<html> <body> --------- 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 </body> </html>