The Exorcist Doctor

The mud oven steamed like a little lung in the middle of the Fogspire Forest, breathing heat into the blue mist and spitting it back out in lazy gusts. Jin’s work sat there like an insult to what Gael was going to make. It was smooth, stable, vented properly, and the mouth was carved in a clean curve. If the clinic didn’t already have a chief engineer, Gael would’ve hired Jin right here and now, actual engineering expertise be damned.

Chief sculptor’s position is still open, though.

But first!

While the wolf meat sizzled on flat stones near the mouth of the oven, fat popping and hissing, Gael and Liorin danced in circles with bottles of alcohol sloshing over their heads. “Wolf meat, wolf meat!” they chanted, swaying drunkenly as they circled around the oven. It was one thing to drink alone, but oh, Gael had no idea it felt this good to corrupt another youth in his ways of intoxication. Liorin laughed and giggled as he chugged another half-bottle of his 44% alcohol, wooden mask askew, and Gael cheered him on while handing over another bottle from his coat.

“55%! Drink! Drink! Drink!”

Liorin snatched the bottle from him and drank like a madman. Saintess, he drank everything Gael gave him. There was no reason to hang out with Evelyn anymore. Liorin was now his favorite child.

While the two of them danced like lunatics, Fergal lounged on the log they chopped down beside the oven as a bench, dropping strips of wolf meat straight into his mouth. The man was having the time of his life—running a gang had aged him past his youthful years—but Jin somehow looked like he was having even more fun, and all he was doing was chowing wolf meat like a machine. Unseasoned meat. Both him and Fergal were plucking the strips right off the stones before Gael could even offer them a few illegal spices.

Whatever makes them happy, I guess.

“... You’re good at tending to fire,” Fergal said idly, glancing at Jin sitting hunched over by the oven as he plopped another strip into his mouth. “I still remember the mud mold you made back in the clinic. You’re good at sculpting, aren’t you?”

Jin’s jaw worked. He swallowed, then he tore another strip of meat away. “This oven is only functional.

“Functional doesn’t look like art unless the man knows what he’s doing. You a sculptor up in Vharnveil or something like that?”

“I was the sixth son of a sculpting and pottery household,” Jin replied curtly. “My father was a most talented man. The best sculptor in our district. He’d always done well enough by himself to support our household, but it wasn’t until five years ago when my five elder brothers finally came of age that they could also open branch shops across the district. There could’ve been no better boost for our reputation, and very soon, we found our status rising to the very top of the fine arts council.”

“You have—” Gael burped, fishing a strip of meat off the oven before returning to his circle dance with Liorin, “five fucking brothers? Saintess. Sucks to be you, I guess.”

Jin squinted at him. “Multiple heirs is expected of any Vharnish man who holds himself in high esteem. It was my father’s generation when he was ascended from Bleakhearth into Vharnveil by a sponsor, so heneeded heirs to continue raising the status of our household.”

“Ascended?” Fergal asked.

“That’s when—”

“A Bharnish household gets picked out by a Vharnish household and brought up to Vharnveil,” Gael finished for Jin, grinning at Fergal. “It doesn’t happen very often—and definitely not in fuckass Blightmarch—but in Bleakhearth where it smells relatively nice and looks relatively bright, there are times when a Vharnish takes a liking to a particular Bharnish household’s skills and expertise. If they like the household enough, they can petition to the Four Black Baron Households to ‘ascend’ the household, giving them Vharnish benefits.”

“Oh,” Fergal said between bites. “That’s why you have black hair.”

Jin took the opportunity to brush his hair, picking fallen leaves out with a scowl. “My father wedded the Vharnish lady who sponsored him and ascended him for his beautiful sculptures. It takes at least two generations for a child of mixed blood to be born with golden hair, so the six of us heirs must wed Vharnish ladies as well to complete the ascension.”

“And I guess it wasn’t difficult to get wedding requests with your older brothers’ successful shops?”

“It wasn’t.” Jin shook his head. “There is never a lack of necessity for noble busts and heroic sculptures up in the City of Splendors. My brothers quickly received wedding requests from other low-class Vharnish ladies all across the district, and I, too, received one from… someone, about a year ago. A lady from a relatively wealthy household was what I was told. Her father made the offer, and my father accepted it for me. I’d never even met her.”

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Fergal frowned. “How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

“And how old were you when you got the request?”

“Thirteen. Why?”

Gael whistled. So did Fergal. Liorin was hopefully oblivious to their conversation at hand, so he only continued dancing and eating and drinking. Gael gave him a few more bottles of alcohol just for fun.

“Hey, fourteen’s not that far off from the average wedding age for boys in Blightmarch,” Gael said, shrugging. “Wanna know what that age is?”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s—”

“I’m fine. In any case, I was supposed to be wed to that lady a year ago, but…”

Something caught in the man’s throat, and Gael noticed as he left Liorin to dance and giggle and sway around, opting to sit down on the bench beside Fergal instead.

