Ezren's position as the Vassour Elect kicked in right after Eraughn and Athua's coronation.
Their first order of official business was sending out extra patrols from the Municipal Army.
The patrols met up with the forces of each land, ordered to clear and secure the Propter. Caran lead the charge so Cetlali kept Masha at her side. She was far too new to her job as an Auxiliary to attend to something as intense as clearing out stretches of wild roads. Despite Masha's skill, brigands were always looking for the best chance at a quick loot and easier kill.
The rest of Cetlali's duties mirrored what she did back at Cazar Shcomou, just on a far larger scale. She was in charge of the Vassour Elect's Complex and all of Ezren's personal requirements. To her great exhaustion, the Vassour Elect was a busy, busy man. She wrote his letters, arranged his appointments and schedule, notated his meetings, and organized his office. Forcing herself to practice writing
with her other hand again, lest her dominant one become cramped and aching by the end of the day. She never thought she'd become resentful of writing and reading until her entire world became made up of only words, numbers, and figures.
Cetlali fetch his trays from the kitchens any longer, but he still preferred her to fill his cup and prepare his plate before joining him for his meals. He often used that time to interrogate her about her life in the Empire. It used to be about what noble came from where or who was behaving oddly at a feast. Now he tried to ask leading questions about Athua and the Enharouq clan. Cetlali wasn't foolish enough to believe these questions were innocent. She learned well at his heel. So instead of betraying the most valuable relationships she ever had, she feigned a certain amount of ignorance. Her circular answers displeased Ezren, usually tarrying on all the wrong details. It often drove him to dismissing her completely. It was a relief he was so consumed with his duties as the Vassour Elect, along with all the benefits of
which his new station supplied. His attentiveness to her waned.
Cetlali sat at Ezren's desk, spinning the dull tip of a golden paper knife into one of Caran's missives. She'd gone through the letters, sorted her notes from the meetings, and reviewed the completed drafts of the compensations record again. Her task was to ensure it all matched up for the ceremony the next day.
Before Masha left for the night, she finished up her last task. Flitting around the back corner of the dim study, she put books and scrolls back into their appropriate storage compartments with absent focus. Lovou sat in a chair by the door, picking at his nails with a large knife Cetlali had never seen before. She wasn't sure she wanted the story behind where he got it with the way he grinned at it, the blade sharp and jagged, with some small vermin's skull on the pommel.
Ezren stormed into the room, throwing the door open so hard it almost smacked against the wall behind it. Lovou jumped to his feet at
attention, like he'd been there all along. Masha froze against the back wall, swathed in shadows. A hand rested on the place where her ulu would be at her side. She stared at the door wide eyed and open-mouthed in obvious shock.
Cetlali sat at his desk as if she may have owned the space.
Ezren was in a mood. It was obvious in the way his eyes bore into hers. A chill spread from her face down because of the look of abject rage he held. The last time she'd seen him so incensed was after Caran's abandonment, something he took as a personal affront to his ambitions.
Cetlali stood and smiled like her teeth were made of broken glass. "Vassour Elect, how may I assist you?" Her eyes flashed to Lovou. She tried to twitch her head towards Masha, but there wasn't enough time to get her point across.
Ezren's eyes narrowed. He stomped around the desk with a look of cold and deadly resolution on his features as he zeroed in on her.
"You may start by removing yourself from my desk," he snarled his words. Cetlali looked at him with a concerned, questioning frown for his tone. Then she realized what a mistake it was to appear reluctant to heed his orders when he was in such a state. The slap across her face hurt before she even realized he hit her. She stumbled sideways and caught herself on the edge of Ezren's cool and cluttered desk.
She had a hand on her throbbing cheek when she focused on something other than the swelling ache in her jaw. Her eyes flickered to Lovou with a firm frown directed away from her towards the opposite corner.
He remembered her.
Masha.
Cetlali looked over to the young Enharouq, her face just visible in the shadowed corner of the room. In the dim candlelight, Masha's well-known stare, unequivocal and fierce, was now wide and terrified. It shrouded her in an
illusion, making her look like little more than a child.
Cetlali raised her hands, wanting to reassure Masha, to scream at her to just go. Before any action or words could come from her mind, Ezren's hand was in her hair. He bent her forward at the waist and threw her face first onto his desk and all its contents. Her hands shot out to catch herself, chin and cheek bouncing across the polished wooden surface as she faltered.
