The Mad Mage
Give me mandibles, fangs, claws. Give me scales, fur, blubber. Give me caustic venom and a jagged stinger. Witness me molt. Behold my foaming maw of teeth and gum. See me loom and be enveloped in my shadow, a pitch so dark it’s a fathomless depth of a sole uneasiness—the kind borne from a lurking thing like a flea rooted to a mound of flesh, drawing the essence of life for its own.
If you have gazed into this wretched sight and are taken of the faculties to tell of it, cursed with eternal duty to gate this knowledge hereafter, perhaps then you are given cause to stare at me so obscenely. Otherwise, venture to keep a refined and stately composure by squarely abandoning your quest to agitate me.
I sit in solitude upon a bench before a courthouse in the public square, unbothered and bothering to none, so acutely aware of the slant glances from the magistrates, solicitors and lawmen to a boy so unobtrusive as I. It’s gauche. So distracted they are by my countenance that they are narrowly missed by the drays and hire-coaches.
Perhaps they should loosen the reins so they don’t.
Perhaps not, as that would be cruel to the horses.
A disconcertingly crowded dray trundles down the boulevard and parks by a terminal across the way, retching its commuters out to fend for themselves amidst thrum of traffic only to devour more into its belly before lumbering down the street like a toad, swelling with coin and civilian. My brother, Alcedor, is one particular passenger.
He makes his way to me after disembarking, disregarding the instruction of the traffic warden to their contempt as they thread through the choked streets of the Castle Ward. He offers no greeting when he closes in on the bench I alone occupy, just planted and idle for too long a moment.
“Where is it, then?” he says.
I look at the courthouse behind us.
“Well,” he drones, “let’s get a move on, then.”
We begrudgingly enter the courthouse, almost losing ourselves under the baroque architecture, the tall, trellised windows, and the high vaulted ceilings until we encounter a hooded magistrate who drags us the rest of the way. I could tell, even under their hood, this magistrate thought it easier to discard us behind an iron-bound door and let some other officials do right by the law, whereupon the subsequent one will repeat the same and mark it complete in their records. All the same, all for naught.
We’re ultimately led under the courthouse where the cell blocks lie in dreary rows of barred boxes. The air felt thin, the walls creeping with mildew. Grimy runoff seeped from the ceiling and pooled in the corners of every cell, delivering tendays of collected sediment and oil.
A torturous gloom pervades the darkly chamber, the kind suffused in sites of profound and historical horrors, like graveyards and abandoned buildings, structures that house a tangible dread within its walls that it palpably forewarns the dangers of entering it, and one that is compounded by the dripping of rainwater and the silhouette of a darkly figure tucked in the shadows of his cell nearby.
I could sense him feasting on the sight of me as we passed. But in the fringes of my vision, I could only perceive the glisten of his eyes—the blotchiness of the skin on his legs—the calloused soles scraping the stones beneath him and his desiccated flesh. He did not breathe and he did not move.
A stinging sensation emerged in my arm and hands. Though I’ve never taken to the consumption of them, tiny needles tugged and pricked under my skin. There was an acute awareness in me that iron bars were all that barred it from me.
“Just teeming with clientele, aren’t you?” Alcedor says.
“Funny, aren’t you?” The magistrate says. “As you can see, there is no other work to be completed in this esteemed court, other than you two boys, who are all that are keeping me from concluding what was an orderly and peaceable day. So no, not counting you both, we are not teeming with clientele.”
“Maybe if your gait wasn’t the distance between your chin and lips, we could finish this much sooner,” I say.
“Are you calling my chin small?” the magistrate asks.
“No—I’m saying you’re walking too slow.”
“Bedeviling child,” The magistrate derides.
I didn’t tell him he missed one—the staring one. He was agitated plenty.
We had thusly reached the cell containing it, the cause of today’s folly and the sink of all relevant party’s time. The thing idled in the cell. Its form was such that of a malformed child, short and little-limbed, but its muscles were taut around the bone and its head and hands were larger than they ought to have been. The skin was grainy and textured wood-like, striations curling along its unclothed body. How its thin and frail neck could support the mass of its own head was a discomforting mystery upon looking at it. The center of its face held a cavity where its nose would have been, and its eyes were lidless and slitted, an abominable contortion of the human composition melded with the perverse qualities of a serpent.
Except it had wings sheathed in hardened carapace on its back like a cockroach. It was an effigy altogether made of the most erroneous, revolting things. A biological catastrophe.
And it was beautiful for it.
“Gods, grace me now.” The magistrate grimaces. “The gall on you to… how did you even conceive of that grotesque?”
“Quite easy,” I say. “By combining sawdust, raven digits, the shed skin of a water moccasin, nail clippings, saliva from man preferably succumbed to illness, and a touch of salt results in this: the impeccable depiction of what you will come to look like once you crest your middle age!”
Alcedor pinches my neck in warning.
The magistrate grows rigidly still. “Keep laughing, child. Continue to humor this, and you will see there are designs beyond your capacity to toy with them.”
“Name one.”
“Nature. Life—”
“I said only one.”
The magistrate balls his hand into a fist.
Before whatever ensued, my brother interrupts. “We understand, magistrate. Ever are we in the service of the courts. So we will generously remove the burden of disposing this little mistake from the great and heavy shoulders of a magistrate like yourself. Do not worry, we are knowledgeable enough to operate the furnaces ourselves: lock before blazing!”
“To my and the courts’ surprise, there will be no need for the furnace today.”
“Excuse me?” My brother says.