by Heath Pfaff
“What are you . . . what, no! No!” Someone began to scream, and then the words died out into a horrifying scream of agony and I tried to turn my head to see what was happening. I couldn’t, of course. There was no leeway for my head to move beneath the straps, but it wasn’t long before my need to see what was happening to others was alleviated by a Fel Cleric approaching me directly. He had a small container in one hand, and I could see the worms crawling around inside of it.
The gray, finger long horrors were thrashing about violently. They had external, hinged teeth on the ends of their head that were clearly designed for borrowing through flesh. They looked as terrible as they were, though I’d never actually seen one of these outside of the flesh before. My eyes went wide in fear as the room filled with screams. The man didn’t even look at me as he approached.
I wanted to scream, but I refused to do it. I would not give in to horror. I would not give in to fear. He unscrewed the lid of his jar, and a moment later he spun it over and slammed the open end of the jar against the flesh of my forearm, giving the creatures no other place to go but into me. They started immediately. It was painful, but pain was only half of it really. It was the horror of watching something alive and hungry, something you knew could kill you, ripping into your flesh, that was what truly made it terrible. They burrowed in quickly, but as they got inside they slowed down. I could feel them eating me, moving slowly, ever so slowly, up my arm, but they moved at an excruciating pace, and their passage caused a tremendous burning pain that felt as though it was lighting my nerves on fire.
The room was a cacophony of screams and begging for the worms to be taken away, and yet I found myself silent as I sat in agony. From the corner of my eye I could just make out the lumps in my arm as they borrowed through my muscle tissue, and it was terrible and painful, but I found myself looking up into the eyes of one of the clerics who had already finished her job. Others were still being wormed, but this one was watching me with eyes that had a sort of satisfied, manic look to them. She watched me with curiosity, and I realized I’d seen her before. She was the woman who had healed me and offered to sleep with me that time I’d been taken to trial for the allegations of sleeping with Zarkov. It was strange to see her again here. I’d almost forgotten about her.
No doubt they thought us all quite pathetic. They were full of these creatures. There were so many of them crawling beneath their skin that they had to use their own healing abilities just to keep their bodies working. They did this for power, and here, in this moment, they were showing us a taste of what their power had cost them and they were judging us weak. I took a deep breath and pushed the pain from my mind, smoothing my features with conscious effort. I wasn’t going to die, not like this. It was in no one’s best interest for me to die.
Pain was just another step in this process, and I'd hurt before. In fact, I’d hurt so many times, and so often it was worse than this was. This was new and terrible, but it was just another pain that I would survive. I found myself smiling, a grim expression that set the corners of my mouth atwitch. The cleric woman smiled back at me. She came across the room and knelt next to me, her voice soft as she spoke.
“You are still beautiful to me. More now than ever before. You suffer with grace and dignity. You’re the only one who isn’t screaming.” Her hand ran over my arm, warm and gentle as it passed over the place where the worms cut through my flesh. “My invitation is still, and always will be, open to you.” She said, and then she stood up and gently kissed the corner of my mouth before she moved away and out of my line of sight.
As the first time, I felt strange about the encounter, though this time a certain heat had flared through me in response to her touch. I couldn’t afford to become involved in something of that nature, to let myself find peace and pleasure, if that could even be found with her, so I pushed it away. I pushed it all away and focused on the moment inside my head. I fell into my own thoughts and let pain become a background thing that didn’t affect me.
The other screams in the room slowly began to stop over the hours, and eventually the clerics came back and cut the worms from our bodies, stitching up the holes left in our flesh rather than healing us. It was another scar we’d keep, a reminder of this lesson. I wasn’t entirely certain what the lesson was, but I felt that it had to do with mastering the body, pushing your thoughts ahead of the discomfort. I wondered if those who hadn’t gotten this training might be worse for having missed it. This lesson felt particularly important to me for some reason. The mind and body needn’t be chained together. One could be divorced from the other as needed. Understanding that felt monumental.
And then it was over.
Reality snapped back into place as I looked up in time to see the worms that had been put into me dropped into a jar again, now covered in my blood. Stitches were put in my arm and then we were shown out of the room and back to our own individual rooms. I was left in a hazy place, one of confusion and introspection. It was a long while before I found sleep, and when I finally did I was stricken by how detached from myself I felt. I hardly felt like myself at all.
6.2
There was no system to the training we underwent as this new year churned on. Martial training happened almost every single day, but there were other tests as well. We tested in life or death situations often. People died around us. No one was ejected from the tests, not like the first three years of training. If people failed now, it was because they died during a test, and it happened frequently. Every day was different. There was none of the monotony that had taken over during the first portion of our training. I felt as though I never really rested.
