An Old Monster from the Calamity

471 years A.C. (After Calamity)

It was a warm summer day. The sky was a pale blue with faint clouds dancing about in the sky. There was a faint trail of smoke coming from a quiet little town, that was near the sea. Following the smoke, you find a train station nestled beside a worn-out dirt road. The train station looked as if it had seldom been used. A train was stopped at this station. Church bells rang. The quiet town of Lle Pysgota was disturbed by the crass bells. As the ringing slowly fades away, the train, once more, disturbs the quiet town with a sharp whistle. And, as if unaware of the quiet of the town, the train starts singing its marching tune.

Inside the train, there are a handful of passengers. None of these passengers had left or joined the train at the station, which was slowly fading into the distance. While looking through the train’s window, Aedifex reminisced about the last time he ‘lost’ his life. The Armless Sage, once more, had tracked him down, this time to a mile outside the town of Lle Pysgota on the island country of Sudurland.

Lle Pysgota was a small fishing town that had less than 200 residents. Aedifex was playing the role that his god had trusted to him. Yet, for the past decade, the Armless Sage had tracked down and ‘eliminated’ him seven times. Even worse, he had fished very few believers from the ocean of ignorance, in these years. In his frustration, Aedifex began to cough. The tightly wound grey scarf that he had worn came loose without him noticing.

The blur of blue, green and yellow from his window strained his eyes. He began furiously tapping his leg on the ground. The person to his right, full of curiosity, looked at Aedifex from above their book. Aedifex had brown hair and eyes. He was six feet tall and looked sickly. Aedifex was wearing a monk’s habit with a torn grey scarf up to his nose. He was a bizarre sight to behold. Ever since the reformation Sudurland’s faithful had all but stopped using this garment. Aedifix, to his observer, looked like a remnant of a past long forgotten. The observer's curiosity, though, had quickly run dry. They looked back down to their book.

The only sounds you could hear in the cabin were the dull grinding of the train’s wheels against the track, tapping, and the occasional turning of a page. Aedifex was slowly calming himself down. He began to hear a sharp whine, when he jerked forward, the blur in his window once more became still. An ominous buzz began to fill his world. The buzz was maddening, it sounded like hundreds of infants began to yell and cry all at once. It sounded like the voice of the being who had cursed him, during the Calamity so long ago.

The person to his left was oblivious to this noise and cautiously looked at Aedifex. To the observer's surprise, Aedifex was hunched over, his entire body was shaking, there was a wetness to Aedifex’s eyes that made him look to be on the verge of tears. Full of worry the observer shook Aedifex’s shoulder and asked if he needed help. Aedifex, while shivering, looked up. And as he looked up his scarf fell on his lap. Eyes wide open, Aedifex looked at the worried observer. The worry, though, had been replaced with fear and disgust. After the observer had seen the entirety of Aedifex’s face. Aedifex had no cheeks, no lips, and where his jaw should be, there was nothing.

Meanwhile, the maddening buzz was growing in volume, Aedifex realized that it had found him once more. He clenched his fist in frustration. “Dammit! Why did I go to Sudurland? I should have known that it would be drawn to me. Sudurland has no damn Sanctuaries.” Aedifex thought. He moved his hand into a small brown cloth pouch that was fastened to his habit.

“I have no time to rely on luck, damn these runes.” Aedifex thought as his breath became unsteady. While cursing his luck Aedifex threw a handful of white beads from his pouch. The beads floated and rearranged themselves. The beads had some sort of inscription inlaid on their surface. With a low crunch, a hole had appeared on the side of the cabin. Aedifex quickly retrieved the floating beads and fled the train through the hole in the cabin.

Ten seconds had passed since he retrieved the runes, there was a grey streak growing through the sky. It drew itself closer and closer to the train. The passengers of the train began to watch the growth in the sky curiously, as a dull buzz slowly became audible. The buzz began to grow louder, the passengers began to shiver and convulse. If one were to observe, they would think the passengers to be madly dancing… dancing to the dirges of death.

There they would see the mad dancers rejoicing to a grey mass in the sky, a mass that was quickly approaching. In the climax of their dance to death, they would see what the mass was. A stream of decaying human hands attached to arms. The stream of hands was twenty meters wide. The majority of hands grabbed an arm. As they followed the horrifying cloud of arms, the observer would realize that it was taking the shape of a massive arm. An arm that would seem to be supported by the gods.

