Chapter Text
I woke up.
Uh oh. That's not good.
It's not like I really slept. More like the days blended together, and it was easier to drift than it was to stay alert at all times.
(Not that I looked any different either way. Every line of my body still stood at attention, held there by stubborn magic that hasn't shown any sign of budging, even though the mage who cast the damn thing must have died by now.)
(He better have died by now.)
But this kind of snapping to attention, the humming that travelled up what passed for a spine around here, all seemed to indicate that someone—
I flickered between various visors, trying to find an eyeline that might show me the door. I used to do this much more often, although I can't be bothered to remember why right now. It did mean I was embarrassingly out of practice, though, and by the time I found something in the entrance, the door was already closing, and footsteps were echoing down one hallway to the right.
Fuck.
What had happened to my exterior eyes? I tried to find them, but my mental map of this castle was a mess. Like someone had rearranged all of my viewpoints. They were all still there — I think? — but in the wrong order.
How long had I been drifting, that I'd let it fall into this much disarray? And now there were people, living people, here.
Dead or not, the mage's curse weighed down on me, and I didn't need to breathe but it felt like something was sitting on my chest anyway.
This was bad.
I'm supposed to be the guard for this place, is the thing. It's what I was made for, as far as I know. It's all I can ever remember being, or doing, or whatever version of the word something like me merited. And I was good at it. I had to be — they would have unmade me and tried again, if I wasn't.
But something had happened, last time. Something I couldn't really remember, but I knew it had been bad. Like, I went from being able to at least patrol the empty hallways occasionally, or sit and read in the library, or talk to—
Well, myself. There's no one else here to talk to. That's the whole point.
But ever since something had happened, whatever it was, I'd been stuck in place. I could still look around through my various viewpoints, but no matter what body I tried to stay in, none of them so much as twitched when I tried to make them move.
It made sense, why I'd been drifting away so much, when my other option was to stare at empty hallways, at rusting gates, at the library and all of the books I couldn't read.
Why wouldn't I be dissociating, with all that in mind.
It's been awful, but at least I'd been left to my own devices. If people were here, though, that would change.
The curse didn't like it when I didn't perform my duty.
Oh, this was going to hurt.
I couldn't do shit about it, so I resorted to watching the intruders. If I was going to be fried for letting them wander around unchallenged, I might as well listen in on what they were saying, try to figure out who these people were, and why they'd come to my (the possessive feels weird there, but I used it without thinking. Huh. Strange.) castle, when no one had bothered for what must have been years and years.
Maybe it would be distracting enough that when the punishment came, it wouldn't even be that bad.
(There I go, lying again. But I'm just talking to myself. Lying inside my own head can't get me in trouble.)
These intruders were... odd. They weren't making a mess of the rooms they entered, even though there were many very expensive or otherwise valuable things practically sitting around, asking to be stolen.
(That was the point of the trap, after all. Those traps had been set up before I'd lost the ability to move. Obviously.)
But they did seem to be looking for something, because they made sure to open every unlocked door, peering around before turning back to the one that must be the leader and shaking their heads.
I didn't want to make note of anything personal about these people. But I've been so under-stimulated (bored, trapped in monotony, stuck inside a horror story I should have known better than to get caught in—) and maybe it was just because I hadn't had guests/intruders in so long, but these people seemed strange, even for humans.
Often, when intruders had come questing in my castle, they'd looked... cohesive. Livery and deferential glances, an organized formation if the person leading them was of particular importance. Or they were of the disorganized raider sort, but even then there were things that tied them together. Humans that were all different, but at least appeared to be written in the same basic language, so to speak.
These humans were not like that at all.
They wore bright colours, and although it did seem that one of them was the leader (a fine silver band stood out against the dark of her hair) the others looked to her as often as they consulted each other. And she wasn't hidden behind the rest of them, but instead seemed to insist on being near the front of the group, and none of the others, not even the one with the heavier shield that gave away a likely knighthood, seemed to have any problem with this.
