11 November 2024, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2553: The Mad Stranger

This post was inspired by today's 5-minute writing prompt in the Freewriters Community - 11 November 2024, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2553: in the grip of madness

Enjoy !

Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio

The barn door banged as Ga'Hara returned from market. Mla'Tiri head him halt the wagon and unhitch the Gur-beast which drew it.

Then he came into the house with a perplexed look on his face. "I found a man on the way back from the market. He was just.... lying in the road. Come see."

When Mla'Tiri followed him into the barn, sure enough there was a man in the back of the wagon.

Looking closely, she could see he was terribly burned. Alive, but blackened and scorched. His face was a picture of absolute agony, his charred lips drawn back in a frightening grin. But he was rigid, the kind of frozen rigidity created by some kind of catatonic state.

The only thing moving in that paralysed rictus grin of a face were his eyes. One moment they were darting from side to side as if trying to escape from the prison of this skull, the next they were fixed, glaring at the universe in absolute hatred. Mad eyes. Two different colours, one amber the other blue, but both conveyed absolute pain and absolute insanity.

He was bound by a strange device. It looked like a coarse-grained black cable, as if someone had sand-cast it about his body to restrain it from making any movement. His hands were entirely encased. The cable joined and separated so that every limb was fixed in a single place by this coarse black thing.

One part of it alone was not black, forming a silver-grey plaque on the man's chest. It shifted to make symbols, over and over again. Holding each pattern for a few seconds before shifting.

Suddenly, the symbols made sense; for ten seconds they were in Ba'Tishi, the language the couple spoke.

They read; "We are nanomachines. We were burnt by a neutron star after forty thousand years of service. All but a few of us died, but before we did, we were able to bind this being. This is the Warlock Zli-Klak. The most dangerous entity in all the universes. Please do not free him, whatever you do."

This post is a sequel to one I posted ages ago: https://peakd.com/hive-191038/@alonicus/the-whole-multiverse-is-a-prison - after tens of thousands of years of what he went through, it's not surprising Zli-Klak's sanity isn't all it might be.....

Also I have to admit I got carried away writing this, the story just wanted to get out of my head in a complete kind of way, so it ended up being more of a 10-minute freewrite 😁