“What do you mean?”
“If you want to make out as if it was your sufferance to assist, then say so, man. I do not need to play at words with you.”
“Ah, I see. You misunderstand. It is my name. My name is Convenient.”
He blinked, taking this in.
“Were you named by a fool?”
The bearded warrior gave him a very focused, careful look, right in the eyes.
“I certainly hope not,” the knight replied.
Outcast just stared back at the dull brown gaze.
Whatever the man saw in his eyes must have been enough, because he nodded firmly and turned away after that. There were many strange things about this day, and this was just another to be added to the list.
So he left the inevitable questions for later and instead asked, “Why did you help me then?”
The strange clothing and bedraggled appearance covered with dirt and muck would once have been the apparel of a proud man. Now it suited well his expression when he answered, “I just do. It’s a task I was given, to occasionally help arrivals from being killed on their first day.”
Strange. But again, nothing new for this day.
“OK, then, how do you choose whom to help?”
“The arriving winds tell me.” He smiled, and behind the scraggly beard, he had all his teeth, although some had turned yellow. Then his expression turned serious. “I will not spend much time with you, but there are a few things you should know.”
This should be interesting, he thought.
He nodded that the armored man should continue, which he did.
“There will be much you will want to do at first, but let me give you this advice, take it slow. The monolith speaks the truth, but there are riddles within its riddle. Ha!”
He smiled along with the old man. Survival instinct allowed him the natural lie of sharing the humor. Not that he thought the humanoid would take it badly if he didn’t, but it helped to be friendly when other beings were inclined to share information.
“First, take your time to recover. Wait it out until you feel stronger. No one else will bother you here at the arrivals platform now that they have all left. Once you feel up to it, go down that path to the north. It will lead you to the Festering Warrens where most of the lowly prisoners stay and work. On the way there, you should be attacked.”
He waited but there was nothing more, so he asked, “And that is a good thing?”
“Oh, yes, my apologies. Thou art new, and I forget. Yes, it is a good thing, because in surviving the attack you will stretch yourself, your skills, and your experience with such things. This allows the barriers within your mind to slip memories through, memories you will need if you are to survive for any length of time without losing yourself to despair.”
Outcast blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“It is hidden within the words of the monolith. By seeking out the deeds which not only allow thou to survive but also thrive, you bring forth your related memories, if only in part. Those who give in to the Prison fall into despair and become walking husks, vacant bodies without independence who do what they are told. Those are the beings who flock into the town of the Festering Warrens and are worked to death in the mines.”
The man smiled grimly as he continued, “But those that seek to remain free from that fate fight for survival, and in so doing learn and grow once more. Most avoid the intensity required to spur the mind, the danger is genuine and more often lethal than not. That releases the inner personality that sparks such things and returns to you that which you already are!”
It was quite a lot to take in at once, and while his mind puzzled, he wanted to get some perspective. “So what is this place, this Prison which I cannot see the end of?”
The land stretched away in every direction, with the distance stippled by other floating sections that seemed to have their own clouds as well. Stone cliffs dotted the far horizon, and he could see the serenely regular ones in the open sky nearby had jagged bottoms.
“It’s an amalgamation of landscapes smacked together hodgepodge, each floating within its own pocket dimension. There is no escape because there is no way out. The door only drops people in. It is the cosmic penal colony where the worst beings in the universe spend their life sentences. If you do not get executed, you get sent here, which means someone really wanted you to suffer.”
“How comforting,” he responded.
Convenient chuckled, so he felt the need to elaborate. “I mean it. If someone out there wants me to suffer, then I have a reason to live. Someone made a mistake in not simply ending my life. I now feel driven, Convenient. Driven to escape this place.”
The old man was looking askew at him and said strangely, “No one escapes the Prison.”
Then, this man was a strange and completely different being, so perhaps he shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
The old man pointed at the monolith and its inscriptions.
Outcast had to ask, “Not a single being, ever?”
“None is known to any of us. Surely one who did so would have bragged about it? It would be quite an achievement, after all.”
“Except that everyone coming here has their memory erased, so who would remember that detail?”
Convenient chuckled again, quite merrily. “Yes, well, there is that of course.”
He couldn’t quite explain why, but there was an urge rising within him. Something that was already pushing him to explore this Prison and find the way out.
Not a way out.
The way out.
He knew that, but couldn’t…remember. To explain that would have sounded like he was going mad, and he was not entirely sure that he wasn’t.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“I don’t remember. Many, many years since my crime sent me here.”
“And you never tried to leave?” He asked.
