Shame mingled with guilt to create a confusing miasma of emotions that Elijah struggled to reconcile with the bonfire of rage still blazing within his heart. He hadn’t set out to kill Fiona. Instead, when he’d infiltrated her apartment, he’d only intended to intimidate her into giving him access to the palace. Once that was done, his plan was to tie her up and imprison her within her own home. By the time she worked her way free, his mission would have been finished.
But then she had revealed the depths of her own depravity. Of her own complicity in the cesspool that was Easton. Or Valoria, as the locals called it.
“Which one?” she’d blurted.
Which one.
Elijah had snapped, letting his rage overwhelm him, and by the time he’d regained control, she was dead. However, as shameful as the act of killing a prisoner was, he didn’t regret it. She had earned her punishment. But even that fact – and it was an indisputable reality – did nothing to assuage his guilt.
That emotional confusion accompanied Elijah as he padded out of the apartment building and into the street beyond. There were few pedestrians about, and the ones that were around wore expensive clothing and copious jewelry. To Elijah, they looked like they were cosplaying aristocrats from a bygone era, and after some of what he’d seen in the less affluent areas, he couldn’t help but feel a note of irritation.
The wealth inequality was disgusting.
Even more infuriating was the regressive attitude that pervaded much of Valoria’s population. They considered Scholars to be second-class citizens, and those people were treated accordingly. Many were not even afforded an opportunity to work in their own fields. Instead, they were used as manual laborers, paid a pittance to do the jobs the other citizens deemed beneath them.
That was Roman’s other sin. Certainly, Elijah had come to punish the man for killing Alyssa. Without that act, he would never have considered acting. However, now that he was committed to taking his vengeance, everything Elijah saw seemed to support it.
Was there ever a situation where murder – or assassination, he supposed – was moral? Maybe. Maybe not. But Elijah was sure of one thing – the world would be a much better place without Roman taking up space.
So, despite the swirl of guilt and shame – and rage – circling his mind, Elijah’s commitment never wavered. In fact, with every person he passed, it felt stronger than ever before.
In his draconid form and cloaked in Guise of the Unseen, he continued down the street, completely undetected by the pedestrians or the blue-and-white clad guards. A few of the latter seemed to have some inkling of his presence, recognizable when Elijah’s passage elicited an attentive scan of their surroundings. However, it was just as obvious that, despite their suspicions, they couldn’t see him.
So, Elijah progressed through the city unmolested, eventually arriving at the palace grounds. They were expansive, with a perfectly coifed lawn, manicured trees, and burbling fountains. However, to Elijah, it was all hollow. The trees felt like they’d been enslaved and pruned into specific and unnatural shapes that had nothing to do with their true forms. They were treated like accessories, rather than living things.
Which just added fuel to the fire of Elijah’s fury.
He struggled to ignore it as he stalked through the grounds. The palace itself was a ridiculously over-the-top exaggeration of gothic architecture that reminded Elijah of the Magister’s Estate. Which was saying something, considering that the entire vibe of that tower had been meant to be creepy.
Tall, aggressive spires, flying buttresses, and pointed arches were in abundance, and Elijah saw dozens of guards patrolling the grounds. The first group he passed gave him a bit of a start, though.
“You don’t feel that?” asked one of the men.
A woman who’d been walking beside him answered, “Yeah. My Guard Sense is going crazy, but I don’t see anything.”
Elijah quickly vacated the area, interpreting the mentioned Guard Sense to be an ability like One with Nature that would give them extrasensory perception. It wasn’t perfect, but then again, neither was One with Nature. When someone was using some sort of obscuring skill – like the vampire back in the tower – he couldn’t precisely sense them. Instead, he could sense something of an absence that took a certain mindset to notice. The same was probably true of the soldiers’ Guard Sense.
And Elijah didn’t want to push his luck by sticking too close to the guards.
Gradually, he padded through the grounds, staying to the shadows as often as possible. Only a few times was he forced to veer close to the patrolling guards, and each time, the sentries went on alert. Fortunately, he moved quickly enough that they never had an opportunity to figure out what was going on.
Eventually, Elijah found his way to an open door that led beneath the palace. At first, he thought he’d found the outside entrance to a storeroom, but the smells assaulting his nose quickly disabused him of that notion. It was the unmistakable odor of unwashed humanity. Pungent body odor, the acrid scent of human waste, and the smell of blood grew stronger with every step.
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But there was more to it, too.
A scent Elijah could only call rot, almost like roadkill, flowed beneath the other smells, hinting that something was amiss. Perhaps they buried their dead beneath the palace, he guessed. But that made no sense. Nobody would design their home to include that sort of thing. A mausoleum or crypt, perhaps, but those usually featured embalmed bodies, so they weren’t pervaded by the smell of rot.
Elijah didn’t know what was going on.
So, he kept going, looking for a means of ingress into the palace. The other doors he’d found had been guarded by many powerful-feeling sentries. If it came down to a fight, he felt like he could take them, but not without kicking up a fuss. He wasn’t ready to engage in all-out battle though. If he did, he’d bring the entirety of Valoria’s defenses down upon his head.
That wouldn’t work for what he had planned, so stealth remained the best way forward.
