Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse

by Christian Winter

  Kill Scammander! I will teach you forbidden magic that even he does not know! Murder Scammander and become my apprentice!

  I could never reply, only listen. While I was still paralyzed I could at least feel my and move my tingling arms but not enough to actually help kill Scammander. The cackling was terrible and I noticed a drop of hot liquid fall off my horn. I looked up to see a thin stream of blood slowly running out of my ears, up the side of my face, and off the tips of my horns. I also felt slightly less—rational.

  I tried to close my eyes to rid myself of the terrible nausea of the abyss, but even with them shut all I could see was the eternal scarlet and orange swirl. In fact, it seemed closer with my eyes shut. I forced my eyes open and looked at Scammander: his ears had a crimson trail rolling off his earlobes, up his neck into his hair. Next I looked at Johannes Dubitandum, who was howling and casting and his ears—were bloody too.

  Johannes seized the gun and flung it away from Scammander as the two fell towards the gaping ceiling then suddenly the roof was back in place and the two were standing next to another, like time had reset. Johannes looked dazed, which could never be a good thing when around Scammander.

  Scammander dropped the gun and the flesh on his hands withered away as he grabbed Johannes’s throat with white, boney fingers. The other wizard wailed as the skin began to melt off his neck. Scammander grabbed both sides of the warlock’s face and shook the man until the body flapped loosely between his skinless hands.

  Johannes’s dangling hand drifted down and pulled a ruby-tipped wand out of his boot and swatted at Scammander’s head. The ruby flashed as a stunning shower of red stars shot into Scammander’s temples, throwing the mage across the room and into the wall. Scammander lay convulsing on the floor, gasping and shaking as flashes of fresh blue light wrapped around his face and vanished, then circled his countenance once more, healing the magical wounds.

  Johannes wobbled as he stood up, again proving his strength and defiance. He folded his arms as his blistered throat and face were ensconced in thick shadows that twisted and throbbed as they reconstructed the flesh burned away from the poisonous clutch. I once again gazed upon the wild tattoo of a city being destroyed.

  The warlock’s shoulders heaved as he unfolded his arms, letting them drop by his sides. His veins were swollen with the athletic pump of blood. He waited with the discipline of one who had been through this kind of battle before. Johannes wobbled in place, then steadied himself as the swirling shadows slowly unraveled, revealing his healed face.

  Scammander has discovered a backdoor into my mind, he whispered into my thrumming brain. Even now he reads my most secret spells.

  I saw the mage shake his head and sigh once more. Through my own sabotaged spell he has found a way in!

  I knew then the only way for Johannes to win this duel of sorcery was for him to forget his magical knowledge, and hope to assassinate Scammander with his pistols.

  What a sacrifice.

  Johannes pulled out a phial full of opaque ivory liquid.

  Would he do it?

  He puffed his cheeks out, blowing out heavy breath and gazing at the potion as he tossed it up and down.

  Johannes looked over to Scammander’s motionless body, popped the cork and guzzled the potion. He had no limits.

  He screamed and grabbed his temples and collapsed to his knees as golden static snapped and bent around his head. Scammander began screaming and shaking on the floor as the same enchanted lightning pulsed across his face.

  The wild warlock tugged on his thick hyacinthine hair and wheezed, slowly leaning to one side, then jerking upright and gasping for breath. Dubitandum’s screams dissolved into laughter. “Out! Get out!” he roared as he severed the tie between their mazy minds.

  Johannes was the first to recover. He pulled a blackened unicorn horn from his jacket then dipped the point in a bottle of dark liquid and began carving into the palm of his hand. He winced and cringed and fell to the ground unable to complete the grizzly spell. Scammander still wasn’t up. The warlock looked at the bloody horn before sinking back to the floor, pulling on his hair and shaking his head. For all I could tell, Scammander was either dead or nearly dead. Johannes growled and sat up and resumed carving into his skin, gasping and dropping the ancient unicorn horn a few more times before finally completing the series of bleeding runes.

