by Max Jager
"I d-don't know man. Who says its bells? It can be anything here and from anyone." Ajax could feel his heart palpitating. It sounded like the chug of a train, starting, only getting faster.
"This is his call. That's a fact. We're leaving. Now." The Hyena jogged down the trail. The child and Ajax looked at each other, both afraid, both children in a way. They ended up following the Hyena.
"I thought you were already used to fighting demons." The Hyena said.
"I haven't fought many," Ajax said. "And even with the few I fought, they weren't anything like...this man you've described. Astrix, or whatever."
"Well it's time for your graduation then, isn't it?" Their breaths were hasty as they traveled the land. The boy struggled to follow. There was an incline, all of them felt their knees burn as they went up. And finally, on top of the hill, they saw it. The blight and tumor of this earth. The giant dome. With the chipped, collapsing edges.
"What the fuck is this?" Ajax leaned away.
"His home." The Hyena said. "He built this, probably, two thousand years ago. Maybe further back."
"We can make the travel in half a day." The Hyena put his paws forward onto the hill. "It was good that you two slept, you'll need the energy."
He slid down. Ajax took a deep breath, the sense of vertigo hit him. Anxiety hit him, all of it compiling on one another, weights upon weights. This was the feeling of being at the bottom of the ocean, the feeling he felt back at the river Styx. The feeling he felt when he saw Sophie's dead corpse. The boy looked at him, his lips were quivering. Ajax grabbed him, held him on his chest and they both slid down the hill. There were entanglements of shrubs and little rocks that cut them lightly and scratched them everywhere.
They landed with a loud thump. Ajax felt the pain jolt up the heel of his foot, up his spin, all the way to his shoulder.
"Don't run." The Hyena said. "We have to be careful from here on out."
"What's the problem? I've got some strength back."
"And yet you're not strong at all, not really. Not strong enough to fight an army, at least." The creature pointed out, into the bustling oaks in front of them. There were leaves now, yellow and orange and wide. Cactus too. And the long reaching hands of thorny bushes. The tendrils moved, not by their own will, but by some other. There were people (in a very loose sense of the word) walking through the woods.
There were things, things that moved and stirred life into this lifeless desert. Ajax felt his feet shake. A tremor from a crowd. His arm felt hot, the string of life igniting heat into his forearm.
"What the fuck did you lead me into, demon?" He reached for his sword. The boy froze.
"Do you think that call, those bells, were just for you? That you were anything special? I doubt the king even knows you're here." The Hyena lowered its body. "No, it was for someone else. Some other people." He walked with a slow gait through the woods. "It was a summons, summons for every foul thing that lives on this island."
The words were acrid to Ajax. His mouth fell into a grimace.
"It's going to get more crowded as we go up. We'll have to wait it out and go in late." The Hyena said.
"Why late?"
"Would you rather go early, in the bottleneck of a horde of demons?"
"Alright then, why go at all? Can't we wait?"
"You wanted to know whether your friend was alive, didn't you? I have good reason to believe he is."
"And how do you know that?" Ajax asked.
"Because I know Astrix."
"Then please enlighten me, genius. When I do get there, when I do meet this prick, how in the fuck will I even be able to fight him with all the damn demons in a fifty-mile radius there to back him up?"
"That won't be a problem." The Hyena said.
"It seems to me a huge fucking problem. A colossal fucking problem."
"He'll grant you an audience and you'll accept. And you'll fight and you'll win."
"And how do you know that?"
"Because he is my child." The Hyena said. "Was, at least."
Ajax's head felt empty as if his brains had been siphoned out. He wobbled, he put his arms on an oak tree and stabilized himself.
"Your child. Your pupil you mean?"
"Yes."
"You're having me kill your protege? The fact that you even have one is alarming enough."
"I am the father of many. Like you and many others. The difference in him, however, is his sanity or rather, lack of one. He lost his direction. He went off trajectory, got too full of himself, wanted too much, wanted too little. Astrix is someone who suffered from bouts of ambition too deadly for his own good and bouts of depression to twisted for anyone else's good. And it was more than any psychological or physical disease could ever hope to be. It was a disease of a soul that broke his intellect; loneliness. You're here to alleviate that now. Astrix is someone who needs to be killed. Needs."
Ajax held his ground. His eyes flared up. His fist tightened.
"I need to know who you are and what you've done."
"What I've done?"
"I'm not smart. I'm stupid, which is probably why I ask so many questions. And I've got one that's been burning me up. Call it intuition or a nasty knack," Ajax breathed deeply. "But when I see desire, I start to get ideas of what kind of extremes those desires might cause. So here you are, with the desire of having trained me, with the desire of wanting to kill Astrix. And I'm wondering, what must you have done to make this all possible."
"Hmm." The Hyena walked a bit away from Ajax.
