A/n: Hello, this is HumanRabbit, Im glad to present the next chapter, after one week of excellent writing. In this chapter, Johann finds himself in a situation he never expected, and I hope you guys find this as unexpected as me and D4rK found it when we began writing this. As a warning, this chapter is kind heavy with descriptive violence and physical abuse, so beware. On with the chapter. Enjoy!
-Disclaimer: Shaman King and its characters are property of Hiroyuki Takei and Xebec studios and we gain no profit out of writing this story. Any other character from other universes are borrowed without any monetary gain and will be properly identified.
The Damnation of Faust
Chapter 2
Inferno's Trial
In spite of his awareness of not being at home or in his car before opening his eyes, nothing would've ever prepared Faust for what awaited him when he recovered conscience:
In first place, he was on his knees, rather than laying on the floor as he remembered himself to be when the streets closed down on him. Secondly, he couldn't move, maybe due to the shock or due to the chains, ending in cuffs attached to his wrists, ankles, waist and neck, binding his naked body. Yes. His clothes, his shoes, and every other item he was sure to carry along had mysteriously disappeared.
Finally, his eye field was blocked by what seemed to be metal bars. He spun his head around – at least all that the cuffs allowed him to – to realize he was inside a cage.
Also, an unbearable murmur was filling the air, mixed with sounds of laughs and whisperings in a language he couldn't understand at all, yet its pronunciation was similar to his native German. Unable to distinguish anything beyond the cage's bar, Faust started to scream, shaking his shackles and trying to rise from the painful position he was in. Suddenly, a voice intelligible rose above the cacophony of onomatopoeias and whispers:
"Attention, honorable members of the jury! The court is in session!"
Johann raised his hangs to hug the metal bars with a deep scream of frustration:
"What's going on?"
His shout managed to free itself from the cage and crashed into the ceiling, its demise making an echo that resounded through all place, but unfortunately falling onto deaf ears.
When the eyes of the trapped man posed on the keeper of those voices swirling the air around him, his air jammed on his throat.
Johann couldn't believe his ears when they were filled by those words; and he wasn't able to believe any less his eyes when they saw one of the most unspeakable horrors ever imprinted upon them:
Outside of the cold and hard cage, were hundreds, perhaps thousands of monsters sat and organized in the manner of a jury, some of them looked clearly like the academic definition of demons or devils, while others seemed to be birthed from the darkest recesses of the most tormenting nightmares.
He backed to the center of the cage with a frozen scream in his throat; he blinked once, then twice, to try to erase the monstrosities gathering around. Everywhere he looked, dozens of those things were there to look at him. Their disgusting eyes were directed at him or at the horrifying being at their side with their long fingers pointed at him, almost accusingly.
The voices only got louder when the monsters seemed to notice that he was quite well aware of them and that only made him more apprehensive about the whole ordeal.
"What's going on?" He demanded once again, this new pledge dying in the same manner the first did.
There was another sound, one that took the company for granted with their voices: a laugh.
"Order, oh members of this honorable jury!" The voice spoke again, silencing the hideous menagerie – The judges to this trial have arrived!
With this sentence, a new row of demons appeared in front of Faust's flinched eyesight:
A total of eight creatures were sitting at a bleached white table with carvings of symbols and depictions of monsters. All of them were clad in robes of dark colors, shades varying from blood red to emerald green to plum to pitch black; all of their eyes pinned to the man in the cage.
"Presiding over this court, the ruler of this realm, the honorable judge and hell master Mephistopheles" Pronounced the voice again, causing Faust to gasp in utter horror, as the demon in the middle stood up, its eyes still fixated upon his sorry person.
The symbol on the flag! How could he forget it? It was Mephistopheles' flag! This was no nightmare, no hallucination! He was in hell!
And the monster himself, so many times he had seen his visage imprinted in the pages of his ancestor's notes and not a single moment he had pay the proper attention to it?
Those longs and bone – like limbs showing from the sleeves of the crimson robe, those fingers festooned in seductive rings, that perfect mask of cynicism and cruelty for a face: the sum of all of that and more was the being Faust VIII traded his soul, his health and his sanity to, almost ten years ago.
Still sporting that same stoicism, Mephistopheles set a hand over the table and kept staring at the man inside the cage before a voice, so haunting that it sounded human, spoke to the imprisoned man:
"Are you the mortal human, Johann G. Faust VIII?"
