Original Fiction: The Left Hand of Fomalhaut
No one knew from where the Magi came, but they were of the old blood...
I.
No one knew from where the Magi came, but they were of the old blood and had erected their many sable towers in the space of a single night.
Ten years later …
Twelve kings gathered in the rotunda of their supreme court. Under the luminous blue dome adorned with crystals in miniature replication of the stars, the room and the twelve darkly robed figures within it were colored in a light like vaporous sapphire. Fluted pillars gleamed like bones around the edges. There was the soft babble of troublous chatter.
Then King Ruth Waldroop spoke.
“Brothers and sisters! Honored Kings of Yomm! I have gathered you here tonight so that you may see what once was the house of justice for our peoples is now home to gnawing rats and creeping spiders. Listen!” She paused here. The only sound was the squeak of leather in someone’s shoe. “These halls are as silent as midnight graves and just as deserted. The marble that constitutes its floors is broken and in more than one place the vaulted ceilings crumble.
“We must ask, ‘What is to be done?’ But first, I must ask, ‘Have we come too late?’ The Magi - with all their awesome power - have threatened us with plague and famine. They have made our city weak by taxing our people into oblivion. Fear has kept you subdued. Fear has kept me subdued. Fear made us kings - true sovereigns of Yomm - submit to the Magi’s will. No longer is this the City of Twelve Kings. No, I say! It has become The City of the Magus! I burn for action, and that fire spurs me more mightily than the reigns of fear.”
A hush fell over the room. Then King Samson spoke. His voice was low and measured. Bandages hid the scarring on his face.
“Sister Ruth speaks true, but what can be done? Their magic is a mighty weapon. When they first came to our shores I went with your father, little Ruth, to the dark tower called Black Rise wherein Temelis the Thaumaturgist abides, or so it has been said. We found it built like a fortress with a single gate set deep within a colossal and multi-columned portico. When we arrived at that gate, the statues in the pillars came alive. Their eyes glowed like charcoal. Our bullets bounced off their hard skins. During our escape one seized me and raked its stone fingers across my face leaving me disfigured.” Samson touched the bandages. A shudder went through him.
King Joseph spoke next. The hood pulled closely about his head obscured all his features except his beak-like nose and the round glasses that set upon it. He was a skittish man. His voice had the cadence of a frightened mouse.
“Indeed! I have also approached one of their black towers. Bane Manor it is called home to Pape the Prestidigitator, and I can confirm it is built like a fortress a castle even. Completely inaccessible! There was a thick fog that night (of no natural occurrence of that I am sure). It is only because I was lost in that fog that I came upon the citadel completely by accident! I heard a cry from above me. I looked and saw … things crawling over the battlements lizard-wise. I couldn’t make out their exact forms through the mist, and I didn’t stick around to find out, but they were not of this world. That I can tell you!”
A nervous murmur rippled through the room. Ruth rejoined the conversation.
“Does anyone have any useful information? I mean, something we can use, um … to find a chink in the armor, so to speak.”
King Rebecca answered. Her ruby hair in the sapphire light appeared amethyst.
“I know little for the Magi are rarely seen or heard from except through the familiars they send to deliver their dictates. Nohle the Necromancer of Night Hold, for example, is said to use her sorcery and strange obsidian scalpels to attach the upper halves of people to the lower halves of enormous things which crawl. Yet, there is no witness to corroborate the existence of these chimeras. Only this am I certain of: Thomas Orion Griffin is their leader.”
“Who is this Thomas Orion Griffin?” asked Joseph.
“And how do you know he is their leader?” added Samson.
Rebecca shrugged. “In truth, no one can say with certainty. Only furtive rumors have haunted my courts like phantoms. Nevertheless, it is said the Magi possess great stores of treasures not just from their forced tariffs on Yomm, but also from alien worlds. From such a world is the mummified Left Hand of Fomalhaut, which Orion keeps on his person at all times. This powerful artifact enabled him to install himself as Supreme Archmage.”
Ruth said, “Then Orion’s power does not come from within himself but from this dismembered hand. If we should steal it …” However, King David interrupted Ruth.
