Arc 3: Chapter 22: Dogma
They took my weapons, my cloak, and my armor. They took my satchels and herbs, all the kit I’d worn through years of wandering and blood. They took my medallion.
They took my ring.
I was beaten, and after I’d killed several of their comrades I could hardly blame them. It kept me from fighting back, which I would have the moment the golden threads came undone. They did, eventually, but by that point I was hardly conscious.
I have a dim memory of being dragged down many flights of stairs, of hard voices in the dark, of the near touch of lit torches held carelessly close to my sweat-damp hair.
They brought me into a dark room and left me there, tied and bound, for many hours. I drifted in and out of consciousness, still shivering from the infernal cold the Zosite had struck me with.
They woke me with half-frozen water. I came to tied to a sturdy chair, one I soon realized had been bolted to the floor. My hands were bound to the arms of the chair by iron clasps. I thrashed a moment, but that ended when the first iron cudgel caught me across the neck.
“Careful,” an unfamiliar voice said, cold and dispassionate. “I do not want him broken yet.”
When the pain lessoned enough for me to hear anything, I heard more movement around me, from several people. A heavy door opened and closed. By the time my eyes had focused, I only saw one person.
We were in a plain stone room with no furnishings save an empty table set with two chairs. I occupied one, and a man I’d never seen before stood behind the other.
The priest — I assumed he was a kind of priest — stood at military rest, facing me. He had a prominent nose and chin below sunken eyes framed by thick eyebrows and a bowl cut which didn’t suit him. His cheeks were gaunt, his jaw wide. His heavy chin hung below a small slash of a mouth beneath a patrician nose. The effect was of one perpetually pensive or unimpressed. He wore a black garment in a bureaucrat’s style, a long, thin robe ending at the ankle beneath an equally dark cape, the two garments nearly blending with one another save for the thin lines of vermillion thread separating them.
Vermillion too was the trident sewn just above his heart.