Life After Death by Atticuss

[Keeper Of Lore]

Tonight I limp openly through the sin’dorei capital, Silvermoon, suffering the subtle indignities that the broken and disfigured feel in the presence of the beautiful. The young ones stare openly, while the older ones try to hide their gazes. Once I pass, I hear their hushed voices speak in petulant tones - but I do not care to listen too closely. I’ve grown very weary, and so it is that I walk the simple path rather than ducking through shadows and alleys. I can bear the looks of contempt and disgust with the knowledge that, despite all of their pompousness, the Blood Elves are just as forsaken as I am. Still, I hate this place.

The leg hurts. It’s my imagination.

I make my way to the Court of the Sun, where I sit on the ledge encircling the fountain. I use the water to wash the poisons from my maces, and the blood from my hands. A guardian approaches me. His voice is a mix of diplomacy and condescension. He tells me that the fountain isn’t a wash basin. I sneer at him and dry my hands on his dress. The blood rushes to his face as he opens his mouth to shout. I rise to my full height and display the mark of the Grim on my chest. It’s nearly imperceptible, but the proud sin’dorei shifts his weight away from me. I recognize the small motion as a mark of fear. I grin at him, gather my things, and move on.

Drinn and I will have to find a more suitable resting place soon. The pinkskins that fill this city will push me too far, someday, and I’ll start cutting off ears and noses.

I’m tired and moody. Best to not let that vehicle of thought travel much further.

I make my way to our quarters. Past the veiled hallways of the Inn, into the chamber that she and I have inhabited together for the past few weeks. We’ve stripped the tapestries from the wall. We’ve removed most of the adornments, in fact, and have long since pushed the bed against the far wall. I prefer to keep things sparse. Sleeping on the floor is a habit I’ve kept since my days working for Stormwind. A habit that Drinn’s been taking up.

I strip off my necklace, my bracers and gloves. I unstrap my weapons and tools, remove my rings and boots. I catch my reflection in the mirror. My eyes glint darkly from beneath the dark mask that hides my face. My fingertips reach for the mask’s hem, but my fingers hesitate, and then there’s the low sound of a distant floorboard rebelling against the weight of a padded foot. I smile to myself. Drinn. Testing her sneaking skills against me. She would have gotten me but for that one unlucky floorboard.

I pull the curtains shut and reach for my bags.

I find the darkest spot in the darkened room and collapse into a discarded tapestry. I halt my old breathing pattern, a remnant of my time prior to the plague, and remain perfectly still. Drinn doesn’t enter the room directly. Instead, she stands just outside of the entrance, peering through the opening at different angles, searching for some hint of my presence. Slowly, she makes a single step past the threshold – and it’s then that I throw a very small explosive at the wall to her side.

Her conscious mind knows better, but her instincts immediately pull her attention toward the distraction for a fraction of a second. It’s long enough for me to gather my legs beneath me, and then I pounce. She turns in time to see my shadow speeding toward her through the darkness. She yelps as I tackle her. I pin her to the floor.

She struggles against me for a moment, then laughs heartily. Deep and rich, with a snort here and there. In those few moments, the pains of the day are gone. Drinn pretends to cry out, “Help, there’s a dashing rogue in my bedroom trying to get me!”

I move to stand up, but the young blood elf pulls me back down towards her. She puts her hands on either side of my mask, and asks, “What did I tell you about this?”

“I know,” I answer.

She nods, then gently pulls the mask off of me.

I feel so hideous without it.

Drinn runs her fingertips over my features. Feeling the line of my jaw in the darkness. She cups my cheek with her hand. She traces the leather strap that runs diagonally across the whole mess. She cranes her neck forward and kisses me, saying, “You never need the mask around me, Atticus.”

“I know,” I answer.

She says, “Atticus.”

“What?”

She says, “You don’t.”

“I know,” I answer.

She nods. She says, “And you know why.”

“I know.”

“And?” She asks. The curve of her grin visible between the shadows.

Women.

“And if you were grossly disfigured you wouldn’t need to wear a mask around me, either. For the same reason.”

She sighs. “It’s all in your head, dearest. You have a good face. But how sweet of you to say that.”

[Keeper Of Lore]

Drinn sweats in her sleep. She twists the thin blankets around her, mumbling, whimpering, haunted by nightmares. The same dreams that promted her to request that I stay by her side the first night, weeks ago. It breaks my heart to watch her suffer. Even more to witness her tired body clutching for mine in the night, only to grasp the cold dead skin of a forsaken. She shivers.

