Character: Karpok

By JW:

Chapter 1

Karpok (Irganos Ixes) is known only as “Karpok” by the few he allows to know his real name. As his surname suggests, Karpok is the only son of the reviled Ixian necromancer, Irganos Sasas Ixes, who is notorious even among the elite class of Mordezzan-worshipping priests and necromancers at the Rim of the World.  Irganos’ infamy stems from his extreme isolation.  He abjures all contact with the living, preferring to send minions to carry out his in-person business relations. Despite his minions’ ineptitude, his mine commands respect throughout Hyperborea as an economic force in the trade of undead slaves, rare metals, and ancient Ixian artifacts.  Irganos’ hatred for humanity extends to self-mutilation.  He despises anything that is beyond his control, even his own body.  Only a few on the sickle-shaped isle of Scythium claim to have ever actually seen him – and they are thought to be liars. 

Irganos’ absence breeds rumors – some of which may be true.  One particularly persistent tale is that Irganos has a “Loyal Friend.” “The Loyal Friend Problem” is something of an unholy grail among the necromantic elite.  You see, the most powerful necromancers of Scythium can cast two powerful reanimation spells, raise dead and animate dead.  Each of these spells has an important function, but each also has limitations.  The raise dead spell can bring a corpse back to the fullness of life, but the reanimated being is not bound to the necromancer, enjoying the same irritating freedom of will it enjoyed in life.  The animate dead spell, on the black hand, raises undead ghouls and skeletons that are obedient to the necromancer, but these automatons’ catatonic functionality limits their performance of tasks that require a more human touch.  Titillated apprentices need not answer aloud what powers and pleasures solving “The Loyal Friend Problem” would unlock for the skilled sorcerer, but, of course, no necromancer has ever had a loyal friend…  Then again, how would anyone know if one did?

Karpok would know.  Irganos’ Loyal Friend was Karpok’s mother, Nauja. Having experimented with corpses both fresher and staler in the grave, of different races, ages and decomposition patterns, Irganos was as bewildered as Nauja appeared to be at the moment of her reanimation.  Irganos was never again able to isolate the variables that allowed for Nauja’s unique existence. He marveled when, after passing routine obedience tests, he directed her to his library to read his accounting logs to learn about his enterprise and she emerged tirelessly after three days, having digested every detail about his highest margin goods and joking about his favored customers’ personal preferences.  Indeed, he was motivated to solve the Loyal Friend Problem for this precise purpose.  Finally, Irganos would have a worthy emissary conduct his business and, at last, to free him from the world.  Nauja would captain Irganos’ slave galleon to the Skarag Coast and negotiate his business with the swarthy swine of Orcust, who had for too long swindled his undead captains and dismembered them for bone meal. 

Nauja would grow to outwit them.  In life, Nauja dyed the mammoth-hide dwellings of her Esquimaux kin their idiosyncratic orange.  In Irangos’ mine, she pioneered new sartorial uses for rare metals, smashing platinum into gravel to make astonishing silver slippers for her master.  Despite her eyes’ decomposition into her orbits, she retained her sense of beauty.  She appeared as obedient as a wand in hand, but her sardonic wit, encyclopedic memory and creative spark remained lit. To Irganos, she was perfect.   

 

Chapter 2

Irganos’ complete control over Nauja became too intoxicating to resist, and he was soon appalled to learn that his thrall could become pregnant.   He wailed in shock and horror. The undead could not become pregnant!  Of course, Nauja was unique.  Perhaps he had deceived himself to think that, although she suffered the human indignities of hunger and elimination, human reproduction would be beyond her. Irganos directed Nauja to throw herself down the stairs.  She did so without hesitation. He walked away towards his library while Nauja curled around herself and rocked for a long time. 

Soon, on an expedition to Eriksgaard to barter for a new longship, Nauja realized that she had become pregnant again. Something else new was stirring inside of her as well: she did not want to return to her master, Irganos.  By the time she returned to Scythium, her gaunt torso had swelled to a transparency that, in the right light, betrayed the whoosh of waters beneath. Again, Irganos directed her to throw herself down the stairs.  He strode away saying,  “What a disappointment you have proven to be.”  With that, she threw herself down the staircase yet again. 

This time, however, the fall precipitated, rather than curtailed her childbirth. She crawled into the basement of Irganos black house so that her screams would escape his detection. Karpok was born grotesque and debilitated into the hands of an adoring mother. Nauja absconded with her broken child into the mine.  “A son! A living son!” She beamed with absent eyes.  The exposed bone and gangrenous flesh on Karpok’s torso betrayed that there was something of the dead in him as well.  That didn’t lessen Nauja’s adoration one fingernail.  She had never entertained the thought of disobeying her master, but on some level, she had planned for this day.  She would keep him hidden and warm in a tiny space behind the smelters where she had been collecting rare metals that she planned to grind into never-before-seen pigments and dyes. Sitting there with Karpok in her arms, she hatched the only plan that would make his life possible.  Even if his childhood would be a montage or torture and isolation, he would survive.