Every two months we were sent through the doors to some other place and given a particularly challenging task to complete. We climbed a mountain where the air was so thin it was hard to move it into our lungs. We entered a system of caves that wound down far into the earth, slipping through gaps that barely fit us, and climbing downward until we reached a place where the rivers ran with flowing rock, and the ground burned our feet through our boots. We fought our way to the top of a tower infested with giant spider-like demons and then jumped from the top, amidst the clouds, into a lake impossibly far below. Three of us died because we hit the water incorrectly.
Ten months of living on the edge of death. This was simply the way life was for us now. There were fifty of us left when they gathered us together at the base of the trial door.
“Pair off.” Warden Shaw ordered, and we fell to it quickly. By now most of us knew who we preferred to work with.
Zarkov and I came together with a small smile and nod. We were still incredible together, maybe better than we ever had been before. My speed complimented his phenomenal strength, and unlike many of the others, we trusted one another. We each wore our weapons already. They let us keep them all the time now. We didn’t go anywhere without them. In many ways this year had more freedom than the first three, though it barely felt like it. Every day was a struggle to stay alive.
“Today you will be seeing something very different. Normally we send you through the door to a place where you and your partner must strive to survive alone against difficult circumstances, and that part hasn’t exactly changed, but you won’t be entirely alone. We are sending you to a city that is in the throes of its last days. It is being consumed by darkness and chaos. In the center of the city is a tower. You’ll know it when you see it. You are to go there. We have laid signs for you to follow. There is a storage room that is heavily protected. You will go there and retrieve a watcher’s stone. It’ll be sitting near an old driftwood box. Once you have the stone, we will open a door to retrieve you, but not until then. You may deviate from your task if you wish, but we will not retrieve you until you have the box, and believe me, the city is coming apart quickly.”
“Are the people hostile?” One of the others asked.
Shaw shook his head. “No, the people aren’t hostile.”
I didn't care for the way he phrased that. T
he darkness, the chaos, that was going to be the threat to worry about. It wouldn’t do any good to ask about the nature of the threat. They never told us. Adaptability was important. It was part of the training.
“Also, from now on you don’t have to survive as a team. You can if you wish, but you aren’t required to. The door will open for you even if there is only one of you.” Warden Shaw added this little bit as if it wasn’t of particular importance at all, but it sent a chill down my back. It was the first time we’d been put into a group and not encouraged to work as a group. Things had always slanted in the direction of us looking out for ourselves first, but this time they were actively setting us against each other if we wanted that. I looked at Zark, and saw him looking back at me.
He was probably wondering the exact same thing I was. Could we still trust each other? We’d spent the better part of three years apart, but these last few months we’d been together more than not. Now, though, we were at odds again. Zark was top of the class and I wasn’t. We complimented each other, but there might come a time when I was holding him back, what then?
We began to enter the door in groups of two. Each time the door swung open I could hear screaming and smell fire and death. It wasn’t a pleasant image I glimpsed through the crack between worlds. Zark and I approached the door together, and soon enough we were sliding through to another place. The door shut behind us as we exited into an alleyway.
Beyond the alley there were people running, screaming, ushering families quickly through the streets. Everyone was going in one direction, away from something. From the alley we couldn’t seen what it was they were running from, but I had an idea.
“I won’t leave you behind.” Zark said suddenly, breaking my focus from studying the area we were in. I looked over at him, surprised.
“I wouldn’t leave you behind either.” I told him, my eyes on his. My heartbeat quickened in my chest a little.
“I know you wouldn’t, but I wanted you to know that I’ve never stopped thinking about you. When things get rough, I always focus on how we can be together if I get through this. We’re going to get through it together. We’ll be the first two deadies ever to make it all the way.” He said, voice strong and confident. “I’ll do it for you.”
I felt a strange mix of emotions. Warmth washed through me, and my heart ached in a wonderful way, but at the same time I felt a surge of guilt. I had thought the same thing about him sometimes, but more than that, I was driven by my desire to make it through all of this and to destroy it. I wanted to change what the Wardens were, to break them down and make them pay for what they did to people. They had to pay for Ori. I couldn’t die until that happened.
But having Zark there in the end, that would make victory sweeter. That would give me something besides anger to go forward for. I smiled at him, and then I came forward and kissed him, deeply. It was a slow, hot kiss unlike any I’d ever had in my life, and he returned it. For a moment the screams and horror of the city beyond were almost forgotten and I entertained the thought of finding some quiet corner to enjoy him in, but as we parted determination filled me again and I nodded to him.
“Alright, Zark. We do this together. We go through to the end.” I wasn’t doing it to be with him, not specifically, but I would be happy to be with him in the end. I was certain I loved him, but sometimes love had to come after duty. And I had a duty to Ori and all the others who had been pushed into those horrible golems. I would change things.
