Book 3 -Chapter 129 (Patreon)

Buttons stared into the dark abyss inside the black tower. The connection between the bird and Wretch was waning with each moment.

Buttons stretched its wings to plummet into the dark, but Wretch was quick, dashing towards it. His tail wrapped around the bird and hoisted it up before him. A strange caw escaped the bird.

Wretch looked inwards to the string-like connection between them. It was fraying, or dissolving rather.

“I won’t allow it,” Wretch said and pushed his will and fiery power through their bond. It fought against something, something strong and distant. But in the end, he won, close as he was.

Buttons cawed again, this time in surprise, looking around as if just awoken.

Wretch ignored it and glared into the dark abyss. Thin steps without railings spiraled into nothing. There was something down there, something that embraced you after death, and that thing could wrestle away his control even from a distance.

A curiosity grew within him. A childlike emotion he thought he had eradicated. Perhaps he had, but now it sprang anew.

“We’re leaving, let me just see what lurks down there,” Wretch said and turned around. In the white marble of the platform, a story was told, undoubtedly connected to what lurked below.

Buttons cawed like an unruly child and struggled in the coil of his tail, but at least now, the bird was his unruly child.

Wretch quickly began to follow the imprint in the stone from the center and spiraling outwards. It followed an undertaker in some city of old. A man he could only describe as featureless and ordinary. Last time, only laying eyes on the stone had caused a throbbing headache. But he was a Blaze now, privy to more of the world's secrets.

The man fled his city, accompanied by a single dancing skeleton. The city's inhabitants threw rocks behind him. The figure traveled far, fought beasts and men as he himself grew thinner and more macabre. In his wake, the number of dancing skeletons grew.

A scene of the man being born again from the rotten corpse of some dead giant made a twinge of pain settle in Wretch’s forehead.

So there are still those so far above that I can't even rest my eyes upon a mere stone sketch.

The figure, now so thin as to be almost a skeleton himself, continued his march across the world, wrapping himself in the bones of the slain. Behind him, a procession of dead danced as if in mockery of their master's painful ordeals.

Buttons cawed questioningly.

“Soon,” Wretch answered. Eyes fixed on the stone. “We leave soon!”

The man met others, neither of whom brought pain to his forehead. Finally he settled in a lush jungle, within a cave-like rift in the earth. People worshipping death flocked around him and the jungle died.

Then came a recognizable scene. An army crested a hill. A giant man, a winged woman and a hovering figure above.

Wretch squinted at the stone carving. The giant held a fire in one hand and a broken banner in the other. He looked familiar, somewhat like Gustavius the Lion, or Gustavius the Cruel as he was now named. The winged woman, he knew to be the Saint herself, hidden away in the spires of his home city. And another figure hid in the rows of soldiers. A man with a wide grin of sharp teeth and two long knives.

He’d thought that man could be his father. The father of Grendel, and even the dead Waddles. A man moving in the dark of Nov Yanosk to sire kids plagued by misfortune.

To think I once searched for you. Wicked being that brought me into this world. If luck is on my side, we will never meet, and you’ll be forgotten entirely.

In opposition to the army stood the figure the story followed, the sight of him sending a scratch at the edge of his mind. The undertaker clad in bone and raven feathers, with the black city behind him.

His temple thrummed as he continued the story further than he’d ever done.

The undertaker joined the army, and together they marched onwards. They bested beasts the size of rivers, razed cities, and made for a kingdom beyond the horizon.

Wretch gritted his teeth while Buttons cawed in his grip. “Just a little further.”

Twelve figures sat around a table. Each was strange and unique, with burning halos behind them. Three of them made his peripheral vision spin, not even allowing him to focus on the others. He saw the giant with the broken banner. Raving screams assaulted his mind. He forced his eyes to the last image on the platform.

The same room, and the murder of the giant. His form wrapped and splayed. Dead divinity. Wretch’s teeth cracked as the deafening roar of madness assaulted his gates.

His eyes caught the undertaker in the scene. He’d become death itself. The tiny figure in the stone turned his head. And looked at him.

“You reek of my kingdom.”

A boom, as much in his mind as in his body. His skin roiled and twisted. Wretch struggled to breathe, and Buttons cawed somewhere in the distance.

He was on the ground, a wave of convulsions rattling through his body. His mind rushed, a thousand images of his own corpse flashing before his eyes. Ripped apart by birds under a black sun, dying of thirst and left to rot in the dunes, impaled by a black cross and hoisted in a church to a missing lord.

Piece by piece he knitted thoughts together, returning control of his body. Slowly, the morbid images settled, leaving a pulsing ache in his head.

When he came to, Buttons was standing on his chest as he lay back on the white rock.

A groan escaped him as he struggled to his knees, sending a handful of cracked teeth from his maw.

“Looks like we both paid for curiosity,” Wretch said as he struggled to his feet. His thought roiled, and his skin still squirmed.

Buttons cawed questioningly. And Wretch shook his head. “It’s better to not linger on what is down there. In fact, don’t even go close to it.”

Buttons swooped down the platform and landed on the corpse of Yarok. Wretch, on the other hand, lumbered across the stone, soothing the aching in his mind by focusing on the pain in his gum.

