Legion

The first thing Legion felt was the numbness in his fingers. They were limp and bloated. He could hardly move them. He recognized they were numb before he recognized what was causing them to be. Around the base of each finger were thick iron rings that prevented him from bending his knuckles. These rings connected to a ball of metal clamped over his palm. Past the ball were cuffs that connected his wrists by a heavy chain. Now that he was aware of this he recognized the pain his hands were in. The joints begged for relief and his fingers were like swollen boils that needed to be lanced.

From his hands his consciousness moved up his body. There was a stinging pain in his shoulder. That’s where the arrow had struck him. Thinking about the first arrow made him think of the second, moving to his thoughts to his side where a similar pain mirrored it. Now that he was thinking about his lower half he recognized his ankles were also chained together. He also became conscious of the fact that his eyes were open, but he couldn’t see anything. Nothing was blocking his vision, yet darkness swirled around him.

“What’s happening?” He croaked.

“You’re finally awake.” Replied a low voice. “You were caught using Arcana, right? No other reason for them to bring a diablan in alive.”

Legion started a question, but didn’t know what he wanted to ask first.

“They’ll force you to confess to something you didn’t do. It happens to all they bring. They’re picking characters for a drama about mad volatiles.”

Legion’s eyes were adjusting slowly. The wall he was against had a sort of earthen texture, as did the slab like bed he was sitting on. He squinted into the darkness to find who he was talking to, but vision that far was still blurry.

“Where…” Once more a question died in Legion’s mouth.

“Underdune Prison.” The voice replied quite calmly.

Metal creaked to Legion’s left. Several doors were being opened in sequence. Like his vision, sound seemed to blur together so that when he did hear other voices it was muddled with their footsteps and the opening of more doors.

“You’re still hazy from how they drugged you. They’ll use that against you. Keep in control.” The voice instructed him. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Legion nearly jumped when the faint specter of a blue and white uniform melded out of the shadows. Aggressive hands took him by the horns and dragged him down a long hall. If he tripped for any reason he was pulled up by his scalp. Legion shouted in confusion. Demanded an explanation. The first torch he saw blinded him into shutting his eyes. When he opened them again he was in a circle of torches, each being held by someone in an Order of Suffering uniform.

The voice had been right. What followed was a long interrogation where Legion was tortured in different fashions to get him to confess to the murder of the Eldest Cleric to the Vulture Mother. Legion tried outward denial once, but when it became clear this was more about breaking him than getting clear facts he swallowed his tongue and let them torture him.

The only time he would speak again was when they pinned his head to a table. One of the men lifted up a bone saw and made a comment about clipping Legion’s infernal horns. That was the moment Legion started struggling, screaming that his horns were a part of him. This wasn’t like dehorning a sheep. He would feel every centimeter they whittled into him.

His pleas fell on deaf ears. If it wasn’t a confession, he might as well have been mute.

He was thrown back to his cell. The four doors proceeding this were shut. He was in total darkness again.

“You survived.” The voice came smoothly out of the shadows.

“Barely.” Legion sniffed. The top of his head felt raw and exposed. It was enough to make him forget the iron ornaments binding his limbs.

Something large shifted in the cell. A face loomed out of the shadows. A bull’s face.

“I am Nosib.” The bull spoke.

Legion felt a yank on the chain connecting his wrists. It snapped and he could finally drop his arms to his sides. A similar break occurred to the chains on his ankles. The bull face receded into the shadows.

“Thank you.” Legion whispered, not knowing what to make of his cellmate. “Won’t they notice?”

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“That’s about intimidation.” Nosib’s voice came from the shadows. “I haven’t worn my chains since my fourth day here. They stopped fitting me with new ones. Completely unprepared to hold a molochan. I’m afraid I can’t do anything for the magebinders on your hands.”

“How long have you been here?” Legion found the slab meant to be his bed. The recent stimulus had restored some feeling to his fingers.

“Three weeks. They want me to confess to the murder of King Fernnal of Finis, among other things. I tell them to walk into the ocean.”

“Did you come from Spiral City?” Legion asked.

“In a way. I was only there a day. Meant to travel to Sráid to see my daughter. The Order of Suffering couldn’t allow me that happiness.”

