Chances are, the folks reading this want me to say something about the advancing Highland army or the steps that our mercs were taking to prevent it. Heh, sucks to be you. Like I mentioned previously: this is my story, and I'm going to tell it my way, and anyone who doesn't like it can go off and find some decent reading material.

Instead, I'm going to tell you the story of Simon Sepet and Adrian Farenheight. They were men of trade (to put it one way), men of the land who lived by their swords. They stole what they could, ate what they stole, and God damn the rest. They lived on their word, for their words were all cons, their cons were all coins in their pockets.

Damn, that sounded good. I'm going to re-read that paragraph a few times; I'm turning into a regular novelist over here.

Simon was a thin, scrawny man with a frizzly mass of dirty blonde hair and arms that looked like they would snap if I bent them the wrong way. His eyes were certainly there, but I don't remember what color they were. Eye color is overrated anyway; what the hell can you tell from the color of a man's eyes that you can't tell by the color of a man's language? To be quite honest, though, Simon never spoke. He had a full, fat, pink tongue in that gaping maw of his, but horror had killed his voice. Maybe he was weak-willed- you really never can tell with these wandering types. An empty scabbard hung at Simon's side when I first met him, the previous housing of a typical Toran-made longsword.

Adrian Farenheight was a jolly fellow, not quite fat but not quite thin either. All of the reddish-brown hair on his head had migrated to his chin long ago, leaving him with a shiny white pate that blinded you if the sun shone off his head. He stood a full three heads taller than Simon, and carried a sword almost as big and broad as my own Shiko. And he had eyes too. Big ones. Eerily big, plastered underneath one thick, orange eyelid. It kind of made a "V" across his forehead. And I'm using the term jolly loosely. Take my word for it; no bloke who's been through what Adrian has can be called jolly for quite some time.

They struck me as normal (well, as normal as we merc types get, anyway) swordsmen when they first joined. Like I mentioned earlier, we didn't exactly have a choicy screening process when it came to new recruits. Basically anyone who didn't drop a pile of crispy canines on my head could get in, no questions asked. They were under my command, being the most important infantry commander at the fort, and it was my job to make sure they could go up against Highland without stuttering and soiling themselves. I was weirded out a bit by Simon's silence (who wouldn't be?), but I really wouldn't trust a guy without some wacky quirk in his personality. Besides, there was nothing wrong with being the strong silent type, even if Simon wasn't particularly strong.

If anything, it was Adrian that got to me. He kind of shot everyone paranoid glances over his mug at mealtime, and seemed to be a step behind at all the training sessions. Truthfully, he always had the look of a scared rabbit pasted to his countenance. He always seemed to be buried in his own thoughts, or rather, drowning in them. I knew the type- Adrian was the guy who hid various nervosa behind a mask of guffawing and belly-laughs, then wept himself to sleep. I know well enough because, for a few long years, I was that guy.

It must've been two in the morning when she woke me up again. Even then, more than three years after her demise, she haunted me. If Flik weren't sitting across from me right now, chin in his hand, flash-frying a piece of mutton over our dying campire, I'd muster the guts to write down her name- but that's not important.

The important thing was that it was now two in the morning and I was awake. And I had to piss something hardcore. My apology to any ladyfolk who are offended by my vulgarity, but realistically now- when a man wakes up in a cold sweat at two in the morning, there's no dainty way to put that kind of thing.

Such business in the fort was usually attended to in one of the handfull of outhouses situated willy-nilly like around the fort. And luckily my room was on the second floor, meaning the simple journey of bladder relief usually involved shoes and a torch. Being the sophisticated gentleman I am, I was usually more inclined to step out onto the back balcony just off to the right of my bed and send yesterday's booze reeling over the edge into the bushes below.

Tonight would have been no different, had I not caught sight of Adrian's fire.

Simon was perfectly content to sleep in the barracks with the rest of my sword-toting lackeys, but Adrian insisted on sleeping outside. After we sensible folk turned in for the night, Adrian would pack his belongings up and scurry out to the wooded area near the northern boundry of the fort, light him a fire and doze off. No one really bothered to ask him if he ever fell asleep or not; we all just kind of assumed he was the outdoorsy type.

Tonight I decided to ask him what all his hullabaloo was about.

