《Avaunt》Five
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Velinaer Dax'Taxu watched the sun rise, sitting on a rock. It took him a moment to realize that he was able to stare directly at it without pain or injury, but the knowledge brought him no real solace. His zombies, swaying slightly, gave the impression of being awed by the spectacle but were in fact not remotely sentient.
To say that his current mental stability was precarious would be a vast understatement. In addition to the perfectly normal stresses of lying down for an illicit on-duty nap in the executive tomb and waking up an unknown period of time later as a living corpse in what appeared to be the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, he was currently also subject to the tribulations of having his cognition adjust to significantly stranger operating conditions than its initial design had presumed. The manufacturers of the sarcophagus had thoughtfully included a pamphlet preparing the user for such effects and suggesting an adjustment period of two to four weeks before returning to work, but unfortunately it had mouldered away to dust centuries ago. His thoughts kept getting interrupted by random disturbances from astral schemata, and he was constantly having trouble adjusting to the sensory inputs of at least three new senses and the disorienting absence of most of the others. He'd fallen over a lot before finally coming to terms with the fact that liches didn't have inner ears.
While Velinaer, or Veli to his few friends, had been a mage in his previous career, he'd have been the first to admit that he hadn't been a very good one. He'd graduated with average grades, gotten a boring job at a teledemonics firm, and had accumulated a sizable collection of disappointing performance reviews. His work ethic had been poor, his spellwork competent at best, and his customer service skills abysmal. The only area of his vocation in which he had excelled had been his design expertise -- when it came to building and maintaining networks, he'd been second-to-none. This fact had allowed his employers to overlook both his abrasive personality and his various obsessions with entertainment media, which had constituted most of his personal life. But this was not a particularly useful skillset for his current set of circumstances, and he was not dealing with it well.
Though he appeared stoic to outward observation, this was mostly an artifact of his current physiological circumstances. Lacking such things as tear ducts or an autonomic nervous system, he was not at all capable of crying, collapsing in despair, or throwing a feet-kicking tantrum. In fact, moving at all required an effort of will, and he suspected he would be spending the vast majority of his future being perfectly still. It explained a lot of stuff from shows he had watched in his childhood, at least.
After a while, he began to notice that his zombies were scooping dirt into something resembling a parody of a throne. That was a bit odd, since he hadn't commanded them to do any such thing. He seemed to recall something about some type of class-four undead being linked to their progenitor's unconscious desires, but he wasn't sure if that was supposed to be zombies or wraiths. Still, no sense guessing now.
He stood up with some difficulty, stumbled over to the dirt chair, and sat in it. Well, that seemed to help a bit. Apparently he'd had some kind of desire for a throne, for some stupid reason, which had now been satisfied. Maybe he should build some type of lair, like a dungeon or something? Liches were always building dungeons in the shows. Seemed like a big pain in the ass, though. He felt vaguely nauseous, which he attributed to his mental state since he no longer had any stomach to be upset. Moping around in a field with some zombies personifying his id was probably not a great long-term plan, and doing so in a dungeon of his own design would likely be even worse.
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With reluctance, he concluded that he probably needed to go find someone and get help. He'd definitely be in deep shit for taking a nap on the job and apparently making illicit use of a liching sarcophagus, but he probably wouldn't get fired and maybe they could reverse the process, or something. The only problem was that he had no idea what direction to start off in.
After a couple of embarrassing attempts to recreate half-forgotten wilderness survival rituals for determining magnetic pole orientation, he hit upon the revolutionary idea of checking the sun's arc for the East-West axis and determining North from there, which seemed like as good a direction as any. After all, what's the worst that could happen?
***
Tebes' grunt of annoyance, eloquent in contrast to his usual sullen silence, cut through Linduin's moping with remarkable alacrity. Looking up, he noticed that the terrain had changed considerably; the lush forest they had been hacking and shoving their way through for the last hour had given way to a less inviting area. Healthy trees had been replaced by rotting black trunks, and the ground had turned into a sort of soupy, watery gravel. As if this were not foreboding enough, a thoroughly unpleasant miasma tinged the air as well, which Linduin mentally classified as somewhere between "rotting cheese smeared on the behind of a dead goat" and "sulfurous toilet bog full of stink-fruits". "What's this? Some kind of bog?" he coughed out, mentally bracing himself for the reeve's response.
To his surprise, Tebes didn't answer immediately. After a long pause, the reeve spat and switched his walking-stick to his other hand. "Wasn't here before," Tebes grumbled. "Supposed to be coming up on another crap-heap farming village, not a damned fen." The two of them continued onwards, occasionally stepping in noxious puddles, for another half-hour before finally emerging from the trees into a field.
Or at least, something that had once been a field. Bloody-looking water, thick with spilth, filled the rows where seedlings had once been planted, and a thick, smoky pall hung in the air despite the absence of any evidence of fire. Linduin gulped, trying not to wet himself, while Tebes paused for only the briefest of moments before striding forward towards the distant clump of buildings. Even the sun seemed dimmer and redder, despite the lack of clouds; it was almost as though something vital had been burned out of the very space the village occupied.
