The words hung in the air.
There was a tightness around my chest as I waited.
He knew what I was?
I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to speak, and yet knew I could not stop him.
The master had once paused in a conversation about expelling me, the silence now had that same pregnant pause of fate. That this was a significant moment in my life.
I got up and wandered into the kitchen still wrapped in a blanket.
He’d explained how he’d set my clothes aside without thinking while he bathed me. The house did away with them in the same way it removed other waste, the dirty bath water, shit, and piss. The house respected it’s occupants things, but everything else was removed when you weren’t paying attention.
That wasn’t a turn of phrase.
“It’s something to do with magic,” he had said with a shrug, “observation and memory hold reality together or the like,” he had shrugged as if it didn’t matter at all. I was soaking the words up, not yet fully aware that I could recall this conversation with full clarity at any point in the future.
“It’s why the Fae make their gates in hedge rows and the back corners of attics. No one remembers what those places are meant to look like so the changing of them is easier, less costly.”
He’d explained other things, the conversation wandering from topic to topic as I asked questions.
Then the book came out and he tapped the covered and told me he knew what I was.
The tightness and dread grew in magnitude, but he wasn’t pausing for effect.
He pushed the tea cups away and centered the book between us. He found a section of black brittle pages on the edge and opened the book there.
The open page was blackened and brittle looking. It seemed like turning the page would cause it to crumble.
I expected him to be very gentle with the book, but he flipped the pages normally until he came to the pages he wanted and tapped the picture with a normal amount of force as he spoke.
“Vampire,” he said tapping the picture.
“Undead Ooze,” he said, “strong, fast, has a small amount of paralytic venom in a stinger in the top of their mouth. You’re missing a lung and in it’s place is a black ooze.”
He reached out blindly for his tea cup, then turned his head and I noted all the cups of tea were gone.
I blinked at the book. Not only because it contained information about me, but because I recognized the symbols that made up the words in the block of text that covered both visible pages.
“Is that Tibean?” I asked.
“Is what?”
“The language, those symbols.” I was trying to turn my head and moved closer to him to see them from a better angle.
“I can’t read,” the paladin said with no shame at all, “never learned.”
“How do you know what it says?” I asked.
“Had to memorize the book,” he said with a shrug.
This time he did look away, sigh, and then pushed himself up.
“I’ll make some tea,” he said.
Had to memorize the book, but couldn’t remember what vampires were until he saw the book again.
“Can I touch it?” I asked wary of damaging such an old book.
“Of course. Oh. It’s not-” he grabbed a few pages and shook them making them snap and wave in the air. The rough motion causing exactly zero flakes of blackened and burned paper to flake off.
“You can’t damage it. The pages are like that to indicate they contain information on the undead. Switch to another section, say here, and these are fairy creatures.”
The pages felt like paper, but very thin even though they were slick and cool to the touch. Not cool, almost cold.
“These are the beasts,” he said flipping to a section much further on. The paper looked normal but he indicated I should rub my fingers over the page.
When I ran a thumb over the paper it felt furry and there was a smell of animal musk.
He smiled and closed the book. He paused for only a moment and then grinned.
“Dragons,” he said as he opened the front cover to the first page
The page was somehow metallic and highly reflective, though it didn’t seem to limit the paper’s movements. The image the Tibean symbols and the drawings all looked like etchings in the metal instead of ink on the page.
“You look through the Bestiary and I’ll make soup,” he said. I wondered if he remembered he just said he’d make more tea.
We spoke as he made the soup.
The paladin had only two books for he could not read.
One was an ancient holy book that had been handed down with the armor, and the other was this picture book of monsters with symbols and diagrams showing what they were weak to, and how to kill them.
The whole book was bound in a smooth black leather I could not identify, not that I knew anything about leather. The nature of the pages inside changed with each section.
There were words in the bestiary in Tibean and some of the pages even read like the silly alchemy stories had in the book I had translated from Tibean to Chemish.
