#35 - You'll Not Exsanguinate

“No. No. No” That’s not possible.  It’s a phantasm of an overheated brain.”  Ahrimaz stared down at his reddened fingertips.  “I was weeping.  I am weeping.  As a man does.”

Arnziel reached up and gently pressed a cloth to Ahrimaz’s face and it came away imprinted with a bloody image.   

“You’re sweating blood too.  From my perspective it is your reaction to developing an empathic understanding that your monster father stamped on in you.  It will be all right.  You aren’t bleeding enough to exsanguinate.”

“That’s reassuring,” Ahrimaz snapped, staring in horror at the cloth.  “It looks like the imprint after Summer Solstice.”

“Imprint?”

“You don’t do that?  After the fight through the fires I take off my helmet as they carry the endarkened foe away… a few years ago it was Arnziel who played that part.  I nearly lost it an almost took his head off with those antique great swords… anyway.  Once the helmet comes off I drink the ‘Cup of the Sun’ and speak prophecy and burst into a bloody sweat.  Highest Priest takes my bloody face image just as you just did.  The priesthood keeps them.”

“Cup of the Sun?  Is that a full wine glass?  Enough to make you bleed like this?  Warm and Blessed Aeono how in Heaven’s name have you not killed yourself?  How long does it take for you to recover from that?”

Ahrimaz shrugged.  “If I pray and take on the Sun sickness I can burn it out of me in a few days… sometimes a week… then I have to recover from feeling I’ve scorched my insides.”

“You have.  Dear and Blessed Aeono.  May I tell Limyé?”

Ahrimaz shrugged and roughly scrubbed his face dry, not looking at the smears of read on the white cloth.  “Don’t see why not.  I AM his patient.”

Arnziel tilted his head to one side, the fire-beads woven into his hair clicking.  Ahrimaz hadn’t noticed them before and stared.  It can’t be. “I expect that you and he and several other of his helpers will have an intense session with his dreaming remedies.”

“Probably.” Ahrimaz didn’t know if he wanted more of those sessions where Limyé’s nostrums blurred the line between reality and dreaming and were astonishingly effective at uprooting pain and rage in his head and heart that he had thought would never shift.  “Everyone said you were an Aeono priest but no one ever said that you were second Highest!”

“Really?  I thought someone did.  Probably when you were ranting about how much of a… hmmm…” he laid a finger thoughtfully against his lips before quoting, “…gutless, spineless, pathetic, listless, apathetic, lazy, gormless, dim, stinking, drunken, asinine, vile, scorchless, lack-witted, moronic, cretinous,  drool-lipped, loose-tongued—“

Ahrimaz cut him off.  “Yes, yes, you can repeat from memory perfectly everything I believed about my brother, thus proving that you are none of those things.  You needn’t defend yourself to me.”

“You killed your younger brothers, did you not?”  He didn’t look as though he was accusing at all.  “and the old man, all to protect yourself.”

“Yes,” Ahrimaz snapped, shortly.

“And your Arnziel is still alive being the hopeless ass that no one will confide in if they are plotting against you?”

“Y…essss.” Ahri sat up straighter and dropped the bloody rag upon the floor.  “I’m starting to see.”

“How hard did he have to work to make you believe he was that stupid?”

“Not… that hard.  Very smart, Arnziel.  If I get home I’ll just have to kill him because I can’t trust him anymore.”

“Not what I had in mind.  It seems to me that he’s willing to be left alone.  Probably without trying to disgust you into pushing him further away.”

“I… have to think about this.  Thank you for the books, by the way.”  There were a new stack upon the desk.

“You’re welcome.”

“Not bloody scorching likely,” Ahri snapped but it was half-hearted.  He picked up his tea cup and held it out to Arnziel.  “Why don’t you pour and we can talk about what that idiot Arouet d’Rig-Un wrote ‘Separation of Church and State’.

Arnziel poured and set the pot down.  “Not an idiot, certainly. But…”