Destiny

A story / background inspired on Changeling: the Dreaming, the RPG by Jorge Arredondo

"I hate you!" Quentin screamed while he closed the rickety door with a sound slam. Clenching his teeth strongly to fight back tears, he begun to descend the dirty steps of the small building of apartments.

He stepped each step heavily, with rage and not well contained anger, until he finished the small tract of stairways that led to the entrance. He opened the door with a kick and left to the street.

His father had been exceptionally hard that night, but of course, he was drunk, as he used to be lately. Since he had lost his job, the money had begun to be more and more scarce, and finally they had to move to that greasy apartment just by the side of a noisy bikers bar, in a miserable neighborhood in the outskirts of the city. And he had drank too much for a couple of months, getting drunk almost every night. It was then when he became rude and violent, but at least he had never raised his hand against him neither against his mother.

Tonight's insults had been specially poisonous. He had demanded again him loudly that he looked for a job, that all the little money that he still had vanished into feeding the useless sack of fat that he had for son.

Because Quentin was fat. Extremely fat. For a 16 year-old boy, his physique was tremendous. He was around six feet tall but his weight overcame easily two hundred pounds, with extremely plump arms and legs, bull neck and amorphous rolls of fat over his whole abdomen. His eyes and nose were small in proportion to his face, but at least his locks of jet black hair helped to hide his fewer favored features.

Quentin took the opposed way to the bikers bar, going to a dirty open field that was near his house. It was his safe haven, since nobody dared to come closer there due to the amount of rats that had there their lair. Although queerly they had never caused him any problem, they had not even tried to get near him.

Once he arrived there, he could not contain his rage any longer, and he begun to kick an old abandoned tire, while he tossed curses to the wind, as if he directed them to the whole world.

What enraged him the more, was knowing his father was right. He was a sack of fat, but it was not his blame. He was always hungry...! Since he was a boy, he was hungry all the time. At least before, when there was still money, they could pay for such amount of food. Now... it seemed like an epidemic. A great deal of people had lost their employments lately, as for example Bernie, the only neighbor that still lived in their building, who had lost his job in a chemical plant two weeks ago and who had confined himself in his flat as a hermit since that, without leaving anymore.

And he felt so useless. There wasn't anything he was good at. He didn't have the intelligence to become a lawyer as his father, although a mediocre lawyer, neither the ability to become mechanic, neither anything... and with his physique, not even in a McDonalds they had wanted to see him. He had not still found his place in life, if there was him such for him...

His mother suffered with it all, but without uttering a single complaint. That also caused him at the same time a deep anger and an admiration for her courage. He wanted that she complained just once, that she rebeled against her situation, but she was a provincial, humble and hard-working woman, and never a complaint, a reproach left her lips. And he wished he could be like her, to be able to contain his anger and sadness as kindly as she could do.

One hour later, in the dimness of the open field, only broken by the wail of the night breeze and the noise that came from the bikers bar, when he thought that his father would have calmed down, he decided to return home. With slow steps and his hands stuck in the pockets of his pant, he headed again to his broken home.

In the bar, the speakers began to spit stridently the letter of "Live and let die", sung by the torn voice of the singer of Guns & Roses...

Quentin began to ascend the stairways slowly. With some luck his father would be sleeping off his hangover and he wouldn't have to speak with him again that night... but he noticed with worry that the door of his house was slightly open...

It didn't take too long to notice it. The blood. There was much, in the bar-counter of the kitchen. A great puddle that had sprinkled around with violence. He advanced slowly, with fear and other feelings that he wasn't able to identify, and he looked after the bar.

"God" was the only he was able to say.

His mother lay in a great puddle of blood, blood that covered her face and head completely. It seemed as if they had squashed her head against the bar, with an inhuman violence. He didn't even came closer to her body. He knew, instinctively, that she was dead... for a moment all that he could seen tinted of red. He blinked till his vision cleared up again, and he tried to order his thoughts and feelings in a coherent way amid the scene of such a slaugther.

Where was his father? If it had been him the one that had killed his mother, he would kill him with his bare hands... but not, there was no one else in the small apartment. He took a quick look, with his heart beating strongly in his chest, and he confirmed that there was no one hidden. He only found a fallen bottle of cheap liquor partially spilled in the entrance of the house, still wrapped up in the typical paper of a near bar. His father used to buy that dirty beverage because it was cheap, he should have left to buy it during the night and then leave it in the entrance...

