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“Alright, alright. How about ‘va…uh…vadri…vardi…’—”
SHINK!
“Vadrigar.”
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
“Sure.”
FOOM!
Death Knight dodged out of the way of an incoming rocket, grimacing as the splash damage from the resulting explosion still grazed him.
“Shit, I was barely even aiming for you, that time,” Ranger said, reloading the rocket launcher he had hefted over one shoulder.
Death Knight took the opportunity to reload his own weapon, the nailgun’s belt fed ammo system requiring far less time to replace.
“Vadrigar. Dreamers Ascended to godhood in the image and for the purposes of an existing Elder God,” he explained. “Their aspects, avatars, proxies, and progeny, depending on the god and the purpose.”
He finished reloading and leveled the weapon at Ranger, pulling the trigger and firing a torrent of nails in the soldier's direction.
Luckily, Ranger had gotten very good at reloading even something as unwieldy as the rocket launcher on the move.
He dodged the incoming fire, only taking a few hits, barely enough to make him wince. Funny how “a handful of red hot nails, fired into his flesh at high speeds” barely registered as an injury to him, anymore.
“So what about Shub Niggurath? The one I killed? What purpose did that serve?” he asked, lining up another shot.
Death Knight's face split into a grin.
“My Lady's machinations! I fight for Her glory! For blood, death, and fire!”
He cackled, madly.
Ranger aimed dead on, this time.
“Wrong answer.”
He pulled the trigger, sending a rocket square into Death Knight's chest, exploding on impact.
The Knight was reduced to bloodied chunks in an instant.
Ranger huffed. He could get about one or two answers out of the shambling madman, at best, before he devolved back into nonsensical fanaticism. Sometimes killing him knocked some sense back into him, sometimes he'd come back just as incoherent.
Either way, the “Arena” wouldn't be happy unless blood kept being spilled, and neither of them had the power to deny it.
“Arena Eternal” Death Knight had called it. A realm within “The Dreamlands” and apparently some kind of fucked up fighting pit a handful of once-mortal gods threw combatants into for some mixture of power, entertainment, and other, “incomprehensible” motivations.
Ranger was getting pretty pissed off about how many things were apparently “incomprehensible”. Seemed to him the kind of answer somebody gave when they didn't know how to explain something. Or just didn't want to.
And, frankly, he didn't really trust the metric of a guy whose brain was probably being eaten by maggots to gauge what was and wasn't “comprehensible”.
Whatever the reasons, they had the ability to just pluck people from wherever or whenever they wanted and force them to fight to the death, over and over, in whatever crumbling city or haunted crypt they damn well felt like.
He'd been midway through trying to drag a few more answers out of Death Knight when they'd been teleported into an ancient ruin of sorts, like a dilapidated castle, with bones inlaid into the walls and murals of anguished souls carved into basalt columns. Patches of cooling and hardened lava made it all look at lot like what Ranger figured Hell was supposed to be.
Death Knight said this whole dimension was created by the dreams and nightmares of people in the waking world and was where certain people went when they slept.
Maybe ol’ Dante had just gotten a look at this place in that famous dream of his.
Or maybe he was one of those “Dreamer” people and that dream brought these places into existence to begin with. And if the Dreamlands existed outside of time, people from all different eras coming in and out, randomly, then maybe he'd retroactively created the very Hell he'd one day describe in The Divine Comedy.
But wouldn't that mean heaven would have to be around here somewhere, too?
Ranger didn't remember a whole lot of specifics from his younger life anymore but he didn't think they covered this in Sunday school.
It was Hell enough for Ranger, anyway, and he was more than earning his place there. All of these realms always thirsted for blood, but when they were teleported somewhere specific like this, it became a demand, and one Ranger had long given up any pretense of trying to deny.
The first time he'd seen another human being, he'd been elated, but it was like trying not to slide down a sharp incline, there was just no fighting it. Somehow, some way, they'd end up tearing each other apart. Trying to fight it just drilled more holes into what was left of his mind. Better to just give the Arena what it wanted.
And Ranger had gotten very very good at spilling blood.
He…tried not to think too much about it. There'd be time for that when he got home. Just one of a million things he pushed off until that mythical future. If he ever wanted to make it real, he couldn't get bogged down with things like morality.
