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The Bloody consequence of confidence and arrogance

1 - by Martin S. Wathen

By Martin S. WathenPublished 2 years ago 21 min read
2

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. In fact, their age of unrelenting bloodshed slipped no farther than three decades. Nonetheless, the butchery and disarray ravaged through their wake reverberated for millennia. Mordecai’s father would warn him, and his brother, of that fiery era. An era when entire cities would glimmer pumpkin orange amongst the murky skies of midnight dusk. An era when those very cities would crumble to scorched ashes by the sun’s next rise. An era when the screams of thousands haunted the souls of the surviving few. Mordecai’s father warned him of that valley. The valley where the dragons came. The same valley where the dragons, eventually, went - and never came back. He counselled them on that valley’s morbid perils. The shifting stone, the souls which slipped into it, swallowed - cursed to never return. He warned them that, if they were to pass through it, they would certainly die.

“Funny”. Mordecai remarked, hauling the carcass of his sibling in a sack. Hauling it, through jagged rope which frayed his palm, red raw, he realised he no longer dreaded death. Why would one fear that which is unattainable? Why, foolishly, flee from a spider creeping in another home? Or dread to blink with eyes planted closed? For Mordecai, death had become the bogeyman in a tale you know to be fiction. Mordecai was, as he perceived to see it, safe. Funny, this time he was not wise enough to remark alone - confidence and arrogance can be near synonymous for the fool deficient of stakes.

No less, he was somewhat eager to negotiate the whetted rocks and curling stones of that valley. Since a boy, he, and Henry, playfully prophesied what dark mysticism could reside within that valley. Was it a witch? Or even a coven of the bloody things? Was it the demon ‘Damnatio Khaan’? It did, like the dragons, recede abruptly at the climax of his story. It needed to be mystical, surely. Whomever it was, that resided amongst that sea of stone blanketing rolling grass hills, Mordecai was primed to learn. And learn he would. He only begged the Gods that he would learn soon. His brother weighed near a ton, and the hills were far from level. He was three sleeps into his journey through that passage. Though, in honesty, he felt no further into it than he strayed in the starting hour. Hopping from stone, to hill, and back into stone, his bicep near burst. As did his calves, and his Achilles almost split into dual strings dangling loose from peeling skin. His palm bled, and skin grated into flakes which only seasoned the rocks beneath. The occasional slip would varnish that very granite at the expense of his grinding heel. The blood would paint them crimson as the trickling drizzle would smudge them into smears. He wondered, truly, how much of a ‘shortcut’ this route honestly was.

The rain was gentle that afternoon. No less, it was aggravating. Mordecai despised the dribbling of rain more so than their monsoon alternatives. The teasing, tapping, nags of their persistence played his nerves like a weakly utilized violin. Each dewdrop spotting stones like freckles – over time gently interlinking. Each bead tickling his cheek became moist smacks on this cold day. And it was, truly, a cold day. Immortality certainly does not spare one of that. His fingers felt willing to snap away. His brother’s corpse, bouncing off soggy stone behind, clamped stiff. An ill breeze curved around his waist and slipped intrusively within his garments. With a free hand, he leveraged fingers to tug them – or tighten the string in which he fashioned as a belt. It was no use. Those glacial gales scraped his joints and crunched them with each fragmentation of movement. He despaired to glance high above, as he knew he would not see a cloud in that sky. The blue above was radiant, near glowing. Clear heavens dangling overhead, he reflected whether the climate followed him. Whether the cloud remained so accurately atop his scalp that he might never witness it outside of the description of another. Maybe, he wondered, it was that which he deserved. To be eternally haunted by a murky cloud. A sponge, always fretting to be siphoned. He realized, a night ago, that he was truly alone. Not only, even, absent of the company of his sibling, but all else too. No birds hovering about those empty skies. No cottontails leaping through grass, or even bugs scurrying between stone. He hadn’t bore witness to a living organism in near a trio of days.

He sneered at it. The awful weather, the awful solace and the awful journey. If only his father hadn’t pricked his morbid curiosity. If only his father hadn’t loved enough to warn with those tales. If only, he begged, his father didn’t fall to that disease. That sickness which led the sons to dread death. The ailment which perpetually stunted the son’s slumber as he anticipated its arrival for the soul of his own.

