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Chapter 36 - A Ghost in Daylight

Nothing was darker, nothing Ted had ever tried came even close to this.

He was about to change something about Junior. He was about to remove his ability to think for himself.

The bravest of surgeons claimed that there was a physical operation that could achieve the same result, rendering the patient unable to actively participate in their own life, but physical violence was the way of cowards.

Ted could change people without even looking them in the eye.

He just had to get that special powder the witches down south in the swamplands used to make their enemies into living dead. Said powder would not be easy to cook up, with nothing but an old book as his help, and the ingredients were rather hard to get as well.

Nevertheless, Ted succeeded in cooking up a pale pink powder in moonlight. He deemed the powder too expensive to make for all cultists. He had just enough for Junior and a Dragon who had displayed willingness to take responsibility over the cult.

The reward for their obedience would be the death of their wills.

Then Ted realized that this would mean not being able to sacrifice those whose wills he had broken. A man with no will - according to the solar deity, such people did not make for good sacrifices.

It wasn't exactly a major setback. Things happened, and Ted would just have to find new cultists. Two people. It wasn't like he had to remove twenty people from the number of actual victims. It would be all right. Junior, in his simplicity, was considered a trustworthy individual. He would be crucial in keeping things as normal during Ted's absence.

When Ted had Junior cornered without the male nurse knowing anything about his presence, he was free to dose the man with the powder.

Now, one had to be careful around such forces. One speck of the powder taken into the lungs of the attacker, and the tables would be quickly turned. It was an intense moment. Ted estimated the direction of the light draft passing through the room. He made sure that Junior was oblivious.

Still, this could go badly wrong. Ted thought about that feeling of being held captive inside his own body, unable to blink. He feared few things, and he wasn't even sure what to compare this feeling to, but his guts were slowly turning upside down and a sweat layer threatened to build up on his palms, spoiling everything.

Ted's heart was drumming quite an exotic rhythm into his rib cage. It was quickly filling the entire room, or that was how it felt like, with the light from the beautiful windows of painted glass drilling into his temples. He felt very much naked, like the sun god would have been watching him.

The deity was probably doing just that, laughing its mean laugh and waiting for blood, any blood to be spilled.

He kept his breath even, and silently strong, like when blowing out a candle, and used the current of air from his mouth to fully immerse the head of the poor nurse in the powder.

Junior sneezed and Ted withdrew behind the closest door, scared that he might have breathed in some of the evil miasmas.

However ridiculous it was, right now Ted believed in miasmas, ghosts, apparitions, everything. He had become a ghost in his own way, cursing people in broad daylight, with no mentors or forefathers to guide his hands.

Ted tiptoed away from the nurse, only daring to breathe after two minutes.

He wanted to laugh. Junior would be coming to him soon, asking for guidance, for any orders at all.

That was the way the living dead behaved. Lacking a will, a body became restless, if it was still breathing – and if it was not breathing, then there was nothing to be worried about, since that was just being dead and ordinary people were to die, some sooner, some later.

Ted regularly thought about his own supposed mortality. In all honesty, he didn't feel like he was one of those people whose lives would ever end. He wanted to at least reform the world into something more honest, into something that would celebrate the animal instincts of man instead of false idols and symbolic actions.

Rationally, he knew that his fate was the same as all fates of men, unless he really rubbed elbows with gods. That was what he intended to do.

This was his first deal with a divine entity. No one had told him that the first would be the last, or that it had to be so, and so he thought that it would be more than acceptable to continue climbing up the spiritual ladder.

No, he did not intend to become a cheese tray for maggots. If he was to be buried at all, he wanted to be buried like the kings of old, to the bottom of the sea where nothing would be able to touch him.

He had heard of deadrousers, people who had been able to actually strike a deal with the spirits of death and bring people back, with their wills intact and their cognitive capacities unharmed by decay. Even though the thought gave him chills, he considered those cases to be fabrications. It was amazing what one could do with illusions, with smoke and sleight of hand.

Magic could do many things. He didn't think it was capable of crossing the great divide, though.

Junior ran to him, and it was just like he had planned. Nothing except for his own agenda colored the eyes of the male nurse. Everything Junior did had to be somehow orchestrated by Ted. At least, he would have to imply that a certain movement would be desirable to him.

Junior looked like a huge, broken doll, even though his face was just as ugly as it ever had been.

"You need to act like you would have acted with your will intact," Ted told him. "You have to make exceptions for the good of our Society, but for nothing else, do you understand?"