  Witness the death of the greatest wizard of all time, the black, molesting whisper hissed as it twisted through my brain.

  No matter where you are, the world assumes a vatic quietness when someone is about to die.

  I heard each slow and ponderous footstep as Johannes crossed the old wooden floor to Scammander’s body. I heard each of Scammander’s final, solemn heartbeats as the warlock stood over the elf’s body. I heard Scammander’s last tremulous breath before Johannes took the rest of them from him forever.

  And then my ears were ringing and the two sorcerers were screaming and casting like they wanted the poets to sing about them forever, like they wanted their names written across the stars for the denizens of every world to see, like they wanted nothing more than to say to every century—it was I who have slain the most, it was I who have laid waste to the most, and therefore it is I who am—the greatest wizard of all time.

  Hexes hissed like ice as each wizard continued their furious onslaught. The room was emblazoned with every color of the sunrise and every color of the sunset and every color that splashes across the hours inbetween, but it was never dark. And then spells started failing. The room, once illuminated by vivid exchanges of magic, fell into darkness for longer and longer periods of time. Each mage stumbled and collapsed mid-cast, losing control of their spells and getting up slower and slower, and staying down for longer and longer.

  But they never stayed quiet.

  They cursed one another. They cursed themselves. They cursed the world. And when they were exhausted from cursing, they rose up in the darkness and began casting. Desperately—wildly—hopelessly—for that was the only way to murder the other wizard.

  A kneeling Johannes hurled an effulgent bolt of mana at Scammander.

  The speeding neon missile slowed as it neared his head then began to stretch and distort and swell. Scammander’s eyes closed and he began making strange motions with his hands as he unwove the missile. Thousands of threads of wispy mana slowly grew out of the hovering ball following the twists and turns of Scammander’s fingers as he coaxed and pulled the magic apart until it passed over him in a delicate mist.

  Johannes grimaced and snarled as he rose to his feet, drenched in sweat and resumed throwing magic—stumbling and tripping towards the two pistols hanging on the wall under his oil painting.

  A pallid Scammander gave chase. The fluorescent mana of Johannes’s spells splashed into Scammander’s palms, dripped between his fingers, and trickled down his arm in vivid opalescent liquid light. Johannes tried to gather himself, but magic fell from his fingertips, or shot sporadically into the floor, and sometimes—not at all.

  Scammander’s eyes remained shut. Johannes pulled the two crossed black pistols off the wall, shoving them forward and alternating fire. Scammander ran towards the bullets, jerking his shoulders left then right, twisting, hopping, ducking. His brow furrowed as he began whispering and stretching his fingers, rolling his wrist like he was weaving a cosmic tapestry across the firmament of millenniums. He began weeping enormously as he tossed his head back and flung his arms up in the air racing towards the stumbling Johannes.

  Help me! He’s going to kill me! The mad voice screamed inside my skull.

  Johannes fell back into the wall beneath his painting. He screamed and threw up his hands, pleading for Scammander to stop just as another Johannes flashed up behind Scammander with the two black pistols.

  Suddenly everything was right side up.

  Scammander’s eyes flashed open as he corkscrewed his arms forward. His wrists snapped and trembled as a beam of a bright unprecedented color pierced the mag
e’s forehead like a lance of moonlight wrapped with ribbons of periwinkle dreams. Johannes Dubitandum’s head thudded back into the wall, slid forward on the rare beam, and then sank back once more into the wall. His mouth dropped open, his shoulders slumped, and his dark leather boots went limp.

  “With your own spell,” Scammander said, dropping a few pieces of Eidos onto Johannes Dubitandum’s body.

  I began lumbering over to my brother since the paralysis had finally worn off, still being harassed by the dark and insane whispers. The whispers turned to screams so loud that I collapsed to my knees and covered my ears just as the entire mansion was ripped apart.

  All that remained was a roofless, floorless, wall-less, great room with a stream of books, statues, maps, papers, and debris pouring out into the abyss past Scammander, who was floating in the middle of it all, robe and hair billowing around in the wild wind, staring at another dead tutor.

