Death After Death 225-227

Ch. 225 - Unearthed

The process of freeing him took hours, but eventually, he felt his coffin shift as it was pulled out of the wall. Then, those cursed swords were removed, and his coffin lid was opened. He was still in darkness, though, because Simon was too weak to even open his eyes. 

He could hear people talking, and the sputtering of a torch, but what the actual words might mean was well beyond him right now. It was enough that he could tell they didn’t all belong to the same person. There were three people here with him. Well, there were at least three people here speaking. There might have been more standing by silently. His sharpened sense of smell was so overloaded by all the new things around him right now that he couldn’t tell anything apart with it. Only his neglected sense of hearing and his atrophied brain provided any help, and they whispered that there was a woman and two men. 

Freya, he thought. She came at last, the second he figured out that it was the woman who was in charge of the two men. 

He felt a moment of gratitude toward her then, even though he hated her. He’d gladly rip her heart out if he got the chance, but hearing her again was a vast improvement over the alternative. She sounded like she was giving someone an order, but before he could figure out if that was directed at him or not, something was shoved in his slack mouth, and he bit down on reflex.

It’s going to be terrible! His dormant mind tried to warn him. You’ll open your eyes to see a child or someone you care about, and you’ll be the one to have murdered them!

None of those admonishments stopped him, though. Nothing could have stopped him in that moment. He was a beast, and he needed to feed.

Whatever he was feeding on struggled weekly in his mouth, but not enough to dislodge his fragile fangs, and slowly, one heartbeat at a time, that vitality entered Simon’s awful body. He was too weak even to suck the blood from his victim, so to add insult to injury, the heart and the blood pressure of the person he was about to murder had to do all the work to feed him.

That only lasted for a few seconds, though. Once he began to revivify, he began to suck lightly, and then, like his life depended on it. The taste and the power of the blood made his heart sing, but more than that, for the first time in decades, the hunger that had been his constant companion began to fade. 

He felt free in that moment, even as he continued to drain his victim. In only a few seconds, they were dead, and even as Simon opened his mouth, they slumped to the floor. 

Simon opened his eyes, then, and was assaulted by the brightness of the torch and the lantern that were in the room. He saw at least half a dozen blobs that were probably people, but it was hard to say. Instead of trying, he hissed and shut his eyes again. The only useful piece of information was that the blob being dragged from the room was too large to be a child. It was either a very large woman or a medium-sized man, and judging by the taste, Simon leaned toward the latter. 

Even as he shut his eyes, there was talking and yelling. Someone tried to talk to him. It was the woman, but he realized then that she wasn’t Freya. Her hair was too dark, and her voice was too deep. 

All of this was too much to take in while his body was buzzing with a life’s worth of energy after years of starvation. So, he tried to roll away to block them out, but instead, another victim was pushed forward toward him. Even as annoyed and out of sorts as he was, that was not a temptation that Simon could resist.

This one smelled and tasted similar to the last one but different from the guard’s he’d devoured before he’d been imprisoned. Not from around here? He wondered. After drinking more of the man’s blood, he decided they were definitely foreigners. 

That was all the proof he needed that his mind was starting to wake up. He’d feared that what had been done to him had caused irreversible brain damage and reduced him to some kind of wild beast. While he could still feel that angry, raging beast inside of him, it was slowly going back into its cage as his mind returned to something resembling sanity. 

As he felt his second victim start to weaken, he opened his eyes again, testing the light. This time, he found it tolerable, but only barely, and even though someone was still trying to speak to him, it was still too echoey and distorted to really understand. Instead, he focused on the man he was draining dry, willing his eyes to focus so the details would resolve. 

Murani, he thought, as soon as he could see clearly enough to recognize the facial features. The same people we fought in Ionar, but they live hundreds of miles to the north. Why would they…

Fragments of conversations with Freya, or perhaps with the farmer before he’d been captured by her, started to come back to him. She was at war with them, or at least this kingdom was. What was the name of this kingdom? Brin? Ionia?

None of those were right, but he couldn’t be bothered. He was in a vampire castle high in the mountains, and that was as much about the world he needed to understand as he let his second victim fall free and turned to face whoever it was that had freed him.

Her face was almost as hard to decipher as the horselord, but once it snapped into focus, he was in stunned disbelief. 

“Arrraaa…” he rasped, still in denial about it. She’d come back for him, some way, somehow. 

