Skull of Oghren

by Tuomas Vainio

  The exit they seek is nothing but a hole in the cellar floor of one of the nearly collapsed buildings. A well hidden if one does not know exactly what to look for. Once down, the rats take their moment to wait. It takes a moment for their eyes, noses, ears, and whiskers to get adjusted to the darkness and to the stench of humidity that appears to linger in the world under the streets.

  Although they are standing inside the city's sewers in one sense of the word, in another, it would be more accurate to describe the actual sewers as nothing but a chain of long forgotten buildings, homes, and even streets that once long ago collapsed into the depths and become buried. Of course, the good folk of the city have dug out their channels to ensure that the city's waste and storm water will gush out into the sea at the city's southern edge. Not to mention the hired effort to reinforce these underground walls to avoid further collapses, if only for a century or two. In short, there has been an effort to keep the city's underbelly as mapped and orderly as it could be. Yet these centuries of efforts do not change the fact how there are entire forgotten cities and hamlets belonging to the Rat-Kings and other less reputable entities. Worlds and domains just hidden under the Sun bathed and wind caressed streets.

  But for now, the path before our small group is adorned with the echoes of life that still haunts the makeshift sewer passages. The walls still bear the signs how children used to run, play, and doodle their markings. The edges and corners of the jagged, twisting, and ever flowing passages still carry the markings left behind by those who laid down the bricks to have a home for themselves and their families. The debris that litters the corners reveals faint glances to what the life must have been during those days long past; a broken skeleton of a wagon, a pile of bent and rusted kettles, forgotten merchant stalls that barely support themselves anymore. They carry on in the darkness taking their steps in silence. They find their company in their own thoughts, thus leaving little interest towards the echoes of past that surround them on every step of the way.

  The Merchant follows the back of the Monk as he continues to drag the unconscious boy with his tail. He can image how she must be thinking how to spend all the gold they got. But as for him, well, the boy continues to weigh down his spirit. His thoughts wander to the many names for his ilk; the afflicted, were-rats, rat spawn, rat men, vassals of the Rat-Kings, and many, many more. His mind focuses on what all the names share in common; a reminder how they are not real humans, not any more at least.

  The Merchant cannot help himself, he begins to wonder what his life could have been like had he not been caught and punished all those years ago. He looks at the Monk's back, and thinks of how she often describes it a gift; to be strong, resilient, having senses well beyond those of mere humans, and remaining free of diseases. The Merchant recognises how he never really had enough raw talent to become a magister, and how he has perhaps done better than what he ever could have managed under the glare of the Sun. Yet he cannot shake the feeling how his affliction is a curse on him, and he cannot deny his personal pleasure in spreading his curse. He stops briefly to look back at the unconscious boy, he cannot wait for the moment when he can let go of him, or the day his luck runs short. The Merchant rat licks his front fangs in anticipation and re-assumes his stroll behind the Monk.

  'Ah, there it is.' The Monk softly says as she opens a door at the side of the makeshift passage. The old wooden door could use some good oil for its rusted hinges, and perhaps even some paint on its chiselled and flaky surface. Thus the door creaks and moans as the Monk draws it wide open with her one hand.

  As for what lies on the other side is a more or less a round shallow pit. A former central plaza with buildings and other makeshift constructions surrounding the ancient well in the very middle of it all. Centuries past it had basked in sunlight and acted as a meeting place for merchants and citizens alike, however, now it only basks in the colourful hues of the dyed lanterns that hang low on the multitude of ropes almost tangled into a giant spider's web. The little splashes of vivid colour from purple to yellow lanterns dye the re-purposed bricks and pieces of wood in their fickle glow, and almost manage to mask the tarnish and worn of the ages. And of course, our pocket of light under the streets of Sun is not devoid of life. The people who live there appear busy even from afar, and their shapes range from humans to those who serve the Rat-Kings.

