by Alan Bayman
As I sank, I wanted to go back to the days under the bridge. I wanted the silence, the fish, and the moss to be the only things to think about. Raindrops dancing on the watery surface. Birds. Maybe a floating bottle bobbing and weaving in its journey downstream.
The water was much deeper than the canal. I settled on the bottom, looking up at the surface, the morning sun glinting through in ripples and swirls. A sense of peace came to me. My heartbeat ceased again, taking the horrid feelings with it. But I did not want to leave.
I should stay down here, I decided. Where the city is safe from me. Where people are safe from me.
There was a disturbance above. Shan-lo had dove in. Her silhouette pierced the water like a spear in a hail of bubbles. She swam down, looking about frantically, until she saw me. She began to swim in my direction when something far off to my right began to move toward her.
What I had mistaken for a log resting on the bottom turned out to be a long reptile, resembling a wingless dragon with mottled green and brown scales in shapes like bark.
It was fast. As it glided towards her she caught sight of it. Surprised, she began to scramble towards the surface.
She was not going to make it.
There was a thud in my chest. I could not let her die. Feelings of rage at the beast began to surge through me as my heart began to beat, but I tried to remain calm. I reached into my bag. It didn’t seem to have any trouble working under water (lucky for me, as that had still been untested). Pulling out a vial of liquid Miasma, I used it to cast one of the offensive spells I was practicing.
The creature wavered as some of the ichor flew into it. It paused, vomited a little bit of red, then started rushing over to Shan-lo.
I lost it. In rage and desperation, I launched myself at it from the river bottom. I wouldn’t have made it in time had the thing not turned to face me. Its enormous head turned to face me as its mouth opened to reveal rows and rows of teeth.
I did not care. My body had absorbed the remaining liquid Miasma to heal itself, and as it brought its snapping jaws down on my arm I drove my other hand through its eye. It tried to recoil, but I made a fist so that my hand stayed lodged in its skull. Enraged I began kicking and biting it until the water was red and it stopped struggling.
I swam up to the surface where Shan-lo was still heading to shore. I could sense other things in the water moving in, attracted to the blood. Or maybe I just imagined it. But I felt she was in danger.
My heart thundering in my chest I swam after her, kicking up waves as I splashed. I have little skill in swimming, but I made up for that in supernatural strength. I collided in with her with such a force that I almost lifted her from the water. She gave a startled yelp and then threw her arms around me.
I dragged her onto the shore, laughing, the warmth of the city air a sharp contrast to the canal water. Shailyn looked down at her wet cloths and giggled.
“You ruined my dress. Again.” She tried to frown but her smile won over.
“It was worth it,” I laughed, pulling her up to me.
The sound of minstrels playing in a nearby tavern caught our attention, and I picked her up whirling and singing as we danced.
I am a terrible singer, which caused her to laugh and kiss me, trying to get me to stop. Her wet hair clung to me. The evening lanterns danced in her eyes reflection. I brought her lips to mine-
-and I realized I was reliving a memory.
I froze, my face inches away from Shan-lo. I was holding her off the ground. She was staring at me wide eyed, her face flushed. I set her down slowly. A mixture of emotions played over her face as I stepped away. Then she squared her shoulders and pointed behind me.
I turned and saw she was pointing at the unconscious Shaman. I hurried over to check on him. His breathing was shallow and his heartbeat faint. I gave him a few of my elixirs and made him swallow them.
After a moment he groaned. He then rolled onto his side and vomited on the grass.
I handed him another elixir and looked up at Shan-lo.
“I’m sorry,” I said in Orc. I was calm. Thinking back, I realized my heart had stopped beating while I was healing the Shaman.
Shan-lo spoke slowly, mixing Cyrian with simple Orc words to make sure I understood.
“Master, it okay. I know. I always know.”
“You know? What do you mean?”
She responded by reaching down and placing her hand over my heart.
We stared at one another in silence. I felt like I was standing on the edge of some cliff and felt the muscles in my chest flex as my heart came close to beating again.
I pulled back. A pained expression flickered across her face as she lowered her hand. Then she pointed toward the Shaman.
“He tell me. He guess it, but I know.” She placed a hand over her heart and then tapped her head. “He help you.”
18.
The next memories were painful. Even now they cause no small amount of discomfort. I learned that while my memory is indeed flawless in its recording of events, my mind is equally capable of ignoring and compartmentalizing events that are unsettling in nature.
The barrier between my emotions and my consciousness is mostly construct of my mind, and only partly because of my undead nature. It is the construct I used to piece myself together after what was done to me. Sort of. My mind was sundered for the hundreds of years I spent under a bridge in a canal as those pieces came back together into something that worked.
But I was far from healed. A broken mind is very different than a broken body and cannot simply mend with time. You must want to heal, and strive for it, and the mending process is often more painful than what sundered it in the first place. This is why so many minds once afflicted, remain so. For, how does one suffer unendurable pain only to find one must endure an even greater pain to be free of it?
