[Mkguild] Divine Travails of Rats - Pars IV. Infernus (s)

[C. Matthias]

---------

Metamor Keep: Divine Travails of Rats
by Charles Matthias and Ryx

Pars IV: Infernus

(s)

Saturday, May 12, 708 CR


Light sprang back into his eyes, the stench of 
fresh manure clogged his nose, and Loriod's 
contemptuous voice crooned above him. Charles 
blinked a moment as his eyes focused on the pile 
of excrement in front of him and in which his 
hands were half-buried. Richly booted feet stood 
a short distance away across a floor covered in 
hay where not despoiled by heaps of neglected, 
decaying animal droppings. The hobnailed boots of 
soldiers surrounded him just clear of the manure 
but he dared not look up, suffused with sudden, 
heart-crushing fear. He felt a terrible pain in 
his back where a gauntlet had struck him.

“You promised me, Matthias.” Loriod's 
condescending croon cut through him like a rusted 
blade; jagged and rough, compounding that sudden 
fear. “You promised that you would come live on 
my land and swear fealty to me; your true lord 
and master.” He lifted his head just enough to 
see Loriod – whole and fat with jewels on his 
fingers with an expensive doublet and hose hiding 
his girth – gloating from beyond the muck of the 
stall into which Charles had apparently been 
cast. The corpulent lord's smile was one of 
triumph. Beside him were two solders, hard faced 
and thick, their expressions ones of blank 
ferocity and vapid brutality regarding him with 
disgust. “You did not do as you promised. Now, 
for all eternity, you will. You are charged with 
the manure and cleaning the privies. Henceforth and forevermore.”

Charles snarled, finding no restraint on his 
flesh, and willed – he willed – but he could not 
think of what it was he was striving for. A 
strength, something within himself, but whatever 
it was he could not grasp it and it would not 
come at his desire. “I'll never do anything for 
you!” He snapped even as he realized that 
something that should have been there, something 
that had been with him since the earliest days of 
his youth, was simply not there. His eyes widened 
in alarm as he sought within, mentally scrabbling 
about like a mouse in an urn but finding nothing 
to grasp. Something was supposed to be there, he knew it!

He just could not remember what!

One of the soldiers shifted and Charles was too 
slow to move, caught in the horror of his missing 
– something. A heavy fist drove into his back and 
Charles collapsed into the pile of manure, unable 
to catch himself with arms suddenly gone weak. 
His face plunged into a heap of the vile leavings 
and the putrescence of his tongue nearly made him vomit.

“That is not what you are to call me,” Loriod 
snapped in anger as he stared down at the fallen 
man, as if Charles were of middling consequence. 
Next to him and lashed to a stall was a 
sable-black horse whose features were very 
familiar, but Charles did not know from where. He 
knew that horse; it had – or should have – been a 
noble steed but somehow Loriod's corruption had 
fouled it; reduced it to a bony nag that stared 
listlessly at Charles with no care for its own 
fate or that it stood hock deep in its own 
excrement. No hint of fire glimmered in those 
equine eyes and his coat looked unkempt from 
neglect. The walls behind him, and parts of the 
ceiling, were an off-white hue perfect in its 
uniformity as if it were part of a canvas that 
had been touched by paint. Everywhere else 
appeared to be the main stables in Lorland but 
somehow washed out; like the walls and ceiling – roughed out but incomplete.

Charles slowly pushed himself back up, spitting 
the crap from his mouth and scrubbing his nose 
with the back of one wrist. His skin was hardly 
paler than the manure that fouled it – stained by 
the muck as thoroughly as leather in a tanner's 
cauldron. Somehow the sight of his own hands, 
bony and thin and pale under the tanning of 
manure soup, struck him as maddeningly wrong but 
he could not understand exactly why. His fingers 
squelched through the mire and his back screamed 
in protect; a rib was surely broken. Someone – he 
knew not whom, but someone, surely – would come 
for him. In this he would trust; he had to trust, 
for he had no other escape. Let Loriod think he 
had won for now. “Milord.” The word burned his 
tongue worse than the manure, but it kindled a 
gleam of victory in the fat man's eyes.

Loriod turned back to the man crouched on his 
knees in the worst sty in the land and smiled. 
Once proud, but no more. Now he was the meanest 
of the low. “Do your duty then.”

Charles nodded as slow as he dared. “Aye, milord. I will.”

