An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 50 (Patreon)

There were detours, wherever we were headed. Some I suspected were part of a deliberate effort to keep the rest of us ignorant as to our actual destination, on Morlo’s part. Others, though, seemed far too hasty and improvisational to have been tied to a wider deception. Born from panicked necessity. 

Whatever was making them necessary, though, Morlo was both content to keep it to himself, and rather good at it. Two thousand years of practice would do that. 

As usual, I was very much unhappy with this state of affairs, and entirely powerless to change it. The fact was that Morlo still had the same influence over me that he always had. The ability to blow me up if I pissed him off too much. In practice, of course, he clearly couldn’t do that, but I was still young and not quite enough of a master over my own emotions to call him on that particular bluff. 

Rampant cowardice might have kept me alive for all these years, but it does have its disadvantages, you know.

Another disadvantage was that I spent much of our journey trembling with fear. So much so in fact, that I was driven to seek out any sort of distraction that I could manage. My first choice was a cooperation-oriented passtime, and one I sadly found Vara unwilling to engage in. 

This meant a lot more Thaumaturgical and sparring practice for me, which was just as well. Blue balls did not, fortunately, get in the way of either activity.

++”I’d expect they helped them, personally, going by the average disposition of a Thaumaturge, and the typical behaviour of a soldier once female prisoners are taken. Did I mention how much I hate men?”++

Electricity still defied my mastery, but the delicate art of smacking people with a piece of metal did not. Gruin and Jeeves had taken to sparring with me two at a time, and that experience was welcome for the sheer difficulty of it. Even as I was now, with my apparently Heroic body growing progressively far beyond anything human as I pushed it, they were hard pressed to gain the upper hand working in unison.

And I was hard pressed to gain it too, because this was bloody Gruin and Jeeves. The latter was among the best human fighters I’d ever seen, while the former…well, you’ve read enough about his actual deeds in combat that it’s rather redundant for me to say.

It didn’t help that they worked together well, with Jeeves circling around to try and pin me down using footwork while Gruin closed on his little stubby legs and swung that damned hammer. After a session I was often bruised, and virtually always exhausted. Il’vanja fought me alone as often as they did together, proving no less tiring but rather less stressful. 

Thaumaturgy, swordsmanship, and physical exercises too. I was strong enough at this point that it was hard to train myself just with bodyweight exertions. Morlo had a solution for that, fortunately, and I was running laps and doing push-ups with great blocks of ice Thaumaturgically closed around my back. Had to be scores of pounds each, but I managed easily enough and was mainly finding endurance strained rather than raw strength.

“Do you think I could become stronger, too?” Vara asked me, one morning, as I worked at it. I said something clever and witty that was rather unfortunately smothered by the grunting sounds that come out of anyone who’s activating more than half their muscles at once. 

Luckily, Morlo overheard her.

“It depends on you, more than anything.”

“Considering I’m a Hero too?” she asked. Morlo froze, stared at her, and for that matter even I froze. Vara’s smugness might have gotten her disintegrated were it aimed at a more irritable person, but Morlo just shook his head slowly.

“Generally yes,” he said slowly. “The extent varies, though. Not all of…them are strong.”

“But all are stronger than humans?” Vara seemed to get the hint, and didn’t mention the ‘H’ word again. 

“Yes.” 

She looked pleased with that, then turned to me. “Can you show me how to do those exercises you’ve been spending so much time on?”

That made the remainder of our trip pass yet more quickly, if only for the enjoyment of seeing Vara try and do something that I was so vastly superior at. 

++”If you’re a man, reading this, you probably think most women can do a push-up without training first. Kyvaine did.”++

I should have enjoyed the boredom while it lasted, but the funny thing about horrible near-death experiences is that you just never really get to the point where they leave a lingering effect on you. Or at least I didn’t. As soon as I’ve gone a week without anybody trying to shoot or stab me, I become entirely unappreciative about how nice it is to have a sit down without any gunshot wounds. 

That appreciation came rushing back around the precise moment I laid eyes on where we were headed next. 

It was a big scary castle, of course. Not like the ones I’d been in so far, though, this looked older. Maybe somewhere between the Catanyan architecture built during their great invasion fifteen centuries back, and the early stuff King Hengrys’ father and grandfather had started planting as their lifelong wars grew more vicious. 

This one seemed more made for the sake of making it than as a defensive structure, though. Too tall, it would’ve given any cannon crew a bloody field day in pelting the structure with roundshot from miles back, and its walls didn’t look nearly so thick as the ones I’d seen hold up to true sieges. 

“Any warnings about what we might run into in here?” I asked Morlo, suddenly getting the impression that a few particulars would help. Or rather, being reminded of all the times I’d done without them. 

“You’ve encountered the undead before,” the Thaumaturge replied. “Just brace yourself for more of that.”

