by B.J. Keeton
***
The pen had barely scratched paper when there was a knock at the front door. Gramps thought there was a knock, at least. The storm outside had picked up, and he couldn't very well imagine that anyone would be out in it, much less knocking at his door. The storm probably tossed a limb at the house. There was another sound, talking maybe, and that made his head jerk up. Gramps’s aged muscles were not used to motion that quick, and he groaned involuntarily. The book slid off his lap onto the floor and closed, the purple ribbon barely caught between the pages.
“Who’s there?” he asked as loudly as he could. He wasn't expecting anyone, and he couldn't remember the last time anyone had just stopped by to chat. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had stopped by at all.
Another knock. And voices. There was definitely someone there; it wasn't just something being tossed against the side of the house.
“Who’s there, I said?”
The knocks grew more insistent, slower but harder. Gramps bent to pick up the book off the floor and placed it back in its home on his bookshelf.
More knocking, louder voices, probably yelling. Even though they didn’t socialize, Gramps knew his neighbors in the village. They were not terribly fond of him, definitely not fond enough to come knocking in a storm like this. That meant it was someone else. Gramps muttered to himself and hoped it wasn’t as bad as he expected.
He went toward the bedroom to put some more space between him and whoever was outside. What he needed was a weapon, but he didn't think he had time to get one.
A loud crash came from the front of his house, and the voices were no longer muffled. He heard a man and a woman speaking to one another. They spoke a language that he recognized, that he had once spoken himself, but had not spoken for many years. He had thought it died out centuries ago. It had been so long since he had even heard it; he couldn’t quite understand what the intruders were saying.
It didn’t matter. Gramps knew the kinds of people who had spoken that language once upon a time, and that was enough. One side of his mouth curled upward in a snarl, while a cold rock formed in the center of his stomach. His heart raced.
If he did not act quickly, there was a chance he might not make it through this encounter.
The man was becoming more insistent, yelling faster and louder. Every time he yelled, a crash punctuated his statement. This went on for about thirty seconds, and each crash indicated to Gramps that the burglars were working their way through the house.
They would find him in a minute, which meant there was no time to search for a weapon. There was a crash from the hallway outside the bedroom he was in, and the woman yelled something Gramps could almost understand.
Fear filled him. He wasn’t ready to die, after all. He had thought he was. He had thought his life had been long enough, but no. Not like this. If he was going to die, it was going to be on his own terms, not because someone invaded his home.
Anger laced his fear, and his heart rate spiked. He focused the emotions, envisioning a purple-green ball of fire in his mind. He poured his emotions into the ball, and it grew hotter and brighter in his mind’s eye. He needed a weapon, so he was going to have one. He held out his hand, ready to feel the weight of the Flameblade, but nothing happened. The purple-green fireball in his mind dissipated, and he stood alone in his bedroom.
Lightning struck outside the window. The light illuminated the room for an instant and blinded the old man. Thunder rumbled immediately, as though to indicate the severity of the situation. He had failed.
He could not let himself fail. Ceril’s face flashed before Gramps’s eyes, and for the first time in his life, he knew that he had something worth fighting for, worth living for. Even if the technomages had perverted him, Ceril was still his boy.
That thought in mind, Gramps did something he hadn't done since long before Ceril had been born. He took a deep breath, calmed himself as much as he could under the circumstances, and felt his skin begin to tingle. He smiled involuntarily as he felt a sensation under his skin that he had almost forgotten.
Had anyone been in the room to see Gramps as he began to smile, they would have seen his skin begin to run and ripple as though tiny insects crawled under the topmost layer. They would have seen his smile grow larger, his skin swell in an almost geometric pattern, and his pores open as a thick, black liquid streamed from them. They would have likely assumed that the old man had been cut or stabbed and begun bleeding a black blood that by all rights shouldn't be bled.
But he hadn't been cut, and he hadn’t been stabbed. His pores dilated just enough to allow the black blood to rush through and not tear or irritate his skin. The old man had gone through the Blood Rites long before—had perfected the process on himself, actually—and learned to control the results in the years following. Quickly after his skin began to ripple and spot with the seeping blackness, the blood ran around his arms. Tendrils moved with a hive-minded purpose, coating his arms, running so close to the skin that his clothing was left untouched and dry. From beneath his gums the blood ran, coating and darkening his coffee-stained teeth. The liquid shimmered in the low light of the bedroom. Its iridescent shade once reminded people of the scales of a snake. Long ago, he had thought the comparison apt—the way it moved out of and over his body did have a kind of serpentine grace. Even after all the years, he still marveled at it.