"I-I am!" Faust heard himself answering; unsure of whether the fear or an unknown force was what made him talk.
Another demon judge, an androgyny looking creature with ophidian features and horns, rose from whatever she was sitting at and summoned a scroll from thin air. After unrolling it down, the judge started to read in a masculine voice:
"Johann Faust VIII, you stand here accused for the charges of body robbery in 1° degree; unauthorized use of necromancy and consequent disruption from the human and the demonic realms' energetic balance; massive energy and magical theft from this demonic realm and from His Honor, Great Lord Mephistopheles; blasphemous usage of His Honor, Great Lord Mephistopheles' name and image; all of these charges being subsequent to the main crime. Violation of the Family Pact created between your ancestor and His Honor"
Johann stayed frozen on the spot. Not only was he shivering inside his prison, that cage with menacing bars and uncomfortable floor but his ever growing doubts and confusion had only increased with those accusations; as the strange creature read the charges against him, he started to clench and unclench his fist with the expanding fury that took hold of his resolve.
"I-I didn't do any of those things! Why I am here?" He impulsively shouted to the judges. His voice curled at the end with his own fury, his body shaking from rage only as the faces of the demons turned to Mephistopheles who sat on his throne, with a hand hugging his unperturbed face.
The demon who had been reading the charges hawked his throat irritably at the interruption:
"Those are the charges that hereby Johann Faust VIII to this court" He concluded, before taking his seat, as all eyes stayed upon the big demon on the throne, waiting for his word, for his command.
He simply stretched the right side of his mouth in a sarcastic smile and spoke to the prisoner, whose face was fixated in a defiant grin.
"You have not the least idea…of why you are here, do you Mr. Faust?"
Johann flinched repressively at his words with a visible cringe of his face. At the sight of that, Mephistopheles' sadistic smile widened into a full grin and stood from the chair with a heavily terrible noise, before continuing:
"Perhaps I should remind you of a little story you might know too well. The story of your foolish ancestor…how he abused of the power he was given from me to his ridiculous and selfish goals, how he pretended to become even more powerful than myself, every single creature in the demon-verse and his God. And of course, how he doomed himself"
Faust said nothing, the omnipresent confusion preventing his lips from pronouncing a word that could cause him harm, allowing Mephistopheles to go on:
"Nevertheless, eternal damnation awaited in vain for the soul of Johann Faust I when, by grace of the angels and his latest lover who prayed a thousand times over his grave, he ascended to an undeserved period in heaven to purify before his next incarnation; thus reneging on his part of the contract. And, at difference of the human made type, a demon contract must be fulfilled, one way or another"
"NO CIRCLE, NO PACT, NO TASK, NO SENTENCE SHALL BE LEFT INCOMPLETE! TIS' THE LAWS, TIS' SHALT BE!" Replied the minor creatures in a thunderous chorus.
"Thus, the condemn fell upon the one whose blood was the closest to Faust I. His child, yet, his mother, an innocent woman who shed many tears of mercy over the father's grave and over the infant child, proposed a deal: If none of the Faust bloodline would ever use those powers, MY powers, their souls would be freed from condemnation at my realm. I was forced to accept, as innocent tears shed over a grave are an unbreakable oath"
However, the influence of the magic took its toll upon the following descendants. With the passing of centuries, the Faust clan forgot about the pact and about me, blaming their misfortunes to illness, to vice, to the wars fought on their dull ambitions.
"But now I call you, Johann Faust the eight...the only last living true descendant of your bloodline, to answer to the crimes you have committed against me, against this realm and upon every long live demon! HOW DO YOU PLEAD?"
There was a scandalous wreckage of voices swirling in the air...they screamed for blood, for violent justice. Upon this, Johann raised his head – the sole part of his body that was freed from the binds , far from being intimidated.
"What charges? What trial? This isn't real! This can't be real! It's hardly believable at all!"
At those words, the turmoil in the room only grew. All the demons, monsters and every single strange being stood with their fists in the air as the guards at every entrance only hit the marble floor with handle of the their halberds.
Mephistopheles raised his massive hand and every single individual in the room shushed except for Johann, his heavy breathing the only sound in it.
