[Exalted] Ain’t No Devil

You wanted to come back. You really did. You were going to visit after you won the tournament, to at least say goodbye before you set sail.

"Jiro," says your captain and your father, "Why did you ever think we wanted you to?"

You didn't. You don't. That's the simple answer. It's what's kept you away all these years, long after you carved your name in battle and turned the spilled blood into more than enough gold and jade to go home. You never went because you were afraid of exactly this, of standing in judgement before the last remnants of your old life and still being found so wanting. Almost a mercy, then, that you'll never have to. That you'll never have to do anything any more. That you can just...

... wake up.

Your cell is a simple stone block, rough-hewn and cold. The uneven wall at your back is like ice through your thin undershirt. A single torch in the hall is the only light you have, the bars casting shadows like dancing tiger-stripes across the far wall. There's a window, little more than a slit, set too high up for you to even reach. There's not a sound to keep you company, not the tramp of boots patrolling nor the snore of a sleeping guard. Your only companion is... your sword?

Your sword lies at your feet. Broken. Someone snapped the blade in two, leaving a jagged stump of a weapon barely half as long, but that's something right? It's broken but it's not gone. You can have it fixed. Just some more metal and money to reforge it and sharpen it and it'll be good as new. You bend forward and reach out to grasp the hilt of your precious sword-

-and phantom fingers simply pass right through.

The breath leaves your lungs in a shallow, shocked sigh. You slump back against the wall.

There's nothing there. Just an aching, sucking empty void where your arm, your sword-arm, should be. You can still feel it. It should be there, you know it's there but- but it isn't. Just cold, empty air and a freshly bandaged... not even a stump. Just the flat, rounded shape where his shoulder flows right down to your side with nothing in between. Your shaking left hand rises, crossing your body, instinctively reaching to touch it. You yank it away just as quickly.

You can't-

You can still fix this.

You push yourself upright. Slowly. Carefully. Rocking dangerously as you fight to get your feet under you with only one arm to steady yourself, head lighter than air and practically spinning. You shuffle forward, just a little at a time. Stoop down slowly, so slowly, to scoop up your sword in the only hand you have left. You've heard of people teaching themselves to fight left-handed. You've even heard of one-armed swordsmen. You can still fight, you just have to train right? Just like the early days, when your body screamed in agony and buckled beneath you, when the other mercenaries laughed at you and told you to find something more your size like a dagger. You succeeded then, you can still succeed now!

You carefully copy your old stance and mirror it, left foot forward. You heft your broken stump of a sword and begin to swing, slowly at first but growing faster. Forehand, backhand, upper, descending. You can do this. You can come back from this. You won't bend, you won't break, you'll get stronger than ever and then you'll show them! You'll show-

You thrust, and overextend. The weight of your sword is too much for your untrained hand, your unbalanced stance. You sway and buckle and you don't have another arm to steady yourself. You pitch forward with a cry and land hard on your knee. Your sword flies from your weak grip and skids, clattering against the far wall.

Your breath hitches in your chest. You pant, hard, too hard. You barely even exerted yourself, you shouldn't- you shouldn't feel like this. Your left arm can't be that weak. You go to rise, to stride over to your sword and try again like you always have.

You instinctively try to steady yourself with an arm that isn't there. You fall again, and this time you can't save yourself. Your full weight lands on your empty shoulder and you scream, the impact like a white-hot stake being driven through into your heart. You roll over and clutch at the ache, curling up like a wounded animal. Breathing hard, gasping for air, waiting and hoping the pain will die down before tears of agony well up in your eyes.

The tears come, but they aren't just from pain. You try to staunch the flow with your arm but they won't stop. Your eyes are burning, your head is aching and light, you try to force yourself to breathe deeper than the sick little sips of air you're managing but all you can do is laugh. You laugh in mad, high-pitched giggles between sobs until you can't breathe any more, until your lungs burn in your chest and your vision swims. Why shouldn't you? Isn't it just fucking hilarious? All this time, no matter how hard you fought and struggled and tried, this was all there was going to be. Saved by medics too cruel to let you die.

Time blurs. You don't know how long you're in there. Barely any light filters through your tiny window, and the guards only bring you your slop when they remember to. It feels like days before you have your first and only visitor - an Immaculate monk in shapeless grey, her head waxed completely smooth, stepping fearlessly into your cell and sinking to her knees before you. You don't meet her gaze. You let your head hang low, staring at the water stain on the floor.

"Greetings," she says. "I come to you today at the personal request of Abbess Tamura, due to the seriousness of your offence. She wished me to explain the particulars of your sentence."

"y'mean why m'not dead?" you mumble.

"Indeed. A soul stained as deeply as yours would find no peace in death now," she explains, her voice gentle, almost sweet. "Tainted as you are, there is a risk you would be reincarnated in an even worse state. With the arm and weapon that performed your ill deeds now severed, you have been freed from the burdens of your past, and may now seek penance and enlightenment with the time you have left. And then, in time, when you have passed on with a heart full of remorse, you will be reborn purified."

