Redemption Bracket: The Wanderer Vs Odium [Archive]

Odium

01-31-14, 10:24 AM

According to the folklore of certain rural Akashiman villages, the body of the most primordial of gods had long since faded away. They whispered that from his flesh the world had been molded by his children, that his spine traced the ranges of mountains across continents. His blood filled the empty basins of the seas and flourished with life. His unmaking had in itself become the greatest act of creation in the universe; not a cell of his body was wasted in the fashioning of a new era to compensate the death of the old. His eyes, they said, who had been passed like heirlooms unto the mightiest of his offspring, were the sun and the moon. The sun flared with holy light, whereas the milky cataract of the moon regarded all worldly happenings as impassively as stone.

It was a warm spring evening in Akashima, and the crisp disc of the moon hung in the heavens. Beneath it, dark things wriggled and writhed in the soft clay of mortal minds.

A man lay facedown on his table in a village's local tavern. A puddle of spittle had begun to form beneath his cheek and an unfinished glass of rice wine hovered beside him. The smell of alcohol was strong on his breath. His furrowed brow was the only evidence to the dark absinthe dreams which unfolded in his mind's eye, like an origami crane uncreased and flattened to reveal a harrowing message. In it he fled from a three-headed chimera which at once commanded the angry visage his wife would wear once he returned home in a few hours, the menacing countenance of an oni sent to haul him into hell, and his mother-in-law with her usual sour grimace of malcontent. As he ran, he struggled to decide which of these possibilities was more horrifying. Above him, like massive redwoods towering overhead, two beings of a wholly different variety conducted their meeting.

"The souls of the heathen are in need of quickening," the devil whispered in its voice like crushed velvet. "And you shall be our champion. You needn't fear, dear child, nor aspire to understand what force it is that shall draw you across the earth. We know. This is enough. Once their courage and hope and fear and sorrow have gone to nourish the Fade, our hunger shall be slaked, however briefly. We will use these moments to embed our faith ever deeper into the earth. And so we shall become stronger." This time, Nepharen-Ka had appeared to Constantine as a beautiful woman with the slit tongue of a serpent. Every so often as the abomination spoke, it darted out from behind its smile to taste the air.

"And so you shall become stronger alongside us."

Images flitted past Constantine's eyes like messages hidden in the spaces between saccades. His sword sweeping through the neck of an expressionless soldier. Countless thousands kneeling to an altar manned by a yellow-robed priest whose face was concealed beneath a featureless mask. Stills of a draconic lizard expiring, being devoured by the ground, and regurgitated as petrified bones which were discovered by a child scuttling through the dust in search of his toy. This exchange occurred every time he communicated with Nepharen-Ka. He wondered if perhaps the demon spoke no words at all, and Constantine merely imagined the contents of his messages. Perhaps these pictures were all that reached him, and in truth he stood in silent congress with his master.

He pushed the thought from his mind. "I do not understand. I am your priest, not your assassin. You would have me take the lives of random men?"

Nepharen-Ka's head ticked a centimeter to one side. Its hand rose to caress Constantine's cold cheek. It took all of the man's indomitable willpower not to flinch away, not to avert his gaze from the obscenity's eyes which parroted compassion. "You are a tool and we the hand that guides you. If we decide you shall cut the flesh of our enemies, you shall cut. If you will be the conduit for our voice, you will speak."

A normal person would have heard threat in those words. As images of a farmer's sickle and a man whispering in a king's ear floated through his skull, however, Constantine detected no outright malevolence. None more than he normally perceived in the abomination.

He opened his mouth to speak, but something tapped him on the skull. He looked up and saw the stars themselves shaken from the sky like fleas from the pelt of a great behemoth, and turned to ask Nepharen-Ka what was happening but the beautiful woman had disappeared.

...

The man in the tavern jumped with a start, spilling his sake and throwing his chair back. He glanced furtively around to see whether the whole spectacle had drawn attention, but most of the bar patrons were engrossed in their own business. Except for a single gray-eyed man who watched him from the corner, he had gone utterly unnoticed. He quickly fumbled in his pockets for a few coins and left them on the table, rushing from the establishment so that he could face the wrath of his wife and slip into the spare futon as soon as possible.

Constantine, meanwhile, stayed immersed in the soft shadows of the corner. He waited, patiently, for some kind of disturbance to draw his attention.