Piece by small dim piece the silence grew into a painful waiting, a heavy anxiousness took hold of Johann's mind and it was broken by a terrible sound all together...Mephistopheles' voice.
"Real? Believable? What is exactly your idea of "real" and "believable", Mr. Faust? It is what you can touch with your hands, maybe?"
With these words, the chains around the prisoner's arms started to grow like vines, blooming spikes that entered his flesh and opened the door to a long gone and forgotten feeling in the doctor's sensorial memory…physical pain.
Gasping at both the shocks of that unwelcome guest invading his body and the facts that his nervous system hadn't been completely ravaged by morphine, Faust did not see the chains that crawled over his skin like thin silver worms towards his fingers, only the coldness of the metal (wait! That wasn't metal, it was something different, something familiar, but what?), adverted him of the imminent torture.
"Perhaps 'real' and 'believable' is what it can't be concealed, Mr. Faust." Continued calmly the demon as the human screamed of the chains burying themselves into the soft tissue beneath his fingernails, which dyed red from the blood.
A wave of laughs rose from the murmuring forum around the cage; possibly the monsters found it amusing that the condemned man was with wide open eyes and an even more wide open mouth like some howling hairless ape. His Honor had butchered many other mortal humans and even demons for disrespecting him in more trivial ways than this skinny, screeching primate did.
Faster than his tearful eyes could have anticipated, the demon was over him in a heartbeat, giving a sound strike to the cage with something that was a grayish limb showing from the robe; the impact sent the prisoner hurling to the bottom of it, the chains barely managed to hold his body from the impact, but still his back crashed painfully against the bars, sending him through a spiral of pain that he personally voiced with scream bloody gore.
"Or simply something that overcomes you…like pain?" Finished Mephistopheles as he returned to his chair, moving in the manner a large fish does in a sea of red darkness… or more like a shadow across the abyss.
Hissing and panting, Johann stood up, trembling and using one bar of smooth surface as leverage. He laid his head on it, his hair wet with sweat and his eyes hurriedly going from one corner of the room to the other, and the same image: demons on his left side, demons on his right side, the judges in the middle and he was still there. His discolored lips parted to say a sentence, but his tongue trembled so much inside his mouth, he couldn't create a coherent sound.
"Now that your sense of 'real' and 'believable' has been leveled, Mr. Faust, let us return to the question. How you do plead for your crimes?" Asked a deer like judge.
"N…not guilty" Faust managed to reply.
All the creatures gasped in astonishment: this mortal human was not only a shameless one, acting disrespectful towards His Honor; he also dared to deny the guilt in his deeds. A cloud of anger started to condense in the room, threatening to boil the prisoner alive. Nevertheless, he continued, not out of free will, but from the same force that made him answer the first time (Mephistopheles' will, perhaps?):
"Everything I did…everything I abandoned, I destroyed, I tainted…I did it out of love…"
That four letter word caused the faces of all demons to sour. There was the possibility they were like the beings of fairy tales and mythology, which disdain love and goodness, hailing hatred and evilness as core values. But probably they only realized the "love" Faust talked about, was nothing but a pretty curtain concealing something horrible.
"If you please, describe to the jury this act of love, Mr. Faust. What or who do you love so madly, so blindly, so stupidly…you broke the pact between your bloodline and me?" Asked Mephistopheles, slamming his teeth, squeaking jaws together. Obviously, this offense resulted far more serious than previously believed, for no one had ever seen such a reaction from His Honor before.
Faust didn't dare to say another word, fearing that if any of those monsters heard a single thing about Eliza, they would hurt her, or hurt the baby. There was the possibility that they didn't know anything of his wife, and he could lie to them, never truly minding the consequences for him; but on the other hand, they might were already aware of her, and just wanted to hear the whole story sprouting from his throat like a painful and deathly truth. He wanted nothing more than being in her arms again with her lips whispering her love for him. Instead there he was, under the watchful sight of demons and other monstrosities...judging him with their gaze, with their hateful stares and the scowl of the high judge, that being whose greatest desire at that moment was to see him inside a torture device for all eternity.
"Mr. Faust, answer the question" Cut the silence the academic definition of a devil sitting beside Mephistopheles, and soothing the mood with his equally academic voice tone.
