Pilgrimage
A short story about holiness
Author’s Note: This is my first toe-dip into the waters of publishing my creative work online since the days of ff.net. If you enjoy the story, please consider subscribing or leaving a comment below! If you read best with an audio component, I’d recommend the fantastic RayCats by Oneohtrix Point Never, which assisted heavily in the creation of this story.
—> This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
—> The message is a warning about danger. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
—> The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The black shimmer in the distance appeared, as foretold, about a month before the band of travelers reached the edge of the spiked sea. When the First elder pointed it out to Serah, with a gruff but breathless, “See? We’ll be saved, soon,” she could barely perceive the dark speck on the edge of the vast, burnt expanse of sand and crumbling rock that made up the Strangelands. But as the days rolled on and the travelers grew gradually closer, the speck in turn grew gradually larger and more defined until it stretched near-completely across the horizon and Serah’s wondering eyes could clearly make out the jagged lines of the onyx spikes that jutted out of the earth like thorns from a branch.
The night before they reached the edge, they slept in a divot that was deep enough to protect the group from angry clouds of microscopic rock blown up by the howling winds of the desert, but shallow enough and angled in such a way that the dark looming vastness of the spiked sea was still clearly visible silhouetted against the sky. After staring up at an uninterrupted blanket of light each night since the beginning of her travels, the sight of the spikes blocking out the stars behind them inspired a worm of anxiety in Serah’s belly that she couldn’t name. She blinked up at the new darkness in the sky from the security of her mother’s arms, tracing the black edge of each spike until she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer.
The next morning, a woman in their group woke with a mild pain between her temples. The elders of the group swarmed her, brushing her hair with their ceremonial oxhair brush and coaxing blessed water into her mouth. The travelers were well acquainted with pain after trekking across the Strangelands for two months, but Serah’s mother explained that considering their proximity to the spiked sea, this pain was unlikely to simply be a warning sign of dehydration or exhaustion. Bodily aches, especially in the head and extremities, were thought to increase when near a holy site. Simply the side-effects of bringing one’s mortal body closer to its ascension. She brushed Serah’s hair back with her fingers, mimicking the ceremony in the center of the divot. The woman with the headache, surrounded by her preening elders and the jealous stares of her fellow travelers, closed her eyes and turned a blissful smile towards the heavens.
The rest of the journey to the edge of the spiked sea took only a little more than half the day. Besides intermittent chatter between those who discussed the woman’s condition, most of the day was spent in hushed observation of the approaching monoliths. Though the area had been described many times throughout their journey, the actual experience of seeing the field of spikes come slowly closer, bow more menacingly overhead inspired funereal silence. When they finally reached the edge, the group fanned out and came to a slow halt around the base of the first spike, where an old wooden sign was driven into the ground.
The blackened inscription on the sign’s weathered face was meaningless to most of the group, so the crowd parted ways to make way for Silas, a lesser elder and the only person in the village who had had the privilege of learning to read. He peered at the sign, traced the rough edges of the burnt symbols, and eventually remarked, “The marker reads: not the land, not the plants, not our bodies, but our souls are nourished by this holy sea.”
A murmur of affirmation passed through the group, a thrum of energy that propelled the First elder to step forward past the sign and, with a flourish, motion for the group to continue, but Serah found herself stuck in place considering the phrasing of the message. Up close, she thought, the name “sea” seemed to be a misnomer. The stretch of spikes as seen in the distance, sure, rippled and sparkled like how the great expanses of water at the edge of the world were described, but up close… the spikes were too rigid, set too evenly apart. The “sea” looked more like the fruit tree orchard her family had kept back home, if all the leaves and branches and fruit were struck off and the trunks were charred and cracking like they had been hit by bolts of lightning and burned from the inside out.
A memory flashed – that same orchard, not burnt, but rotting. The sickly smell of the decomposition that had originally driven her village to wander. Serah shivered and gripped her mother’s hand a little tighter. In return, her mother whispered a blessing:
“Remember, o lost souls: the Lord keeps thee and guides thee towards His field.”
With her mother’s quiet words echoing in her ears, Serah relaxed her shoulders and fell into the stream of travelers, taking her first steps into the field of spikes.
The sun had nearly set the first time the group came across the remnants of another pilgrimage: the spoils of a campsite, thoughtlessly left by a group at some point in the recent past. At the guidance of the elders, the fittest travelers gathered the more useful discarded supplies and proceeded to set up a camp for the group while Serah and the other children hid the trash in a neat pile within the shadow of a spike.
