#Sacromancer

[thousandyearoldtechnomancer]

Whumptober Day 2 - Nowhere to Run

Prompt: Caged

Rated: Mature

Warnings: Abuse, abusive parent, child abuse, blood, violence

Word count: 1551

Summary: Eli, a mage-born Technomancer, is punished by his uncle for practicing magic. His cousin Primo eventually comes to his rescue.

Chapter 1 in Sacromancer, my original fiction for whumptober 2022

@whumptober-archive

Chapter 1

My toes have gone numb from the way I'm seated and the cold air filtering in from outside, by the time the keys come jingling in Primo's hands. The door of the shack creaks open and the faintest of glows spills through the wooden planks of the storage bench onto the hay and guano caked under my feet.

'Took you a while,' I croak in between two shallow breaths. The way I'm folded, with my shoulders pressed against my knees and my face twisted to face the right, there's only so much air I can draw in at once.

Primo doesn't answer. He busies himself with extracting the two nails my uncle hammered in shallowly a few hours ago to close the storage bench around me. The wood moans and whines around the iron as Primo methodically works on the first nail, wriggling it from left to right until it pulls free. Then, he starts on the second.

'Oh fuck,' he curses, and I hear the hammer being thrown onto the soil with anger. The hens huddled on the opposite corner of the coop jolt awake and squawk, half alarmed and half still asleep. 'It’s stuck.'

'I got time,' I reply, then draw in another short breath. 'Pliers, hanging on the door.'

The hens have recognized Primo and rustle around quietly to find another place to sleep. The hay shuffles under Primo’s feet as he gets up, takes the pliers from the door and sits down again. The storage bench rattles around me, the wood creaks a bit more. It’s an established ritual, by now: I do some magic, I get found out, my uncle beats me up and locks me in here. A few hours later, someone comes to get me: sometimes it’s Primo, more often Lisette. I don’t recall the first time I was put into the dog cage, but I do remember I had a lot more space to move around back then. And I have a very vivid memory of when the fake storage bench was built around it. My uncle sold it to me as an extra layer of protection, a place to hide should the White Cloaks deign to visit our shack. It made for a wonderful excuse to take away even the light.

Finally, Primo removes the square plank that closes my hideout and sets it aside. After the time in here, it takes me a bit to adjust to the light. I look at him between the eyelashes of my right eye, the one which still opens. He stares back and lets out a whistle.

'Good god, Eli.'

I grin, and the crust on my lower lip cracks open and starts bleeding again. 'I know,' I say. 'It's bad. Your father...' I stop to take a breath, and Primo finishes for me.

'You really pissed him off this time.'

And all the times before, I think, but I don't speak, and I focus on catching my breath instead. The trick not to go crazy when I’m caged and inside the storage bench is to inhale and exhale evenly, to concentrate on the present moment and to want for nothing but the little space I’m given. The closer I get to being freed, the more difficult it is to keep calm. The more impossible it becomes to ignore the burning ache in my muscles and bones. 

Primo starts unlocking the dog cage I'm trapped in. He inserts one of a bunch of keys in the padlock, sighs as the lock doesn't give, extracts the key and tries another one. I look at his face, at the first proper beard grazing his cheeks, at the databulb pendant hanging from his neck. That's where the light is coming from: an old incandescent lightbulb soldered to a first-generation heart monitor sensor, glowing just because data, as information, is being fed to it. It's one of the neatest, most practical pieces of magic I've worked on so far, and I'm particularly proud of it. As I direct my thoughts to the pendant, the light shines brighter.

'He still hasn't beaten the magic out of you, it seems,' Primo says, swinging the cage door open.

I smirk again; ‘Well, he can’t.’ Blood drips from my lips onto my chin. 'That's not how it works.'

I have so little space inside this cage, that I cannot move enough to get out of it myself. It was my uncle who pushed me in earlier today, and now I must wait for my cousin to pull me free.

'Anything broken?' Primo asks.

'Don't think so,' I answer. He grabs me with one hand under my right armpit, and one under my right knee, and gently pulls me about a dozen centimeters out. Then, he pushes his arm further to take hold of both knees, takes a step back and slides me free of the cage and the storage bench.

I can't help whimpering and whining as Primo helps me lean with my back against a wall, and stretch my legs flat onto the dirty hay. I lie there for a few minutes, face swollen, feeling feverish with pain, shivering slightly as blood rushes back into those limbs that had fallen asleep. Through the slit between my right eye's eyelids, I see Primo stand up again, open the door just about enough to look outside, then close it. He fidgets with the strap of the shoulder bag he's wearing, then rummages through it to extract an old thermos from it. He crouches down by my side and offers it to me.

'Can you stand?', he asks.

I take the thermos with trembling hands, close my left fingers on the top and put whichever strenght I have left into unscrewing it. The thermos lid doesn't budge. I shake my head and give the thermos back to Primo so he can open it for me. 'You need to give me more time,' I say. 'I was in here for so long.'

