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blueheronteanookRating: Mature
Major Warnings: Body horror, graphic violence, familial abuse, other warnings included in fic
Summary: Reid Musser survives the Carmine Contest, against all odds, though continuing to live comes with its own hard choices to make, about his family, his friends, and how to move forward.
The jagged hunk of metal swung for him, and he dodged to the side. Heat radiated from underneath the corroded metal platform he was standing on, and that heat seared through the soles of his shoes and into his feet. That sensation was worsened as the metal rod hit the platform, causing it to shake and sway, with a corresponding harsh screech that assaulted his ears. Amidst the haze of heat and smog that burned his eyes and scorched his throat, he saw his opponent turn. A humanoid figure, two feet taller than him, with metal welded to skin in a patchwork fashion. No eyes were visible, only a metal helm with the rough facsimile of a sharp-toothed metal jaw, but it looked at him all the same.
It went for another swing with its arm, which was nothing more than a weapon, just as he raised the chain in his right hand. A flood of rusted chains burst from the ground, catching the arm—
Just as the Abyssal’s other arm, a similar jagged rod that hung limp at its side, shot out of its body, weaving around the chains and striking him in the chest head-on. There was a crack as his ribs gave way. Spikes pierced and tore through flesh, as blood welled from the cuts and skin was ripped off. Pain shot through his whole body, as if his nerves were screaming at him, and the already-existing pain from his face returned that screaming with renewed agony of its own. He lost his footing as the force lifted him off the ground and sent him flying off the platform.
Reid’s back slammed into the searing floor of another platform a few feet away, and there was another crack. His vision went white. His body felt like dead weight, too heavy to move. He felt his heart stop.
His father’s voice called down to him from above.
“Get up.”
So he did.
His heart jerked back to life and his vision returned, because Death had no foothold this deep in the Abyss. Reid stood up to face the Abyssal, gripping the chain with a hand covered in cuts. The noise of the fight had already started to attract other denizens of the Factory, who were climbing up the pipes and corroded cement pillars that formed haphazard footholds and bridges, their distorted shadows cutting into the distant red glow emitting from the various fires and pools of molten metal around them.
The heat was ever-present, but his footing was steadier than it had been earlier. It was another part of himself made slightly more durable—slightly more hardened. His father had chosen the Factory because of its intensity, something that he desperately needed to prepare for in the Carmine Contest. The area was a constant, unending stream of threats from both the environment and its inhabitants, a realm of endless production and endless violence. In a way, his training was his final test. The more he trained, the more hardened he would be for the future challenge. The more he slipped, the more mistakes he made—
The Abyss would let him keep going. He would keep going, and the more he was broken down, the more other things would slip away, if he didn’t need them to fight. Exhaustion, hunger, shock… the more he fucked up, the less human—the less Musser—he became.
So he would make as few mistakes as possible. Reid gestured with the chain, jerking it downwards. Chains burst from a cement pillar to the right of the Abyssal, slamming into the platform where it was currently standing. The decayed cords holding the corroded metal up strained and snapped, the Other struggling to keep its footing on the now-unstable platform.
Reid kept an eye on the Abyssal as he backed away towards a set of narrow metal stairs behind him leading downwards, where Others were already starting to gather and climb up—weaker Abyssal denizens, some formerly human, some more goblin, each scorched and marred by the place they lurked in. He stashed the chain on his belt and took out a morningstar, running right into the mass of Others and swinging. Each hit had the force of a thunderclap behind it, turning flesh into a spray of red mist and chunks of gore. Easier to aim than the chains, easier to carve a carmine-colored path deeper into the Abyss.
His father watched from safer grounds—Reid didn’t need to look back and check to recognize the incessant pressure bearing down on him. He had protections against this place, and he was powerful enough that most Others would recognize that challenging him was a terrible idea.
His father said that he would train until he was ready for the contest. He was to use the items given to him and learn them well, and to survive. The matter of how to learn and survive was left to him to figure out. As a Musser, he would know.
So he fought. In a realm where time and space folded into a miserable eternity of violence and suffering, he traded blows with monsters until he was spent, and then he fought some more. He reached the end of the staircase and, instead of diving forward into a sea of monsters, he hoisted himself up over the side, falling a few feet down to a grid of steel platforms partly melted by the heat. A few Others followed after.
The struggling Abyssal was above him now, and as he made his way to more stable ground, it swung its arm out, aiming for his head. Reid barely sidestepped the blow, the jagged spikes of the weapon catching on his facial bandages and tearing some loose.
As he dodged, he twisted around and swung the morningstar out to meet the Other’s attack. It hit the metal arm with a sharp clang and a reverberation that Reid felt all along his arm. If it had torn muscle, he wouldn’t be surprised. This thing was too strong to be blown away by the divine weapon.
But it felt the same recoil he did, and its whole body swung back, setting it off-balance. Its other arm started to come loose from the steel platform, spikes no longer finding purchase, and soon the Abyssal began to slip, metal screeching and grinding against metal as it slid down.
