The Slow Fall of the Curtain

[Aggeragua]

I write this as bid farewell to my second cycle of life. The spirit bleeds from the multitude of gashes that have been inflicted in my brain, though if you were to see me you would not be disgusted by gore upon my face. But dare you look into my eyes, and you would know that I have seen the undescribable. If I had the courage to face these images and tear them from my mind, I would have done so long ago. Unfortunately for me, I haven't such inner strength to do so, never had, and have instead decided to expire by my own means so as to stop my torment.

I feel that by recording what I have seen, done, caused, I will somehow find peace, and maybe even find redemption. I read that confessing your greatest sins can earn you forgiveness by the Light, and, with little faith in little, I cling to this idea. Perhaps the Light will forgive me, but if I was the Light, I would surely not.

I believe it started when I was a boy, eleven years of age, and uncorrupted. Indeed, my father was eager to tell the others in the village how wonderous a man his son was destined to be. Though the blood I lacked, the qualities of royalty I possessed: honor, kindness, charity, optimism, love. Yes, love, most of all. Love was what made me what I was then. Love for the cherub Draena Ormwald, the fine young woman with a smile that would make a dead valley rejuvinate, a house build itself, a battle break.

True, I was probably too young to understand what love meant, but the fact of the matter is that by my definition of love, I loved Draena. And would it not be right that she love me back? A fair trade, I convinced myself.

After her arithmetic lessons with her tutor, a wizened man no taller than I, with an overturned spire of cotton for a beard and eyes, blue eyes that could freeze water and shatter glass, I would see her walk towards her home at the north western end of the village. As she would carry herself across the cobblestones, I must have made a fool of myself, more than once, for many a time had she turned her face and giggled with her hand lightly covering her mouth. And I felt a fool, a fool of the greatest degree! It was not right that she refuse my attention and cause the bitter drop scythe down my cheek. Yet my feelings disappeared as soon as I saw her the next day.

This carried on for many years. I grew strong, and tall. I could wield the lumberjack axe better than my father could, and read better than my peers. I knew the sciences' axioms word for word, and I was well read in the works of the great writers: Aushel the Magician, Augur Widgetwax, Marshal Kronarus. Yet like it had been for years, I returned home feeling as if I was the village idiot after my brief meeting with Draena.

I was seventeen when my father scolded me for my indecisiveness over picking to help cut wood for my father's carpentry business or help the town guards collect foodstuffs for the next campaign against the bandits to the south, near the dead copse of pines. "Well, what do you want to do, son? What do you want?" he rattled sternly. The words stuck with me.

I did not decide to cut wood or find bread, but I decided to speak with Draena, face to face, and not leave feeling inferior.

The next day, I had skipped my studies and chores to rehearse what I was to say to the woman who would not escape my dreams. I decided that I would ask her why she made me feel so foolish each day, and state that she and I should get to know each other better. After all, we were neighbors, and not antipathetic towards each other. Yes, I convinced myself, that would be the reasonable course of action.

I consulted her. I may have bungled it, somehow, for I left with a red welt on my face. The events I do not remember well, but I had grabbed her roughly, and instantly regretted it. But instead of return home feeling a fool, I followed her, determined to get what I wanted.

Her home had large, clear windows, and the sun's glare did not interfere with my sight as I peered through the glass. She had entered the house with a prominent grin on her face. Ah! She must have enjoyed the encounter with myself, I thought, though I was confused as to why she hit me if this was the case. I soon discovered that it was not the case. Another woman was there, the Harper's daughter. She smiled at Draena. Draena smiled back. They walked slowly towards each other.

I had only seen seconds of what happened next before I screamed. A horrible, piercing howl I let fly. I shrieked until my throat went dry and I vomited. Not only had my efforts been in vain, but her love had been reserved in a manner that I had never dreamed of. It was...inappropriate. Wrong! Perhaps if two I did not know, had been involved in that way, it would have been understandable, but no, Draena needed a man at this age, and in the man's place, my place, was someone that should not have been there, something that should not have been there!

I did not recognize the people that dragged me home, for the tears blocked my vision. But it was on that day that the first cycle of my life descended into madness.


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Please note: I am not against homosexuality. The narrator's opinion on this matter does not reflect my own. It is simply how I chose to write this segment of the story.

[Aggeragua]

I was kept in a sickbed for a number of days. During that time, I was simply fazed. Minimal food passed my lips, the bare necessary amount of water trickled down my throat. The once bright, enthusiastic mind that was based within my skull was dazed, confused, totally lost. The sight I had seen was as virulent as the most deadly of toxins. What was I to do when what I wanted most had been corrupted? Tainted? Fouled by the essence of an unworthy thing, a dastardly, terrible, light-blast-it piece of hound feces! Ye Gods, how unworthy of life this demonic thing was!

Several days after my mental incapacitation took place, my father’s words clawed their way through my subconscious and into the light, the words that had caused my torment in the first place. “What do you want?” the inner voice asked me? I shot up in bed. I screamed, oh, I did scream! Howl I did at the voice, “I want Harper’s daughter dead! I want her dead! Expire, decease, you horror!”

People rushed to my side and soothed me. I hit them and scratched them and drooled furiously as I cried furiously. “You die, Harper! You die! Your corruption of such innocence shall be dealt with! Strike you! The light strike you!” My fingers drew blood from a restrainer, and my head was held still, but I was a strong lad, and my muscles trembled as I shoved and kicked against the hands I could not see. “Heresy! Heresy with execution! Die! Die! Die!”

My arms gave, my adrenaline sought escape from my vessels. The hands restrained me, unnecessarily, as I had no fight left in my body for the moment. As a balm was applied to my temples, I rasped the fate of the Harper daughter. “Die, die, die…”

Sleep engulfed me for a very long time. I found relaxation in a void that I had grown unfamiliar with. There was no Draena in it. I found that disappointing, as the sight of her face would have brought me to a state of extreme comfort. Alas, there was no Draena to bless my otherworldly visions, but there was great darkness. Darkness as far as my eyes could see. No stars, no baubles to catch my vision, just a warm, cushion-like darkness that I hovered in.

I didn’t contemplate my issues in that session of hovering, but simply stared into nothing and felt happy. Happy that nothing was plaguing me, troubling me, causing me hurt. I was a comfortable soul.

Upon waking I found myself no longer in that state of happiness. The prophetic mutterings that I had stated violently in the past returned to my mind, and once again, my anger swelled, a titanic force within my bosom that tightened its grip on my windpipe and gut, and caused my muscles to shake and flex, tighten in preparation for what was to come.

It was night, and the house was quiet. I had lost all sense of time, but I knew it was a time when not many people would be about the streets. I carried my refreshed self from the sweaty, rumpled bedding to the window that overlooked the west quadrant of the town. Goldshire’s blacksmith could be seen far to the north, the tall forge peeking over the forested edge. Soft noise covered the grassy land, drawing it to bed and relaxation.

I ignored my disheveled state and tip-toed out into the cool night air. My muscles flexed negatively towards the hard cobblestones, and I decided that if I was to carry out what I was about to do, I should be prepared for it. Hopping a fence, my worn boots managed to hobble into the orchard, where I stretched for maybe nine minutes. I loosened my biceps, shoulders, legs, knees, and wrists, before padded back into the main street.

I knew the way well. It was not an enormous village, and I had made deliveries to the place many times.

The door to the Harper house was unlocked. I spat on the door crack where the hinges roughly were, and opened the door slowly. Soundless. The floor was carpeted, which allowed me to cross the rooms quickly without raising a ruckus. The stairs were difficult, as they were rickety and uncarpeted. It took me a four year long session of fifteen minutes to climb the seventeen stairs to the top floor.

The Harper daughter was there, in a bed shared by her brothers, the disgusting, kobold face with rat hairs and pukespit lips.

The siblings did not wake, as the execution was done quickly. A swift, rocking blow to the larynx of the girl, and it was done. Her eyes opened, as did her mouth, but nothing would escape, nor enter. Her body would not respond to the crisis. Only her mind functioned, releasing frenzied electrical reports to the organs warning of a system shut down.

She died. I left the house. I left the street. I left the village.

It is a challenge to run through a pitch dark forest as fast as you can, but I managed to take a rough south west course, away from the most of the major hubs of Goldshire, towards the Fargodeep Mine, where no sane human would possibly go. I probably wasn’t sane anymore, so I didn’t let that last characteristic of the place bother me. I had committed an act that that the victim deserved, though most would not believe that she deserved it. Is it not a ironic how fate rears its ugly head in such a way?

I stopped running when my legs collapsed, throttling my body into the grass. I stayed that way until my body welcomed sweet unconsciousness. What my body experienced after that I don't know. I was unable to care as my body followed my body's example and slipped into a catatonic state. It felt good.

[Aggeragua]

I discovered upon waking that I must have been unsuccessful in my attempt to flee to the mine, as I found myself in a cell.

It was very dark in the cell, and I knew not if it was dark or light outside. It was also very quiet. Seldom have I been in a place where it was totally quiet. Even the abbey to the north of my homestead was never as silent as this stone structure, as it was a silence accompanied by the rustling of paper, the chirping of birds. Here, however, I strained to detect an outside noise.

It was difficult to see what my current state was, so out of habit, I stood erect and brushed myself down, straightening imaginary creases. It was difficult to bend down to adjust my trousers as my spine was suddenly host to great pains. With nothing else to do, I stretched myself, and found that I had been abused quite severely.

My back had been bruised. This I could tell by applying pressure to it. My shoulders and biceps were in a similar state, as I found it impossible to lift them above shoulder height. My ribcage had been battered, as had my skull, this being discovered when I became giddy upon quick movements.

I sat down, and waited.

Though pain was arching through my system at speeds exceeding that of a bolt of fire, I found it oddly simple to recall what had happened. I had committed murder. I had been driven by blind passion, and my lust had caused the death of an innocent. A vile, soulless innocent, but an innocent nonetheless.

I began to run through what other options I had besides the taking a life, but I dismissed it quickly, realizing that such an action would only depress me further. In fact, most things I dismissed, as it would only worsen my state of mind, which was probably, unlike my body, beyond repair.

I cycled through all the knowledge I had stockpiled in my school years. The Auchlaean Screw, the utilization of cross beams for supporting a roof, the theory of Advanced Augury, the application of basic spirit to reinvigorate one’s body, the legend of Uther, the debate on whether or not Dexicultan teachings on the Light should be taught or not, the Elemental Equation…

It was a long time before my cell door opened. A large silhouette blocked the torchlight from the halls. The shadow crossed the room and roughly hoisted me up. It hurt. The shadow ignored my weak protests as it shoved me out through the hall and into a courtyard.

I was momentarily blind, as my eyes had adapted to the darkness of the cell in which I had been staying. When the blur cleared, I took into account my surroundings. The courtyard was surrounded by a wall several feet higher than I could reach. It also appeared to be some sort of cloister, with windowed halls and rooms behind the walls. There was stained glass, so I decided I was within the confines of an abbey or church armory. They were all made of finely crafted stone blocks. The courtyard had a gallows in the center of it, with three men standing by it. One was my father. His arms were folded across his large barrel chest, and his mustached face was expressionless as my beaten carcass was pushed towards the noose. The middle man I did not know, but he appeared to be a servant of the Light. The third man was obviously the executioner, as he wore the black hood and symbolic spaulders of one of his kind.

It was difficult for them to get the noose around my neck, not because I was resisting, but because the noose was too tight. As the executioner adjusted it, the large shadow (who turned out to be a fat friar with a leather sap on his girdle) gripped me powerfully, making sure I would not attempt escape. It was an unnecessary precaution. Had I tried to, I would not have made it as far as the wall before I collapsed in a heap of bashed bones and ruptured vessels.

The complication was fixed, and they fitted the rope around my neck, and bound my hands behind my back with strong wire. Whoever had designed this execution had done it in a wicked way, as I was standing facing my father, who still remained expressionless. I tried to stare back at him in the same way, but alas, I failed to do so, as tears welled up within. I had failed to impress my father, live up to his standards. It hurt more than my bruises and torn muscles.

The church figure was muttering some words from a small leather bound book. I couldn’t hear them, but I quite honestly couldn’t care less. I gasped a little, and sobbed once or twice, before squelching the sadness inside of my breast. I then stood as tall as my battered spine would allow me, and sighed a little.

The platform beneath my feet dropped, and my body entertained my small audience by doing a few steps of the hangman’s jig. My neck was in an enormous amount of pain. Panic overtook me. My eyes bulged out, as did my tongue, and strange caking noises emanated from my squashed larynx. I barely noticed the warm stuff that seeped from my trousers and down my legs to the grass below.

It went dark mercifully quickly. Had I not been deceased, I would have felt relieved.

[Aggeragua]

The first thing I noticed was that I was cold.

The next thing I noticed was that I was noticing things, which seemed contradictory to what had happened what seemed to be seconds ago.

It was dark, and strange in that place, but I could hear things, and they didn’t sound like things I would hear at the sight of an execution. There were, for one, voices. Odd voices, spewing forth words in odd tongue. Dripping noises, too, and the soft clinks of metal tools bounced back and forth across the air above me. The place had a strangely peaceful feel to it.

My approval rating of the room plummeted when I started screaming and bleeding from my neck. I think my eyes shot open, but I wasn’t sure, because everything was still dark. There was lots of pain in my throat. Bile crept up into it, but didn’t reach my mouth. Squirming was the only thing I could do after the vomit prevented me from screaming more.

The voices became excited, and understandable. “You idiot! What are you cutting?”

“It’s all over my finger bones!”

“Get the staples.”

“That is so disgusting.”

“Will you two shut up?”

Something entered my throat, not by means of my mouth, and began scooping its insides out. More bile projected from where my Adam’s Apple used to be. My limbs exploded into action as the panic overtook my body. There were shouts of alarm from around my head, and I felt very confused.

“Keep scooping, I think we’re almost done.”

“He probably won’t be able to talk now, you imbecile. You’re writing the report.”

“Shut up and give me the plugs.”

“I can’t, I have a spoon down his gullet. You go do it.”

“Remove the blasted spoon and give me the blasted plugs already!”

My body lurched as it tried to empty my stomach of its contents, but there was nothing left to regurgitate but stinking gases and a dribble of acids. My head jerked and jolted to no avail, as its movement was impaired by an outside force. One of my feet connected with something soft, and my arms flailed in sweeping arcs as they received insane orders from my brain to do something, anything, to stop the pain.

There was more lurching as what I thought were hands reached into my neck and fiddled around. I began choking viciously, and oozes and liquids rocketed forth from my mouth and nose. There were more shouts and jolts of pain.

“Juice his brain already.”

“Did we cut all the parts?”

“Do it before we drown in this stuff!”

“And the screws?”

“Juice it! Juice it before I remove your only gender defining feature with the battery, you miscreant!”

There was a popping noise, and everything went peaceful once more.

It was quiet for a while, then very bright. I blinked. Dark to light. My eyes appeared to be in working condition. I was staring at a very monotonous stone ceiling, and it made me a bit more confused, as I had been hung in the open air of a courtyard. Blink blink. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to sit up or not.

“He isn’t moving.”

“I told you to check if everything had been cut!”

“They were cut!”

“Maybe we should hit him.”

“And break his spine again? You know how bad that would look on the report?”

“Which you will be writing.”

“Don’t make me hit you, Cheever.”

There was too much noise, and I felt my upper body rising to tell the noise to stop. It didn’t hurt, which in my subconscious, registered as totally surreal, due to what had been going on in past minutes. My eyes fell upon human like things, but not human in a way as well. They were twisted. Their bones showed through their loose skin. Their eyes emanated a cold, golden glow that illuminated the cracks of time on their cheekbones. There were two, and they were about as intimidating as a fawn tied to a wagon wheel, and were arguing bitterly with one another.

I must have said something then, because they stopped, and turned to me. If they had eyebrows, they would have shot up.

“I’m writing the report.”

[Aggeragua]

I’d been saying a lot of things without realizing it, so at first I thought it was I who suggested to write the report. My suspicions were declared false when the true speaker came into view. A large violet wizard’s hat with a gold band around it poked into my field of vision, disrupting my view of the two surgeons. Underneath the wizard’s hat was a jaw that jutted out from the skin, revealing the off-white bone. I felt saliva drip on my neck.

The figure with the hat gripped my jaw with his right hand, and examined me, though I couldn’t tell how, as there didn’t appear to be a glow of eyes underneath the hat. My face was jerked up and down, left and right, my nose pried open with cold, sharp fingers, my mouth thoroughly searched. The two surgeons fidgeted with their tools the whole while.

The figure dropped its hand after retracting an unwelcome appendage into my ear, and nodded. The ludicrous hat bobbed up and down, and a raspy voice emitted from its interior. “I’ll make sure this goes straight to Varimathras. I may not even bother writing a report. Perhaps I shall go straight to him. Yes, I shall go straight to him.” The hat swiveled towards the two uncertain surgeons. “I’ll mention your excellent work. Keep the procedure writings, and make sure none of that gore gets on them.”