See, Mordecai and Henry were boys famed for two reasons amongst their seminal years. The first, amid the ‘good years’ - their roguish reputation. A reputation which propagated beyond the boundaries of their petite mountain village and, eventually, swelled to legend only three towns over. Their father was a good man. A strong man. Unfortunately, however, the good will and strong heart of a parent can only lug a child so far. Sometimes mischief is slipped into their nature. Sometimes, like the Farley boys, they are destined to be a nuisance. A pair of reckless lunatics which sought no harm to others yet became cursed to see the very same more times than they could count. The church fire, the butcher’s fire and the church fire again. They were two boys, attached firmly at their hips, synonymous with chaos.

The second reason, sadly. They were orphans of their village’s solitary ‘mire-lock disease’ casualty. Impressively, that handful of years ago, the village had contained the threat with relative triumph. Only, tragically, at the sacrifice of the Farley patriarch. He sought that the boys should be protected but overlooked the torture of that bloody disease. In their final meeting, the nauseated lads rest their weary eyes upon his; only to find that they sunk, near vanished, into his skull. His lips were splintered, broken and bleeding. His arms, no broader than a flayed lace. His eyes hemorrhaged grease far too golden to be blood. He did best to save his boys, with a sacrifice gallant enough to sling him directly to heaven, but only haunted them with an image from hell.

The very image stained the edges of Mordecai’s mind far beyond the moment he had been granted immortality. He was certain, if one were to clobber his skull like an egg, they might find it smeared aside his brain. It would not depart. Even, harrowingly, reciting throughout that morning of tender spitting rain. Now, however, supplemented by the image of his bleeding brother. His eyes darted and drifted backward on occasion to catch glimpse of the sack he tugged with him. The fraying rope now tangled with flaky skin strings enveloping amongst layers of thread. The sack was splitting at one edge, revealing the bending finger of his brother inside. It curled gently and lingered in place. Surely a product of the chill, or the rigor mortis even, once his eyes locked upon it, they could not slip away.

In a childhood pact, he and his brother promised one another that they might never see their end. Certainly, at least, they would never see an end so Godless as that which their father had met his. Two young, strapping, vigorous boys such as them may well have effortlessly carried more than a handful more decades - yet the clock for their pact ticked loud. From their foundational teenage years, and brasher into adulthood. They near tallied the seconds. Itching, rolling, and squirming at the mere concept of sleep. Awaking early each morning, they no longer toyed with flames. There was no third fire in the church. For some time, their village even speculated whether the brothers remained amongst them at all. They did, for a while. Though they lingered recluse. Burrowed away in shadow, with highlands of books mounding above the windows. Their rooms were shrouded in gloom, and they went several weeks only accompanied by the dainty glimmer of their evanescent candles. But, by the Gods, did they research. They read until the pages cut at their thirsty eyes. They would even groan as they blink. Mourning the loss of their precious second heaved away from the books. It was not long before their skin bleached pastel pale, and hair thinned. Their eyes, once teeming with life, eventually glazed into two buttery sacks amongst hefty sockets. They wrinkled. At the ripe age of their early twenties, their skin crumpled. But eventually, they were successful.

Happening upon it. The ‘Goblet Of Aeternitas’. They caught the realisation that their frantic hallucinations of cheating death were set to be true.

“Perpetual life!” The younger Farley uttered to the elder. For some time during their research, they worried that it might not be true. Perhaps happening upon a fable with its insertion, or the failed trek of another wretched soul on the very same quest as them. They fell into this futile hole with the ‘Amulet Of Amare’ or the ‘Ring Of Vita’. But this? The ‘Goblet Of Aeternitas’? It was real. No less, tangible enough to be only four months travel from their village by horse. With all coin invested in books, the two inevitably embraced their former delinquency a final time. They thieved a single steed from the stable and embarked upon their expedition.

