The Undead Librarian

⟢ ˚. Chapter Three ⊹ ❜ .ᐟ

“How could you leave him like that?”

Shadowheart threw Karlach a scathing glare. “You try getting that prick to listen to you!”

“Maybe if you stopped insulting him, he would listen for once!” Karlach snapped back, nearly rattling Clive back and forth.

“Even if she did, the lad seems to have an agenda of his own,” Wyll said from where he sat at the edge of the campfire, polishing the hilt of his rapier with a rag. “I don’t suppose you know what it is, Astarion?”

The vampire, sitting on a log and lazily cleaning his fingernails, scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Why does everyone think I know everything about him? He doesn’t speak to me either.”

“Oh? Really?” Shadowheart crossed her arms and gave him a look of disbelief. “What’s with all the sneaking around then? You guys aren’t as quiet as you think you are — and, speaking of, please keep your moans down. Some of us want to sleep.”

“And some of us are lonely,” Karlach added with a sniffle, hugging Clive closer to her chest, and smothered a flame from his charred ear with her fingertips.

“Hear ye! Hear ye!” Gale cried from where he was chopping potatoes into small chunks and tossing them into a bucket of water. “Never have I felt the absence of a lover’s embrace stronger than when those two go all night—”

“Alright, alright!” Astarion snapped, raising a hand and silencing Gale from painting a vivid picture. “First of all, no, we’re not having sex. That is… no. Just no.”

“Were it not bruises on your neck I saw the other day?” Lae’zel asked as she walked out of her tent, sheathing her long sword on her back and cracking her neck. “Or were you viciously attacked by another walking leech?”

“Bruises—” Shadowheart grinned, her hazel eyes gleaming mischievously. “Oh, so you are fucking?”

Astarion glowered at Lae’zel, then cast his fiery gaze onto Shadowheart. “No. Messing around is one thing. Sex is another. I thought you of all people would know that—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shadowheart asked.

“—and my private intimate life aside, I don’t know what’s wrong with Adin. I don’t pry because, frankly, I don’t care.”

“Biggest load of bullshit ever!” Karlach sang. Wyll hummed in agreement. “You care so fucking much, it disgusts you.”

Astarion flipped her off and went back to cleaning his nails.

The conversation fell silent after that. No one really knew what to say. Ever since they met Adin in the wilderness, in the wreckage of their kidnapping and uprooting of their lives, he had been an enigma and remained so — despite everything they had gone through together as a group. He was silent, never offering more than what needed to be said, and often used cruel words to get them off his back. It didn’t allow a lot of room for relationship building.

Still, no one could deny it: the drow had a knack for war. Perhaps he wasn’t leader material, lacking in the social aspect, but he could be charismatic when he wanted to be, to get what he wanted, when he wanted it, and was able to point out the weakest points within their enemies in seconds. That sort of eye was invaluable in their current situation.

While quiet conversation began to flow between the campers, a sudden sound from the distance prompted them to glance at each other in confusion and stand up. Weapons were drawn, magic sizzled in the air, and falling into formation, the companions kept a watchful eye on the darkness beyond the torches.

“—elp!”

Ever so slowly, the voice grew closer.

“Help!”

“Is that…?” Wyll began, but trailed off uncertain.

Beside him, Gale squinted and muttered an incantation for superior dark vision. Although it still wasn’t entirely clear, he could make out a large shape charging towards them, cutting through the darkness, something curled up in its arms.

“By Silvanus’ beard, help us, damn it!”

“Halsin!” The members cried, confused as to what the druid was doing outside the camp, and rushed forward to aid him.

Just as a shadow creature was about to lash Halsin’s back open with its claws, Shadowheart sent down a beam of light onto it with her palm, followed by a ball of holy fire that sent another creature shrieking and shriveling back into the darkness. Lae’zel, along with Karlach and Wyll, flanked the bleeding and sweating Halsin, who carried an unconscious Adin in his arms, their steels flashing in the firelight as they held the onslaught of those desperate monsters back.

“What the Hells happened?!” Astarion snapped, releasing fiery arrow after fiery arrow into the forest. Dried leaves caught on fire, forming walls that cut off more shadows from surrounding the camp. The flames wouldn’t last, smothered eventually by the curse that consumed all light and all living, but it would give them enough time to tighten their defenses.

“I don’t — I don’t know!” Halsin struggled to say as he stumbled into the safety of the camp, nearly buckling to his knees. “I was studying the surrounding area, looking for any information about the curse, when I saw Adin! But I fear… I fear it might be too late.”