With our resolve fortified, we headed out onto the streets amidst a sea of people running towards the outer wall of the city. We could see it from where we were. It rose high into the sky, a huge, metal wall unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I’d thought the walls of Black Mark were impressive, but these stood twice as high, and looked like they had no joinings anywhere in their makeup. I couldn’t even imagine the techniques used to make such a thing, though it was when I looked the other way that I was even more shocked. A spire rose into the sky, a crooked black tower reaching far above the rest of the city. It looked like a single claw gouging at the clouds, though it spiraled up from the ground, more like a horn, really. The walls of the city were amazing, but the tower easily dwarfed their height. I’d never encountered anything so high in my life.
“It must have taken centuries to build.” Zark’s voice was full of awe at the spectacle before us.
“Well, they said we’d know the tower when we saw it. I’m guessing that’s it. We should get moving.” I told him, and then began walking in the opposite direction that everyone was running. It was hard going with so many people trying desperately to move the opposite way.
“Do you get the impression that people are specifically running from the place that we are trying to go?” Zark asked after a bit.
I grunted. I’d had that exact thought, actually. “Yes, but are you really surprised? It’s not as though the Wardens have ever sent us any place we wanted to be.”
He shrugged. “We can hope, right?” Zark added a bit of dark laughter to that, and I laughed with him.
I grabbed the arm of a man running by. “What’s going on here?” I asked, trying to get some information. I was surprised at how easy it was for me to stop him in his tracks. I was used to dealing with people trained like I was. We were all strong, but this man felt almost fragile in his weakness. I realized he was the first “normal” person I’d encountered in years.
He gave me a confused look and started speaking in a long slur of words that were an unintelligible tangle of syllables I couldn’t make out. He repeated a few things, words that didn't mean anything to me but seemed important to him. “Mage. Mechanna.” Neither word related to anything I’d heard of before, but he kept saying them.
“What is a Mechanna?” I asked, having to grab him tighter as he tried to pull away. I needed to get more information. “Do you speak my language, any other language?” I knew a few words in a couple different tongues.
Another long line of confused syllables spilled from him, then another slightly different collection of words that sounded like it was perhaps a different tongue, but still not one that I recognized. He was looking back the way he’d come and then forward again. It was clear he wanted to go. I wasn’t going to get any help from him. He pulled hard to get away, and this time I let him go. He nearly tripped over his own feet in his rush to escape.
“Mechanna, and what’s a mage?” I asked Zark, hoping he’d know what that meant. “Have you heard either of those words before?”
Zarkov shrugged. “I’ve never heard of a mage. Mechanna, though, sounds a bit like mechanical, perhaps something like the golems? I mean, most of his words sounded like complete gibberish to me.”
I shivered. That sounded terrifying. I wasn’t ready to fight golems. I hoped it wasn’t anything like that, but at the same time I was positive it was something equally terrible. None of these adventures were easy, and this one seemed to be something above the others. This felt particularly nasty.
“Alright, let’s keep moving. We’ll try to avoid anything dangerous. The city is big. It seems like we should be able to get around any dangers that are out here. We can fight anything that stands directly in our path, and avoid anything else.” I said, thinking that seemed like a good idea.
“You didn’t even need to suggest it. I’m in no rush to fight monsters.” Zark agreed readily, and then we were off again, winding our way deeper into the city. It was a massive place. An hour later things took a decided turn for the worst.
The streets were getting increasingly confusing as we advanced. This was something that sometimes happened in large cities. The places near the center, the older places, weren't’ as well planned and built. Blocks became less square,more twisting and disorganized, so it wasn’t completely surprising.
The disorganization of the streets was a problem, but it was nothing next to what we saw as we turned a corner to align ourselves with the central tower. The smell of death hit us just before we saw what was causing it
. The street was littered with the dead, and they were all torn to bits, missing limbs, pieces of their torso. Some were disemboweled and strewn about as though they’d been opened and used as decoration. Something that looked like a spider with metal legs was wearing the torso of a man, tubes and metal parts protruding from the flesh in strange places.
No, that wasn’t exactly right. It wasn’t wearing the torso. The torso was attached to the metal bits, worked into it as though it was supposed to be one thing, though the flesh part was clearly dead. At least I hoped it was dead. It crawled through the corpses, and then one of its metal legs came down hard on a torso, skewering it as it began to drag the thing away towards an alley. Then I saw the others.
There were more of the creatures in various configurations, some with more legs, some with less, but all of them hacking apart bodies and dragging them off. I could hear screams from further into the city, the sounds of doors being smashed down and windows broken. They were killing everyone and taking the bodies somewhere.