A Death Knight's Tale [2/2]

Standing in the antechamber, Dame Leah came to an unpleasant understanding about the reality of unasked questions. It was the first time since she was still a squire in training that she allowed doubts about what she had been taught to surface within her. Human minds are a funny thing, almost too easily conditioned to abide patterns. Intelligence often makes it even easier to slip into. After all, what is intelligence if not the ability to quickly pick up on and apply patterns? Whether they are for our own benefit or someone else’s matters little, as long as the conditioning is thorough.

Dame Leah was taught not to ask questions, outside of very specific situations. She comes to this realization at the worst possible time, when it is already far too late to turn back. It isn’t particularly grand; not the sort of thought that stops time, despite how it shifts the shape of the world. An average moment of enlightenment, when a small constant clicks into place amongst a larger picture. Standing back from the trees just enough to see the forest. Not enough to fully recognize the wrongness of making any one person so subservient to another, but enough to feel that she has taken a wrong turn somewhere.

For once, a lesson learned in blood was paid for by one of the people that needed the lesson. And a dozen other lessons that were not hers to learn or pay for. In an alternate history, Dame Leah would survive this incident and return home with her horses by the skin of her teeth. Eventually she would train a squire or two of her own, except she would teach them to question. To push back when an order feels wrong or careless. To never touch or take that which others have inexplicably left alone.

But this history is written in blood and sacrifice and madness. This Dame Leah will never have a squire to teach. She will never go home again.

This Dame Leah returns to an antechamber of doors that is significantly more populated than when she left it. She returns to a room crowded with figures in hoods and raggedy bandages. The doors to the other rooms are open wide, and the scents of copper and rust wafted in the air. She couldn’t see where it came from, but it must be blood.

Another unasked question slapped her across the face then: why were there no undead in these ruins? They may be underground in a desert, but that was no excuse or exception. No ghosts had appeared, nor any skeletons, not so much as a single reanimated animal corpse. The utter lack of such encounters in a place with so much history and magic should have been one of many glaring red flags. Well, looking over what she was now sure was a horde of mummies, she had the answer to at least one question.

They were still. Putrid statues that stank of embalming fluids and old blood and dust. The first sign they could move at all came from the figure in the middle that she now recognized as their guide. He had kept his hood up and face covered by a clothe mask the whole time they traveled together. She didn’t remember him smelling weird, but also didn’t really remember anything about him at all, now that she forced herself to think on it. Any such thoughts she had previously had sat like stones in the river of her mind; the stream flowed all around them without truly grasping or pulling them in. Confronting it all head-on like this, clarity snapped into place. Too little too late.

She drew her sword and demanded answers and freedom all in one. It reflected the orange light of the fires, glowing like an unquenched blade fresh from the forge, in her hand. She would cut them down with her oath-sword if needs must.

The guide hunched over, shoulder’s shaking, and stumbled unevenly through a turn to face her fully. Then he threw his head back so hard it caused the bones of his neck to crack and let out a deranged cackling laugh. Only increasing in volume and practically howling, the coverings on his face tore away to reveal a mouth so dried out it was receding from his teeth. Screeching his glee to his captive audience seemingly tore his jaw too wide, dropping low to his neck. One by one the other mummies joined in, screeching, rasping, howling along with him despite otherwise staying put. The room was too full of the cacophony, trapping the sound and making it feel tangible around her.

She called for her allies, but they were not with her. Anger seared through her, wondering where they were. But of course, they were still in the treasure chambers gathering. Lost to their own avarice and the curse of these tombs. Dame Leah was woefully unprepared for this mission. None of the ruins she helped clear out on behalf of her lord had any undead like these, clever enough to set traps. The trickier undead were often handled by adventurers before knights could or would be deployed; the guild tended to respond faster. She had forgotten that this kind of undead could exist in the first place, beyond the cautionary tales all children are told of terrible liches and roaming revenants that are like small disasters when they appear but are equally rare to encounter. Forgot to be appropriately afraid of what it means to enter ruins. Of the risks. Of why her original team captain had argued against their liege over it.

