by Dan Wingreen
The man awoke to darkness.
It was an oppressive darkness. The kind that felt like a heavy blanket, that smothered and constricted and couldn't be kicked off no matter how hard a person tried. It was complete and all-encompassing and wrong. Yet the man was too confused to be scared.
It was a large room he found himself in, he could tell immediately, although he wasn't quite sure how he knew. The stillness of the air, perhaps? He could feel almost-forgotten instincts stirring to life, telling him to assess everything, to find out where he was and if he was in danger. He turned all his focus towards trying to pierce the darkness for even a moment, but no matter where he looked or how hard he tried it was to no avail.
You have more senses than just your eyes.
He paused at the familiarity of the voice in his head. Was that his voice? He wanted to speak, to see if it was, but one of those instincts held him back. Noise could draw enemies. So, he stayed silent, and focused on those other senses.
He was lying on what seemed to be a cold metal table. His fingers, silently, traced as much of it as he could without moving unnecessarily and found it was just big enough to hold a single person. The edges were lipped, as if to keep small objects, or possibly liquid of some sort, from rolling off onto the floor. There was a faint odor to the still air, metallic and faded and strangely familiar. The room was deathly silent—
Except, now that he was listening, he realized it wasn't. Off in the distance he could hear a rustling. His body tensed. Was that an enemy? If it was, whoever or whatever it was wasn't coming closer. As far as he could tell, whatever was making the noise wasn't moving at all. Or, rather, it wasn't moving towards him. He had the impression of restless sleep, of troubled limbs thrashing across smooth sheets. Another person, then? Maybe another prisoner like himself? Was he even a prisoner? Why couldn't he remember? Why didn't he know who he was?
He carefully ran his hands over his face, his hair, his body, looking for some clue, something familiar. Hair, skin, muscles; nothing sparked any recognition. His mind felt like thick, wet mud. He couldn't think. Couldn't remember. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to force the memories to return. The still air stirred, the familiar metallic smell—blood—swirled around him as he felt something inside his body reach out into the air, searching for…something. Something important, something necessary, something—
Magic.
He gasped; the sound startlingly loud in the near silence. He remembered magic. He remembered so much magic rushing through his body, burning through his veins. Burning like the sunrise over a familiar city. Burning like strange tents in the middle of the desert. He snatched the memories, held them close. Refused to let them slip away. He plunged into them, making them almost real, pulling them apart until he could feel the cool air of the dawn and smell the ash drifting around him.
It was working. Slowly more memories were coming back, and he grabbed them as well, wrestled them into submission, searching for more and more and devouring them with an all-consuming greed, searching for the last thing he could remember before waking up in the room—
Fire. Death. Pain. So much pain! Let it end, let me die; don't let this last another second!
He let out a short, pained scream.
And then he remembered everything.
"Good evening, Mr Alexander."
Noah's eyes flew open.
Every instinct he had burning through him—flames eating at his flesh, his throat scorched raw from the heat as he screamed and screamed and screamed—was telling him to attack, to strike out at the man standing next to him and escape, but he couldn't. He knew the voice. And its owner was quite possibly the one person in the world he couldn't attack.
Noah winced as a dull ball of light sprung into existence, illuminating the face of the Prime Minister. He was wearing a dark purple robe with the hood pulled up; it gave his normally bland, pleasant face a sinister, shadowy look.
"I imagine you have a few questions," he said, his voice strangely flat and uninterested. "You may ask them."
Noah recognized the implied order behind the statement, and he obeyed. "Why am I alive?"
The Prime Minister raised an eyebrow. "A very good question. Although, one that's based in a false assumption."
Noah frowned in confusion, but before he could ask what that meant, the Prime Minister continued.
"You are not alive," he said. His voice never changed, but Noah could see his eyes flash in the dull blue light. "You are a lich."
At first, he thought the pained scream that sliced through the remaining darkness was his own. He could have screamed that scream. He could feel it, building in the space where his soul was—where it used to be—desperate to tear itself free. But then the scream turned into a high-pitched cackling, and he knew it couldn't be his.
He was too disgusted to laugh.
"The question you should have asked is, 'why am I here?'," the Prime Minister said when the terrible laughter trailed off. He'd barely seemed to notice it. "And the answer to that is, because my master wishes it."
Another scream. Another shrill laugh. Noah wanted nothing more than to cover his ears, but he couldn't bring himself to move. What right did a lich have to comfort?