That night was the first night the travelers spent comfortably in a long time. The miles of spikes stretching in every direction acted as a shield against the bare wind that had tormented the group for most of their travel throughout the Strangelands. Given the ability to build a fire that wouldn’t immediately blow out, freedom from the stinging pain of flying sand particles, and the knowledge that they were expected to reach the Temple and finally finish their journey the very next day, the mood of the travelers was celebratory. After a lavish double-rationed dinner, one of the men in the group pulled out a bottle of spirits to share, and for the first time in longer than Serah could remember, she was invited to play a game of tag by a couple of the other children. They chased each other around the bases of spikes, shrieking and hollering and hiding behind the weathered stone. When they got tired of the game, they sat down beside a spike in the firelight and listened to the adults and elders tell stories.
Silas was telling a story then. He gestured grandly at the spike closest to him and announced that if they looked close enough, they could find on the spike ancient runes, secrets of the civilization that worshiped this place before them. Intrigued, Serah turned around and swept her hand slowly across the face of the spike she was leaning against. Mostly she felt rough bumps and divots, but on a smoother portion, she noticed a groove that was too straight and too long, with too sharp of an angle at the top, to be a scar from weather. She traced it and traced it until she could picture what symbol the rune might have been. It was perfectly angular, jagged, with a deep-dished pattern that repeated and folded over itself within; nothing she could place or draw meaning from, but she imagined she could. She stayed sitting there, wondering, until her mother would no longer let her ignore her bids to come and sleep.
More travelers woke the next morning feeling some sort of bodily complaint, including Serah, whose mother noticed that the skin on her elbows and shoulders was red and peeling. Though Serah was half-certain that the rashes were just a series of scrapes from tripping while playing, the silver-lined joy in her mother’s expression and the congratulations of the elders convinced her to hold her tongue and nod shyly along to the statement that she was, perhaps, one of the Lord’s chosen.
The woman with the headache came over then and embraced first her mother and then her. Up close, it was apparent just how affected she had been by her pains over the past day. Though her expression was bright, her skin had sallowed to a complexion yellower than the grains of sand underfoot, and as she stood back up from their hug, Serah noticed that the whites of her watery eyes had turned a blotchy red. Unease broiled in her stomach and she averted her gaze. Though her mother rapped her sharply on the small of her back, she couldn’t bring herself to turn back and meet the woman’s eyes again. Serah’s mother started talking about water storage and other adult concerns to distract from her daughter’s rudeness, and they carried on that conversation until the woman reached forward and clasped her mother solemnly by the shoulder.
“Should it be necessary, I would keep care of your daughter until your arrival,” she said. Serah, who hadn’t been listening very closely, felt the nervous feeling in her stomach surge. Her arrival? She whipped around to look anxiously at her mother, but before she had the chance to ask where she was going, why her mother would need to return, she smiled and shook her head.
“Thank you, Margaret,” she said, “but I have faith that if Serah is in the Lord’s eye, I will be too.” She entwined her fingers with Serah’s and gave them a soft squeeze. “My child and I have stayed together this far. We will finish our journey together,” she said with a warm glance, and the churning feeling in Serah’s stomach smoothed over.
The woman dipped her head and walked away, casting another curious look towards Serah with her red eyes. Her mother bent and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. “Don’t be frightened, child,” she whispered, and Serah wasn’t.
Serah glowed in the knowledge that wherever the woman had thought her mother was going, she would go too.
Electric with the anticipation of making it to the Temple, the travelers had the camp packed away before the sun was more than a couple of hand-widths away from the horizon. Accordingly, the walk itself was at a much quicker pace than usual, despite the complaints of those experiencing body aches. One of the elders, who barely could keep up with the travelers on a normal day, asked to be carried instead. The procession paused as two adults fashioned a rudimentary litter out of various camp supplies, and then continued on at an even faster clip with the litter hoisted on their shoulders.
The Templar people started to appear soon after. First, a skinny man with no hair who retreated into his lean-to as the group passed, then a wide-eyed family group with blistering skin huddled around what seemed to be a sleeping small child. Serah craned her neck to see more clearly, but was blocked by the body of the elder beside her. She tapped him and pointed, but he just shook his head and whispered, “Have patience - you will meet them soon,” instead. She blinked back at the family but allowed herself to get tugged along.
