Seemings

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If I Do
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Joined: Wed Oct 31, 2018 8:49 am

Seemings

Post by If I Do » Wed Oct 31, 2018 8:59 am

There is a saying, that there is no mercy to be found on the streets of Menzoberranzan. This is untrue.

We were the Sisters of the Lasting Sacrifice, to those few who cared to call us by our proper name. To all else, we were the silent sisters. It was a fitting name and, by long tradition, none of us spoke to dispute it. We were no longer made to cut out our tongues as initiates, but it was well understood that to speak was to invite that ancient rite. We dealt with the tasks that must, by necessity, be handled by acolytes of Her faith; but were of such trifling importance as to be beneath even them. We were ignored and, in return, each of us conspired to maintain the polite fiction that we did not exist.

We were obedient shadows, to the excruciations and the sacrifices, to priestesses so senior that to look upon them was an act of intolerable insolence. We were burdened with the indignity of prolonging life, of repairing the wounds that our betters inflicted, that their entertainments might not be bought to a premature end by some misplaced knife or ill-pronounced rune.

We restored hope and sense and will; that it might be appropriately extinguished, at a time more pleasing to Her. In that peculiar way, what we did might be called mercy. It was what made us the objects of such ceaseless ridicule to those who did not understand.

We did not dispute it. We did not dispute anything.

*


Each family must, by ancient tradition, provide Her temple with one daughter, to serve as priestess or meat, as her merit dictates. That there are more daughters than positions is an undisguised fact. For the most formidable amongst us, this means that they begin killing before they commit to memory the prayers to properly ensure the Act’s devotion to Her. It is they who will become archpriestesses and matrons if they are quick and if they are cunning and if they do not overreach.

Those who lack the ambition or the skill to compete find themselves corpses or brethren amongst the Sisters. One is much the same as the other.

For me, it was a duller affair. The House of Varsk had never been a grand one; but it had once aspired to power. Even those days were buried beneath the dust of centuries now. Our name was unremembered, unmarked. So the nameless priestesses saw that I was consigned to the Sisters, content that my allotment would offend no-one with means to make known their displeasure.

The priestess who stood before our induction was fond of blunt words. We were the slow and the unlucky, the unwanted and the unproven. The detritus that was yet to find its way to the gutter; and though each one of us was granted the silver spider about our necks that marked us as acolytes of Her temple, our custody of it was expected to be brief. Its eyes were naught but enchanted stone. That way, we were told, nothing of value would be lost when our failure came, as it inevitably must.

Mother was displeased. She did not make it known.

I loathed her for it.

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