Morning always met the sons of the sun mopping the halls. The morning of the sun ceremonial was no different- unless counting the fact that they had to be up a full hour earlier to set up the requirements after cleaning the halls.
"You think if she have a successful binding they won't take her away?" Sunny asked quietly, mop in hand, his chin signalling at Halo.
Luce wanted to answer. She wanted to say yes, to give him a comfort of sorts, but she too doubted it. She had seen multiple women before her get the red ribbon and vanish. Now it was Halo, maybe she was next.
She abhorred the thought, clutching her mop tight and continuing with the task in hand, her head remaining low.
"Well most of you have grown since last time we met. Sunny, going to give the hormones a hard head too?" Markh, the Grand Bishop said as he walked into the room, a hearty laugh following.
Usually only the sons of the sun were up this early, the elders- such as the Arch Fatty, as Sunny called him, were at the time sprawled on their beds snoring like the pigs there were- as Sunny would phrase it.
A snort escaped Sunny, a couple chuckles from the others filled the room too.
"He hates being told that," Halo commented.
"I hate the dark and you don't see me forcing it to be daytime all the time now do you?"
"I get it," Sunny announced.
"Where's my mop? Where are the others?" Grand Bishop Markh looked around as he asked.
Silence.
Sigh.
"Well, I'm here, give me a mop, kids, let me show you how we did it in the good old days!"
The cleaning never was that enjoyable.
The ceremony demanded willpower. It was something the elders couldn't force on him. It was the final step to truly joining the religion.
A three step process, two of which he had been forced to do.
He remembered.
The sun shaped burn on the back of his hand was a very good reminder. He rubbed it watching the elders set up, smiling at the Grand Bishop in his flowing robes which seemed to glow as if they had the power of the sun embedded within them.
This was Sunny's chance, it was to be his greatest act of defiance yet. To make it better, there would be absolutely nothing anybody could do to force him to do anything.
He rubbed on the sun shaped scar some more, his jaw clenching and mouth growing bitter.
The Grand Room had an unwelcoming warmth to it. The torches burned brighter that they ever had, the flow of the fire seeming to follow the movements of Grand Bishop Markh.
It was before dawn, the largeness and almost emptiness of the room was accompanies by an extremely unsettling warmth. Even with the brightness of the torches, it was unlikely that they could emit such amounts of heat.
"Well, speak the words, open your heart."
Sunny was last in line, the Grand Bishop spoke the words he had spoken to each of the sons that had come before Sunny.
Silence.
Pindrop silence.
Sunny's jaw tightened.
He wasn't going to do it. It was a low bargain for anyone to have a successful ceremony, in five generations of sons, only two had managed-according to information provided.
"Speak the words you ungrateful-" Arch Priest Bilhom growled, stopping himself from speaking any further.
The room dimmed with the sun's rising.
"He's a waste."
"Why even bother?"
"He was granted mercy and he denies it."
Sunny's head remained lowered, he held some respect towards the Grand Bishop. Unlike the other rude, greedy, always angry, elders who spent their days enacting a nonexistent superiority.
"And which of you have the authority to decide who is and isn't a waste?" The Grand Bishop's voice echoed the hall in an almost unhuman likeness.
Silence.
"Why did you reject it? Tell me," Grand Bishop Markh asked immediately after taking Sunny for a private walk around the cathedral.
"No reason," Sunny grumbled, rubbing the scar on the back of his hand.
Without another word, they walked to a balcony, watching the final moments of the sunrise.
It was warmer that it usually was, brighter, the vegetation seemed to glisten more under its light.
"Would you accept a god that killed your parents?" Sunny eventually asked.
"No, but who said the Sun god killed your parents?"
Sunny's hands met the railing, looking at the garden growth.
"It's pretty obvious."
"You were found in a burnt field, consumed by a sunly fire, that much is true...what happened prior to that, nobody knows."
"His fire consumed them."
"Maybe it did, but as I said, nobody knows."
Sunny looked away, his grip on the railing tightening.
"I know that my parents are gone, and I'm here, a play thing for his religion."
"I'm the one that found you on that day, if your stay here is as punishing as you state it to be, why not go elsewhere?"
Sunny had thought of it, way too many times. He had tried it. But anywhere under the sun, he could be found by the sun religion, that much had been made clear.
"I'm not saying you run away, of course, tracking while using the sun's power is much too easy. Running away would be, well, foolish."
The words stung. It was as if the Grand Bishop was directly addressing Sunny's attempts to run away in the past.
"Do you know what the belieft hold the religion up?"
"Faith, hope, honesty-" Sunny started answering as he had answered a million times before, boredom evident in his tone.
"Freedom."
Sunny stared at the Grand Bishop for a good while, his robes gleaming in the sun and his skin shimmering like pearl.
"Do you know what freedom is, Sunny?"
"Being able to do whatever you want?"
The Grand Bishop looked at him for a moment before chuckling.
"If you do whatever you want and nobody is there to stop you from leaping off a cliff, are you free, or just alone?"
Silence.
"Freedom, Sunny, is being able to choose not only what to do, but who you are as a whole. That is why you have to make the choice when creating the bond with the Sun god. You have to choose it yourself, it is not slavery."