Happy Birthday

(m/f, consensual, suicide, necrophilia, gore)

Edgar was having a terrible birthday. He kicked rocks with the toe of his boot as he trudged home but these small acts of violence did little to cheer him up. He was twenty nine years old that day and, as he reflected on his current situation, he was not pleased with where his life was.

The day actually hadn’t been that much worse than normal but since moving to the small farming town of Shadyvale, all of his days seemed terrible. Edgar was a cleric and served as a healer and spiritual guide to the people of Shadyvale. But it was always “Praise Pelor” this and “Blessings to Pelor” that whenever he mended a broken leg or cured a minor illness. The stupid bumpkins never acknowledged that fact that it was Edgar who actually worked all of this magic. No, there was never a “Praise Edgar” or even so much as a “Thank you Edgar” to be heard. He was a faithful servant of the sun god and he supposed that the dirt-farming simpletons thought that that meant that he wasn’t even a person in his own right.

The kicker to all of this was that Edgar wasn’t really a cleric of Pelor at all. His magic was granted to him by Hextor, the ruthless god of war and slaughter. And for a good number of years, he had been a model follower of this tyrannical god--he served his kingdom in times of war as a combat medic and, when that war was over, he lived as a mercenary adventurer doing any odd jobs that required his skills in tortuous pain-giving or mending of wounded flesh.

But he was forced to give all of that up when he had a falling out with the city’s local Adventurer’s Guild. He and a group of fellow “adventurers” had cleaned out a tomb just outside of town that had become infested with undead. Edgar had taken it for granted that any treasure in the possession of these monsters was part of the reward for their destruction but his partners had balked at this, claiming that it was “grave robbing”. What use does the ruined corpse of a long-dead noblewoman have for a wedding ring anyway? He had thought they had reached an agreement but one of his teammates had ratted him out to the guild. He barely escaped the city with his life but managed to stumble upon the small community of Shadyvale soon thereafter.

Which brought him to his current situation of patching up the boo boos suffered by the ignorant locals. At least the job came with a small cottage, although it had lain abandoned for several years and was basically falling apart. It was on the outskirts of town, which meant privacy but also meant a long walk between home and the “temple”, which was basically just a small room dedicated to that purpose on the ground floor of the inn.

The sun had almost completely set when he arrived at his dilapidated cottage. As he approached, he sensed that something was wrong. There was something odd in the air that was difficult to define. His reflections had reminded him that he was still technically a wanted man and this had put him on edge. He paused and looked around, peering into the bushes and trees that surrounded the house.

His bout of paranoia passed but he was still especially cautious as he unlocked his front door and stepped inside. The building was simple enough--a dirt-floored one-room cabin with a lumpy bed, a wood-burning stove and a rickety table with two chairs.

Once inside, it was immediately apparent that something was amiss: there was a raven-haired woman asleep in his bed, on top of the covers, arms flung out haphazardly. As he approached her, he quickly recognized her as Amariel.