Karpok grew up the only living boy in a mine full of undead.  Nauja draped her boy’s withering frame in the grey rags of the zombie miners and sent him to the stone with a hammer and pick.  She felt certain that Irganos’ disdain for humanity would not find exception in her son.  Even though Karpok was half-undead, and half Irganos,  Irganos would see Karpok’s life as disgracing hisname. Nauja also knew that Karpok’s half-humanity would not spare him from the spurn of Hyperborea.  Men of all races viewed the undead as an infestation to be exterminated.  Even on the Skarag Coast, the orcs of Orcust did not tolerate undead in their midst, and she usually conducted Irganos’ business at the port from the deck of her ship.  The world would never be able to see Karpok, so she would never let them judge him with their unseeing eyes.

Karpok has his mother’s black and grey hair.  It grows in uneven patches on paper-thin, greyed yellow skin. He is missing a chunk of flesh from his left cheek, and his voice is a whispered rasp.  His right eye seems to wander and his right shoulder has rotted to the clavicle. His ribs are visible through cracks in his chest and his smell is rotten.  He walks with a slight limp due to the absence of flesh on his left foot.  Each worknight, he blends in among the undead slaves at Irganos' mine.  Each daybreak, however, when Irganos would sleep, Nauja would slip away to visit her son in her dyeing lab.  There, she would show him how she had dyed her technicolor masterpiece, a robe of shattering stars dyed turquoise and crimson.  She would show him who he really was and teach him everything she knew.

Chapter 3

One worknight, Karpok slipped away from his duties.  He missed his mother and had grown old enough for mischief.  He felt certain that he could mimic a dyeing technique that he had seen her employ to fashion a disguise that would allow him to enter his father’s house unnoticed.  He stripped off his grey miner’s garb and used it to abrade the realgar stone that his mother used to dye the house slaves’ attire bright red, and that his father used to produce arsenic poisons for the witches of Fazzuum.  Tonight, he would find his mother in the big house. Peaking his head out of the mine, he took the cold air in over his lungs and looked out for the first time across the high grass to his father’s black home.

Once inside, he quickly found himself disoriented and afraid.  The foyer was dimly lit and cracked plaster hallways snaked away in several directions.  His bedtime stories had been filled with grim warnings about his father.  He knew that he could not be caught. He heard house slaves scraping about nearby.  His life had not prepared him to fit into this strange place, red garb notwithstanding.  He slinked through the foyer through a door on the left and soon found himself in a room with walls lined with ancient tomes.  His mother had brought books down to the smelters for him to study before, but these looked different – older, larger.  Just then, a tall, gaunt figure entered the room.  His skin was grey, but taught, and alive.  “Could this be?...” Karpok thought to himself and whirled away to face the bookshelf behind him.  “My father?!” He thought breathlessly, and did his best impression of a librarian, clumsily grabbing tomes from a nearby cart and returning them to empty spaces on the shelf.  How he wanted to turn to see him!  Instead he forced himself to listen intently for any sign that the first living person he had ever seen might have noticed that he was out of place.  His exhaled breath scraped in his throat like boulders sticking in a crevasse. The man quickly found what he was looking for and strode out of the room through the door from whence he came.  The boulders in Karpok’s throat fell into his stomach with a sigh, and he risked the wry grin of teen mischief well played. He looked down at the book in his hand, “THE MALIGN MIND” the binding read.  He opened it, but the markings it contained were indecipherable to him.  Nonetheless, the arcane inscriptions held his gaze. As he slyly tucked the book into the breast of his smock, the inscriptions swam in his mind.  Karpok allowed curiosity to get the best of him, and he carefully made his way to the door where the man had exited. He peaked around the corner.  The man knelt in the center of the room, murmuring a harsh incantation. His face was pressed close to the large book that he had selected, which lay open on the floor in front of him, lit by candlelight. In one arm twisted above his head he held a millimeter thick, threaded silver needle.  His other arm reached around to hold a flap of his forehead open.  Was he sewing together parts of his own brain? 

The gaunt man’s murmuring was punctuated by a shrill yelp, Karpok took three steps back away from the doorway and bumped into a skeleton, also wearing red, who must have quietly entered the room behind him.  Karpok stumbled to the floor and the skeleton dropped its armful of books, breaking the man’s concentration.  As the skeleton hunched down to regather its burden, the man whipped his head over his shoulder and began to turn towards  the sound.  Karpok fled, but his escape was slowed by the limp that had mired him since childhood.  Behind him, he heard a baritone command and a loud ZAP, followed by the sound of a pile of bones and books hitting a wooden floor.  He didn’t turn back, and in another second, he was at the front door. A clamor and clang sang a song of anger in the big house.   “Would his father follow him?” Karpok wondered frantically. He half wanted him to.  Fortunately, the tall grasses of the estate encroached upon the bottom step of the portico, and he was able to quickly disappear into them by dragging himself along on him stomach.  Once he had gotten sufficiently far away, he stopped to listen.  Only the wind. Karpok cracked a mischievous smile feeling the weighty tome rise and fall against his chest.   He returned to his job at the mine and swung the pick just a little bit lighter.    