She could cut them down with her blade, slash them over and over in endless waves of flaking skin and stained bandages, but it wouldn’t be enough. There were too many and the burning flames had eaten much of the oxygen available only to replace it with smoke. Another thing she had left unexamined to her own detriment, and now she would die, but there was no one here to save her. The one who could was elsewhere, completely and tragically unaware that anyone needed her at all.

The dead do not tire. They don’t need air. They fight and chase and cackle until they cannot anymore. Until they are nothing but dust, unable to reform; or until they are purified.

If she had more time or space to think, she would have seen how the guide never stepped forward to attack. He simply stood back and directed the others, acting as a puppeteer for the rest and throwing out taunts. Somewhere in this mess her comrades laden in stolen things emerged from their plundering haze to see what she was dealing with. She foolishly dared to hope they would help, only to have that hope promptly dashed into more pieces than the mummy she had just brutalized into a bad imitation of a sand dune.

They were in no state to fight; a strange headiness to the way they moved, as if drunk on the fullness of their pockets. In this state they were liabilities at best, but she wouldn’t abandon them.

The onslaught paused when the former guide noticed the black chalice in, her fellow knight, Sir Bilberry's hand. He shrieked, enraged that they had dared to touch with their lowly mortal hands that which only the king was allowed to behold. Rambling to himself about the audacity of sacrifices these days and that they should just die already. Dame Leah found it hard to focus on the archaic dialect of his words, but she caught one vital fact clearly: they were the last sacrifices necessary to raise the king from his sealed slumber. Somehow the chalice was involved, was precious.

Thinking as fast as she could when her head felt full of cotton and lead, she lunged and wrenched it from the clutch of her ally. Then she wound back her arm to throw it as far as she could through the doors behind the mummies. She imagined it sailing through the air and clattering against stone in the distant darkness as she turned to run, but found that her hand could not release it. Or rather, even when she opened her hand, it clung to her skin. The nonsensical rambling ceased; the puppeteer meeting her eyes in silence. She thought she saw the dried skin of his mouth curl into a mockery of a smile, but it may have been a trick of the light.

“The chalice has chosen you?” He spat it out like an accusation. As if he thought her entire existence was a mistake or cosmic joke or some other deeply personal offense to him in particular. His sanity seemed to degrade further, if that were possible. “No no no no no No NO NO NO NO NOOoOoO!” He screamed. “After all I’ve done, it can’t be some nobody knight! I am the most loyal. Me! It should be me! Give it back!” But she could not.

It had already fused to her skin, crimson blood overflowed from the cup and she realized with dissociated horror that it was her own. The world darkened around her as she fell, the chalice made quick work of stealing her life; spilling it all out over the sandy stone floors. Then it became a funnel, rapidly injecting her with the magic within the tomb and forcing her into half-life. She watched, paralyzed, as chains wound from the stem along her wrist and arm.

“Accept the covenant,” a voice boomed, “all my riches shall be yours for eternity.”

She thought she was the only one to hear it. She wanted to refuse. She would rather die than become an undead, cursed and malevolent. But then Sir Bilberry leapt forward, tripping over her to grab at the cup and yell “I accept! I will accept the covenant!” His eyes were wide with anticipation and insatiable hunger. He tried to pull the cup from her hand, and managed to tear it away along with chunks of her desiccated flesh.

Apparently, it didn’t matter who accepted, so long as someone did. The transformation solidified, cursing Dame Leah to the fate of a death knight and filling her with an unfamiliar malice towards all things. It stole so much from her; memories she wasn’t aware of losing, and irreversibly changing her body into a monster that would never die again, but could never live either. When she could finally move days later, both the knights and all the mummies were gone. The other knights had run away, and her transformation had absorbed all the nearby undead to recycle the necromantic magic within them.

She rose, dragging herself from the tomb, and gave chase.

Not for revenge, as her new instincts urged, but for the chalice. She had to destroy it. Such an artifact could not be allowed to exist. She turned the entirety of her focus to it.

As for how the horse joined her in un-death, I will spare you the details. Some tragedies need not be recounted.

The rest is history, as they say.