The Death Machine

by Robyn Blaber (October 2021)

Hedgewind Jalinbeti was dead. When I say that he was dead, I mean that his heart had stopped pumping blood. The tissues in his body, deprived of oxygen were dying at a cellular level. His brain, once full of thought and energy was also inert; a mere blob of jelly encased in a skull that was slowly cooling to room temperature. Hedgewind Jalinbeti was as dead as anyone had ever been.

The worst thing about Hedgewind's death was how disappointing it was for Hedgewind. He knew that dying would be a horrific process. All of his apprehensions were confirmed as he died. He doubted the usefulness of his life. He doubted whether he had ever truly loved. He doubted that he had ever truly been loved. A choir of cascading doubts and disappointments swirled in his head as his heart stopped. His mind, losing consciousness, used the last of its faculties to process his greatest doubt; why had he ever lived at all? And then, he was dead.

In death, Hedgewind understood that several possibilities were awaiting the deceased. The most likely of these followed his assumption that his mind would simply be cast into the void, a nothingness from which nothing escapes. There would be no thought and no future. Of course, he considered the possibility that the clergy might have the correct insights. Had he not witnessed evidence of the power of the gods? Surely the powers possessed by the holiest of men were not all illusions. If the clergy were to be believed, he wondered, "Which clergy?"

If the Wodenists and Aspanists were on the path to understanding the true afterlife, then his mind would not go to the void. He would sail toward some predestined afterlife prepared for him by the gods. The gods would, or at the very least should, reward him for having lived a good life. His due should be a pleasant afterlife, an afterlife so incredibly pleasant as to retain its charm for an eternity.

On the other side of this fateful coin, the gods were, depending on who you asked, inclined to punish those who had lived a bad life. Hedgewind confessed to himself that he had made a few bad decisions in his life. It was said that some gods chose destruction for the doomed soul. Could a second death be fraught with more cruelty than the first? Still, others touted the claim that there would be endless punishment. The most cynical of all the clergy believed in the worst punishment possible, an eternity of boredom.

As Hedgewind considered these various permutations of gods and regions and rewards and punishments, he found that he had run out of such things to contemplate. He had exhausted the entirety of his clerical knowledge. He was in the afterlife and he was prepared to embrace whatever lay ahead. It was then that he thought, "Why am I thinking?"

He quickly decided that the afterlife, at least his, was not one of immediate and painful destruction. For the first time since his death, he felt relief that he was not about to be destroyed. His instincts told him that he would feel something if he were being destroyed. Besides, there would be no reason for the gods to impose a second death to an unrepentant soul, unless that second death was an order of magnitude more terrible than his departure from life. "Why do the gods make the first death so terrible?" He wondered.

"Maybe they don't even know it is terrible. No, someone would have surely complained." He continued to think.

His hand gently brushed his thigh. He could feel. A reel of all the benevolent afterlife possibilities filled his head as he wondered if had mustered the temerity to open his eyes. Would there be a paradise before him or a terrifying hellscape? For the hundredth time, he allowed his pantheon of doubts to march onward through the battlefield of his imagination.

Hedgewind readied to open his eyes when a profound sadness overtook him. He could feel his body convulse as the sadness spread through and around him in waves of pain and regret. We are all familiar with the sadness of death, but only in the afterlife do we experience the true sadness of death. Hedgewind was not prepared. There was no way to prepare. His mind bent backward.

Hedgewind, now a seven-year-old in his mind, was presented to the Magisters at the Imperial Academy in Kala Astanals. "He's a very bright child, if not a handful." His father explained.

The Imperial Academy served as the model for higher education in all of Otan. They instructed the children of nobles, even the Zhurek family, the dynasty of the Tsars attended. It was the Imperial Academy who helped hone their student's skills in all matters within each student's grasp of learning. Politics and history were taught to all. Strategy and tactics to some. Magic and the dark arts to others.

