03.09.07
Castiza
“Castiza” is taken from the Jacobean play The Revenger’s Tragedy by way of Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. The core characters of the play aren’t characters so much as archetypes, and Castiza is chastity. She’s a World of Warcraft character, an undead priest on Steamwheedle Cartel. Most undead recall their former lives with vivid clarity, if with emotional disconnect. Cas is no exception, but she’s trying to revive the emotional connections. Where many others of her kind revel in being monsters, she struggles against the dark urges instilled by the plague to remain humane (if not human).
World of Warcraft isn’t a very good medium for role-playing, but it’s pretty good for inspiring fanfiction. A very dear friend made me a rag doll of her, complete with a crescent-topped staff and glow-in-the-dark eyes.
The story begins, as it must begin, with tragedy. Cruelly, it first seemed to be triumph: the armies of Lordaeron had beaten back the undead armies of the Lich King under Kel’Thuzad’s command, saving their city from destruction. The humans of Lordaeron celebrated their victory, reveling in the streets, and cheered their soldiers.
The first symptoms appeared within the week. What began as coughs and chills was followed by nausea and fever. Later stages caused the skin to break out in painful, oozing, festering sores. The healers and holy ones were helpless to stop the progression of the disease. No herbal preparation gave the slightest comfort, prayers of health and healing went unanswered, even quarantine was useless – the plague was everywhere at once. No one who contracted the plague survived it. There were no recoveries, no remissions, no miracles.
Lordaeron became a charnel house as most of its population fell to the plague. The few people who had somehow not contracted the disease went numbly mad from it all, dragging carts through the unquiet streets to collect the dead for burial in mass graves.
It did not take long for the true horror of the plague to show itself. Those who had died of it began to rise again, clawing their way out of the ground with flesh-stripped hands. They had suffered the ravages of death and burial and rebirth, and it showed clearly. Flesh had been stripped to bone, eyes had been eaten by beetles and maggots and crows, skin showed the sickly colors of decomposition. Their minds were twisted, diseased, evil.
All who rose from the grave shared certain qualities: rage and hunger were the strongest. Most fell under the sway of Kel’Thuzad, the Lich King’s officer on Azeroth. The humans that survived the plague itself fell to its victims, torn into gobbets of flesh and eaten. The city fell into ruin, the waters beneath it poisoned, tainted, unwholesome.
Some few had free will, the Lich King’s domination over them severed by the rogue banshee Sylvanas Windrunner as she rebelled against him. It’s hard to say whether this is a good thing (for those with free will) or not. With free will came a sense of self-preservation, a desire to go on unliving. Having died once, the free dead had no desire to do so again. Facing enemies on many fronts in both the humans and their allies and the undead still dominated by Kel’Thuzad, the free undead (who had begun calling themselves Forsaken) sought allies and found them in the loose Horde confederation led by the orc war leader Thrall.
The woman who didn’t yet call herself Castiza was aware of little of this when she woke for the first time after her death. She was understandably confused to find herself alive (in a sense) again, and horrified to find herself still in the mass grave she’d been buried in. She screamed, the sound muffled by dirt and the corpse pressed against her face.
Which way was up? It was hard to tell, even though she could – somehow – see in the utter darkness of the charnel pit. The view wasn’t very exciting: insects, putrid flesh, decaying cloth, dirt. The woman picked a direction on impulse and started to claw through the obstacles in her way.
It took a small eternity, but she finally found the surface. When she’d finally pulled herself free, she collapsed, rolling onto her back to look up at the night sky – memory told her that she should be gasping for breath, but her body didn’t need to breathe. She wasn’t even particularly fatigued. Her fingertips were naked bone, the skin and flesh worn away during her climb out of the grave, but she could still feel with them. The woman felt her face carefully; it seemed that it was mostly intact, though her eyes were gone and bone clicked on bone in a few places.
She was still there looking up at the sky when the gravetender came along. She saw the glow of his lantern first, then the rest of him following soon after. His clothes were little better than rags, and the rest of him was a horror. His hands were bony claws like her own, the joints of his limbs stripped clean, his teeth bared in a permanent grimace, and his eyes! His eyes were gone and an unholy light glowed in the pits left behind.
