“Master… thank you,” I say hearing Argentum’s words. My hand drifts to my mouth realizing what I just said, as I’m surprised by the relief that I feel knowing I can escape my hell. My eyes drift past Argentum’s shoulder and the scowling eyes of the goddess glare at me from the forest. The screaming of Martog’s consumed souls raking my ears. What peace I once felt is replaced by the clawing of ghosts upon my flesh once more.
Argentum’s blusterous entrance loses energy as he approaches Ashe and me. He looks at me and his face softens. Ashe looking at me and then to Argentum, flings herself in front of me and yells, “Haven’t you done enough to him? You’ve broken him and his mind walks between life and Martog now. He didn’t need to see the fallout of my village’s bloody steps into the future, but you forced him to watch as we summoned the claws that made us atone for our deplorable past. He blames himself for our actions, and decisions, when without him we’d all be in the maw right now. Please, leave him be! I’ll take his debt in his stead!”
Silence consumes the cabin, and Argentum places a firm yet gentle hand on Ashe’s shoulder and has her step aside as he continues his approach. I see him bite the inside of his lip, and then he lets out a deep sigh, “your heart is still too soft for what I need you to do. However, we are running out of time, and you are my and humanity’s last hope.”
Argentum kneels to look me fully and directly in the eyes and continues to speak, “I realize that I’ve not always treated you as I should. I’ve claimed you as property at one point, and I apologize. If I was more a father than a king, I doubt that I’d be in a position to beg the broken son of my estranged brother to fix the world that I am at fault for creating. In observing you, and your family I’ve come to know that I should have never become your master but should have been your uncle instead. Please… let this failure of a king, beg forgiveness not of his slave, but of his nephew. Thus, from this point forward, I release you of your life debt.”
“Master, what is it that you need of me,” my voice says escaping from my lips void of willful thought. I’m no longer speaking for myself, but my shattered psyche now speaks for me.
Argentum reels back surprised by my desperate whispers that do not acknowledge the gift he has just granted me. A moment of contemplation passes between his eyes as he studies me, and then gets up from where he knelt to turn his back on me. I see him shake his head and more mutter than say, “I’ve become my father. So focused on the ends, that I ignore the sapient, emotional, ‘human,’ element of a situation. I treated the boy like Angtos treated me. I forced him to drink the venom of the world when the boy was already aware of its fangs. He was who I needed before, now the boy sits fractured, like I am fractured. Like father, like son I suppose.”
I watch as Argentum wanders my family home and with a mournful expression stops at several locations filled with memories. He walks up to the old stew pot and with a sad grin takes a sniff only to gag on the scent. He wanders to a cupboard filled with various carved animal figurines and he bows his head as if reminiscing, and then he pauses as he looks at the lute in my hands which causes him to stiffen as his eyes meet mine again, which he then turns his head and gaze away from me once more.
“Skath, I forced you to watch the destruction of the Gehennan people because that is what I wish for you to prevent on a larger scale. Granted, you may create more smaller skirmishes like the one that has occurred here when you go forth on the mission I’ll send you on, but if you are successful in this mission despite the smaller losses of life at least the world of man will continue to exist. Your life debt was to have five main objectives, but it is up to you now whether you pursue them,” says Argentum still not looking at me, but his words draw me in, as a desire for any purpose to pull me out of the mire of my self-destructing mind grants me a modicum of hope.
I see Argentum attempt to turn his head to me but instead he turns his head skyward, as if he is rehearsing a speech and is attempting to remember the material of memorization necessary to deliver it. Argentum sighs and continues, “Humanity is being manipulated into a final war. A war that has been orchestrated to definitively see the genocide of three human nations, two of which may destroy themselves before a religiously motivated cull finds them, and one which stands as the shield postponing the end. Once these three nations of men fall, the teratolion, glirdon, and eventually even the dracaquan nations will be hunted until silence will be found in the sky, islands, and mountain halls…
“Othenel stands as the victim of my daughter’s manipulation and acts as the aggressors that have already sounded the horns of war. Othenel will be the beginning and end of humanity’s last gasps of air, as once the war ends, they will humbly partake in a mass sacrifice, to appease their angry goddess. Though, if Othenel fails to fully submit to their goddess, and stragglers remain, my daughter is also waiting on the transference of ownership of an ancient evil perfected in perverse ambition that will make a celandil a goddess, and after a thousand years of gestation soon human derived organisms will be born as celandil. Soon, this godless world will know the birth of its new pantheon, and the old will burn and nurture the garden of a new beginning.”
The gravity of my master’s words bears down on the cabin, felt by not only me, but Cran, Ashe, and the messenger himself. My master has never given me truly specific information before and has spoken mostly in generalities in the past so that even precise details felt nebulous. Now that he has spoken clearly for the first-time terror holds my heart. Silence hangs heavy until the more shrouded language of his final statements formed morbid thoughts and new questions in my mind. These twisting thoughts born of a the heavy quiet of realization is then given voice by Cran which surprises us all, “It’s impossible for a man to become a celandil. Skath has tried to overcome his humanity and is only a reflection of the power that his ancestors wielded. The essence flesh barrier has proven so strong that even a halfer bearing a celandilic soul, yet a human body and essence cannot overcome his humanity. If what you propose is that your daughter has somehow found a way to create celandil, and even become more than a celandil herself, then how? How has she created a method to metamorphose a human body into a celandilic state? How has she created a manner to transition a soul’s very essence?”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“The body and soul are two entities that interact in strange and mysterious ways. You are right to assume that there are many barriers to overcome to supersede the essence of humanity, which is why the processes require a millennium to achieve. However, the answers are inherent within Skath himself, as despite his humanity he has found ways to use soul craft. You could say that his bloody discoveries were not unique to him, and hold the key,” replies Argentum now rubbing his face with his hand. His words, once so direct and revealing, now feel like deflections of a darker truth.