"I've got a feeling," Ajax got closer to the Hyena. "That you had something to do with all of this. With the cup, with this island. With Hell, with Horston."
"Oh, my." The Hyena looked up, he contained a smile behind his dagger teeth. "Will knowing change your goal? Will knowing stop you from killing him? You still need his heart don't you, to get you all out."
"It might." Ajax barked back. "What did he try to do that angered you? What did you do to get me here? Who are you?"
"If you survive you might be worthy of those answers." The Hyena looked back to his original direction and wandered into the woods. "But that's a big if."
"Hey, hold on." Ajax chased after him as he turned behind a tree, he reached it, went around and saw nothing. The Hyena disappeared.
Ajax looked back to the child and flinched, there were noises afar, loud footsteps and the grumblings of a populace angry and hungry. Ajax stood dumbfounded, with his meek sword to his side.
"What do we do?" Berok asked. There was no answer.
They spent their time in the forest, low to the ground. The feeling of worry building up with each successive sweep of footsteps, the menaces that harbored themselves behind the leaves and thin tall trees. They saw shadows amongst them, all of them heading to the singular direction: the loud, metal doors at the side of the mountain dome. The giant ringed handles, the giant wooden doors that swept swathes of dirt and dust. He could hear the chains, hear the dozens of soldiers at the front keeping everything orderly and proper.
Maybe I should just kill them, Ajax thought. It wouldn't be too hard.
It wouldn't have been, not the dozen soldiers at least. But the other three dozen demons? The looming creatures, odd shaped and fantastical looking, the very embodiments of bizarre homunculean creation? Those would be harder to kill, take longer, and supposing Ajax could even survive it would not guarantee the child would.
He bit the edge of his thumb and spat out the chunk of flesh and blood and nail.
"Wait here," Ajax told the boy. He climbed a tree to his rear and sat on the branch, perched like a crow. He kept himself still on those arms and surveyed the lands. There were more creatures, not anywhere near him but coming closer still. He watched the gates and how they opened on groups of what he supposed were of twenty or perhaps twenty-five people (calling them people was a stretch).
"I have an idea," Ajax told the boy from up high. "But I don't think you'll like it."
"What is it?
" The boy said back.
"Ever heard of a Trojan horse?"
They stalked the side of a road where the creatures came in droves of threes and fours. It was a little stretch wedged in an area before the doors and little after the woods, a slope down where the trees weren't as dense and the crowds not as big. They waited behind small boulders and a dip in the land.
"Are you sure it'll work?" The boy's teeth rattled.
"No, but it's our best chance," Ajax said.
The loud footsteps approached.
"Be quiet, alright?"
Berok nodded. He could feel the vibrations up to his knees and feet.
The creatures were approaching. The first view that came was the image of the mammoth-like thing with a wide body and even wider sheet of fur that curtained down its humped back to its rough hooves. They extended up to its small head and shielded everything save for the smirk on its dumb face. The slobbering thing left drool like a string-trail that dragged along the floor. Next to it, a lanky serpent whose elongated neck spasmed and jerked about, this creature was smaller, though still stall if compared to a grown man. A little behind the two, a smaller thing with a swollen head who turned in full rotation and whose bulbous white head frightened the boy. Like a sickly owl, plumed, wrinkled and fully-pale.
There must have been a hierarchy to this world, an explanation as to why these monstrous creatures were not as dignified as they looked and acted and why they wandered like exiles as they did. Ajax didn't care to find out though, he was too keen on killing them now as they approached his side of the road.
He waited, prone on the floor, his shoes digging deep.
He revealed his blade, broken and bleeding a red hue amongst the cracks. He cocked one hand back to throw and with the other, started working out a trajectory with his fingers. A bit like a game. In one move, he flung his arm forward and let it break wind.
The creatures heard it too late.
The snake was the first to go. His head squirming as it lay on the floor, decapitated. The body wandered confused for a bit, spurting blood out and venom before it fell, some yards away from the head.
The blade landed on the floor near the corpse, Ajax jumped towards it. The small, white creature jumped back. Too slow. Ajax kicked his sword up and flung it, watching it spiral in the air. It stabbed through the chest of the creature, suffocated the lungs with blood presumably.
He ran to that body now too, putting his foot down on the corpse to remove the weight.
The tall behemoth was the last to die and the last to run. What a strange thing, for such a monstrous creature to run from Ajax. But it did, well, tried to at least.
Starting its gallop was hard and slow, and it gave too much time for Ajax to run towards it. It didn't take much after that. He got under the creature, past the hair-curtains, and punctured his sword into the side of the beast. It ran a bit, under the influence of pain, (the stupid thing). And its running extended the width of the wound until all his underside was burst open.
It must have gone a dozen yards before it realized it was dragging its guts. But by then it had lost too much blood and simply laid on the floor on its side with all its innards on display. It breathed, quick, painful breaths. Ajax walked over to the dying thing. Squinting his face at the scene, with all the large organs displaced about.