“Hold your tongue, ignorant child!” he said. “You forget their wizardry is cunning. As we speak one might be divining your wicked intentions. Maddux the Magician can do so, and he is said to be cruelly vengeful.”
A second hush fell over the room, but this one was pregnant with terror. The eyes of the eleven kings cast harsh and suspicious glares, finding Doom sneaking in through every shadow, peering out from behind the pillars with his grinning skull face.
Then someone shouted to unseen voyeurs, “I’ll have no part in schemes against the Magi!” The rest joined him or her until the rotunda was filled with a disordered rabble.
King Ruth shouted over the din.
“ENOUGH!!! You dishonor your fathers with these words. Mine died by their demonic spells with a rifle in hand while you, you flee with tail between your legs like beaten dogs. Fine! Honored Kings of Yomm. Go cower in your decrepit palaces.”
She stormed out with a huff. The remaining kings renewed their decrees of innocence before dispersing under the suppression of a fatal gloom.
II.
The dim sun sank below the horizon. Ruth sat on her throne. Brow furled and finger rapping against the arm rest, she said to herself, “The only justice served is the revenge we take.” She needed a plan to steal The Left Hand of Fomalhaut from the archmage, Orion. One began to take shape - unclear and uncertain but dubiously perceptible like a wraith emerging from the mist.
In a more rational state of mind she might have postponed any action until a more substantial plan could be devised. However, the cowardice shown by her fellow kings had called back to life the more primal tissues of her brain so that reason was obscured as by a bloody vapor that colored all considerations in an angry red.
Thus resolved, Ruth pulled the braided rope that dangled near her throne. Somewhere deep within the palace a bell rang. In a short time, Malachite entered the throne room. He was House-Wizard under Ruth’s father, Paul Waldroop, and sat on the throne after his death until Ruth achieved the age of ascension just three weeks earlier. He once again served as House-Wizard.
Malachite seemed to glide rather than walk across the room; the long train of his black and deep-purple robes concealed the smooth locomotion of his feet. Over the course of decades his face had waned, and his hands had shriveled into talons. Yet his hair remained jet black and long. An ornamental headpiece pulled it back from his face. A brown wire dangled from his right ear. The other end connected to a mechanical box that aided in hearing.
“My lord,” he said, “what is your bidding?”
“My dearest Malachite,” Ruth began, “you have served faithfully under my father, and I am in need of your discretion. Have McGregor readied and waiting at the secret escape point. I will meet him there shortly. In the meantime, prepare your laboratories to study a talisman or … um, anything else, I am not sure, but we need to understand it within hours of its retrieval. Time is of the essence, as they say. The fate of Yomm depends upon this.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Malachite. He bowed low and drifted away.
Later …
A single incandescent bulb chased the shadows into the far corners of the bedchamber. Therein stood Ruth naked before a floor length mirror. Upon that mirror hung a military style uniform: tunic, trousers, puttees and webbing. Ruth put these on plus a long train of cloth that concealed all the features of her head such as her aubrun, shoulder-length hair and hard mouth unbecoming her delicately molded jaw and button nose. Finally, she placed a .38 revolver in a shoulder holster nestled nicely under her left breast.
A knock resounded at the door.
“Come,” said Ruth.
It was Malachite. “My lord, your House-Guard awaits you in the designated spot.”
“Good,” replied Ruth. “If anyone should ask for me tell them I am not to be disturbed.”
“Yes, your highness.”
When Malachite departed, Ruth walked over to the casement and opened it. She looked out upon the desolation of Yomm. The towers of the Magi rising above the city skyline punctuated her misery.
“My city shall know glory and freedom once again. As Paul Waldroop’s daughter I swear it!”
Ruth kept her appointment with House-Guard, Luke McGregor. The pair snuck out of the palace through a small cellar door in the abandoned north wing. They crept across the ruinous Hanging Gardens of Isaiah like thieves, so as to be seen by no one.
III.