Master Juun had grown frustrated that my letters could twist and flip and that I would never notice until it was pointed out to me
I could read Chemish just fine but he said my writing was horrid. The Tibean symbols helped, because there were so many of them and they were all slightly different. It was still difficult and I made many mistakes, but the translation work did help me learn my Chemish better.
There was a sketch of the stinger on the vampire page, and many notes about how well they could see, how fast they could move, or how quickly they could heal. There were pictures and figures depicting their impressive strength and sharp hearing, and advice on how to use all their strengths against them.
Crush garlic smeared upon everything to overpower their sense of smell. Loud bells to deafen or confuse, and flash powder or magic to blind.
“Fire is recommended to quickly drain the creature of it’s ability to regenerate, as they cannot stop themselves from healing when injured,” I read while my finger slowly moved across the page near the drawn symbol for fire.
“Both lungs are dissolved as the,” I read slowly. It was difficult though. The symbols for lungs were air and sack so I had to work my way through the unknown words guessing and rereading until things made sense. I didn’t know the next word but it contained the symbol for black and the paladin had called it an ooze. I’d find out later as I looked through the bestiary page by page, that oozes were a type of monster with varying traits and categories. They were defined by color. Under the heading Black Ooze the symbols for man and leech were smashed together with some odd accents.
“Both lungs are dissolved as the black ooze converts the body before it regrows one lung. Saving the infected is possibly only until the ooze begins to regrown the lung. At that point any divine healing is healing the Vampire and not the man.”
There were various other symbols of course, but all outlined in black. Only one was different and it was in the shape of a cane, or hooked bone perhaps, but outlined in green.
“What does this mean?” I asked. The paladin looked over my shoulder.
“The green border.”
“Benefits or advantages of keeping the creature at least partially alive. Normally it’s the bits you can harvest that grow back that might be of some use to an alchemist or priest. I think,” he continued slowly as he stared at the wall.
“Ahh, yes,” he said with some relief, “Leeches. It’s something about leeches isn’t it?”
I could only read new Tibean words in the sense that I put every thing together piece by piece and then puzzled through the likely meanings. And even then the only book I’d ever seen had been a child’s story about a traveling hero who did nonsensical alchemy.
There were massive gaps in my understanding of symbols. Thankfully many words were compound and created by smashing other smaller words together.
I studied the symbols and tried to piece it together.
I discussed what I thought I was reading with the paladin and it sometimes jogged his memory. Together we worked out the general information.
The benefit of leeches was a big one. The symbol in the green border was likely a broken bone in the context.
It turned out there was a way to extract the magic that powered the black ooze’s healing.
The black goo was the animating force that allowed me to move my dead body. It also healed me, and using leeches a portion of that healing magic could be transfered to other living creatures.
It was limited to the same day-night cycle as feeding was.
Neither the paladin or I understood what that meant at the time. There appeared to be no information on the page about the blood going bad, but we would learn that later in our experiments.
Later, as I stayed with him we would come up with things to test. I would learn soon enough that I couldn’t harvest blood from a deer and store it in a canteen to drink later. Whatever magic I consumed in the blood was only good that first night, or now that I was without the stupor, good for the first day, if killed during the day. Assuming I had kept the animal alive until after sunrise before harvesting the blood.
If the animal was killed mere moments before sunrise the harvested blood would go bad when the pressure inside of me popped even though the sun was still behind the mountains and the animal was still alive. Likewise when the sun sat, and that same internal pressure indicated the shift from day into night, any blood harvested during the day would loose whatever value it had for me.
It worked both externally, for blood in a bucket, and internally. If I gorged on blood I could feel a portion I hadn’t yet used inside me burn way in an instant. There was no equivalent to my previous life, but how I explained it to the paladin was a feeling of being overwhelming full, then suddenly feeling content.
The leeches, whatever magic they contained, followed the same cycles. A leech killed and prepared during the day only had power until sunset. One prepared in darkness was only viable until sunrise. In addition any leeches exposed to the sun after they had fed, whether or not they were alive or dead, burned without flame, withering away into a dry brittle lump.
