03.09.07
Warcraft Ghost Story
Written in 2006 for a Hallow’s End (the in-game holiday corresponding to Hallowe’en) story-writing contest on the Steamwheedle Cartel realm forum on the official World of Warcraft site. I didn’t win, but I liked how the story came out. Writing it was fun, trying to stay under the 1,000 word limit. It ended up being about 970 words.
It’s a horror story — our protagonist is dead, a zombie raised by the plague that had killed her — but it’s not gory. Our Castiza’s tale is more a personal horror than an external one.
It was unseasonably cold. Snow falling in big wet flakes enforced a chill white hush throughout the valley. One thing moved through the snowfall, a hunched figure wrapped in tatters and rags. The only sound was the crunchsqueak of snow underfoot.
No breath steamed from the traveler’s mouth; the dead woman felt the biting cold but was not discomfited by it. For one who has felt the cold of death, mere weather is easily ignored.
The dead woman, who called herself Castiza, stopped to look up the valley at the ruins of an abbey named for Saint Eulalia and dedicated to the Light. It had once been a small, vibrant community of sisters, a place for contemplation and service. It had once been home.
Castiza sighed. Most of the abbey still stood, though time and the elements had taken their toll. From a half-mile away she could see the damage: holed roofs and shattered windows, though the snow hid some of the wounds the abbey had taken.
She tried to remember her last days here. Surely some had survived, hadn’t they? Not everyone had fallen to the plague. That much she knew. Had they just left as the dead started to rise from their graves?
The chapel was wrecked, the pews battered into piles of splinters, the altar stone shoved aside and cracked in two, blasphemies in several languages scrawled in soot on the walls. In the bell tower, the stone steps still wound up to where the abbey’s trio of iron bells hung.
And something else. Even the dead woman’s sight couldn’t make it out in the shadows, but four things hung from the rafters of the bell tower, not three.
Snow and ice on the steps made the footing treacherous. Castiza made her way up the tower, slow, careful, watching her step. So it wasn’t until she was near the top that she saw the thing that was not a bell. It was a woman, dressed in a nun’s habit, hanging from a rope by her bound wrists. Her belly had been sliced open and her intestines pulled out to dangle, a grisly parody of a bell rope. That was the only visible wound – if that had been the only one, it must have taken her a long time to die.
Scavenger birds had already been at her, taking away the eyes and the soft flesh of the face. She must have been one of the dead woman’s sisters, but who was she?
Castiza looked for the end of the rope holding her sister and found it tied off to a cleat. It wasn’t long enough to lower her to the ground. She didn’t want to just let her fall – she’d suffered enough indignities already.
The dead woman judged the distance and jumped from the walk around the bells, catching the rope holding the nun’s corpse with one hand. She cradled the body to her with her other arm and waited for the motion to slow and stop. Murmuring the words almost silently, she called power to sever the rope.
It was fifty feet to the floor below – a long drop but a survivable one for the dead woman. Castiza landed with a thump and the sharp crack of bone breaking. At least three had snapped from the fall – the added weight of the dead nun made her land harder than usual. But they were all fusing themselves back together, faster than living bone could ever mend itself, and the pain was minimal. She carried her sister into the chapel and laid her out on the floor.
The dead nun looked no better in the brighter light of the chapel, though the snow falling through the roof started to soften the wreck of her face. Castiza’s hands moved over the body, looking for something that might tell her who this woman had been.
On a chain around the woman’s neck hung a starburst pendant (in silver – their order required a vow of poverty and held ostentatious decoration to be less than godly). Castiza lifted it, ignoring the smoke rising from where it touched her plague-animated flesh. One of the star’s rays was dented, bearing tooth marks. She knew then who the corpse had been.
“Oh, Frances,” she said, mourning. They had been novices together and friends after that, back when Castiza was alive. The dead woman strained her senses, physical and mystical both, trying to find some trace of her sister that still lingered, but there was nothing. Empty flesh and tarnished silver, no more. She carefully put the pendant back on Frances’s neck, settling it just so between her breasts. Her green-tinged skin had turned black where the pendant touched it, leaving an eight-rayed burn in the palm of her left hand.
Castiza gathered the remnants of the pews together, building them up into a pile some eight feet long, four across, and three deep. She laid her sister out on the pyre, tucking the rope of intestines back into the body cavity, and covered her with a tapestry found among the debris.
Closing her eyes, Castiza lifted her hands to the heavens and called fire. The ancient wood of the pews, iron-hard and polished with centuries’ worth of bees’ wax, burned bright and hot and clean, giving off little smoke.
The dead woman watched the pyre burn until night fell. She walked away, back down the valley from where she’d come, and did not look back.
There were no ghosts behind her.