#grigori is just a tired blorbo

[ashintheairlikesnow]

The Heretic's Confession, Chapter One

CW: Captivity whump, some... implications... references to branding. This is just me getting a feel for the idea and character, though, really.

-

The robes he once kept pristine are caked in dried mud around the hem. Grigory frowns as he inspects them, rubbing along the seam. It flakes away, leaving imprints of itself behind. 

Maudlin, certainly, but it feels like the stain of their sins painting his soul.

Maybe suffering can give even a man of the Goddess the sentiment of a poet. His lip curls in disgust at the very thought.

Please, please speak to me, Dromada. Tell your priest what he must do to escape this nightmare.

She is, and has always been, silent to his pleas for Her assistance. 

The Goddess the people worship may be a paragon of compassion and forgiveness, her sculptures solemn and grave with hands outstretched to embrace even the lowest-born of Her children, but Grigori is beginning to suspect the holy men have got it wrong. 

She isn't gracefully wise. She does not reach Her hand out to hold Her children. No, as each day passes without Her so much as whispering a reassurance, he begins to feel She is th goddess of laughter, and he is Her current favorite joke.

A knock at the door to his room - his cell, really, but of course they all like to pride themselves on keeping him in high style in his gilded cage - has him looking up, a little startled. The moon has only made half of its trek across the night sky, through the looping swirls of galaxies far, far beyond the reach of mere mortal men. That milky spin of stars, everyone knows, is where the gods live.

He wonders how many of them are looking down on him, sipping crystalline waters, and mocking his pain.

He would spit on every last temple step, if he could.

If he could just leave the fucking room-

“Brother Grigori,” His guest singsongs, half-dancing into the room. Grigory turns away from him, laying one palm over one of the iron bars that blocks any escape through the window. His fingers close slowly around it. 

“What do you want.” His voice is curt, it cuts short and sharp. “Bastard.”

“Oh, see you got my name all wrong again.” The leader of this little gang is tall - too tall - and all knees and legs, lean muscle making him heavier than he looks. Grigori is tall enough for a man, but he seems like he’s half-grown, compared to the bandit. The man’s hair is a shock of white atop his head, shaved on the sides, while Grigori’s curly brown grows to the bottom of his ears, as is prescribed for the priests. He swaths himself in black kohl around his equally dark eyes and shining black leather worn back to brown from age and ill-use at the knees and elbows. Grigori’s hazel and his dirtied robes look like a joke, placed next to the bandit’s appearance.  “It’s Bohli, remember? Or that’s what my mother calls me, anyway. Or she would, if she were still alive. She probably uses that when she curses my name from the heavens above, granted. I mean, probably, unless she really is suffering in the Dark After, like she deserves-”

“What do you want, Bohli?” Grigory’s head is already starting to hurt. “I don’t have time for this.”

“Nonsense. You have all the time in the world. You have nothing but time.”

“Not for… you. Please leave.”

“Nope. Not going anywhere. This is my house, remember? I just let you stay here.”

“Let me.” The words are sour in Grigori’s mouth. “Right, of course. Let me. Because I asked to be branded and trapped here in this room-”

“Hush. I take you for walkies every day, little god’s dog.” Bohli winks, and Grigori - who took a vow of pacifism, once - imagines stabbing his own knife through his eyeball until it comes out the other side of his head. “If you don’t want a leash, you just have to prove you won’t run off.”

He would, of course. Run. Outside, the woods stretch far and wide. There’s a path he could take to find a village, to find freedom...

Or… more realistically… to get arrested for being in league with Bohli and his bastards, which he isn’t, but everyone knows the goddess would save Her most faithful, and he’s been here too long. He would be branded a heretic. Everyone knows he’s a heretic. His own fellow priests would turn their backs on him. The people would burn him at the stake, for being defiled, degraded, a paragon of nothing but the filth they have covered him in. Little more than a bandit himself. 

Maybe he is one.