There is little more that I can do than to comfort her as she falls asleep, and to be there for her when she wakes. The space between is a mystery to me. Whether she’s caught in some diseased corner of the emerald dream, or assaulted by visions of things since past, I do not know. She doesn’t like to discuss them with me.

The heart of my curse, this disease, is not that I have been transfigured into an unfeeling, cold monster. The curse is that the contents of my heart and mind remain all too human – though I have been cut off from even the simplest of pleasures. In the dark of the night, I am aware of my dearest’s breath softly moving against the back of my neck, but the sensation is distant. It holds no warmth for me. This is the price I pay for the crimes I committed in life, though I wish with all of my damned soul that she didn’t have to suffer along with me.

I tried to hold her at arm’s length. I failed.

Damn that Cessily.

The others, The Grim, do not know of my difficulties. Indeed, they know not even my true name. To them, I am Skumm – a mere thief with a taste for alliance blood. To some extent it amuses me. How easily I’ve made a new life for myself among them, using an identity I crafted to spy on the pirate captain Edwin VanCleef in another life.

This was back when I was younger. A spy for SI:7, under the tutelage of Mathias Shaw.

Drinn whines in her sleep. She throws an arm around my chest and pushes her face into my back. Her sweat wets my skin. She begins sobbing. I roll over to face her, rest a hand upon her shoulder and squeeze, saying “Drinn, wake up.”

Her eyes snap open. They shine green. She gasps and arches her back away from me. I say, “Drinn, it’s me.”

“Atticus,” I say.

She is silent a moment, then breathes a heavy, shuddering sigh. She wraps herself tightly around me. She asks, “Would you have hurt me?”

“Never,” I answer.

“No,” she says, “When you were alliance. When you were on the drug.”

I hesitate. She waits for the answer. The silence is crushing. I answer honestly. “Yes.”

She clutches me harder, breathes deeply, then whispers “Then thank the Gods you got yourself killed before we met.”

It’s a simple tragic truth. While she accepts things as they are, I find it increasingly difficult to find contentment, peace, anywhere within my spirit. She seems satisfied with the truth of our circumstances, and settles back in to rest. Over time, her body begins the light twitching that always accompanies her transition back to sleep.

My mind travels to the past...

[Keeper Of Lore]

He wasn’t tall and slender. He didn’t have Black hair. His eyes were not a deep and dark shade of brown. There was no tight definition in his muscles. There was no natural grace in his movements. Should one look at him in passing, he would slide out of their memory just as soon as they took a few steps away from him.

He didn’t exist. His name wasn’t Atticus Grace. He was not a citizen of Stormwind. He was not a member of SI:7. He was not on the first finger. He was not an agent of Mathias Shaw. He was a non-entity, and he could kill your whole family in the space of one breath. He could wipe out any trace of your existence. He could make it so that you were never alive at all.

But he was not part of a select group of other people that didn’t exist – whose whole purpose was to quietly alter the course of history.

If you tried to get a good look at him, he vanished. He was a ghost. He just wasn’t there.

I just wasn’t there.

We found out how to make the drug by secretly studying Mathias’s journals. Of course he knew about it, though he made no move to stop us.

How you made the drug is, first you gathered a lot of dead bodies.

In those days you could visit old fields of battle. You could load wagons with dead orcs until the pile reached fifteen feet high. Their faces would be black with flies. You tied a rag to your face and took shallow breaths. The stench stung your eyes. People you passed on the road would vomit.

You would carry these bodies east of Lordearon, to the area now known as the Plaguelands. This was a little before the rise of the scourge. Before the cauldrons. This was back when the grass was still green and before the toxins changed the sky to shades of red.

Then what you did is, you dropped these bodies into the bottoms of the canyons. You threw them in the lakes and rivers. At the crest of each hill and at the lowest point of each valley, you buried the corpses beneath an inch or two of soil.

Then what you did was, you let the bodies rot.

Soon, the worms would come.

Fat and yellow, leaving a trail of pungent slime in their wake, they would come. They feasted on the dead. They ate their way inside of the bloated, festering bodies, and there they remained, living off the carrion.

The more they ate, the larger they became. Over time, they grew to be as big as a man, and that is when you would come for the harvest.

You would draw straws to see who had to carry out the repugnant task. Two people would hold either end of the massive worm, while a third slit a long, deep gash down the middle.