Hedgewind had a particular gift for the latter. As a toddler, he developed a fascination with fire. He would stare into the flames of the family fireplace for hours, entranced by the beauty of the dance of the flames. Even when the fire was extinguished, he marveled at the color of the embers, seeing the potential for more fire within them. He was no more than four when he discovered that he was able to cause flames to shoot from his fingertips.

He produced flames without training or even the slightest understanding of magic. It was inside him. By the time he was presented to the Imperial Academy, he had already mastered a few methods for producing magical flame. His experiments in the home would regularly lead him to trouble with his parents. When his attempts at fire magic would go awry, they would leave him with burned hands, hair and clothes. Other times he would accidentally burn things in the home that his parents certainly did not want to see burned. He was, as his father had pointed out, a handful.

As a student, Hedgewind was less than ideal. He did not care for his politics and history classes and would drift off into imaginary battles with dragons, wondering if one day his own flames would exceed those of the dragonkind. He took little interest in the strategies of the battlefield and it was not long before the Magisters stopped calling upon him for answers.

Everything was different in his magic classes. While he was less than studious, he paid close attention to the studies of what he deemed the lesser magics; those which did not involve flame. When the topic rolled around the magic of flames, he exceeded his class. He exceeded his teachers. He did not understand how they used so many more words, so many more sleights of the hand to produce so little flame.

His Magisters in the magical arts, powerful wizards all, found themselves being mocked when the subject of flame arose. To all who observed Hedgewind's progress, they would have predicted that the academy would have served him no other purpose than to bolster his arsenal of utilitarian magic. They would have also predicted that Hedgewind would leave with the Academy with a sharply honed ability to mock the powerful. Of course, these two predictions would have been prescient as they did eventually come to fruition.

Something happened, however, that changed Hedgewind for the rest of his life. On a cold Kantar morning, Prince Batil Zhurek the prince regent and heir to the throne of Ortalyk arrived at the Imperial Academy. Along with his entourage of servants and armed guards he had brought a young girl with him, his daughter, Princess Svetlana Zhurek. He came to consign his daughter to the very same Academy in which he was trained and the matters of politics and warfare. Here he believed, she would receive the education she would need to ascend to a great title, perhaps exceeding her already lofty title of princess.

The seven-year-old Hedgewind, of course, thought nothing of this new arrival. She would probably have no interest in magic, he decided. If she did study magic, she would have no interest in flame, he further decided. Hedgewind took little interest in his classmates at the best of times. He had not yet developed an interest in girls, and he certainly had no special reverence set aside for the royal family. This meant nothing to him.

"Hedgewind!" The Magister shouted.

Hedgewind was in class. The Magister of history, a slight grey-haired woman pointed at him with her pointing stick. The rest of the class all looked at him apprehensively. Hedgewind had been a universe away. The new student, the princess he had planned to ignore, had been placed in his history class. It was no fault of hers that she had red hair. It was no fault of Hedgewind's that during his normal course of not paying attention in class, he had casually glanced at and then into her hair.

In Svetlana's hair that he could see flames. They danced and cascaded in endless waves, shimmering and beckoning him to pay closer and closer attention lest he miss some important... "Hedgewind!" The Magister shouted again.

"Yes, Magister?" He coughed, looking for clues as to why he had been pointed out.

"Please remind the class why the long migration of the Ungir from the Aydahar Confederation across the Ortalyk countryside deeply agitated the people of our nation."

Hedgewind had never seen an Ungir or an Aydahar for that matter. He drew a blank. No one could possibly care about this topic, he decided to himself. "I don't know, Magister." he finally muttered.

The class laughed. Princess Svetlana laughed. The princess of with the hair of fire shared in the mockery; his mockery. The class went on and Hedgewind's shame grew. To stare into this fire, he would need Svetlana's approval, not her mockery. The shame stung like a fresh wound. In this moment, he vowed to take his studies more seriously.

A ten-year-old Hedgewind sat in the back row of his politics class. He would arrive early to class to ensure that he would never have to sit in the same seat from one class to the next. He naturally preferred the back, where he could see everyone in the class. Of course, this also allowed him to stare into Svetlana's hair and watch the fire, though he only permitted himself moments to do this when the Magisters were giving their lessons. Often he would sit at the front of the class and engage directly with the Magisters, like it was a private conversation. He found these one-on-one dialogues gave him an advantage over his classmates. Few Magisters would rebuff direct questions from a student, whether decorous or not.