Primo screws the thermos open and pours in its lid what smells like chicken broth. He leans closer to put it in my hands, making sure I can hold it and lift it to my lips before he lets go.

'I'm sorry I didn't come earlier,' he says as I take the first heavenly sip of warm soup. I shrug and keep drinking. It’s really no biggie. Primo grimaces: 'Today's been, uh... hectic. Stuff has happened.'

I extend my arm towards him and nod at the empty thermos lid in my hand. 'Can I have more?'

Primo pours in the rest of the soup, then places the empty bottom of the thermos on the ground, nestling it into a spot of thicker hay so that it stays upright. I keep my eyes on the thermos as I sip the second serving of broth, and watch it being pushed up by the hay slowly bouncing back. Primo is rummaging again inside his shoulder bag, and all sorts of rattling noises come from it: metal against plastic, plastic against wood, the thud of something hard wrapped in fabric. Finally, he extracts an apple and a paring knife. He cuts the apple in quarters, then halves one of the slices, then cuts it again in a piece not bigger than the tip of my thumb, and offers it to me. 

I down the last of the soup in one gulp, set the lid on top of the storage bench on my left, and grab the piece of fruit. The morsel is small enough that I can slide it between swollen lips without opening my mouth too much, and it requires only minimal chewing.

'Thanks,' I tell Primo as I take the next piece he's offering. The way my hands are still trembling, I'd have to wait a few hours before I'd be able to cut the apple myself.

He slices another piece, then waits for me to be done munching, biting his lower lip. His gaze keeps jumping between me, the apple, the door, me again, the floor. I want to ask what's wrong, but he speaks first.

'Eli, stuff is... I-I just dunno how to say it.' He shakes his head, looks at the apple once more, then lifts his eyes to stare at me. 'The White Cloaks. They’re here. They’re looking for you.'

My mouth falls open. I stare back, the morsel of apple between my fingers halfway through towards my face.

'Someone said something, and they've taken my dad. He's not given them anything, but someone else...' Primo breaks eye contact and shakes his head again, brows furrowed, eyes to the floor. 'Someone else will talk, eventually, and...'

I don't let him finish. 'But why me?,' I ask, as if I didn't know the answer. There’s a million better questions on the tip of my tongue: is Lisette okay? Will your dad be alright? Will you? I knew being found was a possibility - I’ve been preparing for it. But now that it’s time, it seems I have only stupid things to say. 'What have I done?' 

Primo looks back at me with bleary eyes and a pained frown. He doesn’t open his mouth, but I can read his silent plea all across his face: don't make this more difficult than it has to be.

[randys-ranch]

been thinking of revitalizing my fruitless search for my greatest online internet inspiration, Chasmosaur- also known as Sacromancer or Shoes or Doctor Birdbrain or whatever other names i found ages ago. i wonder what happened to them..theyre around my fathers age now i reckon, so its weird im so deep into this rabbithole, i hardly doubt theyre around the online spheres anymore..shame

[thousandyearoldtechnomancer]

Chapter 22

It is now apparent that I cannot die.

Nine mornings have come and gone, and I've laid flat on my back in this forgotten junkyard through the afternoon rain and the dimming light of the evening. No one has come for me. No one is left who'd care enough.

The whispers have been filling my head. I let them come and go, like the morning dew, passing droplets in the permanent dampness of this rotting city. Get up, say the whispers. Come and find me. I lie still, staring at the darkening sky.

I wait. I hope to be taken. Disassembled and sold for pieces, left to bleed out on the asphalt. I wait for the sweet mercy of release, when everything I've been will seep back into nature, and I will be no more. But no one comes for me - not even death.

This is the supreme desecration by the One-Who-Shouldn't-Be, the One-Who-Must-Be-Halted: not to kill me, to make me into the same abomination they are. Ever-accruing, ever-augmenting, the most hideous contradiction to the impermanence of life.

I roll onto my side and weep in the rain.

I'm hungry, and the whispers are getting louder. Get up, Eli, give in, they echo in my ears. Look for power, and then look for me. 

Discarded machinery and obsolete technology clutter the tar. The detritus and I ache the same way: at the seams, at the weld joints, at the half-disconnected fuses covered in rust. My android legs are heavy, but my heart is heavier yet. If I open my mouth I'll scream with the anguish of exabytes of data trapped in the chips and memory cards scattered through the trash around me. If I move, if I do get up, then I'll feed. I'll latch onto the nearest human, and I'll drink them dry. Then, then there will be no difference between Alva and me.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Things shouldn't have gone this way. I left to protect the people I loved, not to condemn them to die. 

Steam billows out of the underground quarters’ exhaust pipes and grazes the ankles of the ghosts hanging over me. I cover my face to flee their stares. I pray that I'll sleep through the hunger devouring my insides.