An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 51 (Patreon)

Upiórs have become rather misunderstood, in recent generations. Namely in that people now often make the fatal mistake of assuming they were misunderstood in previous ones. They’re blood-drinking, cannibalistic, magically powerful reanimated corpses naturally inclined to prey upon humanity and overwhelmingly equipped with the means to do so. Those of them that do not look monstrous are the worst of all, using their pretty visages to manipulate the foolhardy into lowering their guard.

Naturally, my guard was somewhere beneath sea level when I first saw  this one. Fortunately Morlo was the one talking instead.

“We can waste more time waving our dicks around,” he grunted. “But I’d rather we actually get things done. What do you know of the strange activity with the blackmists?”

The Upiór was as unflapped by this as she’d been by Morlo’s introduction, and only then did it occur to me that I ought to be asking a rather important question. 

Did she know who Morlo really was? Did she know that she was actually talking to Glyca, that this grumpy human was actually a creature of legend, that everything she’d learned to expect from a common man’s Thaumaturgy went out the window when accounting for the powers he might bring to bear? 

I could only hope she didn’t. If this creature was so unfazed, and knew all that, then I was staring down a dangerous being indeed.

Then she turned her gaze on me, and I forgot about all that. Felt a strange tugging at my wits, overcome by a certainty that everything would be…just as fine as ever. What was that? 

“Did you just use magic on me?” I growled at the Upiór, taking an unplanned step forwards and feeling my hands curl themselves into fists. My anger was only somewhat smoothed over by the look of absolute bafflement on her face.

Morlo couldn’t have looked more different, cackling like this was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. 

“You’ll want to be cautious around my companions, they have all sorts of tricks.” In retrospect I realise this was him just bluffing, my Heroic blood offers some natural resistance to directly magical effects and this was why her attempt to move me found itself stifled. 

But she didn’t need to know that. 

I saw nothing of the Upiór’s face that might have given away what she was thinking, a feature of her being a dead thing I suppose, but before long the conversation progressed. She and Morlo quickly came to an agreement wherein we were to be staying in the castle while they negotiated one way or another.

In the meantime…we would be staying in the castle. As you might imagine, none of us was exactly pleased about this. 

We were placed in rooms on the same floor, and that was about the end of our nods to security. That the place was clearly well-maintained and about as luxurious as any building I’d ever stayed in did little to appease me, because there was an endless danger in the air that could only leave me certain Morlo was getting a lot out of this talk.

He’d fucking better be. 

Though we’d all been given our own rooms, each of us almost silently agreed to share a single bed chamber, hastily moving our covers and pillows through to pile on the floor, then spending much of the evening turning it into as close a facsimile of a fortress as we had the time and space to manage. The sole exception to this was Il’vanja, of course. 

“We would not be given quarters that could mount any sort of resistance against our host’s forces, if she wished us dead,” she pointed out.

“Shut up,” I replied, rather diplomatically. As reassuring as it was to have the most fearless creature I’d ever known on my side, it was also rather awful for upholding an irrational coping mechanism.

The rest of the humans were coping about as well as I was, while Gruin, somehow, was managing to be even worse. While most of us were racked with fear, jumping at shadows and slowly advancing from one tenth to one quarter of our body weight sweated out, Gruin seemed to be growing more violent by the moment.

He didn’t even really talk to any of us, either. Didn’t seek a distraction or a reprieve, simply sat in one corner holding his hammer and muttering to himself. 

I got the distinct impression that negotiations between Morlo and the Upiór falling through were only the second most likely reason for our stay here to get violent. The first, increasingly by the moment, was looking to be Gruin. 

So I kept an eye on him, which, if nothing else, was another thing to focus on that wasn’t my own sense of impending doom. 

“We could run, you know,” Vara told me abruptly. 

I took a second to register her words, and then a few seconds more to formulate a response. Looking around us, I saw that nobody else had overheard. Of course they hadn’t, she wasn’t that sloppy. 

“Why now?” I asked her, finding curiosity stronger than my cowardice. Don’t get used to reading that, the yellow-streak remains supreme even to this day. 

“Morlo’s distracted with this weird creature, right?”

“...Because we’re in the middle of her domain and surrounded by her subordinates, which are apparently good enough at hiding that we’ve not seen a single one yet.”

I couldn’t help a look over my shoulder as I said that, as if some demonic beast might be lurking behind me. Vara even mirrored it, which told me all I needed to know about her nerves.

