The Flying Armbar
Fantasy creeps in as a father must decide how to handle his dangerous son. Fiction.
Here is good fiction. Thank you, subscribe and support. - Bren.
Fog seeped from the mountaintop of Ta’rgatee that dewy morn…
The road was scattered with sulfurous dunes, and Hero annihilated those lowly plumes — lo! He throttled his Civic five ten fifteen miles beyond the limit. They’d called and said, “Something happened with your son, come now.”
Hero peeled to a halt, parked between a yellow bus and a buxus hedge. The school was a vast black basilica of brutalist stress and stone.
They led him down two halls and through a wide pale room. Then further still. Step by step in some direction, to a room beyond.
There: Hero’s son, a man at a desk, and a four-hundred pound police officer.
The officer approached Hero with his hand out, holding a piece of paper between his finger and thumb like how you’d hold a diamond.
The officer whispered, “It’s a hit-list.”
It looked like this:
TO KILL
1. GORZMOTH, THE OTZ KING
“What’s this name?” asked Hero.
The officer nodded toward the seated man.
Gorzmoth, the Otz King stood from his desk. The interlocking pieces of his plated chainmail jostled crudely.
“We believe your son is referring to me,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why?”
The officer took the paper back and placed it on Gorzmoth’s desk.
“Could there be a sufficient why?” Gorzmoth’s eyes shimmered like oil from within his horn-ed barbute. “Your son has a rich inner life.”
In his front hoody pocket, Hero’s hands searched for each other. Right fingers massaging left. He took a knee and found his son’s eyes.
“Are you okay?”
Gorzmoth’s heavy gauntlet scraped against his desk as he sat and grabbed the paper. “We found it in his locker, aside from that there was nothing else. He’s fine in class, but this harms everyone.”
Hero’s mouth fell open, his cheek twitched. The officer took a heavy step forward and turned to Hero, “First we take your son home, alright?”
The officer’s badge read ‘Riggle’. His eyes were gray and pretty. His hair thick and black. All sad features, opulent things hidden deep in the expanse of his flesh.
He went on, “Me with you in your car.” Then cautiously. “Your son with my partner. Nothing scary, just ridin’ in the front seat. It’s only best we talk separate.”
A subtle melody played in Hero’s head as he stood, rigid and drawn until his son got up and gave him a tug. “Okay,” said Hero. “We can do that.”
The street-fog had cleared though Mt. Ta’rgatee remained shrouded in ominous curdling smoke. From the mountain’s shade were they reckoned by minotaur and goblin eyes alike. All prying, craned neck. Moist black nostrils sniffing through the forest towards the paved road.
Hero was crying.
“It’s okay,” Riggle was saying. “It’s not often but it’s not never. It’s happened at the school before, and worse than that. We do these things, or I try to do these things, in a homely matter. Be it the situation permits.”
“Does it?”
“As I can say it, yes. They didn’t find any incriminating stuff. He didn’t freak out — no offense.”
“Right.”
“I’d like to ask, can I take a look through your place?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you own a gun?”
“Not at all.”
Riggle adjusted himself, it rocked the whole car. He was so large he had to fold both his arms across his chest as he sat.
“They will expel him, I can tell you. I don’t want to be dismissive but nothing will happen after that. Emails and phone calls. But it comes down to you and him.”
Hero said nothing. Sky above useless blue. They passed an orchard and the branches looked ominous, weird.
Riggle yawned like a careless bear. He asked, “Are you and your son close?”
“No,” Hero said. “Not really.”
“Not really?”
“He lived with the mother until this past year.”
Riggle turned his whole messy pile of a body in its seat.
“The mother?”
“His Mom, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Something happened, I take it?”
“Yeah.”
“Like this?”
“No.”
“How long ago?”
“Just before the year.”
“Was it violent?”
Jugular veins thick as fingers, he drove stiff. Wheel smooth to the left wheel smooth to the right.
