by J K Ishaya
"I awoke the next morning lying on a wolf skin next to a camp fire. I had been somewhat cleaned up, my nasty shirt bandages replaced with fresh soft cloth, my hair rinsed of urine, though the smell lingered in my filthy trousers, which were the only clothes I had. Where he'd gotten any of the supplies for this care, I could not be bothered to consider. The pain crept back in but no worse than a dull soreness, but I still could barely move. The camp lay tucked between craggy walls of granite with an opening that looked out past pine forest, and in the far distance I could see the rocky jut of Kogaionon Peak, our most sacred mountain where Zalmoxis was said to have resided when he came to Earth. Somehow my rescuer had gotten me all the way from the plateau to this area southwest of Sarmizegetusa. Out there amid those rocks lay buried the inheritance my father had hidden for me to retrieve at the right time to reunite Dacia. That would not happen now, and it only fueled my deeper grief that much more.
"And speaking of my benefactor, I slightly raised my head to look for him, at first seeing nothing around me, until it occurred to me that he sat perched above the crag, on an outcropping, squatting like a bird of prey ready to launch and fly at a moment's notice. From there he watched the gap between our position and the mountain, his head cocking from side to side occasionally with an animalistic way about it, listening and analyzing. He must have sensed me watching him for his eyes suddenly cut downward and looked at me evenly before he pivoted around and dropped down with inhuman grace to land feet away from the fire with only a soft hush on the ground.
"'I thought you might like to see it one last time,' he said and gestured toward the peak, clearly aware of Kogaionon's status to a Dacian, though there was a strange hesitation in his voice. Our legends held that the peak disappeared at certain times each day, merging in and out with the otherworld, though I knew no one who had ever witnessed this. He did not look particularly comfortable being in sight of this supposed anomaly. Little did I know why that might be."
"You mean it actually did disappear?" Howard asks.
"There is far more to it that I will get to." I help myself to a cup of the tea, adding plenty of sugar to wash away the lingering taste of the yellow cloak's heart. "I do not know that I really wanted to see it that much, and I only looked away and toward the fire. I had questions for him, of course, and had to find the strength to speak.
"'Who are you?' It came out in such a rasp, and my tongue felt thick. He hurried to raise a water skin to my lips. I drank, and it soothed my throat, but upon reaching my stomach it nearly came right back up.
"'I am Malorix,' he said.
"'S'not Dacian,' I slurred. 'Gaul name.'
"This seemed to stall him for a moment. Then, 'Yes,' he said, 'I am from Gaul. Was,' he amended. 'A long time ago.'
"So this mystery from my dreams had a name and a place of origin, and he was a variety of Celt as I had guessed way back when I was a mouthy child demanding his name. Now he did not seem so spectral, although his movements were still odd, too quick at times, or he held that animal-like cock to his head when he examined my complexion. He poured water onto a cloth and wiped my forehead with it. I finally stuttered out my other questions for him in hoarse crackles and whispers. How had he been in my dreams? What was the thing in my dreams with him? Why wouldn't he let me go down the stairs? Why had he pulled me from the camp? What was a Gaul doing in Dacia now at this time of defeat?
"He didn't answer these but constantly hushed me, touched me with his mind again and again to relieve my pain or send me into sleep. At the time, I let the fever claim credit for my constant passing out, but I know now that it was him evading my inquest. But also, as when I had been a child on that landing, I began to resist him. I fought the fever, and I fought his mysterious influence, to demand he tell me something of substance until in obvious frustration he stood from my side and walked away.
"I tried to raise onto an elbow and call after him. 'D'on go. Tem'me who you are.' He'd told me a name, but not who he truly was. I fell back again and stared vacantly at Kogaionon beyond the forest window and before my eyes it did disappear from view. Whether it was a haze drifting across the rocky tooth, or a glare from the sun causing an optical illusion, for me it represented being shunned. Zalmoxis had not answered my people's prayers for rain, he'd left our fortress to thirst and burn, and now as I lay dying, he concealed his sacred mountain from my sight. My eyes watered with silent tears and I tried, to no avail, to will myself to die and finish this torment.