“What Cran said makes me wonder. Skath once told me that his body was human, but his soul was magic, or celandilic. I’ve never been able to use magic, so wouldn’t that mean that only magic people, warlocks, witches, celandil have souls able to use magic. It sounds like your daughter found a way to transform human bodies and souls to be magical. Does that mean even I could be a lich… celandil,” asks Ashe asserting herself into the conversation.
I watch as Argentum’s head goes from skyward to hanging low before he sighs, “I do not truly know. I assume so, and I hope so.”
“You’re speaking in riddles. Speak plain, what is this ‘metamorphosis’ you’ve mentioned, and why does your deflections only make me think that you are hiding something terrible. You speak of souls and bodies separately, but that only occurs during death, or at least that is the only moment I’ve seen a soul separated from something living,” I say growing irritated with how my master is dodging the questions at hand when he spoke so clearly only to transition into evasive language gilding a shadowed atrocity.
With an exasperated respiration between gritted teeth, Argentum rubs his face with his hand to then signal for Ashe, Cran and I to follow him and our collective curiosity brings us to our feet. We walk out of my parents’ cabin and follow Argentum through the woods, until we arrive at my old haunt, the waterfall. With a wave of Argentum’s hand, the cascading water betrays gravity whilst oscillating in a strange dance not downward but toward us becoming a staircase of water. Argentum took a step onto the watery staircase, and it bore his weight as he continued up the flights until he stood in wait when he reached the cave mouth originating the falls. Cran floated up the waterfall to join Argentum, and Ashe and I warily but in quiet and anxious amazement stepped up the watery stairs to join both Argentum and Cran at the cave mouth.
Once we had joined Argentum, we continued to walk on the water of the river flowing in the cave much like anyone would wander a man-made path. As Ashe, Cran, and I followed Argentum the darkness of the cave eventually overwhelmed our vision, only for Argentum to again snap his fingers to create a floating ball of fire that illuminated our way.
Step by step we progressed upon the underground river that served as our road. Our progress was steady and constant, until Cran and I recognized a small island in the cave where we had begun our partnership. Argentum beckoned us onward noticing that we had grown distracted, and we again made our solemn journey, all of us sensing a foreboding coming from Argentum, that silenced our lips, but not our minds from wandering to what this journey would reveal.
Thump… Thump…
As we progressed forward toward the deepest parts of the flooded cave a rhythmic noise began to punctuate the shadows. Eventually, we left our watery path when the cave system forked into two paths, and we continued toward the dread beat on solid ground.
Thump… Thump…
The noise felt like it was synchronizing with our very hearts and an aura began to tear at my spiritual eyes as my vision began to sway between the physical world and the world of essence and truth.
Thump… Thump…
A wailing began to assault my ears. A harrowing noise that unlike the screams of the Gehennan ghosts was something not just mental but spiritual and hauntingly familiar. I cover my ears with my hands, but the wailing persists just as loudly as it did before, and with each step it grows with a spiritual pressure I had never known before.
Thump! Thump!
My eyes now begin to uncontrollably flicker in between the two worlds, and my ears feel like they are bleeding. Despite the horrid torture I’m enduring I press forward until we arrive at the destination that Argentum wanted to show us. I look at his lips and see him speaking but I hear nothing but the overwhelming screams of thousands of voices in a chorus of agony.
Thump! Thump!
Argentum, Ashe, Cran and I stand on a metal platform suspended in a room whose walls are embedded with what look like thousands of crimson eggs and strung up chained hollow eyed totalion which are connected to all manner of tubes and pipes that transport a thick liquid in and out of the eggs and totalion into a glassy pyramidal structure filled with red ichor which sits at the bottom center of this massive chamber. In the pyramidal structure is the source of the dread thumping noise, a metallic pump, the very heart of this room that circulates the sanguine syrup that acts as the literal blood of this machine.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
My eyes bounce back and forth from the world of the physical and the world of essence. The world of essence reveals that each egg like pod in the walls holds a soul. The pipes pump in blood void of essence, and then pump out blood filled with essence into the central pyramid, where the essence is then dispersed into the runic writing of the celandil which is graffitied all over the walls of this chamber to be stored within the scrawls. Though, what I find most horrific is that the chained motionless totalion are void of souls and essence; their essenceless blood being harvested for this machine’s purposes.
Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!
Some of the spiritual screams become coherent to my soul to such a degree from some I can make out words, ideas, sentences, and others wail nothing but unintelligible syllables mashed together in torturous cries. However, most disturbingly there is a palpable silence filled with an overwhelming spiritual weight of the suffering of the thousands of hope forsaken that dissect my consciousness with their unknowable pain.
“Princess! You promised us the world! You promised us the stars! Where is it? Where are you?”
“Where is my body! Where is my mouth! Why can’t I hear myself! Aren’t I screaming!”
“… Ahhhhh… Rahhhh… ahhherahh…”
“Darkness Everywhere! Not Darkness, but nothing! Nothing at all!”
“Help Me! Please! HELP ME!
“what’s the point there is no one, nothing at all. i’ve done nothing but call out inside myself, and nothing has responded since the princess has left me…”
“… … …”
“Princess where are you? Why have you forsaken me? Your voice was the first thing I’ve heard in this eternal void, and now all there is, is silence.”
Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump…