Also, turns out the recording of my playing music live isn't a thing, because their camera's memory stick was full or some-such. Regardless, enjoy this piece of writing and have yourself a lovely day! See you tomorrow at eight AM for more!
The Warlock III by Mackinley Clevinger, June 9, 2016
Fear tore at my heart, slipping through my veins in time with the rapid-fire pace of my pulse. My body thrummed with nervous energy, yet I couldn’t move a muscle as the darkness swirled around me. Formless beings passed within inches of me, their eyes glaring with malice upon my bare skin as their whispering voices rose in a chorus around me. The words were nonsense, but carried a meaning I knew all too well. These were the beings that answered the call of the Warlock, shaped by my demands, and they were still –
I woke with a start, gentle birdsong and a distant stirring of leaves meeting my ears as the echoes of the dark place left me. I was covered in sweat, my pulse racing as I heaved in breath after breath and tried to calm myself. It was just a nightmare. The same one I’ve had every night since leaving Carmen trapped in the cemetery, and the same one that I am going to stop having. Eventually.
Morning light filtered through the walls of the old shed I’d been sleeping in, rays of light casting themselves on the overturned bucket that had made a good stool to sit and think on for the past few days. Old, thread-worn clothes that didn’t fit me had been a blessing to find here after stumbling through the woods naked for most of a day, and I hadn’t found anywhere better to rest at night than the hard-packed dirt this shed was built on, so I let these walls protect me until the nightmares passed and I was ready to go outside again.
I rubbed at an unfamiliar face and stood, feeling the coarse material of my shirt settle over me in a way I was still getting used to. My clothes stuck to me uncomfortably, sweat-soaked and sweat-stained from my nightmares. There was a time I’d clean them with a snap of my fingers, make them velvet-soft and fit my body like a second skin, but the power hadn’t come back to me. I couldn’t remember how I’d done it before, and had no idea where to start now. Well…
I shut my eyes against the image that had risen from some shadowy corner of my mind, waiting for it to subside before opening my eyes again and focusing on the solid, normal things around me. I wasn’t going to walk down that road again. I had a second chance, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes again. Those kinds of deals turn the world against you, and leave you dead and buried. I don’t need them.
“I don’t need them.”
Whispering the words to myself helped quiet the part of me that was ready to tear myself open and ease my way into this new world. I mean… I didn’t have to take it too far. Something small in exchange for enough to get me established again; maybe it wouldn’t even ask for a human’s soul. I could just… start small, maybe. Enough to keep me warm at night, protect myself from people, and if I ever want more, all I’ll have to do is –
“I don’t need them.”
My voice rattled the old shed, quieting the sounds of birdsong for a few seconds before it picked up again, my declaration silencing the side of me that I refused to give in to. I wasn’t going to die again, especially not because I couldn’t control myself. I knew what would happen if I followed that same road; a lot of people died so I could feel safe against a world that was always one step ahead of me.
My stomach growled, a knot of pain forming in my belly. I hadn’t left this shed since I’d found it, and whatever scraps of power Carmen hadn’t drained out of me could only keep me going for so long. At the height of my power, eating and sleeping had been a waste of time better spent doing… other things. As it was, I was going to have to leave the shed and see what was out there.
The shed had been the first sign of humanity I’d seen outside of the cemetery, and I’d immediately shut myself in and tried to ignore the outside world until I felt… something. Safe? Normal? What were those to someone revived after centuries of being dead into a world that had left them behind in a body that didn’t belong to them?
Another rumble from my stomach reminded me that there were more immediate concerns that needed to be addressed. Wincing at how the coarse material of my clothing rubbed against my skin, I crossed the dirt-floor of the shed to unlatch the door, peeking through a gap in the wooden walls as the power I would’ve used to sense my surroundings failed to surface.
I let the door creak open, and cast my eyes around an overgrown farming plot bordered by a rough road on the side nearest to me. It’d been dark when I stumbled on the shed; besides the trees that surrounded me, I hadn’t known what was out here. Abandoned, rusted tools had been left all over the place, alongside… Oh. Not alongside; held by bleached bones, which connected to…
The overgrown farm had at least a dozen bleached skeletons, their skulls all shattered but each wielding rusted tools in what I could only assume was the defense of their lives. The failed defense of their lives, to be exact. I wonder if they all died; it would be odd for them not to recover the bodies for burial if anyone did manage to survive.
I picked my way forward through the overgrowth, bare feet sinking into damp and healthy earth as I approached the nearest skeleton. I wasn’t going to make a trade for power, but using what I already had? There wasn’t enough to do anything serious with it, besides some small feats that weren’t bad, just… morally gray.
Kneeling besides the skeleton, I saw that whatever clothes it had had were in tatters, a rusted belt buckle nestled in the soil beneath it. Its hand still clenched a rusted scythe in its hand, nicked and dented in several places and seemingly splattered with old blood. The skull was crushed, bone fragments missing over the forehead and cracks radiating out from the holes that I could see brown earth through.
I placed an open hand over the skull, fingers brushing against the rigid bone as I let what little power had been left to me flow through my hand and into the skull.
“Tell me your secrets, fallen one.”
The skull’s empty eye-sockets lit up with a blue fire, and the jaw rose from where it had fallen to reconnect and make the skull whole. Its mouth clacked shut a few times, the fire dimming rapidly as if it were blinking.
“There was nothing I could do, my queen.”
The voice came on the breeze, rushing words born from no throat created out of the very air by a spirit from beyond this world.
“I am no queen. What happened?”
“But you glow so beautifully; how could you not – “
“What happened, fallen one?”
“We were attacked near the end of our work, when we were our most tired. Creatures burst from the tree-line and swarmed us.”
“Did any of you survive?”
“I had already joined my loved ones in the great above before their attack ended.”
“When did this happen?”
“I… I do not know. I am sorry, my queen.”
“What were they? Are they still here?”
The fire was fading, whatever energy I had managed to pump into the skull running out and making the hunger pain worse. The jaw was sinking back to the ground as the voice on the wind faded, one final message all I would know of what had happened
“Monsters, my queen, beasts as I have never seen. They are still – “
The fire blinked out, and the power I’d sent into the skull returned to me, hollow and empty. It would return, but until it did I would have to make my way without it, somehow. I felt cold inside despite the beaming sun that had risen over the trees to cast its light upon me; an emptiness I desperately wished to fill again so I could feel… normal. Above it all. Not fearing whatever may lie out there, waiting for me.
I pulled the scythe out of the skeleton’s grasp and stood above it, bowing my head in thanks for the service its spirit had done for me. It had called me queen; why? It’d said I glowed, too, but the sun hadn’t been behind me to confuse it. Did it see me differently? Did spirits see… souls instead of the physical? Why would it call me a queen, then? Carmen had done the ritual wrong, put me in a woman’s body instead of bringing me back as I should have been.
Half-remembered bits and pieces that I had discovered a lifetime ago tried to surge in my mind, but none of them were enough to answer any of my questions, and they faded back into locked memory. Knowing those answers wouldn’t help me, anyways; I had to move. No one had come back for the bodies, so whatever had killed these farmers hadn’t been chased away.
I hefted the scythe in my hands and picked my way out of the overgrown farm, reaching the rough, dirt path before casting my eyes around the tree-line. I couldn’t help but feel eyes on me, but without even a drop of power inside of me to cast out and search for it, I knew I was just imagining it.
The path stopped at the farm, so I followed it away from the bleached bones and shed that had harbored me. I couldn’t stay there any longer; there was nothing but ancient death and the promise of a new skeleton to join their ranks if I didn’t leave. Whether by starvation or something more sinister, it wouldn’t matter to me either way.