CHAPTER NINE
THE TALE OF GRIFFIN
I was born into slavery. From my earliest memories, my life was terrifying. I lived in a cell with about fifty other people. They took care of me as well as they could, but they were conquered already. If any of you had ever been in a cell of the like, you would know what I mean. I felt the sorrow in them, and that was all I knew. There was nothing but pain and eventually, hopefully, death. But death didn’t come to take me away. No matter how hard I wished at night, death never came for me. I was forced to walk, every day, to the fields. We called them the Fields of Pain. And that is fitting, because that is what they were. We were forced to march miles to reach them, only to perform pointless labors that were grueling and painful. We hauled stones from one point to another, only to haul them back again; we dug holes deep enough for four people to stand in, only to fill them up again; we built up stacks of wood, only to watch our fellow slaves burn atop them. We were brutally abused every day. We were whipped and beaten and savaged repeatedly. Our lives were an endless hope for death. Anything would have been better than the torture we were subjected to on a daily basis.
But death didn’t come. It was only agony, day in and day out. I grew accustomed to it. I relished in the suffering. I knew that the pain and the horror were the only things that were truly real in my miserable life. So I clung to that; embraced it. I saw no hope in my existence, so I reveled in the pain.
The pain became my only reason to live. I decided, foolishly, that pain was real, and as long as I felt it, I was real. It was my own and could not be taken from me. However, it was a ridiculous existence. I welcomed the pain because it was life. But, of course, it wasn’t life. It was just my feeble will trying to justify my misery.
I was young, and that passed. I think that I was about fifteen when a different thought came into my head. It’s hard to judge years in the darkness, but that’s as close as I’ll ever come. This thought came into my head slowly and relentlessly. I don’t know when it started or how, but it became more and more present in my mind. A thought that maybe this was not all there was to life. A thought that was against the rules in its very nature, but seductive nonetheless. I remember sitting in my cell, with moaning and bloody people all around me, fantasizing about a world that was different; a world that was not devoted to pain and torture.
It was a beautiful world that I pictured. I had never seen the real world, so you can imagine how fantastical mine was. There was light, and color, and hope. All of these things I didn’t really understand, but I understood this feeling that came over me, this feeling that there was something out there worth fighting for; worth dying for.
This feeling persisted, as much as I pushed it away; my world was one of pain and depression, and not likely to change soon. But the thoughts in my head refused to be pushed away. They were there, with increasing intensity.
I think that the demons that watched over me must have noticed a change in me, because my torture became more awful and unbearable by the day. I was hung from the ceiling and tortured. I was made to go days and days without food. And when I was fed, it was demon flesh. I hated it, but it sustained my body. My mind, however, was never changed. I was sure that there was more to life than this.
Finally, I was brought before the lord of the land. She was a demon whose power was unequaled. She was hideous and terrible. Her skin was not her own. It was flesh woven into flesh. The flesh of her victims. She was encased in human flesh, but was as far from human as anything can be. Her eyes were as black as her mind. I remember being dragged before her, bleeding and weeping. She looked like death. Her flesh writhed on her body. I know now that the skin that covered her was still alive; still carrying the life of her slaves. It was beautiful in its seamlessness, in a sick, demented way. The skin moved all over her as if she was covered in living pain. Her hair was braided into dreadlocks, but I could see the faces and the mouths of torment that were trapped there. She was naked, with only the tormented flesh covering her. Her sex was a disgusting parody of humanity. What should have been her pussy glowed with a barking, raging fire, as if she were burning within. On either side of her were two demons. They were as hideous as she, but obviously not nearly as potent. They were scarred and horrible, their mouths and eyes sewn shut. They held spears that were made of bone and flesh and teeth. Their heads were turned towards me as if they could see, and I nearly shit myself from the fear of that unseeing gaze.
“Griffin,” she said, her voice echoing in the chamber that held us. Her voice was multilayered and petrifying. A voice of fear. A voice that held authority and pain within it. I can tell you, if I hear that voice again, my heart will stop. It was so terrible and commanding, making you wish for death and obedience so much that you could tear out your own heart. I shudder to think of the terror. “Griffin,” she said, “you are most troubling.” I wanted to fall to my knees; to lie flat on my face and cower. For whatever stupid reason, I didn’t. I did the thing that seemed most unnatural to me: I looked her in her eyes. There was a fire there, deep within the blackness of her gaze, that nearly destroyed my sanity. She sent her power forth and I crumpled. I found myself on my knees, weeping with horror and pain. She told me her name was Mor'denaa.