  Centuries past, it was once called Elmrick's Well. magisters of repute used to live in half of the once decorated houses surrounding the sunken plaza. Yet today, the name is all but forgotten and what lingers is nothing short of a den of thieves, never-do-wells, and your soon to be new friends if you ever face the need to get something done off the book. How the ancient Elmrick would put down his head in shame to see what has become of it, and his seven-greats granddaughter Vaermina who runs most of the place.

  Vaermina herself is nearing her fourth decade, but she would never admit it. She simply passes down more drinks that are gulped down heartily and followed boisterous laughter. Past her drinks others are singing and dancing, and at the tables: cards are played, deals are made, debts are paid and made in the blink of an eye. Thefore our pair of were-rats leave the young boy to rest by the door. I suppose they see no need to carry him any further, he can wake up when he does, and they got some spare gold to their names.

  ***

  The boy's eye twitches and carefully opens. By habit he moves his hand to his forehead and after some fumbling pulls down the eye patch to cover his eye socket. He ruffles his own hair as he gazes around his surroundings, and finally realises where he is. His face is twisted in disappointment as he stares towards the rowdy celebration going on little further away. He mutters; 'The salt mines would have cost me less.'

  'Shush you.' Says the old grey rat on top of a sack filled with food. 'You even got little extra this time around, two days worth to be precise.' The old rat gave a sheepish smile on its tiny pointy face.

  The boy's lower lip quivers, his teeth become clenched, his face twists in anger. 'Those miserable thieves.' He mutters and tries to get up, but his body remains weary and tired and doesn't listen to his attempts.

  The rat just shakes his head; 'You are a thief yourself, and a greedy one too' – pointing his tiny clawed hand at the boy – 'And most of all, you were hired to cause a simple distraction, not to pickpocket twelve additional nobles.'

  'But all that gold... it could have been enough for decades...' The boy looks at his empty fingers, doing some simple calculations in his mind as his fingers move up and down.

  The rat hobbles onwards, and places its tiny paw into the boy's hand: 'And you are still just a little boy from the streets. Trust me, the gold in your hands would have just caused more troubles in the long run.' The boy stares silently at the rat's tiny black eyes. 'Why don't we head home? I am sure your... sister is waiting. Who knows, maybe the other kids as well.'

  The boy stares at the celebration. 'I won't forget this.'

  The rat turns to look at it for a moment as well; 'You'd be a fool if you did, and even greater fool if you think of trying to get even. Sometimes your cards just are not that great, so you must suck the loss, and deal into the next game in hopes of better luck.' The boy climbs up using the wall behind him as leverage. He grabs the mouth of the sack, and the old rat runs along his arm, and sits on his shoulder. 'You know,' – the rat begins – 'I remember when this place was on the surface.'

  The boy looks at the rat; 'No you do not.'

  'Oh yes I do, and they used to sell oranges just here where we stand now. Shipped straight from the port Oligard.' The rat smiles as the boy shakes his head.

  It takes some effort for the boy to fling the bag of food on his back. His legs wobble, but he forces them to move onwards as the rat continues to tell tall tales of the past. The old rat might not be able to carry the burden for the boy, but at least the boy can focus on the rat's voice to keep himself from realising how tired and weak he still feels. How much his illusionary trick drained him of strength.


  It is how they begin their journey towards home in the dark and dank underbelly of the city basking under the sun.

  Chapter 2:

  A hatch is raised upwards; it creaks and drags as it slides along the floor. A sack bounces upwards few times until it finally lands onto the edge of hole and a boy's hand reaches upwards to push it to the side. The one eyed boy climbs up, and rests for a moment on his back. His eyes wander on the ceiling, he is counting the dark marks left by branches on the old wooden planks. He is looking at the old nails in need of being hammered back in.

  The old grey rat touches his cheek with its paw and says: 'Well done boy, well done.' The boy does not answer, he is just tired, too tired. 'Just sleep if you feel like it, you'll awake to some soup.' The boy smiles as his eye slowly begins to close, one blink at a time, until it remains shut.