It took some time before I was able to leave the cabin. My fingertips did heal but very very slowly. I could cut myself and watch the wound seal back up in a very short amount of time.
With a cut the white-hot healing flame flared and I could see the cut knit back together. For the sunburns the fingertips were immersed in the white-hot flames but somehow I knew the healing was weaker, or the damage from the sun was worse. It was a constant burning as they healed, and the sunburn healed slowly.
He had no leeches in the garden, and even if he did he worried that they would be from fairy and work differently than the instructions in the book indicated.
At that time, it had been almost a full week since I arrived and I had not hungered for blood. I ate with him, of the meals he prepared. He warned me that I must only eat what was created for me by his hand or handed to me by his hand. Should I lift an apple from the bowl on the table it would be as empty and weak as the light that lit the room. I could eat it but my body would gain nothing from the exercise.
During that week we both considered, discussed, and hoped, I was cured. That whatever it was he had forced out of me was gone.
We even discussed the possibility that the sunlight would eventually not burn me at all. That the healing too might fade, as if certain aspects of the magic were just lingering after the change, whatever they had been.
We were both still curious though so one night I headed to the swamps and collected leeches by the tried and true method of wading naked into the water, waiting, and then plucking them off my flesh when back on the shore.
I was still limited to a single blanket for clothing and it had the unfortunate habit of disappearing whenever I was deeply engaged while listening to one of the paladin’s stories and not paying it any attention. Or sleeping, or eating dinner, or anytime I looked away from it.
I had to learn to keep a hand clutching it and rubbing my thumb back and forth over it so that I was always paying a bit of attention to it.
When I returned to the Fairy House after the swamps, the first thing the paladin said was, “Where did you get the clothing?”
“There were bodies in the swamp,” I said slowly realizing that he might think I had hurt someone, “Plague dead,” I added quickly.
“I-” I shrugged and he nodded.
“Not the best quality,” he said as I entered, “but a lot more real than the blanket.”
It was a simple shirt and set of pants. I did my best to clean them in the swamp’s muddy waters but they were far from clean.
The bestiary described only that the leech, fat with a vampire’s blood, should be drowned in strong alcohol until dead, crushed, and applied to a wound or consumed for general well being.
Paladin Flin tested the first leech on himself confident his god would protect him if something went wrong.
He ate it whole after drowning it in a shot of strong alcohol. Then he sat down to wait. After a time he said he felt burning in his joints.
He flexed his hands a few times and then grinned like a child with a piece of hard candy. He stood up and sat back down three times. Then he laughed and did a little dance.
“My knees feel twenty years younger! Fifty!”
In the coming days and weeks I’d give him more leeches in the hopes that they could help with his memory, or sharpen his mind on his bad days. They did not seem to make any difference to his mind. He simply had good days, and bad ones.
It was very possibly a genuine miracle from Moria that he was as cognizant as he was in that first week and a half. It could have been his interest in something novel and new, but he was never quite as sharp later, as he had been that first week, even on his best of days.
The book said sunlight in any form withered a vampire, though the paladin had to help me parse out the meaning of ‘in any form.’ I’d not understood before that conversation that there was magic or creatures that could create or mimic sunlight.
Silver was the odd one.
He was sure he remembered that was the bane of vampires, yet it didn’t affect me like he thought it should.
He didn’t know if he was remembering incorrectly or if losing the shadowy thing had changed me.
“Here,” he said flipping to the section about the Fae, “it has the same symbol for bane,” he said pointing, “but in this case it is iron not silver. Iron burns them like a hot brand. Burns and scars.”
He flipped through the pages, nightmares and monsters were half seen as he searched.
“Here,” he said pointing at another creature that was part turtle shell and part octopus, “Brass is the bane, for this one, erm-” he cleared his throat, “Copper, excuse me. Copper not, not brass.”
“And that means?” I asked.
