Shadows of Elysium: The Laughing King

Chapter 20: The Code: Remembrance

Jasper pulled aside a sheet of yellowish skin, his gauntlets tore the paper-thin flesh. Spiked worms the size of snakes slinked away from the mass. The Valorian shook a deformed beetle from his gauntlet. The creature was already drunk with radiation poison from the brief time spent on his hand. His numb hand that shot a needley cold through his bloodstream when clenched.

As he stood there flexing the discomfort from his fingers, Jasper took a look at the sickly mutant under a pile of bones as frail as chicken wings.

The hunter that Jasper had cured of poison on the way into town sat up and weakly dusted off his fur pelts. He leaned forward to pull a javelin out of a fanged horse skull, but the skull disintegrated. A bloated fly, the size of an ax-head slumped out.

The fellow in the furs stood up slowly and spoke around an under-bite of both canine teeth, "names Grias."

"Grias? Aren't you a little young to be Grias?"

"Young? You must've met my father, is he alright? What happened?"

"Oh, I'm sorry... He didn't make it."

"Ah, I kinda figured... did he say anything before... you know?"

"I didn't really get a chance to talk to him. It's hard to explain, but there's a fire in a bar on the first floor called the Bowlegged Toad. It's full of survivors. The fire tells the stories of lost people, I wouldn't listen too long if I were you. Or at all, honestly."

"Well, it makes about as much sense as anything else that happened here."

"What did happen here?"

"At first, we began losing people. It seemed random, but we soon found out there was a hoard gathered in the woods. We started wondering how we could have missed it long enough for them to gather. That's when we made the connection. All of the missing people were our best scouts, healers, warriors, and the like. The tacticians and war leaders locked themselves in their room to try and come up with a plan, but they never came out to help."

"Then we started seeing... things on the northern hill. An army of shapes and creatures so warped that our watchtower guards started going mad. I'm not sure why, but something about the way they moved made me think they had been corraled. Like they were running from something. And just as those monsters were within range, the undead came out of the woods."

"Some of us poor souls reasoned that the monsters would tear apart the village if they reached us, so without a proper war leader, we decided to go out and meet them. The town was built to outlast the zombies, not Elysium inflicted, so we prioritized. Things got a little too violent and strange from there. War on trhee fronts."

"What do you know about Temnota?"

"That thing that won the battle? I saw it from afar, watching the battle and waiting for the right time to strike. I thought it was just waiting till its kind needed it. Once the sun went down, it grew from a shadow at the edge of the woods into a fog of sand and blades that washed over the village like a swarm of plague flies. The shadow suffocated all sides of the battle. It subdued all of them and made a game of their fears."

"And you've been hidden this entire time under corpses?"

"I think it saw me. It knew I was poisoned. I should have died that first day when the scorpion bit me. Oh, fuck the spirits, do you think this Temnota has something to do with my survival? Like it kept me alive to suffer?" Even as he spoke his fears, Grias stumbled on weak legs and vomited bright green fluid mixed with blood. The only reason he didn't fall into it was that Jasper had caught him.

"It seems to fit."

"It did recede once, the fog. I could've swore I saw Three eyes fighting the shadow creature on top of his throne. I thought he killed it and sent the body tumbling to the sea, but I must've imagined it."

As they walked they neared the front gate. The bodies still hung in a curtain from the cracked arch. King Three Eyes hung from a rope that was looped into his neck; an easily missed detail, but not an easily forgotten one.

"Somehow I doubt that," Jasper took out Momento-Mori and cut them down.

"They deserve a proper burial."