ira
do not mistake me for my mask
you see light dappling the water and forget
the deep, cold dark beneath
T
he first time Ira knelt beneath Caligo’s feet, his father killed a dove. Next, they brought a bleating lamb, all the way up from the valley below. Ira still awakens some nights hearing that specific cry, cut off by the blade.
The third visit, Ira remembers, they brought a steer. This had been the most difficult sacrifice of all, to both procure and to butcher. They had been warned in the markets and by the monks the gods of Novus did not often ask for blood, or sacrifice, to which Ira’s father had replied: gods ask for nothing else.
The fourth time, Ira came alone, during winter. He walked not through a storm but in its wake, with all the world blanketed by white. The silence had been deafening; when he reached Caligo’s alter, he offered not flesh and bone but bits and pieces of his history. A silk ribbon, that his mother used to wear. The woolen cloak of his father’s old uniform. The history book of their homeland, his father had procured as they fled.
These things, Ira burned.
After, when he returned to Denocte, his father waited for him in their small cottage. He had known what Ira had taken, and to where, and he only warned: “Gods do not ask for riches, Ira. They do not ask for sacrifice. They ask for the most expensive offering of all.”
Ira does not know if it was in that moment, or after many other experiences, that he realized the profound depth of his father's warning. He had not burnt belongings on Caligo’s alter. He had burnt himself.
Now, when Ira comes, that is what he brings.
Pieces of himself.
A long braided strand of his father’s hair, snipped from his mane. Antlers of the prized stag of the season, larger by far than any other hunter’s. Each letter Saige had written him the last few months, all bound in long locks of his hair. This offering, Ira thinks, feels particularly heavy; but he has come to the summit devoutly each season since arriving in Novus. The habit comforts him, and he needs the comfort now, after the death of his father and the turmoil within the country.
He finds solace in the long uphill climb; the religious burning of his haunches; the wind that whips and bites his face. Ira finds solace in the sharpness of the air, and the familiarity of the path he treads, until at last Ira reaches the summit.
He does not find solace in the way he is met by company rather than solitude.
Ira pauses, for a moment, where the pathway opens up and veins to each respective god. He holds on to the subtle hope the mare stands not at Caligo’s shrine, but another.
(However, he is too familiar with the shrines to believe this hope for even a second. He recognizes the exact angle at which she stands for he, too, has stood before Caligo in hopes of seeing something—someone—stare back).
Ira says nothing, at first. He merely steps past her to reach the alter and lays his items at the goddess’s feet. He rarely speaks, believing instead the importance of his actions over his words. He never promises fidelity to his goddess, or lifelong service. He only kneels to strike the flint and catch, first, the braid of his father’s hair on fire. The fire spreads quickly to the letters; but the antlers Ira leaves unburnt, placing them instead at the goddess’s obsidian hooves.
The clearing fills with the scent of smoke. Ira looks up at Caligo and then, at last, to the woman beneath her gaze. He has never seen her here before, or within Denocte, although something about the fierceness of her expression seems familiar. Ira remains silent, at first; the kind of silence that belongs to mountains, and forests, and birds, and sometimes (but not often) to men.
"The first time I came here," Ira says at last. "My father killed a dove."
