Please be advised that the following story is not my usual light, humorous fare, and has elements of violence and gore to it that may not suit all readers. If the first paragraph or so bothers you in any way, note that it only gets worse from there.
EDIT: ... based on comments, it's also rather depressing.
Most of the Knight's armor lay in pieces on the ground; her protective bodysuit had been sliced open and her flesh was splayed out so that bones and organs were exposed to the doctor's tools.
Her screams still rang in Lazaren's ears as she drew a last, shuddering breath, even though she had lost consciousness some time ago. His hands shaking, he dropped the bloodied scalpel, not caring where it landed.
"There ... it's done," the mender managed wearily through a wave of nausea, wanting to sink to the ground and close his eyes. "You got what you wanted. Just let my family go home now."
Gristorio didn't answer, just casually wiped his own bloodied hands on Lazaren's jacket.
"Gristorio. Please."
The other gremlin curled his lip at the mender and walked away, toward the cage that held Kelahrita and Meillinir. Lazaren moved to follow, reaching out to catch Gristorio's sleeve, and was promptly grabbed once more by the scruff of his neck.
The mender thrashed weakly in Abad's grasp, but could only watch helplessly as Gristorio went to stand in front of his family's tiny prison. He could just see Kehlarita trying to shield their daughter with her own body as Gristorio pulled the Sentenza from his hip and jammed the muzzle between the bars, priming it to fire.
Lazaren wasn't sure where his own screaming ended and theirs began, until only choking sobs remained of his voice.
Kehlarita and Meillinir suddenly fell silent, but Gristorio continued firing into the still bodies at point blank range until he had finished a full six clips, then turned and wordlessly nodded to the Dark Trojan as he holstered his weapon.
The mender's limp body jerked and went flying as Abad tossed him aside like a piece of refuse, and he felt the impact as he crumpled against a stone wall before everything went dark.
* * * * *
When Lazaren awoke, the bulb that lit the artificial sky of the floating island had dimmed, and all was quiet. Wondering if, perhaps, the last things he had remembered had just been another horrible nightmare, he laboriously picked himself up from the heap he had landed in and slowly looked around.
It hadn't been a nightmare.
Blood stained the ground beneath the cage where Lazaren's family lay cold, and he could smell that the eviscerated Knight, too, remained where he had left it. All traces of Gristorio and the others were gone; they had apparently left him for dead and moved on.
The mender sat for a moment, fighting the urge to drag himself to the edge of the floating island and fling himself off. He had something to do first, so, heavy-hearted, he dragged himself to the tent that had been his pitiful home since leaving Emberlight instead.
Once inside, he shrugged out of one side of his jacket enough to tie a tourniquet around his arm and prepared several doses of the medication he had neglected to give himself over the course of the past cycle. He was dehydrated, so it was harder than usual to find a vein, but after several sticks, Lazaren managed to inject the first dose. He followed it with a second, and then a third, before removing the tourniquet, preparing one last syringe, and hauling himself back outside to the cage, where he sat weeping quietly with his head pressed against the bars as he waited for the medication to take effect.
He wanted to hold his mate and child for the last time and commit them to the Clockworks like any decent gremlin, but had neither the key to open the cage nor the tools and strength to break it. He made do with reaching into the cage to stroke their cold, blood-matted fur and fumbling for a hand to hold, neither gesture much helping to ease the pain.
The dimmed bulb went out completely, then cycled around the darkened dome to slowly illuminate once more in artificial dawn before Lazaren had both run out of tears and felt strong enough to pick himself up to carry on. The only thing he could do for his family now was to repay the gremlin who had murdered them.
Gristorio would have to die.
* * * * *
Lazaren had the same information that Gristorio did about the Knights who had taken down the Grand Arsenal, and he hoped it would lead him to the gremlin he was looking for before it led him to the Knights themselves.
The mender moved as quickly as possible in a single-minded haze of pain, but the going was still slow; he had to stop often when his body was wracked with fits of coughing that nearly brought him to his knees. Gristorio and the others had a long head start on him and he had little hope of catching up, but as long as he found their new camp and somehow reached his target before Abad or Miurr got to him, he didn't care what happened afterward.
For a full cycle, Lazaren pushed himself beyond his limits, growing weaker as he eschewed both food and sleep with no sign of his quarry. As the bulb flickered to life once more above an empty Lichenous Lair near the surface of Cradle, the mender finally stumbled into a thorn-edged clearing that had seen recent carnage.
Earth and stones had been gouged out of the ground in places, long furrows of the sort usually left by Abad's sword, and debris lay stranded in unlikely places as though it had been flung there. Blood and a little of the fluid that ran between layers of the Knights' bodysuits stained the grass. The Dark Trojan himself lay in pieces among the churned soil and disturbed vegetation, while Miurr lay face down in one of the furrows; whatever Knights had been here may have been surprised by the presence of a Trojan and a Devilite, but they had certainly not been mere recruits.
Lazaren surveyed all of this, his body shaking but his mind quiet. Such scenes held no horror for him anymore. Part of him was disappointed that Gristorio, too, didn't lay bloodied and lifeless among the thorns, but the rest knew that his absence was the mender's last chance at killing the other gremlin himself.
An uneven trail of blood snaked down a side path, and Lazaren followed it, hoping that it belonged to Gristorio and that the Knights hadn't hunted him down. Soon, his ears detected a ragged breathing that was not his own. The path opened up into a smaller clearing, and the two gremlins stared at each other for a moment without speaking.
One still looked strong, despite being battered and clutching at a hole in his gut as he kneeled on the hard ground, blood running between his fingers and down his thigh to soak into the dirt. His sword was missing, but his lip was still screwed into a sneer of contempt.
The other stood, withered and trembling, the front of his coat stained with the mingled remnants of the Knight's torture and his own sickness. One hand was tucked into his pocket, clutching the special syringe he had made up just for this meeting, and it was with grim resignation that he met the first's eyes.
Each of them could tell the other was dying, and soon. The only question was who would be first.
Gristorio laughed as Lazaren walked shakily toward him, and the mender saw blood on his lips.
"What are you going to do now?" the ex-researcher sneered, knowing that Lazaren never went armed. He started to laugh again, but his laughter turned into a gurgling cry of surprise as the mender drew the hand from his pocket and plunged a syringe into Gristorio's jugular faster than he thought the sick gremlin could move.
Lazaren let go of the syringe, not bothering to draw it from Gristorio's neck. "There are nine doses of a local anesthetic in that syringe. You won't sleep, but if I can't kill you, it will, even without your injury," he said quietly. Gristorio growled in response and tried to reach for the mender with his free arm, which already felt heavy and strange.
Stepping backward to wait the millicycle it would take for Gristorio to be fully incapacitated, Lazaren watched as the other gremlin struggled to rise from his knees, failed, and finally fell heavily to the ground. He approached the prone figure once more and went to a knee with great effort.
Gristorio snorted as Lazaren's hands went around his neck. "You're just like me," he wheezed as the mender's thumbs bore down on his larynx but did little without the weight of his body behind them. "Blind revenge with no thought of how."
Lazaren drew his hands back as another fit of coughing sent spasms through him. Blood splattered Gristorio's face, but he didn't flinch. When the mender's lungs had quieted, he sat looking at the other gremlin, hate in his eyes.
"Think again," he said weakly, reaching behind him to where Gristorio kept the Sentenza in his belt.
Gristorio only smiled freakishly with his partially paralyzed lips as Lazaren positioned the tip of the muzzle between his eyes and charged it to fire. "Just like me," he whispered once more, and the mender's finger tightened on the trigger.
There was a flash of purple, the sound of a choking cough, and the clearing fell silent.
Great work. This is how a darkly toned fanfic should be written.
EDIT: Extended critique
Normally, I dislike fanfiction written by others, mainly because of the lack of skill they employ (and exhibit) when creating their works. They fall victim to several traps, which this fanfiction has somehow managed to not avoid, but instead skillfully play into. What I'm referring to is your description of the Sentenza: most other fics I've read seem like an unnecesssary extension of in game mechanics and less like their desired goal of a Crichton-esque storytelling. You've managed to subvert that completely. It feels authentic reading it.
In addition, this is one of the few stories that has actually applied a level of catharsis to me with the description of torturing and subsequent execution of the caged family. This is actually the only one. Again, well done.
I'm going to hold this two page fanfic as a standard to every other fanfic I'm going to read.
@Arctifice: Thank you!
@Windsickle: Not your cup of tea, eh? Ah well, I can't always be sweet and silly and socially awkward. XD
Good work! Pretty dark and realistic, but written with skill. some fanfics are like this but badly written so they give dark fanfics a bad name.
Reading this is like watching Grave of the Fireflies: It leaves you utterly depressed for at least an hour and makes you wish you would have never touched it in the first place.
Or maybe that's just me.
Not that it's badly written or anything, but... eugh. I really don't feel well at the moment.
To be honest, this story is so well written, that I forgot about the knot of sadness in my stomach. I seerusly couldn't write this...it's just too hard to kill my characters like this, but the way you wrote it is just...wow...
In other words, amazing job as usual, but eugh...I'm not feeling to good now.
I don't drink tea. And I wasn't being sarcastic, well, not entirely... It was cute. It was pleasant and a good read. I could also write that it was horrid, wholly unpleasant, and one of the darkest, most tragic, most evil and injustice-filled fan-fictions that I've read here yet. It was slightly predictable once things became clear but it was still well written I guess I enjoyed it in that most twisted, pleasing sense. Curious though...
Great story! Not as horrid as you described in the begining but still good.
... 'cause I just woke up for a little while. I've spend more time asleep than awake since I posted this.
Thanks to everyone who has read this, whether or not you've left a comment.
@Arctifice: Wow, I really appreciate the well-thought-out comments.
@Verid, Atrum & Axon: Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@Iskender: Sorry to depress you/make you ill. I can't help but take it as a compliment that you compared the story to one of my favorite movies for emotional response, though.
@Isis: Thanks for the compliments, but sorry to depress you, too! I suppose it's a good thing I decided against killing Bettie just to mess with Vakros, then ...
@Atg: Thanks? I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, since your tongue is stuck out.
@Windsickle: Thanks for the extended comment! And yeah, I figured that it would be a bit predictable after a certain point, but I'd like to think that where you're going is sometimes less important than how you get there.
@Duskfinder: Thanks to you too! I didn't think I made such a big deal of the "horrid" in the first post, but I suppose I'd rather over-warn for those who aren't sensitive to that kind of thing than under-warn for those who are.
/clap
/clap
/clap
That was a slow clap, and it was well-earned. You deserve it.
Oh man, brilliant read! This is the first time I've ever read any fanfic and I am impressed. I guess I'll be looking forward to more of your works.
- Knightriel
I listened to this when I was done reading. I'm so utterly sad. I went through my entire day at school with this really heavy sort of sadness. I read it 1st Period, and I nearly bawled my head off.
I'm going to go kick around some gremlins now, I want vengence for what happened to that poor Knight.
Good fanfic. Now I'm off to cry some more.
For lack of better things to do, I drew a picture of Lazaren and the dirty look he's giving Gristorio coming out of his tent just prior to the Knight incident. If you don't like seeing things smeared with blood, don't look.
I'm not going to pretend it's anything particularly good.
This...makes me feel just as sad as I felt when someone who I thought I knew well was really lieing really badly.
This is a work of art. There's no question about that.
Great piece of work here Tevokkia!
Thank you! It's been awhile since anyone has read it, I think.
Well you did write it a few months ago. :P
I just happened upon a link while in your contest thread. I found the contest 3 months too late exactly... :(
I had a link to this story in the contest thread? I totally don't remember putting one. XD I figured you had been surfing the fanfic page on the wiki or something.
Page one when Luguiru was warning you about his story.
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/61257
Still, that was a few months ago.
Lazaren bit his lower lip as he inserted the needle into his arm and injected the stinging medication, but didn't wince. He was used to this by now, and the pain was insignificant compared to the alternative.
The gremlin mender withdrew the needle and removed the tourniquet from his upper arm, stretching to ease the tingling sensation more quickly. He was gaunt from long illness, his eyes dull and sunken, his fur brittle. Everything about him suggested frailty.
"You! Hurry up!" Gristorio barked from outside the small tent. He was the leader of the current tiny band of misfits and broken souls, and was unsympathetic to anything which did not directly benefit his plans.
"You can wait," Lazaren growled at the other gremlin with what had become his usual bad temper of late. Truth be told, he often regretted the decision to have his mate and daughter told he had perished out in the Clockworks. He had sought to save them the suffering of watching him wither and slowly die of the thing that was consuming him, but he missed them every day. That particular gnawing pain was often worse than the physical one, and sometimes he wondered why he even bothered with the medication anymore. Other times, he wondered why he didn't just inject a dose of Dark Matter suspension and end it all instead.