There were more prints in the floor... blood prints, with what he recognized his father's slippers, and others that seemed to be of barefoot feet. He returned to the kitchen and he observed a great amount of prints around his mother's body. Most of them were of those barefoot feet, and then a few of his father's slippers near the body... it seemed as if...

Opening one of the drawers of the kitchen, he took the biggest knife he could find and returned to the entrance. He looked to the floor and saw those same prints, although not so clear. The barefoot prints ascended till the next floor, Bernie's floor? They were followed by the even more diffuse prints of his father's slippers.

He began to ascend the stairways slowly, brandishing the knife. Again the silence reigned except for the music of the local... that was the strangest thing.

He arrived to the next floor, and Bernie's door was half-open, though it had not been forced. He pushed it softly with his foot, and it opened up with a slight creak. He entered with the knife readied for what could happen... and for a moment his vision turned red again... as the blood he had just watched.

Bernie's apartment was even darker that his. The windows were nailed with wooden planks that barely allowed to enter some rays of light from the local of below, and there wasn't any light turned on. Gropingly he tried to turn on the light, but the switch didn't pay the smallest attention to his tries.

Therefore he advanced in the almost absolute darkness to the main room... it smelled of blood, again...

There was another body in the floor. Gnarled, like broken, in a growing puddle of blood. It seemed a mannequin that has been run over, with its members and the spine broken and in impossible angles. Beside the body, his father's baseball bat lay discarded. He didn't bother either in this occasion to check if he was still alive. He knew that he was his father, and also that he was dead...

Something moved stealthy to his back, and the door of the apartment closed suddenly... something that mumbled words that he couldn't understand.

Quentin turned round as quick as he could, but he only managed to see something enormous but thin that moved quickly from a room to another. The more fear he felt, the more reddish that turned his vision...

The boy was not prepared to glimpse to what he was facing, although the terror didn't make him go back. The... creature... should be more than 8 feet tall, with long knotted and thin members, ending with vicious claws, a wide chest with very marked ribs and thin abdomen. It was barely dressed with rags that didn't hide an enormous tentacular appendix that sprouted from under its left arm. But the worse of it was its face, an unsightly and grotesque grimace of a human face, with a circular mouth plagued of teeth like hooks.

He couldn't avoid to be paralyzed by fright during some seconds... too much time.

The creature mumbled again what it had said before... "Wyrm... Wyrm... Wyrm"!. And in that moment it rushed on Quentin trying to knock down his potbellied victim and shred it by bites.

While the thing was falling on him with superhuman force, Quentin could react in the last moment and remembering the knife that he was brandising, he nailed it to the creature's neck with all his power. The thing screeched with an infernal roar, and with a blow of its knotted arm it knocked down Quentin to the floor, stunning him. Then it caught the weapon for the haft and pulled it out, roaring with pain and sprinkling the floor with the infect and black blood that sprang up from its wound.

From the floor, Quentin saw all red...

With its tentacle, the creature immobilized Quentin and lifted his enormous body till its eyes's level. Quentin could appreciate with horror that the wound he had caused to it was closing itself for moments... but he didn't have much more time, the creature surrounded him with its arms and began to press him with its three members, trying to squash the boy like he had done before with his father. The pain was unbearable, Quentin knew that it will explode or that it will break all the bones of his body... but he couldn't do anything, although he was strong, the creature was supernaturally strong... everything turned red...

At the same time the music continued roaring...

"Noooooo!!!" Quentin managed to scream, and for a moment he was surrounded by a halo of golden light... at the same time he began to metamorphose in a nightmare as atrocious or more than Bernie-the creature. His skin turned grayish as a corpse's, his swinish eyes minimized and collapsed in his skull, getting injected of blood and shining with an unnatural reddish light. His ears became pointed, his black hair turned reddish and tangled as a bonfire. His physique seemed to become more robust, but the worst change was his mouth. It loosened horribly and a good deal of sharp teeth as those of a saw sprang from its jaw.

Quentin ceased to be just Quentin.

