I was recently playing a Rayman 3 marathon and was stricken with the urge to write a story about Razoff (he needs far more love than he gets). I had trouble thinking of anything for a time, considering a character that lives alone in the middle of nowhere kind of limits my options, and then this weird idea popped into my head. I was feeling…deep, I think. And I wanted to continue my ongoing quest to become more descriptive. I hope you enjoy.
Razoff and the Rayman universe are property of the lovely people at Ubisoft, not me.
Fireflies
A dark veil had rolled in from the west with a frightening urgency no mortal's hand could delay, to make its true intentions known when it pounced upon the Bog of Murk and released its torrent upon the waterlogged landscape the sun itself had long ago forgot. Even the luminescent orbs that hung in the trees were choked out by the downpour, their lights retreating for refuge from the storm, and only a thundering flash of lightning could break through the shroud just enough to reveal the silhouette of something not made by the dreams of Polokus.
The mansion towered where it stood, high above the churning floodwaters, for now, haughty in its certainty that it held dominion over nature. It laughed at what it had trampled underfoot to take up its purchase here. Its inner rooms and rambling corridors were the only things to be spared the sky's fury, but its appearance alone was enough to assure any onlookers they were unwelcome to the respite found within its depths.
A predator prowled its labyrinthine halls, but he was no beast, but rather, the hunter who stalks them. The hour was too late for the specifics to bear any consequence, the rooms having been plunged into the darkness of sleep long ago, but even if but a single fireplace remained lit to provide one beacon in an otherwise black jumble of rooms, the occupant could have navigated this place blind if need be.
Something gnaws deep within his soul, and the only way he can seek relief is by movement, and his restless feet take him from wall to wall in a fashion too purposeful to be mere wandering, but too fruitless to be much else. Even a solitary existence such as his has inspired some attention, and some other things, as well, but it wasn't as much a comfort as he had first believed to have one's name whispered for miles around, when the details behind his partial fame were not in the manner he'd prefer.
Count Razoff bears his unease with a regal air only he could possess. A king clad in a crimson coat instead of a cape, paired with the wide-brimmed hat that marked his nobility as well as any crown. And most vital of all, for the man would simply not be who he was without it. A rifle, polished to a silver glow despite its age, a symbol of power far more potent than any mere scepter. The slender reptilian man might as well have been a king, fretting over the affairs of his kingdom, a kingdom of mire and the sulphur smell of stagnant water, his mansion a castle to hide within while the rest of the world decayed. Even still, his mansion, too, had aged beyond its years. The incessant moisture was responsible for the frequent patching the furniture had endured and the peeling walls. A once great work of art left outside to rot.
He had paced these very rooms for years uncounted. Nearly. He marks each year he has aged in a special place in his mind and drinks tea by the fireplace to acknowledge the occasion in a manner hardly different from the rest of the days of the year, but with a silence heavier than those other days. Even so, it is a habitual act he is scarcely aware having completed until the realization another year has passed him by comes to wish him good night as he crawls into bed at another day's inevitable close.
The only cause for celebration, the only real one, at least, is the acquisition of yet another trophy to join the others. He has filled his many rooms with them, another testimonial to his great skill as a hunter, visual proof of his dominance over those he could just as easily grind beneath his heel without another thought.
Another thing to collect dust.
The silence is unbearable, even as the massive clock ticks away in the grand hall to count the seconds and hours that have thus far been filled by the droning onslaught outside and the growling of an unseen creature demanding entrance. Nevertheless, despite the cacophony of noises wishing to steal away the hunter's focus, it is far too quiet. Even the toads that are normally so content to make their voices known in gratitude for the frequent rains of the wasteland they call home were not to be heard, nor the serenade of the insects he had no choice but to allow to lull him to sleep at night.
Not a single groan of those he kept in the basement had been uttered in ages, and he could not say why this weighed more heavily within him than their cries.
At this moment, it was easy for Razoff to forget that he still bore some attachment to the world beyond, even if it was just a mere thread of spider silk, which he had since found was far stronger than its delicate appearance would imply. He had forgotten many times in the past, had believed he had resided in another world, had transitioned to another existence where the bog went on without end, with the wildlife, the witch, and himself as the sole occupants of a purgatory one could stumble into even before death could pluck them up in its icy hand.
Until the first time he had seen that look in another's eyes, when keen senses had detected loathing swimming about the dark pits of his quarry's pupils. Since when had his prey looked up at him with anything but the fear and reverence reserved only for the one who would bring about their end?
No, that kind of response was a personal one. While fear came from the unknown, hatred did not. And from that moment, a floodgate had burst open, along with a realization that would have been meaningless if not coupled with the rumors that had begun to trickle in, of what they said. Of what those who had heard of his name accused him of, a killer, a murderer.
They dared to speak such lies about him, to sully his reputation by recounting atrocities he had not committed. They had their place in this world; he had his. What good was a hunter without his prey? What meaning did victory hold if there was no one to take on the role of the loser? Life was a hunt. Life was brutal. He had learned from his father how to gain the upper hand, even as these same lessons led to a rivalry that had severed their bond even before he had set out for the exile that was his family's tradition.
He would never again allow himself to be on the losing end of the hunt.
Razoff's boot-clad feet stilled before his mind had been given the chance to comprehend why, and his eyes, whose inner thoughts could only be guessed at, but never discovered, turned to inspect the window most readily in his path. Intricate stained glass, tinted yellow and rose when the light hit it, though dulled to an indistinct grey in the gloom, stared back, but this change he had sensed before understanding what it was could not be made clear this way.
