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

by Christian Winter

  “Look closer, but try not to listen,” I knew the voice, it was Scammander’s. I peered into the city: there was no fire, no screaming—but all the windows in the city were broken out. I could see all the way into the city, all the way into the streets.

  “Nice spell,” I said.

  “Most children can cast it,” he said, looking out towards the city.

  I could see Stunt floating in the air, high above the streets, in the middle of the city—playing the flute. Below him were dancing skeletons, thousands of dancing skeletons. I saw one human run towards him, eyes swollen in ecstasy, and then his skeleton burst out of his skin and clattered to the pavement. It rose again, still dripping, but the bones were colored in a muted emerald, and it began to dance towards Stunt, until it joined with the other dancing skeletons below the bard.

  “I remember who he is now.”

  I turned and looked at Scammander. “Hammett Stringslayer, the bard who attained immortality through song.”

  “I’m glad he plays for us,” I said. I was tired, so who Stunt really was did not have its full impact on me until later. I thought Stunt was a better name though.

  “But one day he will stop playing our song,” said Scammander, still staring into the city.

  “Do you think you will remember your magic by then?”

  “All I know is that it is a good thing you gave him that wretched instrument back.” He took a deep breath. “If Stunt—if Hammett had not arrived when he did, I would be the only skeleton down there.”

  “All those skeletons…”

  “That’s all that’s left, and once he stops playing, there won’t be anything left.” Scammander was eyeing the tribunal’s body. “Only one?”

  I shrugged. “The only one that matters for me.”

  Scammander nodded as he put his foot on the tribunal’s corpse, and shoved it down the stairs. “I wonder what the bards will call this day,” he said.

  “They don’t sing about days like this.”

  He nodded slowly. “Evander, you know they will try to kill us now—I mean all of them. Every race, every living person. I mean the world.”

  “No, the world has always been trying to kill me. I’ve just started fighting back.”

  *

  The Inquisitor allowed a light laugh to escape, followed by a tender, practiced clapping.

  “Well done, well done. You have certainly proved you are no simple warrior, and that you can tell a good story,” he said and leaned back in his chair, grinning.

  “A warrior without a harp is just another idiot with an axe,” I said calmly, though I tried to resist speaking at all. My head and limbs felt heavy, and I was encumbered with a sluggish dizziness so that I felt like a summer fly. My vision was blurry, and there was a terrible taste in my mouth. Spittle was hanging off my lips and drying in the fur on my chin. I tried to wipe my face but couldn’t move my arms, so I had to squint to see who I was talking to. And keep the room from spinning.

  There was nothing to be done about the spit.

  He looked familiar, but I couldn’t be sure I knew him. He was clearly elven, and had the calm assurance of someone who was used to having things go his way. But perhaps recently someone had gotten the better of him. I couldn’t see much more than that since it was so dark in the room.

  He tilted his head to the side and slowly stroked his chin. “However, some of your story is unduly effusive, and going forward I’d like you to tell this story with less lyricism; you see Evander, it is the Truth I am after, and clean simple language is the best way to it. Indeed, if I had to summarize your story and reiterate it in the same manner you have done—well it wouldn’t be possible!”

  I had to close my eyes, it was too difficult to keep them open. I succumbed to the shadows, whispering soft blandishments to death and sleep, whichever would take me first. Then he struck me across the face.

  “No, no, not yet, not yet. You may think of yourself as some feral genius…” he continued speaking but as his voice faded my vision sharpened.

  I saw a silver circle with eldritch runes drawn around my chair and realized that neither my hands nor feet were bound, yet I couldn’t move. I also noticed recently extinguished crimson wax candles placed around the circle, wicks still smoking as thin strings of warm red wax slowly slid down their sides. My vision receded once more to blurs and shadows, while his voice filled the room.