Reid watched from a distance as it fell into the Abyss below—a dark, infinite void beneath the platforms, broken up by spots of orange, white, and yellow lights. An inverted, industrial sea of stars.
He continued onward. Stopping for too long would get rid of his momentum. Had to get to more stable ground, off the flimsy platforms, to places like the intermeshed group of pipes and cement pillars he could see in the distance. Had to focus on the moment, and let everything else fall away.
He made his way through the thinning crowd of Others, moving across platforms to the intermeshed structure. He entered into a maze of corridors framed by pipes that continually let out vents of boiling steam. The hissing noises from the steam jets almost disguised the soft, plodding sounds of something approaching from behind. He swiftly twisted around, taking out a steel dagger and sliced at a soot-covered figure. The dagger found its way across the Other’s throat as if drawn towards it, and the wretch crumpled.
He paused to catch his breath, and to make sure the fallen Other didn’t rise again. For a moment the Factory was quiet, except for the constant hum of machinery and hiss of steam. Ahead of him, the maze of corridors opened up to a sort of balcony. Ahead of him was more of the maze, but to his left, he saw a platform jutting outward, positioned so it looked over the deeper Abyss.
Reid stepped out onto the platform and gazed downward.
A dark shadow swooped towards him.
“Fuck—” The shock was enough to make him shout in a voice hoarse from disuse, as the metal platform groaned and jolted to the side, sending him tumbling off and downwards. He grabbed the chain, wrapped it around one of his wrists, and sharply pulled his arm to the side, as if trying to tug something out of the immense morass of broken buildings and steel crates that made up the wall closest to him. Chains burst out of the wall just below, carrying parts of the wall with them. He landed painfully, but it was better than splattering on the ground, which he could just barely see now that he was farther down.
Below him, there were mountains of slag and black sludge—concentrated Abyss-stuff, mixed in with the wreckage of older factories and other buildings. Within one of the piles, something stirred. Something big. He looked up, and found the Factory above had a faint, ominous red glow to it, occasionally broken up by the circling, mechanical wings of a flying Other.
Going this deep would take him away from the Factory proper, where he was meant to train, but… he needed to be a Musser. He had to strive to achieve more. He had to fight greater monsters, like the contestants he expected to see.
And yet, apprehension gripped him. Would that be disobedience? When he had already let his father down so much?
He froze, caught between two difficult paths.
The flying Other let out a deafening screech from a head that seemed to have multiple jaws attached to it. The Abyssal in the slag below began to emerge, a skeletal face appearing from the debris, as multiple, smaller disturbances appeared in the muck around it. He—
He leapt down, to face the deeper Abyss.
---
“I—I wasn’t in love with her. But the conversation was mine and hers, right? I would’ve liked to have her for a friend.”
The soldier responded. Reid understood the message—that he was skirting too close to delaying, that he needed to hurry the fuck up—but the words themselves went right through him. His head was too full and too light at once, both throbbing with pain and lost in a daze as the reality of his situation crept in.
No way out. Not in death, because there’d be no afterlife for his soul. Not in forswearing. Not even in delaying the inevitable.
He wanted to tell Raquel to run. To not end up like him, with a Self that felt so, so very small right now, even without the Abyss seeping into it.
He wanted to tell everyone outside about Lauren—who she was, what she did. Those Kennet people were out there, weren’t they? Maybe they’d listen. Maybe Wye would be able to spread the news.
But that wasn’t possible.
He nodded back at the soldier. John? Was that what they called him? It was hard to remember the little details—between the pain and the tainted parts of himself, there was a mental static over his thoughts, filtering them towards the now, and towards darker, more violent ideas.
The only reasonable way forward was to fight. To die, to end, because there was a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach that winning wasn’t an option for him. It wasn’t an option he wanted, even. Winning was what his father wanted, entering the contest was what his father wanted.
He didn’t know what he wanted, at least on a big-picture level. He didn’t have any hopes or dreams of his own. He only had baser wants, and memories that surfaced even through the mental noise. Wye told him they could have a smoke and chat with Tanner and Chase when they got back to the Blue Heron.
That wouldn’t happen. No more laid-back afternoons with his friends.
He wouldn’t get to see Raquel again, wouldn’t be able to advise her about the best course in life, even if she’d never listen to him. He wouldn’t be able to go home. It barely felt like home, but he’d always been able to return. He could remember his room—was it still as he left it? It would be so nice to rest his aching body in the sheets, in any sheets. Exhaustion had mostly left him, but the pain hadn’t. His father had told him to hold onto the pain, to motivate him, but right now all it did was fill Reid with an entirely different sort of fatigue.
Another memory surfaced, something he’d tried not to think about. He remembered an endless expanse of darkness before him, and a clockwork bird. A massive steel diagram, buried beneath Abyssal depths—
“...Breastbiter. You should fight. Get it over with,” Reid spoke up, his voice rasping against his torn throat.