Ranger's ears perked up at the sound of familiar shout.
“Suffer and die!” he heard Death Knight yell, from somewhere across the pillar filled chamber and saw a telltale flash of fire.
Following it to the source, he found Death Knight locked in battle with the strange, corpse-like cyborg with the flying drone, both sporting singed marks from Death Knight's fireballs.
“We'll process you into a nutritious paste!” the mechanical horror threatened.
Swapping his rocket launcher for a lightning gun, Ranger took aim at the drone, blasting it with a bolt of electricity strong enough to short out its circuitry and send it crashing to the ground.
The mecha-zombie — “Strogg” he believed it called itself — cried out as if it had been the one hit.
“Gaah!” it cried, then turned to look to its fallen drone.
“Peeker!” it exclaimed.
Death Knight took advantage of the distraction and raised his nail gun up, firing a volley directly into the side of Strogg’s head, sending its body crumpling to the ground next to the drone.
He moved his aim to Ranger before recognition crossed his features and he beamed.
“My Lady!”
He gave a small bow and Ranger grimaced but didn't correct him. It never stuck.
He kicked the corpse at Death Knight's feet, watching as it began to dissolve into nothingness.
“This thing your cousin or something?” he asked.
Death Knight shook his head.
“I have no idea what that thing is but it is no Gof'n hupadgh Shub Niggurath.”
“No what?”
“Gof'n hupadgh Shub Niggurath.” Death Knight pointed to himself. “Blessed of Shub Niggurath. My Lady's most favored servants.”
Ranger looked over Death Knight's decaying form.
“That's how Shub treats her favorites, huh?” he said, with a grimace.
Death Knight grinned, widely.
“The Old Ones have blessed me. They have promised me eternal war, and fire, and bloodshed!”
“That's your idea of a blessing?” Ranger scoffed.
“Is it not your own?” Death Knight asked, grin not faltering. “You, too, revel in battle, in death.”
Ranger raised his gun to point between Death Knight's eyes.
“I do what I have to to get home!” he snarled. “Not because I want to. Unlike you.”
Death Knight was unfazed. He tilted his head at an uncanny angle.
“You have filled these ancient battlegrounds with scores of bodies and seas of crimson to rival nearly all but my own,” he said. “Tell me, how much closer to your home are you, after so much spilled blood?”
He stepped forward, putting his forehead directly in front of the muzzle of Ranger's gun, as if taunting him to prove him right.
Ranger wanted to tell him to piss off. Wanted to lower his gun and show he was better than that. But he couldn't bring himself to take his finger off the trigger.
The constant, unintelligible whispering that always lingered in the corners of his mind, even when it cleared in battle, grew louder and more insistent. The air around him felt heavy with them, pressing in on him from all sides.
His finger twitched.
“I'm not like you,” he hissed.
Death Knight's smile only grew more confident, more knowing.
“No,” he agreed. “You're something far worse.”
Ranger’s grip on his lightning gun tightened.
He could prove him wrong. He chose his battles, his targets. He couldn't fully deny these halls’ demand for blood, but he wasn't just a complete slave to it, either. He didn't have to kill every chance he got. He didn't want to.
He could lower the gun and watch that smug look get wiped from what was left of Death Knight's face.
So why couldn't he just lower the gun?
His arm trembled and he felt his finger begin to curl around the trigger.
Then, without warning, Death Knight ducked to the side, drawing his sword and slicing through Ranger's arm with one, smooth motion.
Ranger let out a cry of pain and surprise before it turned to a strangled gurgling as the Knight drove the blade through his sternum, then pulled it free again with a spray of blood.
In the last moment before he was claimed by another of countless deaths, Ranger saw that Death Knight's smile had faded.
Then he knew no more.
-
Death Knight shook the blood from his blade and sheathed it at his hip again.
“Such a strange creature,” he mused.
So fierce one moment, then so afraid, the next. Afraid of himself. Of what he was and would become. Of what he had become already.
Enough so that his desperation to avoid his own truth would turn to all but a silent Command to his servant to strike him down first.
