The soft crackle of leather gloves and a broadsword’s heft in my grip. The play of shadows across ancient, dusty stonework, cast by the sputtering flame of our torches. These sounds and images come to me in colorful splashes out of the darkness, as I stand alone, waiting. My body is ravenous, but strangely still. As patient as an empty grave.
Alone, with my memory, images and sounds, of chainmail, of a boot’s thud and scrape along the floor. ‘Careful now,’ whispered a voice from behind, long ago. The memory is vivid, disjointed. My hand grips the handle of a cobweb covered door, and I pull. A seal of dirt and grime on the edges of the doorframe, laid over hundreds of years in this dank gloom – cracks – and peels, as I yank the door open, pulling with great effort. Iron hinges creak and groan – too loud in the silence of this tomb.
From the inky darkness beyond our torchlight, the opened sepulcher writhes with a strange, slurp and clump. Something lumbers and stops. There’s a faint hint of movement in the blinding dark and then – in a flash it comes at me. I see only flame-lit teeth within a dark thrashing form, a dozen grasping limbs and then darkness.
Slowly out of nothingness, there are voices above me. I lay unmoving, a hunk of flesh in chainmail. My limbs pulse numbly. The torchlight is weak, or my eyes are dim. The faces of my friends seem only shadows over me. My body seizes with animal fear. I push off of the floor, rising against helping hands. Then weakness sweeps my feet from under me. I fall with a crash; I hear a sword fall – my sword – was it in my hand this whole time?
“Easy now,” says a voice. “You killed it, but it bit you.”
The spinning mirror of damned memory shows me Elaine, her smiling face dappled with golden sun as I lay beside her under a summer tree, very far from here and very long ago.
“You’ve taken my heart,” she says. “And now, I have yours.”
The voices above me cry out, the dim torchlight falls away. Their voices are muffled to my ears. My helmeted head is filled with a soft, wet rushing sound. My limbs are moving apart from my will. Something thick and heavy is writhing inside of my hauberk, inside of me. I feel suddenly strong, impossibly so, and the last dim light fades. Utterly blind now, and yet I sense their movement by the vibration of the damp air against my skin.
The voices of my companions make no sense to me. I am advancing, but not by any will of my own. I want nothing, but my body hungers. It lashes out at their hastening, retreating shapes, thrashing with a dozen newly-formed limbs.
