Death After Death 219-221

Ch. 219 - Spilling His Guts

Simon spent the rest of that night telling her everything she wanted to know. On some topics, he was happy to be as forthcoming as he could be. That was especially true when it came to proclaiming his innocence regarding the worst things she accused him of. On others, though, she had to drag the words out of him one painful sentence at a time. It was those Freya delighted the most in. 

He learned some things, too, in the course of their discussion. He learned that it was not his spell that had caused her vampirism but a bite she’d gotten later that day when she was saying goodbye to her boyfriend Kel, and he gotten free again. 

She’d recovered from that one, too, thanks to the lingering effects of his healing magic, but the hunger started almost immediately after that. Within two weeks, she could no longer tolerate the light, and within three, she was murdering strangers just to keep the terrible hunger that was growing inside of her in check. 

She hadn’t known what was going on then, of course, but as she made her way east, she heard stories of similar creatures and followed them to try to learn what it was she’d become. That was almost enough to make him feel sorry for her. At least, until she started to enjoy the killing.

“I came all the way to this blasted castle, though, and no one was even here!” she growled when she got to that part. 

She’d journeyed hundreds of miles over unfamiliar areas where she didn’t even speak the language, and she’d arrived at the source of the rumors only to find the castle abandoned at the previous owners long dead. She couldn’t even read the writing in the basement that was supposed to tell the story. 

“I had Hidaran read it and explain it to me once, but it just seems to be another version of the blasted story that lured me here,” she sighed. 

Simon had never heard this story nor found it in the Unspoken’s forbidden library. If the original really had been written down there, he would have loved to read it, but the way that Freya told it, it sounded like a fairy tale. 

Once upon a time, there was a powerful witch, and her husband was dying of a wasting disease beyond the power of herbs or even spells to cure. So, she sought more power and used forbidden blood magic to save his life at the cost of six others. That only worked for a time, though, and after a week of howling in pain at the light of day and crying out at night in hunger, he finally escaped his bonds and feasted on her flesh. Apparently, he went on to rule the region for decades after that but was slain by heroes long before Freya turned into a monster. 

It would have been an amusing tale if not for the fact that he was in almost the same situation now. He hadn’t killed anyone or brought anyone back to life with forbidden magic. However, after his experiments with goblins, perhaps using a magic circle to heal someone wasn’t the best idea when the environment was saturated with death. 

It was very easy for Simon to believe his magic had set the conditions for this to happen exactly as she’d described them. The ground around that barn had been littered with the corpses of zombies that had been attacked by his incessant hammering, and magical contagion was definitely a thing. 

She wouldn’t hear any of that, though. She had no interest in any explanation except for the one where he admitted to doing all of this on purpose. 

That deluded certainty carried over into every aspect of this awful conversation. Simon found all of that easier to believe than she found any part of his story about how it was they knew each other. She scoffed or mocked him every time he brought it up. 

“You mean to tell me that you and I were once married? In another life,” she laughed. “Preposterous! As if I would ever sleep with a bridge troll like you.”

Simon had long moved past insults affecting him. In some lives, he was handsome, and in others, he was not. It just depends on what torments he put himself through. Freya’s words stung, though, even though he knew this wasn’t the woman he loved.

“You have forbidden me to lie,” Simon insisted. “Why do you believe the other things I say but doubt this?”

“What is you think you’ve said that I believe?” she countered. “I believe you’ve ruined my wonderful little life for however long it takes me to undo all of this damage. I believe that you’ve killed my men, and I believe you are in possession of terrible magics, but that is all. Everything else you say is only to amuse me.”

“Then why not kill me and be done with it?” Simon snapped. 

“Kill you?” she laughed. “Even if you did not seem to believe you would come back to life in a fresh, new body, I would never dream of killing the man who has done this to me. You will suffer for as long as my rage remains, and I assure you that’s longer than this castle will stand. How long did you say you were turned to stone again?”

“I don’t know, perhaps a century or a little less?” he admitted. 

“Well, then I hope for your sake you aren’t telling the truth because I intend to keep you imprisoned much longer than that,” she said with a cruel laugh. 

Simon’s heart sank. Not at the idea of being imprisoned again. He could make his peace with that in time. It was the idea of becoming another monster that upset him. He still lived with the memories of a zombie’s eternal hunger. He didn’t need anything else to add to his nightmares. 

