Published at 31st of August 2023 9:42 am

Chapter 1

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She was gone and he was all alone, trapped in a maelstrom of people. People who were so tall, compared to him, that it was like a sea of moving trees with shoes clapping against the pavement in an ear-splitting cacophony.

He whirled around, trying to catch a glimpse of the blue skirt with flowers and the white-laced sandals that his mother had worn, but he could not see her at all. Tears ran down his cheeks as he realised that he was lost forever and would never feel her warmth again, but then he heard it, a voice calling his name.

“Jakob! Jakob, where are you!?”

“Mother! I’m right here!” he screamed back at the top of his lungs.

Suddenly he heard the sounds of someone running towards him, and the maelstrom of people within which he found himself started breaking apart, as his mother came to find him.

Just as he spotted her white-strapped sandals and bare legs amidst the forest of towering people, Jakob felt the ground drop away from under his feet and saw a darkness coalescing around him, robbing the world of light.

He seemed to fall for a long time in the pitch-blackness. The pull of gravity grew stronger-and-stronger, robbing him of the air in his lungs and threatening to tear him asunder. He would have cried out, had it not been impossible.

Jakob gasped in surprise as his feet found solid ground beneath them, and his knees buckled with impotent fright.

His vision returned, awakened by the dim light that met him. It stung his eyes as though he had been in that all-consuming dark for days.

With hooded eyes, he scanned his surroundings, immediately overwhelmed by the things that he saw. The scents and stenches of many things pleasant and abhorrent assailed his nostrils. The light that scarcely illuminated his surroundings seemed to grow directly from the walls, as though an invading fungus left to fester in the cracks between the large stones from which the room had been built.

Beneath him, where his knees rested on the cold and rough stones, was a slick and viscous black water that ever-so-slightly reflected the green, purple, and blue fluorescent hues of the fungus lights.

Then his ears seemed to regain their sense and he realised he was not alone, as a powerful rhythmic breathing came from a colossal shadow at his back, as well as the rare wheeze of something hidden in the darkness ahead. Too terrified to turn and confront the barely-perceived shadow behind him, he tried peering into the darkness beyond where he knelt.

It took a moment to notice, but then he saw that two big eyes reflected the fungus light back at him, like some enormous cat staring into his soul.

“Heskel,” the voice intoned. “Make sure the boy is not like the others.” Its strange magnanimous cadence made Jakob stiffen, though the meaning of the words were lost to him. The thrum of the words also left a strange ache in his chest.

A grunt of acknowledgement came from the shadow behind Jakob. Suddenly, two hands, powerful yet careful, lifted him from the ground, inspecting first his head, before moving on to his limbs and torso. When the hands turned him around to inspect him from the front, Jakob came face-to-face with his shadow.

A face like that of a man stared back at him, frozen in an archaic smile with closed eyes and a small nose. It took Jakob a moment to realise that what he saw was a mask, and he only noticed it in the dim light because of the small holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth.

Fresh horror flooded through his body as he took in the appearance of the hands that gripped him. There were five fingers, but each were covered in long spiralling patterns of stitched scar-tissue, and, though it was hard to tell in the dark, they had the colour of a bruise. The arms were worse, as they ranged from black to frost-pale, with greys and rotten-purple in-between. Each coloured segment of the arms seemed as though it had been sewed on to the previous bit, and, though they were proportionally similar, Jakob thought they looked like they might belong to many different people.

Heskel’s torso and shoulders were covered in a sleeveless poncho of sorts, though it was made of a leathery material. This fabric too was stitched and multi-hued, as though created from a similar method as his arms.

Strangely, he seemed to Jakob to smell like a flower field. It was such a calming scent that it slowed Jakob’s pounding heart and dispelled his gooseflesh.

“Healthy,” the masked creature gurgled.

With almost affectionate consideration, Jakob was placed back onto his feet gently and spun around to face the darkness and the reflective cat eyes within it.

“At last,” stated the voice, letting out a wheezing breath that clouded the air with particulates.

A mummified hand emerged from the dark, into the little light that Jakob had. It had seven fingers, two of them thumbs, and seemed utterly devoid of flesh.

“Come forward my son, let me see you.”

As Jakob mindlessly obeyed, despite failing to comprehend the words, he heard the splash of the black water under his small shoes, tiny droplets spattering onto his lower legs where his shorts cut off. The fungus lights seemed to follow him with their faint illumination, and the pleasant scent of flowers left him.