When she spoke it in, I knew nothing but horror and agony. It was as if shards of glass had taken my eyes, and my organs had been ripped out through my throat. It is even difficult for me to speak that name now, it’s so terrifying to me.
To my horror, as I was on my knees, silently begging for release, she continued: “Something is different about you. I would like to kill you, but I am not yet able to dispose of your soul as I would like. Anyway, death would be too easy an escape for you. No, for you, I have a very special plan in mind. Your torture will be endless. You will be broken time and time again. You will be killed and brought back. For you, Griffin, I have an eternity of death and agony.” I was almost hopeful that she meant that she would give me death; the one thing that I fervently wished for. But she meant something else, and seemed to read the hope in my eyes. “Death will be yours, Griffin. I will give it to you, only to take it away. Do not think that I will let your death be the end. No. I have it within my power to give death, and take it away. You wish for death, I know. And I shall grant that. I will give you death, but it will take years. And when you have died that death, I will bring you back, so that you can feel it again. Your life will be as close to human Hell as I can make it.”
In my fear and pain, I managed one word: “Why?”
Mor'denaa laughed, if that is what it can be called. The skin that enfolded her writhed with redoubled intensity. A sound came from her throat that was a chorus of screaming pain. But it was her laughter.
“Because,” she said, “you are different. I do not like things that are different. My world I control, and differences are not tolerated. Therefore, you will be crushed.”
My world became one of darkness. I was stuffed into a cell that smelled of vomit and shit and blood and death. When they opened the door, which wasn’t very often, I could see the fingernails and teeth and clumps of hair that lined the floor around the walls; remnants of the poor souls that had been harbored there, broken there. Days turned to weeks. Weeks turned to months. Months turned to years. I forgot to count how long I had been there. I forgot my fantasized world of light. I forgot even the humanity of labor. I was fed the most vile things that you can imagine: demon flesh and blood; human brains; human meat; demon meat. I changed in the darkness, from a slave to a beast. I fancied that I was more like my captors than like my human contemporaries. I no longer wished for death, because I knew that death was only an illusion. If I died, I knew, I would simply be brought back to live another death. Life was darkness.
I don’t know how long I spent in the blackness. I slipped quickly into madness. I screamed for hours upon hours, just to hear a sound. I was silent for
days because I wanted to hear some sign of a world outside of my darkness. None came. By the end, I was raving mad. I was totally insane, my mind a lump of mush inside my head. I spoke to myself as well as to the walls and the darkness. I imagine that I was merely a husk of a young man. The agony enveloped me and surrounded me. I was no longer Griffin. I was the darkness, because that is all I knew.
For all I know, I may have died in that room. I might as well have. But I was alive, either brought back or never left.
Then one night, or day--I don’t know--I had a dream. It was a dream of light and hope. It was a dream that I will never forget. I dreamt that I walked into a field of light and there was someone there waiting for me. It took me a very long time to reach them, but when I did, all of my exhaustion and fear melted away instantly. It was a woman. At least, it looked like a woman. She was beautiful. She was what I had always imagined my mother would have looked like. There was light coming off of her. Being next to her, in my dream, I felt life and sanity flow back into my mortal body. I cannot explain it to you, but it was glorious. It was as if I was in two worlds at once: the world of pain and darkness, and her world of light and glory.
I reached out to touch her, to hold her, but she was miles away. But when she spoke, she was so close that I felt her inside of me. She said:
“Griffin, you must leave this place. It is not for you.” Her voice seeped into me, and seemed to consume me. She was my world of hope and life. She was my fantasy. “There is darkness here, and it has taken me a long time to find you. But you must leave now. There is light in the world, and you must help to restore it.”
I wished with all of my being that she wouldn’t go, but she faded slowly away, leaving only the memory of her brightness, and her message. When I woke, my mind was clear, and I felt the weight of sanity bearing upon me again. I thought for several days that it was just a strange and fantastical dream, but the message would not leave my thoughts: “You must leave this place.” My sanity had come back to me, and I remembered the madness with horror and self pity. I wished terribly that I could go back to that bliss of insanity, but knew deep within me that my fate lay elsewhere.
