wearwind-ao3 - Tumblr blog

wearwind-ao3 · 5 days ago

Text

Lucanis Week Day 2: The Ossuary | The Lighthouse

fanfic and I are still divorced, but i couldn't do -nothing- for Lucanis week. And attempts to deprive my boys of credit for almost escaping on their own must not go unanswered!

(Also I have no idea what day it is in internet-land but here the 26th is nearly over so here we go.)

Rating: M

Relationship: Lucanis & Spite

Words: 3k

Warnings: canon-typical torture and violence (not graphic in the slightest)

Summary: This hellish pit is called the Ossuary, apparently. The concept is distinct from the mausoleums of Nevarra, where Lucanis has been told that the dead are remembered. On the contrary: Zara’s Ossuary is a place in which the good-as-dead are ruthlessly unmade.

The festering lump they forced down Lucanis’ throat is, at first, a suffering no worse than an inoculating dose. The stomach ache is only slight, and the tenderness between his eyes so unremarkable it could be coffee withdrawal. Lucanis’ wounds trouble him much more. Zara healed them only just enough to make the nerve ends spark.

The fever comes later, and sleep does not cure it. He dreams in olive green, that first night – a respite from the carmine red, from the sanguine scent and seeping sting of wounds reopened. Of Zara's favourite spots to bleed. This is no normal dream, Lucanis knows. It is too...

(SOLID!)

He jolts awake upon the hard and salt-scarred floor of his cell. Heart racing. Skull pounding. Sweat pours from his furnace-hot skin.

(IT. IS. TOO. SOLID!!!!)

Lucanis has never experienced a poison such as this one. It thrashes beneath his skin like a parasite fattened on heartblood, like a wriggling worm feasting on his guts. But it is in his skull, too. It is in his lungs. It is –

(LET. ME. OUT!!!)

A hook pulls on his aorta, then another on his lumbar vertebrae. Agony – white hot, ringing – stabs through him from sternum to spine. In the very next moment, the demon gives up on tugging hooks, and becomes instead like brickwork swelling after rain. The creak of bone prepared to fracture echoes off the dripping walls. The ache in his chest turns sharper, hotter –

“Stop!”

Lucanis has not spoken in so long. His is the croak of the gravetender, the rasp of the corpse in the ground. Panic is making his invaded head spin.

Perhaps the thing inside him feels it too. Or perhaps it did not realise its flesh-cloak might have a voice with which to scream. It stills.

It waits.

It…

…Can it hear him?

“If you destroy me,” Lucanis hisses through gritted teeth – into the echoing stillness of his cell, into fetid air heavy with the stench of rotting fish and blood – “then she will have won.”

At first... silence. The steady drip of seawater through decaying wards. One day, when the earth bucks or the Fade boils, this whole place will be taken by the deep.

On that day, Lucanis will smile.

(WHY. Won't. It. Change???)

The pain has not lessened by even a sliver. Lucanis' vision glitters violet at the edges.

“What are you talking about?”

(I want. To be. OUT!)

Lucanis barks a laugh. It hurts.

“So do I.”

The shuddering mass stretching his heart muscle makes a noise like steel on whetstone... but it ebbs. Lucanis gasps against the floor, swallowing spit and saltwater, as blood returns to fill his cramping fingers and starving brain.

“What are you?” he pants. Wet stonework scrapes his scabbed lips.

(SPITE.)

Lucanis has dealt with demons before... but never like this. Curled upon the floor like a drunkard on the cobbles, he scrubs roughly at his aching chest. He does not spare a thought for the demon’s name; he will wear the mantle gladly, just so long as it continues to talk.

“You need me.”

This weedy rattle does not sound like him at all. But every scouring gasp of air that rakes Lucanis’ windpipe, every bright-blood sting reopened in his flesh… They are grim victories, every one. Every second in which Lucanis clings bloody-knuckled to his life is another in which Zara remains denied.

(It is. Solid.)

“It is a floor.”

(It. IS!!!!)

Spite roars this last into the hollow of Lucanis’ skull as if the stone’s very existence is an unforgivable offence.

Of course. Zara and her sadist lapdog could not force into Lucanis any ordinary demon.

He had to get the insane one.