The figure with the hat left, and the two figures started moving about the room. They occasionally glanced at me suspiciously, their scalps creeping across their skulls as they raised what used to be their eyebrows. I looked down at my body. It was covered in blood. Probably mine. I doubted that the surgeons had accidentally hacked off one of their limbs in the process of whatever it is they were doing. I felt queasy, so I lay back down and craned my head about.

The room was a small one. I lay at the center of it, and was surrounded by shelves and tables. There were a great deal of manuals and handbooks on the shelves, and some diagrams of the anatomies of several creatures nailed to the shelf boards. Cases of phials and decanters were in small crates on the tables, each neatly labeled in a text I could not decipher. Models of bones, kits containing scalpels and screwdrivers, and parchments littered the rest of the stone room. Some of the papers were soaked with blood.

One of the strange surgeons had a towel and had begun wiping my body down in short, rough strokes. The other was shuffling through a pile of papers, tossing carbons and charts around wildly. I noticed they were clad in dull blue and grey robes and what looked like heavy rain boots. The one sifting through the papers had a single rod of hair that jutted from the top of his skull and up into the air. A gravity defying toupee, perhaps.

There were loud footsteps some time later, and three more strange figures entered the room, though they were noticeably different than the surgeons or the thing with the hat that had exited some time ago. They wore chain mail and dark scarlet hoods, and there were immense swords strapped to their sides. Two were very large. The other, flanked by the bruisers, was considerably smaller, almost feminine. It had a long curved falchion instead of a massive axe-like blade, and a cloak draped across its left shoulder. It pointed to me, and the two bruisers produced a stretcher.

The surgeons questioned the smaller figure. I couldn’t hear over the sound of the two soldier-like figures scraping my body off the stone table and onto the stretcher. It occurred to me that I was understanding the language of these things, which seemed odd to me because it wasn’t Common. It was more raspy, and harsh.

I was carried through stone halls. Several hundred stone blocks shot past my eyes as the trio of red hooded things marched my body on. I wondered if I should call for help, or try to swing my legs over the side. I wasn’t sure if I knew what help was in this strange language, and if I swung my legs over, the small figure would have tossed them back on the stretcher. They had swords, anyways. Best not to try anything for a while.

I then found myself in another monotonous stone walled room, except this one had a stone table that resembled an office desk, a long metal bench, and several wooden chairs that looked as if they would crumble beneath the weight of a house fly.

The stretcher was sucked out from under me, replaced by the bench. It was cold. I would have fidgeted but I was too boggled to do so. I heard the trio talking amongst themselves. Then I felt a hand upon my shoulder. A voice said, “It may be the future of the Forsaken. So guard it with your lives.”

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

[Aggeragua]

I lay on my back, vaguely aware of the dampness from the gore on my chest and the alien rings in and about my spine. The ceiling, one that looked the same as others I had stared at, were it a face, would have looked as hopeless as I looked, except the ceiling hadn’t been the victim of brutal surgery recently.

There wasn’t much to ponder, so I pondered nothing.

It was a long time before I heard footsteps. I noticed that I could have tried to sit up or maybe something constructive, but it hadn’t occurred to me to do so. The footsteps were of that sound that a woodblock makes when it is dropped from waist height onto a limestone surface. There were two sets of footsteps, one heavy, one light.

I continued to stare at the ceiling as I heard a scabbard scrape the stone walls and the ripples of some person’s robe brush against the floor. Had I been blinking? I didn’t notice if I had or had not been lately. I really needed to pick up on analyzing what was going on.

A trio of claws brushed against my chest. Someone said “You can leave us now. There should be no need for force.” Someone else started to reply, but the original voice said, “You can stand guard outside the door in the hall, but not in the presence of the Prize, Deathguard.” The voice was very soft, and were it a concrete object, may have resembled a trickle of honey.

There was some silence. The ceiling stared back at me.

The voice spoke again. It had that effect that voices do when they’re spoken in empty rooms. “Can you hear me?”

I tried nodding but I felt nothing, so I made a noise. The three fingers tapped gently against my sternum. “Alright,” it said. “Let’s try getting you up first.” He made an upward waving motion with his hands, and I brought my body up to a sitting position, my legs splayed out in front of my. I saw the figure. If it weren’t so inhuman, I would have thought it to be a kindly old man. But that wasn’t the case.

Acting upon the assumption that it was a former kindly old man, I decided that those that resembled him would be male, and those like the small Deathguard would be female. It made identification so much easier.

He nodded. The perfectly bald head gleamed. I realized that there was a brazier in the corner. It exaggerated the lines on his face, especially around the nose and eyes. The face was soft, but the bizarre glow in his eyes made him look secretly malicious. “Good. The Screw in your back works.” He clacked his teeth together and tapped two fingers together in thought. “Good, good,” he muttered again. It must have meant that me being able to move my back was a positive.

He stood up. He wasn’t very tall, but the robe was too big for him, and the small pauldrons on his shoulders sagged. It made him look even more willowy than he probably was. He put a bony hand on my knee. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm, either. It felt like a curved slab of wood had touched my skin – devoid of life, with no blood coursing through the labyrinth of veins in the body. A dead hand.

A dead hand. Consequently, a dead owner of a dead hand? I stared at him.

The hand patted my thigh. I realized as I looked down that my leg had become withered, somewhat. Lost muscle mass, most likely. It also had an unhealthy pallor, as if the white of bone had leeched through the tissue to secrete throughout the many pores. I heard him say, “Swing your legs off the table.” I kept staring at him. I was beginning to realize something, but I wasn’t sure what it was yet.

The hand removed itself from my knee, and the male thing shuffled closer to me, by my side, just to the right of me, in fact. The hands gripped my biceps. It felt like having two books pressed against my arms. “Swing your legs, now. Your back is screwed into good condition, so you shouldn’t have much trouble. No need to be afraid.” I kept staring at him. His skin became tighter over his cheeks and several pearly white teeth grinned back at me. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was the first thing I’d seen that betrayed humanity in these pale abominations so far. So I swung my legs over the right side of the table.

The books slapped my arms gently. “Good, good,” he repeated.

He was about to say something when I lifted myself off the table and stood up. My left leg buckled, but its sibling stayed strong and held. My left arm scrambled backwards and grasped the table’s edge for balance. The hands quickly grasped my shoulders and lifted me with surprising strength back to my feet. I felt tired. That took energy? My left knee quivered slightly.

“Ambition is the key to your rehabilitation,” the wooden man said. I nodded. He leaned closer. “You understand what I am saying?” I nodded. The weird grin reappeared on his face. He pushed me softly onto the table. “Sit,” he commanded quietly. I did.

He shuffled back two steps and dug under his robe. The hands were efficient and made only the necessary movements; lifting the edge of the robe, sweeping the other hand in and to the belt. No scrabbling around. The right hand came out with a small book, black and leather bound with a small insignia on the front. I did not recognize it.

He craned his neck and looked at the door. Then he nodded and dug under his robe again through the neck opening, and produced a small pair of wire framed spectacles. I stared at the spectacles. A human creation.

The glasses were brought up to his head and balanced carefully on a nonexistent nose. A small bump of cartilage was all I could see, and the frames slung perilously, as if in fear of falling to a grisly death. The hands opened the ledger, and the mouth moved. “I want you to tell me if you understand what I say.”

I nodded. I also made a noise that sounded like yurk.

The head drooped a bit, and another grin smeared across his face. I wondered if his skin would split down the middle, it was so tight over the bone. A finger pointed to something in the book, and he recited.

If the subject matter possesses not the physical capabilities
nor the mental agility, spirit, strength of will, etc (see
section seven paragraph nine for complete description of such
problems), the apothecary, who is qualified to do so, may also
conduct the testing of expertise in the field of alchemy, surgery,
engineering, and toxification of supplied subjects. The apothecary
is to follow the procedure outlined in the following section
in order to determine if the subject matter is capable of
operating in previously explained professions. Should the
subject matter fail to meet these qualifications, the
apothecary can decide to either shut down the subject
matter’s support systems or send him to testing
for manual labor.

I understood, and I nodded. Yurk.

The grin came back. The maliciousness in the glowing eyes intensified, I think. He looked suddenly very dangerous. “Well,” he said through his pearly teeth, “I think since you understand, you know what’s at stake.”

I did. I didn’t like it, but I did. I had to qualify. If I failed the qualification trial, I would die. I hoped I was as promising as the Deathguards thought I would be.

[Jondar]

Great work. I rarely say that in these forums, but you hooked me in early. I enjoyed it - it looks to be a long story, which I appreciate. Keep it up, but take your time in editing the story. I can't wait for more. :thumbsup:

[Aggeragua]

I am a rather poor editor because at first wheN i type things, they appear to be grammatically correct. It's usually when i post it when I notice I made a mistake.
And I can't find my "Edit" button on the page. :embarassed:

[Aggeragua]

There was no way I could tell how much time passed in that room, as there was no time piece or window to view the sky. I could tell, however, that the bald apothecary worked with and instructed me for a great number of hours. When he would leave, I would collapse on the stone table, and stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep, but exhausted nonetheless. Then, after a long stretch of quiet, he would return, and I would toil as I did before.

The bald apothecary switched back and forth between helping me gain my locomotive skills and my speech. It surprised and disappointed me to discover that my once conditioned body had been reduced to a state of frailty. It took a huge amount of effort to shuffle from one end of the room to the other. Several times, I collapsed to my knees, my muscles burning, my chest heaving for air. The apothecary would watch me recuperate, and would help me to my feet, before instructing me on how I should hobble around and where I should place my feet.

Occasionally, he would bring with him a cork ball with small indentations acting as grips. I would hold the ball in one hand, and squeeze for a specified period of time, before switching its position to my other hand. The first time I tried it, the ball rolled out of my hand and bounced along the floor. I was too weak to grip it. I thought that perhaps it was due to the state of my hands; the skin over the knuckles and wrist had tightened, and I could see the bone move around under my epidermis like a young spider working to break free from its egg.

I remembered speech being different than what the apothecary taught me, but I never discovered how so. I was taught to use the tongue to pronounce certain consonants, and the throat’s natural ability to produce guttural sounds to pronounce others. My first word was “dark”. The apothecary seemed pleased by that. Progress.

I discovered that while I lay on the stone table between teachings, I could immediately open my eyes at any time. I could then close them and return to regaining my energy. It wasn’t sleep, but it worked well enough.

During one of the rehabilitation sessions, the apothecary dropped the small leather-bound book onto the floor, and pointed to it. “Pick it up,” he told me. I bent at the waist, and shifted my weight to my right foot as I placed it forward ahead of me. My left hand found a hold on the spine of the book, and clutched it with much of my strength. I had to use the table to help straighten my body, but I managed to extend my arm and give the apothecary the book without having my shoulder tear off my body from strain. Progress.

I learned the letters of the language I was to speak quickly. I had been a good student before, and thankfully, my mind had not decayed nearly as quickly as my body had. I read letters off of a scroll with an elaborate insignia printed on the top. It took me several hours to finally say it, but my first sentence had the apothecary grinning with uncontrollable delight.

My finger had been down on the scroll, which was on the table, and I pointed to the insignia. A small line of text was printed on the lithograph picture. I narrowed my eyes to focus on the text. “Dark . . . Lady . . . watch . . . over . . . us,” I murmured.

The apothecary kept grinning at me. The maliciousness in his fiery eyes seemed strangely welcome. The sprites of excitement danced around his invisible corneas as his gaze lay on me. “Yes,” he said. “Dark Lady watch over us.”

Many sessions later, I shuffled around the entire room without taking a rest. I squeezed the ball in my right hand for two minutes, and in my right hand for one and a half. I could pick up the book from the floor in eight seconds. Progress.

Then, one time, I sat up as the heavy wooden door of the room swung open. The apothecary that I was so familiar with did not walk through, but the small Deathguard with the crimson cloak draped about its left shoulder, the two giants that had no doubt been standing guard at the door, and a bald man with wild hair colored green, huge mechanic’s goggles, and what appeared to be studded belts across his face forming an X at the nose filed in and looked at me. The wild haired man was dressed in a sleeveless linen tunic and worker’s pants, with many belts around his waist, draped across his shoulders, and around his legs, upon which hung numerous bottles, phials, ledgers, and satchels. I wondered how he could stand under the weight of all these amenities, but I knew not how to ask.

I was marched slowly out the room, and down the hallway. I struggled to breathe after several minutes of walking, and had to stop several times for breath. During one of these stops, the small Deathguard had spoken to the wild haired man in a raspy whisper of a voice. “Can’t you give him something that will make him move faster?”

The wild haired man shrugged. His voice was very tinny and sharp, and it caused me to flinch upon hearing it. “Of course I could, but Molokk told me not to. The last thing we want is our prize disintegrating because of an allergic reaction to swiftness potions.”

Apart from that, there was no conversation. The bruisers helped me up a flight of stairs that seemed unconquerable in my physical state. I noticed that even though I was very weak, I had been walking for a long time without much help from my escort. Progress.

They lead me to a room with a reinforced metal door, and shut me in it. I looked around. It was a huge improvement. There was a cot in one corner of the room made out of straw and light wood. A brazier hung from the ceiling, and it occasionally spat out ashes and embers that fluttered to the floor. A book case lined one wall. There were no books on it apart from a small black bible-like book, a thick, finely made book with gold writing on the spine that read “A History of Undeath”, and a ledger with no writing in it.

The trek down the stone halls had left me exhausted. I considered opening the encyclopedia and reading a small section of it, but thought better of it. Instead, I shuffled over to the cot, and lay down on it. Compared to the stone table, it was a feather-stuffed four poster bed. I closed my eyes and promised myself not to open them for a very long time.

[Aggeragua]

My eyes opened when I started contemplating reasons for past events.

Why had I moved? I had traveled a great distance from my previous cell to a room with a heavy metal door in a totally different environment. There had been no forewarning of this event. It was done mostly in complete silence. It surely wasn’t to assure my flight from my keepers’ grasp; I wasn’t even in proper physical condition to escape, let alone find my way out of the labyrinth I resided in.

I was continuously referred to as an important object: a prize, the “future of the Forsaken”. Was it to assure that I was kept safe from harm? I tensed. It was possible. Man was a victim of vice, and burglary of prized objects was surely not unheard of. Perhaps this was the case with me? But of what value was I? I barely remembered my studies, let alone know anything of value to the monstrosities that encaged me within these stone chambers.

Perhaps it was my awakening. But no, the book on the shelf was labeled “A History of Undeath”. Had I been through a ghastly process of reanimation? There was surgery. It was highly possible. I had heard tales of ghoulish necromancers raising armies of the dead, so the resurrection of one was far from unlikely.

The fact hit me like a hammer blow to the head. “A History of Undeath’. My unhealthy pallor. The tightness of the skins on my keepers. Fingerbone claws. I was amongst the Undead. These were zombies I was kept by. Though how had they come to their current state? Were they raised as I was? Or was there a different method?

I swung my legs over the side of the cot, and stood up. I was quicker doing so than I was what seemed an age ago. I shuffled over to the bookshelf, and heaved the large book to my chest. It was like carrying an anvil with accompanying blacksmith’s tools. I staggered uneasily to the cot, and collapsed upon it, the book to my right. I gasped lungs of air, and when my circulation stabilized, I picked up the book, and began to read.

A History of Undeath
As compiled by the members of the Royal Apothecary Society
Dark Lady Watch Over Us

Accreditation goes to the following esteemed members of the Royal Apothecary Society

Master Apothecary Faranell
High Apothecary Astan
High Apothecary Evel Bezelbaob
High Apothecary Molokk
Apothecary Argyle
Apothecary Corinthius
Apothecary Farquad
Apothecary Fyldemoer
Apothecary Keever
Apothecary Lycanus
Apothecary Theodore Griffs
Apothecary Zinge
Chemist Cuely
Chemist Fuely
Doctor Martin Felben
Doctor Herbert Halsey
Doctor Marsh

Contents
I. Foreword, as written by Master Apothecary Faranell
II. Origins of Undeath
III. Evolution of Undeath: Formation of the Thuzadin Complex
IV. Evolution of Undeath: Surgical Reanimation
V. Effects of Undeath on Primitive Life Forms
VI. Effects of Undeath on Developed Life Forms
VII. The Human Being: The Perfect Subject
VIII. Lady Sylvanas Windrunner
IX. The Breaking with the Scourge
X. Forsaken: Early Makings
XI. Forsaken: Varimathras and the Greater Organization
XII. Formation of the Deathguards
XIII. Formation of the Royal Apothecary Society
XIV. As We Stand Today




Foreword, as written by Master Apothecary Faranell

With the compilation of this book comes the gift of knowledge of who the Forsaken are and were in ages past. These texts go as far to illustrate the evolution of undeath to our current state, as well as outside interventions on the part of the most revered Lady Sylvanas Windrunner, the Banshee Queen. From most primitive raising of the dead to the surgical reanimation to the mystery of Gutterspeak being unlocked, the members of the Royal Apothecary Society present this encyclopedia of heavily researched information with great pride and good knowledge that it shall be invaluable in securing a strong position in Azeroth.