He laughed when he saw her. “Aren’t you the cutie? Good to see you awake.” The absence of lips didn’t seem to hinder his speech much. “It’s my job to watch over the graves here an’ make sure anything that crawls out of ‘em is friendly-like.”
The woman sat up slowly and combed a hand back through her hair on some faint instinct telling her to make herself more presentable. “Uh-huh. You probably hear this a lot, but… what happened?”
The gravetender cackled again, this time with a sharp unkind edge to it. “Girlie, you dead. Plague got you, or you wouldn’ be here talkin’ to me. An’ you an’ me, we free dead. Dunno if you know, but mos’ dead ain’t free – the Lich King, he run the show with mos’ dead. But the Lady, she got us shut of him.” The man paused to dig a fingertip into his ear, pulled out a squirming maggot, and popped it into the wreck of his mouth. “Sorta. He ain’t happy ’bout it, as you might imagine, and he’s always got somethin’ comin’ after us.”
“I prayed to the Light,” the girl murmured. “I remember that.”
“The Light ain’t here now, girlie. It’s part of why we call ourselves Forsaken, if you catch my meaning.”
Except for the rustling of trees, there was quiet. “No. No, it’s not.” She turned her gaze from the sky to the gravetender again. “Forsaken, you say?” she asked, brushing grave mold from her clothes as she stood.
“Ayup.” The gravetender belched. “You got a name, girlie?”
Quiet again while the woman thought about it. Alisandre drifted through her mind, but seemed to belong to someone else. There were dim memories of dark robes, stained glass, and prayer. “Castiza,” she said finally. “You might as well call me Castiza.”
“Pretty name for a pretty girl.”
“It’s an old word for chastity,” she explained.
The gravetender laughed raucously, pounding his thigh with a fist. “Chastity? Girlie, ain’t none of us virgins, not no more. We all been fucked.”
Castiza gave him a level look until he finally stopped laughing. “I’m aware,” she told him.
“Oh. Huh. You got a sense of humor already. Not bad, virgin girl.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Yeah. You get used to that after a bit.”
“Really?”
The gravetender looked like he’d be grinning, if he had the face to do it with. Clearly he was having fun with her. “Nah. Not really.” He gestured with his lantern; Castiza could see the lights of a small town through the trees. “C’mon, girlie, let’s get you somethin’ to eat. An’ there’s people wants to see you.”
“Me?” Castiza frowned. Who could know her already? Apparently the gravetender could see her confusion. He clapped a bony hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t sweat it, cutie,” he said. “They wanna see everybody new when they come out. That’s why they send me out here, to watch.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Later, Castiza looked into a tarnished mirror by the light of a candle. She’d been right with her first impressions – her face was mostly intact, and even the missing bits looked like decoration more than decay. I’m even sort of pretty, she thought. Still dead, but pretty.
There was a cracked glass full of pale red wine on a side table; she picked it up and sipped thoughtfully. “The Light has forsaken me,” she told her reflection. “I prayed to it every day of my life – dedicated my life to its service, in fact – and it is gone, gone, gone.”
Her reflection had no response. Castiza sighed (sighing has nothing to do with needing to breathe or not) and took another drink. “The weird part is that I still pray. I pray to nothing, and nothing answers. I call for light, and light burns my enemies. I ask for healing, and it is given, knitting together dead flesh as well as it does the living.
“What does this say about people who still live, and still believe? Are they fools, deluding themselves into thinking that there’s something out there that listens to their prayers, something that actually cares about them? If it answers my prayers the same way it does theirs, can it possibly be good?”
“Am I the fool? Do I still believe?” Castiza tossed back the rest of her wine and threw the glass at the mirror as hard as she could. The glass shattered; the mirror fared a little better with only a minor spiderweb of cracks.
“Not something I’m going to answer right now. Right now, I’m tired,” she told the multiple Castizas reflected in the broken mirror, wagging a finger at them, mock-stern. “And I’m drunk. And I’m going to see if I can still sleep now that I’m dead.”
The room held a bed, a four-posted affair spread with moth-eaten brocade. Dust rose in a cloud as Castiza fell onto it. Somewhat to her surprise, she fell asleep quickly and dreamt of deep, cold water.