down here we burn

[saunatonttu]

content warnings: cannibalism, weird relligious relations

Between two war-torn, long-abandoned villages, there stands a war-torn, long-abandoned temple. It was once beautiful, and it is visible at a first glance, but it has since fallen into disrepair and neglect. Its gilded pillars have long since lost their luster, the gold paint having peeled and flaked off as dust and rubble embraced the stone structures instead.

The previous front door had been kicked in off its hinges, but it has been replaced by a door made of molten and re-stiffened bone. Splinters of wood remain here and there, because the sole occupant of the temple isn’t concerned about what’s outside. 

It’s the inside that matters, and inside is where things become so utterly different that one would believe they’d been transported into a different world entirely.

There is still dust and cracks in the walls, of course, and rats scuttle everywhere, though they do not dare disturb the strange man that wanders the halls of the once sacred temples where the air had previously been heavy with incense but now stink with death. 

There is silence in the innermost section of the temple. There used to be sound: priests and acolytes and their low murmurs as they prayed, some sobs from the little apprentices that felt abandoned in the house of a god. But that was when people were still alive. 

The innards of the temple glow from the sunlight, and the bone sculptures that lie around the main hall appear similar to dull marble under the light’s ginger, brushing touch. There is dirt scattered here and there where a broom has failed to touch the hard stone floor. There are more doors to the left and the right. One leads into a library, others to priests’ and acolytes’ living quarters, all of which have gathered layers upon layers of dust over the months.

The aftermath of a tragedy is like that. Quiet but heavy, scars left behind in its wake which often won’t heal right. 

At the far end of the hall are the altar and the large floor-to-ceiling windows, each panel of which is painted with color. There were once pictures upon the glass panels, but the remaining man has never been much of a painter. His elders always scolded him for that, shaking their heads, but picking up the brushes themselves instead of him.

Now the panels gleam red, and the beams of light shining through it cast a reddish glow across the hall. 

The altar beneath the windows is a small stone table covered in golden cloth, stains of red conveniently hidden in the red-tinted light entering from above. It is meticulously attended: it smells vaguely of herbs and incense even when the rest of the temple doesn’t. Cups and goblets crafted out of bone stand on the table silently, drinking in the red light.

This part of the temple is always clean, those red stains aside. And while rats scurry here too, they are afraid to rush through the wide open space that the temple’s human occupies when he is around. 

He is a strange fellow, this man that survived the slaughter. 

Even when committing the most heinous crimes, soldiers are sloppy: as if they want to leave someone behind that will resent and curse them. As if the act of murder is so simple and easy they can refuse to be thorough with it. They never noticed one young man holding his breath beneath a layer of other men, blood and grime dripping onto him from above. 

That man, right now, moves through the temple’s hall and settles down by the altar, each movement careful and reverent. He bows his head as he sets the incense into the bone cups. He has nothing to burn them with, but he doesn’t need anything: he holds his fingers against the sticks for a moment until smoke begins to rise. 

The heat lingers in the pads of his fingers as he pulls them away, but soon it fades away and all is as things used to be. 

He sits down on his knees, hands bunching up the hem of his gold-decorated robe. His short-trimmed nails dig into the fabric momentarily before easing up as the words of a murmured prayer slip past his lips. His shoulders relax when priests normally grow tense during prayer.

Even the most reverent priests fear their gods. Such is the way of these lands he grew up in. God-fear in its most literal sense -- oh, people from other lands would surely raise their brows, for their gods were loving, their eyes gentle and hands firm as they guided their people.

The sun god isn’t like that.

Isn’t supposed to be, anyhow: sun is a ruthless phenomenon, and should its god appear before the people, the results would vary from blindness to wildfires to land being reduced into a graveyard of nature. 

To touch the sun, one must be ready to burn. 

He knows this, so he does not complain that his god doesn’t come to him in the conventional forms other gods may take. (From the now destroyed scripts, he knows of a goddess that walks the earth in whatever form she pleases: always either a human or an animal, always different, always transforming. Always among her people, for better or for worse, in sickness and in death that isn’t hers.)

He has his own idea of what his god looks like, and it is enough. Imagination is more glorious than truth, he has discovered: his imagination made the consumption of human flesh to be worse than what it is in reality. In truth, it’s all about the preparation and making sure to not let the meat rot away. 

Likewise, it is far easier to kill a human than his imagination suggested. Much less spectacle involved in death than what the priests he grew with claimed. 

(Are soldiers humans with their own thoughts and dreams? He does not know. He only knows they die just like others. Their physical hearts work just fine but die easily. Their metaphorical hearts might not exist.)

Anyhow. 

He prays to a god he pictures glorious in his mind: bronzed skin beneath layers of sunsilk clothes, face wide and impressive, nose shaped like the edge of a cliff upside down. His (the god is always masculine to him) eyes are aflame with burnt ochre, and they are the door to the secrets of the universe.

That’s what he believes, anyhow. The god has never told him whether or not it is so. 

But the god does speak to him.

And now, as he sits on his knees, he feels sunlight in his overgrown and tangled hair that’s gone white from overexposure to sun. 

There used to be priests like that in the past: the sun’s favorites, a harem of men, young adults and old both. Their hair had all gone white from the heat of the sun’s favor, and their skin tanned if it hadn’t already been dark. The Sunkissed, they had been called once. 

