9 - 1 [Fool] A Hunger Fit For Demons Kills the Cat

The Wise say that curiosity is a hunger fit for demons. Was it not the lust for the Knowing of the Gods that banished the rebellious Nemesis and Her aerendghasts from the Heavens into the Abyss?

Was it not the lust for the kennen of good and evil that doomed the First Children?

Curiosity and want for higher station foments dissent. To know of greater things above one’s natural place is to skirt the knife’s edge of tribulation and monstrum with bare feet and blind eyes.

Edhen, the Cradle of All Life, was a place of ignorance and naïveté. To have knowledge and ken is to no longer be a child. A bairnling all-grown-up has no place in the crib and must walk on their own two feet.

Must reap what they hath sown, a price paid in full.

-Mandatos Escribus Sagradus, Holy Scripture of the Cult of the Sacred-Scribe.

The Soap-Maker - 1st of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

Greth Eladre had come from a long line of thieves and murderers, connmen and rapists; a lot without a mother, his kin had been.

His kith, even worse. For friends were simply chosen family, and Eladre Junior liked his associates as black-hearted as they come.

Greth was a hedge magicker—known more commonly as a warlock—a magician that practiced the Art without the confines of the King’s Law and bereft of Academy seal. He peddled illicit druggae, cast hexes and curses of all kinds for hafts of silver, and was, by his father’s tongue, a right prick.

Hence why the old man’s bones adorned his neck, ensorcelled to help in Greth’s black bidding. The hedge mage’s thin fingers fidgeted with the bleached ivory stuck upon string of cat’s gut. Rocks of soapstone hung therefrom clinked and clacked from the fingering.

How’s it goin’ papa? How’s the view?

A heart, its muscle dry and preserved via embalming fluids of formaldehyde and mentholeum and then encased in a thick coating of resin of soap acrolein, was tied by lashings of hair to the rest of the amulet. Well-greased, the locks of a woman that took good care of herself bound heart-turned-to-stone to fingers-of-the-bone.

They clinked and clacked their little song. Phalanxes to metacarpals, they bleat their skald’s drum. Metacarpals to carpus proper, they sang.

In chorus and dead man’s fang.

A wailing gravestone hung from his neck; it waited in deathless, bated breath for the torture and damnation that was sure to come when the Pale’s Pull grew too strong.

It waited for the cold waters that would drag the father to the Hells for the sins of the son.

How’s it goin’ papa? How’s the view? The warlock asked again to one who could listen but not scream. Well, at least not scream audibly to the mundane senses of Man.

To the perception of the spirit—of a magicker—however…

Greth smiled, his crooked and rotten teeth like the stalactites and stalagmites that grew from the First Layer of the Nine Hells; Avernus, the Cavern of Desolation.

His breath was the stuff of nightmares, worse even than the sight of his mouth of pauper and heavy-druggae-use. If the mere sighting of his teeth was plenty adequate to make a man keel-over on the spot, then his halitosis sent any courageous enough to take a whiff straight to the bottom of the Hells.

The talisman mummed a jiggy equal parts begging for death and howling from the pain; Greth heard such song through the skin of his blood-ridden spirit; his Wolf Below’s grin widened if not in breadth then in blacken depth.

Such a thing delighted Eladre Junior no middling amount. To know that he walked by so many rats and they were none the wiser of what screamed under the folds of his cloak and shirt. The deaf unawares of the sobbs of the mute.

It was a comfort, this, to keep in touch with the old man without need for his awful words. Greth much prefered this voiceless song of clinking and clacking to the berratement of the judgemental and pious man of the Path-Most-Righteous.

What's the use for lutesong without other instruments to give texture?

Greth hummed a happy tune, one learnt from making deal with such a pleasant lot, as he walked down tunnels of whiten stone. Eladre Junior wondered what the Mad Hatter was doing, where the Man be.

When he be.

Did he still ply the Trade-Most-Foul with the same fervor as before?

Da. Ta. Da

Daah.

Ta.

Da. Ta. Da.

Daaaa-

The tune was strangled in his throat as Greth remembered this Seven-damned, Wheelen week had not come through as much as he would have liked.

The catchmen had not brought him new quarry. That would not do. No, no, no.

No.

The hedge magicker would have to change procurers for the next batch, lest he be left willy in hand and all that. Maybe the slavers from Yggy’s lot would do? He thought, scouring his memories for any catchmen of reputable word.

He let out a scathing laugh at the thought.

Greth turned a corner after having walked down a series of convoluted and unlit tunnels like the switchback trail of a mountain on a voidmoon.

The magicker needed not the sight of Man. By the skin of his blood-ridden spirit, he felt both wall and floor. Like the fingers of a thousand-thousand blind men finding their way through a woman’s bits, Eladre Junior threaded through the black.

Ahh, home sweet home.

He touched the dessicated husk of heart that hung upon his collar to a patch of stone wall most mundane. The heart, as Greth had found out, was the storage of a man’s soul. It was a worthwhile repository of what he had learned to call “mehna”—the stuff of the elements within; be it the essences of flesh and blood and bone or the distillates of pain and sorrow and melancholia.

