by Max Jager
The man stared frightened, trying to move away. His neck was weak though, fragile. He did no more than shake like a newborn. "You don't know what I'm saying, do you? Well, that's fine, word association is good enough."
"Hell." Ajax said. Nothing, more screaming.
"Hyena?" The man fidgeted.
"Astrix?" There was silence. Ajax felt it, the pulse of a lead. He shook the man."Astrix? Do you know who Astrix is? Do you know where he's taken the people? Anything?"
The man was wide-eyed.
"Μην με σκοτώνεις. έδωσα τα πάντα στους ανθρώπους σου." The voice rose from mumble to gasping scream. "Μην με σκοτώνεις. Μην με σκοτώνεις. Μην με σκοτώνεις!"
Ajax let go.
"What was I expecting?"
He watched the urn man struggle out, he watched him squirm and shield himself with a small piece of wood from the corner of the room. Ajax did not move, only studied him. What did he expect, really? This man was just a long-dead soul. There were no answers from the foreign creature.
So Ajax sat in that demure pose, with his arms slumped and his neck craned. And the urn man looked at Ajax, studied him just as much.
And the buzz of the air was still there, and Ajax slumped over, his sword sitting beside him all broken and cracked. The urn man passed him glances every now and then, watched him as he went underneath the disk in the ceiling and lifted his hands to reach it. He couldn't get to the lid.
"He said the barracks would be north. He said I'd find him after that but I just don't get it." Ajax said to himself. "I gotta find the people I came to save. I gotta find Darr."
It was whisper speak, the self-argumentative talk of a man fighting doubt. And the buzz in the air was still there, and the urn man had none of it. He was jerking around, shaking. And he was growing more distressed, more afraid, more talkative to the point where at last he came to Ajax and shook his shoulders and pointed to that disk in the ceiling.
"What?" Ajax looked up. There was pointer finger on the roof. "You want it back?"
There were more greek ramblings. It sounded fast, cartoonish. The urn man kept shaking and pointing. At last, Ajax yielded. He struggled up, went over and lifted the disk from the roof. He passed it to the urn man who looked it, half bent and folded and crumbled like uninspired origami. The man looked at it, groaned and peaked out from the holes on the sides of the house. His eyes were tearing up, Ajax couldn't understand much of it, only saw it, a growing tension.
"Well? What is it this time?" He asked. The man gasped. He scratched his face until it bled, Ajax stepped back. Half his body was out the door frame and he heard it now, that intense buzzing in the air. Not static, not thunder, but a rolling wave of cacophony. The violent throes of a mob.
His eyes focused in on the sound. It was above, around him. It was coming from the narrow way. It appeared to him, a cloud upon the horizon, a long streak of black casting its corrugated shadow across him and across the land. It was loud, this cloud, loud and buzzing. He turned around to face the man, to see what was on his face, but he was gone. Hidden in that small jar. Ajax looked inside the house, to the walls specifically where the porous holes were. He looked to the jar, scratched and stabbed through as if millions of syringes had taken themselves to the brick and clay and metal of the place.
He went outside, the wind was dead. It was still, his flesh felt tingles and his hairs rose.
He cursed under his breath, took out his sword and looked out to the cloud. What chance was there in fighting that, though? He thought. The black cloud drew closer. No chance. He thought at last.
And it came to him, that flood, that crackle of the air like water and thunder. They were locusts, he thought at least. Some deformed, rabid migration of locusts. Black and sleek. He felt one pass him. It cut his arm and Ajax watched the trickle of blood like a kind of thermometer for his fear, as it went down and down until finally, when all sense had come out of him, when he had no urn-man or homestead or God to consult, finally he ran. Down the narrow path, the walls enclosing, running so fast that the sand and dirt beneath his feet left a sharp trail. He looked like an ocean beast, with his body cutting through dirt, spreading it all out in the air like a sleek wave. He was no Leviathan. No predator. Rather, he was prey. Scared. His eyes and his head looked back. He cursed at himself. Why had he looked back? Why bother looking at the giant black wave, the miasma of insects that spread and chipped and ate away at all.
He could see the animals fleeing. He could see what happened to those that didn't. There was a reptile near him, near his feet as he raced along the curve of the small narrow-way, he noticed its body and how it was punctured and lifted and devoured in a cyclone of the bugs. Not locusts, he thought. They were worse. Carnivorous insects, desperate with the sniff of Ajax's sweat.
He ran so fast, so desperately that he hadn't even noticed he was outside. Out again into the wild desert filled with canyons, long pillars, the giant stacks of boulders on top of boulders. Giant towers that did not shield him, did not give him relief, rather they fell. The boulders quite literally carried off, chipped, broken into thousands of meteorites upon Ajax. He could feel the pebbles hit his face, he could feel the rocks falling to him. He dodged left. Right, zigzag as all stones and all manners of flying evil tried at him.
