No More Mysteries

The not-dead man staggered to a standing position, still spitting blood. He still had his eyes, though, and the only blood was coming from his mouth. "You!" Bar yelled, then ran at the man and tackled him to the ground, who crumpled with a wheeze. "What did you whoresons do to me? Where did you take me? Where are my pants? My pence?!" Bar shouted into the man's face, his islander accent rolling like boulders, angry spittle flecking from his mouth onto his short red beard.

Bar thumped the man's head against the hard stone ground with every word, until the man slapped him and pushed him away. "Unhand me, you little pissant! I'm the only reason you're still al-" Bar, indignant at being struck like a misbehaving child, gave the man a backhanded slap of his own. "Strike me like I'm your poor wife, will you, you little wanker!? When I find my shillelagh, I'll-

The man in the white robe hastily scrambled away from the half-naked thug advancing on him with violence in his eyes. "Wait, wait, just wait a bloody moment, man, I'm not your enemy-"

Bar grabbed the man and pulled him up by the collar with his left hand, the other making a fist aimed at the poor soul's face. "Oh, truly, truly then, good sah? Then I suppose ye can explain why I'm freezing my arse off on top of this great flat rock amid a pile of corpses instead of working off the hangover of my twenty-fourth birthday in me own flat!? And best answer quick, laddie, or I'll be sore tempted to make good on that promise involvin' me trusty blackthorn, ya reckon!?"

"Your hand!" The man shrieked, pointing at the fist that was dangerously winding up towards his nose. "Wha' aboot-" Bar stopped and looked at his hand, which did indeed have cause to be be pointed out. After all, it was no longer his own hand.

Bone now covered almost his entire fist, as if it had risen up from beyond the skin to form an intricate ivory gauntlet. It plated his hand in sections, much like a knight's iron glove. In the gaps and seams, muscle and sinew connected it, tensing with an inner strength that Bar instinctively thought could crush stone. He always knew he was built strong, not never this strong. The transformation continued past the wrist all the way up to half the upper arm, where the bone armor and monstrous flesh shifted back into tanned pink skin.

Bar's jaw dropped, and so did the man he was holding with an oof when Bar let him go. He stared at his arm in amazement, opening and closing the great bone fist. As soon as his aggression disappeared, so did the new arm, suddenly writhing and contorting from within as it pulled itself back into a normal shape. Bone shrank, muscle flowed back over it, and skin regrew itself from the upper arm like a mass of crawling snakes. Before he knew it, it was normal again, as if nothing changed.

Bar's mouth was still open, and as he held his arm up one of the flies that were beginning to hover over the corpses in clouds flew right in. Startled back into sense, he frantically started spitting. "*ptah, ptah, ptah* Blegh! Agh, bloomin' hells!"

All the while, the man in the white robe who was not dead (Bar was still confused by this) grinned like a madman whose insane prophecies had finally come true and scrambled to his feet.

"Marvelous, wondrous, amazing, wonderful! Can you do it again? How magnificent… beyond anything I could have ever hoped for, dreamed for, conceived of, prayed for! Not that I do much praying anymore, you understand, far too dangerous, as I'm sure you know..." the man chuckled at his own joke and elbowed Bar in the side, whose mouth had fallen open again as he stared incredulously at the stranger.

The white-robed lunatic actually was a human, to Bar's mild surprise, apparently in his early thirties, and above the rictus grin of white pearly teeth, there were pronounced cheekbones, pale skin, wide eyes that were grey, and a thick mop of black curls that bounced whenever the man moved, making him for all the world seem like a jester for a court of the dead.

Bar stared at the man for another half-second before managing to speak. "Just who in all the hells are ye?"

"Ah, of course, you seek answers for your current predicament!" The pale man said. "Not to worry, my good man, not to worry at all, for you have found yourself in the capable hands of the Count de la Sanguine Marque, the most famed physic in the whole Estoc Plaza. The honor is yours, I'm sure". The man did a quick little half-bow, perfectly suited for greeting someone of lower social status. "You may call me Sanguine, of course."

Bar did not care for the man's condescending demeanor, nor was he completely certain the man's faculties were at all capable. Aside from the ridiculous name, which sounded made-up anyway, the stranger's reactions to his current circumstances were not what Bar would call "sane". "Never heard o' ye."

The man's polite expression twitched into one that might have been rage, but quickly settled back. "I assure you, sir, that could only be because you have not been in the right social circles."

