Killing

Chapter 3

October, 1110 A.D.

I heard shrieks in the night, and I was leaping out of bed and rushing to the scene, armed with my katana, when I found a horrific sight.

My sons, dead… hanging from ropes in the middle of the hallway. Shizuko was gasping for air, dragging herself along the stone floor toward me.

"Darling…!" She croaked. "Your father, he's out in battle. I… an assassin got in, and I… I just couldn't stop them."

I lifted her, and rushed her to our chambers, calling out the physician to our chambers even as I went. He followed us to the room, and I had him to watch after her as I rushed outside, out to the battlefield.

My father was fighting, his mother and he out there using spells that he had only recently began to show me.

I slashed and dashed, slaughtering enemies as I went.

"Father!" I cried as an enemy almost struck him down.

My grandmother rushed to have a couple of soldiers carry him off the battlefield, and she practically flew to a hidden entrance near the back of the castle, and we rushed into a hidden door and down the stairs, underneath the city.

"We have to get him healed, quickly, and then we have to get him sealed! We have to do it quickly!"

I didn't know what she was talking about, but I was shocked and appalled, outright upset and blindsided, when she and the others strapped him down, and chanted. His body changed, looking more and more human, before his body started to freeze.

I could only sit there, stunned in shocked horror, before I rushed out.

I ran. I ran to my chambers in the castle, and I got Shizuko curled up in my arms, wrapped in blankets, before I ran.

We managed to make it out into the forest before someone found us.

The shot arrows at us, and I was tired… but I still dodged them.

I tripped over a large root in the ground, when a woman came up and slit my wife's throat.

I sat there, stunned and horrified. Dazed.

In one day, I had lost my wife, both of my sons, and even my father.

"Well, well, well. You look like you could use a witch," I heard a sultry voice say.

I looked up, and I saw a Darkelf woman, with two large, burly men on either side of her. They looked too similar to be mistaken for strangers. They looked like siblings.

"Witch…" I murmured. Her hair was shaved on the side, and short on the back but came down asymmetrically to fall to her chin on the other side. It was red on the long bit, but the shaved part was black. Her skin was dark gray, however, and her eyes were just as scarlet as the red in her hair.

"I can bring your family back to you, boy. Stronger than you ever thought possible. Unable to be killed. You would never have to leave them again." She bent over me to look at me, her body hovering over my own, and I looked up to meet her sneer.

"What do I have to do?"

The men next to her chuckled darkly. Their hair was white, and their skin was even darker gray than her own.

Her red lips smiled all too happily at me. "All you have to do… is sell your soul to me, and my brothers, here. Serve us in all of our desires, and I will bring your family back to you," she grinned.

I looked at my wife's corpse, and I thought of my sons and my father.

I met her eyes, defiant and determined. "I'll do it."