Free Half Discovered Wings by David Brookes Page B

think when he wasn’t looking up, and so lowered
his gaze and examined the forsaken landscape around him.
    Pain in him and all around him. What on Earth was this place?
For miles and miles, people writhing, screaming … They hung from
huge spiny bushes, like the mice he had seen speared by butcher
birds onto thorns; they hung, chains pulling their feet, from racks
that were made of bloody bones. He saw skulls, alive and screaming.
Some still had the luxury of their eyes, and others even had skin.
They were the lucky ones; some people hung from nooses by the neck,
swinging, choking but never dying; others were lanced by spikes
fixed to the ramparts of huge black-stoned towers, crying out. They
clutched at the bloody spikes through their chests, or groins, or
faces. Every wound was open, raw, wet. All around him:
pain.
    Teague was inside a huge courtyard with distant walls on two
sides, taller than the hollowed-out skyscrapers he’d seen as a
child, black and forboding. They were barely visible through the
haze and forest of sharpened steel poles.
    Behind him the
courtyard was open, and disappeared into a starless void.
    A whorl of shadows swept around him, and he watched them wind
upward from the ground until they were all he could see, making his
dead heart beat like a hammer against his ribs, his dry mouth crack
with fear. The shadow consumed him until his vision accounted for
nothing in such darkness, and it fell inside him, through his
mouth, his eye-less sockets, up his nose, into his ears, and it was
like a new heart within him.
    I am Charos , the shadow told him in
whispers . I keep this realm.
    ‘ You are Erebis?’ he asked, referring the Devil of his
near-forgotten youth.
    I am his
servant. I harvest.
    Teague didn’t need to ask what Charos harvested. He had never
heard of such a creature in the tales. The priest who lived in Niu
Correntia had never said the name before, the name of the
shadow-being in the Devil’s servitude that reaped the new souls,
which filtered through the ether from the world of the living.
Charos was in him now, it was him, and yet he knew that simultaneously it was
inside a thousand other souls in this great courtyard, by the two
towers of the castle of Hadentes.
    The courtyard of the dead, it told
him. Where the souls are
reborn.
    Suddenly his thoughts
of injustice were shattered, and pain consumed him. His soul was
being torn into pieces—
    You deserve Hell , Charos said in his
head. You are Hell. This is where you
belong.
    ‘ I—’
    You deserve Hell !
    The shadow filled him wholly, and he felt his will vanish.
His soul or whatever insubstantial matter he was made up of now
began to dissipate, crack into pieces, and he was multiple-Teague;
four separate shadowmen pulled apart by Charos and encased in
darkness, each equal and the same. Each of them looked at their own
hands and saw smoke and shadow, somehow pulled at by a windless
atmosphere.
    They looked up
and Charos stood before them. Clawed feet dug between the stones,
closed wings hung like a cape from its shoulders. It separated
itself and took the four Teagues in different directions. Every
Teague had the same mind, and shared the same eyes.
    ~
    The Tall Tower , said Charos, which joins the walls of the castle of
Hadentes.
    The first of the four versions of Teague was led through the
torturous courtyard, amidst screaming bodies. Charos pulled at his
soul, dragging it through fire and coal. A semi-corporeal chain
linked them. Up the stairs to the ramparts they went, black slimy
steps lined with living marrow and tormented souls, twisted
creatures kept from a restful death by the demons that tortured
them. Every time the pain became bearable enough to stop screaming
a new hell seemed to beset them, something to provoke even louder
screams.
    The whole place was spiked with gnarled nails that hung
craggy from floor to ceiling. Teague walked by them, not touching
the nasty black things until a body – one of the many