“We don’t know that,” Shadowheart said, appearing from behind Halsin, conviction in her eyes. She sheathed her morningstar and pointed towards her sleeping area across the camp. “Put him in my tent.” Then she looked behind her at the others. “Fall back! Now! And someone call Withers, please! He’s always disappearing!”

Halsin, with the little energy he could muster, dragged his feet to Shadowheart’s tent and dropped Adin gently onto her rugs. The drow was cold to the touch and paler than Astarion, not a drop of color in his lips or life to his ruby eyes.

Was it too late?

+++

⟢ ˚. Chapter Four ⊹ ❜ .ᐟ

Dorothea struggled getting up. It felt like a thousand stones were dropped on her body, anchoring her to the floor. It must’ve been all that wine she drank, goddamnit. She really wasn’t in the habit of getting drunk like that, but the holidays had a certain way of burrowing under skin, under her hurt — until she wished to forget.

Even so, she made the effort to open her eyes. After several minutes of strenuous attempts, she succeeded in lifting one heavy eyelid, then another, and stared groggily at the ceiling. She licked her dry lips, wincing when she tasted the sharp tang of blood on her mouth, and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Every limb in her body felt awfully sore. Had she fallen off the couch or something?

Once the film cleared from her eyes, Dorothea slowly sat up with a groan and looked around. But she realized, skin going cold in terror, that she didn’t know where she was. It wasn’t her living room or her bedroom, that much was certain, for the walls were a purple color and — she gingerly touched a wall — made of fabric. She also saw wooden beams, almost like sticks, holding the material up.

It was a goddamned tent. She was in a goddamn tent.

Her first thought was that she’d been kidnapped. Somehow. At some point. Possibly in the middle of her drunken stupor. But when she looked back into her memories, she couldn’t remember a damn thing. No one had been in her house aside from her, and nothing strange had happened…

Had it? She felt that wasn’t quite right, but she couldn’t remember. It hurt every time she tried to recall. It was as if someone had knocked the back of her head with a brick the way her memories were all muddled.

First things first, Dorothea needed to get off her ass. She struggled getting onto her feet, but once she did, slightly swaying, she grasped a beam and inhaled several times. In through her nose. Out through her mouth. Just like her mother taught her after an attack.

Glancing down at herself, Dorothea had expected to see nothing else but her usual body — soft curves hidden underneath an oversized MTV shirt and shorts. However, what she saw much more horrifying than her unwashed and wrinkled sleepwear.

Pale blue skin, flat chest, bloody gauze wrapped around her stomach that most definitely didn’t look like her stomach, and leather-clad legs that stretched on for miles. She let out a terrified, confused sound and staggered backwards, as if she could run from what she was seeing, but bonked her head against a wooden beam in the process.

“Fuck!” She hissed, in a voice so unlike hers — deep and smooth compared to her usual soft, feminine tone. Her hand shot upwards and wrapped around her throat, although it was her head that was throbbing from the slam. It was all too much process in the span of a few minutes.

Gravel crunched outside the tent, and Dorothea’s head snapped towards the direction the sound came from. She could see some movement behind the fabric, but she didn’t have the chance to brace herself when the flaps suddenly parted and light spilled in. Dorothea screwed her eyes shut, hissing in pain against the bright light, and scampered towards the corner of the tent. Unused to her tall stature, she slammed into the fabric like a bird flapping against its cage and instinctively wrapped her arms around her naked chest.

“You’re awake,” a faint voice said, “I knew I heard your voice. How are you… Adin, are you okay?”

Dorothea stared, wide-eyed and terrified, from her corner. Nothing made sense. She didn’t feel right. As if she’d been drugged and pumped full of drugs. The world swam around her. Vision dark and blurry at the edges. The person, a mystery, an ominous shadow blocking her only exit. Every cell im her body screamed danger.

For a few moments, it was pin-drop silent, until a blood-curdling scream escaped Dorothea’s clenched lips, and she grabbed a pillow from the ground, launching it at the stranger.

“What the Hells?!” They snapped, grabbing the pillow before it hit them, but Dorothea took that opportunity to run forward and tackle the shadow to the ground.

Dorothea and the stranger fell in a tangle of limbs and awkward jabs. She developed tunnel vision due to her adrenaline and fear and focused on nothing else as she pushed herself off the person after smacking them with her hand.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Dorothea heard them screech behind her, and she let the anger in their voice propel her forward.

