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Okay, Fareeq's Perfectly Stupid Ideas is fan-freakin-tastic and I love eeeeet!
The madness and struggle are written so beautifully, and the love scenes are very tastefully done! *Not to mention HAWT*
Go read that fic! OZ commands it! *glares until you read it and leave a nice comment*
Seriously, that fic deserves more comments than its getting. It's tragic how few it has.
DOOOO EEEEEETTTT NOOOOOOOOOWWWW! *insert excessive exclamation points here*
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Chapter 1; The Eye in the Dark
He paced like an animal. Back and forth, back and forth dizzyingly, perpetually, as if he was no longer capable of feeling tired, no longer needed sleep, no longer felt anything but that inhuman, otherworldly thrum beneath his skin.
He spoke of it— No, 'speak' was too dim a word… He snarled it.
Words tumbling out at sharp angles between red teeth…
There was fresh blood at the corners of his mouth, and every so often the sharp blade of his tongue shot out and scraped some back into the cave between his lips, like a mountain beast lashing out for prey and disappearing again before it believed it had been seen.
Malik sat there staring at him thinking—even while he tried to tell himself he needed to listen, needed to know what Altair was saying because it was important— that the young Master needed to eat something.
A week now of these visits and there was still food rotting in the corner from that first day Malik had found him lying there as if dieing, pupils wide, body cold, pale and trembling, blood staining his torn clothes but not a wound to be found.
There was something wrong with Altair, but he didn't really know, or want to accept what he'd been told, so he just sat there, hand on his knee… and listened.
It was all he could do.
Watch, worry, wonder… and listen.
He watched Altair pace, wearing a groove in the floor.
He worried about the bloody sore looking places at the edges of Altair's mouth… they looked larger than they had been the day before, stretching farther and farther across his cheeks, like an ugly mockery of a smile… He needed to eat something, he was malnourished, his clothes were too loose and bruises shaped like teeth were forming on his hands, as if he'd been clawing inside his mouth to force himself to vomit… Vomit, there had been a lot of that too, Altair tried to hide it but Malik knew.
He wondered why Altair's breathing had changed and become almost frantic, why he found the hiss of it in and out of the other man's throat so… so sexual.
Malik didn't know what it was truthfully, only that while Altair was pacing his breath had reached that urgent, wanting pitch. And his hands had begun to scrape over his head, down his chest and up the insides of his thighs to emphasize his misery and despair, as if his very skin itched and burned and he wished to tear it in long bloody strips from his body.
He seemed to be solid, chaotic motion, everything moving, twisting, scratching, sliding…
There was fresh blood at the corners of his mouth, and every so often the sharp blade of his tongue shot out and scraped some back into the cave between his lips…
It was so very sexual. So very alluring—
That was until he realized Altair had stopped talking and was hunched, stomping back and forth with one hand over his mouth, the other wrapped tightly around his middle, whimpering and whining with tears rolling down his face.
"What is it?"
But Altair didn't reply, just whined loudly, the desperate sound of a man who'd lost all his patience with something and had decided to take brash, more often than not reckless, action, and plunged fingers into his mouth, feeling around with a single minded look of pain in his eyes. He seemed to claw around in there beside his tongue for a moment before his nails seized on something and pulled…
Malik's whole body shivered and his fingers tightened on his knee in disgust, jaws creaking as they clamped together.
The muscles in Altair's wrist twitched and his fingers slid free, a bloody rope following them out of his mouth, sliding out to drip and stain his hood.
He released a sound, somewhere between agony and bliss and held his pinched fingers up before his squinted eyes, staring at the spiked thing pinched between them…
It wasn't until Altair let his hand droop to his side and the thing fell to hit the dirt that Malik realized it was one of Altair's molars, bloody and still clinging to a bit of muscle and nerve tissue. He recoiled, staring down at it with his nose wrinkled up, fighting nausea.
