Brick & Mortar (ver 4.1) (Patreon)

Thanks for your patience, guys! This is my fourth attempt at Brick and Mortar and I'm surprised to admit just how similar it is to the first. Hrm!

Anyhow, one thing that I'm still on the fence about is whether I should keep it in first person or switch the whole thing to third. I know that some readers don't care for first person novels, but I'm quite fond of them.

So, I'm going to post both. The first person version follows, and you'll find a link to the third person version at the bottom. This is a very short scene, so consider reading both. I'd really appreciate your thoughts. Which do you like more?

———

I really screwed up. I was so upset about losing my sisters that I didn’t even notice the living dead thing creeping up on me.

That’s bad. … like really, really bad … really careless of me. Back in the prairies and forests that my family called home, I could afford to be a little less cautious. It was—for the most part—safe.

But I was far from home now, farther than I ever had been before. The edge of the grasslands was a three day hike back to the west, and the deserts that stretched nearly to the eastern coast were infested with bandits and worse—human soldiers that had been separated from their platoons.

I had been hiking at a good pace, trying to make the most of the cooler, overcast weather, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, there it was, just three steps behind me, shadowing my pace.

I was so startled that I cried out like a new-born calf. I jumped backwards and raised my hammer over my head, ready to defend myself. My heart threatened to race right out of my chest, and I sucked in huge, panicked breaths through my wide-open mouth. My hands shook, and my arms trembled.

The dead thing just stood there, staring at me.

I had never seen a man—a creature—quite like him. He looked tiny and frail. Had he stood up straight, he wouldn’t have been more than five and a half feet tall. I doubt he even weighed a hundred pounds. His skin had turned pale and translucent, marked here and there with decay. Worst of all, his jaw hung at an unnatural angle, and just looking at his face made my molars ache with sympathy pains.

He looked like a dry husk, a dead casing that some sort of evil beast would one day crawl from. He made my skin crawl.

I lowered my hammer—not all the way in case he proved to be dangerous, but back down to chest height. “Are ya…” I cleared my throat, refusing to acknowledge how I’d screamed only a moment ago. “Are you headed to the outpost?” Refusing to take my hands from the weapon, I jerked my chin back along the road in the direction I’d been hiking.

He didn’t reply. Not shocking really considering how little was still holding his jaw to his skull. Instead, he raised a skinny arm and pointed a bony finger toward the east.

I had heard of the undead, corpses who wouldn’t stay buried, but I’d never actually met one in person. In fact, I’d never even met anyone who had. My people didn’t openly discuss such creatures, so I knew little about them, just that they’d been human once, and some sort of curse kept them alive. Well, half-alive at least.

Lots of my people knew magic. I’d never shown any affinity for it, personally, but minotaur magic was wholly unlike whatever had been unleashed on these people. Druidic spells were all about life and healing, plants and the elements. It couldn’t turn a dead body into … whatever this thing was now.

He stared silently at me. He didn’t breathe.

The creature smelled faintly of rot. Although not a pleasant smell, it wasn’t as horrible as I’d have guessed. He smelled more like a dry, musty thing than a corpse.

“Uh, I don’t suppose you’ve seen my sisters?” I asked him. I raised one hand just under horn height. “They’re both a little shorter than me. Macha has a dark pelt, pale horns, hair down to the middle of her back. Zonta has a cream pelt with brown spots, black horns, braids.”

The dead man stared at me awhile longer. Eventually, it shook its head slightly, but his eyes still refused to blink.

We continued to stare at one another until tears blurred my vision. I had to blink.

“Why are you staring at me?” I asked.

He didn’t respond.

A fat, black fly landed on his temple. It washed its face with its forelegs for a moment and then casually strolled across the creature’s eyeball.

Something lurched in my stomach, and I had to look away.

I headed off once more, my hooves clomping along the paving stones. I couldn’t hear him slinking along behind me, but whenever I glanced back, I saw that he was keeping pace as if I’d invited him along.

Hrmph. On one hand, two was safer than one; he could keep an eye on my back. But on the other, I didn’t exactly have any reason to trust him. He might be a tiny little thing, but he had a dagger strapped to either hip. I suspected that he could literally stab me in the back before I even noticed he’d unsheathed one of them.

My people were highly uneasy when it came to the undead. We revered nature above all else, but walking corpses? That was the antithesis of everything we cared about. If it had been up to us, we’d never have welcomed them as allies! We’d have left them for the humans to hack up with their swords and axes.

As their kinsmen, they should have been responsible, should have ensured that these people stayed dead. They should have put them back in their graves and made sure they stayed there.

But it wasn’t up to us. The orcs decided it would be a good idea to have undead allies, and they welcomed them in the war against the humans.

I’ll admit that decision confused my people greatly.

How can anyone trust the dead?

———

First person link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10_8EzMmiGuj4zhVA0ChDAF67bGYptGL9JcuxMTcWATc/edit?usp=sharing

Third person link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CeCBbFBmTfF7FFQbJt-yC7RQDw88_yt_6ZjwpJxQmVg/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?