He clapped his hands and steepled his fingers. "Now, as to our, what should we call it, situation. You," he gestured at Bar, "were chosen for a ritual sacrifice that was supposed to 'purge the evil' from the soil," he sarcastically said using air quotes, "allowing the crops to grow again."

The Count put his hands behind his back and circled Bar, a behavior that struck him as pretentious, as the odd man continued explaining. "I was visiting these people's little backwater village for a couple days, and they found one of my Elder tomes. Those books are, of course, incredibly dangerous and should never be perused without proper education, training, and discipline. They promise power at a terrible cost. Really, the country hicks should have never been able to find it in the first place, but I suspect my assistant egged them on and suggested using the forbidden knowledge to cure their little drought."

The Count flicked a fly off his shoulder and examined his fingernails. "I recently had cause to believe that she was, hmm, dissatisfied with my patronage, having came on in pursuit of quick, cheap power that she might have used to get back at her family for disowning her."

"I assume she became bitter with me for not sharing knowledge she was not ready to learn, and sought a way to gain power by herself. That's her over there, by the way, the former Lady Sterling of Baroque Manor." He motioned to the dead woman that Bar had fallen on top of in his panic.

"She told them that she could bring prosperity back to their farms with the sacrifice of life force using the spells with my book. It was all a lie, of course, that particular ritual is as useful for soil rejuvenation as an empty keg is to an alcoholic." He sniffed, making an expression of distaste. "Well, I suppose it wouldn��t be completely worthless. Why all these villager's bodies could actually provide the soil with nutrients, given enough ti-"

"Enough aboot the soil!" Bar was starting to get a headache from being around this man. "How did I get from the city to all the way out here?"

"Ah, yes, but of course. You see, you were lying at the bottom of the city gates, completely unconscious. My theory is that the local law enforcement had no tolerance for drunks and threw you from the walls like so much dead weight. Disrespectful to their citizenry, really, but, can't anything be done about it now." The Count shrugged.

Bar gaped dubiously at the man before shaking his head and taking a seat on the altar. "Good gods, I must have really had a few to na' remember any of that," he thought to himself." "It makes sense, though. I remember more than one guard telling me they'd do jus' that if I was drunk an' disorderly on their streets again."

"The angry mob was originally going to sacrifice a scrawny goat or two, but on their way to the ancient altar site of the High Plateaus, they passed the city and found you," the Count continued. "My former assistant jumped at the chance to sacrifice a live human instead of a couple half-dead beasts of burden, and convinced the mob to go along with it, saying it was all for the greater good, and that you must have deserved it, being a drunk miscreant and a lot of other rubbish twaddle." He waved his hand as though to dismiss the whole affair. "Anyways, th-"

"Wait just a damned minute." Bar was trying to rub away the insanity that besieged his temples. The Count stopped and waited with an irritated expression. "Yes?"

"How do you know any of this?", Bar started. "Why all the white robes? Why are you wearin' one?" Bar got up, getting angrier by the second. "Were ye there the whole time and did nothing, or was this all your doin'!?"

"Now hold on a moment, good man!," the Count spoke, seemingly outraged. "I had nothing to do with this. Not a whit of it was done with my knowledge or my permission. By the time I caught up with the mob, I was too late. Had I spoken up, it might have been me on that altar with a dagger in my chest."

"All I could do was knock out one of the halfwits, steal his robe, and… tamper with the proceedings." the Count said while needlessly adjusting his robe, appearing uncertain before seeming to settle on indignant. "As I said before, it's only thanks to me that you're alive and not eternally digesting in the fetid belly of some archdemon or another."

He glanced around at the corpses with a sigh. "As for the white robes, they are indeed bedsheets", he said, looking eternally disappointed. "The local cretins decided they were necessary to add to the flair of occult and wizardry that apparently was present within the atmosphere." He scoffed. "I know I taught my apprentice better than stopping to such theatrics.

Bar scoffed himself and sat back down. "Roight. And by ''tamper wi' tha' proceedings'', you mean, what, exactly?"

The Count winced. "Oh, well, I suppose, I just, simply…" He gestured vaguely. "...Altered the systems of information a bit." Bar crossed his arms and glared at Sanguine with growing intensity.

"You see," the increasingly nervous Count hurriedly explained, "all this, everything you see around you," he said as he motioned to the landscape around them, "is made up of information."

"What some may call 'magic',"

he looked somewhat disgusted by the term, "is simply different principles of advanced alchemy, or the ability to take that information and rearrange it into something different. As, say, a.."

He snapped his fingers.

