Rituals, Regrets, and Really Dumb People

Chapter 3: Emotional Movies are Trite Trash, but I Kind of Want More, Part 2

When I got far enough away, I immediately turned and went to the door to my left, down into the labyrinthian mazework that was the cellar. There were a few different departments here, ranging from a mausoleum for necromancy, my laboratory, my garage, Jo's engineering department, the kennels, a prison and torture pit, and a summoning room for demons.

I kept my library and artifact vaults close to my bedroom, my lower ranked cultists stayed in barracks outside the castle and the more elite of them stayed inside the first floor of the castle proper. The top floors were more for summoning curses and storms on others, and it often didn't see much use. I should, maybe, put a game room up there, or a man's cave. To be honest, though, without Meredith around, I might not need a man's cave anymore. Maybe a pool table would suffice.

I walked the dank corridors and through the halls echoing the screams of tortured folk. I felt a little uneasy listening to the hollering, but it was a product of my own make, so I had no one to blame but myself for that. I went down the main hall and to the left to the large room reinforced with steel cells, that which held my bloodfreaks.

The bloodfreaks were an interesting lot in retrospect. In terms of military power, they were my shock troopers and my berserkers. I walked past the kennels and examined each one of them; while they still had some unique features, such as a noticeable skin hue and if they were male or female, some common features were shared between all of them. Their skin was like parchment, flaky and pallid, toughened like oil-boiled leather. They were universally wiry, the hair on top of their head sparse from the strain of the experiments. What little hair they had was often colored a noticeable white, wispy and hanging off their near-bald craniums in loose fashion.

Their eyes were always maddened, wide open and bloodshot, looking for prey. I made sure to beat it in their skulls that they were hunters and mutants while I was draining their blood and replacing it with an alchemically-infused version. Why did I make a unit like this? Their blind obedience and terrifying ability to fight with claw and fang broke uniformed ranks. They were, as well, a status symbol, a way of showing my cruelty. Looking upon them now, however, I felt something different. I felt pity for them, pity for them for things I had done by my own hands.

"Ah, the good tyrant comes," said a man. I raised my head from my experiments to look at Dr. Mangler, who was sitting on a stool beside Bloodfeast's cage. "Few of the men have been telling me that you seem ill."

I looked at the good doctor, who was closing a textbook and setting it on his lap. Dr. Mangler couldn't have been older than forty, his hair a fair blond and his eyebrows bushy to match his unique attitude. He reached up and scratched the side of his jaw, through his stubble, and stared at me from his glasses. Always the healer.

"What were you doing with Bloodfeast?" I asked.

I looked over to my large, brutish vehicle of destruction. Bloodfeast was different from my other bloodfreaks, who were often of normal height, being nearly two-and-a-half people tall, even hundred down. Again, to reiterate, he was a big fellow, humongous, and built with a gorilla-like gait. Unusually pale and milkish white, he was of a calmer demeanor compared to the rest of my mutants. When he talked with his deep, booming voice, it was always of requests for a pet, a pup namely. When being the key word; he didn't talk to me much outside of that.

"He likes when I read to him," Mangler said.

"Bloodfeast can understand that book?"

"Yes."

"Bullshit."

Mangler shrugged, as if he didn't care about my opinion much. For a man with the name of Mangler, he was actually a pretty chill dude. He was the best doctor on the island I suppose, outside of the Penitent priests, who could heal through miracles, or Nebuchadnezzar's cyborg chirurgeons, who were more likely to augment you than heal you.