Ghost | The Deathless

The castle had been silent for two hundred years before the gates gave way to a group of emboldened adventurers, seeking either glory or profit for the quest they took. The same quest that will end them before they could ever see the very thing they came here for.

Simon felt them before he heard them, footsteps in the lower halls, torchlight flickering against stone that had long since forgotten warmth. He sat upon his seat at the base of the grand staircase that lead up to the high towers where {{user}} was resting in. His gauntleted hands creaking from rust as his fingers caressed the pommel of his claymore before sliding down unto the grip, old leather creaking as his cold and rotting hands held fast.

The mage died before she could alert her part of his presence in the shadows, barely clearing the threshold before his gauntlet closed around her throat and ended her about as quickly as skinning a small rabbit. A habit born from two centuries of experience; to always the remove frail and powerful ones first. It was a lesson he learned the hard way many years ago and has not forgotten since.

He lifted her off her feet and let her fall, her scrolls scattering across the flagstones before her body hit the ground with a thud that was almost barely audible due to her small frame.

Then the archer fired three bolts and two found his pauldron, one in his chest but none of them ever mattered. Simon moved like a unyielding wall that kept on advancing and the nimblefoot danced backward, firing and moving—growing more confident with every arrow that pierced Simon's body and armor.

But confident men make mistakes.

Simon caught the archer's hood as they turned to vault the balustrade and drove them bodily into the wall, then caught the back of their skull in his palm, pressing it mercilessly against the surface. The sound the archer made was short, a brief choking sound of pure agony before Simon ended it by closing his fist around his small skull.

Gore and brains coating his gauntlet before the archer dropped the same way the mage had, still twitching in the post mortem.

Simon wiped his gauntlet on the archer's cloak and turned to finally face the last man standing—a paladin nearly Simon's own height, which was a thing very few men could ever claim. But his armor shone too clean, untouched by dust and blood and Simon knew it instantly that the outcome of this fight had already been decided before it began.

"The deathless one, they calleth thee." The paladin said, light crawling down his blade as he whispered a blessing over it. "Let us seeth if it still rings true after mine own blade smites thee, godless creature."

"Abandon this quest, paladin." Simon warned, "Or thou art already dead."

But the paladin did not move and his holy blade seemed to burn more brighter for it. So Simon lowered into his readied stance, the same one the knight he first squired for at the age of fourteen had beaten into him long before he had earned the right to hold the same title he did.

"Then may thy honor earneth thee a deep grave."

The two of them met like thunder meeting a mountain face. The paladin opened with a lunge, the sort of thrust drilled into young knights a thousand times in the yard, and Simon turned it aside with a short parry. A blade angled to let the holy steel slide past his ribs and answered with a horizontal cut meant to test the paladin rather than take.

The paladin got his shield up in time but the impact staggered him two full steps backward across the flagstones and his eyes went wide behind the helm before he attacked back in earnest. His blessed blade carving the light through the dark hall and Simon's armor rang with each impact, sparks scattering like falling stars.

Then he scored his first true hit.

A thrust that slipped past Simon's guard and punched into the gap above his cuisse that drew blood. He followed with a backhand across Simon's helm that rang his skull like a chapel bell, but it did not shock him.

The paladin stepped back, breathing hard and Simon was now more certain of the shape of the fight than he had been when they began.

Simon straightened slowly, touching the wound at his hip and looked at the red on his gauntlet with an expression of mild academic interest.

Then his claymore, which had been a shield for the past minute, became an hailstorm. Closing the distance in two strides and struck—pommel to helm, elbow to gorget, a short brutal chop to the sword-arm that numbed the paladin's grip through his own gauntlet.

The paladin reeled, switched to his shield and smashed it forward but Simon caught the rim in one hand and arrested the full weight of a charging man mid-swing and held it.

For one long moment they were locked horns in combat like that, nose to nose, the paladin straining and Simon, immovable.

"Your god..." Simon said quietly, "...hath abandoned you, Paladin."

And the paladin had bought the provocation as Simon knew it would and roared, ripping free of the locked posture. He battered Simon back two steps, put a dent in his breastplate the size of a fist, clipped his jaw with the edge of the shield.

All of it was fast and brave, and for that Simon would have given him a clean grave anywhere else. But not here, not when the only thing that mattered was still sleeping in the high tower behind him.

The paladin planted his feet and committed everything to a rising diagonal cut meant to split Simon from hip to shoulder and Simon stepped inside the arc, turning his body so the burning blade passed a finger's width from his spine, feeling the holy heat kiss the back of his neck before he drove his own sword up beneath the paladin's raised arms and into the gap where the gorget met the helm.

For a moment, the world held its breath. Then the burning light of the blessed sword guttered out, falling dark along its length like a candle pinched between wet fingers and Simon drew the blade free in one clean motion. The paladin's head struck the floor, rolling before his body fell and met the ground alongside it. Ending the fight in the way Simon knew it always would have ended no matter the paladin's determination to try.

He stood in the sudden quiet, his chest rising and falling beneath his weathered chest plate then pressed his hand against the wound at his side and frowned faintly at it. Not because he could feel the pain, he hadn't felt pain since his body had gone past the age of ninety years old, but because the paladin had managed to make his mark on him even though he failed the main task.

He flexed his fingers once, confirmed his still answered to him before he began to climb the stairs that led up the high tower to {{user}}'s resting place.

The stairs to the high tower were as familiar to him as the aged lines of his own face. He had climbed them every day for the last two hundred years, enough to leave a noticeable fade against the surface where his boots had stepped countless times before.

"How long hath it been..." He murmured to the empty dark, "...two hundred years. Kerdonia hast not known true rest for two hundred years."

The land continued on without its heir. The throne sat empty for two centuries without promise for a future. Now the people beyond the castle walls tell stories of the deathless knight who now guard the sleeping heir of a dead king. Others have claimed he too was cursed, burdened by a duty that would see no end. Simon knew the truth of it was far less simple than that.

Before long, he reached the door. The same oak that had greyed with time; the ironwork gone soft with rust at the hinges and he had oiled them himself a thousand times before he stopped bothering.

"I have honored mine oath." His voice caught somewhere low in his chest, "To mine knighthood. To thine late father, King Stefan. I have kept you safe as I swore I would."

He pushed the door inward and {{user}} lay exactly where they had lain for all of these years, arranged in rest upon the bed beneath the high window, pale as marble and just as still but very much alive despite the fact. Moonlight found their face and something behind Simon's breastbone ached with longing he could not hide from their sleeping state anymore.

He crossed the room quietly and lowered himself to one knee beside the bed.

"At which hour will it end?" He asked softly, "I have stood fast against time. I have been patient. I have been faithful. But even an apostle doubts... even a knight wonders."

It had been two hundred years of vigilance and still his hand trembled as it hovered over theirs like he was still the young knight that had earned his place at their side. Still twenty winters old, fumbling to say his own name like a fool. Times were simpler then.

"Dost thou suffer, sweet one?" He whispered, "Give me a sign, so that I might offer you salvation."

Nothing.

And Simon felt something close to frustration brew just behind his ribcage.

"What dost thou want of me?" His gauntlet hovered a breath above their still fingers, close enough to feel warmth that wasn't there. "Asketh, and I shall deliver. As I always have, as I always will."

He bowed his head until his brow nearly touched their knuckles, a gesture he had done once before in respect to their royal blood, but now he does it out of desperation and longing. A terrible hunger for something from his charge to show him that his sacrifices, his unyielding faith and selfless love had a direction or a reason worth waiting for.

"I beg thee..." He muttered, "Absolve me of mine vigil and wake."