B3Ch53-The Bloodless Nail (Patreon)

Ok this chapter was rough to work on. You'll have to tell me how if it worked or not. Harold eventually needs to overcome his trauma or succumb to it in some way, and this was the best way I could think of to do it. Time skip after this, and the campaign will start to the north.

The roof was the one place in the Landing no one would climb after him.

The first month back from the trial, people had followed him everywhere, up stairs and down corridors, slates in hand, questions stacked three deep behind their teeth. So he'd started coming up here. It was a few moments of peace before he went back down into the chaos below. Eventually, they had learned the Lord goes to the roof to be alone. Leave him to it.

He sat with his back against the base of the tower, let the cold work into him, and opened the book in his head.

He didn't need the physical copy anymore. He'd read it enough times that the exercises lived behind his eyes. The mana-control guide had cost him a fortune in Merits at the System Store, and for the first couple of days he'd been quietly furious about it, because it opened with a hundred pages telling him things he already knew. Or thought he knew until he started trying to learn them in earnest.

He drew a thread of mana up out of his core and split it.

Not the way he used to split it either. The book taught a different method. He drew the thread fine as a hair and then finer, until it was less a line than an intention, and he wove it together with the other threads he'd built, like braiding a rope. The result wasn't pretty, but it carried more mana while keeping the thread far stronger. He hadn't tried it with his alchemy yet, though he suspected it would give him more control at the brewing bench. The rope bent and wove easier, and answered his intentions better. It was nowhere near his old level of control, but that had come from perks, and this he'd earned himself. More satisfying that way.

He worked for a long while. Long enough that the sky over the eastern edge went from black to the deep bruised blue that came before any real light. This had become the best part of his morning, up here practicing before he went down to do PT. But he was delaying what he came up here to do, and he knew it.

The nail was in his coat pocket, wrapped in the same square of oiled cloth the four-armed clerk had folded it into. He had come up here to bond with it, and he was dreading it. He knew the nail's past.

It had driven its prior owner mad. He had indiscriminately slaughtered in his madness and the nail had made him powerful enough that killing him had been treated like fighting a raid boss.

He wanted. No, he needed that power for himself. But how could he prevent the same thing from happening to him? He had no desire to add more bad memories to his already unbalanced mind.

He took it out, unwrapped it, and set it on his palm.

Nine inches of black iron, square-shanked, the head flared and pitted, the point worn to something between a needle and a tooth. It looked like nothing. It looked like a thing you'd pull out of a fence post and not think about again.

He turned the nail over with one finger. The bonding itself would be easy. That was the trap of it. Cursed relics didn't fight you; they wanted to bond. To corrupt. He could reach out and take it right now, and it would take him gladly. Already he could feel the nail pulling towards him. The past few days he had felt it quiver inside his breast pocket as it tried to turn into him and draw blood.

And if he was honest with himself, the relic terrified him. He wouldn't consider it at all if he didn't know the previous owner.

He beat his head onto the stone as memories came back to him. Hushed conversations in his rare moments of lucidness. Whispered words traded between cells. No…he knew the story of this relic very well.

The previous owner had been captured and brought back to the facility where he was held. He had been allowed to experiment on the man in his attempts to figure out a method to replicate the nail's ability to heal its owner.

He remembered trying to extract the nail from him, slicing him to observe how the nail functioned. Feeding the man's own madness with additional victims, and in turn driving his own madness deeper.

He remembered it all. Every bloody memory, and he remembered it all in almost perfect quality because of his latest mental perk. The one he had bought within the system store.

"Uggghhh," he moaned in frustration, and he could feel the tears begin to leak from his eyes.

"I never wanted this." He murmured to himself. "I never wanted to do those things. I never wanted to become that person. That hollow, broken fucking thing."

He squeezed his fist, trying to banish the crystal clear memories. "Perhaps I can work on redeeming us both by taking this burden from you, my friend."

He turned his attention inward to the perk the System had allowed him to buy at the auction.

