Jonathon Worthington: Strangelight Investigator

Case #18: The Mystery of the Purloined Past (Chapter 7)

Death's mocking laughter at Orsch's proclamation was disturbing in more ways than one.

"Now? You choose this moment to finally come around to where you should have been the entire time?" she chuckled. Her voice was deep and extravagant, like rich chocolate from the finest nobleman's pantry. "Where was this dedication to completing your task an hour ago? A week ago? Six months ago?"

"The situation has changed," Orsch replied stiffly. "He has refused to see reason. There is no further point in masking his arcane signature from you."

A sharp intake of breath preceded a snake-like hiss of anger. "You did what? How dare you! This is just ... how long has he been ready?"

The hint of a smile played across Orsch's smoke-rendered features. "Six months, eight days, twenty two hours. The actions of your diminutive conscript forced his sanguine alterations to mature more rapidly than I had predicted."

"You had no intention of bringing him back to us ... to me." The quavering note in my phantasmal reaper's voice almost made me pity her. There was a sound of loss and longing buried within the anger of her statement. But this was a creature that sought to murder me; any sympathy I felt for her disappointment was fleeting and irrelevant. The fly does not pity the spider for losing its meal when the fly escapes.

"Of course not. Lord Worthington did not wish to return to his former life; he agreed to the procedure for that very reason."

"Stop calling him that!" the obscured woman shrieked.

Orsch regarded her with his emotionless goggles. "It is his name. He chose it, as he has chosen this path. It was not for you to decide my korune's fate; you were foolish to believe he would submit willingly to the sacrificial rites. From the beginning we have both manipulated you to achieve his rebirth."

There was the sound of a sword clearing its sheath, and the specter advanced on my companion. While her form remained indistinct, a distortion thrust forward towards Orsch that could only be a sword in the phantasm's hand. The ogrun didn't bother to dodge, nor did he try and defend himself in any way. The tip of the undefined sword stopped a hair's-breadth away from Orsch's face, its tip shaking with the anger of the woman holding it. There remained little doubt that the immaterial phantasm that had pursued me was no immaterial lost soul given substance by grief and etheric forces; no, only a flesh and blood living woman could be so irritated at my ogrun companion without killing him. Specters had neither the self-control nor the self-awareness to experience and restrain the types of emotions the obscured woman was demonstrating.

"A loyal servant to the end, eh slave? Yet you give him up now, agree to the predestined finale. Is that the action of a servant looking after his master?"

Orsch's jaw tensed in repressed irritation. "Lord Worthington's stubborn insistence on remaining in Five Fingers has begun to erode the safeguards entrenched within his mind. His determination to unlock the mysteries of his past have rendered a complete shattering of the preferred persona inevitable. While focused outwards he could have remained in his current state indefinitely; but his very insistence on the truth will bring this matter to an end sooner rather than later."

"I wasn't just your stubbornness keeping him away, was it? He never planned on returning, never wished to see me again," The sword quavered with each word, and a portion of my heart ached in response to the specter's pain-laced words. They were raw emotion, a desperate plea in the darkness when a child is left alone. Yet at the same time the cry was laced with razor-blades, an edge that threatened to cut the soul with its insanity.

"Of course not."

The sword tip dropped from Orsch's face, the spectral woman's arm having lost the will to hold it. "Of course not," she echoed hollowly.