Having finished putting away the medicines and instruments that were part of his routine, the mender emerged from the dingy tent and shot Gristorio a baleful look, which was returned in kind. The only other two members of the group, at the moment, were already present.
Abad looked bored. This was his usual affect; the Dark Trojan was terminally uncreative, and only seemed particularly interested in his surroundings when there was something in them he could kill. Miurr, in contrast, was a Devil-IT who never really came down from his frenzied overtimer state. As a result, he was nervous, jumpy, and manic. At the moment, he was pacing in some sort of zigzag pattern around Abad and Gristorio, the latter of whom seemed to be about to lash out at his fiendish underling.
"Nice of you to join us," he said tersely as Lazaren took a seat on a stone block. "Now we can get down to business."
The current business was the usual business: try to destroy the Grand Arsenal and everything associated with it. It was an unrealistic goal, but Lazaren seemed to be the only one who saw it that way; he had lost count of the teammates who had been killed in a variety of gruesome and unlikely ways during previous attempts, many of which Gristorio took credit for having helped develop. The actual purpose of these missions was never mentioned, and the mender assumed that the root of it was tied to whatever the reason that Gristorio was no longer there performing unspeakable horrors on his own kind.
And horrors they had been. Gristorio always became highly animated when he described the medical experiments he had overseen at the behest of the Warmaster, and seemed to relish going over them in lavish detail with the mender. Lazaren always felt sick to his stomach having to listen to him, and tried to tune the ex-researcher out, but was rarely as successful as he would like. Some of the mental images Gristorio's stories imparted would just not leave his head, and gave him nightmares on many of those rare occasions he managed to get more than an few decicycles of consecutive sleep.
* * * * *
The world had been washed in a sea of blood ... or so it seemed to Lazaren.
Hanging back, the mender tried to block out the screaming, at least. With each gurgling cry cut short, he resisted the urge to run into the fray and save what lives he could. By all rights, these were his enemies dying, but friend or foe, all gremlins bled the same.
The worst part was the Knockers.
Most of them seemed to be the same age as Lazaren's own gremlinite, and hearing the death cries that were little more than the wails of frightened children, he couldn't help openly weeping.
None of the others seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn't much care. Abad, his eyes bright and his lip curled in what passed for a perverse grin, hacked through youths and adults alike so that it was impossible to tell who the limbs that littered the floor had belonged to. The stench of offal hung heavy in the air.
Miurr, in his usual frenetic way, flung things indiscriminately. He had long run out of whatever he had brought with him as ammunition, and was throwing the discarded armor, weapons, and even parts of the dead that the Trojan knocked into his path.
It was the shields and thwackhammers that did the physical damage, but the Devil-IT's real weapon was not made of metal; Lazaren could see the looks of horror that broke over the faces of those who had just been hit by the head or some other recognizable part of someone they knew. Many of them froze with the gruesome realization and were immediately cut down by Abad's enormous sword, their twisted faces offering Miurr even more of his gristly ammunition.
Away from the others, Gristorio fought with a sort of grim joy. Lazaren had never seen him use a traditional gremlin weapon; he had adopted one of the shadow blades the Knights tended to favor when venturing into Colony territory, and carried a stolen Sentenza at his belt. It was one more indication of just how much the gremlin hated his fellows.
Lazaren followed the three through passages strewn with fresh corpses, his tongue coated with bile as his gorge rose time and again. Part of him asked why he didn't just turn and run as best as he could ... the same part of him that asked why he bothered to keep himself alive from one day to the next. The rest of him knew exactly what Gristorio would do if he did run.
The opposition thinned and finally came to a stop sometime before they reached the Grand Arsenal, givinng the invaders pause as they crept warily through deserted hallways. It has been but a token guard, it seemed, which was unusual. The place was eerily quiet, and after the din of the fight to reach here, Lazaren's ears were filled with the irregular pounding of his own heart.
There was little left of the Arsenal itself but wreckage, melted and covered in scorch marks from the explosives that must have been its ultimate downfall. Gristorio quickened his pace through the burnt-out storerooms and research labs, where only a few charred remains and the occasional scrap of battle debris told the story of what had happened here. Running now, he led the others down one long hallway and into a richly-decorated chamber, untouched, where a throne-like chair sat empty upon its dais of enormous gears.