"Malorix returned sometime later, though I suspect he had been checking in on me all along, waiting, seeing if I had finally shuffled off my mortal coil, but I awakened from a fitful slumber to find his silhouette pacing with agitation before me, and Kogaionon was visible again on the horizon beyond. The sun's rays had turned golden on the western side, indicating evening was upon us as shadow filled our hidden camp. He'd stoked up the fire again into a high, steady blaze and another wolf skin had mysteriously been added to the pile draped over me.
"'Do you want to live?' he asked with an edge of urgency, stepping into the fire light with an almost anguished look on his face. There was far more weight on that question than I could have understood at the time. I gave a shaky nod.
"'Because I can save you,' he explained. Again he paced, as if to get an explanation out was the chore of Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up hill only to have it tumble back down. He came around the fire and knelt down to look at me, offered me more water, and then he sat back by my side and stared at the flames as if with a fever of his own. 'There is something sleeping inside you. I can awaken it, but there is a price so terrible. You will never know peace, never see the kingdom of your Zalmoxis.' He gave a nod toward the sacred peak and then looked intensely back at me. 'But you will know madness.'
"I did not know what he could possibly mean by awakening something within me, but I did not think I could know madness worse than I did already, being so weak, so hungry for answers and burning with anger while on the cusp of death, such a limbo of gross, swirling emotion. I'd lost everything dear to me, and nothing remained but the desire for retribution to fill that void. The last shred of my faith crumbled. I drew in a scorching breath and forced it out with more vocals than I'd summoned since my capture, even when confronting Bielis.
"'Fuck Zalmoxis,' I said through my teeth.
"Malorix almost looked disappointed, as if I had not given him the answer he preferred to hear, but he had given me only consequences. The loss of eternal peace. Madness. Things a man in my position did not see as much of a price at that point. I had no idea of the full impact of such a decision, so I don't know what he expected me to say. He paused for a long moment, then gave a flick of a nod in acquiescence, the most human gesture I'd seen from him.
"Then he held out his hands and spread them wide. To my shock, his fingers appeared to stretch, bones creaking in unnatural growth and his nails sprouted into long, dark claws. They narrowed out and came down to fine, sharp tips, not quite as curved as talons but sharp as the tip of a falx. This startling development drove me to raise up and use my arms to shakily push away from him, gasping and dragging my battered lower half. I came up against a boulder behind me and watched him turn both hands inward and rake his thumb claws along the insides of his forearms, making short but deep gashes. Black blood, not the bright crimson of human fluid, welled up and oozed onto each point covering them completely. They dripped as they came toward me, and my breath quickened as I thought at first he was going to choke me.
"Instead he positioned the points of his thumbs to pierce the sides of my neck just under my ears, right into the carotids on each side. Like an injection, you see? Like needles going in, those claw points delivered the samplings of his blood directly into my own veins. It was a pain unlike anything else, beyond my collapsing spine, the festering wound in my gut, or the slash on the back of my leg; beyond the emotion that I carried over my losses and my grief, and it immediately flooded through me, starting in my head and then plunging down into
the deepest part of my being.
"And it was an awakening."
✽✽✽
To recall what happened next is the hardest to put into words. I stare into my tea cup, empty but for little stained granules of sugar gathering in the bottom.
"I sank," I begin, my vision telescoping in on the surface of each crystal, allowing me to collect my thoughts. Where earlier I shared psychic images with Howard, this I dare not, for it would be too much for him to assimilate and break down into simple thought.
"I sank into myself, swallowed away by my own consciousness imploding. It was my first true deep fall down into that primordial well leading into the center of the world, the cosmos, creation itself. At that core a supreme chaos boiled and brooded before me, through me, inside me. An incomprehensible substance roared through my veins and teased me with the sense that I wielded such power as to be able to undo everything if I chose. But to fully grasp that power? Impossible. It remained just out of reach. My unremarkable human mind was too weak to correlate it completely even as my mental capacities expanded.
