The Yaak House, Part Nine

Walking in through the doors was Rin, Hazel beside him. Boris backed the two like a bodyguard, crowbar in hand as the doors swung shut behind them.

“Rin…” Thaz’ra breathed.

“Hyacinth…” it was not the voice of Clipper, but one that was older, immensely mournful and sad.

“I remember,” Rin rasped, eyes wide, looking to Thaz’ra as the white mists began to swirl about the room, “Dvasia, I remember…” the mists settled and Thaz’ra looked defeated, “I’m sorry Dvasia…” he knelt to one knee and on the floor, Thaz’ra writhed, Hazel rushing to her side, “Our Priestess failed you grievously.”

Gerald froze, turning to Rin, “Priestess?”

Rin and Boris gave a somber nod in unison, however it was Boris who spoke and broke the silence.

“Priestess to Dvasia, the Wind of Many Voices,” Boris’ voice rumbled through the chamber like the distant sound of thunder, and Gerald saw the decayed hide shiver.

“Thaz’ra… was a priestess…” Gerald repeated this in disbelief.

Rin held his head as the memories that clouded his mind at the word formed in the fog that had again appeared around them, rising like vapor from the moss.

The screaming of the fawn being slaughtered.

The sight of bodies, now mere bones, beneath the water…

Clipper’s topless torso on the other side of the door…

Priestess… that was a holy title. These memories were unholy, untampered…

He shuddered as the fog faded, he could feel the feel the drugs in his veins still, the violation, the pain, he hated the memories.

 “She was by birthright,” Jasper sighed. Gerald’s head snapped around to him, his eyes slowly widening in anger and disbelief.

“She got Jasper, Boris, and I out of it…” Rin said, expression grim, “She did what she had to.”

Gerald shook his head slowly, “She got you out too Gerald.”

“There are too many loops that I am out of in this,” he hissed.

“You were always out of the loop because Jake felt guilty rejecting your advances,” Jasper murmured. Gerald’s eyes flashed with hurt, though anger muddled the expression.

“I don’t even understand the loop,” Hazel deadpanned from beside Thaz’ra, who shuddered and gasped, curling up. Hazel looked to her and frowned, “I’m more worried about you Thaz.”

“Miscarriage,” she murmured, not meeting her eyes, “Twelve weeks…”

“Sacrifice,” Gerald spat, “human sacrifice.”

“Religious abortion…” Boris murmured. Gerald looked sickened by the phrase, “to offer the purest of potential to the universe…”

“You’re defending this?!” he demanded, revulsion in his voice as he turned and glared up at Boris.
“Merely explain, not excuse,” Boris pinched the bridge of his nose with a sigh.

The tarnished mirror danced with colors along the wall, Gerald’s aura a furious maelstrom of color as Boris scooped Thaz’ra up, carrying her to a thicker patch of moss before the altar, Rin and Jasper following him in a somber line. Dvasia turned to Hazel.

“You come on shaken faith, as does the stag,” Dvasia indicated Gerald with a dip of their massive head.

“Your assumption reflects your own desires,” Hazel countered.

“Your eyes reflect a lie,” Dvasia leaned toward Hazel, “Blue…” Gerald shuddered at that, but Hazel did not flinch, though Rin and Jasper turned to her, confused.

“I wear colored contacts because I dislike my eyes,” Hazel shrugged, walking on past Dvasia to take Thaz’ra’s hand as Boris set her on the moss before the altar. Thaz’ra squeezed her hand in thanks, “I have nothing to fear of you, old one,” she turned to address Dvasia. The massive head tilted to the other side.

“Trust you your god so much?”

“God?” Hazel asked, “God… no… not so much God anymore,” she shook her head, long blond bangs falling free from where they had been tucked behind her ears, “The Universe however… I trust. Some call it God… I still do sometimes.”

Jasper cast a glance to the mirror along the wall, Rin’s reflection was shrouded in a pained mass of writhing orange and neon red. Boris’ was calmer, a steady cinnamon that pulsed with the beat of his heart, though it was ragged at the edges and bursts of yellow bubbled forth.

Hazel’s aura was different from the rest; placid, undulating calmly… a pastel pink with muted flashes of pale blue and white. He found himself tempted to reach for the smooth, misty surface it presented in the mirror.

Dvasia tilted their head once again, like scales determining the worth of someone’s word.

“Hazel-” Thaz’ra’s warning was cut off with a cry, and Hazel came to her side.

“Why hide such eyes?” Dvasia’s head tilted once more as they paced toward Hazel. Gerald went to take a step between them, but the moss swallowed his feet, “Settle, Stag, I have no ill wishes.”

