Chapter Text
“Otabek Altin.”
Otabek’s eyes flew open, pupils dilated, doused in fear from something his ears hadn’t heard but his brain had.
“I know you hear me Otabek Altin.”
His heart raced, though there was absolutely nothing threatening there, in his bedroom, ceiling lit with faint light seeping through his curtains form the street. At three AM, there were no noises from the street, no cars, no late night teenagers deciding that late night clandestine trips to the local (if not choosey) liquor store was worth the risk of feeling shitty the next morning, school bedamned.
No there was nothing, only the voice in his head.
“Well, we heard you. And it’s time to come to us, Otabek.”
The voice was feminine, but lacking any of the pubescent twang of girls his age. It was low and sultry, like heavy summer heat. The voice knew things. So many things, the kinds of things that Otabek might imagine when jerking off in the shower.
But now it just made him shiver.
“Who are you?” he whispered, shocked all over again by the sound of his own voice.
But there was nothing, the tendril –like presence had slipped from his mind like a cold octopus, leaving him feeling vaguely sullied. He watched the decade old plane mobile that had hung above his bed since forever, the dust so thick on the top side of the little models so that the colour was changed, and gulped his heart back into his throat.
-8-
“Do you think he’ll come?”
“Of course he’ll come darling. Who could resist me?”
“Anyone with eyes?”
“Fuck you, little upstart.”
“Right back at ya, hag.”
“Could you two not? I hope he does. This one looks interesting.”
“They always do.”
“Then they let us down.”
“Hmm, not this one. I have a feeling.”
“I trust your feelings like I trust Napoleon to win Waterloo.”
“You still sour over that? Build a bridge, darling.”
“He was a bad investment. Bowie wasn’t.”
“He’s dead.”
“Exactly. So we need new meat.”
“A new sacrifice.”
All five voices spoke now.
“A new sacrifice.”
-8-
When Otabek Altin was told that his school team, the Gold Tigers, would be playing in the final away game at the Sacramento Hughes Stadium, he’d been ecstatic. Coach had all but promised him he would be seen, scouted and receiving offers before he could get back to the changing rooms. His grades were better than up, his game was in top form, and he and his sprawling family were looking at his future and getting a tan from the shine.
Then fucking Chris, the mother fucking fuckity fuck, had ‘accidently’ tripped him up during practice. Soccer had never been a cheap sport; it took its payment in injury. But there was no way that Chris had just so happen to shove his spiked heel into Otabek’s arch hard enough to puncture skin, and at just the wrong angle that he would turn in ways his bones shouldn’t and come down on it. A sprained ankle. It was nothing. But it was everything. With the game next weekend, unless he was fully healed, he would never get to go, never get seen, never get scouted, never go to college... his entire future was down the toilet because of a sprain. Because of fucking Chris. Almost literally.
He probably shouldn’t have broken up with the guy so close to the end of the season. Or dated someone on the team in the first place. But shit had happened. And this was the case.
He’d seen the look on his mother’s face when he came home limping with a crutch. She’d fussed and fretted, putting ice onto it and offering him things to eat, as if she could feed the injury away. His father had come home from work, seen the bandage on his foot elevated and immediately found the phone. Otabek could hear him arguing with his coach in their native tongue, sounding angrier than he would have otherwise. Russian wasn’t an elegant language. Russia had invented vodka in the middle of winter, it had no space of prettiness. His coach, also from Kazakhstan, obviously argued back because his father had stopped speaking, stamped back through the small kitchen and back out the door with nary a word for either Otabek, his mother, or any of their other 4 children.
Otabek had eaten his tasteless dinner in silence that night, and gone upstairs to bed early, citing homework. Through thin walls, he heard his father’s return from the bar, and the way his parents argued with voices that weren’t raised but audible until Otabek found his earphones and drowned them out. He was the only one of his siblings who was allowed his own room, as a kind of investment in what a treasure he was going to be, the gold star on top of the Altin tree. Now it felt like a heavy, guilt-ridden burden.
Desperation can make you do really dumb, really ridiculous things. And then feel like an idiot afterward.
He’d taken the pain tablets and washed them down with the single beer he’d smuggled in for himself, courtesy of the school contraband procurer, JJ. After all, if he was going to drink a warm beer, that was the perfect night for it.
“How to become healthy….how to become…better? How to win?” he murmured to himself, typing it into the search engine on his laptop screen. “Quick fix…quick heal…”
He was aware he was a little tipsy, though this was inaccurate, because Otabek Altin, who was paramount of good behavior and role-model ship, had never actually been drunk or had more than few sips of champagne at a party. Now, with the pain meds fizzing away in a soup of not-lite beer in his belly and bubbling into his bloodstream, he was not tipsy at all but quite solidly in the ‘drunk’ category.