He blinked at the wall that barred sight to the outside. The rumblings that had competed with his thoughts these past hours was withdrawing, to carry its fury elsewhere. He could hear the ticking of the clock down the hall, but in all else, silence reigned, even the hunter's thoughts as frozen as his lithe frame.
No further sign of the outside world met his keen and practiced ears, and as if to confirm the storm hadn't swept it all away, he made for the window in quick strides. The latch that kept the window secure had rusted with disuse and the humid air, but a few good tugs were enough to make it jerk loose.
A grunt escaped his throat at the effort required to slide the window up against its will, the sound followed by a gasp as a rush of cold came to greet him, the very chill he had always worked so hard to keep at bay. The lowering temperature of the room was not what captivated his attention, however, but the sight of what lay beyond.
Even as the dark clouds that lingered above smothered any chance of light from the twin moons, the Bog was alight with a myriad of orbs in all the colors of his imagination. They drifted with no purpose but a playful urge to merely flit and flutter about in a slow dance, blinking each with a rhythm of its own as their numbers were doubled by their dappled reflections in the still water below, a mirror that had yet to turn cloudy as it inevitably would once the Bog's eternal decay drifted back up to the surface. It was a waking dream that met the hunter's eyes, as he stood there in reverent awe to witness what was surely akin to the stars themselves leaving the heavens to weave a slow dance for their sole observer.
These were not Lums, however, but something far more precious.
Fireflies.
He hadn't seen them in so many years, not since he was a boy in that previous life that took place before he accepted a willing banishment to the most remote regions of the Glade of Dreams. In fact, his father had been the one to show them to him, and it had all begun one night with a whispered and mysterious request to follow.
He had led his son, the boy still clad in naught but his nightshirt and slippers, away from their family's estate, away from the hunting trophies and the wealth Razoff had never been without, to a secret clearing only his father knew how to find. He had expected it to be his father's newest capture, but instead, the boy had been stricken speechless by a spectacle so foreign to his young eyes. The trees seemed to glitter with the sheer number of fireflies that had gathered there, unperturbed by their onlookers as his father recounted tales of his own youth and the luminous insects he said were the last of their kind, that he had only before seen when he was young. They were rumored to be the memories of days gone by, his father had told him, which explained their glow, and at the time, the boy had believed it to be so, when he believed every word uttered by his father as absolute.
It was the only time, as far as Razoff could remember, that his father ever set aside his rifle, the one time they were father and son, and not teacher and student. Not hunting partners. Not rivals competing to prove or disprove the merits of age and experience or the advantages of youth and an open mind.
They remained in that glade in the swamps of his homeland until the child had nearly fallen asleep, and he didn't slip fully into slumber until he was carried home in his father's arms, leaving him to question whether the night had been a mere dream or reality.
Until now.
The fireflies should have been extinct by now, snuffed out by predators and children that wished to trap them in jars. He had never expected them to come back, but there they were, as if they had meant for this encounter, as if they had orchestrated the very storm itself, to lure his gaze outside. At this moment, more so than any other during the long years that came prior, he felt that small boy he had once been, remembered what it was like to be young, acknowledged the unlikely truth that this child had been him once, not Count Razoff and not the owner of a mansion in the middle of nowhere. When he did not even think of himself as a hunter.
And yet, even so, he could not recall a time when he did not know the weight of a rifle in his hands and was not familiar with the feel of another's blood as it dried upon his skin, a sensation he never believed he would get used to, but had with frightening speed.
Like it or not, he had always been the hunter his father had trained him to be.
There had been a time before the rumors, a time which held no presence in this palace of his, a palace of rats and cobwebs and creaking floorboards. Every room, every shadowy corner and twist in the winding corridors was heavy with memories, but none from those days, and the hunter wondered within his secret thoughts, pleaded to the fireflies for the answers to the questions that pursued him to exhaustion, why his sleep was haunted by nightmares anymore and a chill had settled into his heart the first time sadness had peered back at him from the eyes of those he held captive?
What place did bad dreams have for a man who could want for nothing, who was clad in the finest fabric one could buy and detailed in the most expensive of gilded thread? What right did unease have squirming its way into a life free from the worries of everyday survival? Of what could a man complain when he had received what he had worked his entire existence for?
He could not take his eyes from the twinkling display that had settled outside his window, but if the fireflies possessed the knowledge he sought, they showed no signs of divulging it.
Perhaps, he thought to himself, the answer wasn't so far off, after all, as distant to grasp as he had for so long believed. Perhaps he never needed an insect, regardless of how rare and the sheer beauty of the ethereal light in which they pulsed, to appear to him in the otherworldly dance that held him in its thrall.
Perhaps all he had needed. Was a reminder.
Count Razoff swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat and closed his eyes, the act of severing the fireflies from his vision done with far less grandeur than he had expected. He turned from the window and was nearly taken aback at how different a sight that greeted him. High walls and tiled floors in the gold and crimson of his wealth, these details clear by experience only, for they had since been reduced to varying shades of black and grey in the dying embers on the hearth, were more than willing to keep the outside at bay. Trophies stood like gargoyles in the darkness, awaiting the moment they might again gain life, but unlike gargoyles, they represented naught but lives that would never wake again.
Perhaps he had always known why, why he could no longer last one night without being woken with a racing heart at least once, why he had to fight to make eye contact with his prey when it could run from him no more.
And yet, why…why should any of this really matter to him in the end?
For who was there to care for one solitary man?
I haven't had this much fun with my writing in a while, and I think it's one of my most descriptive stories to date. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. And I do hope I got the point across I was trying to make, as well. Razoff intrigues me so.
Please review, my dearies. It makes me jolly.