Chapter Sixty-Five

Vathwin joined us at the table soon after arriving. He smiled at the others,

“Ah, hello, little lambs. I am, Vathwin.”

Andrea put her fists on her hips,

“Who are you calling lamb, Darth Edge Lord?”

Vathwin flicked his gaze over to me, raising a pale eyebrow,

“Why does she call me this? I am no Lord of Edges.”

Ambrose brushed the words away,

“We aren’t here for word games with each other. You’re here because we are planning the island’s defenses, and you’re a part of that.”

“How may I be of assistance, dear ally?” Vathwin’s lips twitched.

A question occurred to Ambrose then. One he had not thought to ask, it came to him like a lightning bolt from the sky.

“Can you bring people back? People that have died?”

Vathwin’s expression sobered. He crossed his arms.

“Not in the way you are asking me. Dying is a very permanent thing in the multiverse. Perhaps a primordial god could do it, but I do not know.”

Ambrose frowned, gesturing at Vathwin,

“But Lich’s are a thing. How do you explain that?”

Vathwin sighed,

“Undeath is not really death, dear ally.”

Ambrose felt his face go blank.

“That does not make any sense.”

Vathwin chuckled, smiling wrly.

“No, to you, I suspect it does not at that. Skeletons, draugr, and other forms of undead are animated by a users mana. Intelligent undead are just…memories of the past self. They aren’t really there, not in the living sense.”

Vathwin appeared to struggle to explain it. He let out a frustrated growl,

“You have moving pictures here, yes? You can capture a person on these moving pictures, and revisit them later to view. Even should they die, a piece of them is forever within that moving picture. Undeath is sort of like that. A moving picture of what once was…only that moving picture could kill you.”

Ambrose stroked his beard, thinking.

“And this is true for all forms of undead?”

Vathwin waggled a hand,

“Lich’s are different. They have removed their spirit and placed it in a phylactery. An object designed to contain their spirit. Normally, you cannot kill a lich unless destroying their phylactery.”

Ambrose frowned. He explained his fight with Mordred’s avatar to Vathwin, asking him why he hadn’t needed to destroy his phylactery.

Vathwin nodded, his eyes gaining a certain interest in the discussion.

“I cannot know for certain, but I would say that Mordred was himself the phylactery. If what you say is true, his spirit was connected to the island, so when you destroyed his avatar, you merely destroyed a vessel he was animating with his mana. The true lich had likely had his phylactery destroyed long a go.”

Ambrose chewed over that, then shrugged.

Ambrose tapped the map he had drawn on the table. He had done it from the knowledge beamed into his head by the island, and he had never been the best artist. It served the purpose. He indicated four different points.

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“These are the four main points of the island. These are the only ways to get to the island proper and the only places you can land. We use the Western one here, for the most part. It’s the one that would be most likely for him to take because that is the direction he is coming from. I guarantee he’ll make use of all four points, however.”

Darren crossed his arms,

“You still have yet to tell us who ‘he’ is. Who is this, Eric? Why exactly is he attacking us?”

Ambrose took a deep breath and tensed himself.

“Does it matter? He wants me. That’s all you need to know.”

Andrea shook her head, Thom crossed his arms, folding his lower lip under his teeth, and Darren let out a rumble. It was Andrea who spoke,

“Not good enough this time, boss. We have a right to know why this man is attacking. We have a right to know why we need to fight.”

Ambrose clenched his fist, his jaw working like chewing on gristle.

“It doesn’t matter what you feel you have a right to. Your deals mean you have to help me.”

Andrea narrowed her eyes, her knuckles whitening.

“Is that the relationship you want to build with us, Sonny? Our deals say we can leave after a year. You’re not giving us reasons to stay, acting like a stubborn ass.”

Ambrose felt a knuckle pop at the barb. Alice would tell you the same thing. Ambrose released a breath through his nose. She would. There was no reason they shouldn’t know; he just didn’t want to tell them. Thom spread his hands,

“I understand you’re distrustful, lad. Do you think we don’t see that sadness and rage festering in you? We aren’t stupid, Sonny. Whatever makes a man like that, it’s a powerful personal thing. But we’ve all been through the thick of it with you, and we deserve to know. Maybe not the details, but a piece of it.”