“What has you so frightened?” I asked after a moment. “You seemed happy enough when we were in the room with that woman.”

“That’s the problem,” she snapped. “I don’t know what came over me, she had my tongue lolling out with a look.” 

Hearing it spelled out, and the fear with which Vara described it, I felt a chill run down my spine as I thought back to the display.

Were Dubin and Vonti as affected as Vara? I didn’t think so, and I was confused as to why. Had the Upiór just not focused her power on them, for whatever reason? Maybe she sensed Vara and my resistance and wanted to test that specifically, already knowing she could overwhelm the minds of common men. 

Maybe she wanted us to think she couldn’t affect them as a trump card.

As unpleasant as it was to find myself spiraling as I tried to out-think one of the deadliest creatures in the history of the world, it was, at least, another distraction from my general anxiety. This didn’t do much to stave off the wave of fear I felt as night closed, however. 

I almost jumped out of my skin when the knock came at our door, and I wasn’t the only one. The sound of drawn steel was all that could be heard for a few moments while most of the room turned in horror to the door.

But there was no great, monstrous creature waiting for us behind it. Just a small man who looked more irritated than threatening.

“The Lady has requested you all accompany her for dinner,” he said mildly. 

Gruin, who had previously been halfway through the wind-up motion for a hammer blow, was the first to speak.

“So she can poison us!” he spat. 

“No,” the man, apparently a servant, replied. We all stood there and waited for something more, perhaps some elaboration on his part. There was none.

After the servant was gone, a discussion broke out that lasted about as long as it took everyone to realise our choices were fundamentally boiling down to risking the ire of an Upiór or not. Not that most of us actually knew what one was, of course. 

Il’vanja was helpful for that, and after she illuminated us all the decision to not piss it off became more or less unanimous. 

So we all headed out into the hallway and scurried down through the castle, weapons still ready, but with a few nods to etiquette all the same. Granted, these nods mostly consisted of trying, and largely failing, to obfuscate our weaponry within flaps of clothing that was certainly not made with concealment in mind. It was less of a nod and more of a wink, or perhaps a momentary glance. Better than nothing, either way.

Probably.

It took a good few minutes to find our way to the dining hall, with all of us being inexorably guided towards it by instincts that we had no clue as to the source of. Looking back, I can make a few guesses. I seemed to have the weakest instinct for where we were going, which tells me that it was probably a product of the same undead manipulation that our hostess had aimed at Vara before. 

++”This would line up with my experience, too. I had an easier time navigating than Kyvaine, but a harder one than the mundane humans. Heroic blood was likely resisting the effects.”++

There wouldn’t have been much need for mental manipulation to strike awe into us then, however, because the dining hall itself proved grand enough to achieve that all on its own. It seemed larger than the entire estate of most nobles that I’d seen, either from inside or at a distance, and was decorated in a way that spoke of unfathomable wealth. 

The wealth of generations? No, more like centuries. And that had me soon thinking back to the things Morlo had told me of the world’s remaining Heroes.

Of course, I was too preoccupied with the sight of our host to do very much thinking. She had changed her clothes, switching one absurdly expensive gown for another, and I got the distinct impression, looking at her, of bait in a trap. She smiled at me, and as she did I felt that tugging on my mind once more. Stronger than before.

As the last time, it crumbled against me without my even meaning it to. Let me tell you, the old Heroic blood has done a lot to save me over the years, but never more so than when I was targeted by powers like this.

“Good evening,” I said to the Upiór, flashing a grin and taking a seat without asking. I don’t know why I’d gone out of my way to annoy her, some method of taking control perhaps. The surprising thing is that it bloody worked, she seemed so stunned—probably by my stupidity more than anything—that she just stared at me in disbelief for a long second before regaining her wits. 

Once she did, there was no telling she’d ever lost them. 

“You are the second among your group, I take it?” she smiled. This was obviously an attempt to isolate me and draw me into trying to negotiate myself, suggesting influence over my group that I didn’t have in order to have me speaking as an individual rather than holding ranks with the rest. It was the sort of thing that worked very well on idiots with a great amount of ego.

“Well, I don’t know if I’d say so myself,” I replied with a moronic grin. “But you could call me that, yes.”

I can only imagine that Vara and the rest were glaring daggers my way, but I didn’t take note of that fact in the moment.

++”He’s right,  we were glaring daggers.”++

The Upiór of course was smiling at me like the sun itself, probably just because she was pleased to have stumbled onto so easy a mark.