The Shaman was able to help me. It was only then that I learned that his name was simply “Shaman.” His talents lay in necromancy, and in that he had very little skill. However, he was he was capable of communing with his ancestors, of which over ten generations of Shamans long since dead routinely visited him. One of them was a Dreamweaver who told me I could finish mending my mind with the help of the others and their knowledge of Zombie Lords.
“Once, long time ago, all Orc chieftains become Zombie Lords. They live forever, they rule forever, have many wives, and raise ancestors to fight alongside their clan.
“But the dead cannot beget life, and a shattered mind brings slow recovery or no recovery at all. Some succumb to madness and are killed or destroy their tribe. Chieftains that survive are the strongest but have no children. Clan blood weakens as only the weakest beget the weak. The elders see this, and in time chieftains only become Zombie Lords in desperate times. In a time of prosperity, the lore became hard to find.
“Then humans come. They steal the lore, pervert it, and become litches. Their nobles and powerful try it, to hold on to their riches and lovers forever, but succumb to madness.
“But not you. You we will help you mind heal, and you will make our clan strong in turn. We will teach you how to awaken your heart, your fourth chakra, and touch the living, as the living do. But be warned. You are still dead. You will only come close to being alive again.”
Awakening my fourth chakra was apparently what I had been experiencing when my emotions ran high and my heart started beating again. During those times I am more alive than dead, or undead.
I will breeze through this next part, as it was especially hard to explain. When my fourth chakra awakens, I must feel as much as I can. It needs to be a great catharsis, otherwise the emotions will build up while my fourth chakra is “asleep.” The emotions will overflow, and my mind will fracture to let them out.
I must do this to keep my mind intact, while facing the indignities of how I was made undead along with the murder of my wife and subsequent torture. If I hadn’t already spent hundreds of years staring at fish in a canal, I was sure this would have
rendered me into a vegetative state.
I will not recount what happened the first times I tried to awaken my chakra.
19.
So where did I go from there? Simply put, with less time and more training. The Dreamweaver let me know that my body did not require rest, but my mind did, so several hours every night became devoted to meditation. He told me that if I practiced I could let my mind process my memories the way dreams normally did. If I practiced long enough, I may even be able to pull my mind into the Dreaming. If I did, he said, it would be both good and bad. On the good side my mind would become a lot stronger and resilient to madness, and this sort of voluntary lucid dreaming was the first thing one learned if one was to study Dreamweaving. On the bad side, the Dreamlands crossed over to the realm of the Faerie, who claimed it as their domain. While my presence could be small and therefore hard to notice, they were not at all fond of the undead.
A few hours before dawn were devoted to this inner contemplation. I noticed an immediate difference, like a man who bore a lifetime in starvation receiving his first full meal. This was both good and bad. It was good in the sense that my mental acuity sharpened, far greater than when I was alive. My senses were sharper, and my movements were more precise. However, there was a stillness in me that was unsettling. I felt the absence of breathing, the beat of my heart and the blood in my veins.
My other organs in their lack of use bothered me as well. There is a great symphony of movement, twists and turns, gurgling and bubbling within us all that, being born with it, we largely ignore. But without it brings forth a profound sense of loss. At times I found myself grieving over my own death.
Shan-lo became instrumental in my mental therapy. When I practiced awakening my heart she was there to bring me back to perspective. When I injured myself, she would be nearby with a vial of liquid Miasma. In my rage things would be destroyed, trees, plants, our campsite. She would be there, cleaning up before irrational guilt at the destruction I caused assailed me.
As uncomfortable as it is, I must mention one episode in detail.
It was night in the wetlands. I was grieving for Shailyn, curled up, muttering her name like a mantra. Shan-lo thought it was her name I uttered, so she walked over, knelt over me and laid her hands on me in comfort.
Startled, I jerked up, and our eyes suddenly met.
The night had been unseasonably warm in the wetlands. Shan-lo, in the manner of her kin, wore only a belted loincloth, sandals, and thin strips of leather woven into her hair to keep it tied back. Her body was coated in a thin grease used to keep the mosquitoes off.
In the dim light, her body glistened a dark green, like a jade statue of some erotic goddess. With my heart hammering in my chest, I felt a hunger in myself long since forgotten. She must have seen the expression in my face change because her eyes widened, and her breath caught. With my sharpened senses I could see a faint red flush come to her face and flow down over her exquisite breasts.
I grabbed her as I stood up, holding her under her arms and lifting her effortlessly off the ground so that we were eye to eye. For a moment we were suspended there, frozen, our faces almost touching. Slowly her arms began to encircle me, and my lips found hers. Her tiny tusks pressed against my upper lip and her mouth tasted of mead and spices.
My heart was roaring in my chest and it became too much. I dropped her and staggered away as she fell. I turned away as she scrambled to her feet.
“Master-,” she began but I cut her off.
“No!” I shouted through clenched teeth. Everything was raw, too intense. I turned to look at her, my hands were uncontrollably clawing my hair. “I will not, not, take you unwilling.”
She looked confused for a moment, then grinned suddenly.
“Can’t,” she said reaching into her belt and drawing her virtus dagger. “I know what this is for.”
I shook my head, pulling out some hair as I did. My heart was still thundering, and the feelings were so intense I could barely speak.