When Jakob reached the many-fingered and enormous hand, his nose was stuffed with the cloying and heady scent of death and putrefaction. Vomit and bile raced up his throat as he took in the monster that hid in the dark. He screamed as four over-long mummified arms with seven fingers each grabbed hold of him and lifted him closer.

While his terrified shrieks echoed off the walls of the room, the mummified four-armed monster said in a comforting-yet-off-putting voice, “You may call me Grandfather.”

The next seven years in the tutelage under Grandfather were cruel and abominable, each fresh lesson under the Fleshcrafter taking with it a piece of Jakob’s humanity.

Grandfather told him that he had been summoned from another world to become his apprentice, so, that when he eventually passed, his knowledge and laboratorium would not be lost. With the Wight, Heskel, as his constant shadow, Jakob was not given a choice in the matter and thus had from the age of seven been taught how to perform Grandfather’s Fleshcraft, in order to create purpose-built creatures for servitude, menial labour, and even combat.

Grandfather had first taught him how to dissect the creatures found within their private kingdom: the sewers of the metropolis known as Helmsgarten. These creatures ranged from the smallest critters like mice and rats, up to the child-sized abominations of Grandfather’s previous experiments, and culminating in the vagabonds and outcasts that had been pushed off the metropolis’ streets and forced to live in the highest reaches of the complex and multi-layered sewer canals.

Jakob’s first successful creation, at the age of eleven, had been dubbed ‘The Rat King’ by Grandfather. It was an amalgamation of three rats, chosen specifically for their cannibalistic tendencies, their flesh bonded together to create one being with three separately-functioning brains within an enlarged cranium. It had four front legs and three tails, and quickly culled the nearby nests outside the lowest part of the sewers where Grandfather kept his sanctum and lab. The Rat King had proven to be incredibly unstable and feral, however, despite Grandfather’s insistence that the bonding was perfect, and they eventually let it free to roam the canals, as it had twice escaped its enclosure and Grandfather wanted Jakob to move on to a new project.

Not long after his first success, he was pushed to experiment with the roaming abominations, but every time he tried to create something new from them, it seemed to fail. Though Grandfather was displeased, he said there was little that could be accomplished from tainted samples.

Occasionally, he was also sent out on hunts with the Wight and some of Grandfather’s other creations and constructs. Their targets were most often the abominations too powerful to let roam but too unstable to control, but once they were also tasked with exterminating a sub-human species that Grandfather had left to breed unchecked.

Alongside the study of anatomy and how best to handle a knife when performing a dissection or disassembly of organic material, Jakob was also taught archaic magics, such as those that controlled blood and flesh or those that called upon Outer Beings for a drop of their power.

When he reached the age of thirteen, he encountered the first human of this new world. Heskel had captured one of the Vagabonds that lived in the upper sewers, and Grandfather oversaw Jakob’s vivisection of the man. Though he performed every technique that he had been taught with perfection, the Vagabond died to traumatic shock before the operation could be completed.

Five more outcasts died in similar fashion, until Jakob successfully vivisected and reassembled a living person. Grandfather had one of his rare moments of praise, and declared that Jakob was finally ready to begin his practice in earnest.

He turned fourteen some months before the day when Heskel escorted him out of the sewers and into the slums of Helmsgarten. With no food, tools, or even money, Grandfather wanted Jakob to set up a laboratorium in the metropolis, with the goal of creating a creature equal to that of Heskel. The Wight was also given to Jakob as his Lifeward, to ensure his safety.

Heskel was the closest thing to a companion and friend that Jakob knew, and part of him even considered him somewhat of a father figure. His real parents, and the memories of them, were naught but mist in his recollection, as all his formative years had been spent mostly under the observant eye of Heskel as he practiced Grandfather’s Fleshcraft.

The Wight, although crude in appearance, was one of Grandfather’s greatest creations. He had been constructed from the corpses of seven different people and possessed an obedient disposition, a superhuman strength, and a quiet intelligence. Jakob had never seen what kind of face lay beneath Heskel’s serene mask, but his curiosity had also not compelled him to find out. Some things were better left unknown after all. What he did know from their constant companionship however, was that the Wight never ate, slept, or tired. He was more akin to an automaton than a person, though Jakob did not see it that way, nor did Grandfather, who shared more traits with the Wight than with his ‘grandson’.

Emerging from a large outlet of the upper sewer canals, Jakob and Heskel came wading out of knee-deep muck and effluvia. The buildings surrounding the river of filth were four stories tall, and though Jakob had spent seven years secreted away in the bowels of the metropolis, the sight sparked some recollection from his childhood prior to being summoned by Grandfather. However, it was clear to his adolescent mind that this world was vastly different than the one he had come from.

