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Splintered hardwood boards smattered with congealed crimson. Glittering shards of glass overlaying them in winning presentation, to nip at you with their jagged teeth. The timber panels constructing the front of your little house, wrenched apart to allow cold light through. The narrow strip streaming across your floor, over shattered ceramic and jutting bone, to illuminate the curve of your cheek and the shell of your ear. It dances in your eyes, sends a white halo to fog over all that they see. He emerges from that brilliance, a man of shadow, to come to his knees beside your broken body, and offer you his hand.
Your trembling fingers touch his palm, smear thick red over the fine soot covering his skin. He leans down, wide brim of his hat blocking out that blinding starkness, to press a gentle kiss to your knuckles, and then flick his pink tongue out from behind his teeth to lick clean the blood printed on his lips.
He carries your limp form against him with strong arms and a steady tread. An army of swarming abominations, once men, clear your path and hold back thorned branches, savagely fight off shrieking shambling corpses. A soft sigh gusts across your forehead, the warmth of it stark against your chilled clammy skin. His fingers flex in their place from underneath the crook of your knees, and he increases his gait. The swift pace jostles your limp dorm, and draws agonised whines from your lips but the weak cries lie unheard amongst the cacophony of your damned procession.
The man smells of copper and rot, sickly sweet in the back of your throat, and you want to move away, lift your head from resting against the lapel of his coat but you can ask for no more from your body. Your toes don’t even twitch. Soon, his scent is smothered by putrid smoke and it clogs your nostrils, choking and thick, until finally you slip into blissful nothingness.
The man brings death and yet he gives you your life. He tells you, with arms spread wide, what is that if not the benevolence of a God? And just like a God, he demands servitude. Your hands, your heart, your soul. He wakes you with a soft shake, palms rough but gentle for all their power, and you stir into your new world laying upon soft furs upon a rigid metal skeleton beneath. He feeds you berries, cold meats, and pours water down your parched throat with a poise and stillness unbefitting such a rugged man.
He promises you companionship, a purpose, somewhere warm to lay your head for the night.
They say the eye of the storm is where it is safest.
In the wake of his quiet reassurances, you finally become aware of a low growl, deep and vibrating through the floor. It’s unrelenting cadence soothes you somehow. Machinery, he murmurs. His factory, where you will work with him if you are agreeable. When that great chug quietens, even for a moment as cogs align, the faintest whirs and cries can be heard.
The harsh lights flicker, and send his face, already half hidden by his wide-brimmed hat, further into darkness. He spins a coin, glinting and silver, without touching it. It floats beside his face, right in your sight line. Leaning against his chair is his cruel hammer, crusted with blood.
Come easy or come clawing, but either way you will go.