Suddenly both Buttons and Wretch froze.

From down the stairs came dragging footsteps under the flutter of wings.

Buttons cawed, but Wretch raised a hand. “We got what we came for. Fly towards the mountains and don't look back.”

The bird cawed in refusal, but Wretch cast a glance at the avian.

“Now, Buttons!”

As Buttons fluttered away across the sky, Wretch made for the gate, past Yarok's corpse and out into the black city. Behind him, the fluttering of wings grew louder. Never had he seen the cycle of the city broken. The murder of crows beneath it only took flight at nightfall and returned at dawn.

But on the other hand, he had killed their guardian and gazed at their lord.

Wretch launched himself up the side of the tower, the ache in his mind settling. He climbed with monstrous strength in long leaps until he came to a natural ledge in the structure. A skeleton sat there, leisurely watching the mountains. He had no time to think about that further and paused his reckless ascent and focused.

The murder of crows, and perhaps even their owner, was coming, the tower almost shivering. Wretch couldn’t help but chuckle dryly at his hubris. Desecrating this grave for a second time.

No matter. He closed his eyes, shut out the visions of his spies spread through the land, and focused on his newest form.

Yarok, Glutton of the Black City.

The massive monster stood in the back ranks around his flame, but still towered over the others. Wretch reached out with his mind, a shiver still lingering in his control from seeing something he shouldn’t have.

But he was no novice rattled by the whispers of madness. He had lived and breathed it for months if not years. He tensed as the fluttering wings grew louder, his muscles straining. He whispered words to his flame, as mad as the hisses scratching at his mind.

Back curved, the flesh twisting. Something moved beneath his pale skin. The skin grew grey and soft, then two bone protrusions burst through in a spatter of blood.

Wretch’s snout grew a smile at the lovely sensation of pain and change.

Flesh followed the hollow bone, reaching upwards even as his skeletal wings grew further. Arteries crawled like purple vines, the power of his flame building cartilage, sinew and finally feathers. Black as the dead of night and long as a man’s arm.

Finally his back stretched, muscles rooting to new shoulder blades. To mix his forms with the wings in a way that made them functional was no easy feat, but in the art of changing flesh, perhaps he was second only to the man he’d slain days earlier.

With a gust of wind, he splayed his new wings wide. Their span six times his own height.

From the gate below, a mass of dark roared forward, flowing through the air like a singular living coil defying gravity, rather than a murder of avians.

“I am so terribly free,” Wretch said as a mantra and stepped off the ledge.

The air rushed past his skin as he plummeted towards the ground. He found the mind-body connection to his new limbs, tricky, if only a little. The coil of dark birds fluttered towards him as if driven mad.

Then he unfurled his wings. The sudden resistance sent a lurch through his body, sending him gliding to the left.

The crows took his virgin flight as an opportunity, closing in to almost peck at his feet.

Wretch beat his wings. His muscles, far from ordinary. It sent him rushing upwards. A gust of wind sent the birds closest to him spiraling off course.

Another beat and he swerved back up around the black tower, sending the living coil of crows spiraling after him.

“I have nothing.”

Another beat sent him catapulting beyond the tower's peak. The murder followed his mad dash towards the blue, lonely sky.

The mass of crows roiled and changed, taking on a strange formation. The tip of the coil morphed into a black skull. Its maw opened as if to swallow him.

Another beat and winds rushed to cool his skin. He pushed upwards, the air growing thinner by the second. He soared as high as he could. He was a Blaze; to breathe was a luxury for someone like him. The two suns above warmed his face as the mass of birds thinned, the tiny birds dropping one by one. The skull of avens disintegrated into nothing but falling black dots. And suddenly he was alone.

“I love nothing.”

Wretch stretched his arms wide as if to embrace the sky itself. All around him stretched the land. The desert of the crater. The snow-clad forest beyond. The Scar Spines.

“And I hunt who I wish.”

He didn’t give another beat with his wings, but merely soared with the propulsion he already had. He slowed as gravity pulled him back and for but a moment, he hovered there above the world.

He closed his eyes and fell towards the ground, wrapping his wings around him as he spun. His speed grew fierce, wind ripping at his eyelids and ruffling his black feathers.

Below, the swarm of crows roiled like a dark sea, congesting into a mass as he approached.

Still he sped up, falling towards the earth like a comet. At the last moment he unfurled his wings, and pulled his fall into a glide at a breakneck pace.

The frail wings of crows could not keep up with him, no matter how many.

He disappeared towards the horizon and the Scar Spines, where a wounded army made ready to return to their home, leaving the black city and its mysteries behind.

The rays of the suns played on the black surface of the tower. On a specific ledge rested a skeleton, staring out into nothingness. A jolt went through it, the skeleton lurching in something between an epileptic seizure and a macabre dance. Another jolt and the skeleton froze.

It stood up casually, in the same manner any man would. A brush of a headless scalp and its hollow eye sockets trailed over the city with a chuckle. It looked upwards from the decrepit houses and the dunes.

In the distance, only one thing was visible. A beast soaring across the sky on stolen wings.