"That substance then began to work on my body, but it wasn't alone in the action. A piece of it had, indeed, already been rooted down and comatose in my very atoms, and Malorix's blood roused it, like watering a tiny seed, and it began to germinate. It crawled under my skin, wrenched around my viscera and heart, muscles and fasciae. The sensation of clawing, tearing, reaming sent me into seizures. When Malorix withdrew his talons from my neck and backed off, I flopped away from the boulder behind me and crawled groaning and screaming over the ground. My brain wriggled in my skull, and my eyes burned like coals in their sockets. The pus that had been swelling in my belly was expelled in a reeking mess upon the ground under me and the wound through my side mended as did the cut across my Achilles tendon. I could almost visualize my cells, flesh and blood, and every tiny nerve reaching out to each other, pulling together. This exquisite pain accompanied an unscratchable itch. I could move my right foot again, and then the most excruciating agony of all came with a revolting crack as my spine slithered out of its curvature and straightened. With it, everything else corrected with audible snaps and pops. My hips and shoulders aligned, and my ribs spaced evenly out, muscles that used to pull against each other now balanced tension and in a moment my screams dropped off as it ended.
"I lay blinking in awe, hands gripping the dirt in front of me. I saw that I, too, had grown a set of long black talons. Little black veins rose under the surface of my skin and then faded as the last of the change settled, and I looked down at my body. All of my scars were gone, even those that had followed the lines and spirals of my tattoos which themselves fade. The black ink—blended of soot, iron oxide and vinegar—oozed from my pores, dried instantly and flaked away.
"I gasped to notice the veil of silence around me. The fire still crackled, but night insects or birds had gone quiet. The crawling in my head ebbed but my awareness remained more acute than it had ever been. I knew with perfect clarity that Malorix had been influencing my mind since long ago, when he first approached me in my dreams to when he appeared in the flesh at Sarmizegetusa and again in the castrum out of which he'd lifted me.
"I knew the answers were right there before me; I could reach out and wrench them from him if I wanted, but as this new vitality grew in me, I found I didn't care about that. I wanted only one thing, and I knew I was capable of taking it. I rose slowly, getting one knee under me first, and then into a kneel. I lifted my gaze away from my clawed hands and looked out on the falling night and the distant peak of Kogaionon and glimpsed a red haze there that I'd never seen before. I stood up completely, marveling as I reached full height. I'd gained perhaps four inches—I towered—and I had never felt so certain of my strength as I did then. I might have laughed with excitement, except that another urge churned in me along with my want of vengeance.
"I turned upon Malorix with a questioning gaze. He kneeled on the other side of the fire simply observing me. His dark brown eyes were glazed over and his brows set in a furrow of what appeared remorse. My mind touched his and I confirmed that emotion. He was asking himself if he'd made a mistake, should I have been awakened? I, of course, begged to differ. My body was far better than it had been before, but there was that urge.
"'That is hunger,' he said gruffly. 'You have to resist it. Control it or it will control you.’"
"I could not control anything at that moment, hunger or wrath. Both gnawed inside my new guts and up the new highway of my spine all the way into my mouth and there I felt my teeth ache as fangs sprouted where normal human canines belonged. The tips were jagged and sharp and oozed a bitter venom onto my tongue.
"'There are deer nearby,' he said. 'Deer blood will curb it for a little while, but you will want—"
"I didn't listen to the rest. I knew what I wanted, and I'd be damned if I'd slaughter a deer for my first sustenance. That would be like celebrating with water and stale bread.
"Without a thought, without a plan, I bolted. I leapt up to the top of the crag, grabbing the rock with my talons, and then from there I sprang to the side of the slope and began to run. Using the position of Kogaionon to the south, I headed north east, and I heard my creator shouting behind me.
"'Zyraxes, no! Do not do it!' And then… 'Shit.'
