The labyrinth of rubble, fineries, corpses, and weapons made a near untraversable path in the darkness. Ahead, I could hear Monvenue executing deserters, servants, and villagers. Winning some skirmishes, we had prevented a few slaughterings, but panicked enemies are efficient.
In the set of chained-up prisoners we rescued, Darnsley's escapee maid was among them. After we let her go, she must have snuck back in through a secret entrance.
"How are you feeling?" I asked, gripping a torch very tightly.
"…" She was unresponsive, silently muttering the long list of human names. I had hoped she would serve as a guide. There were hundreds of missing civilians we had to find.
"Sir, Lord Galdinor has ceased firing by request of Major Melbury, and Colonel Darnsley is furious at you for going in without him." A courier sergeant reported. His dogtag spelled Big John. The sound of the cannons has indeed stopped, abating the harsh ringing in my ears.
"He'd be a bull in a china shop. Status report on the battle?" I asked as we went up a dark set of stairs.
"We captured around 2300 enemy soldiers, most of them wealthy militiamen. We have every dugout, strongpoint, and depot for miles. We have nearly 800 casualties, and they, about 500, since they surrendered before taking real damage." The courier sergeant stated.
"They still have a few hundred regulars left, then. Stay alert!" I ordered. "Also, can no one ascertain where Weaver and Duelist are?"
Suddenly, a handsomely elegant man in a three-piece suit burst through a wall in the dark hallway. He suspended himself in the air by invisible threads. Sending waves of white silken apparitions, his pursuer, the dark metallic creature known as Duelist's artifact, took them apart quickly with his flying swords. With streaks of silver highlights in his brown hair, the elegant man ascended to the ceiling, where he disappeared. The artifact grabbed a flying sword, which carried him to the rafters, where they continued their duel in the darkness. The sound of metal tearing silk faded into the distance.
We approached a stairwell. Stepping into a hardened puddle, I realized that it was stale blood from the smell alone. Someone had already bloodied the corridor a long time ago. In a fit of panic, Darnsley's captured maid ran up the stairs, screaming.
A thrill rushed to my head. I chased, bursting through an old oaken door after many flights of stairs with weapons drawn. The dying braziers on the walls illuminated my battle-worn cavalry saber, turning it into a weary lighthouse. Squinting, I almost took a step before the acidic fumes froze me in place. I pressed my foot forward only to find it raised above a cavernous pool. To cross it, you must traverse a narrow stone footpath across a shrouded distance ahead. There were shapes in the liquid.
"Sir!" Big John and the rest of my men ran in behind me. The torches they carried painted the room in dark crimson. The pool was of a lavender concoction, mixed poorly with the dark red of blood like a cauldron. The liquid's shapes were corpses, young and old, withered and fresh, whose stench mixed with the compound's acidity.
"Sweet Belenatum," My men, who were so bold before, who had dealt and received death as men of the profession often do, were humbled. Missing persons across the lands were here, lost and forgotten, waiting patiently for the day that they could go home. Some had peaceful faces, agonized faces, complex faces, and faces with no features. Many had parts of them cut off.
"Sir, what is this?" Big John quivered with worry.
The maid began to sob violently. It took two grown men to restrain her from diving into the pool. There was the corpse of a little girl that looked just like her.
"What has he done?" I whispered to myself, nauseous.
Half of the tattered rags were white of the maid's similar pattern. They clung to most of the younger bodies. What kind of nobleman could have gotten away with this? No, I was his reckoning.
Ahead was an altar. Scattered pages and ancient scrolls piled chaotically around, next to surgical tools and flasks of human organs. Back turned on us, at the center of the room, a bejeweled shriveled figure hastily secured notes. Monvenue guards ambushed us. We dispatched them all quickly, revealing that in the hand of the dead bejeweled viscount was the elixir of immortality.
***
A low, almost familiar voice rained from the abyss of the ceiling. "Ah, Desmond, is it you again? Have you come to take what is mine? Hehe, I am a benevolent man. Why don't you join our cause?"
"Are you the viscount's conspirator? Show yourself!" I yelled into the void.
"I see that you have discovered my little laboratory again. Hehe, the first time you were here, you looked worse than that girl!" The voice echoed.
"What are you?" I asked. A headache prevailed as if a nightmare marooned me. The sights and sounds started blurring, and the other voices disappeared.
"Ahh… I used to be the viscount. Well, do you like it, my former laboratory? After we all returned to the land of the living, well, now I'm perfected. " The voice descended from the darkness of the ceiling.
An amalgamation of human flesh sutured into a spider's shape, with a human torso and head where the eight eyes are, it was Bluebeard, but younger. Its long appendages were human bodies melded together.
A sword flew from within the liquid, piercing the monster's neck. Purplish blood sprang out, creating a thick, violet miasma that filled the room, choking me until the light faded from my darkened eyes.
As Duelist's artifact emerged from the pool, a "Wake up, Morrie" reverberated in my head. Wasn't I a Morrie Griffonson?
…
The dawn pierced my eyelids.
"Barroco?" I slurred in a morning daze.
"Damn him to hell," Barroco cursed. The scent of smoking pines distanced me from my nightmare, cleansing the sorrow of faraway lands. Was it all a dream? I was lying on blankets in the garden, staring at the charred walls of the shop.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Our vendor sold us impotent Specter's kiss. Damn charlatan probably cut it with sugar or something," Barroco bemused, bemoaning how he didn't destroy the neighborhood in an explosive mistake, just the basement.
The old gravedigger probably saved my life, and he's off to collect corpses with his wheelbarrow.
"What about the lunarfritz?"
"Oh yeah, I guess I haven't thought of it," he sulked. A sense of dread colored his face pale.
"At least let's survey the damages," I droned, looking for a bright spot on this terrible sunny day. I creaked down the stairs and disappeared into the charred house. I knocked on some walls and pillars, testing the structure, surprised by their resilience. The tree was also fine. In the dimness ahead, the remnants of furniture wore a charcoal black coat, while personal affections littered about, destroyed in the same fashion. Within the sea of broken jars, the cauldron glowed. Inside, a silvery liquid bubbled gently, luminescent in the cold morning.
"Come take a look at the cauldron," I yelled.
Barroco ran down swiftly, with a set of chemical gauges and his last unbroken flasks. He tested the solution.
He pranced around excitedly, rambling about everything and nothing all at once.