NICE FRANCE, 1937
There were no books in the room. It was dark inside. Fulvia stepped through the door, and the ground was damp and sticky. The awful smell increased like a humid heatwave. She had lived in the cleanest house and had never been to any place so filthy and rotten. She had never been to a slaughterhouse.
The room was so dark she felt around. The light wouldn’t enter the room from the open door, but she could see it behind her. So she walked a little deeper and ran into something. Something hung from the ceiling in the room. She felt it. It was a body. It was covered in wounds and maggots; she couldn’t see them or anything, only she could feel them.
To her surprise, she dropped the slender key. It didn’t rattle on the floor. Instead, it landed in something damp and soft. It smelled awful. She grabbed the key, stumbled back to the door, and closed it.
She bathed several times to get the icky feeling off of her, and she tried to wipe the thin little key clean, but the blood wouldn’t come off.
The Marquis returned that evening and asked for his keys, and she returned them to him, except for the seventh key, the little thin one. She was trying everything she could to clean it. The Marquis questioned her about it, and she lied, saying she must have dropped it, and she was very sorry and promised to find it. The Marquis didn’t believe her, but he decided to play her game and said it would be alright, so long as she found it soon.
Each day he would ask her if she had found the key, and each day she would report having searched one of the levels and didn’t find it. Finally, on the seventh day, she was in her bathroom scrubbing the key with caustic acid, trying desperately to remove the blood, when the Marquis burst in.
He said that he knew what she had done but that he wanted to watch her suffer in dread before her punishment for betraying him, and he grabbed the key from her hands and then dragged her by her long blond hair down to the seventh level.
He opened the door and dragged Fulvia across the floor, and her dress was filthy with gore, and he spoke an ancient word, and the lights in the room came on, and she finally saw what was in the room.
Six women were in various states of decay hanging from the ceiling, their arms in shackles. They were mutilated; their faces, or what was left of them, were contorted in pain. Fulvia begged and pleaded with the Marquis, but he wouldn’t hear her. Instead, he called her foul names, and each time she begged, he would slap her or spit in her face.
He bound her hands with heavy iron shackles and winched her in line with his previous wives. He said her dress was very dirty, so he tore it from her and left her for the first night hanging naked in the foul room next to his dead wives.
On the second day, the Marquis returned to the room with a small cimeter, a curved butcher’s knife, and menaced her with it. He ran the blade all over her body and told her how he would cut her up, how he hated her beauty, and how it made her entitled and think that she could do anything she wanted. He said that he knew she found him ugly and just married him for greed, not of money but of knowledge, and so she was a whore, just like all women are whores.
And he cut off her left thumb and small left breast and cauterised the gaping wound after letting her bleed a bit, then he closed the door and left her to hang and suffer. That night she focused on her mind. She tried to hide from the pain and thought of the books she had read. She remembered Sir Everett Ward and how he had opened a portal, and she planned her escape.
On the third day, the Marquis returned with an even larger cimeter than before. He menaced her with it and ran the edge over her body, and told her how ugly he was going to make her and how he would take everything away from her and only then would he let her die, and only when she begged him for it. Fulvia spat in his face. He laughed and cut off her right thumb and right breast. He let the meat of her body flop to the floor, and as it did, Fulvia spoke the words under her breath, but the portal didn’t open.
On the fourth day, the Marquis returned with an even larger cimeter than before, and he menaced her with it and ran the edge over her skin and her burnt wounds, and he told her that her chest looked much improved. He told her that her small breasts were too boyish anyway, so she hadn’t lost much. Fulvia spat in his face, so he cut off her ears and two of her toes and let them flop to the ground. As she bled, she whispered the words, but the portal didn’t open.
On the fifth day, the Marquis returned with an even larger cimeter than before, and he menaced her with it, ran the edge over her skin, poked her ear wounds with the tip, and said that women never listen, and he laughed at his joke. Even though her ears had been cut, she could still hear him talking, though it sounded far away. But she could read his lips, and when he laughed, she spat in his face, so he cut off her nose and another toe from each foot and let them flop to the ground. As she bled, she whispered the words, but the portal didn’t open.
On the sixth day, the Marquis returned with an even larger cimeter than before, and he menaced her with it and ran the edge over her skin, and told her how pretty she was without a nose and that really he had done her a favour and now she couldn’t smell the horrible stench of the room. She barely heard him, but he laughed, and she spat in his face. So he placed the blade betwixt her thighs and carved out her womanhood, and took the final toes from her feet and let them plop onto the floor. As she bled, she desperately whispered the words, but the portal didn’t open.
