asconian's blog

 There were no words. Only a note, folded in silence, left on the duke’s breakfast tray. And another, slipped into the fold of Frank’s jacket.  -Midnight. The cellar-  The mansion slept. They did not. The cellar was a forgotten place, damp, bare stone, smelling of rust and wet earth. A place where servants had been punished. Where secrets were stored. Where no one would hear a man scream if he broke from the inside.

 Frank arrived first. No shirt. Bandages badly tied. The eyebrow still open from the last fight. The duke appeared a little later, a lantern in his hand. Also without a shirt. Two muscular torsos. Eyes as dark as ever. They locked the door. No one would come in. They looked at each other. Hard looks. They were going to tear each other apart. 

“Ready?” the duke asked. 

“I never stopped being ready.” And they threw themselves. No strategy. No words. No warning. Only blows. 

The echo of fists boomed off the walls. Frank struck first, straight to the face; the duke answered with a kick to the thigh that made him stagger. They went down on the stone floor, rolling like wild dogs. Sweat and blood wet the ground. Their cries were low, guttural, as if each man were dragging up a buried rage from the bottom of his own history. The duke hauled him up by the arms and smashed him into the wall. Frank answered with a headbutt that split the duke’s lip. They kept fighting, gasping like beasts, without pause. A tooth flew. A rib cracked. They did not stop. 

“Why won’t you yield, damn you?” the duke snarled, face swollen, chest working like a bellows.

 “Because you won’t either,” Frank spat, and spat blood with it. 

And they went on. Fists. Knees. Elbows. Style was gone. Technique was gone. Only the insatiable wish to break the other man—to tear out of him something more than flesh. Pride. Frank charged and stamped the duke against a stone pillar. The lantern swung crooked and threw their shadows up like specters. The duke snatched a broken crate from the floor and smashed it across his back. Frank cried out, turned, and drove an elbow into the jaw that dropped the nobleman onto a heap of rusted tools. 

“Come on!” the duke growled, getting up, blood running from his mouth. 

“Don’t hold back.” 

And hell opened. They hurled themselves at the walls. At the pillars. The duke seized a board with nails in it and drove it into Frank’s thigh. The younger man screamed and did not retreat. He flung a rusted chain; it wrapped his own arm for a second before he used it like a whip. The metal sound ricocheted through the whole cellar. They rolled through sawdust, crushing old bottles, striking with whatever the room offered: buckets, tools, even the leg of a broken chair that ended splintered in the duke’s back. The floor stained itself minute by minute: sweat, blood, spit, dirt. Frank broke a crate over his head. The duke drove him into an empty barrel that went over with a crash. They hit with knees, with backs, with everything a body could still give. The growls turned hoarse. The blows turned slow. As if the flesh had already stopped answering, and only the soul could not. Then the end came. Both on their knees. Face to face. Swaying. Gasping. Silence. 

Only the drip of moisture on stone. Frank lifted his arm and put a fist into the duke’s face. The duke gave him one back without wasting a second. And so they continued. One. The other. One. The other. Slow. Ceaseless. Agonizing. Faces ruined. Mouths swollen. Eyes closing under the puff of bruises. And still neither fell. Only the echo of the blows. Like a war drum between two soldiers who no longer knew why they were fighting—only that they could not stop. Until, at last, the arms came down. Not for peace. For exhaustion. 

They stayed on their knees. Bent. Trembling. Breathing like animals that had survived something they did not understand. The duke spat a tooth. Frank let out a broken laugh that turned into a cough.

 “Damn you…” the nobleman murmured through a wrecked mouth. 

“Same to you, sir… same.” There was no winner. Only respect. And silence.