It was a day filled with the typical emptiness of endless days. Erorn had not slept that night, or any night for five hundred and thirty years. He didn't often remember how long he'd been alive, but today he remembered it in fine detail. He remembered a lot of things. Evenings like this, when the autumn was losing its ruddy, red confidence and looking forward through time to see the grave, lean harbinger of winter standing tall and smug, bringing with them a deadly cold he couldn't feel, a bitter wind he'd never understand again, a sense of emptiness that was nothing compared to the emptiness he felt... they crushed him. Made him less himself. If being himself was something he was even capable of. The sun had set hours ago. Outside, soldiers beat inconsequentially at doors, held men down in the street, and otherwise enforced their petty trivialisation of martial law. He remembered when he would slaughter men like that wholesale simply for being in a city when he rode through its gates. That was a long time ago, and the world had moved on. "More's the pity," he murmured, and the sudden noise startled him, shaking him out of his reverie. That distant contemplation was the closest he had come to sleep for five hundred years. Ah, for those days of unbridled, thoughtless war. He knew that his undoing was that he fixated so strongly on these old days of death and destruction that he hated so much, but nothing was quite like them. They were so empty of any threat to him. So free. He shouldn't have ever undergone the ritual. But then again, not a day went by when he didn't think that more earnestly than he thought anything else. Idly, he picked up the bottle, the clay container, filled with arsenic, and looked at it, heard the sloshing of the liquid. He'd opened it today, his last full one, and it felt comfortingly heavy in his hand as he unstopped the wooden cork, its remnants of wax seal still clinging to it, and idly looked around. There was no basin to use, so he'd have to be inventive. They buried their dead in Zeltiva, or so he assumed, and bodies would be hard to come by. Gently, he stood, taking care not to strain any muscles that would never, ever unstrain themselves, and dipped his fingers in the bottle. Without relevant tools, he'd have to just hope the body could hold together until he could find another corpse. As it was, he embalmed himself because the smell invited less attention than corpse-rot, and if his skin held together then his body would hold together a lot better in any case. This was what drove him from day to day. Ritualistic preservation of his body. The embalming fluid itself, undiluted, would in the end just damage his body, give it a green tinge and a sick arsenic reek that would most likely sicken anyone he actually met. He wasn't interested in meeting people, though, and he was content with his life - if one could call him content. A more appropriate adjective might have been 'empty'. He finished rubbing a fine layer into his face, stood up, stripped off, and ran over his body, even disjointing his left shoulder to reach around behind his back, before getting back into the mouldering but middlingly expensive rags he called clothes and settling back into the chair he had spent the last week in. He never went outside. There was no reason to. He stared at the door, and waited for the embalming fluid to run out, and when that happened he would search for work. And perhaps be run out of town. Such was life. |