  The old rat lingers by the boy's side for a moment more. A moment before he begins to race and climb up the nearby stairs. The old rat bounces up one step at a time with what remains of his tail wiggling over each new step.

  Moments pass. The rat is scouring through the forgotten house. He is not looking for a mother or a father to tug the boy into bed and to carefully caress the boy's head while he sleeps. There has not been a real family living inside the building for a very long time, not over several centuries. The house they are now had remained abandoned, both forgotten and hidden in plain sight, until at one dark one night the rat lead the boy there. He is lucky, as not many children on the streets can say to have a roof over their heads, and walls to keep them safe from all dangers of the city's night.

  The wooden floor planks creak as a girl dashes down the stairs. She is of the same age as the boy. He often calls her his sister, but they do not really look anything alike. The boy has straight black hair that is almost as black as the night's sky. The girl has curly auburn hair that almost explodes with the slightest touch of humidity. Where the girl's eyes sparkle as blue as the sky on a sunny day, the boy's lone eye remains almost like a black dot of ink. This pair of siblings are almost like the night and day.

  She stops in front of the boy, before turning her gaze back whence she came. She turns to the old rat peering at the top of the stairs. 'You promised he would not use magic, he does not have the strength for it.'

  'Aye, I did. He was not supposed to.' The rat's tiny mouth turns to a frown as he stares at the sleeping boy. 'But what can he do to what he is; he wants to survive, he wants to live, he wants to be something. Like all living things, he needs to win.' The rat's piercing gaze focuses and darts slightly upwards to stare right into the eyes of the young girl. 'And he would not have burnt himself out, if you weren't here. He would be better off without a narcissistic fire spirit bound within a shell of flesh to pretending to be a little girl.'

  The girl's hair catches on fire. Her eyes darken to charcoal with blistering red cracks. Unlike the boy's earlier feat of magic; hers is not just a mere nudge and a play on pre-existing fears, her fury is something very much real, and very hot. 'And how exactly would you have dragged him to safety from that burning tower? Do you wish to try fighting me once more, my old friend, my little rat king of old?'

  The rat's whiskers have already bent from the fury of the heat, and he replies: 'No, not today.'

  The fire on the girl's head disappears as if it had been blown out like a simple match. The hair that had been waving upwards as living fire, simply falls down in a tangled mess and the girl starts her futile effort to sort it out. 'Do you think I want to continue becoming more and more human, as he becomes less and less so?'

  'I do not know. Perhaps you already have grown to fancy being of flesh instead of primordial fire. Being truly alive, with a soul inside a body is different experience my... dear princess Loge.'

  'It was not I who broke the spell, and left it unfinished.'

  'I only told the boy what was to become of him, so he could run away from his fate. Do not forget how he chose to stay, and now both of us have our freedom thanks to him.' The rat's eyes wonder back to the boy, and the intense stare of his eyes softens. 'The least we owe him is to prevent him from becoming a wight. Never forget that, never.'

  'So how goes your search for the circle's runes? How goes your search to end our predicament?'

  'You may not remember much from being tied inside that lantern most of your time, but our old master Surtur shared so little of his work, wrote so little for others to read and to learn indirectly. I recall what I can, I have skimmed through everything I have placed my tiny claws on, but the boy remembers so little of what he actually did; what he changed or how... Perhaps the silver lining is that he does not.'

  Both of them remain silent for a while, a while long enough for the silence to become awkward even with their almost hostile disposition towards each other. The girl sighs; 'What can we do for him?'

  The words are difficult for the rat to say, but he forces them out: 'I do not know. I got nothing.'

  'Really, nothing? Both of us spent thousands of years in the servitude of that cursed wizard, the worst heart stealing magister to ever walk these realms and beyond. How can you say you got nothing?'