Ambrose allowed the tension to bleed out of his muscles as he relaxed them.

“Go get me the ranger, Dannill. He should be here, too.”

Darren eyed him but grunted.

“I’ll go get him. Layabout’s probably sleeping. All he’s done since getting here.”

The big man left, only to return a few minutes later, a yawning Dannill in tow.

“Whoa, man, do you know how early it is?”

Andrea snorted,

“It’s mid-afternoon, you lazy bastard.”

Dannill grimaced at her,

“You’re a drag, you know that lady?”

Andrea ignored him, looking instead to Ambrose.

“Okay, the ranger is here. Now make with the explanations.”

Ambrose swallowed, trying to get rid of the lump in his throat. He felt his throat tighten a little more as he swallowed a second time, clearing it several times. He took a long, deep breath.

“Eric Delrosa is, or was, I guess, a gangster. Any criminal enterprise you could think of in the state of Florida, he had a piece of it, or was working towards controlling all of it. He got there, in a large part, thanks to me.”

Thom poked his cheek, brows furrowing,

“What, so you were a drug dealer?”

Ambrose snorted an involuntary laugh,

“No. I was a killer. A trigger-man. A fixer. All of the above.”

Ambrose looked up, studying the wooden ceiling. No one spoke. His voice came as if from far away.

“I met Alice there, my wife.”

Ambrose’s voice almost broke then as images of his wife’s dead eyes flashed through his mind. His voice quavered,

“I wanted out. Alice was so…good. Oh, not in the moral sense, but purer than I was, certainly. She didn’t want that life for us…for our unborn daughter.”

He closed his eye. He couldn’t stop it now, and the room was deadly quiet, enraptured.

“So, I went to Eric. I asked him what it would take for me to be out.”

Ambrose felt his face contort into a lopsided smile,

“Bodies, of course. He wanted the heads of every other crime boss in the state at his feet. Gang leaders, traffickers, if you considered yourself a player in the criminal underworld, Eric wanted you dead or working for him. I made it happen.”

Ambrose shook his head, holding up a hand and clenching it into a fist, skin going as white as pale moonlight touched with the red orange of a cigarette in the night.

“The bodies I buried that day laid the foundation of what Eric became. A price I paid gladly. I was out. I was free. My wife and I bought a house, and it was…perfect.”

Ambrose paused, biting his tongue hard before continuing.

“It wasn’t to last. Eric came by, wanted me to do one more job for him. I told him where to shove it,” Ambrose laughed.

“Eric Delrosa was never a man to take insult well. He showed up that night, got into my house by paying off the security company. He tortured me. Killed my wife and unborn daughter right before my eyes after saying something about the System.”

Ambrose looked down. Andrea gasped.

“Misaq was watching. I made a deal with him, healing, a chance for power that resulted in me ending up on the island.”

He gestured at them all,

“You know the rest. There. All caught up.”

Andrea had tears in her eyes, and even Darren had looked away. Thom’s face was devoid of color, even Dannill looked troubled. Vathwin was bored, studying his nails.

“That’s…”

Ambrose made a sharp gesture at Andrea’s words,

“I don’t need apologies. You were right. You had a need to know. Eric is coming, and he will do his best to destroy this place, destroy me. Not because I did anything in particular to him, but because he gets pleasure out of it. I’m not a good man, and I never was. But Eric Delrosa makes me look like a cute kitten in comparison. He will kill us all because he gets off on it. He doesn’t need anymore of a reason.”

Andrea’s eyes blazed with sudden fire.

“Then we better stop him.”

Darren nodded, and Thom concurred with a,

“Yes, lass. We better.”

Ambrose turned to Vathwin.

“How many draugr can your create?”

Vathwin tapped his chin,

“How many corpses can you provide?”

At that, Ambrose gave him a beaming smile.