“Was it violent?”
“Yeah,” said Hero as he scratched an eye. “Very.”
And they slowed to a crawl and parked along the gravel in front of Hero’s home. Set a half acre deep, a light green prefab dew struck and illuminated in the dull, blue haze of the noon light.
Immediate and obtrusive was an old white wall that cut the property in half and formed a sort of perimeter. Carved somewhere along it was a forgotten family crest. In pink and yellow it depicted a sallow duck eating a flower. The motto in Latin, “Mete, et sanum habe.”
Reap, and be healthy.
Hero, Hero’s son, and Riggle’s partner stood against the vestigial wall and watched as Riggle pulled himself from the passenger seat like a great snail leaving its shell.
Riggle huffed, holding a hand above his eyes to guard from the sun. He gestured to the wall, “This is something,” he said. “God damn. What’s it from?”
“Whatever was here before,” said Hero. “The gap is off down the side we’ve got to walk.”
“Alright then.”
They waddled in form to Riggle’s gait. Dots starched into the fabric. Until Hero’s son broke from the line and vaulted the wall. It was just above chest height for the adults. Riggle was too winded to say anything. Hero knew it was going to happen. Thirty seconds or so later they reached the gap.
Hero’s son appeared and pointed at a hatchet leaning against the porch.
“Wait a bit,” said Hero.
Riggle looked between the two of them, “What’s that?”
Hero pointed at a pile of logs up against the wall. “It’s his thing,” he said.
Riggle and his partner shared a glance. “Good,” said Riggle after some consideration. “Can I head in?”
“Yeah.”
They were all baked into the earth for a moment, sun drenched and still. Riggle’s partner stared at nothing while Hero’s son sat atop the wall kicking his feet in the air.
Riggle returned. He gestured towards Hero in a way. Hero told his son to head inside so he did.
Riggle shrugged his big shoulders in a goofy, dramatic way. “Kid stuff,” he said. “Nothing crazy.”
“Great.”
“Whose sleeping on the couch if you don’t mind?”
“Me, I camp out. My work keeps me up sometimes so I camp out.”
“Huh.”
Riggle gave his partner a thumbs up. The partner walked to the gap and vanished behind the wall.
“You’ll hear from me tomorrow.” Riggle dug his hands beneath the flab on either side of his waist and held onto his belt. “Mostly we’re done up but I’ll still be talking to them over there and then you over here. Emails and phone calls.”
“Okay.”
“It’s gonna be okay, it’s a small town. But there is another school, other side.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s got a phone, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d look through it.”
“Thank you, really, thanks.”
Riggle glanced down at the hatchet, at the wood pile, at the absurd old wall.
“You got a shed?”
“In the back.”
“Can I take a look and be out of here?”
Hero nodded and Riggle turned away. Hero went inside.
Through a window in the kitchen Hero could see a fraction of the shed and he watched as Riggle lumbered into it and a moment later lumbered out.
When the squad car finally bleeped on and rolled away in a faint crunch of gravel, Hero leaned over the counter and threw up in the sink.
The boy stood there in the doorway. Little jackal.
“Sit,” said Hero.
Hero’s son took a seat on the edge of his bed. His room was small and kept.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Tell me what happened.”
He rubbed his knees like an old man. “I’m really sorry,” he said.
“You understand what you’re being accused of, right?”
He began to sob. There was a melody playing.
“I’m not mad, I’m not mad at all but why did you write that?”
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.”
“Did something happen? What’s that name about?”
“Gorzmoth, the Otz King.”
“Is that from something?”
Hero’s son clenched.
“What happened? Buddy what is it?”
Hero’s son fell over onto the bed, burying his head, covering his face with his hands.
Hero stepped closer, “It’s going to be okay, okay? It’s going to be okay but you’ve gotta talk to me.”
A grumble, something. To Hero it sounded like he said “everything.”
“What? What does that mean?”
The boy cowered deeper into his blankets and sheets.