"... s'it?" you ask. "beggar n' a cripple... for the rest of my life?"

"Until you can finally be reborn, yes," she explains patiently. "Unless, of course, you would be willing to submit yourself to the Immaculate Order? It would be a difficult road but with humility-"

"ffffuck you" you snarl, teeth bared, eye glinting through the black curtain of your fringe. She flinches at your defiance and for a moment, just a moment, you feel alive again.

It doesn't last. You think the monk said something to the guards as she left because they don't feed you at all after that. Your skin slowly shrinks and tightens over your muscles, your stomach taut as a drum, but it doesn't hurt. You don't feel much of anything any more. No food or drink means the corner of your cell doesn't get any worse, at least.

When they finally let you out it's an unceremonious affair. One day they just walk up to your cell, open it, and tell you to move it. One guard gives you a swift kick in the back of the knee when your idea of 'move it' proves too slow. When they sign you out they don't leave you with anything but the clothes on your back, the money you had on you and stored safely in your room no doubt appropriated as 'fines', and you hear the guards mention something about the warden wanting your broken sword for his mantlepiece.

You don't care. Not about any of it. You can't bring yourself to any more.

If you let yourself care you'll get angry, and with anger comes the fantasies about your revenge, about crushing the Tamura Clan and toppling their throne in White Tower and seeing their city burn for what they did to you, and then what? Then comes the rest of it, the crushing weight and vast enormity of reality. You can scream and cry and beat your fist against a wall all you want but you won't change that. Nothing can any more. This is all you can be.

They give you a wooden bowl and a thin, moth-eaten blanket and that's it. You're out the door a free man, free to wander the city and beg.

You try the main thoroughfares first, somewhere high in foot traffic. You swiftly find out you're not the first person to have tried that. The second you set foot on the street with bowl in hand, a nearby guard storms through the crowd to head you off. He tells you in no uncertain terms, hand on the hilt of his sword, that the inner city is no place for the likes of you.

And you think about it. You think about rushing him. Not even to kill him, just to make him do it. Just to force him to draw steel and slice you open and let you bleed out on those neat, uniform flagstone streets. But you don't. Your stubborn survival instinct holds you in check too long, and the moment passes. You wordlessly turn around and walk away, down the narrowing streets and away from dignified eyes.

In the back streets, on the outskirts, nobody has the money to spare dropping a few scraps of jade scrip in some beggar's bowl. Especially not a beggar that ruined the festival and mutilated the satrap's son. Soon enough you're diving in the garbage, weakly sifting through layers upon layers of foul-smelling refuse for the few edible morsels the inner-city eateries throw out, to snatch them and scarf them down and flee before a patrol passes by and chases you away. It brings back memories. They aren't fond ones.

You can feel yourself wasting away. It hasn't been long enough to start in earnest, but you can feel it. Your whole body aches, crying out for sustenance. Begging you to feed it or it'll have to turn inward, cannibalising the hard-won bulk you've had for so long. You don't care any more. Why should you? What good's muscle to a one-armed beggar? You can barely even bring yourself to lift your head these days.

One night, maybe ten days after the tournament, you find yourself down by the docks. It's been quieter down here these days, winding down since the last few skirmishes with northern forces they say. Many of the massive warehouses on the wharf stand shuttered and empty, awaiting the next surge of imports and exports to bring life to them once more, and are only lightly patrolled. It's a simple matter to slip through the cracks and wander down to the waterfront, down where the cold water gently laps against the concrete slab the Shogunate set down so many years ago and merges almost seamlessly with the blue-black sky at the horizon. You carefully lower yourself down and sit at the edge, feet dangling just above the surface.

You look out at the water and you think about the world in your idle fantasies. The world where you board your ship a conquering champion, wallet heavy with your winnings and a laurel wreath on your brow, sailing off to chase the setting sun and see the Blessed Isle where it all began. Now the sky is dark and the water is still. There'll be no ship coming to take you away from all of this.

You look down. The water's dark but in the moonlight you can just barely make out your reflection. You wonder what would happen if you simply leaned forward, let yourself slip off your precarious perch and the sea close over your head. The Immaculate Order sure wouldn't be happy if they found out. Suicide's an instant drop down the Coils, plummeting further from the enlightenment of the dragons than you could ever hope to claw your way back up in one lifetime. That was always enough to hold you back as a kid, but maybe that doesn't sound so bad right now. Maybe you'll come back a monster, an absolute nightmare. Maybe Anathema if you're lucky. Heh, yeah. That'll be your revenge. Killing yourself over and over again until your soul's so heavy with sin you drop right off the Coils and come back the greatest ghost Creation's ever seen.

Or maybe you'd just come back as someone like a Tamura. You could ruin way more lives that way.

You let out a soft, mirthless chuckle. You sit there, still as a statue, staring down into the ever-shifting surface. It's cold out here, but you're used to being cold. It's almost comfortable. Maybe you'll just wait. Wait and see what happens. If you get bored, change your mind, maybe you'll think about getting up and moving on. If you fall asleep and slip off, well... then that'll be it. Total accident. Nobody's fault. Nobody will mind either way. The water gently slaps against the concrete below you and you take a long, slow breath.