“Reid.” The soldier—John—spoke, sounding frustrated. Understandably so.
“I know, I—I’m removing protections. I said I would make it faster.”
The words tumbled out of his mouth without any particular cadence. Shellshocked, if anything. John and his pack of Dogs gave him a long look, before John sighed, shaking his head and turning around to address the goblin.
His eyes looked so sad. He looked disapproving, serious, but his eyes—
“All of that hold-up just to pussy out?”
A soldier responded. Not John. “Think he’s realized his daddy isn’t going to bail him out of this one.”
The conversation continued, as the goblins and the soldiers exited the rink. Reid stood there for a moment, watching the two share some short banter as they prepared to fight. He tried to catch it, but—
But he could hardly think. The mental static took over as he clenched his fist, and he was certain his nails would be drawing blood from his palms if his hands weren’t bandaged. Or if he still had all of his fingernails. It was a desperate kind of tension, soaking him through with dread and quieting the part of him that just wanted to lash out—to see how far he got trying to smash his weapons in the Judges’ faces before they wiped him out of reality.
I don’t want to die.
He took a couple steps towards the edge of the rink, out of the way of the Judges and the other contestants. He grabbed the book attached to a chain on his belt, and unhooked it. There was a way to rip out the pages so that it would summon past members of the Musser family. Esteemed men, strong men. Alive, any of them likely would have won this contest.
His father gave him the book so that the Mussers would win. Real Mussers, unlike him. Another way to make none of his accomplishments his own.
With the book still closed, he dropped it onto the bloody ice.
It was nice talking to Lauren. I want that—that feeling again.
He took off his jacket, and the rack of tools attached to it in the process. The Abyssal chain, which summoned many more of its kind from out of the Abyss. The thunder god’s morningstar. The killer’s dagger. Talismans to make him faster, a charm to improve his aim. All of that and more--
He discarded them one by one, letting them soak in the shallow red pool.
The Aurum watched him, and it was hard to tell if the Judge was interested, or simply wearing his default expression.
I want to say I lived—that I had a life, and it was mine.
Tears started gathering around his good eye, and his not-good eye, and they stung. This was so stupid. All he was going on now was a fuzzy memory of a vague idea that he didn’t even trust, just because he was scared. It would be easier to keep everything, to go out in a blaze of bloody glory. What kind of life could he even have, anyway? His face was ruined. His practice was ruined.
… But even like this, he was able to meet Lauren. Even if his ‘out’ was a desperate shot in the dark, it would be wrong not to try.
---
How long had it been? Hours? Days?
Reid couldn’t tell. Time didn’t have much of a hold down in the Abyss anyway, except to trick the senses or to stretch out the painful moments. All he had was the fighting, and even that had blurred together at some point.
The piles of slag had decayed, melted together with rock and debris and Abyssal essence to form jagged mazes of pitch black ridges and hills, so deep in some places as to be almost cavernous. Pits of molten metal occasionally interrupted the darkness—the industrial sea of stars he’d seen in the Factory revealed to be ugly craters, filled with charred limbs desperately grasping for escape.
The Others were more broken-down here, more like piles of bone and metal, or lumps of flesh clotted together, but they were also more desperate, more durable. The instant they sensed his movement, they rose out of the dust and sludge and lunged out, or swooped down from the murk above. They wanted food. They wanted lifeforce and terror to warm their nearly spent forms, or they had already been whittled down into mere arms of the Abyss, trying to break him down into a part of the dark and churning whole.
He fought back, of course. They were less predictable than the Others in the upper levels of the Factory—was he even in the Factory anymore? Their claws and teeth and whatever they chose to arm themselves with hurt more than they had above, so he had learned not to get hit, to switch up his tactics and his tools.
Those lessons only marginally helped. He had stopped counting the number of times he should have died when he realized he couldn’t tell his own blood from the Abyss-soaked blood of his enemies. The wounds on his face were supposed to have been partially healed, even if they’d leave scars. Now they were worse. Every part of him was worse.
He didn’t have two eyes anymore.
There was a certain finality to it, to knowing that not only had he lost everything, but he had been ruined beyond recourse. And amidst it all, he could still feel that same gaze boring into him, pressuring him to go even further.
That sense of finality made him angry, at least. He could use that anger as fuel to push himself forward, when the pain he felt wasn’t enough.
Reid twisted his body to the side, narrowly avoiding a spider-like metal leg that slammed into the ridge behind him as he reached out and caught another appendage, holding it back from piercing his chest. A bogeyman, limbless and swaddled in stained bandages, lay strapped to a rusted bedframe at least ten feet above him, while myriad metal limbs stretched out from the bed and reached for the ground, some acting as legs, some holding scavenged, brutal-looking tools. It looked as if it belonged in a hospital rather than the bottom of a factory, but he supposed they were similar in that regard.
