Chapter 446 - Shadows of the Past

Simon expected something ugly when he opened the final coffin. It was larger and better built than the rest, but from the moment he opened it, the shadows from the black aura contained within leaked out like smoke.

Simon stepped back to take that in, but the only current he could pull out of the miasma was hunger. Composed of black deeds and pain, it was suffused with a terrible hunger that Simon knew all too well.

He pulled out one of his last few stakes and banished the sight so he could look beyond the shadow to the vampire himself. The man was a stranger to Simon, but he looked like a southerner of middle age. He probably wasn’t yet 40 when he’d been turned. Simon might have cared about that story at one point, but even without glimpsing his aura, Simon couldn’t help but see the plain man as vermin.

Despite his pale complexion, he still had the ghost of tan olive coloring his skin. He was well dressed, too, and clearly in charge as he slumbered there in the crypt.

Of course, it wasn’t really sleep. Simon knew that. The condition that vampires experienced was closer to a human having a night terror than anything else. They couldn’t move, but the whole time they lay still, they dwelled in dread of the light above.

“Last one,” he said, pulling out a fresh stake. The other ones were bloody and charred from repeated use. While he didn’t think a few drops of blood would do anything for the vampire lord that was about to die, it felt right to him.

What felt less right was that the man managed to move as Simon drove the weapon down toward his unprotected heart. It shouldn’t have been possible, but as Simon lowered his arm with enough force to puncture the vampire’s thin skin and destroy his black heart, his near hand flashed up and grabbed Simon by the wrist as he opened his red eyes.

Simon’s first instinct was to struggle, but before he did that, he did one thing that was even more important. He closed his eyes.

“I’ll rip your arm off before I let you stake me,” the vampire lord growled. “But death would be too easy after what you’ve done. I’ll break you apart piece by piece, and make you eat what’s left.”

Simon barely heard his threats. He was still impressed that he could move at all. He remembered the weight of the sun all too well when he’d hidden in caves and felt its light weighing on him through the stone itself.

The others only moved when they actually died. Why would he be— Simon wondered before the vampire’s vice-like grip sent a jolt of pain through his wrist as something broke.

He didn’t see his injury because he’d shut his eyes, but then, he didn’t need to for what came next. He moved his left hand above his right, not to push his fist down, though. He’d never win against a vampire’s strength. Instead, he traced the gesture of force for real for the first time.

It was a simple movement. A joining of his thumb and third finger, a circling of his wrist, and a flicking motion of his first two fingers in the direction he wished to move something. In his fear, it wasn’t even perfectly executed, but it was enough. His magic sent the rough wooden stake rocketing out of his hand and into the prone form beneath it like a bullet.

It tore at the soldier’s borrowed leather gauntlet and embedded deeply in the vampire. In fact, it launched with such force that it probably would have passed through him harmlessly were it not for the stone plinth that his casket rested on. The stake shattered when it hit that, and the vampire barely had time to gasp, “How…” before his body faded to ash.

Compared to the others, it was a fairly dramatic display. There was no blood whatsoever, as there had been with his harem. There was barely any decay, either. It was like he’d been hollowed out, and as soon as Simon slew him, he popped like a dusty soap bubble.

The scent of sulfur was overpowering, and the sheer amount of malevolence that was dissipating in the room made Simon feel faint, but even as he stood there in a daze, looking past his throbbing arm to the now-empty coffin, he studied the fading patterns.

When a human died, their aura was snuffed out almost instantly as their soul left their body, but here it was almost the reverse. The body had vanished in seconds without leaving even chunks of bone or vile decay the way the others had, but the afterimage of the man who had been there lingered, becoming more and more threadbare.

While Simon didn’t see the man’s organs per se, it was like he was looking at pieces of the vampire’s failing soul, thanks to the darkness of the outlines, and he was entranced, right until a bolt sailed over his left shoulder, nearly clipping his ear.

Simon spun, but even as he did so, he moved to his left, toward the nearest wall, which would protect him from further fire. It was a good move, too, because as soon as the first crossbowman moved away from the gap, the second one fired at the spot Simon had just been standing.

“Why are you still shooting?” Simon yelled when he was out of their line of sight. “Your master is dead. His magic can’t compel you anymore.”

Stolen story; please report.

That caused a pause, and apparently some bickering, but the second guard he’d thrown out of the hall before eventually yelled back. “The man might have been a son of a bitch, but he paid well, and you just ruined the whole arrangement.”

“So there’s nothing I can do to get you to go in peace?” Simon asked, pulling out his lightning wand.

He tried to do so with his right hand first, but it hurt too much, so he switched to his left. Once armed, he peeked around the corner again and saw that the angry guard seemed to have been abandoned by his friends, which made what was probably coming next easier.

