Even in peeling the freshest orange, there is waste -- the hollow, orange skin, the stringlets of white membrane meant to be thrown to the compost. There is, in the building of a new monument, the rubble of the old one it replaces needing to be swept away. One might say the same of minds: they are not clean things, or perfect, but cluttered with any manner of debris. Even the most precise hole could not be cut in the layers of a conscience without some trash trying to push its way through.
And with some minds, that was the case more than others.
Murder without reason is a sin.
Rhaena Olwak had a mouthful of sand. When she chewed upon it -- and she knew to chew because the tongue must get all of the taste, that was simply the way it was done -- it pierced the top of her mouth and the fragments split off the edges of her teeth. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was a chip of bone and what was a stubborn grain. But she must chew it. That was right. That was obedience. There was a little trowel pushing down her tongue and pouring it into her. And a voice. Male. It spoke in another language, a hard and unforgiving tongue, but she knew the language innately, as if she'd been raised under its tutelage.
"Swallow it, Oro'me. All of it. It is the stuffing--"
"No," she said, and while the voice was not Rhaena's, the words were hers, as if she'd no control over her tongue; like this moment was not hers at all. "I've had enough I've had--"
A hissing overflow of sand was scooped into her mouth. Strong fingers squeezed her jaw like a vice, forcing it wide. The glass edge of the trowel scraped the rough scaling across the bridge of her mouth. "It is the stuffing," the voice said again, "by which we insulate ourselves against the wrongness of the world. You must have it all, you must have your daily due."
The sand was burning, filling her, scalding her throat and clogging her nose as it worked its way up through her cavities with every breath. Plugs like half-wet granite-meal filled her nostrils from the back of her mouth.
Rhaena -- Oro'me -- could feel grains trickling into her eyes, falling off the hand of the overzealous sand-feeder. Blinding her. Turning to mud in her tears. The taste of blood and earthy sand filling her mouth. Steel and glass. The crunch of a trowel-point jabbing up, up into the meaty mouth-top as the base of the spade tried to press the jaw down further, straining, until bone wanted to shatter and all of her teeth creaked with the pressure.
"Just do what I ask, Oro'me. Just be a good girl. Stop flailing, stop struggling, do what I tell you--"
Too much torque. A cracking tooth, an unhinged jaw, the force of a trowel thrusting high into the back of her thr--
"Oro'me. Oro'me?"
That was not a taste that went away with water and mint. It would be there, clinging, lingering well after the flickering thought left. Hot, dry sand and gummy blood.