He felt uneasy whenever he caught a glimpse of the main body, when the bogeyman tilted the bed at an angle to maneuver through tighter spaces. Too easy to see himself in that bandaged face.
The legs looked ramshackle, but they still left holes in the hardened morass they both walked on. And it was fast. Before Reid could try to throw it off-balance with his grip on one limb, two more plunged down towards him. His body dropped down low, and he rolled away from the onslaught. As he got to his feet, stumbling forward and keeping his momentum, he tried to draw the morningstar, only to see more legs spearing down at him the instant he turned back to face the Other.
The first narrowly missed, but the second grazed his upper arm, and the rough, unpleasant texture of the metal scraping against him was almost enough to get him to drop his weapon. He held on, if only by virtue of one of the many talismans on his body. His father had given him plenty of charms and trinkets, and while at this moment he could barely remember what half of them did, he knew one of them ensured that disarming him would be difficult, if not impossible.
He met the next onslaught by parrying with the morningstar. Strangely enough, there was no recoil, no shattering vibration that removed the bogeyman’s legs. Only the loud clang of metal that quickly disappeared amidst the heavy, droning roar that was a constant through the area, from the burning of molten metal and the hum of distant machinery.
The bogeyman began to lower its main body, trying to get its tool-holding limbs closer to him. Reid could see pliers, a scalpel-like blade, and a syringe, among others.
Seeing the syringe made his chest ache with a different sort of pain. A pang of loss, for the power he used to have, and the person he used to be.
Reid continued to parry, stepping back along the narrow valley between two ridges they were squeezed between. He continued, until the back half of his foot slipped ever so slightly. He quickly glanced back, and saw a sharp drop-off downward into darkness. A dead end, but one he could use. He reached for the chain. With the right gesture, he could bid a flood of chains to come forth from one of the ridges, or maybe the ground below? If he could push his opponent off-balance, maybe he could send it off the edge—
Something latched onto his back, digging into skin and drawing blood. It pulled him downward, fast, and he fell a good distance before it slammed him into the cliff. He let out a loud gasp, and scrambled to find a grip, an outcropping, or something to hold onto before the attacker made another move. His fingers and remaining nails dug into the wall of rough rock and sharp metal fragments, and he glanced downward.
The familiar welded-metal skull of the Abyssal from the Factory met him. Only its upper body remained, and it looked worse for wear, but it still had a mouth to bite with—and its spiked club arms, one of which, the one it was able to extend from its body, was currently embedded in him.
From above, the spider-like bogeyman gazed down from the edge of the cliff.
Fuck. He didn’t want to use his more limited tools before the contest, but he didn’t have much of a choice here, did he?
His hand that was partly gripping his weapon and partly gripping the cliff let the weapon drop. He hurriedly reached into one of his pockets and took out a worn velvet satchet.
Reid let go of the cliff and let himself drop. The Abyssal’s arm followed his motion, letting him draw closer to its gaping maw. He stretched out his hand and dropped the sachet just as its head lunged up, swiftly drawing his limb away before it could bite into him. The Other swallowed the sachet, and then froze, going limp.
The arm embedded into Reid went loose as well, and Reid fell past the Abyssal, a good distance down until the cord attaching the arm to its body went taut. Reid tried to reorient his body to grab onto the cliff before that happened, but the spikes caught on his skin, tearing through his back.
That was an agony he could hardly bear even in his current state. He let out a pained gasp as gravity detached the arm from his back, and he fell the rest of the way. His body hit the ground soon enough, as the sheer drop smoothed out into a jagged hill with patches of something more liquid in-between. He tumbled down, his movement slowed by some of the Abyssal sludge, and came to a stop soon after.
He stood up, not bothering to wipe the muck off. It was already too late to keep the Abyss out of him—it wasn’t as if this much more would make any difference. He turned on his Sight for a moment, to find the beacon of power the morningstar emanated. Thankfully, it hadn’t fallen too far away. As he staggered towards it he glanced back up the cliff face. The now-distant Abyssal was outlined with a golden glow as the fae poison, taken from a high prince of Bright Spring, took effect. Soon it would crumble to flakes of gold dust.
He retrieved the morningstar. He stopped, listening for sounds of the bogeyman approaching from above, but there was nothing. Maybe it had been scared off by what happened to the Abyssal.
His eye roved around, taking in the scenery in front of him. It was flat down here. A plain of pitch black ash, which rose higher in occasional piles, but that was it. He wasn’t able to see far—it was like a veil of oppressive darkness surrounded the place.
As for threats…
Tiny limbs tried to form from the ash and Abyssal sludge, weakly grasping at him. He stepped forward, and the limbs came apart instantly, taking a few moments to rise from the sludge again and clutch at the leg of his pants.
Strange. Stranger still was the noise, or the lack thereof. His labored breathing was the loudest soundin this place, and the silence felt almost deafening. It didn’t seem dangerous, but for a part of the Abyss to be still meant something here had to be powerful enough to—
An obnoxious, whirring noise distracted him from his thoughts. He looked up.