“Peace?” the guard chuckled. “You’re the one who threw me, you prick. I’ll—”

He never got a chance to finish his threat. Simon turned and fired from cover, sending a long, slender bolt of superheated light at the petulant man. He never had a chance. His chainmail acted as a magnet for the energy and cooked him to death. In response, he managed to issue a strangled cry and fire his weapon again at random. Then he was just a steaming corpse on the ground.

Simon unbarred the mangled door and pushed the body out of the way with it, then he went upstairs to see what had become of the disused castle.

What he found was chaos. The death of the vampire lord had clearly had an effect on those he held in thrall. When he’d gone down, it seemed like the castle was half abandoned, but now there were several people exiting, others fighting, and more hauling various pieces of loot across the courtyard.

I’m probably going to have to go back upstairs and make sure no one wanders off with my mount, he thought with a shake of his head.

Simon didn’t care about the people hauling dresses or bags of cutlery and candlesticks across the yard. What he did care about was that someone was about to steal his horse.

Simon dashed across the yard and put a stop to that just as the cook was tying another bag to the saddle. She didn’t seem like a bad woman, so he didn’t backhand her, but he did seize the reins from her before she could mount it.

“Hey!” she yelled, pulling a cleaver from her sash. “That’s my horse, you hear?! If you try to steal it from me, I’ll slice you up like a ham. I’ll—”

“Ma’am, take your food and get out before you hurt yourself with that,” Simon admonished her with a smirk. He was more than a head taller than her and had a sword on his belt, and she didn’t seem to care at all. “This horse isn’t any more yours than it’s mine, and if the farmer I borrowed it from doesn’t get it back, his family will go hungry.”

“Just who the hell do you think you are to tell me what to do?” she said, squinting at him, knife still raised.

“I’m the man who ended this awful situation,” he answered. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Y-you killed Lord S… You killed the monster that did all this?” she asked in disbelief. When Simon confirmed that, she apologized profusely and made her escape just as soon as her sacks could be untied. After that, she made her way out with the constant trickle of people. Which left Simon with quite the conundrum: how was he going to untie the guard AND keep someone from stealing his horse?

In the end, he decided he couldn’t, so he flagged down a scullery maid who seemed confused as to what she was doing next. Simon chose her because she had the brightest soul of the group, and when he explained the problem, she practically volunteered and ran upstairs with a kitchen knife to free the half-naked man.

When he came downstairs, he didn’t even attack Simon as the other guard had. He just thanked him for ending it. “It’s like the shadow on my soul is gone,” he explained.

Simon could see that it wasn’t gone by a long shot. The man was riddled with shadowy scars. Still, he didn’t tell the guard that; he just gave him back his armor and cloak and wished him well.

Maybe in a few years, with some healthy living under his belt, that will be the case, Simon thought to himself as he watched the man leave along with most of the rest of the staff.

When that happened, Simon decided it was probably time for him to leave, too. He asked the maid, whose name turned out to be Millie, if she’d take the horse back for him when she confessed to having nowhere to go. “It’s not far,” he told her. “And the family is very kind. I can draw you a map.”

She declined, though, which was a shame. More than anything, Simon wanted to search the catacombs before he left this level for good, but no one else seemed trustworthy, and he wasn’t about to screw up and lose this farmer’s horse every time he visited this place.

“I guess that it will have to wait until tomorrow,” he told himself as he mounted the old gray mare and started rising slowly back.

After he was alone, he pulled out his wand of lesser flesh and used it to knit the fractured bone. It wasn’t quite a pure healing spell, the way he’d carved it, so there would likely always be a bump on the bones there, but he doubted his first life deeper into the Pit would be a long one.

After that, he tried to come up with a plan for what he was going to do next, but mostly the overwhelming sense of relief he felt that the vampires were dead and he was still human kept interrupting him. He wanted to focus on the runes on the walls he’d glimpsed, but just being out of that shadowed place was enough to make him feel alive.

He’d been carrying around a weight in his heart since his first encounter with Freya long ago, and this finally let him breathe easy. So he spent most of the way back just waving to other travelers on the road and whistling as he went, and he regretted none of it. That was doubly true when he reached the farmhouse where all this started and pronounced that the deed was done.

The family was shocked, but his host refused to allow the moment to go unmarked. “This is the happiest day of my life since my youngest was born healthy,” the man declared as he dragged Simon to the nearest village where they could properly celebrate in the pub, “and we’re damn sure gonna mark the occasion. Hell, we’ll have a local holiday and celebrate it every year if need be.”

“It’s nothing,” Simon insisted, but it wasn’t. He knew that. Humility demanded he downplay the event, but that wasn’t likely to last much past the first few pints, and really, it felt good for someone to celebrate his achievement, even if they didn’t know the real reason that it was such a powerful personal victory.