Whereas previously published essays, reports, almanacs, and the such were indeed revealing and thought-provoking pieces of scientific writing, they were not adequate for the difficult task of discovering what our state of undeath is and how we can utilize it for our best interests. A numerous amount of such previously mentioned texts have been assimilated into this ultimate book, but only those that have been scientifically proved by our most esteemed Apothecaries.

True, a number of texts were refused from the contents of this book, but that is due to the inaccuracy of their content or the vastly complex and/or theoretical basis for the writings. As such, these have been properly stored in the appropriate facilities for further reference; should such texts be required for research and even proved to be true, they will be implemented in the next edition of “A History of Undeath”, of which there are already a vast number.

The foreword went on for eighteen more pages, and I decided to skip it until I found a motivation to contemplate Master Apothecary Faranell’s words. Before I could flip to “Origins of Undeath”, I glanced back at the Accreditations. “High Apothecary Molokk” was mentioned on the list. No doubt he was a prominent figure in what I assumed to be a greatly esteemed research organization. The wild haired man had mentioned that Molokk did not want me to ingest foreign substances. Had he taken a personal interest in my being? Was I that important? Why?

Before I could formulate any theories on the subject, the door opened, and the Apothecary that had been assisting me through rehabilitation shuffled in. He looked at me, and nodded. “Good,” he said. “Now, we do as we have done.”

And I got up, and did as I had done countless times before.

[Aggeragua]

There came a day when the apothecary entered my room without the small black book. I sat up on my cot and looked at him. Draped over his outstretched left forearm was a long burlap sack with three needles holding it closed, and upon the wrist of the same arm hung a straight cane made of a cheap wood with a lead cap. I had progressed far enough into my language lessons to inquire what they were for. He shuffled over to where I sat and lay them on the cot. “You are going to attend a supervised tour of one of the primary fields of science. Put these on. You will look inconspicuous.”

Instead of thinking of reasons for why I should appear inconspicuous, I took the needles out of the sack and took out the contents. A grey robe with a tattered linen sash, heavy buccaneer boots, a frayed wide brim hat, and two ragged strips of linen cloth were all that were inside. I looked up at the apothecary. He crossed his arms and waited.

I stood up, and donned the clothing. I imagined I looked so inconspicuous that I wouldn’t notice myself if I ran into myself and made eye contact for twelve seconds. The cane’s grip was difficult to keep hold of, but the strips of cloth, when wrapped around my palms, acted as a grip, and made it easier. The apothecary nodded, and said, “Follow.” He began to walk out of the room. I found walking to be much easier with the cane to help me, so I had little trouble doing as he told.

Outside, the two guards were dressed differently. They had garb similar to mine. The small Deathguard was dressed somewhat more comfortably. She had abandoned her armor for a red tunic with lace around the neck, a crimson felt hat pulled down over her eyes, red pantaloons, and heavy black leather cavalier boots with the spurs unattached. I could see the hint of knee bone peering out from them.

We walked down the hall. The two Deathguards walked out ahead of the apothecary and I, and the small Deathguard walked somewhat behind. The hall had a low ceiling, and was, as I had expected, completely stone. No doubt it was far underground. Most structures that were not underground were constructed mostly with wood, were they not?

In the blink of an eye, I was not in the hall any longer, but in what appeared to be a tailor’s shop. I was stunned, and confused. I looked behind me, and there was no hall like the one I had been walking through a moment ago, but a solid stone wall instead. The apothecary walked towards the door. The three Deathguards were not in sight. The tailor nodded at me. He had a large scar over his jawbone and the expression one gets when one has seen a great deal of violence.

The apothecary, at the door, turned to me and muttered very quietly. “We are about to step into the public eye. You do not make eye contact with anyone. If possible, keep your eyes focused on my feet. Walk behind me. Don’t stare. Don’t attract attention.” With that, he opened the wooden door and stepped out. Without any other option available, I followed.

I wove through crowds, spending all my energy focused on the apothecary’s feet. It took a lot of work. Legs and shoes and boots of all shapes and sizes swung in and out of my line of sight. My legs began to ache, but I followed doggedly. If the cane hadn’t been provided, I surely would have collapsed. But I didn’t.

After what surely must have been four months of walking and weaving, interrupted occasionally by surges of panic caused by my nearly losing sight of my guardian, the apothecary’s feet stopped moving, and the crowds disappeared. I risked an upwards glance. We were at a stone portal that lead at a downwards angle. A thin, pale man with skin that seemed tighter than I have ever seen was at the mouth of the hall. He was completely bald, his sunken cheeks were plastered upon a face that betrayed a madness that is often required in religious zealots. A white tuxedo shirt was neatly arranged underneath a white linen coat, and a spotless white linen smock was wrapped around his waist over white linen pants. His shoes were white leather, and his gloves were white and devoid of wrinkles. He nodded at the apothecary, then looked me over.

The apothecary motioned towards the white clad man and spoke. “This is Alcibiades Sectus. You will stay with him until he returns you to my protection.” With that, he turned and left. I looked at Alcibiades, and he did something that I hadn’t seen for a long while. I saw a grin.

“Well then,” he spat. His voice was repulsively enthusiastic, but it was something I could not change. “He explained the rules. Only you can look at things in here. No eye contact with anyone though, except me or those who I point out. Feel free to question me, but only me. Now follow.” With that, he spun on the ball of his foot, and scuttled down the hall. I had trouble keeping up.

He talked as he strode, flapping his feeble arms and digits in wild windmills. “I will be showing you just a brief but revealing introduction on the field of surgery and its related sub-professions. It is not just what the name may reveal; it is a mind bogglingly wide science that includes many positions and possesses a vital role for the Forsaken.” He swung around suddenly, catching me off guard and nearly knocking me over with his unchecked hand. “A chamber in the heart of undeath, an artery in the reanimated body, an anchor in a society far superior to those of other races!” He rotated 180 degrees rapidly again, and continued scuttling. I followed, but from a greater distance this time.

A rotting wooden door that had little of its former fortitude left materialized out of thin air. Alcibiades produced a single skeleton key from his coat pocket and placed it in the lock. Considering the condition of the door, I was surprised he didn’t knock it over and continue walking. “A noble science, in any case. Undoubtedly, don’t you know. Just as necessary as alchemy, contrary to what some of those chemists may prattle about. The first thing I shall be showing you are some of the products of our hard but rewarding labor in the field.”

The rotting door swung open to reveal a stone wall right behind it. I was puzzled until Alcibiades shoved against the wall, which gave way, surprisingly, to his lank self. I could see every muscle in his body straining and bursting with energy. A secret door. A security precaution. Was it to make sure I wasn’t seen? Or just a service entrance? Was being paranoid? Alcibiades moved the door, chuckled, and waddled through the doorway he had revealed. The cane and I wobbled on in hot pursuit.

I gasped, and dropped my cane. The room I stepped into was freezing. Metal boxes ranging from pocket sized to twice the size of coffins were arranged in aisles. Alcibiades didn’t seem to notice. He charged over to a box the size of a human head, and started fiddling with the latch. He realized I was somewhat inattentive, and he beckoned me over. “Rest your eyes upon a lesser avatar of genius!” With that, he swung the box open violently. The pixies of madness danced fervently in his eyes, and the wide grin on his face added to his obvious enthusiasm.

I managed to hobble over after picking up my cane, and peered inside, to see what appeared to be a hunk of flesh garnished with frost.

Alcibiades began babbling. “Engineered to perfection, this is what every Deathguard relies on for sustaining his or her stamina in battlefield conditions. Grown with utmost care with the esteemed Astan’s own vitamicated growth formulae, this simple chunk of meat…” he grasped it in his bone fingers and brandished it. “This is what wins wars! What determines the course of the Forsaken!”

He dropped the meat back in the box and slammed it shut. If I hadn’t been so cold, I would have squealed in surprise. My reactions were so slowed that the squeal would escape in a few minutes if I was warmed up properly. Alcibiades’ hand flailed around, pointing to the other boxes. “And look here! Muscle tissue for construction purposes, tough as granite, and the basic building block of the fantastic abomination. And here! Brain matter for reconstruction in the medical science ward. Not to mention the chemically altered ghoul flesh for baiting purposes, the pure, unaltered human stock for testing, tendons, replaceable digit muscles, cartilage, reflex-model triceps…”

His wild face turned to me. I saw a look of surprise. It might have been caused by the sight of my frail body sinking to the ground. The floor was even colder than the air. I don’t see why I made a stupid move like that, pasting my body against it. The last thing I saw was one of the big Deathguards who guarded my door walking very briskly towards me.

[Foonyak]

This is a very catchy story. I'm hooked. Please don't stop writing.

-Foo

[Aggeragua]

My body decided to stop being useless and woke up. I wish it didn’t.

I was in a box. I could tell because my legs were pressed against my chest, and my feet drawn under me. Thankfully, it wasn’t early as cold as it was before, though the teeth of chill were still sunk lightly into my organs. The tradeoff was that it was a lot darker. I experimented with moving my limbs. It didn’t work. I was locked up tight.

The box wasn’t moving. I tried nudging my body to the left. The box didn’t move. I shifted and bounced my body against the right. It still didn’t move. I frowned. Then, with nothing to do, I started thinking about how helpless I was, and how uncomfortable I was. My discomfort became worse. Did people who lose their minds suffer this kind of discomfort? Thinking about that waylaid the subtle pains for a while.

How had I gotten in the box? I recalled the big Deathguard approaching me. I was under the impression that his primary duty was to protect me. Keeping me in a cold box with no way out seemed a poor way to guard someone. Had I been kidnapped? If I was, who would have done it? Alcibiades was the only one I could think of, but it was unlikely. The apothecary had been sure that he was on his side, or so it seemed. Was it the apothecary? I couldn’t find any reason why he would do so.

There isn’t much to do when you’ve been locked in a box. So I closed my eyes and rested a while.

Time crept by. The cold had disappeared from my skin, banished by the heat from my bloody rivers. I opened my eyes and discovered that nothing had changed. The restlessness prevented me from returning to a state of rest, but I could do nothing to tame it. It raged quietly around the box, making the stay more uncomfortable than I felt it deserved to be.

It was not until much later that I heard scraping noises. Like boxes stacked upon boxes being taken off each other to get to something within the pile. My eyes widened. There wasn’t anything I could do but wait, but whatever was going to happen next, I wanted to see it.

Scrape. Scrape. There weren’t any others encaged in boxes about me, I guessed. If there were, I would have heard noises before. The scraping got closer.

It was taking a while. Several minutes seemed a several weeks. The scraping was slow work, obviously. How many could be removing boxes? I guessed three. Two workers, one overseer. Or maybe just the two workers. Were the boxes heavy? Probably. Even empty, a box this size was a challenge to maneuver.

The scraping stopped. My box began to move in rough, unpredictable motions. I heard grunts and curses in an alien tongue. Then a wild voice. It sounded like a voice that belonged to a thin, pale man named Alcibiades. “Take it to the service door. We are late. The coach has been waiting for several minutes.”

The box stopped bumping about. It was resting at an angle where my feet were at a lower elevation than my head. A voice with a very thick accent of an unknown race said in a flat voice. “De box is too heavy. We take him out and carry him. No one see us anyway.”

Another voice, more guttural and booming, agreed, panting. “We’ll be using the service exit. And we’ll travel a lot faster. We could even sprint it. The box just weighs us down.” I started feeling cold again. Was I in the same freezer as before? I hoped not. I had few fond memories of that place.

The voice of Alcibiades wheezed. “Fine. Just hurry. We are off schedule. The coach has orders to depart in three minutes.” I heard two sighs of relief, and I felt the lid of the box being pried open. It was well sealed. The lock was beaten off, and I felt strong catches being torn off the sides. At least I would be able to stretch my legs a bit. Maybe.

The top of the box was ripped off. The lighting was dim, but I wished it was dimmer. Directly in front of me was a massive humanoid with short tusks and small, beady eyes. His skin was a deep green, and his muscles were enormous, rock hard and coating his entire skeleton. A scraggly beard covered his lower jaw. He was an orc; I had seen pictures of such creatures in my history books. Next to him was something I had never seen or heard of before. The nose was enormous, and the small mouth had a permanent snarl pasted on, as two enormous curved tusks jutted out of the sides and protruded out in front of it. The hair was a bright red, spiked high and wide. The skin was a deep sea blue, failing to conceal wiry muscles with the texture of steel casing. But the eyes were terrifying. They were blank. No emotion showed in the empty pupils. They were just tools of sight, unrevealing of what lay behind them.

Alcibiades was behind them, staring at me. A large pile of the meat lockers lay behind him. I was in the same room, unfortunately.

The orc locked his hand on my forearm and levered my upper body out of the box. Then he took me by my shoulders and hoisted me out of the box, with me facing him. I felt like a rag doll dangling in the wind. Resisting his grip was a pointless waste of energy. He must have been eight feet tall. At least my cramped legs were able to move. He stared at me for a moment, grunted, and turned me around. He began walking. I saw Alcibiades hustle ahead of him towards a familiar door.

Something happened. The red haired thing had a big knife in his hand, and it was soaked in blood. The orc’s grip slacked a bit. His beady eyes looked at me. He seemed confused. Alcibiades was yelling something. I fell towards my back, and the orc followed me. I landed on the stone floor, and had the wind knocked out of me by the impact of the huge orc’s body landing on me. My robe was soaked. I felt blood spatter on my face.

I gasped and wheezed for a long time. There hadn’t been that much noise, except for Alcibiades’ yelling and a door slamming. I craned my neck. The door was slightly ajar. There was no blood on it. I grunted. The orc was square on my body, his head resting to the right of my own. I couldn’t see his face. I couldn’t even see his back, since his shoulders were so broad and muscular.

Once again, I was stuck in a place where I couldn’t move.

I lay there, aware that my robe was completely soaked. Probably blood. I hadn’t seen any other liquid being spilled. The floor was cold, and the ceiling uninteresting. At least my teeth weren’t chattering; the heat from the orc kept me warm.

I saw another body nearby. It was sprawled in front of a row of small boxes that made up the wall of an aisle. There wasn’t any blood, but whoever the body was, it was either dead or out cold. It was a large body. Was it the guard I had seen before? It was very likely.

The red haired thing burst back in the room, and looked around. It was in a crouch, ready for anything, the big knife out in front of him. The room was quiet. It didn’t make any noise at all. I couldn’t even hear breathing. It stood stock still for several minutes, the empty eyes’ gaze slowly patrolling the cold room. The muscles in its legs didn’t even quiver, even after being fused into a crouch that couldn’t have been comfortable to stay in.

Then it moved. Satisfied that the room was empty? Cramps in the calves? Bored with the scenery? It slinked over to me, its body leaned forward, the legs taking slow but long strides. A hunchbacked creature. The knife disappeared. The big hands reached down towards the orc’s head. I noticed two fingers and a thumb, all huge and calloused. The hands took hold of the head. I closed my eyes. A very loud crack echoed through the room. I couldn’t help grimacing. Then the hands dragged the corpse off of me, and picked me up by the pits of the shoulders.

I was facing away from him. He hoisted me to my feet. I stood, albeit uneasily. Lacking a cane, I had to get a support. I hobbled as quickly as I could over to the wall of an aisle. I looked behind me. One of the aisles had been completely dismantled. All that was left was a huge pile of boxes, one of which was empty and open. They had buried me deep. The room, I observed, was otherwise the same, except now it lacked a red haired creature.

I stood, grabbing the wall of boxes, not sure of what to do. Dazed, I suppose I was, unable to think of a logical course of action to follow. Besides, it took all of my will power not to focus on the dead orc and the other body, and there wasn’t much will power left. My body was cramped and in pain, I was cold and lethargic, and I felt nauseous. My head hurt. I was miserable.

I barely even noticed when the small Deathguard, the other big Deathguard, and the apothecary lay me on a stretcher and took me somewhere.

[Aggeragua]

I was conscious, but my eyes were closed. I felt the chilled scalpel peel away the skin that covered my stomach. The left side of my head had been skinned too, and I felt a man insert hypodermic needles into my brain through the temple. A small tube pumped some life sustaining fluid into a hole that had been carved into my right side and into my intestines. Through the silent crashing and clashing of steel instrument on flesh and bone, I heard the small Deathguard and the apothecary talking gravely. I could feel their gaze on me. I felt it more than I felt the scalpel.

“But we lost Crassus,” the small Deathguard said. Her voice was void of emotion. Flat and unrevealing. The only personality it had was the rasp.

The silkier voice of the apothecary clicked his tongue, as one does in thought. “Crassus was expendable.”

The Deathguard’s rasp became harsher. “We should not have lost him. He was attacked by an amateur thug.” She seemed more disappointed in his performance than by his death. He must have been the body I had seen in the freezer.

The apothecary sighed. “You continue to see him as nothing but a corpse. He was only disabled. The surgeons can fix him. Once we…”

I heard a snarl. “The surgeons can’t fix him. They’ll change him. We can’t afford Crassus being lost while in a combat-ready condition.”

A pause. The scalpel had completely opened up my belly and was probing the walls of my stomach for abnormalities. “Explain your peculiar choice of words, Deathguard.”

