A fluttering raven pecked at the glass and for ten minutes interrupted their silence. The mourners accounted the nuisance as an aspect of their grief until a late uncle opened the window. The raven did not fly away, but instead hopped inside the room. It lifted and landed on the dying man’s chest. He kissed the bird's beak, and stroked its inky feathers. The mourners held their breaths. Some crossed their arms and pouted to the others with a ireful stare; why isn’t he dead yet?
The old man moved for the first time in days other than lurching moments towards the chasm of demise. Shier attention narrowed in on the old man and his pet. Out the window a man in black clothes hopped the gate and walked across the law. The mourners missed him- but they all heard the maids scream as they lead him to the funeral parlor. There he stood, covered in mud and pieces of torn forest, his eyes crystal cones poking from folds of filth. A heavy iron in his hands kept concealed like stolen candy distracted them from looking into his face, and when he exposed the weapon everyone’s memory of what his face looked like became a photo album of mistaken features. Only the dying old man kept his focus on the intruder’s face. He knew who it was right away.
The intruder cut his way forward through the mourners in their dark dressing, and dropped a grave concern on the old man.
“Where is it?”
“Don’t go there, my friend- stay away from that place.”
“You don’t understand,” He uttered like a man arguing against a stacked jury, and aimed the weapon at the raven. “I need to know.”
“Fine. Tell my family to leave.” The man’s tone flatlined. The intruder leaned in to hear him, then leaned back.
“Get out. Everyone.” He brandished his weapon to get the herd out of the room. He slammed the door behind them, and knelt before the old man. The room’s immense silence a ticking clock with deafening strokes. The intruder knelt besides the old man. Sweat and anxiety lit fires under his clothes. His teeth chattered. “Tell me, my old friend, there isn’t much time. A life depends on your words. Please, remember…”
“What do you intend to do?”
“Kill it and make an antidote from its blood.”
The old man looked to his raven as the hungry creature nuzzled his leather palms: “Look in my bedroom closet for a navy suit. I have the coordinates written in my old cabin log.”
The intruder sprang up and waltzed out, leaning forward, the family clustered at the door, listening- but heard nothing. The elderly wife protested when he kicked in the bedroom door, but her dying husband told them to let the intruder take what he pleased. He scoured through jewels and gold until at last he found the sea-rotten suit covered in holes and patches- a disgraced uniform adorned with captain rank. He reached in all the pockets and rifled through each secret fold until he felt the hard surface of a book beneath the fabric. He drew a knife and cut open the fabric, and retrieved the hidden log. He flipped through the pages, the misspelled words, and the coffee rings, until he found the passage that struck him like Zeus lightning. He tore the page free, put the suit back on its hanger, and escaped from the window. The page never left his hand until he left the continent in a small boat he purchased from the bottom of the classifieds. He put the page away as the vessel carried him behind the bleach coasts and disappeared forever.
Two men ran for two days before they decided to risk a sweep. Their jumpsuits torn and streaked with grains of sand. They spotted a cabin in the desert valley, and crouched in the brushes. The clouds covered the moon. Both men snuck to the windows and peeked inside. Dark, the doors and windows locked- Erwin breathed a sigh of relief. “No one’s staying here now.” he said, unbuttoning the jumpsuit, he tore a piece of the fabric, covered his fist with it, and punched through the glass of the door. He reached in behind, turning the handles, and opening the door wide open for his former cellmate.
They went inside, weary and malnourished. “Erwin”-the preferred codename he chose- went to the sink and drank from the tap- his cellmate explored, checking the rooms, finding clothes for the two of them to wear. He carried the garments folded, and placed them out for Erwin to examine and put on. The clothes didn’t fit, and upon close inspection they found all the garments to be ladies’ clothing, so Erwin made him run back to get more appropriate clothes. He came back with camoflauge gear that reeked of deer blood.
Erwin rummaged the fridge, and the cupboards. Some saltines- then a bottle of wine rolled from the dark, and they both excitedly drank. The cellmate in his rosy cheeked jubilance turned on the radio. They reported on two escaped convicts that tunneled from the Correctional Facility into the sewers.
“They have no idea where we are.” The cellmate said, drinking from the bottle and handing it back.
“Unless they find this cabin. They’ll hunt us down like dogs. How long do we have?”
“Far. Getting there will take months at this rate. My feet hurt and these crackers taste like fish tails.”
