Death After Death

Simon’s slumber was mostly darkness and dread, as it always was, but the few dreams that flitted through it were blood-drenched nightmares. The decent parts of his soul warred with the dark, primal parts, and not even the fact that the men he’d slaughtered so violently were bad people was enough to make him feel much better when he finally awoke.

Drinking the blood of the living won’t take me any place I want to go, he told himself as he awoke.

He’d only been sitting there for a few minutes after sunset when Ara arrived, appearing almost as his opposite. She was beautiful and well put together, with fine clothes and even a touch of makeup, while he wore blood-stained rags. His body was no longer starving. No, he was merely emaciated, but his mangled hands looked like they belonged to a monster. They’d never healed right from the terrible wounds that Freya had inflicted on him, and they’d grown even worse after the change. His thick yellow nails made him look like a beast all the time even if he only felt like one whenever he scented blood.

“How did last night go?” she asked. “I worried you wouldn’t return.”

“Their scouts are slaughtered,” Simon answered with a shrug. “I left them in pieces scattered across the woods. When they send out more to find what it is the carrion birds are circling, they’ll know that they need to be more careful going forward.”

That pleased her, and she discussed how her efforts to rally men to the defense of the valley were going. Simon nodded along, even though he wasn’t particularly interested. He was too busy trying to decide what he needed to do next and if there was a way that he could do it without killing any more people when she asked him that very question.

“What will you do now?” she asked, breaking his reverie in a way that made him worry she’d read his mind for a moment.

“I’ll keep buying you time,” he answered simply. “I’m just not sure how yet.”

They talked a while longer, but the rest of the conversation went nowhere. Eventually, the two of them parted ways as they both had things to see to. Simon cautioned her that he might find somewhere closer to the pass to spend the night rather than waste an hour traveling to and from there each night. Ara cautioned him, “Be careful. I know you want to die, but we are intensely vulnerable while the sun is in the sky.”

Simon agreed with that, but that caution didn’t change his mind at all. Instead, it only solidified his plans, and after collected a new sword and shield, he soared through the sky on nearly two dozen wings as he considered all of these things. Much like his clothing, they vanished with him when he shifted forms, but he knew they would be there again when he was once more whole. He couldn’t explain how it worked, but this wasn’t the life to try to understand such strange magical dynamics, and he told himself he would try to figure it out in his next one.

Last night had been clear and bright with a half-full moon, but tonight, the sky was overcast. It promised rain, but neither that nor the darkness caused him any problems. In fact, he thought he might be able to see the valley even better with less light in the sky. It was hard to say for sure.

He was going to try to kill two birds with one stone. He was going to find a place to sleep in those high mountain crags, and he was going to feast on the goblins within it so that he could find a way to deter the looming army without devouring them quite so gluttonously as he had up to this point.

Before he did any of that, though, he simply soared high above the area. Judging by the number of campfires, there were hundreds of men there at the saddle of the pass and thousands more on the downslope. There were far too many for the plan he’d proposed to ever work, he realized despairingly.

That means it's all on me, Simon thought with a mental sigh.

That wasn’t a tonight problem, though. Any violence he did, would be a carefully targeted warning. He promised himself he wouldn’t feed on them in any case, which meant he definitely needed to find something to devour first.

It took only a little searching to find the goblin lair. It was a small one, but as soon as he reformed into a man, his heightened sense of smell was practically overwhelmed by the stench of the place. It would do, but he would not enjoy it, which seemed an appropriate sort of penance for the terrible things he’d done last night.

Simon stood there silently for a long moment, growing used to it before he even sought out his first goblin. They saw nearly as well as he did in the dark, but even so, when he glimpsed the ugly little bastard with a spear, there was no contest. Simon simply picked it up, slammed it against a nearby bolder, and then drained it while it was stunned.

It didn’t even attempt to sound an alarm, and other than the soft fleshy sound that Simon made as he swung it like a club, it silently passed after only a few moments of draining. That was the only good news about the whole thing. The rest of his experience was awful. Unlike the sweet warmth of human blood, the thing tasted acid and vinegary. It was like consuming a human who was well past their best buy date. It was substance, though, and even though the monster inside of him longed for human flesh, it consumed the dark black blood greedily.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

That was only the first kill of the night. After that, he descended into the lair, and Simon spent half the evening murdering and devouring goblins until there was nothing left. This time, he didn’t feel the least bit bad about his rampage, and when he emerged once more soaked in black blood, he felt somewhat better. He’d murdered and fed, but not on people, and for now, that was a small victory.