The rasp responded. “Alcibiades was a surgeon. If we now have those who wish to kidnap the prize in the Surgeon’s Quarter, then we cannot trust the surgeons to fix our Deathguards. Suppose we gave them our Deathguards to fix, and one of the surgeons was no longer a servant of the Dark Lady. He could alter his loyalties. He could change his mentality, recruit him for…”

The apothecary cut her off. “I understand that. The Surgeon’s Quarter is no longer safe. No, unless we find a surgeon who can be fully trusted, we will not repair Crassus.”

“And what of these surgeons, apothecary? If the Surgeon’s Quarter is not safe, it is totally possible that these scientists are in league against us.” The Deathguard was a suspicious character. The apothecary, if he knew that the surgeons were not all loyal, would have taken extreme security precautions.

He explained himself. “These are two of the sons of Apothecary Lukas Scibor. They remain as loyal after death as they were in life to each other. Such is unheard of amongst the Forsaken, but they have convinced themselves that they serve the Dark Lady first, and each other second. Scibor is obsessed with the execution of the Dark Lady’s plans, and he somehow passed that obsession on to his sons.”

There was another thoughtful clicking of the tongue, and the apothecary followed up. “You’ll have to find a replacement for Crassus. I, of course, assume that Goris has not been harmed.”

The small Deathguard replied, “He will continue to protect the prize. I will request from Varimathras one of the Elites.”

I sensed the ugly grin of the apothecary. “See? Already he has been replaced. Crassus was expendable.” His voice hardened. “The Wadjet, however, is not. I trust you have sent him his payment. If we were to lose him to a higher bidder, we would be at a disadvantage.”

There was a silence penetrated only by the humming of some machine and the soft sucking noise of the needle in my head being extracted, and a slightly larger one be inserted into the veins beneath my eyelids inside my left socket. It lasted quite a while, but was finally broken by the apothecary. “You understand, of course. Deathguard, the temporary loss of Crassus is a blow, a heavy blow. But he is replaceable. We have many like him in the ranks of the Elite. But there are few like the Wadjet. Very few. If he was to be convinced to work for our enemies, and be tasked with abducting the prize, it would be highly likely that we would fail in our task of protecting him. That is why I ask him to be paid so promptly. It is essential that he remains…”

I felt the skin on my stomach fold into its original position and a wheezing voice say, “Apothecary, he wakes.”

I felt a sharp stinging in the back of my head, and my eyes shot open against my will. I saw the infinitely large needle extract itself from my eye and shrink into nothing more than what it really was. There was a pale man with what appeared to be a diamond cutter’s lens over his right eye seated near my hips on a large metal chair, and he was sewing up my stomach with a strange, bulky metal device with a pistol grip.

The apothecary and the Deathguard terminated their conversation. I was patched up in silence.

The two surgeons mounted me on a stretcher. The Deathguard walked, they followed. I couldn’t see the apothecary as I was lead down the monotonous stone halls of no doubt another undead compound. I saw us pass through a stone portal, and into a fairly large room with the ugliest contraption I have ever seen.

It had a wagon cart’s bed, with wooden framing. Scraps of iron had been bolted to the sides of the bed as a means of protecting its cargo. Two enormous wooden wheels with iron rigging supported the entire contraption. The front was an array of spikes, arranged in a fan-like pattern, all sticking outwards. They were all crusted with blood. Atop the spikes was a wooden stool, with a hulking man in a tattered hood and cape atop of it. I saw beneath the hood a hard face with a set jaw, and realized that it was the other guard assigned to protect me. Attached by a huge gear to the right side of the wagon was an enormous catapult arm, the loading dock of it adorned with more nefarious looking spikes. The whole thing smelled terribly for good measure, and flies swarmed the entire thing, as if they were bees that did so around a hive.

The two surgeons took me to the back of the cart, and I immediately felt sick and extremely uncomfortable. It was a corpse cart, but adorned with armaments and protective plating. I was placed amongst a small legion of the dead. Almost instantly, the small creatures, of both crawling and buzzing nature, attacked my flesh, assaulting every inch they could. I kept my eyes sealed shut as tight as I could seal them. Before they locked themselves closed, I saw the small Deathguard climb in after me and lay down in a position that looked like she had been tossed carelessly into the back of the wagon.

It was quiet except for the buzzing of flies. I focused primarily not thinking about the multitude of insects that inhabited the wagon bed. It was close to impossible. The wagon suddenly jolted forward, and a piercing squeal bounced off the stone walls. This was to be a most uncomfortable journey to a place I would no doubt despise, I could not help telling myself, and one I was not looking forward to it.

[deathfromabove]

This is a great sotry so far.

I am looking forward to an update

[Aggeragua]

The wagon ride was intolerable. Though I tried with all the will within me, I could not remain still. I twitched, wiggled, and whimpered pathetically as the metal-bound wheels trundled along some street. I caught a glimpse of the Deathguard, and she hadn’t moved a muscle, despite being almost completely covered in insects. A thousand tiny legs supported the mandibles of a countless hundred of creatures that tore at my body, millimeter by millimeter. Saliva coated my skin. The mad droning of the swarm filled my ears, drowning out my thoughts.

It was an eternity. The hell could not have lasted any shorter than that. An infinite number of minutes spent in that pool of madness. How could one bear it? The Deathguard remained still and unresponsive. How? How could she? Did she not feel the microscopic claws digging at her cheeks? The slickness of the insect saliva on her skin? She must have. She must have! No one can bear this torture, undead or not. Was she trying to prove her superiority? Damnation, I had no need of this! This never had to occur! We could have walked away, inconspicuously. But no, no, no! They placed me in this place, this foul, foul place! Did they revel in my agony? My horror?

My jaw ached from all the clenching, but it was almost unnoticeable. Even the insects and their doings faded from my thoughts. My mind was filled with a seething cloud of ponderings. The apothecary! No doubt he had placed me in the wagon. It was an experiment. It was all an experiment! I was their plaything of biology. They used me to learn more about the mechanics of the human body! They would scrap me when I became a withered shell of what I once was, and toss me into the fire or perform surgery on my. The very idea of their grubby, rotten fingers probing inside me made my gut tighten. They would not do such things! I would not accept it!

The wagon was no doubt a part of the apothecary’s plans, though what he had in stock for me I did not know. Better yet, I did not care. Whatever was to be done to me would not come to pass! I would escape. The Deathguard…how could I maneuver around the Deathguard? She was motionless…was she incapacitated? Asleep? No, impossible. Even I had not experienced sleep, and I was most certainly not one of them. Conscious, was she? I could take my chances. Damn this buzzing and its impairing of my train of thought!

I must have faded, for I came to being dragged off the wagon bed into the night sky. The driver and the small Deathguard, the latter still partially covered in insects, were standing me on my feet on a cold cobblestone road in a grey grass valley. I cried out and recoiled from them. They were pawns of the apothecary, the hands of the experiment directors! They would not touch me. They would not!

The Deathguard and the driver had confused looks on their faces. I was weak. My legs already began to buckle, but I forced them to remain steady. My head was swimming. I slapped the air in a feeble attempt to banish the insects from my body. Some crawled into my open mouth, and I spat them out, at the feet of the duo. I snarled at them, slapped at the air again, and crashed onto the road.

Instantly I felt the Deathguard and the driver at my side, assessing the damage. I clawed at their faces, spat in their eyes. They were feeble movements, but they pestered them, which was about all I could do. These bugs! Why were there so many? I felt them crawl down my throat, and panic seized the controls in my brain. I howled, a piercing shriek of both terror and frustration. I saw my fingers, the skin already eaten from the bones, grab my pale skin and begin shredding at it. The driver immediately held onto my wrists, but I managed to break what appeared to be a seam on my left pectoral muscle. The scream had disintegrated into but a gurgle, but I continued. The insects. The insects! The insects! Why did they not cease their relentless assault?

I was kicking and flailing and wiggling with every scrap of energy left in me. The Deathguard was preparing a hypodermic needle. Poison! It must be poison! I tried kicking at her, but she was too close to me to do so. I felt the maddening creeping of the insects in my chest cavity. They were inside me! They were tearing me apart! I groaned and thrashed my head to one side. My skull slammed against a cobblestone, and I heard a metallic crack in my neck. My head would thrash no longer, nor scream. In fact, my whole body had gone still. I was helpless. The insects, they would eat me, a helpless to-be corpse. I was corroding far too quickly. I would be but a heap of bone!

Panic completely overtook me. I could not think, all I could do was lay there and die, as I had done before.

The Deathguard had the needle at my skin but had not penetrated it yet. The driver screamed at her. “He is not one of us, but he is not living! The toxin, inject it!” I felt the needle bite into my skin and bleed into my veins.

Peace at last.

[Aggeragua]

Peace is underrated. Never had I felt such a state of tranquility before in my life. All the crawling terrors, the buzzing horrors, had been purged from my body, and my mind relaxed noticeably. True, I was incapable of movement, but that was a small price to pay for the wonderful stillness that engulfed me. It was a stillness that remained mercifully present even as the Deathguard and the driver lifted me off the ground and hauled me down the eerie cobblestone road.

As my seemingly boneless carcass bounced along in the hands of the undead, I began thinking. This was not a difficult thing to do, as I was not only experiencing a wonderful state of peace of mind, but also that I did not have to focus on bothersome physical movement that would distract me.

Why was it that the insects affected me so much, but the Deathguard hardly noticed? I reflected on the fact that the corpses in the wagon bed did not show great signs of decay. In fact, they had appeared to be in relatively fresh conditions. Was it discipline? I quickly dismissed that option. Discipline alone could not stand against such a mental onslaught. No, it must have been a biological difference. Perhaps my body’s chemical makeup differed from that of the undead? Had the driver not screamed, “He is not one of us, but he is not living”?

As a human body crosses into the stage of undeath, there are, no doubt, some biological changes that occur. I was amongst the living dead, yet I saw few signs of active decay. The skin is tight across the bone, and changes to an unhealthy pallor. So what was it that made me different from the rest of those I was amongst? Perhaps it had something to do with my somewhat odd title.

Intriguing, my title. Why had I constantly been referred to as “the prize”? I had no real knowledge about the fields that these undead scientists were so learned in. I was physically weak. So what was it that set me apart from the others? I began sorting and discarding these characteristics mentally. I was slightly different physically, but not enough to make a very noticeable difference. My inability to sleep, perhaps? That could be it, though I had no real evidence that others did the same. My chemical makeup? A possibility, but I hadn’t the tools to collect data to reach a conclusion on that.

I saw a building pass by my field of vision. A town? I saw more structures composed of rotting wood and ivy-infested spires. When, no, if they fixed me up, I would have to mine for information in whatever texts I could get my hands on.

I was brought into a dingy hovel lit by a single oil lantern. A bookish thing with a thick monocle turned away from an alchemical desk and pointed to a surgery table, upon which I was placed. To my surprise, my immobility was cured rather quickly, in perhaps three minutes. The lanky man placed a vise-like device around my neck, and fiddled with a number of attached drills and clamps, until I felt my vertebrae click back into place. The device was removed, and he hid it away before returning to his work. The simple procedure had taken less than ten minutes.

I lay on the table as the Deathguard and the lanky man exchanged words. The driver had disappeared. “Where is he?” the Deathguard rasped. “He was supposed to be here by the time we arrived.” An edge of irritation cut through the cool air. I saw a hint of moonlight outside the hovel. I gathered she wasn’t talking about the driver.

The lanky man shrugged his shoulders. “Heard his wagon got ambushed. Heard he got away, making his way here on foot. They thought the prize was on his wagon, not the corpse cart.” The Deathguard nodded, and sat her scarlet-clothed self on a chair, to no doubt wait for the ambushed one.

I tested my locomotive capabilities and found that I was able to walk normally. I would no doubt need a cane for longer-than-average journeys, but I could move my limbs and head without much difficulty. Excellent. There was not much room to pace in that one room hovel; the lanky man fiddled with his phials and valves, the Deathguard paid me no heed, and the table prevented me from reaching the door. This being the case, I hobbled to a series of shelves, curious as to what was placed upon it. I discovered it was a bookshelf, with most of the space taken up by boxes of chemicals I had never heard of before. There was, however, one book I was familiar with, A History of Undeath, as well as a few other ragged text books: The Alchemist’s Bible, Exploring the Functions of the Thuzadin Complex and the Journey from Death to Undeath, R.A.S Official Toxin Field Manual, Surgery and Reconstruction.

I had been the subject of so many surgeries that I removed the last book I saw out of curiosity. As I felt the strangely reassuring weight of the text book in my feeble hands, I noticed that I was somewhat surprised at my thoughts. True, I had been the subject in several surgeries already, two of them horribly bloody and painful. Why was it that I suddenly felt an urge to learn more about it?

I shuffled to the stone table and sat on the edge, placing the clumsy book beside me. Was it what the military people called reconnaissance? Know thy enemy? That didn’t seem right. True, the surgeries were not memories that were fond, but they had saved me from...something, had they not?

The book held wonders. As my deteriorating index finger flipped pages, I let my eyes feed hungrily upon the information within. Tables, surgery procedures, tools, diagrams, and graphs all stared back at me. I realized I was drinking from a fountain of knowledge that had taken ages to compile into one packet of paper. I spotted so many things that had become familiar to me; a diagram of the Auchlean Screw-based spinal cord support frame, a detailed paragraph on how to removed the skin from the muscle with a tool referred to as a Bolt/Stitch Biomass Repair Kit (v. 07.22301), and even a cross section of the temple to show where to insert what needles when.

Was I staring back at the very force that kept me alive? The words on the yellowed paper became a blur as I felt the cogs and pulleys in my head spin and turn. It must be easy to keep me alive. The procedures outlined in the text book seemed hugely complex and expensive. Then why was I being kept up? That same question returned in force, and I felt my hand retreat to my forehead so I could assume a pondering position.

If I was to make an escape, or be separated from my protectors, I would die without their support. Or would I? Whoever was en route to this hovel had been ambushed under the assumption that I was traveling with that person. If they wanted me so bad, would they not know of my precarious condition? IF this was the case, and I was sure it was, wouldn’t they possess the proper tools and skills to keep me functioning? The apothecary had mentioned that the “Surgeon’s Quarter” was no longer safe. Were the surgeons allied to the force that strove to capture me? If so, then my physical condition was assured.

…Or was it?

I decided that I would look further into the mysterious texts outlining the surgical procedures of the undead. Knowledge is power, and in my case, information could mean life. I would take every opportunity I could to understand more about this strange science. Opportunities would be rare. I would not let them go to waste.

The Deathguard stood up suddenly, and unsheathed her falchion in what must have been a fraction of a blink of an eye. The sword swept up to rest against her breast as she moved to the side of the doorway, her body melding with the rotting walls. The lanky man dragged out a heavy firelock from some hidden pocket in his garb, and the heavy click of the hammer being locked into place echoed in the small room. Silence reigned.

The apothecary shuffled into the room. The lines on his face had deepened, and the spirits of energy seemed to have been evicted from his eyes. His stride had not shrunk. The Deathguard instantly gripped him by the shoulders and sat him down. “Apothecary,”” she rasped softly. “I trust you are not hurt?”

The apothecary had a grey sorcerer’s hat and robe on, and I spotted a number of shreds in both. His wizened hand took the hat off his head and tossed it on the floor carelessly. “I live, Deathguard, live to see another moon over Tirisfal. But we have reached a state of emergency. Never had we thought our enemies so desperate as to attempt a direct assault on our forces. But it has happened. The wagon on which I rode was attacked not by hired mercenaries, but by the sentient undead.” The eyes stared up at the Deathguard and a sudden pyre of hatred ignited in each pupil. “They have rebelled against the Banshee Queen. The blood of her servants has been spilled on her doorstep.”

A silence hung in the room, thick with emotions I could not detect. The Deathguard rasped again, a rasp penetrated by the hiss of hatred. “We are at war.”

The apothecary nodded. “Yes, Deathguard. This splinter group has taken desperate measures. Another direct attack against the prize is imminent. You are to increase the security detail attached to him. I will take this news to Varimathras tomorrow. Then I will return here, and we shall initiate our grand experiment.”

All eyes rested on me. I felt very uneasy.

[Aggeragua]

The Deathguard kept me in the hovel while the bookish man and the apothecary departed. She pointed to the books on the shelf, and I knew that I was to keep myself busy for a while. I instead picked up the book that I already had and continued flipping through the pages. They must have numbered close to eight hundred, and I could not help but feed hungrily on the information it contained.

The doorway became dark, and I thought that a panel had been put over it to conceal the contents of the shack. It was not the case. A hulking man in ornate plate armor, who could not even fit through the rotting portal, stood there, blocking out the moonlight. A dull, constant heave emitted from his chest. The Deathguard saluted him and rasped off orders quickly. “Guard the house. Make sure none see the prize. I’m going to get into uniform and check on the others.” With that, she snaked her way out past the gargantuan soldier into the greenish night air.