Chapter Ten
"I tasted my first human flesh that night. Before I reached Trajan's fort, which was only a matter of hours running, vaulting over ravines and occasionally taking to the trees—over which time I never tired—I came upon a Roman patrol unit. I had, thus far, only experienced my new cognitive powers via Malorix, but now I found I could hear the thoughts of all of those legionnaires. They were whispers at first, a tangle of questions they were asking themselves over and over, and then as I focused, whole sentences in Latin unwove from the chatter and became clear. They were looking for me after my bizarre disappearance from the castrum. Perplexity and outrage had spread among the forces the moment they realized my cage was empty. Given how I had drifted in and out of awareness while sick and lost all sense of time, I now learned that it had been two nights since Malorix had liberated me. The patrol unit reeked of fear and agitation. They had watched the guards, who had been posted around the circle of my prison, suffer the punishment of stoning for supposedly neglecting their duty. Yet not a single man could imagine how I'd gotten out of the entire castrum let alone moved at all once out of that cage.
"And that fear, it smelled delicious. I ambushed them with new speed that felt all too natural, taking out each one with a swipe to the throat here, a broken neck there before any could scream. Eight of them in all. When blood sprayed on my face, I licked it away with zeal and streaked it in an X form across my chest from each shoulder down. It was nothing like that detestable goat blood I'd tried to substitute for water. Then when I had seized the last one and torn into his torso and up under his rib cage, I discovered a particular taste for hearts. Not that I hadn't had heart before, bull heart, or boar, but human was another matter completely and I loved it.”
Kvasir clears his throat and I catch on that Howard is growing more disturbed by the moment. I pause to temper the unintended enthusiasm that has crept into my tone. Any complacency he had before is long gone to my frankness. He wonders how I could say that there are worse things out there than me, but he will learn. He will learn in a most terrible way if I'm not careful.
"As I knelt over that last kill, his heart a mess in my hands as I devoured it, smearing my face with red, too drunk to pay attention, I did not hear Malorix's approach. Advanced in experience with such abilities, he came from nowhere and dove into me so that we went rolling over, smashing through brambles and sliding on layers of pine needles. We snarled like wild beasts and he wrestled me down, held me with a forearm across my throat as I pushed back. His breath chuffed like a lion's and I looked up into red, serpentine eyes that glared at me with an inner fire. Black veins appeared around his temples and he bared his own fangs, like my own, but longer, w
ith the same small grooves in the tips where beads of venom welled.
"'Stop this now, Zyraxes," he said, his voice altered to something so inhuman and beyond description and yet I recognized it. It was the same voice that had called out that long Noooo when as a child I attempted to slide down the dream steps on a shield. His face contorted. It was just a ripple that moved diagonally from one side of his jaw line up to the opposing temple, like a heatwave that revealed an incomplete transformation to onyx skin, a more slanted forehead and deeply glaring brow, and additional red eyes that receded further back in an elongated skull. Then I was looking at the more human image again. 'You know not what you will bring down on us!' he hissed at me.
"I instantly recalled the thing on the stairs from my childhood, its black, sleek skin and six, graduating eyes of red, its long, fanged snout and winged forearms. It only made sense that he was the thing, but to glimpse it in the waking world humbled me immediately. I stared back for a long moment, allowing the warning to sink in, though my defenses raised to a tight hum in my nerves. When I sensed his muscles unlocking, I threw him off of me with a roar and vaulted up to my feet and into a ready crouch. He leapt back and landed with a hunch in his shoulders and I noticed his fingers elongating, his claws lengthening far greater than when he'd injected his blood into me, and I was sure I saw thin membranes of webs appear between each digit.
"Here it was, the thing within him, but it only showed itself in brief, keyhole glimpses. I waited, but no further change happened, and no attack came. He controlled himself and straightened back into an ordinary stance. His fingers crackled as they shortened back to those of a seemingly normal man. The webs and claws melted back into human hands, and the red drained from his eyes into plain brown. I could not deny that he was my creator, my savior, and my superior, and a silent and ominous warning emanated from him that he could undo it all if he wished.