Lucanis chuckles grimly. Flecks of blood mix with the puddle under his cheek. “So be it,” he whispers.

(I WANT IT. TO. CHANGE!)

To think what Caterina would say if she could see Lucanis now: on his belly, without his daggers, bargaining with a demon as if this were a Chantry, and he some green negotiator...

With a grunt, Lucanis pushes up onto his knees. “When we escape,” he grits out, “we will turn this place to rubble.”

(Escape!)

“Sì.” Lucanis waits for the hooks to dig in again, for the demon to rip him apart from the inside out... but the fatal thrust does not arrive. “You and I will make a contract. Zara would like us to fight against each other. Instead... we will kill Calivan. And we will kill Zara.”

(YES! KILL!)

“Then we will leave this place,” Lucanis hisses. To climb to his feet is beyond him. Instead, he collapses back against the wall. “And we will kill the traitor who put me here.”

The demon trills a screeching signature. Like water on the stovetop, it boils, sending hot-cold shivers from Lucanis' heart, to his lungs, and back again – and then out through his many vessels to his guts and wasting muscles; to the ragged remnants of a body carved to pieces a dozen times over.

Quite suddenly, the ink-black cell is filled with violet light. The puddles reflect the spectacle: a pair of vivid wings, spread as if in soaring flight, framing a hollow-eyed and stubbled face Lucanis barely recognises.

He turns his head just in time to vomit sideways. All his bucking stomach manages to expel is a broth of seawater and blood.

The demon undulates between his guts… but Lucanis is still alive.

For now.

Zara’s lapdog leaves him in his cell for three days. Lucanis has been paralyzed by dehydration and infection by the time Calivan sees fit to bring him water. It is for this reason only that the first venatori to lay eyes on the abomination which was once Lucanis Dellamorte does not die the moment his cell door is opened. A violet hallucination cavorts behind the cultist’s back as she props Lucanis against the wall and tips a slow trickle of water between his lips, then douses his festering flesh in magic that sears his broken vessels like wood alcohol. The vision wears Lucanis’ armor and Lucanis’ face, but it flits from place to place like a rabid bat.

The agony dunks Lucanis back beneath the dark waters of oblivion. When he wakes, he finds thin gruel and water have been left for him. The cultist has gone – but Lucanis’ glowing twin remains, watching him from the corner of their cell.

Lucanis blinks, his blurry eyes sticky – and abruptly, the phantom is looming over him.

(GET OUT. KILL!)

“Soon,” Lucanis breathes. He dips his fingertips into the bowl of water, then carefully brings them to his lips.

Calivan does not allow Lucanis to come so close to death the next time. By four days, Zara’s flower-rot reek has faded, and Lucanis hears her lapdog grousing to his subordinates even over the demon’s – over Spite’s – insistent flapping around the small bones in his ears. He hears the wailing of his fellow prisoners, too. The tortured shrieks cut off by monstrous snarls.

This hellish pit is called the Ossuary, apparently. The concept is distinct from the mausoleums of Nevarra, where Lucanis has been told that the dead are remembered. On the contrary: Zara’s Ossuary is a place in which the good-as-dead are ruthlessly unmade.

“The Crow surely cannot last much longer. Go – give him his meal, lest the loss of her prize hog incur our mistress’ wrath.”

This venatori dies quickly. Lucanis lies in wait above the red lyrium barrier that is his cell door, arms and legs spread to buttress his bodyweight against the stone wall either side. When the barrier dissipates, the idiot steps inside, and Lucanis drops like a stone. His demon cackles madly, rippling along Lucanis’ limbs like purple lightning, as the cultist’s neck snaps with the same loud crack as shattered terracotta.

Spite screams just as harshly as the other demons, just as sawblade jagged and skincrawl eerie, when the barrier immediately reforms.

His captors are more careful, after that. On the sixth day, Calivan declares that he has lost his patience, and has Lucanis returned to his place on the rack. At first, Lucanis hopes for a mistake – but the needles and the screws and the searing pokers are as cruelly precise as prior. And so Lucanis screams… but he withdraws. He retreats to that place in his mind which has shielded him from steel-capped canes, from inoculating doses, from loss and from terror and from the looming fate of every Dellamorte. Calivan cannot kill him. Spite cannot kill him.