“Everything what?”
More sobs.
“You have to tell me,” Hero was struggling to breath, “you gotta,” Hero lost all sense, “what’s going on?”
Hero’s mind became a dull weight, twisted beyond the speed of light by the little black hole he’d sired. Nausea overwhelmed him.
Not choosing his words, Hero asked, “Is it gonna be like with your Mom?”
The boy erupted. He kicked his feet and arched his back and whipped his neck around wildly, he ripped his shirt over his head and began to pinch and twist at the skin on his chest and stomach. Hero leaped onto the bed. Hero took his son’s wrist, pinned his leg with a knee, and reached behind his back to pull him close and force him still. The boy’s panicked gasps for air slowly dissipated into the rapid little breaths of a captured animal.
“Okay,” said Hero. “Okay.”
Hero slid down so his back was against the bed frame. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help if I don’t know, I can’t help.”
The silence was immense. Heavy, dropped from the beak of something on high. Down on them like a sheet of rain. Silence where all the ponds were still. Everything alive was gone. A radiant dizzying nothingness they basked in.
Hero’s son repositioned himself on the bed. He crawled until his head was against his father’s.
Lips to ear, Hero’s son whispered, “If I tell you everyone will know.”
The day’s trauma uncoiled around Hero’s son like the molt of a violent little serpent. He’d marked the center of an enormous stump with a cross hatch, set down a log, and thwacked it in two. Whoosh, crack! Splinters.
“Spiders are animals, because spiders have fur,” said Hero’s son.
“No,” said Hero, watching from the porch. “No they’re not, bud.”
Hero flinched at the crux of every thunderous whack. Even the mosquitoes retreated into the dense thrush of trees beyond the yard. The calm was a discomfort. Fog and antimatter and stale wind, the sun slowly down.
They ordered pizza, it came, they went inside.
Abruptly, as Hero turned from the kitchen counter with a paper plate in each hand, Hero’s son embraced him. Clinging to his shirt like he was a baby. Hero took deep breaths. Hero listened for the little song that had been playing in his head. They both cried, just a little. It was as if someone had already died.
Hero’s son ate half of the pie in a breath, sucking bits of cheese from beneath his fingernails. Hero watched as his own slice congealed into a yellow leprous face. Hours past. Maybe a few movies played. The living room was dark and silent but for Hero’s son snoring on the couch. Then, Bang!
It came from outside.
Hero made circles to the kitchen, the living room, into the bedroom, pause. Again the kitchen, back to the living room, into the bedroom, pause. Hero listened. Hero heard everything… cells splitting… uneasy rhythms encroaching…
Bang!
Something evil. Spangled by an engorged pearly moon, near gibbous, waxing, which cast itself through every window — a sickness come. Sickness devil-strewn and sowed and blossoming slowly. The sickness of an evil man. In the kitchen in the living room, entering and exiting on his son’s gentle breaths. Nothing could be touched. Touch nothing. The wooden bowl of apples there may as well be a Macedonian phalanx, two-hundred and fifty men carrying six meter pikes and all of them aimed at Hero. Turning from the threat he tripped over a shoe then crawled his way to the front door.
He pushed the screen forward and stood up outside.
Bang! It was coming from behind the house.
The porch light was burnt out. The immediate foreground was lit solely by the light from inside. Hero could see the white wall and nothing else. Like a buried vertebrae jutting from the blueish murk of the night. All else was gradient darkness shifting forever ever upward, and not a star. Ta’rgatee.
Bang!
To the scratch of his slippers on the wet grass, Hero traced his hand along the spine-wall until a sudden terror came over him and he began to run.
A reason for the silence, for the lost crickets and rabbits, the steady pines: the wall was not merely a wall. The spine not merely a spine. At its end, beyond the yard, a great skull. He saw a giant rise from the muck, the quake nearly took him off his feet. The giant shook the dirt from its shoulders and head, its voice baritone and brutal, Wherefore and why have the earthen creatures gone? And Hero fell, shut his eyes, opened his mouth to scream — Bang! His eyes shot open and he saw the door of the shed slam, get caught open in the wind, then slam again.