Does this mean that the people of the region have overthrown Freya? He wondered. It was a shocking thing, but it seemed the most likely option. He had, after all, taught her how to use magic. Perhaps she’d succeeded where he’d failed. 

Still, he doubted that. Something was off. He was sure he’d been in there for decades, and given how she didn’t appear to have aged much, if at all, it couldn’t have been nearly that long. 

Was my math off? He wondered. Was I only in the box for a year or two? That would be a horrifying realization, yet even as her mouth continued to move, he finally figured out the discrepancy. She hadn’t aged, but she didn’t have a pulse, either.

The moment she tried to sacrifice her life for her sister came flashing back to him then. It had been decades before, but it was in this very room that she’d begged him to kill her instead of her sister. She’d no doubt made the very same offer to Freya, which meant he’d suffered for nothing. 

More importantly, though, it meant that Freya was alive. That anger was what slowly forced the world to come into focus and for sounds to finally complete their transformations into words. 

“Where is she?” he growled. 

“That’s just what I was trying to explain to you,” Ara signed in muted exasperation. 

She might look the same, but she acted differently enough that it was clear she was taking her cues from the mistress of the castle, which meant she was a servant, or even an apprentice, and not a slave or worse. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but before he could decide, she continued. “We don’t know where she is, but we know what’s coming next, and you’re the only one I could think of who might be able to help.”

“To help? Who? Her?” Simon asked. He wanted to laugh then, but he was physically incapable of it, and when he tried, all he succeeded in doing was coughing. “I’d rather die.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged, but that won’t help with the army, which might start coming down from the pass as soon as tomorrow,” Ara explained. “They will sweep through the region in a matter of days, and sooner or later, they will take Gravenstone Castle while I slumber.”

“That’s rough,” Simon nodded, smiling. “Destroying everything that Freya cares about. That would be a shame.”

The vampiress looked like she was about to slap him. Instead, she commanded, “Leave us. I will call when he is ready to consume another prisoner,” in a tone that brooked no argument. 

That was the first time that Simon noticed the other people in the room beyond their shapes and their heartbeats. There were guards that obviously belonged to the castle and workmen, but they had several prisoners, too, bound and gagged. It was only when all of the men had filed out that she spoke again. 

“You have every right to hate her. I don’t blame you,” she said finally, deflating now that there was no one around she needed to put on airs in front of. “I hate her, and she’s done so much less to me than she has to you, but—”

“But nothing, Ara,” Simon blurted out. “She took your humanity from you.”

“She did,” the vampiress agreed, “But she spared my sister as she promised, so I continue to serve her loyally in all things.”

Simon flinched as his earlier theory panned out. “Well, I can tell you that she’ll be very unhappy with you for waking me up.”

“I doubt it,” Ara shrugged. “I think she’s forgotten all about you, to be honest. If you’ll help me save her castle, then she will forgive me anything, and if you don’t, then I’ll put you back in the box, and she will be none the wiser.”

That last part was said just cold enough that Simon believed it, so, for the moment, he changed topics since that was the very last thing he wanted. “What is it you think I can do for you?” he asked tiredly. “I doubt I can even stand, and you know I can’t use magic anymore.”

“Simon, you are as clever and as fierce a man as I’ve ever met,” she answered, taking one of his bone-slender mangled hands in both of hers. “You saved my father from a vampire and then destroyed Freya’s castle not once but twice, and I have been looking for a justifiable opportunity to free you ever since. All I want is for you to help me save the valley and the people in it, and if you die in the process, then I think we both get what we want, don’t we?”

“The people, huh?” he asked. “You mean your sister?”

“My sister is long dead,” Ara answered with a shake of her head, but her children are grown and have children of their own. Some of those children have children, too, and all of them are spread in a dozen different villages throughout the valley. So, no, I don’t want to save her, or even then, I want to save everyone.”

Simon could respect that. He would have complimented her on it, in fact, if he wasn’t still so blown away by what she said. “Great Grandchildren?” he asked, doing the math. “How long have I been in there, exactly?”

“I-I’m not sure that you want to know,” Ara answered with sadness in her voice. 

“Tell me,” Simon said, looking at her with renewed determination. “Tell me everything.”

Ch. 226 - A Long Time Coming

Sixty-three years, he thought in disbelief as she explained what had happened since he’d been away. Sixty-three years bleeding in a box. Simon was floored. He’d known that it had been a long time, but not that long. He’d thought it had been a couple of decades, not six of them. 

That’s an entire lifetime, Simon realized. 

