“Ask him why he's here,” said the second voice, the one Laurence recognised. “No, wait... ask him if he feels like he's been wrongfully imprisoned. No! Ask him... ask him if he's lost anything”.
“Yes, I've lost something,” Laurence snapped. “I've lost my arm! Not to mention I can't even feel my connection to my book anymore. I've lost contact with my brother and my friends. I've lost contact with her. I've lost everything”.
There was silence for a moment as the people on the other side of the wall digested what he had said. Moments stretched into seconds when suddenly one voice on the other side of the wall gasped.
“Wait, you can hear me?”
“Yes. You're so loud,” Laurence said while trying to move away his sweat slick hair that was sticking to his forehead with his stump of a left arm. After two tries he realised his mistake and gritted his teeth before using his right hand instead.
“But that’s impossible. I’m... Nevermind. How did you get here?”
“I have no idea. I fought with a large amount of the Lupe to stop them from going after my friends and I assume I lost pretty handily. I hope they are okay. I need to fix things. I need to be able to fight again”.
Laurence stood up and held out his hand. As he whispered his hammer’s name the air crackled, and with a flourish he pulled Jormugand out of thin air. The room momentarily tried to reject its existence but soon enough it settled down. It was time to start combat. He raised his hammer and began the most basic form of his first stance, Yesod, only to falter as he attempted to strike out with his first rotation. He pulled his hammer back and it slid out of his palm, straight into the wall. Watching it quiver there, Laurence growled before snatching the hammer and beginning again. It was a series of three simple actions, but the change in rotation seemed to escape him. A third, fourth and fifth time he tried to perform the strike, but every time the fulcrum of the entire strike was lost to him.
He sighed and dropped his hammer to the ground before sitting down on the floor, dejected. Laurence was going about this wrong. He could tell he was, but he had no way of knowing what his mistake was. It infuriating him, and yet no matter how he racked his brains no answer came to light.
You're an idiot, you know that right?
Laurence stopped and looked around. The voice he heard echoed in his head for a moment before disappearing. It was one that was so familiar, as familiar as the one behind the wall, but this he knew the origin of. It was the voice that made him rage. It was the voice that pushed him beyond his ability to cope with the world and took over when he lost himself. It was not something he liked to hear at the best of times, times like now were even worse.
“I don't want to hear it,” Laurence said quietly.
Sure you do. I have the answer to your dilemma. All you have to do is listen to me.
“How could you possibly know my issue? I can't even work it out. You're not here”.
I know the answer. And tell you what, just because I'm your antithesis doesn't mean I can't help you for free. Just this once. Your issue is you are treating your hammer like it has weight.
Laurence sat there waiting for the voice to continue but soon enough he realised that there was nothing else that it intended to add. It just have him the slightest slice of an answer but no release. In the end all he could think was to keep going with his attempts and hope that something clicked.
He grabbed Jormugand off the ground and started slowly rotating the hammer around his hand. It flowed like water as Laurence spun the weapon around like a baton, blade tip between fingers, shaft rolling over the back of his hand and sticking to him as he moved the hand down to catch it - only then to throw it in the air and land it hammerhead up on the tip of his finger. It began sliding off his hand, only to roll off the back off his hand once again and fit snugly back into his palm.
“Like it has weight... I’m an idiot”. Laurence looked at his hammer and attempted the maneuver that had escaped him. He began rotating the hammer quicker and quicker before going for the first swing against his nemesis; the wall. He felt the hammer clip against the wall and as it connected he tensed his muscles, forcing it back the way it came. The original momentum of the strike forced his hammer to slip out of his hand once more, but he regained control over the weapon just as it reached the end of the shaft. “Idiot!” He said once more, much louder this time.
“Are you alright over there?” Said the first voice from the room next to him. “You seem to be yelling a lot. I know that being imprisoned can be horrible, but you’ve got to stay strong. You’ll get out of here eventually”.