On the seventh day, the Marquis returned with an even larger cimeter than before, and he menaced her with it and ran the edge over her skin. The Marquis smiled at her lovingly, spoke to her romantically, and said tonight they would consummate their marriage, and her bowels would be moved for him, and he kissed her lips, and she spat in his face and hurled insults at him. She said that he was an impotent old man and didn’t know how to move a girl’s bowls properly, and then she told him of all the endowed men she’d known and how she would always have those memories, and she would be laughing at him.
The Marquis was driven into a rage and quite forgot his plans to torture her slowly and take everything away from her, and he plunged the cimeter downward into her belly and spilt her bowels on the floor at his feet. Then, as she bled, she pleaded the words, and the portal opened.
Because he had cut off her fingers, Fulvia could slip out of the shackles, and she fell after her innards through the portal and flopped onto a stone floor in a long hallway. On either side of it were cowled monks in green and silver, chanting. She looked down the hall and saw a great basin, and in it was the dancing green flame who is named Tulzscha, the Elder God of the festival.
Fulvia gathered up her insides and pushed herself down the hallway, and each time she approached a monk, she would beg for aid, but they just chanted. She didn’t die, though, and so long as she wasn’t dead, she would fight. She was going to crawl; she was going to do whatever it took.
It took her seven minutes, seven agonising minutes, to crawl to the basin. Every centimetre was pain. Her skin was scratched, and her wounds were opening. She clutched her viscera close and stopped to push it back into her.
She collapsed at the foot of the fire and prayed to Tulzscha, and the flame grew, and it spread over her, and it soothed her pain and healed her. And Tulzscha wrote his Elder Law down her back, and named her The Golden Lily of Elysium, because of her flowing blond locks. Even though now they were rather tatty and damp with grime.
Though the Elder God healed her, he did not return her ears, nose, thumbs, or toes but only healed her as he found her. Perhaps he didn’t know or care to know the exact configuration of a human, and perhaps it was the price for her Elder Law; none can say.
Conomar, Tréphine, Elodie, and Manon were all at the funeral of Fulvia. There was a sealed casket, and her husband, the Marquis, was there. He had brought an elven doctor who claimed Fulvia had fallen ill with a contagious sickness so that they couldn’t open the coffin, and everyone believed him, and they mourned their loss and comforted the widower.
Conomar was the first to pay his respects, and he knelt at her coffin, blamed himself for her demise, and thought that only if he had been more clever and protected his daughter, she wouldn’t have gone with the Marquis and caught an illness and died so young.
Tréphine was the second to pay her respects, and she collapsed on the coffin, her grief so profound and begged to be buried with her baby, and she was inconsolable, and Conomar had to take her into his arms and hold her and let her weep.
Manon was the third to pay her respects. She kissed the coffin of her little sister, talked to her, and told her of the poem she had written to be engraved on her tombstone, and said it was her finest poem and that she would never again write another so that it would be forever remembered as her last and greatest work.
Elodie was the fourth to pay her respects, and she had brought her lute, knelt beside the casket, and played a mournful song. It was so mournful that everyone was struck dumb, even Tréphine, who couldn’t even weep as deeply as the song could weep. And the song wept for everyone. Then Elodie broke the lute and swore never to play it again so that her finest song had been the eulogy for her beloved sister.
The Marquis was the fifth to pay his respects, and he stood up and spoke of his great love for Fulvia, how she had fought so bravely against her disease, and that none of his potions could save her, and that he blamed himself, and wept. And all the family Fulvia was moved to tears, hugged him, and said he would always be a part of their family.
The sixth person to pay their respects was a hooded figure. No one had seen him enter. He smelled filthy, and everyone fanned their noses as he limped to the casket. The Marquis stood up and demanded to know who this vagabond was. The hooded figure reached out with a mangled hand and stroked the coffin, and Canomar, Tréphine, Elodie, and Manon gasped to see the thumbless hand of a woman.
Fulvia threw back her hood, and everyone was shocked. They barely recognised her. Her face was horrible, noseless and earless; her blond locks were a tangle of dirt and leaves. She spoke deeply, in words and syllables that no human could understand. The kinds of spells that haunt the nightmares of the foulest necromancers.
She attacked the Marquis, but he was powerful and blocked her spells. And they fought for seven days and seven nights. Fulvia was powerful as well, but she was inexperienced with her magic.
On the seventh day, the Marquis succumbed to her power once she had fully learned what she was capable of, but she didn’t kill him; she dragged him back to his castle and down to the seventh level. She seized his thin little key, opened the door, brought him into the foul butchering room, and spoke the words to illuminate its horror.
She cursed him for seven hundred and seventy-seven years to a deathless hell. And she cursed him with a powerful thirst that could only be quenched by his own blood and an unending hunger that he could only sate with his own flesh. And before she closed the door on him, she cursed his cimeter to never be keen and threw it on the floor at his feet. Finally, she sealed the door, locked it, and made the key into a necklace she wore around her neck.