Toulouse, 8 March, present day
A rancid cellar, re-evaluating some recent life decisions.
Magic is an overpriced escort, glammed up to the nines and looking for a good time.
It’ll make you feel great. It’ll flatter your ego, and there’s plenty of times it’ll blow your
mind. The more you invest, both time and finances, the more it’ll play the game, the
more it’ll feel like a genuine relationship until you think it really cares — that it
honestly has your back.
Don’t be fooled. It’s all just business.
The thing about business deals is, sooner or later, you’re going to get screwed over,
however solid you think your relationship is. Not in the good sense either. Happens
to the best of us.
I mean, getting tortured to death by a shit wizard wasn’t on my agenda when I blew
in through the front door of his house, overpowered to the nines, a magic-wielding
badass ready to fuck things up. Funny how things work out, and by funny, I mean
agonisingly painful, like being suspended from a set of depressingly solid, rust-
stained chains currently doing interesting things to my various cracked and shattered
ribs.
And by interesting, I mean if “how far out of alignment can you put parts of the
human skeleton without it killing someone” is one of your topics of interest.
Incidentally, if it is, please stay the hell away from me and mine.
The only thing allowing movement is the blood slickening my skin around my ankles
and wrists. The cold iron strums my forearm bones like washboards played in a
skiffle band, only even more annoying. Just about. Have you ever heard a busker on
a skiffle board? Every time one plays, I want to shower them in coins. Preferably
heated up till they’re white hot.
My breathing’s transition from bubbling gurgles to maraca-like rattles doesn’t require
centuries of medical expertise to recognise it as probably a bad sign.
It’s not just the agonising pain that makes the basement I’m in depressing. Mildew is
not the décor choice of optimists. Through the sheen of grimy sweat stinging my one
unswollen eye, the ethereal glow of magic sigils taunts me. The sneaky bastards.
The language of the angels doesn’t make for comfortable reading, at least for a
mortal mind like mine. It does a damn good job of keeping me trapped in place
though.
Said sigils —all intricate swirls around the sweeping curves of the Kabbalist
lettering— are also light-years beyond the capabilities of the spittle-flecked shithead
of a mage standing before me.
Working out he’s incapable of having created the Enochian containment runes
glowing on the walls isn’t hard. I’m more surprised he’s capable of walking without
tripping over his own feet. Hell, one look at the complete fuck-up he made carving
runes of persuasion into my flesh shows how rubbish he is. Top marks for gratuitous
damage. Must try harder regarding actual magical prowess.
His efforts, displayed in inch-deep gashes across my skin, look like someone gave a
spirograph set to an alcoholic deep in the DTs. They wouldn’t compel me to talk even
if he had the magical knowledge and artistic temperament to engrave them correctly.
But even assuming he could master writing that level of magical script correctly
without it making his brain explode, I’m still totally out of his league talent-wise. He’s
not got the power to force me to do anything.
As he continues to rant and rave at me, trying to get me to tell him what he wants to
know, wondering why the runes of persuasion aren’t working (simple answer —
because he’s a shit wizard), I temporarily zone out. An inner debate as to what is a
worse form of torture —being physically sliced to ribbons or having to be this close to
his body odour— distracts me. It’s a tough call to make. The continued screaming up
in my face brings me back to the situation at hand. While the rancid breath
accompanying it is a painful reminder of the importance to brush after every meal, as
well as being further evidence that cleanliness was an early offering on the altar in
his quest for magical power.
His scraggly, food-matted facial hair underlines that.
He clearly feels a beard lends him an air of Rasputin-level dark mysticism, but I’d go
more with drug-addled village idiot chic, personally. He looks like Doctor Moreau got
funky with a rat, a toad, and an incel.
His failure at forcing me to answer his ridiculous questions has driven him from ‘guy
to avoid sitting next to in the pub’ to ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, get the fuck away
from that lunatic’ in a relatively brief space of time. The erratic swaying of the gore-
stained knife he keeps waving about would be disturbing enough even if it wasn’t my
gore doing the staining. I was bloody attached to that gore.
‘Tell me what you are!’ The vein at his temple throbs like his head is about to pop.
Sadly, I doubt I’ll ever get that lucky. ‘You aren’t human; else, you’d never have found
my lair and been rendered helpless by my power.’
His power. Pah. What a load of bollocks. I’m not sure how these runes are
restraining me, but one thing’s certain. It’s not because of his power.
The knife’s drunken dancing weaves closer to my one remaining good eye. ‘You
don’t need to see to speak, creature.’ The squeaky tone, his voice cracking like an
adolescent hitting the first agonies of puberty, doesn’t really aid him in his attempt to
be menacing.
I chuckle, sending little tributaries of blood dribbling from the corners of my mouth to
join the rivers currently streaming down my body. ‘Your lair? Sorry, your lair? Are
you… are you serious? What are you, a fucking Bond villain? No, wait, don’t tell me
— you’re an alpha lone wolf or coyote misunderstood by a society that will one day
regret it ever dared reject your magnificent superiority.’
I flick my eyes up and down his spindly form. A filthy magician’s robe that looks
suspiciously like a hastily altered threadbare dressing gown hangs from his bony
shoulders. It doesn’t give him quite the aura of evil genius I suspect he was going for.
‘Nah, mec, you don’t fit as an alpha wolf. More likely a weasel or…’ I take a sniff,
wincing. ‘Skunk, I’d say.’
I roar my agony at the low-set cement ceiling as a razor-like knife is buried several
inches into my right shoulder. It being pulled back out again isn’t a barrel of laughs
either. I gulp down desperate mouthfuls of air as it resumes its two-step
choreography in front of my iris. Panting, physically broken, I look past its vanishing
point to the insane little shitspawn wielding it.
‘Okay, okay — I’ll tell you,’ I whine, struggling to draw in enough whistling breath to
make my words audible. A punctured lung will do that to the best of men. I am
definitely not the best of men. ‘I’m…’
He leans forward without the knife ever leaving its threatening proximity. Greed for
forbidden knowledge is carved more clearly on his pock-marked grubby features
than his rubbish attempts at runes are on my body. ‘I’m… so… so…goddamn sexy, I
wish I could have switched eyes with your mother to watch myself fuck her brains out
last night, cadorna.’
Pithy put-down issued, I slam my head forward, embedding the blade’s tip deep into
my brain. Then, accompanied by the sweet, sweet lullaby of his screams of impotent
rage, I die.
Again. ...
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