Episode 23
1
If I had to give physical form to despair, Caim thought, I can't think of anything better than this damn thing.
Although he had barely managed, by the hairs of his beard, to keep the doors open, even that small victory had cost him. Or rather, it was costing him. It was a pressure he had to constantly exert to prevent the iron doors from closing on him, burying him in darkness forever, and every inch of this damn thing was covered in spikes.
And that was just getting into position. He hadn't even, so to speak, taken the first step yet. The iron maiden was covered in spikes and so was he, stabbing him deeply. He could feel his blood flowing between the metal.
And the pain, the pain was unimaginable, but it was a blessing, a true miracle, that his body was still 'whole' enough to feel pain.
That's why this death trap was despair itself. To fight for freedom, you had to offer your pain and your blood as compensation. He was pushing himself out while the cobweb net could still protect him, serving as a partial barrier between him and a death of a thousand spikes. But that meant dragging the spikes out of his body, letting them twist inside him. He was already quite shattered inside. This would be even worse.
In short, the only hope he could cling to was to tear his guts apart with his own hands. Something that wouldn't guarantee his survival even if he managed to escape, and Victoria had to hurry to get here below.
On the other hand, if he fainted, only a slow, violent, grotesque death awaited him. He would be left hanging in the air, trapped in the iron maiden, as a warning to everyone who passed by of the horrible fate they could suffer. Just that and nothing more... If anyone ever came to see his corpse. After all, he hadn't reached this part of the Tower naturally; the floor had collapsed just then.
He didn't want to think, he couldn't think, but wasn't that too convenient? Too bad luck to be true luck? And what did that change? Absolutely nothing.
Tears welled up in Caim's eyes, simply in reaction to the pain.
A purely biological response and not a sign of weakness.
In any case. Even if you gathered the courage to face that agony, even if only because the only alternative was death, your progress was measured more by what you lost than by what you gained.
You constantly lost skin, flesh, and blood. A lot of blood.
It is said that sixty percent of the human body is made of water, but you don't really understand it until you look down and find yourself honestly believing that there was more blood outside your body than inside.
So much, so much blood.
Could he get out of this, even if he managed to free himself from the deadly embrace of the iron maiden? It was a matter of fate. Yes, maybe, and didn't he believe in fate?
Didn't he believe he was destined to reach the top of that tower and conquer all its secrets, not to die miserably here?
Yes. He couldn't die. He couldn't.
It hurt so much, but he couldn't even scream. There wasn't enough air in his lungs for that.
He managed to tear his left arm from the bed of spikes. He collapsed once free, and no wonder. He had more holes than Swiss cheese. An absurd, insane comparison, but the truly strange thing was that he could compare at all.
That his mind had not been reduced to a white flame of wild survival instinct, like an animal in a hunter's trap.
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It wasn't even the most absurd comparison that came to mind. If some spikes had stuck to him, if he had pulled them off the iron maiden just as he had torn his arm from it, then he would look like, I don't know, a damn porcupine. No, a cactus.
Okay.
It was something, an arm. Little by little, limb by limb. Handful by handful of flesh and countless liters of blood.
He tore off the right arm too, and as a result, he moved forward, but only up to a certain point. Since, naturally, his legs were still where they were and were not going anywhere.
He felt the blood sliding between his teeth and over his lips.
He saw it fall, dripping onto his boots.
His arms were numb, as if they were no longer connected to his body. While he struggled for his life, the iron maiden continued to sway, although more and more slowly.
If he wasn't careful, with so much shaking, all his progress would be erased before he realized it. Caim tried to take a deep breath, almost choked in the process with his own blood, so in the end, he just coughed miserably.
He put strength into his arms. They were practically useless, like a straw doll without stuffing.
But only practically.
Forcing things would only cause more damage to his body, but it's not like it would go better if he stayed still. First one leg, and...
He fell.
He was hanging upside down, a few meters from the cobweb. He didn't have a very good position to pull the last leg. His vision was darkening, he was shaking for a reason that had nothing to do with that damn thing not staying still. And he was sure, even if he had his feet on the ground, he would feel like he was floating. As if he were so insubstantial as to disappear with a blow.
But he gave everything of himself and more.
Swinging with the iron maiden, to reach the last leg. Even then, it was a shitty position to exert the little strength he had left, but what other option did he have, damn it?
He managed, in the end.
Once on the ground, he couldn't help noticing that the leg in question was twisted in a way that it shouldn't be able to. But, after all, that was the least of it.
He had no air or strength to scream. He hadn't had it from the beginning, much less now, but...
He laughed.
Caim laughed as if he had finally lost his mind.
Over a pool of his own blood, maybe that was the punchline of the joke.
Well, he had made it so he supposed he had the right to celebrate, to laugh as loud as he could. But now he wasn't able to move a muscle.
Where were Yonah and Victoria?
How come they hadn't come to rescue him yet? Had they given him up for dead? The mere thought was a betrayal (not to mention a stupidity, he had left behind a large window, that is, the hole in the floor so they could see what the hell had happened to him), but he couldn't help it.
He had suffered from his first breath, so he couldn't even say this was the worst moment of his life. But anyway, it felt like he had hit rock bottom.
That was him. A mass of contradictory impulses, destined to be buried in darkness, right?
Fate.
Always the same thing, over and over. Was there a fundamental difference between being crushed by what others believed he should be and what he believed he should be?
What about what he wanted?
Wasn't his happiness something much simpler than all this?
A frozen breath, as if beyond the darkness awaited the heart of winter. That breath pushed all other thoughts from his mind. He had no doubt that it wasn't a human breath even before a beast leapt out.
The wild beast landed and continued running on all fours. Its lean body and taut muscles told him he wouldn’t be able to run faster than the creature even if he were well. But of course, if he were well, he wouldn’t need to in the first place.
It was like a mix between a panther and a shark. It wasn't as strange as that description might lead one to think. Ninety-nine percent of its body was panther. The only thing it had of a shark, though definitely significant, was its mouth.
He had seen a shark once, but it was unmistakable. He would not forget it for the rest of his life.
That huge mouth full of teeth. It didn’t have the mouth of a panther. It would be comically disproportionate if it weren’t for the fact that the punchline was just his body being violently mutilated.
In fact, it was, in some way, a mouth big enough to swallow him whole.
It seemed that the Tower mutated monsters too, not just humans like the poor bastards who had been massacred in that forest.
Even if someone told him, he wouldn’t be able to believe that this creature had been born in a normal way... Of course, he also wouldn’t have believed that he’d end up being devoured by such a thing.
Episode 23: FIN