He marveled more at how much he had missed this.
The blackness poured from his nose and across his mouth. Tendrils met in the space between his lips, interlocked, and formed a mesh web over his mouth that solidified to fuse his upper and lower lips together. The ecstatic smile on his face was frozen in blackness—blackness that bubbled and shimmered with every breath.
He bled from his eyes, and from his ears. His nostrils continued to pour the blackness from them. The blood from his nose worked its way into his mouth and proceeded to fill his throat and lungs, but he didn't choke or gasp. If there had not been intruders, he would have laughed. He had not felt this alive in so long.
When the process began, his hair—what was left of it—had been white with age. However, the blackness coursing over his body revitalized it, providing as much color and richness as it had once possessed when he was a young man.
Black tears streamed from his eyes, and they became bloodshot before dilating into complete blackness.
As he enjoyed his transformation, his resurgence, the old man stripped out of his clothes. Any blood on the cloth slithered its way back to the mass that eventually coated his body. He stood naked in his bedroom and threw his clothes in the small pile that already sat neglected in one corner.
When the cycle was finished, he was completely black, coated in the iridescent blood. It began to harden around him and briefly, almost imperceptibly, the black liquid flashed with a bright, purple-green light, and then Gramps disappeared from sight entirely.
The whole process took maybe fifteen seconds to complete. In that time, the intruders had split up and were ransacking individual rooms of his home. Invisible, Gramps walked around the room. He was perfectly aware of where he was placing his feet and how much sound he made as he did.
As he neared the door, the female intruder sprinted into the bedroom from around the corner to the left, almost barreling directly into Gramps. If he had been three or four inches to his left, his disappearing act would have been for nothing. Instead, though, he remained undetected while the intruder searched his bedroom. Gramps chuckled silently as the woman quickly rummaged through the pile of dirty clothes in the corner and put them back as though they had been undisturbed for weeks.
He left the woman in his bedroom and stalked back through to observe what was going on in the rest of the house. More people had broken in than he originally thought. He had heard two voices, but there were maybe fifteen people in his house. He didn’t want to fight them, and he wasn't sure how much the invisibility Conjuration had weakened him, but he was sure there was going to be a co
st. At this point, he just needed to find out what they wanted.
He saw a large man with a beard in his sitting room, perusing the bookshelf as though he were at a library and wanted just the right book to curl up with during the storm. The man stiffened as he came across Gramps’s incomplete history and pulled it from the shelf.
As the man leafed through it, he yelled to his companions again in the dead language. The other burglars gathered in the sitting room, and Gramps found himself a corner away from them. He watched them.
Everyone was silent except for the large man who found the book and the woman who had searched Gramps’ bedroom. They talked animatedly, but Gramps could understand very little about what they said. He thought he heard the woman mention master, and the man responded with what could be translated as reward. The conversation ended with a unified chant. Only one word of the chant meant anything to Gramps. They had all chanted untouchable. He stiffened when he heard it, and it took almost every bit of self-control he had not to break cover and demand to know what they meant.
Afterward, the large man and woman stood back to back. He raised his left hand, she her right. Swords appeared in both of their hands. Gramps made note that the man’s sword glowed a dim blue-red and the woman’s a dull yellow-silver. The duo both stretched their empty hands behind them and around their partner’s midsection. They drew semi-circles in the air with their swords, and momentarily, the auras around the blades flared away from the swords. The energy met in midair, swirled together, and then sped from one intruder to the next. When every one of them was encompassed with fire, they all disappeared with a whuff-pop.
Half an hour later, when he was certain that he was alone, Gramps reattached his door to its frame, and then fortified it with as much furniture as he could pile behind it. The black blood that had granted him invisibility was absorbed back into his body, and he sat on the edge of his bed, sobbing into his hands.
When he cried, it was not for the violation of his home or his privacy. Not even for the theft of his book. Though each would have been justified.
No, when he cried, they were tears of anger. Of contempt. Someone had made him break his vow, and he was going to kill them for it.