MALEDICTION (14)
"Fredric James, 3999 to 4027. That's really young to just die like that." Gil's knelt before a tombstone and looked at the engravings of the dead. They had been there for quiet some time now, and yet nothing seemed to 'pop out' like Blake had described, perhaps he just wasn't looking closely enough. Keeping this coating of fragment energy on him was tiring, it probably messed with his concentration.
"What did that old fart even mean?" Catherine was getting a bit too frustrated. "It will appear in time? That's the one thing we don't have."
"Well, complaining about it isn't going to help at all."
What is the purpose of this entire endeavor? To stop the malediction. True, what else are we here to do?
What else indeed.
"It will, we just have to do it more often, I saw it once in one of those films."
A long while ago a caravan of travelling performers passed by. Gil wasn't around at that time, and Catherine was just but a wee little thing.
They offered a variety of services, such as clowns, jokes and sock puppets. The last one is what Catherine referred to as a 'film' which is sort of sad since she has no idea what that word even meant.
"Not to dampen your spirit, but I think you have a terrible understanding of what a 'film' is. And apart from that this seems hopeless if we don't understand the assignment." Gil squatted, "Has Blake always been this cryptic?"
"I can't really remember, didn't you live with him most of the time?" Catherine responded.
"Not really, he always locked himself in the morgue, I barely got to see him my entire seven years here."
And whenever he did see him, it always felt as though he only moved out of the morgue for a specific purpose. Whatever that purpose might be or was, he had no idea, all he knew was that you could never find him within the village limits when he did leave.
"He seems like a very reasonable kind of guy, very logical. Some might say even calculative."
"How is it that you're vocabulary improved when you died?" Gil asked.
"That's my little secret." She chuckled.
Gil sighed, but she was right, Blake wasn't the type to send them on a wild goose chase, but he wasn't the type of guy who would say something without it having any meaning.
'What did he say?'
"By mastering Chi you're able to achieve a level of understanding of your own body and your surroundings." Blake had told him a few hours prior to this moment, "One uses chi to map out their own body before being able to circulate fragment energy throughout the body. In doing so, you can cover your skin with fragment energy or even use it to see what you couldn't prior."
Gil remembers him putting a big emphasis on the word 'see' a lot in his explanation, well it was either that or he had just been exaggerating, it was a bit hard to tell the difference especially at a time like this. So it was time for him to probably look into his other lessons.
CRACK!
Gil turned sharply and shone the lantern light behind him, the only things to greet him were the paved rows and some crows that nested on the trees.
"Are you sure we're alone here?" Gil whispered.
"I never said that." Catherine reassured.
"Oh… right, then are we alone?"
"How am I suppose to know that?"
"You know… because you're in a very unique position."
"So just because I'm dead you think I can see other dead people?" Catherine was a bit offended, "How dare you make such an assumption."
"Sorry, I was just…"
CRACK!
More twigs snapped somewhere in his vicinity. His heart rate began to rise drastically.
"Gilly, calm down, remember what Blak---"
She stopped, there was growling in the distance, not only that but something a kin to moaning. Now this was getting a bit too scary for Gil, especially with his tendency of imagining things that may or may not be there.
"Gil." Catherine called, but it was obvious that Gil was trying his best to drown out the sounds. Now that he thought about it, those creatures with ashy skins were pretty horrifying with their demonic presence and weird body shapes. He clenched his chest as he tried to breath in and out.
Suddenly everything around him seemed a lot scarier than before. The crows looked monstrous and huge, with blood shot eyes and large beaks, the tree trunks seemed like skulls with red eyes glowing at him.
He had been overwhelmed by fear.
"Gil." Catherine's voice sounded heavy and deep, as though being distorted by some external force.
He took deep breaths, trying to calm himself back, but each breath seemed deeper than it needed to be. He was surpassing his lungs capacity.
"Come, Gil."
He suddenly felt something grab his foot, he jolted backwards, but he still felt something grabbing his leg. Slowly his eyes moved to his ankle, there was a detached bony hand clinging on.
"Mind giving that back?"
He looked up, to find a walking corpse. Its skin peeling from bone. Chunks of rotten flesh fell off hitting the ground, one of his eyeballs hung outside his skull tethered to his brain by a piece of pink flesh.
Gil's eyes widened.
"I'll be eating your brains now if you don't mind." The corpse said with a wide smile. "Don't--" Before it could finish, its lower jaw got flung as Gil managed to throw a last minute punch.
"Huh?"
"Damn it." He whispered as he made run for it. In this state one might ask themselves, 'You have lightning based abilities, why not use them.' in truth he tried, he tried creating a spark, which added up to nothing.
It was going to get harder from here, as since he had used his heightened state to achieve purple lightning before even mastering the basics, he would have to work twice as hard as he would have if he hadn't in the first place. He was seeing the draw backs now. But how would he have known? Its not like theirs a manual on these things, and even if there was no one ever gave it to him.
In fact a few months prior to this he had no idea sorcery was a thing he could use. Now here he was, running from an undead man in the dark under a blood red moon. What a time to be alive.
Everything seemed the same as he ran through that graveyard, the road he thought would send him back just sent him into a spiral of thoughts, with creatures he had never seen before. His mind spiraled on the brink of madness as up turned to down, left was now right and when he found himself falling down it felt as though the world opened up itself just to swallow him.
Now he fell, deep into a trance of life, death and rebirth as the world spun around him sending him to a place that not even the most wicked of wishes dared to venture.
Unknown to him, the crows kept a close eye, their eyes glowing a bright blue.
THEY ARE WATCHING, WE ALL ARE!
TO BE CONTINUED