AllFreeNovel
Share Us
This did nothing to alleviate Enzo’s bewilderment. “You didn’t want to lose me… so you refused to keep me?”
“If an elderly gentleman I don’t particularly care for casts me aside, it’s nothing to me. But if you…” Fiore trailed off, as if he couldn’t bear to give voice to his worst fear.
Enzo could hardly bear the thought himself. The idea of anyone casting Fiore aside made his blood simmer with righteous anger. But to hear Fiore say he feared Enzo would discard him… Enzo wondered what he’d done to make him think such a thing were possible.
Still, for once, Enzo felt he had the correct answer. “I would never.”
Fiore didn’t look as though he believed him. Yet he reached for Enzo regardless—and, as Enzo descended to meet him, pulled him into a desperate embrace.
And, however privately, Enzo vowed that nothing should tear him away.
~
Hempen bonds burned through Fiore’s wrists as he struggled in vain to break free. Every pull of his arms only scraped away more of his skin and embedded the ropes deeper in his flesh. The knuckle stump of his missing finger throbbed all the while. But all this was nothing in comparison to what would befall him—again—if he should fail to escape.
Bound to the mountaintop, he could see little through the roiling fog. He could hear, though. And soon enough, before he could twist his wrist to get his mangled hand out of the rope’s coils, he heard that dreaded sound.
An eagle’s shriek.
With an answering echo.
Fiore hardly had time for one last frantic attempt at escape before the raptors fell upon him.
Vicious beaks plunged into his gut. They tore screams from him alongside his entrails. The eagles feasted on him as they had every day before, for as long as he could remember, and as they would every day after, unless he could slip his bonds. But they only grew tighter as he struggled. He couldn’t even recall what he’d done to deserve this eternal punishment. Some betrayal, some failure of loyalty, some cowardice had led him here. Unlike Prometheus, there was no Hercules come to set him free.
Or so he thought, until a peculiar sound caught the very edge of his hearing.
Above the cacophony of his own screams and the eagles’ triumphant cries, a whisper floated on the wind whistling past his ear.
Fiore.
His own name, spoken by a familiar voice, one which had no place in this realm of pain. He clung to it nonetheless. Even the eagles rending his flesh couldn’t tear him away from that blessed sound. He tried to answer it, but his screams clogged his throat.
Fiore.
The eagles, intent on devouring him, didn’t seem to hear the whisper. And yet amidst the stabbing agony in his entrails and the burning pain in his wrists and the dull throbbing ache in his hand, another sensation arose—the ghostly touch of invisible yet gentle hands upon his shoulders.
“Fiore?”
Fiore jolted awake with a choked-off gasp. The oil lamp still burning on the nightstand revealed the curtains and bedposts above him and the coffered ceiling beyond. The ghostly hands on his shoulders coalesced into Enzo’s very tangible yet still tender grip, and he turned his head to find Enzo half-upright in the bed beside him. Locks of long, dark hair fell across his knit brow and beside his cheek as he gazed down at Fiore with concern in his warm brown eyes.
The eagles and the mountaintop were merely a dream.
The pain, however, remained excruciatingly real.
“Steady,” Enzo murmured as a whimper escaped Fiore’s throat.
Half of Fiore’s heart regretted that his own weakness had forced Enzo awake beside him. The other half held only gratitude that Enzo had arisen to tend him in his hour of need.
Enzo reached across him towards the silver hand-bell on the nightstand. Its tinkling refrain ought to have brought Fiore relief. Instead he found the sound inspired fresh dread, for it heralded the chirurgeon’s return. And all the while the phantom eagles continued their assault on his entrails.
“It’s all right,” Enzo murmured as another pitiful whine forced its way through Fiore’s clenched teeth. He stroked the sweat-slicked curls back off Fiore’s forehead. “They’ll give you something for the pain.”
Fiore wished Enzo trusted himself with the needle. He had almost as much education as Dr Venier or Dr Malvestio. Surely enough so that nightmare needn’t compound upon nightmare as Fiore’s worst fears came to deliver him from the tyranny of his mind’s horror.
Enzo, meanwhile, took up the termometro and stetoscopio from the nightstand.
The door creaked open. Fiore flinched from the noise, however slight. Footsteps crossed the room, and soon the face of an unfamiliar man of some threescore years appeared at the bedside, garbed in a black waxed-canvas gown. Presumably this, then, was Dr Malvestio.