Before long, however, Nauja rushed in.  She had never visited him during the worknight before.  She looked even paler than usual and was out of breath.  She grabbed Karpok, dragged him quickly to the smelting room, and began shoving his things into a canvas rucksack. She spoke frantically.  Your father knows!  Irganos. He knows. He asked her if she knew.  She couldn’t lie.  She tried but she couldn’t.  She cursed. Yes, of course she knew why there might be a strange boy creeping about his library. Why, Mordezzan, why were you in his library? She cursed again. “Karpok, how could you!” Oh, the agony of her own mouth betraying her as she was forced to tell Irganos that, yes, she did know why there would be a little Ixian boy on the plantation.  She could not lie.  She couldn’t! Not when asked directly.  She told him as little as possible, but she told him.  She told him about her son.  His son!  He was furious. And he was coming.  “We must go now.  The longship is leaving for the Skarag Coast and we must be on it.

Chapter 4

By daybreak, the winds filled the longship’s sail and Karpok could see the dawn light illuminate the pallid backs of rows of undead scullers, reaching and pulling in unison.  Karpok asked Nauja why Irganos did not simply direct the ghoulish mates to return them to shores of Scythium.  Nauja was silent.  She turned from him and closed the door of the captain’s quarters behind her.  Karpok carefully maneuvered himself out onto the prow and opened THE MALIGN MIND.  He had never seen his mother so angry.  He had also never seen this much water.  In this moment, he just let the ocean spray his face in the warmth of the sun over the Hyperborean Sea.  By the time he returned to their quarters, Nauja was already asleep.  He stripped off his miner’s garb, lifted the blankets and curled up beside her. Resting his head beside hers on the pillow, he felt a crinkle beneath.  He reached under to find the following note on House Sasas letterhead:

INTENT OF SALE

Slave: Karpok Irganos Ixes

Height: 5”7’

Weight: 165lbs

Hair color: Black and Grey

Eye color: Black

Special Skills: Mining, dyeing

Estimated value: 50,000 Gold

Transported by: Nauja Ixes

Any questions can be answered by: Nauja Ixes

Karpok pushed his mother’s shoulder hard enough to wake her and scoot her partially out of bed. “Mother.” He said, aghast, holding the letter in disbelief.

“Karpok, I…”

“What is this?!” Karpok fulminated, starting to cry.

“Your father…”

“Don’t talk to me about my father. This is you. You, mom.”

“You don’t understand, Karpok. He made me. He’s making me.” Nauja pleaded.

Karpok paced, grabbing a handful of his scraggly hair and pulling it so hard it separated his scalp from his skull at the root. “I am your son.   What are you doing?” He asked incredulously.  He stepped toward her fuming and pleading for some reasonable explanation, but, truly, he was unable to hear.

“Karpok, listen to me, your father would have killed you, he…”

“You said we we’re ESCAPING!” Karpok continued to advance on his mother, forcing her to take a step back out of their quarters onto the deck.  “You said that you tried.  You didn’t try!  I thought that you covered for me! But you’re selling me!”

“Karpok, you know I love you, I love you more than myself, I…” Nauja, tripped over a step and fell back, landing on her bony hip.  She tried to explain, “Karpok, this is the only way for you to live.  You couldn’t stay.  I couldn’t tell you. I love you, please.  I want you to live.”

“As a SLAVE?!” Karpok wielded the letter before his mother’s face like a cudgel, trying to spur some intelligible explanation.  He found only an excuse. “You love me. 50,000 gold? Is that how much you love me?!”  Karpok stepped quickly to where his mother was struggling to stand and pushed her again with two hands in the center of her chest.  Already off balance, she stumbled back again, and her thigh caught the lip of the stern. Her buttock wheeled over the railing and she began to fall towards the water below.

Her jaw dropped in terror, her empty sockets widened, and her hands splashed upwards and outwards towards Karpok, trying to regain her center of gravity.  Karpok’s chest immediately hollowed in horror.  He lunged forward to catch his mother’s hand.  He caught her by her middle and pointer finger.  For a moment, he thought it was ok.  But she continued to fall as her fingers sheared off at the palm.  She plummeted thirty meters into the roiling water below. Karpok looked over the railing mournfully.   He didn’t see her anywhere.  The rows of scullers rowed on toward Orcust.