The beard split in another smile. “No, no. I have a debt to repay still. Also, my crime, well, let’s just say that I do deserve to be here. I live only to serve now, my one last duty, and then I can be free. So in the meantime, fare thee well, and I hope to see you again, out there,” he said with a vague wave at the landscape beyond.
Then the man started off, before angling in a southerly direction and disappearing from sight.
Outcast waited, but the armored warrior had been correct, no one else came out to see the new arrival, and so he was left to peaceful pondering.
His head did clear with time as he watched the inner vortices make their slow swirl across the sky.
No stars, only the vague, ephemeral energies clashing together here. He found that his thoughts quickened as the night wore on, his mind grasping the situation and adapting to it with speed he found both startling and comforting.
Like an old friend returned.
Vague recollections…
A well-lit room made of stone, a solid rock without texture or marbling.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were all an unrelieved smooth and an unbroken surface of blue-gray that was glazed over with a hard enamel or glass. Scorch marks were running in great streaks along the floor, up the walls, and across the ceiling.
The smell of carbon hung in the air.
Caused by him?
Perhaps, although he could not quite recall how he had made them. But, he knew they had been made in a halfhearted attempt at testing the room’s ability to contain him, to hold him, to keep the awesome power he wielded at check. It was, after all, his cell.
That realization was surprising to him, but he supposed remembering anything was unexpected at this point.
Before being placed in the room, he had been shown that exertion against the confines would be useless. The outside was as geometrically linear as the inside, a rectangle of stone upon which were writ the wards that would contain the prisoner within.
Intricately made and precisely formed magical wards filled with precious metals from half a dozen worlds. The cell had be
en designed to hold beings of great magnitude, beings who needed to be contained but only for a short while.
He had the feeling that his efforts tested those wards. That the guards in this place of floating blocks latched to circular podiums by jingling, swaying chains had been very careful when providing for him. As prisons went, it was a far cry from being a permanent solution.
Then, it was only meant to hold him for a while, keep him secluded until the trial was over.
A flurry of other images swept by, but none that clicked in place or formed anything coherent. Even with the recollection of that cell, he knew nothing more about himself, just that he had been there, and some feelings.
Trapped?
No.
He had not felt trapped—which was strange.
Faces, images, and places all cluttered in the flux of his thoughts.
Only when his mind settled back into the depths of sleep did they resolve into another memory.
He was in a vast amphitheater, wide at the lowest floor where there was a raised stage, and the circumference much larger still at the outer edge, so high above. Beings or representatives from hundreds of pantheons, worlds, or planar landscapes filled every one of the thousands of seats.
The sheer multitude would have required an astounding memory to recall in the first place.
To him, they were a blur, regardless.
Even without the influence of his passage to the Prison, his mind would never have remembered facts on that many different beings. But that they had all been there, he knew.
They were all assembled in this amphitheater to watch his trial.
The stage was made of the same magically formed stone as his cell.
When had he remembered that?
How had he remembered that?
It seemed that skills and knowledge were more readily recalled after all. How long until he could remember everything?
There was something important, something essential…
He stood there, on the stage.
At his full height of almost six foot six, he was not the tallest being there.
In some cases, not by far. He had braided his long white hair, the end knot coming down to the small of his back. The sides swept back past his ears and down over his shoulders, a stark highlight across his clothing, the bright orange smock all prisoners in this specific holding area wore.
He stood barefoot within a set of concentric rings embedded in the floor, through which his dark gray skin with its granular texture could feel a slight warmth of power even though the stone was cold.
The circle was a great containment, and where he now stood was where many other of the worst criminals in the cosmos had been sentenced.
A waiting room before going into court.
He was under no delusions that this would be a trial to determine his innocence. None came before these judges who were not already known to be guilty, only the extent of their punishment was a question.
He could not remember the trial itself, or the details of it.
The opening ceremony went on for some time, almost as if to goad the prisoner into some sort of action against the very formality of it all. His dream state wafted past it all in a blur of boredom, even as he stood with bearded chin held high, the shapely point combed adequately.
Why had he taken care of his appearance?
It seemed a part of his behavior, his attitude. How he approached life was now something of a mystery to his addled mind, despite that primal portion which still drove him to survive.
His rambling thoughts evoked images of his own face in many different guises. Shorter hair, no beard, or various facial hair trims, perfectly styled for the presentation that he wanted.
He had also been wantonly lax with his appearance at times; those images usually including dirt, blood, or sweat. Exertion and circumstance did not always allow him to be well groomed. That was fine, as, regardless, he admired the sharp features of his face with his prominent cheekbones and thin-lipped mouth.
His focused expression of intensity was painted on all of them. Shining out of all the images of his face from the past, his sapphire-blue eyes burned and narrowed the dream to single points.
