Thorns are Weak 2 (Patreon)

And as I said and proclaimed and promised, thus did I set about the deed. And I would do much. 

Yet it was no swift matter this. I needed still to visit other places to gauge the lay of the land before I announced my presence. I needed to plot and ponder. I needed to prepare for the many dangers that lurked here, and to deal with each in its turn.

Unlike my fortunes in the town, luck did not smile so kindly now. Not every settlement knew the ways of bureaucracy. Not every one knew the craft of paperwork.

I had not been granted the power of wish, though power still rested in my hands. I could fashion a mind twister with ease, yet to do so I would need to slaughter many beasts in gathering of the sacrifices. Man offered a stronger vessel for such witchery, but I loathed to hand any human soul to that dark obscurity.

With that I stepped aside from my first purpose and turned instead to hunt the band that burned and pillaged villages. I set about subjugating the many bandits who littered the roads as well.

Merchants needed safe paths. I could ensure that safety.

Thus I took to the hunt and melted into the woods. There I began the slaughter of monsters and gave the beasts their feast. Four days of hunting, and it was yet done with art in all but pride. I became slaughter and creature both.

From the moment I awakened in this world, my life had been blood and flesh. The struggle felt distant now. I killed as easily as I drew breath, and battle served as my meditation.

I raised mountains from the bodies of men and women alike. I made orphans of children and witches of women. I was terror. I was blade. I was death, and I had come for the monsters who walked in the skin of men.

For all that the killing of common bandits proved an easy breath. It was only with certain few that it grew heavier. In those, there burned a love of cruelty.

To such a place I was fortunate to come upon it last. Cruelty answered with cruelty.

There, in the plains of Reims within the Faux de Verzy a short way into the old twisted woods remade by the lingering radiation into trees no child was ever urged to enter, dwelt a band of ill men.

I entered those same woods with the easy gait of summer. A casual air hung about me. My cloak fluttered in the harsh wind that swept these once orchard lands, my long hair tied back and dancing to the wilds of the breeze as well. My brown eyes stayed silent and still. And my brownish skin stood loud against these pale territories.

I had come from Southern Asia, bringing terror and death to the ill-men who had turned India into a wild thing. From there, I pressed north through China, through Korea, and all the other realms that lay along that path. Ten years upon the road. Most of those years spent among settlements still dreaming of becoming villages and towns.

Asia was gone. It had suffered the worst of it, I judged.

So too had most of eastern Europe. It remained a wonder that no nuclear winter had followed such a cataclysm, and if any had come, it had not lingered. I wondered whether the old United States held any survivors. That young nation had made foes of all the world, and so I doubted it had spared itself any reservations.

As for my own homeland, we had most certainly gone to war with our neighbouring brothers over old wounds that bore scarcely any scars left upon us.

But to my venture into these woods. There was a great silence here, a gloom that swallowed the light. There was story, and tells of a whispered fantasy. And in that fantasy, in that tell of legend touched by the twisted magic of radiation, there was witchery here.

Rough witchery. Men’s own whispered horror.

I scooped the soil, and my fingers tasted it. It was rich and bloated but starving for more. I spoke into it, mumbling words and curses that scraped my bones. It was an old hurt. It was an adapted hurt.

It was my own sorcery. And I was a treasure with it.

Thus having chanted and sacrificed and given my time into it, I blew the soil off. A silhouette of dust manifested into presence.

“Find me these devoted men who prayed for my anger and bite.” I pointed it to scout for me. “I’m ever to please those who’d caught my ear.”

It melted into the shadows.

And so I walked, chewing on some dried meat—what I wouldn’t do for some modernity.

My witchcraft came back a few minutes, and from it, I was told of the layout and number of bandits and their victims—all women and girls. 

I reached for my pouch with a lazy hand and withdrew a sheathed knife. A local knife. Cruelty begot cruelty. I cracked the sheath open just a bit, and the sweet sickly stink of rotted corpses was upon my nose.

It was hard not to frown. It was harder not to gag. I managed both, though I regretted my success.

My pride and cruelty. My punishment of evil beyond salvation. My anger.

This was Plague and within it lay my rawest sorcery. A pure invocation of rot. Flesh cut by it would decay in seconds. Purulent matter would ooze forth in minutes. An infestation of flesh eating worms would swarm within a short time, and finally greenish spores would bloom from the wounds in mere hours.