It was a lengthy excursion. The pair of young men sacrificed comfort and, in many cases, food. They sprawled every classification of terrain. Mountainous snowscapes, desiccated deserts, stony quarries and coiling valleys like the very one Mordecai somberly negotiated on this wicked day. They allowed themselves to near starve - their ribs and joints piercing through recessed, undernourished, leathery skin. They allowed their gullets to scrape dry, stomachs to roar and cannibalize themselves. They allowed, for the sake of a brighter eternity, a blanket of months perforated in suffering. It was, as they deemed, justifiable for the holy price ahead. The price which, should they accomplish it, might negate the wretchedness in their quest to reach it. This melancholy, they deemed, a noble homage to mortality’s concept – before it’s triumphant defeat. A worthy sacrifice, they believed.

The goblet was veiled amongst the wastes of a toppled city. Tall cathedrals, and castles, reduced to brick and grit. After their journey, it took some time to scuffle through the rubble. More so, it took longer to decipher whether the container, once they happened upon it, was truly the holy piece they did seek. Above this, they quailed with flaking patience; it took weeks to decode the messages scrawled along its lengths. See, the goblet was a fine steel piece. Standing no taller than an outspread hand, and narrower than a tankard, it initially appeared a very inconsequential article. An item which, God forbid, one might overlook amidst the others on their mantelpiece. This was, of course, by design. If one were to truly translate the elvish sketched transverse from tip to toe, they find a story accompanying it. A story scratched with, upon its creation, a witch’s stubbiest rib. A story which, at times, was so finely sketched that the brothers were required to glide their fingertips along its edges. Even to muster a semblance of its haunting vocabulary.

Between the brothers, Mordecai was most versed in timeworn elvish inscription. At least, he was fluent in Eastern and conversational in Southern. This chalice was North-eastern. Henry’s interests slipped more toward Orcish or Sclatvonion. It was fortunate, for Mordecai, that he was the dominant speaker of the Goblet’s tongue. It gave him, sadly, the advantage. A benefit he recognized necessary when gliding the tip of each index finger along the goblet’s final rule. To, quite devilishly, ‘sip six pints of the blood of your relative’.

It was, justly, a conundrum. A dilemma, for any man. Even those teetering carelessly from the clutches of lucid reason. It was a decision he salivated. Devoured. Envisioned.

“It says we must sip six pints of water, from a mineral rich lake”. He lied. Circumventing the eye line of his enthusiastic brother. See, the brothers were the final vestiges in a tight bloodline. For that moment, Mordecai could not recall a remaining relative in reach. Once more, he knew, he could not utter the words before his brother. Of course, it was logical to consider that Henry might contemplate betrayal. Logical, because Mordecai ruminated upon this himself. But not there. Not in the grasps of a dilapidated city. To lie amongst the filth and rot into the ash. No, he wanted to take his brother home. No less, he knew of the curses which might emanate if he did not enact his betrayal with paramount respect. A definitive, and certainly ironic, juxtaposition. So, he set that younger man home. Promising, on each day, that they might find the perfect mineral lake. However, Henry learned, on each suggestion, that a better one always lay ahead.

They were a trio of months into their journey home when Mordecai slipped into action. In his credit, the decision was more impromptu than he would have liked. Catching his brother chatting with an elven bar lady one night aside a ballad and drinks, he detected the man withdrawing the goblet in a drunken boast. He witnessed, as the elven beauty scanned feeble fingers along the lengths that she could only gently sense. Then the jaws of his brother slip agape as she timidly mumbled into his ear. The bulging eyes of his skinny Henry popped wide, and trembling fists immediately scrambled for the nearest blade. By then, Mordecai recognized from across the bar, that the jig was up. He realized that, sadly, his beloved brother was gone.

Henry fled that night. He could not, of course, rightly, kill his own brother. Into the dusk on horseback, he was trailed only at distance by Mordecai himself. The elder of the two stalked the younger. Slithering between trees, surveying at the camp’s fire from a cosy distance until Henry’s eye lid become too fatigued to carry its own hefty weight. Until he, tragically, plunged a plump head against the bark balancing his back – and floated to slumber. A slumber, which, Henry realized, would soon be his last.