A clockwork bird, like the one that had knocked him into the deep Abyss in the first place, circled above.
For the first time in ages, he heard a coherent voice. A distant, almost mechanical voice, like it was being transferred through multiple, imperfect recorders.
“You’ve come a long way.”
The Other could speak. He reached for another weapon, a gilded revolver.
“There are no treasures down here, no glory. So why?”
“Aa—a—” Reid opened his mouth, to try to speak, but all that came out was a rattling noise. His throat felt dry and tight, like it was clogged up with ash, and his mouth was drier still.
Faint panic bloomed in the back of his mind. He needed to speak if he was going to represent the Mussers. He took a few slow, wheezing breaths, pain shooting through various gashes around his neck, and tried again. “I-I don’t need to—answer to you.”
Speaking hurt, but maybe this was practice in and of itself. He had to assert his authority. The Other seemed like a practitioner’s construct—someone who had an interest in the Musser family? A hostile interest? He tried to focus, mentally paging through family contacts and enemies. Who was able to enter the deep Abyss…?
He couldn’t think of anyone. He wasn’t sure he cared.
The bird simply continued its circling motion. Reid took a step forward every few seconds, to keep the half-formed limbs from actually getting a grip on his legs, and the bird seemed to follow.
“But you could. You could, lest your speech slip away entirely. Why come here, drenched in the mud of the Abyss?”
“Who made you?” he shouted upwards, ignoring its question.
The construct didn’t answer.
“Who made you? I compel you to answer!”
The pressure from his father’s gaze, and the faint roar of constant pain and irritation, and the darker parts of him that he was certain the Abyss had seeped into by now, were telling him to just shoot the damn thing. He readied his finger on the trigger.
“I ask you for the third time, who—”
“Is this how you treat curious strangers? Even without that man watching over you?” Reid froze. Still pointing the revolver at the bird, he turned around, looking behind him, and then up the cliff face. His eyes flashed with the Sight, searching for that connection.
His father wasn’t behind him. His father was far away.
“What did you—” He looked back at the construct, and tried to See through it, to see if there was some greater power or connection behind it.
Nothing of the sort. Only weak connections, stretching away and downwards.
“Will you blame me? A weak Other? Truly?” That incessant pressure was gone. He was alone. He—
What did he do, here? Alone?
“...How long—”
“I wouldn’t know.”
How long had he been struggling down here, pushed forward by a gaze that wasn’t even there? His father couldn’t have been in danger. Was he satisfied enough by Reid’s performance to think supervision was unnecessary?
Did his father even care what happened to him, as long as he was able to enter the contest?
The parts of him touched by the Abyss wanted to scream, to break something, anything.
He settled for stalking forward, making his gait forceful enough to violently rip at the grasping sludge limbs trying to get a hold on him.
The fucking bird was still there. Circling.
After a few moments, Reid spoke. “...We’re training. Preparing for a contest.”
He wasn’t sure how much that contest mattered in his father’s eyes now, so it was fine if a random practitioner learned of it, right?
“Oh? And what sort of contest requires you to drink in the Abyss?”
“A violent contest. A savage, primitive bloodbath.”
“You don’t sound eager.”
The grasping limbs began to increase in volume, and it started to feel as if he were slowly sinking into a mire. He took out the Abyssal chain, and tried to think of how to respond, or how to not respond.
“I’m—I need to do this. For the family. So our name isn’t—”
He let the chain extend towards ground level, and gave it a sharp pull, sweeping the chain around him. Where it swept over the ground, a miniature wave of rusty chains followed it, dispelling the grasping limbs and sending sludge and ash back in a small pile around him. He didn’t continue his response.
“Ah. So the son sacrifices himself for the wants of the father.” “It’s not—”
“Is it? I’ve heard plenty of stories like it, before.”
The ground beneath him was, as he continued to sweep away at the increasingly agitated Abyss-stuff, surprisingly...solid. His boots hit metal, and not the rusting, hostile bars and slabs that were supposed to be in this region. Solid, although tarnished, metal. There were soft ridges and markings that traced out fragments of symbols.
He used the Sight and the symbols completed themselves, forming parts of a large, complex diagram, still largely covered by the Abyssal ash. It looked binding. As if there was something very large down there that needed to be contained.
Reid glanced up at the bird. One of the faint connections went towards the metal surface.
“Did your masters create you as a warden?” He asked. He was jumping to conclusions, but that would explain a lot—the constructed nature of the thing, and how it was hanging back.
“A warden, of sorts. I watch.” As the construct responded, Reid could swear he heard a faint tone of amusement in its voice.
He was about to say more, to ask which family or group had created the construct, but the sudden, frenzied movement of the Abyss-stuff around him took away his focus. The growing piles around him began to tremble, grasping limbs rising up and outward, increasing in size and force as the sludge came together and rose up. A train of hands and claws and legs, roiling out like a storm, with a pitch black set of fangs in the center of its form.
