Origins
There is little I can recall of what came before my abduction. Fleeting memories entice me with the vision of a warm tropical land. Of a boat. Of a strong, respectable, stern man I believe to be my father. Life was easy. Fish was plentiful. Duty calls and I join the militia. That grizzled sun-kissed man swells with pride as he looks on me, and seeing him in such a state near brings me to blubbering like a weaning infant. Choke it down, put on the mask of adulthood. A final nod of approval as our cadre marches to fates unknown. Dressed in the attire of a soldier I enter the world desperate and afraid. The mist grips it's icy talons around my heart and keeps I in a perpetual state of unease, magnified by the knowledge that
something is hunting, and I am on the menu. It dogs me to run, hide, escape. It watches, silhouettes in the murky mist enjoying the comfort of treading in their home domain. Eternity passes in the piercing cold. Dehydration, exposure, and exhaustion addles the brain and the belief that I erred in life settles in. That this is some fitting punishment for my soul, and what I experience now is to last forever. Every appendage and every organ wracked with pain. Every thought tainted with the maddened edge of delirium. The end comes with my collapse after tearing through a final thicket of vegetation native to the realm I now call home.
Time is a strange thing. At times, it passes like the waters of a raging river. So it did. Primal instincts took hold and it soon became clear that evading the lupine threat of the lands was the foremost of my problems. Days pass.. I come upon the Gray City in desperate straits. Experimentation with local fauna had left my body in bilious disrepair and seeing what I believed to be the smoke of a man-made fire in the far distance resolved I to abandon camp and use the last reserves of my strength to, hopefully, encounter civilization. Charcoal burners were the siren's call, and the priests of a strange sun-worshiping religion nurse me back to health. The city, built around agrarian pursuits and the efforts of trawlers, seems strangely well-defended to me at the time. Quickly I find that food is scarce in these parts, and though the proletariat were prone to suffering from famine; the upper echelon of nobility rarely goes without.
"Come one, come all! To the Carnival!"
"If one exists, it is an aberrant and depraved mind that churns out the horrors of this land. One trembles at the thought of what designs it might conjure, but none can be so terrible as the snare reliant on our self-imposed demons. Everyone, at some level, recognizes their names. I speak now of greed."
I and a multitude of adventurers stand in attendance of a macabre specter of jovial death; cheerfully dubbed the Ringmaster. His trade: to ply willing participants to their doom. His instrument: a wheel of fortune with seven spokes. The results vary promising the unwitting contestant: a fantastical journey, a vague but surely grim curse, amnesia, amputation of an appendage (fortunately of their own choice, for whatever good that be), a pit battle with unknown creatures, victory, and gruesome death. The latter certainly most likely given the odds. In awe I watch grizzled veteran and novice alike step into that ring to test their fate. My stomach churns as I witness a dapper-dressed woman stricken with forgetfulness, who knows not how they came to be where they are, still destined to finish the spins promised to the gleeful fiend. She stares in confusion at the stricken crowd as her arm is taken. Her prize for a lifetime of memory and function? A magical helmet.
Often I think back to these moments. Why? Why did we, the noble heroes and protectors as we fancy ourselves, keep watching? Is there some subliminal fascination with the art at work here? Perhaps this fiend's true masterpiece was the apathy that permeated that morbid marquee. White-knuckled fools awaiting their turn; looking on magical baubles with nary the thought that they'd be unsuccessful, only of what ease they'd have in a world with their prize. What benefit does trinkets do the dead, and what of one's
soul lost in such a gambit?
A new selection is found. Humorously enough a crystal ball; similar to those employed in the craft of fortune-telling, but capable of revealing the unseen indefinitely. I wonder now, were there a wise vistani soothsayer among us, if they could have divined the fate of one who'd risk such a game for a
thing? The best of us steps forth. Her noble friends crying out in horror at her proclamation of spins. She makes her peace with them before stepping into the fiend's domain.
'Round and round it goes~ Where it lands, nobody knows~!' . . . A curse. Audible gulps and the collective holds their breath. Again it spins. Death. Cries of appalled terror ring in the crowd and perhaps .. this specter feels pity? He allows her another spin. What has she to lose, that will not already be taken?
'Tick.. tick.. tick.. tick..' The death rattle of the wheel the only sound we hear. It stops and the woman violently implodes in a spatter of viscera and gore, decorating the dirt in one final grisly painting where once a warrior woman stood. It is too much. I flee the marquee and discharge the contents of my stomach behind a tree. The nausea remains. On the gentle rocking of the caravan home between lucid nightmares I reflect on the lessons of that night. That we are so often our own undoing. That man is so easily enchanted by materialistic pursuits we lose sight of the things that give our lives true meaning.
and I walk on,
in fear.