It was hard to tell what compelled Ajax, pity or efficiency, but he stabbed it nevertheless, right through its exposed heart.
He ate it, that heart, digging his hands through the carcass like some starved animal. His arms came out of the creature, blood covering them with a black coating. The child looked at him, shivering. And it made it that much harder to convince him to join. And even harder than that? Convincing him to climb into the corpse.
He was wedged inside the body, Berok, and he moved around to try and fit himself somewhere in between intestines and lungs.
Ajax XI
Ajax
It was jarring to see the corpse of a creature, animated as it was. With Ajax underneath like an amateur puppeteer, with his hands firmly injected into the open chest of the beast and Berok directly above him laying still in the corpse. Ajax dragged the heavy thing towards the crowd of demons and monsters. All of whom stared, all of whom laughed and joked and prodded the stiff mammoth. Smelling it, eying it.
Ajax put a hand up towards the jugular of the creature, his whole body hidden underneath the hair of the monstrosity. He tried moving the head of the creature. It was surprisingly light, even with the long drooping snout, and thick tusks and bobbing eyes (three exact). There must have been no brain, or at least too little brain in the head of the demon corpse.
Now controlling the neck of the creature, Ajax had the advantage of nodding, of manipulating ticks and gestures. And the advantage of smacking the small impish creatures that tried to play with the dead creature by hopping on its back or tugging on its body. Ajax flexed his muscle. The snout came out in a sweeping motion, drawing a line in the sand. The other demons stared at it, some intimidated and moving back, others coming closer to taunt the creature (though, actually just Ajax).
A guard wandered up. He saw the commotion and walked up, somewhat hesitant.
Ajax looked down, underneath the body everything was shadowed. He was looking underneath and behind him, to see if he had left a trail of blood. No, good, check. It had all been drained. He looked behind, to see if there were any entrails he hadn't trimmed, check. He looked the part, now he had to act it. So, what would a stupid, giant, animal do here?
"Are you causing grievances in the capitol? Do you come here to trouble, the king of kings, Astrix?" The guard asked.
Ajax jerked his arms, they felt like giving way to the body. They almost did, as the body dropped an inch. He immediately responded, moving his thighs to balance himself. His heart beat quickly as he shouldered the weight of the corpse. The sweat came off his hair like shoots of black, mildewed grass, dead and wet. He moved his hands again, though his arms were beginning to wobble from the weight. He hoped he had made the corpse nod.
The guard scratched his chin, looked back to the other eleven guards and furrowed his brow. Flakes of skin came off his dead skin. Ajax could notice, between the small gaps on the curtains of hair. Was he suspicious? He thought.
He gulped the spit in his throat.
"Is there something wrong, plebeian?" The guard poked the head, the corpse's eyes rolled around like those cartoonish googly eyes, loose in the head.
Ajax moved the head again, nodding no. The boy, still in the stomach of the corpse, shook. The dead beast seemed upset now, or sick. The child stretched his hands, they poked out the side of the creature like undigested, live food. Ajax smacked the body from below, the vibrations scared the child who remained quiet. The guard came closer, his breath stinking of rotten sweet death. The scent came through the thin layers like a smoke screen of malaise just pouring in. His helmet rattled with his bobbing head as he inspected every corner of the creature.
His neck was now feeling that strange sensation of anxiety, the prickly feeling, the cold feeling, the shocking feeling. Ajax felt the urge, at once. He stuck his arm into his coat. He held his breath and thought, I'll kill him. I'll leave the kid inside, and kill the rest. That'd be the best chance. He felt for the handle. Holding his breath lowered his heart beat, a lower heartbeat eased his shaking hands, calming him from the presence of the prodding guard.
He saw fingers peeling back the hair, going inside towards Ajax. His blade felt light, his knees ready to pounce.
But there was a noise elsewhere. A loud banging. Smacking. Slapping. Chaos, somewhere in the crowd of demons. Two demons were fighting.
"My shiny." One said, rather stupid and slow, with a dragging lisp as if his tongue had been cut down the middle. It spat everywhere as it spoke. This creature, poor and lame, was fighting another for what looked like a small gem. A rock, a kind of treasure. It must have been something of importance at least because they dragged their fight through the cr
owd and rowdied everyone. The more brutish demons huffed and cowered. The human-sized ones, with language and desire and the kind of fetishized desire for violence, cheered them on.
The guard looked away from Ajax and the mammoth corpse. He removed his hand from the body and left in a jog towards the fight. Three guards went as well. They dragged the two out of the crowd.
"Alright, that's enough. I know you're angsty." One of the guards said. "But that's no reason to sully the place."
They pulled the two apart, faced them towards a guard and in one quick move, stabbed them clean through the neck.