"The answers are mine!" a new voice, harsh and raspy, shouted. Noah's instincts, the first thing about him to heal from the trauma of dying and being reborn as an abomination, told him it was coming from the same direction as the earlier rustling. "Mine! Mine! Mine! They live in my organs and I will get them out!"
The person—thing?—screamed again but this time it was accompanied by the unique sound of flesh being torn apart. It was followed by a much less identifiable, but all the more disturbing, squishing sound. Noah, no stranger to atrocity, slaughter, and torture, felt himself shiver.
"What is that?" he asked without meaning to, his voice small and unsteady.
"That," the Prime Minister said without looking away, "is my master. And yours."
"Things of three, inside of me, there's only two, what shall I do?" the voice sang light and childlike, but also thick and muffled, like its mouth was filled with… Noah didn't want to finish the thought.
"Would you like to see him?" the Prime Minister asked eagerly, leaning towards Noah ever so slightly. Before Noah could answer, the Prime Minister made a short gesture with one hand and the ball floated to the top of the room and brightened just enough for Noah to make out most of the rest of the space.
There were seven waist-high tables just like the one Noah could now see under him, all of them made of thick metal and set upon wheels. Across the room to his right were several doors. Most of the area to his left was still covered in shadow, but he could see the barest outline of shapes he couldn't quite identify. In front of him, raised on a dais, was a large, ornately carved bed.
And on the bed was a creature seemingly made of nothing but torn flesh, gushing blood, and bright, feverish eyes. As Noah watched, the torn flesh quivered, and began to slowly pull itself back together only to be pulled apart again by thin, skeletal fingers. With its other hand the thing reached into a ragged hole in its chest and pulled out its heart. It started to rot the moment it hit the air, but that didn't stop the creature from biting into the organ, thick red blood pouring down the monster's chin as its horrible, inhuman eyes bore into Noah.
This time, Noah was the one who screamed.
◆◆◆
The creature listened to the screams of its hunterbrothermurdererslavechampion—and so many more possibilities that just looking at him made its head hurt. It listened and watched until the light burning its lidless eyes lessened and disappeared. A soothing darkness once again covered its chamber. Eventually, the screaming stopped and the robed one began talking again. The creature didn't listen. It had already seen a hundred different versions of this conversation and it didn't really care which one was going on now.
Unless it was the twenty-seventh one. It didn't like the twenty-seventh one.
It could feel its
elf healing, but the urge to damage itself slowly faded with the horrible return of his sanity. His skin grew soft and taut, his eyes grew lids, his mouth grew lips, his hair grew thick and shiny. He spit out the remains of the…whatever it was he was eating as the need to return to the Mists overtook him. This time, unlike so many others, he fought it, pulling away from knowledge and answers and everything he craved with a sheer force of will powered by the sacrifice he'd made. He cried at the loss, but it was necessary. He couldn't sleep any longer. His hunter had failed.
Daddy was awake, and he was going to be very cross when he found out what he'd done. He rather thought he should prepare for that.
Slowly, so painfully slowly, he pulled the last bit of his consciousness firmly back into his mind and slammed the door shut. His body cried out with the need to return. He ruthlessly denied it. Stupid body, what did it know? It didn't even have a brain. He giggled, then, reluctantly, forced himself to stop. He didn't have time to be crazy right now.
With that thought firmly in mind, he wrapped himself in the slowly mending tatters of his sanity and, for the first time in over two hundred years, Mordred stood and walked into his kingdom.
To be concluded in
Awakening Camelot: A Wizard's War
(Coming soon)
About the Author
Dan lives in Ohio (as people do) with his husband and the most adorable little rescue dog ever. His three favorite things are The Empire Strikes Back, winter, and RPGs. His least favorite thing is pizza. Since the age of twelve, it's been his dream to write something good enough to get published and, after over a decade of unforgivable procrastination, he actually managed to get it done. Thankfully, what he finally ended up writing turned out much better than the Spider-Man and Eminem fan fiction he wrote in sixth grade. His new dream, which will hopefully take less time to achieve, is to own two Netherland Dwarf bunnies named Bunnedict Thumperbatch and Attila the Bun.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DanWingreen
Email:
[email protected]
Titles by Dan Wingreen
Awakening Camelot: A Wizard's Quest (formerly Awakening Aidan and Awakening Arthur)
Awakening Camelot: A Wizard's War (formerly Awakening Camelot)