Something, a message, or a mantra of some kind.
Something was there, he had stared at himself in a mirror to recite something he must above all else remember. There had been power in the words, their meaning, not in the repetition but rather settled deep within his mind.
He could not remember.
Why would he have gone to such effort? Did he know he would be sent here?
Why would instilling a message help?
On and on, his faces swam past, faster, so many of them that he could no longer draw any association from his past with them.
Blame and scorn radiated from them now, so many faces, blurred and twisted. Their envy, their pressure to see him dead, so many people had wanted him dead.
He could credit the feeling; he actually accepted, and even enjoyed it, from some of them. There were more. Gone were his features; now he looked about as he heard the shouts and cries from the audience at his trial.
He knew they associated him with this other being of such tremendous guile and power.
But his mind did not bring the dream around to explain it to him. All he knew was that they feared him, in relation to this other being, concerning something he had done which proved he could be compared with…Her?
Swirling brushes broke up the scene, throwing his mind aside like flotsam on a surge of emotion so strong he could not even begin to define it.
The flow of thoughts became a torrent, but not a single one latched on and showed him what he wanted to know. Just a single faint glimmer of an idea of Her brought a tempest through his sleeping mind. Thoughts lost coherency; blatant chaos thrust aside all cold logic and whipped the dreams into a frenzy of delusion.
It took some time before things settled.
He could feel his body responding to the light on his skin. He was nearing a waking state, and the myriad of kaleidoscopic images dissipated within a blue fire from his mind, there was one last impression arising.
Escorted by no less than the entire panel of judges, he had been immediately brought before the portal.
The crisp scent of the ozone still clinging in the air prickled his tongue and brought the fragile smell to his nose. Before him stood two arches inscribed and covered in precious stones. The portal was a swirling mass of black and white, chaotic noise in the space before him, sucking at him eagerly.
The slightest push had been more than enough to tip the balance, and he had been consumed by the vortex.
Day 2…
The sky was stained a dull claret, the red hue offsetting the blazing orb of the small sun as it rose in the distance.
From where he sat, the monolith was thrown into stark relief, the writing indecipherable with the dull glow coming from behind.
The tall edifice threw its shadow straight over him and on past the marble stone at the edge of the cliff where the arrivals platform was. He could imagine the sun’s path as it arced overhead and that gave him a clear sense of direction.
East, where the sun rose, and west, where it set.
So north was where the slimy yellow being had gone with its minions, and where Convenient said he should go, to the place called the Festering Warrens. Not a good sign based on the name alone, but then who was he to judge in this place.
It was as good a place to start as any, and he needed to learn more.
Outcast stood and arched his back. His athletic, muscular body stretched well, with no stiffness from the night spent sitting on the hard stone. He had the vague impression that he was used to hard surfaces.
Something from his past perhaps?
He didn’t take much time to ponder the sensation. Keep moving, keep driving toward your goals, and stay ahead of everyone else. That was a creed, some kind of directive on an instinctive level.
He left the black marble
cliff at the far northwestern edge of the Prison behind, walking briskly down the path that dipped along the northern side of the strangely floating land.
**
The ambush was poorly executed if the three prisoners who had planned it ever actually intended it to be much of a trap and not just a chance that was taken to waylay a convict found out alone.
His orange pants did not deter them if they even noticed he wore them.
He had removed the tunic and tied it around his waist like a belt. The material might be useful later, and one did not give up anything in a place where survival would be hard won.
The trail zig-zagged down beside a tall cliff to his right, which would make the stone wall almost due south, since he was headed toward the rising sun. The trail occasionally shrank to a narrow path squeezed between the cliff face and another sheer drop on the other side. Beyond the trail’s edge, the panorama of sky swirled and eddied with unseen currents.
The strange sky was all hues of blue that melted and reformed in strange swirls that the eye could not quite follow.
Bushes and short brush grew alongside the worn track that followed the line of rocky soil from which they toiled for life. He had just come around a corner and was passing between groups of the taller shrubs when the two beings jumped him, one from either side.
Each was snub-nosed, with light skin that darkened to a dull brown in places, and scraggly hair on their heads and chins.
Ugly creatures was Outcast’s first impression.
His second was that they were thugs, strange in this Prison of hardened criminals, and then a third one stepped out behind him and drawled.
“Hello, stranger. Welcome to our little toll road. You got a name?”
The question elicited grunting chuckles from the first two. It was an interesting idea, though. If Outcast could remember his real name, would that be a good start or the finish?
“Could you be any more idiosyncratic?” Outcast asked, the depth and timbre of his voice easily outdoing the attempted polish of the third being.
Convict Fenix Page 5