“Next you’ll be telling me you did it to save everyone,” Drusella Voyeaux said.“Everyone who’s familiar with the subject knows that any alterations to the past create a Paradox and therefore are essentially useless.”
“I know,” I said.“But I already created a Paradox.Well, not me, but another me…”
Judge Volkheim’s face was serious.
“Wait.Are you saying you really did travel back in time?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know what I was doing.I didn’t even mean to, really.There was a Land Wight—his name was Richard Tremblay.He said he was sending us back to an Echo of the night he was murdered.But somehow or another.It really happened.I don’t know.I don’t have any memories of what happened—just that note the me that travelled in time left.I still don’t know what happened to that version of me.William Corcoran was trying to die that night by passing the curse of the Routshammer on to Richard Tremblay, to keep him trapped as the house.The past me pulled it out right after he died.I was told it would break the curse, without passing it on to me… but there were some unintended consequences.”
“So you’re saying you are blameless in this,” Prosecutor Brynholf replied.
“I mean.Yeah.”
“Except for the part where you created the Paradox,” Brynholf said.
“Yeah,” I said.“Wait.No.”
The crowd was booing.The Judge banged his gavel again.
“Let her speak.Or Defense, you could stand up and protect your client.”
Abe coughed and stood up again.
“I’d like to call a witness to the stand,” he said.“Vic Almoday.”
“What are the witnesses’ qualifications?”Brynholf asked.
“I travelled through time with Stacey,” Vic said brusquely, from where he stood up behind us.“If you’re going to prosecute her for it, you may as well prosecute me as well.”
He barged through the crowd and up to the stand, waving a hand at a nearby bailiff.Shadows screamed forth, blades at the ready, as he sat astride the chair like some demon ascending a throne.He pushed the long black hair from his face and stared with his bright blue eyes out at the audience.He looked terrifying.And I had seen him flipping pancakes before.
“I’m also William Corcoran’s former apprentice,” he said.“A Necromancer by trade and training.If there’s anything you want to know about his methods, I can tell you.”
“So now we have a motive,” Brynholf said.“Abraham, you’re making this far too easy for me.”
“I have something to say first,” Vic said.“A lot to say, as it happens.Seeing as I was there.For everything.Some of it I’m a little fuzzy on, but I want to clear up everything that happened here.So you all understand why we did what we did.”
“I’m still not sure what the deal with the Routshammer is,” Judge Volkheim said.
“That’s as good a place to start as any,” Vic said.
Chapter3
“Imet with William Corcoran in 1834.I was working as a trapper in Canada.He was a fop—I didn’t have a very good impression of him at first, but it was a cold winter’s night, and we happened to have to bunker down at the same cabin in Alberta in the middle of a terrible snowstorm.He showed me all sorts of things he could do: black magic, sorcery, even pyromancy.The man was a wizard.He could conjure shadows, demons, make people fall to his glamours, and reanimate the dead.He was searching the forest for rumors of a terrible blood-thirsty creature that drank from the living.He was hoping that the creature’s blood, once imbibed, could undo the curse on his body.
“That creature he was after was a vampire.Some of you may be familiar with this story.It was a powerful creature—a vampire from Europe, a former noble who had gone feral and insane with blood lust.He had set himself up as a false god and called himself The Lord of the Wood.William Corcoran and I worked together to bring him to justice for the wanton murders he’d committed on the townsfolk.Afterward, while the Lord of the Wood lay staked in his coffin, William Corcoran collected multiple vials of his blood.This would prove useless for him, but a life-changing event for me.
“To make an exceptionally long story short.William Corcoran was unable to remove the curse.The Routshammer was an ancient relic, one passed directly down from Necromancer to Necromancer.It ensured that one’s soul was bound permanently to one’s body.No amount of physical damage could separate the two.It was a way of immortality, of sorts, but it carried a great deal of inconvenience with it.After a very long life, Corcoran had decided that the practice he carried should be burdened on no one but me, his last apprentice.He bid me drink deep of the Lord of the Wood’s blood, and with it, I became blessed with my vampiric nature.Yet no amount of blood imbibed by Corcoran did much more than rejuvenate his form, temporarily.
“I was his best and brightest pupil.At long last, he had decided he was tired of living.He had taught me most of what he knew.And he conspired that we would meet a man who was so craven, so filled with greed, that we would offer him the Routshammer and he would grasp it of his own accord.
“The first two men could not bring themselves to grab immortality when offered.As disappointed as we were, we were grateful for their humanity.But Richard Tremblay was vain and feared death very much.He almost immediately took the offer that was given to him.And this is where things get complicated.
“Richard Tremblay’s essence became infused with his house.He was not a Land Wight, but he was rather cursed with immortality, and a fragment of the power most Necromancers transfer with the passage of the dark relic, the Routshammer.William Corcoran’s curse was passed on, and Richard Tremblay was left with his soul bound not to his corpse, but to his house.Time and memory being what it was, many of the details from that night were not available to me.I fled the scene after Tremblay’s apparent death and Corcoran’s disappearance.And did not think of that night for years afterward.
“Fast forward nearly a century.Stacey here and I managed to meet, seemingly through sheer chance.She invited me, as an occult expert, to investigate Richard Tremblay’s Manor.Tremblay, cursed as all undead are with a mortal memory, could not recollect how he passed.At this point, it had been a century.Memories, as I’m sure many of the other undead here recognize, can jumble with time.I was familiar with the place during our initial investigation, but time and tide and other events pushed most of what happened that night from my brain.
