Azik crawled out of a cramped, stone warren and into the main tunnel that led out into the dreary work flats. A countless number of similarly tight, convoluted passages riddled the bedrock in these parts and pock-marked the black basalt cliff face outside with imp-sized cave openings like tiny, gaping mouths. He peered out through one of the tunnel mouths at the sky, burning red and choked with thick, endless smoke. Even though he was almost fifteen years old now, the acrid fumes of the open winds still stung his eyes and made them water. This was his place, buried beneath the foot of his master's stronghold, invisible, inconsequential and worthless.
As he trudged mindlessly into line with a thousand others of his kind, a large, leathery hand clapped down on his shoulder. Azik froze, wondering in a panicked instant how one of the Masters had managed to get inside the imp brood tunnels, and prepared himself for a painful end. To draw the personal attention of one of the Masters was, without doubt, an irrevocable death sentence.
Nadirak Blade Fiend
The wrinkled hand pulled him quietly out of the marching column and into one of the countless side-tunnels. Azik sighed in relief as he realized the hand did not belong to one of the Masters, but to another imp, one of the old longtooths from the main warren.
"Azik," the longtooth said in a guarded whisper, "You have been chosen."
Azik gaped in awe. Chosen? By who? And for what? Instinctively, he tried to turn back into the flowing oneness of the column of imps who were on their way out to the work flats. Digging and toiling and slaving away for the Masters made sense to him, but being chosen did not. The only imps who were ever chosen for anything ended up in the bellies of the Masters. The longtooth deftly steered Azik back into the side tunnel and urged him to continue with him.
"Come, child." he said, his voice low and purposeful, "There is something you must see."
Azik followed the elder imp through a confusing array of tunnels, some so narrow that he was forced to fold his wings down tight and crawl through on his belly. The elder navigated the dizzying chaos with ease, as if he'd painstakingly committed every bend and curve to memory. Twice during the journey, the old one stopped and pressed his pointed ear to the stone, waiting and listening. During these long moments, Azik remained tense and still, holding his breath to try and remain as quiet as possible. Whatever the longtooth was worried about, Azik knew he didn't want to attract its attention.
They came to a vertical crack in the bedrock, barely wide enough for an imp to squeeze through and, again, the old one pressed on without hesitation. Azik followed, turning sideways and shimmying slowly along the rough stone. After almost twenty feet, the crack widened into a small chamber. Once inside, the old one moved a flat slab panel of volcanic rock over the crack, blocking it off. To anyone on the outside, the passage would seem just like any of a thousand similar cracks throughout the brood tunnels which went nowhere.
The old one sparked a tiny switch of tinder and ignited a brazier filled with fire stones, illuminating the chamber with a dull, orange glow. Azik noted that the bowl was scorched and blackened from repeated use, and hundreds of burnt tinder switches were scattered on the floor near it. He wondered how many other imps had visited this place over the years.
"Look." the old one commanded, reaching out and tilting Azik's chin up and forcing his gaze to the walls and roof, "and learn."
Intricate images had been scratched and painted into the rock, crude pictures of imps and demons and great black, stone palaces. Whoever had first made these pictures had taken great pains to keep them well-hidden. Aside from the intricate and confusing pathway, the uninvitingly tight passageways and the secret cave, the images had been further protected by deliberately inscribing them on the ceiling. No imp who, by some impossible accident of chance, found the chamber would ever think to look up. The first lesson any imp learned was to keep his eyes down at all times. Imps who didn't see things remained unseen themselves and to be unseen was to be safe.
Azik stared upwards in amazement. The pictographs stretched across the upper walls and ceiling, covering every inch of stone in a dizzying blur of shapes and colors. Azik suddenly felt very small as the weight of those images pressed down on him. He could feel their age and importance surrounding him like a heavy vapor.
"What . . . is this?" he asked quietly, wincing slightly as his whispered voice echoed back at him in the close chamber.
The old imp put a bony arm over Azik's shoulders and gestured grandly with his other hand.
"This is us, Azik." he breathed reverently, his eyes narrowed and twinkling with an odd emotion, "This . . . is the imps."
Azik began to decipher some sense out of the pictures now. He recognized a progression, a series of events which proceeded from the direct center of the ceiling and spiraled outward and down to the mid-point of the wall. The longtooth pointed to the centermost picture, one which showed a strange world with pale blue sky and deep green hills. Azik found it very peculiar indeed. These colors were only found in minerals under the ground, not on the surface or in the skies. It didn't make sense.
