dread.docx

dread.docx

The sensors that provided the soldier with vision after his eyes failed had long since exhausted their power. He wandered blindly through the endless wastes, cursing the winds that grated against his numb flesh like sandpaper. There was determination without purpose in his solitary march. The once glorious Dreadfish captain was being punished.

That’s the problem with magic, he thought on pensive days, all you have to do is piss off some witch and suddenly you’re stuck in the desert like a stupid asshole.

He would distract himself by smelling the air. Detecting scents was impossible for him, of course—his condition didn’t allow for it. He had decided some time ago that fate primed him as a fighter, not a hunter, and had eliminated his vestigial senses in order to sharpen the essential ones. Then why can’t you see? he would think. Then why can’t you shut the hell up? he would think.

Still, from time to time he would take deep breaths through his unresponsive nostrils just for the sake of doing it; his lungs, caked with the dust of the barren wasteland that stretched incalculable distances in every direction, groaned in protest and he would hack and cough. Oddly enough, this was one of the few reflexes that he still possessed, one of the few that had not died along with most of his sensory system. He loved the feeling.

For months, this was his only entertainment. And then he smelled something.

At first, he attributed the sickly sweet scent to his imagination; it had disappeared as quickly as it came. It was a distant memory, a scent from his past that had come bubbling to the surface uninvited, nothing but a vestige of a remarkably irrelevant life. Until he smelled it again. The revenant captain stopped marching. The scent persisted this time, even without inhalation. It was in his mind.

Finally, he thought.

Almost languidly, he reached into a leather pouch at his waist and pulled out a palm sized black stone. Although he couldn’t see, he knew that it had noiselessly began to glow as it activated at his touch. The jewel’s magic stirred images in his mind, outlining the features of a young woman clad in dark armor and short robes. The psychic scent pulsed from the jewel in an erratic staccato.

“Captain. Things have changed. I need you here. Hope you have had fun. S.”

Necromantic energy erupted like red lightning from the gem, spinning around his head as the message echoed in his skull. His optic sensors reactivated with a whirr that was barely audible over the crackling of the magic. Data coursed through circuitry just under his skin, bypassing his dead eyes and flooding his mind with sight.