Altair stood there staring at it curiously, lips parted, gore dripping from the center of his lower lip, gathering in the corners of his mouth.
He didn't blink, just turned and stared at Malik, his eyes somehow feral, nostrils flared…
He was terribly, eerily still for a long while, and Malik felt an unnatural pressure building on his chest, as if some invisible spirit were sitting on him, trying to sink down and find a home for itself in his very core. His vision shrank in at the edges and he slapped his hand upward, finding it suddenly flat in the middle of Altair's chest and for a moment he thought he was touching something long since dead and rotting.
When had Altair moved?
The next instant Altair was gone…
Malik stared, shocked, fear so potent and real he felt like a child again. The cave was empty except that little fire he'd built and that pressure like presence that made him think he was being watched from somewhere far above him in the blackness.
He fled.
The whole of the next day and night he kept a knife within his reach.
It was two nights before he could go back, and when he did Altair was not there, but scattered amid the frantic footprints and stamped out ashes he found nine more bony protrusions and black, crusty clots of blood and rotting flesh.
He counted in his head… A man only had, on average thirty-two teeth… Altair had only thirty-one to begin with, had had two removed by a surgeon years ago and two broken out in a fight… That left twenty-seven… Now ten were gone in a matter of three days? Looking to have been torn out by the pressure of two fingers?
He shivered and searched the cave, walking as far back as he could calling out before he lost the light of the day and could travel no further. He stood there, on that borderline between hellish blackness and the small shape of daylight behind him for a long while, staring trying to make his eyes penetrate the gloom.
He could feel something, far back in there… watching him.
He likened it first to an animal… but there was something too intelligent about its gaze… something too human, even in its inhumanity.
He called out, once, twice, three times…
Somewhere far back in the cave farther than he could see, the echo of a rock tumbling from some lofty perch echoed out at him.
The eerie silence that followed made Malik feel very small and vulnerable.
There was something big back there… something big and dark that would grab him before he even saw it.
It would strike faster than any blade, faster than any disease. What resided back, far back in this cave was nothing to be trifled with… It flew upon Death's very wings.
He retreated… quickly.
He did not run away. He was not a child and he did not run from the dark. No… He strode quickly, with purpose.
The next morning Malik woke to angry fists pounding on the door to his chambers and somewhere in the world outside his window there were screams.
He worried that there had been an attack, that the fortress was being overrun and he leapt to his feet, sword in hand…
What he found down stairs, instead, was something even more ugly and unexpected.
A woman, collapsed on her knees over a sheet draped body… Her only son. Nearing fifteen years. A mute who had been watching the family's lone surviving goat after the other two had been dragged away and mauled by wolves.
Malik crouched and peered beneath the sheet, breath held from the stink… And found himself staring down at what could only fundamentally be called a human corpse.
The boy's face was gone, only a bony skull, licked clean… Deep swooping grooves were carved into the bone, and both eyes had been plucked cleanly from their sockets… like grapes.
His skeleton was incomplete, the left arm and three ribs gone, the remaining bones showing signs of being gnawed upon. And the flesh of the boy's chest and stomach and been stripped back, peeled away and eaten… Amid the gory mush still residing in his ruined belly Malik spied something foreign… Something that shouldn't be there.
He lifted his eyes again, and then his gaze flipped back quickly in horror, because the boy's grinning eerie skull still had all of his teeth… And that was most definitely a human tooth amid the remains of his liver.
The deceased child's cousin, who had been staying in the field with the unfortunate boy that night, a novice nearing the time of his first trial, was pale but his dark eyes were very very clear.
Malik stood and brushed the sand from his knees, let his breath out in a hiss and gave the three men a nod. Wordless permission to move the body to a more secluded location to be properly washed for burial, a place the dead boy's mother could mourn him without interruption.
