47th of Frost, 4622
Darkness.
Silence.
Weightlessness.
The atmosphere had been the same every night since he had received the request. He had continued to be his usual self. Supportive, kind, smiling, giving his one hundred and ten percent of his soul into his everyday life. Ford could not escape what had begun happening each time he closed his eyes and fell asleep. It had begun with mere images, flashes, really. And he had not put anything towards it because he would always wind up with the feeling of his husband beside him, flowing with that warmth that the two seemed to share.
Tonight was different.
Ford had found difficulty falling asleep. Once the group had discussed their plans and ideas for everything happening, they retired to their respective rooms. Ford and Taelian sharing their room were quite welcomed, but also it led to something else beginning to happen. Since he had come close to the obelisk, he had felt the radiating warmth, but an odd feeling had also begun to fill him with unease. The mysteriousness of the whole ordeal had bothered Ford for some reason or another.
On this particular night, Ford had taken to bed and had laid for quite some time, waiting for sleep to take him. It wasn’t until fires began to die from burning out that Ford would feel the pull of drowsiness. Eventually, the world blurred around him, darkness blurred over his vision, and he fell into a slumber.
Darkness.
Silence.
Weightlessness.
Ford’s mind was floating in a sea of blackness. His light was radiant, but it illuminated nothing. He was alone, cold, forgotten even. Nothing was tangible, and no matter how hard he attempted to move, swim, or climb, he went nowhere and would go nowhere. Not until a brilliantly off-white light, tinted with yellow at its most distal edges, began to shine. There was a warmth in this light, a light that outshone his own light, dwarfed it even. He wanted to simply float into it, allow his body to be carried into its warmth, and bask in the welcoming rays until the end of his days.
It was beautiful, serene even, and a sound had become apparent as he floated slowly toward the light. The sounds were akin to light windchimes dinging against one another in the softest breezes. The tonal notes added an extra layer of warmth to the light's ambiance. But soon, as the chiming had steadily grown louder, the ringing became a deafening shrill. The magnitude of the soundwaves had begun to vibrate him through to his core, and then it came. The sound he heard was, in fact, not windchimes blowing in the breeze.
A sickening squelching sound emanated from Ford’s right bicep. Then again into his left bicep. Once more, the piercing squelch could be heard piercing through Ford’s right, then left quad muscles. Spear-tipped chains of a silver and golden design had come from within the light and pierced his flesh. As each spear tore through skin, muscle, bone, and ligament, the spear tips opened like claws behind his limbs, and the metal claws folded backward and pierced his flesh once more in a grasp, encompassing the thickly muscled man. The rattling of the chains, the melody he had loved just moments ago, resounded in a cacophony of suffering and mind-rattling dissolution. He screamed out in pain and frustration, but nothing came from his voice. And as the warmth radiating from the light-filled his being as he was pulled into it, his body was hurled into the light to be burnt alive.
…Or so the Griscian had thought. Before his mind could wake him up, he was forced into a cell of sorts. It was not made of metal or any other material that Ford was directly informed of. It was black and had a shade to it just beyond his mind’s recognition. The walls were black and jagged, with high ceilings. As his consciousness came to, he had found his arms were in tightened, spiked cuffs. Something on the inner portion of the cuffs had pierced his wrists, keeping them from twisting and turning, and they were strung up at his sides, attached to chains of a darker metal that he could not quite focus on. Each ankle had been treated with the same treatment. Crimson ran in rivulets down each of his bare feet and down his hands to drip along the predestined path across his palms and down the sides of his hands. As the rivulets ran along his palms and continued to the middle finger of each hand and each foot, his blood pooled at the tips before falling quickly to splatter against the black, uneven flooring.
When he attempted to move, he found that he was suspended from the ground and not lying against any surface in particular, and there had been minimal slack allowed for his body to move. The shirt he had been wearing in the day with the group was ripped open from behind and hung around his shoulders, exposing his back to… Something… Someone. There was a presence behind him, but it did not feel entirely human. Lifting his head, the blonde could have sworn he saw something in the distance… Was it a pile? Clothing perhaps? He could not tell.
Suddenly there was a cold grip of a metallic glove with black, carved talons at the end of each finger. The accented metal above each finger was golden, and the underside against the palm was white. Still, the armored gauntlets were dripping with crimson, their blood drops matching in time with his own, an almost metronome effect. The grip had centered on the back of his neck, pulling him backward. The voice was unkind and cold yet full of a heated rage. There was the reverberation of at least a dozen voices all speaking in one chorus.
“What did you think you could do?”