Though the text was a captivating piece, I could not help but stare at the behemoth who had turned his back to the contents of the shack and stood fast. I guessed him to be at six feet four inches, but could not estimate his weight, as the armor that was piled upon him made him appear to be several tons heavy. The purplish steel pauldrons had flowing from beneath them a long royal colored cloak that danced quietly on the wooden floor.

The Deathguard returned in full military attire. The wicked falchion at her side bore a razor edge. A small buckler decorated with skull designs was strapped to her left forearm with a scale mail bracer. Her footsteps were silent, though I could see solid metal armor on her person. She ordered the colossal guard away, and she stepped inside the shack. The face beneath the red hood glared at me and spoke. “There is much danger. You are to read your texts and think not of stepping outside this place. Do not show yourself to the world outside. Take orders from only the apothecary or myself.” With that, she spun on her heel and the Deathguard once again stalked out into a most curious evening atmosphere.

It was only natural that as soon as she spoke those words that I would not be able to focus on the books, no matter how fascinating the word within were. Sitting on the stone table, I craned my neck to see outside the door. Unfortunately, it was only an inadequate sliver that provided vision of the happenings outside the hovel. Against the orders of the Deathguard, I slithered off my perch and pasted myself against wall of the shack. I then began to inch along the deteriorating panels to my right until I had a clear view of the outside. I found a position in the corner, near the alchemist’s table, and crouched, hiding myself with a small tray holding bottles.

I could see a set of stairs leading to a building that much resembled a town hall, though it had decayed and fallen into disrepair. A dead tree stood to the left, and nothing else showed itself. I resisted the urge to fidget or pull the book to my side and read quietly for fear of missing any events that were to follow.

It suddenly struck me how quiet everything was. The wind was nonexistent. Something cold grabbed me in the gut and wrenched hard. I felt my eyes darting around in a pointless attempt to find a place where I could hide should trouble arise. The hut was small, so small! If I was to be assaulted, I would surely die. My fingers quivered slightly, and I clasped my hands together to stop them from shaking. Where had my protectors gone? Perhaps it would be to my advantage to flee. But to where? If ever I were to escape, I would no doubt be stranded alone in a land seething with danger. My clasped hands were shaking, and I gripped tighter. Where were my protectors? I was open to attack! Surely they could not let that happen?

It happened so quickly.

A black wind swept into the room, a wind with eyes that glowed with some energy absent in the eyes of the others I had seen. The room went pitch dark, save for those terrifying pupils that had locked on me. I found my gaze had met his, and for one split second, I saw that it was a fanatic that had entered the room, a thing devoted to a cause beyond my understanding.

There was the flash, a bang! The darkness disappeared for a moment as something exploded outside. The black wind made the room dark again, and engulfed me. I saw the eyes but a thumb’s distance from mine. Long rods of force wrapped themselves around my body, squeezing until my eyes bulged and my back screeched.

Then the wind disappeared in a flash. The eyes widened in surprise as the thing staggered back, and I saw that the assassin was a humanoid with a billowing black cape about it and a skin tight black hood. I saw a hole where the thing’s voice box should have been. It swiveled about, and I saw in the doorway the Deathguard, her eyes blank under the red hood, with a firelock in her left hand, the barrel smoking. She did not check to see whether her opponent was dead, but instead pasted her back against the wall and reloaded the heavy pistol in mechanical motions, and quick as she had come, she disappeared back into the screaming night.

I saw the tree was ablaze, and bolts of fire arced down from somewhere behind me into the town. Small fires in the grass licked hungrily towards the town hall structure. I saw figures with the distinctive red hood of my guardians wielding short bows, firing them back at the origins of the flames. My jaw dropped as one of them was hit with by a flaming ball. He was thrown back several paces, and fell on his back, immobile. As his body burned, his companions ignored him and continued firing.

I could not evaluate the battle as I could not see how the origins of the fires were doing, yet I feared that my protectors would be defeated. What would happen if that was the case? I began inching towards the door, preparing for a mad, undirected retreat across the burning ground into the unknown should the need arise.

Another black wind swept into view, rushing across the smoking foliage towards the two remaining deathguards from my left. One of the deathguards, displaying remarkable reflexes, turned and skewered the attacker on an arrow he had been preparing to fire. The black wind dissipated into another hooded humanoid, and it collapsed into the grass, its skin fuelling the flames.

An explosion rocked the shack, and I was thrown against the wall as the one behind me was torn open. Splinters of wood, shards of glass, and chips of stone hailed on the inside of the furniture and myself. I gasped as a hot lance of pain clawed across my chest, and looked down to see that my robe had been torn open by debris. Panicked, I fled the shack, intent on burying myself in some place where the attackers would never find me.

I flailed out into the smoking, hot air, and ran. My feet pounded the ground heavily as I slipped and staggered away from the burning wreckage. Another deathguard erupted in an enormous pyre. I ran into a cast iron fence, and dashed alongside that. It led northwards, away from the fighting, towards a place better than the skirmish site. In my haste, I tripped, and crashed onto the grass. Thankfully, it was moist, not burning, and as I scrambled to recommence my flight, I looked back and stopped in shock.

There was a hill behind the burning shack, and on it, surrounded by flames, was a fight. Not a battle, but a dirty brawl. The deathguard with the purple armor was at the center of the hill, brandishing a massive sword, and he swung and thrashed and carved at a weak looking man in a red robe. But the weak man dodged and dove away from the decapitating swings of the warrior, tossing off rays of flame and sudden bursts of fire at the terrifying warrior, who shrugged them off. Further down the hill, a line of black robed figures was shooting flames into the town and at a new threat, the Deathguard and four of those under her command, who leapt out of cover and charged towards the spell casters. A black wind leapt out and engulfed a deathguard, but was brought down by a swift arrow. Both figures collapsed.

The black robed figures were losing. The Deathguard was upon them, slashing their bodies apart with her sword, crunching skulls with her shield. Her pistol flamed, and a skull exploded in response. Red hoods wielding broadswords hacked at their fire-throwing opponents, who fled from the attackers, to no avail. One by one they dropped into the flames, twitching and leaking bodily fluids.

The red robed figure then unleashed a wave of flames that spread out from his feet into the town. The shack I had been staying in disappeared, and I saw the purple armored deathguard fly into the air, out somewhere into the night. The other red hoods were either incinerated where they stood or collapsed onto the grass.

The red robed figure looked at me from so far away, and I swore it spat at me.

Then it was gone, vanishing into a cloud of magical energy and smoke. The silence returned in an instant, broken only by the soft crackling of flaming wood and the belching of smoke from the hill. I stood in the damp grass with blood oozing from my chest, shocked, as the world burned around me.

[Aggeragua]

Edited: Double Post. whoops.

[Aggeragua]

The times following the skirmish when orange fires devoured the buildings were tiring and tense. Deathguards patrolled constantly, or tended to the wounded, who choked up blood and twitched as they waited for release into the nether. The deathguard with the purple armor shut me inside a side room in the town hall, restricting me to a tiny cube with a bookshelf and a cot that took up half the space. The book had many things an of unreadable nature; blacksmithing manuals, bare maps of the countryside, lists of supplies ordered aeons ago. However, salvation from boredom materialized on the bottom shelf. A ragged copy of A History of Undeath was hidden behind a thick textbook on smelting. I liberated it from the forgotten recesses, and gripped it tight in my hand. But before I could open it, gallop away on a steed of ambition to a meadow filled with information and diagrams of the enchanting, I was hit by a wave of exhaustion. The book fell from my hand, and I leaned forward on the bookshelf, my eyelids drooping. Shaking my head vigorously, I managed to stumble to the cot and lay upon it before I closed my eyes and thought of nothing for a long while.

I opened my eyes to find myself still in the windowless room. With nothing else to do, I located the book that I had located before, and flipped it open to a section of a chapter titled “XIII. Formation of the Royal Apothecary Society. Section U. The Sciences”. My spine straight against the wall, I placed the book on my lap and began to read.

Time shot by as I delved into what seemed to be a bottomless well of knowledge. There was a complete description of each of the sciences: Alchemy, Surgery, and Engineering. The definitions of these professions were each over six pages long. Then came the articles explaining the sub professions of each: flask brewing, toxin studies, plague studies, bio-mechanics, organ preservation and processing, explosive construction, rocketry, and countless other things that I had never heard of before. I flipped pages hungrily as I learned about the invention of the Adamantite Grenade, the first demonstration of the Featherby Distillation Process, the uses of the elixir. I soaked up the facts, memorized the charts. I was hypnotized by the words and numbers that marched into my skull, unable to do anything but read and turn pages.

I had just completed drooling over a diagram of a v.8 i33 + ultra-strong pectoral stitching for something called an “Abomination Construct” when the door to my prison opened. How long had it been? A few hours? Days? The Deathguard, her red hood cast off, was in what I suppose one could call urban disguise: blue linen pants tucked into high leather boots, a red button down tunic with lace at the wrists, and red fingerless gloves. I noticed for the first time that her hair hung in long black clumps down her head, falling down over her face and left eye. A monstrous pistol was thrust into her girdle, as was her wicked-edged falchion and a sheathed knife.

I closed the book and looked at her. She remained standing in the doorway, and spoke, her voice strained and harsh. “You will move again, very soon. You will be escorted to a stronghold by a warlock,” she spat the last word, “and myself, as well as another deathguard. The apothecary will rendevous with us at the stronghold. You are permitted to bring two books that I will provide. You will be ready to depart within the hour.” With that, she reached back behind the door frame, retrieved two thick text books, and tossed them on the floor. Then, she left, marching down the hall to attend to some business that I cannot even bother to guess the nature of.

I put the book in my lap to the side, stood, and collected the texts the Deathguard had dropped. I was pleasantly shocked to see that they were books devoted to surgery: Surgery and Reconstruction and The Reconstruction Manual. How had she known? She was very observant, I decided. She had seen my interest in the surgery book in the hovel, no doubt. Still, it was unnerving that she had paid that much attention to me during that time.

I sat on the cot, waiting for the time of departure to come, and it did so faster than I expected. The Deathguard came, nodded at me, and left again, and I followed her into another night haunted with an alien green glow. In front of the town hall was an enormous man. Though his body was hunched over, he must have stood over seven feet tall, for he loomed over me when the Deathguard and I approached him. He had black pants and boots on, and an aged harness covered his chest and back from which hung two crossed cutlasses, clumsy beasts of weapons. I wished it covered his face. His lower jaw was missing, and his tongue hung from the top of his mouth, dropping bodily fluids. His eyes, unlike all of the other eyes of the undead, were dark, devoid of a mysterious glow. His cheeks and forehead were covered in scars, long, jagged scars that twisted the face further.

An enormous hand lifted and saluted the Deathguard. I gaped in awe. The Deathguard and he ignored my stunned expression. She said to him, “Where are the others?”

A voice that chilled me replied. It was disturbingly soothing voice, silky and low, that emanated from the behemoth’s chest, and the consonants seemed very soft. “They keep the warlock at bay in the stables. He is under close watch.”

The Deathguard nodded and walked, and as the behemoth and I followed, she nodded approvingly. “Good.”

She had taken but a few steps when she stopped. I felt tenseness from her as I saw a figure walk towards us from up the cobblestone road. It had a tall black wizard’s hat on, and had a robe that seemed as if it were made of shadows, a constantly warping thing that billowed and swished as the figure walked. A tall black collar stuck out from a black mantle that protected the thing’s shoulders, and from that, a great black cloud gushed. I felt fear, for that was the cape that had nearly killed me some time ago. I felt myself backing up, but the colossus behind me arrested my retreat.

As it approached us, the figure planted its staff down in the ground. It was a tall black thing that had a headpiece shaped like a claw that leaked a bright purple smoke. “Deathguard, you really didn’t expect to be departing without me? Surely, you wouldn’t refuse the services of a humble spellsmith such as myself?” I could not see the thing’s eyes behind the wide brim of the hat, but I could see a grin, a diabolical black-toothed grin stretch itself to the limits. The robe continued to billow madly, though I felt not even a small breeze.

The Deathguard stared past the figure. “Warlock, I have orders to…”

The black clad figure waved a hand in dismissal and stuck what should have been his nose into the air, and as he tossed his head back, I saw a finely sculpted male face. The finger bones had been stained black. “Oh, Deathguard, lament not about lies. It makes for excessively boring talk. I see you are doing well, might I be so bold as to observe. The tunic fits you. You have been partial to red for quite some time.” He cackled lightly, a bone-shaking laugh that stank of the strange. “It must stem from your proclivity for violence! You always have been somewhat persnickety about fashion, indeed you have. Ah, I see you have graced us with your gorilla. Goris, you are looking divine this day.” He bowed dramatically towards the enormous protector. “And the prize! Allow me to introduce myself.” He swept off his hat, revealing a wild tangle of hair that curled and uncurled, as if it were alive, a forest of sentient tentacles. “I am his most…”

The Deathguard snapped at him. “Terreur.”

The warlock, stuck in mid-pose, grinned, his eyes dancing diabolically. “Yes, that is correct, Deathguard. Terreur, Warlock Maxmillian Cornelius Terreur, and I shall be your honored guide to a far off land.”

Goris gently pushed me aside, and stepped forward. Terreur hadn’t even moved a thumb’s width to stop him. “So bold, Goris? Nay, so quixotic.” The cloak exploded into a massive black flame that surrounded the warlock’s feet and threw smoke into the heavens, and from it rose up two terrible things larger than Goris. They were hidden by the darkness created by the dark fires, but I saw wings, prominent horns, and bodies that betrayed otherworldly strength. Terreur cackled lightly again, amused. I closed my mouth that had been hanging open.

The two horrifying things, the very appearance of them, stopped Goris in his tracks. Terreur placed the hat back on his head, crossed his arms, and the black flames disappeared back into the billowing cloak, pulling the collosi with them. “Dear Goris, I think it is safe to say that you aren’t a match for the likes of Warlock Terreur. Goodness!” He clapped his hands suddenly, making me jump. “Too gregarious am I, garrulous to the point of being quite sickening. Come! There are many days of travel ahead, and it is to our advantage to start quickly.”

The Deathguard stared at Terreur, her face cold and emotionless. “No mounts.”

Terreur shrugged. “You insist on subterfuge and shirk speed, sweet one? Very well, we go by foot. Shall we?” He spun and began walking leisurely away from us, without so much as giving us a backwards glance. The Deathguard marched behind him, rigidly, and Goris shook his head. He held something towards me, and I saw that it was a long cane. I took it, and he walked after the Deathguard. I clumped after them, pondering the phenomenon who went by the name Terreur.

[Aggeragua]

We travelled in silence. I walked behind the Deathguard, who marched rigidly on. If she felt emotion, she hid it well, for her face was a pale mask of indifference. Goris prowled behind me, his cyclopean bulk padding along the road in silence, a shadow that engulfed mine own. Far ahead, his self shrouded by the billowing black cape, walked Terreur, floating over the cobblestones like a sudden fog, its origins unknown and its destination known less.

The rod end of my cane, or staff, really, cracked quietly against the cold night road as I slunk behind my protector. The books given to me by the Deathguard were in a small satchel that Goris had found for me, and that was slung across my spine. There was little time to read, and so, as I walked, I pondered.

Terreur was a strange entity. The Deathguard, Goris, the guards who had been posted out door, they all betrayed little emotion, had no sense of humor. They were totally dedicated to a cause, fanatics. So far, these shells had protected me from harm for a reason still beyond my understanding.

But Terreur? He not only was seemingly frothing with energy, but he had stated his allegiance. The Deathguards, I assumed they were not dark in their intentions. Terreur, I felt, I knew, that he was diabolical. Nefarious. Vile to the very core. I know not of one warlock that ever walked to do good for the purpose of doing good. At the very least, they did good as it was in their best interest.

Was Terreur doing this, allying until a contract was fulfilled? Had he been promised a morsel of magical strength, a parcel of power, if he assisted in guarding my helpless self? I felt a cold snake coil ‘round my spine and creep down into my gut as I recalled that black toothed grin. He was foulness, the avatar of some black magic, the physical manifestation of the essence of evil, of this I was sure.

And that black cape, that cloud! I had seen that ebon wind wrap its iron limb about my body the night of the skirmish. That wind had attempted the abduction, nay, execution of mine self. That wind could kill me; what could Terreur’s do? I had seen it erupt into dark denizens before my very eyes without even a mutter of a magic charm from the mouth of the warlock. If he spoke and commanded it, what wickedness could it raise? I raised my head and eyed the warlock from afar. The serpent around my spine squeezed further still. I was not safe.

The only other man, creature, I had been exposed to was the treacherous Alcibiades Sectus, who had nearly spirited my woebegone pseudo-corpse to…to what? Where had Alcibiades planned on taking me? Further more, who was he? What was his allegiance? What master did he serve?

Who he served, I knew not, but I did conclude that he and the red robed spellsmith were on the same side. Alcibiades had attempted to abduct me, and the magus, eradicate me. But from where had they come? I scoured my cerebellum for an answer, but I had within me none.

