#a peek into damians life while kari was still young? sure
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obliviouskind · 3 years ago
Text
Bacteria
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They’d lost a child, the young couple. In anguish, through throats thickened by tears and trembling palms clasped in a prayer to God, they’d sought his help. His wisdom, his leadership. Upon their knees they’d fallen and the woman, with her ashen locks, had looked as though she’d seen a ghost.  Rags, wound round their limbs and soaked at their hems.
And ‘please’, they had begged, clutching at his robes, ‘our boy has been seen by neither smith, fisherman nor nurse. He’s nowhere to be found.’
‘He’s but one,’ the woman wept, ‘A baby, nothing more. Surely he has passed!’
He’d left them with the promise of a hunt. That their boarders be scouted for dangerous beasts should the poor boy have been caught somewhere he ought not to be and had warned that, should they not find him come daybreak… then there was little else that he could do. Put faith in the lord, he’d asked of them, and they’d left his sanctuary with nothing but quickly drying tears upon their cheeks.  In his gut’s, Damian had then deemed that something foul was abound. Huntsmen, he called for – and search for the child they did throughout the night. Guided by cloth soaked in pyre, Lomma’s boarders were scouted as he, Father Nazarov, sat upon his knees.
And as the wind beat hail upon his windowsill - he begged. Prayed. For on Lomma’s outskirts, a mother longed that her child never be found. ‘She’s but human,’ he reminded the lord. ‘Have mercy upon her.’
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Kari had asked him about death that night, and his answer had been that there was tragedy in this world of which one will never be able to comprehend.
She had been but a child, too.
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It had been the nurse who had suggested the lake. A foreigner that had arrived to the town just a winter prior, but whom had been welcomed into the community as though she’d come from their blood. Marnie, she was called, and she’d sought him in privacy in a manner unbecoming an unmarried woman.
He’d stood with his back strung the entire time.
‘Southwards,’ she’d said, a lilt to her tongue. ‘One knows when the first day of spring has arrived, for the waters will warm and cause bodies hidden in lakes to emerge to the surface due to bacteria.’  He’d deemed her words horrid, wrongful in the house of God and Marnie had suggested that the truth often was.
Before she’d left, by a glance from where the heavy hide of a Stantler framed her shoulders, she’d so kindly offered.
‘Of course… As far north as we are, the water most likely never warms enough for bacteria to begin to breed.’
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That evening, he retold tales of Necken to little Kari. A young man who hid in murky depths – and that she ought to run, should she hear a fiddle playing near a lake. It meant that it was no longer safe.
‘But music is so beautiful, Damian,’ her youthful voice had queried. Sleepily and sweetly.
‘As beautiful as a mothers love,’ he’d agreed.
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They found the boy three days later. Bloated, disfigured and with water filling his pleural cavities. The woman – ashen locks, soot streaked cheeks – had been as distraught as she’d seemed the very first evening that he’d seen her and her husband fall to their knees.  ‘Our boy,’ she’d cried, her gaze wide and frightened. He had seen how she’d sought something within him that he could not offer.
He wasn’t the lord.
‘Oh, our dear sweet child…’
He couldn’t forgive so easily.
They’d lost a child, the young couple. In anguish, through throats thickened by tears and trembling palms clasped in a prayer to God.  As though what they’d done could be undone, and that all would be well once more. He wished that it could’ve been the truth.
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