A bottom-feeder.
As he threw himself into the personification of the Abyss’s roiling chaos, the bird continued to talk.
“You remind me of one young man I heard of, hailing from the Hokkaido prefecture…”
---
Breastbiter’s misshapen form, enlarged and mutated by his final red lock of hair, went still just as the door to the Arena opened. Reid watched as the Alabaster went to answer, to let in Abrams, the forsworn. He could hear John and the goblin exchange words, but it was too quiet for him to make out the particulars, and the words weren’t for him to hear anyway.
The man was shirtless, wearing red furs around him like a child might turn a blanket into a cape. Reid would have thought it comical, but he felt just as bare and vulnerable. He was an open, bleeding wound on multiple levels, stripped of his weapons and his protections, of his talismans and his spells.
He felt bad, looking at the man walking towards him. He felt bad for the soldier, who had wanted all of this to end before Charles Abrams arrived for some reason Reid didn’t understand, because the soldier had heard him out, despite probably hating him.
Abrams stood at a distance, in the direction of John and the other returning soldiers. The man glanced over at him and narrowed his eyes, frowning.
“Reid Musser?” Abrams asked, with a weary, growling hoarseness to his voice.
“Yes.” Reid replied with a creaking rasp of his own. “Is it that difficult to tell?”
The expression on the man’s face softened, looking more… disgusted? Pitying? Both? “You were whole the last time I saw you. You were untainted.”
“I don’t want your pity.”
Reid’s reply was quick and sharp enough to end the exchange, leaving the two of them in a tense silence. After seeing what Lauren had lived and died through, pitying him felt like a waste.
John and his soldiers stepped back onto the rink and approached them, sparing a quick glance at the small pile of Musser family tools soaking in the shallow blood. Reid couldn’t tell what John was thinking as he looked at him, but the Dog’s expression darkened considerably when he looked over at the forsworn.
Abrams met John’s gaze, but rather than greet the soldier, he turned to Reid and spoke again, any previous softness gone from his voice.
“I made a deal with your father.”
“...What?” Reid asked, blinking slowly, trying to clear his head enough to process the man’s jarring words.
“I said what I said. Your father—”
“I know you can lie, Abrams.” He snapped, taking a couple of threatening steps towards the man. “Don’t—don’t try to fuck with me.”
His voice hitched partway through as he held himself back from crying for the third time that day.
John gave Abrams a strange look, and held up his hand. As if he was trying to stop Reid from punching Charles’s face in, which he was tempted to do.
Reid listened and stepped back as John turned towards the Judges.
“Is this true?” the soldier asked.
“It is,” the Alabaster Judge responded. “Abraham Musser agreed to allow Charles to enter, and impeded efforts to stop him.”
Her voice was kind, but it said the cruelest things. Reid’s eye widened, and he looked towards the entrance to the arena. The closed door. His father could have been just outside, for all he knew, but he wasn’t here.
Just like in the deep Abyss. Alone, disconnected, untethered. Down in the Abyss, he was forced to focus on fighting rather than having time to think, but here?
Here he didn’t have a purpose, or a driving force, besides not wanting to die. John had called him a soldier, sent out to do his duty without question. He was right. His father had thrown him away in the Abyss so he’d be useful. His father had sent him into the contest to die, physically or metaphysically, because that would benefit him the most. He was just as much of a tool as his father’s implements. A part of him felt like he already knew that, but he thought other feelings were present as well, like pride or favor that would be given to a human being over an object.
Yeah. He was wrong about that. He was wrong about so many things.
“How does it feel, Reid, to know that your life is worth as much as a forsworn’s word?” Abrams said, his voice tinged with malice. “People like him will continue to let others be hurt for a shred of power or protection. That’s what you support, that’s who you’ll benefit if you take the seat. Or do you even care?”
“Unless you intend to go back on your word, Charles, you’ll be doing the same thing,” John said.
“The way I’ll disrupt the system, he will be brought low, even indirectly—”
Reid let out a single harsh, bitter laugh, interrupting both of the other contestants. “No, that’s not—You can’t. My father’s too strong. Losing the practice for one night didn’t mean anything, what’s a week or—or fuck, a year of that going to do? Didn’t you used to know him?! He’s—he’ll just come out of this better! How fucking stupid are you—”
As he continued talking, his voice rose, his tone becoming more desperate, more angry. Abrams stared at him, dumbfounded, like Reid had suddenly become a different person. He hated that look. He hated everything about him, and of course he did, because Abrams was forsworn and that was how it worked, but he especially wanted to tear that look off of his face, and then he wanted to scream, wanted to feel less like he was on the verge of crying at any moment now.
He felt a firm hand settle on his shoulder. The pressure, and the small jolt of pain that carried down his shoulder, cleared the haze of angry thoughts just a little. Reid realized how heavily he was breathing. How loud his wheezing breaths were, even with the arena burning around them.
