I don’t know if something is broken. It all hurts like it is. I have finally lost the sense of smell, I think. My head spins. I am sipping water from a rivulet to see if I can recover before the dragons find me. In case I don’t, however, I have inscribed a few—that many would consider several— explosive sigils on my body. If I die, they go off. Boom, from pawn to none faster than you can say “Rook to e4”. Learn to be hated by airport security with this one simple trick.

Jokes aside, I don’t like the idea of blowing up, but if it renders my remains unsuitable for necromancy, or even if it has a small chance of doing so, it’s worth the effort and mana spent. It’s not the idea of serving Lady Scarlet that scares me, it’s not the thought of helping her make more monsters by mocking and mishandling human anatomy, it will not be the sleepless nights or the terrible things she would do to my body if any speck of it remains. No, it’s the fact there will be no effort to hide those ugly truths from her part. There will be no more palace, no more Lady Scarlet, no more “brewery”, or “dogs”, or tortured ghost mistaken for fish. No more Gadorprims being a backyard-bred gharial. No more chances to love the fourth Abeline. All sorts of pretense would be dropped. I would dance and dance and dance and dance to her song without even enjoying the beat or the melody. I would go from having the love of a lie, from Lady Scarlet that would maybe be Lady Abeline Scarlet some or all of the time, to being the hated, failed toy of Scarreladai the Deceiver, necromancer and illusionist dragoness, host and maker of a parade of horrors. “You had to live, Francisco! You had to keep Jillsenbane away from my heart!” she would think or say or yell at me while she hangs me up from strands of my own muscles and uses me as a plaything for the dogs or some new… decoration.

And that’s if she doesn’t ask me and Abeline what would be the worst torture for her that we could have in mind —And the worst torture for Abeline, Scarreladai knows, is the worst torture for me, too— and, being their undead servants, we would be forced to answer, to obey without a complaint. And I don’t know what Abeline would say: I knew her well, she was not the kind of person that would easily fall prey to defeatism. But then, neither was I thirty years ago. Thirty years I napped in the sweet lap of madness, as she wailed and screamed in vain, as she became the fallen angel of woe. I don’t know what Abeline would say, and it feels like a new brick in my castle of betrayals.

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Yet, I know what I would say. I would begin by rambling, my soul trying to delay the inevitable, and as the dragoness increased the pressure, I’d have no option but to tell her. to tell her that it all would begin by me being a normal worker zombie that went about doing his tasks: The Pawn, but without the grace, the quirks, or the smile. Unless she would force me to smile, that is. It would follow that, one day, she would take out one of my eyes, the same one she took from Abeline. I have dark brown irises, so my eyes are not suitable for Scarreladai’s head dressing. What they are suitable for, though, is owed to the fact that the human eye has very little variation in size between sexes. My eyes probably fit your or Abeline’s sockets just as well as they fit mine. And if not, my dear Lady Scarlet would have no quarrel nor problem making it fit.

I would still see form the plucked out eye, she is a good enough necromancer to make sure of that. And then, she would graft it into Abeline’s disfigured face, and Abeline would scream and trash about, trying to free herself from whatever the cross is. She’d hate to be one with this traitor she has come to despise through years of uninterrupted torture. She’d do, because Abeline hates me. She has the right and the duty to. Please, Lord, let Abeline truly hate me.

Every day, every second, I’d see Abeline crying or struggling to get me out of her face, and as Lady Scarlet is intelligent, she would cut out the eyelids, maybe graft them elsewhere. And this would not last a day, a month, a year, no, I suspect The Lady plans on living till the world succumbs to fire, and so would we. By the time we burn, Abeline would be so broken and I so traumatized, that maybe, she’d say a last “I loved you”, always in past tense, to make sure I don’t depart with the wounds closed.

I need to stop writing and get going. I cannot rest for long, even if I’d like to sleep for whole year. Things to do, places to be, horrors to meet, a girlfriend to euthanize.