He was on, what, level 33? That meant that he was fifty or sixty years into the future of the cabin level as soon as he entered it, and now he was sixty years into the future of that level? So, he’d been doing this for a century? His mind boggled at that. 

He’d been a statue for a century, too, or somewhere thereabouts, but somehow this hit him harder. Then, he’d never been defrosted far into his future, and he had trouble processing that. Seyom would still be alive probably, but he would be an old man now and—

When Ara noticed he wasn’t paying attention, she grabbed him by his chin and stared into his eyes. He could feel her trying to force her will on him, the way that other vampires had done before now, but he felt that strange pressure slide right off of him. Even ineffective, though, the sensation was a slap in the face, and it snapped him out of it. 

“I know this a lot, but I need you to focus, Simon,” she explained. “We don’t have a lot of time. They only delay in fear of her, and when they find that she’s not here, the castle will fall in hours, not days.”

“You’re right,” Simon rasped, “I’m sorry. It was a lot to take in. Please start again, from the beginning.”

Ara did just that, though he could tell she was a little annoyed at having to repeat herself, and this time, she gave him a pretty abbreviated version. 

“The last war ended shortly after you were imprisoned,” she explained. “Emma and I were caught two nights later, and I was turned then. That was awful, but I did as the Red Widow commanded, and for a long time, for everyone else at least, things were good.”

“The Red Widow?” Simon asked softly. “That’s a bit theatrical. Is that because I killed—”

“No,” Ara answered flatly. “It’s because no man that my Mistress ever brings back to her bed chambers survives the experience. She never replaced her harem. Instead, she just began to snatch up more and more handsome men from further and further afield. In a way, you actually made it worse, so, unfortunately, you aren’t as important as you think you are.”

Her tone of annoyance only increased then. Simon could see that however sweet and kind she’d been when all of this started, she’d really gotten used to being obeyed in the decades since he’d met her last.

He didn’t interrupt again for a while, even though he felt the urge to at every new revelation. Charia, as it turned out, was not really a unified Kingdom like Brin or Montain, as he’d thought previously. Instead, it was barely a confederation; It had a king, but the post was nearly ceremonial. It was the Mountain Lords scattered through the region that held the real power. 

They finally won against the Murani, eventually, when they banded together. They repelled them from the north, and apparently, even now, several keeps were under construction that would make further wars in the future very unlikely. “Not that they will do us any good in the fighting to come.” 

Simon expected to hear more about peace after that, but apparently, as soon as the Murani were pushed back to the deserts of the north and the foreign lands beyond, Brin attacked Charia. Before she’d even explained that it was a crusade against warlocks and other foul magics in any great detail, Simon was already blaming the Unspoken. 

“Apparently, the warriors in white cloaks have many techniques for disabling mages,” Ara explained, unaware that he already knew that, “But few of them work against vampires. So, even though they came for my Mistress, they were devoured by her instead.”

“What are your impressions?” he asked. “Have you fought them?”

“I—” she started. “I don’t fight. I don’t kill. I just can’t, even after all of this. I mind Mistress Freya’s castle and attend to her needs. Everything else I leave to her.”

“And she has no other lovers or vampire henchmen or whatever?” Simon asked in his uncomfortably gravelly voice. 

“She’s had a few over the years, but none currently. They all died in the crusade at one point or another,” she answered wearily. “I do not think that delving into those details will assist us now.”

Simon wanted to protest and explain that knowing how their enemies killed vampires was the most valuable information of all, but he shrugged mentally and dropped it. Even after feasting on so much blood, he was already starting to fade. Why do you care about staying alive? He asked himself. Death is exactly what you want. 

Apparently, the crusade ended up indecisive and dragged on for years as a series of border skirmishes, just the way that the war with the Murani had turned out for years before. That had been enough to cause a fragile peace enforced only by apathy. Unfortunately, that meant that when the Murani attacked Brin again for the fourth time this century, all of their strength had been spent, and they fell before the horselords. Now, only a few years later, the mountainous region of Charia was poised to do likewise. 

“Every Mountain Lord between here and the old border has fallen,” she explained. “Castle Gravenstone is all that stands between this valley and—”

“What about the rest of the nation, though,” Simon asked. “What about Ionar and—”

“I don’t give a damn about any of those places,” Ara spat. “I woke you to save my family. The rest of them can fend for themselves.”