Chapter 5

She was gone.  He was alone. After failing to shake the undead scullers from their rhythmic progress, after calling to his mother over and over, after cursing the winds, then praying to them, after begging forgiveness and hearing nothing but the rhythm of the oars, Karpok collapsed on the deck.  What had he done?  And for what? His fate was sealed in the letter he still gripped in his hand.  Laying his head on the wooden planks, he saw his mother’s two fingers.  He shuddered.  They twitched as though trying to crawl towards him.  He dropped the letter and let it blow away in the wind as he wept.  He took his mother’s fingers into his hands.  He held them to his chest as he finally slept.

But his sleep was fitful in the noonday sun. The image of his mother falling over the railing was stuck on repeat in his mind. He couldn’t get it out, and he couldn’t bring her back. He was so low, he could barely lift himself off the deck. Eventually, he dragged himself back to his quarters and sat in bed.  He opened THE MALIGN MIND. In the pit of his sorrow, the symbols on the page began to swim and shimmer for him in a new way.  To his surprise, the pages seemed to turn themselves, and yet, to all be open to him at the same time.  He saw PHANTASM, DISGUISE SELF, DARKNESS, and many others.  At once, the spells made sense.  The rush of knowledge did not alleviate an iota of his suffering.  Indeed, it seemed to burrow a hole deeper into Karpok’s sorrow where he could feel… not at peace, but at home.

Karpok did not leave his quarters for two weeks.  He grasped at the text of THE MALIGN MIND as though he could have caught his mother’s hand; as though all around him was a sea of his sin, and this spellbook was his ring buoy. By the morning the ship arrived at the Skarag Coast, Karpok had formed a plan.  He did not know what powers or connections his father had in The City of Orcust.  He could not risk being recognized by the orcs ashore as a slave for sale.  His mother had told him of their animal brutality, and though surely there was no creature on this plane more loathsome than he, there was still enough of him left to protest the abject abandonment of his soul to their whims. 

As he had practiced, as the longboat pulled into port, Karpok allowed his heart to drop into the pit of sorrow.  He brought the arcane symbols to mind in the order they presented themselves to him, and he thought of his mother with him in the smelter room, showing him how to dye the master’s robes black with the carcasses of grasshoppers.

His spine suddenly compressed and he felt every bone in his body crumble and grind into smaller shapes. His face contorted in agony and his vision blurred as his eyes seemed to burn to ash in their sockets.  When it was over, he was cradling himself in the fetal position on the floor.  He stood up and walked to the tall mirror on the closet door.  There stood his mother looking back at him.  He gasped to see her, and in surprise at the seamlessness of his disguise.  He fell to his knees, crying hard. To any watching, there knelt Nauja, tears quickly filling empty sockets and falling through the hole in her hand where two fingers had been.    

Chapter 6

The crew lowered the ladder and Nauja descended to the dock below.  She was greeted by two orcs, one more porcine than the other.  They greeted her with familiarity. “Shut your green mouth, half-blood.” Nauja barked.  The orcs were stunned. 

“Rrrungch, this’ns gotta mouth.” The taller one growled.  “D’ya think we’re kin jus’ cus yr’a miner’s errand girl? Ya’ fancy yaself one a Thaumagorga’s chosen, sweetheart?”  Nauja unsheathed a hammer from her hip holster and in a moment was at the orc’s throat with the claw. 

“You are nothing.” She growled, bleeding the smaller orc’s bravery with the intensity of her empty eyes.   “And I am nothing like you.”  She pressed through them and strode along the dock, returning her hammer to its holster. 

“Don’cha ‘ave something for us, sweetheart?” The taller one dared. Nauja spun around and in one motion threw her hammer at the orc, bludgeoning him in the forehead.

“Your business with Irganos is over.”  She dared them to speak further, but in their silence, she turned away again towards the city as the two orcs snuck baffled looks at one other.

Nauja tried to lose herself in the throng, but the undead were unwelcome in Orcust.  At her presence, mothers held their children close.  Men sneered and spat.  As the sky darkened, she felt her facial features begin to tingle, then ache.  Her DISGUISE SELF spell was slipping.  She hid in the window well of a ranch home in the residential district.  She felt racked on the wheel as her chest expanded and her body became squeezed by the hole in which she sat.  Karpok blinked.  He had eyes.  And they were crying again.       

Karpok had nothing but a fat spellbook, and while he found a grim companion there, it exacted a toll, even as he strained to understand it.   Having been unable to sleep all day, peaking furtively out of the window well for any passerby that might notice, or the master of the house who might arrive home at any minute, he tried to distract himself with THE MALIGN MIND.   The book promised the reader control – control over others, and over one’s own mind.  Karpok was fascinated, and as he turned the pages, found that he paid less and less attention to the street.  He read about an ancient race of crustaceous fungus called the Mi-Go, who first brought the alien knowledge of mind control to Hyperborea.  The Mi-Go were now but a rumor on Hyperborea, but rumor has it that they maintain libraries of domestic and alien knowledge somewhere in their tunnel networks, and that they send brains to their god, Yug, for reasons unknown.  He read about their laser pistols and crystalline scimitars… they seemed… spectacular.  He had to know more.  But before he could read on, heavy footfalls reached the window well.