Death Knight was more than sure he'd not realized the Command he was giving and, in truth, Death Knight could have held off on obeying it longer than he would have resisted pulling the trigger but…
…Why had he done so? Had it not been his point to prove his Lady's new proxy fought for more than just necessity? Had he not goaded him for just that reason?
The uncertainty bothered Death Knight, so he simply dismissed the entire train of thought. He didn't need to know why he did anything. He rarely had much of a reason, anyway.
He was, himself, after all, a strange creature.
---
“Fucker,” Ranger said, under his breath, as he came back into existence.
Messing with his head like that just for a cheap kill. Pathetic. Of all the people he had to end up relying on in any way, of course it'd be that freak.
The kill had, however, apparently been enough to sate the Arena's more immediate bloodlust for now, as he'd been resurrected somewhere else than the ruin he'd been killed in.
Instead, it was yet another open, barren area, empty of all but some rocky hills and a handful of long crumbled stone structures.
He was again confronted with the fact he no longer had any direction. He knew now that just trying to walk in a straight line had gotten him nowhere. He needed a different plan.
For that, he needed information.
He closed his eyes.
He wasn't sold on the idea he was somehow the second coming of some kind of ancient god or whatever it was he was supposed to “be, have been, and would be” (or something along those lines, anyway), but he had to accept that Death Knight did have some way of finding him and that he'd somehow accidentally triggered.
So what had he done before?
He remembered…it had felt like summoning the Dire Orb.
That made sense. If Death Knight really was Shub Niggurath's servant, he'd likely be able to sense the energy from something he'd dug out of the corpse of Her “proxy”.
Then what?
He'd…he'd just been thinking about being alone here. About wanting some kind of ally. His “desire was his Command” apparently, so that tracked, too.
Ranger tried to focus on the feeling of summoning the Orb. It was tricky to do without actually summoning it, though. His palm tingled as it tried to form in his hand.
No good.
He tried, instead to focus on the “desire” part. What did he want? Want bad enough it would trigger the borrowed power of a god?
He wanted… Well, he wanted to go home, more than anything, but he was pretty sure clicking his heels and wanting it bad enough wouldn't get him there. Still, it was the one thing he could feel that level of want for, so he focused on that feeling, that yearning, until it welled up in his chest, buzzing like electricity.
He wanted to go home. Wanted to see his wife and kids again. Wanted to get out of this hellhole. And to do that, he needed answers. And to get answers, he needed, he wanted…
“My Lady!” cackled a familiar voice.
Ranger opened his eyes to see Death Knight clawing his way up out of the strange fiery portal he created.
“You called for me!” he said, sounding earnestly surprised and delighted. “Quite impressive! Your new form’s strength grows!”
“Trust me, I wouldn't have if I had any other choice,” Ranger said, flatly. “Right now, you're my only hope of getting home.”
“You are home, my Lady. You need only reclaim that which is already yours. A task with which I will happily assist.”
“This isn't my home, these aren't my realms and for the last goddamn time, your ‘lady’ isn't me!”
“Certainly not!” Death Knight said, looking as though the very idea was downright shocking to him. “I would never think to suggest such a thing.”
“You've done nothing but ‘suggest’ it for the last day!” Ranger cried.
Death Knight shook his head, fervently.
“You are Her,” he corrected. “She is most certainly not you.”
“What the hell's the difference?”
Death Knight shrugged, nonchalantly.
“My Lady has a great many forms in which Her power and will manifest, all of which are Her,” he explained, as though it was all very commonplace information. “But there is only one Shub Niggurath.”
Ranger mulled over the information, not quite wrapping his head around it. He figured it might be a bit like squares and rectangles. All squares were rectangles but not all rectangles were otherworldly, all powerful entities that existed outside of time and reality.
Maybe the metaphor didn't really work.
“Well, stop calling me that, either way.”
“What would you have me call you?” Death Knight asked, sounding sincere.
“‘Ranger’ is fine,” Ranger sighed, repeating the same instruction he'd given every other time Death Knight asked that exact question. “Not that you'll remember it.”
“As you wish, Ranger.”
Ranger made a face. The moniker sounded strange coming from the ancient being.