Her long limbs charged towards the dark forest, mind not focused on the fact that she was far, far from the wheat and cow fields she called home. Mind not focused on the fact there was nothing normal about herself or where she was. However, once she was inches away from the tree line, fingertips grazing sweet escape, there was a tug on her waist, and she flew backwards, and it was all gone — trees replaced by a starry sky.

Landing painfully on the ground, Dorothea struggled catching her breath. She gasped and heaved and curled into a ball. Now every bone, whether she knew the name of it or not, was on fire inside her.

“Shit, was that too harsh?”

“Nah, he was about to — ”

The voices faded in and out.

She stared helplessly at a campfire in the distance, her eyes welling up with unshed tears.

Black shoes stepped into her line of sight, and someone dropped onto their knees beside her head. Freezing fingers gently cradled her jaw and forced her to look up. Impossible red eyes ravaged her face, left to right, up then down, and a thumb grazed her lip.

“Do you know who you are?”

Dorothea drank in the appearance of the pale, white-haired figure above her. He wore a frivolous dress shirt with some specks of blood scattered about. His eyes, though nothing gentle, were analytical and observant and bored holes into her skin. High cheekbones. Thin brows. Beautiful and haunting in every sense of the word.

Except he wasn’t real. He couldn’t be real.

“Who are you?” Dorothea whispered, again in that unfamiliar voice of hers, confused and petrified as to what madness was unraveling around her.

⟢ ˚. Chapter One ⊹ ❜ .ᐟ

“Must you be so stubborn?”

Aside from Shadowheart’s annoyed voice echoing through the curse-ravaged lands, no other sounds could be heard for miles on end. No birds. No wind. Not even a leaf. It made it difficult for Adin to pretend he hadn’t heard her; not that he was interested in pretending in the first place.

“All I’m asking is that you take one of us with you,” Shadowheart continued, catching up to Adin from behind. “It doesn’t have to be me.”

Adin gave her an empty look as she fell in step with him and said, “No.”

The tone of his voice allowed no room for argument or space for doubt, but Shadowheart was unfazed. She side-eyed the drow and scoffed.

“Oh? You thought it was a suggestion? I’m coming with you, whether you like it or not. It’s not safe out here.”

Adin wanted to ask why she cared so much whether it was safe or not (nothing about their current lives were safe to begin with), but thinking it’d just be a waste of his breath to argue with the cleric, he decided to take the matter into his own hands and deal with it the only way he knew how. With a flick of his wrist and a whisper of an incantation, roots burst out of the ground beneath Shadowheart’s feet and tethered her still.

She gasped. “You asshole! Let me go this instant!”

He spared her a glance over his shoulder as he trudged towards the thick fog ahead. Roots curled around her ankles to her thighs, wrapping around her waist. She kept on lifting her feet and thrashing side to side, but it was to no avail. “Keep on struggling and they’ll never loosen up,” he warned.

Despite the torch in Shadowheart’s hand, a shadow fell across her eyes. Grinding her teeth, she stole a twig off the floor, and in one fell swoop, threw it at the drow’s head. Except her aim was completely off, and Adin watched it sail over his head with an unimpressed gleam in his red eyes.

He shook his head as he turned back around. “Perhaps work on your aim, and I’ll reconsider your competence,” he told her, his voice loud enough for all the undead critters in the forest to hear.

“Perhaps shove my foot up your ass!”

“Ask Astarion. I believe that’s more his thing.”

Shadowheart growled. “It’s been weeks! You can’t keep on disappearing like this. We’re a team!” Her voice grew louder the further he went. As his shadow shrunk with every little step. And not once did he look back at her or falter. But he heard her. Loud clear. The last words she ever said to him. “Do it alone, then! Fight alone! But that means you’ll die alone, too! Is that what you want? Is that what you want, Adin?!”

He did not know what he wanted.

He didn’t think it had ever mattered.

+++

⟢ ˚. Chapter Two ⊹ ❜ .ᐟ

Grief was a funny thing. It came and went for Dorothea Park. Like sea foam on a beach, lapping at the sand. A bitter-sweet push and pull. A never ending carousel ride.

Sometimes, when she didn’t remember, she smiled and laughed and enjoyed strolls around the park. She had the energy to do those things. To life live the way her mother wanted her to live it. But then, other times, such as the days leading up to the funeral anniversary, or her mother’s birthday, she remembered, and all the joy was immediately sucked out of her lungs. Her body became a heavy burden she did not want to carry, and she’d end up rolled up in her bed for hours on end. There was no one or nothing to get up for.

