The candles were bleeding.
Anywhere else, to anyone else, this might have been a concerning development. Instead, he leaned closer, dipping a fingertip as white as ash into the thick ruby bead rolling down the side of the nearest one. It clung for a heartbeat as if it didn’t want to be parted from its perch before finally the surface tension broke and it flowed freely over the probing digit.
The stained finger rose slowly to his face before being pressed softly, carefully on his eye. Normally the blood would be daubed on the eyelids for this particular ritual, but that wasn’t currently an option. His own eyelids were peeled back, the soft pink flesh embraced by delicate hooks leading to slender chains that wound under and through skin and bone, disappearing under his brow.
The blood stung as it coated first one eye then the other, leaving a clinging red film over everything his gaze fell upon. But the minor irritation went barely noticed amid the ruination he had heaped upon his own flesh. He inhaled slowly, deeply, filling his lungs. Held it. Felt his chest expand to capacity. On the exhale, he quieted his mind that little bit more, feeling the cool air pass over lips that were torn and raw.
Satisfied, he adjusted his position on the cold stone floor of the chamber, legs crossed, hands cradling something within their spider-like cage. Thin steel wires wrapped those hands, biting deeper into incisions in the tender flesh between each finger with every small movement. Habitually he splayed his fingers out and closed them a few times, savouring the threaded metal rasping over exposed nerves. But focus reasserted itself again.
He checked once more to ensure he was in alignment with the carefully chalked design spiralling out from his position. Each time his eyes danced over each of the individual marks making up its entirety he could feel the strain, could sense the subtle wrongness of their geometry pressing in. The ones directly before him were hidden beneath a tattered map, its singed edges and stained face betraying how many times it had been here before. Satisfied, he raised his left arm out straight before him, still clutching its treasure out of sight.
Breathe in.
The smell of the candle wicks slid into his nostrils, making it tingle with the unmistakable scent of burning hair. The air was tinged with the coppery tang of blood, and not just the tears of it wept by the tall, stout candles. Focusing only slightly more, he could detect the heated fat of each of the seven points of light in the chamber. Like a frying pan that hadn’t been scoured before being reused. Though there were few who might have recognised this particular odour, it sang out sweetly to him – the words in the small tome sitting open beside him danced once more through the back of his mind. ’Mayke ye thy candils wyth the tallow of an hangid man.’ It hadn’t been difficult for someone like him to acquire such a thing.
Breathe out.
Without looking, a hand slithered out to place a small copper bowl before him, the small pile of dusky maroon powder within cascading over itself like miniature dunes. Even once the bowl was left alone, the reagent within continued to churn and roil like silt stirred up on a riverbed.
The rest of the small room was veiled in shadows that pooled viscously in the corners, held at bay resentfully by the tapering tongues of flame. The sounds of the room’s other occupants tried to slither into his consciousness, but with a small effort of will, he managed to keep them at bay. A minor incantation spread across the room limited their presence to an insubstantial background buzz for the most part, a soft blanket of white noise. He tuned out the few moans that were audible, the whispered words and the smell of blood and sweat that each of the three gave off.
Not yet, he thought.
Reaching out again with only his will, he kissed the top of the powder with a coiling flash of black fire. The shadows seethed in the presence of this unholy element. The close confines of the chamber became a touch more claustrophobic as the darkness was simultaneously fed by the unlight it shed, and battered back by it. While it didn’t disorient him in the slightest anymore, he could feel reality gain a bit more friction against itself at the paradox. Where the soft glow of the candle-flames danced up the walls it was riddled through with twisting, necrotic veins of darkness. A plume of heavy smoke the colour of rust crawled sluggishly over the tarnished edges of the little copper dish before it seemed to hit a barrier and twisted languidly in place. If one looked closely, they would even swear they could see tiny shapes cavorting in the tendrils. But it wasn’t wise to look that closely.
Oh, he knew.
Finally, with the preparations complete, everything as it should be, he began.
His fingers uncurled slowly and from within his cool palm there dropped a small, uncut gemstone; it stopped suddenly, exactly two-fingers-width above the copper bowl of burning incense, swinging pendulously on a chain looped around the truncated end of his ring finger. It looked almost like a garnet, shimmering suggestions of reds and blacks in its glossy depths but its origins were nothing so mundane. Eyes unable to close, he watched the interplay of natural light and his own Hellfire shift alluringly over the gem for a moment, waiting for it to cease its jangling dance even as he lowered his head and devoured the smoke with a single rasping breath.
Spine arching, head thrown back, tendons taut in his neck. A violent shiver wracked the lean body, and he smiled inwardly as he felt no small number of artistic lacerations and piercings open wider, his flesh plucked all over like a harp strung with nerves. His pupils, normally mere slits, widened until they almost engulfed the golden irises. Every sense was sharpened like a razor, sliding through the soft meat of his conscious mind. He felt a tiny, molten bead of saliva escape his mouth, running over the exposed bone and muscle where his chin had been opened, the flaps of skin pinioned with slender steel nails driven into the jawbone beneath.
Finally, he allowed himself to take in the three bound figures around him. A dark smile crept up his features, the corners of his mouth parting bloodlessly as it continued to widen beyond what any smile should.