The first Priest to greet them informed the travelers that they were approximately an hour’s journey from the Temple. When Serah wriggled close enough in the crowd to catch her first glimpse of one of the legendary Priests, she was thunderstruck by his appearance. His skin was blotchy and purple, and where his right ear should have been his head simply boasted a hole. He turned and fixed his eyes on her as he was speaking, and a current of fear shot down her spine. She shrunk back into the crowd and buried her head into her mother’s belly. Wordlessly her mother stroked her hair, soothing some of the fear away.
The closer they got to the Temple, the more people appeared. Some of them looked just as ordinary as the travelers in Serah’s group, but more still had the purple skin, missing extremities – fingers, ears, noses – that Serah learned marked them as longstanding Templar folk. When she finally built up the courage, she tugged her mother’s sleeve and asked why the Templar people looked so frightening. Her mother gave her a horrified glance, then crouched and said, very seriously, “These people should not frighten you. These people are saved, remember.” She placed the palm of her hand on Serah’s sternum and continued, “Our bodies are not what we are, they just contain us. Think of the elders, or your grandfather, of how his body got slower and weaker as his soul grew wiser and stronger.” She smiled, then said kindly, “and you know, as soon as your soul is wise enough to return to the Lord’s flock, you will be in Paradise.”
Serah had heard of Paradise. A green land, not yellow and brown like the Strangelands, filled with fruit orchards and clean cool rivers.
She stretched back up and offered her hand to Serah. “Don’t be afraid, child. Their souls are as strong as their bodies look weak. Let them inspire you instead.”
Serah nodded, and though she was still a little afraid, took her mother’s hand and continued walking.
The travelers reached the Temple Clearing shortly after that. Serah had never seen so many people in her life – people with purple skin, people with what looked like open sores on the portions of their skin that weren’t covered by their clothes, people missing eyes and teeth, and the smell of the place was exactly like the sweet, sick smell of her family’s orchard decomposing – but with her mother’s encouragement, she focused on the thought of their souls’ ascensions to Paradise as the travelers wound their way through the crowd towards the middle of the clearing. The Temple itself was a small wooden construction, strewn in fabric drapings of all colors and hues, dwarfed by the tents and merchant stalls and people chattering and clamoring around it. Serah studied it for a quick moment, marveling at the vividly dyed blue-green-yellow drapes, but when a scarred priest emerged from the interior and stared back at her with an empty, red gaze she averted her eyes.
The Priests directed them to set up their encampment behind the Temple near the edge of the clearing and provided them with new provisions as well as directions to the community well. They set up camp slowly, devoutly; at last, they were setting up their camp for more than just a single night. Serah carefully unrolled her bedroll next to her mother’s and sat on it, arranging her belongings and avoiding thinking about the rash on her shoulders until dusk blanketed the clearing in darkness.
The energy in the group was different when Serah awoke the next morning. Most of the group stood clustered in a rough circle, including, she noticed, her mother. She straightened and padded over to stand next to her, peering through the gap in her arms to see what was going on inside the circle. The woman with the headache was still asleep, her face peacefully still despite the elder crouched beside her gently shaking her shoulder.
Serah glanced around at the faces of the travelers, at the expression reflected in each of their faces, and realized that the woman wouldn’t be waking up. Her breath caught in her throat.
The elder stood up, brushed off her knees, and announced, “Margaret has passed out of our care.” She cast a glance down towards the woman, then said, “That we all may follow in her steps.”
The group of travelers responded in a rumbled chorus.
That we all may follow in her steps.
Serah watched as the rest of the elders filed into the circle and began to brush her hair carefully, reverently, with the oxhair brush and wrap her body in a green fabric draping offered by one of the Priests from the walls of the Temple. Serah found her mother’s arms around her, soothing her pricking nerves.
“Is she going to Paradise?” Serah asked.
“She is already there,” her mother responded.
Serah blinked and tried to imagine that the body of the woman in front of her, the face she knew, was empty. That her soul had been strong enough to move on. She looked around at the yellow earth around her, the black spikes at the edge of the clearing. So different from Paradise.
The raw skin on her shoulders suddenly itched. She rubbed at it absentmindedly, a gesture that her mother immediately noted. She pressed a kiss to her forehead.
“We will be with her again soon.”
Serah swallowed and thought about green grass, clean water, and a cool breeze.