There was nothing he could do to stop it, though. He couldn’t even stop telling this Freya every gory detail about all the other Freyas he’d known. “You should understand, then,” she said with a smile when he finished the story about how he murdered the man who killed her. “You got your revenge, and now I’m getting mine.”

The second time she drank his blood, it was to the very brink of death. She said something cruel then. He could tell from her expression, but he was too enervated to hear what the words were. He still knew what was coming next, and when she ripped open her own wrist with her teeth, she drizzled her poisonous black blood across his face. 

Still, he refused to open his mouth to drink it. He didn’t have to. He couldn’t hear her dread commands or focus on her eyes. Instead, he simply lay there on the stone floor of the tower and waited to die. He knew Freya wouldn’t let that happen, of course, and instead of letting it all go back, she picked him up by the breastplate, kissing him hard with her cold, dead tongue and forcing as much of that awful blood into his mouth as she could. 

Her evil smile was the very last memory that he had before his body started to burn with a terrible pain. Every last one of his blood vessels started to burn as his heart continued to slow down. It was a nightmare, but the paralysis that came with it made it impossible to do anything.

Simon was surrounded by darkness until his heart slowly came to a stop, one slow beat at a time. At the end, it seemed like those beats were hours apart. Then, there was only burning. Somewhere far above him, he could feel the warmth of the sun. He even feared it despite the fact that he wanted to die, which was a singularly strange sensation. 

When he woke next, he didn’t know if hours or days had passed, but he was alone in a locked room somewhere beneath the castle. He was sure he’d seen it before in his search, but his mind was too jumbled to remember the layout very clearly. 

All he knew was that he was naked in the dark and as weak as he might have been if he’d spent days in bed with a fever. He was also still in pain, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been in some of his other lives, and he tuned it out as the background hum it was. 

It took him a few minutes to figure out that he was able to see without any light whatsoever. The world was reduced to a flat gray place, but he could see quite clearly, and he could see that there was no way out. Though he’d wrecked the place, there were stones stacked on the other side of the door, and it resisted his every effort to knock it down. 

“That’s okay,” Simon told himself. “I don’t need to escape. Dying here is fine.”

He took a deep breath and centered himself. Then he whispered, “Gervuul Meiren,” willing himself to blow apart into a thousand flaming chunks of dead flesh. 

But nothing happened. It was strange and disturbing. There wasn’t even the taste of sulfur or the feeling of essence moving through his body. It was like nothing happened. 

Simon tried again, but the result was the same. He tried a regular word of fire after that, with the same effect. It wasn’t until he tried lesser fire that he felt even the hint of something stirring inside of him, and it was only when he finally tried lesser lesser fire that he was able to make a single spark appear in his cupped hands for a few seconds before it faded. 

That tiny spell left him feeling weakened, and he sat back down to contemplate his situation. 

“Well, that’s fucked,” he said aloud as he considered the new problem. “When Helades explained that years of my life fueled magic, I never took it quite so literally.”

He’d only just started to consider this problem, but he was almost certain that the reason he couldn’t cast spells was because he had no life energy to fuel them. He was no longer alive after all. He could move and speak. It was also clear that the vampires he’d fought had some magic in their nature, but wherever that was in him, it was inaccessible to his spells as he’d cast them, which was more than frustrating. 

Simon considered that after he’d fed on someone, he might get enough energy back to cast a spell or two. It was a grisly thought and the very last thing he wanted, but he wasn’t sure what else he could do. He should be able to stake his own heart. He was pretty sure there was no rule against that. 

It was only after he’d decided on that course of action, though, that he realized why he was in such an empty, boring room. If she’d given him a coffin, he could have smashed it and found a piece big enough to end him. 

“Well, weak as I am, is it possible to die other ways?” he wondered aloud. 

Simon had no idea, but he decided it was worth a try. He forced himself to his feet, then staggering over to the wall, he smashed his head against the rough stone wall as hard as he could. It was painful, but he managed to do it twice. Then, he heard something crack and fell to the ground. His head was in agony, and he was no longer able to feel his legs. A few minutes later, he was mostly fine again. He just needed a minute to catch his breath before he could stand again. 

Ch. 220 - Locked Away

Simon was there for nearly a week before his captor showed herself. By the time he next saw Freya, he was completely overwhelmed with the thirst, but at least for now, he did his best to ignore it completely. 

