26th of Winter, 511 AV
Again, he trudged down the dank, dingy corridor, which snaked upwards to that ring of stony despair. There were tremors, brought on by the partly deadened rumble of the crowds. They shivered the dried, decaying plaster, making it slough away in chunks and choking swirls of dust, competing with crackling torches in their rusty brackets. The oily plumes of smoke made him cough, cuff at his reddening eyes. There were dark, crusty smears, reeking of feces, of agony and metal. The imagined cry, only heard in these cells of the damned. The clank of illusory chains. Thought I was done with this, he grunted. Thought there wasn’t any use.
Empty words, as always. The sot was ever craving a drop of wine. The slut couldn’t keep from spreading her legs. And him, well, he just couldn’t steady his desire to fight, to crush the japery of their faces and batter through pride, through armor to slice pink, yielding flesh.
Ulric reached the grate, hefting the circular shield before him, with its dirty, dented covering of leather, the bearded axe with its long, curving edge, a spike rising from the handle’s end. They were plain, just like everything else about him. They didn’t need any sorcery. They didn’t need jewels, or fancy engravings. They just had to do their job. There wasn’t glory in this, after all. Pretenders, all of them, he frowned, a low growl boiling up from the depths of his chest, the shreds of a resurrected animosity come to manifest itself in the creak of his gauntlets as they cinched tighter around the axe’s haft. They perch up there like so many pigeons. The cunts, always stuffing their faces with lemon cakes, soused with honeyed wine. They clamor for blood, and we give it to them, so much their cups spill over. They don’t care. They’ve only ever cared for their own sakes, never ours. The desperate. The broken. The glory drunk dreamers. There was a defiant plunge of his jaw, spiky with whiskers, though the coals of his eyes were yet to ignite. They don’t know what it means to fight.
There is was, looming up before him. The grate, forged of heavy, blackened iron. The bars redolent of menace. They just sat there, judging.
Ulric gave a shrug of his broad shoulders, covered by layers of leather, scales, and plate that clanked softly when his strides jostled the armor. There was a slither of metal. The grate gave a discordant squeal.
Then through, erupting in greater noise, the blare of horns. They stood, feral in their frenzy. The eyes blank. The robes, just shreds of tawdry cloth hung on bags of flesh, sinew, and bone. They weren’t anything.
Before him, there was only the lofty ring of stone blocks, nothing chimerical in their desolate, ponderous brutality. The tiny, crawling ants of faces, clad in myriad carapaces. The furl of pennants, slowing flaying to rags by the gusts as they forlornly straddled the coliseum’s immensity of gnashed gravel. This wasn’t his city. There was a strange sense of unreality in this carefully orchestrated spectacle. The further he trudged, encircled by blots of gray, indigo, and ruby, breath rasping through his crackled lips, he could only wonder if he wasn’t caught by a fever dream. The center beckoned him, smears of darkly drying red on the sands, and it was there that he stayed.
Ulric slowly lifted his eyes, as though rising from a deep torpor. The voice was back, luxuriantly deep and resonant, hurling out his name, and the string of lies that succeeded. They gleamed, spun to strands of old, molten gold, set with pearls. The dismal charade had begun.
Might be it’s just ending, he stifled a cruel chuckle. Might be we’ve come to crucible, and there’s naught left but bones.
And that, that was how it began, with a dull, raspy chuckle. The measure of his defiance. There were some, knowing they were consigned to the sucking mud, that just wept. Then the others, with their grim faces pasted on, molded on as a poor simulacrum of valor, the folds and creases betraying their fear. That used to be him, too. That was before he’d learned that to conceal these deepest, most primal of urges, you first had to submit to your quivery, watery, gut-churning dreads, to make them part of you. There wasn’t any use in fighting against your fear when it could fight with you, steadying your grasp. There were many vagaries of war, but there was only a single, fundamental principle. Though grimy, loud, and brutal, the struggle was inevitably carried by your will to never relent.
That’s why he laughed, caught by the sullen absurdity of what he was doing. There really was no augury. The jangling japery, that was it.
They burst up, freed from cages of rock. The long, dirty nails, set on ugly hands that raked through the ruddy sands, bluntly inhuman faces breaking from their places of imprisonment. They began to shriek. Theirs was a cry of hatred, of consuming anger.
Ulric’s eyes lashed over cracked skin, clung by patches of grit, irregular chunks of rock, even tufts of grass, all jerking away from leather hides that might’ve at one point, been familiar. They were bestial, the eyes as red, as hard as garnets, harsh and unforgiving. They ringed him, far more than a handful. Their lust for carnage was strong; he felt it coruscating, bulges of bile in the cavities where their inky, putrefying hearts should’ve been. They drew nearer, but he didn’t move. There were yowls, perhaps seeking to frighten. The swipe of talons, too far away to scrape through the desultory patina of his apathy. The largest among them, hulking under a visible broken by fragments of basalt, by plunging spears of onyx, began shambling toward him, a low, blundering shriek forcing from gaping mouth.
