Fell Beasts and Fair

by C. J. Brightley

  She dropped her eyes, then looked at him with intensity.

  “I miss you.”

  “And I miss you,” he answered, turning his head away. “This place will not keep me.”

  He took a step and the brilliant color of the place twisted and spun, dissolving into flat, dank gray.

  A dungeon.

  It smelled of must and human waste, and Ruggiero found himself face to face with himself. He did not recognize his own body, but he knew his visage, and he knew that the other self recognized him.

  The scrawny, ill-dressed man sat on the floor, his arms held in shackles over his head.

  “What’s happened to you?” Ruggiero asked.

  “The inevitable,” the other Ruggiero answered. “What did you think would happen?”

  Ruggiero looked around the cell. Two walls were square, one with a door, but the rest was an arc, a subset of a round wall. This was no ordinary prison.

  “Who?” he asked, looking back at himself. “Who put you here?”

  The other man spat on the floor.

  “You think you’re so free and so powerful that no one will ever force you to take a side. They conspired against you, you fool. Both sides wanted you gone, because neither could trust you.”

  “What of Aurora?” Ruggiero asked.

  “Dead,” the other man growled. “Died trying to defend you. Last thing she saw was her own failure.”

  Ruggiero went to the door, looking out.

  “Whose prison is this?”

  “Who do you think?” the other man asked. “Don’t tell me you don’t know the place.”

  He did.

  He didn’t want to admit it, but he did know this building.

  Only from the outside, but the size and shape of it was unmistakable.

  “Margano would never allow it,” he said.

  “He wears the key around his throat,” the other Ruggiero said. Ruggiero came and squatted in front of himself, looking into his own eyes.

  “I will not fear,” he said. “My future is not known, and I will not be swayed away from my path by what may be.”

  The other Ruggiero blinked at him.

  “You will suffer as no other man has suffered,” he said. “You will lose everything at the hands of men you trusted.”

  Ruggiero stood.

  “And yet I will not despair,” he said, turning his face away and taking a step. The gray blurred and melted, and he found himself in a room constructed of wood and plaster. There was a tapestry on the wall, and he stood next to the solid post of a canopy bed. He turned his head and smiled once more as he saw Aurora curled there against a pile of pillows. He tipped his head, frowning, and took a step forward.

  Yes.

  Cradled there in her arms, swaddled tight, there was an infant.

  Aurora sighed, seeming to be unable to see him, this time, and a man walked into the room. It was a friend, a man that both Aurora and Ruggiero had fought alongside in the war, as need arose, and Ruggiero recognized the home he was in, as he saw Montalban.

  Aurora looked up at Montalban with a friendly smile, then looked down at her child again.

  “Any word?” she asked.

  “No,” Montalban said. “The king does not know where he is.”

  Ruggiero frowned, and Aurora put her hand to her mouth, blinking quickly as she put on a pained smile.

  “I know that he is where he should be,” she said. “I just wish…”

  “Of course,” Montalban said. “He should have been here for the birth of his son.”

  Aurora shook her head.

  “He will come.”

  “No one has heard from him in months,” Montalban said. “I think perhaps…”

  “Do not speak to me of this,” Aurora said. “Not today.”

  Montalban lowered his head in a slight bow and then stood straight, looking directly at Ruggiero.

  “You are, of course, welcome to stay here for as long as you need,” his friend said. “I will send someone down into town to hire you a nurse.”

  “I am fine with my own two arms,” Aurora said. “Thank you.”

  “You need rest,” Montalban said, his attention still fixed on Ruggiero. “Especially with Ruggiero not here, you must take extra care that you keep yourself healthy and give yourself time to recover.”

  “He is out there,” Aurora said. “And he will come.”

  “God willing,” Montalban said, the corner of his mouth twitching up. He turned and knelt next to the bed. “But you will remain as my guest, either way, until you are fit to travel. I will not hear of anything else.”

  “Of course,” Aurora said. “And we will be grateful of your hospitality.”