So when his drunken meanderings through the endless train of thought that is the internet pulled up a funny little ouija-type ritual, he shrugged, giggled a little and said: “Sure why not.”
Otabek didn’t have enough space on his floor to draw a pentagram, and if he had his mother would have wailed anyway, but he did have a piece of paper and some crayons left on the floor from when his youngest brother had obviously been in there earlier.
“Ha, it’s the Olympic symbol. Except for the black one. Wait, there’s supposed to be a black one…” He said to no-one in particular and draw the five colored circles in each point anyway. This was after he’d drawn and gotten wrong a pentagram several times. He squinted at the laptop screen again.
“…blood, yuck, ok. Wait, spit is fine.” He blew a wet raspberry at the paper in his hands then giggled at himself. “And then...um…oh. I want to be better. Like, my ankle. I want it to be healed? And I want to win the game against the Cobras. And maybe Chris should breakout in backne or something. I, Otabek Altin, ask this of the Five Lords.”
He chuckled again, then it died. He stared at the scrawl of a ritualistic marking without seeing, feeling the weight of his unexpected failure settle on his like leaden ash. This was dumb.
He was fucked.
-8-
He felt it at the breakfast table. An annoying little itch right behind his belly button. Since his stomach was still grumbling over the previous night’s abuse, he put it down to that and didn’t think much. But it grew just a little as he left the house, hobbling on his crutch, some more as his split ways with his sibling whose was the other way, and became a ‘tug’, like a stitch of flesh just there, between his abdominals.
He rubbed at the spot on his belly as he made his slower than usual way to the bus stop, not paying much attention to the way, trusting his feet (one and a half feet) to lead him there. His father’s expression that morning had been stormy, angry, and his mother…hadn’t even looked at him.
He stopped because he had walked into a pole.
“Ow, what the…?” he almost cursed but trailed off.
This wasn’t the bus stop. He looked around. This wasn’t even close to the way to the bus stop.
Somehow he had made it into an alley, no a weird blank thoroughfare behind an office building. It was quite, absent of life except for the birds that called from trees beside him.
“What…?” he muttered. Then the tug tugged. “Ow!”
“Come.” The disembodied voice shivered up his spine at the same time as the tug became a sharp single into of pain. He cried out and lurched forward, and immediately the pain lessened. He stared wide eyed at the ground.
“We said come.” A different voice sounded now, and its effect was far different. Like warm electricity up his spine and over his shoulders, insistent and brooking no argument. “Now come!”
The tug made him lurch once more, and his crutch nearly slid from his aching shoulder.
“Ouch.” He said, surprised that such a mundane sound could come from his mouth. “I’m coming, alright.”
And he hobbled forward, the tug-pain lessened. It turned out to be directional, as it led him around a corner, and onto a tarred road, which led onto a brick pathway. It looked older, grass and daises growing between the stones, the bracketing foliage a little overgrown but nonetheless quite lush. He looked ahead, saw that he was approaching a high wall, its whitewashed face peeling in places and the fading echo of some painted decoration along its edge. It exuded a feeling of peace and quietude, like something sleeping. He followed the tug until he came to the closed wooden doorway and then stopped.
His shoulder ached from the crutch, and he hitched his school sack higher on his other shoulder. This was a lot further than the bus stop.
A sudden attack of reality hit him and he tried to turn back the way he’d come when the same, electric voice said “Nope.” And he was hauled bodily and backward through the door. He didn’t even yelp in surprise, because all his breath had fallen out of his lungs.
After the surrounding blur had stopped and he found himself sitting on a similarly bricked ground, he opened his eyes properly. His crutch lay a ways away, his bag too, the books scattered and some pages bent. He was in a courtyard, he saw, this side of the high wall was not crumbling or old, and resplendent with intricately painted decoration, reminding Otabek of Turkish design. Then he would look at another wall and see something that looked more Greek, or roman, then another which was very clear in the stylized, blocky primaries of Africa. The bricks on which he sat were not overgrown, or old, or chipped, but in crisp reds and browns as if newly baked, the grout between them clean and smooth. He was just realising too, that there was a pattern to them…
“Turn around, idiot.” The electric voice sounded, and this time, Otabek’s ears heard it before his brain did. He turned around.
Before him, on a raised crescent dais, were five thrones. The one in the center had a tall occupant, who smiled at him.
“Welcome. You have found The Five Lords.”