These months are always difficult for Dillon Connery. So much is attached, by mortal society, to the last few months of the year. He understands well the expression that living men have... "barely time to breathe".
Except Dillon doesn't breathe. He hasn't drawn a real breath in...
Fourteen decades?
Somewhere in that neighborhood.
Nevertheless, the so-called Holiday season venerated by faith and commercial religions alike are hectic enough without study. There is quite enough going on, quite enough mortals to teach, without the Ritae Apostolica. And the Dark Miracles of Amoniel. But when combined with thousands of lines of Latin and Greek by night and day, when combined with sermons and lectures, testimonies and trials, demons and demagogues... well. Dillon had rarely even slept.
Thanks to the Requiem, he doesn't really need to do that anymore, either. No matter how hard the daystar attempts to crush his will with its regular cycle.
The Reeve never left the city unprotected, but on one or two occasions, he did indeed leave it. Things had to be seen to. His petition for Solomon Birch to empower a Legate to anoint him a priest had gone strangely unanswered, and Dillon had to find out why.
He found out just that and more. He found out that it would cost him a fair pound of flesh all too late.
But flesh grows back.
At the business end of a scourge, his own syrupy, potent Vitae pooling about his bare knees on the marble floor of the cathedral, Dillon is taken back to a situation reversed. Here, with the song of Longinus around him, the cool room smelling pleasantly of incense and sandalwood, surely the conditions are better. But the comparison is impossible to ignore. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, Dillon has to wonder if Birch knew all about it somehow, and this is intentional.
Rural North Carolina, January 1857
The boy has him on his knees in the matted straw of the barn. It's freezing, and the man shakes with cold. He shakes with cold, and convulsions of shock and blood loss. So much of his blood soaks the straw, biting into the flesh at his knees. That is, what flesh is on them.
Rendered sober by hours of torture, a pitiful man weeps for his end. And the boy will not give it to him. When he had realized a knife would end the man's torment too soon, the boy had long ago switched to a bullwhip.
The man had wept his apologies to the lad until his voice left him. It did no good. When, amidst the torment, his voice had found him again, the whip bit his tongue.
He understood. He really did, in those last moments. His parents had been taken from him in his youth, and almost as though cursed to, he'd done the same to his tormentor, months before. Killed the boy's father and tortured his mother to death, just for the coin in their pockets. The clothes on their back. A wagon. Two fine horses. All it had earned the gang of highwaymen, was a slow death to vigilantism.
An excruciatingly slow death.
Impossible to remain upright any longer, the man slumps to the earth. Though he is immediately assaulted at the taste of his own filth and urine and blood in the dirt, it is of little consequence. There is not strength enough left to right himself again. Finally, in those wee hours of the morn, the boy will be forced to turn him over to the afterlife.
***
And so John does. Having taken vengeance in his own hands four times over, he knows the grievous sin that stares at him. Worse yet, because he knows he can never bring himself to feel remorse for returning monstrosity with monstrosity. An honorable father, a precious mother, brought under the heel of vile and greedy men. If seeking the satisfaction of retribution at his own fingertips is evil, then evil he may well be.
There is a great, empty well inside him, where happiness and peace once existed. John knows that the hole will never be filled with the blood of the wicked, but that he will try anyway. The path seems set before him in stone.
But not as John. A name whose origin comes from a divine gift. John Dillon Connery is no gift unto mortal man anymore, if he ever was. This night, he's a murderer; a sadist. In three short years, a soldier.
In nine, a Gangrel.
In seventy, Sanctified.
Western Nevada, January 2014
Dillon barely flinches when the scourge strikes him again. The clothed brothers standing above and around him chant lyrics in verse and time that he is expected to keep up with, and he does.
"Munda cor meum ac labia mea, omnipotens Deus. Miseratione dignare mundare, ut sanctum Evangelium tuum digne valeam nuntiare per Longinum, Sum Sanctus."
The Gangrel's husky voice, full with the power of dark divinity that powers his unnatural form, doesn't waver. Though his injures are many, his voice is steady. On his very last syllable, the anointed return in unison:
"Dominus sit in corde meo et in labiis meis. ut digne et competenter annuntiem evangelium suum. In nomine Domini et Longini, Sum Sanctus."
Dillon stands, and in well-rehearsed motions, a black robe is slipped around his bloody shoulders. The peace he hadn't known in so long has begun to settle into that infinite well of pain and anger where his heart lays, unbeating. Privately, Dillon smiles at how little it actually has to do with the Lancea Sanctum. As he fastens the buttons in front of the robe, the Cardinal slips a small white strip of fabric through Dillon's collar.
"Go now," Solomon says through the curious bronze mask that always adorns his face for ceremony, "and tend your flock.
"Do not falter, Bishop Connery."
Draft this Post
Humanity loss; no derangement; sings just fine
