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[Fool]

Madman

In Heaven, They take your skin.

—Nameless vagrant, the tavern corner of the town of Charlystead, Sothron Aardweni Province of Terabinia - 9th of Morning Star, Year 1117 A.E.

—Heretic line excised and emendated from the Mandatos Solohmon, Holy Scripture of the Cult of the Wise-King, as of 7th of Meridian, Year 999 A.E.

The Tunnel Rat Mageling - 5th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

Eiden knew the look of madmen well.

He had avoided She-Who-Dwells-in-Blind-Eyes cultists like the plague that they were. Their numbers, though less than middling, were easy enough to stumble upon; a man with a rag tied tightly around his face—pox-ridden pustules trailing down his cheeks like tears wrought of rancid flesh—a common sight in lower levels of the Undercity.

They usually kept to the dark for reasons both obvious and occult. Eiden kept the hell out of their territory for reasons mostly obvious.

He was partial to having his eyes where they were now.

Inside their sockets.

Fates worse than the Soap-Maker’s Pit awaited those that fell in with any of the devilish cults that promised freedom from the Tunnels and reprieve from the tyranny of the Path-Most-Righteous. At least in the Seifar’s Stew they had the decency to leave your spirit and soul untouched; they only wanted the bones and fat, afterall.

Was no Iron-or-High-Law-honest money to be made with selling one’s eternal self, besides; the Lumenari Inquisition took none too kindly to unsanctioned magicking, much less that which dabbled in the domain of the gods and trafficked with devils.

Eiden knew the look of madmen well. And so, when Fin—no, the Exorcist, he corrected himself as he saw that Wolf Below’s grin, all spittle and snarl—started walking towards the Rat, the Rat took a step back.

His hands, unbeknownst to his waking cognizance, constricted and hardened into the rictus of a claw, tendons creaking at the strain. The veins that wound around his arms so readily, what with his many winter famines, grew in size and thickness; more like eels and leeches that suckled upon his insides than proper carriers for his vital breath.

His heart beat erratically, wrong and full of the Power of the Eld; intoxicating and stupefying insanity.

‘See the wolf beneath the skin’ whispered something planted deep in the marrow of his bones; a song of sirenes that promised everything he’d ever wanted for and been left wanting but did not get.

Bedeviled blood came from the base of where his nails met bone, darkening them unto the hue of three-colored bruise—xanthene, carnelian, and amaranth—and mushy plum. It spilled over from within and made his nails into talons black as sin and sharp as wolf’s teeth.

Arisen from the blood covering his nails, the claws grew in the manner of bismuth-made-jagged. Rusted iron, oily and erebeian, crystalized from the furthest reaches of his soul; the catalyst to the nucleation, his fathomborne fear.

Eiden knew the look of madmen. He knew it more than well, he knew it intimately.

The image of candles that burned with colors not natural threatened to make him vomit. A face he had banished to darker corners still, floated up to the surface of his mind; a bloated corpse of memory thrown into the sea of himself.

A face in the shore’s sand that he had picked up, dissolving back into but grains and nothing. It burned in the black behind his eyes, exiled but never truly forgotten. It smelled not of sulfur, but something far worse.

Of sweet rosewater twice-distilled and the grease of anbar.

With seeing the Rat stuck back at the room’s corner, eyes flashing the bright scarlet of things that made bump in the night, the Exorcist faltered in both the hitch of his step and the expression that sat atop his cheekbones.

With a breath of someone quickly sobered up from the mania brought about by heavy drink, Fin spoke; all tired and weary and old and sorry.

“I apologize, Eiden. I got caught up with myself and unleashed something which is not to be let out in pleasant company. I simply wanted to inspect your spirit after you cast that sorcery o’ yours; still not an excuse for startlin’ ya so thoroughly.”

The Exorcist’s aura, and the presence exuded by it in turn, folded back into itself. The feeling of great weight settling upon the world and of a blade held tightly to the artery of the neck, dissolved as salt does upon brook-water.

As does light not reach the fathoms of monsoon-engorged Ydden; unseen but still there, lurking and biding. A leviathan returned to the depths.

“If you’d like, I can leave the room or you may do so yourself for a few breaths to wind down before we get to talking properly. Again, I apologize.”

The infernal iron from which the Rat’s talons were wrought and the leeches-for-veins upon his arms dissolved, but fogmist ‘neath the sun at its height; like it was never there to begin with after it was gone.

