Ch. 447 - Gravenstone’s Scrawlings

While he wasn’t much of a drinker anymore, Simon let himself get caught up in the celebration. For the first hour, it involved only storytelling in the common room and any number of cheers. After that, though, as word spread throughout the tiny village of Lostelam, the small inn eventually became so overcrowded that the festivities spilled out into the street, and the affair became an impromptu festival.

These days, getting drunk was something Simon did when he was in serious pain from an injury, but for once, he got smashed with a smile on his face and danced jigs with several young women who made it quite clear they were available. That was Simon’s night, in a nutshell.

He would dance until he was pestered into telling his story again, then, after a few toasts and another mug of beer gone, he would get back to dancing to the simple music that the villagers had to offer him. They cringed each time he described the moment that the vampire lord nearly prevented him from staking him and held up his black and blue wrist as proof, but they enjoyed the way he tricked the guards the most.

That was for the best, since he intentionally skipped over slaughtering the other vampires in gory detail. Everyone was in much too good a mood to hear how messy that had been. Simon ate until he was full and drank until the world started to spin before he finally ended up in an upstairs bed at the inn. That he managed to end up in bed alone was only because he’d explained, “I’m a holy warrior in the service of Saint Cenarious, restrained by my vows and cannot lay with a maiden,” to half a dozen interested women eager to show him their appreciation.

Simon was sure that their gratitude was genuine, given that the alternative was probably to become dinner, or worse, for the monsters he’d killed. The idea of being with someone again even appealed to him, but he knew that ending up with a random girl was just begging for him to spend levels obsessing about the relationship when it went wrong somehow. Somehow, though, the idea that it might end in a fling so casual that he wouldn't care what happened to his partner horrified him even more. Even drunk, he didn't believe that's who he was.

Was he really ready to handle that after Zoa? Drunk as he was, Simon played it safe and woke up with a hangover instead of a half-naked stranger. On the whole, it was a poor trade, but he made his peace with it over a late breakfast of warm beer, cold oatmeal, and a ham steak.

After that, he made a trip to the baker to secure some decent food for the days he planned to spend studying the runes that marked the walls of the strange castle. He’d danced with the busty baker more than once the night before; she reminded him of someone he’d known in some earlier life, but he couldn’t quite recall who that was.

Did I know a baker? he wondered, racking his brain. For some reason, he thought of Daisy, but that was a mule’s name, not a person’s.

While she was happy to give him several loaves, she wouldn’t accept his money. That was good, because he was pretty much out of coin. So, instead, he gave her a blessing for good health and long life, and she accepted it like he was a true holy man.

“Pity I’m not,” he told himself as he walked down the road and began the return to Castle Gravenstone that would likely take the rest of the day. “If I were, perhaps I could make my prayers matter.”

Simon spent most of the rest of the day inventing a fake religion, based on the one he started when he’d been in the mountainous kingdom of Charia. I could embed words of healing in the most important prayers, and turn every holy symbol into a real force for good, not just a symbol, he reflected.

Simon spent hours planning that, including sketching out in his mind what the cathedral would look like, and how it would harvest the prayers of the faithful to cure their ills and help their community. It would require years of actual development, of course. Not only would he have to work out the spells involved, but he’d have to disguise them as the delicate stained glass veins that held up the broad windows and then figure out what picture he could make to disguise those efforts.

“Brin hasn’t even invented stained glass yet,” he said to himself with a laugh.

It was a good intellectual puzzle, and figuring out how he could bootstrap a religion with the words of power he had without actually having a god kept his mind occupied until he spotted Castle Gravenstone on the horizon. That muted his enthusiasm for his hypothetical religion and turned his focus once more to the task at hand.

He no longer feared that he would be murdered by a vampire, but some part of him still felt he might yet be transformed into one. It was irrational, of course. The vampires were dead, but perhaps the dark magic was in the walls of the place itself. Maybe that’s what the runes and markings he wanted to examine did: they turned those who dwelled within their walls into evil bloodsuckers.

He dismissed the thought immediately. Lots of humans were living in there when you were there yesterday, he reminded himself. That was true, but he practiced the gesture for light in his mind and considered the pros and cons of sleeping outside its walls every night for the foreseeable future.

When he arrived, there were no new signs of bloodshed. The only thing that had changed was that the looting was more complete, and the disused structure was entirely abandoned; even the large double doors which led to the main hall were left ajar, and the stables were predictably entirely empty. Simon stood in the courtyard for a minute, looking for any signs that anyone still dwelt there with his eyes and with true sight, but he saw no one.

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Then he descended into the basement, briefly, before he realized there was no light. “Of course,” he sighed, backtracking to the kitchen.

He found no supplies of oil there, and all of the candelabras were gone, but the servants who had taken them had discarded half-used candles in their hurry to take the more valuable objects, and Simon scooped up more than a dozen of those.