  Ruggiero closed his eyes.

  He felt it.

  Unwonted and unbidden, he felt it.

  Jealousy. Mistrust. Anger.

  He took a long, slow breath.

  “This is not real,” he said. “And even if it were to happen, I trust my wife and I trust my friend. Even if something were to kindle between them in my absence, I forgive them.”

  The words were freeing, though not magic. He opened his eyes again and found that he was still in the room, but now the child was to the side in a bassinet and Montalban lay in bed next to Aurora, his arm supporting her shoulders.

  “They confirmed it today,” Montalban said, watching Ruggiero. “He died in a fight.”

  Aurora nodded.

  “I’ve suspected it,” she said. “He would have come, if he had been able. At least…” She paused. “At least he died doing what he felt he was meant to do.”

  Montalban nodded, kissing her hair as he watched Ruggiero out of the corner of his eye.

  “Yes. You must keep that in your mind.”

  Ruggiero steeled himself.

  “That man is my friend,” he said, meeting Montalban’s eye. “I trust him, even if he would do something like this, because my trust is about me and not about him.”

  He turned his face away and the vision vanished like cut ribbons. He was once more in a forest, dark, with trees so old and so tall that he couldn’t see any branches. It was just the great trunks of the aged trees and the dim forest floor. In front of him, in a slanted shaft of light, he saw himself, once more, fighting sword-on-sword with a man in black armor. The Ruggiero of his vision was helmetless, but otherwise fully armored, and his shoulder-length hair flew in the air behind him as he attacked. Light glinted off of his armor, and the other knight fell back, step by step.

  There was no sound but that of steel against steel in the muted forest, and the fight seemed to go on for forever, Ruggiero handsome and powerful against the black knight, always winning, always pursuing. Finally, he slew the black knight and another man with a blue pendant stepped forward, shoving his standard into the soft earth and unsheathing a sword.

  This fight lasted perhaps longer than the first, with more give-and-take, but without Ruggiero ever seeming to have to give ground. He was fast and powerful, and it was only a matter of time and waiting for the other man to make a mistake before he won again.

  Yet another man stepped forward with a red flag on a standard and once more Ruggiero fought. He did not sweat and he did not fade.

  He was matchless.

  Even Ruggiero, standing off to the side, could see that that was what was going on. The man in the shaft of light was invincible, the most powerful man alive with a sword or with magic.

  He beat the red knight and a fourth man stepped forward, a man in robes, who spread his arms and threw a fireball at the Ruggiero in the glinting armor. That Ruggiero crossed his arms and braced as the fireball crashed into him, then he roared and spoke words of magic - words that Ruggiero recognized and would have used, himself, if he’d been up on the sunlit knoll instead of the vision of himself. The mage fell back, spreading his arms again and throwing a glass bottle at Ruggiero. The exchange was complicated, and at the highest level of skill in magic, but the Ruggiero in the light never flinched, never failed. When
the time came, he vanquished the mage.

  Ruggiero took a step back, away from the vision of himself, and he shook his head.

  “I am a man,” he said. “I am not invincible, and I will die when it is time for me to die. I will not count on my own strength to give me victory.”

  Trees from overhead crumbled and fell onto him like fine ash, and when he opened his eyes again, he was standing in sand.

  There was no shelter anywhere. No water, no other person.

  He was alone.

  The sun overhead was unbearable, and there was no landmark anywhere to give him a sense of direction.

  He was lost.

  He was hopeless.

  He peered up at the sun through slitted fingers, then he squatted down, covering his head with his arms, and he pointed himself at his shadow.

  “The sun travels east to west,” he said out loud. “In an hour I will know which way is north, and I will go that way. If I do not find settlement, I will continue on until I perish, and I accept it.”

  The intensity of the sun went away, and Ruggiero blinked, standing and holding out Gentleness at the sudden darkness.

  “I will not sacrifice my duty for my desires,” he said to the echoing space. “I will not succumb to despair or greed or jealousy. I will not feed you.”