“They took my horns…”

With his hands free Legion could feel the rough hewn job his torturers had done. The center of each stump was sticky with slow flowing blood.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Nosib replied. He sounded genuine.

The minotaur moved again, sidling to the edge of his own bed so that Legion could make out some definition of who he was. Nosib was large, but Legion had no other minotaurs to reference against. His broom thistle hair was almost yellow in its brightness, which aided in seeing him in the dark. Nosib inhaled deep. Small bridges of electricity coursed across his hairs, providing a soft glow to his body that better aided Legion’s sight.

“How?” Legion marveled.

“My god is Pashindra. She is an Eastern Goddess of Lightning, and I am her invoker.”

“But where is your mantle?” Legion canvassed the minotaur’s body.

“Here.” Nosib pointed to a fractal scar that spilled from his shoulder and onto his chest.

“And here. And here.” He pointed to more scars. Each crackled with more electricity than the other sections of his body. “Pashindra brands her mantle onto those she deems worthy. I have been struck by lightning three times. Each time I survived, my connection to Pashindra grew stronger.”

“Why haven’t you escaped?” Legion asked.

“I am waiting. A storm doesn’t come from thin air.” Nosib snorted a brief chuckle. Legion did not understand the reference.

The electricity on Nosib’s body fizzled away. Legion heard the first two doors to the cell opening. His eyes had adjusted enough that he could slightly see the slot that food, in this case a vegetable stew, was distributed through.

He and Nosib talked longer. Legion was grateful for this. If he had been isolated in a cell he might have broken his fingers trying to claw his way out. He told Nosib his quest, and what he had done since leaving Refuge. Nosib was a silent listener. Never asking questions, but always paying attention. Legion panicked when he realized that he didn’t know what happened to Mercenary Maya.

“Did she have something to live for?” Nosib spoke for the first time in several hours.

“Yes...No. I don’t know.” Legion was laying down now. He tossed with each disparate answer. “...I hope she does.”

“For your sake I hope she does as well. Pashindra is also the Goddess of Tethers. We tie ourselves to other mortals. If the bond is mutual, then the tether grows strong. A regiment of soldiers bonded as family will always supersede those who interact as strangers, no matter the number difference.”

“You really believe that?”

“I am eighty. Twenty years from death for a Molochan. I have been impaled, dehorned, shot with fifteen arrows, drowned, broken-”

“-Struck by lightning.” Legion added.

“-and struck by lightning.” Legion could hear the smile in Nosib’s voice. “And I am still here. It is very difficult for a soul to pass when their ties to Domhanda are so firm.”

Legion had never been exposed to much religion. There were no clerics in Refuge. There were priests of Sahn and Hami-Hami, the Fishing God, but they never proselytized or built temples of any sort. Barato once said that most Diablans were agnostic. Divines mattered only so far as they existed like anything else, but Diablan society could progress without them.

“When I first left Refuge I heard a story about the origins of Minotaurs.” Legion said to the ceiling.

“Oh? The old story about the Raja and the Moloch Bull?” Nosib was curious. He rested his old back against the wall on his side of the cell. “And I take it you heard that story before you ever met any Molochans?”

Legion nodded. He couldn’t say why, but he felt guilty. “Is that story...true?”

“Which part?” Nosib chuckled. “If the story has spread this far across the world then it must have had some changes. We have fiend blood in our hearts, if that is what you were wondering. We sought to conquer our neighbor, but so did our neighbor seek to conquer us. You see, the story would have you believe that once molochans were made they immediately organized and set the jungles ablaze, but there was a ten year gap between the moment of transformation and the early skirmishes of what would become the Moloch and Automata Wars.”

“So the Mino-...the Molochans didn’t start the war?”

“Oh no, we did. Of that I am certain. The reasons are muddled and confusing, as all true history is. You see, the humans of Sanaatan tell of a horde scourging the land, but we molochans tell of a war. No different from the wars we waged when we were human. Our bodies were different, but our methods weren’t.”

“Then...which story is true?” Legion asked. He did not think Nosib a liar, but they had already established you can’t trust bias.

Nosib was quiet, thinking on his answer before he spoke. When it came to him, he leaned towards Legion with a low sigh:

“Whichever is told more.”