"A baker, for example, may take several key components of a cake, such as flour, sugar, cherries or the like, and induce chemistry through heat to rearrange the components into a new, different, yet the same, object-"

"Get to tha' point!" Bar's patience was wearing thin.

"Right, indeed." The Count conceded, still looking displeased for the interruption. Not that Bar could give a damn.

"The point is, that the ritual was designed to imbue a person with certain abilities and faculties that no one else could ever have, with the exception of others applying arcane methods with the same principles behind them. Of course, it is impossible for a human to grasp these methods, so we must rely on what we have been given in ages before, when extradimensional Powers walked among us in this world." He walked over to the dead woman Bar fell on top of and pulled out a massive black book from underneath her.

"Despite what some uneducated people may tell you, it was these Powers who taught us the first "magics","

he used air quotes again and rolled his eyes, "and granted us the ability to teach some of it to others. Now, my former apprentice desired personal power, to the extent that she had neither the patience nor the resources to acquire it. So she turned to this." The Count held up the book as a professor might show one to a class.

"This tome is one of the Elder texts, containing methods, theories, and other knowledge that can only do more harm than good if not handled properly. Her problem," he gestured to the dead woman, "was that she was impatient and ignorant. There is no such thing as power without a price. Even when someone else pays it." He looked pointedly at Bar.

Bar looked at him dubiously for a moment before speaking. "...Alright, but, say all that is true, and she tried to give 'erself power, why am I alive, after bein' stabbed no less," he pointed at the rip in his shirt, where a gaping chest wound should be, "an' she and all everyone else ended up dead? What's up with tha'?"

"Ah!" The Count looked positively delighted to explain. "Well, my good man, that is because I, as I mentioned earlier, tampered with the proceedings!" The red headed half-naked thug looked confused and angry, an expression the Count began to associate with him more and more.

"You see, I understood the principles of world manipulation and planar communication far better than she did. I am, after all, *ahem*, was, I should say, her teacher." He looked at the dead Lady Sterling with a curled lip. "In short terms, I was able to chant behind the scenes, weaving my own instructions into the spell and disrupting her efforts to communicate with the Powers Below."

The Count cleared his throat. "While you were passed out from drink atop the altar, and all the village idiots were all a-sway in the grip of superstitious delusion, I tried to cancel out the spell by adding contrary instructions. Namely, to direct the life force energies into you rather than from you."

The Count stopped, looking into the distance with disbelief and astonishment written across his face. "This did not work. At all. Something happened, something I could have never predicted. Instead of canceling each other out and saving your life in the process, the two spells merged, mine and hers, and the collective will of so many willing souls and the intention of sacrifice combined to make a startling effect, something I've never seen before." He looked back at Bar, clearly in wonder at this ruffian.

"Somehow my improvised meddling caused the spell to rebound and be redirected towards my former apprentice and the mob, with the intended result landing on you instead. The original spell, vaguely written as to provide healing from all wounds and effective immortality, struck all the congregants and used them as the source of life force to empower the target, which was now you." He chuckled at himself, seemingly in awe of his own brilliance. "Powers Above, I'm good."

Bar, still sitting, stared at the man who had just spoken so many words, trying to make any of them make sense. He eventually gave up. He shook his head and rubbed his temples again. The brain pain was here to stay.

"Even if all that really happened, that doesna' explain how you're still alive. You were here too, why didn't yer eyeballs explode and yer "life force" get sucked out too?"

"Ha! Finally, an excellent question, my dear ruffian!" the Count exclaimed, then proceeded to just look at Bar without saying anything.

"..... are ye goin' ta say why, or…"

"I have NO idea!"

The Count threw his hands up in the air in surrender with the biggest grin on his infuriating face, completely giving up on this subject.

"I cannot even begin to fathom how I'm still alive, and functional at that. By all rights, I should be dead and gone, with none of my precious life-liquids having vacated my person. And yet, here I am! Ha!" Sanguine literally jumped and clicked his heels.

"I suppose this is one of those "miracles" peasants love to talk about! How fascinating! My own continued existence is a complete mystery!"

"Why am I!?" he joyously asked Bar.

Bar truly didn't know.

"But then, that's a question philosophers have been asking themselves for actual millennia, and the Powers know they've never agreed on a single answer." He chuckled again, still leaving Bar dumbfounded. "But I digress. Welcome back to your second chance at life, my dear boy! You've got the very world at your fingertips! I suppose all that's left is how you'll decide to use it." The Count finished, a very self-satisfied grin on his face, hands behind his back, once more gazing at the horizon.