A westward wind brought a line of angry black clouds. Occasionally lightning flashed. When it did, everything became bright and still before the darkness returned even darker than before. Two shadows threaded the tortuous streets of Yomm, and more than once they climbed over the mountainous debris of a bombed-out structure.
“The work of the Magi,” Ruther muttered. Destruction was at every hand, and the king bristled.
“Do you see it, Luke? What has become of my home! And there, the south and west faces of the Jacob Clock Tower are yawning blackness. I remember when I was a girl their electric glow shone into my room like a colossal night light. Alas! No more. The remaining hands are still while the light is extinguished. Ol’ Jake’s iron bells still occasionally chime, but they are death knells for themselves.”
She saw too, though did not say so, the sable towers of the Magi. Their heights were lost in the raging clouds, but their bases possessed a sheen that made them stand out like wounds in Night herself.
At last, the threatened rain fell. Ruth paused under a tattered awning. The lumbering Luke McGregor trotted to catch her up because the weight of his gear had slowed him down. Already his orange-red mane was soaked, and little beads of water clung to his matching beard. He was short and stocky and moved like an oversized dwarf: the piston action of his legs rocking his wide body from side to side.
In the days when Luke had rocked Ruth to sleep in his brawny arms, when being a House-Guard was little different than being a babysitter, there was no threat from which Luke could not rescue his ward. Then the Magi came. Luke’s skill with a firearm was no match for their sorcery. The guard dog had been neutered.
“How do you manage?” Ruth asked.
“Slow but sure,” huffed Luke.
“Good. But do not lag too far behind; I will need you to protect me if I should fall into trouble.”
“Do not worry. You are safe in my care as you have always been.”
“I know.”
A few more turns brought them to an abandoned suburb where Nature had long begun her reclamation of the land. Methuselah’s Gulch it was called. The ancient race that once lived there had vanished decades ago, but it is said Ruth’s great-great-great-grandmother was of that race and passed down the secrets of their herbal witchcraft.
The old thoroughfare of granite stones was broken by the rampant growth of gnarled oaks, which had taken root in the interstices of the wide blocks. Still, it carved a clear line into the valley where the roofs of brick buildings were overtopped by close-grown trees.
The clouds closed in around their heads like palls of black smoke.
“This is bad,” said Luke.
“It is a fog, ‘tis nothing,” said Ruth.
“No fog. Orion sends it to befuddle us. We have been discovered.”
Ruth looked and found a large mushroom growing in the corner of a dilapidated building. When she tore it up, the gills flashed with a bright, pale green light.
“Phosphorus fungi,” she said. “My mother taught me how to spot it. Some plants release pheromones when distressed. This one shines.”
“But m’lord, if we have been found out …”
“Then there is no place on Earth that can keep us safe.”
By the giant mushroom’s flashing luminescence, the pair found their way through the murky gulch.
IV.
Before them, Orion’s citadel stood in vigilant watch over Yomm. The view from the forest was far too obscure to discern details beyond the flickering points of bright orange flames that irregularly flecked its façade. But as the king and her soldier passed from the forest, they saw it more clearly. Tier upon tier the high walls rose to the dizzying vacuum beyond the clouds with battlements and merlons that stuck out like jagged teeth set in the broad, square jaw of a rocky face. Figures could be seen pacing between these, all black but for the sheen on their rifle bayonets.
“It is worse than I had imagined,” said Luke. “It is a piece of Hell come to the Earth. If we ever see the light of day again, I will be very grateful.”
“Hush!” scolded Ruth. She pointed. Just as Samson had described, there was a colossal gate set in an equally sized portico. There walked living stones. Ruth motioned her guard to follow her. “We will find another way,” she whispered.
They left the Methuselan highway. A few rubble piles and half-standing walls were the only remnants of the society that once thrived here. To their left the ground sloped sharply away. It formed a shallow but broad ditch lined by purple stones covered in reindeer moss. Through the center purled scummy water. Its surface possessed a greenish shimmer. There was also the faint smell of sulfur and ozone.
“Wizard waste water,” Ruth stated. “Let us see from where this came.”
