Kingslayer

Renard returns to his parents’ house, prepares himself a simple dinner from wellwater and garden vegetables, then wonders if horfing food while having his brother’s soul in his gut might be a step too sacrilegious.

As he sits with his untouched bowl of stew, such apprehensions towards his choices arise. He dips two fingers into his mouth as if to make himself vomit, but withdraws them with sober resignation that he can’t back out of this now.

The guilt, shame, sickness, and fear as he lets himself sit is immense. From the root of him up, these actions feel to be wrong. Stripped of their context, and even with it, too, he can imagine how his present choices would evoke judgements of contempt and disgust, that he has desecrated the dead, that he has disrespected his brother, that he is a stupid and simple boy dabbling in things too big for someone as stupid as him to get right.

Renard sets his hand on his stomach. For all that fear, however…

In Pleione’s story, the warrior-boy produced the ‘witchbane’ swiftly upon imbibing the half-ghoul. Renard cannot say he feels close to puking, or any physical discomfort or strain. Without the soul in front of him asserting its presence, and with the prickling of its distress blending imperceptibly into his already twisted gut, things presently seem stable. The belief settles in Renard’s mind that Isen’s soul is okay.

Which means that he can’t have messed up too bad. If things stay just like this, and he can imagine Isen is simply with him, that is actually rather comforting.

Isen, all along, was the one who should’ve found glory. Were this a story of nobles and knights and of the triumph of good and the struggle against evil and the celebration of the best of humanity, of the journey of a humble peasant-boy into a hero that men for generations would model in their behaviour and aspire to become, Isen is the one of whom it should have been told. If he had been able to pursue the opportunities already firm in his grip, had secured that knighthood, and had broken into noble circles in Sebilles, Renard does not doubt that Isen’s presence would have single-handedly shifted the entire course of the nation of Lacren towards triumph, heavenliness, and prosperity.

In any case, he wouldn’t have abided the Iron King. Though, he would not have boorishly aggrieved him as those Pilamine agents did so many years ago, either, with offensive self-righteousness and repulsive condescension. His respect and compassion would have been undeniable even as he struck the King from the throne to the dirt. With that special core of humility, optimism, clearheadedness, and strength, he would have resolved every one of these conflicts perfectly.

Renard may have made a mess of everything, but it feels he is somehow honouring Isen by bringing his soul to clean it all up. By so summoning this spirit to take him, to hijack him, it would guide Renard to trace the righteous steps Isen himself would have taken, and in that veneration, lay that spirit to rest, and let Renard be dismissed from his own hotheaded, impetuous errings.

Having found peace by this mindset, Renard untenses and prepares for bed. He can return to Pleione with his head held high above his shoulders tomorrow.

Sleep descends.

Renard awakes.

A chill wracks him out of his slumber, like the cold finger of a witch trailing itself down his spine. He gasps, teeming with sweat so thick it pastes him to the covers, but still so cold he might well be caught naked in a winter field. He stumbles out of bed, wobbling on weak legs, in some half-conceived attempt to flee his frozen blankets, and steady himself with a glass of water.

He leans on furniture, hobbling, to even get to the kitchen, and slumps immediately over the sink. The exertion of even this tiny journey threatens to black him out, his vision swimming with warping masses and nausea churning so thick that he vomits, just barely out the window. It is the sickest he can remember being in his life. He strains for a cup, pours out a shaky glass of water, limps back to the table. His body hits the chair with the relief of a runner freed from a marathon, and the water cup lands on the tabletop as promptly as a thousand-pound barbell.

Renard pants, eyeing the water like a panacea. Eventually he finds the will to drink, but spits out the liquid the second it hits his tongue.

Anguished, but growing too feverish to understand much, he abandons the water. He needs it, but cannot have it, so he will not have it, and that is the way. He cups his wet forehead in his wet palm, doubled over off the side of the chair. He is sick, sick… his body must fight it off… soon…

He retches in announcement of imminent vomit. Initially relieved to be getting whatever is sickening him out, he hazily realises this must be the ritual.

Renard yanks his sword from its scabbard, glad to have made such a habit of carrying it. If… a story… story… he struggles to align such thoughts into words, but lays the blade over his lap that he may puke on it, getting the crux of the instructions correct. He still reflexively fists this wave back into his throat, not wanting to messy over himself.