“Afar Vadokanuk! Who are you and why are you here by my house? Explain yourself!” The orc bellowed.

“I…” Karpok began to explain but realized before he found the next word that explanation was useless. He tried to run, but before he could pull himself out of the window well, a calloused hand gripped his shoulder – and it was so large that his fingers squeezed his jugular.  Karpok’s heart sank, but the orc immediately recoiled in terror.

“What are you?” The orc interrogated, now sounding less authoritative than before. His other hand reached for his scabbard while his lips snarled at the exposed bone and rotten flesh on Karpok’s shoulder.  Karpok lay flat on his stomach in the orc’s front yard, jarred awkwardly on top of THE MALIGN MIND.  He gripped handfuls of sandy gravel, and tried to push himself to his feet, but the orc was upon him, stamping his boot into the back of Karpok’s neck.  “Explain to your God then.”

Karpok felt the rush of air as the orc hefted his blade overhead.  “It was all for nothing.”  He sighed and felt his torso hollow from his neck to his pubis.  Suddenly, a single symbol appeared to him.  He recognized it.  DARKNESS.

The orc must have been caught off guard as he lowered his blade, somehow catching his own foot rather than Karpok’s head.  He screamed in pain and anger, and, falling to the ground, removed his boot from Karpok’s back, allowing him to crawl away.  Karpok looked back.  He couldn’t see. He could only hear the orc’s guttural wail and hurried, staggered footsteps.  Others were coming.  He limped around the back of the house and kept moving as fast as he could. Breathing hard, he limped passed closing shops, and back to the port.  As day broke, and his breathing returned to normal, he began to feel more at home, but an impression of the darkness stayed with him.  Had it been within him all along? 

Townspeople seemed to smell him from a distance.  He had never known that he had any particular scent. Some recoiled at his exposed bone and flesh… as though they did not have bone and flesh themselves.  He saw Atlanteans and Kimmerians, Picts and Vikings intermingling with the orcs here.  None attracted such disdain as he.  In the bustle of commerce at the port, most were too busy and blasé to act on their disdain. Still, he found that the inns, and even the brothels, were closed to him.  He sat alone, leaning against a dock piling, and watched stars disappear over Scythium.

Chapter 7

He had not been able to eat since it happened, but tonight, he awoke hungry.  The hunger unfurled from him like the darkness.  He felt as alive as he ever had.  He walked a short way along the docks until he saw splashes of color seeming to glow from a merchant’s wooden stall. As he approached, he saw a wooden sign hanging below the merchant’s counter, “Gijook’s Fruits,” it read, and small tags supported by clothespins, “Apples,” “Pears,” “Plums” stood proudly above items of different colors and shapes.  Karpok walked confidently up to an orcish woman, who he assumed was Gijook.  The items before him – fruits, they must be – looked magnificent.  He had never seen a fruit before. Gijook did not rebuff him from a distance and allowed him to walk all the way up to her stall. A win that Karpok celebrated in silence. He began talking to her about her produce.  He found his admiration to be sincere, and that flattery came easily to him.  They truly were remarkable looking fruits.  He began to ask for plum.  As she happily obliged, asking him to pick out one that looked particularly delightful, he realized that he didn’t have any gold with which to pay her.  As she placed the plum into a brown paper bag, he cast about furtively, his eyes falling upon a tip jar on the counter.  He slid his hand in and out just as fast as the thought crossed his mind.  She didn’t notice. No one noticed! He handed her a copper piece and she handed him a plum, with a smile! He nodded to her respectfully and walked away.  As he walked he looked down into the bag she had given him. A plum. As he grabbed it and sunk in his teeth the juice dripped down his lips.  He needed to stop in his tracks.  He nearly laughed.  A plum!  The sweetness was almost unbearable.

As the stalls began to close for the night, merchants shooed him away.  One particularly surly orc called names after his “ugly mother.”  A figure of speech he was sure.  Still, Karpok glowered at the man and walked away. He sat down on a nearby dock piling to watch the man selling paper trays full of sausage to hungry orcs just back from sea.  He found himself circling the man’s stall, up and down adjacent sidewalks.  Watching him.  His mind was circling, too.  His name was Shaa.  He was battle-wounded and dealt with particular jocularity with his battle-worn brethren. “Mabaj bot ob armauk,” he challenged his customers.  He had piercings up his right ear and a portly stomach hung over his belt.  Karpok could see its contour through his butcher’s smock.  Pork hung in the butcher’s awning.  He kept a ring of keys on his belt.  There was a sliding wooden door with a key hole in it on the inside of his stall.  Karpok noted each of these things, as he continued to circle.

