Charlie got his first tattoo outside Rebolt Prison: small-time. He'd been embezzling some of the money at the mill. It was all in hand then, every bit. He was the collector: the guy down there in the wife-beater and straps tapping his boot watching as the drivers came up the hill. There'd been some compression issue in a valve, and paper snowed down from one of the giant steel turrets. Down, down, down. Charlie stood in it, heedless, just tapping his boot and waiting for the drivers to sidle up close and he'd lean in and take the money. He'd cut his little profit around the back under one of the pistons. Pierce had trusted him, always liked him, and maybe Charlie had gotten a little too easy with that trust. Liked the way he could stretch it. But when he leaned inside and saw it was Pierce in the driver's seat, well, he just about knew all his luck had dried up.

Pierce had been fair, despite the short-changing, and while he did pour Charlie into jail and his bad luck along with him, he said he'd grant the bail, if Charlie made good in Rebolt, and perfected that art he was always scrawling. Jail was a haven if you were a rapist or an artist. Pierce's on law was strange to many, but he had his reason. He saw in Charlie someone he could manipulate - or, rather, that he could see in the boy enough desperation that he might twist it. use it as bait. You get them early, you can pervert them forever. He'd always feel grateful for Pierce's mercy. He could see it. The snake in him, the eternal betrayer, knew it.


So, while Charlie sat ninety days behind bars, missing the fresh air and sunlight and fresh thighs, he observed his promise. He didn't act out, he kept his eyes down, he participated in the single extracurricular class for stencilling and tracing to keep from going mad... and because, Pierce had said so.


Then the day came, that the sentence was nearly done, and Pierce bribed his tainted money through the holes in the sheriff's pockets and integrity, and won his boy back, and Charlie was indebted. "You work for me, I keep you alive. It's easy."

Charlie was forbidden to speak to Ignus and engage with anything of his other life. That Charlie was dead. Charlie was now part of this family. He learned the codes, the sigils, the glyphs, the secrets, the sign. He wore them up his arms. Green ink on his thick, ginger-haired knuckles. He was a new man. Shed one skin for another. When a new man came in, they sat before Charlie Lucre, and were emblazoned with the autograph of the devil himself. Glass-Eye, Pierce's right-hand, sitting beside Charlie, ensuring that the words were spoken, the complicit state of the reborn.

When a new man came in and sat before Charlie Lucre, they'd see a thick man with a raging, wild red beard. His arms covered in serpents, a gryphon, and broken arrows. His wrists encircled with wicked eternities in ink. They wouldn't ever see the boy Charlie had been. Glass-Eye, sometimes he had moments of wondering if any of them ever, like he, thought of life before Hexxen. What it meant, when the town was young and they were who they were, because of upbringing, environment, experience. And now, all that erased, they were mean slates, carved up with these infernal poetries. Glass-Eye had more than once told Charlie that at some point he should run.

Lucre Charlie lost his luck
Finger at a time
When the second hand came off
They say he cried an' he cried

Chop chop chop
He hears it in his sleep
Chop chop chop
Chop chop chop
Lucre Charlie's blood runs clean


After they had sewn up the stumps he was left with, ruined, mangled, a poor job, he sat slumped in the chair in the basement holding, watching as the red sunlight crawled backwards across the scarred floor like it pitied him, until it was gone and night was settling outside the doors. Through the bars he could just make out the moon. It was low and full and large - a great yellow eye, staring at him. He sat like that for ages. What was there to do?


Later in the night, there was only the ferocious ache, a screaming pain through the ends of his arms. He couldn't stand to look at the things. He imagined, through the pain, he was reaching out, or moving his thumb up and down. The phantom feeling of a tingle in his palm. And every time he looked, he was shocked all over again. And he would close his eyes and breathe deeply. He couldn't yell anymore, no more protests. His voice was hoarse from all the hollering he'd given them under the noon sun as the blade went though his wrists.

He'd hurled vomit when he looked at his cut hands lying there on the board. Inanimate, still, like wax creations, not his. Glass-Eye had bundled them up, raw and bloodied, into a small sack, and then handed it over to Pierce, who grinned his brilliant, terrible smile at Charlie. "S'all over now, Lucre. Men, take him to the cell."


Charlie thought as he sat slumped in that old chair, that the worst part was that he'd never be able to paint, or draw again. He didn't think he could live without that ability. More than squeezing a tit or curling a hand around the satisfying cool of an ale glass. He would dream later that night, in black and white. His hands returned to him, and he strangled Pierce with them. His fingers were broken, disjointed, and the sound of Pierce's neck crunching still echoed in his ears when he awoke, his own neck stiff from how it'd rolled to the side as he fell asleep. He thought, besides drawing, wrapping his hands around Piere's neck could have felt good too. He didn't know if he could carry on without art, and without being able to see through to the end of that man.

He was handless. What kind of man was he now?