Kellehendros
Eternal Wanderer
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--It waits in Bren.--
A low groan rose from the prone form that lay next to the campfire. It was a weary sound, an indication that the sleeper was finding little rest despite the quiet of the ridge overlooking distant Bren.
The dream was coming.
--... Bren. Seek it in Bren.--
He stirred restlessly, a hand of flesh reaching out unconsciously to the haft of the polearm that lay beside him, closer than any lover. Calloused fingers curled about his mute companion, knuckles going white with strain as his grip tightened, vice-like, around the helve.
The whispers would not be denied.
--Remember.--
There was another faint moan from the sleeper by the fire as a tremor trawled its leisurely path down his spine, but still he did not wake. Beneath their lids his eyes flickered back and forth, as though he sought an escape, a way out.
But there was only the dream, and its pull was irresistible.
“Always remember...”
On his chest, a hand of dust and shadow flexed. Its fingers were elongated, twisted, clawed like those of a demon, and they dug into his vest and shirt, twitching unconsciously. Upon the middle finger of that infernal hand was a band of untarnished silver set with an onyx stone. Polished though it was, the ring gave neither wink nor reflection of the light back, seeming instead to drink of the emanations from the banked blaze nearby.
The tidal drag of the call pulled the sleeper deeper, swirling him down and down and down. It was waiting. The dream - an old and hoary beast - stirred, rose up, and claimed its prey.
There was a sound of dull negation from the man; it might have been a smothered cry of denial, or a broken whimper of dread.
And as ever, the dream was the past, beginning again.
“Some things should never be forgotten.”
Storm clouds gathered on the horizon, and his father told him once more that the ring was cursed.
The old man had borne it on a chain hung about his neck, as had his father, and his father before him. And so, in time, the man whose name would be forgotten had worn it. For the ring was the responsibility of his house. And as the young man sat at his father’s deathbed, the old man bequeathed the band to him, saying, “a curse is on this ring. You must never put it on. And yet, you must never be parted from it. Within the ring slumbers a devil, bound by your ancestors long ago. It is our duty to watch over it.”
His words were interrupted by a coughing fit, blood and phlegm staining the pristine linens heaped upon his frail, failing frame. It was high summer, and the room was tropical with heat. Sweat beaded along the son’s scalp from the braziers that stood nearby. There were six of them about the bed, blazing with incensed flames that nonetheless could hold back neither the frigid chills that wracked the body of the dying man, nor the nauseating stench of his decaying flesh.
Niella, the leech-men called it - devourer - a disease that ate its victim from the inside out. It had killed the old man’s father, and his father before him. Now it was his turn. Just as it was his turn to pass on the ring, with its terrible curse, to his son. And so he would, even knowing that one day the ring would bring his child to the same end.
The young man waited patiently, though it had taken his father several minutes to be able to speak again. “The creature within the ring may try to speak to you. It will offer you... everything, in return for a little blood, a little flesh, a little...” The old man trailed off vaguely. His voice was fading, but his eyes... His eyes were as blue and sharp as they had ever been, the eyes of a man who was going to live forever.
If forever was the next thirty seconds.
“It will offer. You will refuse.” The old man said this with all the gravity of a man stating a simple truth. Water is wet. Fire is hot. You will refuse. “You will refuse, as I have, and my father before, though it should offer you the world, though all should be...” His father looked up at him, seeking out his son’s gaze as he gasped for breath. “One day, you will have a son. One day you will pass the ring to him. One day you will tell him these words, so that he may understand.”
If there was more for the young man to understand it was lost in the next gale of wracking coughs. There was something desperate in the old man’s eyes, a need to hear the words. “Promise me,” he rasped, his penultimate breath wheezing through the cracked bellows of his lungs. “Swear to it.”
To this day the man who would be called both savior and despoiler, saint and devil, could not say if he would have sworn the oath his father asked of him. He had always been... other than what the old man had expected. But before he could give his answer, the wizened man had died; one final breath rattled from his chest as the light faded from his eyes.
In the distance, there was a grumble of thunder. The storm drew closer, and one by one the braziers flickered out...
The dream shifted, as dreams were wont to do. One tableau dissolved into the next as the old man’s voice whispered the words his son had never forgotten, words given by his father, and his father before him.