This was when the worms would scream.

The third man would have to reach his arms inside the pulsating innards and search for the small, writhing larva. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, none would be there. Every now and then, though, you’d find a worm that was ripe with them. You’d pull the squealing larva out by the fistful. You’d fill burlap sacks with them, and the sacks would writhe as you moved to the next body.

Then, once you had collected all you could, you would travel South. Past Stormwind. All the way to the abandoned tomb in the Badlands, where you would perform the ritual.

The machine you used was simple. Two flat iron plates that moved toward each other as you turned a wheel. The bottom plate had grooves that angled downward, slightly, so that the liquids would flow toward a container.

Then what you would do is, you’d pile larva onto the press. You’d spin the wheel, slowly crushing them, until they burst. You’d keep spinning the wheel until every ounce of liquid that they contained was collected.

This liquid, it absorbed light.

You would take this container and suspend it over a fire. The liquid would slowly burn off. The smoke would burn your lungs. The stench was even more foul than the rotting orcs you used to draw out the worms. But finally, once all the liquid had burned off, inside the container you would find a thin lattice of delicate black crystals climbing up the glass walls.

You and the few other agents involved would take turns administering the drug to one another. You would scrape the powder from the container. Each dose would cover an area no larger than the head of a pin. Then you gently pull down on the flesh just beneath someone’s eye, exposing the thin red rim. There was where you’d deliver the tiny black crystals.

Your subject, he would take a deep breath, then collapse. Then it was your turn.

For two days you would be immobile. Your mind would be plagued by horrific visions your conscious mind could never concoct. But when you woke, you were transformed.

Your senses were heightened. You could see in the dark. You could smell someone’s blood-type. You could turn your perception of pain on and off like a switch. It seemed that you could measure out time however you chose, so that you could mark the time it took for a pupil to dilate in hours rather than moments.

This drug, it transformed you into the silent, perfect, hand of death.

But just as it altered your perceptions of the outside world, it ate away at your personality. Questions of morality, justice, loyalty, all of them evaporated.

Someone looking at you would never truly see you.

You just weren’t there.

I just wasn’t there.

[Keeper Of Lore]

The seasons changed and the wars raged on. Azeroth was besieged by the Burning Legion. The Lich Ner’zhul crafted his plague and the wizard Kel'Thuzad delivered it to the Eastern Kingdoms. Prince Arthas, busy defending Strahnbrad from orcish raids, sent word to Stormwind.

Mathias called for me to meet him. He and I walked through the stockades. As we passed each cell, he named each prisoner for me. All of them I recognized as political enemies of the kingdom. Several of them I had captured myself. The cold stone walls resonated with their lamentations. Mathias turned towards me. His face was hard. He spoke.

“I know that you and a few others have been using the larval acid.”

I nodded.

“The drug is extremely dangerous, Atticus. It ultimately destroys whoever uses it.”

I nodded. “We have it under control, Master Shaw.”

He peered at me, searching my expression for any reason to doubt me. He smelled of worry, but also admiration. He spoke further, saying, “I understand though, that it is not without its benefits.” He spread his arms wide, gesturing to the dank expanses of the prison. “Each of these cells has been filled with the help of you and the others that have been using the drug. I doubt that many of these men could have been taken without a full army if not for you and the others.”

I had spent the morning vomiting blood. It didn’t smell like my own.
I merely nodded once more at the master rogue.

He sighed. “Atticus. Would you agree that sometimes, for the sake of a greater good, circumstances may arise that force a select few to do things that would repulse good and decent men?”

“Such is the world we live in,” I answered.

“Would you claim yourself willing to be one of those select few?”

“Yes.” I answered.

“A plague is beginning to spread in the north. The victims die within three days of contracting it.”

He spoke more carefully. “After they die, they come back to life. They act as beasts, tearing at the flesh of other men. They act with a hive mind. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard of. The reports say they are impervious to pain. They say that, even if you remove their arms and legs, these…things…will still come after you, dragging themselves along the ground with their teeth.”

In retrospect, I should have been horrified. I wasn’t.

Shaw continued speaking. “We have reason to believe that the plague was first planted in Andorhol, the center for agrarian trade up north. Since then the plague has moved to the neighboring town Brill and possibly Stratholme.”

Stratholme. My home.

“What do you ask of me, Master Shaw?”