For a moment it was the creature the one that was assaulted by a wave of uncontrollable terror. Quentin tossed its head against the monster, nailing wild and deeply its teeth in the creature's shoulder. Again its blood gushed forth, sprinkling the just reawakened nightmare that bit and bit it with fury and fear.

The creature screeched again with horror and pain, and moved away from its body all that it could the one that had hurt it, that one who had even taken a piece of its shoulder with its bite... for a moment the two wounds and the loss of blood made stagger the monster.

Quentin was able to free one of its arms, and bending it backwards he tried to catch something that he knew he carried on his back. He didn't know how, but he knew that it had been always with him. His fingers touched the haft and he seized it with force. He brandished one of his two twin axes, with the edges sharpened in the very forges of chaos, and he discharged a blow to the monster's armpit, just to the base of the tentacle.

The creature screeched again, a roar that threatened to demolish the building. But it wasn't defeated so easily. Loosening its prey, it gave a tremendous blow to the boy with both arms making him fly through the room and smash against the wall.

While Quentin lay in the floor, completely stunned, the creature sank the knee in the floor, trying to recover its strength while its wounds were healing themselves again... in its instinctive mind, it knew that it had to kill the boy as soon as it could...

Quentin shook his head and tried to get up as best as he could. He saw the creature had been weakened, but he also saw its wounds as they closed again. Cursing, he managed to get up ignoring the pain of his multiple bruises and grabbed his favorite weapon that, as always, he remembered now, hung of his belt.

The creature seemed able to focus its eyes with clarity again, and roaring to Quentin, it got ready for the final charge.

Quentin took his weapon with the right hand, reinforcing his prey with the left, and he brandished it. A chainsaw, wrought with the very materials of the dreaming, with a blade of three feet long, with perverse spikes in the guard, and with sharp mobile triangles as wild teeth. But it remained silent.

The creature, with its wounds almost fully healed, charged on all four against Quentin.

Then Quentin remembered the rest, and he imbued his weapon with some his own magic. The blade seemed to awaken to life, with the happiness of waking up after long years of forgetfulness, it roared with the force of a Harley Davidson... in the last moment, the boy tried to avoid the creature's jump and hit it with the blade...

And the blade bit, and cut, sprinkling of blood almost the whole room. It cut cleanly from the monster's clavicle till under the armpit of the opposed side, severing the head of the body... the monstrosity hit against the wall loudly, sinking it partly, and it lay there immobile while its viscous blood covered the floor more and more.

But Quentin wasn't satisfied, and with a scream of fury, he cut, and cut, and kept cutting, until the creature was nothing more than a bloody heap of chopped meat, tendons and bones...

Quentin panted with the effort. It was covered with the stinking blood of the creature from head to toes, but when he become only Quentin the human again, great part of that blood disappeared of his body.

He sat down for a moment, observing his father's corpse. He had tried, but he hadn't had any chance of success. Maybe, if he had been there... but it was too late to complain.

He knelt down next to his corpse, and anointing his fingers in his father's blood, he tinted a lock of his hair, which seemed to burn brilliantly with the fury of a bonfire in his other half. Then he touched his father's head, caressing him softly... Quentin got up and left, without looking back.

He returned home, and he knelt down in front of his mother's corpse. He took softly her hand and sighed heavily. Again, with her blood, he tinted a lock of his hair, which like in first case in its other half turned on a fierce crimsom. He got up and told her goodbye without words, with a look. He took the few belongings that still had value for him, and stopped a moment in the entrance, thinking.

He picked up the bottle of cheap liquor, and he spilled it little by little from the kitchen till near the entrance of the building. He returned home and left open the gas of the kitchen, caught a lighter and returned to the entrance.

From the street, Quentin observed for the last time its last home and place of his rebirth. Lighting the lighter, he threw it on the trail of liquor, which burned quickly with a blued radiance. The flames spread toward inside the building quickly... Quentin step back some feet... and soon after the building exploded with a cloud of orange fire that knocked him down and made tremble the street like a small earthquake...

The people of the bar by the side began to run away among panic screams, while Quentin got up and sat down in the floor. While he observed the dance of the flames and how the old and decrepit building began to collapse, he took a new name.

He would be no longer just Quentin. He had remembered, although with a very high price, his faerie inheritance, and he had a lot of work to do, and a very difficult work. That night was reborn Quake the redcap, the hunter of nightmares... his destiny.

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