Relocate. Renard lifts himself from the table, but sinks to his knees, then his belly upon reaching the bedroom, finding standing too nauseating to even make the last mile to the rag-well. He lays the sword flat on the floor, close to his face. A mouthful of puke gorbles out from his throat. Though he squints, his dizzy eyes cannot tell whether he achieved something by this rudeness, and enchanted the blade, or whether he just made a mess to clean up. He slumps back to his side, breath laboured toward relief or exasperation, but even with every limb resting, his sick gut only grows only more uncomfortable.

Something in his stomach twists, scrunched and pulled like a rag. Dread sweeps over Renard. He flails as if to run, but is too weak to even stand, collapsing under his own body weight. Swimming around his flesh, little blots of black sludge condense out of the crevices between his guts, dripping and collecting like a cluster of mouse droppings. His limbs shudder so vigorously they rattle. Fury and disgust, of feeling these profane corns swill their taint through his body, gleefully smearing him from inside out with flaky lines of dung, disintegrate that simple nausea. This isn’t illness. This is violation, humiliation, a demon chewing on his soul.

Renard heaves onto his hands and knees and retches aggressively, murderously. A jet of thick, black fluid with an odd silver sheen glops onto the sword. Renard cannot even care, fist clenched, breath shaky. He can combat this enemy, defeat it, rip its revolting hands off of him, bite out its neck and tear out its ribs leave it screaming and wailing until it is tortured insane and dead. He retches again and again, producing more and more of the black glop, the act of expelling it in itself carrying an addictive sense of triumph.

The volume of the crap is ceaseless, growing only thicker and heavier. Renard panics. The vile substance is clogging his throat and nose, churning too evenly and constantly out for him to cut it, break it, or stop, and only choking him should he try. His throat convulses of its own accord, the weight of the viscous mass flowing from his mouth folding in on itself, drawing out a tubular chunk that keeps growing longer, and longer, and longer. Renard thumps his fists and squeezes at his throat as if to break the stream — more flows up to gag him, instantly.

He claws at the chunk as if to yank it out, but it drips amorphously through and over his hands ever at its own steady pace. Tears prick his eyes. He collapses onto the ground totally, as his eyes roll backward and body seizes in an unshakable current of epilepsy. He folds his hands behind his back to watch himself struggle, dispassionately. Simultaneously, he feels the texture of cracked vinyl drawing itself out of the core of the mass, breaking through a deep glassy membrane that his spirit knows must not be punctured. Panic rises like an ocean, as Renard recognises that he has gone blind.

Blackness consumes him. Light still strikes his retinas, and so nearby objects remain present as phantoms, and he still must be on the floor in the bedroom, but the veil of darkness wrenches him away to impress that he is no longer there. Suspended he witnesses, as if caught in a jar and thrown into an ocean, a great mass of candescent tree roots, or perhaps bald tree branches, that crackle and stretch out so far into the infinite night that he cannot see where they end. The night is the black is built from lines, inestimable short and squirming little lines, and each line is a serpent’s slit pupil.

They regard him with passive disconcern, as one might regard a leaf on a stream. A current of mist effuses from this lazy attention, wisping around waist-level but unable to penetrate the jar. The eyes seems to accept his presence, so shielded, as fine. Feeling safe, or assured, he regards the forks of the glowing, rootlike mass, and traces his gaze down their million offshoots backwards, in search of the root.

The serpent-pupils erupt into frenzy, snapping to full, seething attention. Lines flurry down to blot out the thicker branches that would lead to the core of the root-mass, transposing themselves thickly between his gaze and it, a wall as thick and impenetrable as an angel’s thousand folded wings. The light below disappears. The current of mist bulges into a ferocious jet, but this force does not break the jar. So guarded and untouchable he is, but the lines bend to collapse themselves outward and between themselves reveal wiggly, iridescent streaks of silvers, pinks, and blues; these are the threads of an iris. Over them falls the imprint of scales, which draws back as a snake poised to lunge, or an arm winded to punch.

Painless inside the jar, he realises his shape has contorted, stretched and twisted into a long, thin rope, fraying at the ends…

Renard gasps. His cheek lays on the floor of his bedroom; the sword is but an inch from his nose. He hasn’t the strength to look up, but from a caterpillar's vantage sees a horse’s hooves, that such a creature must be in the room with him.

“At least you killed me for a purpose."

As Renard’s consciousness fades, he hears the bitterly distorted, but somehow still satisfied, voice of Isen wisp into silence.