But Alcibiades was a man who was energetic, his veins surging with sprit, unlike the Deathguards, the somber commandos who battled my killers and kidnappers. And Terreur? He was very much the same creature, an animated…spellsmith! The magus and Terreur shared that key characteristic. Thankfully I hadn’t had an opportunity to discover if the red robed one was an active being, so I could not draw a similarity between he and Alcibiades. But Alcibiades was similar to Terreur in that way…

Fear gripped me. My eyes widened, but I kept walking as if nothing was on my mind. Terreur had stopped Goris, a behemoth, dead in his tracks with what the warlock must have considered a mere magic trick. Terreur was the better of Goris. But what of the Deathguard? She was similar to Goris, but simply a more vicious creature than Goris…or was she? Still, I had little faith, all of a sudden, in the Deathguard and Goris’ ability to protect me should Terreur turn on us three and unleash hellish fury. They would be cremated on the spot, annihilated!

I hunched my shoulders and clattered on through the chilly air, shielding myself from the moonlight as if it would tear open my thoughts and reveal them to the party with which I traveled. I was simply not safe while Terreur could think, could conjure up creatures. Indeed, none of us were safe while he had the ability to banter so. The thought was imprinted into my mind as a certainty; if I were to live, Terreur must die.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


I haven’t really gotten much feed back so far, and if those who read this would be so kind as to give me any advice on how to improve this story, that would be very nice of you. This is my first fan fic so I’m not really sure how well I’m doing, but it’s really quite fun writing this, so I’d really like to improve. Thanks!

Edit: I correct myself. I did experiment with a fan fic a while back but I never did take it seriously. I think it got to five posts.

[trudelle]

I am horrible on both spelling and grammar so the only advice I can give you to improve this story...is to finish writing it. I started reading it a while ago and am glad you have come back and are continuing it.

Edit:
Please also keep working on your other fan fic, started on that one and am already hooked.

[deathfromabove]

Is this really your first fan-fic? I am impressed.

The story is amazing so far. The only thing you need to do is keep writing. I hate it when people write stories and then stop it midway through.

Keep up the good work!

[Tikki]

I just happen to stroll over here...
Excellent writing.
I haven't read a whole lot of fan-fic, but if this is any example of the quality which comes through in personal writings - wow - i'll have to check more out!

Wicked job

[Aggeragua]

Thanks for the feedback! I'm most certainly going to write more in the future.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Arduous. That is the only word that can describe the march that took us across the cold glades. The chill of the green night succumbed to the frost of a bitter black one as time lingered on. I realized that I had long before grown accustomed to a new life in the dark, for though I knew it was close to ebon pitch, I was thrust a short lance of vision into the aegis of the late evening. It was a morbid thought, that realization I had that this place hadn’t seen sunlight. Had it ever? Had this place known of no hours but those after eventide and prior to dawn? Gloom, this place was shrouded in, a gloom that hung over the heads of all that traversed these somber grasses.

I was not so terrified of what lurked and howled about us as I was of getting separated from my protectors. To be swallowed up by an unforgiving cavern to be feasted on by all manner of malicious entities… A beastly, yet gentle, paw prodded me onward, and the presence of Goris fortified my confidence. What manner of creature could claw their way past such a monstrosity? Then I recalled Terreur’s cloak, and the terrors it had transformed into, and my spirited away was my strength as quick as it had come.

So I walked, terrified every step of the way down that invisible road.

It was a long time, such a long time, before the clawed hand pressed against my chest. The Deathguard’s face was nearly invisible in the gloom, but her glowing eyes dug fist sized chasms in the seemingly impenetrable night. “To earth you go. It is but a few short moments before light. We will travel only in the murk. Goris will take you to a sheltered place. You will stay there until we are ready to recommence marching.” Her hand detached itself from my chest, and she diffused into the dark.

The shelter was a subterranean isle of stone set in a sea of foliage that rampaged unchecked around its perimeter. There were solid stairs that were hidden by tall grasses, and they led to a damp, cavernous place devoid of furniture or light. A basement of a building long since decimated, no doubt. Goris pushed me into the room, and departed, but not before dragging a colossal slab of ashen wood over the stairway. I was alone in the dark.

Dark is an understatement, for the place was so aphotic that the absence of light made the air seem thick and almost solid. A lightless, liquid prison, and I, the prisoner. I clawed along the floor, a pathetic, reptilian cave creature, until I found a corner. There are few corners of rooms more foul than that one, for it was a fungal, microbe breeding pool, but it was soft, and I could wallow in its contents comfortably. I placed the leather satchel beside me. It was a futile effort to read in such an opaque fog.

But no! There is a thing darker than total darkness, a stygian nebulosity, and it appeared before me in that basement, a haze that oozed and wormed its way towards my feet. The screws that controlled the clamps around my bowels turned themselves tighter, and before I could see the thing with my eyes, I knew what it was. I had smelled the stink of such a creature before.

“Is this not a snug little niche?” The serpent-like voice snaked a path into my ears. “It used to be a wine cellar for a tavern called the “Sky-bound Lark”, and lined along these walls were great wooden tubs of some of the finest brew this land has seen. Now? Even the dead avoid it. Or the majority of them, at the very least.” Terreur cackled softly.

I closed my eyes, but his silhouette would not remove itself from my eyes. “I beseech you, warlock, leave me to my own horrors. I was tormented already by mine own problems before you made yourself known. Your presence makes this life ever more harrowing.”

Terreur hovered above me ominously, and I felt my skin attach itself to the wall, trying to escape the figure through the cracks. His voice was one of the light hearted, and a heavy drum beat constantly in my breast, filling my head with the marching rhythm of the panicked. “The dead really would enjoy this quaint alcove, though. Indeed, it is ideal for a workshop. And the bewitching atmosphere too! Isn’t this a capital cavern to be dead in?”

I stammered. I didn’t know what it was like to be dead…or did I? I resembled those about me, the undead. I felt my right hand reach over my body and clasp the left by the fingers. They were skinless, but a collection of dry fingerbone claws held together tightly together by elastic tendons.

I felt the bulk of Terreur close in on me in the corner. “Isn’t it?” He inquired. His voice grew harsher, the serpent qualities giving way to more volatile tones. I opened my mouth but no words came out. I searched my mind but no answers revealed themselves. I was trapped. Terrified! Witless, sure that this infernal character would butcher me in a place where no protector could witness the execution.

Terreur’s voice grew amused, the voice of a cat batting at the tail of a mouse with broken legs. “Perhaps you are incapable of answering because you are unaware of what it feels like to be deceased. Is it possible that this is the case?”

I croaked inaudibly, instinctively. “What am I?”

Terreur’s eyes penetrated the fog. Cyclones of amusement orbited his pupils as he stared at me. I could almost see him grinning that rotten, repugnant grin. “I think it would be to your advantage to use a problem solving method. Don’t you think? Look at me.” I dared not turn my eyes towards him, but he didn’t seem to notice, or, perhaps, care. “I am dead. You were alive, some time ago. But you are not dead. So what are you?”

I felt like a small child who had been asked an impossible question, and answered the only way I could. “I don’t know.”

I felt a fetid sigh wash over my face. “It really is quite distressing, your lack of spirit. Lend me your terror so that I may dismiss it promptly. To some, death is the most unwelcome occurrence. They fear some eternal punishment for their crimes in life. What is this called?”

“Hell.”

“Correct. So if death is hell for some, then it is logical to assume that to live is to be in heaven. Now observe your situation. You have departed from life, but you are not dead. Not heaven, not hell. So where are you?”

“Purgatory?”

The soft, bone-chilling laugh emanated from the gloom of Terreur’s throat. “Yes. Yes, you are in Purgatory. But hold, there is a difference. The metaphor I chose is flawed. In what way?” I felt his disapproval press against my temples as I shook my head. “In Purgatory, after your sins are expiated, you travel to a destination based on how grievous those sins were. Those who are completely redeemed are sent to heaven. Those who are not or simply cannot be completely forgiven go to hell.” That grin returned. The eyes bored gorges into my skull. “And, you cannot go to your heaven because you have already departed from it. Your path is chosen.”

If I wasn’t huddled in that dark corner, I would have collapsed. A realization. I pressed a palm to my eyes as Terreur whooped maniacally. “Your time will come eventually, worry not about that. Busy your mind with when and how you will get there.” The fog melted into the lesser, total blackness, and disappeared, taking its hellish laughter with it, while leaving me despondent in the dark.

[deathfromabove]

That was incredible. keep up the good work

[Aggeragua]

We walked in the dark once more, though I had turned my eyes skyward and noted that the impenetrable blackness had begun to disappear. The air was a desolate grey, with oases of jade scattered sparsely throughout. The sight of color, even such a small amount of it, lifted my spirits, and I found my pace lengthened. Perhaps, some time soon, my skin would smile and kiss the sun’s rays.

Terreur walked far ahead of the Deathguard, Goris, and I, so I felt some small measure of security. I refused to think about his foreboding words, but my mind rebelled against that command. Images of torture twisted through my brain’s channels and down my nerves, and soon, my somewhat-sunny disposition gave way to more familiar aches of despair. I would never see the sun; Terreur would not allow me to. He would slowly, ever so slowly, seep the life out of me with his nefarious mana-charged weaponry.

As any panicked person would do when faced with such a dire situation, I dismissed Terreur’s promises as nothing but hollow words, and that it was but a foofaraw. Yet, in the adytum of my mind, I knew that he was not to be taken lightly, that I was lying to myself. I sorely wished those lies would be believable.

A long march, but bearable, had passed, and I found myself in an enclave of a field formed by a small ring of shrubs and a boulder that hung over, once again cloaking my frail self in darkness. The others disappeared, and I closed my eyes.

But some time later, quite a while, in fact, I found that my eyelids were not dark. They were…what? Ochre, I suppose. But…not the color of the night! My eyes shot open. There, before me, was an invasion of light, its missiles thrust onto my chest to form a cloud of yellow spots. The sun! The sun! Not artificial light, but the sun! t

I was surprised when I exercised caution. I half expected to blunder out of the alcove and into the brightness of the greatest day this world had been blessed with, but I instead separated the branches and leaves carefully with my finger bones and peered out.

There is only one place on the planet that is truly pristine, and it was that field. I saw a phalanx of grasses waving their blades in the wind, singing of summer days and the death of cold. I saw great bark skinned spires, their branches not sharp and brambly, but smooth, inviting. The leaves were a full green, a lustrous, pulsating green that glowed in the golden air.

And I saw a girl.

Crouched in the center of a most gorgeous place was a small female with a light blue blouse and a long dress of pastel lemon yellow. Her left side was turned to me, and I saw that from her scalp flowed an eternity of hazel. She was looking at something on the ground, and her hand, a velvety thing with spindly fingers, was probing it in curiosity. A sharp nose and hazel eyes were set in the smooth skin, and above the strong chin, her ruby veil revealed a hint of pearl beneath.

I felt my blood stir. My vision began to sway. I knew not what was happening. It was such an alien feeling! My hand clawed in the darkness until I found my staff.

Then I rose, stumbled really, and walked towards her. I was in a strange trance, hypnotized by some quality she possessed, no doubt. But what? My feet drew me closer to her.

It was not far, perhaps twelve strides, but she did not notice me until I was directly behind her. I saw my shadow descend upon her, and she turned her head to face me. The soft features hardened. I could feel the chill of her veins in the warmth of the day. Was it fear? Fascination? I knew not. I was not capable of thought myself.

Still, that stirring seized command of my actions, and I sat back and watched as it took control of my body, flexing muscles and bending joints.

I felt my hands grip the staff tight. My arms floated skyward, winged, feathers, lighter than air. Then they turned to stone, and came crashing down to chew on bone and brains. The eyes went blank. The arms raised again and descended. Raised. Crashed down, down onto the nose and eyes and skull. The pretty face disappeared. It itself hid behind a red waterfall, and the staff attempted to pry that liquid aegis open. Skyward. Fall. I saw the head of the staff splinter and bend awkwardly. Then, it seceded from the rest of the cane, which continued to swing wildly. Up. Descend. A crimson hurricane swirled in the grass, festive flags on poles in a breeze. What charming hues. To the heavens. Down. Whatever took control of my body was quite an artist, dabbing several shades of red into the jade scene with utmost delicacy.

Then, I noticed that my arms would not lift anymore. All of a sudden, I noticed my heaving chest, the burning in my arms, the numbness in my palms. I saw a dead girl in front of me. My eyes widened. Nausea? Did I feel that? I staggered backwards. My left foot then refused to do my bidding, and I fell on my seat. A gasp escaped my mouth.

But it was not a gasp of shock. I saw a marvelous summer day, and I had gasped at the beauty of it. I noticed how the girl with the brown hair did not spoil such a splendid sight, how no unnatural brown strands would clash with the colors of nature.

I picked my body off the ground and padded back into the alcove. I sat myself down, and closed my eyes. Then I felt myself do something I hadn’t done in eons; Another alien afeeling, but a most pleasant one. Just before I descended into a thoughtless coma, I grinned.

[Aggeragua]

When my eyes opened, it was dark. The Deathguard shook me by the shoulder, jerked her head to motion behind her, and I stumbled out of the enclave into a most dismal twilight. The shrubs and trees about me were withered and exhausted by life. Had there been a breeze that passed through their near-naked branches, they would have wept in shame. I peered out into the glade, but saw no girl. I looked down at my robes and hands, and saw no blood. A dam gate in my mind opened, and all the energy I had flooded out of me into the rancid air. How hugely disappointed I was.

But despite my heavy head, I staggered behind the Deathguard, satchel slung across my back. My mind went blank, and all my body could do in response was plod doggedly on after my protector.

The path we took had a different feel. Before, the surroundings had been gloomy but had an aura of imposed tranquility. This place… I looked up. The trees, though stripped bare, were colossal and ominous, towering straight up to block out an augural sky. I noticed no noise but my own foot steps, clumsy crunches on the schiltrons of plant life. Goris padded behind me somewhere, spectral and ever present. The Deathguard marched violently forward, but it was as if she thundered quietly on a thick carpet.

I was hammered on the chest softly by the hand of Goris, and I was astounded that we were stopping. Time had gone by so fast. My locked down mind had not registered a thing on that section of our journey. Dazed, and mildly shocked, I was lead to the base of a wooden colossal, its roots, screwed into the ground, spiraling hither and yon, under and over the broken dirt. A natural chamber lay beneath the great trunk, and I was quite pleased with such a cozy shelter. As usual, my protectors vanished into the night, and I straightened my back against a bark-skinned column. I was, I suddenly realized, not fatigued, and I felt my heavy head sprout wings as I reached into the leather satchel to remove The Reconstruction Manual, still unread, not even glanced at. I flipped it open to the middle to get a feel for the contents, and selected a paragraph to read.

…And in every surgeon’s hands are the tools of the craft of animation, and at their fingertips, the materials used to create or rejuvenate. It is, however, not the medicinal field that gives the profession its notoriety and fame, but the ability to invigorate the inanimate to activity.

The field has progressed rapidly in a short time. It was the necromancers of old who did the most common form of reanimation: that is bringing the dead to life. This relies almost completely on one’s magical abilities, and only the simplest, or not even any in some cases, devices are used. It is, however, the fusion of magic and machine that gives the surgeon the potential to do the mind-breaking; things that range from shocking the recently deceased back to life to giving the brainless dead a caravan of thought. Some fields are, of course, more challenging and fascinating to the public than others.

One of the most difficult fields of surgery is granting the mindless a mind. Yet to be perfected, it has captivated many fledgling surgeons to tireless research. As Surgeon Beckersweld stated at an apothecary meeting-

“It is a disciple that makes something live, but a learned surgeon that makes it complain about living,” a silken voice interrupted. My eyes snapped up and I found defenseless against Terreur’s drilling gaze.

His tall black wizard’s hat was on his crossed legs, and his black garb slithered out from his body to form sable tendrils in the ground, roots of evil. His foreclaw rested on his sharp chin, and he cocked his head upwards in thought. “Famous words of Surgeon Beckersweld, twenty six days before he was eradicated by an energy surge from an abomination battery. Quite a scientist, you know.”

My throat was dry. I felt dizzy. “A pioneer,” I gasped.

Terreur guffawed at me. It was not a boisterous laugh, but a stinging one that flowed effortlessly through my mental defenses, annihilating what few remained. “Cease your babble. No, he was no pioneer of surgery. He was simply a gifted apothecary. Lacking in creativity, but a most efficient character. I am gifted with the memory of him vigorously scolding two junior apothecaries for failing to follow correct procedure on a reanimation. The operation proved a huge success, however. But Beckersweld, after reporting the results, deliberately left the names of the junior apothecaries out of his summary to punish them for not doing the surgery by the book.” He grinned a wide grin that reeked of turpitude. “Is that not most strange?”

I nodded. I felt as if I was inhaling noxious smoke. My head was swimming, but my eyes were nailed open. Terreur bantered on, unaware, or unconcerned, with my state. “It was quite a controversial operation. Did you know that? Oh, it’s not in that book, is it? No I don’t think so. It really is quite fascinating. Would you like to hear about it?”