Dromada would have saved him if he were truly Hers to save. And instead, here he is, the infamous giver of absolution to the men and women who massacre whole towns in defiance of - in direct insult to - the power and might of His Majesty, the King.

No. he would be burned as an enemy of the King's, and he would have no standing to defend himself. A captive this long isn't a captive at all, in the eyes of the world.

Just a man who no longer wants to be saved.

Tears prick at his eyes, and he struggles not to let Bohli see them and mock him even more. It’s not like he hasn’t already been marked. It was one of the first things they did. Bohli had given the order and watched while they tied him down. Grigori himself had been made to look as they put the iron in the fire, made to watch them heat it to red. Bohli had been whispering in his ear when when they pressed it to his pelvis, and Bohli had cooed over him while he screamed, stroking through his sweaty hair.

“Just leave,” He whispers, the area aching all over again. They branded him over the symbol of Dromada tattooed, a mark of his vow of chastity.

Another one broken.

Maybe that was when She stopped listening.

“Oh, but I can’t, darling Grigori. I’ve come to make a confession.” Bohli laughs, and his laughter could make you bleed even better than his blade. But somehow Grigori can’t seem to die from the loss. “Isn’t that why I keep a priest of Dromada around, anyway? For to save my poor mortal soul?”

Grigori fights the urge to wish aloud someone would poison the asshole’s food. “You would burn if you touched the Hem of her robe.”

“Maybe.” Bohli shrugs, kicking a chair over and dropping down into it, loose-limbed. His eyes spark with delight as he takes in Grigori’s misery. “But you wear Her robes, and yet I never burn when I touch you-”

“Speak your confession,” Grigory snaps, his heart twisting and going briefly silent and still in his chest. He feels blood rush to his face, and Bohli’s peal of bright, brittle laughter tells him the flush isn’t going unnoticed. 

“Say it.” Bohli watches him, and it’s like being watched by one of the terrifying big cats that roam the woods just beyond this hideous prison. Unblinking, a predator’s stare. “Say the words, priest.”

Each time he does, they feel more bitter on his tongue. 

But still.

Grigori draws the ruins of his robe closer around himself, and sits up straight. He swallows and sets his jaw. “Bohlinde hir Maksma en Ygridsen, the goddess Dromada hears and forgives all from those who love Her. You have only to ask. Speak, child, and be forgiven.”

Bohli licks his lips, leaning forwards. Somehow, Grigori can’t make himself look away. The bandit leader’s teeth are sharp - those canines can rend skin from bone. He’s part-elf, they say, somewhere in his bloodline the half-mindless shrieking hordes of the elven race lurk. You can always tell, so it’s said, from the sharpness of their teeth. From how little they care for the lives of men.

Maybe he’s half-elf.

It would explain why he’s so fucking smug.

“Forgive me, Dromada’s Chosen, for I have sinned against Her,” Bohli says, and he doesn’t even try to feign sincerity. Why he even plays this game, when Dromada isn’t a goddess for the elves of their wretched offspring to begin with, is beyond Grigori’s understanding.

Grigori fights the urge to sigh. He makes Dromada’s Sign, wondering if it even calls to Her any longer. If She even feels the spark of a follower’s call, or if he’s cut off from Her entirely. Who hears him when he prays?

Does anyone?

“How have you sinned against Our Mother, She Who Gave the Waters?” 

Bohli licks his lips. His smile is a little too wide, shows too many of those sharp, sharp teeth. He'd be blisteringly handsome, if it weren’t for the sight of fangs where none should be. “I won’t lie, Brother Grigori. I set some stuff on fire yesterday. And I’m going to do it again. Will I be forgiven?”

Grigori imagines the mud climbing higher and higher up his robes, pulling him into the earth, forcing itself down his mouth and pressing over his eyes. He imagines the gods in the sky, looking down from their stars.

The image shatters with the memory of first sitting at the table with the dozen or so of Bohli's favorites, each of them smiling at him, while he sat in his pure white robes and felt himself bared, as if naked, before them.

