Shit!
This is bad.
This is the absolute worst.
What are the odds that a guard would have been standing right on the opposite side of the carriageway. Crossing a carriageway is obviously illegally, in the worst case I could lose a hand! Crap! No it's not, my mind frantically screams, the worst case is he holds me here long enough for the gormless cretin triumvirate to catch up! If they catch me, I won't lose a hand I'll lose my damn life! I glance up at the guard holding me immobile, his features are hidden by a portcullis grill helmet so I can't tell what he's thinking. I bite my lip trying to think of some kind of lie to spin to get me out of this situation.
"Thief, that's a weird thing to call me after we first meet friend and I'm flattered really but I actually have an appointment elsewh-" the hand on my shoulder tightens painfully. The guard takes his hand off his halberd and reaches into a pocket to retrieve something. As he does I "stumble" and knock my foot into the weapon by "accident" causing the heavy weapon to immediately fall backwards. The guard reacts on instinct releasing me to grab the weapon. The second is all I need; I bolt for an alleyway if I can make it into the warren of back streets alleys I'll be as safe as can be.
That was the plan at least.
What I failed to anticipate is that the gormless cretin triumvirate as one might expect, are very persistent. I'd barely taken two steps from the guard when a fist hammered into me square in the face flooring me in a single hit. For several seconds I'm too stunned to even realise what hit me until a boot is placed firmly on my face pinning me to the ground. The leader of the trio is talking to the guard whilst one of his cronies pins me down. I release a groan as the leader finishes his conversation with the guard and strolls causally over to me before squatting down by my face. He smiles a genuine smile at me, which is only partially ruined by the rat dung on his teeth.
"Hello there friend, I don't think we've had the pleasure of being acquainted before it's a pleasure to meet you" the leader of the trio talks in a warm friendly tone, it would have been comforting if it wasn't looking at me like an insect on a dissection table. "Can't say the saammm--!" my retort is cut off by the boot on my face crushing my lips into the back of my skull. The trio chuckle for among themselves before the lackey without his boot on his face rams his boots into my balls. "Ooph!", I feel bile at the back of my throat as I feel the terrible pain every man knows and dreads, I would've curled into a ball but the boot on my face poses an impediment to that. I see stars for a moment and so it takes me a second to realise the trio have yanked me to my feet.
I groan my knees knocking together unsteady as I am forced to stay on my feet, "If you'll excuse us Prefectus Markus me and my friend here need to have a long conversation about the consequences of our actions". The guard sighs and turns away from us, "Just have your fun where the public can't see young master Primus". With that the guard walks away and I feel the last vestiges of hope die in my chest. Primus, it's incredible how a single word is more terrifying than the fact I'm now held captive by these three. "You er, you wouldn't happen to me the son of Orland Primus the captain of the guard now, would you?". The hellish grin on his face on his face is all the answer I need.
I would like to take back my early statement. Now, this is the absolute worst.
"Darius Primus at your service urchin", Darius gives me a mocking half bow. Oh, I'm dead. By the dead gods why do Leo have to get caught by Darius Primus! Darius is an urban legend among the urchin community for all the wrong reasons, he's the kind of psychopath who always pushed for maximum punishment under any circumstance. The trio begin hustling me towards a nearby alley, I shoot the guard a last desperate look, but he doesn't even acknowledge my existence. I feel my bowels tremble and I'm a hairs breath from wetting myself, despite that I'd be damned if I let this guy know I was scared.
"You wouldn't happen to know a Cassandra Primus would you Darius?", Darius eyes narrow at the mention of his younger sister. "How do you know her name?", its less of a question and more of a demand but I shrug my shoulders nonchalantly, "I don't think there's a man in the lower city who doesn't know the how the body of your sister fee-!". A fist to the gut shuts me up. Saliva spews from my lips as I feel the air explode from my lungs, I heave air into my lungs and grin at Darius, "I, I, didn't even get to the part about your mother yet, pheww those hips don't li-!". Another gut punch drops me to my knees. "At least, let, me, get to, the punchline man", I wheeze and a fist smashes into my face breaking my nose in response. and sending me crashing to the floor. Wiping blood out of my mouth I stare up at Darius, my face and chest is on fire but I can't stop a sick grin from spreading across my face, "Didn't you ever read a story dumbass, you have to let the handsome protagonist finish the joke before you hit him you third rate bully". I shake my spinning head dramatically determined to never show Darius just how scared I really am, "What are they teaching the youth at forgettable henchmen academy these days?"