  “I realize of course that as a small piece in the huge events of recent times you were necessarily involved with some of the most learned poets, philosophers, and sorcerers to ever live, but you do not fool me. No, you do not fool me. You did not attend the Academy, you are not learned. Moreover, you never attended any illustrious writing workshops—it would have helped you clean up your story and would have saved me some time. So let this be a lesson to you, cow, less poetry, less adjectives, simpler language. I ought to know, my short stories won many prizes, and were lauded by professors eager to see me attend the Academy.” He reclined in his seat, and crossed his legs before resuming. “How many generations of your family attended the Academy? Could you have gotten in as early as I did? I doubt it, I doubt it. Could you have won the Chancellor’s Fellowship, as I did? I doubt it, I doubt it.”

  “Where am I,” I whimpered bewilderedly. I could barely see anything now. And I couldn’t stop talking. “Where is—”

  “Yes, where is Scammander? That is the question you should be asking.”

  His voice seemed far away, and for a moment I was filled with the hope that I was dying. “What…what is your… name, again?”

  “Tristan. Tristan D’Mure,” he said imperiously, clearly annoyed. “I already told you that.”

  Suddenly, my vision flared and the room was filled with a blinding white light. My eyelids fluttered and I gasped and strained in the chair until the room slowly dimmed.

  He shifted in his chair then pulled a small leather bag from his pants pocket and took a pinch out of its contents, then sprinkled a silver dust along a thorny flower with purple petals, which he pulled off the dark wood floor. It slowly floated out of his hand and across the room. I tightened my jaw, but it was pointless; my mouth pried open and I began to chew.

  I winced with each bite, and the more I chewed the more the roof of my mouth and gums were pricked until it was full of thick leaves, thorns, and the thing most familiar to me, my blood. At least for once it wasn’t spilling out of me.

  He rose up from his chair, and with a strange limp began to circle me. He dipped two fingers in wax from each candle, chanting as he slowly moved around me; when he once again stood in front of me, he leaned in and smeared the warm wax on my brow, then stepped back and drew a second circle with his silver chalk. He put a new set of candles around this circle, pausing with each to whisper a strange prayer over its flame.

  “Drugs and elixirs were not enough to make you talk. But when I ground the horns of unicorns into chalk and employed some basic magic, well, it seems you become rather voluble.

  “Do you recognize this?” He held a large book up in the darkness. “Scammander tried to destroy it in the bottom of that bottomless well. It belonged to the witches Hylax and Glycerin—notable alchemists—but also preternaturally adept sorceresses in the art of memory. Alas, most of it is illegible, but the early simpler spells seem to work with ease on you.” He tilted his head and tapped his lips with his index finger. “At least for the moment. But if they cease to be effective…” He hobbled back and sank down into his chair. “I have other tools.” He leaned over the side of his chair and drug something around from behind it. Even in the darkness I recognized the amethyst glow.

  “Nachtlagend,” I moaned.

  “Yes,” he said in a serpentine whisper. “Left in the rotting grass of the rainbowless unicorn grove, under an emaciated unicorn corpse.”

  The room began to grow dark again as he spoke. “I feel like you have so much more to tell me, so much more that you—remember.” He leaned forward and his eyes narrowed. “I�
�d like you to tell me more about magic, and your friend Scammander—where he is, what he is doing, and all that he knows.”

  I knew I would tell him, and began to cry a little, just as I had done before telling him how we met. Old memories that I had forgotten began to roll through my skull. I was still crying, and began to speak once more—even though I did not want to.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  C. S. Hand has a Master of Philosophy in English Literature from the University of Cambridge where he studied British and German Romanticism. He is currently preparing the notebooks of Christian Winter for publication, which he discovered while doing archival work in the Bodleian Library, along with translating Winter’s tripartite epic, Splatterism.

  Christian Winter studied rhetoric, speculative dialectics, and Italian Literature at Exeter College, Oxford before leaving prematurely to pursue mathematics at the University of Padua, which he considered to be “flowing with a weird oil which I will use to ignite the lamps of learning across the endless millenniums of mankind.” Plagued by a broken heart, he never made it; instead he embarked upon a nomadic existence whose peregrinations across various deserted and uninhabited Greek isles culminated in suicide in an undiscovered labyrinth below a famous ancient Greek dancing floor.