“The desert burns so hot… hasn’t been this hot a night since…” Erwin wiped perspiration from his forehead and the arrow cross party crest tattooed on his neck. “...Since those cholos caught me with their kilos. They drove me out around here, handed me a shovel, pointed to the ground and said something in mariachi. I didn’t think. I just started to dig, feeling pretty sure that I was deader than chivalry anyway. Know what happens next? This buzzard or something dives into the ground. We all hear its bones crack, we all felt it hit the ground. And it's weird, but none of them gave two shits until it flew back up into the air. That scared them. When it crashed back down they dropped their guns, ran into their trucks and left me. The vulture broke it’s wings, it’s neck, I don't know how this happened, but it kept flying up and slamming into the sand. So I started digging there… and know what I found? Nothing… just an iron head. A lion’s head. But then you told me about that place… and now I don’t think its nothing.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Left it buried where I found it so no one may take it. Think we’ll need it?”
The cellmate examined an unloaded shotgun he found beneath a bed. No matter how hard he looked he failed to discover the ammunition, and set the weapon down. “Probably not. I heard nothing about an iron head- but I’m excited. I’ve been waiting so long- for two decades- for this day. I’m cold and hungry but I don't feel like there’s a thing that can stand in our way! Not the state patrol, no way in hell its gonna be the warden!”
They both slept in the cabin, but Erwin awoke earlier. He lived with his cellmate for five years, and sure enough he slept in. Erwin awoke at every sunrise, rain or shine. He stole away from the bed room in which they slept, and he reached into the mousehole where he hid the shells. He loaded one into the shotgun, then entered the bedroom and planted the barrel onto the cellmate’s heart. He grumbled in his sleep. Erwin fired and painted the walls and carpet. He wiped the blood from his own face, and issued an apology. “No hard feelings, but now that I know where we’re headed, I don’t need you so much.”
Erwin took the weapon, and stole a shovel he found in a small shed. He walked out into the desert to familiar paintings on the rocks and the taste of jet fuel in the air. He dug and dug, until the shovel collided with metal. Erwin reached into the hole, and pulled out a mass wrapped in canvas. He pulled loose the fabric and let the wind steal it. The metal weighed more than twenty pounds despite being no larger than both his hands together. Black metal that absored the sunlight so potently that the area around it darkened too. The lion’s eyes looked deep in prophecy. Its mane a full cape, and untarnished surface a well of ink.
Erwin carried it with him as he travelled under the guise of a wandering spiritualist. He hitchhiked his way to the coast. Anytime they spotted the swastika on his arm, he explained that the swastika once was a symbol of peace. Not a single one recognized the arrow cross. Erwin felt like a secret agent spying in his own country.
He waved his ride a farewell, shaved his head and face, and jumped on a small fishing boat. He threatened the fishermen with his weapon. They travelled fifty miles up shore before Erwin expelled them into the waves, then he took the ship beyond the foaming waves never to be seen again.
A tower of smoke reached to the clouds. The farm house blazed and lit up the evening. Flames crashed through the windows. Embers climbed up the porch columns, and when the roof collapsed a black shroud exhumed into the air like broadened wings.
Ulysses watched from his truck with binoculars. An empty gas can lay in the back alongside a sharpened axe. When he lowered the binoculars, he noticed another vehicle watching the flames from one hundred yards from his position. A black truck sat facing the fire, its windshield fluttering with red and orange.
A flurry of sparks spat from the peeling walls. A burned frame outlined against the fire like cage bars. The dust from emergency vehicles appeared south coming northing towards the home. Ulysses put his car into drive, and hurried down the gravel. He checked in his rearview mirror. The black truck remained in place among the foxtails. Then his own features filled the mirror as the distance deepened. Half he recognized, the other half the doctors made from prosthetic. The jaw looked too big, the cheek bone too low, his nose reduced to a thin strip, and his left eyeball made of glass never moved. His ear dead as well. His left arm a metal prosthetic, his leg too, and many other parts of his body.
Ulysses drove down the highway, into town by the back entrance around the softball fields and the cemetery. He held his breath due to a longstanding superstition that a buried killer would come back and take your soul to the grave if you breath while passing his cemetery. Ulysses gasped for air once passed the gates. He remembered when they caught him as a kid. The prosecution tried to get him sent to the chair, but the state wouldn’t have it- so someone shot him and he bled to death on the courtroom floor. Justice is not owed to anyone, Ulysses thought, it’s something you take perhaps.
He drove up to his sister’s trailer and limped out, his left leg not bending under his body weight, holding still and straight as he pivoted onto the other foot. His hook hand swayed. He tried to remember his days as a promising athlete, but memories of smoke and explosions always out screamed the good ones.