Darius brings his face to within millimetres of my own. "You, are, dead, brat" .Darius hisses back at me enunciating each word clearly. I feel my bowels loosen as Darius goons grab an arm each and hold me tight. I glare back at him and smile unable to stop myself from further aggravating him. I shake my head in mock sadness, "Sorry the name's Arba, dead's my twin ", my smile shifts into a mocking frown of resigned annoyance, "I don't know how people keep mixing us up, she has a rack that puts your mother to shame and I have a coc-!". Darius face twists even further with rage and he raises his fist, oh that was so not worth it I think as the fist crashes down into my face. Again. And again. And again.
I feel my consciousness ebb as the repeated skull trauma threatens to knock me out, Darius's cronies release let me collapse onto the cobblestone floor. I feel broken teeth shift in my jaw as I cough out puddles of blood from my mangled face, "Yeeu, you .. couldn't even, mix it up a bit", my voice collapses in a fit of coughing. "Yeeu, uncreative, baaasstard!".
I'm sure there's some saying about not digging when your in a hole but to be honest I was good at taking advice. I take a strange sense of pride in my humour wondering oddly not on my impending death but whether I should try insulting his father next as the beating truly begins. Blows rain onto my already battered form in an endless drumbeat of agony. I try to fight back at first, it is a brief and pitiable effort which was quickly cut short by a my skull being slammed into the cobblestone floor. The sensation of my brain being compressed against my skull is lost amidst the rapidly growing all consuming pit of pain that threatens to consume both my mind and body.
Retrospectively perhaps aggravating Darius was a bad idea. I feel bones break and contort under the unrelenting tide of abuse, ribs shatter, my left arm shatters cleanly at the elbow the joint reduces to wet slush under a boot. Another boot descends on my flailing hand reducing cartilage and flesh into a single homogenous object as I try to scream around the blood choking my throat. My mouth opens for air and only takes in more pain and suddenly liquid and broken fragments of teeth that cause my breaking from to shudder as muscle spasms seize my gaging form. A gory mess of viscera, bone shard and pulped flesh tinged with stomach acid jets from my lips as try to suck in deep heaving breaths. My lungs clung for air that cannot satisfy them as more blood jets from my mouth as the unmistakable sensation of drowning wraps its icy claws around me. I am drowning in myself I realise. I am drowning in my own bodily fluids.
The stench of urine and ammonia at my shattered nose but are almost completely drowned out by the crimson stench of spilled blood. My blood, the thought dances through misfiring cranial neurones as the sight of so much of it fills what little remains of my vision. An overwhelming sense of anger rises in my chest as finally my consciousness fades. What crime did I commit! I want to scream the words but my mouth refuses to obey me. I want to claw at the heavens up the broken thrones of the dead gods themselves and demand what sin I committed to deserve such an end! The sin of saving a child to slow to escape pursuit! The anger flares to even greater heights as finally, finally my consciousness deserts me.
Only to be grabbed and dragged kicking screaming back to the horrific world of the living a bare heartbeat later. My one functioning eye snaps open as my nostrils flare as the distinctive acrid reek of smelling salts sear into the back of my brain, robbing me of the sweet release of unconsciousness as the pain flares to new heights as my brain is hurtled into full gear. I can feel very broken bone, seemingly every ruptured artery, vein and capillary as they screech a sonata of soul-destroying agony through my mangled form.
My vision is tinted red and blocked by already swelling eyelids but I don't need my eyes to see exactly how much Darius is enjoying this. Laughter scalds my ears. It's loud, strangely high pitched and reminiscent of a squealing pig in shit. He keeps laughing as he kicks me again, and again, and again, laughing all the while. Just like the older boys in the slums, just like the brothel owner I ran away from, just like the slave trader who caught me when I ran. They always laugh.
Why?
