Mists

[Adrian Kane]

Byron / Inquisitor Jeorune

The sudden resurgence of clarity in the boy's mind was a sure sign that the boy was still had some reserves of strength. That was good, as it meant the Inquisitor need not allow the boy the chance to rest. Not yet, at least. The anger was met with that usual disappointed smile; as if the boy were but a petulant child raging about some petty slight. But the smile changed with the boy's final words. The smile turned to one of amusement, the Inquisitor's stance shifted subtly, and with that the Inquisitor melted away, replaced by something else.

Byron

The gleaming white tabard was casually pulled free and neatly folded to be set aside; it was tarnished and stained red by that point, and the hours of washing required to leave it pristine and pure, while certainly a most meditative chore, was robbing him of sleep. Belts and straps were undone and set aside as well, as was the chain hauberk that had been weighing him down all these days. Just how a man was expected to march into battle, and commit to so physical a task, with something so heavy and restrictive was yet another reason why Byron long knew he had no place on a battlefield.

Oh surely, he could swing a sword better than common soldiers; he was Tower trained after all. But his skills were much better pointed elsewhere. With the chain pooled onto the floor, Byron rolled his shoulders casually, but left the padding that was worn beneath the hauberk for the moment. ”I had expected one as smart as you seem to find yourself, to have figured that out long ago, lad. It is a most useful mask though. I think the good Inquisitor shall remain in my repertoire. Some time to practice, however, would be appreciated.”

Gone was the Amadician accent, gone were the mannerisms of the Inquisitor. He ran his hands through his neatly oiled hair for a moment, then frowned at the filth for the oil that clung to them. The blood was ignored; blood washed away easily enough. Oil though, it clung and left a most distasteful film. That there was now blood in his hair was also ignored; again, it would wash out easily enough. But that damnable oil..."But he is so wrapped up in his appearance, isn't he? The hair? And all the white? A poor choice of clothing for a torturer, isn't it? But it is about the image I suppose.”

He plucked a long piece of metal which ended in a painstakingly sharpened blade, and turned back to Arikan, letting the blade trace along the man's ribs exploratively, without actually cutting the skin, yet. He was curious to see how effective the item's application would be, considering the lengthy notes of its application. "Unfortunately, this of course means I will have to try harder now won't I? I mean, now that you know that you have been fooled. How many interesting secrets did you give me before the Inquisitor even had to bleed you? But now your hackles are up. So much progress lost.”

The blade dipped deeply along one of Arikan's ribs. Strong fingers and the sharpness of the blade saw it dip into the bone deeply, only to be twisted slightly side to side as if trying to split the bone like a piece of wood. He didn't apply enough pressure to do so, but the sensation would surely be an unpleasant one. Then the blade was withdrawn, and he held it up to inspect it more closely and nodding in approval to find it hadn't bent under the pressure. It was a well forged piece. High quality steel.

Byron entertained the thought of telling Arikan who he was, or at least of what had happened to the real Inquisitor. But this was no usual prey. He could not take the risk, considering this one's unusual ability. He would have to educate himself regarding this Tel’aran’rhiod business a bit more thoroughly, to better understand the risks and dangers such people posed. Best not to give too much information in the mean time.

"I wonder though. Am most curious. Why did you swear yourself to old Lord Grim?" The blade was returned to the table, and he found other tools to busy himself with; small things, nothing too terribly intrusive. Painful surely, but nothing that would risk the man's life yet. He worked on Arikan's body with more curiousity than hatred or dire intent; he could now experiment more openly, without worrying about trying to maintain the façade of a practised Questioner. Needless to say, such skills weren't amongst those taught at the Tower. Even Master Dekan hadn't taught young Byron such things; how to kill a man quick or slow, in secret or as a show, yes. But nothing like this. It was too time consuming. But now, there was time aplenty.