Simon nodded, disappointed by the answer. He would have tried to stand then, but he was too weak to get out of the coffin, and after decades with a severed spinal cord, he could barely feel his toes. “I’d help, he said finally, but I can’t even walk,” he sighed, feeling every year of his advanced age now that time had caught up with him.

“No,” she agreed, “Not yet, but you are a clever man. You escaped from my Mistress’s cell, and such things are not done. Surely you can come up with some kind of plan to help us. Perhaps you could teach all the men we have under arms magic?”

“I-I’m not sure that would go so well,” Simon answered, suppressing his urge to tell her that was the worst plan he could imagine. Teaching two or three dozen men words of power might win a battle, but they’d kill themselves in a few years from the drain, and that was the best-case scenario. Making them all magical weapons would do better, but “The key is the pass, I think. That is where we should be fighting them, not here at the castle walls.”

“We lack the men for that. If we had hundreds, or—” She started answering. 

“You just said you have a valley full of families,” Simon interrupted. “That’s all the men you need, right there. Give them weapons and tell them to fight for their homes!”

“The men of the valley have never had to fight,” she said, looking confused. “My Mistress has always protected them. She—”

“She isn’t here,” Simon said. “If you want an army, then you have to make one yourself. It’s the only answer. A double rank of men with spears and as many bows as you can find might be enough if you can get the high ground. It would be even better if you could pick ground that is rough enough to break a charge all on its own.”

“I see,” she said coolly, obviously not impressed with that idea. “How long do you think that would take? Two days? Three?”

“I’d drill them for at least a month together before I put them in the field together,” Simon said, suppressing a laugh, “But in times this desperate, a week perhaps, if you include your castle guards as sergeants and other leaders. Any less, and it would just be a slaughter.”

“We don’t have a week,” she answered in a tone that sounded closer to a frustrated child not getting what she wanted than it did to a ruler who wasn’t getting her way. “We have half that. Maybe. I told you. As soon as they grow bold, it could be over in a single day.”

“Well, I don’t know what miracles you want me to work here,” Simon said, feeling his own frustration starting to rise. “If I could fight, I would, but I can’t use magic. I can’t walk, and I can’t…” 

His words trailed off as she turned and left the room without a word. He heard some talking from somewhere further on, perhaps a room or two down the line, and then, a few minutes later, guards returned, pushing a couple more men into the room. The door was then slammed shut and locked, and Ara appeared at the small window while the prisoners scurried back in horror at what was about to happen. 

“Feast on as many men as you like tonight. Regain your strength.” she said, “Then tomorrow night, you can buy us the time we will need for your plan.”

“I’m not sure that killing more men will solve this,” Simon said with a shake of his head, not certain how he felt about killing people now that he was more or less in full control of his faculties, even though the blood racing through their veins sang to him. “It’s decades of damage we’re talking about here. It will take time and—”

“Time is the one thing we do not have,” she said sadly, “Fortunately, I’ve seen the miracles that blood can do. If you drink enough, you will be whole, eventually.”

“Enough?” Simon asked, holding up his arms to show how they were basically skin and bone. He couldn’t see his face, but he knew that he was closer to a ghoul than a vampire. “How many is that? I don’t want to kill dozens just to—”

“My impression of you, brief though it was, is that you are resourceful and are at your best under pressure,” Ara interrupted, her voice going from cool to cold in that moment as she made some decision about whatever it was that had been on her mind this whole time. “The guards are under orders to bring you fresh prisoners each time yours expire. If you are not strong enough to fight tomorrow night, then they will start bringing you children to devour instead.”

Simon couldn’t answer for a long moment. Then he finally stammered, “B-but your sister’s grandchildren…”

“None of them will be related to me, Simon,” she explained. “Why should I care if they live or die? Feast now or feast later. The choice is yours.”

She left after that, and even when he called out to her, she didn’t return. Instead, she left him in the near dark, with only a single lantern between him and the prisoners. He looked at them, then, and though he wasn’t sure they understood what he and Ara had been talking about, he didn’t need to exchange a single word with them to be certain that they knew they were about to die. 

Ch. 227 - A Murder

Despite his protestations, his willpower was not as strong as he wanted to believe that night. The two prisoners she left behind didn’t last half an hour and the two that were brought after that were devoured even more quickly. 

Simon might not have cared for it, but he had little choice in the matter. There was a starving animal inside of him, and though he could chain it down and away from the light when he was alone, as soon as something with a pulse was led into his cage, it broke its chains and ripped them to pieces. 