Not even for herself.

Although her job at the elementary school forced her out of bed, she still did so grudgingly. She wanted to smile for her kids, but it hurt. And it hurt especially more when she saw them with their parents, running to them with their arms open wide, ear-splitting grins on their little faces. She was jealous, so bitterly jealous. She was only twenty-four, and she’d already lost all her family. There was no mother at her graduation to run to and cry with.

Usually, Dorothea threw herself into work to drown out the sorrows, but it was Christmas break, and that made it all the more worse. She ended up curled up on her couch, chugging glasses of wine after wine, staring emptily at the Christmas tree in the corner of her living room. She only put it up because she hadn’t liked how empty her home felt without it. She didn’t even know why she was drinking wine. She didn’t like wine! She just needed something to do.

There was that game she bought a few months ago though… which she finished once, in the easiest mode, and never touched again. She sipped her bitter wine and mulled it over. According to all the videos she saw, there was at least a full day of unexplored content. And she liked doing the character customization thing. It was fun.

With nothing better to do, besides get drunk and cry, Dorothea turned her console on and settled comfortably into her couch. It was late in the afternoon, meaning she had a good few hours until midnight, so she could cover a good amount of ground until then and call it a night.

She had been gravely mistaken. Never underestimate a drunk woman’s incentive to take on two whole acts on her own.

“Leave me alone!”

Dorothea had a furious look of concentration on her face, while she shouted at the screen as another one of those shadow creatures slithered out of the trees and initiated a battle. It had felt like the hundredth time something was out to kill her in the Shadow-Cursed Lands.

What she wanted was a peaceful trek to the Last Light Inn, which she had forgotten how to find, but Honor Mode had other plans. It wanted her to suffer.

Since it was her first Honor run, she hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be. And, yes, she had read the rules. It just happened to be that she overestimated her patience and skills and thought, compared to Dark Souls, it would be a piece of cake. And, sure, it was — in some regards. But the game mode was still a nightmare on its own.

Unfortunately for her, she had sent her character, the Dark Urge (she didn’t know what to call him), alone to explore and scavenge the Shadow-Cursed Lands —because she thought it would’ve been a fun in-character thing to do. Now she had five-and-counting cursed undeads to deal with, armed with ten health potions and sheer fucking will alone. She refused to let all her hard work end in vain.

Since she was first in the turn, Dorothea decided it was the perfect time to run to the bathroom and grab a snack before locking in and finishing the fight. She stumbled around her fallen pillows and cluster of books, finding her way into the hall. In the darkness, she patted the walls until she found the doorknob and slipped in. She gasped when she turned the light on and the horrendous state of her being was revealed. Greasy, two-day old hair thrown into a lopsided bird’s nest of a bun. Her brown eyes were red and puffy. Meanwhile, she poked her skin which had certainly seen better days. Perhaps the concept of the sun should be revisited some time soon…

Not in the mood to pick her appearance apart, Dorothea quickly did her business and exited the bathroom. Her vision slightly swayed as she went, and she shook her head as she paused at the threshold of her living room. She hadn’t eaten enough all day to had drunk the amount of wine she did. What if she got alcohol poisoning? She scolded herself, then moved towards the kitchen with the intention of drinking half her body weight in water, but froze once more and cocked her head in confusion.

Her eyes narrowed on the glitches destroying her TV screen.

“Oh, fuck me.” Dorothea pressed her fingers to her throbbing forehead and sighed. She padded towards her TV and gave it a good smack. “Damn old thing. I knew this would happen eventually.”

Although she didn’t know what she was doing, Dorothea took a peek at the cables behind the TV and shimmied them back and forth, hoping that would somehow fix the issues. But when she stepped back, she saw nothing had changed. Various shades of purple kept on popping up and appearing all over her screen. Even the music was all messed up, scratchy and eerie in a way that set her hairs on end.

Sighing, she swept the TV remote control off her couch and pressed the turn off button. It didn’t turn off. She repeatedly slammed her thumb into the red button, but nothing changed. The glitches persisted, growing larger by the second. She threw the remote back on the couch and was about to unplug the whole damn thing when purple fog slithered out of the TV onto her floorboards.

Dorothea blinked.

“Holy—” she hiccuped “—shit! I must be drunk as fuck.” She studied the strange magic happening before her eyes and wiggled her toes as the fog wrapped around her ankles. It was rather cold.