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The Warlock II by Mackinley Clevinger, March 26, 2016
As a spirit, every memory of my life had been retained perfectly; all the old feelings that had torn me apart inside, everything I’d done and had done to me… and my death. Memories I had obsessed over and examined for the centuries I’d been trapped, alone; but now I could feel that record beginning to slip away. The imperfections of flesh: a curse and a blessing.
I lost my old name first, but I had barely used it in the years before my end. The Warlock was what everyone called me, the title bestowed upon me for what I’d done. Those memories were fading too, but they’d never leave me completely. Nor would the image of the heroes who’d ended my reign of terror, gathered before me in my own home in the dead of night to finish what I’d started.
Everything had seemed clear to me after the first century alone, but it was all fading now. A whirling vortex of thought and memory that was draining from me as Carmen’s ritual finished preparing my body for me. Something had gone wrong with the ritual, though; I’d been returned a woman, not the man I’d… the boy I’d been.
I remember the pain; before I’d been ‘The Warlock’. I’d never felt right, like there was something wrong inside of me that only I could see. That I was a lie everyone believed without a second thought, and I had no choice but to play the part. They never understood, and things my family didn’t understand were ‘demonic influences’ that needed to be beaten out of me.
There were other memories whirling around my head, too. I didn’t recognize them, though; only some of the places, but they were… wrong, somehow. Different, but still the same. There were people in them that I didn’t know; the same man and woman over and over again, and a face reflected in water…
The girl Carmen had killed. I didn’t know if that ritual would work, but Carmen had done it. Reviving an ancient monster who had terrorized everyone he’d come across at the cost of an innocent life; tearing a rift between the living and the dead to exchange one soul for another. The body was supposed to have been consumed, though, not trade places. I’d designed it to form a new body; what had gone wrong? What had Carmen done?
Besides… besides killing an innocent girl to bring me back. My life in exchange for hers as a testament to his loyalty. No, not loyalty. To the powers I’d had to make a father do this for his son; to make him serve me beyond death, long after I had passed; to make him forever serve me in taking out my revenge on the world. Carmen wasn’t my father; he hadn’t been since I stopped his heart. He was just a reflection of myself, and he killed her to bring me back.
“My lord, it is time to awake.”
The words fell into the whirling vortex of memory, shattering my reverie and releasing me from remembering. The details were gone, buried deep or forgotten forever. I remembered what was important, though. I wasn’t the Warlock any longer; the Warlock had been born of pain and suffering that was gone, born of an ignorance of myself that had been released by centuries of thought. A shame I don’t know what realization had cured me, but I knew what path I would walk this time. At a terrible cost I was returned to this world, and I would never allow the name of the Warlock to sully it again.
My eyes flickered open, and I found myself lying within the tomb I had been trapped within by… that woman. There had been four of them, and she’d… she… I shook my head, the barest trace of remembrance gone as soon as it had returned. I was clothed now, dressed in a torn, stained, and worn wool robe that I recognized.
My fingers numbly found their way to a tear in the fabric along my right arm, where an axe had shattered it. I poked a finger through a hole in the side beneath my ribs; a barbed arrow. The hood was stained with centuries old blood and twisted out of shape. My knees had slammed against the ground, restrained by unyielding arms and the pain, and they had…
I raised a hand to my throat, feeling tears well up as that memory played out before vanishing. It wasn’t gone forever, like so many others were. I knew it wouldn’t disappear; some things stick with you.
Unresponsive limbs lifted me from the stone coffin I’d been lain in, skin crawling as the robe brushed against my bare body. Every sensation was an explosion in my mind as I adjusted to being alive again, the added complexities of a body I hadn’t grown up in and a gender that hadn’t been mine hindering my actions, but not blocking me from stepping past a silent, watching Carmen to stride out of the tomb into the sunlight, my bare feet dragging across rough stone, and tearing the robe off of myself.
