by Max Jager
He spun. He felt his blood pushing out to the outer parts of his fingers like small centrifuged vials. His nose and lips turned red, his eyes followed. His hair pulled through from inside the gaps of his helmet. He spun five times, five full circles of confused dance, until the blade slipped out of his hands.
It flew high into the air, the half-sword with its tiny shadow, a kind of toothpick. And only by sheer luck it seemed, did it hit its target. Hard through the mouth. Ajax watched a pincer fly off trajectory, plunging into the tough earth with a swift swish.
The wound spurted out blood. Green, and thickly vile. The animal spun, like Ajax, writhed, like Jeronus. A natural response to having its teeth and bones ripped from its person. Ajax ran to it at this time, with his head forward and his arms outreached to grab a hold of the creature. He found one of the many hands and climbed, digging his fingers deep into the little gaps separating the armored slots of the animal trunk. Ladders, he thought. Ladders leading to the face and the blade interred into the side of the creature's mouth. It siphoned the green blood, freshly warmed by the red ring in the sky.
A shake. All of his armor brushed and clanked. He tightened his grip. Both the creatures outraged thrashing and Ajax's fear wanted him off. He clung anyways.
He climbed and felt for the little sword of his. He dug it out and felt the pieces of the exoskeleton brush his shoulder. It looked like a spilling dam with all the spilled blood leaking out. He raised it again, cut again. A set of eyes, an antenna fell off the monster. The animal shook again, Ajax lost most of his balance. He hung by a single arm only, his whole body felt the force yanking him away. It was made worse with the blood right above him, like a fire hydrant with the kind of pressure that could rip flesh from bone. He maneuvered beneath the spillage and felt only the mist of blood and small sprinkled wet taps. He was looking for a good spot, a gap of armor to dig his blade in. He found one, near the top where the neck (assuming there was a neck) would have been. Like a chisel, he fixed his blade in there and began tapping it inside flesh. He worked it with that same artisan intensity, his eyes focused, his palms sweaty, worked it inside the armor and inside the flesh. He felt the squishy body, the flimsy, gelatin-like pink mush for a body. Pushing, pushing, pushed. The injected blade came out another end. A piece of armor fell and a giant swelled wound burst into a shower of blood. Ajax kept his blade in. He was screaming, not louder than the shower, but loud enough to remind himself he was still alive. Like mad surgery, he pulled down on the sword and let go of the body. He let the blade guide him down like a monorail and watched as the wound widened with the stroke of the blade, length-wise through the centipede. It was an autopsy, a filleting of the creature. Ajax hit the floor and his blade followed near him, it whistled against the wind and stabbed its broken edge into the dirt.
The creature fell, with a cringing convulsion and seizure. The rest of the body still laid in a circle, piled up like a giant green and black rope. The wound poured blood out, that thick, viscous goo as if Ajax had struck an oil vein. It filled the pool green.
But it was somewhat comfortable, to be sitting in a pool of your enemies life force. To stay there, listening to the death throes of a behemoth disappear into the wind. It was good knowing even monsters bleed, that they die too.
Ajax's breathing calmed into a set interval of proper deep gasps. He stretched out his armor and his clothes. It was suctioned on to his flesh and opening the little gap, a small puddle of green good fell out.
Ajax wiped his forehead, he was watching the flow of the blood, following it as it extended out to the other end of the arena.
There he saw a boy, still untainted with the green-stuff. He took a step towards him but stopped. He wanted to say something, to offer a hand, but watched closely with tired eyes.
He was a peculiar boy who did not cry (not yet at least). Who rubbed his eyes and looked around with wide-eyed curiosity. Who looked at Ajax, then adjacent to him. The boy screamed. Not at the monster or to the red-eyed half-devil in front of him. He screamed at Jeronus. He scrambled for the body on scraped knees. Then his head fell and his body drooped and he sat on his knees, with his nails digging into the dirty earth.
He was prostrated in front of the corpse of Jeronus.
Ajax couldn't speak. There was a strange quietness about this all. The sound of rushing water was still coming from the body of the giant arthropod. It lent a calmness to the ceremony. There was wind, though it seemed to circumvent the coiled corpse. Ajax let his helmet fall, wind brushed his sweat-grossed hair past his face. It was greasy, wet, tacky. It couldn't compare to the feeling in his heart though.
Berok crawled over to Jeronus. Tear-dry, red-cheeked. He shook the body and prodded the pale face. He looked back to Ajax, Ajax who had nothing to say or do and offer solemn rejection. His tired eyes looked dismally into Jeronus, the boy knew what this meant, almost instantly. Why wouldn't he? This wasn't the first corpse.
It didn't hurt any less.
Berok frowned. His face, undecided in emotional outrage. He grit his teeth, his cheeks swelled.
He massaged the body again. He put his hands on his chest, pushed down. CPR like he had seen in the movies. Nothing. He slapped Jeronus's face. Nothing.
