Chapter Text
There was a ghost behind their rooms.
Once, that part of the cave system had been quiet and inhabited only by a few pests. Now, its single inhabitant ate any animal that crawled in. Few did. The colosseum’s ghost didn’t leave to hunt, despite this. A poor bit of life planning, see, because their ghost wasn’t a real ghost. Theirs still had to eat.
She was just the only one who seemed oblivious to this fact.
Now, you could call them fools all you wanted. They’d picked the name for themselves. And every single other fighter here absolutely qualified as one. But that didn’t mean they hadn’t picked up on what was out there. Not when their ghost stuck close to the colosseum she’d scorned. She was a bygone phantom of the colosseum’s legend that couldn’t bother herself to actually leave and let history fully live up to that name.
So they went about their business and pretended it didn’t bother them that someone crawled outside their back door.
This was just a fact of life for a fool. The colosseum had a ghost.
They all knew it. Sometimes she was loud enough out there to be heard. She could climb the cave’s walls. A sturdy fool had once opened the vent of his barracks and found her staring back, upside down on the rocks. His scream had left him the joke of the barracks for a while, all in good fun (til he’d died a few weeks later in the arena and the world moved on without its latest comic relief once more). Another time, the shell of a former champion decided to lurk outside her old room and its current occupant had heard the heavy breathing through the vent above her bed. Ghosts don’t breathe. No more than they eat. Nobody gave the lurker the memo.
Even if she scared some of the more superstitious or jumpy fools, the colosseum’s ghost didn’t do much. She didn’t even bother to hunt for her own food, again. She didn’t kill anybody. Nobody went out there to see her.
There was something very unsettling for many of the fools when it came to seeing her. They tended towards the oblivious when it came to their own dense, pointless lives and inevitably stupid deaths. The barracks typically were a bright enough place. As bright as it got, when more than half of the fools wandering around down there had burning pus oozing from their eyes and coughed the stuff up on people’s feet sometimes and also had the conversation skills of a garpede. Those that had enough of their minds left, at least, liked to use what brain power they had on weapon maintenance and drinks and bragging delusions that they’d be a champion someday. They didn’t like to see a reminder of their mortal permanence.
The colosseum was all about confidence. It was about belief. You didn’t last there if you didn’t believe you’d be the champion someday. You didn’t last there no matter what, granted, but the death or abandonment of this place came faster without dumb confidence. And those that snuck a peek at their ghost would have to deal with that belief wavering sickly.
She’d believed it all once, after all. She still had the helmet on. Even idiots would have to recognize that the thing crawling around outside had the same helmet as them. Which meant she’d been one of them, one time.
Certainly not anymore.
That was the part that left most of the semi-sane ones wishing she was just some resident animal out there. It was unnerving to stare back into your own face. That fool had believed it all, danced the dance, and now sat alone in a cave, muttering only to herself, the laughingstock of the rest of the colosseum. If that fool had been brought to such a pathetic state, could this fool?
The answer was yes.
Nobody wanted that answer.
So most tried not to think about the former fool outside. The colosseum’s champion was a different matter. The rest, see, they had to hope and delude themselves into thinking they’d be important someday. The champion already was. She saw the pointlessness of fame and inevitable decay of value and sanity like anyone else when she looked at their resident ghost, sure, but she didn’t tend to feel it all quite as strongly as most fools.
There were three camps regarding the pale thing lurking outside:
There were the fools who found her- a shell of one of the greatest fools the colosseum had ever had to offer- depressing and anxiety inducing and faced a nihilistic epiphany every time the subject came up; there were the fools deep in their own sickness who did not care because they hardly had the mind to care about themselves or others anymore; and there was the single one who did not care, much like the infected, but certainly had the mind to have faced the fear, as the former would, and surpass it.
God Tamer was the only one in that third camp, she thought. And because of that, she was also the only one who bothered thinking about the colosseum’s discarded living failure. It didn’t take a chance sighting to bring her to mind. The thought of her didn’t leave the champion shuddering and scared of the future.
And God Tamer was probably one of the only reasons the colosseum still had its ‘ghost’ anyway.
The rest all knew she was out there, but they didn’t go looking or picking fights or taking any care of at all.
God Tamer didn’t know why she did it. Maybe it was because Lord Fool had started it, back when he was, wouldn’t you know it, alive and all. Most fools didn’t even realize he was dead. As one of the very rare exceptions, the champion would know she wasn’t beholden to his anything. Didn’t matter if he’d started something, or ordered something, or made a tradition. It was up to her whether she wanted to follow or not. She could redo this entire colosseum, if she so pleased. She was the champion and all she had to do was tell the fools that their Lord had been the one who told her they had to do some new thing.
But honestly, God Tamer didn’t care to redo anything. She was the champion here. She was the lord of this arena. She’d gone from nothing to everything and she wasn’t planning to ever get killed by some contender. With her beast, of course. They were both the champions, really. Together, they had not faced a challenge that left her truly fearing they may die. Not since she’d reached the top. Not even from some time before that, but…
She wouldn’t have lost against the old victor, if there’d been a fight. If that champion hadn’t-
But she’d have won it. She had Balon by then. Nothing could have stopped her then, or now.
It was up to her what traditions stayed and went and she’d decided there was no harm in keeping her predecessor alive. The old champion did a shit job of it on her own. God Tamer was used to being around fumbling things that she got the food for instead of letting them fumble that job up too. Did it make that much of a difference if this one was alive in the way some bugs were and some beasts weren’t? Or had been alive that way, once, anyway.