Sometime in the last couple of hours, while he’d been slaughtering green skins by the dozens, it had started to rain. That didn’t bother him, either. Not only did it suppress the stink he’d thought he’d never escape, but it started to rinse him clean. He just stood there for several long minutes in the cold, appreciating it as he watched the filth and the gore drip off his hands one drop at a time.

He didn’t feel good yet, but he felt better. Somehow, despite all the violence, he felt at peace then. He might have been content to stay that way had he been able to ignore the campfires burning in the pass below like a swarm of fireflies.

“How do I convince so many men that they have no chance?” he asked himself as he started walking down the slope to the men below.

The answers were fairly obvious and not entirely different than they would be if he were human. The easiest one would be to march on them with a superior enough force that they retreated. That one, at least for now, was impossible, which meant he would have to go for the second-best alternative, which was to strike the head of the snake.

That option was good but unpredictable. If their leader was a popular man, it might drive his army forward to avenge him by daylight, which Simon would have no chance to counter.

“That means I need to make them afraid first,” he decided. He’d already started that in motion by massacring their scouts, but one setback, no matter how bloody, would not be enough.

Simon looked around. He didn’t want them to think that a vampire was harrying them, even up here. If they did, they might no longer have any reason to cower. That was good; it gave him one more reason not to do any unnecessary biting, even if it limited his other options.

When Simon reached their first scout three hundred yards from the line of campfires that held back the night, he snapped the man's neck. Then, he ripped him to pieces and left him where he lay. With any luck, they’d think it was goblins or something worse.

Once that was done, he was about to turn away to find another scout to end in the same way until a boulder caught his eye. It was large, nearly round, and precariously balanced. More importantly, there was still plenty of slope between him and the leading edge of the camp, which meant that if he could move it, there was every likelihood that it would rampage right through several rows of tents and cause all kinds of chaos.

Which is exactly the sort of thing that might make a soldier afraid, he decided. Though soldiers weren’t quite as superstitious as sailors, they weren’t so good with enemies they couldn’t meet on the battlefield. It was one thing to know that a hoard of centaurs might kill you, but at least you could die on your feet. It was quite another to face a volcano or an earthquake.

Simon looked around the slope and imagined all the chain reactions he could cause with a major word of earth. Sadly, for the moment, that was entirely out of his reach, but acts of pure brute strength were not.

When he approached the boulder and pressed against it experimentally, it didn’t move. He thought about simply pushing against it with his shoulder as hard as he could, but after seeing a nearby log, decided there was a better way.

“You can be insanely strong, but still not as strong as a lever,” he chastised himself as he picked up the several hundred-pound piece of wood and, with great effort, thrust it partway under the rock.

The second time he tried, it shifted almost immediately, and with only a little strain, he forced the thing to roll forward once. It hung there for a second like it had found a new resting point, and then, with agonizing slowness, it turned over again. That time, it didn’t slow down at all. Instead, with every turn, it started to move faster and faster. Soon, more medium-sized stones followed in its wake, spreading out slightly to expand the tiny avalanche.

Simon smiled. This was going to be far more devastating than he had ever planned. It wasn't a tactic that he was going to be able to repeat easily, but it would be worth looking around on the slopes to see if he could find any other good setups.

There were a few outcries even before the stones hit the pickets or the tents, but they were of surprise and alarm. They wouldn’t be enough to save many people.

Simon had managed to move five tons of stone a few inches, but when it hit the outer defenses of the Murani camp, it was a hundred-ton wave of rock that killed and crushed with equal impunity. For a few frantic seconds, there were the sounds of screams as people died and the snapping of wood as tents, large and small, were flattened.

When the rocks were still, though, there was only the sound of the wounded moaning in pain and the bewilderment of those who’d been spared. Simon smelled dust on the rain during the avalanche, but now that it was done, he found a new aroma on the breeze: blood.

He could smell the carnage from here, and it made his mouth water. It was a hundred times sweeter than any goblin. That was when he turned around and started back up the slope. He could resist temptation, but only to a certain point, and for this evening, he’d reached it. Dozens of dying men smelled far too much like a banquet to him than he was comfortable with.

He retreated to the darkness of his goblin den with hours left in the night, satisfied with that. He dreaded the stench, but tomorrow, he could try to find a better place. Surely, there was a cave in one of these mountains that only smelled like water and dust. He would find it, and maybe once this army was done, he would meditate there until the beast within him was once more entirely under his control.