"This is the world of Those Who Came Before." the elder imp explained, as if reciting an ancient, memorized mantra, "It was a land of plenty, with good food and clean water in abundance."
He moved on to the next picture which showed a pair of tall, stylized humanoid beings dressed in fine robes, one male and one female. They floated in the air, limned with a halo of light, and a series of tall, white structures rose up behind them.
"Those Who Came Before had the power to change anything they so desired and shaped great cities for themselves, filling them with all manner of beauty and riches."
The next picture showed a small, imp-like being bowed at the foot of one of the robed-ones. It had long, flowing, white hair, angular features and soft, pale, flawless skin.
"We were different, then. We lived above ground in a form that pleased Those Who Came Before. We served Them and They took care of us in return."
The mural proceeded to show two of the robed figures facing each other in conflict, fists clenched and aggressive confidence expressed on their stylized faces.
"Over time, Those Who Came Before grew dissatisfied with the expanse and glory of their kingdoms. They turned to a dangerous sport of intrigue to amuse themselves."
One of the robed figures had been etched standing over a stone altar in the midst of casting a spell. The magic of the spell twisted around the altar where a terrible being stood half-formed. A variation of the same scene mirrored it on the opposite side of the panel, with the mage in different robes and a different kind of creature taking shape on the altar. In the background, speckled masses, representations of tremendous armies, flanked the mages. In the direct center, one of the white-skinned, imp-like beings knelt and stared up at the sky imploringly.
Azik recognized the monsters in the picture with quiet shock. Although they were crudely drawn and heavily stylized, there was no doubt in his mind. They were the Masters. Those Who Came Before had created the Masters.
"Wars scarred the world, as Those Who Came Before forged legions of soldiers and marched them carelessly against one another. We tried to warn Them, implored Them to stop this horrible game of Theirs, but They were confident that there was no real danger. They were wrong." |
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The paintings continued to show how Those Who Came Before grew ever more complacent and lazy until the Masters seized the opportunity to overthrow them. They cast down their creators and stole from them the secrets of their powerful magicks. They learned how to create more of their kind and continued the war that they had been built to wage, for they knew nothing else.
Azik followed the images, watching as the blues and greens of this primordial world became overtaken with more familiar angry reds and ashen blacks. The old longtooth nodded softly as he watched his pupil's gaze.
"Yes, the Masters failed to fully grasp what they had stolen from their creators. Over time, they lost small but vital pieces of the puzzle and their incantations became flawed and corrupt. Every spell they cast darkened the world by a tiny degree, feeding a taint that burrowed, gnawing deeper into the fabric of the land and poisoning it ever so slowly. Eventually, all that Those Who Came Before had wrought would be forever stained by the work of the Masters."
The final piece of the tale depicted a towering creature with a terrible, flaming blade in its fist, a version of one of the Masters which was much more modern and familiar. Above it, the crimson sky swam with dark smoke and a dozen red-skinned, horned and fanged imps cowered in terror against the blackened ground beneath its feet.
Azik reeled, stunned by the sheer amount of information his mind had to grasp. The implications were preposterous. The Masters were unnatural creatures who had usurped and destroyed the world of Those Who Came Before, a world that had once treated the imps with respect and dignity. How could this be? The Masters' rule was absolute, as was the imps place in it. He felt ill just by conceiving of such impossible thoughts. It had to be a lie.
The elder imp traced his long fingers over a series of lines that had been carved into the wall near the end of the pictographs. The markings on the left were worn and shallow, growing sharper and more recent as they went to the right.
"What is that?" Azik asked, feeling dizzy and oddly numb.
"These are the markings of all the keepers of the knowledge we have recorded here. For centuries, we have kept these truths alive, so that we would not forget who we are or where we came from. Each of these marks is the mark of an imp who held this place more preciously than his or her own life. This one is mine." He paused with his fingertip over the last mark in the series, and then indicated a conspicuously empty place next to it, "And this spot is for yours."
Azik backed off a step, too frightened of the possibilities to accept them. So much history, such an important duty, it was too much for a single imp to handle. He scrambled for the door, shoving the plate of basalt aside and squeezing desperately through the aperture. The rough stone scraped his skin and bruised his flesh, but he didn't care. He just needed to get away.