Arikan

The pale flesh of the Whitecloak melted away, and a sicker man was revealed beneath.  Arikan quickly realized confronting his torturer was a mistake. 

The garb was dropped. Piece by stained piece. The cloak cast aside, the shepherd’s crook folded for storage, to be reused again surely. Chainmail became a discarded mound and none of it trashed.  The man would don such attire again.  Someday.

But it was the relief in the man’s voice that froze his blood. The burden of maintaining his facade was eased.  Now, he was free to plunge the full breadth of his focus into one. disturbing. task. 

Definitely a mistake.

He refused to let his voice shake, but inside, he was worried. Definitely worried. “Hands are convinced they are the shell of the Light itself—“

His voice trailed in the end, inexplicably fixed upon the show that followed: the point of a knife across his ribs trailed a streak of white behind.  It riddled his flesh with goosebumps upon its withdrawal.  And for the threat that followed.

Try till he die, eventually they would come to a point where Arikan could say no more.  He would chew out his own tongue to prevent betraying the Lord of Souls.  Such secrets were priceless, and far more valuable than one useless tongue.  Or so he thought.

However, Arikan liked to think his ability to endure stronger than resorting to such unpleasant measures.  A full team of Questioners might ply the teeth from a man's gums to prevent such things; actually, no.  They were unlikely to think of such careful, preventative steps.  At least, not until Under Lt. Jeremel Nessad suggested it a century ago.  Every once in a while the Questioners gathered themselves an actual Darkfriend.  Or—they were delivered one.  Arikan enjoyed his time in white.

Irony was a bitch sometimes.  Thankfully, as this man was no true Inquisitor, he might be ignorant of such tricks.  Plying teeth seemed quite excruciating--and humiliating--for the poor bastards.  That, and, the task required more than one pair of hands for proper restraint.  Safety first, afterall. And this bastard was alone with his victim.

So his eyes rolled around his head, watching the man as he circled, blade trailing. Twisting and writhing to watch his every movement. The man seemed to settle on a spot he liked, right beneath the ridge of one rib. It wasn’t a long blade, thankfully. But it was flat. The hiss of pain when it slid in was genuine, but it was the twist under the bone that made him scream. Blood dripped a steady river around the arc of his chest when it came out again. His hands yearned to cover the wound, but there was only the weak rattle of a chain when he tried. 

"So Lythia found herself a torturer,” he eventually gasped, continued to stare. "There aren't many of you around.  She's smarter than I thought —I really hate that.”  Yes, he knew her name. In fact, he wanted them to know he knew her. He would take great pleasure in their knowing that.

He continued, wanting to leave her with a wound she could never heal. “You know she was suppose to die too.  The gray man meant to gut both of them.  Tell her that.  With everything else.  I really want her to know Darius was the one.  No.  I was the one.”  He watched to see if there was a flicker of recognition on the torturer’s face. Probably not. He looked younger now than he had all this time. But he wanted them to know that he was the M’Hael’s killer. That a decade of ruination followed because of him.

The torturer, named as Arikan came to think of him because frankly he was too out of his mind to be more creative, was unleashed after that. He didn’t need to keep up the guise of a professional Questioner and frankly was free to ply his practice to his heart’s content. Oh he still asked questions, but it took more and more effort to extract an answer. But sometimes long stretches of time passed without a single word spoken. The torturer left him alone once, returning with buckets that reminded Arikan of being manipulated into cleaning the floor.