And at last, he broke. Crying his fake roar, his counterfeit courage, he put his shaking blade in front of him. He stood his ground at last when he came upon a pyre too large to walk around. He stood there, with the pyre behind him and a wall filled with small rocks. There was a draft, he didn't know what it was though, wind or fear. And he stood there, with his shaking blade in front of him, with his nervous ticks. He could feel his heart accelerate as he faced the giant wave of black, the millions upon millions of bugs, long-legged, syringe mouth creatures. Their eyes were bulbous, two ruby gems wide apart, all of them looking at the shaking Veron. And Ajax tried hard to steady his blade, to put it horizontally next to him.
To die stabbed in the back, eaten alive or to die in flames. He thought. It wouldn't be the first time I burned a man alive.
And he waited, felt the cuts across his cheeks and arms, felt them on his legs and thighs, the paper thin incisions of the insects that darted to him. He waited for the wave of bugs to reach its full, he waited until all his horizons were covered in that uneven, shaky blackness. And then, at that moment, when the veil of night seemed upon his face he lunged his blade forward. He could feel it in his arms, a roar and explosion, like his muscles had flexed outside of the boundaries of his flesh, like all of his strength had been blown out and all his joints and muscles were stretched and strained with the summons of his will. It was magicks, fear, dread, all of it coming out like the first night, with the bird-devil.
And from his blade, from that hunk of steel, out came the fire. An explosion so strong, so uneven and disastrous as to having sent him flying back, through the wall of small rocks and into the pyre itself. He was falling through it and he had no reservations to stop it. His body felt spent. He saw for a moment as he flew in the air, that large swarm of arthropods writhing. Shriveled, turned to ash in a flash of bright white light. The blade flew past him, the rocks behind him shattered as his body collapsed into them. He saw darkness in spots in his eyes and in the vision remaining, blinding fire. His view was broken as if a photograph had been ripped and burned.
The locusts were dead, and what remained of them, scattered. The sky was in flames. It licked and twirled its primal heat around and above, encasing the horizon and spreading its wrath upon the locusts.
When all was done, when Ajax lifted himself with his creaking joints and bones, he looked out to the hole in the cave. His strength felt wasted. A streak of blood fell from his forehead, his eyes were shaky as he looked at the ashen remains of the bugs. They were far from him, buzzing around him but away too. And he was gone, buried in this nameless Hell. He could only hear the carnage from a distance, for his bod
y seemed too broken to crawl to it and his mind too scattered to think of it. But he knew this, in that brief moment of consciousness.
He had killed them, at least. A few seconds later, his eyes closed. He fell into that sleep. Whether deep or shallow, he did not know though.
Jeronus II
Jeronus
And Jeronus thought, only thirty-two remained of the fifty that had come here. Thirty-two people, with their broken clothes and their broken spirits, traveling with bleeding feet across the desert.
They were not in chains because they were not threads. They wandered, endlessly it felt, endless in a world that did not turn and did not sleep. Like a projector with a never-ending film of grey, flat, lifeless picture. They spent days (or what felt like days) walking and had no hungers or thirsts to bog them down, only a growing weakness and ache in their limbs as they traveled through the hot sands and the pavement stones that felt cut sharp beneath their feet.
Jeronus looked up to that bright shine in the sky and he felt as if the red ring was glaring at him and looked around instead. There was an odd number of what he saw as the devil's army, what he called them at least.
They came to a large hump of land and it was at that instant that Jeronus had the inkling of an idea. A brief one and he went to Berok who was some paces behind him and then to Sam who walked with a bowed head further behind.
"I'll make a scene, you take the kid and run." Jeronus said.
"Are you insane?" Sam said. He looked at Jeronus, specifically to the torn lips on his face and the crooked nose that whistled with his breathing.
"No. I just figure that it can't get any worse, can it?" Jeronus said. They spoke in whispers, in nods and jerks. Jeronus paced a bit further from them, Sam tried to stop him by grabbing his shoulders but he was too far gone. Then he waited, with quivering shoulders at what he thought would be the signal. Or the scene, rather.
Jeronus moved fast. He moved right, mostly because his left eye didn't work so right was all he could see and what he saw was a soldier, a demon, walking casually with his sword exposed. He grabbed it, held it with shaking hands and was dumb enough to pass glances at Sam and Berok.
They didn't move. They were too afraid, too scared. And the demon looked at Jeronus, he made what appeared to be a smile, toothless and sinister. They were yellow, broken too. And he walked to Jeronus, taunting him almost and all the demon's around smiled and took turns at betting. Jeronus made eyes with him, looked around to a circle forming and began to move rather stupidly in quick shuffles. He slipped. On his own feet. He fell, tried to stand and felt a hand grip his neck and force him down.
"You're the feistiest one here." The demon said. Jeronus could feel the spit running down on his face. It felt like grime, like sewer water washing over him. "How should I play with you? Breaking a man is only really as fun as how hard it is. You really need to savor the method and the journey, know what I mean?"
He put his send hand on Jeronus's neck. It felt like lizard skin, whatever was underneath those gauntlets.
"Don't." A voice said at the front of the line. Jeronus could only see the plumed helmet amongst the crowd, it looked like a walking peacock as it came up to Jeronus and when it came to him, he could feel his neck ease and relax for the demon on top him came straight, tall, with his hand to his forehead to signal the commander. Or what Jeronus felt was the commander.