Mens Perfecta (Epic)

He didn't fully understand it yet. He'd had it for a couple of days since the auction, and the only thing he had noticed so far was that his memories had become far sharper. He could recall everything in perfect detail, but what he thought the perk was doing was using the trauma he'd gone through to refine his mind and mental state. The perk pulled mana from his core without stop, and he didn't know yet what all it was doing with it. His emotional state ran closer to the surface, and he'd caught himself snapping at people when he wouldn't have otherwise. He desperately needed the perk to function. He wouldn't attempt bonding the nail at all if not for the hurried words exchanged between him and the original owner in the weeks before his eventual death. He had figured out how to beat it. That was how he intended to beat this cursed relic. He needed the power. It had to work.

The tears continued to fall from his eyes, and he squeezed the nail. He could feel it quiver in anticipation, and it was terrifying.

In the stillness at the bottom of his breath, he bit the side of his thumb until it bled and pressed the drop against the flat of the nail.

Light flared, and mana exploded around him and blasted out over the top of the keep. The nail drank the drop of blood.

It came off his palm faster than he could flinch. He felt it strike his chest over the heart, felt the point find the gap between two ribs. Then it was going in, sinking through muscle and into the wall of his heart. He moaned in pain, and it did not stop until the flared head of it lay flush against his sternum and the whole nine inches of it was buried in him to the tip.

Harold's back arched off the stone. His mouth opened, and a soundless scream escaped him.

The thing behind his breastbone woke up and was so so happy.

He'd half expected words from it, some silk voice in the dark speaking to him. Instead it was a feeling, a cold, endless hunger that fit itself against the inside of his chest. He felt it begin to drink, to sort and examine his memories, and it exalted inside of him.

It reached into the sickness inside him, and it found everything there exactly as bad as he'd always known it was, and it agreed with him. The way the worst voice in your own head agrees with you.

Yes, the feeling said, without saying. There you are. I knew you'd be worth the wait.

And then it opened the door, and the memories exploded out of him, and he screamed.

It came all at once, and in perfect order, and that was the cruelty of the thing he'd bought to save himself. There was no blur left to hide in. No merciful gray, no soft edges where he used to be able to hide from his memories. The walls he had built and drawers he had nailed shut stood open and lit, and the endless hunger in his chest went through them one after another, unhurried, delighted, and made him live in each one.

He thanked a man happily for the letter and went to open it. His wife was calling him from the kitchen, asking who was at the door. The horror rose within him as he realized what memory this was. But he continued to look through his own eyes and opened the letter. Then he read it again as his heart pounded in his chest and the tears began to fall from his eyes. He felt his own anguished sob escape him, and then the scene shifted.

He is on the bench.

The straps are tight, and the room smells. The man's bloody apron is pressed against him, and he hums as he works. Harold hears the small, pleased sound catch in the man's throat when one of his rib bones comes free, and the man lifts it up where Harold can see it, delighted.

His voice had long since gone hoarse with his screaming, and both the memory of him and the part of him watching all of this begged. And begged and begged for it to end.

The hunger only settles deeper, pleased, and turns the page.

He is in a cell in the dark, and a voice through the wall is telling him a story to keep them both human. It's such a simple story, but in those days a reminder like that means everything. Then one day the voice isn't there anymore, and he knows what the silence means. He tries not to cry that night, but it's impossible.

Please, he says, smaller. Please stop.

He is holding the knife.

That one he tries to fight. He throws himself against it the way you throw a shoulder at a door, and for a heartbeat it holds, and then it gives, because the nail won't let him look away. He is holding the knife, and the man on the table in front of him is the one who owned the nail before. He feels the nail within him get curious for a moment before it continues.

The one they hauled in half-mad and thrashing against his bindings, and Harold is not afraid; Harold is curious, and he makes the cut and watches how the wound closes and makes a note in his blood-strewn notebook next to him. He feeds the man another victim he's taken from the larder in the other room. He has to keep the madness sharp so the healing can continue. It's necessary, it's needed. Humanity needs it to survive. And the terrible thing, the thing the hunger in his chest laps up like cream, is that when he told himself that, he had not been wrong.