“It’s not that,” Laurence replied. “I lost an arm, so I am trying to compensate for the fact that I don’t have one anymore. I need to relearn all of my forms again, else I am going to mess things up while fighting anything”. He picked up his hammer and swung it against the wall with a thud. “That’s why you’ll hear me hitting things occasionally. It’s my hammer”.
“Hammer?” The second voice said in surprise. “How did they let you... Is... Is that a manifestation of your spirit?”
“Yeah it is. It’s also the reason why I am calling myself an idiot. I’ve drilled into myself the concept that my hammer has weight to me that I was treating it like it was one, but it doesn’t at all. It would be like thinking the mana within my body had weight, I mean that is what it’s made of... I think. I’ve never been too sure about that, but either way. The issue I am having is that I am still subconsciously treating it both like it has weight and forcing it to have weight to me”.
“That’s not what I meant, I mean you have a hammer. That’s the shape of your soul, right? Are you a member of the Dominus family then?”
Laurence laughed, his voice cracking slightly against the general silence of the prison they were stuck in. “Not at all. Not at all. I’m from the Absolution clan, my full name is Laurence Absolution”.
“What? Laurence? The two voices on the other side shouted. “This is ridiculous, how are you here? You should be much further along in your journey than the eighth floor!”
“You know me? And believe me, this is not the eighth floor, it’s at least the twelfth”.
“Of course we know you, Laurence. I didn’t recognise you because you were so young when we last met. It’s me, Jake! I’ve got Damascus here with me, and we’ve been stuck in this prison for weeks”.
“No way, that’s impossible. We met in Cie’Awll, years ago. You said you were on the eighth floor? That’s pretty impressive for five years. How’s... Trev? Is he okay?”
“I... I don’t know”. Jake’s voice became subdued. “Last time I saw him he was running to try and get help from the nearby town, but of the four other people with us, I’m the only person left here. I don’t even know what happened to my other companions. I think they might have died, but I don’t know”.
“Oh wow,” Laurence said. “That’s unfortunate, how long have you been here for?”
“It certainly is,” said the second voice, who Laurence presumed was Damascus, the wayward imp. “By my count we have been here for at least seven or eight months. Maybe upwards of a year as there are times when we seem to have forced breaks in consciousness. Either way, we’re trapped in here, and we don’t even get to see our captives. It’s horrible for Jake”.
“It must be pretty horrible for you too,” Laurence said in response, He grabbed his hammer again and began swinging away at imagined enemies before him. With each attempt he would feel like he was closer and closer to his goal of breaking his bad habits, but they were so heavily ingrained. He began focussing less and less upon the conversation that he was having with Jake and Damascus, and more upon the nature of the movements he was making. His lost arm was a curse, there was no doubt about that, but the loss of a limb opened up the world to him in a different way.
Again and again, he would swing the hammer down, left, right, up, in every direction he could. There was something that he was so close to understanding in the simplicity of movement that he was losing himself to. With each strike he sent out he felt closer to it, this enlightenment, the movements he was making and to Jormugand itself. He smiled, there was nothing else to him but the whispers of the hammer as it shattered the air, the cracking of his joints as he moved his body in ways he had never thought possible, and soon enough he found the single piece of information that he was looking for. He knew that he had made a mistake so long ago, back when he was a child and first starting his steps on his journey with his brother, and his hammer. He should have known inherently that what he held in his arms was not a hammer. He did not hold anything in his arms, his arm. His hammer, Jormugand, was no hammer at all. He even began to question why Tony had told him to name it in the first place.
The single action of naming his hammer may have helped him progress so quickly, but it had crippled him in ways he was only beginning to learn. It had inhibited his potential, curtailed him from the endless capabilities that he could feel were bubbling up inside him. It had stoppered him for a long time, and now he was uncorking himself.
He felt his epiphany was about to come to fruition, that his musings within his simple actions would bear fruit when there was a sharp pain that sprung out from his right hand, from his chest and from his head. His fluid movements ground to a halt and he turned around to face a shadow across the room from him.
Stop.
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