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| | | The Holy Cross - secrets of the Dragon |  |
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She-Rex
Regular
Posts : 62
Join date : 2015-01-21
| | Subject: The Holy Cross - secrets of the Dragon Tue Jan 27, 2015 7:05 pm | |
| ( Italics are my way of illustrating past events, so enjoy  ) “Forgive me Father for I have sinned.”
A pause.
“Father?”
“Bring yourself closer to the lattice my child. I cannot hear as well as I used to.”
The assassin leant closer to the partition in the confessional, hidden blade sliding silently from the sheath upon his wrist. This was going to be too easy.
“Now. Please begin.”
“Forgive me Father,” he whispered through the tight lattice, blade poised, “for I have-“
The knife which slid through the partition and struck the assassin clean through his left eye held him fast to the wood and meant an agonising death. Yet, he stayed alive long enough to hear the strong tones of the priest, his target, which had so easily become the hunter rather than prey.
“Yes. You have sinned.” He twisted the hilt of the letter opener and heard the strangled half cry of the man whom he had stuck so viciously. “Grievously.”
Then the assassin died against the confessional partition and would only be discovered days later by an unwitting clergyman.
“May the Lord forgive you. For I shall not.”
He left the confessional, cloaked in an apparent humility; his holy robes concealing talons of malice.
“Amen.” | |
| | | | She-Rex
Regular
Posts : 62
Join date : 2015-01-21
| | Subject: Re: The Holy Cross - secrets of the Dragon Thu Jan 29, 2015 6:12 pm | |
| “I have had a vision, my son,” the partially blind monk recanted as he lit the candles at the altar of his modest Sicilian monastery, “of a great army from the south, with cannon the like of which we have never witnessed, belching fire and destruction.”
Dante Salucci aided him as he was addressed; lighting his own share of candles in silence.
“Women lie dead in their beds. Suckling babes will be snatched from the breast and dashed against the city walls. This army will march North like the revolts against Rome, invited in by a cleric…in black.”
Dante continued to diligently light the candles in a thoughtful silence.
“Are you the cleric in black, my son.”
A pause of contemplation.
“And in this vision of yours…was the Grand Master deposed?”
The old monk turned to him and sought out with withered hands liver spotted with age which found purchase about the Sicilian’s shoulders.
“I see castles aflame,” his voice was a fervent, almost mad hush, “I see blood running through the streets of cities.” With a grit of his remaining teeth in pulled harsher on Dante’s ecclesiastical robes;
“I see the bloated body of the Grand Master, blackened by syphilis, lying in his luxuries. Nobody dares approach it.”
The flame burned ever closer to Dante’s hand.
“Will you be the one, my son, to bring forth this apocalypse?”
“Are you the cleric in black?”
The Sicilian sensed the heat and blew out the flame. | |
| | | | She-Rex
Regular
Posts : 62
Join date : 2015-01-21
| | Subject: Re: The Holy Cross - secrets of the Dragon Fri Jan 30, 2015 6:58 pm | |
| “The Order is no longer the Grand Master alone,” a drunken Templar murmured conspiratorially across his cup, “the Order is now Dante Salucci also.”
Another drink and now it was getting rather difficult to keep focus in the dim light of the Roman tavern. He wasn’t usually this terrible at holding his drink but his new friends had been insistent and his mind had been too fogged over with inebriation to take such things suspiciously.
Drink made him sloppy.
They ordered him more drinks with their wide smiles whose edges lost their sharpness due to blurred vision. The Templar had a feeling that they weren’t drinking themselves, that the liquid in their cups was water or a shimmering trick of the light.
“Who else is privy to this information?” They asked, their traitorous counterpart too far gone to need subtlety anymore. “Names.”
The Templar had been won by their smiles and their free alcoholic doses of drugs, and truly believed in his addled brain that they were his friends.
They all burned.
All thirty two of them.
For heresy. Naturally.
Dante himself had read their rites and set the burning branch to the pyre to a select few he deemed especially worthy of the honour, before standing upon the hill and watching the densest smokes of hell and the devouring jaws of the devil in turn devour the flesh the cleric had ‘sacrificed’.
“Let this be the consequence…” he had begun to his closest circle of conspirators in a sinister tone of calm that undercut the screaming and the low scent of fear and burning meat.
“The consequence to those who betray me.”
They didn't need to see his odd eyes to know that they captured the firelight in those red cells as though it were not reflection but rather coming from within.
| |
| | | | She-Rex
Regular
Posts : 62
Join date : 2015-01-21
| | Subject: Re: The Holy Cross - secrets of the Dragon Mon Feb 02, 2015 5:55 pm | |
| Emilio had been the first to die. Smothered in his sleep.
Florentino fell victim to poisoning.
As did Clemente.
Marcello’s case was sad. Yet a sad death befitted a sad man; found hung from the beams of his brother’s church.
Nicolò’s coffin lid was scratched; planted in the earth before his time and finding his peace in suffocation in that cloistering cradle.
Giacomo. Giacomo the smart. Giacomo the cunning. Supplanter in his very name.