Until Bohli had given the order for what to do with him.

“Dromada forgives all who seek Her,” Grigori intones, thoughtless. The words memorized before he was even thirteen years old, before he was old enough to take his vows. Before he was taken, and they were all broken, one by one. Bohli loved breaking Grigori's vows. “You have only to ask.”

“Good.” Bohli’s voice drops low. He has to focus to hear it, which is probably the bastard’s entire point. “Because I really, really love asking, and I love the sound of your answers.”

The bandit stands, walking over to him, putting one finger under his chin and forcing Grigori to look up - and up, and up, and up - to see the demon smile.

Grigori is sure, as Bohli watches him with his head tipped to the side and his black eyes as bright as the stars, that he can hear the goddess laughing.

#whump #new whump #the heretic's confession #captivity #captivity whump #intimate whumper #creepy whumper #fantasy whump #some weird fantasy race stuff happening here #just go with it #religious whump #religion whump #fantasy writing #bohli is a bad bad man #grigori is just a tired blorbo

[ashintheairlikesnow]

The Heretic's Confession, Chapter Two

Chapter One

-

Two years prior

The world is on fire, and Brother Grigori can find no opening in the wall of flames. 

He comes to a stop as the archway comes crashing down in front of him, blocking him from taking the market road. When he turns, the crush of the crowd behind him, pushing and shoving and trying to force their way through the narrowed alleys that still remain, seems as dangerous as the burning buildings.

There can be no air to breathe, in a crowd like that. He would be trading possible death for certain suffocation.

Instead, Grigori pulls his white robes more tightly around himself, feeling marked by the visibility. On a normal day, the white robe would lead to people stopping to ask him for healing, for forgiveness, to confess their sins and be freed of the guilt and shame of them. Now, though… the priests of Dromada seem a special target of the bandits who have attacked Her most beautiful patron city.

The priests are nearly all dead, he thinks, in a circle in the temple where they were caught unawares at the evening meal. Only Brother Grigori had been away, ministering to a family with a dying father who needed to be given his Final Grace. 

The man had taken his last breath just as the first bells of alarm rang at the guard towers. Grigori wondered if his body was still lying in his own bed, forgotten.

Or if the man’s house had already burned, a tomb of fire. 

Where the man’s wife and daughters had gone.

Grigori had run for the temple, only to see the bandits streaming out, laughing and shouting and shoving at each other, soaked in sprays of bright red blood against their black leathers. He had hidden, in the temple stables, until they set the stable roof on fire, too, and then he opened the stalls and the wide double doors and escaped when the sudden rush of panicked horses overwhelmed their observations.

The horses had been let to run to freedom and safety. If they make it to the river, and they can swim, there will be safety at the other side. 

Grigori had one inside, moving past the shattered remnants of Dromada’s statue, now crushed on the temple steps. A single white marble eyeball, austere and somehow judgemental, had stared up at him from her half-formed face. The rest looked like cake crumbs, marked with footprints from the soot-stained soles of the bandits’ boots.

He found the bodies of the others in the dining room, some still seated before their still-warm dinners. Throats slit, stabbed through the heart, some simply bashed to death by shield or flat edge of a sword. Twenty-nine dead priests, and only one remained alive, the youngest, twenty-two year old Grigori, who had been found on the steps as an infant and knew no other life than this.

It seemed impossible that the wail he had let out hadn’t brought the walls down around him. 

Then, because there was nothing else left to do, he ran.

Now, the people of the city scream around him. They fight and shove and kick, they hold to each other, beg for mercy from the faceless men in black leathers on black horses who race through the night with torches in hand. 

They kick with heavy boots to knock victims to the ground, yank jewelry from their necks, and slaughter them in the street. He sees someone drag a young man into a house, laughing uproariously as the man pleads, the bandit already tearing at his clothes with abandon. 

It’s obscene.