“Listen. You said you're supposed to obey the things I ‘desire’, right? Well, I desire to go back home. Back to Earth,” he stressed. “You know this place. Where's the way out? How do I reopen the Slipgates?”
Death Knight's eyes went wide, as if staring at something in some unseen middle distance.
“Doorways through time and space. Her Dreamer opens the way between sleep and wake. Her children follow. This world will open itself to Her at last. The gates will open and He will come through.”
“He…? Gilman? He's the one who made the Slipgates. Does that mean…he's the Dreamer?” Ranger wondered, aloud. “Was he the thing I killed?”
Death Knight blinked several times, his eye focusing again.
“Hm?” he hummed, inquisitively.
“Don't worry about it,” Ranger deadpanned.
Death Knight clearly knew about Quake’s attempted invasion, but it wasn't knowledge he seemed to be able to consciously access. Certain words would just set him off into a cryptic fugue state where he'd ramble some vague nonsense with a few actually useful words thrown in occasionally before coming back to himself.
He never seemed to remember it afterwards so there was no point in trying to press for more.
“As you wish, Ranger.”
“I'm not—” Ranger started, out of reflex, before his brain caught up with what Death Knight had said.
“You called me Ranger,” he said.
“You asked me to,” Death Knight stated, simply.
“You…don't usually remember.”
Death Knight looked momentarily troubled.
“Don't I?” he asked, his brow furrowing. “I…often do not recall things…I think…”
He shook his head as if to clear it, then looked back up at Ranger, his normal, vacant smile on his face.
“Have you need of me? I am eternally at your Command.”
He gave a small bow.
Ranger blinked.
He'd actually remembered what Ranger had told him to do, this time. Did that mean he was able to remember things, with enough tries? That boded well for Ranger's attempts to extract more information from him.
That is, if it wasn't just all completely random. Which, knowing the Dreamlands and Death Knight himself, was probably more likely.
“How do you get of this place?” Ranger said, enunciating every word.
“This place?” Death Knight looked around.
Ranger pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.
“Not this place. I mean, this whole dimension thing!” he said, gesturing vaguely with a hand. “Back to Earth! The way I got in is closed. Is there any other exit?”
“There are many entrances to the Dreamlands. Ghouls traverse back and forth frequently, as do the Zoogs.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“Some, yes.”
Ranger tried to stop any flare of hope from forming too quickly. It couldn't be that easy. Nothing here was.
“Where's the nearest one?” he asked. “How do I get there?”
“From here? You cannot. The Arena Eternal is isolated from the rest of the Dreamlands,” Death Knight explained. “Temporary rifts draw in combatants, as do the gods, themselves. No doorways exist and only a god could hope to create one.”
Despite his attempts to avoid it, disappointment washed over Ranger, but he tried not to let it consume him.
“There's gotta be something I can do!” he said. “Where are these gods? If they can bring people in they can send them back out!”
“I know the location of only one Vadrigar,” Death Knight said.
“Then point me in its direction! I'll track it down and make it send me home.”
“No tracking is needed. He stands before me.”
Ranger deflated.
“Oh. Right,” he grumbled. “You still think I'm one of those things.”
“I know you to be.”
“Sure…” Ranger said with a roll of his eyes, then blinked as a thought occurred to him.
Wait…Let's say I was one of those things. Then I'd be able to open a portal out of here?” he asked.
“Most likely.”
“How? What would I need to do?”
“Accept Ascension.”
“Barring that.”
Death Knight folded his arms.
“There is no other way,” he said.
“If Gilman really was a Dreamer, then he was able to build the gates before he turned into that big monster. Before he Ascended,” Ranger argued. “If he could manage to do that back on Earth, then I can find a way to do it here.”
Death Knight seemed to consider this.
“I do not know much of this ‘gill man’, but it is true that the Vadrigar can attain power beyond that of a normal human being, even before their human forms are shed, completely,” he mused. “It could perhaps be possible to reclaim enough power to reopen the rift that you claim the gill man created, without Ascension. However…”
“What? Is it possible or not?” Ranger demanded.
“Even my Lady, herself, is not able to tear open a doorway to the Dreamlands from within. Someone on the other side must act as a bridge.”
