Salazar the Wizard

Here's a story beginning in the myth-punk style of The Arabian Nights.

            Salazar stood quietly in the darkness, contemplating his sins. The manacles clattered around his feet as he shifted his weight. The grate high above remained impassive, like the heavens he had cried out to for help. The gods didn’t listen; no, they feasted on human suffering like vultures on rotting flesh. They were waiting for more of his suffering--it must be as sweet as mangos to them. Salazar refused them even that much pleasure and thus remained silent.

            The grate shifted high above with the deep scraping sound of stone on stone. Light sprayed down through the steam.

            “Have you repented, blasphemer?” The voice called. Salazar didn’t even deign to raise his face to the light as he remained silent.

            There was muttering above. Several of the elders must have been there, he thought.

            “Blasphemer, is breath yet in your body?”

            Let them wonder.

            A ladder spooled down, swinging gently near the place his chains had been bolted into the bedrock. There was grunting, far above. Salazar muttered strings of arcana into the moist air, feeling the words fall like pebbles, entirely bereft of the crackling energy he had once commanded. His rings had been stolen, his pendants destroyed, his staves burned.

            A fat, sweating man with a dirty beard woven with silver charms reached the bottom rung and shakily stepped off the ladder, brushing his silken shirt down over his ponderous belly before turning to regard Salazar imperiously.

            “Blasphemer, you answer me not.”

            “Burn in eternity.” Salazar murmured. The light was dim, but even so the man’s face visibly reddened.

            “You dog!” He shouted, his high voice ringing off the slick walls. “Even now you speak more blasphemies against your priests.”

            He produced a key that appeared to be more dagger than instrument and thrust it into the massive padlock at his feet as if he wished it were Salazar’s throat. The lock snapped open with a metallic scream. Salazar stepped away from the stone post as composedly as a cat, towering over the short man.

            “We have arrested your magics, you are without your potions and poisons and elixirs, you foul creature. Kill me and your death will take a thousand years. Up the ladder with you.”

            Salazar climbed the ladder, luxuriating in the pull at his once dormant muscles.