Like something out of the filthy books they sell in secret at the bookstore in the market, the ones wrapped in thick paper as soft as cloth, that you must ask for by name. Oh, Grigori knows all about the profane pleasures the temple forbids.

He used to dream about them, before he begged Dromada to take such desires away, and they had marked his flesh with his vows. 

He had owned such a book.

Once.

The bookstore has burned, too. There will be no more books sold in this dead city, to dead men, with open eyes the flies already hover over. 

Near him, a woman holding a baby cries out, breaking him from his terrified stupor. Her voice is shrill and panicked. “No! Please, not my baby, please, no!”

Grigori, who had been hidden in the shadows, bursts forward. He’s driven more by instinct than courage. The woman turns to him, eyes wide, tears streaming down reddened cheeks marred with soot. She clutches the wailing infant close.

A bandit on a huge horse looks down at him, face hidden by a mask and helmet except for their eyes, wide with surprise at the sight of him. They have a sword held high in one hand, ready to bring it down. 

“I thought we killed all you stuck-up snobs,” The bandit says, puzzled. “At dinner. Eating fine foods in your fine temples.”

“I-I wasn’t th-there-”

“Oh, you weren’t. Huh. Visiting a mistress?” The bandit winks.

“I beg your-... no!” Fury rose in him, barely held in check by the fear. How dare this anonymous creature of such darkness and hate suggest he would do anything to break his sacred vows, while still wearing the white robes of Dromada, whose hem stays clean even during the worst of the mudslides and floods of spring?

“Oh. Well. If you could just step aside so I can go back to slaughtering-”

“Hurt not the children!” He calls, his voice rasping from breathing in too much smoke, forcing the woman behind him, shielding her with his own body. His heart pounds wildly, making him oddly dizzy, uncertain. “They have done nothing!”

The bandit blinks once. Their eyes crinkle at the edges. “None of you have done a single fucking thing to deserve this,” They said. Was there laughter in that voice, mocking his fear and his righteous anger? When something so terrible goes on all around them? “And yet we’re killing you anyway, just to send a message to Pehla, aren’t we?”

Grigori’s eyes widen. “The… the King Pehla?”

“Oh, right. He’s a king now.” The bandit laughs outright this time, but they lower the sword, and Grigori finds some slim, small pointless hope in the sight. “He was only a prince the last time I saw him.”

“The last time you saw him? No one sees the King!”

“Well. Not since I saw him, I guess. I do tend to make an impression…”

Grigori’s mouth is dry. “I-I… you must go-”

“Anyway,” The bandit says, ignoring his attempt to speak entirely, “Why should we leave any survivors, huh? Tell me why.”

“I, I can’t-... why do you need to kill anyone?” His voice trembles, and he coughs to pretend it’s the smoke forcing it to weaken and not the same fear that has his knees turned to liquid. Somehow he locks them in place, keeping the poor woman and her wailing baby behind him. She shushes the child, cuddling them close. 

“Because you can’t send a message about being dangerous unless you’re actually Dromada-damned dangerous, now can you?” The bandit’s eyes are crinkled again. “Wait. Droma-damned. Is that better?”

“I-... Just. Please. Please, the town is yours, no one else needs to die, there are no more soldiers here. Please.”

There’s a pause. The bandit stares at him, considering. “Say please again. Just like that, but… softer.”

Grigori’s eyebrows furrow, but he offers a hesitant, not-quite whispered, “... please.”

“Dromada’s Dick, that’s nice.”

“Dromada doesn’t have-”

The bandit cuts him off with a gesture. “It’s a figure of speech. Have they ever let you out of that temple, honestly?” Then they sigh. “Well… fine. You're very pretty. I think I've made my point."

Grigori’s mouth opens, but no words come out. The confusion is so pure and perfect that he forgets he ever knew how to speak beyond a stammered, “Wh-what?”

What point?

The bandit points at him, and Grigori straightens up, trying to seem taller than he is. “You. What’s your name, Priestling?”