Why is it so much fun to be strong? Does it feel good? To know you're at the top of the food chain, to know nobody can ever touch you? Could he even imagine what it feels like to be me! To be trapped at the bottom of hell knowing you will never be able to escape. To be stuck stealing scraps from fat pigs who throw away more food than I eat in a week every day! I stare at Darius with my blurry damaged vision, one eye is red raw darkness alive with carnal agony and the other barely a stick thin strip of vision to grace me with visions of my killer.
I wish he would just die.
I wish I could just reach out and kill him.
I wish I could kill them all.
I wish a lot of things. Sometimes I hear someone moaning and muttered curses or blasphemy and it takes me far too long to realise that the whimpering wet mess of gargled blood and broken teeth is my voice. My voice. Speaking words I can't remember saying, trying to spit curses I can't remember thinking. The old stories always said death brought a final moment of clarity but all this pain has brought me is a bone-deep haze of gore drenched stupefaction. A blow rings my cranium and for the first time in my existence I feel the meat of my brain warp as the gelatinous mass compresses against broken and cracked cranial architecture. The confusion already a roaring tide in my ears bloating out sound becomes a typhoon as I feel myself forget who I am. It is the most terrifying sensation I have ever had the dubious honour to experience.
Gradually as all things must my execution enters its final terrible chapter. The crescendo of agony in my now thoroughly shattered bones as finally, finally reaches its limit. Neurones unable to bear the load of the endless stream of pain signals burnt out with an almost visceral sensation of burning as I feel, actually feel my nervous system collapse. Thankfully this brings a cessation to he all-consuming hell that has engulfed my soon to be corpse as all sensation flees me.
Alive simply because its body has yet to realise it is dead it's one eye stares blankly forward. The other is simply gone, a wet mess of gore drenched pulp. Time has long since lost any sense of meaning for the husk that the boy once called Arba has become. Unthinkingly it gazes at its killers no longer able to conceptualise a sense of self, it is nothing more than the slowly fading pain and the terrifying spreading numbness. The thing that was once a being registers its final flickering snaps of firing neurones.
The thing registers first of all in a crude and primitive sense, surprise. It cannot believe it is still alive. In its broken trembling thoughts it is almost impressed at it's sheer tenacity. More thoughts begin to worm their way through the husk's collapsing mind as it tries to process what it sees. Images it can no longer process burn into its remaining retina, flushed cheeks, a wide spread of hardened enamel in a flashy crevice, a distinctive bulge in the lower midsection of the things that stand before it. Two flickering spectres of emotions are borne from those final snapshots of reality and twinkle faintly in the broken thing's remaining eye as it slowly starts to close.
They are fickle and fragile things, barely able to distinguish themselves from the rolling slop that the thing's thoughts have become. One is envy. A soul-deep loathing so vast it boggers comprehension, it despises the things in front of it for reasons it can no longer remember. Clear and unclouded eyes unmarked by shadowy bags, cheeks full and untouched by starvations caress, thick strong chests corded with muscle. The husk desires these things more than it can say, which it thinks in broken fragments may not be a good metaphor as it cannot currently say anything.
The second is unsurprising. Hate. A hatred so extreme that it can only be produced by this broken thing because in it's shattered body it is finally free from its mortal limits. So it hates in a way that can never be expressed, it hates in a way beyond mortality that reaches into its very soul, so deep and vast that it impossibly reaches to somewhere deeper. Somewhere darker. It reaches down into the depths of its being and caresses just for a bare micro-second a being full of similar hate. The two share a nigh sensual experience as boundless hate meets an equally boundless fury. The pair find a strange solace in that for the heartbeat that the connection lasts.
Invigorated by the encounter spite or the shattered approximation of spite fills its closing eye as the husk denies death for another heartbeat. The broken flesh of what can no longer be called a mouth ripples with bubbles of liquefied flesh and viscera as a shattered splinter of a tooth ejects from the husk's face and strikes lamely on the closet of its killers. The maw of abused and tattered flesh twists into a facsimile of what it once called a smile. Death takes the husk as it feels its heart stumble, falter and then stop. The tattered and popped bags of air and flesh cease their faltering rhythm and the corpse grows still.
Arba is dead.
("O my foolish hero")
But the thing inside him is not. And it is coming.