The stream wandered but maintained the general direction of the tower. It also grew shallower, wider and its bottom more earthy. The stones that formed its banks disappeared, and its waters spilled over. At length, the stream vanished altogether. It had led them to quagmire, at the far end of which the walls of the many-turreted tower were based. A pipe jutted from those walls. A rivulet of green slime poured out. The sulfur and ozone smelled strongest here.
Ruth said, “We must have swung wide while following that stream and have come to the rear of the structure. Look. That pipe may take us inside.”
Ruth led the way. Her light body traversed the mire easily. Luke, on the other hand, sank knee deep into the soft earth and had to use both arms to lift his buried leg out. He would have lost a boot but for how tightly he had laced its strings.
The pair had closed the distance by half when Luke shouted, “M’lord!” Ruth first turned to her House-Guard, puzzled. Then she spun herself to follow his wild gaze.
Vague forms crawled lizard-wise over the tower walls. They descended with alarming rapidity. A single cry went out. It was answered by a nightmarish chorus of similar vocalizations.
“Run!”
In her terror, Ruth forgot and stepped off the tussock that supported her. She sunk into the mud and reeled drunkenly into the morass, sending a spray of green water into the air. Attempts to extricate herself only pulled her in deeper. She panicked and thrashed. The morass swallowed her faster still. Soon the muck closed around her face. The stench of ozone and sulfur filled her nose. It forced its way into her mouth. She gasped and sputtered. A fountain of sludge sprayed from her nose. Between clutches at air Ruth cried out.
The rabble responded.
V.
Air suddenly rushed over her. Ruth sucked in a desperate breath. Something had ripped her from the mud. But what? She wiped the sludge from her eyes expecting to see Luke holding her ankle in his mighty hand. Instead, there stood a gray-scaled monster. Its head was a tangle of horns. Double tongues licked hungrily at cracked lips. Two eyes glowed like pale lanterns filled with anthropophagic delight. It unhinged its jaw and placed Ruth’s foot inside its gaping mouth. Easily it could have swallowed her whole.
The king screamed.
At once a bright light blinded her and a sound like thunder deafened her. When Ruth’s senses recovered she observed the lizard man slumped in a heap, its head opened and oozing gore.
Ruth looked and saw by her side stood Luke. Both barrels of his leopard gun were smoking. He grabbed her by the back of the collar and threw her over his shoulder. In the next moment he was running through the pipe with no aim but to run.
The lizard men followed. Their presence was an ever-swelling din on the heels of the House-Guard and the king he carried. When he dared to look back, he saw an advancing gray mass scored with slavering maws and groping appendages.
The lizard men raced and fought one another for dinner. Their numbers swelled. Soon, the narrowly set walls of the pipe could not accommodate the multitude. They choked it like a dirty bone in a throat. This drove them to madness. A bloody orgy erupted amid their ranks, and there was great rending of flesh, which Luke and Ruth observed only as a sound like tearing fabric …
The pipe led them deep into the heart of Orion’s tower. They passed through a crumbling wall and entered an inky corridor. Following this led them through a series of dark rooms that, in turn, led them to a dimly lit library.
In the center of the library was a long table with six chairs. On this Ruth discovered a hawk’s quill, an inkwell and a little blue notebook. The last of these Ruth picked up and began reading. Meanwhile, Luke opened the breach of his gun and loaded a fresh shell into each chamber.
It did not take long for Ruth to finish the slender volume, but from it she learned many things.
First, the Magi came from the Eastern Winter Lands, which the people of Yomm - that is, the people of the West - had believed uninhabitable. Second, the Magi were driven from their homes by the ruling oligarchy of Alchemists there. Evidently, the Alchemists blamed the Magi for a disaster that fated the Eastern Lands to a never-ending winter. The Magi, for their part, blamed the Alchemists who openly researched ancient and forbidden sciences. Third, Orion apprenticed under Jonathan Orgetorix, a powerful Magus and political dissident who encouraged rebellion against the oligarchs.