The vision of the giant fell away.
Hero yanked on the copper pull chord in the center of the shed, bare tungsten scorched his eyes. Forlorn objects abound. All of it meant nothing to him. Achy, soft, stiff kneed. Hero never had a need for tools.
But there stuck in the middle of a beaten wooden table was his son’s hatchet, its edge white in the light. Hero reached for it and it came free easier than anticipated. Its heft was perfect. To Hero it felt light but serious. The hatchet had a way with its swing. Hero swung it around and it hummed. The thing cut nothing with a tune. Hero felt the tune familiar.
He swung and swung until saliva gathered at the corners of his mouth and his arm felt heavy. Ta’rgatee simmered in the distance.
There in a chair, leg over leg, staring through his steely helm: Gorzmoth, the Otz King.
Darkness. Evil empire. The sickness devil strewn… Moon near gibbous, waning.
Ta’rgatee simmered in the distance.
The thing cut nothing with a tune.
Everyone will know.
He felt the tune familiar.
If I tell you…
Everyone will know.
He felt the tune familiar.
The next day, Hero awoke from unpleasant dreams to the sound of his son, again, chopping wood.
Hero filled a kettle with water and put it on the stove under high heat. Hero rinsed a French press and unclipped a bag of whole-bean coffee. He weighed out forty grams in a small copper cup. He ground the beans with a hand grinder then he pulled the kettle off the stove. By the time all this was done, the chopping had stopped.
Hero’s son was standing outside the screen door looking inside the house.
“The fat cop is here.”
“Not nice.”
“But he’s really big though.”
“No, he’s enormous.”
Hero’s son smiled wide then walked back towards his stump.
The sun was violent. The stillness of the day before remained, like somewhere someone had pulled a big plug.
Officer Riggle was posted up against the gap in the wall trying to catch his breath. He wore a blue collard shirt and pleated pants, soaked through with sweat. Hero went inside grabbed a second mug, and came back out. Riggle was still against the wall. Hero set the two mugs down on the banister along with the French press. He tamped the press down, filled both mugs then sat on the lip of the porch. “Coffee!”
Riggle came alive, took a breath, and made his way towards Hero. He hadn’t shaved and the stubble gave his double chin a regal quality.
Riggle was too winded to talk, he merely pointed at a lawn chair situated nearby and collapsed.
“G. Zus. Christ. You’ve got a bullshit situation with that.”
Hero nodded, “It sucks, I know I’m sorry.”
“No I’m sorry,” Riggle reached for the mug in Hero’s hand and balanced it on his belly, “It was an easier walk yesterday somehow.”
Thwack!
Riggle flinched.
Hero watched Riggle watch his son toss two halves of wood onto the pile.
“Planning on a long winter?”
“I know, he loves it though. It’s good for him.”
Thwack!
Riggle leaned forward a bit. “God damn he’s strong as hell. He do any sports?”
“Not really. He did jiujitsu, you know? For a bit.”
“Stopped?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t like it?”
“Loved it.”
Riggle thought that over, quite comfortable now in the lounge chair, one arm rested on his forehead to shield from the sun.
Hero’s voice got low, “Guess you got news for me?”
Riggle made an odd grumbling noise. “Not as much.”
“Really?”
“It’s a little weird, sorry, I came out here like this but I wanted to check on ya.”
“Right, no problem.”
Thwack!
“I gotta jump to it — did you go look through your son’s phone?”
“Nope.”
“Not yet?”
“I’m not gonna.”
Riggle faltered a bit. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t care what’s in there.”
Thwack!
“Did anything special happen?”
“Not really.”
Riggle stared for a moment. “Nothing?”
“No, really. Did something happen on your end?”
Riggle looked off at something.
