by Edwin McRae
Vari’s eyes met the sergeant’s just before the mud closed over her. The sheer terror in those bloodshot orbs was enough to make Vari feel sorry for the woman.
35
Mark seeped over the edge of the battlements and crawled like a wave of dry ice along the outside wall. He stayed low, knowing that if the reiver captain saw even the faintest wisp of mist, the jig would be up. He waited there, clinging to the stone, listening to the fracas within the courtyard.
As savage howls echoed around Citadel, Mark knew that Vari and the others had caught the attention of the headhunters, which hopefully meant they also had the attention of the captain. He just wished that he could end this before anything happened to his friends.
He carefully peeked a tendril over the nearest crenellation. There was the captain, his back to Mark, surveying the courtyard below. His shoulders were tight with tension and he was moving his hands rapidly through the air, like a puppet master attempting an ensemble ballet.
Mark raised himself up a little higher so that he could see what the captain was seeing, and the vision almost made him lose his grip on his Ethereal Flesh spell. He watched, powerless, as the sergeant eclipsed Vari’s slender neck in a grip of iron. Had he possessed a mouth, he would have screamed out Vari’s name as she struggled against the reiver’s chokehold. But then Vari dropped to the ground, gasping for breath. The reiver woman staggered, her throat gushing with blood, then sank into the dirt of the courtyard, thrashing in the quagmire that was consuming her.
“Sergeant!” shouted the captain, his throat raw.
Mark seized the opportunity, flowing over the parapet, congealing as he went. As his form solidified, he drew his sword, raised it, and swept it down onto the captain’s back. The blade struck hard but didn’t pierce the reiver’s chainmail. Instead, the force of the blow sent the man sprawling onto the cobblestones of the walkway.
“Arcane Edge!” growled Mark.
He felt the warmth of the blade against his cheek as he raised his sword once more.
“Hasten Wits,” cried the captain in retaliation. And then, almost too quickly for Mark to hear, came the words “Surge of Strength’.
Even as Mark lunged forward with his sword, he felt dismay blossom within as the captain’s musculature ballooned beneath his chainmail. The reiver’s suddenly hulkish forearm knocked Mark’s strike aside and his balled fist slammed into Mark’s side, the impact cracking several of his ribs and knocking him sideways into a crenellation.
Gasping against the agony as he slid down the stone, Mark looked up into the captain’s cold blue eyes and wheezed out a “Terrifying Manifestation”.
For the barest moment, Mark thought he saw the captain wince. But then the next fist came crashing into his belly and Mark doubled over, coughing blood onto the walkway as something ruptured inside him.
The captain’s teeth glistened red as he grinned. “Your little mind games don’t frighten me, mage.”
He raised his arms and joined his hands together, as if in prayer. Then he brought his clasped hands down in a thunderous blow that caught Mark in his lower back. Mark heard a sickening crack as his spine snapped, and felt the nerves go horribly silent. He crumbled to the ground, his lower body numb while his upper body burned with pain.
Through a fog of agony, Mark’s desperate brain searched for options, like a fireman hunting through a house fire for survivors. He could return to his Ethereal Flesh form, but that would only give him a momentary reprieve, and put his friends in grave danger. The captain would have the head space to navigate his minions around Braemar’s quagmire barriers. Second Skin was too weak and Avalar’s Leech was too slow. The captain would finish him off before Mark stole more than a few HP.
Mark felt the captain’s breath in his ear, heard the serpentine whisper that followed.
“If I kill you, you’ll just come back. Where’s the justice in that, eh?”
Blinding pain followed as the captain rolled Mark over and stared him in the face. The man’s red grin was even broader than before as he flexed the fingers of his right hand.
“So here’s an idea. Why don’t I just rip that annoying tongue out of your throat? Don’t want you going all misty on me again. Then we can enjoy some quiet time together, watching the fun as my adoring savages carve your friends up and have themselves a nice, juicy banquet.”
As the captain’s thick fingers closed in, Mark realized that he had some final words he wanted to say.
“Ignited Exhalation.”
The heat of Ivara’s spell roared up his throat and flared from his open mouth. Fire enveloped the captain’s face, melting his flesh like wax from a burning candle. The man screamed and staggered backwards as he tried to smother the flames with his hands. For a moment, Mark thought he might fall into the courtyard, hopefully break his neck. But the captain lowered his now blistered hands from his steaming face. Mark’s heart sank. Though his face was a scorched horror to behold, the captain was still very much-
Mark’s thought was interrupted by an eruption of blood from the captain’s throat as an arrowhead tore through his flesh and sinew. The man staggered for a moment, his already tormented face now twisted with agony. He snapped the arrowhead from the shaft with his thumb and forefinger, and jerked the rest of the arrow from the back of his neck with his other hand.
Blood gouted from the captain’s neck yet still he remained standing. Mark marvelled at the man’s resilience until he saw, with mounting desperation, that the captain’s wounds were beginning to heal. His melted face was reforming and the wound in his throat was closing up, staunching the flow.