Three times he knocked, and his sister let him in. She noticed the ash conviction burying his contemplation. He stayed in the doorway, under no circumstance did he intend on telling anyone he felt a pitchfork at his back.
“Sister, I’m the Elkhead Arsonist.”
She cast doubt, so he explained in vivid detail how he targeted buildings, how he destroyed them and made away without attracting attention while misleading investigators.
“Today-” he finished, “I burned down the home of the man buying you dresses. He may have been inside. That makes me a murderer. I need to know if you’ll help me escape.”
“We can help, we can help...” she said unblinking, but Ulysses understood what she meant- so he gave her the keys to his truck, as she owned no car, and also told her that he opened a bank account for her son with ten thousand dollars to be accessed when he turned 18. Then he turned away and limped out of town. A screeching hawk flew from down the road and circled him.
The excitement of the fire worried away. Now he felt the metal in his body chill and clank down the highway as he limped, holding his metal arm, a tower of smoke rising in the distance. A state trooper sped past with its lights on. Air reeking of cruelty filled the highway.
At a creek bridge, Ulysses found the black truck laying capsized in a ditch, its door open and engine running. A man with his face clawed raw lay in the ditch ten yards away. Ulysses almost lost in him the weeds, but when he did he knelt besides him and started to inspect the injuries- not blunt impact, but lacerations across his arms and neck and face. The man grabbed Ulysses by the collar.
“You have to find it for me- listen, and remember every word. This is the most important day of your life.” He held a forearm bone in his hands. Ulysses recognized a fracture below the wrist joint. He suffered such an injury as a child. “I’m going to tell you where you can get a new body… The last unicorn...It can save your body! Just listen, and I’ll tell you where to find it.”
He whispered the coordinates to Ulysses and died.
Ulysses went through his clothes for an Id, but found nothing. No registration inside of the truck, and the license plates were from a state called “Ark-Texas”. The man carried with him an arsenal of assault rifles and ammunition for each one. Ulysses left the scene. Night fell. He walked, wondering if the dead man’s words meant anything to him. He stared at the stars and watched as they turned. There was no place else to go, and so Ulysses decided- and he dissolved into the shade, and was never seen again.
They came through frozen forests, crossed roaring streams, hiked over frosted mountain peaks, and rowed over waves of gray water, to the island of ancient pines and their beckoning shadows. Strange black obelisks decorated the white sand beach. They bent, contorted with jagged angles, and sucked away the light from the sand casting deep shadows despite the tumbling cover of heavy cloud. Abandoned boat shells rotted in the green foam. Crustaceans littered the shore. A handful of seahawks circled around the sharp cliffs, descending below to eat the dead shellfish.
None knew of the other, and each thought they found the place and they alone knew of its secret. They each kept careful as they felt the presence in their lungs and veins. Their boots sank into the mud. They spat out needles and covered their faces, and marched over sharp rocks and crossed the crown of a gorge by a fallen tree. The bridge long since fallen, one rope still hung to a post and dangled down to the breaking waves below.
The closer they came, the more carnivorous fowls circled the air overhead. Their feathers dropped, and Ulysses picked them each up and stored them in his hat. They felt soft against his glove, but the pattern colored by blue and red gleams matched something too perfectly resembling the seashore obelisks.
The hawks swooped down and rested on branches, and watched them with baited curiosity. Their eyes bit deeper than wolf fangs and the screech they emitted alarmed the animals nearby. The fog between the trees grew denser, and they only saw the silhouettes of lepus large as wardrobes, snakes serpentining tree trunks, apes convened in hunchbacked congress. Some stayed far back as possible and only watched the passing humans in confusion, where as more curious creatures breathed and licked at the raiders- but they scurried away and disappeared. When the fog cleared, the raiders saw only trees and pools of mud. A misty rain recessed from the sky and dripped from the pine needles and steeps of protruding boulders bridging the running slopes.
The fog lifted as they hiked up and they found a ring of black pines bleeding with purple sap. They walked slow for they felt sentry guardians among the dripping sap. They saw the gate first, and converged from the tree cover. The gate inhaled, and they felt themselves approaching as if compelled by chain. The gate loomed and capitulated the nature around them. From corner of one eye to the other, it flooded their optical capacity and caused their eyes to tear.
The whole structure looked to be made of one big slate of onyx with two towers ushering the gateway. The structure stood tall once, but the raiders found it partially submerged in the earth. Yet despite all the grass, algae, and animals around them- not even a vine grew up the sinking walls. A net of iron spikes sealed the entry way. Two onyx griffins sat before the towers. The contours of their designs flooded with clear water. One kept watch on the two men to the east, the other kept watch to the west- but no head watched from its winged shoulders. The chest muscles still flexed as if making ready to act.
