He lay there gasping and shuddering in pain as he struggled to breathe, his wide eyes fixed on the old shaman who hefted his bulk off his pallet and moved to sit cross-legged next to Yhalen’s body. The slaves hurried to gather his ritual items, sitting them reverently within his easy reach as he chanted and made meaningless motions in the air over Yhalen’s head.
Yhalen faded out, sucked into the throbbing center of pain at his feet. He came back as the ogre clutched his face, thumbs biting into his cheeks as he forced Yhalen’s mouth open. He stuffed something in, a ball of bitter tasting twine and bramble woven with thorns that ripped past his lips, tearing into the inside of his mouth and tongue as the old ogre pushed it by his teeth. When his jaw was forced closed, the sharp edges of thorns dug into the roof of his mouth.
Yhalen’s screams were muffled, blood-garbled things in his throat. The inside of his mouth was shredded and bleeding from the thorny ball and his throat worked constantly, swallowing the blood.
All the while the old shaman chanted, a low rumbling singsong of the same incomprehensible words over and over and over.
Consumed by pain, Yhalen searched for the power to destroy them, to wither them into husks as he had Deathclaw—anything to stop the pain. But he couldn’t find his focus. The outside world, the world beyond the physical hurt, was blurred and distant and without control. Without purpose and concentration, he had no power over it.
The chanting became more distant, like something heard through a rush of falling water. He felt light touches on his chest. The swirling of patterns painted with the brush of a feather, soft and teasing before something sharp and hard thrust into his navel. A thorn, digging into the little recessed nub and tearing past skin to embed itself into the flesh and muscle beneath. It was one more pain among the many and he moaned hoarsely through the prickly gag. One more throbbing irritation that began to swell with the toxin that had coated each thorn.
The knife sliced across his nipple, cutting deep down the center. He couldn’t see the damage, but he felt it. Felt it when a thorn was plunged down into the bloody split flesh, nestled in deep by the prodding of a big finger. There was too much blood in his throat to do more than gurgle in agony. The other nipple was cut, and the thorn pressed down with enough force to embed the tip into his breastbone. He felt the flesh swelling around it, engorged by poison. The blade marked his torso, shallow cuts along his ribs on his stomach, in the hair above his cringing penis.
The little pains were a relief almost, their infliction drawing his battered mind away from the greater ones. Perhaps the respite, slight as it was, had been designed, a few cruel moments to gather the shredded edges of his mind before the shaman grasped his cock and sliced up the bottom side from base to tip, a thin gash that almost immediately began swelling. A thorn was jammed into the slit at the tip, forced inside by the tip of the blade and Yhalen squealed past the thorn ball in his mouth and slammed his head against the floor in an animal frenzy to escape, world narrowed to comprehension of
nothing but the torment his body endured.
He fell into insensibility, not quite able to escape to full unconsciousness, for the hurt was too invasive to allow that peace, but past caring, limp and drifting at the edge of oblivion and wishing for the death he’d been promised. He hardly noticed at all when they untied his legs to flip him over and begin the slow mutilation of his back.
The pain would not allow the escape of unconsciousness, so he was vaguely aware when they dragged him out. Vaguely aware when the ogres took him from the hands of the human slaves and held him up by one ankle, the rest of his limbs dangling uselessly, to the roars of the assembled ogre crowd.
They dragged him by that ankle down the path to the village and through the crowd of massive ogre feet and legs. He was spit on, pissed upon, even kicked if they were quick enough to land a blow as the warrior dragging him marched along. Beyond the village to a stretch of field between the forest and the cliffs, with the whole of the clan following, still jeering and roaring their appreciation of his slow execution.
There was a structure of sorts erected there. Thick poles set in the earth with thinner poles secured perpendicular to the ground. They grasped his other leg and lifted him up, head down, ass up, so that his hips were level with the lowest rung and began securing his legs, ankles to each end and legs stretched so far, so abruptly, that it felt as if tendons tore. He was bound tight against the rung, rope at ankles, knees and thighs. They strung a rope through his hands, still bound at his back and attached it to the top rung, pulling him up so that his back arched painfully, and his shoulders strained in their sockets, through his head was still lower than his hips.
The warlord stepped forward, and spoke loudly to his gathered clan. They roared in a frenzy of anticipation.
Kill me now
, he thought.
Kill me now and make it end.
All he could see was the ground and his hair, lank with sweat and blood falling around his face. The first strike of the whip made him jerk with renewed pain—a curious surprise, considering the greater pains his body had endured. The crowd screamed in appreciation.
Another strike by the hand of Wartooth and the metal-studded strands of the whip slashed through his already torn skin, but this time there was no burning poison to swell the cuts closed, limiting the flow of his blood. This time the red began to freely roll down his body, streaming down his face, blinding him as it pooled in his eyes, wetting his hair, and darkening the ground beneath him.
The lashing stopped and he was distantly aware through the haze of pain and the welcome loss of blood that made his senses dull, of the crowd moving back to a great distance, but not departing entirely. Of the light of morning that made his shadow grow on the ground.
He waited to die. His blood seeped and slowed, and his wounds clotted, prolonging his demise. He cried what tears he could over that denial and hung there, shoulders slowly sliding out of joint as his blood pulsed in his head. An hour passed, perhaps more, while he passed in and out of consciousness.
Distantly, he heard the flap of wings, heard the raucous cry of a carrion bird. He felt the weight of the first of them jar the rung his legs were secured to as it landed, and knew what the final method of his execution was to be. Picked apart by scavengers while he still lived. He moaned and broke the promise he’d made to himself, praying to the Goddess to strike him down now, before they could start in on him.