Mark raised his hands as the captain crossed the distance between them, one armored forearm protecting his face as he once again reached for Mark’s mouth. In desperation, Mark clamped his jaw shut and tried to press his face to the stones, but the captain’s strength was irresistible. Fingers pried his jaw open, closed around his tongue and pressed down hard.
As Mark heard the sound of tearing meat, felt the searing pain and hot flood of blood fill his mouth, a wordless howl of rage and fear erupted from his throat. For a moment, Mark felt the very stones beneath him tremble and groan in sympathy. Then the groan turned into a roar as the rampart beneath them shattered and fell.
Mark and the captain tumbled together, face to bloody face, as the rubble pulverized them, grinding their flesh and bone into mince and flour. Mercifully, Mark didn’t feel much of the descent. Darkness took him well before what was left of him reached the flagstones of the courtyard. But the last thing he saw, the last thing he remembered, was the captain’s eyes in their reddened sockets, wide and fearful, just before the rocks crushed them into a pulp.
The darkness only served to intensify the rhythmic sound that echoed through the chamber. A lone note on a single reed pipe, played over and over and over again. Mark felt a warm and enclosing softness beneath him, then an intruding weight about his arms and head. Thorns pressed into his flesh. Thin vines filled his nostrils, reaching through his sinuses to entwine within a greater vine that choked his mouth and throat.
He heard movement around him, a whispering of cloth, then felt a sudden, hot pinprick in the crook of his left elbow. A memory flared in his mind, a vision of a small boy and a woman with a syringe. He remembered an empty tube and how it filled up with his bright, red blood. Glandular fever. That’s what the doctor had been testing for. The boy, that was him, feverish and so very, very sleepy, struggling to keep his eyes open even as the needle pierced his tender skin.
Piece by piece, realizations lit up the darkness. A bed. IVs and breathing tubes. A heart monitor. He was in some sort of hospital.
Yet that realization gave him nothing. No sense of relief, no comfort, no yearning or sense of loss. He felt numb, and in that moment Mark understood that this was what he feared more than anything else he had encountered in his entire life. This was real. It was home, and he hated every horrifying second of it.
His scream echoed up through the br
eathing tube as his muscles tensed, as he rose up from the cloying softness of the bed, as he tore the pipe from his retching throat and yanked the invading needles from his veins. Then he ran, into the darkness, not caring where his feet took him as long as it was away from that hospital room and the stupefying rhythm of its siren call. He ran and he ran, until there was nothing but darkness and silence.
36
“Mark?”
With a trembling hand, Vari stroked Mark’s eyelids closed. She wasn’t even sure why she’d spoken his name. Apart from his face, now serene in death, there was precious little left of Mark’s body. The rest was lost under several tons of debris.
To her left, the rubble shifted, a tiny cascade of chips and fragments as Dayna pulled the captain’s helmet free of the man’s pulverized remains. In fact, it was hard to describe the thing as a helmet anymore. It was more of a crumpled ball of gold and steel, bloodied and gore-smeared from the skull and mind and it had once contained. With a sneer of disgust, Dayna scooped out the leftovers with her hunting knife and held the battered relic up so that portions of it gleamed in the light of the rising sun.
Calder and his miners emerged from the stables, shaking their heads and wiping the stupor from their eyes with dusty, blistered hands. The uninjured rangers attended to their wounded comrades while the few villagers simply stared at the carnage around them, dumbfounded. The headhunters were gone, seizing their newfound freedom upon the death of their master, pausing only to collect their fallen tribemates.
“Sid?”
“Yes, Vari?”
“Has he returned?”
“Our beloved warlock? Yes. Right here in the library.”
Vari felt her shoulders relax and her heart ease back from its frantic race against fear. While Vari had clung to the hope that Mark would rise again, like he’d done so many times before, there was always a chance that he wouldn’t.
“Is he awake?”
“Not yet. For some reason, his resurrection is taking longer than usual, but I suspect it has something to do with the rather ‘dramatic’ nature of his death this time.”
“Because I buried the poor bastard,” murmured Braemar, his deep voice hoarse with guilt.
“Braemar, if the captain had lived, we’d all be dead. He would’ve found Mark too, and I don’t really want to think about what the inquisitors would do to a man who can die over and over again.”
“Shit. Neither do I,” answered Braemar.
“Good.” Dayna slapped Braemar on the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince. “Remember that the next time that old bitch, Guilt, grabs your balls and gives them a twist.”
That brought a smile to Braemar’s hair-framed lips. “Thanks, Dayna. I will.”
Dayna then picked up the Helm of Supremacy and turned it over in her hands. “Doesn’t look like much now, does it?”
“Don’t know about that,” countered Vari. “Knock it back into shape, fill it with some power-hungry mind, and it’ll be as controlling as ever.”
Dayna shook her head. “Then we chuck it into Sid’s forge, melt the fucking thing down so it can’t-”
Dayna’s words were choked off by a dagger. It was pressed to her throat by a muddied hand. And the hand belonged to the filth-coated warrior woman who now clutched the ranger like a child to her breast.