Mathias broke his gaze from mine. He turned, lowered his chin to his chest and took a deep breath. “Do you know how to fight a wildfire?” He asked.

I nodded.

You build a controlled fire to consume all the fuel before the wildfire can reach it. Once the wildfire reaches land that’s already burnt, it dies.

Mathias said, “We need to prevent this plague from spreading.”

He produced a small scroll, bound by a black ribbon. His final words were, “Gather the others and explain what must be done. There is little time. Prepare yourselves.”

He said, “And beg your Gods for forgiveness.”

Mathias departed, leaving me isolated in the dungeon with all the other condemned men. I opened the scroll. It was a map. It was a death sentence for every innocent man, woman, and child in the towns marked red.

That night, the others and I performed the ritual. We suffered the drug-induced nightmares for two days. When we rose, we mounted our horses and rode north, to Sepulcher. Our clothing smelled of death and tears.

[Keeper Of Lore]

Night came to Tirisifal. We spread over the land like the fog that shrouded our movements. We were heartless, soulless shadows bearing death. The first one I killed was a baby, sleeping in its crib. I moved to its parent’s bedroom. The wife woke as my garrote tightened around her husband’s neck. Her death was bloody, but swift.

Cut the right veins, a person can bleed themselves dry in eleven seconds.

I wiped my daggers on their marital bed before I disappeared back into the darkness.

Their nearest neighbor lived a mile away. He sat smoking a pipe on his porch, scratching the ears of an old dog while he stared at the shrouded moon. My throwing knives whispered through the fog and into his throat. The dog licked the blood that dripped down his fingertips. I snapped the dog’s neck after.

There was a church that housed the poor. I slipped between each bunk, driving a thin stiletto deeply into each left eye, jerking the blade once it reached the brain. The bodies would shake violently, soundlessly beneath the sheets, before going still.

There were farms. The wise thing to do is to kill the family first, and then the animals. The way horses scream could wake the dead.

Brothers and sisters. Cousins. Parents. Sons and daughters. Orders are orders. We were the select few. We were saving mankind.

The veins you cut – there are six of them. Two in the neck. Two beneath the armpits. Two inside the thighs.

Men and women. Adults and children. The elderly. All helpless. All innocent. Eleven seconds is the longest it should ever take.

The fog swirled with our movements. The stench of blood rode on the suspended droplets of water. I filled my lungs with it.

I found two lovers in a barn. They tried to cover their nakedness as my blades made way for their hearts.

I found a beautiful woman, dressed for bed, sleepwalking through her fields of maize.

Eleven. Ten. Nine…

She asked if I was a god as her voice grew weaker.

“Quiet,” I whispered, “quiet now.”

The blood stained my clothing and skin. It ran down my face. It collected and dried in my eyebrows.

To quiet a person’s cries, you have two options; sever the vocal cords, or puncture both lungs. The sound of a death rattle inside of a ravaged voicebox never leaves you.

I would find houses that the others had gotten to first. Some of the things the others could do with hammers were works of art. Whole families dead before they could wake up. Their faces caved in. The brains spilling onto the floor. What the method lacked in aesthetics, it made up for in efficiency. That was where the beauty was. The inescapable finality of it. The speed. The confidence with each swing of the mace. I marveled at the broken skull fragments embedded in the wall.

Had I been free of the drug I have to question whether I would have been filled with disgust or with awe. Most likely – both.

In a night filled with so much gore, I could taste the different flavors in the cracks between my teeth.

How many times can you count to eleven in a single night? How many souls can a dozen deadly gods release in one night? I stopped counting after a thousand seconds.

All through the darkened hours we moved. Our controlled fire, burning up the fuel before the wildfire hit. Until the sun sparkled through the low mist and light began spreading. Our task wasn’t finished. Not nearly. There were numerous towns on the map that we hadn’t yet eliminated.

Scattered throughout the countryside, there were inevitably a few that we had missed. As those saw our work highlighted by the light of day, Tirisifal wept.

Then, things got complicated.

[Keeper Of Lore]

Drinn stirs from her sleep once more. The small motions pull me from my anamnesis. She makes a soft sound as she moves her face to my neck. Her fingers uncurl over my ribs. She kisses behind my ear. She whispers so quietly that I can barely hear her. “I love you,” she says.

I lay flat on my back. The young elf pushes her body against my side. She moves one of her legs over both of mine. I feel the muscles of her calf moving as she stretches her toes. I slip my arm beneath her, wrapping it over her back. My thumb rests on the scar that bands around her arm, just beneath her shoulder.