“The teacher,” he stopped himself then started again. “Used the word charges.”
“What? Against an eleven year old? What charges?”
Riggle scoffed and made an ‘O’ with his hand.
“None,” he said. “There’s no charges and it doesn't even make sense. But I’ve gotta react.”
Thwack!
A sense of urgency struck Hero, “How does Gorzmoth, the Otz King even know he’s Gorzmoth, the Otz King? Was that ever addressed?”
Riggle squinted one eye.
“I didn’t ask. He found the note in your son’s locker, though.”
“And why was he looking in my son’s locker?”
Riggle inhaled, exhaled slowly. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I should have addressed all of this yesterday. I’m an idiot for letting it happen.”
“No,” Riggle said, his cop voice returning in full. “I saw the two of you yesterday. That wouldn’t have gone in your favor.” Riggle pointed towards Hero’s son, “And he was done, I don’t need to tell you, he was goddamn paralytic. The reality is: you can’t be writing I am going to kill anyone, not at any age, no matter what nickname you use. And it seems we’re all agreed we know who your son meant that was never in question. Is it?”
“No,” Hero said in a voice from far off.
Thwack!
They drank their coffee.
“Can we talk inside?” asked Riggle.
“I’d rather not.”
Riggle adjusted himself, leaning dramatically over his fat. “Truth be told I’m meant to be assessing things down here. I mean, I don’t know how or who he knows but this teacher, my God. He knows what call to make, and what word to use with who and he’s going about it all right. I got a buzz from my superior he wants to know what I think of the school shooter. Its hardly been a day! So nothing, I tell him, nothing. I don’t get it. I need to know what your son has said. Cause I think look, the guy is a fucking asshole, alright? And I can tell you’re thinking something too, more than normal dad-thoughts. I’m trying to figure it out. You gotta tell me what your son has told you. Cause I can’t make any sense of it, other then maybe the guy plainly wants to just cause hurt. But I don’t like to think people are like that for no reason.”
Thwack!
“And that is starting to seriously freak me out.”
A pause.
Something came over Hero. Wave after wave of bizarre sensation. Half thoughts, symbols ill-defined. There was an ocean within and Hero was face down in it, awash in its vastness.
Everyone will know.
Hero whispered, “He won’t say anything, but my son is hurting.”
Thwack!
“Look if I ask do you trust your son in the situation, could you be honest?”
“I love my son.”
“That’s understood, but everyone’s on edge in these small fucking towns. People move out here for calm.” Riggle waved an arm in futility. “What calm? Everyone’s on edge in these small fucking towns.”
Hero looked up at Riggle and he said, “My son is a very serious person.”
Riggle stared a moment longer then he fell back into the lawn chair. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger for a while.
Thwack!
Hero shouted, “Tommy!”
A moment passed and Hero’s son appeared before them.
Dirty, wiry feral little thing. A sparse, too muscular little thing. With brilliant eyes and a mess of brown hair swept with sweat. There was an irony in the shape of his mouth, an intelligent, demanding irony.
In a mock child’s voice, Hero’s son Tommy said, “Am I going to a little guy jail?”
“Don’t joke,” said Hero. “Go into your room for a bit.”
“Okay.”
Breaking the new silence between them, Hero managed to say, “He listens.”
Riggle looked incredibly concerned.
Hero leaned forward and noticed it was dim all of a sudden. Cloudy. The air was putrid.
Now they spoke not in whispers or hushed tones but in some other way. Prayers. Knowing each term may become a spell.
“He said everything,” Hero said.
“The word everything?”
“Yeah, and I brought up his Mom, it trumped the whole thing. I messed up I should have realized.”
Riggle’s look was soft. His eyes were soft, his voice was soft. “What happened?”
A harpy played a lyre.