“So that's why she needed Gilman. That's why she needed the Slipgates…” Ranger muttered. “But, then all anyone on the other side should need to do is reopen a gate, right? Then I could connect to it on this side?”
Death Knight shrugged.
Ranger rolled his eyes.
“Very helpful,” he said, dryly. “Don't suppose there are any payphones that’d let me place a collect call to the waking world around, huh?”
He sighed, but set his brow, resolutely.
“It's a start,” he said. “And a hell of a lot more of a heading than I had before.”
Reaching into his boot, Ranger pulled out the faded photograph of his wife and daughter. For the first time in what felt like centuries, he felt some sense of progress towards seeing them again.
“Hang on, Annie. I’ll find my way back, I promise,” he said.
“Ooo! What’s this?”
Ranger pulled away from Death Knight, who leaned over his shoulder to try to get a glimpse of what he was holding.
“None of your business!” he snapped, putting the photo back in his boot. “Just…a memento.”
“Of some past conquest, perhaps?” Death Knight asked, his uncannily wide grin stretching his face.
“Of my family,” Ranger corrected, with a glare. “Not that I’d expect a monster like you to understand.”
Death Knight’s eye widened, then his gaze seemed suddenly distant, his grin falling.
“Alas…Quite the contrary…” he said, a hollowness to his voice not unlike when he rambled about Quake’s invasion, but with a deep underlying sadness. “For many years after her death, I wore a memento of my wife, draped across my shoulders…that she might still be always close to my heart…”
“Your wife?” Ranger exclaimed. “You were married?!”
Death Knight’s brow (or what remained of it) knit together.
“Was I?” he asked, seemingly more to himself than Ranger. “I have not…thought of it in some time. Yes…I was, wasn’t I? Before my rebirth. I—"
He winced, then shook his head as if trying to shake something from it.
“Ah…forgive me, my Lady, you…asked something of me?” he asked, seeming to have, once again, forgotten his brief moment of something approaching lucidity. Yet, despite the lapse in memory, the solemness of his tone did not entirely dispel the way it usually did.
“Your past,” Ranger pressed. “You were talking about your past. Mementos.”
“My past? My past…” Death Knight muttered. “Yes, yes of course! My past!”
His tone brightened again, and the his normal grin returned to his face.
“My great conquests! A thousand lifetimes of war!” he said, his voice now fully back to its normal state. “And the trophies of victory! Of course, I gladly show them to you.”
“Show them?” Ranger asked, but Death Knight was already busy pulling his blade from the holster at his hip, not paying attention to his words.
With a cackle, Death Knight drove his sword into the stone beneath them and dragged a jagged line across. The stone split open into a yawning, fiery portal.
He held a hand to Ranger.
“Come. I’ll bring you to them!”
It took Ranger a moment to understand what the knight was getting at.
“What? You want me to jump in there with you?” he exclaimed. “I’ll be deep fried!”
“My flames burn only whom I wish them to. You’ve seen this when we’ve been allied in combat. Hold close to me, and they will cause you no harm.”
Ranger eyed the outstretched hand, clad in a clawed, metal gauntlet, warily.
Certainly the ability to teleport from one place to another would be useful, but he wasn't sure he trusted Death Knight not to immolate him, nor to know what would and wouldn't immolate him.
Oh, what the hell? It would hardly be the first time he burned to death.
He took Death Knight's hand and let himself be pulled close to him.
Death Knight wrapped an arm around Ranger’s waist to keep them from getting separated in whatever strange dimension he moved through when he teleported like that.
Ranger appreciated the idea of not getting left in a void of eternal flames, though he didn’t much care for the close contact. The extent to which the knight’s flesh was rotting off the bone was so much starker up close.
Death Knight stepped backward, leading Ranger forward to where the ground fell away to curling flames and the stone swallowed them up.
Fire engulfed Ranger on all sides, impossibly hot, yet none of it burning him. He squeezed his eyes closed against the blinding brightness. It stretched on for an eternity, but also somehow for no time at all.
His stomach did flips as gravity seemed to turn itself inside out before, all at once, it was over.
Death Knight used his sword to pull them out of portal again, this time in a similarly rocky, mountainous area, but one that seemed far stiller than the last. Almost…faded, like a room left alone for so long that every mote of dust had settled and even the air felt somehow more empty.
