Ruinous

He woke up tasting blood.

Normally, this would not be anything unusual. Bartholomew, or Bar as the local louts at the pub called him, had spent more than one morning nursing a hangover with a mouthful of red in his life. Usually this was the result of some moron making snide speculations about his questionable origins, a favorite topic of conversation at the pub.

But as he groaned and stretched his limbs on top of a cool, hard surface beneath him, he realized that the guardhouse cell never had this much room. Hence he must not have been arrested this time.

Eyes still blurry, he grinned for a moment before sitting up and rubbing his eyes as to deduce his current location and what time it was. The sky looked grey, as did the oddly small horizon and he felt a cool wind against his cheeks. Bar's sluggish mind deduced he must be on one of the High Plateaus. A new distance record for a hangover. The boys would love this one. He felt a sharp, hot pain in his chest, and his skin felt sticky, everywhere, for some odd reason.

As Bar's vision cleared, he thought about procuring some worker's tar to help get the fogginess out of his head before seeing the ornate dagger in his chest.

He promptly stiffened, widened his eyes to the size of King's coins, and screamed.

He scrambled away backwards, as if to somehow run away from the thing, fell off the stone platform he seemed to have been sleeping on, right on top of a corpse.

Bar choked, hands flying up to his mouth, frantically looking around to get a grasp on what his life had become at that moment. And then he realized there were lots of corpses, certainly more than he thought. Aside from the one he had fallen ass-first into, of course.

Frantically pressing his back against the rectangle stone thing, he very quickly saw so many corpses. The dead surrounded him, dressed in white robes dyed blackish red from all the blood. Their eyes looked to have burst from their heads, crimson streaming from every orifice, their mouths, their ears, noses, everywhere, really.

His mind, a tad fragile at this point, brought morbid humor to the forefront of his thinking. He thought for a second that logically, from whatever happened to these people, blood would have also come from their improper areas too, and he laughed. Well, at least, he thought he laughed. What really happened is that he gave a strangled, girlish giggle, and pressed himself against the stone to make himself as small as possible.

After hyperventilating for a couple minutes and forcibly stopping before he passed out, Bar took stock of his surroundings. First, it came to him that the dagger, a black-handled, vicious looking thing, was still in his chest, and perhaps he should get it out. Then a stranger realization; he wasn't bleeding. At least, not really. His own blood was writhing around the wound, as if sentient, alive. It still hurt like a horse's kick, but when he looked closer, he saw more of the blade, and then more, being *pushed* out. His very body was rejecting the dagger.

Understandably shocked and confused by this, he gave a harsh yell and yanked out the offending object and threw it to the cliff's edge in one panicked motion. The wound promptly closed itself shut, as if it was satisfied to be rid of the annoyance.

In his movement, Bar caught a glimpse of what he was sitting against, and immediately jolted away from the thing. It was a great stone table. Arcane writing and macabre art depicting monsters and men decorated it's six sides, a different scene for each.

"Powers Above and Below, what the hells....?"

"What happened to me?"

He slowly got up, off the dead person who he now saw was a woman, with a pale complexion, freckles, and ruddy, messy hair. He swiveled around, and saw that aside from the elegant-looking once-white robes, the people that surrounded him in a gruesome circle looked to be peasants, not anyone rich. Farming people, missing teeth, with tanned skin and stout frames, dressed up like members of a bedsheet ghost organization.

Bar looked back at the table, which he could now see the top of, and saw what clearly must be some kind of altar. Six lines stretched from the center, reaching to small circular hollows at each corner of the table. He realized he had lain unconscious at the very center, where the hollows and lines carried some kind of fluid to where he was. Judging by the blackened marks where the lines and hollows were, a flammable liquid. There was a burned silhouette of a person right where he got up from.

Many thoughts came unbidden from his mouth.

"What did these blighted bastards try to do to me.... and why aren't I a bloody corpse too?"

Bar stared at himself, his hands. He was wearing nothing but his wool shirt, and besides the stab wound that used to be there, he noticed with growing shock didn't even leave a scar, he was completely unmarked. In fact, physically speaking, he felt healthier than he ever had in his whole life. The toothache that had plagued him for the past few weeks as gone, and as he ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth, he discovered all his own teeth were back too. One he lost from biting a man's ear off in while getting mugged in an alleyway (it was loose anyway), another gone when a watchman stomped his head on the ground when he was arrested for vagrancy (he had a place to stay, the bloody guard just wouldn't let him explain why he was out past curfew), and another from a good ol' fashioned street fight he earned more than a few pence from.

Suddenly curious despite his circumstances, he checked his toes and and confirmed that his missing left pinkie toe was also back from the stomach of a prison rat he met when he was six.

"Huh.. ha.. ha!"

Bar bent over and held his head in one hand while he laughed, this time in earnest. Dark humor had always been his getaway from the shoddy mess that life had been ever since he arrived in the city, but this was something special altogether.

"Ha ha ha ha... so instead of gettin' meself butchered like the prize pig at the swine fest to some blackened god or other, I was refunded for mah trouble by the Powers, with *interest*! HA!

Bar doubled over and cackled like a madman whose raving prophecies had finally come true. It took him quite a few minutes before he stopped, and only because he heard moaning.

He shot straight up and looked over both shoulders, suddenly afraid for his life again.

The moaning turned into wracked, wet coughs, and he spun around to discover that one of the white-robes was still alive.