Loriod laughed and nodded, glancing at the two 
guards. They had kept perfectly still until 
Loriod looked at them; then they began to breath 
and move slightly. Puppets, each of them. One 
soldier kicked him in the stomach and he dared 
not flinch away under the lord's regard, and then 
both of them turned to follow after their master. 
Loriod stopped a few paces past the stall and 
half-turned. His voice savored every word. “Until 
you learn your place your family will not receive anything from the stores.”

He will save me, Charles thought grimly, even 
though he did not know who that 'He' was. Someone 
important, he knew. Another lord, but nobler, and 
far more powerful, than the corpulent monster 
stumping away on legs as thick as Charles' torso. 
Someone Charles would follow, willingly, when 
asked. This thought kept the humiliated man 
moving despite the agony in his back. Somehow his 
past had prepared him for cleaning a stables 
though much of it was incomplete like the wall 
and ceiling, but that past he could not recall. 
It was there, but a fog. Somehow, in the depths 
of that fog, the nag roped to the wall was more 
than a mere broken down flea hostel – he was a 
Royal. But Charles, knees in the muck, could not 
imagine who, or how, or why he might bend knee to 
the beast – or any beast – yet somewhere in the 
back of his mind he knew he had, and would again.

There was no pitchfork to gather the used straw 
and no other tools to improvise. In the end 
Charles used his hands and arms, scooping the 
revolting mass into his embrace to transfer to a 
heap outside. By the time he had finished 
spreading fresh hay he stank worse than the 
meanest peasant and his back was in so much pain 
he could barely rise past a crouch. He crawled from the stables on all fours.

Somehow he found a little hovel crudely fashioned 
from a few planks of wood, mud, and bits of cloth 
that was meant to be his home. The thatch of the 
sagging roof was little better than the straw 
Charles had mucked out of that revolting stall. 
Lorland castle glimmered like a diamond in the 
midst of the fields and mudpits, clearly visible 
from any place within the hovel through gaps in 
the walls. Charles found Kimberly there also 
coated in mud up to her ankles, while his 
children cried with stomachs distended from starvation.

There were four of them, but somehow he knew 
there should have been more. A small chair of 
rough twigs drew his eyes. In it sat a pitifully 
small object, some strange sort of effigy, but 
somehow wrong. It had a tail emerging from the 
feed sack that adorned it as well as the 
twisted-straw legs. The effigy's head – an old 
rotten apple – was horribly misshapen into a 
pointed taper where a face should have been.

Kimberly glowered at him. “You fought his grace 
again, didn't you? Fool! Now we will all go 
hungry again!” she snapped, fists on bony hips 
garbed in little more than cast off feed sacks. 
His own children were similarly clothed in 
sack-cloth so crude that they were little more 
than actual sacks in which holes had been poorly 
cut for their heads and scrawny arms.

Charles shook his head. “He is not our lord.” He 
hissed, trying to stand but succeeding only in 
rising to a bent stoop. Like a viper her hand 
lashed out and laid smartly across his cheek. He 
recoiled and closed his eyes. This is not my 
wife, Charles thought. But she looked like his 
wife – but then, somehow she did not. Under the 
grime of her hard life her skin was still pale 
and dotted with freckles now made invisible under 
the overall brown; her hair a natty tangle 
colored as much by dirt as its natural hue. She 
looked like Kimberly, sounded like her, smelled 
like her, but it couldn't really be her. Surely 
not, he tried to tell himself. Yet, he did not know why she seemed so – alien.

“You force me to beg again just for scraps!” She 
shouted over the cries of the children. Charles 
collapsed against the straw-strewn ground, trying 
to cover his ears. “Don't you hide from them!” 
She jerked a finger toward the wailing children, 
all of a similar age. How had she whelped so 
many, being as waif thin as she was? “Shameful 
husband! Be obedient to him and we can eat!” 
Stomping toward the door she wrenched it open. 
The gleaming lines of Lorland castle shone on a 
rise in the distance. How, then, could it also be 
seen through the gaps in the wall at the back of 
the house? “Now I must go to him and beg! I will 
have to pay for your stubbornness!”

Kimberly climbed from the hovel, bumping him in 
the side where the guard had kicked him. He felt 
the lance of pain from the broken rib stab him in 
the back. He gasped and collapsed against the 
dirt. He could only gasp two words between the coughs and agony. “Beg? Pay?”