As Karpok settled himself back down, he hatched a plan.  He swung himself underneath the dock onto the rocky shore where he couldn’t be seen. He hugged his knees to his chest as he sat on the rocky incline.  He dared to think of his mother, and he filled with shame until he thought he might drown.  But then, instead of holding his mother there, he held the visage of one of the jocular sailors he had just seen carousing with Shaa in mind.  It wouldn’t be perfect, but he hoped it would… “arrrghh!” The pain was not unpainful, nor was it dulled by its unfortunate familiarity.  The skin on his chest and torso stretched past the point of breaking, and then hardened and scaled.  His face contorted in agony, and then suddenly, it was over.

Shaking off a daze, Karpok walked over to the surly merchant who had disparaged his mother, fully appearing to be one of the merchant’s battle brothers.  He extended the greeting that he had overheard and the merchant turned.  His face was skeptical, but he seemed to play along with the charade, not wanting to risk offending an old friend.  Karpok embraced him hard, rollicking and congratulating, and chancing a hand by his belt loop to find the key ring. 

Too clumsy.  The merchant noticed.  He pushed Karpok back and rebuked him.  Although not all sign of camaraderie was gone, he noticed. Karpok feinted left, slid right, and grappled Shaa, laughing boisterously – and, lingering for just a moment...  Shaa seemed appeased, and amenable to playing along.  Karpok demanded a tray of sausage.  Shaa obliged after offering a fake counterpunch to the gut in return, along with a jagged toothed smile.  When Shaa asked for payment, Karpok easily passed him a silver piece that he had pulled from Shaa’s back pocket.  Karpok told him to keep the change.

Chapter 8

Karpok walked further along the port, mirthfully cursing Shaa’s ignorance.  He had almost forgotten about his food.  He took a bite.  Rubbish.  He discarded it on the ground and kept walking. He was lost in a bitter reverie when he overheard two Viking fishermen talking to one another over mugs of mead. He stopped to tie his shoe for some while.  The taller, fatter of the pair spoke through a bright-red mustache and beard.  He spoke of the heroes of the port from which he sailed, gesturing with hands like shovels.  He named at least 5. Heroes who defeated a giant octopus that rose from the ground.  Heroes who saved the last descendant of the Hyperborean House Rhaan.  Heroes who vanquished the oon by defeating… a Mi-Go! He couldn’t believe his ears.  So, they were real!  He nonchalantly walked past the sailors out on the dock, took off his shoes, and dipped his feet in the water.  He thought.  He listened on, but the men transitioned to discussing “the true heroes of the Viking invasion of Gal.”  Karpok’s attention wandered to the sea, but as they finished their drinks, the storyteller remarked that on the morning he would sail the Ormen Skamme to Port Greely.  “Could that be the port of which he had spoken?”  Karpok’s mother had never mentioned this port to him...  The fishermen pushed back their chairs and hefted their girth to the north along the dock.   

They were almost out of sight before Karpok got up the gumption to follow them.  He limped along gingerly and self-consciously at first.  He was acutely self-aware of not only his disgusting appearance, but his smell and his limp as well.  In attempting to conceal as much of himself as he could, he assumed a hunched posture and a harried affect that made him appear old and bothered. Up ahead, the two Vikings seemed to exchange a blessing, and parted ways.  One headed further along the boardwalk back towards the residential district, the other, stout, red-bearded one turned up a cobbled city street past an open-air smithy to an Orcish Inn. Karpok followed, sticking to the shadow of an alley, and shrugging his tattered grey garb up over his cheek.

Inside the inn, two orcs were wrestling violently before a hearth-lit crowd.  Others tucked into booths with bronze flagons and debated in a tongue that Karpok could not understand. Another lit a cigar as wide as fist with a circular gesture of a flame in his off hand as he guffawed and pointed at the scene. He watched the bearded Viking check in at the bar and receive a key numbered “3” with chalk on a piece of slate hanging from ring, along with a full flagon.  The Viking leaned against the bar and watched the fight.  He tucked himself into the corner of a vacant booth nearest the door and surreptitiously opened THE MALIGN MIND, not knowing exactly what he expected to find there, but knowing that he had to be aboard that ship to Port Greely in the morning. 

