8 - The Bestial Realm

    Luitold had just woken up from the most comfortable sleep of perhaps his entire life. After four days of riding in Dietrich’s carriage, which was equally rough in ride as it was opulent, the warm and supple bedding he slept in at the castle was like a dream. In just one night at Isenburg, he had been given all of the luxuries that life as a peasant had never provided him. When the party had first arrived, they were greeted with a bountiful dinner prepared by Dietrich’s staff, one consisting of fresh roasted meat, expensive white bread, and wine, all things the boy had never once dreamed of being treated to. 

As he slowly awoke from his slumber, Luitold continued to lay in the comfort of his bed even as the sounds of others beginning their morning routines began to echo on the other side of his door. He indulged in this comfort for what felt like nearly an hour, an hour that freed his mind from the pressures of the outside world. For once, it wasn’t the pain of his loneliness or his fear of the ghostly faces in the smoke that clouded his thought. All there was to think about was the joy of his new material condition.

He understood, however, that this mindless bliss couldn’t last forever, and before long, there was a knock at his door. Just after that, the door opened, revealing the familiar sight of Bernhart.

“We’ll be beginning your training in just a moment, Luitold,” he said as the warm morning air of the castle’s halls seeped into the bedroom, “There should be new clothes for you in your wardrobe. Put them on and we can leave.”

Luitold shot out of bed, realizing he should probably demonstrate some form of respect for him.

“Yes, sir,” he said quickly, his eyes still foggy from sleep.

“I’ve told you, I’m not a Sir,” Bernhart replied as he shut the door halfway, “There are others here that are very proud of that title and wouldn’t like hearing you call me that. You can address me by my name.”

“Yes, um… Bernhart,” Luitold said as the door shut further, allowing him his privacy to change.

With haste, Luitold left his bed and approached the ornate wooden wardrobe in the corner of the room. Within was a pair of loose-fitting white linen pants, as well as a deep blue colored tunic and a leather belt. It took him a few minutes to get them on, with him finding the belt in particular a struggle to get on. He could imagine Bernhart’s impatience growing on the other side of the door and hoped he would cut him some slack for being new to such luxuries.

“I’m ready!” Luitold finally called to him.

“Took you long enough,” Bernhart replied as he opened the door and looked down at his new clothes, “Hm, you don’t look like such an animal anymore.”

“The material is very nice, Bernhart,” Luitold said, looking up to his mentor as they started heading out into the hall, “I’ve never felt so clean.”

“Yes, Lord Dietrich has been very gracious to give you these garments. I felt the same way when he first took me in. I think I may have been just around your age, too.”

Luitold followed Bernhart as they slipped between droves of cooks and cleaners travelling through the busy halls. At last, they reached the back door of the keep, which had been propped open to let in the fresh air. It was a beautiful spring morning, with the sun high in the air and shining softly down on them through the clouds.

“There’s a building behind the main keep where Lord Dietrich conducts his experiments,” Bernhart said, “He and Lord Rudolf should be waiting for us there.”

The word ‘experiment’ instilled some curiosity in Luitold’s mind. It reminded him of alchemy, though that was a subject he hardly knew anything about either, only that the brimstone he mined back home was used for it frequently.

“I still don’t understand what kind of training they want me to go through,” Luitold said, “Do they want me to be a knight like you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Bernhart replied, “Whatever role you’ll serve, it’ll be something completely new. They want you to do what you did against Alemannia.”

“But—whatever I did was only on accident!” Luitold said.

“That’s the point of the training, Luitold,” Bernhart said, “You’ll get all the tries you’ll ever need to make that lightning strike twice.”

Before long, the building Bernhart spoke of was in sight. It was quite humble looking, with no kind of ornamentation to be seen on its stone brick exterior besides the two tall chimneys on its roof. Leaning against the side of the building stood Lord Rudolf, who seemed to be lost in thought as he stared at the swaying grass in front of him. 

“Good morning, my Lord,” Bernhart said, “Is Lord Dietrich here as well?”

Rudolf rose from his resting position against the wall and straightened his posture to face Bernhart with a friendly smile.

“Good morning, Bernhart,” he said, “Dietrich is waiting just behind here. The training grounds have been set up there.”

“Thank you, my Lord,” Bernhart replied courteously as he continued to the back of the building. 

Rudolf turned his gaze to Luitold.

“Good morning to you as well, Luitold,” he said. Though he maintained his smile, his eyes squinted as they would if he had just bitten into a sour fruit.

“Morning, my Lord,” Luitold said shyly as he nodded his head and followed Bernhart. In the corner of his eye, he noticed Rudolf’s smile fading as he walked past him. 