“Always remember this: We are, each of us, the choices that we make.”
How many times had he himself said those words? Sharpened them, made of them a spearpoint to cut deep across flesh and bone, drinking heartsblood?
Pain and the man were old friends.
He snarled his father’s words as the hammer descended, biting into his lip - and then through it - as the warhammer crushed his hand where it was braced on the wall, blasting his knuckles into powder, splintering his fingerbones. He choked down a scream as the silver-white lightning of hurt raced up his arm and into his brain. But his shadowed hand was unharmed, and the pain was only in his mind.
--Pain is only of the mind.-- Gripping it close, strangling it with his will, smothering it with his desire, he denied the ephemeral hurt. His flesh and blood hand drove the dagger up, sinking it into his victim’s throat, seeking, twisting, ripping. Hot droplets of blood splashed his face as golden triumph, sovereign for all ailments, soothed him.
Perhaps it was better to say that pain and the man were old foes.
We make our choices. We do what must be done.
The sleeper came awake with a gasp of pain, curling around his dusty limb as phantom signals of agony throbbed through the demoniac arm. Coppery blood filled his mouth as he bit into his tongue, muscles twitching as he thrashed and spasmed into the ashy remnants of the previous night’s fire. The tremors subsided slowly, very slowly, leaving the man panting and gasping for breath. Smears of ash and bits of charcoal clung to the sweat on his skin as he stared up into the sky.
He flexed his left hand - the shadowed hand - in and out of a fist as he lay amid the thankfully cool remains and the sun crested the horizon. --Remember.-- Grunting, the man came slowly to his knees, staring down at the indistinct, hazy lines of his umbral arm as its fingers curled into the soot.
“I remember,” he spat the words into the now silent clearing, following them with a glob of blood and gritty ash. Pushing himself up to his feet, the powder-caked man reached out and gathered up his gear. “Bren, and the competition. Bren, and the wish. Bren, and the debt.” For a moment the ring was cold on his finger, like a band of ice closed about a shadow. “Enough,” he rasped, ignoring the mess of the once orderly camp he was leaving behind. It had served its use, and as such was beneath further notice. “Enough,” the man said again as he started towards the distant city, “you told me what you want. I agreed. One way or another, an end to it. So say no more of what you would have. I know. I know it very well.”
His only answer was a deep, mocking laughter in the recesses of his mind.
“Sir, are you certain that you are alright?” Regulen asked quietly. The would-be entrant had been staring at the parchment before him for nigh unto five minutes. More precisely, it was the final line of the document to which his gaze was fixed, the empty space that awaited a signature or mark of acknowledgement.
The registrar did not like this one. It was not that he was dirty or unkempt - though the Lords knew he looked it, what with the soot smeared on his face and clothing. What was he doing, rolling about in a fire pit? Honestly though, Regulen had seen worse in his time. Nor was there any issue with the man’s voice, which was still strong despite the slight rasp that flavored its foreign accent. In truth, it was hard to say just what it was about the stranger that unsettled him so. It probably had to do with the man’s left arm. The thing seemed so ephemeral, composed as it was of swirling dusty black motes, and yet, he could not deny its reality as those specks gathered into piles on the table where the two sat across from one another. It was hard not to stare, for all that doing so gave the local man a faint feeling of nausea.
Mismatched eyes flashed up from the parchment, radiating equal parts anger and disdain. “I heard your request the first time, clerk.”
There was an astonishing amount of venom imparted on the word, and Regulen shifted back in his seat, lifting both hands in a placating gesture. “O-of course, sir. Please forgive me, I meant no offense. Should you wish not to enter under your given na-”
“What I wish is silence from you, churl.” The cat’s eye gem flashed, and the registrar would have sworn in that moment that he saw the carven pupil - surely nothing more than a fanciful embellishment on the fake eye - narrow in fury. “You speak lightly, at your ease. Some things should never be forgotten.”
Taken aback by the rage in the man’s tone, the clerk floundered a moment, unable to frame a response. Across the table the ash-dusted man scowled, his odd left hand clenching into a tight fist. Regulen watched as the document was signed, and then carefully drew the sheet over to himself, adding his own signature as witness. He peered at the neat script a moment, and then spoke before he could stop himself. “Sark Ynet. A curious name, sir. I take it you are far from home.”