It came to pass that the entire country of Ortalyk was starting to feel the rising tide of war. The Grendel in the north and the Aydahar to the south were grumbling about how much of the continent's wealth had moved itself to Ortalyk. They complained that the advantages provided by the gods of Otan always seemed to find their way into Human hands.

The Ortalyk perspective seemed to be a matter of simply riding out and putting foreign dissenters back into their places by means of force. A war on two or more fronts, however, could prove to be a terrible burden on the country and everyone from the Tsar down to the lowest cowherd was speculating on how a war might unfold. A combined attack by the Grendel and Aydahar would certainly be the worst of scenarios, and possibly more than the Ortalyk military could bear.

"What is the greatest threat to the Tsardom of Ortalyk?" The Magister demanded of the class.

The class put up their hands to seek the glory of giving the correct and obvious answer. Hedgewind did not put up his hand. It was perhaps for this reason that the Magister called upon him for an answer. "Hedgewind?" She demanded. "What or who is the greatest threat to our nation right now?"

"The Ungir, Magister." He replied.

The class gasped. The Magister leveled her gaze at Hedgewind. "Do you not suppose, dear boy, that our greatest threat is the Aydahar? They have dragons! Yes, real dragons that accompany their military."

Hedgewind gulped. "The Aydahar are less of a threat because we treat them like they are people. We trade with them, they buy our goods and fineries. On our shared border, our people cross freely back and forth. They will not want this relationship to end."

"The Ungir," Hedgewind continued, "have been treated very badly by the Ortalyk people. Our people have always treated them as though they are unworthy of life. Should they find casus belli after years of our poor treatment of them, they could be a terrible threat! Their numbers are far greater than most people know, with perhaps nine Ungir living underground for every one that we can see on the surface. Their military could be greater than the Ortalyk and Aydahar combined."

"They have no end of gold, silver, and gems. The Ungir leaders hoard their treasures, but if casus belli is declared, I believe they can get a token from their assessors. They can replace their hoards with a token and use the treasure to harm us. They have treasure enough to buy the loyalty of the Eastern Ortalyk provinces, while destroying the economies of the Western provinces. That action would certainly harm the Aydahar economy to great effect. They Aydahar would blame us and turn their dragons upon us to gather up some of this loose treasure."

"The Ungir would simply hire the Grendel as mercenaries, putting us at war with three nations at once, while also being thrust into the midst of a civil war. They would destroy us completely."

The Magister looked gravely at Hedgewind, too shocked by the answer to voice her opinion. Confronted with her stern gaze, Hedgwind thought that his answer must be incomplete. He had thought this all through. He had studied. Knowing he had to be correct, he continued.

"And who would give us succor, Magister?" Hedgewind asked as he drew more breath. "The Ælfes would not lift a finger to save us from the tiny Ungir. The Ontustikters would not save us unless we all converted to their religion, but no other way. The Sigis Empire is only interested in trade and everyone else is too far away. So those, Magister, are the reasons why did not answer Aydahar."

"Get...out... of my classroom this instant!" Screeched the Magister, enraged by Hedgewind's detailed answer.

Hedgewind got up to leave. He picked up his books, looking back at his classmates. They all looked stunned in surprise. All but Svetlana who had what he could only guess, what he hoped most dearly, to be a look of admiration.

The next day Hedgewind was summoned to the office of the Registrar. When he arrived, his father was there with a bewildered look on his face. His mother sat there too, crying. He had been expelled. The disappointment in his parents' eyes filled him with a deep sorrow. This was a sorrow that would never leave him, not even in death.

"Why, father?" He asked. I spoke the truth.

"You did not speak 'The Tsar's Truth', my son." His father replied and said no more.