  Peri Psuche

  “He who cannot forget will never amount to much.”

  Kierkegaard

  I grabbed onto a floating bookshelf, and drifted down to him. A few open books, loose papers, and statue heads drifted past my face and floated off into the red abyss. I grabbed one of the severed statue arms from the stream of debris and before I knew it was swinging it towards Scammander’s head.

  “Scammander! Look out!”

  He turned around just in time for it to club him between the eyes.

  Yes! Again! Shouted the insane voice in my head.

  As Scammander slumped and began to sink into the abyss I let go of the severed marble arm and grabbed him by the robe. It was like holding a statue with one hand—I couldn’t.

  I wrapped both arms around him and folded him into me as we plunged down into the abyss. I heard muffled groaning as Scammander opened his eyes, winced, and then stared at me in horror.

  “What in the—”

  “We are falling to our death.”

  Scammander stretched his head back, then looked at me.

  “You’re so clingy,” he joked.

  It seemed like we were falling faster and though he was right in front of me, he seemed very far away. I could feel my grip loosening.

  “Don’t you want to die?” he said.

  I winced.

  “Don’t you want to die?”

  “Not yet,” was all I could mutter. I looked into his eyes, trying to focus. If mine looked anything like his, we were both doomed. He said something else, but I couldn’t hear it. I slowly rolled my head to one side, again trying to focus, but everything seemed so far away. He was wincing as the wind whipped his long blond hair about his face as we hurdled even faster, deeper and deeper into the swirling scarlet and orange abyss.

  I squinted and moved my head forward, then tried to open my eyes wide as I moved my head back away from his face. He shook his head at me, and my last focused effort at understanding was hearing him say, “no way out.”

  “Greatest wizard of all time,” I slurred. Then I passed out.

  “You really shouldn’t be alive,” a strange voice said, repeating what the voice inside my head had been saying for my entire life. “Either of you.” I heard some glass clinking around.

  “Here, take these bottles. He needs both of them.”

  I opened my eyes to see that I was seated at a grey stone table, Scammander on my left, and a fluttering gargoyle on my right.

  And we were right side up.

  My neck was really stiff, and felt heavy on one side. Scammander slid two vials with fat bottoms and slender necks, full of sapphire colored liquid down the table to me.

  “I’m not even going to ask,” I said, uncorking them and tossing the cool liquids down my throat. I genuinely hoped that they were poison, would reduce me to a coma, or at least unconsciousness, but instead they made me feel better.

  “I need that,” the gargoyle said, pointing at me.

  “What? Me?” I said, wondering if Scammander had bargained me away while I was unconscious. I had tried to kill him, after all.

  “Indirectly, yes. But I also require inanimate instruments,” he said, fluttering next to my head. Instinctively I swatted him away, and immediately tried to apologize.

  “No harm Evander, no harm,” he said.

  I looked over at Scammander, who pointed to his neck. I frowned, and reached up to the side of my neck and hit something. A big something. I gasped—and nervously tugged—then pulled—and continued pulling something out of my neck. I held a huge syringe in front of my face as my arm began to quiver.

  “That’s what saved your life, and turns your world right side up,” the gargoyle said as he snatched the syringe from my trembling fingers. The thing was so large he dipped a little and was fluttering lower as he carried it back across the room. “Well, it saved your life after I did,” he said, laying the syringe down next to some empty vials on another stone table. “This one was about to kill you,” he said, pointing a finger at Scammander, “but was too dizzy to cast spells.”

  “I heard the voices too,” said Scammander. “In fact, he was screaming in my head the entire fight.”

  I nodded. “So how long is it going to last?”

  Scammander shrugged. “Just be thankful; there is no one alive who is more able to kill you than me. I wonder how I’ll do it,” he said, grinning and leaning back on his chair.

  “I’m sure Johannes has some ideas,” I chuckled morosely. “For both of us.”

  “Usually things tend to drift apart in the abyss, but you two fell onto my rock almost in unison,” the gargoyle said.