  “Very well,” a dark voice said. “If you will not come willingly, we will devour you as you stand.”

  He opened his palm, blowing across it and letting the white angel flame grow higher, burning his very self, an oil sourced from deep within him, but one that he tended and kept at reserve for moments like this one.

  The circle of demons drew back, throwing up their arms at the sudden, pure light, and Ruggiero held out Gentleness, the angel blade impatient to be involved.

  Once more, Ruggiero looked around the space, bending time to let himself really look at it as he drew on long-practiced spells that bound the demons to their own space. They could not glitch from one place to another, while his magic was active, and he felt the way the temple reacted to his light magic.

  This was a place of great, great darkness.

  The deep-rooted dark magic flexed around him, unaccustomed to the intrusion of light, and he pushed harder, changing the shape of his cast to address the room as much as the djinn. They flamed around him, one by one kicking on the roll of orange flame about their feet until their legs disappeared into the fires.

  The walls were bloody shoulder high and above, and the floor under Ruggiero’s feet had lost its sanded texture.

  “Where do you find the men to bring here?” Ruggiero asked.

  “They are drawn,” one of the djinn said. “They hear the promises of what we can give them and they come to us.”

  “The desire,” another djinn breathed. “They season themselves.”

  “How many die, trying to find you?” Ruggiero asked. “And how would they know to search?”

  There was a dark chuckle behind him, and Ruggiero turned, just a simple foot-over-foot motion, to face a djinn who had slid ahead of the rest.

  “Because, once in a while, we let one go,” he said. “All it takes is a wish, and men will feed themselves to us for the rest of time.”

  The demon raised his arms over his head, spinning a ball of flame there, orange and black, murky with smoke, and Ruggiero counted the djinn he’d seen.

  There were at least a dozen of them.

  Conjurers of fantasy, demons who fed on lust and anger and greed, and ultimately on blood.

  “No,” Ruggiero said, looking at the walls, at the signs of lives wasted. “No. You will not have one more.”

  There was a laugh, but he spun, casting strong, light fields of protection, ones that spread until they hit the walls and kept going. The temple trembled and the djinn moved to throw the great fireball at him, but Ruggiero breathed in at a break in his spell and blew across the angelflame in his palm, the white flame lengthening and stretching to take in the demon’s fire and suffocating it.

  Silently.

  Angel flame was breathlessly silent, and as Ruggiero put his hand out, letting the white crystalline flame seek out the rest of the demon fire, the room grew quieter and quieter.

  The walls shook and sandy dust drifted down from the ceiling as Ruggiero continued to cast. The demons hesitated, Gentleness keeping them out at arms’ length.

  Only when he was ready, as he felt the dark magic rumbling through the temple beginning to crack and shatter, did Ruggiero let the angelflame touch the floor.

  It took to the human blood there like its native fuel, burning ruby red. The demons screamed and tried to flee, but they could not glitch, and the flame burnt, spreading through the temple out of Ruggiero’s control, racing across the bloodied surfaces. It still had a hook into him; it was the only way he could hope to extinguish it when it had run its course, but it left him on his own at the center of a red inferno, weakening as the powerful angelflame sucked at him. He felt the last of the djinn ash, returning to the fiery plane they came from, and he felt the walls of the temple turn back the angelflame, finally. He had underestimated how large the place might be, and he had no idea where the door was. What he did know was that he didn’t expect to find a second door.

  He sheathed Gentleness and held his arms out to either side, allowing angelflame to sprout from the other hand and join the rest of the fire, pushing it out of his way as he walked.

  The walls of the temple creaked and groaned, and somewhere they partially collapsed, pouring an ocean of sand in on the fire, but it yet burned. It didn’t need air like earth-bound flames. It would burn until its fuel was consumed - until the human blood in the temple was purged. Ruggiero let it go, taking another step and another step, only the vaguest sense of the shape of the building around him guiding a guess at where to go.

