Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

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Part Two

The Guardian of Death

Chapter Eleven

A thin layer of snow covered the ground. Mortanius’s dark red cloak rustled softly as his breath billowed away. There was no other sound, and no one around to disturb his quiet thoughts. On the ground in front of him were three graves, barely noticeable now, in the middle of an overgrown field beside the ruins of a long-ago burned down house.

Mortanius was no longer a boy. His brown hair had darkened with age until it was nearly black, and his face no longer sported the softness of youth. He sported a strong chin, dark eyes, and a mouth that seemed always on the edge of a frown. Although he was still a young man, Mortanius looked significantly older than he really was.

Thirteen years had passed since the death of his family. When he took the time to think about it, it surprised and angered him to think that he had lived with the vampires almost as long as he had lived with his own family. He had not intended to stay with them so long, but each time he made up his mind to go out and live on his own again, something kept him with the vampires. He had wanted to build a home, find a good woman, and start a family. He wanted to have a normal life once more, but it never happened. And he had already accepted the fact that it never would.

Moebius was right that Mortanius would never be able to leave the vampires, but he was wrong about the reason. It was not the vampires who kept Mortanius there, it was Mortanius himself. In thirteen years, he had become a prisoner of his own fears.

Each year, he came back to his childhood home to visit his family’s final resting place. Not out of a misplaced sense of sentimentality, and not to remind himself of the good times. Seeing their graves again only reminded him of the bad times. He came back to remember the pain. He returned home year after year to remind himself of the fear and sorrow he felt the night they were killed. The hatred and terror. He came back to remember the death.

He could never go through that again. Seeing someone you love die was hard enough, but for Mortanius it was worse. He was too connected to death, too closely associated with it. Death, to him, was very literally a way of life. And no matter how hard he wanted to get rid of the power the Pillar had granted him, he knew that it would stay with him until his own death. As long as he held that power, he could not afford to love anyone the way he loved his family.

And so he stayed with the vampires at the Home of the Guardians, when every day he stayed there was another day closer to the end of his human life. He was twenty-eight years old now, very close to the age Lora and Romanen had been when they were changed. Mortanius knew he didn’t have much time left.

Someday soon, the vampires would inevitably come for him, to turn him into a freak hybrid like Lora and Romanen. And when that day came, the vampires would learn that some things had not changed over the years. Even after more than a decade with them, he was still determined to retain his humanity.

He still carried a sword sometimes, and he’d become quite adept at its use. He was nowhere near as skilled a warrior as Romanen, the Guardian of Conflict, of course, but he could hold his own. He kept the sword by his bed, unsheathed, ready to grab at a moment’s notice. He didn’t really believe that he could fight the vampires off, but if they wanted to steal his blood, then he would take some of theirs in return. He would not be changed easily. And when it was over and he ceased to be fully human, he would run out and greet the sun for the last time. Mortanius would rather die than become a half-breed.

With a long sigh, he walked back across the field to where his horse was tied up. The trip back to the Home of the Guardians would take most of the day. He’d spent almost the entire previous day traveling out this far. Janos once suggested he let a pair of vampires fly him back to his childhood home, rather than travel by horse, but Mortanius said no. He didn’t want the vampires doing him any favors, and he didn’t want them intruding on such a private moment. Besides, he liked to travel away from the Home of the Guardians. This yearly trip gave him two days to be alone with his thoughts.

Although his family’s land had so far not been claimed by anyone else, there were still quite a few farms around, far more than there had been when Mortanius was young. He remembered wild meadows where there now stood farmhouses and plowed fields.

He waved in passing to farmers in the field as he rose his horse down the rutted, uneven road. The farming villages were rapidly finishing up the last of their preparations for winter. Some children ran around the side of the small farmhouse, giggling breathlessly, and stopped in their tracks as they saw Mortanius traveling down the road, his red cloak flapping behind him. He smiled and waved at the children as well, and they shrieked playfully and ran off.

Every year, it seemed that the farming communities moved closer and closer to the Pillars. A significant number of people lived on small plots of land within a few miles of the Pillars now. It wasn’t surprising, since soil there was fertile and the weather was pleasant most of the year. Mortanius liked to see them, because it meant more people to associate with. Many of the local villagers didn’t even know Mortanius was one of the Guardians. They thought he was just some wealthy landowner or nobleman.

The vampires, however, were somewhat uncomfortable with so many humans living in close proximity to them. Of course, Mortanius rather liked the idea of the vampires being made uncomfortable.

He spent the day riding and reached the Home of the Guardians after the sun had gone down. No one was around, so he took some food from the small pantry and retired to his private rooms. Of all the Guardians, only three lived there full-time: Aleph, Lora, and Mortanius himself. The other vampire Guardians lived in various locations around Nosgoth. Romanen had moved to an estate to the west some years before. Janus lived in a spacious mountain citadel in the north. However, all of them could return to the Home of the Guardians on relatively short notice if the need arose.

Mortanius lit a few candles with a snap of his fingers. Along with his magical powers as a Pillar Guardian, he had been learning some other magic. Simple things like making an object levitate or making a spark of fire appear. The vampires had far more powerful magic, but Mortanius doubted he would ever be able to learn it.

He sat down at his desk and looked across the stacks of scrolls and texts scattered across its surface. Some were his own notes and other ideas he had written down, but most were writings borrowed from the vampire archives, which he still only had limited access to. His predecessor, Varash, had written a few journals about his experiences as the Guardian of the Pillar of Death, and Mortanius found them fascinating and illuminating, but also extremely frustrating. While Varash had committed to paper many things that were useful to Mortanius, he had left out much more.

But the few journals that Mortanius was allowed to read still held a wealth of information about how his abilities functioned, the range of their powers and also their limitations. Reading the scrolls, Mortanius thought back to the night his family died, and how he pulled the murderer’s soul back into his body to return him to life, just to die all over again. That was just a taste of the awesome power he could wield if he so chose. Varash, according to the scrolls, had developed deadly powers that thrilled Mortanius and also terrified him. The power to pull souls directly from the living, killing them with little more than a thought. The power to make undead servants and other foul creatures.

Of course, Mortanius would never reach that level of magical power. Varash had thousands of years to experiment and master his abilities, but Mortanius would certainly not live that long. If events transpired as he expected them to, he would be dead in just a few years.

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