“You, you, I won’t take, what you don’t want to give.” I was sinking to my knees.
“You my master,” her voice was soft. She dropped the virtus onto the ground, and slowly walked to me. “You have my everything. You not like slave traders. You, I give.” She stood before me, her eyes soft and glimmering.
“I give,” she smiled warmly.
“You’re not her,” I whispered. The pounding in my chest was tearing me apart.
“I know,” she said. Her hands seared my face with an overwhelming comfort they rested on my cheeks. As her forehead pressed against mine my heart began to ease. I felt as though I was drifting, floating along, being pulled by her touch.
“I know,” she repeated, again and again, until I heard her.
I learned more about the changes within me. The living body is perhaps the greatest alchemy lab ever created. When one is angry or frightened, your organs produce elixirs to sharpen your senses and quicken your reflexes. If one is in the throes of romantic intimacy, potions are formed within you to soothe your troubles and prepare your body for its ultimate act; creation.
But my body is dead, alchemical reactions remain so within me. My adrenal gland does not dance to the tune of fight or flight. Neither do (ahem) other organs respond to the attentions of a comely lass.
This is the barrier I between myself and my emotions. My feelings are subdued because I lack a living body to react to them. That all changes when I awaken my heart. I become “alive,” at least in a limited sense. With all my organs functioning (yes, all of them) I become something greater. A living zombie. Both undead and alive.
It would be ideal to remain in such a state if it were not for the many downsides. I react to everything in its extreme. Were a man to rudely shove me in the street while I wasn’t paying attention, I could easily react be tearing his head off before I even knew what I was doing. Grieving in such a state is a horrid experience, made worse by being the only way for me to completely do so. And while being awaken in the throes of passion could easily lead to great feats of stamina and ingenuity, to inspire many a bard and sighing maidens for many generations to come, a passing glimpse of unintended flesh could just as easily turn me into the kind of predator I abhor the most.
Shan-lo and I became lovers. Not lovers in love, or rather not the kind of love between people who wish to spend their lives together raising a family. She cared for me, no doubt, but she spoke to me about an Orc named Thanok, whom she had known since she was a child, who she always had her eye on. He was older than her, and much higher in status. But his first wife had died in the last plague, leaving him bereaved and, in Orc tradition, unable to remarry for a year and a day. Shan-lo felt that with her rise in status and in being a Shaman’s consort, she could catch his eye and eventually become his new wife.
She was also uncomfortable with many acts of sex. The Slave Traders had mistreated her before selling her, and while she was a very emotionally strong woman, those memories would often haunt her.
She did like me, love me even, but she knew I too was grieving for someone else, and she wanted many children I could not provide. I told her that I wouldn’t mind her having someone like Thanok’s children while remaining my consort, but she disagreed, saying that if I saw her with another man while my fourth chakra was awakened I would probably kill them. It was a good point, and likely true.
Regardless of my time with Shan-lo, my thoughts would still turn to Shailyn, and I wondered what happened to her. The Shaman told me he couldn’t find her soul, and that it was likely that she moved on or was reincarnated. Learning her fate would require some powerful Divination magic since I had nothing physical of hers and it had been so long ago.
The things I had unintentionally done and subsequently blocked out of my mind also required attention and reconciliation. I tracked down some of the places from my memory to learn about the people I had eaten.
What I discovered was that all but a few of the people I devoured worked for or with U
benfold Trust and Banking. I had gone after them. Supposedly, they would have left me alone since I hadn’t claimed Cronwins inheritance, but I had hunted them anyway. I suspected that they had not called a Judicar or guards after me out of fear of scrutiny into their own practices. I wondered why they hadn’t posted a bounty on my head until I got wind in a bar full of mercenaries that they had a reputation for shortchanging their contracts and recently had been blacklisted.
Once again, I had lucked out. In hindsight, I should have taken notice. There were too many coincidences for it to remain merely luck. But while in the middle of it, it seemed palatable, and I was in the busy trying to get a handle on my grieving and emotions to wonder why moments of emotional discord threw me across the path of one of my enemies, or that no one seemed to notice me to call the guards. Revelation would come much later.
20.
Like many things in life, my next discovery involved large necromantically infused rats.
I had been trying to increase the ratio of undead parts and organs augmented to living rats with the rats surviving the result. Up until then, Tina was the only living being I had encountered that had made it past twenty percent undead parts to living.
The discovery happened after an accident, where a crate fell on one of my rat cages, crushing the rats within. I rushed over to save a few of them via augmentation.
It was surprisingly successful. It turns out that when a living body is already near death prior to surgery, it takes readily to necromantic augmentation. Or it dies very messily. I found out I could augment as high as thirty three percent this way, a full one third of a living organism!
Additionally, once the organism is thus augmented over the twenty percent ratio, other effects come into play. Rats that were once weary of me grew docile. Miasma did not affect them as much, and I suspected their aging process had been retarded. They were slower to heal, and depending on their injuries, healing magic could damage them. My liquid Miasma (distilled or otherwise) could heal them fully if injected into their undead augmentations; both the augmentation itself and their living parts.