I never wanted this, Harold says, and it is a child's sentence. It's even true, and it doesn't matter and doesn't change what he did.

He is looking at the woman he took, hoping she'll last long enough to show him what he wants to see.

The memory changes again. Each one takes a little more of the walls he had built within his mind to maintain his sanity. He can feel it going. Fine as a hair, then finer, then fraying, the exercises unraveling one strand at a time. Somewhere outside of these memories he can feel himself screaming and sobbing until the nail forces him to pay attention to the memory in front of him.

Stooooppppp, he moans, and he thrashes against the memories. He tries to enforce his considerable will, but it's like throwing dust into a storm.

And through all of it — every scream, his and theirs, every cut and every silence and every yield — the thing behind his breastbone is happy. The relic is simple in its own way. It has its wants and doesn't concern itself with anything else. It has waited a very long time for a host with a cellar this full, and it can drink here for a long, long time.

You were always the man humming, it tells him without telling him. Stop fighting. You're home.

His resistance is a candle in a wind now. Another memory. Less fight. Another. Less fight still. He can't even say stop anymore, until one memory after another passes by him and he begins to look forward to the next one.

There was a knock at the door.

He was standing at the door of the chamber. And the nail tried to change the memory. Why this memory? There was nothing happening here. He had to continue his work. He had made so much progress in this place. He needed to continue his work. It was important. He was saving humanity.

But…nobody knocked? In this place, nobody had ever knocked. This was where he worked, and when someone needed him, they would just enter and tell him. Why knock? It was so polite? So formal?

He felt himself tremble. Somewhere far down, a soundless scream tore loose and forced him toward the door.

With another effort of extreme will, he opened the door.

A man walked through it.

Harold didn't know him and knew him at once. A nobody — that was the first impression, an ordinary man in an ordinary coat, the kind of face you'd forget before you finished shaking his hand. And under that, somehow, something else. Looking at him, Harold recoiled. He knew he was in the presence of immense power, and even the nail shrank back from it.

Harold knew he wasn't supposed to be here at all. This could only be happening inside his soul, his own inviolable fortress. So how could the man be here? Then he understood: he had invited him in. The knock. He'd even opened the door himself.

Then he knew that the man, in some sense Harold couldn't see, was running out of time.

"Well," the man said, and looked around the chamber with an expression Harold recognized: exhaustion. Older than any face had a right to be. "This is a hell of a place to keep in your mind."

"Who—" Harold started.

"No time for that one. I mean that literally, not as a figure of speech." The man's eyes came back to him, and they were kind. "So listen, because I can't do this twice and I can't do it long. You've done something clever and so monumentally stupid. A combination I've come to associate with you; I thought you were smarter than this."

The cold weight in Harold's chest pulsed once. It was angry, and the room dimmed at the edges. He felt himself return and he sucked in air. He hated that part of himself.

"It's feeding," Harold said. His voice came out steadier than he felt. "I planned for that. But I think I failed almost immediately."

"You planned to beat it." The man said it gently, but it landed like a hand flat on the sternum. "That was so stupid. You can't beat it. The relic feeds on trauma; that's why it drove its owners to cause it. Unfortunately for you. You have enough trauma to sustain it for decades." He shook his head.

"Then what?" Harold asked helplessly. He could already feel his sanity retreating as the nail tried to reassert its control.

The man looked at him for a moment, and his face softened, and Harold knew they carried the same kind of pain.

"You have to relate to it," he said. "You let it be what it is and stop holding it back like that. You have to let it be what it is. You turn around, look at it, and say, all right. You're mine, and I'm yours, and neither of us is leaving. And then you allow all of each other into each other. It is part of you now. You can't conquer a part of you after all. Trust me, I've tried." His mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "You once said you would become the monster humanity needed to survive. No more hiding from it, I'm afraid. You'll have to find a way to coexist with the Bloodless Nail, or it will consume you. Do what no one else has ever managed, and you'll become a very, very formidable opponent to our enemies."

