Through These Nights

Chapter Seven: Happiness

Author's note: A slightly more upbeat chapter, in preparation for the upheaval I'll be pouring onto you all in the next ones! Aren't you excited?

Anyway, aside from that – there's some magic and language and zombie meta going on here. Amelia's attempt at approximating the lines from Knoll's text are actually derived from phonetic readings of a translation of the imagined sentence into Old English, which, as with the text and Magvel's current tongue, has some superficial similarities with our modern English, but is truly a very different beast. And. . . yes, I am a language geek.

Continued thanks and love to everyone who's following this. Things will be getting underway very soon.

Amelia's chest shuddered with each heaving breath that came as she drove her sword into the putrid torso of yet another revenant. A strangled gurgle burst from the ruins of its throat as the blade tore into the gaping cavern that had once been its gut and rended the creature nearly in two. It almost sounded human.

There was something even more human in the way its eyes, dead once again as they should have remained, stared up at Amelia, and in the way its jaw, clothed by strips of half-rotten flesh, hung open, as if in mid-scream. There was another lumbering toward her already, but for just a moment, Amelia allowed herself to stare, and to notice that in the deep, reeking holes of its face, its eyes shone a shade of green that was all too familiar.

Were it not for that, she might have wondered why it was its eyes were even still intact when the other soft organs were clearly in tatters, if perhaps the thing could actually see, instead of just dragging its body toward its targets through some hideous, unnatural sense. As it was, she could do nothing but stare at them, her sword slack in her hand and her mind ablaze with images she didn't want to remember. Blood on her hands, on her face, on her clothes as she held him close to her body and shouted his name.

Amelia didn't want to remember that. She focused instead on the cold, creeping sensation of another revenant's hideous hand fixing on her forearm, and on the satisfying squelch of her blade slicing its arm clean off before running it through. Worse than the sight of them, the peeling, wrinkled skin and soft, wretched flesh, was the smell – sickly-sweet and unescapable, like meat left out too long in the sun. Amelia was sure it would cling to her clothes and hair as it always did, just as the smell of blood from the battlefield never quite left her.

The almost-human things were not the only ones creeping out from the edges of the woods. There were a few – thankfully only a few – of the larger, monstrous things that would almost seem like ordinary animals were it not for the huge fangs and weapons they bore. She still remembered the sight of the wound in Knoll's shoulder as she dodged the axe of one of the larger beasts, which towered over her even on her mare's back. It had a name, she was sure of that, but she could never quite keep track of them all. All she knew was that there was no one in sight to back her up, and if its blade cut into her the way it had Knoll, she wouldn't make it out alive.

I don't want to die.

There had been a time when she hadn't been so sure of that, but she had recovered quickly. Too much had been lost for the sake of her life. It wasn't for her to just throw that away. She raised her sword with a shout to counter the blow of the axe-wielding creature, her arms nearly buckling beneath the force. She had too much to fight for, too much to live for, to die alone in the woods. She would make sure that no one would ever have to grieve for her sake.

At last the creature withdrew its blade. It heaved the axe upward again in a slow, measured arc, an unexpected act of precision in a thing that was otherwise so wild. Amelia did not wait. She drove her sword into the belly of her foe without a shred of hesitation, only tearing it free when she heard the axe fall to the soft earth below.

As the monster toppled to the ground with its weapon, the few remaining revenants seemed to take it as a cue to retreat. They shambled back into the trees, and Amelia, exhausted and aching, made no move to follow. It would be useless, she figured. There was no way she could take them all on alone.

Her gaze strayed again to one of the monster corpses sprawled out in the mud, its eyes still open and staring her down. It really did resemble a person – the same hands and feet, bones she recognized from too many battles. She could almost imagine lips at the meeting of its skull and exposed jaw, covering the teeth held in by ragged bits of gums. The face she found herself imagining made her stomach lurch and her knees feel weak.

Suppose this was a person, once? Suppose any person could end up like this? Suppose. . .

She couldn't stand the thought. She dug her heel into Shanley's side and urged her on, out of the woods and back into the village, at the fastest speed the mount could handle.

Amelia had hoped to find Duessel in the little cottage. Surely, he'd have some word of comfort. He always seemed to know just what to say, the way no one else ever did. Of course he'd tell her what she'd imagined wasn't possible, and she could stop thinking about it for a while. Even if his words were perfect, it was often hard to believe them. He'd said, as well, that losing Franz was not her fault, that she couldn't have saved him, that no one could have – but he seemed to forget why it was Franz had been where he had, why it was that her own countrymen had been so able to cut him down.

She found, instead, only a slim figure hunched over a book and a single candle. It took her a moment to recognize him without his dark, heavy robes, though it had been nearly two weeks since he'd cast them off and tucked them in with the old books he insisted on carrying.

Maybe Knoll would know, she thought, but she stayed quiet and made no move to come closer. He'd probably snap at her if she asked, and she couldn't truly blame him. Had she perhaps moved a bit faster, shouted a bit more loudly, his arm might still be intact, instead of hanging useless by his side. Were it not for Natasha's own speed and expertise, he might have bled to death out there, or worse.