All this while the person was alive, conscious, and in tremendous pain and agony. All this for days, with pain that could not be grown accustomed to. With life beyond the mortality. Death came neither early nor late.

This was my gift.

As I had said I was a man without tact. I struck not from the shadows. I practised no stealth. I stood brazen. I stood loud.

My entrance into the bandit camp came announced. The monsters grew curious and in that curiosity they arrayed themselves to intimidate. A host of them stood to the front while a few perched on vantage points with arrows nocked and drawn.

There was wisdom in their caution.

“Who are you stranger. What curiosity has led you to our stronghold.” It was a large man who spoke, so big and burly with too many teeth missing from his grin.

He carried a cruel stink about him, and a faint touch of the forest’s whispered evil.

“I have come to kill you and yours.” I was a free man and thus I spoke honest.

The man laughed, and his fellows laughed with him. They took me for a boy lost to anger and hot vengeance. In truth I was lost to depression. We all were. Our depression ran old and inherited and the gloom of this world fed upon it greedily.

Still laughing, and with his company at his side, the man truly held no fear of death. I found thrill in negotiating with such confidence.

Thus I moved. I moved with all the inhuman speed granted me. In the blink of an eye, in that sliver of unseen darkness, I had unsheathed my knife, stepped to the leader, and sunk the blade deep into his chest.

“Eh!”

An echoed note of surprise.

I dragged the knife downward with cruel leisure cutting through bone flesh and organ until it ended at his abdomen. 

“Death has come for you, cruel men.” I breathed, caring nothing for the man who crumpled at my feet with eyes wide as saucers.

With Plague pointed towards them, I told them this.

“Now fall to your knees and pray.” I was cold fury and bloodlust. “Beg unto your gods for forgiveness and succour, and make yourselves ready for me when I visit your heavens to claim their heads for the hubris of absolving you of your sins.”

The arrows came whistling then. I moved once more, all leisure like, and slapped the shafts from the air. From the ground the leader let loose a blood freezing wail. His immortality had awakened.

I danced to his gruesome torture birthed by foul magicks.

The men startled again yet shook off their fright and rushed me. I was a nimble thing. I flipped toward the nearest, burying my knife deep into his skull. Before he could crumple I sprang off his shoulders with vicious force and grace, shooting toward the tree where the archers crouched. Inhumanity drove my climb. I rushed up the trunk like a slithering cat.

It was a blink and I was there.

Another blink and my blade punched clean through one archer’s chest and out his back with a sickening squelch of parting ribs and organs. 

My hand burst forth glistening, drenched in thick warm red blood mixed with the soft exploded ruin of heart and lung. The wet heat of it coated my arm to the elbow, dripping in heavy strings. The man’s eyes bulged wide in raw agony.

“You have been touched by the grace of immortality,” I told him, then tossed him aside toward the ground below. His pained wails began midway through the fall.

One of the others let terror take him and tried to run. An arrow pierced his chest before he managed two steps.

All eyes turned to me. I regarded them with the same impassiveness, running my dagger along the tips of the arrows still clutched in dead hands.

“All your lives are forfeit,” I said. “Any attempt at escape will see you dead in the same breath.”

Nothing came of my warning. They tried every desperate thing. I was an honest man, so I slaughtered them as promised. I turned gale then, stabbing, slashing, spilling guts from bellies.

I did not wish to make a show of it, so I granted them no chance at victory. Every strike, kick and slash was repaid with broken limbs. I crashed one head first into a tree trunk, shattering his frame and rupturing his skull.

He was perhaps the luckiest, for he never tasted the cut of sorcery before death claimed him.

“Bastard!” another screamed.

I moved with all the inhumanity of my nature, lunging my hand toward the crazed man’s face. My fingers jammed into his eye sockets with the fluency of volitional craft. 

My power halted his momentum.

I forced my hand downward, my digits carving furrows through flesh, tissue and bone, gouging channels from eyes to upper lip where cranial blood spilled freely.

The man crumpled to his knees, teetering on the edge of death.

I drove Plague into his skull, awarding him the sweet agony of tortured immortality.

“For all my cruelties, and I am capable of many, the punishment I show to people of your likeness is nothing short of merciful.” Anger simmered hot beneath my calm mask. 

A thousand eternities in hell, tortured through their urethras and balls with hooks and fire, would not suffice to pay for the sin of degrading one’s fellow humans.