Chapter 25: Voices
Lord Zahul’s fog was an intoxicating drug, and its voice was like the song of a siren. It pulled at his Heartstone. It promised to take the pain away, the thoughts, the memories, and forge him into something hard beyond anything human could breach. Acceptance would bring relief to his churning mind. Off with anything that had ever bothered him in this second life.
Nomad refused.
He brought the sword up with all the frustration in his stone, the mail underneath the chest piece rattling, mana hissing in his throat, and caught a floundering skeleton below the ribcage, stabbed it through with the tip of his sword, and hacked it sideways before bounding forward.
In the din, the voices were no more. The chaos was the best remedy to his broken mind.
The fog seeped into his visor, tendrils of it dancing alluringly in the corner of his eyes. More foes and the crunch of bones. They dampened the siren’s song. Then he was swinging, sword catching the pitiful fools and sending them sprawling over to the others, the thrill rising in waves, the Heartstone thumping in his chest.
Lines pressed him from behind, humans scrambling to get to his aid. He scarcely needed their intrusion, but he liked the blood. The sight of it as it trickled down through their faces, the thickness of its consistency as it pooled over the dead bodies, the smell of it as it burned its way through his nostrils.
It almost made him feel he was back in the old, back to where he really belonged, his brothers at his side, Laran with his giant shield, Bart resting his hammer over his lap, Resni all worried about how things changed and kept changing, shadows looming, shadows seeping, talking and whispering, Terek telling him that it was high time they leave the past behind.
They were all dead now. He was the only one remaining and wasn’t even half the man he’d been. A damned skeleton with a hoax of a heart beating in his chest. Memories broken and false. Constantly fighting against the voice of a Master. Still deep in the clutches of that same shadow.
It’d jerked him around like a piece of ripped cloth and flung him down in the depths of the world, only to raise him again and make him do its bidding.
Not much of a choice, Nomad reckoned. He was a coward through and through, and the notion of being dead still scared him to the bones.
He sent a Skeleton Soldier spinning back, lunged in, and plunged a knee up to its non-existent gut, felt his bones crunch against its rotten skin. With the pommel of the sword he dented the side of its skull, dented it deep and well, made a tangle of it before the rot burnt off its sockets.
Somewhere deep in his mind a notification blinked. Then confusion filled him. He reckoned another memory was about to make a mess there, as it always did whenever he’d gotten a level, but it wasn’t that. He’d had someone with him, no? A young man a touch strange of mind, of body, and magic both. Where was he, anyway? He should’ve—