Ulric just laughed, spreading his arms wide as the stained lips parted, revealing a snarl of quartz-like teeth dangling from pulpy gums. The things were defiant in their voracity, at least. They harshly crowded him, clung by beads of dark slaver. “That’s disgusting,” he growled, leaning in closer. The churl’s talons flung out, only for the shield to transpose with the crushing brutality of his disregard. “But I forgive you,” he grunted, a fiendish grin forcing over his face. But that’s not my only gift to you, sweetling. Taking a swift step to the side, he swept the axe around in a deadly, upward arc, shearing through tough flesh, leaden bones. The arm, severed just below the shoulder, flew away in a gout of blood. He sprang forward, legs coiling like bands of steel, and whirled, driving the axe’s head through the back of a knee, the blow’s force tearing the joint asunder with a grating pop, dark ichor boiling from the wound’s floppy, dreadful grotesquery. And yet, before the creature could even tumble, he was dragging his other boot around, completed another whirl.
Harshly, he cleaved at vertebrae. The severed mockery of its cranium struck the grit with a thunk, rolled for several paces. There wouldn’t be a respite, though. They hurled forward, trying to bind him, to tear him to lankly hanging strips, but he wouldn’t have it.
Ulric swept the rim of his shield around, smashing at a fiercely protruding chin, making a shower of mica shards spray wildly over the sands. There was a grunt, a sag, but he was already moving. They rush in, he growled, swiftly taking out a surging leg with the edge of his axe. They’ve just the mystifying cruelty of their frenzy. That’s why. Taking a step back, he jabbed the spike into a horrid spay of jaws, whirled away from the shrapnel of broken molars, deflecting yet another swipe of talons. Then, toes digging in, he clove upwards, taking the thing under the shoulder, crushing through layers of flesh, gristle, and bone. The spin of his hips, rapidly consequent to the swing, ended with him bashing yet another, nearly squealing yukman in the face, pulping an already squashed nose, making it sag away.
The shrieks began to multiply. They came at him, but he was ready. They hadn’t seen enough, yet. That is what they do. He drove a heavy boot into a belly crusted by chunks of schist, spun so his elbow crunched into a face, sending tiny splinters of diorite sloughing away. They were like a cascade of jet.
Ulric’s laughter was as the thunder. There was an elegance to his carnage, his crushing, myriad fluidity like the passage of chain lightning through the crevices of darkest darkness. He swung his steel, and it nearly looked to stir the air in a crazy, whorled tracery of a pattern. There was a flutter of his heart, a pulsing of joy. Then he was inscribing an intricate jigsaw of devastation, scything down that vicious edge to shatter a skull, nearly sever a raking arm just above the elbow. They’d learn, of course. They’ve a sordid affinity for mimicry, he grunted, making his shield crunch into a skinny chest encrusted by chunks of basalt. They pelted his eyes, drawing a curse. The yukman gave a stagger.
Chuckling, he surged forward, driving a shoulder into its gut. There was a hiss of rancid breath, laden with bile, and then it was yielding to the crushing impact. They’re slow to adjust, he reached back, yanked out its already shivering, unsteady legs with his axe’s curved edge. They can’t grasp the upper hand if they’re no pattern, if all they’re forced to perceive is a chaos of horror. That, above anything, was why he’d augured this slaughter.
Ulric danced away from jagged incisors, ducking under a swipe of claws flecked by flint, and mashed his knee up between a leathery juncture of legs. He twisted away, keeping the shield lifted to catch the smashing slab of a cranium, and flung up his axe. Deftly, he caught it at the top of the haft, swinging it like a cleaver into an exposed neck. He sliced through tendons, through a pulsing artery.
During this all, he was curling around the shudder of its spine, viciously treading on the back of its ankle to bring it down in a miasma of quivering, bloody ruin. There wasn’t any hesitation, for he was already digging in his heels, going low as he lifted his circular shield high. They not seen this before, he grunted as a yukman crashed into the sudden bulwark. There was a dull scrape, a squeal of frantic raking as it was spun aside. Though the subsequent foe neared, shrieking like a banshee, he didn’t keep up his defense. The axe clove upwards, hewing deeply into a hip, grating on a pelvis, while the shield was already hurtling beyond, crunching into the back of the other's head. There was a gravely blur, but he was faster.
The crowd gasped.