He grabbed small piles of sand from the dug earth, compressed them as much as his little hands would and pushed them down on the holes of the corpse. Maybe, Ajax thought, maybe he thinks he could fill the holes.
A small draft blew the dirt aside and left the wounds blood-blackened and exposed.
Nothing.
The boy slumped over, his dirty hands in front of his face to cover a new outbreak of tears. Ajax looked up into the sky. He saw birds. He rubbed his nose and looked around and tried to strangle the feeling in his chest. But it popped up, like a hiccup, like a diseased cough. That small uncontrollable tick. When the boy started to scream unintelligibly, when the sound of outraged sadness struck Ajax's ears, he stopped thinking about suppressing anything. His body stopped shaking, his chest stopped stretching. His body let go.
It must have been the first time in eight years since Ajax cried. And now he remembered how bad it felt.
Darr VI
Darr
The choir of men played around the white circle. They screamed vulgarities at Darr. Darr whom, just punched in the face, crumpled on the floor with his loose teeth hanging down his lips. They did not grow back as fast, as well, as they should. He sat there, on the floor, like a small teething infant, with his hands to his face and the little knobs of white forming on his bleeding gums. He faced down. His body was bruised and healing and bruising again, his flesh changing color from green and purple to pink to tan like a confused chameleon.
All around him the men threw small bronze coins, crudely etched onto them, a different number and a different face of Astrix. They threw them on the floor near Darr, somewhere outside a white chalk line. They were betting on him or rather the many things about him: whether he would stand up again, whether he would survive another five minutes, whether he'd win or live even. It went on, some demons taking tallies and small tips as people lost and won.
The demon in front of Darr walked up. He was nude almost, with a brown cloth covering his genitals. He pushed his scarred and dry, flaking feet on Darr's face and rubbed it down on his chin.
"Come on, fight," Astrix said from behind the crowd. He was looking with suspicion more than pleasure.
Darr spat blood on the floor, it tainted a bundle of bronze coins.
The foot rose high above him.
"Show me something, I tell ye." Astrix screamed. Darr closed his eyes and breathed heavily, the foot hovered over his skull.
"You won't heal that, you'll die. Understand?" Astrix said. It was coming down, Darr felt the air push back as it did.
"Stop!" Astrix screamed. All the deranged creatures turned to stare at Astrix. His chest jumped up and down, his breathing was quick and deep. He stood from his wooden rocking chair and walked to the wrestling circle.
/> "Why stop me?" The competitor said with that stupid, deformed smile of his. Astrix eyed him up and down. His face soured and he cocked his hand back. Blood flew everywhere. The competitor hurled back. Astrix grabbed his head before he could land and sunk a thumb into his left eye until he felt it pop underneath.
"Don't you ever question me." He said. The other men heard it better than the demon, who lay on the floor in throes.
A deviant demon, a small imp-like specimen, shuffled below the feet of the other betters. He was collecting.
Astrix knelled over Darr, who looked up with his half-healed, half-broken face. It looked like steel sheets at the forge, some of it mended and treated and the other red and dark and malleable. Darr whistled from his broken nose. He coughed some. Astrix fixed two thumbs around the hook-shaped thing and felt for the cartilage and bone. He snapped it back into place.
"You might redeem yourself if you'd just fight. I'd even forgive your transgression if you would."
"I have nothing to fight for. I have nothing to apologize for." Darr belched snot and blood. "I had a chance to kill you and failed."
"The men will kill you and rape you and take from you everything. You will be a figure of fun for the rest of your days, is that what you'd like? O' noble Darr?" Astrix tapped his face, amicably. "You're not a pacifist. It's not in your blood, believe me."
"If it makes you more miserable, that's good enough for me." Darr looked past the king and towards the candle holders and wicks circling the small room.
"What do I care what happens to you?"
"Well, you're here, aren't you?"
"You're so stupid," Astrix said. "Feel free to meditate in your small box, then." Two men came up behind him. "Take him away and don't feed him this time. Starvation will break him."
Two demons came around with their beige tunics and lifted Darr, dragged him by his arms and legs through the doors and the many halls of the dungeon. He laid in their arms coming in and out of consciousness and caught glimpses of the blurry shadows across the walls. They morphed and curved.
He awoke again at the height of air. He was thrown into a cell. The four-inch-thick metal bars clanked behind him as he rolled down the filthy floor, stopping only at the end of the room. Near him, a bucket and the smell of excrement.
Time passed even slow down there, as if the everlasting sun wasn't enough a prod and poker of sanity, there was darkness now. Torches that seemed to burn forever, brick and mortar walls with the small gaps that allowed dust and light inside. There was no change of day, he knew. No escape, he felt. Darr dragged his body up, two joints rubbed against each other wrongly around his shoulder. He snapped it back into place and rested his bad side against the wall of the prison. He was feeling residual pain, which was odd.
Mortality, after all, was odd for Vicars.