He didn’t wait for a response. It is likely he wouldn’t have been granted one, as I my tongue had swollen to monstrous proportions, and my vocabulary had disintegrated, leaving only primitive grunts and hand signals in my personal lexicon. “There were many problems with the operation before a knife even broke skin on the patient. The recruiters had dug up a body that was much too young. A careful ear, lend me for a moment. A body requires time to move from the living phase to the time when the Thuzadin complex is at least moderately evolved. If a corpse is...disintered… before the Thuzadin complex is evolved, key features of the undead character are lost. The language, for instance. The lexicon of the living dead is simply mutated Commonspeak. If a recently recruited servitor is reanimated too soon, he…or she… will not be able to communicate well.”

Terreur leaned forward. I leaned back. He ignored the motion. A spindly finger ticked off points off on his left fingerbone claws. “Of course, that’s not the least of it. Sometimes a newly reanimated character will maintain old loyalties. This isn’t very easy to fix, you understand. When surrounded by a totally new environment, it has been observed that those who maintain old loyalties refuse to bow down to another. In my case, the Banshee Queen. Then…” Another finger. “There is, occasionally, the event where the reanimated corpse has a defect that death hasn’t had the time to heal. When this occurs, reconstruction or surgery is necessary. That isn’t too difficult of course, simply restrictive on the reanimated character. A man with a broken neck cannot become a combatant like the Deathguard, for instance, for his weak spinal cord would not allow him to maximize his combat capabilities. A mute would not be able to study magic, as the art of casting would be nearly impossible, except, of course, for the terribly weak spells that are capable of casting with a wand…though those are so hideously unpopular that I doubt anyone has ever taken that path.”

He looked at me for a long moment. I stared back. I felt my innards attempting to escape out of my back, fleeing from that vile face. Terreur then ticked off another finger, lapsing back into his care-free attitude. “Then there is the dangerous possibility that the reanimated character has the mental capacity to pledge allegiance to the greater power, but has no talents to donate. Thus, such a character becomes a drain on the entire society, selfishly claiming certain resources, above all else the time of another, for a purpose they cannot even verify.”

He discarded the topics and flapped his hand in a dismissive manner. “And there are others, of course. Less important, some less relevant…some aren’t too fascinating of course. I’m just naming the more gripping points of this whole thing, mind you. Do you not think them gripping?”

My mind had been enveloped in an icy wind, and its communication channels had solidified so that nothing could move into or out of my brain. My jaw opened, but no noise escaped. Terreur stared at me for a long time, his face very still and devoid of emotion. The grin was gone, replaced by a flat mouth.

He suddenly stood up and swept his tall pointed hat onto his head. The cape let out ripples of black energy. He grinned at me, the serious face gone, replaced by a jovial, malicious one with which I was so familiar. “Enjoy your books.” And with that, Terreur turned his back on me and coiled out through the tree’s roots into the night sky.

When he departed, I felt myself curl up into a ball. I lay still with my eyes wide open for a very long time.

[DumbCow]

This fan-fic seem uncanny. its alot better than some ive read. im not the best writer so i don't have any real critasizim to add just saying this is a fantastic series and i hope you continue writing ::).

[deathfromabove]

Excellent update

[Tyg]

It took me a good 3 hours to read the prequel passages. I was hooked on the 2nd post. Murder so early in the story, tsk tsk, normally that only happens in mysteries. Although, you've been able to tie this into the fan fic quite nicely. Much praise for this.

[Aggeragua]

The next night’s march had the Deathguard leading us onto a road. It was a common countryside pathway, roughly even cobblestone, and three horsewidths across. There were, caged beneath the rock pavement, a multitude of weeds and wild plants that slithered their way to safety, ever so slowly. On the right hand side of the road was a fence that had long ago fallen into disrepair, with not even enough body to be harvest for the termites. The causeway gave off the silent sound a neglected road makes: cold sighs as the breeze floated over its top.

The road was set on an elevated surface, and what unnerved me was that our silhouettes were visible from quite some distance away. On either side of the road, a number small, empty glades existed, and in each glade we passed, movement flickered. My paranoia burst into full bloom, and at every slight that caught but a shred of my attention, my head eyes whirled to that location. It had a noticeable strain on my body, and I tired long before I should have.

If Goris noticed my slower and more labored pace, he did not comment. Neither did the Deathguard, for that matter. Without even looking back to see my weakened body’s faltering speed, she matched it, and the distance between the three of us never changed.

In every dark hollow lurked a carnivorous grin, and every tree branch’s shadow harbored the silken cackle of the warlock. To witness the end of Terreur’s life was to ensure my safety, on the mental front at the very least. But every minute spent pondering how such a deed would be committed, my disposition darkened further. Such a thing was not possible to do, I had convinced myself. The death of one rendered immortal is an event that is impossible to view.

I noticed that my feet were no longer on the ground, and I was being carried away from the road. Quickly. The left arm of Goris had encircled my waist and both he and I were advancing rapidly up a small forested knoll. The Deathguard was several yards up and to the right. Her pistol was in her gloved right hand, and my staff was not in mine.

Goris pressed me onto my stomach at the top of the hill, facing the road, and he lay very close, hiding me with his bulk. His ragged tongue dripped fluid onto my neck, one drop at a time. A tree blocked the left side of my vision, but I could see the Deathguard with her back against a thick trunk and her eyes scanning the cobblestones below.

A small beetle scuttled towards me, and milled about not a pace away from my mouth. I felt myself shrink inwards. On the road, four figures appeared. They were dressed in grey, and stood erect. Two had torches in the upraised left hands, the others had weapons. All but one were males. They did not have pale skin stretched tight over their bones.

They walked quickly, but were cautious. Their eyes scanned every direction, front and behind, right and left, skyward and at each other. One of them, a man with a heavy mustache, had platinum hair and a black gorget at his breast.

They would have passed without noticing us had I not panicked.

The beetle had crawled onto my face, and had bit a section of skin directly below my right eye. I yelped, and tried to squirm my arms free so that I could tear the intruder free, but I was prevented from doing so by the bulk of Goris. One of the grey garbed patrollers noticed me, and the small group immediately fanned out facing the knoll’s summit, weapons at the ready. Three of them had crossbows, weapons that at such a short range were unnervingly accurate. The other two had short swords. They were the men on the flanks. The Deathguard’s face did not change.

Goris’ right paw reached over and flicked the bug off of my cheek, for which I was enormously grateful. His left hand reached over his back and unsheathed one of the heavy cutlasses off his back slowly before laying it down in front of us, the hilt to the right. The Deathguard’s falchion was in her right hand, and the pistol hung loosely down by her left thigh.

The three with crossbows had just begun winding their windlasses when Terreur killed them. There was a flash of darkness and they were sprawled stomach-down on the grass. The other two patrollers turned around and were silently dispatched by the warlock’s dark magics. Their bodies toppled over, the collapses muted by the moist grass.

Terreur, at the near edge of the glade on the far side of the road, stood looking at the corpses, appearing quite bored. After a few seconds, he ambled up the gentle slope to one of the crossbow wielders, and nudged the skull is foot. The Deathguard descended, but Goris and I stayed where we were.

At the foot of the hill, the Deathguard kicked the corpse that Terreur was standing over. The warlock grinned at the Deathguard. While she argued, he bantered. Goris remained silent. I scanned the grass for insects. A burst of anger emitted from below, and a glove pointed up the hill at us. Terreur laughed, shook his head, and wheeled around on the ball of his foot before sauntering off into the glade, flakes of his being spinning off into the darkness.

The Deathguard grabbed one of the corpses and dragged it up the hill. Goris got up off his stomach but made no move to assist her. She arranged the body in front of my prone self, flat, on its back, bored pupils wide with that look the dead are wont to receive. The corpse’s mouth hung open slightly. The Deathguard, still standing, whirled her arms in small arcs, the falchion eating chasms into the cadaver and the clothes it wore, until a large gash in the belly revealed itself. Another motion with the wrist and it widened. She wiped her sword on the grass. The red glove pointed at the corpse and she said, “Consume.”

The Deathguard and Goris walked out of earshot and were talking quietly but urgently. At least, Goris was. The Deathguard’s seemed almost nonchalant. Was she infuriated? I stuck a hand into the belly of the corpse and removed a shred of material which I placed in my mouth and chewed. I did not feel uneasy, or odd, or disgusted. The meat was invigorating. I glanced at the dramatic duo in the distance. They were watching me. Their faces were blank. I reached for another morsel, and as I did so, I noticed that the corpse bore a resemblance to my father. It was a casual observation, but after it, I realized I was chewing slightly faster.

[Dstroy]

absolutely awesome story dude :) like the others i was hooked after the first paragraph, great work, looking forward to the rest of the story.

[Aggeragua]

My pace was noticeably quicker on the road, and despite the weight of the shackles of mental instability, I did not tire until the Deathguard stopped and motioned towards a dilapidated cottage floating in a sea of dead grass and surrounded by a complicated archipelago of cold dirt islands. The cottage was not far from the road, but difficult to see, as its decaying frame blended into the somber surroundings.

There was nothing inside the abandoned home, save for the skeletal remains of the victim of a crime committed some time ago. It was a one room building, and quite small. I was surprised one could reside in such a space with furniture comfortably. There was a crude fire place that had been dug into the wall opposite the door, and it was invitingly dark. I took the leather satchel off my back and placed it inside the hole before crawling into it myself. To my great disappointment, the hole was much too small for me to rest in without a constant pain in my back, so I clambered out and lay down near the door.

I had just closed my eyelids when I was disturbed by the cold breath of paranoia that pried my eyes open and stiffened my bones. I sat up, and on my right was the wall with the door. However, I could not see the door, or the fireplace. On my rear, I swiveled about clumsily so that if I was to be rudely awakened, I would see all possible entrances without difficulty. I eyed the doorway. It was just the way it had been when I entered the cottage. The fireplace was still a dirty hole in the wall. I lay down on my back.

Then I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling. It had no gaping holes in it. No torn shinglework. No points of access. I looked again at the fireplace. I saw eyes, a dark, insidious gaze that was camouflaged in the shadows. I hastened stared back, but the eyes vanished from whence they had come. The shadows looked exactly the same as they had before. My gaze held where the eyes had been. Or had they? I looked at the door, then the fire place, then the roof.

My back balanced itself on the worm meal wood floor, but the eyes had returned, and I leapt up with a cry to meet it. Once again I was too slow to see what manner of creature observed my behavior from the darkness. I scrambled to the fireplace and ventured a probing hand within, but detected nothing but dust and ash and the leather satchel. I swung around and my gaze swam over the sparsely furnished room. There was no evidence that pointed to where the eyes had fled to. The skeleton eyed me humorously. Fuming, I stormed to the door.

I was met with an audience larger than I expected. From every shadow cast by the moon on every blade of grass, and from every blackened bough of tree or shade of shrub appeared a host of invisible eyes, a throng of penetrating gazes that slammed into my chest with staggering force. I cried out and fell back, my arms flailing out in front of me in a hopeless attempt to defend my body from the venomous crowd. I clawed my way out of the doorway and to the wall by the skeleton. My breath came and went heavily, and the glacial worms wriggled madly within my gut. I heard soundless laughter and I whirled my head around to see the skeleton grinning at me. I scrambled quickly towards the fireplace and removed the leather satchel, then got to my feet and swung it with great force at the skeleton. Two ribs snapped and splintered off of the sternum, but the empty eyes continued to stare at me with great amusement. My arms strained and I felt the satchel roaring through the atmosphere of the cottage. The right arm broke off from the body. I screeched. Another uncoordinated swing. The heavy books in the satchel connected with the sternum and the rib cage exploded in a needle storm of bone fragments. There was a noise, a constant, vibrant noise now, but I could not tell where it originated from. The satchel landed again and the skull bounced but did not break. The right arm snapped in half at the elbow. The pelvis danced loudly on the wooden boards. Splinter. Shatter. Hammer, batter, bash I did, the skeleton erupting into a volcano of shreds and a cyclopean hurricane of alien noises.

I swung at the skeleton once more but I could not lift the leather satchel anymore. I looked down at my hands and saw they were trembling violently. The strap fell out of my nerveless fingers, and I collapsed to my knees, my head down, a titanic weakness encircling and infiltrating every muscle I possessed. My eyelids drooped, and I shivered. I saw that there were shards of white material scattered all about the floor. My eyes closed.

I felt as if I were in an enchanted sanctuary as I rested. I felt the hard gazes of the eyes of the most strange and mysterious observers on every part of my body, but I did not, strangely, feel disturbed by them. Had I been physically assaulted by minions of the occult I would not have raised a finger in resistance, for where I was, I was safe. I did not think very much, if at all. All I experienced in that tranquil setting was the peace one must know when all problems have reached a resolution in your favor.

When my eyes opened, it was nearly pitch dark. The moon was near nonexistent, a sliver of a sliver visible through a minute crack in the damaged ceiling. I looked at it for a long time. Then I looked around the room. Bone pieces had been propelled throughout the entirety of the rotten box. The fireplace was the lacuna in the tissue of the wooden wall it had always been.

The skeleton had been destroyed, save for the skull that grinned at me with empty sockets and a mirth I would never know. I got to my feet, uneasily, for my muscles ached and I felt woozy, as if heavily intoxicated. I staggered to the skull and placed my foot on the left temple. Then I leaned down, but the skull would not break. Harder I pressed on the bone, but the resilience of it was surprising, and I eventually removed my foot from the head of the corpse and stared back at it. It continued to look at me in a most amused manner and, unable to bear its silent and undying ridicule, I wept until the hand of Goris pushed me gently out the door.

[mnOne]

Wow. Haven't gotten the time to read all of it, but the writing conveys the mood of the story really well. As a reader, I can really feel the character, almost to the point where I completely associate with him... Except for he is mad at the beginning, which is kind of hard to associate with. But overall this is a nice piece of fan-fiction, one of the best I have ever read.

[Allabora]

Amazing work, i really enjoyed this so far. You must finnish it pls!

[ghonky]

I just got caught up to your most recent update and all I can say is WOW. Your descriptions completely immerse the reader in the world. As I sat here and read this, I didn't even realize that I passed over an hour reading. Keep it up and don't quit this until you see the end of it. Great Work!

[Aggeragua]

The road began to shimmer fluctuate as I walked, steadily becoming slipper, and I noticed it was raining. I cast my eyes skyward and saw a colossal maelstrom manifesting above us, violently declaring its promises of cataclysm. The beads of moisture volleyed steadily on our backs. I turned my head and looked at Goris. He was staring straight ahead, the hollow eyes betraying nothing. The rain streaked down his cheeks, sloshed out of his eye sockets, and mixed with the fluids that dripped from his jaw.

The noises of the storm grew. Heavier and heavier still the sky’s ammunition fell on us. Looming clouds, like battle ships, vomited forth swarms of their liquid weapons. My vision became impaired, and I thought myself dead. I couldn’t see ten paces away. The Deathguard marched stolidly on, and I, relunctantly, followed, my robes clinging to my chest and back, the leather satchel like an iron cask across my back. I shrugged my shoulders, but still it was uncomfortably heavy. I was about to transfer it to the other shoulder when Goris slipped a humongous fingerbone under the strap, heaved it off my body, and slung it across his own back.

Though uncomfortable, I felt safe. In the veils of falling water I was safe from the many eyes of Terreur. Even if I wasn’t, even if they could see through the solid walls of rain, I did not know, and that gave me some peace of mind. Unless… my eyes went up again, and, swirling in the center of the apocalyptic mass was a core of solid night, a pupil roving in the ebon white of a stormy eye. I looked forward and closed my eyes tightly shut. Goris guided me along. My robes felt heavier.

Then the Deathguard stopped, and Goris lumbered past me to the Deathguard. They were talking, but I could not hear them. The Deathguard pointed in a direction, and we marched off the road into a muddy pit, a quasi-lake, browned by mud and debris. My footsteps were loud in the ankle-high water. I trudged with heavy feet after the Deathguard, and followed her into the shelter of an overhanging rock. The ground beneath it was wet, but it did not rain on our heads from there. Like so many times before, I sat, my back against the wet and mossy rock wall, while the Deathguard and Goris disappeared into the impenetrable haze.

I was quite cold, but I had very little enthusiasm about finding one of my protectors and asking for extra cover. Besides, I would have become even more wet, if such a thing were possible. So, I hugged my body with my knees drawn up, shivering, surrounded by the cacophony of nature. Cannon shots of thunder ruptured the air. The clashes of water on water rang across the lands around me. The mud swirled madly around me.

I shut my eyes and placed my head on the caps of my knees. There was little more I could do but try to get some rest. I tried as hard as I could to block out the disturbing sounds that constantly surrounded me, but my eardrums were under heavy siege, and tired as I was, I remained awake. Yet still I shut my eyes and willed the noises away, willed the cyclopean eye of Terreur in the sky away, and along with it, all my other troubles too, though they were, in comparison to the warlock, quite minor.