But in regard to Ruth’s quest to steal The Left Hand of Fomalhaut this passage was most relevant:
1 Nov.,
I laste Night by ye Wordes of O. rais’d upp to ye Lite Horizon and stille ye Vacua Beyond and sawe for ye the first FOMALHAUT. And HE be’g a Fleshe Builder spoken of shew’d me Horrendous Wonders … HIS sorcery is not easie of get’g, and ye Process playes harde to come near. The Hands seem to carrie ye gift; perchance Dysmemberment may ease ye Labores.
Luke stood very still and listened. Something had caught his attention: a grating noise like something heavy being dragged across stone. Now it was farther away; now it was closer and closer still. He heard belabored breathing. Now gargling. It was practically in his ear, yet he could not locate its source.
A fetor slowly moved into the air. It stank like all manner of garbage: rancid chicken, spoiled eggs, curdled milk. Luke questioned his own senses, but then he saw something. A shadow had moved. Just the flickering light of the gas lamp? No. Something slinked between the stacks.
Then a rubbery mass exploded from the gloom. It darted for Ruth. Luke shoved her away. He unloaded both barrels of his weapon, but whether he missed, or the 00 buck shot was ineffective he would never know.
“LUUUUUKE! Ruth cried. A quivering, gigantic lump of white flesh smothered her friend and House-Guard. She leveled her revolver and discharged all six rounds.
The wet sounds of mastication ceased. A head atop a slender neck slowly turned revealing lips that foamed with gore. Where its eyes were meant to be there were only two bloody stains in a bandage half hidden by sparse strands of lank hair. Still, it glared at Ruth with soul-penetrating hate. The rest of its large body unfurled revealing its true awfulness by mind-wrenching degrees. It was, evidently, one of Nohle’s grim abominations as appalling as it was unnatural.
Most of its body was an enormous maggot, skin semi-translucent, innards visibly sloshing within. The mouth hooks had been surgically removed and there, attached at the waist, began the human female portion, emaciated and pale. The entire thing wriggled side to side in hideous locomotion - a sight made more grotesque by the exaggerated swing of pendulous breasts.
With surprising speed, it seized Ruth. The garbage odor struck the king like a physical blow. The monster scratched and bit. Ruth shut her eyes against the terror. Her world became a sightless hell filled with eternal struggle against a relentless onslaught of claws and teeth. And in that blind struggle Ruth found and inadvertently tore at a warm, wet cavity in the Chimera’s body. Ruth’s hand pulled back in instinctual disgust, but so too did her attacker.
The king opened her eyes. At the joining of maggot and woman she saw a jagged line of stitching. Some of the threads had popped and from the open wound poured puss and blood.
Ruth howled, “Fuck you, cunt! Have a fist!” She punched the stitching. Unexpectedly, her hand went right through. She yelped and reared back, but her hand was stuck in the chimera’s abdomen. Seeing an opportunity, Ruth instead pushed her fist in deeper, working against the resistance of muscle and entrails. The maggot-woman tossed its head back and shrieked through blood bubbling in its throat.
A final heave forced Ruth's arm elbow-deep into the wound. She crushed the pumping vitals with her fist, then pulled out what she grasped. The knotted cord of entrails struck the floor with a sickening plop and splayed out in a bloody line.
The chimera fell, sucked in a gurgling breath and died.
The king stood over her victim like a woman of the wild: shoulders hunched; head down but eyes forward; chest heaving; clothes and hair disheveled; blood dripping from minor wounds; the right arm a gory mess and the left wiping the foam that flecked her lips. No pity gleamed in her cool gray eyes. In them was only ebbing fury and the rising sense of victory, celebration, and pride.
But Luke was not moving. All her animalism abruptly evaporated. Ruth ran to her House-Guard’s side. He lay in a heap. Little trickles of blood ran through the cracks in the floor. His face was twisted in a half scream and full terror.
She wept over the body.
VI.
Ruth placed Luke’s gun upon his chest and folded his hands over it. It was a small gesture ultimately meaningless for none would come for the body but the ghouls of the citadel. Yet, it was a gesture for her own sake, and small acts can ease the greatest sufferings.