The Priests suggested that the elders’ ceremony be continued with a ceremony of their own, to be celebrated at moonrise. Their observation that an ascension this quickly upon reaching the Temple was rare and should be properly marked was echoed delightedly around the traveler camp – a good omen for their fortunes as well.
The rest of the day, then, was a celebration. Once the Templar folk caught wind of the passing on, Serah’s group was showered in gifts and conversation. Serah was approached by a boy around her age, the son of travelers from another recent pilgrimage, who asked shyly if she’d like to help him gather stones for the moonrise ceremony. With her mother’s blessing, she ran off into the spikes with him and gathered rocks and chippings of the spikes themselves until the small woven basket they shared nearly overflowed. When they got back, a mound of splintered sticks and scraps of fabric had been erected near the mouth of the Temple. They chose the prettiest stone, a large, blade-like chipping of a spike, to save to lay at the head of the pyre and scattered the rest around the base of it.
When the basket was empty, Serah turned towards the boy, who was holding the saved stone in his hands and quietly considering it.
“My name’s Serah,” she said.
He looked at her. “I’m Amos.”
They stood in silence for a moment, and then he reached out and offered the piece of stone to her. She took it and looked closely. The piece was lighter than she would have expected from its size. She ran her finger over a deep, curved crevice in the surface and shivered, suddenly struck by some deep unease. She handed the spike sliver back.
“What do you think about it here?” He asked.
“I don’t know,” Serah answered honestly.
Amos frowned. “I don’t think I like it. My sister… ‘sended a couple weeks ago.”
“That’s a good thing, though, ascending,” Serah said, parroting her mother’s words. “And a good omen for you, too, I think.”
“But I miss her,” Amos responded, his bottom lip beginning to tremble. “I didn’t want her to go.”
“But you’ll be with her soon,” she persuaded, desperate not to see her new friend cry. “Just like I’ll be with Margaret again soon.”
“But I don’t know if I want to… ah-send,” Amos said miserably. “She said it really hurt.”
Serah was suddenly keenly aware of her itchy skin. “Your sister?” She asked hesitantly.
“Yeah.” Amos rubbed at his eyes with a quiet sniffle.
“Really?”
“She cried a lot.”
Serah studied him more carefully. “Well,” she said, tamping down her discomfort, “I know that the only way our souls get stronger is when our bodies get weaker. So maybe her soul was just getting really strong really fast.”
He gave her a look that said that he didn’t believe her, so she just gave him a hug and said goodbye.
Margaret was laid on the pyre as dusk fell, and it was brought alight as stars blazed to life in the sky above. Serah’s group of travelers and the rest of the Templar folk stood around the pyre, the firelight flickering in their eyes. Two of the Priests, cloaked in the same colorful fabric that adorned the Temple, prowled into the inner circle and turned, raised their arms, surveyed the crowd of people. Silhouetted by the flames with their limbs and features obscured behind folds of fabric and their arms outstretched, they looked more like the shadows of enormous birds than humans. The Priests on the outskirts of the circle began to beat their ceremonial drums, and to their beat, the cloaked figures within began to dance.
They moved first with erratic, ginger steps that grew stronger and more confident until they swooped around the burning pyre, loose fabric swirling. The people around Serah began to sway disjointedly, moving their feet in tandem with the Priests, and the rhythm of the drums echoed in Serah’s skull, burrowing into her head. The crowd shifted, writhed around her.
Caught in the motion, she staggered into someone, then backwards into another person, then managed to lurch herself back onto her own feet. She danced then, because she would fall if she didn’t, and swayed and turned around the circle, spiraling with the Priests and the Templar folk. Through the bodies of the people around her, she watched tendrils of pyre smoke curl up towards the sky. She imagined what Margaret was thinking of Paradise as the gray coils unfurled and filtered out the light of the stars behind them. Then she thought of the sliver of stone carefully placed at the head of the pyre and the little boy who’d helped her find it, and she wished she could have told Margaret to look out for Amos’s sister. A person she didn’t recognize caught her arm and spun her, sending her exhilaratingly off-balance and breaking her view of the sky. She laughed, breathless, and in that moment fervently believed that her friends in Paradise would find each other anyway.
One, then both Priests in the inner circle broke out in song, a guttural, improvisational melody that pulsed in symphony with the throbbing in Serah’s head.
Serah was the first to raise her voice to join them.