My citizens were quick to rally to the call of war as patriots and heroes right alongside my mercenaries who affectionately referred to themselves as the Bastards of Glory. I, as their leader, had marched alongside them. Many thought me as an honorable man for this; that I too was a patriot of the territory I ruled over. In all truthfulness, I was only interested in two things, keeping what I saw as rightfully mine, and collecting the spoils of war and the spoils were plentiful at that.
After the fighting ceased, my city lay in ruin, my population decimated, but the corpses were more than I could tend to at any time. I had to create a vast frozen tundra inside of my own home to keep the bodies fresh and paid the families of the deceased well enough to satiate their mourning. With the end of the scuffle that took place, many of the citizens reveled in their own personal glory for a time till the flames of their passion quickly burned to embers and the only thing on their mind was not surviving the war, but surviving the next day. With many of the citizens dead, there were not enough people to tend to the fields or raise the livestock. The mercenaries, those Bastards of Glory demanded reparations for their feats in the war, but I was too wrapped in my studies to care about the financial climate, however quickly declining it had become.
It was not long till these mercenaries decided enough was enough and blockaded all roads and railways leading into and out of my city and ransacked any caravan foolish enough to come up these paths. They claimed it was a means of paying reparations for the war and would continue to take what they saw fit till they felt they were finally paid their due. Even as I write this now, I can see bonfires out in the forests that surround my once proud city and if I listen closely in the quiet night, I can hear songs of revelry and comradery. I know it is only a matter of time before the citizens come to their wits and join the mercenaries and attempt to overthrow me. That is of course if they can pass through the ruins of the city to get to me.
Shortly after the war had ended and I was left with the corpses of many enemies and allies alike, I had made another breakthrough into the resurrection of life itself. Most of the spells I knew required a constant connection from me and the use of a consistent flow of power. But if I could summon a sort of battery, a means of truly self-sustainability, then I could shatter the laws of this world over my knee and return to my people as a god of the resurrected. I began to take the bodies of the deceased and pealed back the veils of reality to reach into a realm where the souls of the dead roamed, these realms where the gods themselves had resided and stole from them the souls of those who had passed long ago and sealed them inside these new bodies.
As expected, these beings were simplistic and ignorant like a new born child and I had little patients or time for such simplicities and abandoned these things into the sewers where I hoped they would perish from disease or be eaten away by the vermin that resided there. With each subsequent experiment in sealing a soul to a body, I was able to notice a slight change each time. In many cases, regardless of who the mind once belonged to, the souls seemed to recall events from times and places however patchy they had been. I had not been bringing back the beings that once resided inside of the bodies, but rather, gave the souls a new form with which to inhabit. I realized that if this was the case, then I would need to take care to carefully weed out the souls from one another and choose the right ones to reattach to the body. I wondered how I might do this till I began to remember that young handsome boy from many years ago. My dearly beloved Gabriel. I could still picture his face and with it I began to notice the various bits and pieces of other bodies that resembled him and put together a body from memory that, in the end result, resembled that black haired boy I fell so deeply in love with.
It was simple enough to attach the bits and pieces with traditional healing magic, no need for unseemly stitches or scars and because of this, each and every part of the body fit within one another as though it was meant to be. As I drew closer to the end result, my heart throbbed in my chest and my hands shook with anticipation. For days I spent casting the spell, sorting through the hundreds of voices I heard beyond the veil till I finally managed to find his. I took the soul in my grasp and refused to let go as I wrenched it from the other world and into the new body I had made for him. The spell took weeks to accomplish, none of which I was able to truly comprehend at the time as my zeal had consumed my senses, but after a month's worth of time, I had brought him back, fully and truly.
Gabriel rose from the table I had laid his new body upon like a child rousing from a deep sleep. The screams that followed chilled my soul down to my bones, he grabbed onto the body he now resided in and clawed at it as though it were unnatural and toxic. I pleaded with him to stop but he wouldn't, he just stood there, begging and pleading with me as to why I brought him back, why I had insisted on such an ordeal to put him through. I tried to explain myself, to reason with him, but he would hear none of it and the last I saw of him was when he ran out into the ruins of my city. I perused him from the front gate of my manor only to see the true extent of the destruction I had wrought. All around me had been corpses decayed and destroyed as frequently as the rubble of the city once before. This sight seemed to span unto infinity in all directions and the crushing weight of my deeds all came back to me. I had managed to bring the dead back from the very veil of the afterlife, succeeded in purists some men had only dreamed of accomplishing, I stood as the leader of an entire city, but now, I am only the lord of its ashes.
Dawn has broken now, the sun crests over the horizon of the ruined city and I have yet to leave my tower. I have but one last venture to execute and it is one I do not intend to return from. By the time night falls, I will open the gate to the void and find my rest there, no grave shall mark the soil where my body lay; my physical form will not be claimed by the earth from whence it came. It is a fate I do not deserve. Heed my warning one and all as I write his memoir as a cautionary tale to those ambitious few to realize what is important to themselves and remind them to cherish what they have now, not what they think they desire.
To my Gabriel, I love you, and I am sorry.
~Doctor Aldrich Slode