Kiss of Osiris

Chapter Five

At last, the time of the dig came. In Al fashion, they left at dusk so he wouldn't fry in the sun. They broke into an unexplored pyramid and set out on their adventure. Al wouldn't say at first what he was looking for. They had a couple of shady explorers they hired to come along with them. They were disreputable, to say the least. Evee didn't like the way one of them looked at her. One wrong move and she would stab him right in the nargles. Al would probably find it amusing. Well, this is exciting at least, real-life kind of sucked. Especially my life. 

They were doing okay until they realized that the traps in here were still active. A false floor bottom gave away and a fat explorer by the name of Renois fell screaming into an abyss. We listened for a while and never heard the body hit anything. After that, we were extremely careful. Al made the hirelings go first. They glared at him with a mutinous stare but his cold, dead eyes stirred them on. Another guy got squished as he accidentally pressed a tile button and the ceiling dropped on him. His name was Abi and smelled of gin and potatoes. He had the map.

Things took a turn for the worst once the map was lost. We found an alternate route that we thought would lead us to the center where all the goodies were, and where Al's treasure supposedly was. I was terrified and I could see Al was a little unnerved as well. While fearsome creatures the vampyrussic were not indestructible as some might have thought. Seeing how death might be a possibility Al began to open up.

 With hirelings up front and we a safe distance behind he began to speak in soft whispers, perhaps mostly to himself. "I take no joy in killing. I was serious when I mentioned my faith. Before my change, I even wanted to become a priest. No one really showed kindness to me or my mother other than this foreign priest who ran the local church. We were poor and he would always drop by and leave us fresh fruits and vegetables. "

"He would even bring a toy or chocolate when he could. He was poor himself and I appreciated his generosity. Well, anyways I got a good dose of Catholicism before I got shanghaied into darkness. I didn't commit suicide because I wasn't sure if suicides go to heaven. Or purgatory... or hell. I didn't know what I believed anymore."

"I was strong for a while. But then..." his eyes glazed over. He seemed to be hiding great pain. "...but then the hunger, oh god the hunger. I would pace, I would sit, I would scream. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't think. My teeth grew, my eyes burned like the very pits of hell! I was a devil! I just wanted to be nothing more but a simple man of the cloth. It started out small. Rats, insects, things that crept and crawled. But it didn't do anything if anything it only made it worse! My hunger was a bottomless pit."

" Soon dogs and cats started to go missing. No biggy. But soon... Albus the town drunk went missing. No one much thought about that. Shore' none of those bastards cared about a poor drunk named Albus!" he spat. There was fire in his eyes. What in the world. I have never seen this side of Al before. It's almost... human. "But I knew, god help me, I knew! The way his scared brown eyes widened when I took him, has never left me."

"I mostly see his face first when I dream. Every other day I sleep I see his face. They're all apart of me somehow, a little bit. A little bit of their essence. A whisper of a memory there, a flash of anger there, a touch of sorrow here. A little bit of their soul, a little bit of their being. I almost don't know who I am anymore. So many little bits. But you wouldn't understand... the hunger..."