Behind the building laid a massive dug out pit in the dirt, about a story deep in all dimensions. Inside the pit was nothing but a straw scarecrow. The walls were lined with wooden boards, and nailed to one of them was a sturdy looking shelf full of glass jars. Beside the pit was Dietrich, clothed in his usual wolfskin mantle that hung to his shins as he stood patiently waiting for Luitold to arrive.

“Luitold, I’m glad you’re here,” he said warmly before gesturing to the pit, “This is where you’ll be doing your training for the foreseeable future.”

“Yes, my Lord,” Luitold quickly replied, bowing at the waist.

Dietrich then looked beside the boy to face Bernhart.

“Bernhart, please help me lower the ladder,” he said.

Bernhart quickly walked to Dietrich’s side as they approached a tall wooden ladder that laid on the ground. Nearly in unison, they each grabbed a side of it and pushed it down from the grass into the pit, leaving it to lean at an angle so that it wouldn’t fall over.

“We can begin as soon as you climb down, Luitold,” the Count said.

“Yes, my Lord,” Luitold replied again.

Luitold walked to the edge of the pit, a strange feeling of judgement passing through his mind. For the first fourteen years of his life, he had been so far removed from the world of nobles, and yet now he stood before two of the most powerful ones he knew as they both looked down on him in observation. With no time to dwell, he climbed down the ladder and stepped foot in the firm dirt bed of the pit. Only a moment later, Dietrich and Bernhart pulled the ladder back up, leaving him without the option to leave. The wood-plated walls that surrounded him were imposing. He wondered if this is how it felt to be an animal in a pen.

“Your task is very simple, Luitold,” Dietrich said, raising his voice to make up for the vertical distance between them, “Do just as you did in the battle at Rheinmark. Try to remember.”

“But I don’t have a weapon, my Lord,” Luitold called back as he craned his neck up to face him.

“Today you don’t need a traditional weapon,” Dietrich told him, “All this requires is one of the jars to your left.”

Luitold looked to his left, seeing the shelf of glass jars he had observed earlier. At a closer glance, each was filled with piles of white crystals and brimstone powder. Immediately his mind was called back to the scene of the battle. He stood in a petrified stupor as the memories came to him. The smoke, the darkness, the ghosts.

“Go on,” Dietrich said.

Luitold approached the shelf and grabbed one of the large jars, carefully holding it between his hands as he returned to the middle of the pit. It was cold to the touch.

“I am told you saw a jar like this in the battlefield and broke it,” he continued, “and that’s what gave you your power. Please, do just as you did then, Luitold. As similarly as possible.”

What needed to be done was only a simple action. All he had to do was break the jar. But somehow, the task ahead of him seemed bigger than that. There was a strong hesitation in his mind, one that told him this wasn’t meant to happen. The jar trembled in his hand, and the sweat forming on his fingertips made it hard to grip. Understanding his lack of choice in the matter, Luitold held the jar high above his head and threw it down at the ground beneath him.

The sound of shattering glass echoed through the pit, and a cloud of light blue vapor rose through the air, spiraling up in a small vortex as it expanded and grew darker. A strong wind circled around Luitold, seeming to pull the cloud around his body as it continued to grow, until finally he was submerged in complete darkness.

Just as it had been before, this dark space was silent, completely devoid of information to any of his senses. Just pure dark, pure silence, pure numbness, nothing. Yet again, just like before, this silence was followed by a chorus of whispers.

“You…” the pained voices said in unison, “Why have you ret-t-turned..?”

“Who are you?” Luitold barked, his desire for answers overpowering his fear.

“We are j-j-just like y-you…” they said, “You have ig-n-nored our messsssage, and now you will f-f-face your doooom…”

“You’re not answering me!” Luitold snapped back, “What is this? Explain!”

“We are the ssssoulss t-trapped by the b-bark…” they said, “...trapped i-in the bark…”

An audible gust of wind blew through the darkness, revealing the ghostly faces that spoke to him. The sight was just as disturbing as it was the first time. A collection of inhuman faces, devoid of color, expression, or life, hollow. This time, Luitold was able to see further behind them. He now saw that the faces were part of a larger being. What looked like a large mass of white opaque crystal connected the pale faces together, as if they had melted into it.

“Your ssssoul has been link-k-ed between t-two realms…” they continued, “...that w-which belongs to m-man and that which belongs to b-b-beassst…”

Another gust of wind blew violently through the blackness, revealing more beyond the limited view Luitold was first shown. As the smoke cleared, the mass of crystals in front of him extended further away and down beneath his feet, resembling the shape of an old withered tree branch, and, like a branch, a greater tree laid beneath it. Luitold seemed to float in the darkness of this world high above the trunk that these branches of crystal were borne from. The scale of this pale tree was almost unfathomable, with what must have been thousands of branches just like the one he stood near stretching for what appeared to be a near infinite distance away. 

