Note: OK, so this part is long. Really long. Believe it or not, this is what I intended to write in the very first section before I realized I had to get here first. This was a hard section to write due to it being first person for much of it. Dialogue, in the form of storytelling, is hard. If I go back and edit and clean this up, this part will likely need a lot of work. But, for now, I hope you enjoy.
Disc 1Track 4: House of Doom – Black Label Society
“They say you reap what you sow. Hell, if that ain’t a fact” Nestor turned his back and, for a second, Oan considered driving the spear, which was still lying across his chest, between the old man’s shoulder blades. He had asked the questions that had been running through his mind and his soul since pulling Nestor from the Belnor, but now he was not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer. His chance for attack slipped as Nestor glanced over his shoulder, the light hitting the ridge of the scar that ran down his face. He thought both Nestor’s mouth and the scar grinned daring him to try.
Oan instead tossed the spear aside, rose from the fire, his skin healing fully as he did. He fed a few more logs into the flames and dropped to the ground. Doom settled over Oan as Nestor’s voice started with a low rumble that seemed to echo off the dark sky and reach the ears of Old and New Moon. Oan heard movements from the camp, but he knew as that as long as the voice spoke that the Aldroubi would stay away knowing not to interrupt a telling such as this. While the story conjured evil, the spirits of the forest, of the river, of the wild and of the earth would want to hear. Interrupting would only incur their wrath.
Nestor began, perhaps with a tear running down his cheek although it very well could have been a cold sweat. Oan was not close enough to tell.
“Aye, the Sorna watch failed. On the day a thousand season cycles ago that Tarek Grandar cast Salama to his tomb in the sand, he posted two-dozen towers along the sprawl of the barren land to watch for the demon’s return. He blessed the men charged to give watch, but cursed them if they failed. The men of watch came from the city of Noce, heart of the great kingdom of Nocnil, one of the seven great kingdoms of the old age. If I may add, the only one of those great kingdoms that remains, unless of course you believe the tales and such of Arna, which they say is west of the Sorna. Don’t believe them boy! Everything dies west of Noce. Only the damned come back from those sands.
“Since that day men have been trained to watch the sand blow and shift across the vast wasteland. It takes a keen eye, my boy, it does and a strong heart. Most of all your taught the tale of Salama, of Tarek and his blade Lunar. To watch, because even today, those in black cloaks try their hand at the desert to find the hidden tomb, deliver a baby of pure stock and bring the demon back to life. But for years, those in the black cloaks have dwindled and all but disappeared from the earth. The watch grew uneventful and boring.
“Arrogant and restless were youngest men of the watch. Too good, they were to watch sand and their time too valuable to guard against an old fantasy. Too many days, too many nights, they left their posts unwatched. I warned them, I being the oldest still alive. I could feel a change, smell it you know, in the dust kicked up by the wind.
“Then one day, I spotted his ashen corpse top a golden dune far off in the distance. Even with my sharp eyes, I had to squint to see the demon. I was alone atop my tower and I sounded a horn, but no one came. As the day drew on, I blew the horn more as the bedeviled man closed in leaving a black trail of dead steps in the sand. He arrived as the sun burned its way to the underworld and behind me Old Moon’s cracked face peaked over the horizon.
“The demon recoiled at the sight of Old Moon. I think the old wound from Lunar flared just then and Salama thought of Tarek Grandar and the blade born from Old Moon’s own face. I saw it all on the demon’s face, you see, because I wasn’t bout to forfeit my tower and my honor without a battle.
“I’d been trained and tested, my boy. I had lived through battles and brawls. I was good boy, as you can now attest. But I knew that no sword or staff of mine would pierce this demon’s skin. My only defense was the old skins filled long ago with the icy waters of the Belnor where it touches the heavens (where it is at its most pure) brought by Tarek Grandar and placed in each tower. It was said the Belnor water, once thrown on the demon, would extinguish the fires boiling in his blood.
“So armed with nothing more than a skin of water, I rushed down the stairs of my tower and met the man that torched kingdoms and nearly devoured all the world.
“He was like no man I’ve seen. His skin, nay, it wasn’t skin. It was flaky and black, not like those of the men from the south, but like ash and some blew off in a strong wind. The demon had four arms, two from his shoulders like you and I, and another short pair from the side his chest. He wore a black robe that covered his naked chest. There were no pupils to his eyes, just a clear surface that changed colors and tones from purple to red to a milky white. There was little else to the form to his face, just subtle features that had not yet taken shape. My current scarred features pale in ugliness to that monstrosity.
“In a scabbard was the black sword he received from the lord of the underworld so long ago. In his hand, a whip was unfurled, but not naturally dangling. It was coiled and tense.
“His ugliness burned at my eyes, but I could not look away and he did not speak for I do not think he had a tongue. Least not one that had grown through the ash and decay yet. Nor did I speak because I knew there was no reasoning with a demon. Only action in the ways of the demons and such – ill-intentioned action that scars and carves great craters of agony in the light.
“I fumbled with the skin, unscrewing a cap sealed for what I thought was centuries, but I knew straight away that the treachery that had reborn this monster had sullied my only defense. The water inside was warm and dirty. The kind of water I was bathed in as a babe and drank all my days. This was no Belnor water. This was water from Serj, a nasty pool south of Noce. Someone, likely a man of the Sorna Watch, had replaced the true water. A shame and a curse, I put upon that unknown man every morning when I awake.
“Alas, I sprayed the water anyway at the demon and he didn’t so much as flinch. All I heard was slight crackle like pissing on a fire as it landed on his ashen skin and then nothing. I swear the demon smiled then revealing a row of razor sharp teeth and a fiery abyss beyond.
“Then he cracked his whip once with a grin and then unleashed its hell. It snapped and whizzed.
“Now boy, I’m fast. Even for a man whose hairs are gray and back is weak, I was quick enough. I snatched the tip from the air with my right hand. The sting pierced my skin, but my speed did impress the demon. I held the whip contemplating pulling it hard. Then I heard a snap, then a crack. In my hand, the tip of the whip was biting away at my first two fingers. The whip had a face of a snake that had a full mouth of teeth and venom. I shrieked pulling away, the snake grinned taking my two fingers with it.
“The pain coursed through my arm and I feared a poison that may burn through my soul. I was paralyzed as I fell to my knees. The sand below seemed to be swallowing me up. The whip or the snake or whatever the cursed thing was slithered along ground toward me, hungry for blood, for bone.
“The last I remember was it stiffening once on the ground and then uncoiling toward my face. It’s jaw unhinged, gorging down my face then plucking my eyeball straight away from my socket. There a wet noise, my boy, when your eye leaves your skull. One that haunts my dreams and turns my insides even to this day.
“I screamed and everything after was black. I didn’t dream. I didn’t stir. For hours, nay it may even been days, my blood soaked into the Sorna. Why the demon or the snake didn’t finish me, I cannot say. I reckon the horror and shame of my failure was more pleasurable to the demon then my demise.
“For when I awoke that’s what I was forced to confront in the form of a string of corpses lining the road back to Noce. All of them men, of which many were men of the watch that had answered my horn’s call too late.
“The men were devoured, ruined and drained of their blood. They appeared to be corpses left in the sand for months, not one’s lying there for less than a day. With each, the jaws were wrenched open in a final scream of horror. The first few, I stopped and wept by. Then the numbers became too many, the feeling inside too numb.
“But I tell ya, boy. What was done to the men was terrible, that’s for sure. I soon discovered though, it was much more favorable to the fate of the women. That hell, along with a poison slowing coursing through my veins, sent me on the run to the waters of the Belnor.”
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