“What was your original role in this realm?” Hazel asked Dvasia, “An answer for an answer, I gave mine already about my eyes,” Dvasia halted their advance, the human torso of clipper retreating into the larger ribcage, arms crossed as the bigger ribs closed over it, “You’ve no reason to fear me Old One, nor I to fear you,” her voice was gentle, Rin and Boris looking on with a tense breed of awe while Jasper supported Thaz’ra, who had since taken the fabric of her sweater into her mouth to bite on in her silent agony.

“I was first bound to this realm to protect the Ral line twenty-four mothers before Thaznelra,” Boris and Rin looked stunned, and even Jasper lifted his head from where he knelt beside Thaz’ra, “Every fifth mother has determined the recipient of my protections.”

“But…” the heavy sigh came from a ghostly visage that stood from the blood that had started to pool in the moss around Thaz’ra, Jake, “The line was disrupted…”

“By… Tajra?” Gerald asked warily, trying to settle his heart as it skipped in his chest. Nobody answered him, “Was she Thaz’ra’s… Aunt?”

“He…” Thaz’ra spat, malice flashing through her pain, “She, they… It,” Her grimace of pain became a snarl of rage, “Tajra was a true Hermaphrodite…”

“Clipper’s business partner was a…” Gerald looked confused, lost, more than a little disgusted even.

“Lover…” Jake corrected sadly, “and he willed upon Thaz’ra, her own kin,” he bowed his head sadly, leaning down to press a kiss to Thaz’ra’s forehead. On the floor, it was unclear if the defeated sound from Thaz’ra was from her present pain or the way her past was being laid bare.

“Tajra was doctor… was. They lost medical license,” Boris explained, “malpractice and… human experimentations. On paper, paid for good lawyer, left medicine to teach dance… in truth, recruited for cult life.”

“I…” Gerald shook his head, turning away from the group and holding his head as the fog now filled his mind and echoed it before the others, Tajra in all her handsome features, always slightly masculine, seducing him into the dance studio where he would meet Jake, seducing him over a glass of wine… everything being blurry.

Waking in a gurney, blacking out again, waking on her couch.

It felt again as if the bruises on his hips were still fresh, red welts in the shape of her hands.

No! No!

He could see again, her green eyes and slender hands trailing down his vulnerability with a scalpel…

No! That had been a nightmare!

The stark white scars that had always glared at him and his lovers in private…

No…  That had been a nightmare.

Yet he scars looked like the antlers atop Dvasia’s head…

Had it been a nightmare…?

“She used you, stag…” Dvasia’s voice was saddened.

“Shut up,” Gerald growled.

“She stole your seed for herself-”

“I said shut up!”

“To fufil her own inability to sire-” Gerald raised his gun, it clicked. He fired repeatedly in futile hope, but the rounds refused to fire as Dvasia continued, their voice becoming Tajra’s, “-the next mother holy through Thaz’ra-”

“Dvasia, sileo!” Thaz’ra’s voice thundered in the chamber, and the unseen wind that had rustled the moss hanging from the ceiling stopped as everyone turned to her. Then she shuddered, sagging against Jasper, her eyes rolling back in her skull a bit. Hazel sighed a bit, then stood, taking her contacts out.

“Haze?” Jasper asked warily.

“Damn things feel dry,” she huffed, tossing them aside, “My vison is fine… I just hate the color of my eyes…”

“Blue,” Dvasia hummed. Gerald cast a glance at Hazel, looking more and more uncertain of the world with every passing moment as he shook his head before going to the doors, pacing before them now like a caged animal.

Hazel frowned as Jasper pat Thaz’ra’s face in an attempt to make her focus with little success, “… How would you wish to find peace?” Hazel asked Dvasia, not meeting their gaze yet.

“Freedom from this realm… I have tarried much too long…” it was a child’s voice that spoke now, “I have taken my lifetimes in exchange for others… it was not uncommon of my kind back before the modern time… when man was fewer,” Hazel knelt beside Thaz’ra and ran a comforting hand through her hair. Grey eyes flickered up to meet her gaze.

“One has more value in a thousand than a million,” Hazel lamented, Dvasia took a step back, as though surprised, only for wind to whisper through the room as she continued, “You always understood that best,” her eyes shone a bright blue in the dim chamber, the sky dull in comparison to their neon shade. Dvasia’s nebulous green eyes seemed to bore into hers.

“You fear me not because you’ve known my kin,” Dvasia murmured.

Hazel stood with a thin smile, nodding, “Surgam mea custodem, Odrisk,” the chamber chilled as a breeze rustled the moss that hung from the ceiling, carrying the smell of pine trees and tilled earth. Rin let out a shaking gasp as he saw the mirror reflect an antlered Coyote appearing at Hazel’s side, eyes the same shade of blue. They blinked in unison, the coyote tilting its head in time with Hazel doing the same as she faced D’vasia. The antlers in the mirror were similar of an elk, long and strong, threatening to dwarf the canine body on which they sat.