Forsaken

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

Jason dreamed of some kind of medieval banquet hall, a dark, dank place with rough-hewn stone walls that vaulted at least three stories overhead, converging in a peaked dome. Torches had been mounted in heavy steel frames, spilling orange light in broad circumferences, interlaced with heavy shadows that danced and bobbed with the fluttering flames. The room was lined from end to end with long wooden tables and corresponding benches. These were jammed to overflowing capacity with a boisterous throng of men and women, their bodies marked and disfigured with bizarre and intricate tattoos and piercings. The tables were covered with trays of food—meat, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, breads—all of it rotten and moldering, festering with maggots and worms. This didn't seem to deter the guests in the least. They gorged themselves on the putrescent fare, drowning wolfish mouthfuls with cups of wine.

They were attended to by the strange, mummified creatures Sitri had called Hounds, which scurried and scampered about, hefting enormous jugs of wine that they slopped and spilled all over the table and floor as they offered refills, or more of the platters of spoiled food, which they dropped or shoved onto tables wherever they could find or make room.

Whatever this place was, the Eidolon hated it. Jason could feel it inside him, writhing through his veins. It wanted to escape. Like a wild horse caught by a lasso for the first time, it strained to find a way to flee, and in struggling to control it, the Wyrm inside Jason's skull had let its hold on his mind slip. In those few fleeting moments, Jason found himself fully conscious and aware, cognizant of his surroundings, if not utterly bewildered and terrified by them.

He wore some kind of mask and could feel it cinched tight against his face, enveloping his entire head. His line of sight was partially obscured by the rims of the eyeholes. A thin slit had been cut beneath his nostrils, with a wider hole at the mouth that had been sealed with steel pins like bars covering a prison window. A metal plate, like a horse's bit, had been secured in his mouth before the mask had been donned. His back teeth bit into it and he could taste it, bitter and oily, against his tongue. He couldn't close his mouth all of the way as a result. He could see his breath frosting in the cold, damp air, hanging in front of his face in a moist film with every labored, ragged exhalation, and could feel saliva frothing against his cracked lips, trickling down his chin.

His mind was awake, but his body was immobile, still under the Wyrm's control. All he could do was move his eyes, crane his gaze from the floor in a narrow arc around him. He was naked and stood on one of the tables, his bare feet surrounded by blackened, greasy, rotten fruit and the carcass of a pig, its flesh rotted away clear down to the bone in places, revealing spongy, maggot-infested panels of underlying flesh.

This has to be a dream, he thought, watching as the people sitting on either side of him, most of them nude or only partially dressed, reached for him, stroking his legs, smearing grease or rotted food on his skin. They were all ghastly pale. Like corpses in various stages of decay, some were bloated, others desiccated, with skin hues ranging from waxy gray to tawny and parchment-like. This has got to be a dream. Please let me wake up now.

"He's beautiful," the bloated, mottled remains of a woman said as she leered up at him, her voice drunken and slurred. Her teeth were gray, crooked or missing in places from her plum-colored gums. Her hair was damp and stringy, her eyes sunken, the pupils milky and clouded. As she spoke, water dribbled out of her mouth and down her chin in thin rivulets, as if burbling up and out of her lungs.

"He is, Ceto, yes," Jason heard Sitri say, and had he been able, he would have moaned aloud in stark fear as he felt the man's fingers close against something at the base of his skull, the metal ring interconnected through the mask to the bit in his mouth. When he wrenched his head back by this ring, the metal plate sliced into the corners of Jason's mouth.