While lighting a wick with a flint spark was all but impossible, a quick trip to the stables for some straw handled that problem admirably. After that, he was able to head back to the vampire’s crypt and turn the guard’s oil lantern into a small candle-powered affair, which worked great. It wasn’t a lot of light, but in its glass case, it didn’t flicker much and gave him more than enough to see. The bigger problem was where to start looking first.

According to the story Freya had told him, the man who had ruled here in ages past had accidentally transformed his wife into a vampire in a bid to save her life with magic. That account not only mirrored legends that he’d read about in the Unspoken’s library, but was also very similar to what Simon had done when he was trying to stop Freya from becoming a zombie a couple of dozen lives back.

The real question is, does this place have anything to do with it? he asked himself as he moved to the nearest wall and started to read.

The first place he picked was dirty enough that he had to rub it with a rag to make the scratches in the stone readable. Just because they were readable didn’t mean they were particularly legible.

None of the marks in this area were particularly deep, and as he studied them, he decided first that they were Charian, and second, that they were done in a hurry. They’d probably been made with a steel knife or dagger instead of something more proper, like a stone chisel or something supernaturally sharp.

The meaning of the marks took longer, and when Simon managed to decipher enough words in a row to do that, he was disappointed. It was a crazed rant written by someone who had been locked away in this very room for much too long.

“I sympathize, buddy.” Simon sighed as he switched to another wall and started again, hoping for something more interesting.

He struck out his second time, too. Then, he found a long and rambling apology that focused more on how terrible the writer felt to someone named Thedonia.

Simon couldn’t say for sure if that was a man or a woman, but still, the synchronicity struck him more than anything. Someone had been locked in this room until they went insane. They’d been locked in the same room he’d been walled up inside so long ago. What were the odds?

Eventually, he decided that what had done the scratching was not a metal implement, but the claws or nails of someone, probably a vampire. They’d been left in here to do nothing but write until they met their end.

Of course, he made that determination only when he left the room to look at other writing. In the hall, the marks were clearer and deeper. There, they were done in steel, which made them deeper and clearer. As soon as Simon saw that, he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d thought he was going to have to go through this entire place with a magnifying glass like some archaeologist and was relieved that wouldn’t be the case.

Where he didn’t have it easy, though, was deciphering this new message. While the last two had been rambling messages, the marks on this hallway were more like formulas or nonsensical math equations. He even found a couple of what might have been words of power scattered among them, like Eszloum and Hyakk. That was exciting, even if the marks were far too rough to ever channel real power, and he doubled down, spending hours more trying to uncover the hidden meaning there.

While he made some progress, after burning through four candle stubs, he decided to call it a night and find some place to sleep. That turned out to be the right decision, because when he returned to the first floor, he found it had gotten quite late.

“You're in no hurry,” he reminded himself as he started looking for a safe place to sleep for the night. There probably wouldn’t be any midnight visitors, but if there were, he wanted to give himself every advantage.

He looked at the servants' quarters first, and the ransacked pantry. Both had no windows, but flimsy doors. The nicer rooms were upstairs. They had solid doors, but completely open windows.

They didn’t seem defensive enough either, so Simon went up another floor. He wanted something with a heavy door and as few windows as possible. Ideally, there would be zero windows, but he never found that. He did find a small room at the top of one of the towers that was just about perfect.

Unfortunately, it proved to be occupied. After a moment, he recognized the occupant as the maid servant that he’d spoken with briefly at the end of his last visit. She was sitting upright, looking at him fearfully. This clearly wasn’t her room. Not only was it too nice to belong to a maid, but it had probably belonged to a man before all this. It was only after he took all that in that he noticed she was hiding a knife in her lap.

I can hardly blame her for having some personal protection, Simon realized.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” he told her. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll just go and—”

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, apparently only recognizing him when he spoke. “The vampire hunter.”

Simon considered correcting her, but instead thought better of it and made a small bow. “At your service.”

“Why did you come back?” she asked.

“There are a few things I wanted to investigate in the crypts to make sure none of this happens again,” Simon answered vaguely.

That led to a whole conversation where she assumed that he’d been here the whole time, which scared her because she thought she’d been all alone. Simon assured her he would leave her alone and find somewhere else to sleep, but when he did, she looked like she was going to cry.

“No, stay, please,” she insisted. “I-I’d feel better if I didn’t have to sleep alone again.”

It was an awkward moment for Simon. He wanted to tell her no, but the way that the fear swirled across her aura, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So, instead, he closed the shutters and wedged his knife in the door, and then he lay down on the bed next to the maidservant as he tried to remember her name. Mildred? Mira?

It wasn’t until she asked his name and they introduced themselves to each other properly that he knew for certain that her name was Milie, but when he did, he felt bad for forgetting it in the first place and vowed to treat her better and hopefully persuade her to leave for Lostelam or whatever village it was she’d come from originally.