A towering cliff wall of jagged stone loomed over them, stretching for miles above, past where Ranger could see.
Nestled into the cliff face was a small building, like a misshapen hut, that looked as though it was carved from the cliff itself.
On closer inspection, however, it looked as though the structure flowed organically from the cliff, or that the cliff had somehow grown over it, like a tree growing around a light post; slowly, over decades or centuries, engulfing it.
“Did you…live here?” Ranger asked, but Death Knight didn't seem to hear him, or at least was too preoccupied to answer.
He made his way to the hovel and pushed open the door, which creaked loudly, clearly long disused. Dust stirred from the movement, swirling sluggishly up into the light coming through the entrance, as if resentful of having been disturbed.
The door opened to reveal a mostly empty domicile, bare of any furniture, save for an old wooden table and a large, metal banded chest.
Death Knight hurried within and pried open the chest, kneeling before it to better see its contents.
Ranger followed, cautiously. No horrifying traps seemed to have been set off just yet, but he knew better than to assume everything was safe.
Examining the walls, he could see faded scorch marks and the telltale scratches of blades against the ancient stone. Most seemed randomly placed, the likely product of boredom or misplaced aggression, but others seemed more purposeful.
Clusters of marks etched into sections of wall in sets of five caught his eye. Some kind of tally, maybe?
If he'd been trying to deduce some way of keeping track of time, he'd clearly had about as much success as Ranger had, seeing as the marks swiftly devolved into sprawling criss crosses and spirals.
Had he, once, not been so dissimilar to Ranger? A man cursed to fight in this nightmarish place, clinging to the memory of loved ones left behind while his mind was consumed by the madness of the Dreamlands?
What did that mean for Ranger's future? Was a cackling madman, reduced to nothing but the love of killing, even that far from what Ranger felt himself slipping towards becoming?
He looked back at Death Knight to observe his progress in finding whatever it was he thought Ranger had asked him to see.
Muttering to himself, Death Knight dug around in the contents of the chest, pulling out various strange, confounding, or upsetting objects.
A sword that looked like it was grown from some kind of plant, were it not for the skulls adorning the face of the warped metal.
A glowing eye the size of a bowling ball that seemed to burn from within with an endlessly roaring flame.
A book bound in skin that Ranger didn't want to know the source of.
A golden emblem shaped like a grinning skull.
All these curiosities were unceremoniously tossed aside in the Knight's search.
“Ah ha!” Death Knight exclaimed, at last, grasping a length of golden chain in his hand. “Yes. My prize! My first and most precious trophy!”
Getting to his feet, he pulled the chain and what was attached to its ends from the chest, holding them up to Ranger, triumphantly.
Ranger grimaced at the gruesome display.
A pair of severed hands connected by golden chain that wrapped around the wrists.
At first, the sight stirred little emotion in him, far too used to the horrific gore of the Arena to be bothered by such relatively clean and unmarred pieces of flesh, until two details caught his eye.
Red painted nails. Despite their clear age, the slender fingers still sported carefully painted nails.
And a golden band around the left ring finger.
The pieces of what Death Knight has said earlier clicked into place.
He'd said he'd worn a memento around his neck. Of his wife.
Ranger’s stomach flipped with a nausea he hasn't thought he was still capable of.
“You cut off your dead wife's hands and wore them around your neck?!” he cried.
Death Knight's expression grew eerily hollow.
“No, no,” he said. The empty, emotionless tone of his voice made a cold dead settle in Ranger's gut like ice.
“She was not dead when I cut them from her.”
Ranger staggered back and turned away from the ancient, cursed being before him, hand pressed over his mouth and eyes squeezed shut as he desperately tried to force the image from his mind.
“You're sick!” he hissed. “You're sick and evil and I am nothing like you! I will never be like you!”
His words were as much a prayer, a desperate plea, as they were an accusation.
Dear God, let them be true! Let that not be his fate!
“…hm?” Death Knight hummed. “What is this?”
Ranger opened his eyes, reluctantly turning back towards Death Knight.
The Knight’s expression and tone had returned to his normal, unbothered cluelessness.