He knows only the stories. Remembers the one Sunkissed that the temple had before the tragedy and soldiers struck. Wide shoulders, brown skin, clothed in white and red. Eyes that had been shut forever behind a layer of bandages. But he never spoke to him, a Sunkissed to a mere acolyte. But he, the man that now occupies the temple alone, always watched him. Admired him, even, for a man that gains the sun’s favor must be a special one indeed.

Sunlight, as filtered through the blood-stained glass, caresses his covered shoulders and messy hair with the affection of a beloved friend. Such touch contains an entire language of its own, one that not everyone will ever be fluent in. 

The man, who has taken up the name Leo, is still not fluent in it himself. Touch itself has been foreign to him since he was left to the temple as a child: the followers of this faith refuse the pleasures of the fleash, and so they refuse touch of any kind from another. 

Leo is not like them. 

But he is alone, at a first glance.

He finishes his prayers with a soft click of his tongue, his own little tick that the head priest had never approved of much. 

The sun itself doesn’t seem to mind it. The light distorts and tilts, chasing after what skin shows between the layers of his robe. 

Come outside for me. The words don’t reverberate through his mind like a thought, but they come to him as a feeling, as a certainty he’s been told to go outside. 

Hastily, he stands up and nearly trips over his own legs, the noise echoing off the once-pretty walls. The banners of the sun god are still there, pretty and clean against the dirty and cracked stone, whites and reds and oranges dancing with each other like flames. 

He ignores them now as he ventures outside, where the air is warmer and nature almost recovered from the soldiers’ insolence many moon cycles ago. 

The world around the temple is lush and green, though some patches of grass between the temple and the circular edge of the forest remain burned and brownish, a blemish in a scene where the temple is a deep-ridged scar. A gentle breeze brushes by the sleeves of his robe, beckoning with an insistent tug like an impatient lover. 

The world is full of light even in the wake of all that he has done and all that he has lost, ignorant to how he still wakes up in the middle of the night to the taste of human flesh on his tongue and blood between his teeth. 

Air has long since cleared from the smells of smoke and burning wood - to the east and to the west, villages had been burning for days back then - but he feels as if he can still catch a whiff of it. 

He hurries his steps, following the gentle tug of both wind and the leading sunlight, and goes into the forest. 

Grassblades turn into moss as he walks among the trees. The woods are thinner now than they used to, and sunlight filters through to show him the path. It narrows into a beam of glowing yellow light, the air around it turning dim and gray. Moss and leaves shimmer brightly like a celebration.

The trip alone is a gift, he knows. Not many can say they’re ever guided anywhere by the gods -- they are ultimately uninterested in human woes and joys, regardless of how many of them started out as humans themselves. 

It is the apathy that comes with centuries upon centuries of unmitigated, unchallenged power. Why should they mingle with human politics and cruelty when they are not affected?

Even among the Sunkissed, to travel with the sun god’s guidance was a privilege. 

An indeterminable passage of time later, he arrives at a clearing more colorful than anything he’s ever seen before -- and he used to paint, using watercolors, with the other acolytes once. They had crafted beautiful pictures, dreamy landscapes, a touch of sun always present. His fingers used to be stained with reds and blues for an entire day until the priests ushered him into a bath. 

The water was scathing hot. Servants of the sun should burn a little, after all. 

(There are uneven patches of angry red skin on his back and thighs, left by the burning water.)

The clearing that he’s arrived at is impossibly more beautiful, flush with color and filled to the brim with flowers whose petals lean up towards the sun. Oranges and reds across the clearing, trembling in the wind like a nervous greeting, like flickering flames. 

(Villages are on fire, the flames licking at the skyline with the hunger of a starved animal, and the priests know not what to do. Screams echo all the way to the temple. The ground shakes with the sounds of approaching horses and soldiers’ yelling orders to one another. Soon they will set the temple on fire too.)

The sunlight curls around him, as if to embrace him, as if to gesture at the field of flowers that flow like a sea of fire.

They live up to their name, these fire lilies. 

Leo walks to the clearing, and the flowers tilt away from his path. He does not know whose doing that is: his god should have no sway over the forest and its inhabitants. 

The sunlight presses against his back like a pair of fingers nudging him forward, an action so intimate his heartbeat speeds up against his ribs. 

For you, beloved, the sunlight fingers write against his neck in a language only Leo and his god know. Sun-lips brush against the side of his jaw, fleeting and quick like a hummingbird. Joy spreads through him like a contagion to which there is no treatment. 

The world burns with color, and his soul is ash.

Leo sits down. The flowers lean closer to him, like eager acolytes or even younger apprentices. It’s nostalgic: he used to be one of those eager children, too, who hadn’t understood why he’d been abandoned in the first place. 

Does anyone really understand parents abandoning their children? Not when it comes to their parents; anyone else’s must surely have good reasons. Empathy comes easily when the distance is either great or small enough. 

Leo finds it a difficult task, so he doesn’t try to. He probably could, though. If he tried. 

He doesn’t think much of them to begin with, anyway.

He rubs his thumb against a flower’s petal, so bright and orange that it seems the color only existed for the flower’s sake. A life mission completed in being a fire lily’s pigment.

Sun-fingers brush at his tangled hair, and Leo reveres the touch as he does everything else his god has given him since the day the temple burned down. 

This, Leo finds as he closes his eyes and worships his god with a smile, is what his purpose is now. 

To burn until his god has consumed all of him. 

There is no more glorious purpose than that.