“He lived with her. We divorced when he was four. She moved, I tried to make it so she couldn’t move, but she was able to move. I’d see Tommy but not often enough, we spoke on the phone a lot. After a few years something went wrong. He sounded unhappy. There was no point in asking his mother, and it got worse. Tommy was starting to sound old. He was ten. Ten and old? I freaked out and drove down to them, and I took him out under the pretense that I was working in the area. It’d been a few month since I’d seen him. He seemed different, like he was hunching. Something was wrong but I got nothing out of him and—”
Hero caught himself near a sob. A saturation crept into the world around them. Riggle and Hero. Tommy in the house. Vestigial white wall. Shed. Forrest abound. Ta’rgatee simmering in the distance.
Hero spit and continued.
“I asked if he was being bullied and he said nothing, I asked if he was being bullied and he said nothing, I asked if someone was hurting him and he started to cry, I mean like I’ve never seen. Just, manic, like I’ve never seen someone cry. I was gonna take him to a hospital, I’m serious. So I thought…”
Hero stopped talking. Tune played on. Riggle’s patience was stalwart and indomitable.
“I thought he was probably being bullied. I had a friend that wanted me to get into jiujitsu, not my thing, I never did. I called him, he said he’d gladly train him. It was a task to convince the mother but she gave in. I thought it worked, a few times we spoke he sounded right again, talking about jiujitsu. Then one day I got a phone call and it was the police.”
Riggle betrayed himself with a deep exhale through the nose.
Hero continued, “In the background of the call, I heard an ungodly wail. They asked if I was nearby, I wasn’t. They asked if I knew of any domestic issues, I didn’t. They told me to come, now. I asked, can I talk to my son? They said yes. And Tommy’s voice, ordinary as anything he said, “I did a flying armbar!”
Hero was smiling, it was the first and only time Riggle saw him smile.
“They said he rolled with it like an alligator, I mean, took the thing off basically. The cops had come because they were fighting outside, the mother had Tommy by the face, she was pinching his face so hard all these capillaries had burst in his cheeks. And the cops rolled up on them and she immediately stepped away — and then Tommy pounced. He had to jump up and pass his legs across her head and get one of her arms between his legs, you know in his hands. I must have looked the move up a thousand times. And when he rolled down the yard with her, his shirt and his shorts rolled up, and the cops were good, they noticed immediately. Hundreds of little black and blues, yellow bumps. Scars on his inner thighs, his back, his pelvis.”
Riggle was no longer looking at Hero. He held his face with his fingers in dismay like a King who’d just received terrible news.
“He got her though,” Hero said as he looked away and towards the forest.
Animal eyes peered through the branches. An ogre nearly stepped on a twig. All the little things in the world pushed foliage aside to see the spectacle. Hero and Riggle there, rendered in all dimensions, spilled along the canvas. Them the story, pages mid turn.
The creatures wriggled their noses, thinking what to think.
Riggle sprang to life.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine.”
Riggle looked down again.
“But what he did affects him, he pays for it,” said Hero. “Do you understand? But I don’t think he’s crazy.”
“He’s not crazy,” Riggle said with absolute authority.
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“It’s okay. So your son said, he did everything?”
“I don’t know, I think. And he said, everyone will know.”
“What?”
Hero just looked at him, shrugged. “He said everyone will know.”
Riggle stood up.
“I’m going to address the circumstance on the teacher’s end. Um. Sit him down.”
Hero nodded.
“I’ll talk to teach tomorrow, tomorrow’s Friday,” Riggle said. “He’ll make time at night, I will compel him.” And Riggle looked to the ground, failing to hide a flash of anger that just as quickly vanished into his stolid blubbery face.
“Thank you,” said Hero.
“Tomorrow,” Riggle repeated to himself. And he looked for the sun as it hid behind some trees. Then he wandered off in the direction of the exit with a stiff back and a strong stride, only half hearing Hero’s thanks, wholly unaware of what was to come.
Hero was certain the scream was not real.
The vigilant dream world, surly, was reaching more and more into the waking upper sphere to torment him so.
