Forger chapter 1-3 - Jude Alquinto (books to read for 12 year olds TXT) 📗

but I held my gaze. Then there came this gut feeling shouting to me, I should taste her lips. I took my gut’s word for it. She didn’t like it—hammering me on the head with her soft fists were enough to tell me that. I still remember that frightened look in her eyes. Five men were already pulling me back but they weren’t enough—not for this wilful bastard.”

The heart-broken forger’s chest rose as he drew a deep breath. “She had to cut my neck so I’d stop. It’s amazing really… living after a slash like this. Funny how my wound bleeds more after it’s healed.” His tears finally let themselves down. William lightly touched the scab on his neck, feeling their hardened lumps. “Stay away from Lady Anita, Axev. She’s a bewitcher. She bears the curse.”

William stood and took off his tunic to show Axev what has become of his back. There was his mark of being a forger—a black cross printed on the skin from the moment forgers were but blobs in their mothers’ wombs. Every mark was as unique as the person who wore them.

The cross on William’s back was with curls and spikes as if a painter spent weeks on it using a strand of hair for a brush. Underneath it, the bewitcher’s curse—a round silver mark with four segments crossing against the forger’s. Both marks, grey and black, a nemesis of the other by nature’s design.

“See the grey marks?” he trailed a finger along one of the segments of the curse. Crawling over his shoulders, sneaking around his hips, the pointed segments had found its way to his heart, “these were just short as fingers at first. Ever since I’ve been under the curse, there’s this surge o’ pain when I make iron,” said he, donning his tunic. “I feel poisoned. Like a hundred… no… a thousand thorns prickin’ my body for every bucket of silver made. Soon, when you start feeling your entrails in knots, you’ll come to realize it’s better not to forge at all.

“Losing what you treasure is a wound like no other.” William added, “and I’ve so many wounds now that a tortured man should be ashamed to show his.” A dry laugh made its way out of his lips.

“Many people live without the power we have, get on with their lives without it,” argued Axev but doing his best to sound comforting, “for every hundred men, only one is born like us.”

“We’re not among those ninety others now, aren’t we?”

At that, Axev felt a stinging urge to utter ninety-nine as a correction. But seeing William in such a dramatic state, he let it pass. “There’s no need to be so fru—”

“You don’t understand!” At William’s roar, Axev held his tongue. Upon seeing tears go down his friend’s cheeks, he knew quite well he was only meant to listen. “My sister died yesterday. It happened in the workshop. The locksmith I’m workin’ for… him and some merchant friend… they wanted to rape her. She wouldn’t go down with no fight. I had to do something… so I held out my hands, made to summon sickles for their necks. As the dust formed into pieces, the curse raged in me. I could have killed those two pigs in five seconds… easy as breaking twigs, I’m a forger!  Instead I writhed on the floor, Anita’s curse making me feel like I was being flayed alive.

“Betty was startin’ to make noise. So, the merchant struck her head with a hammer. The pig must have put all his strength in that one swing.” William paused, his hands rolled into fists. A deep breath before he added, “I swear by all things holy, I heard her skull crack.” He passed his hand over his eyes, the wind cooled the tears smudged on his cheeks.

Axev knew a lot of words but none seemed proper to say.

“This is too much to bear. You see, I could barely forge—not a key strong enough to turn locks, not a hammer hard enough to sink nails… not even one blade to save the only person I call family. And I fear there’d come a day when this curse consumes me entirely.” William spoke faster without knowing, hands on his head as he did, walking in circles, “this curse is devouring me… making me mad. Just hours ago, I served justice to my employer… put four daggers in the swine’s chest. I tried my justice on the merchant too but he got away. The bastard must have tattled on me to the guards. They caught me… bound my hands and made to take me to the dungeons.

“One day, you might fall under a damned bewitcher as well.” William raised a trembling finger. “Don’t die the way I did.” He held Axev in both shoulders. “I want you to take your last breath as a wrinkled up geezer who spends days on a good seat.”

“Your death?” Axev had to ask, brows knitted believing it was said in mistake. “I’m talking to a bloody ghost?”

“Not quite, but soon enough,” he peeked at the pointed rocks below. “You’ve been a good friend to me, Axev. It’s been a nice chat, but I really have to go.”

“Wait!”

William stepped down the wall.

~~~

“You’re not dying tonight, you craven git!” Axev had responded quickly to William’s tragic surrender. Swiftly forging a short line of chains and a hook, attaching it on one of the battlements, he managed to grab hold of William’s tunic.

“Ah, one last thing before I leave, my friend,” said William as he joined his hands, “don’t bother picking up the pieces.”

“What pieces?”

William slowly parted his palms. Between them, out came his five spinning blades from the ends of his fingers. Under their forger’s command, the thin long blades sheared William’s body into pieces much too many to count. His clothes were torn like leaves; blood sprayed madly about; and flesh splattered against the wall, chunks of it fell into the sea.  Nothing could have prepared Axev for such a grim sight—a friend dismantling himself before his very eyes.

Only a piece of William’s linen tunic was left in Axev’s grip.

~~~

Axev remained atop the wall, lamenting, unsure of what to do. His face and clothes were sprinkled with reeking red. He could smell William’s death all over him but was too shocked to even move or weep. He did nothing, spoke nothing—he only sat in solitude. After two hours of thoughtless staring at a little sheet of fabric, a guard spotted him atop the wall.

“You there! How’d you get up here?” the guard bellowed as the man hauled the sword strapped to his waist.

Quickly, with a flick of Axev’s finger, five swords came into being—then dropped dead by his feet. With a whisk of his hand, each sword sprang to life like a startled dog and stuck itself on the horizontal crevices of the wall—instant stairs. Advancing to lower slits as their forger made his way down, the first thirty steps had served their purpose well. But as Axev laid foot upon the next, it shattered completely—dealing him with an agonizing fall three yards high. Perhaps a tad higher if not for the roof he ruined as he went down.

Out of sorts from the dismantling he’d just seen—he believed it normal that a sword or two should break.

Hearing a bellow of ‘whot da fock wossat?!’ from inside the house, this time from some bigger man with the throat of a boar, Axev scampered his way down. He set himself down on the roof’s edge until only his fingertips kept him from falling. He let go—crashing onto the barrels below. Rushing to his feet, he flew to the nearest place he could hide in—which was a narrow passage between a house and the high wall one step wide.

Braving to pass the dark narrow passage, his boots landed on mushy earth that smelled more like shit than mud. Successfully avoiding a fated meeting with the monstrous grunt he’d awoken, Axev spent his next hour searching for a well to wash off the stains of the evening.

Imprint

Text: Jude Alquinto
Images: Jude Alquinto
Editing: Jude Alquinto
Publication Date: 02-02-2012

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