The only thing he couldn’t ignore was his new fangs. He was unable to stop toying with them with his tongue. He couldn’t help it. They felt so strange and foreign in his mouth. 

Despite the fact that his cell was pitch black, he could keep track of time fairly easily by the feeling of dread that forced him into a dreamless torpor each time the sun rose. It was terrifying. It wasn’t so much sleep as it was lapsing into a coma and praying that he never woke up again. 

Unfortunately, each night he was disappointed, and each time he was disappointed he carved another mark into the wall so that he would remember how many days he’d been down here. 

She thinks this is as bad as being a statue? He thought defiantly as he sifted a handful of coarse sand through his fingertips. 

Here, he could still move and breathe. Even better, he still had a goal, and that was to die. A statue couldn’t do any of those things. It could only endure forever.

Such thoughts assured him that he hadn’t completely lost his mind nor that it seemed likely that it would in the near future. Simon noticed when they repaired the door to his cell and replaced the broken door held shut by rubble with a stout oaken slab that was barred from the outside. This one had a window at the top. It was barred, so escape was impossible, but sometimes people looked in on him after that. They never spoke to him, though; they simply held up a torch and looked at him for a bit before leaving him in the dark. 

That was enough to make him resent sparing the staff of this place. None of the faces he saw were proper guards. He’d killed all of those, but only a few days later, Freya already had people back to work. Maybe if I’d slaughtered everyone, they’d have been more wary, he sighed. 

Once, he woke up to find a rat in his cell. He felt his mouth water at the idea of draining its meager life force. That was a feeling he knew well in the form of the word of transfer, though. So, he resisted it and, capturing the thing, tossed it from his cell uninjured. He didn’t know if the thing had been tossed in as dinner or if it had crept in. 

I will not give in, he promised himself. I will wait for the hunger to take me. 

That was easy to say, but it became harder to believe with every day that passed. Simon’s heart no longer beat. It had been replaced with a black hole and every day, it grew larger and deeper, demanding to be filled. 

When Freya finally made an appearance, she didn’t bother to open the door. She just flowed around it as a fine mist before she reconstituted before him. She must have feasted quite a bit in the last week because she was as young and beautiful as he’d ever seen her in that moment. He, on the other hand, was decrepit and dying. 

Simon was dead already, of course. He couldn’t die again. At least, he couldn’t without a stake to his heart, but he felt like he was just the same. 

He no longer had the strength to try to kill himself. He’d attempted that a dozen times before he’d given up. Now, those deaths, combined with the thirst, made him so weak that he could scarcely do more than sit up when she arrived. 

“Not so mighty now, are you?” she laughed. “It’s only been a week, and my home is all but back to normal. You, on the other hand, have transformed from witch hunter to wretched.”

“Normal, huh?” Simon spat. “You were able to replace your lovers so quickly, after all. Good for you.”

That drew a harsh look from her, but she didn’t take the bait. In his weakened state, he was pretty sure she could kill him with a hard enough beating, even if he couldn’t do it himself. She seemed to have similar thoughts, though, because she just smiled coldly, showing off her fangs, and said. “No, your suffering has only just begun. I just came down here to disabuse you of a few… misconceptions that you seem to have about your current state before I leave you to rot.”

“No, thanks,” Simon said as he laid down and rolled over to huddle against the wall. “I’m good. Dust to dust and all that.”

“According to the stories, vampires can live for decades or even centuries without a drop of blood; that’s your first mistake,” she said cruelly, ignoring him. “I wouldn’t know because I’m well-fed every night, but I think going at least a year between devouring someone probably wouldn’t kill me. It would just make me miserable.”

Simon was afraid of that, too, but he said nothing. A decade or a century, though, didn’t really matter. If she just buried him alive, eventually he would die, and eventually, he’d make his way back to his cabin, where he would make sure all of this never happened. 

Even as he contemplated all of that, his captor kept gloating. “You also seem to think that you can control the thirst, but after a few days, it will control you. You’ll be begging to feast on rats and worms in less than a week, and after that, it will only get worse for you. Once you start begging to be fed, I plan to brick up your little room and check on you every few years. Perhaps I will show you off once a decade on the anniversary of my ascension. Maybe we will make it a public holiday, and we can take you to the top of Gravenstone’s tallest tower so you can watch all the surrounding villages burn you in effigy. We’ll call it Traitor’s Day.”

