1st Orovost, 997 NE
“I want to thank you, Mr. Wyle, for your ongoing cooperation.” Lyferin’s dark smile never changed, not since their first meeting. “Tonight, we’re going to try something else. I think I have it narrowed down at last.” The cryptic words were only compounded by the fact that the lord brought forth a cushion from the large drawer in the side of his table. “You are going to use this.”
Harukar used it, three times that night.
He couldn’t see the faces with the pillow pressed down over their mouths, their noses. He could imagine it was just a pair of disembodied arms, frantically waving, scratching at him, pulling at his wrists.
But these were waifs, stringy street-creatures. Harukar wasn’t particularly well-built but he was tall, and he was strong enough to keep the pressure on until those arms were de-animated, falling down to flop lifelessly on the couch.
For the first time since he’d met the Lord Lyferin Othelroe, he saw a frown on the boy’s face when he left the mansion at ten.
Did I do wrong? he fretted on the way home. What did I do wrong?
But there was no answer. Nothing made sense. Nothing but the three new faces he’d be seeing tonight.
“Are you quite certain you’re alright?” Yathira asked him when he arrived home, standing by as the servants produced his late supper. She’d gotten into the habit of staying up for him to return and it was annoying. “This lord isn’t overworking you, is he? If you look –“
“Enough questions,” he said. “Enough comments. Is the food hot?”
Yathira sighed, and nodded. She knew he could see the steam coming off it. She knew what he wanted from her. Once they finished serving the meal she wordlessly retreated with them and headed up the main staircase to the bedroom, leaving him in solitude.
Leaving him to enjoy his meal in peace in the only company he cared to keep these days; that of the ever-watchful eyes, the ghosts of his imagination, the shadows cast by his soul against the dim canvas of the world.
* * *
6th Orovost, 997 NE
The same nightmare, only real. The same faces, only hidden. The same screams, only stifled.
He pressed down with the pillow, again and again and again, and still the arms wouldn’t stop, scratching him, clawing at his face, marring him horribly – this one was stronger than the others, and he wept as he strained with all his might to squeeze the life from his victim, because he knew –
Realisation and awakening happened simultaneously, or were mixed together as wine with water, inseparable.
He awoke, and he killed his wife of nineteen years, at same time. The nightmare became real or reality became the nightmare – he couldn’t tell which was which anymore. They bled into one another so that he didn’t come fully to his senses until the very instant she went limp.
For an indistinct length of time there was only Yathira’s body, her face beneath the cushion. While he sat there rocking back and forth, her face covered, he could pretend it wasn’t real, pretend he hadn’t just –
His hand snatched out of its own own accord, disturbing the cushion, and his mouth loosed a sharp yelp of terror; he stared at the guilty arm as if he could disown it, detach it with mere will. He jerked his hand back and wrapped his faithful hand about its wrist, holding the traitor down.
No. No, it was too late. There was no going back.
She was dead.
The memory came to him, from over two decades ago: the two of them sitting on the bed, giggling, trading jokes and kisses, mastering their fortify skills late into the night…
Now she was dead.
But he didn’t have to move the cushion himself. The unconscious thought activated her and she did it for him, moving it with a sweep of her arm, sitting up with a terrible dynamism in her motion.
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The dead face. The glittering eyes. The chalk skin.
She looked at her hands, and horror struck her features. A croaking breath came out of her lungs from some dark plane.
“What – did – you – do?” She looked back up at him and he winced, turned his face aside. “My – dear – I –”
He’d killed her, but he wouldn’t be rid of her so easily.
He fought to thrust his feet into his boots in the doorway as he ran, ran to Lyferin’s house, at two in the morning. It was still raining out but he ran, and she chased him down the secluded forest routes, purple eyes staring ahead at him, her eyes and bedrobe gleaming in the night, saying nothing, only chasing him, always chasing him. She didn’t modify her pace for changes in terrain, and loped easily despite being barefoot, while he had trouble keeping his footing on the weed-tangled paths.
She could’ve caught him, but she didn’t. She acted like it was a game.