  IRONICALLY PLACED EXORDIUM (AN EARNEST EXHORTATION)

  First and foremost, thank you for purchasing and reading this text. If you feel moved, and I hope you were and are—I hope you burned like a wild meteor—then please consider leaving a review, and visit me on facebook, or send me an email. Please enjoy the following excerpt from the upcoming novel, Splatterism: The Horrific Recollections of A Minotaur Assailant (An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse).

  FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/christopherthescholiast

  EMAIL: Christopher.the.scholiast@gmail.com

  BLOG: http://www.finalxbreath.blogspot.com

  COVER ART: THE WONDERFUL CYNTHIA SHEPPARD of CYNTHIA SHEPPARD ILLUSTRATIONS http://sheppard-arts.com

  CHIC KILLS: SEPTEMBER AS EDUCATRIX (OR, OF LIPGLOSS AND CHAINMAIL)

  “Your educators can only be your liberators.”

  Nietzsche

  The hood whipped around my face, flapping and snapping in the loud wind. I looked out off the back of the ship into the deep night sky as the vessel glided over swelling hills of soft clouds, smeared with petals of lavender and periwinkle, and then silently across deep, tenebrous chasms.

  The clouds were bigger than gods.

  “There is a hole in the back of your hood,” someone said behind me. When I looked to the side, I could see September standing there, looking up at me with a strange twinkle in her eye. “I almost thought a giant, wandering ghost was dreaming on our ship, or praying to his goddess in the moonlight.”

  “Would a ghost dream of the past or future?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, what do you dream of?” she smiled.

  “Of what may come,” I sang. “And I didn’t know ghosts had gods and goddesses.”

  She shrugged. “The living do, so why not?”

  “You know what I think the greatest superstition among the ghosts is?”

  “No, what?” She said, leaning in curiously.

  “That they’re alive.”

  As she reeled away laughing, another voice spoke: “Ghosts are known for their prophecies.” I turned around as a second, pale, thick ebony haired, older and yet tremendously beautiful woman extended her hand to me. “I’m Sapphire,” she said as I shook her outreached hand. She had a nose like a fairy queen, with a small shinning stud on the left side. Behind her ear I saw a fluorescent butterfly tattoo glowing in the dark, trailed by a shower of luminous ultraviolet stars, some large, some small.

  “And I’m Karamel,” a new voice behind me said. I turned back around to where September was standing, now with the other girl, Karamel, whose hair was the color of autumnal fire. “And ghosts always need so much blood for their prophecies, so I guess he hopes to un-riddle himself in strife and splatter.”

  “I’ve never met a minotaur before, do they have gods and goddesses?”

  “I’m sure they do, but I don’t worship them,” I said.

  “Why are you whispering? No one can hear us up here,” Karamel said with a slight giggle.

  “Stunt says he doesn’t like to talk,” said Sapphire, looking at me.

  I shrugged and looked back out into the sky. “The world speaks and sings, and I’d rather listen to its deep, eternal rhythms than spoil it with speech. But that’s wisdom for some sweet future I suppose.”

  There was some moaning and muttering between them, then Karamel exclaimed, “You’re worse than a ghost! You’re a philosopher!” And then they all started laughing. I shook my head and grinned inwardly.

  “I thought they were the same thing,” I said, turning around.

  “He sounds like he reads a lot,” said Karamel, biting her lip.

  “September reads a lot,” said Sapphire, sidling over to Karamel and folding her arms around her fellow warrioress. “I’d say she is a philosopher.”

  “Do you know of any female philosophers?” the two asked with sparkling eyes. I felt like I was being set up for something.

  “I suppose the world is still waiting for one,” I said. “But I don’t read, so you would have to ask Scammander.”

  “Then where did you learn to speak like an oracle?” they asked.

  “Golden soil,” said September.

  I chuckled. “Old proverb.” Sapphire and Karamel looked from me to September then back at me again. “There was supposed to be wisdom in our golden soil,” I said and glanced over at September.

  “I used to read on campaigns,” she said with a smirk.

  “A real soldier?” And I finally slipped.

  “You don’t think a girl can fight?” quipped Sapphire and Karamel.

  “I bet I’m as good as a fighter as you are,” said September.