He placed the buckets along the wall, walking among them with serious contemplation for a moment, as though trying to decide which one to focus on first. Then, the torturer selected a pair of long pincers. Of all the tools to retrieve, that one cast a worried look across Arikan’s expression. But he watched, transfixed upon how they would be used. Such when the torturer plunged the points into one of the buckets, and carefully lifted out what was hiding inside, Arikan’s eyes flared wide at what squirmed from the end. Clearly the torturer didn’t want to touch it. For a man who did not so much as squirm at smearing his victim’s blood across his brow, that he didn’t want to risk touching this trade was worrisome. Looking at it now, Arikan didn’t blame him. Then the torturer approached, thing dangling from the pincers, twisting and writhing, and walked up and down the long line of his bolted down body. Trying to decide where it should be placed. Every hair on stood on end. Arikan couldn’t watch. He stared at the ceiling and swallowed dryly. Blades and pliers were one thing. But this… Water dripped on his chest. He winced. His abdomen. He shivered when the drips landed on the tender tissue just above his crotch. The torturer paused there. The drips trickled down. Darkness no. Not there. He squeezed his eyes shut.

The torturer seemed to change his mind, and the weight of the worm pooled on the tender flesh of his throat instead. It seemed stunned at first, dropped into the hollow just under the adam’s apple. Silence stretched between them both. Arikan held his breath. Then the creature moved. Slithered down the arc of his throat. Probing. Stretching. Tasting nibbles along the way that felt like little pinches. Arikan didn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. When it slipped off his throat, a slimy trail was left behind. And he exhaled a sigh of relief.

Until it the wetness brushed his earlobe. “NO!” he screamed in horror for this abomination. He whipped his head aside, trying to throw it off, but it slipped in with one long slither and the exquisite pressure that followed made him want his cut it out of his skull. He was breathing rapid, fast shallow breaths. Then a second creature was dropped in the same place as the first.

Deafness plugged his head. He couldn’t hear his own screams. Then a blanket was laid across his face. The heat of it became an oven. Darkness swallowed him up. Devoid of hearing and sight, barely able to breathe, every other sense was heightened. Blades he previously grimaced through reopened half-plugged holes. The breath hot, he gasped for air, drowning in the humidity of his own mouth. Fibers of the blanket were pulled in. Choking. He started to gag, turned his face to the side.  The motion in his ear swirled and he heaved what little remained in his stomach.

Clearly not desiring him to choke to death, the blanket was yanked in a smooth motion. The torturer beheld bulging eyes and a face so red it was nearly purple. He just waited to see if Arikan would manage to calm himself long enough to suck air again.

The pincers came back and the worms pulled out like a long string and dropped back in their buckets. Arikan’s head rolled side to side weakly. Air circulated his lungs, and he was given a chance to recover. More questions came then, and Arikan’s throat burned from the acid of wretching an empty stomach, and he managed a thin answer.

Afterward, he looked down at himself. Little black bodies ebbed up and down his torso. He could feel them now. The prickle of a thousand suckers boring their faces into the skin. Any River Rat raised near the Erinin knew what they were. But his gaze settled on those that delved around red lines where the torturer’s tools had split the skin. The fresh knife hole under the rib. Crawling under the loose flaps of skin. The suckers pushed deeper, and he writhed, but there was no getting away.

Cold snaked up his shaking body, and there he was left to wait in darkness and recovery before the next round.

Arikan

Being given water was a bad sign.  It meant the torturer wanted him alive a while longer.  But he accepted the swallows nonetheless.  It thinned the coating of blood from his mouth. Cut daggers across the wound in his tongue, but he swallowed anyway. The leeches had been peeled away. All but the one under his ribs that in too deep by then, and it was left to burrow. He’d have begged to get it out if he thought it’d do any good, but it was clear what type of thing he feared the most, and the pain of needles, clamps, pliers, and fire was not it.

Later, more buckets lined the wall. And Arikan’s eyes widened when he glimpsed what wiggled around in them.

So Arikan tried explaining again, voice raspy, desperate.  ”—the Chosen built their own forces, with each carving out their centers of power.  Raviel disappeared after being driven from Andor.  Ashtaroth was captured by the Dragon. Amogorath is probably still in the Blight. Merihem skulks in the shadows, a joke by the Chosen. Lanfear stalks the Dreamworld. Graendal is dead. Probably Samóch too.— On and on until his throat cracked and his ignorance of the Chosen was reached.  ’You may take his place', the hallucination--or visitor, or ghost, or the Great Lord himself whispered like a stake to his brain. It wasn’t going to happen, he knew, but his hatred of the Chosen was potent, and he had no hesitation to sell each and every one of the bastards out. They could all burn.  And he wasn’t going to survive anyway.

