80 ABHORRENCE

The happiest day of Isaac's life was the day he became a knight of the Paladin Order. The memory of the day was still fresh.

Standing in the Hall of Protection- the most sacred place of the Order- while donning white armour, he had been unable to keep a smile off his face; especially when the Lord Paladin called him to step forward and speak his vows while holding Virtue. Back then he had been unable to contain his excitement as his fingers enclosed the hilt of the sacred blade. In that moment, he was touching the most famous weapon on Rekke. The very origins of the sword were divine, a gift from the Goddess to her champion. This was the weapon that slew the Dark Lord and ended the Days of Gloom.

After those dark days, the Saint declared the blade's purpose over; then, in the heart of the Imperium, she thrust it into the ground. Legend had it a magnificent hall sprang from the spot to enshrine the divine sword. On that day, the best of the Light's Army stepped forward. Each one of them took turns holding the sword and vowing on the Goddess' name they would protect the place and its treasure. They declared that that from this hall they would look upon the Goddess sphere and root out all corruption. Since then, these protectors became the staunchest defenders of the Faith; the greatest champions of justice.

Initiates of the Order had to were put through a gruelling process of hellish training and blasé lessons aimed at forging not only strength, but a just and moral character. Unfortunately, whether the moulding was successful or not, it was impossible to know without entering the initiate's mind. Such methods were unacceptable though, as they often led to brain damage.

Thus, the final test before promotion into the official ranks was to hold the sword and speak the vows. Virtue was a sacred item crafted by the Goddess; if one's heart was insincere and their vows were uttered half-heartedly, the sword would know and the initiate's life would be forfeit. The Goddess name was sacred; to swear on it in vain was deserving of capital punishment!

Over the millennium and a half that the Hall had stood, many had failed the final test. Many more, after witnessing this, had fled when called to says their vows. Even among his peers- originally twenty initiates- two had died while saying their vows, causing thirteen to withdraw from the ceremony. Only one person had passed, leaving him and three others remaining.

Paladins were meant to be the best; only few could ever meet the requirements.

On that day, when Isaac's name was called, he had not hesitated to grasp the sacred weapon. Ever since Saana took him off the streets, this was what he had wanted; there had not been a single bit of doubt in his mind.

When he began to speak his vows, Virtue lit up, its radiance enveloping him. This was a sign of acceptance; the sacred blade had sensed his sincerity. After he had uttered his final words, he had looked up from the sword to the Lord Paladin, unable to keep the ear-to-ear grin from his face. When the leader of the Hall of Protection offered him the golden cloak of the Order, he had to reign in his enthusiasm to stop himself from snatching it. For years he had dreamt of this moment; after finally making it here, it was a struggle to keep his feelings at bay.

That had been the happiest day of his life.

Eight months later, he would be handing the Paladin cloak back.

To prevent himself from thinking on those particular events, Isaac opened his eyes; to be met with to his current circumstances. The sight of his undead hijacker dropped his mood to the base.

The time spent as a Paladin, short as it was, had been spent hunting down the worst kinds of individuals.

One such had been a pyromancer who went around setting fire to entire town sections. After doing so, he would stand and watch with elation, drawing pleasure from the agonised screams of his victims. With how open this sick bastard's acts were, it had not taken Isaac and several comrades long to track him down and end him.

Another had been a group of bandits who assaulted a priestess on a road between two cities. What the priestess endured in the hands of these scoundrels was too horrible to mention, every branch of the Church had been incensed to learn what had occurred. Hunting these bastards down had been the first assignment Isaac had been put in charge of as a member of the Order. Due to his anger back then, when he caught them, instead of ending them there, he chose to shackle and hand them over to the Vigilants. The intelligence branch of the Church did not have the most stellar of reputations, even within the Church. Isaac had handed the bandits over to them specifically because he had known the scumbags would not meet a peaceful ending in their hands.

A third case that came to mind was a sorceress who had posed as a healer in a remote village, all the while using its inhabitants to test out curses she was developing. When the Order became aware of what was happening, it had been too late to save the villagers. All they could do was decapitate the witch to ensure she would never hurt anyone again.

