DOTD: Mattias

Back writing Demon of the Dead today - 4k words today and counting, let's goooo - and look, what's this? Mattias POV? 👀

This book has that *special* feel to it. I've enjoyed every scene and every sentence so far. Sitting pretty at 52k words so far, and a way to go yet. 

“Mother?” he inquired, but Father kept him from following her; got down on one knee so they were of a height, and gripped him firmly by both shoulders.

“Mattias,” he said, and his voice was oddly tight. “This is Master Sigismund. I want you to listen to him. Do everything he says.”

“But why?”

“He’s your teacher now. You’re to be a member of the Dead Guard.” And though Father’s smile was proud, his eyes glittered in the slanted morning sunlight, tears that he refused to shed.

Mattias went with Master Sigismund to live in a crude timber longhouse on the back side of the fire mountain. The sky was gray, hazy with a constant layer of smoke, and the ground beneath their feet in the training yard was dried magma covered with sand. When you slipped and went down while sparring, you left wide slashes in the white sand, black of the old magma showing through in jagged, cut-off shapes like runes. There were no girls or women. Their beds were low and hard, their meals nutritious, but not rich. They were woken before dawn each morning, and made to run a long, narrow trail that carved its way through the lowlands. Afternoons were for study: military history, tactics, rudimentary first aid; reading, writing, and sums. Then, later, there came the sparring.

That was Mattias’s favorite part. He was the tallest, and the strongest, and graduated quickly from a wooden practice sword to a steel one – even if it did have blunted edges. In the hours before dinner, he put the other boys on their backs in the sand, again and again.

He didn’t tell anyone, though, that sometimes he missed his mother’s lullabies as he tried to fall asleep. That sometimes he pressed his face into the blankets and let the wool drink his silent tears.

His homesickness eased with time, and his prowess in the ring grew. He licked his bowl clean every night and heeded all of Master Sigismund’s instructions.

“You’ll make a fine captain, one day,” he was told, and struggled to keep the smile from his face. Not just a Guard, but a captain. His young mind could think of no higher honor.

But always there was that underlying strain: being apart from his family, from his boyhood friends. Games had been replaced with exercises; flights of fancy for learning well the weight of armor. They wore mail shirts, gods-awful heavy even if they were boy-sized. And after meals, they scrubbed the wooden bowls and spoons, cleared and waxed the long tables where they ate; banked the fires and raked the hard-packed dirt floors. His life was half sword practice and half maid duty, and it became routine. Became normal and inescapable.

But then he turned ten. And the reigning Corpse Lord died.

A coronation day was announced for the heir, newly born. Master Sigismund brought him a new tunic and trousers in fine gray wool, and he shaved his head for him; braided his hair in the single long tail that was the style of proper Dead Guardsmen. Mattias’s pulse beat drum-quick on the long cart ride around the mountain, to the base of the palatial Naus Keep, home of their lord and master.

Mattias was overwhelmed by the crowded, switchback labyrinth of the Keep, studded here and there with pockets of soaring opulence. All in shades of gray. All of it glittering with diamonds. He struggled to keep his gaze level and his mouth shut, filled with a ten-year-old’s amazement. He’d never seen such wonders as this, the palace of his duke.

But then he was led into a room carpeted with furs and kept warm by two roaring fireplaces. And a bundle was lowered into his arms, swaddled all in gray silk and linen. A baby, small and pink, wrinkled and fussy.

“This,” Master Sigismund said, voice gone grave and heavy, “is Náli, Corpse Lord of the Fault Lands. His life is yours to guard and serve, Captain.”

The other boys were named to the Guard: his strong second, Klemens, and Einrih, the cousins Danksi and Darri. All strong, all quick, all loyal and trustworthy. But from that first moment, when a tiny hand batted Mattia’s nose, and newborn blue eyes peeped up at him, it was Mattias who became the steward of the new lord’s every need and want.