“Reid. There’s only one way to keep Abrams from having the throne.”
John’s voice.
“...Right.” His own voice sounded so small.
John stepped away, walking towards the gate. He kept his hand on him for a moment, as if leading him along, but took it off when Reid started to walk with him, away from Abrams. The other soldiers followed a short distance behind them.
Reid’s eye flicked over to John.
“Your jacket’s not red anymore,” he said.
“Breastbiter mentioned that.” John replied. Curt. Faintly irritated. “Did you—”
“Everything should be gone. Over there.” Reid pointed towards the blood-soaked pile of tools. “I’m not sure if you know how to use them—you can’t use the book, only family can—but if you want them, you can have them. They were never mine anyway.”
“Noted.”
They walked on in silence until they reached the gate. Reid’s boots were waterproof, but the shallow blood felt like it had soaked into his feet and the bandages over them all the same. John’s steps were heavier than his, and it felt as if the tense air and that feeling of haste he bore before Abrams entered had vanished.
“...If you hadn’t heard me out, he still would have arrived before the contest ended. I would have fought you,” Reid said quietly.
“I know,” John said, frowning. “I saw your weapons were with the things you discarded. Are you still going to fight?”
“I… don’t want Abrams to win. I don’t want my father to—” His breath hitched, and he let out a deep, pained exhalation. “But I don’t want the seat.”
They passed through the gate and onto the stands. He heard the distinct click of John readying his revolver as they did so.
“W-wait.” Reid turned to face the soldier, holding up a hand covered in bloody, stained bandages.
John stopped.
“I want to ask something, not to you. To try and make a case. I removed my protections, I upheld my oath, and Abrams is here anyway, so—”
He heard one of the soldiers let out a frustrated groan. John sighed. “If this doesn’t go the way you want, I can kill you?”
“...Yeah. Yeah. I said I’d make it quick,” Reid said, reminding himself of that fact just as much as he was answering John. “ And you get momentum, a little more claim.”
“And if it does work?”
“...The same thing, I think.”
John took a moment to deliberate, before finally giving him a curt nod. “Fine.”
As Reid walked away, he heard the soldiers talk among themselves. They sounded frustrated, exasperated. That was fine. He circled the stands, trying to find a spot that wasn’t too close to roaring flames, where he could look down at the Judges, and they could see him. He stopped by a pile of smoking rubble. He didn’t mind the smoke, not anymore, and it was a little less noisy here. A little easier to be heard, even if it was harder to be seen.
He took a deep, ragged breath, and readied himself.
“Judges!”
All three of them turned to face him.
“I’d like—I’d like to put forward an argument, a case for an error within the contest.”
“You may state your case, Reid Musser,” the Sable answered. “But the contest has existed in this form long before the Seal, should you try to challenge its nature and form.”
Reid shook his head. “No. My case is—there’s someone who should be in this arena, but isn’t. Who should be a contestant, who wants the throne in his own way. Whose tools and—and subordinates are already in this arena without him.”
The Judges remained expressionless, near-motionless. He couldn’t tell what any of them were thinking right now, or how they might answer.
“My father, Abraham Musser, should be considered the Musser family’s representative and their contestant. And I—I’m subordinate to my father.”
It was the Alabaster who spoke up first. “Reid, you were the one who entered this arena. You were not summoned or called.”
“The witch hunters entered through the same door, and some of them got to leave.” Reid replied quickly, maybe a little too quickly.
“The witch hunters also followed their representative contestant,” the Aurum remarked.
“But they weren’t—they didn’t come in with their father’s blood, or their father’s tools, and their allies aren’t other members of their family—”
“Reid.” John said, and the frustration in his voice was apparent. “Soldiers have fought for their lord and country’s interests for centuries, and died for those interests. Accept that your duty brought you somewhere you aren’t happy with, and make peace with that.”
“No, fuck that. I’m not okay with that!” Reid shouted back at John, the words flowing out from somewhere deeper now, carried by his hoarse voice. “No one should be okay with that! I don’t want to lie down and die just because that’s what my father wants, I don’t want to give up—give up everything just for some sacrificial idea of duty that I don’t even believe in!”
He seemed to have said something that reached John, as the man went quiet, a troubled expression falling over his face. As he did, the door to the arena opened below, and Reid could hear a girl’s voice calling out to John. The girl tried to throw something in, only to have a small, swift shadow catch the object and fly up and away with it.
“John is still right. There’s precedent for sending another to act in your interests stretching back for a long time, Reid Musser,” the Sable said. “We cannot change these rulings on a desperate whim.”
“I have precedent too.” Reid said, focusing his gaze back on the Judges. “From Awakening, I was defined as a Musser son. Our bloodline and position is what the oldest Others see when they look at us. My—our accomplishments are for the Musser family, not for our own, and the head of the family bears all of those.”