See, as the younger brother awoke, late into the night, he caught little ability to shift his shoulders. In fact, he could only mildly swing his fingers and grind heels on thawing mud. He was, as he knew it to be before his eyes even opened, trapped. Tied to the tree by the rope of his brother’s improvised belt, he caught Mordecai’s icy eyes aside the sizzling of that night-time fire – glaring back to him. The elder’s face shone ginger. The shadows accompanying it curling and rolling, then winding along his cheek to offer the impression of a ghoul in the night. His pupils were pinpoint. An expression about his cheek matched the haunted pale complexion it accompanied. Brandished in the left palm, Henry’s own knife. Freshly whetted, razor-sharp. Crisp enough to lacerate the eye only by surveying it. In the other – the ‘Goblet Of Aeternitas’. It was empty, for now.

“I’m sorry” Mordecai mumbled beneath bated breath - whilst his brother plead for mercy. Those pleads fell upon deaf ears. For the few hours to come, that cushion of plentiful woodland echoed whimpered begs which transitioned into agonized howls. Ultimately, gradually, they interspersed into exhausted moans. The sobs of a man peppered in slices. The groans of a man drained of his blood. Moans which, mercifully, finally, ground to a halt.

When considering the pints of expelled blood, Henry’s body felt no lighter. It was still, grotesquely, bulky. Yet, for the sake of his fresh life in eternal existence, the elder brother did best to avoid curse. He, no matter the mass of his departed Henry, battled beyond the agony to provide a comfortable point of rest - beside the father which raised them. A father which, Mordecai worried, as he felt the stones shift more so beneath his feet than they had ever before, might become nauseated in his paternal revulsion.

The stones were, Mordecai noted, truly beginning to shift. It was as his father foretold, as it was set to be. The patriarch warned of shifting stones before an agonizing death. A death which, Mordecai smirked with some egotism, was set not to come. So, with their shifting he found a new-found energy. An excitement, if you will. His gutless eyes scanned the ground. Catching pebbles vibrate and roll between stones that near convulsed. It was loud. Truly, unspeakably, shrill. The crunching and clanging of the formations stretching in places - or metamorphosing into nothing about others. They were morphing. Mutating into something both familiar and alien. Transforming, with each crunch, into the vaguest semblance of cognitive shape. The first of which, clamping and interlocking aside his right flank. A claw. Mammoth above his own height, it eventually swelled whole. A foot. Then a scaly leg, until it grew a serrated tail with honed bone blades angling the plates. Mordecai’s jaw slithered ajar as his eyes engulfed the sight ahead. Devoured, fascinated, as they drifted toward the head. The head of a beast he’d only recognized through his father’s ramblings. An inferno dragon.

“A fortunate moment to be blessed with an eternity in life”. The spineless brother sneered. “Oh, beautiful, ferocious, beast, I’ll tell everybody of who I saw today!”.

The dragon, dwarfing his height but twinning his mountainous ego, gazed down upon the inconsequential coward beneath it. The arrogant fool looked back. His lips curling upward, grimacing with crooked teeth to reveal a jubilant smile. His departed Henry, who once, so recent, was a significant priority, slipped amongst the shifting stones and far from grasp. His carcass was now, as far as Mordecai’s concern, discarded furniture amongst a fading pasture. The beast, above, hollered in the face of the beast below. Only to be greeted by a gloating giggle and passionate applause. It was, for a moment, a definitive flash of joy – before an era of despair. An era, birthed by the motion of that dragon’s single reaction. The re-separation of its girthy jaws, and the eruption of flame. As that furnace twinkled about the broad bouncing tonsils within, Mordecai realized that confidence and arrogance can be near synonymous for the fool deficient of stakes.

See, this gift of immortality did not come lacking the biproducts of existence. After devouring his brother’s blood, he still felt pain all the same. Only, he could recover from it. He could recover from absolutely anything. He could slip from cliffs, if he so wished, only to splatter healthily at the surface. Of course, he would wince at the agony accompanying it. An absurd pain. But he would never die. So, with this, he soon realised there would come moments in which he might beg the Gods to allow his death. A realisation, almost immediate, as that smug grin slipped into a tortured moan in the second that flame ruptured his skin.