Aedifex threw out more white beads in a hurry. The beads rearranged themselves in the air while glowing in a vermilion hue. The beads, as if magnets that repelled each other shot apart, and fell to the ground. Where they fell, phantasmal bodies that resembled Aedifex appeared.

These bodies were identical if it were not for the fact that their faces were empty of any human features, the faces were replaced with a bloody carving that resembled an hourglass. The bodies began running towards the train. The horrid buzz was shaking the ground surrounding the train. Aedifex began to curse and threw another handful of beads in front of himself. The beads fell to the ground and did nothing. “Damn my luck.” cursed Aedifex. The phantasmal bodies looked up in unison, as they did, the decaying mass of arms fell upon them like a fly swatter. A deafening boom resounded, the bodies, train, passengers and even the hand that slapped down, were destroyed. The arms retreated into the sky, like the prong of a tape measure retreating into its case.

Aedifex continued to run. He did not look back. He didn’t know if he could revive if he was killed by that mindless horror. That horror is one of the few remnants of those Immortals, who tore the sky asunder in their chase of… of the calamity. ‘They had abandoned this plane already.’ thought Aedifex, ‘If they hadn’t, my god would still be suppressed. That fool of a sage, does he think that his enchanted machines can match those Immortals? Since the calamity, I have seen many wizards and sages, none have come close to those immortals. They only had enough power to seal my god in this plane, and he thinks he can kill my lord? The lunacy!’

Aedifex heard a gigantic crash as he saw a cloud of hands retreating into the distance. His face paled as he threw out a series of beads. Eventually, four beads lit up and sank into his legs. Aedifex’s speed increased. It took him two days to finally escape its pursuit. Aedifex had stopped at the edge of a river that was walled off by a curtain of trees. Aedifex stumbled under a tree. While leaning against the tree he began to relax.

He turned around and sat down with his back resting on the tree. He had used the majority of the beads in his pouch in his flight. Aedifex poured his remaining beads onto the ground. He slowly picked them up one by one. Looking at the inscriptions on the beads, he sighed in relief.

Aedifex put eleven beads back in his pouch and rearranged the remaining beads manually. He took a deep breath in, and gently blew onto the beads. They began to float up and slowly transformed into a woven basket and blanket. Aedifex stood up and grabbed them from the air. He gently laid the blanket on the ground. Sighing, Aedifex sat upon the blanket and opened the basket. Inside was a loaf of bread, two boiled eggs on a plate, a knife, butter, salami, and a thermos filled with water. Aedifex sighed.

After resting for two hours, Aedifex had a perturbed look on his face as he thought ‘It is times like this when I wish I wasn’t a thaumaturge.’ Slowly, He drew out the remaining white beads and once more, he rearranged them in his right palm.

He put his remaining bead back into his pouch. He blew onto these runes. The beads floated two inches above his palm. “My left arm.” he thought while slowly extending his left arm like a wing.

As if possessed, the beads formed a circle around his right shoulder. The beads began to quickly revolve around his shoulder. Every revolution the beads draw closer together. They cut apart his habit, then his flesh, and finally his bone, until they removed his arm.

Aedifex, as if used to this, sighed, “I did not think that I would have to create bone runes manually so soon after a death.” Aedifex removed the knife that was left in the basket. He grabbed his detached arm and began removing its flesh from the bone. All the while he was reciting scripture in his head.

“In an unorganized room, I see the world.” He thought to distract himself. “In my head covered by a box, the mess is contained. The box is open on one side, with an eye looking in, a window. Watching the eye, I grow dazed. The mess grows over the eye, and I see the world.”

In a solemn mood, Aedifex focused on trying to find the meaning of the scripture, “Was God referring to an ideal world that was overwhelmed with evil, until evil became the world? Was he referring to a corpse looking at the world from a casket?” Aedifex had finished removing the flesh from the bone.

The sun was setting. He carved into the bone. After washing the blood from the bones, in the river, he blew into the carving. The bone started to fracture into hundreds of white beads that glowed in the dim sky. He began the task of carving runes into the individual beads.

Aedifex had finished his task at midnight. There he sat on a bloodied blanket, there was a basket, and a pile of flesh. He stared off into the void. After a moment of rest, Aedifex clasps his hands together and prays. As he thinks an eerie voice sounds outpacing his thoughts. “Oh god, in your mercy, I offer, to you, this one's pitiable flesh. May you use it as you see fit. Amen.”

That night a hungry dog spotted a jawless man sitting next to a feast of bread and meat. The dog slowly approached the man, but the man noticed. Staring into the man's eyes the dog felt scared. It snatched the basket and ran off into the night.