Terrible discipline, I couldn't help but think. If you only stepped in front of your leader when trouble showed up, you would never be anything but on the defensive.
I've seen that behaviour with other humans, but only when the intent had been to hopefully have the leader fall, some passive attempt at an assassination plot.
(I don't remember much, but I remember death more than I'd like. Faceless bodies bleeding out on the stone floors. A weapon I missed desperately, even as I remembered the sensation of it plunging into the hearts of adventurers whose only crimes were coming to the wrong castle)
That was another thing, about this group. Either they were very good actors, or they genuinely cared for each other. Not that I'm an expert on humans and how they care, but even I could see how often they reached out to each other. One of the shorter ones stumbled, and another caught him. A woman that had the sharp taste of metal lingering on her skin held out her hand to one of the other women, who accepted it as she helped her climb over the rubble of one of my castle's interior walls. Little touches, so casual and common that I had to look away, come back to my favourite suit of armour and just hide away for a little while.
I don't need to breathe, but still I felt like I had to catch my breath.
Of course this happened. Of course, the first people to come this place in ages and they were nice.
Fuck.
And because I'm not just cursed, but also apparently a curse on those around me, I wasn't even looking at them when things started to go wrong.
I felt the movement before I noticed anything was happening. Shit, I've really been neglecting certain parts of my already pretty limited patrols.
But that sword, that piece of myself, I hadn't felt it so much as twitch since the mage took it away from me. And now it was swinging down, aiming for one of the new humans.
I threw myself into the nearest viewpoint. I told myself it was just because I wanted to see my sword, but that was a shit lie, even for me.
In the back of my mind, I could feel the castle's more automated defences creaking to life. If I were my whole self, I could tell it to stand down (or ask, I correct myself, although I don't know where the correction came from. Why would I need to ask my castle, when I was supposed to be its defence? When this is literally what I was forged for?), but I wasn't. I couldn't do anything except watch, knowing that whoever wasn't killed by the sword that looked so wrong, not in my hands, would most likely fall to some other trap or trick in this thrice-cursed castle.
Ugh. He'd given my sword to some kind of animated skeleton. That was just tacky, even for him.
The knight saw the attack coming, and she was fast, but the skeleton was faster, as it bared down on one of the taller members of the group, a pale man with the air of a magic user, although I couldn't identify any specific focus. He froze, eyes wide, hands starting to move to cast something, but humans were all so damn slow—
The leader had been next to him, almost hidden by his height from my angle. She was the only one close enough, but I had already dismissed her as a potential rescuer for the mage.
If there's one thing I knew, it was what loses were acceptable, and what losses were not.
She stepped in front of him.
She's not wearing armour, and if there's a weapon on her I can't see it, and she steps in front of him—
I reached out, because I was frozen in place, but that was my sword, and if there was anything I could move in this moment, let it be that.
I wasn't able to completely deflect it, but I felt the moment it wavered, burying itself in the leader's shoulder, instead of neatly severing her head from her body.
She cried out, and the mage must have finished his spell, because the skeleton exploded, bone dust covering the whole party in an instant.
There were lots of distressed human noises, and my head was spinning. I couldn't seem to hold on to the visor I had grabbed onto to watch them, and for a few seconds all I could see was the inside of my favourite suit's armour, the one with the little suns engraved on the inside of the visor, which was such a waste of energy. Who decorates the inside of a magical construct's armour?
And, because I was still recovering from the effort it had taken, to get my sword to move away from the kill, I forgot that I wasn't allowed to speak.
"You were lucky," I said, and another voice echoed behind my words, some ghost of a memory.
The humans all fell silent at once, and turned as one to stare at the sword, which had been removed from the leader's shoulder and tossed aside as they all fluttered around her in various states of helpfulness and not.
I got my vision back under control just in time to see the tall magic user reach down to grab my sword, where the voice had come from.
Well, that was stupid, Zweihander.
Then the curse kicked in, and it was my turn to scream, as lightning struck my armour, and my whole world went white with pain.