thrice dead

2021-01-13

I’m flying around the outside of the castle keep, in some new part of the country I’ve never been to before, my cloak billowing out behind me as I soar and glide.

I spot a bit of dense thicket, shrubs and bushes, in an otherwise flat and sparse grassland, and for just a second I think I can spot something larger within the thicket. Like peering into a keyhole and seeing the room beyond it.

I swoop down and carefully pick my way through the bush and find a hole, the entrance to an underground ravine that seems to recede straight down into the earth. I can’t see the bottom.

I billow my cloak and jump in, floating slowly down, but still too quickly for me to take in the sights, my head whipping around to the left and the right, trying to see as much as possible. The canyon walls have been worked smooth by competent hands, and then lined with shelves all around, packed with chests and boxes and jars and urns and bottles and other trinkets. Roots from above reach down and intertwine themselves with the shelving, while at the same time thick, hoary vines reach up from below and do the same. Somebody carved out the stone to make room for all this, but then grew this space into the rock.

I finally reach the bottom and stand myself up on the bare stone floor. I am surrounded with stuff of alchemy and druidcraft. Cauldrons boiling, potions brewing. A thick tome on a pedestal seems to be writing itself, words appearing in a tight flowing script until the page fills, at which point the page turns itself and the writing continues. The air crackles with magic. Whatever this place is, it is otherworldly. The world above may have mastered its arts and built fine roads and strong stone buildings. But the masters of this place are mastering the stuff of creation and reality itself.

Soon I am discovered. I am an interloper, an intruder, until I am proven. My trial will be to conduct a ritual. One already scheduled to happen. They have captured an enemy and will kill her and use her life to fuel their magicks. Only now it is I who must perform the deed and then be welcomed into their ranks to study their arts, or else I will forfeit my own life in addition to hers.

They bring her out and lay her out long and naked on a low altar of dark flaky stone. She seems to be sleeping, an unnatural sleep brought on by one of their potions or spells. She is beautiful.

My attendant hands me a slender, exquisite glaive, runes spiraling around the thin wooden handle and etched along the length of the blade.

This is the ritual of the thrice dead. I must first pierce her heart with the tip of the blade. I must secondly slice her throat with the edge of the blade. And I must finally hold her beneath the flowing waters of the underground river and bury her there.

In her sleep she takes a deep breath and her eyes move beneath her eyelids. Dreaming. A dream she will wake from, I will see to it.

I stand over her and aim the blade at her naked chest, and plunge it down carefully. I pierce her skin and feel the blade stop, blocked by her ribs.

My attendant’s face darkens.

I carefully draw the blade across her throat, making a thin line, beads of blood sweating from her skin. Not deep enough to harm.

And I wade into the water carrying her and I support her as she sinks halfway into the water and floats there in my arms.

The attendant roughly seizes me and leads me back to the altar and orders me to start again.

I gently pierce her chest again. He seizes the shaft of the glaive, his hands closing over mine, and thrusts down, the blade going clean through her chest.

Still gripping my hands, he swings the blade up and brings it down, nearly taking her head clean off.

He escorts me back to the river’s edge, where he watches me wade out into the water with her until we both sink beneath the waters and still I carry us across the waterbed until we are far, far below the surface.

I sit and cry and cradle her to my chest and I let the currents drag us along the bottom of the river where they please, and we remain like this for how long I don’t know. Eventually she wakes and reaches her arms up and around me and holds me back.

We swim together. The wound on her neck is little more than a scratch. The hole in her chest just a scrape.

We swim until the river emerges from the underground. We break the surface far from where we entered, far from the eyes of the magicians. She swims toward me, kisses me softly, and then plunges back beneath the surface of the water and is gone. I float on my back and look up at the sky.