Malik's hand landed on the novice's shoulder and he gave a firm, directional squeeze, guiding him just into the entryway of the fortress, a cave like room hidden in deep shadow and highlighted with white sunlight reflecting off the sand and stone in the courtyard. A few people milled around there to escape the heat, walking back and forth on their way somewhere, in and out and away while he and the boy blended in to the shadows. Voices hushed but firm.
"What did you see?"
And the boy spoke, softly, but very clearly in much detail…
"It looked like a man… but not… His eyes glowed like coals in a fire, and he…IT—it moved like a fog. Almost too fast to be seen." He swallowed as if he might be sick and his lips rolled back from his teeth, finger rigid as it pointed. "They were sharp, like blades. It tore into him without making a sound… As if it didn't even notice I was there… I didn't know what it was at first, a demon maybe… A monster. But it-i-it…It ate his eyes… I remember the blood running off its chin e-even as he tried to scream, how it licked him clean—licked its hands clean."
"Did you try to fight it from him?"
"Yes… I hit it with my knives." He indicated the empty sheathes along his stained belt. "It fled… B-but I could still feel it out there until nearly dawn— watching me."
Malik didn't leave the fortress that night… He stood high on the tower wall and stared outward past the village and deep into the darkness.
The world hummed beneath his feet, alive… And he could feel some invisible threat out there before him. Like that blackness he'd sensed at the back of the cave—but much too near for comfort.
He didn't sleep that night, and the next morning he found the novice and promised to find the beast that had killed his cousin and destroy it.
That night Altair was waiting for him, a little fire built and he was reclining almost sleepily on the ground with his arms folded beneath his head.
His outer tunic was missing, and all he wore were his pants loose and lightly stained on the knees and thighs.
"Where are your clothes?"
Altair raised his head, eyes clear, but eerily bright. "They were covered in sick and filth… I found a spring back there—" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, "—so I washed them."
Malik didn't sit, just spoke in a voice that he tried to make sound sincere; "A spring? Really?"
Altair nodded and waved, eyes turning back to the flames; "Yes, just back there over the rocks. It's quite pretty. Would make a very nice hide away if one should be needed."
Malik did sit then, carefully, on a rock as far from Altair across the fire as he could manage without seeming suspicious. "You look well."
Which he did. The growing sores at the edges of his lips were gone, and his skin had cleared. No more bruises and reddened irritated places on his jaws.
He didn't look like he'd been sick for the better part of two weeks.
"Whatever was in that tonic you brought me last helped, thank you."
Malik hummed, eyes locked on the shining white in Altair's mouth…
Teeth… He's still got all his teeth.
"It wasn't the plague then I suppose."
Altair chuckled, such a warm, inviting sound that for a moment Malik let his guard down… just a moment…
But it was long enough to damn him.
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"Where are those boys going?"
His nose wrinkled, peering out the window toward the courtyard where a group of five boys were gathered, tightening belts and harnesses, going over the edges of blades with whetstones.
Malik recognized only two of them, and after that fact registered he knew exactly what they were doing, and why the largest boy had a young lamb with him. Although why that large boy looked on the verge of tears, holding the lamb to his chest as one might do a babe was beyond Malik's realm of thought at the moment.
"They're going to take the lamb out to the field where the attack occurred and try to lure the beast toward them… Then they plan to kill it."
Malik nodded warily and turned back to his work.
By morning the boys in the pasture were exhausted, and happily—for Hammad at least—the lamb was still alive, looking sleepy and bleating pathetically for its mother.
For almost two weeks it went on like this every night. Malik watched them come and go from his study window. His brows creased with worry.
Maybe the Novice had been mistaken and it was only a common wolf to attack and kill his cousin. That was a comforting thought, Malik liked that, it was less complicated than his other thoughts and therefore easier to accept.
So, he tried to ignore the people of the village who came to him complaining of missing sheep and goats. Tried to ignore it when a horse went missing, because for a week afterward everything was still and he could breathe a sigh of relief…
That was until the girl disappeared…
She was nearing four years old, just a baby in Malik's eyes… she'd been by her elder brother's side one minute, then her little fingers had slid so gently from his hand and when he turned to catch them again she had vanished.