He was the last.
oOo
The night was young and the hours small when Dante was cleaning after midnight mass; making his way about the aisle and the pews a phantom in that empty house. Empty of God perhaps, but not empty of men.
“A very nice service,” Giacomo flattered his younger brother, hand resting on the pommel of the sword at his hip. He directed his hazel gaze upwards to the figure of Christ. “Very nice. You write it all yourself?”
The condescending tone broke against Dante like waves against the cliff. Still the cleric swept. “There is nobody else here to write the sermons.”
“What? Christ didn’t come from his kingdom and write his good graces for you to preach?”
“Blasphemy my brother,” he chastised hollowly, snuffing out a row of candles as Giacomo laughed.
“You seem to know the holy ones as if they spoke to you,” Giacomo swept his fingers along the marble of the altar, pausing upon the silken drapery, “will you give them my apologies?”
“Give them yourself.” Dante moved to the front, the sparse broom in his left hand as he moved along the rows of the more prestigious candles still burning in their groupings either side of the altar.
“And how would I go about doing that wise one?”
“Personally.”
Giacomo fixed his eyes upon the centre cross before being knocked double with the broom handle forced across his skull. Down he went, hand instinctively balled in the red silk and bringing most of the religious ornaments down with him to the marble steps. Hitting his head against the altar didn’t stop the elder brother from turning upon his back and reaching out with the length of silk in hand to strangle his assailant; his brother who bore down upon him yet couldn’t prevent his neck being caught in the material.
With his vision blurred and descending red, Giacomo struck his knee into Dante’s abdomen and used the leverage to switch their positions. He pulled taut the ecclesiastical silk about his younger brother’s tan neck, covering the dog collar with crimson and kept pulling, kept tightening.
Dante kicked out, flailed his arms in vain attempts to strike Giacomo, but the man pulled out of range whenever he saw a blow incoming and snickered beyond his bloodied countenance. Dante bore his teeth like an animal as nails and fingers found nought but cold flagstones.
“Oh little brother,” Giacomo leered, tightening the silk, “Oh little ‘father’. Do you panic because you know the inferno you’re heading to?”
Still nothing, and Dante’s lungs were aching in their starvation.
“Emilio. Florentino. Clemente.” Giacomo began recanting the names as if invoking the murdered spirits of his siblings to bear witness to the last seconds of their murderers life. “Marcello. Nicolò.”
Dante whispered a name with the little breath he still had left to waste, and Giacomo in his arrogance leant down.
“Speak up Dante.”
“Gia…como…”
The cleric’s hand had found purchase upon the golden cross which had fallen from the altar during Giacomo’s descent, and with it reassuring but heavy in his hand, Dante brought it forward and aimed as if to strike deep into his brother’s skull.
The pressure was suddenly gone from about his neck and as Giacomo yowled Dante barely gave himself the luxury of respite before kicking his brother back, Giacomo’s spine hitting the steps as he sprawled hence, and, straddling his chest, proceeded to hit him again across the skull with the heavy cross.
Giacomo’s body was left shivering under the shock; nerves electrified and brain sent white with instinctual fear. Only the fleshy shell remained, whatever that was of the man within had fled with his final quip;
“Jesus must love you, Dante Salucci.”
In the first few strikes, teeth were shaken loose of the dislocated jaw.
The next few crushed any distinctive facial structure beyond recognition.
The last caved the thick dome of the skull down into the brain.
It was an ugly, desperate and wretched fight up to the end, savage and vicious and the cleric was left panting in exhaustion over the disfigured body of his older brother with the cross in his left hand bloodied and smothered with mucus and gore. His clothes and face were much the same and when he stood he did so with a body still reeling oxygen into desperate lungs which fell back against the altar with his spare hand, slick with blood, slipping along the marble.
“Yes….” The cleric began quietly with the scraps of breath he could spare, talking to the mutilated corpse of his sibling as if he could still listen. “He weeps for me…with love for me…”
His rasps for air became a low chuckle and to a congregation of betrayed ghosts he threw his arms out like Christ upon his crucifix and roared his hellish triumph to the heavens.
“JESUS LOVES ME!”
Last edited by She-Rex on Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:50 am; edited 1 time in total | |
| | | | She-Rex
Regular
Posts : 62
Join date : 2015-01-21
| | Subject: Re: The Holy Cross - secrets of the Dragon Fri Feb 06, 2015 4:39 pm | |
| It may have been blasphemous but to compare his little corner of Sicily to the Lord’s eternal kingdom wasn’t something Dante deprived himself of thinking that afternoon. The sky was clear and blue with a few wisps of cloud threaded through its unpolluted tapestry aglow with the sun’s radiance. The leaves threw dappled emerald shadows upon the sandstone pathways and the ocean in the distance melted into the clear horizon with only an ethereal band of white between heaven and earth.
The priest was reading quietly, dressed in his standard clerical clothing of cassock and collarino with pectoral cross hanging about his neck. His black clothing was as intended – striking – especially against an environment of such warmth in colour, but his demeanour was unassuming as he read scripture upon the steps of the orphanage that he helped.
