I love Once Upon A Time, but I own not a single word of it. Warning, it's a bit dark up ahead...
Set around the figures in Desperate Souls, or, well, one figure anyway. I'd gotten curious about the origin of the Dark One and the notion that such awesome powers could be controlled by virtue of controlling a common household object, which then sent my brain spinning along parallel lines and other supernatural creatures who could be coerced by humans who held common household objects, and, well, the ifrit (or jinn, or genie, whatever) just sort of smacked me in the face. A short bout of research later and this story emerged - yah, yah, I know ifrits are Arabic in origin, but the guy's a traveler so I figure, what the heck. And if anyone can tell me who the woodcarver is, I'd appreciate it; I'd imagined him as Gepetto, right up until the point that I wrote it so he couldn't be (at least according to internal consistency with the canon). Read and review! Reviews are my happy ending. :)
"It is a long tale," said the man, swirling his drink in the bottom of the cup before raising it to his unseen lips and tipping it back. His deep hood kept his face in shadow, and the dim lighting discouraged anyone from gazing too long into the darkness.
His companion, a man young in years though old in experience, grunted, using a long poker to stir up the fire. A plume of sparks flared and settled, and the old logs complained mightily as a new one was added to their number. Splinters of wood caught fire and burned, bright and brief, before hunkering down to the serious business of giving light and heat. "It's a long night," said the fellow at last, "and bound to get longer. I've told all my own stories to m'self a hundred times over; I would welcome fresh tales, if only to stave off the boredom another night." Despite his words, his hands sought his knife and a chunk of wood, busily setting to work whittling as he always did in his spare moments.
The hooded man seemed to take no notice of his host's distraction, fishing out a pipe from the depths of his cloak. He lit it casually with a taper from the fire, casting the glowing stalk atop the rest of the flames once his pipe was drawing well. It was disconcerting to watch smoke issuing from an unseen mouth, and a man with a more active imagination might have seen demon flame glowing there instead of eyes. "Ahh," the stranger sighed with satisfaction. "Good food, good drink, and good tobacco; what else in all of this green earth could a man desire?"
"A good yarn," came the reply. "Beggar ye may be, but the food is not begrudged so long as a tale follows it. Come, man, a story! Lighten both our hearts from our cares."
The stranger stretched out his limbs, settling more deeply into the chair. He drew once more upon the pipe, then let his hand rest upon the arm of the chair as the hood turned, taking in the full details of the room. "My tale is a true one, for a given value of true," he said at last.
"There are few who would believe it, and there are times when I don't much believe it myself. It began in a country far from here, in a time when no man living can ken.
"At that time, there were wars, aye, and rumors of wars. Death was cheap, and life held dear by those who had it. Blood stained the sands red, and those red sands were so weighty that they pressed together to form rock, and those rocks were used to build fortresses so that more blood could be shed more conveniently. Men in jewels and brocade fought other men in jewels and brocade, and their armies died by the thousands. One would think that the spirit of Death would be sated by so many sacrifices to his altar, but He is ever greedy, and the bloody scimitar is not more satisfying than the bloody club. He haunted the streets just as He haunted the battlefields, and that is how the Dark One came to be born.
"Murder most foul lets loose more in the world than a mere murderer, you understand. The very fabric of the universe is changed by the act. There are steps that may be undertaken to stop these changes, to reverse them, but if the murderer goes unpunished, if the rites go unperformed, if the blood of the victim cries out for justice...
"It was a young woman who began it. She was a bride-to-be, whose bridegroom was to meet her before her tent the very next day. In her nerves and excitement, she could not sleep, and so took herself to the garden, to the cistern, to watch the moon and compose herself for her wedding.
"As she sat, contemplating her future, a dark shape grabbed her from behind. A single thrust, a single slice, not even time to scream, and the girl lay dead upon the ground. All her hopes turned to rage, all her fear turned to wrath, and the wizard who committed the murder bound her soul to his knife, the very knife which had let her blood fall. He sought a magic weapon, which could wield great power, and innocent blood is best for such dark deeds. But he reckoned without the iron will of the girl, and her thirst for vengeance.
"On a black night beneath a lunar eclipse, when dark forces are at their strongest, this wizard performed the final rite. He bound himself to the knife, that he might live howsoever he might be struck, that old age and illness should not befall him, that nothing alive nor dead could strike him down. The souls of his many victims would fuel his own life, and he would be eternal, and eternally powerful.
"But the girl. Oh, the girl! From her blood had arisen a creature of myth, of legend, culled from the very depths of hell itself by her unholy murder and forged from the last remnants of her soul. An ifrit, called also by the name of jinn, or genie; the wizard had, all unknowingly, created the creature and bound it within his knife. And when he bound himself, also, to the blade, the ifrit had its exit. It flowed down the magical bond and burst forth from the wizard, charring his corpse almost to cinders in its haste.
"And then stopped. For the magic of the wizard, though foolish, was also strong, and the ifrit could not escape it. It was bound to the knife, and the knife to him, and knife and ifrit both to the corpse which still smoked on the floor of the cave.