Kimberly turned and shot him a scowl as she 
started toward the castle. Another woman stood on 
the pathway, her beatific expression curious, as 
she gazed upon Charles stooped in the ramshackle 
doorway. The stranger was breathtakingly 
beautiful but Kimberly did not seem to notice 
her. Even the dust of the pathway failed to find 
purchase on her immaculate white gown. “Beg for 
succor, fool! Pay by giving him what he wants, of 
course!” The woman – his wife, you somehow not – 
snapped back at him as she trudged up the dusty 
trail. “My body to use as he will. Again!” The 
fact that the strange woman, an observer to their 
familial strife, bore the countenance of a rat 
seemed not to dawn on any of them.

“No!” Charles tried to stretch out and stop her 
but she was already too far away. Charles beat 
the mud with his manure-soaked fists and gagged 
on his own stench. The wails of his children filled his ears for hours.


“Charles,” A soft voice, seductive in its gentle 
caress, whispered in his ear. “What is it you 
desire, Charles? Not this, surely.” A hand 
touched his cheek, heedless of the dirt and filth 
that turned his tanned skin almost treebark 
brown, but it brought no surcease to the pain. “I 
am right here, Charles, if you but say my name. I 
can free you of him, if you say my name.”

Charles turned ever so slightly at the 
suggestion. He could not form the words, but he wondered after her name.

“You know it. Merely say my name and he will have 
no more power over you. You... you will have 
power over him. Only say my name.” Her hand, soft 
yet tipped by a sharp nail like an animal's claw, 
brushed over his cheek one last time and then she was gone.


Thought he could not recall sleeping, nor eating 
whatever lop that Kimberly had brought back save 
that it was revolting, it seemed to Charles that 
a day had passed. The same two burly, stone-faced 
guards dragged Charles to the latrines used by – 
it seemed – an entire city, handed him a bucket 
and rope, and then shoved him down into the pit 
beneath the privies to clean them. Other than the 
bucket he was given no tools, and the underside 
of the privies was too low for him to stand. He 
spent hours upon hours scooping refuse, including 
his own vomit when the stench proved too great, 
into the bucket. The soldiers emptied this into a 
cart, and then tossed it back down, often aiming 
for his head. Many times their aim was true. All 
of this he did while the latrines were still 
being used by the hudreds of servile peasants 
under the fat lord's thumb. Most looked almost 
identical; shambling manikins who only showed a 
facsimile of life when their lord was near.

Loriod put in a single appearance that day. 
Charles stared at him without feeling. The fat 
noble sneered. “Do you not kneel before your sovereign?”

He groaned and did so in a spot he'd managed to clean. “Forgive me, milord.”

“Do not rise until I give you leave.” Charles 
held his pose for several minutes, his entire 
body trembling with the strain. Something warm, 
heavy and slick splattered atop his head. A 
stream drenched his back. Charles closed his eyes and thought of rescue.


Each day he toiled, that strange rat woman in the 
white gown would watch from a short remove, 
unobserved by Loriod, his guards, or anyone else 
that lived under the corpulent lord's crushing 
boot. Each day she came to him when he retired to 
the whip sharp lash of Kimberly's anger and 
watcher her storm off to bed – and pay – for some 
succor for their children. And the effigy in the 
chair stared on, but Charles could never wrench 
his eyes from it. Therein lie what he most 
desired, but he had forgotten what it meant. Each 
day her seductive voice would croon in his ear, 
promising surcease, if only he let her know his inmost desire.

All he could do was point, voice stolen by her 
beatific presence, at the effigy in its little 
twig chair. Was it that she was a rat and he a 
man that turned his desire to a twist of straw 
topped by a misshaped old apple rather than her?

Somehow, he knew, it was not her rodentine 
appearance. That, if anything, was strangely familiar.


He slept twisted by agony; the ache of his labors 
and fresh new insults delivered at the boots and 
fists of Loriod's brutal guards, and never ate 
anything fit for consumption of man or beast. The 
scent of manure never dimmed. And yet days passed 
with no end to his labors, humiliations, and the 
sudden violence from the soldiers or from his 
wife. His children never stopped crying. Loriod 
never touched him and he didn't have to.

He merely watched and gloated. Often he did so 
while performing acts that left Charles revolved, 
knowing that those actions alone were as 
insulting to the tortured muckrakes as the labor itself.


