He wasn't Kasoria when he clawed his way from the flowing water, attaching himself like a barnacle to the shore. He wasn't aware of name or gender or age when he started hauling himself, hand over hand, across the muddy expanse that seemed to go on forever. All he was knew was pain, and anger, and bitterness, and a growling, spitting desire not to die. He was alive. No matter what else he was and did and felt, there was that constant.
He welcomed the pain. Corpses could not feel it, nor ghosts suffer it. With every breath that raked jagged claws down his lungs, Kasoria exalted in being alive. Even his thoughts were broken, simple, unfiltered and animalistic.
Must. Move. Crawl. Live. Not. Drown.
The living corpse groaned into the mud under his face as the crossbow bolt in his stomach caught on something and pulled out of him. It felt like a melting iron poker being wrenched out of his guts. Yet even as the pain threatened to throttle him again, he remembered that a blade should be left in the wound it had made, rather than carelessly yanked out. Damaging though it was, it was also a plug that kept a torrent of blood issuing forth. Better for the thing to stay where it was, keeping the torrent to a trickle.
There was a sound, grinding and half-drowned, that spewed into the mud and turned it into froth. The corpse was laughing. He counted four such wounds on his body, and he was so concerned about
one? He was drowned, pierced, had trailed blood every yard of his journey, and
now he was worried about such liquid loss? For a moment his crawling flight was forgotten, and he lay there, unrecognizable as human, save for his grasping hands and shaggy head, and the parody of laughter rattling from his lungs.
Keep. Moving.
Reluctantly, the corpse obeyed. The world had shrunk to the dozen or so yards around him, as if he were god of a world turning in confusion and chaos and every expanse to be measured was nothing but a muddy plain stretching into infinity. That and the sky. Grey like lead and promising rain to come. Even as h thought the word, a patter of droplets started to fall on him. They were... soothing. Cooling. He stopped and half-turned, ceasing his stubborn crawl towards... what, exactly?
What's the plan, old man? Gonna shake it off and get marching, hmm?
Kasoria didn't even have the strength to shut his own mind up. All he could do was lay there and pant shallowly, fearing to breath too deep, lest his wounds tear open anew. He tried to blink away the exhaustion but nothing fresher or brighter floated into view. He could just about make out... carts. Horses. The road. The road by the river. And no buildings. No smell of smoke. No cobbles under his feet. The air was too fresh, too clean, so he was-
Stop it. Stop trying. What does it matter?
You're dying, old man. You're done.
"F... Fuh..."
He couldn't silence the voice, couldn't spit a curse. Couldn't prove it wrong. He lay there and his limbs wouldn't listen, his muscles wouldn't obey him. So tired. So weak. The rain felt good, though. Refreshing. He decided to lie there a while. Let it wash over him. Thought of his son and the thought made his lips twitch. Then his whole world was the roaring river and he was lost to it. Sinking down into a hole and here was where he would die...
Until the voices found him.
They crept into his mind like wraiths would a child's bedroom. They invaded his mind as jerked him from a sleep that should have been the start of his death. Kasoria awoke without opening his eyes, listening to them approach. First the footsteps. Then the curses. The sensation of his body being turned over, and him being too battered to resist, then-
"FUCK!"
Angry words clashed with confused ones. He listened to it all and didn't know what to make of it. Had he been rescued? The Corp... military term. Soldiers? Guardsmen? Fates, that would have been fucking hilarious. His chest sucked in a breath and seemed to resent him for trying to do so. But it was still air, still life, and Kasoria started to open his eyes.
"Well, fuck me. You weren't kiddin'."
"C-Course not, Corp. I mean... fuck, it's him, ain't it?"
"Hard to forget that face, son. Lot more hair, though."
That voice. He knew it. Harsh and grating, like a whetstone over dull steel. Fitting, considering what the purpose of its owner had been. Kasoria tried to focus on the blobs surrounding him. These wraiths, these vulturous things that were picking over him, fingers and hands moving across his body. One hand squirmed its way into his purse and he summoned all the strength he had left to grab at the wrist, other hand reaching back for a blow-
CRACK
-until the pommel of a sword struck him across the forehead and what fragile vision he had was shattered like glass. Shards and wreckage dug into his eyes and once again, he embraced the pain. Fates, he was fucking alive. That was what mattered. Then he started laughing again, an ugly, hissing thing, a death rattle with mirth. The blobs exchanged curious looks and worried words... save for the older one. The voice he recognized.
"Fuck's he laughing at."
"I had t'guess? Probably the fact he ain't dead."
Then the blobs stopped talking, and listened. Words were coming from that soaking face. Sliding from split lips carelessly, coming with a half-mad smile and no sense of where he was. Watkins glared at the halfway-corpse and fingered the dirk at the small of his back. Better to end the little cunt now. Let him know who and why, and do it. He couldn't think of many worse places to die than here, but The Corp... he probably had different ideas.
"What's he-"
"Gimme the kit."
The Corp worked on Kasoria without a word. Skilled, practiced, experienced hands staunched the blood from his stomach, the most telling. Serious wound. A fresh wave of shivering, biting agony gnawed at his skin as something foul and acidic cauterized the wound. Then a dressing was shoved inside him, soaked within trill blood and fluids pumping out of him... but there was enough of it to staunch the wound. Kasoria was aware of the penetration, the violation. but he couldn't... well, he could feel it. But it was just one more shade of opain, overlaid across a tapestry that his body had become. He was starting to slide away from himself. Barely able to grunt and hiss as pain set him shuddering one more time.
A final dressing was slapped over his stomach and the voice he knew and yet didn't know grunted with grim satisfaction.
"A'right. That'll get him to the Combs, then we'll get the others out. Dun' want this traitor bastard dyin' before time. You two? Geddim in the wagon."
The blob, the commanding blob, looked down as the man started raving again. Eerie, choking, wheezing laughter dribbling from his mouth along with the mud.
"Hell... m'in hell... gotta be... yer... yer dead... n'I'm in hell..."
The blob came closer to Kasoria. He saw the features, plain as day, just before the dancing darkness claimed him and the pain threw him into deep, dreamless sleep once more. He saw the lack of hair, from his bald dome of a skull to the absence of eyebrows and whiskers. The callused, leathery skin. The flinty eyes that had watched and judged him long ago, when The Raggedy Man was still a myth yet not whispered.
"No, Cadet," growled Corporal Drix, formerly of the Blackguard Cadet Academy. "But it's
comin', boy. Oh, it's fuckin' comin'..."
not even close to
THE END
