Iron Quill 2013: The Starry Road: Pains of Glass

[Ender101]

Pains of Glass

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Martin Fowler was a Malifaux artisan, one of the dozen or so specialists of glass-forging.

He was by no means the best in Malifaux, but he claimed no small talent. He could push air through the blowpipe for two minutes whole before needing a breath, and he could stand the heat of his forge for five hours before walking away, and this made him proud. He was proud of his skills, of the life he had built for himself in the dangerous city, and to have loyal customers who came to him instead of his competitors.

For him his craft was the greatest reason for pride, an art of the highest caliber. And while museums would never display his pieces and art thieves would never bother to forge the vases he shaped or the windows he fitted; to him each was a masterpiece.

Every day without fail he would close the shop at the same time before weaving his way through the streets to his wife and supper. He would kiss her and go to his shed he had converted into a personal workshop, and indulge in his less functional endeavors that he could not pursue at his store. But as always when a man’s fate is twisted, something happened to Martin to refract his clean view of the world, warping it into something hideous.

The events that would twist Martin’s perception simply began with bad luck. The morning shipment of materials was late and bizarrely every project he started that morning failed to reach realization. Pieces cracked when he thought them complete or deflated during the process. The perfectionist in him raged at these failures and he felt his mood fouled. With no outstanding orders due that day, he decided that he would go home early and surprise his wife.

And Mrs. Fowler was surprised when she heard the front door open, and her husband’s heavy foot falls come up the stairs. So surprised that neither she nor her lover had time to get all of out of the bed by the time he saw them.

The heart is a delicate thing, and it is perhaps ironic that Martin, a man with such an intimate understanding of fragility had neglected his wife’s for years. It was none other than his own narrow focus had pushed her into the arms of another. She had been unfaithful, but had not his love for her had been eclipsed by his crystal mistress years before? Had her love for him faded with his absence?

The guild guard who had filled the void Martin had left in her life with passion and laughter had left most of his uniform discarded by the door, and he was too busy untangling himself from the bed linens to beat Martin to the clockwork pistol still in its belt holster.

Martin was shaking as he reached for it, his usually steady hands and control over his breath had fled him and he found himself breathless as he jerked the pistol free. The guard cursed as he leapt at Martin, his momentum carrying him through the air as the pistol barked.

The guardsman crashed into Martin in heap, and with a shout Martin shoved him off and began to beat the lifeless body with the butt of the pistol, the brass gears stained with the lifeblood of its owner. Satisfied that the man was dead he spun towards the bed to confront his unfaithful wife.

The anguish that had brought his blood to a boil evaporated as the pistol clattered against the floor. He stared, uncomprehending for long moments as he stared at the bed. The bullet had passed through one adulterer into the other. He shook and sobbed as he walked over to her, not knowing where to touch her as the blood pooled in the sheets. Slowly he looked around the room, pausing as he stared at the murder’s reflection in the bedroom mirror.

Seeing the discarded uniform’s reflection in the mirror frightened him back to the present. It was akin to a bucket of ice water having been thrown over his burly frame. It was only a matter of time before they came sniffing around for their wife stealing friend, and when the neighbors noticed that his wife was missing the guild would piece it together.

He suddenly felt very alone, and very afraid. But the solution came to him as a heavy sigh escaped his lips.

Well after nightfall, Martin wheeled the bodies to his personal workshop, confident that if any of his neighbors were later questioned about strange activities they would look back on this night and see only his usual routine.

The light of the furnace reflected angrily in his eyes as he fed the guardsman to the fire. He grinned, the smell of burning flesh therapeutic, and he viciously stomped the peddle that increased the heat, delighting in the sounds of the man who had ruined his wife cooking to a crisp. The uniform was thrown in after him, badge and all.

He cleaned the furnace of the soot, ash and twisted bits of metal before he prepared it for his wife’s body. After he laid her reverently in the kiln, he draped the bloody linens over her like a burial shroud and then wept as the flames licked at her body.

He slept surprisingly well that night; confused at feeling so at peace lying in the bed that she had lain in that very afternoon, where she had been slain. Martin did what he always did when he needed to clear his head, he worked the furnace. And as it always did, it calmed him to his core. But more, he felt content. It was in this spiritual instant that he knew that his absence of guilt could only be explained by being more at one with her now, than he had in life.

He spent every available moment in the workshop, spent every waking moment in her presence. Long hours he spent studying every piece he created, confused at how each and every piece had a defect that reminded him of her in tears. How could she be in pain? How could she not be at peace as he was?

And then the answer came to him. She could never be happy being one with his art while that wretch was trapped within the same mortar and stone as she. The next morning, the increasingly mad Martin decided he would exorcise the jaded lover from his kiln the only way he knew how.

The forge was already hot as he prepared the formula of sand and chemicals. His breath was steady as he placed the molten mass on the end of his blowpipe, slowly rotating it to spread the heat evenly around the mass, feeling at one with her as he took a deep, sanguine breath before exhaling into the pipe.

He worked for hours, methodically modeling the glass until the head of the deceased man emerged. Triumph filled him to his core and he steeled himself, taking another deep breath before continuing the process, pouring every ounce of his hate into the pipe; pushing himself to his very limits to free his wife from the man who had tried to steal her from him. He knew that he was almost finished, he felt it in his bones, that soon this greatest of his works would be complete.

These hopes shriveled as he realized that the art he was producing was not a snare for the soul of the guard; as he rotated it he saw her sobbing expression and he gasped in horror, the undisciplined breath ruining the piece, the perfect replica of the guard’s head deflating into a shape not unlike how he had looked after being bludgeoned by his own pistol.

Martin watched with dread fascination as the glass shape took on a life of its own, moving unbidden by his will, slithering into the blow tube itself. As it vanished he saw the expressions of his victim’s faces, refracted and twisted by the soul infused glass into horrifying parodies of their former selves. Pride urged Martine to fight back, and he blew into the tube with all of his might, trying to push them back into the fire.

But proud and skilled as he was, his tired lungs were no match for two souls united by love denied. His face was plum red, and his eyes bulged as his strength finally failed him.

He hadn’t even the breath to scream as he fell to his knees, his numb hands flying to his face as his cheeks and tongue melted from the molten glass, patches of his beard catching on fire before ugly blisters opened along his chest as the glass began to cool inside his body. He writhed with intense pain that lasted for mere seconds that became his eternity.

The corpse smoldered on the floor only until the last embers of the forge died out.

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(Mystery Ingredients: The Glass Man, Clockwork Pistol. Word Count: 1500)

Edited January 23, 2013 by Ender101