It was just routine at this point. God Tamer didn’t like to break routines.
She shoved some cooked great hopper legs into a sack and climbed out into the small cave system behind the colosseum.
Nobody but she and Balon really ever went back here. Not if its permanent inhabitant was overlooked. The fools ignored this place as best as they could, until that inhabitant crawled a little too close to her former home for their comforts. They were a bunch of cowards scared of seeing the shell of someone great.
(Not as great as God Tamer, but the Pale Champion had been from a different era for the arena anyways. Less infection, less madness, a still living Lord Fool, a living kingdom next door to laugh at, et cetera.)
It was as easy as ever to find her target. Even if she could creep and hide about better than many beasts (especially the infected ones, and what animals in this world weren’t infected by now?), God Tamer was experienced with some damned impressive predators in her time. The previous champion could’ve been as imposing, if she didn’t mutter to herself quite so much. It made her blatantly obvious to anyone tracking her down. She probably didn’t care. She didn’t really have much of a mind to care about things these days.
She was down in a lower cavern that day. The tunnel down was too narrow of an incline for Balon to crawl up again. God Tamer motioned for him to sit and then waited next to him on the higher path, looking down upon the colosseum’s dread phantom.
There was a ghost, there was a shell, there was a practical beast depending on how you looked at it.
God Tamer had met far better behaved beasts than the former champion. It seemed almost rude on their sakes to call her one.
Her own growled and rose to his feet again when she opened the sack’s mouth wide. Yes, yes, she knew it (probably) smelled good (she smelled sweet things when none were around, and nothing else; whatever had happened to her olfactory sensors, it had happened gradually and she did not have time to complain about losing the ability to smell anything aside from that thick sweet odor). But he had already had his fill of great hopper today. She snapped the fingers of her free hand and Balon lowered again sadly. Her other hand was deep in the bag grabbing hold of the thin, grilled legs within.
God Tamer tossed them down into the room below. The ashy ground puffed up under the meat’s landing. If the skittering of the small being below and her immediate rush to push her fool’s helmet apart enough to chew meant anything, it was that she didn’t care if there was ash or not. Heh. So maybe she wouldn’t care what sort of meat God Tamer threw to her either. Most figured that was the case. The good meat went to the fools first, after all. The raw went to the beasts of the colosseum that God Tamer caught and kept. Only the extras went to the former champion. Sometimes those extras came from her own stores. God Tamer didn’t really mind. Besides, she’d killed the latest batch of great hoppers with this job in mind.
The leg meat of great hoppers tended to be the most untouched. That infection that bloated their bellies made meat fat and streaky near where the pus collected, painting them orange. God Tamer had noticed her sense of taste deteriorating in the past few years anyways. She didn’t have an issue tossing what’d be called the ‘good’ meat to the colosseum's lovely little bygone.
Though the Pale Lurker- as the arena had taken to calling their resident ghost- would probably eat the infected bellies alone. She never checked to see what she had been offered. Only grabbed, ate and shoved her helmet back down over her hidden face so she could go back to hunching over some metal key of hers that she always kept on her.
There was nothing special about it. It was just metal. It offered her nothing. The Pale Lurker was obsessed with it regardless. Years ago, when God Tamer had even gone up to check on her (Lord Fool had heard too many rumors of the previous champion getting too close and upsetting too many patrons and participants; he didn’t go check himself in spite of that though, but God Tamer didn’t mind being an errand bug for her boss), she’d tried picking up the key just to get a closer look.
That hadn’t been much appreciated by its holder. She’d been furious, spitting and hissing, and hunched, and still trained enough to remember how to use her rusty weapons. Feral was a good word for it. Just plain feral. God Tamer tossed the stupid thing back and the former Pale Champion had leapt on it, weapons forgotten, to whisper and hold it up to the mouthpiece of her helmet like it was alive or something.
God Tamer saw enough lunatics to recognize another one. There was none of that orange sickness, but the lurker was honestly worse than most of the fools that got afflicted. She was still good at wrangling them up and keeping them useful.
They sat together there listening and watching the Pale Lurker eat. God Tamer pet over the chitin of her beast. Balon rumbled patiently under her hand. She paused her calming strokes and gave his fur a pat.
“You see what I mean,” she said aloud to him, even though he never once talked back. It was a perk of animals, actually. She really didn’t meet people that said anything worth hearing. At least animals didn’t waste time.
God Tamer smirked under her mask.
“It’s rude for your sake to call her a beast.”
Balon even sounded more civilized when he ate. And he knew how to wait for her permissive cue before attacking his meals. He was a very well trained monster. Not quite a god, but his rare, wild species came close.
She pulled the strings of the sack closed again and motioned Balon to return them both home. The Pale Lurker could eat her fill in peace. She probably wouldn’t even save the extras properly for later. Her survival capabilities did nothing but dim the more years passed. She’d wait in these caves with her useless key cradled in her hands while the rest of her body failed and died around it, at this rate.
Then the colosseum would lose its ghost and they probably would barely notice a difference. They noticed few things. The fools lived up to their names now, in the stench of sickness, more than ever before.
God Tamer was the only one that bothered entering her abode and making sure she was even still alive. Her predecessor probably would’ve been dead by now without her. And she’d have kept plenty more good food for herself instead of having to share. It wasn’t like the Pale Lurker offered any use in return.
Yet the champion couldn’t- rather, wouldn’t- put the colosseum’s ghost down no matter if her time entertaining the masses was long over.