The knight knelt, boots crunching softly against the soot-laced stone floor, the air around him choked with the acrid smell of charred flesh and scorched cloth. His fingers hovered near one of the iron stakes that pierced the woman’s body, its blackened shaft jutting from her side like a cruel monument. He hesitated, the tip of his gauntlet barely brushing the edge of the nail, which radiated an unnatural warmth, as if it had never stopped burning.
“D-don’t touch those!” The vampire hunter’s voice cracked like dried bark, raw and strained as he staggered forward. His arm hung limply by his side, bones likely cracked from the blow he’d taken from that scorched figure, the one who still lay trembling and pierced like a relic.
The man’s breath hitched, a tremor in his chest making each word stumble from his lips. “Those are binding nails,” he rasped, nearly coughing on the taste of blood in his mouth. “Records… we have records… they say they were used to pin down the worst of the worst, monsters beyond reason or mercy. If you touch them unprepared…” He swallowed, eyes darting to the unmoving figure before them, “Be ready to feel what they feel. Every ounce of it.”
The knight recoiled with immediate obedience, jerking his hand away as if it had neared a viper’s fang. There was no prideful protest in him, no knightly scoff of disbelief. The evidence was too plain, too grotesque to deny. He didn’t need the hunter’s words to tell him, he could see it. Every inch of the woman’s flesh had suffered. The torn muscles, blistered skin, the marbled trails of scar tissue that formed like webs beneath her collarbone… the agony was embedded into her.
If that pain were shared… he wasn’t sure he’d survive even a sliver of it. His breath caught as he imagined it, what it might feel like to be rent open in such fashion, to breathe through lungs compressed by torment. He might not even be able to scream, let alone draw another breath.
“Can’t let her suffer much longer,” Ludwig said, breaking the heavy silence. His voice came from a place of eerie calm, almost indifferent, yet edged with a grim finality. “She might have an idea or two on what’s going on.”
He crouched down beside the woman without ceremony. His hand moved forward without tremble, Gloved fingers wrapping firmly around one of the blackened stakes. The moment his grip closed around it, the nail pulsed once with a sickly red glow.
A flaring heat surged through him, bright, immediate, and volatile, racing up his arm like molten glass within his bones and through his Undead Skin. For a second, his flesh felt as though it should have split open, peeled back to reveal raw sinew beneath. But then, as quickly as it came, the sensation dulled, fading into a hollow numbness that spread outward. He blinked, once, and then again. The pain didn’t remain, it simply echoed faintly at the edges of his senses.
The hunter and the knight both stared at him, the former blinking, the latter holding his breath.
“This is quite painful,” Ludwig said quietly. Not as complaint, but as observation. To the current him, pain was an abstraction, something glimpsed through a veil, he’ll never feel directly. Even now, it was more like a memory than a sensation, a distant echo within his body. His undead form didn’t allow for pain in the way the living understood it. But still, he felt it, in a way. Like frost against bone.
The knight shifted, his jaw tight. “Wait… these things might not even be working,” he muttered, and then, perhaps from some impulsive hope or a deeper oath etched into his being, he reached out again. “If they’re not working, then maybe, maybe I can help, “
The moment his fingers touched the metal, his body snapped taut like a bowstring pulled past breaking. Every tendon strained. His back arched unnaturally, a guttural noise locked in his throat. His mouth opened, but no sound emerged, only the tension of a scream that refused to break loose. Veins surged across his face and arms like twisting roots beneath the skin. His eyes bulged, every muscle writhing against an invisible tide of agony. His armor creaked with the pressure of his spasming form, and his knees began to buckle.
“Gods, no…” the hunter spat and lunged forward, face twisting with a mix of anger and urgency. With his one working arm, he gripped the knight’s shoulder and yanked hard, breaking the contact. The stake fell silent again.
“GHAASP!” The knight staggered back and dropped to one knee, gasping, no, heaving, for air that wouldn’t come. Each breath scraped out of him like gravel, his ribs refusing to expand. The pain that lingered in his body was like poison; it clung and gnawed, unwilling to release him fully.
“By the gods…” he wheezed, sweat pooling at his brow, dripping down his neck. “You mean she’s enduring… all that?”
“That’s just one stake,” the hunter muttered, his voice low, shoulders tense. “There are eleven more…” He glanced toward the broken form impaled on the ground. “…and the strangest part…” He turned, slowly, gaze locking onto Ludwig. “You. Your face was like that of a bored man. You didn’t even register it. Sir Davon.”
Ludwig tilted his head, almost as if considering the accusation. Then his lips parted into a wry, unreadable smile. “What can I say,” he replied as he firmly gripped the stake, “I’m built different.”
He dragged the stake free with a swift, measured pull. The metal slid from the woman’s shoulder with a sickening resistance, the surrounding flesh twitching violently, yet no scream came. A dull shudder coursed through her body, as if something ancient had just been slightly loosened. A ripple of relief, minuscule but visible, passed through her limbs.
The stake hit the ground with a soft clatter. Its etched runes flared once, then died. The symbols dulled into lifeless iron.
The air seemed to shift.
And Ludwig, with neither hesitation nor triumph, simply reached for the next one.