Short Little Stories

Mister Alistair wandered through the twisting corridors of his own mind, and felt a strange sense of sadness at how little he recognized.

Five years past, his memory had been perfect – a tight-knit trap from which nothing escaped. He prided himself on his intellect, a factor that set him above his brothers, that gave proof of his independance from the others. Oh, he did not speak such sentiments, for it was not his purpose to aspire towards being anything more than simply another one of Roland’s carefully crafted servants… but somewhere deep inside, he held that spark. And perhaps that was why he remained, even broken as he was, when all his brothers had returned to the nothingness from which they had gone.

Five years ago, Mister Alistair had not been unique, as he was now. He had been an unusual creation, certainly. He was a falseman, a homunculus – a construct of raw flesh and bone crafted into the form of a man. He and his brothers had been refined creations, and not just possessed of greater strength and will than most of their kind, but also enough wit to pass for normal men. They appearance was not perfect, their speech not quite right, but they were, of all such creatures, only a hairsbreath away from true humanity.

That state had passed. For his brothers, it had been lost to their own growing insanity, or the hazards of a life spent in service to a bloodcrafter as ambitious as Roland. For his twin, Mister Finch, it was lost in the labyrinthine sewers beneath Old Charcoal City, where the prey they chased, a band of children, had turned the tables on them and unleashed an ancient magic that brushed them aside like insects. A torrent of water hurled them away, through the winding tunnels of the sewers, shattering them against walls and eventually hurling their broken bodies out to sea.

For Mister Finch, it was an end to his existence.

For Mister Alistair, it was a beginning.

He could not remember that night, at least not in its fullness. Snatches of memory played out in his mind, scenes of the children and the hunt. And the boy that led them, the one called Carter… but when he tried to focus, to place the scenes in order or fill in the missing holes, great splotches of white seemed to cover his vision and leave his mind floating aimlessly through the light. And what lay past that moment of crashing thunder, of what explained his survival after being hurled like discarded trash into the ocean… there was nothing. Nothing until the moment he had staggered back into the city, searching for Roland, his master and his maker, four long years later.

He was different now. The magic that had struck him, the missing journey in his mind… it had changed him, altering the fundamental magic that defined his nature, that gave him life. He could feel it, twisting within him, and he knew not yet what it meant – but he was eager to find out.

The hunger, after all, still remained – the hunger that had once been for independance, for individuality.

Only now, he was unique. Never before had there been something like him that walked this earth.

His desires had been granted… and the hunger within him was eager for even more.