She went on like that for some time, but Simon ignored her. As long as he wasn’t looking at her, she couldn’t compel him to do anything, it would seem. After a few more minutes of explaining how awful she was going to make his life, Freya eventually left him in the dark. It was only then that he smiled. She truly seemed to have no idea that he’d already spent lifetimes, on and off, wrestling with the very addiction that consumed her. 

This was as bad as it had ever been, of course, even as he lay dying in Ionar, but he could cope. At least, he thought he could. As the weeks passed, one scratched-out day at a time, he could feel the urges growing ever stronger. Every few days, rats would reappear in his room. Though Simon never saw his jailers add them, he was sure that was what they were doing. It was a petty torment, but each time, it was harder to throw them away. 

After Simon had been in that living hell for a month, Freya upped the ante. First, she did so by leaving her bloody victims just outside his door where he could smell them. Then, after that, by leaving bowls of blood on the ground just outside of his door, where he could see them if he looked out of his tiny window. 

Those sights doubled his hunger and made it burn out of all control, but he still took the opportunity to try to call the mirror in that dark reflection. Unfortunately, no matter how he tried to invoke it, it wouldn’t come. 

At first, Simon thought that was because he couldn’t use his magic anymore, but after a couple of hours of trying, he decided the problem was deeper than that. “Right,” he reminded himself. “Vampires don’t have reflections.”

That, at least, was enough to make him laugh, which did him a world of good. He chuckled about that for days on and off, which made all of his other sufferings a little better. It was a stupid reason for one of his powers not to work, but he could hardly deny it. The mirror had once told him that it had trouble finding him on some levels unless it was called, and without a reflection, Simon was almost certainly invisible. 

Simon suffered in silence, even when Freya started bringing her victims to his door and devouring them in front of him. Sometimes, she even offered to let him have a taste, and though every fiber of his being wanted to leap up and do just that, he refused to let it. Instead, he sat there, doing his best to meditate her and her bloody feast right out of existence. 

That annoyed her more than anything else he’d done to date, and two days later, they started installing manacles on the walls of his cell. At first, he thought that they might be for him so that she could torture him more. Up until now, she’d refrained from physical torture, preferring to let her psychological torments slowly do the damage instead. Still, it was only when they’d installed a second set that he ruled that out and grew curious. 

What is she up to, he wondered. 

Simon didn’t have to wait long to find out. Two days later, on day eighty-nine of his imprisonment, his door was unlocked, and two women were brought inside by guards with torches. They said nothing to him as they bound both of the young women to the wall with both their wrists above their heads. 

Freya was there too, but Simon ignored her as he studied the women. There was a sense of familiarity to both of the women, and it was only after studying them that his eyes widened in alarm, and he realized it was the daughters of the farmer he’d saved the first night. 

“Ah, so you did figure out my game,” Freya smiled as she noted the look of recognition in his eyes. “I’d wondered if you’d be so far gone that I’d have to explain all of this to you.”

Both of the other women squirmed silently, but they didn’t dare scream. Not in the presence of this monster. They only cowered, so it was Simon who spoke next as the guards locked the bindings and retreated silently. 

“You really are a monster,” Simon grunted as he got to his feet for the first time in weeks. “Throwing away these girls' lives as pawns just to make me suffer.”

He’d grown steadily weaker for the first week. After that, he’d flat-lined at the pathetic state he was in now. He was skin and bones, but he was skin and bones that would not die. 

“I’m not throwing them away,” Freya smiled wickedly, showing off her fangs. “That will be your job. Even though I have to chain them to the wall so they don’t find a way to end your miserable existence by day, they are my guests, and they will stay here until you make a decision.”

“I’ve already made my decision,” Simon said, ignoring the way that the smell of living humans made his mouth water. “I’m not eating them or anyone else. I’d rather die.”

“I admire your optimism,” Freya said, “But even if you manage such a reckless feat, you will only kill them both. I will let one free when you drain the other one dry, if you can restrain yourself from just devouring both. If you will not do that, then they’ll stay here until they starve, and the blood of both girls will be on your hands.”

Simon’s shock at her wicked plan must have shown on his face, because Freya laughed then. It was a terrible sound. She took the last lantern with her as she left the room and started down the hallway, leaving the three of them locked inside that room together in the dark. Her voice carried a long way down here, and her terrible mirth echoed down the hallway long after she was gone. 