He ran his hand over the familiar inscriptions for DISGUISE SELF and the closed symbol for DARKNESS.  Other spells were indecipherable, appearing more as art than language.  He found the pages beautiful to behold nonetheless, and was caught off guard when the bar maid approached to take his order.  “Mead.” He rasped in the common tongue.  She turned back through the hanging smoke towards the bar. His accent must be passable enough in the clamor of the hall.  Knowing he would now have to devise another wile to avoid payment, he turned again to THE MALIGN MIND.  The barmaid soon returned with his mead, which he drank distractedly as he poured over the pages. Some chapters in, he found a set of symbols that were vaguely familiar from DISGUISE SELF, PHANTASM.  He had stumbled upon this page before, but the spell couldn’t possibly be as open ended as it appeared to be.  He decided to give it a shot and was soon lost in a kind of rhythmic incantation – more of a beat really, than a saying.  This was fortunate, because even his subvocalizations seemed to attract wary glances.  He silently moved his lips to form the rhythm.  Still nothing.  He had another swig. As he let his mind wander a bit, he tried tapping the rhythm out on his lap. His hand fell upon a lump in his pocket.  He adjusted in his seat to dig his hand in and found his mothers fingers there.  He held them tightly for the first time since that morning and took another swig.  He felt the fingers twitch in his hand.  Some lifeforce still possessed them.  Karpok found this strangely reassuring.  As he continued to tap out the rhythm in his pocket with his mother’s fingers in hand, he felt his fingers begin to reverberate as they touched his skin through the canvas of his trousers.  The reverberation was numbing and intoxicating.  He rapped on as he watched the orcs brawling in front of the fireplace. A grimy looking green-faced troll just arose from the wooden floor with a victorious look on his face and taunted someone in the crowd.  Like the DISGUISE SELF spell, there seemed to be a place in the incantation to insert the spell’s object, but Karpok wasn’t sure where it fit within the rhythm.  He tried out different combinations of finger and mind movements.  Without his mother’s fingers twitching in his pockets, the spell seemed to be gathering some kind of momentum. 

The green and grimy champion’s taunts were met by jeers and incitements from the crowd.  This was a challenge! The taunted orc, a slimmer and ornery looking orc, was now thrust into the ring by the crowd. He didn’t seem entirely displeased by this development.  He gathered his courage and assumed a fighting stance.  Combat ensued.  With a quick leg sweep the greenish orc downed his challenger and pounced upon him, grappling his arm across his throat to prevent the man from breathing or escaping.  Moments later the challenger was tapping the ground frantically to signal his submission. 

Karpok watched as the lithe orc’s eyes filled with fear and he abandoned the fight.  Like a light switch turning on, he tapped the ground with a solitary focus on survival, and the immediate submission that survival required.  Karpok marveled at the single-minded commitment that overcame the orc.  As he tapped his own rhythm on his thigh, he dared to invite that feeling in – the terror at one’s life slipping away helplessly and the accompanying immediate abdication of all other priorities.  In that moment there was only the lifeforce, whatever one imagined that to be. Karpok imagined a champion – one that could survive in this world.

In the seat opposite Karpok in the booth, through the bar haze, details of a fighter emerged.  PHANTASM! Karpok startled, but held his focus.  Deltoids rippled beneath chainmail and plate. A square jaw cast a shadow down a leathery neck.  Teeth gnashed, looking like they belonged to a wild horse. An angry orcish brow furrowed over dark eyes, and hair knotted itself up in a ponytail. Karpok looked deliberately from place to place on his creation’s torso, and as he imagined him down to the smallest detail, there those details appeared.  The barmaid returned to the table to ask how everything was going. “Fine.” Karpok replied curtly, even then feeling his grip on his creation beginning to slip.  “Anything for your burly companion here?” She asked sweetly.  “Mead.” He barked. Holding intently to the image of his champion before him, he hatched a plan.  He didn’t see the barmaid go.  He saw his champion stand from the booth and turn towards the green and grimy orc at the center of the ring.  Karpok knew that he would need a flawless victory.  “Mabaj bot ob armauk.” He called, but though his champion’s lips moved, no sound came out of his mouth.  Undeterred, Karpok made his champion point a massive finger at the orc and stride single-mindedly towards the ring.  The slimy one prepared himself by loosing a rough, wooden club from his hip belt.

The grimy orc wound up the club above his shoulder, giving Karpok’s champion enough time to side-step his swing. He kicked in the back of the grimy orc’s knee, forcing him face down to the wooden floorboards.  Karpok swung the back of his champion’s palm at the back of the orc’s head, flooring him.  Karpok’s champion fell upon him and locked his arms straight.  Karpok ferociously closed the space beneath the orc’s head, crushing his neck.  Though it was effective for now, Karpok regretted fighting like an undead miner.  It was too risky.  One touch from the orc would dispel his PHANTASM.  Luckily, the orc could not free himself to land a blow.  The orc desperately tried to flail onto his back, but heaviness was among the primary characteristics Karpok built into his champion, who lay upon the orc like a collapsed excavation.  Karpok hunkered down in the booth, tapping intently, and wondering when the orc would succumb.  He didn’t want to actually decapitate the fool – he didn’t know what the custom was around actual murder in barrooms.  It seemed to him that, if anything, it would come off as unsportsmanlike.  He didn’t have the mental space to ponder that niceties of this encounter though, his whole brain was set to squeeze, squeezing so hard he was giving himself a headache.  Then there it was.  The frantic tap of complete submission. Karpok’s champion arose victorious.  He pounded the ground with his fists and pounded his chest and yelled into the ceiling.  Then he pointed at the red-bearded Viking.