Of course he was still leaving things unsaid, probably because he figured that telling us all where we were actually going would raise the risk of us doing a runner. He was entirely correct, if so, on my account, as I’m quite sure you’ve read enough by now to work out for yourself. For that matter I imagined his suspicions were grounded in reality for Dubin and Bolg, too. Neither of those poor sods had signed on to fight every bloody magical being in existence, and unlike me they didn’t have the benefit of being magical beings themselves.

Gruin didn’t either, though as usual he looked downright eager. “Who cares what we’ll meet in there?” he spat. “Undead, right? You said it already. That’s all I need to know.”

Morlo shot a weary look his way, at that. “You can’t kill them,” he told the Grynkori. 

Gruin looked as though he were struggling to comprehend the sentence, like it didn’t make grammatical sense. He looked as though he’d just been told that up was down, right was wrong and wet was dry. For a moment, I wondered if he might attack Morlo out of sheer, muscular confusion. 

“Fuck you,” Gruin spat. “Lanky…fuck.” His mood didn’t simmer out into the realm of the physical, fortunately, and so that was the end of it. Our time with the castle, however, was only just beginning.

The first thing I noticed as we drew nearer was the weather, and how it seemed to darken. It’s inaccurate to say it just became a dark and stormy night, as popular as such things are in the storybooks this…wasn’t quite that. It was less darkness, and more desaturation. I could see, I found my hearing free from being drowned by a great wind, and yet everything was just…faded.

“Who the fuck lives here?” I asked Morlo, even knowing I wouldn’t get an answer. I just needed something to say. Something to do, besides look at the grey skies, the grey ground, the grey air. Besides feel how the world was worn thin and ragged as we closed on the castle, and imagine what I’d be meeting inside it that could manage such an effect. 

“It’s better that none of you know,” the Thaumaturge replied. Of course he did.

The gates loomed over us like a maw, one with a great excess of teeth and an endless eagerness to use them. I watched as they slowly opened, seemingly of their own volition, and offered us entry. Then I suppressed a shiver as we all stepped into the empty hall beyond. 

“Do not speak out of turn to our host,” Morlo advised. “Do not offer her offence, and absolutely do not swear any sort of oath to her. Understand?” He wasn’t satisfied until each of us, including Il’vanja, had verbalised our assent.

Deeper in, I found it increasingly hard to understand why the hell he thought any of us would need to. 

I for one wasn’t in a particularly trusting mood, taking one look at the eerie structure surrounding us. And a scarce glance at my travelling companions showed that the feeling was more or less universal. Vara, in particular, seemed to have gotten the creeps. 

++”And no wonder, I was probably the easiest there to kill. I didn’t even have armour.”++

We were walking for a while, which meant our tension had a while to build. From the corner of my eye I saw the Arvharest trainees testing weapons as subtly as they could manage, while Gruin forewent subterfuge and just took a few practice swings at the air as we went. Soon enough, though, Morlo gestured them all into settling down.

Another set of doors awaited us, and like the last these ones opened wide without anything seeming to drive them. This time, though, there was a person behind them. A woman who looked remarkably young, at least compared to the expectation Morlo had built up in my head. She dressed in an older style that I thought would perhaps have suited a queen from generations past.

That should’ve been clue number one.

As things were, I was a bit too busy staring and drooling for any clues at all to register. The woman seemed to be looking right at me, with eyes only for me. Now, as an older, wiser man, I am aware of this phenomenon, known colloquially as “stupid, teenaged lust”, but at the time I was sadly unequipped to resist. 

Il’vanja resisted it just fine, on account of her kind lacking virtually all emotion. Gruin resisted better still, since Grynkori tend to see women as merely faulty product that’s less useful for manual labour than their male counterparts. 

Vara, of course, was entirely infatuated. Worse than me, if anything. I found myself staring more at her than at the woman on the throne, studying how her eyes seemed to glaze over as she leered. 

++”I didn’t leer. I was just surprised.”++

Morlo wasted no time in striding forth to get the ball rolling, speaking gruff and openly as always. But I didn’t miss the note of caution in his voice, the sudden focus. 

“You know who I am, Upiór. You know what I can do.” 

Interesting way to start the conversation, I thought. This ‘Upír’ didn’t seem as impressed as I’d have expected from someone who…knew who Morlo was and what he could do. She just smiled.

I saw jagged canines as her lips pulled back, like knives of ivory.

“And you know who I am, Thaumaturge,” she purred. “And what I can do.”

I was lost, as usual, but there’s no reason for you to be. Those of you who are well-read will know that Upír isn’t a person’s name, but a species’. Those of you who are better read may well recognise that species.

But I’m betting that the majority of you will know it by the name made more popular in today’s gothic novels. Vampyr.