At first, the village merely seemed deserted, but the intensifying stench as they approached the village center soon disgorged the truth. Linduin likewise soon disgorged his breakfast, while Tebes surveyed the massive knot of twisted corpses with an expression of critical appraisement, as though determining what grade he should assign. "Well," he remarked, "at least this one has a good excuse for the tax shortfall." Linduin's only response was another choking cough and spurt of vomit. Tebes, in an uncharacteristic display of compassion, waited a full twenty seconds before roughly kicking Linduin in the ass. "Well, go on. They won't be needing their coin now."
The rest of the day was spent picking through the remains of the villagers and their homes, taking anything of value they could find. At first, Linduin had to force himself to steel his nerves before touching each corpse, but after a few hours he had become numb to the horrors of mortuary salvage. Unfortunately, most of the corpses bore little, with many completely unclothed and fleshless, and as the sun began to set they had only accumulated a pittance. Tebes, clearly in a foul mood, began stalking back and forth throughout the town square as Linduin combed over the remains with increasing desperation.
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Just as he was beginning to fear that the reeve, lacking other targets, would take his frustration out upon his carcass, Linduin's eye was jabbed by a crimson flash of light -- the setting sun, hanging low in the sky, had glanced off of some shiny object in a nearby field. Signaling Tebes, he stumbled over to it, as the reeve followed ill-temperedly.
"Some kind of... metal box?" Linduin pondered. The box was half-buried in the mud, but oddly clean; it smelled faintly of heat, like a recently-used cooking stove.
"Maybe one of these dung-brained farmers hid their stash in it," Tebes sniffed. "Go on, get it open."
Initial, rather desultory attempts to find a hinge or other opening mechanism met with predictable results, and only a concentrated session of bashing with Tebes' walking stick proved sufficient to induce the box to yield its contents. Tebes, who had been expecting a handful of copper coins and perhaps some moonshine, gawked at the spidery gold thread packed within. "Well now."
Linduin, on the other hand, felt nebulously apprehensive. "I don't know, Tebes. It seems... a little strange? All these people dead, and this box..."
Tebes nodded. "Strange enough. But gold doesn't lie, whelp. Into the bag."
Linduin hesitated, earning himself another backhanded slap and a kick for his trouble. When Tebes raised his walking stick pointedly, Linduin whimpered and acquiesced, tentatively spooling the thread into his pack. The thread pricked and stabbed his fingers, but there never seemed to be any blood.
At last, when all the contents of the box had been stowed, Tebes grunted approvingly and unrolled the vellum sheet which had been serving them, rather poorly, as a map. "One more village, and then we'll head back to drop off our take." Linduin, sore and sullen, could only mumble noncommittally. As they strode away, the slithering wisp of blackness which escaped the broken husk of the box went unnoticed.
***
Velinaer paused, feeling very awkward, and pulled the arrow out of his left eye-socket. Whatever he had expected, this hadn't been it.
He wasn't sure if the sarcophagus had malfunctioned, but however it had happened, he was clearly not in his typical geography any longer. He'd been at least as astonished as the man he'd found hitting plants with a stick upon their first encounter, albeit for rather different reasons, and his initial attempts to wave and ask for directions had been met with exceedingly rude shrieking and jabbering in some chirpy, guttural dialect he wasn't familiar with. He'd held out hope for a little bit longer when the fellow seemed to be leading him somewhere, admittedly at an uncomfortably rapid pace, but he'd done his best not to presume. Arriving at some sort of collection of mud-huts had been quite a shock, however, and in comparison the motley pack of people clad in boiled cow skins who had launched a volley of pointy sticks at him was almost anticlimactic at that point. He wondered if he'd committed some sort of faux pas.
"Listen, I'm very sorry," he said, doing his best to sound contrite and not let his increasing frustration seep into his voice, "but I really do need to use your communication facilities. It's very important, and I apologize for whatever I've done to offend you, but --"
The lead militiaman, already terrified out of his wits by the unanticipated advent of a tar-covered skeleton with three zombies in tow, shrieked at the evil-sounding invocation coming out of the monster, and leapt forward axe-first towards his foe. Velinaer, quite startled, jerked back and fell over for the hundredth time.
As he hit the ground, a burst of annoyance escaped him, and his zombies surged forward, slavering and howling. Mortified, he managed to get control of them fairly quickly, but not before one of the militiamen was lying on the ground with most of his brains inside two of the zombies' mouths and another was screeching and flailing about on the ground, blood spurting from a jagged stump where his left arm had previously been in residence. The remaining militiamen broke and fled, screaming.
In a kindler, gentler universe, Velinaer might have been able to cut his losses and merely flee the village in embarrassment, but unfortunately he was only halfway to the tree line when the corpse of the dead militiaman arose and began attempting to feast on its former comrades. Guiltily, he began to run back, which the villagers naturally misinterpreted as another attack. Things went increasingly poorly from there.