The first two were the messiest, mostly because he had to fling himself from his coffin and crawl after them like some kind of zombie, with his legs flopping uselessly behind him. While he devoured the first, the second managed to wrestle one of the swords embedded in his coffin free and stab Simon, but he barely noticed as blood filled his mouth, and he felt another’s life flow through him. 

He ripped the man with the weapon apart when he finally got past his guard, and when he was dead, too, Simon was covered in blood. That bothered him less than he thought it would, and when he stood once more, he had only a little regret about what he had done. 

Executing prisoners was something he was normally comfortable with. He’d done it before. Draining his enemies with an empowered weapon to fuel his magic was something he’d made peace with, too. This was only a little worse than both of those things combined if he set aside the gore, yet to him, it felt a boundary he probably should never have crossed. 

There’s nothing I can do about it now, though, he decided, even as he tried to figure out what damage all of this was doing to his freshly positive karma score as he waited impatiently for the guards to bring him fresh victims. He could walk a little now, so Ara’s plan was working. When I’ve saved this valley, I can die. Then, I can repent for a life or two. Maybe I can become a monk or a vegetarian or something.

Simon wasn’t sure what he would do later. For now, he would feast, and then he would fight, and hopefully, somewhere in there, he would die. Then, he would go back to the early levels and make sure Freya never became this creature, even if that cost him the chance to visit his son again. 

His time with the dragon taught him one thing, Simon wouldn’t erase the boy as he thought he would have previously. He would just move to a different timeline where he’d never see the boy again. That was sad, but he could live with that separation a lot more than the idea that Freya would keep slaughtering innocents and causing depravities over and over again.

By the time the sun rose, Simon was curled up in his battered coffin and crusted in blood. He wasn’t in much worse shape than he’d been as an old man toward the end of his last life in Ionar, and he knew that with more death, he would only strengthen further. What he didn’t know was what other powers he might have at his disposal.

Vampires have weird magics all their own, he reminded himself just before his consciousness was extinguished by the weight of the sun rising slowly above him. It was something he would need to ask Ara about tomorrow. 

At sunset, he arose, and then, when his door was unlocked, he staggered through the dungeon toward the keep where he found the vampiress. “See, I told you that you could walk with proper motivation,” she said with a cold smile. “Now let’s get you armed and—”

“Wait,” Simon interrupted, “Before I get a sword and whatever else, I want to know, how do you use the rest of your powers?”

“Rest of my powers?” she asked. “Like the mist and the gaze? You just sort of will it, and it happens. Those powers sort of… build over time. I didn’t have them at all for the first decade of being like this. I’m not sure how being in torpor so long will affect their development, either.”   

That seemed a little oversimplified, but rather than tell her that, Simon tried to reach within himself while she continued to speak, and he found that there was definitely something there. With a little effort, he could even feel himself begin to dissipate, but he stopped almost immediately because it was unnerving. It reminded him of the feeling of slipping away to nothing when he’d been buried for so long. 

“See, you’re getting it,” she nodded. “My men saw a few scouts on horseback come down from the pass earlier, but beyond that, nothing. They’re no doubt gauging the threat level. If they return to the rest of their army with good news, then that will be the beginning of the end.” 

Simon nodded. More than anything, he wanted a shower. He had no reflection to study, but from the way the few mortal men around him reacted, he looked every bit as hideous as he thought he might.

Normally, that would have bothered him, but right now, it was probably an advantage. Not only would it be easy enough to terrify his enemies. It made it easier to pretend that he was someone else. When he put on his proper, flabby flesh again, he’d be Simon, and he’d do the right things that Simon would do. For now, he could do whatever he wanted, and those deeds would belong to the monster that he was grateful he couldn’t see in the mirror.

Simon picked out a sword that would do, along with a buckler. In both choices, he favored weapons that were smaller than usual because he wanted to get within arm's reach rather quickly so he could use his fangs, and there was no point in denying it. In terms of armor, they had only poor choices. Nothing available was built for anyone as tall or slender as he currently was. He was still skin and bones, with only a few strands of lean muscle, so tonight, he would have to go without. Given how quickly he healed, he didn’t think that would be a problem. 

When he left the castle walls, he felt like a beast as much as a man. He was far enough away from anywhere that he probably should have borrowed a horse, but he didn’t expect he’d need it for long. 

He carried no pack or torch. He didn’t even have a bow because he didn’t trust his clawed fingers and shaky hands to use one correctly. He was just a scarred and withered abomination that refused to die, and as he strolled down into the valley, he took a long look around, then he sniffed at the wind, looking for anything that didn’t belong. 