All three were humans, at least originally if not in their present state. Willem, Rark and Ezekyle had been their names, a long time ago now. Not that any of them would recognise the syllables if they heard them. And as his eyes wandered over the raw lumps of scar tissue where once eyes and ears had sat, he sincerely doubted they were likely to.
Each of the men was bound to the wall behind him, suspended above the floor in a harness of thick chains that hugged them tight to the bare stone, nails as thick as a man’s wrist keeping the heavy links in place. Dark smears of russet colour, barely discernible in the chaotic light permeating the room, marred the places their heads had smashed and ground repeatedly over their incarceration. That they would damage themselves was unavoidable; but precautions had been taken to ensure the damage was at least kept to a minimum. For in addition to the lack of senses, each of the bound three was also lacking something much more readily apparent.
Their limbs.
While the stark, cross-hatched ribbons of scar tissue over their faces hinted that the wounds had been inflicted savagely, with nothing sharper or more durable than their own fingernails, the rest of their loss had his protean signature writ large across it. If he had ever given it a second thought, surely the words ‘necessary evil’ would have sprung to mind. But he never had, so the words went unspoken. Instead, he thought briefly of the vicissitudes that had landed them in their unenviable state. The men, the former workers, had come into contact with something beyond them – a wellspring of tainted, raw psychic flotsam that had poured through their fragile and all-too-human minds like molten lead. But just as when pouring liquid metal through an anthill, while it destroyed what lived within the tunnels, it preserved the passages themselves. They had been hollowed, but with his.. gentle encouragement, something else had been contained within their ravaged husks.
The pendulum hanging from his finger started to move, twitching and jerking at first, drawing his attention back. Soon it was moving out in a wider and wider spiral, widdershins. His hand still had not moved. But the stone picked up momentum. The powder beneath it shifted too, the smouldering substance moving back up on itself with a sound like a snakeskin dragged over sand until, reaching its apex, it began to rise into the air like a questing serpent. It swayed uncertainly for the span of a single breath before it latched on to the gem, following its circuit above the bowl as iron to a lodestone. Every trace of the still-burning powder left the bowl, creating an unbroken circle in which the pendulum travelled. With a flick of his free hand, the now empty copper dish was cast aside, leaving just the weathered map beneath the swirling vortex of ember. All at once, around him, the candle flames tilted away from where he sat as if caught in a breeze. But they did not go out; instead, the flames shifted, burning sideways until they looked like nothing more than little eyes. They peered inwards at the sigil’s seated occupant unblinking, almost expectantly.
A single word left his mouth, visibly shivering into the still air as it was birthed.
Shoulders tensing, he braced himself as the silencing incantation was swept away, mist dissolving in the morning sun. And in rolled the cacophony pouring from his carefully crafted vessels around him. It smothered his mind more than the perpetual smog of Ettermire choked the sun’s light of power and warmth. Their mouths moved, blood clinging in thick strands to their chins. But the deafening, visceral wall of noise that tore from the ruined creatures didn’t match even their frantic gibbering. It was almost a physical force, assaulting his heightened senses to a level that transcended the flesh. It smashed against the bastions of his psyche relentlessly, but he had been prepared for it. Even so, he could feel sweat beading on his brow and his teeth ground together in his mouth with the sudden strain. Like rising from the depths too quickly, there was a hideous, wet pressure building behind his eyes. ‘Prepared’ and ‘ready’ were not always one and the same.
It was a sound that defied description. It was the screaming winds of Pandemonium; the soul-starved shrieks of the Abyss; the plaintive wailing of the ever-in-flux denizens of Limbo; the soft pained whispers of those who could not escape their own minds no matter how far they ran; a hundred, a thousand sobs, hysterical peals of laughter, whispered entreaties, begging, raging, scathing, ranting… it was all of these and more. Every note of this grievous song joined the ones before and after it. The discord rising and rolling in on itself, stirred by the undertow. It was a creation much more than the sum of its parts, and for a moment he was proud.
It was, in a word, Madness. Not the pale shadow most thought of when confronted with the word. This was a pure and gestalt amalgamation of true, elemental insanity. The nature and wellspring of its myriad fractured branches given voice.
Something wet slithered from his ear.
He didn’t pay any attention. He felt the chain around his finger heat up considerably as the wave rolled against his mental defences. The sigils on the floor burst into vivid light, each lined in a sickly, cyanotic radiance as the chaos in the room was channelled through them one after another. Inwards. Towards his pale, cadaverous form.
There was a word for what he was about to attempt. Not many bodies out there knew it, and the very few who did counselled against it. It was, they said, folly. It was tempting fate, it was dangerous at worst, idiotic at best. To try it courted disaster and that well-earned.
It was called chresmomancy; the art of divination through the ravings of lunatics. But any “learned scholar†would cite the unreliability of listening to a madman for insight. And as the violently siphoned psychic force crushed the bastions of his mind more and more with every hiking, laboured breath, he would agree with them – there was little to be gleaned from the ravings of one or two; even three of the tortured souls whose perceptions fit jaggedly inside their own fragile cradles of sanity, cracked mirrors who saw reflections of reality no-one else could.
But what about listening to them all?
With a final, pained grin, Aurelianus Drak’shal dropped his mental barriers and as the tempest roared through him, setting fire to his sanity, he watched the future unfold before his eyes…
… and he laughed.
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