Several hours later, sitting in the smoldering rubble of the village, Velinaer hung his head -- well, skull, anyway -- and sighed. It wasn't easy without lungs, but he managed it. He'd done his best to sort the problem out by himself, and look where that had gotten him; at this rate, he really was going to get fired. Resigned, he drew a few sigils in the air and booted up a standalone interface. They'd deduct it from his paycheck for sure; he could plead ignorance for the sarcophagus, but not for activating field nodes. Still, it might be worth it if he could contact his supervisor. Stringing together a symbol set for a broadcast ping, he traced the execution sigil. A very long time from now, he would come to recognize this as the moment where things had really gone downhill.
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Thaellis A Kingdom Down Under
A kingdom down under, once it had prospered, expanded, built, and conquered until all that they thought of worth was theirs. Peace ruled for a time the people absorbed in their own self-satisfaction. But eventually, old urges returned. Conquest called, though this time there was no outside outlet to turn it towards. So in ages so long and distant the memories most couldn’t recall, the kingdom turned upon itself. War raged for many years, no one coming close to being considered a victor, it appeared that this self-destruction would go on till nothing was left. Many if given the chance would have claimed that would have been a mercy for this kingdom and its people. For as they killed, and butchered each other over things they already had. Vibrations traveled through rock and stone guiding things best left alone. Creatures came things of horror armed to the teeth with claws, fangs, and armor. Cities fell and were consumed not even the bones of individuals remained, for these creatures hunger knew no limits, had no end. The kingdom rallied together once more, what was left, they fought and fought but their Nightmare had no end. Their greatest, brightest minds worked their magic, carved into stone. Wards they called them, this would keep their Nightmares away. They abandoned attempts to fight and focused on walling every surface of the kingdom with these Wards. It worked mostly, an illusion of peace returned, one that crumbled often, but it was better than before, it was a bearable hell now. So here we start our story as ages have passed for a walled-off kingdom, hunted by a never-ending Nightmare. With a poor but deserving soul born into this world.
8 168Kano's Necromantic Comedy
Humanity is extinct, leaving the world in the hands of mad biological craftsmen with miraculous technology. They were once humanity’s last hope for survival, but ultimately these necrotechs served only to speed its final destruction. Now their defective creations make up the last remnants of civilization, senselessly slaughtering each other as the necrotechs war for control of what little remains. Kano, a fractured soul born from the ashes of the old world, wallows in the lifeless wasteland. A shell of her former self, Kano now ranks amongst the worst of these new horrors. Caught up in the mad machinations of necrotechs, she stumbles upon helpless beings that force her to confront who she once was and how far she’s fallen. Cover by CristianAC.
8 205Until Forever (ROYAL RIDERS SERIES BOOK #1)
Vince Hunter. The rich, famous, and world-known hockey player and my asshole of a boss. People see his charming smiles and game moves on the ice. I see his tantrums and irresponsibility. What I never imagined happening between us was a drunken one-night stand. And even worse? Getting fired because of it. But now, six miserable months later, he's back to ruin my life and he's at it again except this time he needs me to play the picture-perfect girlfriend. As it turns out, our scandal left his reputation more damaged than mine and if he can't redeem it, he can kiss his spot on the team goodbye. The worst part of it all?I'm stuck with him, bound by contract, until... forever?...ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDTRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of parental abuse
8 199White Lich
A very unfortunate girl dies, and then gets reborn as a pale lich in a different world. Her misfortune does not end there; She gets captured, enslaved and finally sold to a hero. Or so he call himself. He prides himself on only having his party full of girls and he adores his harem he created over the years. But because she is a strong willed girl she do not easily give in to his ideas of love. She is still faithful to her boyfriend from before when she died. Whether she will be able to accept her loss and build a new relationship will be impossible to say. Her journey is filled with danger from both ancient civilizations to humankind. Will she find happiness in her new existence as a slave to the idiot hero? Or will she find never ending despair?
8 101Unknown Stars
It's 2424 A.D. and mankind is rapidly expanding throughout the stars, propelled by drives that bend the very fabric of spacetime and allow near instantaneous travel across tens of light years. It's a new golden age for humanity.But not all is right with the universe, and sometimes it's your turn to have a very, very bad day. A young boy is thrown through space to an unknown land, a land of savage warlords, tyrants, ‘gods', and marvels.Amid the chaos, blood, and filth of this new world ruled by inhuman, immortal, self-styled demigods who have long ago succumb to their own madness he'll always be close to the comfort of death.How will he come to live in this depraved land among unknown stars?Well you'll have to read it to find out. Blurbs always sound super lame anyway, don't they?
8 97Ocean of Poems (Completed)
[Completed]In this book, you will a see a lot of poems of various themes. Currently, there are only 2 poems of mine in it.Cover is made by Humna20Enjoy!"Out of the light that covers me,Black as the Pit from pole to pole,I than whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.In the fell clutch of circumstancesI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the yearsFinds, and shall find, me unafraid.It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul." ©️ All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying without prior written permission from the author. I do not own any of these poems, credit goes to respected authorsDone on 9/7/18 subject to changeRankings: #79 in relatable out of 1.6k stories #70 in literature out of 700 stories #201 in deep out of 1.9k stories #11 hardtimes out of 102 stories #28 in meaning out of 150 stories #35 in relate out of 187 stories
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