Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse

by Christian Winter

  Unless I could get that arrow.

  I lurched over in the stomach and sticky entrails and slid across the frozen scales. Then I blacked out.

  I awoke cold and cramped and alive. But closer to the arrow. I wheezed as I flung out my arm, just barely wrapping the shaft in my hand.

  I sighed and shivered. My end was at hand. I would not freeze to death. I took a final breath and tightened my grip around the arrow. “Don’t miss,” I said to the tundra winds.

  Right as I was about to drive it through my eye my fingers were crushed as a foot sailed down from above. I heard the arrow snap as the point was thrust down and buried in the snow. I whimpered in futility as I looked up to see what kind of tormenter had sabotaged my best chance to escape from this icy plain.

  It was Scammander.

  He sprinted a couple paces further then whipped around, completely in shock. “Dead? Not quite dead?” he asked as he slowly approached.

  “I’m not sure who’s more disappointed,” I said. “How did you get down here?”

  “Stunt and that wench September kicked me in the stomach and then tossed me overboard.”

  Reluctantly, I sat up and scratched my head. “That’s weird, she’s the one who shot those two dragons.”

  “I don’t think those arrows were meant for them,” he said.

  Another lesson learned. “Guess the tombstone conversation wasn’t simply for jokes after all.” I began to climb out of the carcass, but Scammander stopped me.

  “Stay there. Don’t come out until I tell you,” he said as he pushed my head back in the stomach and folded the thick flaps of skin up, leaving a little space for me to see out of. He rushed back a couple paces and began slamming his cuffed wrists down in the snow, digging and carving in a circle. His cuffs flashed under his robe as bits of ice and snow jumped up around him. I could see slight symbols and icy runes of various sizes half way around him, when he suddenly stopped.

  A gleaming white platemail boot covered in a layer of thin ice descended in front of my view, and as it moved forward towards Scammander, gave way to a frosted platemail leg, and finally a tall warrior whose long, thick white locks trailed out of his helmet and spilled across his shoulders. In his left hand he was holding a large red shield with a white skull on it, which looked like it had been pulled from an old abandoned dining hall. In his right hand was a strange and magical sword.

  The blade was long and thick, the color of enchanted lake water. Carved on its edges were vines and leaves. In the center on darker metal was a gilded history of elvish civilization. The hilt was as golden as elven apples and in its center sat a large emerald, and preserved in the emerald was the sharp-staring eye of a dragon.

  “Trespasser! These verdant lawns belong to the elves! Leave our brave new colony at once, or by all the vines and blossoms and sunlight of this beautiful vale, I will command my noble patrol to kill you where you stand!” He looked back over his shoulder and gave a signal to his imaginary column of fellow soldiers.

  “Hythloth…” Scammander said cautiously. “It’s me, Scammander.”

  “It cannot be!” screamed the icy paladin.

  “Look at my eyes,” the young wizard said. “Remember I told you, you would know me by my eyes.”

  “It cannot be!” he screamed again. “I’ve killed you a thousand times! I’ve chased you through this verdant vale, over its sloping green hills, and spilled your blood on thousands of white blossoms! And still you live to mock my labors!”

  I couldn’t see his face, but the insane elf fell silent as soft snow drifted down from the dull sky. “Damn my eyes you’re just another mirage!” Hythloth bellowed as he raced at Scammander and swung the magical blade over his shoulder, arcing through the air and slamming into the ice.

  Scammander ducked past him and hopped over the dragon corpses. Hythloth slowly turned around and took a deep breath, then sprinted after his foe and my brother.

  I burst out of the dragon’s stomach in a shower of bone-shards, frost, and entrails and threw my forearm into Hythloth’s face. His feet flashed up where his face had been as his head crashed into the snow. I turned around to Scammander, who jumped up and shoved the shotgun into my face, already squeezing the trigger. I tried to duck, but Hythloth’s pommel pounded the back of my shoulder sending me to the cold ground faster. As I sank down the shotgun blast flew past me, blowing my hood back against my shoulders. I heard the shrapnel bounce off something icy and Hythloth skidded away behind me as I face-planted into the snow.