He spoke about things he knew best, namely the machine of war.

”—The forges of thakan'dar churn without end— armor, bone, blood, steel — the priceless quenched with a soul — “  He babbled about the magnificent valley below Shayol Ghul for a while.  Yet there were no words by which mortal tongues could depict such a place where sands piled to mounds in the site that was once an ancient sea. He described feelings of unprecedented awe, sparked with lucid moments of overwhelming clarity in such raw emotion the Dreadlord sincerely wanted to impart the experience to man who so desperately wanted to know it. 

The slopes of Shayol Ghul was sort of place where a man was rendered to what he was, a spick of dust in a sandstorm of the apocalypse.  A place where infinite night choked the sun, where lightning bolted from the ground upward to the swirling sky, where stables of humans were bred for their parts, plucked from grasping arms like witless cattle.  He loved and hated that looming mountain; both drawing and repulsing, like living with oil coursing veins  he wanted to open because it was slowly poisoning him, but burned ecstasy every moment until.  Glancing along the ridge of his own body strapped below, he knew the color of his own blood, and it was indeed not black as he thought it must be.

The forges of the Great Lord were known to some men of the Light, though no witness of the Light ever returned to tell his allies about it; they should bemoan their ignorance as blank mercy.  The name was known by some, however; to diademed battle lords or warders of the Tower, filtered by leaks among Darkfriends and prominent Black Ajah, but a Child's mind should be ignorant of thakan'dar.  From that trance-like cocoon of self-preservation and the edge of panic, Arikan did not miss the Inquisitor's lack of surprise when he explained the origins of Myddraal steel. Wait. No, he wasn't an Inquisitor. He shook away the thought. The torturer was just a man. Or maybe something else. 

For fear of going madder than he already was, Arikan struck the nocturnal imagery from the forefront of thought.  The burden of falling into his own mind, of his own eyes burning from their sockets simply to behold the walls of dripping stone and black lake pooled therein, was too powerful a mental stroke to endure at the same time as the physical; in the end, he was indeed only mortal, and he reached the point of biting his own tongue off again. Fresh blood poured from the slicing wound. At least the torturer hadn’t thought to pluck a leech on it yet.

But the machine of war was only part of the larger arsenal. There were weapons of the shadow lurking amid dark places in the world. Pieces hoarded by the Chosen, locked away forever. The Seals on the Great Lord’s prison were trinkets compared to these mighty tools. Arikan knew nothing but rumors and saw nothing but glimpses, and his voice shook to explain as much when the buckets were brought near again.

The torturer held a small smile, proud of finally finding the thing that thing that pushed his man over the edge. The silence stretched like the bells in his head finally gonged him deaf, and Arikan looked at the torturer in turn, then. Really looked at him. He was younger than the Inquisitor seemed. Sicker though. Far sicker.

But the final question was one he’d tried to elicit many times already: why sell his soul to the Dark One? 

Arikan was ready now. It was probably the last thing he would do. “Really want to know?" His voice was scratches. Barely audible by then. “Because I was born a darkfriend... and I hope by my rebirth that I return to darkness again... And in that life, I will find you.. And I’ll make you remember this moment... I swear my soul to the wheel... and hope of rebirth you will remember me when I track you down…”  He was confident the man would think his vow mockery. Nobody would believe such things, but whether true or not, Arikan knew. With all his dark soul he swore a vow more potent than anything to have ever passed his lips before. 

He soon folded a void around his mind.  After a certain extent of suffering, more seemed no worse than what came before.  It was all a walk through hell. 

So let the forges churn.  He was ready to die.