Dark Souls: Masque of Vindication by Michael A. Stackpole

Author:Michael A. Stackpole [A. Stackpole, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yen On
Published: 2022-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

I had no sense of how I should feel after I had been reclaimed. I got the sense that the words solar and bright and razed, when appended to our names, implied rank based on appearance. I assumed that Solar, since it had been applied solely to Jaranessa, was the highest rank possible, which made sense. That Krotha and I had achieved the rank of Fair placed us in the middle.

Clearly, I should have felt honored. Definitely grateful, and yet I felt no gratitude. When I looked in the glass one of the villagers offered me, I did not see a thing of beauty. I certainly looked more lifelike than I had, but all the paint and color could not alter the fact that I was dead. They had painted a mask on me, and in their eyes, that mask became me. Their only criteria for judging me became their handiwork, which was akin to praising a painting for the colors, not for what it presented or represented.

Krotha did not share my apprehension. He got one look at himself, his armor all shiny, his flesh returned to a lively hue, and he roared with laughter. He did look every inch a Knight of Virtue, but as I had noted, the operatic kind. Everything was overdone, making him into a caricature of himself. In that glass, the Knight of Truth did not see truth—he saw the mask and chose to believe what it reminded him of himself.

We got paraded through the village, with much praise lavished upon us and more upon our makers. The villagers seemed to take us to be a treasure or a wonder or a community project to which all had contributed. We might as well have been a barn or a bridge or a watchtower, yet neither of us had such substance nor could be of such value to a village. And still they eyed us the way Tsaleryk did gold, with pride at our making foremost in their minds.

So much attention being paid to me was something I found unsettling. Krotha, however, reveled in it, overplaying his part. I understood, in part, that desire to return to what he had been, because being a Knight of Virtue in Alkindor meant he had risen above all but his peers and the king. To lose that, to have been judged and felled by the great leveler, Death, and then to only slowly be regaining a sense of how much he had lost, had to be disorienting at the very least. Here, he didn’t have to think about why he was being praised—he merely had to luxuriate in the praise to let himself ignore the hole in his psyche.

Balarion and Phylasina had likewise been remade. Each had been bathed and groomed, shucked of their armor, and clad in bright silks. Balarion wore greens and browns, a huntsman’s outfit with a hat similar to mine but lacking the fancy cockade. He seemed more at ease than he had been, and I guessed that was because these clothes felt more familiar than the armor.

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