The Crippled Jackal
Part One
The Tortured
Prelude
Even the darkness was marked with fear, as shadows joined it in its fright. There was no wind, and not a single tear fell from the sky, though tormented streams scarred the night air. For them, all the forces of nature and all spirits took pity, as much as any spirit can. Though the darkness endured, as did the screams of the tortured, resonating in the marble walls of ancient halls. Following the screams came the trickling of blood as it stained the milk white steps of ancient stairs. A pleasure palace bathed in blood. Though even when every marble step had been stained red, screams persisted to sound in the dark even as a new sound was heard. A faint but cruel laughter, light but sadistic in its origin emerged out of the horror, even more terrifying than the painful howling of all the other victims.
The assailants pressed him with pain, though he dealt them only laughter, and so they spared him for last, making him watch as they extinguished his friends one by one. Finally when it was his turn to die, they cut off a limb and bludgeoned the rest, but again the main was returned in equal measure by laughter, not screaming, but sadistic laughter.
Thinking that their victim was enjoying his torture, the assailants silenced his laughter forever and mutilated his eyes for good measure.
Thinking the task had been completed; the perpetrators departed with in stealth, just as quickly as they had appeared, leaving behind only corpses, and one tattered, broken body of a man with only a single eye.
Several years later
Some would say that he would limp in the darkness, but in reality he was the darkness. So fitting was that spirit to the essence of his present being that he had taken its name and assumed its role as the instrument of eternal despair, clothed in charcoal and the fear of all his victims.
He now turned to faintly gaze at his next specimen, as his henchmen worked to prepare her for his designs. She hung half a meter off the ground, held by hooks imbedded in her ribs and back, more dead than alive although still breathing.
In the dim light of the torture-chamber it was difficult to recognise the innumerable damages done to her body, as her capacity of enduring pain had been tested innumerable times. So swollen and bloodied was her body that there was not a single square inch of her skin that hadn’t turned red. His men had broken her arms and legs, one by one to make her scream. They had run blades across her veins and beaten her in the darkness to make her whimper through broken teeth.
She’d thought that the army had taught her how to resist pain, but once then she had realized that she had known nothing of pain, and little of endurance. Most of all, in her suffering she had learned that all resistance was futile, though her information made them pursue her pain even further.
First the screams and then the moans had rung on the metal walls, the echoes of a tormented creature and the sound of endless torture spreading through the hull of the ship like a wildfire. He had fed on her pain, just as a vampire feeds on blood, hungrily devouring every drop, but which of the two is more wicked, the monster that kills to live, or the monster that lives to kill.
Her eyes fixed on him as he entered the range of her damaged eyesight, as those bloodshot eyes hungrily devoured his image at first with curiosity, and then seemed to spit it out in hate and disgust with one final defiant glare. Though he looked back at her, staring her down with a single blue-grey eye, gorged by the sight of her suffering.
Little did anyone know that as a youth he had undergone much worse at the hands of even more skilled torturers, though he hadn’t screamed, he’d laughed until they tore off his jaw and cut out his tongue to silence him.
With one movement of the wrist, which was all his left hand allowed, he commanded his henchmen to depart and let him finish the victim.
First he circled around her like a vulture, fixing his eye upon each of her wounds as his feet scraped upon the bloody floor.
She knew she was finished, and that he would be the one to end her, the crippled jackal they called him, though the reality struck her with more relief than she could have imagined.
With every step, he came closer and closer, like death, he was a patient waiter.
To her it was all the same, an end, and end to this perpetual madness. After what seemed like days of unending world of suffering that knew no bounds, of oblivion and pain that only accumulated but never peaked. The last thing she was going to see was the face of her killer, and that was the only right he would grant her. For that ephemeral moment, she saw him as few living souls ever had.
In truth he was neither baleful nor hideous to her, just the pitiful shell of what had once been a human being.
He was a grey haired young man, a silver mask and a respirator hiding the lacking lower part of his face, while the other seemed to have been mutilated by a jagged blade that had torn off his right eye. A single limp and undeveloped arm hung down his left shoulder, it’s tendons irreparably damaged and its fingers permanently bent like claws. The other arm was a thin metallic monstrosity clutching a naked blade.
Only the one functioning eye stood out as the last remnant of what must have been the beautiful visage of once noble features. All that was left of that was a tortured and scared boy, driven insane by knowing nothing else besides fear and suffering.
As if averring her death sentence, he looked straight into her hazel eyes, as he would with every victim, though when he was done with them there was no fear in their eyes. It was a bleak emptiness that defied the fear of death, not through pride or courage or any sense of heroic duty, but the tired broken spirit a consciousness ready to die.
For a moment he left her transfixed, long enough for him to thrust his blade into her spleen. As the last of her blood ran down the blade, a sigh of relief passed through her swollen lips as she died.
“Another life extinguished.” Varus whispered to himself.