"Thus bound, the ifrit was unable to take physical form. Instead, it was forced to inhabit the body of the thing it was tied to, or to inhabit the knife itself. Frustrated, for the jinn love their freedom near as much as they love their mischief, it animated the corpse. It walked it into the wizard's tower, and then down among the wizard's servants. Terrified, they fled. All but one young man, nearly a boy, who, in utter desperation for his life, wrested the knife from the corpse's grasp and plunged it into the unholy chest.
"And the ifrit sensed a crack, a hole, a portal in the wizard's power. With a cry of triumph, it tore free from the charred body, seeking the freedom of the upper air.
"And was sucked back, down again, into the body of the young man. The ifrit stared at his knife in his hand, as his former body fell dead before him. He stared at the name that formed in letters of black hellfire along the wavy blade, and knew it to be his own.
"And the ifrit laughed. He laughed and he laughed and he laughed, his dark mirth staining the very air about him, until the sky itself clouded over so that the stars could protect themselves from his madness. Born from murder, bred from magic, power in his very veins, the ifrit knew the world was his for the taking, his for the destroying. Shrouding himself in a cloak black as midnight, taking with him only a staff and his knife, he set out to conquer the world."
"And did he?" asked the young man, who had long since ceased to whittle, eyes growing round and white as the tale progressed.
The stranger took another puff from his pipe. "Yes. Many times, in many guises. The old wizard's spell was imperfect - the one who bore the knife could not be harmed by anything but the knife, and therein lies the weakness. Death comes to all men, and to the powerful more swiftly than most. When one body was murdered, the ifrit simply took up residence in the murderer, and thus passed from body to body, age to age."
"Has he no weaknesses, then?"
"Oh, aye," replied the man with a grunt, shifting old bones on a hard bench. "All creatures living do. To lose the knife is to lose control. He who rules the knife rules the ifrit."
The whittler nodded. "Like a genie," he said, "tied to his lamp."
He couldn't see the stranger's eyes, but a crawling feeling up his spine made him think that the man was regarding him carefully.
"Very like," came the voice from under the hood. "Only the wishes that can be demanded are not limited to the traditional three. A brutal and powerful man who has no fear could bind the ifrit to eternal servitude. In an aging body, he would be unable both to resist or to leap to another host."
"Could he not get his knife back by magical means?" came the curious question, and the old man shook his head.
"Not against the wielder of the knife. His magic is bound by it."
"Then trickery, perhaps," said the young man. "He could convince someone else to do the stealing for him."
The hooded figure lurched a little, as if in denial, then settled back, the set of the shoulders thoughtful. "...yes," came the murmur, almost inaudible behind the wool hood. "Yes, it might be possible. Very possible. Of course," he mused, "such a man would have to be desperate."
The young man shrugged, taking up his knife again. A figure had formed in the wood, the body of a wolf-puppet, and he carefully carved away another shaving, helping the muzzle take shape. "There's always desperate people about," he said, a shrug in his voice if not in his arms. "Couldn't be that hard to find one."
A smile was in the stranger's voice. "You'd be surprised, lad," he said. "Ah well, I'd best be on my way."
"Really?" The young man set aside his knife. "But it's hours yet until dawn."
The old man stood and shook his robes into place, lastly pulling the strap of his bag over his head so that the burden rested upon his hip. "'All things are difficult before they become easy,'" he said, and it sounded like a proverb to the young man's ear, though not any proverb he had ever heard. "You have given me much to think upon. I thank you." He paused on the threshold and bowed graciously.
"Sir?" The stranger paused as the young man came to the door. "I never got your name."
A beam of light caught the man's face as he turned. He was old, older than the young woodcarver would have placed him, but that was not what arrested his eye and chilled his heart. The feral grin of a demon winked out at him from the folds of cloth that formed the hood. "Why, I am called Zoso, young man. For now." And with that enigmatic final phrase, he hobbled off into the borderlands, leaning heavily on his staff and cursing softly with every misstep.
The young man shivered and shut the door. God help whatever poor soul that man was after. It was sure to need God's direct intervention, too, for surely the man who had so innocently shared his table was not of woman born, nor had he a soul which might harbor hope of salvation. He crossed himself and tried desperately to remember if there was a proscription against breaking bread with the damned. He rather thought there ought to be, though he was almost positive that his immortal soul was covered by the injunction to succor weary travelers. He crossed himself again, and a third time just to be sure, and went to bank the fire. Things would be better in the morning, clearer. It was too easy to see goblins and fae folk by dark of night.
As he tucked himself into bed, he shook his head. "Look at ye," he scolded himself. "You'd think the Dark One himself had supped here, for all your superstition." With that, he blew out the candle and settled to sleep. A small part of his mind, however, sent up prayers of gratitude that he was not, in any way, shape, or form, a desperate man. God help the man who is. I should not like to be in those shoes, no sir.