She forced herself up, fingers splayed in blackened ink spreading out from its tipped well, the desk consumed by the dark mess.
Ezren's hand seized her shoulder and his other gripped her arm. He yanked at her elbow, dislodging her support in an instant and sending her smashing into the wooden desk. It forced a whoosh of air from her lungs, and a swell of confusing terror started consuming her.
It forced her into a weak-limbed darkness where she didn't have to cry, didn't have to scream, didn't have to feel.
"I shouldn't be surprised. All women are wretched. Full of insolence and foolishness.
Just quivering wombs yearning to be filled."
Ezren snarled as he stepped closer behind her, yanking her arm behind her back as his hips pressed hers against the hard edge of his table.
"I will teach you to know your place..."
Cetlali was reeling into the pit of absence.
He pressed into her more roughly and she was ground against the unyielding wood. An agonizing burst of pain screamed through her body from her stomach and lower back outwards. Her mouth opened with a soundless sob and an empty plea for help she didn't want anyone to heed. She tried to tilt her head up to look at Lovou. She needed to see if he had the foresight to grab the petrified Masha. They needed to run before it got any worse, because it could always get worse.
A sudden, jagged rip of fabric sounded.
Followed quickly by the harsh grating of a vicious snarl. A frenzied wail of rage overtook the room. Cetlali fell away from the table in a heap as something wrenched Ezren's weight
from behind her. As she scrambled to her hands and knees, she saw Masha on top of Ezren, pinning him on his side, in an awkward sprawl.
Masha screamed at him, positively
apoplectic, "Don't you fucking touch her! You never touch her again, you bloated maggot!" A furious squall burned behind her grey eyes. She ripped the small, blunted blade of the paper knife out of Ezren's shoulder. A cool rage stretched her face, and she raised the blade gleaming crimson and gold, intending, without hesitancy, to jab it into somewhere much more deadly.
Cetlali jumped on her in an instant. Her arms wrapped around Masha and yanked her off of Ezren in a frenzy, sending the knife clattering away. The child wailed with a protesting fury in her flailing limbs. Cetlali ignored everything as she held Masha to her as firmly as she could manage. They scrambled together, twisting. Lovou was right there, arms already reaching for the enraged child. Seeming less like a child now that she screamed for the
celestial Thonul to deliver Ezren into each one of the nine hells.
"Go!" Cetlali begged Lovou as she shoved a thrashing Masha into his arms. "Take her to safety, now!"
Lovou seethed, glaring down at Cetlali's blank face. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she shook like a sopping leaf in a storm.
She devoted all of her strength and focus to getting the young girl to safety. Not a second of concern for herself, she couldn't bear it. She glared down at the man just regaining his senses, disoriented after being stabbed so fast, by someone so small, so sure, and so full of justified rage.
"Go!" Cetlali's despondent scream
lambasted Lovou. She shoved him, though it did little to make him want to leave. He looked at her one last time. Shaking his head with an angry glower, he snarled something unintelligible. Then, he slung the Enharouq girl over his shoulder like a damned carpet roll
and was gone with the echoing slam of the door.
Ezren struggled to stand and Cetlali rushed over to him, ripping at the ruined part of her muslin skirt to press it over his wound.
"Vassour Elect, I'm so sorry..." She didn't know what she was apologizing for, but she was sure it was all somehow her fault. She wasn't paying enough attention or wasn't fast enough to point out that Masha and Lovou were there with her. She insulted him somehow, without even knowing it.
He had come to his quarters already in a mood. And she had the audacity to be seated in his chair as she managed his files. She should know well by now that it was never about what she did. It was only that he'd found a new way to be disappointed by her.
Ezren gave her a disdainful look. "Get the healing kit," he snarled. As he sat in his chair, a veil lifted. All that haughty terror deflated. He stewed like a petulant child, glaring at his table,
stained with ink and the swiping smears left by Cetlali's struggling.
She looked down at herself. She wore a dress Athua gifted her, an airy, bright yellow one. The blood and ink were an irreparable stain. Marred. Ruined. She swallowed something frantic and submitted to Ezren's tantrum.
She came back, kneeling at his side as she handed him a flask, a heady clear liquor from Batawarenti. Known not only for its effective purifying and numbing abilities but also it's very efficient intoxication if imbibed. He took a long, heavy couple of swallows, and passed it back to her. She took it and dumped it over her hands and his wound. She gave it back before she worked. He hissed and fidgeted and finished the flask off.
