“I’d be happy to. What kind of work is it?”
“Nothing difficult. Until tomorrow then, Talan from Beyond.”
Talan tried to reply but he had already slipped away, carried upon feathers of down to the darkness of heavy slumber. There he happily dreamt of spinning music, meadows and dancing fauns that played wooden pipes as he whirled among the falling leaves and laughed and laughed and laughed…
Chapter 3 — The Twisted Ones
Talan wakened to a hissing, scraping sound that dragged across the floor to his bed, scattering his dreams to the unsettling dimness of the barely illuminated room. He blinked open his eyes and sat up.
What he saw froze the scream that tried to rip from his throat.
A twisted monstrosity towered over the bed, its skeletal face so baleful that Talan could not tear his eyes away. The creature consisted only of tightly stretched leathery sinew drawn over a disproportionate body of knobby, jutting limbs. The hissing came from the snakes that writhed in place of tresses; the scraping was the sound the creature’s limbs made as it moved.
“Fool boy.” The monster’s voice was dry and crumbly as old dust. “Childish, trusting, young innocent boy. A fool you were to enter this place. Twice the fool to agree to the Pact.”
Talan shrieked and shrank against his pillows. His horror mounted further as he realized that the bed was pitted and scarred, a rusted frame supporting a sagging, rotted mattress full of pale, wriggling things. The sheets he lay under were ragged and moth-eaten. He closed his eyes and imagined the room as it was before, but deep inside he knew.
He knew the beast was real.
Somehow he managed to find his voice. “I agreed to no Pact. I want to see the Denizens!”
Yellow fireflies flickered from the skeletal sockets and the serpents hissed in amusement. “You ate from the tables. You danced to the songs. You gave your word to work, and work you will; with all the other fallen, misbegotten, lost, foolish boys and girls who came before you.”
It grinned, a rictus snarl of polished fangs as its iron-clawed hand seized Talan by the hair and yanked him shrieking from the bed. As it dragged him across the cracked and broken flagstones, he saw that the room had altered. No longer glorious, it was lined with bones and filled with the sighs of broken dreams, a prison cell that whispered with voices of the damned.
No one arrived in time to save him. No gentle, smiling, graceful Denizens fluttered down to impede his downward spiral as he was ruthlessly dragged further under the magnificent city. The jagged teeth of the stairs gnawed hungrily, scoring gashes and bruises the entire length of their descent. Although lit by flickering torches, the darkness only grew stronger even as cries and screams grew louder along with the dreadful clanging sounds of blunt tools striking objects of colossal indifference.
At last the stairs ended and he was thrown sprawling to the dusty floor. He managed to raise his head and gape at his surroundings.
It was a massive cavern; an underground city interlaced with scores of tunnels and petrified bridges. Endless throngs of moving bodies shuffled along the cracked, dusty passages. The air was thick with the sounds of frightened feet scurrying, the clanging of tools, and screams of anguish. Most of the figures were small and pitiful; children like him with scrawny limbs and harrowed eyes. Dirty, haggard faces stared at nothing, their gazes swept by unnoticing as they passed.
Twisted creatures like his captor waded among them, brandishing whips of fire that would lick searing stripes across the flesh of any who they felt deserved them, as well as others who did not. The screams of the tortured went unheeded as well.
Talan’s breath fled his lungs when his captor slammed a clawed foot into his back. Serpents flailed and hissed as the creature threw back its wasted head and howled.
“A new volunteer has accepted the Pact! Shall we give him his just payment?”
Other Twisted Ones turned with flashing grins and strode over on their gangly, knotted limbs. Their fiery whips lashed, and Talan screamed as they bit into his flesh. With every shriek their blows quickened, until his entire body became encompassed by the roaring voice of pain.
He knew then that he would die. But just when darkness clouded his eyes, the blows ceased. The creature’s shambling footsteps faded in his ears, and he was left shuddering uncontrollably, enveloped in a cocoon of suffering.
It took a long time to realize that protective arms were wrapped around him, that a voice hummed gently in his ear. He opened his eyes and tried to penetrate the crimson haze that clouded his vision.
A girl around his age gazed at him. The eyes that practically glowed from her dirty face were the bluest he had ever seen. She was as wasted as the others, but her arms had determined strength as she held him tightly.
“It will be all right,” she said softly. “They will beat you every day until they are satisfied of their mastery. You will have to be strong, or they will break you.”
Speaking was agony, but he had to know. “Who… are you?”
Her lips almost curved in a smile as she continued to rock him. “My name is Skye,” she said.
Chapter 4 — The Taste of Hate
Skye had told the simple truth. Every morning he was roused with a beating, and received another at the end of the day before he could lay his weary bones down to sleep. After some time he realized that the creatures didn’t hate him personally. Hate was all there was to them; all they had flickering behind their amber eyes and hissing serpents. They hated the way a normal person breathed; they hated every living thing, every ray of light that penetrated the darkness of their world.
And so he was scourged daily with lashes of fire and spite until the well of his tears was spent, until his skin hardened under the layers of calluses and he could scarcely feel the blows. The beatings ceased only when they were convinced of his obedience, save for when they lashed him for no reason as they did from time to time to all their captives.
“They are the Gigeron,” Skye told him soon after his capture. They seldom had a moment when they were not watched, so snatches of hurried whispers were all they could savor. Sometimes they spoke, other times they simply clutched each other’s hands while trying not to crumple in an avalanche of tears. Those rare, precious moments were the only reasons he had for living.
“They are the servants of the Faelon, those who live in the city above. The Gigeron are your gods now, just as the Faelon are theirs. Your life is in their hands; they decide who lives or dies. Do as you are told, and it will go better for you. Be obedient, but do not let them have your mind or you will end up like the others.”
He had already seen that most of the children were walking dead; submission and indifference having long replaced the bones of their existence. He tried to resist the indoctrination of suffering, but found that the endless days of mind-numbing labor threatened to drive him to madness. Things would have been so much easier were he to become numb like the others, if all that his world consisted of was the demands of his masters.
“Why do they hate us so much?” he asked in a stolen moment with Skye.
“Because they used to be us.”
He stared. “Impossible…”
“It’s true. You have to understand, this mine… it has a power. The mineral feeds the city. It is what causes the walls to glitter, what gives the Faelon their beauty and power. Without it, the city would be nothing.”
She looked around warily and lowered her voice further. “Sometimes it does… things to some of the children. Changes them. They start to do things that can’t be done. When that happens, they are taken. They are… turned into the Gigeron.” She tilted her head, listening. “We can talk no more. I must go.” She scurried away as the familiar grinding sounds of the Gigeron grew closer.