He met no one – nothing that could help him. Owls hooted and bats squeaked. He tore his own bedrobe on the brambles, but even with his backside bared he would’ve still welcomed the sight of a stranger, someone who could tell him what to do…
When he reached the mansion he banged at the door, banged, banged, please be there, please – she was following, she was close – the Lord Shadow had an actual doorman at the main entrance, twenty-four hours a day, and he should be there – he should’ve opened this gods-damned door already!
The startled-looking man was quick-thinking enough to pull Harukar inside and slam the door behind him, turning the locks, putting two inches of solid oak in the way of the menacing undead woman prowling in his wake –
She tried the handle, and there was a distinct clunk-sound, the sound of the handle being torn off – the doorman squealed in response.
She knocked, rapping with her knuckles softly, so that the door merely shook in its hinges.
“Harukar – M-Master!” she moaned through the barrier. “Are – you – alright – my – dear?”
“What did – what do I do?” Harukar gasped, clutching the doorman’s lapels as they stumbled together towards the stairs, his soaked bedrobe making him slip when he accidentally caught his foot inside the torn flap of fabric. “What can I do?”
Pale fingers came like moonbeams piercing through the wooden door.
She was clawing her way in.
The doorman had turned as white as Yathira, but his eyes were mercifully brown in the dimness of the candlelit foyer; his strong hands took Harukar by the shoulders and tried to peel the two of them apart.
“Sir, sir please!” the doorman shrieked. “What is that thing?”
Then everything changed.
A champion came walking down the steps from the upper floor, the one called Redgate. Scarlet robes. Face of a spider. A nonchalance to his posture, every motion looking relaxed.
Harukar watched in utter absorption as the champion approached – the doorman too seemed to have been paralysed in awe.
He still didn’t understand when Redgate removed the dreadful mask, and Lyferin’s dark smile was there beneath. His first instinct was to assume that Lyferin was dressing-up as the champion for whatever reason, but then –
Then he could see it. The aura of power burning away in the air about the young lord – the blue lines…
He stared, fascinated.
“You’re Redgate, m’lord!” the doorman cried, for whatever reason making it sound like he was trying to inform Lyferin of a fact that had until now somehow been hidden from him.
“I’m sorry, Chalvers,” Lyferin said in a bored voice, “but I’ll no longer be needing your services.”
A ruby-red dagger was in the Lord Shadow’s hand, and then it was buried in the underside of the doorman’s chin, piercing his brain.
Harukar had seen so much unceremonious murder lately, was under so much pressure from the failure of his poor wife to simply die, that he couldn’t really react to the sudden, brutal attack; other than to note the feeling of fellowship that thrummed right through him.
Lyferin kills with his own hands, just like me!
The young lord waggled the blade around a little then withdrew it, unleashing a torrent of blood, letting Chalvers’s body drop to the carpet.
“So, Mr. Wyle, you finally did it,” Lyferin said, wiping his dagger on the corpse’s clothes and then stowing it again inside his sleeve. “And another sorcerer too; interesting. Your wife, I presume? Very interesting.” He turned to regard the creature just about to successfully tear through the door, and spoke glibly, “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, my love.”
The language – the words – he hadn’t even realised until now, hearing Lyferin speak to his undead wife, that the things she’d said weren’t in Mundic, weren’t even in a tongue from this dimension –
“But – m’lord –“
“Don’t call me that anymore. Not when I’m dressed like this. I am Redgate. You will have your own name. You have your own power, now.”
“My – my own power?”
Lyferin sighed. “It’s what I promised you, is it not? What did you think we were doing all this time? You answered my question for me, and now I’m going to show you how to be a champion in return, Mr. Wyle.” The lord smiled again, sympathetically this time. “Get your lovely soon-to-be-ghoul to stop wrecking the place, there’s a good chap, then follow me downstairs. We’ll acquire you a rhimbelkina, discuss our plans.”
The champion moved to follow the corridor behind the stairs, and Harukar blinked rapidly as Chalvers’s body hoisted itself up, dragging itself like a wounded dog across the fine rugs after the red-robed archmage.
“Now,” Redgate said without turning, “at last, the real work can begin.”
* * *