but still a boy in many ways. His smile was so hopeful, so innocent and so carefree, despite the weight of the future laid out before them.

Scarlet knew what she had to do. Knew what those around her expected from her. And so, she spoke the words they all needed to hear: “I accept our God into my blood, into my heart, into my mind and invite our God to guide my path so that I may be of one mind, one family. So that we may become one.”

But Scarlet did not believe.

At that very moment, she began planning her escape.