Rasp awoke dead. When he jerked his head free of the damp pillow, his skin hot to the touch and coated in a sheen of sweat, he was surprised to find the afterlife had provided him with a coffin. What was even more surprising was that it was downright comfortable. The funeral shroud placed delicately over his prone form was warm and smelled of citrus and crushed cloves. It was a little insulting they’d arranged him facedown but, then again, between his face and his ass, the latter was the more appealing feature.
‘Here lies the biggest pain in the ass to have ever lived’, his headstone would say. No. That wasn’t right. Rasp deserved better than that. After all, he’d helped stop a damn apocalypse! Never mind the fact that he’d been the one to set it off in the first place — that little tidbit didn’t matter. The point was, he’d overcome his old ways and turned into something good, for the betterment of all mortal-kind.
Now that was someone who deserved a decent head stone. Something along the lines of: ‘remember me as I was: naked and screaming’.
Nah. Still not right.
It was missing something. A punch of emotion, perhaps. Anyone visiting his gravestone needed to be reminded just how much he meant to them. ‘It should have been you, Faris’.
As Rasp laid there, facedown in his burial pillow, arranging the details of his funeral, he gradually became aware of another presence. Something was nearby. It shuffled about, heavy feet dragging across the floor as ancient wooden boards groaned beneath its weight.
Floorboards? Rasp thought.
That wasn’t right. They didn’t bury people above ground. For fuck’s sake, if they’d left him facedown in an open casket for all the word to see, he was going to have to come back and haunt someone!
Had Rasp still possessed survival instincts, they would have demanded he put his head back down and remain still, and wait for the danger to pass. As he was already dead, he had no need for survival instincts. Thus, Rasp flipped over, fighting to remove the dark shroud that served as the thin layer between him and the world of the living.
“Get off me!” he cursed, struggling to untangle the sheet from his unruly limbs.
Rasp’s arms were numb and cumbersome, as if they’d been left out in the cold too long. He tried to use his legs to assist in getting himself free, but all he got for his effort was a shooting pain in his right ankle. Clutching his throbbing foot, he fell back into the coffin, only partially aware that he was screaming at the top of his lungs.
Heavy footsteps clomped against the floorboards moments before the shroud was lifted from Rasp’s mangled corpse. His rescuer spoke. The guttural words, alas, were not any Rasp recognized.
Rasp twisted his head from side to side in a futile attempt to take in his surroundings. For some incredibly cruel reason, even in death he was blind. That didn’t seem very fair. It wasn’t total darkness, however. He could make out a dim light flickering not far from his final resting place. A tallow candle, according to his nose. His tongue agreed as the dingy air tasted remarkably similar to rancid bacon grease.
The candle did a piss poor job of illuminating the surrounding room. Fuzzy shapes and shadows filled the space, arranged in a way indicative of furniture and, therefore, a tripping hazard. Not that running from death would do him any good, but it was nice to have a contingency plan just in case.
A stout form loomed over the top of him, still talking at a volume far too loud for their given proximity.
Rasp shooed the angel of death away with a limp wave of his hand. “Will you give it a rest? Pace yourself, for the gods’ sakes. You’ve got all eternity to torture me.”
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The speaker relented, for a few seconds anyway, before stating something that sounded like it might have been a question.
“I don’t speak ghost yet, sorry.”
The speaker tried again. This time more slowly, with distinct pauses between each word. It was similar to the manner in which Rasp used to explain to his brothers why clutching a bunch of feathers before jumping off a cliff would not work. Regrettably, Rasp happened to be the dim-wit in this particular scenario and failed to grasp the angel of death’s meaning.
“Talking slower does not make me understand a language I don’t speak!” He crossed his arms over his chest, muttering, “Just makes me feel stupid.”
The speaker sighed. The heavy, full-bodied kind that usually involved a nose pinch or some other demonstration of mental exhaustion. “You…” they said, struggling to piece the words together.
“I understood that.” Rasp sat straighter. “Go on. Me, what?”
Rasp’s encouragement gave the angel of death the motivation he needed to finish his sentence. “Stay.”
“Don’t leave?” Rasp was really nailing this whole communicating with the dead thing.
The speaker stepped away, repeating the command. “Stay.”
Rasp held his palms aloft in the universal sign of ‘I’ll do exactly what you say until your back’s turned and then, well, no promises. But don’t worry about that.’
“I’m staying,” Rasp said. “See? Not going anywhere, am I?”
A heavy door creaked open and shut, followed by the unmistakable jingle of metal keys as the lock was twisted shut from the other side. Damn. A locked door was going to make the ‘stay’ order significantly harder to disobey. Clever death. What did the afterlife need locks for anyway? Was it possible for a ghost to stumble his way back to the side of the living?
You know you’re not dead.
It was true, Rasp supposed. What he’d initially mistook for a coffin was clearly just a bed with an understuffed straw mattress. It’d been so long since he’d slept on anything other than cold, hard ground that it had merely felt heavenly. Acknowledging that he was alive came with a daunting to-do list, however, which was probably why he’d been putting off his inevitable resurrection for as long as possible. A corpse could just lounge around without a care. Unlike him, who now had to get out of bed, break out, locate the others, and then get them all topside before anyone noticed.
Groaning, Rasp scooted his way to the edge of the bed and swung his stiff legs over, surprised to find the floor much closer than he expected. He gripped the cold wood with his bare toes, feeling every buckle and crease underfoot as he considered how he’d become a giant without noticing.
His brain helpfully provided the answer. You’ve been captured by dwarfs, idiot. All of their furniture is close to the ground.
Oh, right. The whole captured by an underground cult had felt so much like a bad dream, he’d simply dismissed it as one. Kind of sad that, in comparison, death was the more desirable option. He definitely wasn’t staying put now. Rasp held his breath as he willed his leaden legs into an upright position. The dull throb in his right ankle neatly stepped over the threshold from tolerable to ‘oh my gods, someone hand me the bone saw, I’ve got hack this fucking thing off!’
Rasp flopped back down onto the bed with a mangled scream, writhing as an invisible wave of blistering fire rolled up his leg. After a few moments of pathetic sobbing, able to do little more than remember to breathe around the tightness in his chest, the brunt of the pain subsided. Rasp worked his fingers down his pantleg and gingerly lifted the hem of his trousers away from his swollen flesh. His ankle was hot to the touch and bulbous, stretched tight with an ungodly amount of liquid pooled beneath the skin.
The dwarf’s ‘stay’ order seemed a little less ominous now. Rasp wiggled his way back into the center of the sagging mattress, resigned to stay put. This, alas, left his thoughts to wander unchecked.
If he was alive, it meant the others were too, right? Gods, he hoped so. He wouldn’t make a good virginal sacrifice on his own, after all. And why was it always virgins anyway? Was it because the deity was awful at sacrifice and simply didn’t want its victims to be none the wiser? ‘Stick me with your teeth, oh great and awful one! Stick me harder! Are you sticking me? No, seriously? Is that it? Wait, you’re done? No, no, no. It was fine. I just imagined my first time, I don’t know, a little more torturous is all’.
Rasp tried to distract himself with absurd sacrificial situations, but his mind kept wandering back to the one topic he wished to avoid. The voice. That soft, crooning sound that had called to him from the darkness, beckoning him to find it. The memory sent chills shimmying down his overheated skin. Whatever it was, it wanted him. And, like all of his past love interests, the more they wanted him, the more desperate Rasp was to get away.
A bum leg, mysterious voices, and an underground cult set on sending him to his death. Good gods, Rasp thought as he ran a heavy hand down his face. How in the realm was he going to get them out of this one?