  “Stunt would have loved to hear that,” I grumbled.

  Three giant crates stacked with potions caught my attention. It seemed odd that so many would be needed for just one small creature, no matter how large his problems might be.

  “Oh, these are my memory elixirs,” the gargoyle said, opening one and smelling it. Dull grey steam meandered out and slowly curled up in front of the alchemist’s stone face. He swirled the thin liquid like he was about to sip a refined drink and then be expected to deliver an oration on its spices, soil, the weather at the time of brewing, general age, and secret flavors. “This is how students study for exams now, and do so much better to spite the tricks of their professors.” He tilted his head back and consumed the potion. “I used to forget many things, now I forget nothing.”

  I slid my eyes over to Scammander waiting for him to give me a sign, any sign, to kill this gargoyle and steal every single one of his memory potions.

  Instead, Scammander was content to use his own deteriorated memory to attempt to identify our host. “There is something oddly familiar about you,” he said.

  “I was the first exile of the modern academy, and the first gargoyle to become self-aware when some clumsy neophyte alchemist spilled a stolen animation potion from the cabinets of Magnus Albertus and Regiomontanus.”

  It seemed that the boring need to narrate one’s origin to anyone who would listen was not limited to the living. I searched for pernicious potions, or a syringe loaded with toxins, but to no avail. I was going to have to endure a story.

  “At first many sorcerers were fascinated with me, but soon began to deride me because of my lack of memory.”

  Scammander lurched forward in his chair like he was about to say something, but the gargoyle silenced him with a calm nod of its head.

  “Well, my memory never lasted very long. In fact, it was so short that I had to learn to write critical aphorisms in reprisal before my memory disappeared. That’s how I earned my nickname, Ebenezer the Pithy Gargoyle.”

  Scammander couldn’t hold back any longer. “It really is you! We had so much fun trying to locate all your apothegms!”

  The tiny floating stone beast grinned and fluttered his wings. “I would write them wherever I was, often hiding them in a clever place; finding them became something of a dignified sport amongst the undergraduates and professors as well. Once I perfected my memory potions I was able to think longer about where I
would hide them, but I always kept my epigrams short and potent.”

  Scammander chuckled and leaned back in his chair, lost in sanguine recollections of his golden academic youth.

  “So you fled to an abyss?” I said turning away from the wizard.

  “Oh yes. I don’t suffer from vertigo and nausea, having sat so high up on those spires for so long. No gargoyle does.”

  “Who do you think the animation potion was for?” I asked.

  “Probably some female statue,” Scammander scoffed. “Did Johannes know you were down here?”

  “Oh no, of course not. No one has ever made it this far into my nether realm.”

  Scammander nodded nonchalantly.

  “It’s been quite peaceful. I’ve been free to read, to study, and to mix potions at my leisure, free from any worries.”

  “About how far down are we?”

  “Well, there is no such thing as ‘down’ or ‘up’ or ‘left’ or ‘right,’ in here to be quite honest. I flew as far as I could once I got here, and then drifted some, and then I made my patch of onyx which does not float at all in this abyss.” There was a ponderous pause between all of us before Ebenezer answered the question. “I’m not sure how Johannes was able to suspend that manor, but he was one of the greatest warlocks to ever live. Even if he went mad in the end.”

  “Is there a difference between warlocks and wizards?”

  “One follows less rules than the other,” said Scammander.

  “And what about one that doesn’t follow any rules?” I asked.

  “That’s called greatness,” he replied with a malicious grin.

  Ebenezer chuckled. “I am a great alchemist, if unrecognized,” he said, looking over to his stockpile of memory syrups.

  “Well, how did you get into this abyss anyways?” Scammander asked.

  “I have no memory of that.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “It’s true. Until perhaps two hundred years ago, I had horrible memory. I spent an enormous amount of time writing notes and creating potions to extend the longevity of my memory. Many times I lost it, and but for my tediously detailed notes, I would never have recovered my research.”