“Papa!” A vulnerable wail cut through air to pull him from his solitude, “Papa!”
One voice, but two sets of footsteps gained volume as they approached.
He set his book aside and rather than stand he instead rested his arms upon his thighs; clasping his hands to rest in the black material canvased between his knees. Two children, a girl and a boy, rounded the corner, one being chased by the other, and it didn’t take long for the priest to realize the situation.
The girl, six year old Fiorella, was red in the face and sobbing. Her doll had suffered horrid decapitation and was held in both of the child’s small hands; the body in her left and the head in her right. She thrust them forwards as both evidence and for want of a miracle and Goffredo, the boy a few months Fiorella’s senior, now hung back shamefaced and scuffing his shoes on the path.
“Papa!” Fiorella cried and Dante picked her up in fatherly comfort so she could cry onto his arm, “he hurt Alba! He stole her away from me and hurt her!”
Dante looked at the doll that had been small enough for him to hold with only one hand. The creation was poor and old, second-hand with only one eye, short, stubby limbs and an overstuffed body, but the blonde threads comprising hair were still in good condition and one could tell the dolly was loved. The cleric looked from ‘Alba’ to Goffredo as he felt hot tears starting to soak the crook of his left arm.
He addressed the sulking child with a calm but serious tone, making the boy look up and reveal he was almost on the edge of tears himself. ‘He hadn’t meant it’, he protested, running forward and clinging to Dante’s right leg. ‘He hadn’t meant to hurt Alba! He just wanted to play with her!’ The little boy had lost his own toy, Alfonso, at the beach when Dante had taken the orphans to the coast and was jealous when he had seen Fiorella playing with Alba in the garden this afternoon. In trying to bully the doll from the little girl, he had ripped the sack head from the sack body and that was that.
Dante listened to the children as was his title, a father, and when there was nothing more to be said and there was only sniffles and whimpers he bade them both look at him with their grief reddened eyes.
“Now there don’t cry, there’s no fighting between friends,” he began soothingly, looking between them both, “violence and jealousy are never the answers are they?”
A furious shaking of their heads. “No papa. Sorry papa.”
“Do you know what is written in the Bible? Of Jealousy?”
A sore look between the two children. They knew a lot of what residing in that old book, but not in particulars.
“’Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast.’” He knew that the calmed children were too young to understand such a seemingly vague explanation, but it mattered not. All that mattered is that one day they would understand and be the better for it. “Violence is never the answer.” He reiterated simply, looking between the two as he quoted: “‘Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’”
Fiorella wiped her nose and eyes on her sleeve. “Will God help Alba?”
Dante chuckled and placed a kiss upon the little girl’s forehead. “Maybe if you both go and pray for her.”
They were both off in a shot; Fiorella leaving Alba in the hands of God with all her innocence and faith.
The cleric looked down upon the broken doll, finally stood with a small crack of his back, and resolved to find his darning needle and thread.
“Master Salucci.”
The man making his way from the gates to the steps of the orphanage wasn’t a familiar one about the place, but rather familiar with the cleric through ‘business’. Dante kept the broken doll in hand and his kind smile was sobered.
They fell wordlessly into step with each other, taking a walk about the premises.
“To what do I owe the visit?” Dante asked over his shoulder, rubbing the back of his neck to try and soothe an ache.
“There’s been a lot of bad news lately coming from Spain.”
“Yes.” The cleric turned and faced the man decades his elder, “they’ve been working hard to keep things quiet.”
“Assassins.”
Salucci’s smile was demonic in its malice.
“There’s recently been multiple reports of assassinations within their borders. Far too many to be pure coincidence.”
“If all this trouble is in Spain then surely the Spanish can handle it themselves.”
“But it is not only Spain.”
Dante’s pupils dilated. “What?”
“There has been attacks in the New World, their fledgling Cuban colony, the port of Havana.”
The Cleric hummed an acknowledgement as his Templar associate walked past him continuing with his report;
“European Assassins are on the move. We shall not sit back and watch.”
Dante rolled his tongue in his cheek, “the nerve of them,” he smirked viciously, “sneaking around where they’re not wanted. Like they belong there. These fools are as shameless and presumptuous as ever.”
“We will teach them to know their place Salucci.” The man paused. “They tread of Catholic ground. These murderers are ours to destroy.”
The older man turned, the sunlight flashing off his wire rim glasses; “we are part of God’s divine instrument on earth. We do not retreat when challenged by heretics.”
“If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus Christ let him be accursed at his coming, God save you from your fate. Amen.”oOo The orphans were supping in the main hall under the supervision of sisters Bernadette, Claudia and Angelica when Fiorella and Goffredo finally saw Dante again. He crouched behind the pair of them seated upon their bench so he could be level with them. “Have you said your prayers?”
The pair nodded furiously and with a smile Dante revealed Alba – head once more attached to her shoulders. With grasping hands the little girl took her doll back from the cleric and held it close squealing in childish delight.
“God heard us?” Goffredo asked.
“He is always there to listen to the faithful my son.” | |
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