Once again, Mr. Faust's lips did not let go any answers; they only complemented the portrait of his battered puppy expression, perhaps begging for a non-existing mercy, perhaps just trying to purge the pain that came again whilst the spiked chains hurled at his surprised body, wrapping around his mid section and then snapping shut. Struggling with the sheer agony, Johann gripped the bars to ease his pain and with a shout he surrendered to it.
"Eliza!"
The demons around him and before him showed their surprise in each unique manner their anatomies could express: Those with brows raised them; those who didn't simply looked to the ones beside them, while Mephistopheles tapped his lips with a finger, watching at the prisoner with indulgence.
"That didn't result too difficult for you. Did it, Mr. Faust?" He asked with a tip of sarcasm in the poison of his voice. "This Eliza you soundly mentioned…is someone important to you? A sibling, a friend, an unrequited love, maybe?"
Ah – there's no need to answer that one, with a snap of fingers, it shall be revealed to us…Your Honor, Lord Corvi? If you please, show to the jury who this Eliza is"
With these words, a judge with a death mask, like face, pitch black eyes and a symbol in his forehead summoned a scroll, unrolled it and clearly read.
"Eliza Amsel, born 26 June 1963 with a chronic disease, cured in 1988, murdered in 1989. In the following years, she spent countless years with her soul bound to an unanimated object, her own remains; this abomination as described here was done by the accused. He bonded his wife's soul with her carcass in a sinful way to avoid her passing to the earth…where it should have stayed"
Although he managed to keep his head high during those humiliating moments, the judge's words felt like a nail passing across a chalkboard to Faust, not only because of someone calling his work of almost half of his life an 'abomination' but also due to the following sentences being the same that his wife told him (or more accurately yelled at him) the moment she was resurrected.
"She didn't deserve what happened!" Screamed Faust, gripping the bars.
The demon closed the scroll in a fit of anger. "It was not your concern! The matters of life and death are never to be disputed: the flown of life is like that, it can end on a heartbeat. You should have known better Mr. Faust"
"Punish him, punish him! Make him suffer! Torture the criminal, torture the criminal!" Chanted the demons around the cage; even though they still didn't know all of Faust's actions, what was read from the scroll was enough for them to see him as a deviant and a monster.
Lord Corvi stood silent while his eyes blazed with the white hot rage of Tartaric hell pits, his stone fist clenched to the scroll as if he was about to curse Faust himself for that insolent interruption.
"Enough!" exclaimed Mephistopheles while raising a hand and punching the table with the other, silencing the entire courtroom. "This courtroom is not a vulgar courtyard for anyone here to request an execution! The accused will receive what he deserves, but not before he confesses the full scope of his crimes!" sentenced the demon while turned his head to the other judge, still with the scroll in hand and his eyes blazing of indignation at the human, "Lord Corvi…please sit down", at which the flames froze into a shade of shame.
"I did it because I loved her! I couldn't be apart from her in such manner! What is wrong with that?" cried Faust, exasperated by the whole affair, and wanting nothing more than end that nightmare, so he could return to his wife and unborn child. However, Mephistopheles wasn't going to let him go.
"Love, you say? Are you sure it was love what motivate your deeds, Mr. Faust…or was it the fact of losing your lifetime work as a doctor?
You might lie to yourself Mr. Faust, but no one in this court is that foolish! You committed a sacrilege not only against me or against both the human and the demon realms, but to your wife; someone who, you like it or not, was mortal and had the right to decide whether to stay dead or not and you disrespected that! Is that what you call love?"
"All those years of wasting yourself away… with so many people who needed your help as a healer, neglected! All those other women who could have been happy by your side, shunned! The sole thing that you showed then and you show now is your selfishness, Mr. Faust"
"There isn't, there wasn't, and there would never be a woman like my Eliza! And I am Doctor Faust! " Replied the prisoner, feeling an effervescent anger inside him rising like yeast.
Mephistopheles gravely chuckled with his mouth closed and replied.