“It burns and scars, and this creature heals faster than you do. I had to fight one once and the best you can hope for is that they simply leave. I’m not sure I would not have failed the Lady that day had she required me to kill it instead of drive it off.”
He whispered a short payer to his god thanking her again for her blessings and attention.
Then he sat in silence. Perhaps remembering what had happened those long years ago or perhaps lost and unthinking. He blinked when he looked at me then down at the silver hair pin I held in my hand.
It was clearly a woman’s and important to him.
“That’s mine,” he said after a moment.
“Of course I said setting it down and taking my hand away.
“Ah,” he said with a small shrug, “I’m sorry, I was- what was I saying? Ah yes. You touched the silver, held it, even licked it, yet everything I understand about banes mean that should have injured you more than the sunlight does. The only repeatable effect at all is the sneezing!”
He was growing frustrated.
“Ah!” he said spinning the book towards him and flipping back to soft warm and almost furry paper that the beasts were inked upon.
“Here,” he said finding another creature.
“Bane,” he said, “and silver.”
There was a huge bear thing. It’s size depicted by the crude drawing of a man who stood only waist high to the creature. It had more symbols scattered around the edges of the page than most of the others.
“Silver to these burns and scars instantly, and if the silver remains embedded within the creature the silver can force it to shift back into a weaker human form! So if you are a vampire, which it appears that you are, or were, than silver should be your bane. Yet you can hold it?”
Then we did a few more experiments. I sneezed again when I put it to my nose and inhaled deeply. I licked it but only tasted metal. Eventually he pushed the tip of the silver pin into the meaty part of my hand.
The the scream that ripped out of me came without warning or permission. The room blurred and spun and fire and pain consumed not only my hand but the whole of my arm.
When my head cleared I was pressed into one of the only corners in the round room, where a cabinet with shelves stood straight out from the curved wall. I was shaking almost uncontrollably.
It had burned and scarred me. Yet cutting the scarred flesh away an hour later was enough that the regrown flesh healed without damage.
Silver was a bane.
Not to me, the dead outer flesh, but to the black ooze that animated me.
The experiments continued during the four weeks I stayed with him. I slept in a real bed, and ate hot bread with butter and honey almost every day.
There was no privy and instead I shit and pissed in the Fairy Garden anywhere I liked. The ground would open up and consumed my waste by swallowing it like quicksand.
He said the garden took anything as an offering and would provide something in exchange where as the house simply disposed of unwanted or unclaimed things.
Sometimes when I shit a piece of fruit would fall or a flower from some plant would bloom and then fall off. The paladin, being the occupant of the home, could harvest anything he liked, whenever he liked.
He warned me often not to take anything that wasn’t offered in exchange. So dire was his warning that I never once picked up the fruit or flowers that fell, even though they were clearly offered.
During those weeks he was almost always animated and exited about the experiments we would do or the discussions we would have. Then, before I knew it, we had run out of experiments either of us could think of. We knew nothing more than when we started on the why of things, though I had learned much from his bestiary both about myself and about other monsters.
Mostly I was humbled. Cook had long told us we were lucky to be born in the Slums even if we had no parents to care for us.
“In the wilds monsters kill and paladins and priests are rare things. A traveling wizard or druid may happen by when you need one but more often than not the monsters prey on the people or their livestock until help can be hired from far away.
There were always monster hunters in Cook’s stories. Women of the Red Hood, Men of the Iron Hand, Spearwalkers, Grimms, and Fire Shouters, the great companies were talked about, but it was the Companions he focused on. Not that all the heroes in his stories lived at the same time. Aldus was eaten and killed two hundred years before Sila was even born. Yet the Companions remained the centerpiece of most stories. When other companies were mentioned they often failed to kill the monsters and had to team up with one of the Companions to finish the job.
In the bestiary there were crude estimates on the number and type of troop needed to kill each creature. There were little depictions of men with crossbows, pikes, or men sitting atop horses with numbers indicating the number of each.