“Good milord,” the shrewish woman who claimed to 
be Charles' wife called from the edge of a corral 
in which Charles labored to remove a decade's 
worth of heaped manure. Small ponds of vile black 
water surged into each hole left by the shovel he 
was given as he bore the noisome load to a wagon 
parked nearby. The bony black nag stood in the 
traces, another victim of the corpulent monster's 
conquest. Seated on the headboard, idly striking 
the haunches of the nag with a short whip solidly 
enough to draw bloody weals through the black 
coat, Loriod glanced up at the inquiry. “Again 
that slovenly creature has let us go without 
food, Milord, in sufferance of your grace with 
his unrestrained tongue.” She glared past the 
wagon at Charles laboring before a pile of dung 
nearly as tall as he would be if he could stand 
straight. Around her legs Charles' four 
starvation bloated children clustered sullenly. 
The queer effigy from the chair was clutched in the arms of the eldest.

The wagon groaned as Loriod turned and dropped 
down from the buckboard. Despite its load of 
leaking manure it lifted noticeably once the fat 
caricature of ignobility dropped to the ground. 
“Oh, yes, he has left you going hungry yet 
again?” He crooned, his voice grating to Charles' 
ears though no doubt the epitome of masculine 
nobility to the speaker. “Come, come.” With a fat 
arm he bade the group of woman and children 
around nearer the rear of the wagon. Once there, 
where Charles could see everything, Loriod turned 
his back to him. The clink and creak of a buckle 
and belt came to Charles' ears. “Come to your 
lord, I have more than enough to see you all fed.”

Out of the corner of his eye he espied the 
strange woman, beautiful even though a rat, 
standing upon the road watching. She regarded him 
with an arched stare; for a moment their eyes 
met. His fingers bent tightly around the shovel 
and though his tongue was fixed behind his teeth, 
he sensed at the same time some part of him yet 
not himself turn toward that rat and murmur a single word.

Suspira.

If it were possible, the eyes, whiskers, and 
snout of the rat woman stretched out in 
satisfaction beyond his ability to describe. Her 
voice carried across the air as if shouted, but 
caressed him as if whispered into his ear. “O my 
champion of Dream and Hells, he is now yours.”

Before he was aware of his feet moving or 
thoughts of his actions Charles found himself 
turned from the watcher and moving across the 
soupy ground as if across hard packed earth. He 
charged out of the corral, between the two inert 
guards who stared vacantly at the lord and his 
supplicants, with the old iron shovel raised 
high. With a snarl he brought it down, the 
dented, nicked, rusty metal edge cleaving into 
the back of Loriod's head with a meaty crunch. 
Jerking it up, even as his snarl rose to a 
shriek, Charles brought the shovel down again; 
and again; and again. Each time flesh and hair 
was sent skyward in an arc of gore. Five times 
the shovel rose and fell before Loriod hit the 
ground. The guards, wagon, Kimberly and the 
children all simply ceased existing.

There was only one existence; that of Charles and 
Loriod sprawled upon the polished flagstones of 
the courtyard. Beneath his knees the tattered 
remains of a form rendered unrecognizable as 
human save for the pale hue of the furless flesh. 
Charles' hands rose and fell, fingers extended 
and splayed not as fists but claws. Against they 
rose, striking down and across, shredding the 
flesh of the form beneath him even as it cried 
out in agony and fear. That what remained of 
Loriod could still cry out was testament that his 
flesh was not truly alive – Charles could spend 
an eternity rending him, and for that one moment 
fervently desired to. With each slashing plunge 
of his claw-tipped fingers Charles ripped away 
more of Loriod's flesh but, rather than casting 
the shreds away, he brought them to his muzzle and consumed them.

Like a starving man suddenly placed before a 
banquet he stuffed himself gluttonously with the 
flesh of the damned lord, the man's piteous cries 
as much succor to him as the flesh he shoved into 
his muzzle. He relished it! There was a taste; 
cold and harsh like biting a rusty rod of iron. 
Yet Charles savored it and basked in the wails of the damned.

A gentle hand grasping his shoulder brought his head up with a snap.

“Who are you?” The slim, aristocratic man asked. 
His face was sharp; chiseled and angular with 
sharply angled brows and ears drawn up into 
tapered tips. His eyes were intense, blue and 
boring into Charles like badgers after a vole. 
The rat tried to wrench away, his desire to do 
nothing more than return to the violence he was 
wreaking on the tattered remnants of his foe. All 
that remained of Loriod was a bit of shoulder and 
his corpulent face. That face was not stretched, 
not distorted. There was no trace of the creature 
that had worn him like a garment. The fingers of 
the slender man's hand tightened powerfully on 
Charles' shoulder. “Who are you?” He asked again, more sharply.

Blood dripping from his muzzle Charles looked up 
at the man, his dark rat eyes wild. “Vengeance!” 
The rat snapped gleefully. “Rage! Fury! Hunger!”