Not if either of them expect to get what they want.

Seven days. Seventeen. Seventy. Lucanis does not have thoughts anymore, not if there is any chance at all to avoid them, but he does not need to think to kill. The venatori learn to leave him food and water only when he has been restrained by the fucking phylactery Calivan made from his blood, but they hurry about their business, even then. Every day heralds a new death, although the memory of sunrise has long since escaped him; either the death of an unlucky jailer, or that of one of Zara’s other victims.

Lucanis hears them sobbing in those hours he can only imagine must be the night, hears them crying out for lovers, for mothers, for the Maker. Some scream for Zara, as if worshipping demons ever did anyone any good.

Those people deserve to die, Lucanis thinks during one of those nights he cannot help but think. Spite is staring at him from the corner of their cell again.

(They are. WEAK.)

No lover. No mother. It is an unfair advantage, and it is one Lucanis will make use of. Any hour he does not spend either comatose or on the rack, he spends training – even as his undernourished flesh melts from his bones.

As if any Crow is a stranger to starvation.

One hundred days. Two hundred. It is somewhere around this time that Lucanis stops counting. That he loses count, he will admit to himself later. Days do not matter, down here where the passage of time is marked only by death and dripping brine. The venatori argue outside his cell whenever it comes time for food or water. It’s your turn! No, it’s yours! Fizzing violet, Spite often mimics their squabbling from behind the barrier.

The demon wears a beard now. Calivan keeps Lucanis’ own neatly trimmed – in case Lucanis’ mistress visits, the lapdog tells him one day, before taking the razor to the underside of Lucanis’ eyeball.

It is on the same day Calivan muses that he might soon take both out – “You do not need your sight to incubate a demon, after all…” – that a snarl of fury shudders through the bowels of the earth. Jolted from the fugue state he now calls sleep, Lucanis scrambles upright just in time to watch his cell door shatter. Torrents of saltwater gush from buckled wards. Clouds of debris rise from collapsed walls.

For several seconds, all he can do is stare. Screaming echoes in the deep – not despair, this time. Panic.

(YES!!! GET OUT. KILL!)

Lucanis staggers out onto the cell block floor with the demon panting in his ear like an overexcited mabari. He is barefoot. Unarmed. But he has walked this route in his sleep… two hundred times? Three? Calivan taunted him with a visit on the thirteenth day: to the room in which the tools of Lucanis’ trade have sat in storage, kept ready to adorn Zara’s new demon of Envy.

Lucanis is two rooms away from his cell when he first encounters opposition. This venatori is a junior guard: the one always wheedling and whining, too precious to risk feeding the Crow. But he comes at Lucanis now with a red lyrium sword, the charging slash of which Lucanis easily sidesteps. A second quake strikes while Lucanis’ opponent is still on the follow-through, and the sudden bucking of the stonework sends him stumbling like a drunkard. Lucanis takes this opportunity to snatch the weapon from his hand –

And runs him through with his own blood red blade.

It is nice to be armed when two more venatori stumble in after the other. They last no longer than he, however. Lucanis slashes through the throat of the taller before he can even raise his scimitar. To Lucanis’ astonishment, Spite discerns the need for altitude; those violet-light wings launch Lucanis just high enough – and bring him down fast enough – for Lucanis’ two-footed kick to strike the other directly in his centre of gravity. This cultist finds time for only a brief shout of terror as he plummets into a narrow chasm opened by the quake.

The scream ends in thud, followed by a wet gurgle. When Lucanis glances over the edge, he finds the man's limp corpse impaled on a stalagmite.

(It is. Solid!!! SHARP!!!)

“It is,” Lucanis agrees, and hurries to retrieve his equipment.

It has not been well cared for, but it has been mostly protected from the wet. The mould grown on his armour is not so bad that it will not come off, Lucanis tells himself as he slips into leathers which are now more than a little too roomy. He can still work. And if the mould does not come out, it will not be such a terrible thing to commission a set that lacks the demon motifs. Damn Viago and his –

No. Calivan is probably still alive. And Lucanis is a Crow, even if…

(KILL! KILL! KILL!)

