Swallowed A King

Who the hell wants rigid days of mediocrity?

Serfdom bound me to the land. I might as well be a nymph of the estate. Along with the other families, we farmed for a living. It was a grueling four-day cycle that left no free time until these wonderful three days blessed us.

And yet, this weekend, I found myself swinging the scythe again.

The nerve of my coworking workaholics! I can’t believe that some of us actually want to work six days! Don’t they have any adoration for freedom?! Take up a hobby!

“Sheesh! Work hard, play hard… Yet somehow, my play mixed into my work!”

These calloused hands wait to swing my wonderful sword. I needa get this done, and done well!

We harvested our counterpart plantation while their workers utilized their free time fully. From the patio, they bantered with the baron’s daughter, the Miss. She had returned from a lengthy business trip.

“We have you to thank for how easy our jobs are!” They called.

My hearty muscles developed all the same, so I had no significant complaints… As IF! Built or not, I’m particularly athletic when I enjoy it!

For many of us serfs, the ideal was to grow out of farmhood and enter estate servanthood to our lord, or otherwise, knighthood for the New Kingdom. By switching jobs, we would be granted freedom. These dirt shackles would be watered down into happy mud to jump around in.

Naturally, there were workarounds. A chirpy giggle escaped the lord’s daughter. A giant emerald hung from her necklace.

“You missed a bundle!” The leader of this plantation shouted from the shade.

Did I say friends? I supervised my buddy cutting the barley path at my side.

“Hey, your body belt is fraying.”

“Ack! I didn’t notice!”

“Leave it to me!”

I helped his posture by mending his belt. The scythe was not the only factor that was aided by immaculacy.

“Whoa, thanks, Corin! You’re good at this stuff too?”

“The Miss taught me.”

Being a good cog was refreshing. Cogs lead to progression. This progression was the reason why I could swipe this deliciously crafted blade around without hurting myself.

However, good cogs never led to innovation.

If you wanted innovation, you had to take risks. You had to fall out of place. That was a journey for a cog to become a new machine, bringing about new machinations.

I wanted to be useful, more useful than a good cog. To wonder more, to keep this childlike wonder, I had my eyes set on freedom. I would do things my way, which weren’t the right way. And that was okay.

Others were certainly going about things the wrong way.

My so-called friends were flirting with intent, next to the Miss whenever possible, always available for her. Little did anyone know that she and I were also flirting with intent, flaunting diligence from afar.

Her eyes, which should have been directed at her political rivals, were instead turned to me, who wasn’t there to sedate her until she locked the door behind us at night.

Distance breeds curiosity.

Curiosity breeds breeding.

After moonrise, I had a choice that looked, from the outside, like nothing.

Stay in the bunkhouse and rest. Be a good cog until morning.

Or walk to her quarters, knowing full well the present state of affairs, that if the baron found a serf in his daughter’s bed, it was a life sentence.

I went.

It was supposed to be our little secret, but the Miss was madly in love, just as my plantation’s coworkers were with their overtime.

Given that our closed-door relationship was going smoothly, I never expected a massacre would lead my freedom astray.

When my friends uncovered my relationship with the Miss, they were most envious and greedy. Animalistic self-preservation also slammed into play. If these furtive sweets between his daughter and a serf reached the baron, lest to say it would not breathe new life into his values. Under duress, they stole the family jewels and fled, taking her treasure too: the Emerald of the Vampire King.

They didn’t make it past the outer perimeter before the jewel’s curse activated at their malintent.

I had been out late after I had to readjust my sleep schedule, polishing my tools near the stables, when the screaming started.

To the sounds of vocal cords ripping asunder, I sprinted to the manor courtyard. My farming scythe gripped tightly in my hands.

What I saw in the starlight froze the blood in my veins.

An ancient evil was terrorizing my former friends. Corroding my olfactory senses was the snapping of bodies. Bones breaking and elongating, workers of the manor bellowed in pain as they became large, grotesque Fiends. Their lower jaws unhinged a half meter, dripping with toxic saliva.

They may have been monsters at times, but none of them deserved this.

With a deafening roar, the plantation leader smashed its massive claws downward, shattering my scythe to splinters. Its follow-up attack came the moment the pain registered. It kicked, twisting its long nails into my viscera, sending lung juice coughing out and rebounded me across the cobblestones.

I didn’t believe it was possible. I was going to die here. The facts were being battered and nailed into every part of my body. Large stakes called ‘agony’ jutted through me at every angle.

I fought against a besetting future, but it was no use. It was no damn good at all!

The monsters were too strong.

Not like this! Death wasn’t freedom!

It split the air like starlight. A flash of silver transcended the night.

A woman gracefully parted me from the monsters, her long hair whipping in the wind. The voluminous house dress snapped around her legs. Her sabre gleamed as she parried the incoming attack, and in her other hand, an ancestral, magical chain was hungry to leash, and shot through the chest to subjugate the trembling Fiend.

My trainer. The Miss. One of seven top adventurers.

After all, it wasn’t any serf who had access to swordsmanship. She had returned from a lengthy business trip indeed, to resolve her cursed emerald. She was quite the beautiful cosmopolitan.

“Stay behind me,” she commanded. With fluid strikes, she cut down the attacking horde. So exceptionally was her grace intertwined with wrath, so clean her cuts on this bloody field, that she became a shooting star to grant the last wishes of our lost companions: bloody mercy.