The four looked like the shadows of trees until they came near enough to see the filth covering their faces and clothes. They each pulled a gun on the other and pointed from man to man with uncertainty.
One of them stood taller than all the others, and kept his beard and hair tied up in a scarf. He pulled away the scarf to reveal his smiling teeth. A waxing crescent on his right cheekbone, and a waning crescent on his left. His eyes dark and sunken, wrinkles deep and red. He set his weapon down in the grass, and placed his fists into the air, unleashing his slender extremities and scraping the wind with bruised finger nails. Unlike the other three raiders, his back hunched and he carried a walking stick- the man’s dark skin obscured his age, but his yellow eyes and white hair composed the stature of a man lasting well into his seventies.
“Within this place, man’s creation will fail you all, for these walls are made for only the most horrid race- those things we cannot bare dwell within this frigid design. So let us beware.”
The other three all looked at the old man.
“Though many years have brought many names, I have chosen Ashgabat- and you will address me as such, for it is a name woven with long life of pains- Pains that I may fragment and share at my leisure, should any defy my beholden nature. You three, what names could there be? Let's not announce our honest identities, but remain as honest strangers, until again we meet in this cabalistic rain.”
“Call me Ulysses.”
“Call me Erwin.”
The other stayed silent- Ashgabat intervened. “Then your name will be what I so see, Virgil- esteemed honorably, speaking to the peasants beneath thee.”
Ashgabat kept his hands wide open, showing he held no weapons hidden up his sleeves or elsewhere, and walked into the center of their postponed campaigns.
“Among us, who knows what breathes within?”
The three stayed mute.
“League-length patrols, yet no mind for arcane study- burned out candles stand among me. Hark, my dishonored seraphs...”
Ashgabat approached Erwin who rose his weapon, and uttered for him to stop. Ashgabat heeded, and pointed to the bag on the ex inmate’s back.
“The griffon's crown, please, and I will prove my merits.”
“You’re a nut job ranting on the subway.”
“I’m the master of all manipulations, and possessor of the deepest secrets- I know you wish for its coat. You, Enoch, wish for its blood, and you, Ulysses, you will not find what you're seeking here- that lost arm and leg and years are spent without reward. These are mere aspects of my capacities, and I shall not ask again lest you wish to experience the reach of my preternatural sword. The griffon, Erwin.”
The other three looked to him. Ashgabat held his claw out like a beggar's palm. The rainwashed sweat into Erwin’s eyes. Every part of him hungered to pull the trigger, but the hollow moaning of the structure guarded over him like a slave driver. He dropped his weapon to the grass, and the other three followed. He took the bag from his back and handed it to Ashgabat with both hands. Ashgabat took it in one hand, drew the head from the bag, and approached the gateway. He placed the head atop the decapitated statue, and like a magnet it snapped into place and the crack healed as it bled foaming grease that washed away in the rain, but left an immaculate griffon- its head followed Ashgabat as the other griffin's lake pure eyes followed the other three.
Ashgabat stood back. The spikes in the Gateway retracted. The way opened, forlorn air escaped, and Ashgabat descended with heavy boots clapping against cold stone.
The three of them looked at each other. Ashgabat left his bag of supplies outside. The gateway widened like tiger jaws. Ulysses’ guts merged and boiled. His heart beat in the direction of the gateway, but sheer terror drew him back like an oncoming truck. Ulysses embraced the head on collision. He took the first steps towards the gate.
At the entrance his boots found soft dirt and moss covered earth, but once the daylight over his head hindered to darkness, he heard the familiar contact of his soles on solid stone. The stairs felt jagged under his feet as if he stepped on the crack in a sidewalk. He fell against his prosthetic arm and used it to guide himself down. Lifting his metal leg and dropping down, he felt something like warm water rising up his body. He checked himself with his good hand, certain to be sweating, but found no flooding. He felt his vital organs, and felt that his heartbeat slowed to a rhythm almost lost.
Ashgabat’s bootsteps floundered. Ulysses tried to see through the dark. After ten steps down, Ulysses saw him standing at the bottom against a floor flooded with green fog.
Ulysses no longer felt afraid. Each stone he touched as he passed hushed at him. Some in language and vernacular alien to his ears, but one at last he understood. “Free me! Free me!” the stone weeped. Blue slime soaked into his coat and slathered his hook. The wailing faded behind a stream of wind rushing at his back. The fog below stirred. Ashgabat wore a pair of welding glasses. A nova of green light burned within a glass orb floating above a misting fountain.