The passage continued to slope downward at an easy decline, doubling back and forth as it progressed ever deeper. Then, it leveled out, ending in a large chamber lit by wall-mounted sconces filled with flickering torches. There were three guards on duty, and they stood sentry before a massive, iron-bound door.
Elijah considered simply going back.
There had to be another entrance.
Yet, he suspected that he would need to kill if he wanted to enter the palace. And given the isolated nature of the chamber – as well as the light guard presence – he expected that this would be the best chance he would get. So, without further hesitation, Elijah slithered forward, circling around the edge of the room until he found himself facing the back of one of the guards.
He stood before the door, while the other two sat on a pair of stools nearby, where they were playing cards. Even as the pair bantered back and forth, Elijah embraced Predator Strike and pounced, decapitating the upright guard with a single bite of his powerful jaws.
Then, he used Flicker Step, disappearing and reappearing behind one of the other guards. He struck again. This time, there was more resistance – without Predator Strike to augment his attack, he only had his Strength on his side – but it wasn’t enough. The man’s skull shattered beneath his forceful bite.
Before he fell, Elijah launched himself forward, attempting to rip into the third man’s face. The sentry scrambled backward, tipping over his stool and letting out a scream that was cut short by Elijah’s attack. The guard used some sort of shield skill, fouling Elijah’s initial strike. However, the second attack – a swipe from his claws – shattered the plane of ethera, allowing Elijah free access to the man’s delicate throat. He ripped it out with a second swipe of his claws, sending an arc of blood to splatter across the wall.
Only three seconds had passed, and the guards were all dead.
Elijah stood over his final kill, looking down at the man with no emotion. It wasn’t so different a mindset from what he usually adopted in towers. They weren’t people. Just enemies. Obstacles that needed to be overcome.
It was a dangerous frame of mind.
And he rejected it.
They were people. They probably had families. Friends. Hopes and dreams.
But they had chosen the wrong side. They had supported Roman. There was an argument that they’d only done what they needed to do to survive, and while accurate, that didn’t excuse the horrors in which they had engaged. Because the guards had done plenty of horrible things, too.
During his exploration of the city and the conversation with the man in the tavern, Elijah had learned a bit about the men and women who wore the blue-and-white uniforms. And what he’d learned was enough to assuage any guilt he might’ve felt. They’d engaged in wholesale slaughter during the failed rebellion, an act which most citizens considered excessive.
But they hadn’t stopped there, either.
They never missed an opportunity to bully the population – especially those who the city’s leaders deemed expendable. Or worthless. As a result, some truly despicable acts – ranging from sexual assault to extortion and murder – had been swept under the table.
No – Elijah might’ve felt guilty about killing Fiona, but that was as much to do with the fact that she was a mostly helpless woman as anything else. The soldiers couldn’t claim innocence. The moment they’d donned their uniforms, they’d established themselves as combatants.
And with them, anything would go.
Elijah shifted into his human form, then searched the guards. Their armor was nothing special, so he didn’t bother taking it. His Ghoul-Hide Satchel held far more than its appearance would suggest, but its capacity wasn’t infinite. So, he needed to be selective about what he looted, and given that the armor didn’t seem valuable, Elijah left it on their bodies.
However, he did take a couple of decent daggers that felt more powerful than normal. Both were cool to the touch, suggesting that they had been made from the Cold Iron Carmen had mentioned. Still, they seemed poorly constructed, which probably affected their grade. Whatever the case, he could never have enough knives, and they didn’t take up much room.
He also found a ring of keys, which he expected would unlock the gate – and any others past it. So, once he’d ensured that they had nothing else of value, he piled the corpses near the door, unlocked it, then pushed it open, revealing another corridor.
However, this one was slightly different in that, only a dozen feet in, there were two doors – one on either side of the hall. Elijah stalked forward, then checked inside the first. It was empty, which gave him a perfect location to stash the bodies. It only took a couple of minutes to carry them to what looked like a jail cell, then deposit them inside before moving on.
He did so after having switched back to his draconid form and under Guise of the Unseen. Like that, he continued on until, at last, the torch-lit tunnel terminated in a huge chamber. It was hundreds of yards across and just as deep.
But Elijah wasn’t concerned with the dimensions.
Instead, he was only concerned with the cages, each one containing naked people, that lined the walls. Stacked three high, there must’ve been hundreds of them, and they all held at least a few prisoners. They were all dirty, emaciated, and on the edge of death.
That left Elijah with a choice.
He could free them, taking precious time to heal them. Given their condition, that might take a while.
Or he could ignore the issue and continue on with his task.
He glanced toward the center of the room, where he saw a raised circle decorated with chains and a series of square plinths. Each one was stained with blood, telling Elijah that he’d found another execution site.
The fires of his rage reignited.
Elijah stalked through the prison, ignoring the pitiful people in the cages. He still hadn’t decided what to do with them, but whichever path he chose, he needed to scout things out. After all, who knew what horrors the dungeon held?
The answer to that question came soon after, when he found another room. It was much smaller, and inside there was a corpulent man who Elijah’s instincts told him was someone important.
Not that it mattered.
With what he saw, Elijah’s conscience wouldn’t allow him to ignore the monster in human form. So, without further ado, he stepped through the open door and prepared for battle.