He laid in a corner of the room thinking that, with closed eyes and his cauliflower ear stinging and ringing. He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted to fall into it, to dream. His eyelids began to burden themselves, to overwhelm him. And just before he could close them fully, before the sound of distant footsteps could disappear, he slipped out of it. Rather, was thrown out of it.
There was a loud bang in the front of the cell. A collection of successive blows against the metal bars, the sound made the local prisoners aggressive. They began to screech in strange languages.
Darr turned to face the source. He felt worse for some reason.
"What do you want?" He asked.
Aleistar sniffed and covered his nose with one hand. He extended a metal cup with the other, it barely fit through the bars. A drink? Something like it. It looked like that bitter black sludge he had earlier at the kitchen, days ago (or what felt like days).
"I managed to convince him to give you this. As a diplomatic gesture." Aleistar said. "He wants you to know that you are not, in his words, a plebeian. Though you may act like one. And he would prefer that you, in his words, act with more dignity."
Darr took the cup and drank. He felt better, his pain seemed to subside a little. Calories, after all, wherever they came from, were vital to that nasty process of revitalization and regeneration.
"I bet you feel smug and strong, huh? With me behind the bars now." Darr said. "Does it feel good being a lapdog?"
"Better out here than in there." Aleistar pinched his nose.
"So was your cry of guilt a lie too?" Darr asked. "Is that all it takes to make you feel good, a little air?"
"No," Aleistar said. "No, none of what I said was a lie."
"Good." Darr drank again. "Is there another message from your master?"
"No." Aleistar looked down.
Darr sipped. He limped all the way to right side of the wall and put his back against it to slide down gently onto his ass.
"It was stupid trying to kill Astrix." Aleistar said.
"Is that what he told you to say too?"
"You knew that you would fuck it up. You tried killing him with a potted plant, after all." Aleistar rubbed his forehead. "What a stupid plan. Why do it? You had a good deal."
"You're still so stupidly gullible, aren't you?" Darr scoffed. "That's what my friend would have said, anyways. And he'd be right. I may be an idiot but at least I still have a brain, doctor."
Aleistar wrapped his hands around two bars and pressed his face against them.
"What do you mean?"
"You believed him when he said he'd bring back your family and you believe him now, with his convenient deal?" Darr asked. "That everyone is nice and safe and that they're free to go so long as I comply? Did you even see these supposed prisoners?"
"No."
"Because they don't exist." Darr said. "I've accepted that fact long ago."
"He's keeping you alive so maybe you should cooperate, make your life a little easier."
"He's always wanted me here. It's all a game to him and I'm the zoo animal. And if he's frustrated, it's because that's part of the fun too." Darr looked away. "That's all he wants, company to harass. Company to destroy. Nothing more. Why would he tell the truth, after all? He has what he wants."
Aleistar bit the interior of his mouth.
"He has as many docile pets as he'd ever need." Darr laughed. "Who am I kidding? He'll probably be bored within the month. And out again, he'll hunt for more. A living Venus fly trap. He's probably sweet mouthing another poor idiot like you as we speak."
"So that's it? You've given up?"
"I'm taking things as they come." Darr sighed. "My hot-headedness, my violence brought me here. If I was a bit calmer, more compliant, more thoughtful. If I'd just listen…"
"You could have stopped yourself."
"I could have stopped you." The torch fires flickered. "I could have killed you a long time ago. Now? Why does it matter now? Revenge? Revenge only makes my situation worse."
"That's right." Aleistar said. "You were a pain in my ass before, so why can't you show me that same energy now and try and kill that prick again?"
"I'm sure you'd like that." Darr said. "You're always thinking about yourself before anyone else, after all, Doctor."
The word doctor seemed to stab into Aleistar's guts. He twitched.
"I'm angry at how calm you are with all of this. I'm frustrated that you'd let that demon run around, knowing he still causes that much grief. I'm frustrated you're a pushover. Who cares what happens to me?" Aleistar asked. "I'm already doomed. At least punish him too, isn't that what you're here for? Vengeance? Punish him as much as me. We both deserve it."
"I am punishing him." Darr laid on his back. "I'm boring him to death. I'm not even giving him the pleasure of watching me. If I suffer, I suffer quietly. That's the thing that drives him wild, seeing his exceptional pet act in very uninspiring ways. He hates that."
Aleistar banged on the bars. The other prisoners howled.
"That's it?! That's your plan? Behaving like a fucking saint?"
"Until my time comes, yes." Darr said.
"You're going to
rot is what you're going to do."
"No, I'm not." Darr closed his eyes. "I'm repenting. I'm making myself a meek man. And I'm sure the Lord will save me, one way or another."
"Show some spine."
"It eats away with me," Darr said. "Knowing that whatever lives in your king lives inside of me too. That long-lasting desire, that primitive thing. I can't keep fighting knowing each time I do I get closer to becoming a psychopath like him."