However, victory was short savoured.

Even her immense power had limits. The spiraling magic from the gemstone was an unattainable beauty. The Fiends adapted, their muscles bulging as they were granted rebirth by absorbing the mana in the air. Their eyes mutated, never to spin back, their attacks bellowing death-glaring in their place.

The mutated Fiends surrounded the Miss, and more surged around the garden to flank her from behind. Caught in crossfire, the Fiends ripped the emerald from her. It bounced and landed squarely in the mud, mere meters from my fingers.

The Fiends ransacked to reclaim their prize. If they consumed it, they would evolve further. They would slaughter us, and then they would slaughter the entire country.

Driven by the urge to protect the magnificent, free-fighting woman, and with refusal to die as a mere cog, I lunged for the gemstone that demanded a vessel.

It demanded a blood price.

“Don’t–!”

I raised my scythe to reject it, smashing the nauseating emerald to inclusions… or so I meant to.

“–Look at it!!”

Look at my eyes. Look at my eyes. Look at my eyes.

The abyssal vortex enamoured me. The green light’s shining made my mind scream words that didn’t belong to a serf: “I won’t give you to anyone else.”

I clasped the gem and swallowed it. Not once had I thought, “I want to eat this pretty rock”. So intoxicating was the curse that I ventured to conceal it in my innards, so as to let no one else have this precious teardrop of Mother Nature.

Everyone sensed the massive surge of corrupted mana.

“No! The curse of the Vampire King will tear your mortal vessel apart!” she shouted over the monsters’ deafening roars. Her gloved palm came against my chest, weaving a blinding magical tether between our souls.

The horde chased us down.

“My bloodline’s claim is called Rein,” she briefed her dying soldier. “It draws the power of any living creature and makes them mine hound. However, I have to accept them as such. That’s not all; the cursing effects were amplified by a Witch who toyed with the Vampire King’s corpse and gave our House that emerald. That’s why all of them have been corrupted. Being a cog alone is no good, right? I’ve always, always needed one in my search. Become mine hound, so the Witch never evades me again!”

The demand was insane. The arithmetic was not. She drove me back against the cobbles, chain ringing, and set her thumb against my mouth. Panic moved in me. I had already swallowed a king. What was a taste, in this paradox? If I accepted, I would escape the land by volunteering as property.

I took her thumb between my front teeth.

In the kiss of freedom, I chose my chain.

Licks of green flame tore through my veins. Bones cracked and lengthened. Muscles piled onto muscles. The farmboy’s shape came apart, and what stood up in its place was a towering beast of emerald fire hide. From my right forearm, a blade of condensed golden silver erupted, the memory of a scythe, perfected. The Miss vaulted onto my back.

“Now,” she commanded. “Show me machinations!”

We tore into the horde. The exhilarating shape of her will enveloped the prickly fear. I sheared bone armor. I smashed the mutating Fiends into dust until the dust was them.

“Grant them mercy!”

In minutes, the swarm was a hill of dissipating ash. The tumultuous fires going out, I hit the cobbles on human hands and knees, gasping, beaten as a brown banana.

The Miss was over me, unreadable like the war paint on her cheek.

The green light suddenly crawled up from my stomach toward my eyes, avid to finish what it had started. My name began to leave me. Corin was a thing of the past. Memories of serfdom were flying away. A crowned evil was trying to take me.

I could sense survivors from afar. I was starving for their humanity. I needed to rip their names from their minds, to devour their memories, their loves, their fears, I needed to fill the emptiness the King had gouged into my soul. I was going to leave them as catatonic husks, and I was going to enjoy it.

“No. You feast on me.” The Miss leveled her majestic being. She fisted the collar of my ruined shirt, and dragged me up close. “Listen. The House Sinclaw does not reward a hound for hunting. The Name-Sealing steals a man back from a king. I have to put yours back where it belongs.”

She kissed me, forcing a magical conduit wide open.

The beast inside me tore into her mind, ravenous. The Miss refrained from raising the imposing superiority of her weapons, opting for me to taste her fiercely guarded secrets instead.

A seductive atmosphere that amounted to enchantment capable of mesmerizing all the men and women in the world surrounded me.

I saw serene afternoons with my coworkers. I felt the warmth in her bosom as she secretly watched me swing my scythe from the patio, mirroring her secret training.

She poured these affections into the void, force-feeding the King a vulnerability so enticing that the evil succumbed to the sweetness of it.

Devotion it could not conquer or corrupt overwhelmed the crowned evil.

Nobody goes to the grave without at least one great story to tell. We were sharing ours now.

My name, Corin, Corin, Corin, enveloped and seated in its rightful place. I was under her employ and served her wholeheartedly. And the Miss was not so merciless as to let her loyal subjects go without reward.

She stood back, wiping her mouth with her glove.

“Greedy mutt,” she scorned fiercely to cover her exposure, as if she hadn’t willingly offered herself to part beast from human. “You swallow a king, and then you try to steal mine mind, too.”

She adjusted the harness with composure. The barley fields were gone.

“You deserve praise for your behavior, if only that. You’re coming with me. You will fight when I call you hound. We will find the Witch who cursed the Emerald, because I will have mine treasure, and you will have your name.”

I looked up at the heir who had rewritten my life.

I, who refused mediocrity, had swallowed a king. The king, it seemed, intended to be walked at her side.

“Too many people we knew died today. We check on mine family.”