  Scammander cocked the shotgun as he hopped over the hulking corpse, spilling two hot shells on me.

  He fired again to keep Hythloth pinned to the ice as he charged towards him. When he was right on top of the knight, Scammander shoved the barrel against the shield and fired. The loose shrapnel blasted off the shield and bounced everywhere. Scammander went flying backward, tossing the gun in the air in the process. I sprang up then slipped on the ice, twisted my ankle and crashed back down face first in the snow.

  Hythloth looked around his shield, then rose up and hurled it through the snow at Scammander. I pushed myself up as all three of us ran for the gun.

  Scammander got to it first, Hythloth second, and me third. Scammander planted the twin barrels into Hythloth’s icy breastplate, but he grabbed Scammander’s shotgun barrel and spun into him, crashing his plated-elbow into Scammander’s face. As Scammander grunted and slouched, the frosty paladin yanked the gun from him and flung the sorcerer across the tundra. I pulled out the crossbows and planted one right on his neck, but Hythloth shoved the barrels into my stomach and squeezed. I heard the loud thump and the gust of wind as I somersaulted up into the sky. Upside down and half-way through my second aerial tumble I saw my legs and lower torso flipping through the air away from me and hurdling blood across the sky and white tundra. Pain and nausea blasted through my skull, and no matter how loud I screamed the two never subsided. I landed in the snow just in time for my newly grown legs to shatter and my newly grown torso to tremble, wrenching my old mouth open in a dry-heave. I clawed around the snow, gasping and whimpering; I dug my nails into the ice and crawled aimlessly, balling up, choking, unfolding, writhing, and crawling and coughing on the cold, sunless plain.

  By the time I crawled back to the dragon carcasses, I had prepared myself to see Scammander’s dead body. I propped myself up on the dragon corpses and saw the elven commander running around like he was marshalling a battle-line. Scammander lay motionless in the snow, but no blood seeped out from his robes.

  Hythloth waved the sword over his head, rallying his imaginary soldiers to his side. “To me! To me!” he cried. “You!” he pointed at some mounted mirage. “At once make haste to our sylvan citadel. An invasion has begun—I’m sure of it. Two enslaved minions of some enchanter have I just now defeated in most martial combat. No doubt they were scouts sent forward to observe our armies and to disclose the location of our new colony. Dispatch at once, and bring brilliant elven banners and knights to the fray.” He watched as the fantastic herald galloped off into the forest, then gathered his remaining illusionary column together.

  I watched in disbelief as the snow fell from the thick grey clouds. I spotted the knight’s shield and began moving towards it.

  Hythloth froze suddenly. He looked right at me and pointed to where I stood, signaling for his phantoms to spread out. “See! I hear another adversary stirring just beyond this screen of bushes, thick with old vines. If my memory still serves me, and not the wily wizard besieging us, just through there is a grove with the softest grass, full of yellow sunlight. This same grass only a few days prior did I jest was softer than the green lawns of the Academy!”

  He rushed across the iced earth then swung wildly at my face, and as I leaned back his gelid boot crashed into my knee-cap, pushing it back through cartilage, muscely strings, and out of the back of my leg with a loud pop. As the mound of bone and blood tumbled across the snow behind me I gasped and realized the swing wasn’t wild at all
, but disguised for the disabling blow to my leg. I cringed as my face crashed into the cold snow. The ground and sky blended together as I rolled away from Hythloth until I hit his huge red shield. I grabbed it and stood up across from my enemy with a new knee.

  Hythloth fought with the cool discipline of a soldier who has risked his life thousands of times in the calculus of combat. His movements were elegant and economical, imagined in liquor-filled campfire recollections and card games, practiced in skirmishes, and refined in war.

  Clouds of steam poured from my mouth and nostrils from our labor, but Hythloth’s breath was disciplined and regular. Small puffs shot out of his mouth as he sprinted towards me. I opened and closed my hand around the heavy leather straps as he came closer. I hesitated for a moment, then darted into him, swinging the shield as I tried to backhand him in the face. He ducked under the swipe and jumped up in front of my face, but before he could drive his sword through my stomach I drove my horn into his neck.

