Undead

In a way, not much had changed, really.

There were still early awakenings, shouted commands, muffled complaints. They still had to perform sword practice and guard duty; he still went to sleep in a crammed bedroom in the barracks, albeit a different one than before. The food was miserable as ever, and the weather even uncommonly dreary. Lothric worked the same as it had for years.

But there were the looks.

Gael noticed them everywhere he went; they prickled on the back of his neck constantly. Sometimes they were simply curious, but these he had quickly learned were the exception: most showed open disgust and fear. Some felt like silent accusations; that he wasn't like them, that he was still walking. Everyone seemed to know. And most looked away when he stared back. He was determined not to let it faze him, but he now had to steel himself every time he left the barracks.

These looks were bad, but it was almost worse when he was back inside the barracks with his fellow soldiers. Whenever he crossed eyes with one of them, they spoke not of contempt, but of despair and defeat. You wouldn't see slumped shoulders, or any of them hanging their heads, or any other outward signs; but the looks were always there. He wondered whether he looked like that, too. Probably. The Others had to recognize him somehow, since there were no outward signs of his condition as far as he could tell. But this air of defeat, it seemed to be common to them all.

There were some exceptions. A soldier in his opposite bunk, Geirm, was almost cheerful about his condition. He claimed to be the oldest Undead among them, and he saw his many rebirths as a way of spiting some higher power or other. Sometimes it was the world itself that had tried and failed to kill him- his first death had been in a landslide-, other times it was the royal family they were serving: "Let that old fart of a king chase his precious immortality; he'll never get to the same level as me base farmhand. Has to irk him somethin mighty!"

Then there was the one who had drawn patrol duty along with him this night. Knut, his name was. He had the pallid skin and blue eyes of a Northerner, and those eyes never showed any sadness. In fact, they very seldom showed emotion at all. Most of the time, he seemed to be somewhere far away, though he always performed what was required of him. He rarely talked either, which suited Gael fine. He had his own thoughts to dwell on.

Walking the battlements, with Knut carrying the torch, they passed several guards in their little alcoves, who watched them warily. None of them were Undead. Gael suspected they had orders to watch them just as well as any possible intruder. They might still wear the same uniforms, but that didn't mean much. Nobody bothered much to conceal it: even though there were hundreds of Undead in the barracks by now, they were only ever sent out in small groups; so that they were outnumbered wherever they went. They were treated like the enemy, Gael thought wearily. Why did they still keep him and his fellow soldiers here, then?

It had very quickly become apparent that his case was by no means singular. Upon reporting in the barracks, he had met several soldiers who had died in the same battle at the streams, though he didn't recognize any of them- he didn't know whether to be glad about that. But there were also men like Geirm, some of whom had first been reborn as long ago as twenty years, and as far away as Courland. There were archers, pike men, swords, even peasants who had only ever wielded a pitchfork in their life. They had all been shepherded together here for some purpose. No one had yet bothered to tell them what that was, but then it wasn't that hard to guess. The quartermaster had put it best: Dying once simply wasn't enough anymore. The king of Lothric, or his army commanders, must have realized the potential of an army that could fight for them as often as they chose. No, Gael reflected grimly, fighting wasn't the word. Getting slaughtered more likely; used as re-usable cannon fodder. None of them were knights, after all; they had all been infantrymen, and now they could simply fulfil that role more effectively.

None of them had any illusions about their situation, and if there had been some in the beginning, they had quickly been dispelled by their officers. Strikingly, none of these had died before. They didn't make a secret of what they thought of their underlings: the fact that they had died made them second-class soldiers at best, because how much fighting spirits could they have left after that? Among them, the quartermaster Gael had met after his awakening was one of the better ones. He didn't treat them any kinder, but at least he seemed to be determined to work with what he was given, which resulted in them receiving a lot of training under his watch. It kept their mind and body occupied at least.

They had reached the outer wall. The sky had turned dark with clouds, so much so that Gael could barely see twenty feet in front of him. Theirs was the only light on this stretch, as they had drawn the first shift of the night. While Knut lit the scattered sconces with his torch, he fell back a little and looked over the battlements, letting his eyes wander across the darkness. To the south, a silver shimmer indicated the sea. His eyes turned eastward, towards the mountains over which he had come to Lothric back then. It seemed like a very long time ago.

