#// wanted him to master bishop before mastering gremory because of the symbolism of his base proficiency being staves

[twistedisciple]

Before the Scars

Bishop Mastery drabble: 682

cw: gore

Everyone had to be good at something. Otherwise, you would die. Get thrown out, technically, but in the snowy wilds of Elusia, everyone knew what that meant. Back then, fear had not yet hardened and calcified into a defective, useless organ inside of Griss. It used to pump his blood so full of adrenaline that he’d spend his nights praying that Lord Sombron not abandon him, spend his days with a desperate sleeplessness in his sunken eyes. 

Like the other monks in the monastery, he’d been taught magic under the priests’ whips, and he’d watched the older cohorts split into two groups as the years passed: those that were awarded some modicum of prestige and a minor title within the church, and those that turned into grey monuments in the snow, fingers and toes blackened, eyes frozen wide open, waiting for a spring that would never come for them. Death did not scare him, and indeed the fear of death was counted among a handful of cardinal sins, but the souls of those that had succumbed as the defects had were trapped within the rejected flesh for eternity, never to decay, never to be a vessel for their lord’s power, their existence immortalized in a pillar of shame. Eternity was a long time, Griss knew that, but he saw it hurtling at him faster than he could run.

Each day, angry red welts were added to his arms and back, and each day he had nothing to show for them. Sometimes, he could conjure a little bit of a breeze, enough to sway the scraggly grass under his feet. Sometimes, a spark. But always the whip’s fierce lashing. He lacked focus, one of the priests said. He didn’t know how when he prayed every night. He kept praying, because there was nothing else he could do. The flagellum had even started to lose its edge.

Torn flesh fascinated him. He ripped his own open, stitched it together in pretty red zigzags, dug his fingers into the wounds of others, plucked out splinters and fragments of bone like an archaeologist, and closed them all up again. Curiosity cultivated an uncommon fearlessness which bred an even greater curiosity for all the different ways the body could be bent and broken, the sensations that came with it. How it could be put back together again. His own. Others. It didn’t matter whose, in the end.

No great epiphany had preceded the glow of the Heal staff under his palm one morning in the monastery’s iron-scented infirmary. It’d been abandoned by one of his fellows for just a moment, and Griss had swept in to prod at the swelling around the patient’s mangled elbow, searching for a source like an explorer charting the frontier, ignoring sleepy moans of discomfort even as he pressed his thumb hard against a lump and pitched the cries louder. Then it gave. The cries subsided. The fever heat cooled. The man treating him returned and chased Griss away with a few solid strikes from the staff’s blunt end.

It came with no fanfare, this talent. From that day on, he intuited his way around a variety of staves without picking up a book, driven by a curiosity toward the flesh and a resonant listening gifted to few - a kind of perfect pitch that he would never recognize as a gift until years later, with Zephia’s observation. He could recognize each staff by a series of shapes. Heal was a single, simple triangle. Recover was a red thread, three loops, ringed by seven triangles. And these were inarticulate instructions his body simply knew. A gift he learned to take for granted.

His lessons with the priests and their whips never stopped though, and neither did their criticism. There was nothing special about learning to use a staff, but there was nothing really special about learning to cast spells either. These were givens. The expected minimum to allow one shelter within Lord Sombron’s grace. Everyone had to be good at something, after all. Otherwise, you would die.

Griss did not fear death, and he never would again.