But no. It was a real scream, layered and incredible.
Hero shot off the couch and stumbled towards the front door.
Horror ran him through. As he stepped outside the stillness reached its singularity. There was no sound. Nothing anymore. Not even the melody in Hero’s mind persisted. The scream transcended sound, became the scene.
Riggle was on the front porch, his eyes were bloodshot and alert, searching endlessly in their sockets. His mouth was open and in one hand he held Tommy’s hatchet, while in the other he had Tommy by the wrist.
Tommy was wailing. Of course, Hero couldn’t hear this, but assumed, as Tommy’s shoulders and chest rose high and then collapsed horridly as his mouth twisted and the veins in his neck and forehead pulsed.
Strangely, Hero became fixated on the small backpack hanging over Riggle’s shoulder. Tommy’s backpack. Must be Friday morning. Tommy would have had school.
Hero felt he had to explain something. A lash of desperate energy. Hero stepped towards Riggle. Tommy reached for his arm but missed.
Hero freed the hatchet from Riggle’s grip without resistance. Riggle continued his desperate plea, whatever the plea was.
Hero bound across the lawn.
Riggle tried to stop him but rolled his ankle and face planted into the ground. Tommy waved his arms wildly above his head. Hero vaulted the wall. When he landed he became acutely aware of the feeling of grass beneath his bare feet.
Riggle had left his squad car running. Stopped diagonally, door ajar, somewhere along the gravel. And by the time Riggle made it around to the front of the property, Hero was long gone with it. Siren blaring.
Ta’rgatee’s blown cap blotted out the sky in red and black streaks. The ash and debris did nothing to slow Hero. The school was there before him.
Its massive walls crept in every direction.
Hero saw its forked balustrades, lit by smoldering torches which dotted the horizon like false stars too low. Hedge knights clinking softly in their mail circulated their posts. The front gate stood fifty meters tall. Iron spikes too thick to have been latticed by human hands. Horizontal and vertical horizontal and vertical, one-hundred-thousand cold sharp things drawn up by two coiled chains deep within the school grounds.
Hero smashed through it all.
He ditched the car and entered the school. He found the big pale room and followed further, further still. Sound came back. Oh how they sang! Lo! If only you could hear the lyre!
The classroom door was marked with a five-pointed crown. Hero turned the knob and pushed it open.
Gorzmoth, the Otz King stood at a blackboard underlining a word. As Hero entered, thirty-odd children turned and looked at him in various states of alarm.
Gorzmoth said something.
Gorzmoth took three steps towards Hero, his arm held out to halt him.
Hero stepped forward and swung the hatchet in an arc.
The blade caught Gorzmoth just above the shoulder line, it took a half a second, but the hatchet pushed through and cleaved Gorzmoth’s arm off so there was nothing left but a splintered collar bone and a perfect cross section of fat muscle sinew bone.
A fountain of blood erupted from the gore hole and sprayed all over the chalk board then all over the children as Gorzmoth twisted and collapsed in place and the children scattered in every direction.
Hero bent over and picked the arm off the floor, thick black chunks of viscera and strings of pink and yellow hung from it and felt warm in Hero’s hands.
Hero heard a voice behind him. Presenting Gorzmoth’s arm, Hero turned to meet it.
Thus appeared a set of marble gates with opalescent hinges. A soft, sweet aroma flooded the room. From deep within came the familiar fae lyre playing twinkle-tee, twinkle-tum. The gates swung open in a rush of cool air. Beyond were palatial objects, kaleidoscopic delights of every sense. Rare fat game, a lush garden where a little cat played. And our Hero levitated upon them. All things uncoiled and released. Hero on high. A sweeping release of tension. Our Hero on high, lo! Our Hero on high, to apotheosis.
Wow, I read this through once and then immediately circled back and read straight through it again. Really love how this is written, thanks for sharing this!
I just finished this… wow. What an adventure. You are wildly talented.