“The r-root of thisss earth is what c-cursssesss usss all…” they said, “...f-for the fruit it bears w-withers its v-very leavesss…”

“What the hell is this?” Luitold screamed.

Suddenly, another voice was heard, one far more familiar. It was the voice of an adult man.

“Do not fear him!” he said with a panicked tone, “It is the fear that kills you.”

Luitold turned around to see the voice’s origin, and as he did, a horizontal slit in the black sky opened like eyelids, showing him a view of the pit where he had just been before the smoke surrounded him. The world he saw wasn’t the same as before, though. Everything was cast in shadow, as if stuck in a perpetual dusk. The sky itself was red, but with no sun, and seemed to flow like water, or more specifically, blood. Luitold realized his other senses had returned, too. He could feel the chill of the morning breeze and could smell the fresh air, too, though these pleasant sensations didn’t match the horrors of what he saw. 

He began to feel droplets of cold rain hit his skin, only the rain was red just like the sky, and the droplets were far thicker than normal raindrops. Not only that, but his arms didn’t look the way they should have either. They were black and oily, and exceedingly slender. As Luitold looked up to see the origin of the voice, which he now realized was Dietrich’s, he did not see a human. In his place was another dark creature, one with arms just like his, and the rest his body was just as dark and slender too. His mouth was wide and lined with rows of spear-like teeth, and the whites of his eyes shone in contrast to the dark tissue in place of his skin, accentuated with the pupils of a snake. Beside him stood two other creatures of the same appearance, who both seemed to recoil in fear as they looked down at Luitold. Their faces, though distorted and monstrous, still displayed an innately human sense of emotion.

“Is this what you saw in Rheinmark, Bernhart?” one of them asked.

“Yes, my Lord, exactly so,” the other replied, “I don’t know what to make of it.”

“It’s only staring at us,” the creature with Dietrich’s voice said, “It makes me wonder how much of the boy is still in there.”

The three creatures continued to look down at him in silence, their fear visibly easing. It was strange how normal they acted despite their appearances. The one with the voice of Dietrich rubbed his chin as he appeared to ponder to himself. The one addressed as Bernhart stood wide-eyed with his jaw slightly agape. The other stood with his body tilted sideways, seeming too uncomfortable to face Luitold with his chest towards him.

“Bring in the animal,” the Dietrich creature ordered calmly.

The Bernhart creature began to walk around the edge of the pit and headed behind the building next to it. Though Luitold could see, hear, and feel everything in this vision, he had no control over the body he observed it through, as it turned around to watch the creature walk without any input from him. Also, the question of just what he was looking at remained unsolved. Was this real? Were these monsters actually Dietrich, Rudolf, and Bernhart? For now, the best thing he could do was assume the answer was yes. 

When Bernhart reemerged from the side of the building, a fat pink pig was wriggling in his arms. Unlike the humans, nothing about the pig seemed to be different than it would be in the normal world.

“Toss it in,” Dietrich said.

Carefully, Bernhart kneeled down beside the edge of the pit and loosened the pig from his arms, letting it fall into the pit and roll on the dirt as it squealed in pain and fright. Without permission, Luitold’s neck immediately jerked sideways to face the pig, which stepped back and continued to squeal in horror at the sight of him. Not a second later, his body lunged forward and landed on top of it, digging his pointed fingers into the pig’s flesh. He had no idea why his body was doing this, but he was forced to feel all of it nonetheless. He felt the pig’s skin break beneath his nails, its muscles ripping from its connective fat as he tore it apart, and he tasted the cold, disgusting meat that he gnawed from its body like an animal.

“I doubt the boy is that hungry,” Dietrich said as he observed from above, “We just fed him meat last night.”

“Then it seems the beast has a mind of its own,” Rudolf added.

Suddenly, black steam started to emerge from Luitold’s skin. Whatever force that controlled his body seemed just as surprised by this as he was, as it looked at his arms in confusion and growled. The steam began to thicken until it closely resembled the smoke cloud that emerged from the glass jar. 

Just like before, the cloud swirled and wrapped around Luitold’s body until he was again stuck in total darkness. Shortly after, though, the smoke completely cleared. Luitold quickly shot his forearm up over his eyes as an overwhelming brightness surrounded him in its absence. It was then he realized he was in control of his body again, and his body itself was back to its usual form.

Luitold fell to his knees, just as he did the first time the smoke cleared in Rheinmark. His body was totally numb and his vision was blurred to the point where everything around him was incomprehensible. He held his head and shut his eyes as his body tried to recuperate. The voices of Bernhart, Rudolf, and Dietrich echoed in the distance, muffled through the sound of blood pulsing past his ears.