Ulysses when in its presence felt something- his old limbs- as if he never lost them resting at his side.. He reached and examined himself- finding his limbs still prosthetic. He gaped in awe of the restoring sensation and looked into the orb right into its fire-white axis, and falling back against the walls, his eyes felt stuffed with cotton and he rubbed them with the base of his hand, but nothing brought him relief but her groans of agony boring into his skull.
Virgil came down next, and when he saw the orb he lost no time. He pushed Ashgabat aside and rushed to the orb. He took it with both hands, and Ulysses didn’t see what happened next, he heard a short scream and the gust of burning flesh.
Ulysses tried to look, but his vision in his good eye now only revealed spots- like divots in a golf ball, but he saw the flames coming from Virgil’s eye sockets and smoke coming from his mouth. Ulysses rushed to take his reaching hand, but Ashgabat held him back. In three seconds, Virgil dropped to his knees and the burned husk of man sank into the fog.
“What beauty adorns the spirits of these walls.”
Erwin came down and sniffed the burning. He looked around looking for the screaming echoes, and covered his vision.
“Put that thing out!”
“Beauty?” Ulysses challenged. “He’s dead!”
“Our own Icarus flew too close to the sun and became his own undoing. Cease your fuss, Erwin, and watch as I display my merit. See, only a shaman of those that built this place can touch this orb,” Ashgabat pulled a chain from around his neck, a finger hung at the nadir. “I met one once”.
Ashgabat surveyed the walls. Ulysses grunted and tried to breath- his mind reliving the day he lost his limbs. An armoured vehicle exploded. He stood ten feet away and was pinned to a sandstone wall by the car door with fluid reds and blasting embers filling his brain.
Ulysses regained his balance. He wiped glaucoma from his only functioning eye.
Ashgabat looked around the walls- each brick contained bones and features of lost humans. He checked them each from floor to ceiling, until he spotted the one that depicted a cup being offered to a monstrosity. The contents stood out from the slimy stones with blood-red stone.
Ashgabat went to the orb, and took hold of it. Ulysses held his breath expecting him to burst into flame, he smiled unharmed and even childish with joy, he carried it to the unique block and shattered it against the wall. The chamber rumbled. A narrow strip of wall folded back and opened. Ashgabat went in.
Erwin staggered, but stopped to notice Ulysses feeling around the wall. Darkness filled the room. He heard Erwin’s breath and his boots and the contact of metal pins against steel.
“Have water.” Erwin thrust a canteen into his chest. Ulysses took it. The container chilled the sweat in his hand. He drank from it, and used from to washed out his eyes, then he handed it back to the dark.
“I don’t like that man.” Erwin told him. “I’ve known lots of bad people. He gives me shivers. We can’t trust him.”
“You pointed a gun at me. I don’t trust either of you.”
“Because I didn’t think anyone else would be here and got scared! I hate it when things don’t go as planned. Nothing personal.”
“Whatever is at the end of this, you can have it. Or Ashgabat can have it. I don’t care- so long as I get my body put back the way it was.”
“Then you’re in the wrong place.” Erwin’s boots tapped into the dark.
Ulysses followed the sound with his hook out to catch himself should he fail to see a rail. Air streamed down the nexus opened by Ashgabat. His boots didn’t tap- they crunched. He looked down and picked something up with his hook. A three eyed skull with one horn protruding from the side of its head and twisting downward and another twisting upward. Ulysses dropped it and followed the air stream to a room lit by natural light from a hole high in the ceiling. A plate sat in the center under the light. Clean as rain washed haul, but adorned by shackles and chains.
Ashgabat stood in the front of the nexus and scanned the chamber before stepping in. Rows of niches layered on top of each other, each niche filled with metal capsules. One lay open, the door crushed by falling stones from the ceiling. A broad spined skeleton stood facing the interior, iron gloves and iron boots sealing it in place, a cramped cell, only a fraction of the size of the creature within.
A portion of chamber wall collapsed long ago. A waterfall rushed outside. Ashgabat ran his hands along the frame of the passage.
“Yessss.” He smiled, peeling his the welding glasses away and dropping them to the floor, he stepped inside. “Come, seekers of truth, for at last we’ve found the isolated chambers allocated for miscreation. Enter safely, beneath the ensorcelled roof.”
The Erwin and Ulysses followed. Erwin gasped at the sight. Each cell rang to him. He inspected the interior of the crushed cell, examined the skeleton, the scales on its back, the jaw that protruded like a garden hoe.
“The unicorn's not here.” he declared, pointing out the gap in the wall large enough to fly an aircraft through.
