Deus Necros

Chapter 549: Artistic Eccentricity

The scene in front of Ludwig revealed itself fully. And it was the same scene that caused his heart to roil, even though the pendant tried desperately to calm it down. It still struggled to stop it from shuddering at the scene. Cold moved along his ribs like a thin wet thread, while heat from the braziers and the breath of the cavern pressed against his face. He let the cool of the amulet settle in his throat, let it spread along the collarbone and pool there, yet the sight would not soften. The mind steadied, the body remembered its training, and still a pressure gathered behind the eyes as if the skull wished to close.

Ludwig didn’t have hate in him for Titania or her followers, he only found them annoying, mildly at times and exasperating at others. But not to the point of going at each other’s neck. The holy order was in fact a religious group, too held up on their thinking and avoid progressive cognition, but at the same time, they weren’t directly harmful to him. Memory laid its cards with sharp edges. The way the young paladins set their jaws when speaking of sin and salvation. Irritation, yes, and on bad days a pulse of contempt, but not the kind of hate that burned clean through bone.

Even with all the happenings back then at the Black Tower academy, he couldn’t fault the Holy Order for hunting him, as the cause was Sebas and Evan in the first place.

And the meeting with Titania cleared up some things, especially after she spent some of her own time teaching Ludwig more about the sword. And then fought alongside him back at Tulmud against his master’s worst nemesis and the many abhorrent creatures and monsters of the former servants of Necros. He remembered the slight turn of her wrist correcting his guard. The small nod that meant try again. The sound steel makes when it meets steel with perfect intent. He remembered Tulmud’s heat and the color of the sky when monsters died in numbers that broke counting, and the way she stood after, as if a storm had passed through her and found nowhere to rest.

But right now, the scene in front of him though made all those memories come back, alongside them it gave Ludwig an incredible urge to utterly destroy the person responsible for this situation. The urge did not shout. It grew the way frost grows across a pane, thin at first, then burying everything beneath a breathless white.

Every paladin, cleric, and church member, along with many unfortunate soldiers of the empire, the Hero and Titania included were all pinned to the walls of the caverns. The walls themselves were no longer stone but a ledger of bodies. The ribs of the chamber framed them like the bars of a vast cage, and that made the silence worse. It was the kind of silence that comes after voices have been carefully removed.

Crucified, while alive and breathing. Their feet crossed, and a nail the size of a child’s arm staked through them, their arms spread and nailed to the walls, while their eyes and tongues were missing. The breathing came shallow and wet. A thousand small sounds none of which became a voice. Chest plates rose. Fingers twitched in unconscious prayer. The thin threads of blood at the nails throbbed with the heartbeats of those who remained, bright and steady as if the body refused to learn what had happened to it.

All their eyes were placed on a large plate while in another plate was their tongues, right next to the man with a hammer in his hand. The plates were set as if this were a table, as if a guest might sit and decide which dish to taste first. Some of the eyes still glimmered with milked light, catching the reflection of the brazier and giving it back in small, broken rings. The tongues lay heaped and drying, edges curled like leaves in drought.

The tall skinny man who had no face as it was cloaked in darkness, arms thin and long, and a body to match, far taller than Ludwig was by at least half the size. His shadow did not behave. It leaned where it should not and folded the angles of his limbs into shapes that did not correspond to the body. The cloth of his hood was the kind that drank torchlight and left nothing but the idea of a head.

Two circular blades of doom and death were placed neatly behind his back, blood drying and occasionally dripping from them. The blades rested with a careful symmetry, one edge faintly notched as if it had eaten bone too quickly, the other with long streaks that had already turned brown. When a drop fell it made a small sound, more like oil than water, and the smell of old copper rose a little stronger.

In his other hand was another stake, and from the looks of it, the last one he’ll place. He turned it once in the fingers as a workman tests a nail, weighting the length, listening for the soft song that wood or bone sometimes gives back. The hammer sat in his palm as if it had grown there.

And although he noticed Ludwig and Misty, he smiled, raised an unfortunate, unable to even scream soldier’s hand up, and then struck the stake into his arm. The blow landed with a clean crack that the cave returned three times. The soldier’s throat worked without sound. His heel shuddered once against the stone unable to move due to the stake pinning it. The eyes already taken away left only the collapse of the brow and the trembling of the mouth unable to announce pain.

The soldier couldn’t even groan although his whole body convulsed. It felt like he wanted to scream, but something took his ability to even utter noise away. Ludwig watched the pulse in the neck leap and slow.

“Ah, finally, I’m done,” the man, servant, creature, or whatever that thing was said. He turned to Ludwig and asked, “Tell me, what do you think of this artistry, fellow servant of Necros,” the words were spoken to Ludwig and it told him tomes. The title fell into the room like a stone into a well. The echo that came back was not the same shape. It told him familiarity where none had been offered. It told him presumption and the kind of joy that artists reserve for those they think understand.

Without beating around the bush, without even conversing, Ludwig had flown through the whole room with his sword swinging down at the man who had more than so anticipated it. The knees bent and released. The floor took the first step and gave it back without a sound. Durandal rose and came down with the weight of all that was pinned to the walls. He did not bother with the breath that names a technique. He let the arms do what they had practiced to exhaustion.

He meant to break through, and if the body refused, to break the body too.