Monday, May 20, 2024

Page 3590

Perhaps that was a strange way to look at it. He was technically immortal, after all. He was literally unable to die on his own.

And yet... the more time he spent as a servant, the more tales he heard about servants of the past, and the more he saw of other, older servants around him... the clearer it became to him that things weren’t so simple as all that. Surely, it was no coincidence that, despite the long history of reapers and humanity as a whole, the oldest living servants were still only a few hundred years old.

Voreese fell quiet for a while, and Roman did the same. As he went through the motions of mindlessly checking wall after wall, stone after stone, for some sort of secret passageway, he allowed his mind to wander, again, into the larger questions about this very odd life that he’d found himself living.

About what the future might hold in store for him.

He realized that, if he was being totally honest with himself, this immortality didn’t feel so at all. In his gut, when it came to the subject of death, he had this looming sense of inevitability--much more so than before he’d become undead. Like it might just be around the corner, somehow.

But it didn’t bother him.

Maybe because he’d already felt death once before. Maybe this was just an in-built adaptation that all servants had. He’d have to ask some others about that, sometime. Though, he suspected that Hector might be the exact wrong person to consult. And the Rainlords, too, for that matter. Hmm.

He remembered a time when he’d felt invincible. Multiple times, in fact, both before and after meeting Voreese. Naturally, when he’d discovered his new undead powers as a servant, that had been quite the confidence booster, until he’d learned more about how dangerous the world really was. But it was the times from before that were sticking in his mind, now.

Back when he’d been poor as dirt. Somehow, that hadn’t seemed to affect his confidence at all. Not in those days. If anything, it had emboldened him. Perhaps it had been because he’d had nothing to lose. If his life was already at rock bottom, then the only way was up, right?

All that verve eventually caught up with him, of course, when his life of thievery led him into biting off more than he could chew.

At the time, anyway.

Once he’d revived, he discovered that he could suddenly chew quite a bit more. And his appetite had increased, as well.

With Voreese’s help, his fortune accumulated quickly. Getting back at the rich bastard who’d killed him turned into something much more than just revenge. That score had been unlike any other. And it had allowed him to begin building himself into someone entirely new.

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