Christopher Kellen - Elegy

Suddenly tiring of stealth, D'Arden shoved open the door, allowing the sapphire light from his blade to illuminate the darkened interior.

He was greeted with only more darkness.

D'Arden stepped carefully across the threshold. Sorcerers could do terrible things with the manna when they tried, and he had come to find himself extremely cautious when crossing a doorway. They could lay traps that would explode violently when triggered, and they would do it with abandon. A man who dared to use the manna, who had a will strong enough to control it without falling immediately before its grace and majesty, was a dangerous animal – and nearly always fell victim to their own corruption. Sorcerers were often in league with demons, for whatever reason. Promises of wealth, power, sometimes even of eternal dominion over the land itself… promises that were always broken, never fulfilled.

In a place this corrupted, there could be a sorcerer hiding around any corner.

What he found within was obviously once a carefully-decorated entryway to a home. Cloaks hung on the wall and there were boots piled along the floor, lying haphazardly, strewn in every direction. A layer of dust had settled upon them; they had not been used, nor even disturbed in some time. The same layer of dust covered the floor, and there were no recent footprints. This place might not have any relevance at all to the demon's whereabouts.

A sound – a low, aching moan – came from within. He immediately stopped moving, unsure if perhaps it had been made by one of the floorboards beneath his feet. When he heard it again, longer this time and slightly louder, he knew that there was someone… or something within.

He moved swiftly and smoothly across the floor, pressing his back against the wall as he reached the next doorway that would take him inside to the house proper. It was dangerous to investigate, he knew, but if the boy outside got wind that there was someone inside and he didn't properly determine whether said person was still human in this awful place or not, he would have a very small, manageable mutiny on his hands, but one that would still be quite unfortunate.

The next door was slightly open also, and D'Arden shone the light from his blade through the small opening. There was rich furniture within, all covered with the same layer of dust. That same sound, the low, sad cry issued once more from beyond the nearly closed portal. It was a sound of pain, a sound of mourning. D'Arden felt his hackles go up. It was not uncommon for a fel beast to feign death or near-death in order to lure its prey close enough so that it could reach out and feed when one approached just one step too far. The child had been one of those, and he'd seen many before. The loved ones of a man would come home to find him crying out in pain and with desperate pleas for help, and they would find themselves quickly devoured by the beast that had assumed his form.

The door creaked softly as he pushed it open.

"Who's there?" the voice groaned from within.

Two words strung together. Could there be someone truly alive in here?

As he stepped through the second doorway and came fully into the room, the blue light illuminated a scene which he could have lived for many years without seeing, and have been perfectly happy about it. A man sat in a chair, and if the description had ended there, D'Arden would have been far more pleased.

The man – if he could still be called a man – was strapped down to the chair with heavy leather bands that wrapped around each wrist and the chair's arm. His head lolled back, and his guts had been opened as though with a vise. His innards lay strewn around the room, spread about him, and wrapped around his neck, and strung up and nailed to the ceiling in such a way that it looked like some sort of gruesome spider's web. There was blood everywhere. On the walls, on the floor, the man himself was covered in it almost from head to toe. D'Arden wondered just how it was that this poor creature was still alive, and then he noticed the trails of crimson light that crept up from the ground, infusing him with just enough manna to keep him from dying completely.

It was a truly gruesome scene of torture, and it had obviously been constructed very much on purpose.

The head lolled towards him, the eyes staring blankly as the man let out another groan. "Why can't I die? Why won't I die?"

"What happened here?" D'Arden whispered.

"They… they…" it started as what seemed almost a stutter, and then became a mantra as the man simply kept repeating the word over and over again.

It had happened already. The man's consciousness was lost. He still lived, but it was not a natural life, and what might had remained of his sanity was long fled this awful place. This grisly sight might have sat here for days, or even weeks, the poor wretch's life extended artificially through a careful application of the corrupted manna – leaving him not quite alive and not quite himself, but neither exactly dead.

"The horrors," the man whispered. For a brief moment, his eyes focused on D'Arden. "Save yourself!"

That's when D'Arden discovered just who 'they' were.

From all of the rooms of the house they suddenly came, the dead pouring out of the doorways as though they were the building's life blood suddenly released by the slicing of an artery. They groaned, they cried out, they shrieked with their still-taut throats. These were nothing like the rotted and desiccated corpses that he'd fought in the crypt. These were the bodies of the recently deceased, those driven out of their bodies by the corruption that pervaded every corner of this terrible place.

He cut at them with his sword, trying to drive them back. The walking dead staggered towards him, and though every one he cut down burst into the cobalt flames of the manna fire, it seemed as though a hundred more took their place. Where they had all come from he was not sure that he could ever know, and why they had all gathered here was a mystery that he doubted he would ever solve.

He stepped backward through the doorway, swinging his sword almost wildly as he went. They followed after him in a wave of stinking, rotting flesh and swinging limbs, desperately clawing at the air before them, staring ahead with unseeing, milky white eyes that twitched and danced in their skulls.

This was madness.

This was horror.

As he stumbled backwards out of the door that led out to the sunlit streets, the dead immediately halted and began slowly retreating back into the house. Mikel stood, staring dumbfounded as he watched the corpses begin moving backwards in what seemed like one fluid motion.

“That’s…”

“Sickening?” D’Arden asked sharply. “Horrifying? Going to haunt you for the rest of your days?” He shuddered, trying to shake off the image of the man inside, his innards strewn all over the room. “You have no idea.”

“So that’s what happened to all the people…” Mikel said slowly.

“Yes, that’s where most of them are,” D’Arden said. “My intuition tells me that not all of them are in that one house. There are probably more places like this where the corruption has spread so thickly that they congregate here. I would not be surprised to discover that there was a manna font sprung up inside that house. If I could burn the whole place down, I would.”

He shook his head despairingly. “I don’t know what I can do for them. There’s too many of them in there for my sword arm to take care of it, and I’m not sure I have enough manna within me to destroy them all without recharging at least once. I could try, but it might well kill me.”

“So what do we do?” Mikel asked.

“There’s nothing we can do. Make sure none of your people come here after dark. I realize that you believe there might be someone left alive in here, but there is not. There is no one left in here that still needs your help. In fact, your captain should be closing this gate to ensure that none of these monsters get free and begin wreaking havoc on the rest of the city. Calessa Heights is lost, boy, and your family’s home might well be next if we do not find this demon and destroy it!”