Shadows of Elysium: The Laughing King

Chapter 5: The Code: Primal Compassion

With the shade's remnants behind, Jasper descended the bay cautiously. Not even four steps in there was a man-sized hole in the ground. With a very slight lean he could look straight down the pitfall to find it was far deeper than anything should be explored. Turning away, Jasper seriously considered using a corpse as a sled down to the village. The sand was probably slick enough with blood. For a brief moment the world became fuzzy from dehydration and Jasper forgot his bizarre thoughts. The few miles to the Village on Stilts might as well have been a marathon through a bloody and depressing obstacle course.

The battlefield was dying, but far from dead. Jasper could sense the movement of the wounded and trapped spirits. Two humanoid corpses were gored on the horns of a barely living mammoth-sized goat, it's features and angles exaggerated unnaturally so as to give the animal a cruel, devilish look. Lines of runic text written in ash across its horns scattered as hot wind buffeted Jasper's long hair.

The symbols were gone now, but a pint bet that it was the Elysium language would have been a pint won. A fate even worse than slow radiation death.

A part of Jasper's code was to bring peace to such places. To be responsible for the wounded.

Two spears had pierced the goat, one into its chest and out through the shoulder, the other remained lodged in its forehead giving the impression of a third horn.

Jasper cautioned a look at that night's dinner, a three-horned Jack-rabbit strung at his hip. The urge to dry-heave passed, and the silence broke with a gunshot. Abomination or not the goat didn't deserve to live like that.

Vultures scattered in the distance.

A dark fog had settled over the bloodstained village. To one side of the sky the pale moon was setting while the red moon rose on the other.

The sun was lost somewhere in the clouds giving the landscape before the village a monochromatic tone with red outlining the village itself and bathing the already red-speckled beach beyond. Jasper walked the ground carefully to avoid disturbing the corpses or their spirits.

Just in case, a hand rested on the great sword high over his shoulder. Even for him it was too long to carry anywhere but his back. The crosspiece rested on a clip that held tight to the wide ricasso and the tip filled a full long-sword sheath at the back of his hip.

A slight movement next to a pile of yellowish skin (grey in the moonlight) swarmed with a variety of hellish arthropods and worms.

Poking through the mess of flesh and bugs was a horse-like skeleton with thin, and mostly crushed, bones. The struggling form underneath the 'skin-horse' was a mutant dressed in the many pelts and furs of a hunter. His javelin had found it's home in the skull of the horse, but it had been the hunter's last kill.

He lay there beaten with ragged breath; his veins shown a clear green from a slow poison. The bugs scattered and Jasper's buck knife struck a fleeing scorpion the color of the mutant's poison. He knelt down on both knees like a samurai and plucked the stinger from the bug.

A finger and a thumb squeezed poison from its stinger into a crucible and Jasper mixed in some detoxifying herbs. Then held a small, rusty blowtorch lighter to the bowl, unafraid of heat reaching through the palm of his raggedy steel gauntlets. Once it had boiled and cooled the crucible was pressed to the hunter's lips.

The hunter drank willingly of the antidote. Perhaps trusting the recognizable red pauldrons of the Wandering Kings, or more likely too exhausted and hopeless to resist. Jasper met his grateful green eyes and bowed slightly before departing.

Jasper trudged warily to the beach, past the chaos of the village's shadow, where a whimpering could be heard from the water. Washing in and out of the sea were at least a hundred corpses.

One particularly acid burnt corpse floated up at Jasper's feet, this gave him pause as most acid spitting creatures steered clear of swimming. Their spit would either not work in the water or backfire and float into their eyes.

After checking the other bodies to make sure it would be no acid bath for himself, Jasper pushed far into the sea of blood and corpses. A massive white wolf lay partially submerged on a sandbar. The great beast was both terrifying and majestic.

The blood and water came up to chest height. Pushing aside a mutant's body made way to look the wolf in the eye. Even laying down and half submerged it towered over the water level by seven feet. A low growl shook the water and its weak muscles managed to claw up a large amount of sand just from tensing.

"Calm down, Buddy, it's alright." Either the beast understood or was just another case of something too weak to protest.

A cut ran the length of its belly just above the water level. Good thing too; the salt might've helped the wound, but the mutant blood would've damned the creature to a slow, cancerous death.

It would take Jasper's whole first aid stock to patch that wound. A far more concerning matter was a moving lump in its chest. As tempting as it was to end its misery right there that wouldn't solve the parasite problem. All of these years after being orphaned he could still hear his father's voice saying, 'all life is precious'.

The knife bit into skin without causing so much as a shudder, the animal was too far gone to notice. Jasper took a breath like a sniper would to steady himself. When the breath came out, he cut through the center of the lump as quick and straight as a bullet from a gun. The locust-death-screech was bittersweet music, but it meant nothing if the makeshift surgery was incomplete. He cut out a V shape around the first cut and applied numbing medicine to the scars.

Sweat-drenched hair threatened to stick to his eyes, as cold steel sliced the sticky part between skin and muscle. The further it opened the more numbing agent was needed to douse the wound with, until at last he had pealed back one side of the carved V. The parasite had already started sending its eggs down its stringy appendages in a last-ditch effort at survival. Hands firmly gripped the exposed half, gauntlet crushing the small teeth, and tossed it into the ocean.

The other half was even more stressful as the wolf was starting to feel the cutting and the eggs had made it halfway out of the appendages. Jasper applied a salve to the skin where the parasite had left tunnel marks.

Now came the hard part.

Disinfecting the large gash without alarming the beast. If the creature had any strength left it would maul him to death for what came next. Jasper uncapped a large flask and poured the whole thing into the cut. He swore it must've been delirious because it sighed pleasantly at the burning sensation.

He had no way of knowing that the burning sensation was akin to something the wolf had felt in captivity. In the cage where it grew up on a near-steady diet of Elysium. It was no comforting reminder, but it took the edge off of the addiction for a moment. One memory that did help was of the pup's family escaping into the Pits under the Eastern Wall. The warmth of that was enough that the hour of stitching went unnoticed.

Once done with the needle, Jasper patched both wounds with strips of sweaty undershirt cloth. Then he trudged back to the once glorious village on stilts half naked, wet, out of medicine and still hungry. At least now he could die knowing that in the deepest, darkest part of a battlefield he had saved a life. Be it friend or foe.