Lazaren's blood chilled at the howl of rage that tore from the other gremlin's throat, and he knew that the ruined Arsenal was only the beginning.
* * * * *
For the better part of the cycle, Lazaren had lain nearly motionless on the shabby, comfortless pallet he used as a bed, almost too sick to inject his medication and too tired to care. The rag he had been coughing into was soaked through with blackish blood; the mender was sure that his time was coming soon, but he couldn't even muster the energy to feel relieved.
Gristorio had yelled at him to come out several times already and had been ignored; only when Lazaren's tent had been invaded had he actually reacted by weakly chucking a vial of something foul-smelling at the other gremlin. That had been some time ago, or so it seemed to Lazaren, and Gristorio was starting in with his haranguing again.
"If you don't get your instruments and get out here right now, I will have Abad tear down that tent and drag you," the gremlin snarled after a few millicycles of ineffective barking. Lazaren lifted his head and scowled at the tent flap before painfully dragging himself to his feet and pushing it open, medical bag in hand.
Almost any other gremlin would have quailed and slunk away at the scowl the mender leveled at him, with his face little more than skin and fur stretched over bone, and blood smeared across his mouth. Gristorio just sneered, however, and jabbed his thumb in the direction of a slab of stone where a Knight, little more than a recruit, by the looks of her, lay bound and whimpering.
Lazaren stared at it for a moment. "What's that for?" he asked wearily.
"I want you to find out from her who it was that stole my revenge," Gristorio answered, grabbing the mender's gaunt arm and hauling him over to where the Knight was bound. She quieted as she turned her head to look at the two gremlins, her eyes wide with terror.
Disgusted, Lazaren tried to pull away from the other's grasp, to no avail. "Why didn't you already just ask her? She's scared. She would have told you if she knew."
"Because I want you to do it." Gristorio smiled nastily, his eyes resting meaningfully on the bag of surgical tools the mender held.
His stomach churning as he realized what the other was getting at, Lazaren tried to pull away again. "I'm a doctor; I'm not a torturer."
"But you will be." The young Knight gasped and struggled as Gristorio yanked Lazaren's arm, making him stumble into the slab. He found himself staring straight into the captive's face. "I'll stand right here and direct your every move if I have to," the ex-researcher added, sounding as though he was looking forward to it.
"No," the mender answered as strongly as he could, picking himself up and narrowing his eyes in suspicion at the expression of malicious glee that spread across Gristorio's face.
"I thought you would say that. Abad?"
Lazaren paled at the sound of familiar cries as Abad dragged a cramped and rusty cage from somewhere around a corner, Miurr darting around it to occasionally prod the figures inside. The mender's worst fears were confirmed when he saw his mate and daughter huddled together, trying to avoid the Devil-IT's harassment.
The mender stumbled as he ran to his mate and child, falling to his knees before the cage door. All of this had been put into motion with the best of intentions; he joined Gristorio for an opportunity to strike at the heart of the Colony with what little life remained him. Only later did the other gremlin's true colors show, and by then it was too late. He had already found out about Lazaren's family, and would threaten them on any occasion that Lazaren had said he was leaving the band. This time, he had preemptively made good on his threats.
Kelahrita and Meillinir stared at mate and father for a moment as though they had seen a ghost before Kelahrita leaned forward, clutching the bars. "They told us you were dead!" she whispered at the same time Meillinir cried "Papa!", thrusting her little hand through the bars to gingerly touch her father.
"I know," Lazaren replied hoarsely, clutching each of their hands in one of his and letting his forehead fall forward against the cold metal. "I'm sorry .... so sorry. I only wanted to spare you..."
"Spare us?" Kehlarita asked numbly. "You mean you knew? Do you have any idea what you put us through?!"
"Kehl-" Lazaren tried to answer, but was seized with a fit of coughing that made him double over, his body wracked with spasms as fresh blood stained the ground in front of him. Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he looked up just in time to see the horror on his mate and daughter's faces before he was dragged to his feet by the scruff of his neck.
"Please ... just let them go," he begged Gristorio, hanging limply from the Dark Trojan's hand.
Gristorio smiled nastily again. "If I let them go before you do what I've told you to, it will be so that Abad can chase them down."
Lazaren slowly turned his head to look at the terrified Knight struggling against her bonds on the stone slab, then returned his gaze to the other gremlin. "Fine," he said, defeated. "You win."