“I-I am Brother Grigori, priest apprentice to the-”

“Right, yes, Grigori. I like that, Grigori. Nice, won’t have to change it. That would be irritating. See you later, Grigs. Bet you twenty marks I know exactly where you’ll go after this."

"I-... I don't understand."

"Ssssshhhh. Don't worry about it. I’ll find you.”

Before Grigori can answer, the bandit jerks the reins, turning their horse on its heel and riding off into the night. Grigori hears shouting in a language he doesn’t know, one voice then echoed by dozens more, and watches in confusion as the bandits brandishing their swords come pouring out of what houses still stand. They ride away. He watches the one who had dragged the young man into the house come out still fixing his sword belt back on, the young man stumbling after him with his shirt off and his pants ripped, holding them up with one hand. The young man and Grigori briefly meet eyes.

In less than an hour, all the bandits have gone. 

“What happened?” The young man asks, breathless. There are red marks around his neck, which Grigori’s brain refuses to acknowledge are in the shape of the hands that had closed there. “Where are they going?”

“He made them leave,” The woman whispers, and Grigori turns slowly to look from side to side. Indeed… there are no bandits to be seen. 

No army of men and women in black on black horses, setting fires, slaughtering thousands.

No one but the people of the city, and their sole surviving priest.

“You made them leave,” The woman says, in a tone of awe, and she touches the sleeve of his robe as if he himself is the statue since fallen. “You did that. Dromada’s sake, you made it end.”

"What? I, no, I didn't-... I don't know why-"

"Dromada's own has saved us!" Someone yells. Someone else echoes it.

Grigori feels like he'll be sick all over the cobblestones, more frightened of their admiration than he was of the bandits.

By the end of the week, the temple has been cleared of bodies and Brother Grigori is the hero of Henton City. He sweeps the steps, accepts a handshake from the equerry to the king, although not the king himself, who hasn’t been seen in years, not in public. He is given a medal,  special coin on a ribbon with his own likeness cut into it. He's told to wear it always.

He hangs it off his bedpost and pretends it doesn't exist.

He cries, at night, alone in a room that holds thirty beds but only one man left to sleep in any of them. He tries to clean the sleeping space out but finds a diary under Brother Fraykil's bed and reads his writing about what promise Grigori has shown and cries some more, then he never touches any of the other beds again.

People keep coming to thank him, and he can't make himself be rude enough to send them away.

For a few months, he's famous. 

A hero.

Painfully lonely, but... a hero.

Plagued with nightmares, withdrawing from the people, eventually closing the temple doors and barring them shut. The people pitied him, left him gifts of food and drink on the temple steps for him to bring inside at night.

They whisper about him.

He doesn't care to listen any longer.

He prays, and feels the Goddess's touch, but by the time he next wakes from sleep, the comfort is gone.

And yet... still, he's the Hero of Honorable Henton City, Dromada's favored priest, the single survivor of the temple massacre. The man whose grace and holiness was so strong, at his young age, that even the evil things could be convinced to leave by his word.

He was meant to be there, the people whisper. He was born to be the orphan left at the doorstep, raised bathed in holy waters by the men of Dromada's temple. He was born to be a hero.

He doesn't... feel like much of a hero.

They say he's one anyway.

... until he runs away from the temple and joins the very bandits who had so disgraced Dromada’s own city, swears allegiance body and soul to their terrible leader, sleeps with him on the dark altar to a vicious elven god, and vanishes into the dark forests of the Kaila, never to be seen again.

At least... that's the way the story is told.

Grigori's version of what happened is a little different than that.

Not that there's anyone to listen, by then, but the bandits.

-

tag list: @whump-for-all-and-all-for-whump @sunshiline-writes @befuddled-calico-whump

#the heretic's confession #religion whump #fantasy whump #whump #prologue #little bit of world-building here #just havin' some fun #burning city #brief references to noncon and murder #priest whump #grigori is just a tired blorbo #guess this one's going a Hero and Villain direction #hero and villain