Stark boom and holy hell poured forth from the crimson scar in creation which so marred the ground, all with a tinkling dance of otherworldly faery lights coming in joyous procession behind. Next came the hand, that bony shrub of yellowed talon and grim determination tearing furrows in the soft, dark earth as it dragged its fatigued charge ever onward and out of the cackling, spitting, ritualistic residue.
In reluctant response followed the arm and shoulder from which those pawing, scratching digits did sprout so stubbornly. It came more into the dim light of the outer room now, this creature of bleary eyes and chapped, knife-wound thin lips. Its agency seemed too grow as yet more limbs limped their sinewy mass out of the blood scribbled circle from whence they had come. Another arm and two legs behind, each growing from the emaciated jumble of skinny ribs and rumbling, pulled taught skin that was its torso.
And as this grimy and moaning creature collapsed into the fetid, sad glow of the far off and wavering lamp light was its true nature made known. For as it lay, drained and panting from the summoning’s strain, did the pallid flame show no beast of fang or fur but a man, all mangy hair and unkemptness.
He lay in his squalor for a long time, shivering in sleep as he spilled what little body heat remained within that rag clad form in cruel libation onto the frostbitten and wet ground. Finally, and more out of a sheer and resounding discomfort that any great desire did those eyes, welded shut by stale mucus, crack their fatalistic seal and open to their surroundings.
They were met with the warbling, silhouetted expanse of a spartan room of sparse furnishings and forlorn hope. The stage to which only himself, a single lamp affixed to a far ceiling corner, a chest held hostage behind the demonically wicked scar at his feet and a door, standing tall and erect before his head did act upon.
He dragged scuffed knees to his chest and screwed shut disbelieving eyes as his lips mumbled out a secret prayer known only to himself. He stayed there for a time longer, in the eye of the storm, held still by the knowledge that to stand and address the situation would be to grant it legitimacy.
Blind faith is not a fire however and soon the glacial ache in his bones forced action.
Arthritic cracks and pained grunts lanced out from a much to young for them body as he forced mutinous bones into a despised motion. But move they did and soon, though with a stoop, did the man stand. He leant one hand on the wall as he hobbled a beleaguered form over towards the lamp’s brighter corner on the left-hand side of the door. With a nigh religious fervour did the man then cast torpid fingers slick with black mud to the feverish flame.
A sigh bordering on orgasmic pranced forth from a desert of a throat as he revelled transiently in the feeling of the heat shaking off the icy shackles from within his joints. Then he turned bloodshot eyes over his shoulder and with ill regard did he inspect the sundered circle from which he had slithered. The man winced, then spat, then sighed again, though now with a decidedly darker demeanour.
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His gaze however lingered on the chest with a hungry twinge to it.
He walked with footsteps like a passing rain, all light and furtive, pressing a wicker thin form against the grindstone, burred wall as to stay as far removed from the tainted, pustuled scar which still spit its foul and sulfuric smog intermittently as he attempted to weasel around it and toward that vestibule of hidden possibility. The roughhewn and sturdy chest at the far side of the room.
He broke free from the reaching grasp of the rift with the reckless exuberance of one tearing across no-man’s land and near about collapsed against that mass of splintered, unordained wood and smooth iron trimmings. He panted as he cast yet another harrowed look back to the now fizzing and dissolving mass of scimitar crescent and alien symbols.
The chest was unlocked and opened like a crypt, with a rush of foul air and the swirl of long still dust.
Immediately inside and shrouding any more sinister treasures was a tattered and moth bitten cloak sewn of a fabric much closer to burlap in texture than the wool it may once have been. He tore it out of the shadowy embrace in which it had sat long dormant and tossed it around bony, broad shoulders with a frantic fury, hugging the scratchy but warm garment to his paper-thin skin.
The cloaks absence revealed the final pair of items held within the chest. One was a simple pair of boots, more holes and scuffed smooth soles than anything else. A purpose they served regardless and feet, before frozen into something more akin to shod hooves, were stuffed into their yawning, slightly too spacious maws. Finally there was the ring.
The man eyed its unornamented surface with an avaricious glint, for though engraving it was sans, the sparkling, buttery gold surface and shimmering mineral curves held within them a sense of inherent luxury and value. A dry tongue licked cracked lips.
His delicately fingered hand slid ponderous and stuttering through the stale air in their inevitable death-march toward the ring. Unmanicured nails brushed against it and the room seemed to slip into a deeper and more deafening silence.
Right hand gripped it tight and pushed it shuddering onto the ring finger of the left, it slipped on smooth, as if coated in an ethereal and invisible slime.
Hate! Lust! Greed! Pride! They burned hot and hellish in his thoughts these beautiful, profane statuettes and tantalizing, hissed, reptilian voices. The concepts whirled and wheeled through his mind’s eyes as they plunged their tar slick and groping roots deep into the protesting mass of his brain. The man’s jaw flew open in a silent pantomime of a scream as he scratched red trenches into his scalp.
He collapsed to the floor in a heaving, sweaty mass of poor decisions as he waited in agonized impatience for the voices to fade down to a dull yet ever-present throb. Then he reached for and began to desperately pull at the stubbornly stuck ring.
Frenzied blades and a mountain of sundered skulls! The voices returned once more the fore in a vindictive cacophony of hate filled, scowling sneers. The ring didn’t budge.
The man howled as he fell back to the floor in a periodically sobbing mound. Then the voices came. They were quiet at first, easily mistaken for the misremembered fragments of better days. Then more undeniable, a steady stream of half caught conversation that slowly made their way toward the still closed and heavy door.
The man was a ball of taught muscle and nervous energy as he cast wide eyes to the ever stalwart silent companion to his suffering that had been the door, the voices came closer and hushed down to naught more than clattering footsteps and the odd hushed whisper. He had a decision to make.
Author Note:
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