I don’t know how long I sat again in the darkness. Food was brought to me, but I refused to eat. I suffered through beatings and torture that terrify me even now, but I didn’t cry out in pain. My mind was lost in the vision.
Then it happened. The day was as normal as any before; the beatings and torture were the same. The food was the same, brought and left silently. But the door was open still!
I stared at the open cell door for a very long time, possibly hours, before I decided to walk through it. I expected to be caught immediately and beaten then thrown back into my cell. But it never happened. I just kept walking, in a trance-like state. I saw the walls and the chambers that I walked through, but it didn’t really register in my mind what I was doing. I walked for what seemed like hours before I was finally confronted. I hadn’t even seen a single demon in my wandering. I was standing before the massive wall of the complex of Mor'denaa, and there was but a single demon standing guard in front of the gate.
It looked at me with shock on its face. Before anything else could happen, I leapt at the thing. I don’t know how I did it in my weakened and delirious state, but I attacked the demon. The madness of the cell came back to me and I tore the thing apart. Literally. A rage took me over and I pummeled the demon and tore its limbs off, and finally its head. I was screaming, I remember, though I can’t remember why. I opened the small portal in the wall, and left.
It was night, and I walked. I was convinced that I would hear the screams behind me and feel the talons digging into my flesh at any moment, but the moment never came. I kept walking through the night, until I literally fell asleep on my feet.
The next thing I remember is sunlight. Blessed sunlight! It was so warm and bright on my face and arms that I wept. I had never known it, for Mor'denaa's lair is covered by an impenetrable cloud of darkness, but it seemed as if the sun was the beacon of my imagined world: there was light and hope now! I stood up and walked in the glorious rays of the sun. It was dim here, but to my sheltered eyes it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. It was bright and hot and beautiful.
I was naked and alone, so I did the only thing I could think to do. I walked. I walked through daylight and moonlight; starlight and twilight. I walked until I could no longer walk. Then I slept. When I slept I dreamt of light and hope and the woman that had visited me.
Eventually, when I was on the brink of death from starvation and exhaustion, I saw something moving on the horizon. If they hadn’t seen me, I probably would have perished in the forest. But there was a man. He came to me and lifted me up and nursed me back to health. His name was Eliah, and he turned out to be an old angry man who refuses to listen to reason. He was stubborn and unruly, but he became my closest friend.
As I said, he nursed me back to health. I told him my story and, for whatever reason, he believed me. His story I will not tell you, as it is his to tell. However, he taught me to fight and to hunt.
It was nearly two years that we walked the world alone. Constantly I was visited by the woman from my dream. She told me that I needed to search for others, that I needed to fight, that I needed to survive. Of course I told these things to my friend Eliah, and, again, he believed me. For that I cannot be blamed. But through our travels we met other wanderers. They were similar to us in that they were out for themselves, and that they were self-sufficient.
By the fourth year of my escape we had nearly two hundred men that wandered with us. I had no part in their training, except that I saw the need for it. Eliah was in charge of preparing them for battle. That thought was never once in my head, but as they grew they decided that they would take it upon themselves to find a teacher and create a force worth reckoning with.
It didn’t take long, as Eliah is a very efficient instructor, for them to become very good at the art of killing. Again, I had nothing to do with this. I simply watched and saw that they were no longer wanderers, but were now a troop of soldiers that would fight to the death.
I have to admit my dismay when one of the men approached me and told me that they had adopted a name for themselves. They called themselves Griffin’s Hammer. I was stunned and horrified. I tried to stop it, but it had already gone beyond my control.
The Hammer recruited men from every village we passed, and all were ready to fight to the death.
As far as I was concerned, however, I had no lofty goals in mind. Once I had escaped, I was ready to live a simple life without fear or pain. But, being responsible for all of the men at my back, I needed something on which to focus. Therefore, and with the help of my strange dreams, I decided to pursue a life of hunting and killing demons. We have done this for nearly four years now, and have become very good at it. But my true goal is to return to Mor'denaa’s lair and destroy it. I will gladly do this alone, but the Hammer has decided to follow me, and I cannot change their minds.
We will storm her compound, free the slaves, and kill their captors, no matter what the cost is to us.
That is our goal. That is where our doom lies.