Ch. 221 - Madness

It had been a long time since Simon had been truly stunned by anything, but the terrible trap that the vampiress had put him in had been completely unexpected. “I-I’m not going to hurt you girls,” he reassured himself as he sat down against the door, as far from them as possible. “I’m so sorry that I got you involved in this.”

“What happened?” the younger one whined. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty. “You said you were going to slay this witch! You promised us!”

“And I very nearly did,” Simon nodded tiredly, trying to ignore his rising guilt along with the frantic way that the hearts of both women were beating in their chests. That was even worse than smelling them. The sound of warm blood flowing through their bodies made his stomach growl as his body slowly came back to life and prepared to feed. 

“This wouldn’t have happened!” the girl screeched. “It would never have happened if—”

“That’s enough, Emma,” the older girl chastised her sister. She might have been twenty-five, but it was hard to say. Simon felt so old these days that even forty-year-olds looked young to him. “He did what he could. What happened to Papa and Mama wasn’t his fault.”

“What happened to them?” Simon asked. “Freya… the vampiress, she killed them?”

“In front of us,” the older sister nodded. “She ripped the farm apart looking for something called a portal, but she couldn’t find it.”

Simon sighed at that. She’d listened to Simon as she’d forced him to tell her everything, but apparently, she didn’t understand. While he didn’t know exactly where the portal to the next level was, he was pretty sure it was on the farm that belonged to these two girls or in the castle, depending on what exactly this level wanted him to do. No matter where it was, though, it wouldn’t appear without him.  

He sighed. The mere fact that Freya had picked out this farm because of that fact made this a lot more his fault than it had been a moment ago. He had no idea what the right answer was now, but he knew he didn’t have long to decide. He couldn’t look at either of the girls without getting hungrier, but looking away from them didn’t help much either. He was fairly sure that this was more than he could tolerate for very long. 

Today, he could handle it, and maybe tomorrow he could too, but if he had to wake up day after day to the sound of beating hearts and the sight of beautiful girls with throbbing carotid arteries, he knew he was going to snap. Even if he didn’t, in a few days, they'd die of dehydration. He doubted Freya would make it that easy, though. 

She’ll draw this out, he told himself. She’ll let them waste away for a month as they starve to death in front of me. The more they suffer, the more I suffer, and that’s what she wants. 

He needed to make a decision and then act fast. Unfortunately, the older sister was faster than his sluggish brain and made up her mind before he’d even figured out what all his options were. “I want you to do it,” she said calmly. “I want you to kill me. It’s the only way to save Emma.”

“No! Ara, you can’t!” the other girl cried out. 

Simon only sat there quietly, his face in his hands as he tried to block out both of their tearful voices. Their suffering only made his thirst burn brighter inside of him.   

They continued like that for several minutes before Simon wiped the drool from his mouth and said, “I meant what I said before. Both of you are getting out of here.”

“How?” Ara asked. “If you could have escaped so easily, wouldn’t you have done so already?”

Simon nodded ruefully, but before he could agree with her point, Emma said, “Why can’t you just use your magic? Like you did to heal Papa?”

“Because I…” Simon trailed off as his world spun on those implications. 

For a moment, his mind had tried to tell him that the only way they could all escape was if he drank their blood and then used it to fuel his magic. In theory, that might work, but that was just the thirst talking. In reality, there was an imminent, more practical solution: he could just teach them how to cast a couple spells necessary to break free from this dungeon. 

While he hated the idea that he’d be shortening their lives if he did this, it was the only way to save them. He thought about it for several seconds, though, before he spoke again. He had to because every other path led right back to drinking his fill, and honestly, once he started to devour the blood of either girl, he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to stop. 

“Because I can’t…” he continued cautiously. “But you can. You both can, I think.”

“We can what?” Ara asked. “Use magic? Doesn’t that damn your soul as badly as being a vampire?”

“Magic does nothing to harm your soul. It, but it burns your life away one spell at a time,” he explained. “It's dangerous stuff, and I’ve never taught anyone before for that reason, but it might be your only way to get out of here.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to to save Emma,” Ara said with conviction. Emma agreed, too, but Simon was a little more concerned about her temperament. 

He gave it a few minutes thought and then began his explanation. He told the girls how imagination, more than anything else, was what channeled the energy that they summoned. “To speak a word of power correctly is to summon its energy, but without a tight grip, it could go wild.” As he told them that, he recalled his early experiences with the greater word of fire. It was not the most forgiving teacher, and he’d burned out his throat more than once by failing to harness it properly. 