Hedgewind realized that he would never again see the princess with the fire in her hair. His sorrows multiplied. They wracked his body and he screamed in torment. He wished he was dead. It was then that he remembered that he was dead. "Sorrow does not die." He reasoned as he was overcome by a strong urge to cry.

He opened his eyes. "What the hell?" He said as disbelief overtook him.

Part of him expected or even hoped to see a classical depiction of Valhalla, a city of gold nestled in the clouds. Perhaps he would see the halls of Asgard with gods and heroes, side by side, drinking and telling tall tales. He did not see this.

He saw a long corridor. The hallway was illuminated with what appeared to be strips of magical light. The lighting was subdued. He could see that between himself and the hallway was... glass? He was inside a glass or crystal case. He realized that he was immersed in water. "How is this possible?" He wondered.

Looking to his left and right he realized that there were other glass cases. Hundreds of them, perhaps more. The cases he could see seemed to also have people in them. They appeared to be either dead or unconscious. After some time, he saw people strolling down the corridor. They appeared to be human, strangely dressed, but with a god-like beauty.

The gods, if they were gods, appeared to be chatting casually to one another. They would periodically stop and look at one of the crystal cases, or perhaps coffins, waved some magical illuminations at them, and move on. Wishing an explanation, he tried to move his hands to get their attention.

His hands were loosely restrained. He could not cast a spell or create fire, but he could rap lightly on the glass. Two of the gods looked his way. He tried to speak, but it proved impossible with the fluid in his mouth and lungs. He made a gesture with his head that he hoped to mean, "I want out."

The gods looked at Hedgewind's coffin without a hint of surprise on their faces. They waved magical lights in his direction and then examined the sides of his coffin. A few high-pitched bleeps permeated the coffin's waters and soon Hedgewind felt his consciousness being drained from him. The sorrow and despair that joined him on his voyage here also started to fade. Perhaps this was the end, the beginning of destruction and nothingness.

Hedgewind blinked. He was immediately overwhelmed by the stench of death. Strapped inside a machine of his own creation he quickly undid his straps and fell to the floor. He threw up, he had hoped, emptying the contents of his stomach. They tasted of death. He threw up again. Convulsing in pain and horror with the taste and smell of death permeating every morsel of his being he writhed on the ground as his attendants surrounded him to tend to him.

With soothing words, they rubbed his skin with fragrant oils. They filled his nostrils with fine scents and treated his palate to the taste of mint and basil. Hedgewind began to throw up again, first what little water he had taken in, then nothing at all. He wanted to empty his insides. His skin crawled and he wanted to slide out of it. He wanted to tear it away. His whole body disgusted him as though he had been transported into a corpse. Technically, he had.

His skin turned reddish-purple and veins began to pop from his temples to toes. Eventually, his convulsions subsided. He simply had no more energy to vomit. His servants carefully got him to his feet and hobbled him to his bed-chamber. There they continued to anoint him with oils. They scraped away necrotic flesh and where the flesh bubbled, they applied healing salves. Bandages were applied with liberality. With their ministrations complete, they pronounced Hedgewind fully alive, though he looked only slightly better than a corpse.

After some sleep, Hedgewind was able to sit up on his own. He began to inscribe magical symbols into the air. He made calculations. He wiped them away and inscribed new calculations. He wiped those away. "There's something wrong." He thought, clapping away the last of the runes. "The gods are broken."

A swirling image moved at the end of the room. Hedgewind's eyes, still damaged from his experience did not want to focus. He blinked hard. As his eyes strained into focus, he could see a woman. Her back was turned toward him as she examined herself in a looking glass, brushing her hair. Her hair was red and it danced with fire.

Author's Note

This short story is intended as a vignette; a peek into life on Otan. This vignette may one day find itself embedded into a complete novel. The novel, I should hope, will fill in the many details left behind in the vignette. As the author, I've also taken the liberty of adding hyperlinks allowing you, the reader to look deeper into the story. If you're interested in the Ungir, the Aydahar, or any of the characters mentioned, you can look into them deeper. Thank you for taking a look and do come back to seek more Shorts from Otan.

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