And Harold, standing in the worst room he had, felt three things come together that had been apart for months. Churchill on the training yard, snarling at him to control his aura while it raged, that he needed to find a way to allow the aura to become a part of him; Bethel's dry palm on his cheek, her power flooding him and driving the darkness from his mind, the meditation is helping you process your memories, keep doing them; and now this. Coexist. The same lesson three times from three mouths, and only now, with a relic buried in his heart, did he understand it was one lesson.

The man leaned against a blood-dark rack and looked at Harold. Somewhere far off, the clang of fighting drew his attention. That didn't belong in this memory.

"I see everything," the man said, and the pain in his voice was plain. Harold felt it resonate through him, the same way he used his own aura to make his voice land inside others. "Every stele burning and every human death, and I can't — I've spent nearly all of what I had to even do this. I don't get to stop looking. You're my— our— last hope. We gave up everything to bring you back." He exhaled. "You and I are more alike than either of us would like, and I need you to succeed."

The pressure was rising. The edges of the ordinary man were starting to blur, to thin, like breath on cold glass.

"Be strong," he said, fast now, urgent, the words crowding each other. "I know you're tired. I know what it costs you to keep getting up every day and not slip." The man's voice caught. "I see how you fight yourself. You're doing the right thing. Humanity does not deserve you, but it also needs you. Do you understand me?"

"Wait—" Harold reached for him. "Who—"

"Later." The man was already going, already half light. "We'll talk when we can. It won't be soon, and it won't be safe. I'm sorry for the pain in your life, Harold. I'm sorry for all of this. It's my fault you are here, and we are both damned for what we have done." The grief was naked on him now, and something under it that could only be love. "Never doubt that you are worth the effort, Harold, my lad. I know you can find a way to beat this trial. You are the best of us."

And he was gone, and the door was gone, and the chamber folded up like a hand closing.

The chamber did not stay folded.

The instant the man was gone the hunger rushed back into the space he'd left, and it came back furious, done with curiosity, done with patience. It threw the drawers open all at once and dragged him down without order or mercy.

He is nine years old and something is wrong with his mother and no one will tell him what. He is on the bench and the man is asking if he will give up his formula. He is in the larder choosing. He is holding a screaming stranger's jaw still with one hand. He is watching light leave a man's face as he slides a knife into him.

Far off — past the bench, past the larder, past the whole rotten cellar of him — there was a sound that did not belong.

Steel on steel. Men shouting in a cadence drilled into them. And under it, over it, tearing itself raw: a woman's voice screaming his name. Screaming at him to wake up. HAROLD. Wake up. Wake UP, you stupid, you don't get to — WAKE UP —

He tried to turn toward it and the hunger hauled him back into the next memory, and the next, faster now, and he understood he was not going to claw his way to that voice. Not this way. Not by fighting.

You can't beat it, the man had said. It's part of you now. You can't conquer a part of yourself. Trust me. I've tried.

And Harold, drowning, finally understood him.

You couldn't cut it out. It had his blood and his heart and the worst of his life for a foundation, and every wall he threw up was just one more room for it to fill. He had spent his whole return trying to strangle this thing in himself — the door, the hunger, the cellar full of it — and be someone who didn't have it. To be normal.

So he stopped running.

In the middle of the worst room he had, with a memory of his own knife in his hand as he tried to use it on himself, Harold turned around and faced the thing that was eating him. He addressed it.

All right, he told it. His will rose to reinforce his voice, the dispassionate part of him folding together with the part he'd played for everyone since his return. You want it. Fine. You can have it. All of it. Every memory, every scream, the whole cellar — it's yours. I'm not going to hide it from you and I'm not going to hide it from me. Not anymore.

The hunger paused, uncertain.

