”The cunts in the Department will catch on quick if we parade around shooting death beams and shit, Caroline, we need somewhere to hide before everyone and their bleeding mother starts sending assassins after us.”
The first thing she felt was pain; it flared through her senses, blinding and deafening her to the outside world. For what seemed like an eternity the pain continued, pushing any and all thoughts from her mind. Eventually, when the pain had dulled to a point where she could collect together thoughts and memories out of the maelstrom of pain, she discovered that she had no memories to collect. Rather than feel startled, her first instinctual response was disgust; disgust at the pain, disgust at her amnesia, and disgust at her weakness. She pushed past the pain with pure stubborn will, and resolved to open her eyes.
The first sight that greeted her was some sort of monster – perhaps male – that was shaking uncontrollably. Confusion and disgust followed, as she began to wonder just how many surprises would be sprung on her in the next thirty seconds. Fate answered by restoring her hearing, where she very quickly found that what she assumed to be a seizure of some sort was in fact laughter, exploding from the creature in an unmistakably masculine tone. Disgust continued to build inside her as a sneer crossed her face; this male was obviously attempting to strike her down, which resulted in the flash of pain that had overtaken her. Before she could formulate a plan on how best to castrate him, however, she was once again surprised by the lack of a sneer on her face, or indeed, any emotion whatsoever. A quick examination revealed that her mouth was frozen in a haunting grin, mostly attributed to the fact that her jaws were completely exposed and coated in bright red gore. She clamped down on the disgust and hatred in her soul that was threatening to erupt, and instead turned her attention to the earlier problem that fate had so mercifully deigned her with: the male monster.
The most striking feature was the male’s green skin, almost bright green in its hue, which the whirlpool of thoughts in her brain then corrected to the term ork. The ork male apparently saw something incredibly hilarious about her circumstances, as he was quite literally wheezing with laughter at the moment; his loss, the longer he guffawed like a jackass was more time for her to formulate a plan. Unfortunately, fate decided to continue its relentless test of her patience when the ork slowly started to regain his senses. She didn’t have much time – a few seconds at the most – and the ork held a nasty looking implement in both hands that she did not wish to learn the purpose of. Frantically, her brain screamed for a solution, poring over the few coherent thoughts she had assembled for a way out. With a start, she realized that she had already found the solution several seconds ago.
She looked inward to the disgust and hatred she had earlier suppressed, and let it flow free: how dare this green-skinned moron make a mockery of her? How dare she let herself grow so weak as to let him strike her down? The emotions inside her slowly built pressure and she was sure that, were she not still affected by whatever the ork did, she would be feeling it. Rather than letting the hatred explode, she simply focused on a body part – in this case her eyes – and released, allowing the negative emotions to flow towards her head. She realized – from her own observation and from the dawning look of horror on the ork’s face – that she still had a couple moments before whatever was going to happen happened.
Her next reaction came as easily to her as breathing, and, before the ork could react, she looked at him with pale, hateful eyes and screamed.
What happened next took a couple seconds for her to process. As soon as she screamed, pure, malevolent energy poured out of her eyes, burning out her eyeballs and scorching the skin and bone around her face. As much damage as this did, it paled in comparison to its effect on the ork: his skin slowly buckled in like a can of soda being crushed, and in a split second all of the blood in his body exited violently through his eyes and nose. His laughter was silenced by the flow of blood and – much to her annoyance – he expired in a scant few seconds. Slowly, the skin sloughed off of his body like wet dough, and fell next to his feet, leaving him nothing more than an odd looking skeleton. The fact that the skeleton continued to stand, coated in crackling dark energy, did not surprise her, and actually filled her with a measure of contentment. Violent reanimation was a simple, crude spell, but its results were undoubtedly effective.
With her aggressor dead and the pain wracking herself subsiding, she got up off the ground and took in her surroundings: she was in what appeared to be a long abandoned room in some sort of log cabin, the only furnishings being a small mat on the ground and a mirror, next to a broken window where her assassin-turned-servant most likely entered. She decided that damage control was her top priority, and she walked to the mirror to check her wounds.
Her face was a mess, to say the least. All of the skin around it – as well as most of the tendons that made up her neck and the area around her collar bone – had been messily ripped off by whatever tool the ork was using. Her eye sockets were now blacked out holes surrounded by charred bone, accented by two, soulless dots in the middle which connected to her brain and allowed her to take in visual information. She realized that the only thing saving her from being a quadriplegic was the fact that her attacker had failed to sever her spine with whatever crude tools he attempted to kill her with. She found her visage lacking, but realized that there were more pressing matters to attend to before she concerned herself with cosmetics.
She looked around, a bit lost in her surroundings. She did not know her name, nor did she retain any knowledge of the magicks that lay within her. Her face and chest were charred and bloody from an unknown assassin, who tried to kill her for an unknown reason. She realized that, before she could do anything, she must take time to collect her thoughts and dredge back up her missing memories. She sat down cross legged on the small mat, sending a mental command to the skeleton to begin cleaning up the mess in the room. She was amnesiac in a cliché and incredibly annoying way, but she did not care. She simply needed time, time to remember and time to rebuild and heal herself. Before she descended into a heavy trance, a voice from deep in her memories spoke to her:
“You’re a lich now, love. Patience is ingrained in your bones, and you’ll soon find that patience will make you who you are.”