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

created on 03/10/2011  |  http://fubar.com/augurs-martyrs-and-agnostics/b340021  |  8 followers

The stench of dry bones and musty rags hung in the air, he imagined a great dust cloud had been stirred by his arrival, but such a phenomenon was invisible in the complete darkness around him. He Stumbled through ankle deep rattling steel and mortal refuse with each clumsy step. He made a point to pat carefully in the dark making sure not to stomp on any speartips or exposed blades.

The striking of flint and steel had managed to flick an ephemeral light into the room, and in the first bold strike he had not recognized any danger over his shoulder or at his feet. Just the momentary glimpse of strewn bones, swords, and clothes. By the echo of his footsteps and the clack of the flint he could tell the chamber he was inside had quite a bit of depth and breadth, perhaps the size of an entire beer hall. He didn't care to estimate just how many bodies were piled around him.

Dozens.

Hundreds was a bit more likely. He pawed at a nearby body and ripped a few handfuls of dry stale cloth. The rags he had gathered would only burn for a few seconds, in that time he scrambled for a more lasting solution holding the ember high over his head.

The first scramble yielded no results, all he had upset were more ragged bones and the fine layer of dust on the ground. For the second round he decided to step away as far as he could've seen with his makeshift torch before lighting another one. The bodies were less concentrated here, the saturation of body upon body, corpse clawing over corpse was now a mere smattering. As if there was some mad dash prior to a catastrophe, some climactic cataclysm with every man diving for where the old mercenary had arrived. He looked back as something dawned on him. They had all been dogpiling and stampeding to the exact point where he had arrived after touching the stone.

Was that the only way out?

Where was the stone now?

He started back as the ember licked down to his fingers and he flung it aside as his flesh sizzled. As the light extinguished he tripped over a loose shaft or perhaps a femur and tumbled end over end into a pile of rusty clangs and hollow precussion. He pawed and groped and set his whole wingspan out in looping, blind desperation for the stone, but it was nowhere in the darkness, nowhere in the light.

A deep and unwelcome shiver went up his spine and past his lips in a quavering whimper.

He had to know why they called it the Fell Tower... had to know what was so damned mysterious unknown and powerful about it.

Had to know ...

He struck another ember and lit his third bundle of rags in a futile attempt to gain his bearings since the fall. He could only assume he was back to the epicenter of carrion, any direction from here would be just as valid as another.

What good was light then?

So he crawled on all fours for what felt like a hastened eternity. With his dry calloused hands he searched for a crack, a crevice, an edge, a wall, a change, but for infinite leagues all he felt was the same dusty, smooth cool stone interrupted ocassionally by a crumbling body, or loose weapon.

It occured to him that perhaps this was some impossible riddle, some trap of an endless globe of dirty floor he had fallen into. An impish purgatory before judgement, or perhaps his trial had been one without peers, defense, evidence or testimony. What a merciless and efficient sentencing. Though he found it hard to imagine a hell without beauracracy, after all, it had to be full of lords, tax collectors and long winded sophisticates. The place would be completely devoid of humor and poetic retribution if that were the case.

And he refused to have any part in such an unimaginative and humorless hell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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