But you don't get to just feed, Harold went on, and something in the dark chamber began, very slowly, to turn toward him. If it's trauma you want, then understand me — I am going to make an ocean of it. There is a whole world out there that wants us dead. I am going to take them apart, and you are going to help me do it, and I will feed you every horror we make together until you are so full you could sleep for a thousand years. He felt the black iron blaze up in answer, greedy, delighted, and he did not flinch from it. He leaned into it. You and me. You're mine, and I'm yours, and neither of us is leaving. So let's stop wasting it on the dead, my friend, and go make some for the living.

For one long moment the thing behind his breastbone simply considered him — the way a starving animal considers a hand that's offered food instead of a blow.

Then it settled down and retreated.

It didn't stop wanting. It would never stop wanting; he knew that now the way he knew his own pulse. But the hunger curled itself around his heart, no longer trying to burrow through, and it fit there, and it was — content wasn't the word; there was no contentment in a thing like this — it was aimed. For the first time since it had drunk his blood, the nail and the man it lived in wanted the same thing.

Under his sternum the black iron settled and began, quietly, to burn — with him now, not against him, folded into the beat of his own heart. He could feel the power of it the way you feel a loaded weapon in your hand: patient, terrible, and his. He had taken the thing that broke every man who came before him and made it his own. Something cold and satisfied moved through him. He'd done it.

The cellar went dark and quiet around him.

And the other sound — the steel, the screaming — came rushing in to fill it.

The world came back in pieces, and none of them were gentle.

Cold first. Then stone under his knees, and the copper reek of blood. His ears were ringing. His aura was still bleeding off him in waves, and he could hear the screams around him. He reeled it in, hand over hand, until the pressure eased off.

His guard stood arrayed across the width of the roof facing him.

Every one of them was wrecked. Corwin was down on one knee with his shield arm ending at a stump wrapped in a tourniquet, a spent healing vial still in his fist, his face gray. One of the Guardians — Dorgan — had a rent in his breastplate a hand could fit through, the edges of the steel peeled back like paper, the wound under it already an ugly closed scar where a potion had caught it just in time. Two more knights lay flat and breathing behind the line where someone had dragged them clear. There were scorch marks on the stone. There were gouges in it, deep and clawed, the width of his own aura. Ren had blood sheeting down one side of his face and hadn't wiped it.

His eyes went back to Corwin's arm — the stump, the tourniquet, the gray face — and he knew whose hand had taken it. The satisfaction went out of him cold. He had done that. To Corwin, and to every one of them standing wrecked on his roof because they loved him too much to run.

They had been trying to stop him. They had fought him and lost ground doing it, and they had held anyway. And now they watched him fearfully — Corwin's jaw shook as he watched him, Ren's hand gripped his sword hilt and stopped there, unwilling.

Beth stood in the middle of them with her hands still out in front of her like she'd been holding people back, chest heaving, tear tracks cut clean through the grime on her face, one arm curled hard across her belly. Josh leaned against the wall with a split brow and a dented pauldron, breathing hard.

And Jack stood a single pace in front of all of them, between Harold and everyone Harold loved.

His plate was torn to hell. Great furrows raked across the breast and the left shoulder hanging by a strap, and he was bleeding from a dozen places he hadn't bothered to close. He was breathing in the deep ragged pulls of a man who had spent everything he had and then spent some more. His axe hung from a hand that didn't look like it could lift it again. His sword was shattered on the ground beside him. His eyes were fixed on Harold's face, reading it, searching it.

Harold looked back at him and let him see it — let him see that whoever was behind the eyes now was Harold, all the way down.

For a heartbeat nobody moved.

Then Josh made a sound that started as a laugh and broke in the middle. "Oh thank fuck. Thank fucking god." And his eyes rolled up, and his knees collapsed as Beth caught him on the way down more from instinct than strength, both of them folding to the stone.

And Jack — Jack held Harold's gaze one second longer, long enough to be sure — and then the fight went out of the old soldier all at once. He took a knee, planted the head of his axe on the stone and both hands on the haft, bowed his head against them, and passed out exactly like that as he fell to the ground.

Harold knelt alone in the wreck of his own roof, in the blood of the people who had refused to let him become the thing inside him. They were alive. And he was thankful.