Little elf, through all of the horrors I’ve witnessed in my life, seeing you hurt so badly was the worst of all of them. I’ve never been more frightened, for myself or for anyone, than I was for you when I saw what the twisted priest had done to you.

This scar. Your halo. Only the Gods could know what I would have become if you had died that night.

The words are awkward for me. I hadn’t spoken them to a single person in my life before the plague. Here, though, now, it’s an obvious truth. “I love you too.”

I’m a monster. I took innocent lives with professional pride. Orc. Troll. Tauren. Elf. Finally, Human. People who had nothing to do with the war. I murdered thoughtlessly, indiscriminately, like a cannon that Stormwind aimed at its inconveniences. I am as bad as the worst of our enemies.

Drinn slides her hand down my side and holds her palm flat against my stomach.

Those people were trying to carve out a bit of peace in a war-torn world. We could have evacuated them. We could have quarantined them.

Drinn pulls air deep into her lungs. Her chest swells against my side.

If somebody ever took her from me…

How many wives did I kill that night?

She kisses my neck. My cheek. My lips.

Was it me or was it the drug? Do I just pretend it was the drug so that I have some kind of moral escape hatch? Would I have told Shaw no, had I been in my right mind?

Drinn moves. She kisses my shoulder. My chest.

If I had said no, I never would have met her. Given the choice again, would I spare their lives and spend the rest of my life without her? How selfish am I to even question that?

A good man would say yes.

I don’t know.

Drinn straddles me. She pulls the band from her hair. It flows around her face. She leans forward. She kisses my forehead. The bridge of my nose. She kisses beneath my eyes. Her hair dances along my cheek.

Gods damn Mathias Shaw. Stormwind. The Alliance.

Her fingernails push into my arms.

Shaw chose us for a reason. He knew we weren’t able to see things straight.

She bites my lower lip and smiles.

He asked if I was willing to commit horrors for the sake of the greater good.

I reach my hand into her hair.

I said yes.

I pull her hair into my fist.

That wasn’t the mission he gave us. That were was no need for the murders. There were other ways to handle it.

I pull. Her neck strains backward. Her breath becomes shallow. Her nails cut into me. I sit up. I kiss her collarbone.

I said yes.

Her chest rises and falls. Rises and falls.

I was drugged.

She wraps her legs around my waist. Her arms go around my back.

It was the Alliance. Their black and white thinking. The easy solution. To not bother distinguishing between the enemy and what merely looks like the enemy. To them an Orc is an Orc. A Scourge is a Scourge. A threat is a threat.

A low voice rises in the darkness.

Would I have stayed my hand so that they could live, at the cost of never meeting Drinn?

The voice is my own. A growl rising up from the back of my throat. My muscles tighten. Drinn winces.

“Atticus,” she says.

She says, “Atticus, I think you cut me.”

I blink. She pulls one of my hands from her hip. There’s a small break in the skin.

“Yeah, that’s bleeding. What got into you?”

I take a deep breath. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says. She stands up and moves toward the lamp. “Is everything alright?” She asks.

“Yes,” I say, “I was just getting hit with some bad memories.”

She lights the oil in the lamp. Examines the small wound where my unkempt nails dug into her skin. She smirks, “So they do keep growing after you die.”

“Very funny.”

“Do you want to talk to me about it?” She asks.

“You already know the story.”

She returns to me. Sits at my side. Shoulder to shoulder. “You were drugged up,” she says.

“I was.”

“You’re a good man. It was the Alliance. They used you.”

“They did.”

She tilts her head against mine. “It’s a good thing we stopped when we did anyway. Thrysta would have made us recite prayers if she found out you and I…”

Her voice trails off. She holds a small bandage to the little cut.

“There’s not much beyond that that I can do,” I say. “Being dead and all.”

“I know I know. It’s a damn shame too.”

“Well what are you gonna do?”

“Bring you back to life?”

“How?”

“I’ll learn how to do magic?”

“And find a magical cure?”

“Why not?”

“Somebody probably thought of that already, because if it worked there’d be a lot less Forsaken running around?”

“Well I don’t see you coming up with any ideas.” She said.

That reminded me of someone.

I slip my arm around her shoulders. She asks, “Do you remember anything from when you were controlled by the Lich King?”

“Bits and pieces. Images, really. Nothing more than an impression here and there.”