  The rat shakes its head from left to right: 'And that is the thing, because of him, I know magic almost like the fur on my back. The only solution I can come up is one where we need to acquire the Book of End, and use it to breach the veil of reality itself. A pathway to the realms of Ether and Dreams, to face and strike a deal with the Lord of all Deals to shatter or finish the spell and ritual that binds you two together.'

  The girl's face twists into a crooked smile, she tries to laugh at first, but she just cannot bare to do it: 'You really got nothing then.'

  'And we do not even have the time, even if we had the means.'

  The girl leans in to look at the boy's face once more. 'How fast is he burning up exactly?'

  The rat turns around, and starts to climb upwards; 'Two years... perhaps ten at most, if he learns to prolong his own life...' The old rat gives a long sigh. 'You got a soup to boil, and I am needed elsewhere.'

  She watches as the rat's tail vanishes to the upper floor. The boy continues to sleep completely unaware of the words the two have exchanged. Thus the girl leans down and just moves her hand to the boy's forehead and swipes his the hair aside. 'Right, we need food.' She stands up and moves towards the stairs and tries to sneak up to the best of her ability. It is a kind gesture, but even if she jumped on each of the steps, the boy would not have had the strength to wake up quite yet.

  The upstairs, the ground floor, is not as barren as the cellar below. What strikes out is the old stained glass windows that colour the room in various geometric shapes dyed in the many hues of the rainbow. The wooden floor planks show the teeth and claw marks of time, and it has already been far too many decades since those were last oiled and properly maintained. The barren wooden furniture that linger about acts as a reminder of the people who once lived inside. In front of the girl, kitchenware adorns the wall on both sides of the furnace, the few paintings that still decorate the walls have dimmed and remain covered under a layer of dust. And of course, on the walls to her right and left are the locked, and nailed shut front and back doors. And behind her are the stairs that continue to climb upwards all the way to the fifth floor without counting the basement nor the ground floor.

  Loge rolls the sleeves of her dress, and begins to pull a large pot towards the furnace. She lifts it up onto the old charcoals and makes it stand firm by twisting and turning it over the black and cold pebbles of burnt wood.

  She then grabs a nearby bucket and dashes towards one of the windows facing towards the courtyard of the block. Carefully and slowly, she draws it open and looks from left to right before jumping down and going towards the well in the middle. A well filled by rain water collected by the storm drains of the surrounding houses. She attaches the hook at the end of the rope to the handle of the bucket, and lowers the bucket into the darkness below. She grabs the handle of the lever and begins
to spin it so that the bucket is lowered down into the dark depths.

  Hearing the slow metal creaks and clicks as the lever spins, Pandora's platinum blonde head pops out from the other side of the well. Surprised, Loge jolts back with a loud and startled: 'Eep' as her hair releases the tiniest puff awkward smoke. Pandora grins with a smile that is short of few missing milk teeth. She runs her fingers on the well as she rushes to the other side to have a better look at what the other girl is doing.

  'Water?' She asks, while hovering on her toes and peaking over Loge's shoulder.

  'Yes' – she replies carefully – 'For a soup.' Loge looks at Pandora, she looks around and finally asks: 'What have you done this time?'

  Pandora in return does her best to assure that she has done nothing wrong. But as she continues to tell more the whole story cannot help but to be unveiled. She tells how her mother just got her a new dress and made her wear it as when she went out in the early morning. How the boys from a nearby block made fun of her wearing it, and how she went and knocked them down to their sorry little butts for it. When she came back home for lunch her mother had not been too happy to hear of how her little darling was involved in yet another street brawl, and thus Pandora was made to sit by the well until dinner.

  Boredom can be the harshest punishment, and our Pandora was someone who had to find something to do and she had already sat against the well for hours. Thus she is willing to do anything and to escape her boredom she offers to help with Loge's soup. In fact, she demands it. Her mother would have surely fainted in shock, on that very spot, had she been there to hear her daughter demand to help to make a soup of all things.