This was a common practice between them at this point. She'd sewn up him up before.
None had ever resulted from an effort to protect her. This wound was something long festering. She didn't think she could ever
overlook such visceral evidence. This was lasting proof that he had hurt her and someone had the courage to stop him. Cetlali felt an agonizing distance from the implications of such an understanding. She could only do so much at a time. Right then, she just wanted to get Ezren to stop moving, bleeding, and seething with a silent fury.
He was no stranger to a fight or a bit of blood, but his hands were almost shaking. The barely concealed emotion backlit his eyes, seeming unstoppable like a raging forest fire.
Cetlali tied off her last stitch and lumbered to her feet despite the agony in her legs.
"I should have that little wretch gutted,"
Ezren's abrupt snarl shook through the silence.
Cetlali squeezed her hand into a tight fist.
She felt more than remembered the small blade in her hand. An object meant for slicing through material to get at wounds or cutting the suture thread, meant for helping and healing. Despite its original intent, something tempted her to shove the blunt little thing right
through Ezren's eye and end this farce once and for all. Perhaps Masha had the right of it. All that perilous influence, all that dangerous fury, it could extinguish into nothing with just a singular, pointed strike. A sudden hollowing fear came up in her chest though, because in the end, she wasn't sure she could do it. Killing and killing Ezren Armistead were two different things.
She stared down at him, numb, as tears brimmed in her eyes. She released the knife. It clattered into the kit just as she dropped to her knees. She grasped at his thighs, and her voice sounded like the moment was pulling up her fingernails one by one. "Ezren please! You cannot harm Masha!"
She realized the error in her words when his challenging glare snapped to hers. He shifted in his chair and Cetlali was sure he was going to strike her. Rising onto her knees, she pressed her hands against his stomach and slid up his chest. She leaned her entire body into him and was profoundly unsure inside her own skin. She
had to fist her hands in the ruined sash across his chest to keep herself from shaking.
"Ezren, she is young and foolish. Masha comes from an entirely different age and realm.
She doesn't understand!" She pleaded. The words were like bile spewing out her lips, scalding everything inside of her on their way out. The truth that screamed between her breaths was that Cetlali didn't understand any of it, either. There was a soul shattering fear broiling in her very blood, thrumming through her with finality. There was nothing she would not do to protect the youngest Enharouq. His toxic wrath and greed would not touch her.
"I'll talk to her, Vassour Elect. Imperator Caran returns tonight. Masha is far more than just capable of being a successful Auxiliary to him now —,"
Ezren grabbed her arm and yanked her close. "Do you mock me, Cetlali?" He hissed out the words with a clipped rage. The compliment towards Masha was an
unintentional jibe at his pride.
Cetlali's tears were back, and she did her best not to sob. "No Ezren, please!" Heaving out a shaking breath, she pleaded through the pain of him squeezing her arm. "She's just a child! She was just trying to protect me!" He shoved her onto the floor. Cetlali let out a pathetic little yelp at the pinpoints of agony on her backside.
"And is that what you wish for?" His rage shook through her as he snarled, "You believe you need protection? From me?" A vibrant haze came over his vision. His features wrinkled with disgust and anguish. His voice held a forced softness, yet agonized and accusing, "After all I have done for you, Cetlali..."
"No, Ezren, please..." Cetlali sobbed, wishing this torment would end. "Please, there is nothing and no one that I hold more devotion for than you. You must believe me, Ezren."
"Then why should I spare her?" He rasped, eyes boring into hers. "She would have killed me."
"Please, Ezren... Please!" she begged through her tears. "Sh-sh-she's just a child." The words should have been more than enough.
Even in all her despair, Cetlali knew that none of this was right. She shouldn't have to be defending Masha for protecting her. She shouldn't have to be beg for the safety of a child's life. None of this should have ever happened at all.
"Spare her, please." Cetlali begged and the next words came out in a pained whisper,
"Ezren, I will do anything..." The moment she spoke it, the oath slammed around her like shackles. Her heart ached itself into its next reluctant beat. Something echoing and foreboding thread through the subsequent cadence. She chilled into stillness, like her body already decided it was a kinder thing this way, allowing itself to die.
Ezren's eyes gleamed with something hollow, hungry. He blinked and leaned towards her. His fingertips spread across her jaw, eyes
narrowing with a dreadful tilt to his lips as he spoke. "I'll hold you to that, Cetlali."
She nodded once but did not reply.