“You,” the sergeant whispered into Dayna’s ear, “will hold that fucking thing very tightly in your hands as we walk towards the horse that your deserter friend is going to fetch for us.”
The forearm that Vari had broken was now straight and intact. Was she like Mark, able to somehow resurrect herself? No. The thin red line across the woman’s throat told it all. A freshly healed wound, the product of a carefully cultivated regeneration skill. Vari quietly cursed her carelessness. If only she’d taken her dagger and sawed off the woman’s ugly head before it had sunk beneath the mud.
She looked to Braemar who could only shrug. They were both desperately low on essence and neither dared reach for an essence potion.
“Now would be a good fucking time to remember how to take orders, deserter,” snarled the sergeant. “Otherwise, I’m going to open up a new tier in this ranger’s smiling ability.”
Vari slowly raised her hands. “We tethered our horses out in the forest.”
“Then you and carrot-top there best lead the fucking way.”
37
“Mark?”
The silence fell away like the shattered stones of a collapsing rampart. And the voice was so welcome to Mark’s ears that he could do nothing but cry.
“Mark?”
His eyelids opened, slowly, protesting every millimeter of the way.
“Sid?”
“For a moment there, I didn’t think you were going to make it back to us.”
“To be honest, neither did I.”
Mark pushed himself up on one elbow and heard the familiar creak of leather armor. Of course, his warlock gear was buried under several tons of rock.
“Vari?”
“Alive. She, Dayna and Braemar have passed out through the gates.”
“Why?”
“It seems that the reiver woman has also survived. Judging by the proximity between her footsteps and Dayna’s, I believe she might be holding the ranger hostage.”
“Shit!”
Mark struggled to his feet. “Where are they headed?”
“I’m unable to sense anything outside of my walls, so I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“Oh hell, the wall… how are you feeling?”
“Like someone has cut one of my arms off.”
“Damn, I’m sorry.”
“I’ll mend. Now take the tunnels to the forest. Help your friends.”
“What makes you think they’re headed for the forest?”
“I assume your horses returned with you from the Barrens?”
“Right, of course. On my way.”
The notifications rolled in as Mark sprinted through the tunnels.
Congratulations!
You have completed the “Home Bittersweet Home” quest.
Your XP reward per party member = 50 XP
Your party has slain Serik of Credence, Captain of the Reiver Legions.
Your XP reward per party member = 20 XP
In slaying Serik, you have defeated the bearer of the Helm of Supremacy.
Your XP reward per party member = 20 XP
Your party has killed thirteen Level 2 Headhunters.
Your XP reward per party member = 65 XP
Your party has disabled two Level 2 Ranger Thralls.
Your XP reward per party member = 5 XP
Congratulations!
You have reached Level 7 in the Warlock class.
You gain 2 attribute points and now have access to Level 7 Warlock spells.
Spell Selection
You have 7 magical spells available for selection.
You have 3 spell slots remaining.
Cunning Linguist (Cast cost = 7 EP)
Brain Leash (Cast cost = 7 EP)
Lurking Inferno (Cast cost = 8 EP)
Crippling Lethargy (Cast cost = 9 EP)
Contagious Fervor (Cast cost = 9 EP)
War Cry (Cast cost = 10 EP)
Shroud of Shadow (Cast cost = 10 EP)
Alternatively, you may wish to save your spell slots for ‘found’ spells.
Mark wished he had the time and focus to choose and unlock his new spells, but his lungs were already burning and his legs becoming more lead than flesh with each step. And he was only halfway through the tunnel system. He would’ve cast Ethereal Flesh, flowed through the tunnels without even breaking a sweat, but could only move at average human running speed in that form. Right now he needed to be a good deal faster than average. He stopped, pressed a hand to the fierce stitch in his side, gulped down some air, and dropped his two recently acquired attributes points into Body.
Body: 18
His muscles responded immediately, thickening and gain
ing in definition. The lead melted from his legs and he was able to launch into a sprint once more. Significantly faster than before, it wasn’t long until he reached the stairs up to the forest. He bounded up the steps, two at a time, his breath even and strong, his lungs barely feeling the effort.
Mark reached the doorway, pressed his palm to the cool stone, and slid through the widening gap as soon as he was able. He stepped out into the chill forest air, took in the rich scent of thriving vegetation and mouldering leaves, and growled under his breath at the sight ahead of him.
The reiver sergeant stood beside Braemar’s horse, Dayna clutched close to her chest, a dagger to the ranger’s throat. The reiver woman had hooked the former captain’s battered helm to Dayna’s saddle. Vari and Braemar were there too, eyes narrowed, hands at their sides, ready to act yet seemingly helpless to intervene. Mark doubted they had any essence left, and even if they did, if Vari were to break the woman’s fingers, if Braemar were to plunge reiver and ranger into the mud, the warrior would still have time to draw her blade across Dayna’s throat.
Mark’s eyes met Dayna’s, then the sergeant’s, and he was struck by how similar they were. Faded emerald versus crystal blue, polished stones devoid of any trace of fear or anger. The eyes of soldiers.