In addition there were symbols and breakdowns of the creatures strengths and weaknesses. A few symbols to describe important details in a straightforward manner, or on a few pages stories or poems relevant to the creatures. Before each section were a few pages of symbols explaining why the monsters within that section had been grouped together. What general characteristics they shared, either in strengths or weaknesses, as well as other general details.
For the undead it said most were feral creatures, mindless slaves to their appetites. That they had no memory of their previous lives and no loyalty to family or oaths given in life.
It was common for each section to be ordered by ease of killing, which often equated to how strong the creature was. In almost all cases the weaker the creature the easier it was to kill. There were some creatures out of place. Ghosts could be deadly and hard to kill, but easy to trap. A multi-legged land crab was equally difficult to kill but easy to drive away as they were terrified of mundane fire. These were further back in the lists to show how dangerous they were.
Mostly they were ordered in each section by how difficult they were to kill. That was where the tiny symbols of fighting men came in.
A single ghoul was depicted with four pike-men. The shambling men, what the book called zombies were depicted with a single pike-man. Those were the two creatures weaker than vampires in the section of the book with the black brittle pages of the undead. I warranted six pike-men with a symbol that meant they needed something else.
Fire.
The method of killing me the book recommended was to set me aflame. Magic fire from spells or alchemy worked just as well as mundane oil. Once on fire, pike-men were to hold me at bay until I stopped moving, chop me into bits and either burn me with more fire or set the bits out under the sun.
From there it climbed in both numbers of men and warning symbols.
In another section the werewolf creature, what I’d first thought of as a bear-thing, had the little soldiers men painted with long shadows, which the paladin said was ten men standing in a row. Which meant one of those creatures didn’t need two pike-men and two crossbow-men, but twenty of each.
In our time together we learned I was not cured of my hunger for blood, but that my hunger only grew if I used abilities that normal people did not have.
Outside the Fairy House, I could jump higher, lift more, hit harder, and run faster than I ever could before. The paladin suspected I was stronger than most humans, though he claimed to have seen tumbling men in a traveling show who could jump as high I as could
When I pushed myself hard, and my body responded I could feel something. A growing void or hunger, though in truth hunger wasn’t the correct word. It was need for blood but it wasn’t hunger.
I still had a hunger for food and thirst for water, but I also yearned for blood. They were different feelings and over time the yearning for blood separated from the other feelings, becoming recognizable as its own need.
Since it was blood that seemed to fuel the magic I thought of that lack as a lack of blood. As if I burned or used up the blood inside me to do extraordinary physical feats.
Neither of us had any idea if that was true, but it did seem like the amount of blood I needed to feel full was directly related to how quickly I used it up.
As we discovered the limits of my abilities I felt extremely powerful. As if nothing could stop me.
Yet in the book there were winged beasts needing sixty men, or a type of tree that needed two hundred. Another, on the red pages, had red X’s over the depictions of troops and half a page of written warnings.
Inked in symbols larger than found anywhere else in the book was a simple message, “A pit fiend has never been killed upon the mortal planes. They can be starved of strength. Avoid allowing the creature to come into physical contact with sentient creatures, friend or foe, for a whole day and they will grow too weak to remain.”
That thing was the size of a building with the man depicting size drawn smaller than knee high.
The red pages were creatures from the hells. Brown pages that smelled of pine sap contained non-magical beasts that were themselves formidable.
There were bears, large cats, and wolves. Colorful snakes and beasts of the seas as well, not all of which were dangerous.
“While frightfully large,” the book said of whales, “these creatures pose no danger to ship or sailor and in fact their presence often shows that the surrounding seas are empty of kraken. Wise sailors steer their course toward whale sighting for safe passage.”
There was a turtle so large that the man with his hand up in a wave depicting relative human size could be swallowed by it in one bite, and a Fey creature so small that it was depicted as a small dot between the man’s raised thumb and first finger.
And as powerful as I felt, almost everything in the bestiary was more difficult to kill than I was.