Two days later her left foot was found near one of the old wells to the west, the flesh had been neatly, almost delicately eaten from each of her little toes, and a bite had been taken from her heel…
The most unearthly thing though, was that no flies would go near it…
Two days later Hammad's lamb was stolen cleanly away… Hammad had nothing to say because all that was found of him was a gory disturbed place in the grass and a gnawed, bloody hand still wearing his ring.
Malik forbade the Novices from leaving the keep at night, chastising them, asking in a low, cold voice how a boy as large as Hammad and as loud could be killed and dragged away without their knowledge. Nobody died silently, no matter what you may think.
That night he spent lying in his bed, staring upward at the ceiling wondering what thousand horrors could be lurking in the darkness just outside his window.
He left his bed, shrugging on his coat over his bare chest, lit a lamp and strode carefully, more aware of the blackness of the night than he ever had been before in his adult life. It seemed a living thing, swallowing up the light of flame and spirit like this faceless monster that plagued his village.
He found a ledger, just a small, rather poorly made thing that some novice or another would carry with him, and often left absentmindedly. None of the pages had been written on, so he pocketed it, sat his lamp on the nearest desk and began to pour through the shelved books. Books in languages he could barely understand, cryptic confusing passages, descriptions of ancient beasts that were said to haunt the endless forests of the Brittans. Fell beasts and fire wyrms that devoured ash and fed on the bodies and souls of young virgins. Demons who lived in the earth and tore apart babes and children as a wolf pack would rip apart a lamb.
He made notes and hypothesis. Used the charred end of a reed to sketch what the novice had said the… the thing looked like.
He found himself shortening the creatures limbs, very wolf like with a long snout of sharp teeth and pointed ears… He'd heard Greeks and a few Christians talk about such a creature, that a man in league with the devil would become a wolf in the night. That during the day he would remain as a man, only detectable by hair on his palms and the length of his fingers. How the only way to kill such a creature was to take off his head and burn his heart…
It sounded ludicrous to Malik, insane that this could be anything other than a rabid wolf… or perhaps some poor man who'd gone mad.
There had to be a logical explanation… There just had to.
The next three days he poured over his notes, questioned and requestioned the novice who had witnessed his cousin's death.
The young man became so enraged at the constant, almost angry sounding interrogation that he slammed his hands down on the table.
Malik felt his hand twitch toward his blade. He'd spent the better part of a week now obsessed with finding some inconsistency in the boy's story. Some little something he could use to convince himself that this had all been a damned wolf pack roaming the area and he could stop worrying himself over stupid tales of monsters that only existed in the minds of ignorant people and children.
But… The boy's story did not waver in the slightest. His descriptions vivid and too clear to be anything but authentic.
"Why are you still questioning me! This thing is out there! It strikes without mercy or discrimination and instead of allowing us to seek it out and destroy it you have us cowering in our beds with the windows and doors barred and knives under our pillows!"
"Whatever it is, beast or man or demon, it is dangerous, and until it can be identified I will not allow any more lives to be wasted recklessly looking for it!"
The boy slammed his fists onto the table again but said nothing more as he stomped heavily from the room.
Any other day Malik would have beaten the insolence out of him, but the dread that this thing wasn't something that could be logically explained had begun to settle like a leaded weight in the pit of his stomach.
The boy did have a point… Waiting for it to strike again in hopes of catching sight of it was pointless. Hiding and cowering from it, allowing it to rule over the whole fortress and everyone within it made them absolutely powerless against any number of other assaults.
Sleepless again, feeling sick and exhausted from the noise in his head, Malik made a decision.
He sat out alone the next morning long before dawn.
Almost a week now without an attack the beast, if it was still alive, would be hungry. It would be near, lurking in shadows and watching.