Amelia's imagination seemed to only be vivid when imagining the worst situations. It could conjure up corpses at a moment's notice and easily recall the sound of blade piercing flesh, of strangled gurgles, of her own name choked out –

She forced herself to focus on what was in front of her, shutting the images out of her mind. She hadn't noticed before how long his pale hair had gotten, long enough that even when messily tied back, it brushed against his shoulder blades as he moved to turn the page. It was an interesting distraction, enough to keep the hideous images at bay for a moment.

"I heard you come in, you know."

Amelia had never quite understood what people meant when they spoke of jumping out of their skin until that moment. Delicate and, dare she say it, pretty as he was, there was something about Knoll's voice that never failed to unnerve her, and it was made even worse by the eerieness of the candlelight on his drawn face and the sudden jolt of his words.

"I'm sorry," she blurted, finally coming a bit closer. Knoll looked up from the tome he'd been studying, which she liked to imagine was in some mysterious arcane tongue. She ignored the text she saw etched in its spine as Knoll closed it and pushed it away: A Concise History of Magvel, Volume 3. It didn't seem particularly arcane or mysterious, or really, interesting at all. "I didn't mean to intrude –"

"Next time, just saying 'hello' will do." She couldn't tell if the edge in his voice was annoyance or fatigue. From the way he slowly closed his eyes, almost as if he was nodding off, she preferred to think it was the latter option. "I take it Duessel went back out to the woods?"

Amelia swallowed hard. "I was hoping to, uhm, to, ah, to find General Duessel here, so I could, ah, tell him that I –"

"Did something happen?" Finally, Knoll looked up from the closed book in front of him and met her eyes. "Are you injured? Let me get the supplies – sit down; don't tax yourself."

"I'm not." By the time she found the words, Knoll was already halfway across the room, rummaging with his one usable arm through his supplies. "No, don't worry, I wasn't hurt at all. I'm fine." It wasn't quite true. Amelia's arms still ached from the force of the blows she'd dealt and countered, and she was sure the claws that had been fixed on her limbs had left their mark. "I just, I, uhm. . .do you know where the monsters come from?"

He stopped short at her words and turned back to face her, the light of the candle casting odd shadows on his face. He was pale enough to be one of those undead creatures, Amelia thought, and nearly as thin. She'd noticed the same things about Natasha, but at least Natasha never looked quite so downtrodden. There were days when she wondered if anything really made him happy.

"Where the monsters come from?" he repeated, eyebrow raised. "It is just the lingering influence of the evils we fought before. The remaining energy is enough to. . . ."

"Not that," Amelia cut in. "The bodies. They look like people."

Knoll carefully replaced the supplies he'd dug out and approached Amelia. He looked at her only through the corners of his eyes, as if afraid to fully meet her gaze. "What are you suggesting?"

"They were never. . . they were never people, were they?"

The question hung in the air in between them as Knoll chewed his lip – hopefully in contemplation, and not in aggravation. Finally, he held up a finger, then went back to the his bag of supplied and pulled out, with some struggle, a tome more worn than any of his others. He thumbed through the pages, muttering to himself as he ran his fingers along the worn text. Finally, he let out a soft "aha" and opened the book all the way, then pushed it toward Amelia. "Read this."

Amelia didn't have to imagine it being in some strange tongue. The characters were almost familiar, but missing parts she thought would make them letters and arranged in ways she couldn't recognize. "On. . . se . . .geberd. . . ?"

Knoll gasped and pulled the book back. "My apologies. I had. . . forgotten. This isn't taught normally, is it?" Before Amelia could answer, Knoll had found the section he had pointed to again and was murmuring the words aloud to himself. The didn't sound quite as Amelia had imagined them by the way they looked.

"What it says, roughly," he said, as he finally spoke words Amelia could understand, "is that the bodies of the revenants were believed – and mind you this text is hundreds of years old, and the scholars in those days were quite. . . no, my apologies, that is an unimportant detail – er, the bodies of the revenants, they are not derived of any mortal creature. Though they take the form of things we know, they are wholly the creation of their master."

"The Demon King, right?" Amelia caught the slight wince as Knoll silently nodded. "So. . . so there's no chance any person would come back like that, right?"

"Not without the influence of forbidden magic, no," Knoll answered, his voice a mere shadow of even its usual hushed tone. He closed the book and pushed it away with a small shake of his head. When he finally looked up at Amelia again, there was an odd expression on his face – a furrowing of his eyebrows, a pinch of his lips. He reached out suddenly and grabbed Amelia's hand, his slender fingers twisting in hers for just a moment. "I can promise you, it will never happen to anyone you love. Never."

Amelia swallowed hard. She had hoped to keep her reasons secret, but clearly, she had failed. "Thank you," she mumbled, as Knoll pulled his hand free.

"It was no trouble," he answered softly, running his hand through the bit of hair that dangled over his face. "Now, you said you were looking for Duessel, did you not?"

Amelia gasped. She had nearly forgotten. "Right! There's no one out patrolling the village – I have to hurry; I'm sorry!" She jolted out of the seat she'd taken and scrambled for the door.

"I believe he is still in the fields with Cormag – look there first," Knoll said above her commotion. Amelia was halfway out the door by the time he spoke, but she turned back around to poke her head inside.

"Thank you!" she repeated again, and it was only as she remounted Shanley and spurred her on again that Amelia realized that Knoll had smiled at her words.