“Sorry man filled with sorry doubts. Cast your eyes around, and you'll find no treasure, because the most valuable jewels are under the rock and clay of the earth. Have you wondered how our creature inhabited this anti-palace?”
“You talk like a rosebud.” Erwin stepped up to him. “Why don’t you step on that thing in the middle and tells us what it does.”
“My pleasure, for it will do nothing for me. As I am no monster.” He stepped onto the plate and locked his ankles and wrists in the shackles. Nothing changed. Water dripped from the holes in the ceiling and rippled in shimmering pools on the floor.
Ulysses blindly felt around the walls, following the dots of light peering through his eye to the fallen wall. He stumbled over the crumbled brick. His bag fell open, and his forearm bone rattled to the stones. He patted the wet surfaces for it, and by the time he found it the bone melted to separate fragments and sank into the floor. Ulysses felt the floor and found the bone left an indentation in the floor that slowly rejuvenated and with some soldering material foaming and then peeling away Ulysses found the floor smooth as before.
“What are these things? What is this place?” Erwin asked Ashgabat as he undid the shackles with a many pronged key.
“Lose your composure not, for these banished things died long ago.”
“Their bones aren’t decomposing.” Ulysses said, pointing to the bones and humans in the blocks. “Those things in the cells…”
“Of course not! A healthy body rejects splinters. Erwin, now step on the dais. Then our way will be clear.”
Erwin looked up to Ashgabat. “I don’t want to.”
“We can’t retreat. Our lives will end.”
“What does that mean?”
“You will see.” Ashgabat smiled “Step on dais. And unharmed you shall be.”
Erwin looked around the chamber, his bald head shining, but only did as instructed once seeing the skull in an exposed capsule- its dragon teeth and scowling eye socket like a narrow slow whispering intimate perils to the back of his mind. He stood on the short scaffold. It wobbled enough for him to readjust his center of gravity. Almost falling, Ulysses caught him with his good arm and set him back up. Ashgabat watched with crossed arms.
“The shackles.” Erwin put them on. And looked up at the holes in the ceiling. The veins under his chin looked like blue spider webs. Nothing changed. Ashgabat undid the shackles and turned to Ulysses.
Ulysses felt as he did as a child walking home from school-when a man in green sedan offered him fast food and candy, which he refused, but the man still followed him home and sat in the vehicle until the next morning.
He stepped to the dais and it rocked him back and forth. With his shackles in place, he stayed on the dais- and once the shackles snapped, the dias collapsed to the ground and no longer wobbled.
The cells opened. All of them sang as idle hands strumming an orchestra of piano wires. Dusty air escaped, and rusted shards rained down on them. Wisps of hissing air rushed out the holes in the ceiling, and the reek of bitter oil sank to the chamber floor.
The platform continued to sink. Lower and lower, grinding, scowling, the chains straining against his limbs as he pulled to free himself.
Ashgabat reached to the spiraling smog as it took the shapes of furious demons licking the deep crevasses of the chamber, with his hands like an apple pickers. No matter how hard he willed it, the spirits did not obey him.
Erwin screamed at the monstrosities and his echoes enriched the color and distinction in the cloud of beastly assemblage. He ran back, his mind fixed only on his own safety. His boots stampeded through silver pools and muted in the nexus as the walls within closed in as skeletal hands gripped his ankles. The walls closed, and sealed.
Ulysses saw the floor rise above his head and the grinding noise rose from his feet to all around his body. His phantom limbs scoured for the way up. Ulysses acted in impulse as his heart burned with refusal to let this place take the rest of his body. He slung the slack in the chains against the stones, but the chain caught nothing. He knelt and felt the platform for the rings that held the chains, and pulled them until his prosthetic arm popped off. With new agility he pulled until his leg popped off next and he fell to the ground, hitting the back of his head against the wall. His pain filled grunts rose up to the chamber. Ashgabat peered down and wandered away.
Ulysses sat, propped by his good leg, his mind raced until the platform stopped and tugged him back down. He tasted the platform and every foot that’d stood on it. He spat the bitter saliva from his mouth. The wall opened up and the shackles came loose. Two iron shells encapsulated him, a thin slot showed the platform rose once again, this time higher than the ceiling, to the top of the chamber, where the capsule tipped backwards and fell into an empty niche. Ulysses breathed in relief that the iron clasps in the shell locked around phantom limbs. He slammed against the interior, drowning in his own demands of release. Again pinned against a simmering wall, smoke and flames fogging his brain, the crawling bodies of legless friends and the pieces of burning remains scattered around him- his own remains. The stench of burning flesh drove nails up hi nostrils and suffocated the capsule.