A normal blaze of this magnitude would liquify the man before he even recognised it to be true. The most unfortunate of souls might suffer a splitting second of anguish before vanishing abruptly into another plain. But not Mordecai. No, he screamed. He wailed. He begged the beast he recently mocked to cease its inferno. He pleaded, as his skin bubbled and bounced on bone like water in a boiled pot, for mercy. He pleaded, as flesh blistered and popped, for mercy. Yet, to his dismay, he received none. In fact, the beast only blew harder. Knocking the decrepit soul against the rocks he once traversed. Howling louder than the flames as he felt the balls of his eyes thaw away – reduced to juice. As his vision banished him to the dark, and he could only focus on the bursting of his teeth. The squelching of his bones as they liquefied into the boulders around him. The steaming of his organs. The whistling of his lungs which blistered from the inside. The roasting scent of his own heart sizzling. The rancid contortion of his intestines which swirled in hopeless endeavors to flee the onslaught. They were, of course, unable to abscond their assault. There was not an inch of him which did not bubble, simmer and fizz. For an attack which last near two minutes, the agony associating which appeared an eternity. By the moment that the beast eventually grew bored with the obliteration of its challenger, Mordecai was nothing but a steaming shadow on stone. A steaming shadow which, to his dismay, could sense every agonising detail of its incinerated tendons. A position which he remained for weeks or, perhaps, even months. He was sure that seasons even changed but, eventually, he did come back.

This return was far from graceful. No less, the agony never did subside. It began with the loosest foundations of bone. Detailing the shadow from scorched char to glimmering pale. Then, slowly, the flesh - which supplemented the organs. There was a period, of which Mordecai estimated to last three days, that the brother’s veins tangled over moist tissue and irritated bone. He could feel each pump of this crisp new heart slither through veins which tickled fresh bone. It was, predictably, intolerable. On his eventual return, the empty, silent, valley was only punctuated by the softened moans of the fool alone. Moans which groused, even wept. None the less, with time, he eventually simmered back into life. The final piece of the macabre puzzle was his eyes. He winced and groaned as he felt their melting reverse. He felt them grow, and then awkwardly slot back into their sockets - and adjust to the sun again. For some hours, he only saw creamy blonde. Until, silver, then navy, until all of life’s wonderful hues popped back into place.

He, again, smiled. Lips spiralling upward, his gums revealed teeth which battled beyond fresh gums. They bled but he didn’t mind. His fresh, soggy, eyes glided back to the position of his brother’s sack. Now, he could see even from a distance, rotting. So putrid, it near liquified. He greeted it with a sigh, then tugged one arm to leverage the strength to stand. But, to his dismay, he could not. In fact, he could wiggle his toes, but could not manoeuvre his legs. He made efforts to wrench his neck – but failed. He began, in this moment, to panic. Tugging every appendage he could muster, he realised each motion ensued into the matching result – failure. Nothing. Not even the slightest leverage with the greatest tug of his most vigorous effort. Nothing. His fresh eyes scanned downward, as best they could without twisting a neck which had fused into place. He caught a pelvis, leading into a torso, half imbued into stone. Skin, and the majority of bone, now welded to rock. Bonded, in the cruelest of ways to that which the dragon melted him. Trapped.

“Help!” His never-ending lungs cried. There was nothing. Of course there was not. This was the very valley his father cautioned him in tales – after all. The valley which no other soul has passed alive. The valley which saw decades, even centuries, without a fresh challenger. More so, he was firmly entangled within it. Perhaps, even, meeting its center. Positioned in a point where, he believed in the moment, no soul could ever meet him again. Alone. For the rest of days, he would likely outlive the plain he existed. Only, damned to suffer it alone. He rolled those mushy eyes upward to the skies atop him. This time, the clouds were heavy. Thick, and dark, they near itched to precipitate. He wondered, as those initial droplets bounced amongst stone around him - What use is an eternal life, if banished to suffer it alone – with no rights of motion? As those raindrops cruelly sploshed against a forehead fused and unable to wipe them away, he recognized, finally, that confidence and arrogance can be near synonymous for the fool deficient of stakes.

Fantasy
2

About the Creator

Martin S. Wathen

A writer practicing in both prose and script. With a deep passion for film and screenwriting, I use this platform to publish all unique ideas and topics which I feel compelled to write about! True crime, sport, cinema history or so on.

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