"Better forget it."

Gael started at the voice. He glanced at his partner. Knut kept walking. "What?"

"Escaping." The soldier lit the next sconce. "Forget it."

Gael caught up to him. "I wasn't thinking of…"

Knut turned towards him. His expressionless eyes shone in the torchlight: "Friend, I've been here a while longer; I've seen that look lots of times. 'Get out the next chance you get; this isn't where you belong', is what you're thinking. Am I right?"

To have it spelled out before him like that by this soldier he scarcely knew was something very different than thinking it to himself in the nights. It was the fact that everyone seemed to just accept it. As if from a black pit, Gael felt anger rise within him; anger directed at everything, but it found a specific target. "And if so, friend?" he questioned. "What do you care?" Part of him- the dominant part at the moment- hoped that his partner would take offence and begin a quarrel, if for no other reason than to have to think about something else for once.

Knut didn't seem fazed. "If you really want to leave, you will manage it somehow." he stated. "You could throw yourself off the wall and hope that you'll wake up before they find you." He nodded across the wall: "There's a settlement for Undead not far from here, if you want to try your luck there. But you won't have it any better there than you do here, I believe."

"I don't care about some settlement!" In the back of his mind he knew that Knut was probably trying to be helpful, but right now he simply presented a vent for Gael's frustration. "I don't care about any of this; I just want to go home! That's where I belong, not to some old king who can slaughter me over and over again like a sheep!"

"No, you certainly don't belong here. You don't belong anywhere; you're an Undead."

There it was; the dreaded word that kept creeping into his thoughts. Undead. Undead. Lucky to walk again. Freak. Cursed. And not truly a part of the world of the living. Gael shook his head, attempting to dispel these implications he had tried with all his might to supress. The anger had suddenly left him. "No. I have a family…" He couldn't go on and his voice failed him.

A gloved hand rested on his shoulder. "I'm sorry for you, friend. Truly, I am. But our condition- people just don't shrug it off like that. We frighten them. You see how the other guards look at us; do you really want to see that look on your family's faces?" The words were daggers, boring into him mercilessly. "If you still have some responsibility left, you'll spare them that ordeal. And yourself, too."

They had drawn to a stop. Some distance away, another pair of guards was coming towards them, but Gael hardly saw them. His sister's laughing face danced before his eyes; her braid swinging in the strong winds that swept over the cliffs of Astora, mere days before he had left for the High Wall. But her eyes weren't laughing; they had that frightened look now. It hurt more than the spear had.

Knut drew him onwards, before the guardsmen reached them. He was vaguely aware of them staring at him, but he couldn't tell if it was the usual look of disgust or if they were wondering about the tears he felt in his eyes. Knut had tactfully drawn ahead of him again. A tear ran on Gael's cheek, and he saw it fall onto his breastplate. In his haze, he seized that image and held on to it. Wasn't that proof that he was still human? He was, despite everything. Knut, the quartermaster, they all saw something in him that simply wasn't there.

Gael wiped his eyes. Knut was wrong. He did belong into this world. He did not feel like dying had changed him into a different person, let alone something less than human. He could not accept this being cast upon him, like everyone else seemed to have done. Nor would his sister accept it, he suddenly felt certain. The look on her face had just been his imagination, and now he felt ashamed for it. She was better than that, better than all the people in Lothric. His breathing evened out. He was still breathing, too.

They kept walking, with neither Knut nor Gael making any attempt at speaking further. To the lonely tower that marked the end of their guard, and back the way they came. Paradoxically, Gael felt elated. Dwelling on all this in solitude had done him no good, he realized; it made everything look far worse than it was. In some strange way, he felt grateful to his partner. He had something and someone worth living for. And Knut… He re-played their conversation in his mind.

"Who is it?" he finally asked.

Knut looked at him blankly.

Gael pressed on: "You were speaking from experience, weren't you?"

His partner shrugged, but for a second, there seemed to be a little live returned to his face: "My daughters. Beautiful little girls; they loved to sing. Never let them see me like this." He paused, looking over the wall, towards the sea. "Was better that way."

Gael swallowed: "You never once saw them after you became Undead? Even if you had the chance now?"

Knut glanced at him, with those absent blue eyes. "Why would I? They're long dead by now."

The rest of the walk back to the barracks passed in silence.