The shimmering clouds rose to the ceiling but swooped back down, dissipating, becoming fainter, seeping in through cracks in the capsule, he felt their claws and teeth rejecting him. The cloud materialized and peered in through the slot like a butcher picking a swine. Ulysses felt his good limbs droop as his phantom limbs covered his face. The monster inserted to claws into the slot, and pried it open, reached in and took Ulysses by the neck and pulled him out.
Ulysses remember waking up in a hospital bed with surgeons besides him and xrays of a body that looked like soup inside. “You’re lucky to be alive.” They told him- Ulysses thought: I could’ve played for the University but I enlisted instead. Such luck!
He awoke to a similar condition, laying up looking at the holes in the ceiling like leaking stars in the night sky. He wanted to lift his good arm- but couldn’t. He rolled his head over and found a pool of blood in its place. The blood sank into the lines between the blocks. He tried to lean up,but failed- and when he looked down he saw his leg gone too. Ulysses felt no pain, only the utterances of the chamber’s lost dreams.
Ulysses again refused to let the ancient structure take his limbs. He dunked his hair into the blood pool and dropped his head in- when he withdrew it, he held his arm in his mouth. He took the rejuvenating foam from the injured capsule with his detached arm, slathering the end with the substance than re applying it the best he could The arm reattached two inches below his shoulder and the immediate soreness signaled that this limb hung by threads. He leaned on it, and dunked its legs in next, drawing out two new legs. None of the limbs matched his own body or each other. One leg was long, brown and scared.The other was short and shaped like a bow. His new arm he inspected, finding it to be feminine and slender. He dunked his other knob in, pulling out something stronger, covered in tattoos. The blood dried up and darkened to match the floor.
Ulysses stood up, his body a plane in a storm, leaning on a rail overlooking the chamber. No strain will lead down- no one was meant to go back down. Ulysses circled the ring of cells for a way down. The bones in these new limbs ached, and the joints that connected them burned like hot needles in his pelvis and shoulders. He counted thirty rings of cells layered on top of one another. He climbed over the railing, his tendons stretching and tearing as he lowered himself to the next level.
At the last level, he heard a cardboard like riiip and pain shot through his upper body. Blood trickled down his back. One arm now hung by a single vessel- he felt it.
The opened way closed- the gap now mended with a fresh slate. Within the slate, Ulysses saw the neck veins and the swastika tattoo of Erwin. He touched it, and heard his shrill threats to release him.
“I’ll get you out-I’ll get you out.” Ulysses assured, rich with doubt, the ear hole in the restored wall.
Ulysses walked away, his mismatched legs causing his body to plummet. The tendons in the arm he caught himself with tore. The spirits still stirred overhead, dividing and parting back to their cells that closed at once with a damning bolt that sealed the chamber’s silence. Ulysses leaned up on his arms, another riiip but he stood once more, blood trickled down both sides of his back.
The ceiling growled, simmering like distant cracks of thunder, then grinding as disjunctions widened in the ceiling above. Grains seeped downward through the ethereal dust, then larger sediments as the fissure broke out into branches of disruption. A blitzkrieg of blades of light cut through the ceiling. The holes broke apart, and large portions grumbled and collapsed.
Ulysses applied his body against the wall and covered his face when the ceiling wedge slammed into the floor. Ulysses felt his feet bounce. A gust of air swept sharp grains into the back of his hands. The fissures widened when Ulysses looked up at the emerging daylight razors. Rain fell from the clouds into the chamber with swooping cyclones of mist. He trembled , his bones anticipating the pressure of the slabs pressing his ribcage enough to squish the air from his lungs, but not enough to kill him, but to let him suffer and drown in the rain.
A guttural moan barked to him. A cell across the chamber called to him. A pair of gleaming eyes shined like a lazer and struck his pupils.
“Open my cell, and I’ll save your life.” The entombed offered, slurping saliva and growling between breathes.
Ulysses pressed even tighter against the wall, but he dove away when the crumbling blocks drifting towards him as if thrown from a mountain peak. In the impact dust, Ulysses felt the furious chains of the Chamber stab his heart with its intention to kill him as the rocks followed him as they fell as he ran like a clawless crab to the cell. “Yes, Ulysses, yes-” The voice uttered.
No handles, nor locks stuck out for Ulysses to take hold of. He checked the capsule shell, feeling around with his fingers, pressing the squares and lines for switches. Rocks exploded against the floor behind him, splashing in sky white pools.