Holding the balled-up robe away from myself and feeling the early-sun shine on my bare skin, I twitched my mind into a shape I remembered well and felt energy channel into my hand, smoke rising from the robe for a second before it burst into flames. I dropped the robe to the ground and turned away from it, my hackles rising but the crawling sensation across my skin quieting down as the robe was reduced to so much dust.
“Who was she?”
Carmen looked taken aback by this question, replaced with a concern after the shock wore off.
“My lord, she was nothing compared to you. A village girl wandering in the woods. It was nothing to lure her here and – “
I raised a hand to stop him, my tomb-cooled body warming slowly in the sun.
“Who do you serve?”
“I serve you, my lord.”
I stepped back from the tomb, off of the slabs of stone that had once been the mighty doors crafted to contain me.
“Who am I, Carmen?”
Carmen stepped into the doorway, looking at me with worry evident in his gaunt, ancient face.
“You are the Warlock, though your body is not your own, my lord. We can fix this in time.”
My hands clenched as he said my name. If I wanted my body, I would need Carmen. He remembered everything, and yet…
“What was my name before that, Carmen?”
“My lord, you instructed me not to speak of it after my transformation.”
I hadn’t wanted to hear it, back then. I’d left that name behind just as I’d left their bodies…
“And I’m instructing you to tell me what my name was. Tell me, Carmen.”
I needed a name besides the title I despised, something to remind myself that I was different now, a new man in more ways than one.
Carmen was silent for a few seconds before saying “I don’t remember.”
It had been early days for the terror I’d become; Carmen and a few others weren’t mindless slaves, they could think for themselves. It kept them alive, and let them do things like this. My word was still absolute law, though.
“Step back into the tomb and never leave it.”
He was surprised, but there was a grim acceptance behind it; an acceptance of what, I don’t know. I just know he didn’t move.
“Carmen.”
I cast a hand out to my side and lifted the massive stone doors with ease, bringing them from their resting point on the ground to hang in front of Carmen. He stepped back from the doorway, watching me with a blank expression on his face, fingers twitching.
“Why?”
The stone doors drifted towards Carmen, shutting him within the tomb as he obeyed my orders to the letter.
“Because I’m not the Warlock.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, a line of black smoke shot out between a crack between the stone doors and the tomb, stabbing into my bare chest and expanding as it sucked power out of me. Carmen’s face had was flushed now, his hands taut as he whispered beneath his breath and held onto his end of the line that connected into his wrist.
The power I’d used to lift the stone doors waned suddenly as the smoke-tether continued to draw more out of me and send it slowly streaming towards Carmen. Through the shock and pain I tried to force the stone doors to shut on Carmen and break the connection between us, but the power I needed for that was slowly approaching Carmen. Tensing my hand, I dragged my nails diagonally across my chest, drawing blood that stuck to my nails.
“I make an offering of my blood that the spirits may come to my aid!”
I slipped over the words in my rush to speak them before the power trapped in the smoke-tether reached Carmen, satisfied as I felt a sudden dryness on my chest and the presence of another being. Shuddering, the doors slid the last few inches to close in Carmen and trap him, the tether broken and hanging limp between me and the tomb as the power moved sluggishly through it.
The spirit I’d summoned didn’t pass up the opportunity, and in the blink of an eye I was alone outside of the enchanted tomb, the tether and its power gone as well as the random spirit I’d called to help me. I sank against the basin I had been revived within and drew a shaky breath, body quivering as the power that had kept me safe and ‘normal’ was almost completely gone.
I had no name, and Carmen had unsurprisingly betrayed me when he found a way out of the contract I had formed centuries ago. I had next to no power, which meant there was next to nothing I could do unless I got more. I had no clothes in a cold graveyard at dawn, and no magic to let me ignore such basic concerns as hunger or freezing, and yet…
I wasn’t the Warlock. I was alive again, free of an old life that had created a monster without even the name of the boy I’d been. I didn’t feel that pain anymore; the constricting feeling around my heart was gone, and no one that wasn’t trapped within a tomb in an abandoned cemetery knew of what I’d been. I was free.
To do what?