Excerpt: Ignes Fatui (working title)

The most popular story, and one that had sprung up north in in Spruce Grove from the mouth of an amateur storyteller named Trevor or something along those lines, concerned Jack and the King of Angeles. This tale was far more common and notably varied from the original telling, which had originated in the tavern of Springville. In it, the King of Angeles wanted to capture young Jack Stingy, a shockingly handsome farmhand working just within the walls of Angeles City in one of few farms not shunted outside into the dangerous plains, and force him to to court. Angeles City was notoriously lacking in courtesans, if only because of the King's equally notorious temper and lack of courtly manners, and so this kidnapping of young aristocratic-looking citizens for his own purposes was not unheard of or even uncommon. Jack could expect to be dressed up in fine aristocratic trappings, given a quick and thorough course in courtly behavior, and unleashed within the inner walls of Angeles Court, where he would be expected to dine, gossip, and dance with the finest ladies and gents Angeles had to offer, most of whom were simple countrymen like himself stuffed into fine clothes.

Jack Stingy, for some unfathomable reason, didn't want to be lavished with money he hadn't earned and dressed in clothes he hadn't bought. He was more than happy being a farmhand (so the legend went), and refused the King's first and only polite request for his presence in Angeles Court. The King, furious that he had been so directly disobeyed, had Jack Stingy kidnapped and brought to court against his will, to be thrown into the dungeons until he decided to go willingly into court.

But Jack did not relent. Days and nights passed, and the King still did not see Jack's face among his courtiers. What's more, when he inquired as to Jack's state of mind, his guards seemed hesitant to answer. Finally, the King ventured down to the dungeons where Jack was being kept, flung open the dungeon door, and demanded an explanation.

The first thing the King noticed (so the legend went) was the smell. The awful, pervasive, gut-wrenching smell. It was worse than the usual lingering smell of refuse and piss that filled cells such as these, tainted with some dark and unknown underpinning odor that seemed to pierce every particle of flesh, and not only the nose. Jack stood in a corner, faced to the wall, and as the King neared to him, he felt that the smell grew closer. And when the King took Jack by the shoulder and forced him to turn around, he saw the source of that strange and terrible odor: Jack had cut his face.

Not cut. Mutilated. His hair was dark with the blood from his forehead, the fleshy cartilage of his nose hanging grotesquely from his face. Both cheeks were almost completely freed from flesh or fat, leaving his cheekbones exposed. His lips, once beautiful and curved downwards in a slight moue, were diced up roughly and chewed to bloodiness. And most disturbing of all, his entire mouth was slashed up with uneven lines in the shape of a smile - no, not a smile, a grin, a face-breaking grin dripping with his own blood and freely spilling spit. Jack had ripped the flesh from around his eyes, and with bloody sockets looked up to the king and smilingly asked, (so the legend went) "Does my face goodly please you, King?"

The King, a warmonger and bloody man at heart, was so shocked by this mutilation that he immediately collapsed to the floor and died. The guards who saw Jack then said that he looked almost possessed with the passing of the King's spirit, such that his eyes and mouth lit up with a red and ominous glow. Then he moved (so the legend went) with an inhuman speed, pushing away the guards with an inhuman force and escaping into Angeles in the dead of night. He killed three more courtesans with the mere sight of him, the horrific and bloody picture of his visage striking a fatal fear in the hearts of any unlucky enough to see him. It took two ladies and a child dead before the King’s widow told the guards to open all of the doors of the court and city, to allow Jack to escape and cease his haunting of Angeles.

The night that the guards carried out her orders, nary a soul was willing to open their door or window. Children were brought in as soon as the sun went down, and the entire city lay in silent waiting for this awful, grotesque spirit to leave them. In the night, the city doctor was rudely awakened with rough burlap around his eyes and an incongruously sweet voice demanding that he sew up his face. The good doctor felt out Jack’s bloodied face, knowing that to see him would be suicide, and stitched up the infamous lines on Jack’s face, stemming the blood flow and allowing this demon-thing to live.

That evening, Jack tore out of Angeles. Citydwellers said they could hear the painful slap of his bare feet on the paved sidewalks as he ran out of the court, out of the city, out into the big and empty brush and danger of the Plains. A farmhand who had worked with Jack when he was a human, a boy named Will born in some far-off place called Wisp, left the city that night as well. The legend goes that he wanted to escape his cruel master, and took this opportunity as a blessing from his old friend Jack and his nigh freedom. But as soon as Jack set foot on the plains, the storm that has haunted Angeles since the memory of the southwest plains suddenly struck up (so the legend went), and Will was struck by this demonic lightning and turned into a ghostly creature the likes of which had never been seen before nor recreated since.

Jack, naturally, was unable to enter any walled city again, for every guard who saw him even from afar would know him as the demon Jack Stingy that had haunted Angeles, and were he to approach too quickly and in the night he would kill any who saw him with the terror of his face. And Will too was thrust out from society for his bizarre, new, ghostly form. The two boys found each other once more in the Plains, and, though Will was frightened of Jack’s new face and Jack was driven near mad by his bizarre bout of self-mutilation in the jail, they accepted each other as friends and brothers and began to roam aimlessly between towns, endlessly seeking the one that would take them.

So the legend went.