Ruth left the library by the same doors she and Luke had entered, but in place of the inky rooms and corridors there was an immense expanse of industrial realty. It was like being in a huge factory or dam. There were bundles of electrical cords, rows of machines and a system of chains and pulleys.
Ruth stood on a catwalk of corrugated steel high above it all. The walk led to an elevator. There were no other branches or doors. With nowhere else to go she boarded the lift. Its motors whined: ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank.
In the rear wall of the elevator was a window. Ruth peered through it and gazed at the vast factory and awed at its bright, mechanical gigantism. Then the elevator ascended into darkness. The humming of the machines continued deep below.
Ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank.
When the elevator again entered the light, Ruth saw hundreds of beds in curtained-off cubicles. Upon these beds lay living, conscious creatures including humans. Masked homunculi cut and sawed these wretches with tools Ruth associated with a fishery, until the victims were in various stages of deconstruction. Screams rented this section of the tower.
When the homunculi had finished, they strode on dubious limbs to other parts of the floor carrying with them sacks full of gore. Then, they dumped these sacks onto long tables. Other homunculi who waited on either side of the tables began distributing the pieces equally across its length. Then they went to work. What they did with the body parts Ruth could not see. The elevator climbed on.
Ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank.
The next floor was, as with everything in Orion’s tower, of immense proportions. Ruth saw a kind of storage facility. Glass canisters reinforced with brass stacked one on top of the other and stretched for as far as the eye could see. A hateful green liquid filled these canisters, and a faint smell of sulfur and ozone permeated the place.
On closer inspection, Ruth discerned bodies floating in the containers. These bodies, or things, were crude caricatures of human beings. Represented in these shadows of humanity were all the deformities that flesh is heir to and others invented by nothing short of a sadistic intelligence. Three limbs, six limbs, seventeen or none at all. A body teeming with fanged mouths. A mouth an amalgamation of fingers and toes. Insides out. Outsides missing. A quivering pile of flesh with a palpitating organ here, a wailing face there and bones jutting everywhere. The king vomited onto the elevator floor.
Ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank.
In the final section of the tower Ruth saw horrendous wonders. She never knew flesh could be molded like clay or bones bent like wood or blood used as a mortar. In Orion’s castle they were and used to construct things both living and dead.
The elevator gained speed.
Ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank. Ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank.
A gothic arch looked over the entire city of Yomm. From this great height the far eastern border could be seen as well as the gently rolling hills beyond. The city sprawled out darkly and in ruinous splendor. Blue-purple night persisted in a sky bright with twinkling stars, but the eastern horizon was blushing with the rising sun’s ruddy kiss.
Ruth pressed her lips to the glass. Tears sparkled her eyes silver.
“Good bye,” she murmured.
Ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank. Ka-clink, clank; ka-clink, clank.
VII.
The lift stopped. The doors opened. Ruth stepped out.
She found herself in a magnificent hall built of gleaming marble in the likeness of a cathedral. She stood in its nave. To either side were the lower aisles festooned with disembodied heads. One head had a brown wire dangling from its right ear; the other end connected to a mechanical box that aided hearing.
As Ruth advanced through the nave there was a shift in the light such that the aisles and area behind her darkened while the sanctuary brightened. When she at last stood between the transepts everything had vanished but the altar, which she now saw was not an altar, but a throne carved from a single piece of ivory.
Thereon sat Thomas Orion Griffin.
Broad shoulders connected arms that bulged with sinewy muscles. His iron-colored hair neatly framed his rectangular head. The cloak that wrapped his athletic body hinted simultaneously at elegance and mystery. So, too, did the golden chain that fastened it.
Yet, he was old. That fact showed in the lines that cracked his face and the white film that just began to cover his right eye. When he moved, his joints cracked and popped. When he spoke, the extensive decay on his yellowed teeth became clear. Ruth recalled the descriptions in his diary of friends being hoisted on telegraph poles and roasted like marshmallows over bonfires. Orion had lived a long and tumultuous life. For a moment she pitted him.
Upon his knee rested a mummified left hand attached to his belt by a chain double bolted to the dismembered appendage’s protruding bone.