It was an odd sort of dream, flecked with the scent of violence around the edges and the subtle awareness of
pain. But at the center there was a lethargic quiet that was all pervasive. Getting past the peaceful silence to
discover the threat that stalked at the edges of perception was a monumental task, and not one he was
necessarily willing to undertake, immersed in lethargy as he was.
It was easier by far to simply sink back into oblivion, to let the wolves that roamed the night do as they
wished. What cared he? One oblivion seemed as welcoming as the next, now that he’d tasted the solitude of it.
He’d had enough of fighting. A lifetime of it, from the moment almost of his birth into the cold world. Fighting
for the right to his mother’s teat, fighting to survive the horrendous strength of the other toddlers, for the right
of food and shelter that, after those first few years of life, his mother stopped particularly caring if he got.
He might have died, like so many other half-blood children, of starvation or exposure—or from the sheer
cruelty of the older children—if he hadn’t proven quick of wit and clever even at so tender an age. Even so, the
cleverness of a child barely capable of speech would not have gone far to ensuring his survival if it hadn’t been
for the weakness of an ogre war chief presently out of favor with the clan council.
Mateless and with a young full-blood son of his own, Nagmor Icehand took him in, and was ridiculed for it.
If he wanted a slave, they cried—the proud, ruthless members of the clan—why not take a human, who would
scurry about his duties faster and be easier to reprimand for stupidity. Icehand, among ogres, was considerably
long on patience. He tolerated insults to a great degree, and after a point simply dispatched the voice that
persisted in agitating him. Eventually, all but the most foolhardy ogres ceased to belittle Icehand’s choice of
foundling. At least to his face.
No such temperance was practiced towards the child when he wasn’t within the direct protection of his
newfound guardian. It was worse for him, perhaps, because Icehand had taken him in and defended his choice
and defended his little half-blood from the idle malice of others. They went out of their way to harass him, to
belittle him, to hurt him if they could—and he endured. And grew strong and wily in his stratagems to avoid
them. And soon enough his machinations revolved less around escaping their cruelties than exacting vengeance
for past wrongs endured.
Years and years spent on nothing but survival among them. Years and years learning the way of the proud,
ruthless ogre warrior and then learning how to turn that strength against them.
So much fighting. So much struggle. He was tired of it. The peace he drifted in now was a welcome
alternative. So let the wolves circle. He no longer cared.
The Goddess didn’t hear Yhalen, having turned a deaf ear his way long ago. She had no care that his demise descended in a cloud of dark, fluttering wings.
The crows came first, flapping down to perch on the bar that his legs were bound to, croaking and cawing raucously as their fellows alighted on the ground under him, waddling and pecking at the blood that spotted the earth. A beak pecked at one of the slices on his foot, jabbing into the wound and twisting out a fleshy prize. Others joined in, crowding the pole, flapping onto his legs to pick at the open wounds on his thighs and calves, the slits behind his knees and his buttocks, each of them wrenching free chunks of flesh
He hung there, shuddering in shock and pain, and terror, dizzy from the drugs and the blood filling his head, and the shock of so many tiny agonizing impacts as beaks broke through the open cuts on his body and took away parts of him not heeding the inhuman shrieking sounds that escaped his lips.
Bigger birds came, vultures that landed with a powerful flapping of wings. They had the height that the crows did not, and could feed on him from the ground, strong beaks tearing into the tattered flesh of nipples, wrenching and tearing chunks away, swallowing them whole and plunging back in for more.
His bloody navel was plucked out, the rune thorn with it, and another bird tore into the muscle of his stomach. He felt his right nipple ripped free and a bird pick at the raw flesh beneath it. His left followed suit, a thin strip of skin tearing off along with the nipple, leaving a naked layer of flayed muscle from the place his nipple had been to his armpit.
A few of the vultures displaced some of the crows on the bar between his legs and their more powerful beaks broke into the pits the crows had made in flesh, tearing through soft, scored skin and pulling out the contents in a few victorious chunks. He began vomiting in his mouth, the pain eating away at the reasoning human thing behind his eyes. Agony that never stopped, that hit in a hundred different places, that didn’t diminish with the loss of pieces of him, or the draining of blood from too many wounds on his body to count, but grew and grew and grew until he gibbered inside his head, blind and deaf to anything but the cries of the birds and the struggles of his own heart to keep pumping blood into a body and a mind that wanted to die.
And still he lived, clinging to distorted life. He laughed through the vomit that clogged his throat and filled his nasal passage, suffocating him. He laughed and laughed and felt the overpowering omnipotence of the mountains of the very earth beneath him. He felt the charge in the air of the elemental power that always hovered, that he’d always been peripherally aware of but never so in touch with as he was now, on the verge of death. Just like before, when he’d lain bleeding to death, ripped asunder by Deathclaw in some unnamed southern wood, and power that he’d never known he possessed came to him in flood of omnipotence. Like before, when he had pulled the heady, sweet life-force from the forest and taken it into himself. Only here, it was thick and ominous, a brittle crust of heavy, sluggish force that lay above a raging stream of hot power.
Fire essence, that he did know—mixed with the stubborn forces of the earth, which wasn’t so familiar. He plunged his awareness into that primal power, felt it sweep over him, and any but a pain-mad mind would have tumbled and flailed at the utter immenseness of it. He drew it in, and it
scorched his body and mind with the intensity of its power.
He screamed in euphoria, blood beginning to dribble from his nose, overflowing from a body cavity beginning to fill with it. The birds squawked in fright, animal senses registering calamity before it fell.