“We understand that many practitioners structure their families this way. Do you think this means you can blame all of your actions on your father? That your responsibility is interchangeable?” The Aurum’s centipede twitched its antennae and flexed its legs, as if restless.
“Not every—”
“Then your argument contradicts itself, if you intend to extend it to responsibility and actions outside of this duty.”
Reid fell quiet, trying to steady his racing, strained heart. He looked down at his hands and noticed they were shaking. He was getting carried away. Were the Judges trying to do that on purpose? To make his arguments worse, make him forget points?
He started again, not quite feeling ready, but not wanting to give the Judges an excuse to dismiss him. “There’s more.”
The Aurum’s smile widened slightly, as if he was suddenly more interested. “Go on, then.”
When Reid had first encountered that clockwork construct, down in the Abyss, it felt only natural to attribute it to a practitioner’s workings. Yet as the thing continued to prattle on, its stories didn’t feel like knowledge a mere Warden’s family would know. Its connection to something below the binding diagram continued to look too prominent to just be duty-bound. When it had dodged the question of who its makers were for the third time, Reid had promptly shot it down.
He still suspected the Other had attempted some trickery, or laid some trap in his mind for the future. The information it passed on didn’t feel as if it would be good to use, or reliable, or even useful for something as specific and monumental as this.
Still, it was something to cling onto.
“Hokkaido Prefecture, 1905. In a succession war for the Lordship, the first son of the Okui clan killed each challenger to the seat. When the final challenger was killed, the son—he sliced open his body and his father emerged from his blood to claim the Lordship. This was accepted, and the father went unchallenged.”
“A bloody contest, yes, but it took place halfway across the world, for a position that came about after the Judges. I would not let it apply here.”
“Newfoundland, 1960. An Aurum Judge was bested at a game of cards by a young practitioner. Before she could take the seat, her mother appeared, and argued that since she had taught her through the family practice, the girl’s skill was hers, and the victory was her mother’s. This was accepted, and the mother took the Seat.”
The Aurum rested his head on one of his hands, the smile disappearing from his face. “I’m not sure how you came across such information, but that’s a very different sort of contest from the Carmine, and a far looser interpretation of victory than I would prefer.”
This entire contest is nothing but loose interpretations. Reid thought, but kept the spiteful words to himself. “Montana, 1943. A Judge was succeeded by the heir of a practitioner family. They were body-jumpers, so the father—” Reid stopped, clearing his throat. “So the father possessed the son and became Judge. And because the rest of his family shared his blood, he could take over them at any time, and share his power. This was accepted.”
The Judges were quiet, letting Reid pause for a moment and catch his breath. He looked down at Charles, who was too distant and shrouded by smoke to see much of. He looked over at John, who stood quiet and at the ready.
He continued.
“I argued my case. I cast away my weapons, because they weren’t mine.”
He grabbed onto the bandages at his chest and ripped away what he could, tearing off gauze and dried blood and skin with it. The patch of exposed flesh that was there was a bloody mess, stained with black at the grooves and edges of his wounds.
“I—I cast away my blood, because it’s not mine.”
He reached into a wound with one hand, and dug into it, opening it up further and letting blood drip out onto the ground in front of him at a steady pace. A flare of pain shot through his body, and his vision grew fuzzy for a few moments, but he didn’t flinch.
“And, I would cast away my role as Carmine contestant, because it never should have been mine.”
He stared at the Judges, attempting to meet their eyes even with the growing smoke getting in the way.
“We’ve deliberated, Reid Musser, and—” the Sable started, but a faint voice interrupted him.
Charles. He was saying something, but the wind refused to let his voice carry this far.
“...Very well,” the Sable said, not as a reply to the forsworn man, but more of a general statement.
“You understand that you may be gainsaid for your words here, correct?” the Alabaster asked, concerned, as if gainsaying was such a greater concern than dying that it made it worth reconsidering. “You spoke with the intent to enter the contest days earlier.”
Reid nodded. “That’s—it’s alright.”
“Then by rule of the presumptive candidate and of the majority, let…”
The Alabaster began to speak, but her words grew distant. He could hear a trickling sound beneath him, and looked down. The gash in his chest was bleeding more now, letting out more blood, mixed through and darkened with Abyss-stuff, to pool at his feet.
He wasn’t sure people were supposed to bleed this much. Not even Abyss-hardened people.
Then the dizziness hit him. And the heat. And the exhaustion. And so many other things, as he felt his strength and protections, his ability to bear his afflictions, fall away. He doubled over, choking with a throat that was difficult to breathe through on its own, let alone with smoke around. His vision darkened and his awareness dimmed, but he could feel his body leaning to the side, falling.
Oh. I get it. I’m going to die anyway, aren’t I?
The last thing he heard was the sound of a stream of bullets being fired, and then a darkness much like the pitch black Abyss took him.
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Date: 2023-06-12 07:42 am (UTC)