The glyphs, roughly hewn onto the marmon wall by way of stone-carver’s tools, glowed a sickly, pale red; the color of a vagabond dog’s infected willy, all pink and inflamed and throbbing and wrong.

Greth quite liked the colors the etchings made.

The stone fell away, illusory that it were, letting the warlock through a portal demarcated by threshold of glyphery.

Stale air and the odor of sickly-sweet carrion slapped Greth in the face; he smiled, no teeth and all taunt.

When the hedge magicker fully entered into the hidden-away abode, the etchings glowed and reknit the illusion back into whole cloth.

I’ll have to recharge those, the mehna is close to a quarter depleted. Gonna haf’ta sacrifice a pup from the bitch when I plan to go outs again.

Greth hummed a little jiggy as he walked further into the fathoms of his lair. All the while fingering the collar of fingers-of-the-bone and heart-of-the-father and soapstone that hung upon his neck.

Da. Ta. Da

Daah.

Ta.

Da. Ta. Da.

Daaaah.

Ta.

The stairs fed into a balcony o’ sorts, overlooking a good part of his domain of dastardly deeds. The warlock surveyed his dungeon with the same sort of brow as a haughty, Seven-blessed kingsman.

All high and proud, he was, as he looked at cages that held beast and man alike of a smatter of ages. Pups and bairns. Sows and crones. Bucks and old dogs.

Some were held not in bars of wrought-iron imported through Qyranian Sea Roads, but instead slabs of stone they lay.

Bodies—some squirming and writhing and wailing, others quiet and meek and dead—lay atop tilted beds of rock hewn. Once, the marmon were tables of sunchildren, yet now they were host to a different sort of feast.

More fitting for the Nine than any sort of gods’ blessed hearth.

Greth saw their eyes—some glassy and hollow and lost, others wide and begging and stewed-wrathful—and he delighted in them.

Upon those slabs of marble were channels carved, slick with drops of blood that dripped from wounds that would not close. At the foot of each table was a basin of wowan wood, etched with glyphery that would collect the effluvia of humor sanguine by way of the tilt of the marmon.

Like honey going down a spoon, the blood was greasy and did not coagulate as was its nature, what with all the different compounds therein.

Druggae such as sedatives of concentrated milk o’ the poppy to rob the strength and make them meek, psychoactive stimulants like devil’s teeth mushrooms to inundate the blood with the humor of fear—quite effective for producing mehna, Greth found.

Terror and suffering made the spirit especially potent in mehna, inducing the production of more of its substance insubstantial.

Adrenaline extracted from the kidneys of lesser men to make bleeding faster, radium taken from pitchblende to slow the healing of wounds so that the incisions would not close so quickly. Heparin harvested from the livers of cattle made effluvia of the blood, thinning the humor and preserving it from coagulation.

The specialized chemicals and reagents were no easy things to procure in King’s Kedwen.

Menders and medikers had to either be bribed or robbed, yet that brought with it investigations from the local guard or, if the stolen goods were notably potent, the bloody Inquisition itself.

Guilder apothecaries had to be approached by either a third party or with a disguise lest they get suspicions of unsanctioned magicking, but herbalists, especially those that abounded near farmsteads to heal cattle and other livestock, cared not.

The medicinals used for the mending of beasts were good enough to be used on man, Greth reckoned.

Tanners were easy to part with their materials given their middling wealth and propensity for not asking questions; most were under the thumb of some liege lord or another. Their only problem was their gods-awful smell, what with such an occupation using piss and shit to process hide into workable leather.

Yet, all the work. All the annoying intricacies that had kept Greth away from his true occupation that was plying the Trade Most Foul, had been worth their price in labor and time.

And lives taken.

Like the distillation of ether from messy mash, mehna was taken from the flesh by way of the blood. Therein, among a row of tilted slabs and wailing men and women, a basin glowed a sickly pale red.

The color of the ripe crop of the Aspect of Famine.

The warlock’s face broke out in a sinister smile as he took the large bowl wrought of wood wowan, removed the cork that seal the heart-turned-to-stone that hung from his neck, and put a funnel of the same wood before finally pouring the effluvia of humor sanguine within.

A whole basin’s worth of mehna, of the elements of blood and spirit, fit inside a dry husk of heart no bigger than a fist. Most of the liquid was not natural material substance at all, but instead spirit-made-physical by way of the glyphery etched on stone and wowan hewn.

Now that no glyphery made the mehna into physical substance, the elements within reverted as dictated their nature, returning to the Realm of Spirit.

If in life the heart was a repository for mehna, the storage of a man’s soul, then in deathless unlife, it would be so too.

The sheer possibilities that dwelt within the energy that was mehna was nigh endless, giving Greth a giddy feeling. The joy of plucking a butterfly’s wings or breaking a cat’s frail bones, yet somehow more.

It was the same sort of satisfaction of listening to the Realm of Spirit of his dungeon, of the wailing of the bodies atop the marmon or caged within iron.

A cacophony of emotions, of tingly little feelings that danced and sang and spun atop the skin of his blood-ridden spirit. There was far too much dissonance in the piece for his liking, but that was no bad thing. No, no, no.

No.

The fun would be had in breaking and then remaking them to the tune of his own design.

Ahh, home sweet home.