Chapter 3: The Opening Rite
1634 Words
Chapter Three
The Opening Rite
The dress was the color of nothing.
That was the only way Oraya could describe it. Not white, not grey, not the pale ivory of old
linen. It was sheer layers of some fabric so fine she could see the outline of her own hands through it when she held it up to the light and the effect was less dressed and more revealed. The ceremonial garment of the Kejari's Opening Rite, worn by every human contestant who had ever entered the tournament, which was to say: almost nobody.
She had worn worse things but she said to herself in the mirror while Septimus's attendants worked oil through her hair and pinned pieces of it back with thin gold clasps.
She wasn't sure she believed it, but she told herself anyway.
Septimus himself stood off to the side of the preparation room a tall, angular man with a
priest's collar and a High Priest's coldness. He wore the full regalia of his office: deep violet robes, the Nyaxia medallion at his throat, the bloodstone rings on both hands that marked his rank he was watching the attendants work on her with the detached, professional eye of a man examining livestock before a sale.
"The oil must be applied to the neck and the inside of the wrists as well," he said, to the
attendant and not to Oraya.
The attendant reached for the small silver bowl.
"That," Oraya said quietly, "is not going to happen."
Septimus's gaze moved to her in the mirror. It was the kind of look that expected compliance
the way weather expected to be cold but it had never occurred to him that it might not come.
"The anointing oil is part of the Opening Rite's sacred preparation," he said. "It signals to the
goddess Nyaxia that you are offered freely and without condition."
"I'm not offered at all," Oraya said. "I'm a contestant, there's a difference."
"For humans who enter, there is no—"
"Septimus." That was Vincent's voice, from somewhere behind her she found him in the
mirror, standing near the door in his full court dress, watching the exchange with that flat, patient stillness. "Let her keep her wrists."
A pause. Septimus inclined his head and stepped back.
The attendant withdrew the bowl.
Oraya met her own eyes in the mirror and breathed.
The preparation room let out into a long corridor that ran beneath the main arena floor. She could hear the crowd above her before she reached the corridor's end a particular sound of a large gathering of vampires made when they were anticipating something which wasn't loud. Vampires weren't loud in the way humans were loud. It was more of a resonance a vibration in the stone beneath her feet like the building itself was holding its breath.
There were forty-two contestants in the Opening Rite lineup. She knew this because she had counted them when the line assembled but she was the only human.
The vampire ahead of her in line tall, female, house colors she didn't recognize on the left
shoulder turned and looked at her with the particular slow interest of someone examining
something they might eat later.
"You're the ward," the vampire said. Her voice had that older flow to it, words slightly too
precise, like someone who had learned this language three centuries ago and hadn't bothered to update the accent.
"And you're in my space," Oraya said. "Move forward."
The vampire's mouth curved she turned forward without another word.
The doors at the end of the corridor opened.
Light red-soaked arena light poured in, and the sound changed from a resonance to
something more immediate, more directional. They filed in one at a time when Oraya stepped through the door and onto the arena floor, the noise shifted again.
A different quality of attention.
The arena was circular and open to the sky, which in Obraya meant open to the Blood Moon.The stands were tiered and full every seat occupied, vampires from a dozen courts packed in shoulder to shoulder, and she could feel their collective notice like a hand pressing against her skin.The human girl the King's ward in the sheer ceremonial dress with oil at her neck and knives at her thighs, because she had kept her thigh sheaths on beneath the sheer layers and dared anyone to say something.
Nobody had said something.
She kept her chin level and her shoulders back and her eyes moving, mapping the space the way she always mapped spaces. Forty feet of open floor raised platform at the center where Septimus would conduct the blessing. The tribunal box to the north elevated, draped in violet and gold where Vincent sat with the court elders, already watching her.
She didn't look at him.
Septimus took the platform. He raised both hands, and the arena went so quiet she could hear the torch flames.
"Nyaxia, goddess of blood and dark and the space between—" he began, and his voice had a carrying quality that needed no amplification, the kind of voice trained over centuries to fill stone rooms. "We offer you these servants,these seekers and these blades in your name let the strongest among them find their way to your gift."
He spoke for seven more minutes, Oraya counted.
Then the blessing began.
One by one, the contestants approached the platform septimus pressed two fingers to each
one's forehead, said something low and specific that the rest of the arena couldn't hear, and the contestant stepped back into line. The touch was brief and businesslike when the vampire woman from before reached the platform, Septimus's murmured words which made her straighten sharply, and she returned to line with a look on her face that Oraya couldn't categorize.
Oraya's turn came.
She stepped up onto the platform and stood in front of Septimus, who was taller than her by
nearly a foot and had the kind of bloodless, ageless face that made it impossible to guess what he was thinking.
His two fingers pressed to her forehead,his skin was not too cool like a room-temperature, but actively cold, the way a stone pulled from a river was cold she kept her face neutral.
He leaned slightly forward.
"You will not survive the first trial," he murmured, for her ears only. "But you will satisfy the goddess's appetite for spectacle. That is a worthy enough purpose."
She met his eyes.
"I'll be sure to keep that in mind," she said, at the same volume, "while I'm still alive and you're still here doing paperwork."
His fingers dropped from her forehead. Something crossed his face that might have been surprise and might have been something colder.
She stepped back into the line.
The closing rite was brief a final call to Nyaxia, a raised cup of something dark that Septimus poured across the platform, a words-only declaration that the Kejari had begun. The crowd's collective exhale came out as something close to a roar, and then the contestants were moving, spreading across the arena floor, and the noise was real noise now loud and sharp and buzzing with anticipation.
Oraya stayed where she was and swept the arena one more time.
She was looking for exits, the pattern of the crowd and he vampires who moved differently from the others.
She found him without meaning to.
He was on the arena floor, not in the stands. A contestant, then a big—not just tall but solid, the kind of build that came from a body that had been used for violence long enough that it had shaped itself around the expectation of it. Dark-haired Wings—
She blinked.
Actual wings. Folded tight against his back, dark as char, the feathers lying flat in a way that
made them almost invisible against his dark jacket until the Blood Moon caught the edge and they went briefly, deeply red.
She had never seen a vampire with wings before. It wasn't impossible there were bloodlines that carried old, strange gifts but it was rare enough to be remarkable, and remarkable things in arenas were almost always dangerous.
He was looking at her.
Not the way the others looked at her but the slow inventory of someone calculating odds.
More direct than that and deliberate.
He started walking toward her.
She considered her options in the two seconds she had before he reached her.
She didn't move.
He stopped closer than most people stopped to her, close enough that she had to angle her chin up to look at his face, which was a powerful move she recognized and resented. He had dark eyes and a jaw that looked like it had been broken at least once and healed slightly wrong, and he was looking at her with the kind of attention that felt like fingers on the back of her neck.
He leaned down slightly.
His voice was low, meant only for her.
"You should leave the arena floor before the trial begins," he said. "Whatever the King told you, whatever reason he gave you for entering he's wrong. This will kill you."
Oraya studied his Fac, the set of his jaw and the directness of his eyes.
"Was that a warning," she said slowly, "or a threat?"
His mouth pulled at one corner. Not quite a smile.
"I genuinely haven't decided yet."
She opened her mouth to answer.
The floor fell away.
Not all of it just the section beneath the contestants' feet, a massive circular segment that dropped in one smooth, terrible mechanical motion, and the arena floor was simply gone, and they were falling, all forty-two of them, down into the dark below, and the crowd above was screaming something that sounded exactly like joy.
- Writer
