I
I no longer remember the first time I took the life of an unsuspecting traveler. Perhaps it was with a crooked axe, the ragged handle wavering unsteadily as the stone blade collapsed their ashen throat, drenching our morbid ballet in a cloud of dark blood. Or perhaps it was more happenstance, a lucky dart blown from a distance, connecting with one of the many vulnerable pockets of taut skin, a warrior's final pleas for mercy drowned out by the haughty jeers of his assailants. It's a memory that wasn't so much forgotten as it was replaced, my mind filled with the images and scars of countless skirmishes since that first, each marked by the worst inside someone bubbling forth, a primal and violent fury—all while the insides of another spilled out, decorating our village with the musk of death and decay.
But travelers aren't the only ones whose corpses nurture the soil here in the Settlement. Hollows and hounds are felled like clockwork, routinely butchered by those too powerful for us to overcome. After all, in a past life, in a distant land, in a dream somewhere long forgotten—what were we but mere peasants, a throwaway gang of miserable sinners and wretches now cursed to fall at the blades of foreigners? Some of those among us try to tell me otherwise, spinning their yarns in a guttural and twisted tongue, but the bile salivating from their purple lips betrays the stories of their supposed former braveries. How do they expect any of us to believe that a knight or mage would ever be reborn as a lowly thrall? Regardless, stories are just stories, and words can't help them escape death. And so they die.
I've joined them more times than I can count.
I don't remember my first death, or the first hundred following it. But the curse of Lothric remains—no matter how viciously we fight, no matter how agonizing our own suffering, we never stay down. Never was there more apt a name than the Undead Settlement. No one can truly explain it, though some claim to have seen a swirling gold haze, like swaying serpentine tendrils of a cloud pulled from some distant heavens, circling mysterious bonfires. It is to these fires we attribute our cyclical agonies, time itself becoming an illusion as we are birthed and rebirthed emad infinitum. /emBefore anything can ever be done, before any investigation can occur—not that any of the other dung-headed lowlifes care for much more beyond the next notch in their knife—we're pulled back, the cursed hands of time weaving a new thread into their fabric, tearing out the stitches of the past—whether it be a past where we've slain or been slain—and building a new pattern, a new timeline for us all to follow. We dimly retain some memories, hazy as they may be, and some of the scars remain, fading as additional threads are torn and rewoven, fingers of misery tracing the outlines of bruises on our flesh as new shades bloom.
A brave few have ventured past the fire, in search for peace or answers or some other mysterious and unobtainable Truth, but none ever return. Their absence is temporarily noted in the village, typically marked by the growls of discontent from the hollows we serve, angry that their servant has abandoned their post. Yet without exception, upon the return of that golden haze, that foreign luminescent glow, a new thrall will appear in the village to take the place of the one that left. Perhaps they're one and the same, but they never understand our questions and are unresponsive to any former names. The thralls that leave return in body only; the spirit and soul are lost somewhere in the unknown.
So it continues, from familiar faces and new, from blades and burns to pestilence and witchcraft unknown—we kill, we die, we retread the same paths we always have; the hunger within ebbs and undulates, growing voraciously as whatever semblance of reason within us becomes violently dissolute. Not much changes within the Settlement.
At least, that was true until Greirat. A lowly thrall, hollowed and subservient like the rest of us, though what he lacked in brute strength he compensated for with his cunning. As with the others, there's no way for any of us to either confirm or disprove his tales, but rumors abounded that it was Greirat who first started climbing and hiding in the musty rafters of buildings, that it was Greirat who showed us—the weak, disillusioned, and hopeless—that we, too, could satiate that suppressed bloodlust, long unquenched, dormant yet brooding within each of us. It wasn't long before Greirat became a symbolic figure in the Settlement, though what that symbol meant varied based on whom you asked. To some, he was the guiding force they had long sought, instilling in them a self-dependent efficiency, a catalyst to further hone their murderous craft. To others, he represented a faint beacon of hope, the manifestation of the idea that it was possible to do things differently, that our positions within this cycle of death could change, if only slightly.
One day, Greirat was gone. There was no new hollow stumbling in his place, dim and unaware, and no corpse signifying his passing. Murmurs of how he slipped outside the Settlement surprised no one—he was always one wont for adventure, often filling my ears with a prophetic, if not misplaced, vision of a distant land of wealth and revelry. In his absence, we endured the lashes and abuse from the hollows he served, an angry retribution for a slave's disappearance, pools of dark blood gathering and messily lapping into one another. But the rage subsided and eventually the gold mist returned, as it always does, and we were all pulled back into place, everything broken now fixed. But still there was no sign of Greirat or a replacement.
Countless cycles passed. It was a trying time for the Settlement; it seemed each stray traveling wanderer we vanquished was replaced by a dozen more that were even stronger, laying waste to our hollows and homes, leaving behind them a wake of agony and loss. Soon, Greirat's departure ceased to be a topic of discussion or concern, the void left in his former position replaced by a renewed caustic intensity in the others, each of their movements filled with malevolent purpose. Though the others held no quandary with continuing in their slaughters uninhibited, I felt a profound sense of lacking unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was an emptiness within me that sharply contrasted with the empty feeling of having one's entrails escape them; it was a longing that far exceeded the one I once harbored exclusively for bloodshed. Even as I felt myself torn apart by gnats and horned insects, the victim of a dark spell, minuscule assailants flooding my pores, puncturing my flesh and organs, feasting on my living body—I felt the wonder within me take shape, forming an imaginative iron shell that withstood death, a promise of a future that I could endure.
Then Greirat returned—and he wasn't alone.
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