Father

[Story]

This is an excerpt from a chapter I have been working on for quite a while. First real shot at story telling from a different character's perspective. Part of a greater piece, which is about a city called the "Seven Holy Stations", which are really 7 different cities, governed by an aristocratic ruling class and a "holy church". This excerpt follows Father Crispin, a young "priest" of the holy order who is being introduced in this segment. Crispin, originally from the 7th and lowest of the stations, and an antagonist in this story, is an ambitious youth who has climbed quickly through the ranks of the Holy Mother Church, and shows a promising career in the world of governing the Seven Holy Stations through "holy law".

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 2:

Crispin looked up at the brilliant white star that hung above the bright green marble altar. He looked at each one of it 12 dazzling points, their glittering grandeur reflected in the dark, black pools of his eyes. His hands were clasped tightly under his chin, his thin and ragged knees resting on the cold marble flow below.

Crispin came here often to the Seventh Station chapel. He liked to come early in the mornings, as the sun was just beginning to rise over the sparkling gold tips of the great dome, long before the scratchings and noises of the common rabble during their morning commutes to the Plaisin mines. Crispin like the stillness and the quite of the chapel in these early moments. A large marble structure, centered around the large crystal rendering of the sacred Holy Star, this church was a place of comfort and safety to him now. He liked to come here in those earliest hours and stare with reverence at that star, feeling its power and its grace wash over him; it was the only thing in this world that made sense to him.

Crispin’s mother had loved coming here. He could remember walking down the dirty and crowded streets of the Seventh Station, his tiny hand folding gently into the soft, thick folds of his mother’s. She had come to the chapel everyday, no matter what was happening in the life around them. She had told him that the only thing in this life that mattered was the word of their most Holy Lord, and their willingness to do his will. She had promised him that as long as he always paid his attentions to the Holy Lord, his life would always be blessed with greatness and prosperity; that all his troubles would cease to exist as long as he gave himself fully to their great Lord above.

She had told him all the stories. All the great sweeping epics of their Holy Father that had landed here, along what was now the Seven Holy Stations, all those many years ago. As he had set in her lap, head pressed gently into that warm and heaving breast, she had told him how their Holy Father had come to land among the Seven Holy Stations after the great Battle of the Fall, and had been taken in by the gentle and loving plains-people that had lived there for a time beyond memory. She had told him the tales of how the The Great God had revealed himself to their Holy Father, and of all the great miracles he had performed with the blessing of their generous Lord.

She said that the Lord had brought them all here, and sent Dragutin as a great prophet to cleanse them all and create a new world for them, a world in which everyone could be happy and safe - a new world of the holy and faithful. She had always showed this great faith in the Holy Lord, and even in her darkest days among the tumble-down dreams and broken hearts of the Seventh Station, her faith had rarely wavered.

Crispin hadn’t been there when his mother had left him. He hadn't been there to hold her hand or give her peace. Crispin thought of her often, and as he knelt here in the silence and the coolness of the chapel, her image and her presence was with him again. He looked up into the light of that dazzling twelve-point star, and was spellbound as his eyes looked upon all the tiny fragments of light that shattered against it and burst into a million shining pieces that raced and flickered along the walls of the tiny chapel. He wondered what it had been like for his mother in the end.

In his childhood innocence, he had not even known she was sick. He wondered if she had felt pain or fear as the dark walls of death had steadily closed in upon her; if she had called out his name in that darkness. But those were things not to be thought of, those were things that were far down the path that led you from the light of the Holy Lord. He supposed he would never know, how she had met her end, and what's more, he supposed that it did not even matter in the great mechanism that was his life. But still the question gnawed at him; had she kept her faith in the end? Had she seen the face of their great Lord and Keeper as she had slipped away into that subtle darkness? Or had she fallen, far and away into oblivion?

His knees ached below him as he knelt on the cold white marble of the floor. His red flesh was irritated and raw from hours upon hours of faithful devotion, long nights and mornings knelt before the altar of their Holy Father and the Great God. They rubbed against the rough krelaway wool of his dark and modest habit, the thin white flesh growing thick and swollen with his prayers.