Karpok’s champion stood with his hands on his hips as the Viking was thrust toward him. Apology and regret rode the Viking’s every look and action.  Then dread.  The man was not ready.  Karpok’s champion approached menacingly as the crowd cheered.  He raised a fist above the Viking’s head and when the Viking looked, raised his minotaurean knee and brought down a massive boot on the man’s instep.  The Viking squealed. Karpok’s champion laughed silently. Karpok noticed that this oddity seemed to perplex those standing nearby.  Even though none dared to act on their suspicion, Karpok knew that it was time to go.  His champion moved quickly for the exit, and soon disappeared into the alley. 

Karpok smiled to himself, and with an air of self-satisfaction, crept under armpits and by elbows to get another look at the red-beared sailor, still lying flat on his back in a space that had formed in the crowd.  The firelight showed that his foot fell awkwardly flat along the wooden floorboards, and the crimson of blood darkened the man’s sock.  With great effort, the Viking cantilevered himself off the floor, but he stumbled, and needed to be caught by a nearby patron.  His foot wouldn’t bear weight. Perfect, Karpok thought.  He would not sail in the morning.  Karpok watched the Viking hobble up the stairs to his room marked with a “3” on the door jamb.  Karpok continued to study the Viking as he lumbered up the staircase and closed the door to his room, not for a second looking back.  Once the patrons’ attention turned back to the next fight, he ducked his way back to the exit, leaving two unfinished flagons on the table.

Chapter 9

Although morning was near, Karpok knew that he could not sleep.  He sat tucked behind a large trash bin in the alley, holding his mother’s fingers tightly in hand, recalling the abject terror of near death.  As the first stands of dawn pierced the darkness of the alley, Karpok tapped out a rhythm on his thigh, and a bright red beard began to appear below his chin.

Moving within a phantasm of a Viking was challenging, but necessary.  He could not risk a simple disguise to board the Ormen Skamme. He did not know what would await him within that ship.  He could not count on having his own quarters within which to retreat, even for a moment, and who knew how long it would take to reach Port Greely.  Oh, but the promise it held.  The Mi-go! If he was to discover the otherworldly knowledge of Yuggoth, he would need to effect a true transformation.  Fortunately, the Viking was large enough for him to fit within comfortably, and he could even exaggerate some aspects of his build and clothing to conceal where his limbs would swing as he walked.  Safest not to exaggerate too much though.  He didn’t know how familiar this Viking would be to the rest of the crew.  Later, he thought, when his disguise didn’t need to be sufficiently similar to allow him to impersonate a target, he would have to fashion himself an even more portly host.

Karpok did now know how soon the Ormen Skamme would depart, so he would have to practice maintaining the phantasm on his way to boardwalk.  Day was breaking.  He found that he needed complete stillness to make the rhythm of the phantasm first begin to reverberate.  He struggled to abandon himself to the rhythm in his anxiety about missing the ship’s departure.  He knew that he needed to go now.  Soon though, he had the rhythm going again on his thigh, and he found that he was able to move, if stiltedly, from behind the trash bin.  Then, just tapping the rhythm in his own palm was sufficient to keep the beat humming and the illusion compelling.  He stepped out of the alley onto the sparsely populated street.  He could not allow himself to be touched.  Even the twitch of his mother’s fingers could be enough to dispel the phantasm. Fortunately, the outside world was kept at a distance by this Viking’s heft.  As he toddled downhill, Karpok exaggerated his gait to match that of a larger man, and swung his arms in cartoonish parabolas. He felt safe, in a way. Not being ogled by passersby as he had been in his own skin was a great relief.  Plus, there was a certain unspoken braggadocio in just being large.  He could get used to this, Karpok thought, if he could just keep his focus

Walking along the docks, he marveled at just how many ships there were.  He reached the residential district without seeing any ship by the name Ormen Skamme, and anxiously redoubled his steps, waving to Gijook again and ducking furtively past Shaa’s stall.  He walked further north now, past where he had first seen the sailors.  The sun was now peaking above the buildings to the east and casting a golden hue on the sails and waves.  He needed to find that ship now.  Then, a commotion caught his attention aboard a ship that reminded him of the one that his mother had sailed with him to this Yug-forsaken city.  As he neared, he overheard someone asking, “Where the heck is Haukr?” Karpok wasn’t sure, but it sounded like a Viking name, and as he tried to peer around the other side of the ship to see the name that was emblazoned on the side, one of the men aboard called out to him. “Haukr, you’re late, get over here! We’ve gotta’ go!”  “Haukr,” Karpok thought.  “Okay, here we go.” He boarded the ship.