"As I said, you cannot lie to this jury Mr. Faust. We know that you are not officially a doctor at all; your license was revoked after your little breakdown with your colleagues during your wife's funeral. Consider yourself lucky that the people you were living among these last years is the "don't ask questions" type; otherwise you would have end up in jail as a fraud, or in a psychiatric hospital as a basket case"
The booming words of Mephistopheles brought Johann much grief, because he was right, he was absolutely right about everything. He clenched his teeth and his eyes, barely managing to hold the threatening tears. He hit the cage's bottom with his fist ignoring the pain that came with it; the demons looked so pleased with his suffering, but nonetheless he was right...that, that monstrosity was right...he was a horrible thing that only brought suffering to others, especially his love, his only love on this world probably hated that part of him that seek the knowledge of the arts of the undead and the price that came with it, the forbidden knowledge that abides his trust on it and what brought this calamity he was suffering.
I'm the worst being in the world, but I-I couldn't let Eliza leave me, not after we went through. I finally cured her disease, she didn't deserve it. - Thought Faust with painful shock.
The guilt was filling his mouth with a bitter taste as he remembered that day: When at some point, they had a discussion about something he couldn't remember at that time. They started to yell at each other (he yelled to his own wife! how could he?), when she turned around and left, wanting to be left alone for some minutes, but he started to follow her, wanting to grab her, yet she somehow sensed him and started to walk faster, almost running, and then...it happened: she tripped with something on the ground, perhaps a rock or a dry root and fell from what seemed to be a cliff to be a lower level on the earth. He remembered that tiny puddle of dark waters, like a dead eye staring at him from below.
He had run to that place, unnoticing everyone behind him and committed to his memory the metallic hues of the water and how little bubbles appeared on the surface. Her left hand was the first thing he saw that emerged from the dark waters, then her arm and her rest of her upper body. Her hair, her soft hair had been wet and dripping with a thick substance he couldn't exactly place…she had been glowing, like a Christmas tree on a cold winter forest or one of those monsters emerging from dark waters like in old vintage science fiction movies: an image incredibly beautiful and at the same time so horrible.
"Are you listening, Faust the Eight?" Mephistopheles voice interrupted his thoughts; he looked so angry and deserving of a better explanation than he was giving himself.
"In case you were not paying attention, we were asking if, after your sorry demonstration of self-destructive attitude and contempt for the rest of mankind, you managed to accomplish your comparable to scratching an itch...goal."
"I did…I think that I did…" Faust heard himself answering.
Mephistopheles exchanged his stance, he became more rigid rubbing his hands together, almost in an exhilarating way.
"Confess you little pest...how did you accomplish such a remarkable 'exploit'?
"…And I did not, too"
"Would you mind to explain yourself?"
"My wife was resurrected, fully resurrected, but it wasn't by my hand"
"And how exactly did she come back to the world of the living, Mr. Faust?"
"She…" He swallowed before continuing, in spite of feeling the mouth dry. "She fell into a puddle of metallic waters, and emerged alive"
"You look confused about the whole ordeal, Mr. Faust, or is just the disappointment of having your promethean goal being snatched by the capricious hand of random?"
"I am…confused. What exactly was that thing?"
"That 'thing', as you call it, is a devil's pool, also known as devil's pit or Lazarus pit. They connect this realm with yours and they have the property, among many others, of resurrecting the dead.
"Resurrecting…the dead"
"Yes. Depending of the concentrations of the fluids in the pit, it can revive both recently deceased and those of decades, even centuries long dead"
"Is that so?" Asked Faust, star struck by the information. "Had I know those pools existed, I would've never used necromancy. All I needed to do was to find one, submerge my wife in there and-"
"It is not that simple, Mr. Faust. The devil's pools are extremely rare in your realm. Usually they appear every few centuries, eventually drying out and vanishing in the same fashion of inter-dimensional doors. Also, they spring in places where the land has great power, the kind that relates with other worlds…"
"Like the world of spirits?" Said Faust.
"Yes. Like the world of spirits" Replied Mephistopheles.
"I see…so a devil's pool would result very difficult to find…"
"They're almost impossible to find in these current days; in consequence almost nobody in your dimension knows about them. The only notorious human who is aware of their existence is a thanatophobic, selfish old man who has been using them to prolong his sorry lifetime, just for fear of natural progression" Mephistopheles chuckled. "Besides, without a soul, the deceased one becomes 'empty', wouldn't you agree?"
Johann clenched his teeth all together; this was, not, this was not good…no good at all. For the second time of his life, he didn't know what to do, who to come with…he felt desperate and to whatever thing destiny had prepared for the likes of him.