“I am here,” Ruth said. Orion remained silent so she continued, “This has all been your game, yes? Rebecca’s rumors about Fomalhaut; the stream and sewer entrance; the corridors that led us to the library with your diary conveniently sitting out in the open: you planned this. You sent for me. What I want to know is why. Why didn’t you just pluck me from my palace? Surely you have the power. And why do you ‘request’ my presence at your court?”
Orion spoke. His Eastern accent was evident but lessened by the years he spent in the West.
“I will answer ye last question first, and ye first question last. Your presence is requested, good King Ruth Waldroop, because I admire ye. I remember me self at your age. Full ‘o piss and vinegar. A fire burnt in my belly then. The same fire that … What did ye say? … Pricked your sides mightier than the reigns of fear. Look at ya! Covered in mud and gore from head to foot. Ye infiltrated my home with designs to pilfer my relic. More, ye believed ya could get away with it. Just like me at yer age battling the chymists with guerilla tactics.
“But you need to learn the truth about life, Ruth. Let me ask ye, what good did joining’ with Orgetorix do? He was burnt alive with ye rest. I lost my home and my friends.”
Ruth interjected. She trembled but not with fear. “Then all this is for revenge? The death and destruction of my people and my home was to compensate for your failure to repel the oppression of the alchemists! Go back to Europe, Orion, and take your army of abominations with you. Seek your revenge against the alchemists if you must but leave my people out of it!”
“I intend to return East, indeed, but ye misunderstood me,” said Orion. “I seek no revenge upon ye or the chymists. I only wish to impart my knowledge unto you all, knowledge gained over a lifetime of suffering. Ya see, in me youth there was an adventurous half-expectancy - an eagerness, I suppose - to defend my morals. I knew right from wrong and took pride in me stubborn defense of it. That is what motivated me to join up with Orgetorix in the first place.
“I had been told a number of platitudes. ‘Stand up for ye self.’ ‘Good shall prevail.’ ‘Right side of history.’ These are lies. Verily, a man can do everything right, be everything right and fight for what is right yet still fail. Nothing is guaranteed to us. Twas the chymists who openly studied illegal science and caused the fire and Hundred Year Rot. Yet, it was we Magi who took the blame and the persecution.
“So, what care I for yer peoples and Yomm? Tis but a single city. There have been many like it: Babylon, Cairo, Rome and New York. They’ve all come and gone. In the end the dim sun will die at last, and the deep chill of space will freeze the Earth. Ruth, my dear lady, there are no happy endings … for anyone.
“But words will not convince ye, and that is why I didn’t pluck ye from thy castle. Aye, ye needed to be shown. Very well, I have learnt an impeccable method of persuasion from the Flesh Builders of Fomalhaut. I sentence ye, King Ruth Rachel Waldroop of Yomm to a Fleshless Exile.”
Orion traced a pattern in the air with The Left Hand of Fomalhaut. At once Ruth’s clothes, boots and undergarments flew from her body so that she presently stood bare before the Magus and feeling rather silly for covering her breasts while her bush and mound were exposed.
Orion traced a second pattern. Ruth’s skin ripped clean from her muscles. Finger and toenails, eyes lashes and brows, even the soles of her feet torn from her body. Only the hair on her head remained. The rest of it lay in a whitish-pink pile on the floor.
Leaving a double chain of bloody footprints, Ruth fled in terror and in pain. The haunted laughter of Thomas Orion Griffin chased after her.
Later that morning the citizens of Yomm discovered twelve pikes around their supreme court arranged like the numbers on a clock. On eleven of these pikes were the heads of eleven kings. On the twelfth pike hung the skin of Ruth Waldroop folded neatly and hanging like a leather suite in a wardrobe.
Special Thanks.
I’d like to thank Caffeine Tweaker who graciously donated the art that accompanies this story. “Maggot” was slightly cropped by myself because Substack wouldn’t, or couldn’t load it for some reason. If you’d like to connect with Caffeine Tweaker, she can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/CaffeineTweaker.