What he saw in the face of the man who had named himself Sark Ynet made the registrar flinch, and he all but upset his chair in his haste to back away from the table. Anger, raw and burning, blazed from the entrant’s eyes, suffusing his face with heat and marking each glaring line with the promise of suffering. “It is no name, boy.” The stranger rose, his dark hand curling around the haft of the ranseur leaning against the table. “It is a title. The last that I may bear. There is nothing more. The rest was taken from me by small and petty men.”
Regulen stammered, holding the entrant’s papers before him like a feeble shield. “I... I w-will see the paperwork filed, m-my lord.”
Sark Ynet’s smile was a small thing, chill and predatory. It was the sort of expression a mouse might see on a snake just before it struck. “Oh, my little fool, I was so much more than a lord.”
As the platform descended, the wiry man stared at his left arm.
All his life, since that moment of fateful decision, the limb he had lost had been supplanted by a creation of swirling shadow. The motes of its composition had danced over its surface like transient stars in the heavens, shifting specks that had belied the appendage’s solidity, even as tiny flecks had flaked off to be borne away on the wind.
Now... now it was frozen.
It was not that Sark Ynet could not move his arm. The limb still answered to the orders of his mind with all its normal dexterity. Wrist, fingers, thumb, each was as mobile and responsive to its tasks as ever. But the motes... the motes moved not. It gave the appendage an appearance rather like glass cast for a decoration: a faint outline of form filled with curiously shaped specks, almost as if the first moments of an ash-storm had been locked in time.
It was... unsettling in a way he could not quite put words to.
--Treachery. Which among them stoops?--
Which indeed? Sark Ynet lowered the umbral arm, his hand of flesh and blood flexing to a white-knuckle grip on the handle of his ranseur. Mismatched eyes narrowed as he considered each of the others in turn, a circle drawn about the tile that lowered slowly to the Arena below.
A small woman, fair to look upon but for an unseemly scar.
A slender man of golden eyes, his hair a riot of crass color.
A well-heeled man in a popinjay’s attire, his eyes vainglorious and cocksure.
A thing that seemed constructed of gemstone enrobed in leather straps, man-shaped and abhorrent.
A womanish husk garbed in vines and flowers, sporting freakish gnarled skin and an escort of free-floating orbs.
A tall woman, lean and scarred, the headscarf about the left-side of her face doing nothing to hide the knife-edge of her right ear.
These then, stood against him in the battle ahead. Pathetic. But one of them was already at work, deploying some subtle magic to stay the dust of his normally rippling arm. It was little matter, in the end. These were but pale appetizers of the feast to come.
--Greater even than Pretu.--
Pretu... Pretu which had turned to cinder. Dust on the wailing wind. Ash-storms lashing canvas and skin as plumes of smoke choked the sky. Yes, Pretu had been a feast, if only the fools had listened to him.
The tile upon which the assembled entrants stood reached the floor, docking neatly into place with nary an ounce of impact. About Sark Ynet the air was redolent with heat, and the fainest edge of a scent the man could not quite lay a finger on. Sage perhaps, or juniper. It was a desert smell, a dry smell. Perhaps it was somewhat of the famed curse that prevented healing.
“Tis passing easy, this penchant for destruction. Building, healing, is harder.”
He scowled the thought away, shifting slightly as a klaxon wailed into the stillness of the Cellar. Sark Ynet blinked slowly, witnessing the blades that hummed from the walls, scything their lethal courses across the breadth of the Arena before vanishing as quickly as they had appeared. He watched carefully as the voice called from above, but the lines remained where they had been traced.
One less question then.
The ranseur in his right hand twirled, rising slantwise across his back as his hand clasped just below the metal collar affixing blade to stave. Sark Ynet darted forward, rushing towards the western plate.
From the corner of his vision the scarred one leapt, great feathered appendages unfurling from her back. Unexpected, to be certain, but a heavy beat of those wings thrust her north and away from his course. The space was welcome, for all that the wretch conjured forth a bow as her armament. This arrow, at least, was aimed at the others. All to the good.
There was one more question to ask before the bloodshed started in earnest.
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