Paladins were revered across Aran, even among nations that did not worship the Goddess. It was a point of pride for every member of the Order. Even so, the job of Paladins was strenuous and stressful, primarily because it often brought them into contact with the worst of the human races. Even then, necromancers were the worst of the worst.

Not only did they defile the dead, an act that went against everything the Goddess stood for; these monsters went further, massacring entire towns simply to bolster their sacrilegious armies. As short as his stint with the Order had been, it had been filled with constant action, most of which involved the unholy mages. He had lost more than a few comrades to this menace and that was not even the worst of it; because within moments of their deaths, they would be brought back as members of the unnatural horde.

The act of cutting down a former companion, even when they were in such a state, never left a good taste in the mouth. That was why he hated the necromancers and undead and would spare no amount of effort to eradicate them.

At least that was how it use to be.

Now, with the life literally and figuratively drained from him, he could only sulk and respond mechanically to the phantom's orders.

After all the time spent hunting necromancers, undead and their ilk; the last thing he had ever expected was to become one of them. It would be a lie to say he would have been fine with dying at the hands of such a creature, but such a fate would have been better than his current one. Against his wishes, he had been turned into a monster; a monster that defiled the very nature of life itself. To add insult to injury, this new mockery of a life was not even his to do with as he pleased; the phantom controlled his actions, preventing him from ending his life. A few days ago- when he awoke to find he had changed- that was now the worst day of his life, completely overtaking the day he had been let go from the Paladin Order.

When he glanced at the phantom by the river with several vials, filling them to half capacity with water before making them almost overfill by adding what appeared to be vigour potions, he could not stop his teeth from gnashing. Isaac had hated everyone he had hunted down when he had been a Paladin, however, the disgust he had felt for those monsters was no where near the infernal loathing he had for the phantom.

First off, she had made him like herself, a monster who went against the natural order. Gone was his comforting heartbeat, replaced by an eery silence. Breathing was no longer automatic, but something he had to consciously control; evens so, the breaths he let out were chilly, causing icicles to form on his gauntlets; he had decided to forgo the act all together. No longer did he hunger, thirst or tire. Then there was the fact that everything he touched, no matter what colour, was turned to a corrupting black. After a while he had learned how to prevent this. But that was not the point; the most important things about being a human had been stripped from him!

There was the fact that the phantom had killed those poor villagers' horse and forced her to subject it to his fate, an act of pure vindictiveness if he had ever seen one; he could only wonder how the frightened villagers watching from behind their curtains had reacted to that scene.

All of the above was reason enough to hate the undead. However, the greatest reason of all, the one that made him want to rip her head of- with hand or teeth or whatever he had access to- was what had occurred after the phantom defeated the elemental. Although he had lost consciousness somewhere between her departure and her return, the fact that she had returned could only mean one thing; the death that the Head Priestess had been waiting for decades had finally gotten her, and not in the natural way. The witch had killed her!

He watched her as she finished filling the vials and watering down the potions. What she was going to do with them he did not want to think about; there was no way it was going to be good.

"Let's get going," she said. As easily as the sentence was spoken, it was not a request.

Gnashing his teeth again, he called the poor beast he had been forced to turn into an undead steed. The horse reacted well to him as he boarded it, but when the phantom got to them and requested his hand to help her up, it neighed in disaffection. Isaac felt a kinship with the mount, brought about by their shared dislike for the phantom.

He only hoped she stopped being as vigilant as she was. Even when the phantom was reading a book her alertness was up, making it hard for him to do anything without her noticing. Even in the rare moments when her guard was dropped, the emerald eyes of her familiar, currently perched on her shoulder, would always be trained on him. Nonetheless, he continued to observe.

Although shackled to the creature's will in the deepest pit, he would continue to look for a way out. The moment the phantom dropped her guard, he would strike her down. Not only would that end its accursed existence but his own as well. Also, by doing so he would be avenging Saana; that was something worth dying for.