Scattered by the winds of his soul, given back to whence they came. They traveled a particular pathway of his, the one which ran the gamut between brow, heart, and navel; the conception vessel was its name as Phineas had lectured a day ago, the major spiritual artery that bound the Three Basins.

It had a smattering of other names, too, but those were not on his mind as of now.

Eiden had looked down upon his hands, then. He had seen what he had become in its entirety. He could not deny the sight any longer by willful or unwilling ignorance.

Nine Hells take me away from the vile Divine…

The Rat wanted nothing more than to run away. To reject all that had happened since that accursed night. To return to the home that never again would be. Anything but be confronted by something he had already known full well of yet had attempted to drown in the strong drink of denial.

He did not acquiesce to the instincts that screamed for him to be rid of it all, the cold steel at the place where Eiden felt the drum of his chest stopping him so. The iron of his stomach held back the bile; slow nausea took place of quick release.

The breath taught to him by Fin came upon the Rat, but faint etchings of habit in the bosom of his soul yet helpful nonetheless. He’d not succumb to the rush of his blood nor drum of his heart, neither the thrall of tharn nor the fugue of rage.

He was even and aware as he looked down upon his hands. Not serene, never that, but awake and ready to brave whatever it was that need be braved.

Finger-tips made the raw red of skin dragged along rough, marmon grit looked back at him. They stared, still and searching. They almost seemed to speak; perhaps a trick of the essence that had been channeled through them, perhaps even just a conjuring of the mind.

‘Power’ was what they seemed to say.

Eiden found that line of thinking to be good.

This was a weapon, no different than any other than by, at most, its uncomfortable origin. And a tunnel rat did not possess the luxury of choice; he’d take upon this blade no matter that it stung his eyes like the brimstone that it was and from which it was wrought.

A price paid in full, he thought, no doubt influenced by the subtle and arkane ken that he chanced upon ever since brother-found and would-be lover had been taken away from his weak clutches.

As the Devil’s baleful cull, the core of his core whispered.

Nevermore, never again, he answered back in agreement.

A single, sinuous and spasmodic line of lightning—tinted the color by Oriathian church-glass—come and gone heralded the end of those vampyre’s mitts. Scarlata incarnata, was its name, he knew; the ken of a sage apparent in a urchin with no bloodline, neither noble-born blue nor merchantdom nor even petty field serf were present in him.

He did not know of his sires, only that they were not here nor had they ever been present, not even in his memories. But those thoughts caused him no pain. Not even a numb ache. One could not mourn what one had never cherished.

With a violent shake of his head and hands, to throw away the slimy feeling of that terrible, awful mana, the Rat refocused upon his mentor.

He thought long and hard about the words he would say.

“It’s alright Fin, no harm’s been done, not truly. Nothing permanent. Stop bein’ so hard on yourself; you’ve done more for me than perhaps any other in this damnable life of mine.”

His voice was slow and stumbling, throat unused to uttering kindness, honesty, vulnerability, and all the other things that got a tunnel rat killed and thrown down into the Stew.

“You keep cruxing yourself like that and I might slap you upside the nook and nape; only I get to mock my kith like that.”

With a smile like the shaky foundations of marmon ruins centuries-old, Eiden walked over to the Exorcist. They stood only five span away, a little farther than the reach of their arms such so that not even the tips of their digits would brush but were in reach just the same.

They stood five span away, but It felt like the separation of a single step.

“Now, since you feel as guilty as all Seven Damnations, why don’t ya teach me a new spell?”

A strange expression crossed Fin’s face, an insubstantial cloud that would, nevertheless, blot out even the sun if but for a moment.

As rays peek through greyen omen o’ storm, a wrinkly grin unfurled along the leathery hide of sun-tanned skin.

“Shouldn’t have expected any less from ye.” He said, a rueful shake of the chin coming upon him. “Can’t promise not bein’ hard on meself given there ain’t no way to become better than we are than to acknowledge that we aren’t as we should be.

“When ye come upon my degree of power, to not question what is done with it and not corral it, is to tempt the wayward eye of fire. But you’ll know when it comes your own time on the Path proper.”

Fin squinted his eyes and tapped a finger to his thin, wrinkly-wide mouth.

“Aye, laddie… I have just the spell you’ll be right smitten with. May even marry the ‘lotted thing.”

With a smile that did not reach Eiden’s eyes, the Rat sat down cross-legged and listened, the mess of the room around him.