“And just like that, he’s a kid again,” Dietrich said.

“This is how it appeared in Rheinmark, too, my Lord,” Bernhart said, “One moment a demon, the next a human.”

“Wait—look at the pig!” Rudolf interjected.

Luitold, his senses slowly returning to him, raised his head. Before him laid the pig he just finished devouring as a beast, only now its skin was in perfect condition. It was still dead, of course, but its body showed no signs of distress.

“What the..?” Luitold murmured.

“How is this possible?” Bernhart asked, “It was just in pieces a moment ago!”

Luitold looked back to see the three men. They were back in their normal forms. The sky was no longer made of blood and the atmosphere was no longer dark and ominous. 

“This is what happens to beings that die from magic,” Dietrich explained, “The body doesn’t react normally. It seems the same applies to this kind of dark magic as well.”

“Luitold, are you still awake?” Rudolf called from above.

Luitold, still catching his breath, simply nodded in response. Rudolf quickly came to the ladder beside the pit and lowered it himself, climbing down as soon as it stabilized. The baron came to Luitold and kneeled before him, placing his hands on his shoulders.

“We need you to tell us what you saw while it’s still fresh in your memory,” he said, “You don’t have to do any more today, we only need you to talk.”

Rudolf looked up at Dietrich, seemingly looking for some kind of validation. Something about the situation made Luitold feel it was Rudolf’s own idea to cut the training short this soon.

“When the smoke surrounded me, I woke up in a place that was dark,” Luitold said, “A group of ghosts spoke to me. They said they were trapped, and they made it sound like I was one of them.”

This was already the most Luitold had said to someone in a long time, maybe even since his mother had gone missing. There was never much time or occasion to talk to people for more than just receiving orders. Even now, he was doing as he was told, but he felt comfortable speaking. It didn’t feel like he was speaking to a Lord, it felt like he was speaking to a guardian.

“In the darkness there was a white tree that was bigger than anything I’d ever seen. The ghosts’ faces were part of one of its branches,” Luitold continued, “and then I started to hear your voices behind me. When I turned around, a hole in the darkness opened, and it was like I could see through another person’s eyes, and then I could feel what he felt, too. He was in this pit, but everything looked different. It was all dark and the sky was red and his body was oozing and black, and when I looked up at everyone, you looked just like him, too, with sharp teeth and scary eyes.”

“Luitold, that other person was you,” Rudolf told him, “After the fog cleared, you had turned into some kind of beast. It had black skin and sharp teeth just like what you said.”

“But how could it be me if I couldn’t control it?” Luitold said, his voice raising unintentionally as his lip quivered and his eyes doused with water, “I could feel everything it felt but it moved without me doing anything!”

“We know just as little as you, Luitold,” Rudolf said, maintaining his calm voice and concerned look, “Just tell me, what did you see after that?”

“The three of you all looked like monsters, too, but you could still talk,” Luitold said, “The one that sounded like Bernhart brought in a pig and threw him in here, and then I—I couldn’t control myself and I…”

“You killed it?” Rudolf interjected as Luitold trailed off with tears streaming down his face, “Then you saw exactly what we did.”

“Did you see the blood in the sky?” Luitold mumbled.

“No—”

“Did you look like monsters, too, when you saw it?”

“No, Luitold,” Rudolf said, “Maybe the eyes of the beast see things differently.”

Luitold continued to kneel in silence as he wept, with Rudolf watching him closely the whole time. 

“Let’s go home,” he continued, “We can talk more tomorrow.”

Luitold’s anxious mind softened at that word. Home.

Was this home? What did it mean to be a home? He had never had a home since his mother disappeared. Yes, he had a shelter, but it did not feel like a home. It was missing the comfort that the word “home” entailed. His new room in the castle was comfortable, very much so, but it wasn’t the same comfort that family gave him. Maybe Rudolf was like family.

“Okay,” Luitold said weakly, “I’m ready.”

Rudolf rose to his feet and grabbed Luitold’s hand, pulling him up beside him. Luitold stumbled as he stood up, his legs still regaining their strength. Rudolf stabilized him and held contact with his shoulder as they walked to the ladder.

“Will you be able to climb?” he asked.

“Y-yes,” Luitold said. 

As he approached the ladder, though, an overwhelming feeling of nausea began to radiate through his whole body, starting from his lower chest and rising into his throat. Luitold burped before leaning forward with his hands on his knees as a mass of blood and cold raw meat cascaded from his mouth, a taste of uneasy stomach acid filling his tongue. It was horrible, but more than that, it was impossible. It was clear, this was the meat the beast ate. The meat from the pig that laid beside him without a cut on its body.