It wasn’t that he was drunk, either. He simply wanted to focus on scarfing down the wolf meat as Jin continued adding them from the bloody pile to the heated stones.

“... ‘Father’ was in past tense,” Gael started, plucking another strip. “Your dad dead?”

Jin nodded slowly.

“A week before my wedding a year ago, he disappeared,” he muttered. “None of my elder brothers knew where he went, but we all presumed he went to give some rich man private tutoring in sculpting. He used to do that a lot when we were younger. Sometimes he’d even go down to Bleakhearth to teach, and he’d disappear for days and weeks at a time. It wasn’t anything special as long as he was back for the ceremony.”

“Mine used to do that too,” Gael chimed in, “but instead of teaching sculpting, he was out robbing corpses from the catacombs and dissecting them in their coffins.”

Jin didn’t bite the joke. “But a few days after he disappeared, he stumbled back into the main shop. I was the only one manning the storefront at the time, but I remember… he was all sickly and bloody. He looked beat-up.”

“Robbed?” Fergal offered.

“No.”

“Drunk?” Liorin cheered.

“No.”

“Run-through at a brothel?” Gael asked.

“He told me to run as he staggered in, because a second later, a Myrmur burst out of his chest and tried to kill me.”

“... Oh,” all three of them said. Gael coughed into his fist. “Well, did you run?”

“No.”

“And… you’re still alive?”

“I picked up my sculpting tools and beat it to death,” Jin said plainly. Gael and Fergal both blinked. “I didn’t know back then that it couldn’t be killed. Not the manifested form, at least. I beat it to ‘death’, and then it slinked back into its heart within my father’s chest. At that point, I knew… that my father was already dead. I may not have known much about Myrmurs back then, but even I knew Myrmur Hosts would die no matter what, either by the Myrmur draining him to death or slain by the Exorcists for hosting a parasite. My father knew that, too.”

Gael stayed quiet.

There was more to the story. He could feel it in his bones.

“But before he died, he told me something that didn’t sound… natural to me,” Jin continued, eyes lingering on the flames within the oven as his hands stopped plucking meat from the stones. “He said… that whatever drug ‘they’ gave him to make him forget wasn’t completely effective. He didn’t forget everything. He told me he remembered going down to Bharncair for business, and then he woke up halfway through being operated on in some gilded laboratory before he woke up again in Vharnveil, right outside our door. There was also a ticking sound in his chest. Does that sound familiar at all?”

Gael’s gaze went dark, and his fingers tapped his cane once, then twice.

“Sure sounds familiar,” he said quietly. “He blew up afterwards?”

“... The cleanup was messy, but he told me to keep his death a secret,” Jin said. “After all, people believe one can only contract a Myrmur if they are already sick and weak to begin with. Nevermind the fact that stronger Myrmurs can parasitize even completely healthy men—that is what most Vharnish believe. It is a sign of bad fortune for a Vharnish to be parasitized by a Myrmur. A Myrmur Host who must be put down by an Exorcist, even more so. He didn’t want his death to plummet the household’s reputation no matter what, so I…”

He trailed off, and even if Liorin wasn’t listening, he was feeling the tension in the air. The boy stopped dancing and twirling and spun onto the seat beside Gael, suddenly looking solemn with his blank wooden mask.

“You did as you were told,” Fergal finished. “You hid his death from everyone.”

Jin nodded slowly once more.

“Everyone… apart from my elder brothers,” he said. “They didn’t believe me when I told them what father told me. ‘Operated on, my ass’, they said. As if Myrmurs could be artificially implanted into people. As if anyone would even want to do that. They told me to keep quiet about father’s death as well, and if anyone were to ask, we were to simply say father simply left the city on some extended business trip. I was told to just marry that lady I was supposed to marry. I was told to just ignore it and open my own shop when I came of age, produce pure-blooded heirs, and cement our household’s status, but… how could I do that?”

Jin looked at Gael sternly. Then Fergal. Then Liorin.

Gael couldn’t really put it into words, but he’d read, in some faraway professor’s journal long ago, that a man’s ‘fire’ could sometimes be seen in their eyes.

For the first time, he saw fire in Jin’s dark eyes.

“I watched him die before me,” he whispered. “I knew what I saw. I knew what I heard. I knew what I fought. I knew I was the only person who could do something about it, so on the day of the wedding ceremony, I—”

Gael’s bloodshackle suddenly jerked him off his log, and he grunted as he landed on his side, making Liorin and Fergal flinch.

He couldn’t hide his irritation as he glanced in the direction of the forest’s exit.

What in the hells are they doing out there?