The man held before him a bit of twisted straw, 
sack cloth, and apple. “Who are you?” He asked 
again, hissing as if afraid to be overhead. “What 
do you seek?” Before his eyes the effigy 
softened; straw became flesh and fur, sack cloth 
to swaddling, and the apple to a head; a face. 
The effigy faded to nothing the moment he recognized it.

“Ladero,” Charles growled, stumbling in his rage 
even as he distractedly shoveled a torn hank of 
flesh past his bloody whiskers. “I – I am – am – 
Charles? Charles? Matthias...!” He gasped, 
suddenly realizing how lost he had become in his rage.

What Loriod wished; what he desired, Charles had 
lived! But there was no Loriod left beyond a few 
bits of blood, flesh, and bone slowly fading into 
the polished flagstones of the courtyard. He had 
lost his desire, and found fury... for that shrew 
of a woman; his not-wife. As she had been, or 
might have been, had the curse of Metamor not 
touched her. Somehow that love had seen past the 
unpleasant masquerade. He blinked and looked at 
his hands but saw no blood, no lingering remnants 
of the creature that had buried him in the dark 
desires that had led him to the rat queen's realm.

“Good.” Qan-af-årael hissed with a nod, his hand 
giving a last squeeze before he stood. “She will 
not be distracted long, we must slip past while 
she chases your simulacrum.” The Åelf nodded 
toward the stairwell upon which sprawled the 
serpentine form of the Daedra of Lust. Before her 
a facsimile of Charles bent knee, his head bowed, 
as she held before him an offering that wrenched at Charles' own heart.

She held his son in her arms, his Ladero! She 
cradled the babe and smiled upon the illusory 
Charles as if awaiting him to ask for that which he desired.

Wrenching his gaze away Charles stood easily, 
feeling strangely energized. For all of his 
trials and tribulations through the hells he 
expected each would have worn some bit of his 
away. After Revonos he had felt utterly spent, 
but now he felt as if he had rested a week. 
“Where is the bridge?” He asked, falling into step because the taller Åelf.

“There,” Qan-af-årael waved a hand toward the 
ground. “And we must make our way there before she sees through my masquerade.”

“What of Loriod?” Charles cast his gaze around. 
The succubae and incubus still reclined around 
and upon the fountain of blood dark wine. They 
regarded the approaching pair with mild interest, 
too taken with their own pleasures to show much 
concern for the rat and Åelf drawing near. The 
rat expected the fat lord to spring out of 
hiding, hale and whole, at any moment.”

“That one – ah...” Qan-af-årael shook his head. “He is here no more.”

“What?”

“Charles, remember the beasts of Lilith's realm? 
What happened to the damned who could not escape 
them?” Glancing back at the stair he quickened 
his pace, reaching out to take Charles' upper arm in one slender hand.

“Their... essence went to sustain Lilith, I guess?”

“Their potency rather, but verily. She consumes 
them until only their essence – which none can 
destroy – remains. Of Loriod there is nothing but 
that for oblivion to claim. Now, come!” With a 
tug he pulled Charles forward more swiftly, 
breaking into a half run as, behind them a 
startled hiss became a sharper, steamkettle wail. 
If it could be said that such a sound could have 
issued from a steamkettle smaller than a 
warhorse. “She has vanquished your doppleganger.” 
Charles chanced a glance over his shoulder, not 
stumbling in his side-crabbing sprint when he saw 
the great serpent descending the stair with 
frightening speed. If the features of that 
rodentine face had once been beautiful they were 
no longer such; loving eyes had gone the color 
rubies full of fire and prominent incisors had 
become terrible, long fangs. Glistening claws 
extended from upraised hands ready to rend him as 
thoroughly as he had rent the damned soul of Altera Loriod.

The preternatural perfection of maleness 
reclining upon the fountain looked on in bemused 
surprise as the Åelf and rat charged headlong for 
his burbling throne. The succubae moved aside as 
if merely perturbed, their attention roving from 
them to the serpent swiftly closing upon them. 
“Dive!” Qan-af-årael bellowed when they reached 
the lip of the fountain, scattering demons and 
their toys like a bully might the playthings of 
their younger siblings. With perfect form Charles 
leaped up, extended his arms, and plunged into 
the pool of wine, Qan-af-årael a scarce heartbeat behind.


----------

May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love,

Charles Matthias
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.integral.org/archives/mkguild/attachments/20150305/7a8e5f65/attachment-0001.html>