Still, he’d already decided that he wasn’t going to give them the greater word. Even normal words would do enough damage to them. They would practice with lesser words, then escape with regular words, and somewhere in the chaos, Simon would die. It was the perfect plan. 

At first, the only good all of his explanations did was to give the girls hope and keep his hunger at bay. While he was focusing on teaching them, he couldn’t very well focus on ignoring their heartbeats, and that noise taunted him relentlessly. 

Fortunately, by the time he was done with the theory behind all of this, just before sunrise, teaching them had opened his eyes on a couple of issues. He’d had whole lifetimes to think about some aspects of magic, but he'd never actually tried to teach anyone before, and the results were illuminating. Mostly, it was how fast they were able to learn the basics. That left him questioning a lot of his assumptions. 

Speaking a couple words perfectly wasn’t so hard, and though they both complained about the pain and the taste of sulfur after a few attempts, they cast their first spell with less effort than he did, and after a few tries of “Aufvarum Barom,” there were two tiny specks of light floating there in the absolute darkness of their cell. Ara’s was an ivory mote not much bigger than a firefly, and Emma’s was a diffuse cloud of glowing blue glitter not much bigger than his fist. Neither of them put out as much light as a torch, but it was a start. It was undeniable proof that magic could be taught to someone who couldn’t see the auras. 

The Unspoken were right, he realized as he watched those motes drift throughout the room. At least a little. If this knowledge got out in a major way, it would sweep through the world like wildfire. That was a dumb realization, though, he decided after a moment. It already is sweeping through the world, just not this small part of the world.  

Simon didn’t try to explain any of that to the girls. He merely congratulated them and told them, “It's an excellent first step.” He promised to teach both of them more in the morning, but in return, he extracted a promise from each of them that neither would try to use any magic while he slumbered. “Tomorrow, you will learn the word of force and perhaps one or two more but do not practice without me. Not only could you alert the guards, but you could do serious damage to yourselves.”

The last part was mostly a lie. As near as Simon could tell, screwing up a spell was a little hard on the throat, and he was pretty sure the energy involved went to waste, but that was about it. Still, they didn’t know that, and while he wouldn’t mind if they tried to kill him in his sleep, he’d rather help them escape first. 

Torpor took him a few minutes later. He had no choice in the matter. He could feel the sun rising, and that terrible light was enough to make his half-starved form curl up into a ball like a beaten dog. He would have done anything to escape it, and every time he went through this, he wondered how that third vampire had managed to put up any fight at all while there was light in the sky. 

The following night, their situation was unchanged, yet he still didn’t start immediately. He couldn’t, not when he knew that Freya would have to come and see if he’d given in yet. Sure enough, less than an hour into the evening, that mist reentered their cell, and she materialized. 

“Both of them are still breathing?” she taunted. “I have to say, I’m a little impressed. You have more willpower than I gave you credit for, wizard.”

Simon wasn’t sure if that last word was a not-so-subtle hint that she knew what he was doing, but it didn’t matter. It was their only option. He didn’t try to sleuth that out; he just pretended that it was all he could do to resist killing those girls and stuck to short answers with the occasional hiss or long look at Emma or Ara. 

Freya was amused by that, but when it became apparent that he was not, in fact, going to give in, she left. “Maybe we’ll have better luck tomorrow,” she said before she drifted away through the cracks in the door. 

After she was gone, they got to work immediately. This was the night he wanted to escape before either girl was too weakened by hunger or thirst, but if they weren’t ready yet, then it would have to be tomorrow instead. 

“Either just before dawn tonight or just after sunset tomorrow,” he explained. “We either get you out then, or we die trying.”

Simon gave them both a crash course on lesser force and fire after that. Force was for breaking their manacles and the door, while fire was for any guards they happened to encounter between here and the gate. 

Both of them learned those words as quickly as the light, but he was a little concerned with how sloppy the lines in the sand were when they used force. Using small amounts of force effectively meant using it in very small lines, thinner than a sword blade. Both girls seemed more comfortable wielding sledgehammers instead, which was inefficient. Sledgehammers would need greater force, and they might well break their wrists in the process. 

Still, as dawn approached, he directed them on what to do to break free. They needed to move, now while he could still resist devouring them. His crash course would have to be enough.