Malik would need help if he were going to find this thing… But the fact Altair had not returned to the fortress yet worried him.
He had seemed healed the last time they'd spoken, healed enough for his body to cling with an almost inhuman strength and his voice to ring out in the night like a storm gale… He should have returned, and had Malik not been so worried about other things, and had he not been trying to ignore that sick not-quite-right feeling in his stomach when he thought of Altair, he might have allowed himself to worry about the other man's absence.
As it was, for some strange reason he couldn't name or explain, maybe it was lingering anger and that sour sense of betrayal, or the sadness and bitterness he felt… It seemed more likely than some strange sixth sense like Altair had spoken of weeks before while he'd been ranting and clawing at himself.
'The smell… fuck—the smell.' He inhaled deeply through flared nostrils, his pupils wide and dark. 'it's rot and filth and ancient damp… It has color! I breathe and I can see it moving through the air! I-I-I can feel it in my mind… burning—burning always.' He clutched at his stomach and bent almost double, teeth red where they were bared at the floor, wetness glittering on his cheeks—
There was fresh blood at the corners of his mouth, and every so often the sharp blade of his tongue shot out and scraped some back into the cave between his lips…
The sky was just beginning to redden at the edges when he reached the caves, a gaping stony mouth appearing out of the ground like the very blackest maw of hell.
There was no sign of a fire, no sign of a struggle, or any indication that Altair was there at all.
Malik, inwardly, was not surprised… At the moment he felt distinctly chilled, every little hair on his body alive and standing on end.
He sat on a rock, just outside the cave and held his torch between his feet while he lit it, then sat there holding it for a long while, listening to the wind moan quietly through the pit.
He remembered, as a child, once being perfectly horrified of the darkness. That fear had long since faded away… but it resurfaced now with a vengeance. Clawing the back of his mind and the depth of his chest.
He didn't want to believe it… Didn't want to think it was possible, forget probable.
He still has all his teeth… I saw them, they were not sharp, they were just his teeth. What that boy described was not human, and Altair is very much human. I know that for a fact. I've seen him bleed—I've made him bleed.
He still has all his teeth…
He forced himself up, the wind pushing against his front, as if trying to warn him of what may lie beyond.
He took a deep breath… and pushed on.
The rocks and stones and dirt of the cave around him glowed in the firelight. Every so often he saw disturbance in the dust… What looked like a scuff, or a footprint.
The world slanted steadily downward and back into the earth, so far he could only identify the direction because the mouth of the cave was a distant dimly lighted shape behind him.
He almost tripped twice in something slick, but when he held the torch down to inspect it all he saw was the same dark moisture that covered everything about one-hundred meters into the cave. What he had begun to notice was how terribly deep this cave was… How parts of the walls looked to have, at one time, been carved into. It would only come to him later that this must be the remains of some ancient mine or something of the sort.
The darkness smelled damp and musty, like old rotting earth and something long sense dead that had turned to dust hundreds of years ago, but the scent of its decay had yet to dissipate—
And then something crunched beneath his boot and he went deathly still, body tense, staring out into the abyss for a ten count before he rocked slowly back a step, swallowed thickly, and peered down at what he'd stepped on.
At first it looked like, maybe the skull of some old dead rat… but as he bent to inspect it, to chastise himself that all the danger here was oversized rodents, he realized it was not a rat's skull… but was actually that of a small cat… still young enough to be called a kitten… And there was a smattering of gray fur around as well.
Rats, he told himself once more.
It was separated from its mother and rats got it—
Something twinkled like light off a coin somewhere high to his empty left sleeve and Malik's head snapped up, body rotating on the balls of his feet, torch brandished before him like a knife. He shouted in surprise and anger at being startled and the twinkling was gone…
But that oppressive presence he'd been hyper aware of was back. A solid smothering wall of it now instead of the dull aching pressure it had been before. He felt drowned by it, overwhelmed…
He was being watched…
He was being hunted.
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