"S' so quiet out here," says an unfamiliar voice. "How d'you stand it?"

You turn your head. There's a demon sitting next to you.

You freeze solid, clinging to the edge of the wharf with a white-knuckle grip as you stare wide-eyed at the nightmare come to life. The demon's sitting a good distance from you, about a hip-width and a half or so, and it makes no move to approach. It's too busy staring out at the horizon, idly rolling a cigarette between its claws before lifting it to its lips for another contemplative drag. Your eyes dart up and down and up again, taking in the sight of it in waking-nightmare clarity.

It's like a living statue, something lovingly sculpted from a massive block of raw obsidian and polished to a mirror sheen. Every curve and contour gleams bright silver in the moonlight, glassy-stone skin stretching and shrinking and shifting as smoothly as flesh over a labourer's rounded, well-developed brawn as the demon lowers the cigarette once more. It takes you long seconds to realise that it's roughly man-shaped beneath the instinctive confusion of its silhouette - it has too many of everything. Four arms, four wings, two tails, four eyes. Four horns crown its brow framed by four pointed bat-like ears. Its face is a gargoyle's snout, fanged maw framed by mandibles that almost give the illusion of a human mouth between them. Its tongue is the molten red-orange of steel freshly heated in the forge, and when it speaks a sickly green furnace-glow radiates from the back of its throat. Its legs dangle down towards the water just like yours, and they're about the only thing it's got the correct number of. Taloned, digitigrade feet scrape the surface of the water, slicing furrows in the dark skin of the sea with every idle motion.

It's been broken once before. Broken, fixed, and starting to break again. Almost everywhere you look you see the perfectly polished obsidian finish is marred, fracture points rippling out all across its body that were filled in with molten metal and blended with the main body. Gold you think, or maybe brass, something that glimmers in the moonlight. Fresh cracks are opening, some only hair-thin, but you see them by the toxic green glow that seeps through every time the demon so much as breathes. Its eyes are like burning emerald marbles set in the sockets, and tongues of green flame intermittently slip free through the cracks between its maw and mandibles. It finally notices you staring and turns, giving you a quick once-over in kind.

" 'ey kid," it says. "Not gonna scream or nothin'?"

You shake your head.

" 'ppreciate it."

"You here to take my soul?" you ask, finally finding your voice again.

The demon chuckles mirthlessly. Its voice is deep and bassy, thrumming through its stone chest, gravelly and metallic in a way no human could ever hope to replicate. "Well. Kinda. Mean, not the way you think."

It smokes its cigarette down to almost nothing, orange embers glowing beneath its claws as the ash falls into the harbour. It looks down at the stub, smoke that smells like a forge at work filtering through the cracks around its mandibles, and flicks it into the water. It produces a fresh one from somewhere, and hesitates.

"You want one?" it asks. You shake your head. "Suit yourself."

It catches the tip on another tongue of toxic flame, igniting it in a flash of green-turning-orange. It pinches the cigarette carefully between its fangs, letting it smoulder a moment, and turns to you.

"I ain't got time to explain the whole thing, so I'll give you the short version," it says. "Hell saw what happened to you. It sees what happens to folk like you all over Creation. N' when it does, it sends folk like me to find folk like you to give 'em a choice. A chance to start over, with the kinda power people can only dream of. Power of the real Anathema."

This is insane. Absolutely insane. A demon - an actual, genuine demon - is sitting next to you and telling you it can give you another shot, fuck it's all but telling you it can grant wishes on top of it all. Like Creation itself heard your idle thoughts and sent alone someone to help you put your money where your mouth is. You want to laugh. You want to scream. You want to pinch yourself and wake up from this absurd delusion. How are you even supposed to react to this?

[ ] Anger. Does this thing think you're fucking stupid or something? It comes along and promises the world and you're supposed to just take an emissary of Hell at its word? You've had the rug yanked out from under you too many times before, and you've had enough. Tell it to fuck off.
[ ] Suspicion. This thing comes along and promises the world, and you're supposed to just take an emissary of Hell at its word? The problem is... you want to. You so deeply, desperately want to. You'll compromise. You have to be sure. Question it, grill it, it says it doesn't have much time but it'll answer you until the eleventh hour and damn well like it.
[ ] Glee. It's everything you were asking for, everything you could want. The power of the Anathema, that's what it said. The thing spoken of in hushed whispers, the thing all Immaculate faithful should fear, the things that once shattered the world. You'll take that power and show the Tamura what it's like to lose, to struggle and fight and believe so desperately that they deserve to exist, only to be crushed all the same.
[ ] Relief. You don't know if it's the offer, the isolation, or the demon's strange demeanour but... for the first time in so long, there's even the slightest ray of hope. You know bullshitters and swindlers and conmen and this demon doesn't sound like one at all. You think he actually wants to help you. The prospect's almost terrifying but you can't let it slip away. Not now.