Ford could not recognize any of the voices he was trying to single out in his mind. The taloned armored grip pulled at his neck, the claw tips piercing his flesh and scraping against his flesh, drawing small lines of carvings, four to each side of his neck, that began to run tiny blood strings down his neck.
As the crimson ran down his neck, there was a disembodied laugh behind him. The chorus of voices all sounded off in amusement as, once more, Ford’s flesh was pierced. The talons dug into the meat of his back, just above his right scapula, and continued to pierce until he felt the clawed tips digging against bone. The blonde loosed a scream in the soundless void that was that cell amid the chorale of voices.
“You walk into the lion’s den. You, the biggest pretender of them all. We know what you have done.”
The voices died out for a moment, and Ford finally found his voice.
“I have done nothing that I am ashamed for. He needs me. He—”
”HE WILL SUFFER BECAUSE OF YOU!”
Once more, the taloned gloves pierced the flesh of his back, the fingers wiggling into the opened wounds left behind by the talons, searching for the lumbosacral portion of his spine as the Griscian cried out in pain. Once more, his pain was accompanied by laughter that was quickly cut out as if something had merely erased it from existence. For a moment, he was thankful for the feeling that had been presented when the fingers that had come dangerously close to his spine had vanished, with only blood trickling down his lower back and below.
The muscled chest expanded and constricted with heavy breaths as he was given a moment of respite. It was a false rest, though, as the mixture of voices returned.
”Ah…”
The voices rang out but once more bled off, and he felt a single-taloned point raking across the back of his neck in a familiar area. His eyes widened as he suddenly felt a presence pressing against him from behind, in an almost intimate touch. The breath was warm, familiar even. Another taloned gauntlet came around his side, only this one had no armor on the forearm, and for a split-second, he had felt he recognized the arm itself, which was stupid. Why would he know the arm that was torturing him? At the very moment, he came to a startling revelation. There was but a singular voice, a voice he had known more than anything else in the world. Blue eyes widened in horror as the familiar voice of Taelian spoke into his ear.
”…Did you think you could just walk into Bel and not be a target, Arlaed? Do not be foolish. Your people are responsible for what happened to mine. And you think we were just going to let you walk in because you made a promise to me?”
As words fell silent, there was a stinging sensation on the back of his neck, right over a particular spot. The blonde’s brows rose significantly as the talon dug into his neck, tearing and cutting a swatch of the flesh right from the neck. That was not all, though. As the rough shape had been etched into the man’s neck, two talons pierced again, causing the blonde to grit his teeth and nearly shake violently as the flesh was peeled from his neck and held up. Ford’s skin patch was dangled up in front of Ford’s face and swayed back and forth in front of the blonde’s eyes. ”You won’t be needing this anymore.”
The fist clenched around the morsel, forcing blood to drip down the gauntleted hand.
When things had begun to grow dark between blood loss and pain, the other had moved around him and stood in front of him, the blood-stained gauntlets lifted to catch a single talon under the bearded chin of the Griscian to force him to look up into Taelian’s darker, red-brimmed eyes.
”Husband. I have told you, time and again, you have a depth to you not many know. Welcome to your deepest. It will be your fault.”
The voice was no longer Taelian’s but… It was still Taelian’s face. The voice was familiar, and he could not figure it out at first. The voice was a voice he had known all along. A shiver ran down his spine, his nerves chilled, and his pores began to feel on fire. Ford’s body had grown cold, and suddenly he was very aware of the entirety of his body.
“You will be the reason he loses everything… Prepare to take everything he loved away because you failed.”
Horrifically, the image that was Taelian literally began to melt, the flesh fell from his bones, muscles and all other viscera ran from him like water, and the bones left behind disintegrated the moment they touched the air.
Finally, Ford realized what was happening, the numbness, the coldness, the voice he was hearing. It was his own. Slowly, blue eyes slid down to see he was the one with the taloned gauntlets. It was both of his hands covered in blood. And when he looked up, Taelian’s lifeless corpse had the flesh ripped from the neck, the gouge wounds along the back and spin, the shredding tears of flesh along the neck, and he slumped forward, lifeless in the bindings that suspended him from seemingly nowhere.
Out of his peripheral vision, Ford saw a semi-familiar sight, the pile of clothes he had seen far off, or what he had assumed were clothes, were twelve or so bodies. Ford did not know who they were personally, but he did know who they were. His heart began to beat harder, and his body seemed to be tearing itself apart from within because there were other bodies atop the twelve others, and he recognized their features instantly. His metallic armor clanked as he tried to catch his breath and turned away from the carnage that he had inflicted to find himself staring at a full-body mirror.