He’d been locked away from the world for decades, and inhaling now was almost too much, but he’d take that compared to the isolated hell he’d endured for so long. He smelled dozens of meals being cooked, along with hundreds of hearth fires. He smelled the scents of man and beast and, most of all, the damp smells of nature. He wasn’t interested in any of those, though, and sifted through them quickly, looking for something altogether more appetizing. He was looking for the scent of blood.

He found it in several places in the wide valley, which wasn’t surprising given how many animals would be slaughtered by these farmers every day. Every barnyard chopping block and village butcher was a distraction. 

Each time he smelled manure or clean fresh meat hanging somewhere, he ignored it. Instead, he sought out the tang of oiled weapons and the smokey blaze of a campfire. After ten minutes of searching, he finally found a likely target at the far end of the valley, in the woods there, at the base of the mountain. 

That was about the place he would have guessed that scouts would hide based on tactics alone. Still, he tried not to let those thoughts prejudice his decision. Not when he could let hunger guide him instead. 

“You know, if you run, you might just make it before sunrise,” he said to himself in a growl that sounded almost human. Simon laughed at his own joke, at least until he settled into a coughing fit. 

Once that was done, though, he focused. Simon had used many kinds of magic and gotten very good at impossible things. The idea of being a mist seemed a bit too disperse for him just now, but Vampires could turn into other things too, at least according to the dimly remembered movies. He didn’t like bats too much, though, so he decided to try ravens first. 

It’s just like the saying, as the crow flies, he thought to himself wryly as he imagined himself as a murder of crows. That wasn’t so hard. He wasn’t really a person anymore. He was murder. Who was to say what shape that murder would take. 

For a moment, he felt himself starting to burst apart at some unseen seams, and then, after only a little hesitation, he flew apart into pieces of darkness. One second, he had two eyes, four limbs, and, thanks to his mangled hands, seventeen digits. The next, he had eighteen eyes, just as many wings, and he was soaring in all different directions in a way that he found to be dizzying until the nine crows that made up who he was slowly reformed into a flock and began to soar over the valley. 

He panicked in those first seconds and very nearly tried to pull himself back together into a man, but he resisted the urge. This is fine, he told himself. I can do this. 

It was chaotic and frightening, but as they spread out throughout the sky and adopted some sort of pattern to their behavior, he found that seeing through more than a dozen pairs of eyes wasn’t nearly as insane as he would have thought it would be. His sense of smell had completely vanished in this form, but his compound vision was sharper than it had any right to be. 

He could pick out dozens of tiny details from each farmstead and hamlet he passed over. How are vampires able to do this? He asked himself. Draining energy to fuel their hideous unlife curse, he got, at least, based on his current understanding of magic. Healing themselves quickly and preternatural strength even made sense, but the rest of it? He had no idea. He added it as one more question that he hoped to understand one day. 

Tonight wasn’t about understanding, though. It was about sending a message, and after half an hour of flying across the valley, he sighted a small triangle of campfires in the woods, well off of the main road. While there were a few houses in the woods, too, the only tents he saw belonged to the men around those fires, and the bronze scale mail that they wore told him that they were here for a fight. 

Simon landed in the trees around the camp, well out of the firelight, so as not to draw attention to himself. Then, instead of attacking immediately, he merely observed and listened. 

Their armor and accents might be foreign, but other than that, the scene reminded him of any one of the bands of armed men he’d led in various wars and skirmishes over his many lives. These weren’t evil people. They were just people fighting for their cause. In their minds, they almost certainly saw themselves as liberators as much as conquerors. They would take this land, but they would do so for the good of the people who lived here already. 

Simon heard strains of that in what the men said, between raunchy jokes and reminiscing about previous battles. It was clear that they’d decided that the dread vampiress, whom they referred to simply as the Widow, or alternately the Widowmaker, was no longer here and that their army could march on the valley with impunity. 

Only their captain seemed unconvinced, and he rebuffed the words of the rest of his men with statements like, “We’ll give the place one more sweep tomorrow. Then, If there’s nothing to find, we’ll be back with the main body of the army before nightfall.”

“What’s the rush?” someone quipped. “This is the easiest duty I’ve had in weeks. I say we be extra thorough, just to make sure.”

Everyone laughed at that except for Simon. The captain’s caution was admirable, he decided, however, in this case, it was going to get everyone in his group killed.