  He was tiring.

  If he fell, the flame would burn until his body was gone, and then it would go out, but it would burn everything else, first.

  The temple would go.

  He thought of Aurora, hoped that, if he didn’t make it, she would find happiness with a man who cherished her as Ruggiero did.

  Thought of Ferrau, and hoped that his friend would feel no guilt at sending Ruggiero into the temple on his own. Ferrau would have been no aid, and Ruggiero was glad he didn’t have to worry about rescuing other victims as he trudged, struggling not to fall to his knees.

  He couldn’t see anything. The crimson, fluid-surfaced flames were higher than his head, and they climbed the walls around him.

  He walked on.

  Another wing of the temple collapsed, and bits of sandy gravel rained down on Ruggiero’s head.

  He thought of soft, green forest and of water that covered mossy stones.

  The roof behind him gave and he looked over his shoulder to see sand spilling down in a waterfall around the sandstone.

  He was almost empty.

  And he could not see.

  He would die here, but he had done what he needed to do.

  Sand splashed against the walls, and the angelflame extinguished in a great collapse as the blood ran out through most of the temple.

  It was only here, in the room with him, keeping him company and finishing the job he’d been here to do.

  There was little dark magic left; it collapsed with the stone.

  More sand clouded his vision as he walked through a sheet of it coming down between stones, and he blinked, shaking sand out of his hair.

  There.

  That was a cut in the stone that looked like a doorway.

  And there was no angelflame beyond it.

  He kept going, his legs no longer supporting his body. Something else was, some primordial desire for survival, some magic he didn’t know, perhaps something else. Another pocket of flame went out.

  Ruggiero was through the doorway.

  The entire room collapsed behind him and the deluge of sand knocked him forward, buried him.

  He crawled, pushing himself through the sun
-scorched sand.

  He was close.

  Only the top layer of sand could be this hot.

  A hand grabbed his, pulling him loose, and the last of the flames went out.

  Ferrau dusted Ruggiero off with firm hands, then held his shoulders.

  “I am to take it that they are gone now, yes?” he asked.

  Ruggiero flinched against the intense sunlight.

  “Why are you here?”

  “It is the agreed time,” Ferrau said. “Two days.”

  Ruggiero shook his head, sand falling down the back of his neck. Ferrau grinned.

  “It was an epic battle then,” he said. “You must tell me everything. Come. Come.”

  Ruggiero looked up at the top of the sand dune, relieved beyond measure to see Frontino standing with Ferrau’s horse.

  “You must tell me everything,” Ferrau said again with a happy grin. “Your stories are always the best.”

  About the Author

  Chloe Garner acts as the conduit between her dreaming self and the paper (or keyboard, since we live in the future). She writes paranormal, sci-fi, fantasy, and whatever else goes bump in the night. When she's not writing she steeplechases miniature horses and participates in ice cream eating contests. Not really, but she does tend to make things up for a living. Find her on Twitter as BlenderFiction, on Goodreads and Facebook, or at blenderfiction.wordpress.com.

  Necessary Threads

  Lora Gray

  On your last day of solitude, you find the straw man in the gully, that deep gash between the cornfield and the trailer park where Lucy’s Husband Casey chucks old tires. A creek, thin and murky, hiccups through the sallow muck there. Water? Sewage? In this corner of Ohio, it’s difficult to tell.

  The straw man is crumpled on the bank. He wears human clothes, plaid, denim, bright orange cotton, but he doesn’t smell like skin.

  You breathe deep and creep forward, one broad foot in front of the other. Mud squelches. Your arm fur snags a blackberry bush. A songbird flickers between the trees. But the straw man doesn’t move and so you crouch beside him.

  His torso is puckered at the seams, his legs and arms tied to stumps at the ends. His head is a sphere of newspaper and paste (you taste to be sure), and rain has softened the left side until it’s slumped and pulpy where the cheek and eye should be. Clods of straw surround him and you can see yellow peeking from the tears in his clothes.