B5 Chapter 59 – Near Death Experience

Drifting in the black was something Tyron had gotten used to over the years. He preferred the darkness to the other possibility. The darkness was constant, steady, predictable and cold. While he slept, he came here sometimes, his consciousness simply existing in an endless void.

To some, it may have been a dreadful, even terrifying place. Such a blank and empty existence wasn’t something a person could conceptualise under normal circumstances. People needed things, they needed objects, conceptual concrete they could use to set their feet in place. They needed other people, to converse and exist alongside, to define themselves against and alongside.

Tyron didn’t need those things. Reality was an existence filled with memories. Memories only brought pain.

Darkness was so much more comforting than dreaming of the things he had lost.

Of course, the brief respite couldn’t last for long. His body was inhumanly durable, and even the absurd amount of punishment he had heaped upon it wasn’t enough to keep him down. Like a diver rising from the depths, he awoke.

“Hah… holy fuck,” he croaked.

His head pounded harder than a smith’s hammer. When he tried to open his eyes, the light stabbed as sharp as a knife. Squeezing them shut on reflex, he started coughing, causing his throat to spike with pain. Swallowing felt like shoving razors down the back of his mouth. Head swimming, he could barely move, a weakness gripped his limbs and his guts ached.

“Here, drink.”

He didn’t recognise the voice, nor place the hand that raised his head and placed the vessel to his lips with surprising tenderness. When the cool water touched his lips, he drank greedily, gripped by an overwhelming thirst. He’d barely had a mouthful before it was snatched away again.

“Slowly. Take too much at once and you’ll be sick as a dock dog. That’s what my brother used to say. Mutts roaming the docks were always flea-bitten, mangy things, riddled with disease. Ate too many rats, I think.”

“Water,” he managed to say, his lips feeling like they were splitting apart. They felt better than his throat.

“Just a sip.”

He managed the smallest of nods and the vessel returned. Cool and refreshing, he took a tiny sip, holding himself back. After a few moments, he was allowed another, which he accepted gratefully.

Just how weak had he become?

How long this went on, he couldn’t say. A few sips, then he fell back again, breathing, waiting for the roiling in his guts to cease. When it settled a little, he would drink a little more.

“That’s enough for now. I’ve blocked the sun, can you try opening your eyes?”

He would rather not, given how it had felt the first time. He cracked his left eye open a sliver, and once again stabbing pain burst through the gap and right into his brain.

“Blood!” he grunted through clenched teeth.

It hurt like hell, but he tried to endure it. After a few seconds, he managed to see something before he squeezed his eye shut again and let his head flop back onto the grass.

It was Filetta, standing over him, using her armoured frame to block the sun.

“How long have I been lying here like this?” He managed after a few moments to recover.

“Almost a day,” she replied. “We covered you earlier, but thought a bit of sun on your skin might do you good. You’re shockingly pale.

Hardly surprising. The Realm of the Dead was a lightless place. No doubt the reason his eyes hurt so much was because he hadn’t seen the sun in weeks.

“I’m surprised you thought of that,” he chuckled.

Filetta prodded him in the side, causing him to flinch.

“It’s not polite to point out how detached the dead are from the feeling of being alive.”

“I didn’t realise I was in polite society. Ouch!”

She prodded him again, harder his time, and he was shocked by the pain he felt. Shifting a limp hand, he felt his side to check for an open wound, but there was nothing. Why was he so weak?

“I heard some of the mages talking about it,” Filetta told him. “They think your body might have soaked in too much Death Magick.”

“Shouldn’t it make me numb?”

If anything, being drenched in that sort of energy would make him closer to an undead, not more sensitive.

“That’s what they thought at first, but they had a few theories. Your flesh has deadened but the nerves are more raw. You were too resilient and resisted the magick, so it’s eaten away at your constitution without actually deadening the flesh.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

None of those outcomes sounded good to Tyron. Hopefully after he had some water, food and rest, he would recover his strength.

Chatting with Filetta to pass the time, he continued to try and acclimate his eyesight, but it wasn’t until late afternoon and the sun had started to go down that he felt able to stand up and walk around. Someone had managed to track down some edible plants, a few wild herbs and veggies that they boiled up and fed to him in a broth.

The first thing he did was try to assess the damage to his horde. His memory of the final moments was more than a little hazy. He remembered the ghoul sweeping in, trying to seize him, and he’d called on the wyvern to save himself from capture. After that… nothing.

“It was a scramble,” Filetta told him. “Everyone tried to get through the gate while the skeletons were sacrificed. Most of the wights and demi-liches made it, but some were lost. Almost a third of the revenants died and over half of the regular undead. In particular, the frontline skeletons had suffered the most. Those who bore shields, swords and spears, forming the front ranks in the battle had naturally been the ones to suffer the most.”

A devastating blow to his horde at a time when he needed all the strength he could muster.

“Master Willhem is safe?” he asked.

“He was one of the first through the gate,” Filletta assured him. Her ghostly features twisted into a wry smile. “We didn’t need to be told he had to be kept safe.”