“A fascinating curio, indeed,” he noted, then looked up at Ranger. “Some relic of yours, my Lady?”
“Of mine?!” Ranger exclaimed. “You just—!”
He let out all his breath in a defeated huff. Something about the painful earnestness of Death Knight's question drained all the fight out of him.
There was no point. It was clear he remembered nothing. Whatever bits and pieces of memories occasionally rose to the surface of his fractured mind were clearly no more than shadows and echos. Whoever, whatever, the rotted corpse before him had been in life, no more than those faint traces remained.
And there was no use arguing with the dead.
“No. Not mine,” he said with a sigh. “Nobody's anymore, I guess. Not for a long time.”
“No?” Death Knight hummed again, in apparent confusion. “Strange, for such a thing to have been abandoned. Very strange…”
Ranger tilted his head, curious about the possible importance of the grisly trophy.
“Why?” Ranger asked. “What's so special about it?”
“To you or I? Very little, I suspect. But to someone…a very very great deal, it seems.”
“What makes you say that?” Ranger kept his tone calm and even. It was so easy to snap Death Knight out of moments of relative clarity like this. “Is it some kind of artifact? Like the Runes?”
Death Knight shook his head.
“Quite the opposite. I sense no magic within them. Nothing to give them any great value. Yet, look.” He gestured to the dull and clammy flesh. “The worn chain around them suggest a great age, but there is no rot. The wrappings are ancient, but intact. The paint is unchipped. The golden band, unclouded.”
He pointed at a series of tiny stitches across the skin.
“These wounds have no sign of swelling or healing. They, and the stitches that mend them, were made after death.”
Ranger shook his head, not following.
“So, what does that mean?”
“It means that someone stitched closed everywhere the skin split as the it dried decayed. Cleaned and preserved the wrappings, embalmed the flesh then kept it free of any rot or parasites, kept the band polished, and even reapplied the paint on the nails each time they began to chip or dull,” Death Knight explained. “Someone painstakingly preserved these over…decades. Centuries maybe. Such a treasure…one does not part from while one still draws breath with which to defend it.”
His brow furrowed, a troubled look crossing his features.
“I… Might I…keep these, my Lady?” he asked, uncharacteristically timid. “If you've no use for them? I find myself…strangely… fond of them.”
He looked up at Ranger, his heartfelt expression unsettlingly out of place on his face.
“The were yours to begin with,” Ranger sighed, knowing the reminder was pointless. “Do what you want with them.”
Death Knight's whole form seemed to sag with relief.
“Thank you,” he said.
He clutched the hands to his chest for a moment, then carefully returned them to the chest he'd pulled them from.
As he closed the wooden lid again, he looked around, as if only just becoming aware of his surroundings. Knowing him, that was probably exactly the case.
“I…know this place…” he said, getting to his feet and running his fingers along some scratches in the stone that lined up perfectly with the fingertips of his gauntlet.
“I had forgotten…” he said.
He pulled his hand away from the wall and stared as his palm, flexing his fingers, slowly.
“What a strange clarity…to have dredged up such a place from my memory, after so many eons…” he breathed. “Is this…what you require of me, Mistress?”
“You're the one who brought us here,” Ranger said. “But if you're able to teleport here consistently, it would be useful to have a home base.”
Death Knight's gaze flicked over to him for a moment.
“It wasn't you I was asking, Ranger,” he said. “Nor about this place. But I can bring us here at your command, if that is your wish.”
He'd remembered Ranger's name again. And that he wasn't Shub. And yet he seemed to have forgotten the conversation they'd had only moments earlier. He'd apparently killed and dismembered his own wife, however long ago it had been, but then lovingly preserved her severed hands for thousands of years? Forgotten they even belonged to him, yet was so adamant to keep them?
Ranger couldn't wrap his head around it all. There was something more to him than it had seemed, however, and more of it seemed to be surfacing the longer he spent around Ranger. Maybe that meant more answers about Quake and about how to get home would turn up in that mix, as well, with enough time.
Ranger supposed he didn't have much of an alternative.
He looked around the decrepit abode again. Somehow, he got the feeling he'd be getting very familiar with this place and its former, and now returning, occupant.
Whether he liked it or not.