  “I don’t fight. I kill. There’s a difference.”

  “I’m especially good with swords,” she said and winked.

  “Well, I’m good with all words,” I joked. I thought for a moment. “Fighting is not the right word, nor is killing. Living is the right word. You do not live as I do.”

  She turned and rested her back on the ship’s rail, crossing her legs. “And how do you live?”

  “Without hope.”

  “Surely you could give up in all these fights you throw yourself into.”

  “I should die the right way,” I said. “Death, like life, is an art.”

  “Death is a part of life. Your quest for a perfect death seems to be inexorably linked to a quest for a perfect life—and a perfect life is something everyone finds ridiculous.” She leveled her gaze on me, and calmly narrowed her jade eyes.

  “Death is the end of life,” I said. She rolled her eyes at me. “Death is distinct from life,” I continued, “and for someone who claims to be good with swords, you haven’t done a good job of cutting so far.” I grinned.

  “So you will cling to life until you find this perfect death?” She tilted her head back, and gazed up at the stars. Her thick ebony locks flowed out into the midnight sky.

  “I am preparing a great hecatomb for the Cadaver King, for I would like to be his prince, a cavalier of the shade. So many want to be kings in life, which is fleeting, but death—death is forever, and in forever is where I would like to rule. So again, it would be improper for me to visit my king before the ceremony is over, before my offering is complete.”

  “Well if it’s a hecatomb you are preparing, you need more heifers,” she said smugly.

  “It is a great hecatomb, and I am the final offering. I will go down to the underworld as no other has ever done,” I said turning back to the sky and clenching the ship’s dark rails. “A thousand screams from the scalpless, from those with broken crowns and shattered faces will announce me, will be the incense I throw across the marble altar of oblivion.”

  I wrapped Coffin’s shroud tight around my bo
dy and whispered like a hot lightning bolt. “I don’t need life, and that’s what sets me beyond life. My task needs life, and when I’m done with it, then I won’t need life anymore.”

  “You will finally be a true free spirit,” said September as she patted my arm and turned and strode away.

  ***

  “Ah, here is a soul in fear and trembling and much spiritual trial! Judge for yourselves! See how much ruin his good name brings upon him!” Stunt said behind me, leading a whole pack of aged, beautiful women. With weapons.

  “Sorry, I thought you were a werewolf or some bloodthirsty revenant, here to massacre us,” one of them said as she lowered her crossbow. “I’m Delicioux.”

  “Perhaps at some point I will be,” I said as I swept my eyes over all of them. “But for the moment, I’m Evander.”

  “I think he’s already been with Scammander for too long,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Oh, no one is around Scammander for too long, they tend not to last,” Stunt said to snickers and jeering.

  “A werewolf, though?” I had never seen one of those, only heard of them in stories.

  A bronze skinned woman in a ripped chain mail vest with crossed scimitars behind her back came forward to speak. “Yes, some lycanthrope has been killing women all over the countryside—but seems to have a predilection for nobles.”

  “Guess that means most of you rapscallions are safe,” I joked.

  “I’m Nevada, by the way,” she said strolling past me in tall leather boots to stand next to her swashbuckling captain. I could just see two outstretched mountain lions etched in gold crawling down the side of each boot.

  I looked over to Stunt. “Where do you find these—”

  “You tell me where you got your latest friend first,” he interrupted.

  Stunt grabbed the railing along the stern of the ship with both hands, and leaned out into the sky, taking a large breath. He slowly straightened, then rested his elbow on the rail and planted his chin in his palm, still looking out into the lavender and ebony sky. Finally, he stood up: “Scammander has played many parts throughout his life—traitor, madman, dreamer, peasant, courtesan, murderer, lover, but perhaps the most perplexing one yet is his decision to play your friend.” He sighed and looked away. “No one really knows how old he is or what he knows or even what he doesn’t know. He goes away from time to time, but he always appears again as a grinning young elf, like he has never aged a day. Even elves age! But not Scammander! He is like some sojourning attempter-god that has bent his frame to our mortal laws, but bends our laws to his immortal frame of mind.”