Role

Chapter 3

Tombury choked on the stench before his eyes opened. Did his eyes even open?
All he could see was darkness. He commanded his body into action, but he
couldn't move. He wriggled and choked and vomited, then wriggled some more.
Something beneath him burst like a bubble, and everything became tacky, soft,
gooey. Something sharp scratched at his face.

Was he drowning in a swamp? Was this quicksand? He froze. No, he wasn't
sinking. He kept wriggling in a direction he assumed was up. Mnay minutes
later, he realized he was near the bottom of a mountain corpses. About a
hundred of them.

He spent several more hours wriggling out of the heap, passing out at times,
crying and dry heaving as he went. Tombury's thoughts turned inward. His
entire life, he had been hammered over the head with the ideas of goodness
and righteousness. But he spent a day and night with the product of goodness
and righteousness, which seemed to be precisely the same as the product of
wickedness: Death.

In the face of death, all of these distinctions fade away. Men and dark-elves
are all meat in the end. Tombury found this Truth.

And so he was reborn. He emerged back into the world, bloody, gasping,
screaming, in the middle of the night. Voralian guards at first believed he
was a stray drowish zombie before someone recognized him. When he returned
home, the townspeople teased him about it: He was a sissy, a coward, a
light-weight. His drow-blood made him weak, they laughed.

Before, that would have devastated him. It didn't anymore. He became
disinterested in the living and their arbitrary distinctions and instead
developed a fascination with the dead. Dark-elves, wood-elves, high elves,
humans. They're all pink inside.

Tombury was a skilled surgeon. So despite his new eccentricities - which only
provided more gossip fodder for the quiet town - they trusted him to care for
the sick from all of the surrounding villages. They didn't realize that he
wasn't the same young Tombury they had tormented for nearly 30 years. The
sick became dead, and the dead became something else entirely.

By the time they discovered his twisted experiments, he was gone.