No, no! He did the right thing! He saved his love from death, even if he had to made a few sacrifices for her well being, yes that was it; even though she had been mad at the beginning, it worked didn't it? She was alive and well! It was like she had never been taken away from him, to be loved again. He wouldn't bury her for a second time, never!
It had take all his sheer will to not punch the metal floor again, but for the first time Johann could notice how cold he was. The nudity wasn't even a problem; he didn't even have to try to cover his genitals. But the cold managed to shrink his testicles, and the frosty air hitting his body didn't help matters.
He felt his body doing times to accommodate the new discovery of his condition; however, it just distracted him from everything else. Feeling cold was a thing Faust always hated, more than the lack of sleep and food, more than the wounds; a sensation that none of the painkillers in the world would cause to disappear. Perhaps the demons knew about it? They wanted not only to taunt him, to pierce his flesh, to break his miserable heart, but also to make him feel cold?
He suddenly felt his face had been slapped by a tornado; his head smacked painfully against the metal bars. He groaned, bringing his hands to his stinging forehead. He painfully opened his eyes, what had just happened?
He saw a massive fist near his cage: the hand of the big monstrosity, fingers intertwined, and then snapping together. The same force slapped him in the face; it was like an earthquake just exploded around his body.
"Mr. Faust, you are not here for sleep! You have an ongoing trial! We were speaking about your wife, about her condition after her resurrection"
"Her condition..."
"Yes; I believe you know which is the term used for deceased persons who are resurrected by magical means"
"A...a revenant"
"Exactly, a revenant; that is what your wife is...an abnormality wandering the earth"
"My wife...my Eliza is not an abnormality!" Faust interrupted with wrath – She's a…"
"In your twisted point of view she might be an angel, Mr. Faust, but revenants are a serious matter! They are the blank spaces, the clots, if you prefer, in the stream of the living and the dead!"
"Eliza is different!" Faust screamed deaf to the words of the demon. "She has a soul, her soul! She has her free will, her feelings intact!"
Those words caused all judges and the rest of the demons to see Faust with an either frightened or worried look.
"Your wife...still has her soul? After all you did, you gave her soul back?"
"Yes" Replied Faust, with a sudden confidence. " You see...she's not a revenant"
"You're wrong, Mr. Faust". Said Mephistopheles. "She's a far worse type of being than a revenant"
"I don't believe you. She's the same woman she was before dying"
Mephistopheles was growing tired of discussing with this stupid little man, so he decided to pluck another painful chord in Faust's spirit to bring him completely down.
"Indeed, she is the same woman… the same youthful, healthy and beautiful woman; you, however, are not the same man; are you, Mr. Faust?"
The confidence disappeared from Johann's mind, leaving a sudden fret.
"How old was your wife when she passed away; twenty, thirty years old?" Asked the demon with a sly smile "And how old are you now: thirty, forty years old? It doesn't matter, because the age of your body, of your brain and other organs is older…far older"
"I never cared about that" Faust said defiantly.
"Of course you don't, but that doesn't stop the clock to keep ticking. Mr. Faust. All summers lead to autumns, all autumns lead to winters. While your beautiful, youthful Eliza still is fresh like a rose, you are already decaying… all those nights spent with no nutrition, no sleep and those wounds had taken their toll upon you"
Faust did not say a word.
"Otherwise, why do your hands tremble like those of an old man? Why do you lack energies to keep yourself steady in the bedroom?"
A murmuring laugh was heard among the demons. Faust felt more and more ashamed.
"In a not so far future, you won't even be able to move your body. Your organs will fail, your mind will flake, and you'll end as a useless, polluting, excreting waste of space…all while your Eliza will continue to be beautiful and young"
Faust felt a knot in his stomach, so heavy that he lowered his head.
"You would be too weak to enjoy the love you gave everything for, and by the time you realize of it, your body will collapse of the fatigue, will wither away and die…leaving your beautiful and young Eliza a widow"
Johann stood silent. There was nothing he could say, there was nothing he could do.
A/N: Ah…cliffhangers, you gotta hate them. Im sorry to cut down the chapter like this, but it's necessary for the next one. D4rk and I already have the next ideas for the following one , and Im sure that whoever is reading this will be happy to know. Just a little longer for the next one. Take care everyone!
-HumanRabbit