Blood ran down his arm and onto his hands, and streaked across the ingot surface. The fluid sunk into the faint notches and imperfected clefts and steamed. The capsule opened with a n ancient straining of wires. Ulysses dove in when the cell opened wide enough to match a car window. He scrapped his clothes and tore them, cutting his chest and guts on the edge with the velocity he hurled himself at.
The rocks shattered when they hit the cell. Dust gathered around and buried the capsule, pouring through the slot. In the front.
Ulysses didn’t have room to move- the creature inside, Ulysses dared not look away, his eyes- not even if they were optimal- able to distinct the creature from the sharp iron and shadow inside. The creature viewed the world not with one a single pair but five eyes convecting up and down across its body.
“Fear not,” wet tendons tangled around its neck. “ The others may, but I shan’t hurt you.”
Ulysses felt its tarp like skin pulsate against his, the cramped space a hot, slime coated mess. In its eyes Ulysses saw torches he used to ignite fuses and the art of flame’s pure consumption. Ulysses choked on the dust seeping in. The hurdling impacts ceased. The torches sank, and the creatures lungs filled, pressing through the ribs under its chin and wheezing like an empty plastic bottle under the strangling hold of someone wanting every last drop. Thorny bristles scratched Ulysses cheek only a hair gone from his only function eye. The bristles grew like grass.
“… but I haven’t eaten in so long” it uttered, a javelin of remorse in each hot breath. The bristles grew like barley, leafing his body for pores and orifices to root into. Ulysses took a handful of it and pulled. Elastic snapping, but crunched before they tore free as he rolled from the capsule, as the shell closed. The slimey hairs brushed his hand, between his fingers, under his fingernails. Ulysses dropped them, and unlike the remains of abominations littering the chambers, they lived on- tumbling into a corner of rubbles. Hairs reached like sunflower stalks from the slot, until the seeping dust flushed the slot. A loose pyramid formed in its place. The hairs fell and ceased advancement.
Ulysses suffered strikes of soreness cast through his torn flesh and bruised ribs. His legs gave out once more, but he drove his knees forward and rolled onto a door sized ceiling fragment. His mass centered on his shoulders but he landed softly. He rolled off, and looked up, the exposed sky a colander of blinding lights. Ulysses rubbed his eyes with what remained of the flesh between his thumb and pointing finger. He noticed something in the air, the water falling sounded different than before. It didn’t patter or slap but shaved almost in sound, as a razor does when gliding down a soap lathered extremity.
He opened his eye once more, and felt the ceiling cover and felt a coat of swampy moss across the crumbled pieces of ceiling. He squinted and watched slowly as he drew in detail by detail. Leafs, vines, green and purple knots of swaying growth, drooping over the lips of the surface.
Ulysses no longer heard the mourning of bones confined in the blocks nor the wailing of imprisoned blasphemies. Only the breathing of the foliage.
Ice-water rinsed his body as he hauled himself up the vines. Some snapped free, but he secured his waist in ligneous vines. The weight pressed against the center of his body, and his limbs burned with overuse, but despite the urging agony endured up each brick of the wall, the tendons remained firm.
The peak beckoned with wavering blossoms on curled vessels. Shore-tasteful wind galed moisture and loose leafs in his face. Red sea hawks flew overhead. The waves crashed somewhere below.
Ulysses reached for the climbing vines, propelled his reach over the mass of growth. With his arms across, he saddled the the wall, and looked out across the remains of the isle. Rocky ridges eclipse a pillar of earth connected to the isle by a path of boulders smashed together and suspended by the cliffsides. He heard something like wings, and looked for the living myth among the rocks and trees below- A hawk cried out for blood.
Ulysses heard its swift wings slice through island vapor, but he didn't look skyward for its, for he saw Ashgabat emerge from the rocky bushes, carrying a hacksaw in one hand and a silver horn in the other.
The hawk landed its talons and dug its claws into the soft cheese of his good eye. He took the valkyrie killer with his corrupt clutches and tore it pieces as he dropped fifty feet and bouncing from the wet clovers below, coughing up blood, he rolled towards the cliff, where restraining waves washed the spear heads of rocks below.
Ashgabat crossed the boulder arch and stood above Ulysses. He hacked clots of blood from his lungs and spat them over the edge.
Ashgabat walked on, stopped, drew a long knife and returned.
“Dont worry, I will let you live on. If I'm right, I can use this horn to clean water, or ease infection, but I have a better idea- you see, I need something that will keep me safe from the curses of this place while I practice raising the bones of the inhabitants. You will be my finest servant, Ulysses-” He produced a forearm and shin bone from interior pockets.