The young imp fled blindly through the tunnels, somehow remembering his way back to the main warrens. He hid in his sleeping hole, too sick and frightened to move until one of the Masters commanded his labor gang to another part of the work flats and he was able to slip out undetected and rejoin them. For weeks, he worked at nearly double capacity, throwing himself headlong into menial labor in a desperate attempt to bury the terrible knowledge that had invaded his being. The old longtooth did not approach him again, but Azik saw him watching and waiting in the distance. Like everything Azik had seen and learned that day, he tried to pretend the elder did not exist, but every time one of the Masters stormed past or raised a biting whip in anger, Azik remembered.
After many long days of tedious work, the Masters allowed Azik and his labor gang to return to the warrens and rest. Exhausted and sore, he curled up in the first empty sleep hole he found. Within an hour, he awoke with a start. Something was happening outside. Imps scurried in all directions within the warrens and screams of terror and pain filled the smoggy air, a sure sign that the Masters were coming. What frightening stroke of misfortune could bring the Masters here of all places? Azik instinctively darted for cover, scrambling for the upper reaches of the brood tunnels. A taloned hand reached in and snatched an imp who had been standing right next to him and the unfortunate female shrieked ear-piercingly as the arm dragged her outside. His little heart thudding in fear, Azik ducked low and peered out through a small, fist-sized hole in the rock wall.
Down on the work flats, a dozen Masters had rounded up ten times their number in imps. One at a time, they marched them up onto a stone perch and slaughtered them in increasingly more brutal ways. After each grisly murder, the Masters roared in anger, demanding the surrender of a heretic. They were prepared to kill ten thousand imps if necessary to find one they called the spreader of lies. Azik watched in horror, stunned by the Masters' limitless cruelty, as a score of imps were slain in succession, bathing the stone and the ground around it in blood and gore. The atrocity seemed like it would never end, until one imp pushed his way out of the meager safety of the warrens and threw himself at their feet.
It was the old longtooth, his withered face resigned to the terrible fate to which he had condemned himself. Realization dawned and Azik slowly came to understand what had happened. When Azik had refused to accept the responsibility of the knowledge keepers, the longtooth must have sought out another candidate. While Azik would never have given away the elder imp's secret, he knew many imps who would do anything to ingratiate themselves to the Masters.
The old man withstood almost half a day of gruesome torture before the Masters finally allowed him to die. Their message was clear. Imps were offal, a resource to be used, abused and forgotten. Neither will, nor thought, nor hope had a place with them. Azik forced himself to watch the entire affair, ensuring that he would always remember it. Before he finally died, the old longtooth somehow knew he was there and raised his head so their gazes met one last time. In that final moment, Azik understood.
The Cave of the Keepers
After that, the imps walked with their shoulders slumped a little lower, their eyes a little more vacant, resigned to endless servitude. Azik took extra care to keep his head down and his step meek, despite the newfound fire that burned within him. It took him five weeks of furtive searching, carefully timing his absences to avoid notice, before he found it again. In the deepest part of the brood tunnels, after a mind-bogglingly complex series of convoluted passages, Azik found his way back to the chamber of knowledge.
The young imp squeezed through the narrow crack, slid the basalt panel aside and peered inside. He carefully pulled the rock plate back over the entrance and filled the blackened bowl with some fresh fire stones before lighting it. The place was exactly as he remembered it. The traitor must have been unable to find his way back when he reported it and, now that the old longtooth was dead, the Masters cared little about the subject. Everything was as they wanted it in the brood tunnels, placid, obedient and fearful.
Azik reached up and brushed his palm very lightly across the motifs, following the progression until he came to the series of individual scratch marks in the bare stone. Unconsciously, he picked up a shard of rock between his fingers and began scratching at the wall. The Masters had been afraid of the old longtooth, he realized, afraid of the thoughts and information he possessed. They wanted to keep the imps firmly controlled, without thought or feeling. Their place was as it always had been, under the heels of the Masters. But Azik knew the truth, now.
He finished scoring a new uniform mark in the wall, just as all the knowledge keepers before him had done, and sat down with a contented smile. He was a slave, imprisoned by the will of the Masters, but there were things inside him now that they could never take away. He knew from where his people had come and where they deserved to be. He had discovered hope and the desire to kindle that hope in others of his kind. And with hope, he had found a certain form of freedom.
- Excerpted from "Memoirs of a Visionary", written by Vasq, Disciple of the Creative Flame |