"You don't have a right to make a judgment. That belongs to the strong." The commander said. He slapped the yellow-toothed demon and sent him down, holding his cheeks and lips.
"And you." He turned to look at Jeronus, Jeronus who was stood by two more soldiers. "What compels a man to make such a rash decision? Who do you defend and why?"
Jeronus said nothing. He only glared with that defiant intensity.
"What an odd and stupid look you have." The commander came up to him. " Odd, because I think you might have inspired the rest. Stupid, because I'm not sure that rebel spirit of yours has ever been tested."
The air went cold. The other thirty-two stared at Jeronus, looked at him for answers. These strangers they had only met in passing, these strangers that traveled and in their travels had shared that same sacrifice. And they looked at Jeronus, fright-eyed, looked with weak and lifeless faces.
I just wanted to help out the kid, Berok thought. Just the kid.
"Well, let's test you then. We'll see where your tension breaks."
The demons hollered now. A rowdy bunch that jeered and made small passing laughs at the people. They banged their chest armors, slammed their helmets on cacti and dead trees and stones and made drums of the desert, joyous, warring drums.
"Everyone, get in lines of eleven." The commander turned to smile at Jeronus. "As for you, I will give you the honor of the draw. Pick a number, any number, please."
And those creatures of base desires kept laughing. Slapping each other into slack-jawed messes, drooling, rolling on the floor. Some started picking guesses.
"Well, are you going to choose?" The commander looked to Jeronus who stood afraid and mute. Afraid to speak, afraid of what was coming next.
"Pick!" The commander shouted. Jeronus shook.
"Choose what?" His fingers felt numb. "How do you expect me to choose when I don't know what's what?"
"Yes, there it is! It's not what you stand to gain, but what you stand to lose." The commander smiled. His teeth were jagged. "Choose a number or else I'll kill everyone there. That should be proper inspiration, don't you believe?"
Jeronus fumbled his thoughts, it was all too fast. He could feel it, all his life's experience leading up to this moment. All manners of juvenile joy, all manners of sorrow, all manners of redemption finally coming together in this singular moment. It overwhelmed him, his heart felt like it would break. He asked himself, a number for what? For how many will die? For how many will live? I don't understand. His head felt the blood rush like a hot flash on his forehead. The sun seemed blistering now, so fiery hot as to ignite his scalp into flames. And he bit his tongue, and he began to sweat.
"Th-three." He said quietly. "Three."
The demons looked around. Then laughed.
"What a terribly low number." One said.
"God damn, you're insane!" Another one.
"Three? You really like killings, don't you?"
"Three is your answer then." The commander said at last.
Everyone looked confused in their lines of eleven, wondering which three it would be. The question and chatter went on until a silencing smack fell upon them all. They looked to the front. One, two, three. The third man from the front of the line starting from the right, dropped dead. His body collapsed in two thumps, severed from the waist. The blood smeared against the shirt of another.
The commander killed the third man in line.
They were silent all of a sudden, eyes wandering aimlessly as if they were falling into that deep, mesmerizing sleep. It felt like a nightmare, at least. For the thuds continued and the people kept dropping. And dropping. Every third person in every line of eleven was going to die. It was unbearable, counting down and realizing whether they were safe or not. How couldn't it be? Facing death, knowing death, and being weak to it.
"No, no I'm next." A woman shouted. She tried to run. She made it two meters past Jeronus before the blood splattered against his face. He looked to see and wished he didn't. Her head was missing from a spear that had gone clean through her, that had landed and impregnated itself in a rock nearby. It had happened too fast for him to have shielded his face, and it had been too horrible for him to forget. And Jeronus fell on his knees as he felt the woman's life fade away into the ether. It was this instant, this climax, where he felt for the first time humility. And it was a strange feeling, humility, it was the feeling of powerlessness and the feeling of dread and the feeling of acceptance. It felt like the hot blood of a stranger dripping down his cheeks.
"Get back in line." The commander smiled. "New numbers for everyone."
So
me breathed relief, others began to sob.
"That's unfair. She moved. It's not supposed to be my turn." A man said.
"Fairness? Where can you find that? Where if only in the lands of man? For fairness is what weak men invent when they cant come to terms with the unprejudiced chance of the universe."
The man fell before he could make a rebuttal. He splattered quite horribly on Sam and Berok, both who finally released their breaths as the soldiers passed them. Their bodies were tight, but they were smiling, not out of joy as much as relief, smiling and crying. For in one direction they could hear sighs and soft sobbing. And in the other, where the commander traveled like a walking scythe, they heard nothing but obscene silence.
Aleistar
Aleistar
By sheer will, Aleistar had come undone from that rancor of the river Styx. By tenacity, by strength, he had grasped the rocks leading up to the hill cliff above the waters. He had stripped himself from those phantom claws that grasped his skin. And he climbed, higher and higher. With his clothes ripped, his skin torn and scraped, his body bleeding and battered, he had climbed two hundred meters high up to the hill by the shoreline he had spawned from. It had taken him hours, half the time to moan and shout and hold himself anxiously. And the other half to do the effort of the slippery climb.
