Icarus's blog: "Augurs, Martyrs, and Agnostics"

The voice... that scratching at the gate.
It had faded so far out from before.
No longer a whisper through the door, like that of a conspirator, or a comrade through the bars.
Now it was just a whimpering plea.
Like an old dog curled up next to a cold fireplace.
Blind, sick, and whining to die.

Davretor wasn't ready to let go.
Why wasn't he through this yet? What had to be done, what could be done to set them both free?
Weeks ago, he feared what was inside him. Now he turned to it, facing certain agony.
Anything was better than this, but what could be gained, he couldn't even raise his iron-bound wrists to drink a palmful of water, much less to strike his captors and make some daredevil escape from a lab under a dungeib under a prison.

At least there was light. Someone to mock you for lacking even the strength to cry out in pain any more.

Lash, burn, cut- it was completely without merit now. He was one leathery scab of callouse hide. If the nerves underneat were still alive, he gave no indication that he felt pain any more.

Perhaps a development resulting from his curious symbioses, perhaps a result of their magicks and the strange drawings and markings dug into his skin with hot quill and incensed ash and ink.
He should be dead.
He'd much rather be.

Time was meaningless. Pain had disappeared, and they had halved the team studying him.
Tired... he started counting the characters dug into his leathery skin to pass the days. One, maybe two feedings a day. One session a week.
8 inquisitors, 4, and now ...
just the man in the mask.

How long had it been?
His listless, weary eyes turned to his tormentor.

"I know what you are now."
His flat, frank stair didn't implore death, it simply invited the next natural thing to be done.
The gilded body of the inquisitor hovered about the examination table, he idly fingered a hook, a scalpel, a dull quill. Placing them back carefully where he had laid them.
Davretor did not follow with a baleful glare or a silent plea.
He just laid still, his body too heavy, his mind too numb.

"But you've not yet pieced together what I am, have you?"
With his back turned to Davretor, the inquisitor began removing the ivy embroidered trappings covering his body, and placed them next to his instruments.
It took quite a bit of time, and Davretor noted the dramatics and self indulgent reverance that accompanied when the inquisitor turned revealing a body as heavilly scribed and tattooed as his own.

His reaction was bemused at best.
He didn't even care to struggle to ask what this could possibly mean, he didn't care.
He just wanted something sharp in his heart, and a sadistic grin in his face as the light faded one last time.

If not for the head to toe runic tattoos, Davretor would consider this man three things, young, thin, and handsome.
His face and head were shaved razor bald, no soft fluff or bristles anywhere on his body where ink stain could not cover.

There was... fear in his eyes, desperation. This wasn't an act of a rational person containing something terrible- it was keeping it out. Board the doors, plaster the windows. Silence the mind. Remove the soul.
The daemon hoarde was coming...

Davretor laughed, for the first time in months, a dry, sickly thing that quickly turned to a wheezing hack.

He had suffered this profane lunacy at the whim of a terrified child asking his weary father to look under the bed.

...
Why was that such a poignant comparison to him?
Why would he even know such a feeling?
Perhaps a long time ago, the man he was before all this- had a child.
A scared child.
With ashes on his fingertips. As the whole world burned and caved in on his defenseless body... his father screaming an injured curse as he arrived too late to save them.

Davretor began to tremble. A series of pictures were flashing through his mind, but these were the memories of others. He lived a thousand deaths as the world crumbled into char and smolder, his skin blistering under the heat, the acrid invasion of sulfur and kerosene into his nostrils, first the hair, then the eyes, blind to the horrible burns consuming his body.

The final despair of all the people his guest had consumed.

He lived a thousand more before a cleansing, cool hand was placed on his forehead.
The tremors and the sputters and gags emerging from his lungs and spine subsided.

"I take it that wasn't for my benefit," The inquisitor said to Davretor.
Davretor shook his head. Or rather- intended to, but only managed to raise his neck half way, and let it fall with a limp thud against the table.

"His hold on you is slipping, he's becoming less real, and you're becoming more mundane... if you can survive the process, you can be freed of him"
The inquisitor came eye to eye with him.
"If that is your most sincere wish. But I think we both know it isn't, hidden deep behind this new ... thing you've become, there was once a man. And that man needed that demon for something dreadful."
With a sigh he stood back up and paced away from Davretor.

"Don't you find it strange that he'd withhold only two things from you, even after his seal unraveled- the two most important aspects of any partnership?"
Davretor couldn't respond to answer the clearly rhetorical question.
"I'm speaking of course, of your names, and the terms of your pact."

The inquisitor's tattooed hands went gingerly to work as he widdled a dull quill a new tip.
"I have a feeling that tonight will be our last together... either you will be freed, I will get a glimpse of the reality daemonic beneath ours- and I will have seen to my most holy mission, or you will have fused with that hideous thing and my hand will be forced against you
and in your weakened state, felled.
also accomplishing my most
holy
mission."

He placed his hands in a basin near the sharper, glistening instruments at his disposal, and patted them dry against his cloak and turned back to his subject, glittering sharp steel in his thin fingers.
"By the end of tonight, we will know your name. Though which one, I'm uncertain of".

The first cut was without malice or the faintest inkling of torturous bliss.
No cackling, derision, or sadism as Davretor had become accustomed to, and frankly bored with.
This was task, not pleasure. Perhaps for the first time in this whole god-ignored charade.
And the task was simple but tedious execution.
The inquisitor was carving the runes into his skin, not just inking them.

Perhaps all the pain and digging, and burning, and bleeding up to this point had been conditioning, the slightest flinch or jerk offsetting the precise mutilation at work here.
The tattoos had simply been a guideline.
Measure twice...
cut once.
Perhaps Davretor was giving the young inquisitor far too much credit... but its what he would do in this situation.