Endurance

The next day proceed, and the next, when I awoke on the third day.

I breathed out. My stomach was aching. Before the Church intervened and stationed me in Vish, that ache would burn like a fire, with a magnetic force pulling me toward a sinner to eat. There was no such pull this time. It was simply an untethered, hollow, yawning pain—uncomfortable, but something I could bear.

Vicar Herrat met me when we would typically have breakfast. He asked me, “and how is your condition today, Mephi?”

“Fine. I mean, it hurts, but I’m fine.”

Herrat gave me an appraising look. “It’s begun in earnest, then. Don’t push yourself too hard.”

“It’s seriously fine.”

And it was. The Church had slipped and failed to feed me for more than a week before—keeping the wince off my face, I proceeded through the day normally.

But that was only one day, and the hunger got worse, morning by morning. The corners of that yawning hole in my gut distended, wider and wider, and in my mind’s eye I saw the black hunger swirling and raging and frothing. I remembered when it would be roaring, ‘eat!’, and shred my body with claws of flame, but a barrier kept it from ravaging me and muted its complaints into noise. If anything, I was getting colder and hollower.

Soon I caught myself wincing on Turisday, at the Charity House, and panting, and clutching my stomach. A headache pounded that clouded my mind with cottony sludge.

“Mephi?” Herrat questioned.

It took me a moment to realise he was speaking.

“Mephi?” he repeated.

“Uh—uh, yeah,” I wiped my eyes clear. “Yeah—I’m, okay, I’m not feeling too great. I can, continue to the end of the shift, this isn’t too, complicated...”

I would’ve been relieved when the shift ended, but all I could concentrate on was how crummy I felt. We limped back to the penitentiary.

“The fast is clearly affecting you,” Herrat noted. “I believe we should cancel your shifts for the time being.”

“Sh—I, I, I, fine... it’s not, going to get better, anyway, so...” I massaged my pounding forehead. My hand came back sweaty. “Okay, I guess that’s fair...”

“Can you still read?” Herrat reached for the Book of the Scriptures.

“Okay, Excruciations... three, uh... pain is not beloved by God; do not... bring pain to uh, uh, sh—where was I. Pain, pain is not beloved by God...”

“Affecting you clearly,” Herrat said.

Days continued. Three weeks had passed since the start of the fast. I was no longer working; I spent my time going out on walks, attempting to read, and scrawling doodles of birds and flowers and jackals fighting under the moon and the Katani river among all other miscellany. The aches only worsened.

The arctic winds of the north whipped across my every cell.

I woke up one day, shivering and clouded with fever.

“F-fuck,” I stammered, and retreated to tremble under the blankets.

Pain. Sickness and pain. I was a dying creature in the snow, bleeding out all its warmth. The Hunger howled so constantly like the incoherent roar of a storm, and that day I refused to get out of bed. But for how I was hollow, wilting, and dying, there wasn’t that impulse, that horrible impulse of ‘eat!’.

I could still do this.

It had been a month since the start of the fast, and now, in pain and delirium, was when the true wrestle began.

It is gods who are made to suffer...

I writhed in bed, sweating and shivering, in too much pain to think or do anything. Agony crept up ever hour until it had seeped through my bones. The Hunger roared endlessly. And I wanted to break, I wanted to scream too, ‘stalactite,’ or was it ‘stalagmite’, or whatever, both of them, anything, but for as long as Herrat was in the room watching me toss and turn and butt my head against the headboard and bite at my own fist, I refused to vocalise this distress.

If he knew how horrible the pain was, how close I felt to my limit, he might call it off.

When I was going to fucking beat this thing.

I screamed through the nights. I slept when I could. Time had blended together. Days were dreams. The Hunger’s roar heightened in pitch to a voiceless shriek that buffeted me, but I could no longer hear it. I simply prayed, in moments of lucidity, that the Archbishop hadn’t seen the hole grow too big.

Time was a single, stretching line of constant pain and screeching. The shriek was endless. Endless...

The vision of the Hunger lightened to the white of a snowstorm.

And a wave broke, out of the noise.

All went quiet.

A thread of warmth pulsed in the midst of numb pain. It was a heartbeat restarted, summer light breaking after winter, and I took in a gasp. I held myself to that warmth as if cupping a single sunlit flower out of the snow.

Vicar Herrat was speaking, and I actually heard him. “Mephi?”

I groaned, flopping over to gaze up at him. “Hhhgn...”

“I’ve just spoken with the Archbishop. There has been a shift,” Herrat said. And then, he pronounced:

“Mephi, the hole shrank.”