I walked up to Adrian's self-made camp and was nearly flattened by the odor. I've smelled some seriously nasty stuff in my life, but this stuff was serious flatten-your-ass revolting. Before I asked the bald-headed mental case about his unnatural sleeping habits, I found myself belching out, "What the hell is that smell?"

"Garlic," said Adrian. "Mighty powerful stuff I picked up from some traders on their way to Marovia."

I regained my composure and did my best to breathe through my mouth (that doesn't help, by the way). "If you plan on eating that stuff, I'm afraid we're gonna have to exorsise you, buddy."

"I'm not gonna eat it. It's for that pale blood-drinking bitch out there..."

Blood-drinking is a mighty strong adjective to use on a person, and I could tell Adrian meant it. Intrigued, I continued to bat off the demonic scent. "Mind elaborating on that, Adrian?"

And he did. I got a tale about a vile, gore-covered monster who attacked the small caravan of free spirited Marovians on their way to Muse. I heard about Adrian's nephew, a right handsome kid they called Denis, whose wrists were slashed by the monster's hellspawned claws. Adrian was forced to stand by, watching in horror as the terrible she-devil feasted upon the gushing blood.

"When I awoke," he said stabbing me with each word, "Denis lay on the ground, pale and clammy, the cut in his wrist no longer bled. His skin was pulled back onto his bones, and was a whitish kind of grey, the grey you turn after you've been dead for a few weeks. His eyes were still open, and they were black as charcoal. He had a look on his face, frozen there, that scared me shitless. I coulda handled it if he was frozen in terror, or in awe, or even in some kind of sick perversion... but... man, I'll be damned if the kid didn't look satisfied. Like he enjoyed it."

He proceeded to tell me of the bloodied camp, of the men who were not drained, but mutilated. He told me of their still burning corpses, of men propped up against blood-slick trees, their entrails spilling out onto the ground before them. And he told me where he found Simon.

"I guess me an' Simon were the last ones in the camp. Everyone else was either dead or eaten or had hauled ass. I saw a pile of flesh- mad-tangled, evil-lookin' flesh- like the pale bitch had stripped men of their skin and strewn it on the ground like a god damned throw rug. And it was movin'. An' I ran over, throwing the charred shit away from what was movin', and I realized I was throwing parts of my friends into the forest. And there lay Simon, underneath it all, covered in blood and smellin' like a dead man. An' I pulled him off and took 'im to the stream there, nearby, an' stripped us down so we could wash it all off... and when we got back out the stream was red."

He bowed his head. "One of those son-of-a-bitch thieves thought Simon was dead an' made off with his sword."

He looked at me again, the look of a man who wanted to kill the whole world. But what he said next almost made me double over in laughter- it was possibly the stupidest thing I'd ever heard in my life. He said, "That pale bitch was a vampire, and I read somewhere as a boy that garlic kills vampires. So I've been sittin' here, out under the stars at night, waiting for the pale bitch to come back so I can finish her off."

But I didn't laugh at him. I couldn't, for reasons that are too painfully obvious to repeat here. I told him to throw the garlic out and get in bed, that we had Highland to worry about and not some pale, blood-sucking bitch.

And he replied, angry and cold, bitter, like I had backed him naked and disarmed into a corner, "And what in hell would you know about vampires, ya brainless oaf!?"

And I still didn't laugh at him, even though some folks would have found it funny. I leaned forward, smacking a wreath of garlic bulbs from Adrian's neck. I looked in his eyes and saw fear- fear that few people have the misfortune of knowing. Fear that, at the ripe old age of fourteen, I was forced to chew, swallow, and digest. And I told him the God's honest truth.

"Because I'm from North Window."

And I left him there, a shivering shell of a man, scrambling to collect his fallen bulbs of garlic. By the time I had encircled the main fort to the front, climbed the stairs, and walked back to where I could see out the window from my bed, Adrian's fire was extinguished. It was raining now, and I watched the drops come from the clouds and bat against the wooden walls. I heard thunder off in the distance, but to me the screaming claps sounded like a hideous cackle.

I suddenly found myself longing for the Old Man. If this thing was out there, hunting, it was only a matter of time before fourteen-year-old Joe Schmoe, gone for a week on a short errand to a nearby city, would return home to find a crumbling, zombie-filled ruins.

Something inside me had to prevent that. Everything seemed so insignificant all of a sudden. I felt sick. Not sick in my head or sick to my stomach, but literally sick in my heart.