The armor was not that of any design he had ever seen before. The first thing he noticed was the shoulders. They were large and heavy with three plates of ebon-colored armor, accented with gold outlining and rivets. Each plate ended in spiked gold metals permanently stained with crimson, which gave way to the gauntleted arms. His head was encompassed with a massive helmet. On each side of the helmet, two golden horns with three red diamond-shaped rubies encrusted into the metallic piece. Two holes for his eyes led down to hold spikes lining the face of the helmet. A barbed chain went around his neck and gave way to play armor beneath. Black in color, etched in gold with a crimson runic design leading down his sternum.
Quickly, Ford fought to rip the helmet from his head, and it was almost welded to the armor, but the harder he pulled, the more it hurt. The pain became so excruciating that he felt he was going to pass out, but the helmet finally gave and was torn, rolling with a loud clanking sound until it came to rest in a slick puddle of blood, skidding to a halt. What Ford saw next, he could not believe. There was a face staring back at him that was not his own. But his voice spoke, the Griscian accent thicker than usual, laced in augmentation.
The face looking back at him was not his own. The hair had grown a colorless slate, and any remnants of facial hair had fallen from his face, unable to exist. The left half of his face had been sheered away, seemingly frozen in time with dead muscle and nothing more than his cheekbones holding up torn flesh below his eye, only it did not look like flesh. It almost looked wooden, corrupted from being human flesh. The Griscian’s left eye was colorless, lifeless, and pale as the rest of his ashen-white skin. His forehead was cracked, his flesh threatening to peel with the wrong facial expression. His lips, the only things left practically unmarred, and his right eye was corrupted through and through with a glowing red tint. To each side of his head, where the golden horns had been, were obsidian stalagmites in sharp, branchlike protrusions, and the smile that sickening came to his features as he looked into the mirror caused cracking along the frozen, corrupted flesh.
”There we are. You have been hearing me for so long, and I did not think we would ever meet.”
The face looked hideous, but the mismatched eyes scanned over the dead body of his husband in the reflection of the mirror. “Unfortunate, that. He screamed until the end, you know. And their prayers and pleas went unanswered.” There was almost a mirthful smile on the decayed visage as it nodded toward the pile of bodies.
”They are going to find out about your lie. Everyone will. Smart that we got rid of the only one who knows the truth. Walk tall, man of Grisic. The great pretender, the Liar. You have already had the thought. Your precious Arlaed gave you the idea, and you have coveted it ever since. Which are you going to choose, a pretender? Your heart and soul, or the one thing you can put your hand on and prove with science? Either way, you are going to lose something. And I can not wait to laugh in your face the next time you make a mistake. Careful where you step.”
And just as it seemed to be finished, it began speaking one last thing.
”…Oh. They were delicious, by the way. We enjoyed it very much.”
His lips parted, and a grey-red, near-pointed tongue slithered out between his lips; black saliva dripped from his lips as he licked his dry, ashen lips.
And finally, with whatever grace there was in the world, the tanned eyelids peeled open to reveal glistening blues, and he shot up out of the bed he had been sleeping in with his husband. The bedding was soaked through, the covers drenched in sweat, and with a scrambled movement, he tossed back the covers from his body, his black sleeping pants clinging to him as he stood. Trails of sweat ran down the blonde’s tanned, muscular body, soaking in at the waistband, resting low on his muscular hips and soaking completely in his perspiration. His blonde hair had matted to his forehead, temples, and sides of his head, and his beard was soaked to the root with sweat. His chest was violently rising and falling as he fought to capture his breath, and he looked over at his husband, sleeping peacefully in bed. Suddenly, an urge hit Ford that was not common for him. With his eyes welling up, wetness threatening to fall from his eyes, he moved with whatever dulled swiftness the sleep had taken from him towards the room door and eventually outside, where he found himself off to the side, his hand holding the wall. The intense pain he felt in his stomach brought him to vomit whatever had been in his stomach.
Ford took a few moments, heaving at the building’s edge damp with sweat until only dry heaves were left. Until he was certain he was finished, he remained there, bracing himself against the building, and drew the back of his hand across his mouth to wipe any sick that was left behind. Once he was composed, and the sweat was beginning to dry, would he head back inside. Even heading back into the shared room with his husband, he would return to the area but not to the bed. It was soaked through, and he had some thinking to do, which meant, naturally, he was sitting at the very edge of Taelian’s side, at the edge of the bed, allowing himself to think in silence.