An alien noise cracked somewhere in the midst of the storm. I raised my head, slowly, but detected nothing. Even after a thorough scan of what I all I could see, I was unable to identify the source of the noise. It hadn’t sounded like a storm noise. It was too light to be thunder, too thunderous to be falling debris. I felt my body tense. Again, I scanned the churning rivers of mud. Again, I saw nothing. My intestines contracted and shrunk into a block in my gut. The noise came again, and I feverishly looked about, but to no avail. Nothing suspicious, or even mildly interesting, showed itself. Everything was as I thought it not: untroubled, save by the torrential rain.

I felt an urge to go forth from my shelter and investigate the source of the noise, but I was simply too afraid to do so; too afraid of the consequences of being discovered by the Deathguard, too afraid of a marauding Terreur. I felt myself start forward, beginning to uncoil to meet the rain, but I checked myself and shriveled back to a ball. My hand reached out and touched the water with my hand. My fingers were pushed downward by the bullets of rain, and I shrank back from the chattering storm, as if it would swoop into my small shelter and engulf me. The water was not rising very much, but there was a thicker fog of mud and dirt in it. It was a dirty brown, like rust or crusted blood on a sword blade. But I had to know. What had it been? The noise, where had it come from, of what nature was it?

I called out, “Goris.” I received no response. The rain drowned out my nervous shout. Again, I said, loudly, “Goris.” Nothing resembling human nature replied. I leaned forward, so that my knees were underwater, and my nose almost touched the wall of cascading droplets in front of me, and raised my voice a bit “Goris.”

Suddenly, my face was being hit by a plague of rain, and I felt my body being drawn out of the cover of the rock. I was stooped over, my legs sloshing through the pit as quietly as I could make them do so. My body was hunched, my head down. I felt my fingers slash scratches in the water, where they healed almost instantaneously. “Goris,” I called out. I could barely hear my own voice. What little I could hear, I noticed, sounded almost anguished.

My body crept through the open waters, unwary of any dangers that lurked. My focus was on locating the source of the noise, or Goris, who may have known. I looked around but saw nothing but a fog of grey. I turned around, but could not see the shelter. I was lost, and the revelation made me shiver harder. I felt smaller.

I waded through the murky rain, and cried out again. I began to make more noise, my feet rising and falling more violently, my arms swirling in arcs to maintain my balance. My robe was sucked into the water, and I nearly lost my balance. I raised my head and hollered, stomping ahead, in a random direction. My feet began to move faster, and a war drum crashed and boomed inside my skull. My arms flailed wildly. I stumbled and crashed into the water, but got up quickly, and staggered clumsily on. There was mud on the front of my body, and my skin was slick with moisture. I swiped a hand across my eyes to clear debris from them, but only rubbed it in more. As I tried to clear them, I broke into a pathetic dash across the bog, creating much noise as I dashed ludicrously somewhere and nowhere. I cried out for Goris. I nearly tripped, but wobbled uneasily forward again. My breathing was heavy. My legs began to shake, and felt as if they would become one with the fluids around me. I stopped and turned around in a full circle, and saw nothing. I chose a different direction and ran forward, blind and panicked.

I stopped when my legs gave, and I collapsed on my hands and knees, my chest heaving, and my mouth hanging open. I stayed like that for a long time, catching my breath, letting the rain fall around me. I was wet and cold and scared, and I wanted everything to stop being so horrid. I raised my head and cried out, “Goris!” I went to my feet again, and staggered four steps before I saw a break in the muddy water surface. It was large, and it had two swords strapped across its back. It was laying face down in the water, and was very still, noiseless.

I looked at it, and felt my legs give. I fell down with my legs splayed out in front of me. The water churned around my stomach, and the mud oozed through my robes. My legs felt as if they were weeping, suicidal. But none of it mattered, because Goris was dead, and my soul felt more pain than my body could possibly feel.

[Lobose]

great stuff, keep it coming

[Aggeragua]

The Deathguard and Terreur stood facing each other, some distance away from the body of Goris, next to which I still sat. Terreur had stepped forth from the fog, as had the Deathguard, as if they knew it had happened and had decided to call counsel. But there was a lack of counsel, it appeared, for they simply stood staring at each other, shielded in a bubble that blotted out everything but the water. The Deathguard’s hair was plastered to her skull in ragged ebon strips, and her chin was thrust forward as she stared up into the eyes of the warlock that lurked beneath the ominous black hat.

How she could face the monster that coiled and slithered in that face… it was courage I would never know, never have known. There was a force inside her that enabled her to face the most despicable of denizens head on. I did not know what it was. A fanatic sense of duty, perhaps. To serve one’s leaders, to follow them to the grave? Indifference to destruction, as it was inevitable? Maybe the Deathguard had seen a vision of paradise, and, knowing what lay ahead of her, was comfortable, or even willing, to meet death once again.

The apocalypse roared around them, as if they were located in the eye of the world whose lid began to close for the last time. They still stood, speechless, unmoving. What were they thinking? Both their faces were hard to see in the howling tears of the storm, but what little I could see betrayed a frost more chilling than the breath of a necromancer, the tendrils of solid hate that encircled the mind of a madman. Terreur’s face was the same, revealing no amusement.

Then the Deathguard reached to her belt, slowly, and unsheathed the falchion. The noise it made was silent, blotted out by the thunderous environment. The wicked blade, after it had cleared the leather scabbard, came up, and the edge of it hovered unmoving a hair’s width from Terreur’s face. Still the did not move. In fact, that was the only movement that had occurred. It was some alien game, the ruled known only to the two, with consequences that were absolute. Complete victory, or utter defeat. Or was that the case?

The sword stayed a moment longer in front of the warlock’s face, then fell to the Deathguard’s right side, hanging loosely from her fingerbones. She turned away from Terreur, very slowly, and walked over to me. She looked feeble, her aura of command depleted, but her eyes were the same as ever; cold, unmoving eyes that betrayed nothing of what strange things were imprisoned within. When she reached the body of Goris, she did not look at it, sparing it not even the slightest glance. Instead, she stared at me, and I felt myself get up, pushing my defeated body to its feet, so that I stood, too, hunched over, shivering, and pathetic.

The Deathguard began to walk away, but the warlock’s voice, soft, yet booming, stopped her, when it said, “Where will you go?” Terreur’s head turned to face the Deathguard and I, and I could see his eyes now; they were not entertained, light hearted, but were instead flat like the Deathguard’s, as bright with a fervor unknown.

The Deathguard looked straight ahead of her, her back to Terreur, and said, “Our destination.” The rain fell heavily. Her voice was quiet. It sounded lost.

A silence hung. Then, Terreur’s voice said, “You know you cannot reach there without my guidance.” Another long spell of quiet broken only by the storm followed. We were suspended in time while everything else raged around us at twice the speed it should have gone at. The Deathguard nodded her head. There was lead in her skull when she did it. Terreur spoke again. “You know they will find him. And you know the humans will catch up with you. They know these roads better than you. They move faster than you. And they will defeat you when the time comes to cross blades. That is a certainty. And if we travel together, the same will occur. You know perfectly well that the humans employ magi far more powerful than I. If they intercept us, they will annihilate both you and I, and the Prize would have traveled all this distance for little but to be experimented on for years by their scientists. But were there a distraction…an obstacle in their way, to slow them down…perhaps the Prize could escape. If sufficient time was bought, the Prize could reach the destination safely.”

“They will not find him. We will hide the body. We…” The Deathguard stopped, and sucked in breath. “You…You have...with the living…”

Terreur’s eyes were diamond hard, obsidian dark. “They…will…find him. That I can guarantee. Even if I hadn’t done made contact with them, they would have found him. They have necromancers of their own, corpse speakers, who can find and communicate with the dead.”

The Deathguard closed her eyes. “And I haven’t the ability to get the Prize to the destination, because I…”

“Because you are in command. To let all who serve you die before you would be a burden your mind could not bear. But if you were to give the Prize time…” Flames of something hellish darted into Terreur’s face as he smiled a diabolical smile. “I may be able to get him to safety.”

The Deathguard opened her eyes, and I saw in them emotion: anger. Anger at Terreur, at her misfortune, at the death of Goris. Perhaps even at herself. Through gritted teeth she muttered, “Terreur, you are a monster. You have abandoned your master and have selfishly served only to bring to yourself power. You have made alliances with the enemy to sap power from those who rightfully wield it, and you transfer it to yourself. I don't know what the living gave you... and I have no doubt that you will not bring the Prize to the safety of the Deathguards, but to the renegades, who will give you items of magic that will make you mightier than the most adept of spell smiths. But you know that I cannot abandon my duty; were I to walk away from here with the Prize, I would be caught, and I would fail. If we were to travel together, you would vanish when battle is joined with the human trackers, and the Prize would be captured. I would fail then, too. But if I leave the Prize to you…” She stopped, and looked back at Terreur.

The warlock met her gaze steadily, but I saw something that shocked me to the core. Terreur had met the gaze, but had winced at it. The Deathguard was defeated, but far from powerless. Trapped in a position from which she could not escape…and I realized then what made the Deathguard different. She was proud; to live with certain failure was a thousand times more unbearable then to die with a glimmer of hope for success. A captain goes down with the ship, and the Deathguard was prepared to stand on its deck and welcome the depths that would swallow her whole.

They stared at each other a moment longer, the Deathguard and Terreur, and then, as if she was unwilling to do so, the Deathguard turned her back on Terreur again. I ceased to notice the rain, the cold, the depression the weighed heavily on me. It was a featherweight load compared to what the Deathguard wrestled with inside her. Looking straight ahead, her sword in hand, and the hair clinging to her scalp, she marched slowly forward, away from us, blending into the rain with each step until she disappeared from this world.

[Aggeragua]

Terreur forced me onwards without saying a thing or touching me. I was so terrified of his person…am terrified… that I moved away from him with great haste. It was my fatigue that prevented me from sprinting as far as I could from that diabolical thing. And Terreur did not interfere. As I walked, I could catch glimpses of him in the surroundings, whether they were the trees, the swirling air, the cobblestones. It was if I was fleeing from him right to where he wanted me.

An image of the red robed mage flashes across my mind, and I felt my eyes bulge in their sockets. The magi had radiated an energy that I had seen corkscrewing about in the eyes of the warlock. An evilness. The way he had exploded into a raging pyre…far from Terreur’s style, I thought…far more violent, nefarious, power hungry. I felt sick at the thought of a union between the two, and I as a souvenier passed from one madman to the other. What did they have planned for me? It may be the future of the Forsaken.

How was I? Why was it me? Why was I the focus of all this horror? I almost fell over when the hammer of despair crushed my ribcage. So many had died by my hand indirectly. For what? Why? I did not understand. I was a weak, pathetic creature, unknowledgeable of all aspects that were important to the undead that surrounded me. I was no warrior, no scholar, no scientist. I had nothing. I was nothing. Why was it me?

I felt my feet pick up their pace as thoughts raged through my skull, poured out of the orofices in my head. I felt drunk, dizzy, enfeebled by my degenerating mind. The face of the Harper girl I saw on the road, but when I threw a second glance, it was not there. The cell. The second surgery, the skirmish, the hanging. I saw the Deathguard collapse in some desolate opening, bloodied and fatigued by battle with human enemies… I charged onwards. My legs throbbed painfully but I felt very little. My eyes clouded over with a swarm of insects. I smacked them out of my brains. I staggered from side to side, on the verge of careening over the edge of the road into the depression that ran along side it. The cyclone continued wreaking havoc in my skull.

I saw Goris’ bloated corpse floating in the shallow pond. My tongue reaching skywards as the rope tightened around my neck. The Deathguard again. A wave of sorrow washed over me as I saw her determined, rugged face, the ugly hunks of hair wet with blood, close to the ground, her breath coming in harsh rasps. Her eyes widened at some pain in her abdomen… I shook the image out of my head. The agony the guilt caused was unbearable. I kept running.

The large guard in the cold room, I remembered too. The orc, with the confused expression on his face when the Wadjet killed him. The five humans, their lifeless bodies twisted in that way that only the stone dead can bear. The Harper girl. The Deathguard again…

I fell on my chest, my arms splayed out, in the middle of the road, after running for a period of time, the length of which I have no idea. My ribs heaved, my body ached, but the vice-like grip on my stomach was agonizing. I struggled to my hands and knees, and hung my head, keeping it there for some time. I noticed there was but a drizzle left of the powerful storm, and small beads pranced about the back of my skull.

I stayed there and ignored the thoughts, blocking them out, thinking of nothing, letting the air return to me. The rain danced about me. The eyes still gouged chasms on me.

The face of Draena Ormwald sparked in the corner of my brain, and I reached back, seized it, and hurled it in front of my face. I felt some…energy. Something that was not affection, or an affection I had known before. I looked hard at that face that was not in front of me, and I felt my breath coming in and exiting harder. My eyes lightened. Energy returned to my legs. I dug one foot into the road, and, leaning on my knee with both hands, I shoved myself up.

I wondered about that face. It faded from in front of me and, try as I could, it melted away from my memory. Questions bombarded me like the weak precipitation, but I didn’t know what any of them meant, and didn’t know any of the answers to them.

When I looked in front of me, I saw a ramshackle hut. There was no roof, and the wall to the left of the door had eroded away. Tentacles of green coiled about its base. Alien vegetation had sprouted in every possible place. It was a deceased house, dead from tiredness and, possibly, lonesomeness. I felt a hand on my shoulder, a cold, wiry hand, and stiffened when Terreur said, “Do rest up a bit. You’ve got quite a few things to do this next night, and quite a few things to tell those to who you will be a guest.”

Inside the house, I could still feel Terreur lurking about, invisible. There was rubble everywhere, a ruined fireplace, a set of shelves that had been built into the wall. There were many leather ledgers with the pages eaten away by insects and time. I picked some of them up, weakly, and scanned over the titles. They meant nothing to me. I dropped them on the floor next to a mound of garbage, one by one, until I found one of interest. It was a heavy book, but quite small, with a multitude of waxy pages bound in a brass cover. I opened the book and flipped through, and found it was empty. I put it back on the shelf, but picked it up again. I sat amongst the trash, and dug about until I found a charcoal piece underneath a severed hand, long since pearly white.

It was then that I began writing this, for I cannot stand what I have done, what I have caused. Perhaps, though a slim chance, I can still achieve happiness if I ensure that I do not cause the deaths of more. I would wish for the death of Terreur, but that is, I fear, impossible, at least in my mind. Things that evil tend to survive longer than they should.

I pray for redemption. I have found a shard of masonry in the rubble, and will drive it through my left eye and into my brain. I hope this causes enough damage to prevent another resurrection, if such a thing is possible. And I pray that those whose deaths I have caused find some sort of paradise.

And still I know not why me…

[Aggeragua]

Terreur,

I know that somehow, this letter and ledger will reach you somehow. I hope you are shamed by the suicide of your objective, and as you read this book, I hope the shame tears you apart. To read the words of that which you let destroy your chances at empowerment must be quite humiliating. I surely would not have felt right had it happened to me. And I hope you did not show up at our designated meeting place for fear of consequence. Indeed, it seems to me that you are but a charlatan capable of a few fatal tricks, but no magi of power, such as I…

You will be quite horrified to know that seeing as how my entire mission will never be accomplished due to your pathetic failure, I will be diverting all of my resources towards your capture and torture. I will remove what few powers you wield, and watch you cringe as a worm, a powerless worm, vulnerable to the slightest dagger’s kiss. But I shall grant you no such mercy.

It was essential that I, we, knew of how such a creature had survived the reanimation process with both a Thuzadin Complex and the ability to reproduce. We can now only theorize. Ahn’ghaz speculated that it was the condition of a number of organs that are not normally functional, or even present, on many of us. But we do not know, seeing as how the report taken from the Surgeon’s Quarter gives little information save for medical banter. We needed him, and I sent you. You failed. For that, as I have said before, you shall suffer tremendously.

How a despicable offspring of mine could have defeated you, I have do not know, but at this point, I do not care. It did not become someone as incredible as I in its time after its death, but it was an estranged creature, and incapable of such awe-inspiring action. I am but a few steps behind you, warlock. Enjoy your last spells, and pray for a speedy demise, something which you will surely not receive.

-L




[Fin]

[Inquisitor7]

Well done, Aggeragua. This was an excellent story. I would give you detailed feedback, but it would take me a number of posts to go over everything- both good and bad. In general I thought the concept and the characters were interesting, and I liked your style as well. There were a handful of minor grammatical problems, but nothing major. Also, there were times when the narrative dragged a little bit, but overall the story flowed well. Excellent work. I hope you will continue sharing your stories with us.

[Aggeragua]

Thanks very much! I am, as a matter off act, outlining my next one now. My other story, the one that I redid for the writing competition, is done, so I will be able to focus primarily on my new story (although my other story didn't qualify for the competition, unfortunately; it was too long for the short stories entry, and too short for the full story entry!).

[Keella]

Amazing! Even with such a dark nature, I have enjoyed this story emensely. With it being a longer post, I never bored, and was sitting on the edge of my seat. I had to find out what happened!
/thumbs up

[Deadinthewater]

This was an awesome story from beginning paragraph 'till the very end. It was a story which I got so far into that I read for over an hour thinking that half that time had gone by. Looking forward to any other stories coming in the future
/THREE THUMBS UP