  The layer of frost on his skin deflected the blow and I fell backward in a daze.

  “Damn my eyes, you’re just another mirage!” He screamed wildly as he brought the sword arcing down towards me. Squeezing the leather straps I leaned into the blow, trying to block it midswing, but the sword split the shield and loped my arm off in a shower of splinters. Hythloth carried the swing all the way through, slicing across my thigh and through my leg, drenching the snow in a vivid red. I fell into a pool of my own smoking blood as my face crashed into the white ice. I tried to roll away in a haze of pain, but instead of a new arm and leg I had two leaking numb nubs.

  Death had finally come to me, and his name was Hythloth.

  The knight’s chilly visage loomed over me. My teeth began to chatter uncontrollably as he stared down at me beneath the thick grey sky.

  This was the end.

  I would say nothing.

  A roaring inferno swirled around the icy knight as long tongues of red and orange flame whipped about him. He fell instantly to the snow, where the magical fire snapped and popped as it faded away from his darkened remains.

  There stood Scammander, whose smoking, bloody hands were holding a flame sac from one of the fallen dragons.

  “Stop saving my life,” I groaned into the frost.

  “Hythloth wasn’t going to kill you, he’s too noble for that.”

  “You’ve run from almost every fight we’ve ever been in together,” I wheezed. “Who is Hythloth?”

  “Someone Scammander killed,” the wizard said, dismissively.

  “When will they say that about me?” I whispered into the ice.

  Scammander roared as he lifted me up, stumbled a little, exhaled, and steadied himself. “I’ll tell you about Hythloth some other time. But first, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  I knew we weren’t going to make it—because we had nowhere to go.

  “If you can chop off my horns, we can impale ourselves on them rather than freeze to death out here,” I gasped. “I was going to use the arrow, but you crushed that hope,” I said faintly and coughed. We started moving and I watched as my severed arm and leg grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared behind the veil of snow.

  “Take this opportunity to prove your vow to silence, I’m going to need all my strength a—” he stumbled again and went down on one knee. “—And can’t talk.”

  “Where are we going? We’re on a forsaken plain of ice. There’s nowhere to go.”

  “Following my instinct,” he growled as he rose up again, with me laying across his shoulders. “And it’s not a tundra, we’re on a frozen lake.”

  “Drowning might not be so bad,” I muttered.

  Then Scammander knocked me out.

  Deleuzions of Scammandeur (Or, Cool Memes)

  “Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.”

  Baudrillard

  I awoke looking into a giant eye on the floor.

  The floor was such stuff as dreams are made of. The indigo tiles were as soft as crepuscular shadows and blue phantasmagoria. Painted onto them was a portly blushing sun half eclipsed by an equally rotund pearl moon, whose simpering eyes exchanged a knowing glance amidst hills of thick, white fleecy-clouds. I pushed myself up with the one good arm I had left.

  I was lying in a dim court, surrounded by thick columns of fluffy white clouds. Six levels of the cloudy colonnades rose above me where they merged with the oneiric blue ceiling.

  Then I heard screams.

  Scammander’s screams.

  A scowling old man with long hair stained silver from magical labor leaned down and looked into my eyes. “A minotaur! I wonder if I can teach you magic…” he continued in a trembling whisper, “but you might become more powerful…I had that problem once before…” he glanced from side to side, then snarled and looked back at me. “But that problem is to be remedied.”

  The magician rose up and held his palm out from my missing leg. There was a light breeze as thin white and periwinkle strands of light crisscrossed each other in front of my leg-stump, followed by a new leg. And there was no pain. He did the same for my missing arm and the side of my face.

  “I see Scammander hasn’t stolen all of my magic.”

  The old wizard placed his frosty palm on my forehead. Shelves and shelves of weapons flashed past my eyes in strange hallucinations and with such exhilarating speed that I became short of breath. Suddenly they stopped. I looked up just in time to see the pale blue light fade back into the sorcerer’s white palm, hovering a few inches away from my face. The wizard had a puzzled look on his countenance.