When Lucanis emerges, he finds two more venatori inspecting the bodies of the slain. Although he has been without them for… for too long, Lucanis’ blades feel once again like parts of him, although the sheathes hang differently upon his wasted frame. The closest venatori falls with a poignard buried between his eyes. And the other –

Mierda.

The other flees.

Lucanis gives chase, ripping the poignard free on his way by. Only luck has kept him from the sight of Calivan’s mages until now – luck, and perhaps also whatever disaster is responsible for the sounds of combat echoing in the waterlogged halls. His quarry is swift, and unlike Lucanis, has presumably had more to eat than stale naan and gruel for the better part of… for almost…

The cultist is fleeing toward the cell block. A causeway passes overhead here, one which the venatori sometimes use for –

Lucanis has just enough time to spot a warden and his gaggle of juniors on the causeway, for his eyes to burn as if they have been tossed with onions when crimson ripples swirl outwards from the mage’s staff, before the arcane imperative lands on him like a mountain.

“CAZZO!” Lucanis roars as his limbs lock up, as his legs bend despite his every effort to will it otherwise, and – briefly – all he can think of is when Caterina made him swear never to use that word again.

His knees hit the floor with a thud. Spikes of pain lance up through both his femurs. His elbows are next.

(NO!!! GET. UP!!!)

“I… can’t! Help me!”

The spectral wings flap, yes, but all the demon manages is to send beams of angry violet strobing across the chamber. Lucanis is growing dizzy with all the flapping inside his skull. He cannot –

(It won’t. Change!!!)

Lucanis knows it is futile when the warden's footsteps ring out on the stone behind him. A moment later, walls of ice rise up to enclose him on all sides.

Somewhat belatedly, the demon’s wings fizzle away.

And Lucanis is left in almost total darkness.

“No!”

It is like being inside a giant, hollow dumpling; the walls of ice converge to a tapered point only a short distance above his head. The space is barely tall enough for Lucanis to stand up, once the unholy magic gripping his limbs has loosened.

“We are not finished,” he snarls, and takes Spite’s noisy fizzing for agreement. “You took us upwards before. Can you do it again?”

Outside, heavily muffled by the ice, Lucanis can hear the venatori conversing. It does not sound like a relaxed conversation. Spite’s simmering turns violent; so bright it sears the backs of Lucanis’ eyeballs even worse than the blood magic.

(It is. SOLID!!!)

“Ice is not the same as stone,” Lucanis hisses back. “If we go up – fast enough – we can break it.”

There is a new voice outside. Lucanis does not know it, but his heart lifts anyway. A new innervation sparkles through him. He has heard only the slimy tones of venatori, or else the rasp of the newly dead, for… for…

The warden booms the beginnings of an incantation, and Spite propels Lucanis upwards.

Through the ice.

He catches only a glimpse of the scene beneath before he falls, violet feathers and shards of ice raining around him. Venatori, arranged in a ritual half-circle. A pair of strangers in the cultists’ sights. The wings buffer Lucanis’ descent – just enough that no bones break when he lands on his feet behind the warden, ice shards ringing on the floor in a shower of shattered glass.

First: a bear hug which traps the warden’s magestaff against his chest. Then: a spin which drives him, flailing, onto the blade of the nearest guard. Lucanis studies the newcomers from the violet-stained corner of his eye – both startled, both armed, but neither threatening – as he repeats his new favourite move: impaling venatori on the sharpest rock formations he can find.

Three left.

Two of them are staring. It is their turn to be paralyzed, if only by fear. Launched like an arrow by Spite’s wings, Lucanis flits between them before either has a chance to react, and introduces two bared blades to throats deserving of them. The last, he catches in a spin – and snaps his neck with one clean twist.

When the room is still, and Spite’s wings have once again dissipated, Lucanis can finally look the strangers over with clear eyes. Later, he will wish he had something charming to say. He will wish he could have cut a striking figure, and not that of a hollow-eyed abomination. This corpse costumed in the mouldy leavings of a Crow.

But he still has his contract. He. Did. Not. Give. Up. And for the first time in almost… in more than…

“Lucanis Dellamorte?”

And for the first time in almost a year, someone is looking at Lucanis as if he is still alive.

46 notes · View notes