Work Text:
You are a cleric of the Life domain. You serve a god of goodness and care, and embody their healing principles. Life is the domain of deities of creation and birth, deities of mercy and protection, and deities of agriculture, nature, and bounty. All clerics have the power to heal, but those who draw from the power of the Life domain are unrivaled paragons of preserving and renewing life.
[James Haeck, “Cleric 101: Life Domain,” D&D Beyond]
Kristen Applebees, you’re in your bedroom right now, you've got an emblem of a cob of corn in praise to Helio, the god of corn, and his father, Sol, the god of the sun. You have been touched by his spirit divine. You have been sent to this world to share the healing power of your god, amen!
[Fantasy High, “The Beginning Begins”]
When she’s younger, Kristen tastes holiness in the back of her throat, thick enough to choke on. Divinity tastes like this: syrup-sweet, high-fructose-cloying, saintly saccharinity.
When Kristen is nine, she trips and scrapes her knee on the sidewalk, calamitously, and as she weeps and wails and clutches her calf she watches syrup ooze slow and sticky out of the wound instead of blood.
(At Sunday breakfast, she pushes her pancakes away. I’m not hungry, she tells her mother, and her mother feels her forehead for a fever. You’ll feel better after you eat, sweetheart, her mother advises, and they sit until Kristen cleans her plate.
This is the rule in the Applebees household: you eat until you’re done. You don’t waste Helio’s harvests.)
Kristen is six and sick with the flu and when she spits up into the bowl at the side of her bed only a throat-scorching slurry of ethanol comes out, the spillover dripping bloodied from her nose. Her throat hurts too sharp to scream for her mother.
Sometimes when she sits in church she feels a tickle in her throat, starting at her sternum and building, grow as you go, until she coughs up kernels into the cupped pit of her hand, the sanctuary. No blood, no bile, only clean perfect corn, and who is Kristen to wonder why her god gives her blessings that taste more like punishments, that hurt coming out? Who is Kristen to suggest that she doesn’t want to slip from the front pew onto her hands and knees and hack up golden corn, gasping and glowing, rapturous, interrupting the sermon? Who is Kristen to assume that she knows what’s best for her?
(She is seven when the corn comes, and she sobs as Pastor Amelia, wide-eyed, declares her a miracle worker, a prophet in the flesh (the scattering of corn on the ground some symbology of the divine, a forecast from the old diviners, the portents they used to see the rapture in, the world will end in—). A mouth for heaven to speak, teeth and tongue, and lo, Heaven’s voice was shaped in endosperm, germ, pericarp, and tip cap.)
(At fourteen, freshman year, she’s an old pro; when she doesn’t want the fuss, she keeps the corn in her mouth, chokes and chews and swallows.)
When Kristen’s alone in the kitchen, knife grip in her hand, caught in the rhythmic chop of vegetables (this is how I feel closest to Helio, her mother told her once, confidential, cooking dinner for this family—don’t tell Pastor Amelia, and she chuckled, nervous, but I’d rather worship here in this kitchen than any church, if I could choose), she wonders—if she stabbed the blade into her stomach, to the hilt, twisted the knife, would the wound leak creamed corn through her clutching fingers? She’s bled before, red and real and mortal; she broke a bone when she was eight; she knows she can bleed, she knows she’s human. (Right?) (She must be.) (Right?)
(She fell from her bike and snapped her leg, boneshard breaking skin, and as she slumped there clutching at her thigh and dripping silent sobs, she saw gold (corngold) light shining on her, a spotlight from heaven or from her, and her eyes went white with sainted pain as the bone snapped back into place, the skin knit together, the gravel dislodged and fell with clinking onto the ground; she stumbled to her feet and felt for the break, and the only testament that there was ever one was the blood that clung to her fingers, sticky(-sweet?); she smelled popcorn on the air, buttered and salted, hot out of the microwave.)
(Helio wouldn’t let his prophet die. (Helio would let his prophet die?) She’s not a good mouthpiece. She’s not his word made manifest, or whatever else they whisper when they think she can’t hear, or whatever else they whisper when she can’t. She wonders what it would be like to stab herself in the stomach. She cries when her god heals her.)
Kristen’s hands get hot when she heals, glow yellow-warm, drip with something that could be holy light or sun or butter. No oily residue on the wound, but her palms feel greasy afterwards. She scrubs them clean in the sink, avoids her reflection in the mirror.
Clerics speak to their gods. Or, clerics should speak to their gods. Or, girls who were chosen by (for) their gods at birth should speak to their gods. That’s what Kristen’s mother says, what Kristen’s father says, what Pastor Amelia and the congregants say. It’s Kristen, the cleric, the girl who hears Helio, the girl who talks to gods, to the father and the son and the holy cornstalk, hallowed be their names.
Kristen has never heard Helio’s voice. Even a whisper.
(Kristen, I love you.) (I know.) (Does she?)
The holiness of her body can be merciful. Kristen is a citadel of life, a safe haven amongst the harvest. And lo, when the son of Sol was starving, he came upon a stalk of corn in the withered land and ate of its sweet flesh and was sated. A cleric’s role is to be the stalk. A cleric’s role is to heal, to save, to sate hunger.
The holiness of her body can be unyielding. A cleric is not only a healer. Kristen carries a shepherd’s crook: a staff for prodding sheep, for picking up fallen animals, for fighting off predators. Raised to block a blow, raised to strike one. Kristen follows the path of pacifism—but Kristen is the child of paladins, and Kristen knows holy war, how a weapon can shape a prayer as easy as a mouth. Kristen is, when push comes to shove, unafraid of self-defense.
(In the name of her god.) (Against the emblem of her god.) (Her staff hits huskflesh, for a split second, and her staff slips out of her hand, scatters across the floor clear to the other side of the room, as if Helio himself is saying nice try, but don’t you remember what my gospel has to say on weapons formed against me? Didn’t you do the reading, Kristen? Don’t you remember your place?)
Godlight is blinding. It’ll burn everything in its path. It’ll burn its bearers from the inside out. And the righteous burning shall say acorn.