With his tall Wight as a shadow, Jakob emerged from the sewage river, his stitched human-skin trousers shedding all that attempted to cling to it. Heskel wore only his sleeveless leather poncho, so the filth clung to his legs, though the stench was masked by his perpetual scent of flowers.

All around them, people milled the streets and tight alleyways with a strange sort of aimless wanderlust. It was the rare few people who did not appear as though they regularly bathed in the filth river. Rarer yet were the ones who even seemed to notice their passing.

“Tainted samples,” Jakob muttered in disgust. Such creatures would be near-impossible to elevate to a higher lifeform, as their vitality seemed inadequate to survive beneath his knife. He had learnt this lesson well when he had worked on the sewer vagrants, however, he was appalled to find that those vagrants seemed far more vigorous than the denizens living above them.

Likely noticing Jakob’s dismay that he would have to work with such terrible samples, Heskel grunted and said, “Slum: tainted. Upriver seek.”

Caught off-guard by one of Heskel’s rare moments of advice, Jakob hesitated for a moment, before going over to one of the dismal stone bridges that spanned the filth river of the Slum. Tracing the path the river took upstream, he saw that far in the distance an entirely-different part of the metropolis existed. It was as vibrant as the Slum was filthy, and though he could not see any of its people, it seemed a sure thing that they would be possessed of more vigorous souls.

Jakob breathed a sigh of relief that there yet was hope for his nascent undertaking.

“Thank you, Heskel. Let us seek people more worthy of my knife.”

After some hours, the sun had set as Jakob reached a wide section of the river where a large bridge, manned with people in leather-and-chainmail and armed with swords, blocked the passage into the metropolis beyond the Slum.

His eyes long adjusted to the darkness of the sewer, he did not need a torch to see his surroundings, but it seemed the guards were not like him, as his appearance into their torchlight elicited surprised gasps from the lot of them.

He was not self-aware enough to realise that it was not his sudden appearance that caused them alarm, but rather his attire of bruise-hued flesh-wrought hooded apron, trousers, boots, and gloves. Certainly, the red scent-mask, crafted and gifted to him by Grandfather, which covered the bottom-half of his face, two tube-pumps diagonally situated in the underside and venting his condensed breath in rhythm to his breathing, did not help.

“Halt..!” one of the men commanded uncertainly.

It took a second for Jakob’s mind to register the different language to what Grandfather and Heskel spoke, but he had been taught well enough to have a grasp of its limited complexity.

“Do not bar my passage,” he replied.

The guardsmen, of which there were five, exchanged glances, before the leader drew his blade from its scabbard. The rest followed his example.

Having already warded off several abominations and vagrants within the sewers, Jakob was not unused to such a situation, though his foes were better equipped. It mattered little however.

“Heskel.”

The Wight emerged from the darkness, eliciting terrified gasps from the guardsmen, who seemed to not have noticed his presence until then. To their credit, they steeled themselves and charged towards the towering figure, blades held high.

Heskel was a musclebound giant compared to the guardsmen, as he stood almost two heads above them. With a single punch, he pulped the head of the lead guard, before blocking a slash with his left forearm, the blade not digging very deep. He grabbed his attacker’s neck and snapped it with a simple twist, then took the blade from his forearm and carved through the third and fourth with such terrible strength that they fell into pieces.

“Disable the last, but leave him breathing!” Jakob quickly commanded, and Heskel stopped himself from decapitating the remaining guard, instead dropping the sword and grabbing the man by his arms and crushing the bones with his hands. The guardsman let out a sobbing scream of pain, but Heskel wasn’t done, as he grabbed the man by his legs, flipping him upside down, before twisting both of his ankles so he could not run away. At this point, the guardsman had passed out from the pain, and the Wight laid him on the ground, knowing he could not escape.

Jakob pointed at the two men who had been carved into pieces, and said, “Throw those two in the river, we’re bringing the rest.”

From the cloth the guards had possessed, Jakob made a gag to shove into the mouth of his captive, lest his screams draw too much attention.

It had taken a while, but Heskel had brought the two corpses and their captive to an abandoned shed further into the residential area beyond the Slum gate-bridge.

When the captive guard came to, he whimpered in terror at the sight of Jakob carving into his dead friends to harvest their skin and organs.

“Do not fear,” Jakob said in the man’s tongue, “I will make you better.”

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