  “Hythloth is dead,” he said. “The two of you have slain Hythloth. I have seen it.” Scammander began screaming again. “No, not a task for me, a task for a new thrall,” he said looking at me. Scammander’s screams ceased. “Come, come Evander. A trial for you.”

  I slowly stood up, then stretched my arm out and opened and closed my hand, stretching my fingers and wiggling them. I shifted all my weight onto my new leg, then slowly lowered myself all the way down to the floor, before springing up.

  The magician looked at me for a moment before speaking. “Pick your weapon.”

  I stared at him blankly.

  “Does Scammander teach you nothing?”

  More screams from Scammander.

  An onyx sword in the shape of a terrifying hourglass appeared in front of me, slowly spinning in the air. The dense obsidian sword was covered in thick white flame, like a winter shadow illuminated in pearl fire. Swervy atoms cascaded down the blade. On the top half of the hour glass rushing atoms blended together to create a stream of animals which then raced towards the tip of the sword. As they moved the dizzy atoms swirled around their muscular bodies. When they crossed to the bottom half of the hour glass their motion slowed and their bodies slowly deteriorated, until they dissolved once more into the atomic sand that swirls across our infinite chronological surf.

  There were also cubes, triangles, orbs, and the philosopher’s dodecahedron that emerged from the atomic spray and tumult and tumbled down among the other creatures. And there were worlds and planets and stars, worlds fashioned to unfamiliar geometry, geometry unfamiliar to this world, but, perhaps, at the pushing edges of time were young—new—possible.

  Etched into the center of the blade was a striking phrase running down the sword “I spill the hours in seconds, and make eternal that which is fleeting.”

  “Do you know of this blade, Evander?”

  “Does anyone who yet lives in this world?”

  The old wizard grinned. “It is a governmentless blade, inconstant and planless. It is the blade Momentum.” His eyes fell to the sword hanging in the air as if he expected it to leave. “An ungoverned lightning bolt was fastened by wild winds that toss trees and enwreathed with meteoric spray and flung starlight, far traveled, from the then edge of our edgeless universe. This was done by a great circle of sorcerers, all beaming and brimful of magic, arcing, splendid, in huge strokes of
static sorcerery to bind that which is, that which was, and that which will be into one momentous blade. None survived the labor. And thus the blade Momentum was born, yes, Momentum, the tomb of moments.

  “And do you know who these magicians were?”

  I shook my head.

  “Minotaurs. And their ashes constitute your golden soil.”

  Suddenly the blade vanished.

  I looked at him.

  The sword flashed back in front of me, slowly turning in the air. “Observe it carefully. Hold it in your mind as you hold it in your hands.”

  This time I reached out and slowly wrapped my hand around the floating blade. It was as light as a summer leaf.

  “I gave the other blade of this caliber, Lentitude, to Hythloth, the prince who was supposed to rule this brave new colony of elves. Did Scammander ever tell you about Hythloth?”

  I shook my head.

  The icy sorcerer grinned. “No, he wouldn’t have.”

  The blade Momentum vanished from my hand, replaced by a longsword. “I will teach you how to summon it, supposing you complete your task.”

  The room blurred for a moment and I felt the strange sensation of moving backwards while not moving at all. When everything sharpened into stillness again, we were standing in the shadows on the edge of the court and the sun and moon mosaic had been replaced by a giant chessboard. I suddenly began to feel very drowsy, as though someone had placed a slender garland of poppies around my forehead and hung a heavy morphean amulet around my neck. I yawned and closed my eyes as my ears filled with the soft susurrus of sands pouring from a thousand hourglasses.

  I rubbed my eyes and opened them as the sound of the sibilating sands continued to spill through my mind and fill my ears. On either side of the cold court slender tendrils of dense purple and sapphire mist seeped out of the shadows and rolled past the bottoms of the cloud-columns as they spread across the floor before gathering into illusory Scammanders.