Chapter 7: Stormhill's Bloody Introduction
The wind howled wrong on Stormhill—not the clean mountain breeze Gara expected, but something hungry and violent that carried whispers of old battles and fresh graves. Torrent's hooves found purchase on stones slick with something that might have been morning dew if morning dew ran red and smelled of copper. The winding path carved switchbacks up the hill's face, each turn revealing new reminders of mortality.
Corpses lined the road like mile markers. Not ancient bones bleached white by time, but fresh casualties still wearing their gear, their hope, their final expressions of surprise when the Lands Between proved less forgiving than expected. Tarnished, most of them—warriors who'd made the pilgrimage to claim their destiny and found only the democracy of death.
"They died once," Gara muttered, guiding Torrent around a particularly fresh corpse whose armor still gleamed with recent polish. "I'll die a dozen times and still make it through. That's not confidence, that's just statistics."
The math was simple: every other Tarnished had one life to lose. Gara had functionally infinite attempts, each death buying him information that would improve the next run. It was the ultimate cheat code, the kind of advantage that should have made him feel invincible.
Instead, it made him feel hollow.
Smoke rose ahead—cookfires, probably, marking a soldier encampment that blocked the path to Stormveil proper. Gara's enhanced stats sang in his veins, seventy deaths' worth of accumulated power making him stronger, faster, and more capable than he'd ever been in either life. The temptation to test that strength against living opponents was almost overwhelming.
Level 23. Enhanced Vigor, decent Endurance, respectable weapon skills. I could take them.
The thought carried dangerous confidence born from watching numbers climb and feeling his body transform with each absorbed rune. Death had become educational rather than terrifying, and education bred competence. Competence bred arrogance.
Arrogance got people killed.
But not him. Never him. Not anymore.
The first soldier camp appeared around the next bend—three tents arranged in defensive formation, cookfire sending lazy smoke toward clouds that gathered like vultures overhead. Gara counted guards: five visible, probably more in the tents. Crossbows, spears, leather armor that had seen better decades. Professional but tired, doing a job that paid in survival rather than glory.
He could sneak around. The path offered alternatives—rocky scrambles that would bypass the camp entirely, longer routes that traded time for safety. Smart tactics for someone with limited lives and unlimited patience.
Instead, he rode straight toward the guards.
"Tarnished!" The lead soldier called out, crossbow already in hand but not yet aimed. "This is Lord Godrick's territory! Turn back or face the consequences!"
"Sorry!" Gara called back, not slowing Torrent's approach. "Just passing through! I'll be quick!"
The crossbow came up. Professional reflexes, honed by years of standing guard over roads that attracted everything from bandits to worse things. The bolt took him center mass before he could shift stats to defensive configuration.
Death #71: Stormhill Soldiers. Crossbow bolt to chest. 3/10 - should have seen that coming.
He respawned at the last Grace, body whole but pride thoroughly punctured. The familiar golden light welcomed him back like an old friend who'd stopped being surprised by his frequent visits. Already, his mind was calculating adjustments—more Vigor for survivability, Fire Resistance in case they had alchemical weapons, enough Endurance to maintain mobility under pressure.
The second approach went better. Twenty points shifted to Fire Resistance and Vigor made him functionally immune to the perfumer's bomb that had caught his first attempt by surprise. But the crossbow bolt that punched through his eye socket proved that some problems couldn't be solved by stat optimization alone.
Death #72: Stormhill Soldiers. Crossbow to the eye. 1/10 - remarkably precise shooting.
Third time was the charm. Gara approached with maximum Dexterity, weaving between crossbow bolts while his enhanced reflexes turned the world into slow-motion poetry. Each shot became predictable, each guard movement telegraphed by micro-expressions he could read like subtitles. When combat was joined, he flowed between opponents like water, never staying in one place long enough for concentrated fire.
The fight lasted three minutes and left five bodies cooling in the dirt.
Runes flowed into him like liquid vindication—warm, energizing, addictive. Each absorbed essence carried fragments of memory: a guard worried about his sick daughter, another counting days until his service ended, a third who'd joined Godrick's forces because the alternatives were worse. Their deaths painted his vision gold while their hopes dissolved into statistical improvements.
"Reconnaissance through resurrection," he thought, wiping blood from his blade. "Each death teaches the pattern. Each respawn lets me optimize. It's working."
But working felt wrong in ways he couldn't articulate. The guards had shown him mercy twice—warning him away instead of shooting on sight, giving him chances to retreat that he'd ignored in favor of experimentation. They'd died for doing their jobs while he'd treated their lives as learning experiences.
"You'll die there," a voice whispered from the ruins.
Gara spun, hand moving to his weapon before locating the source: a commoner huddled in the wreckage of what might once have been a watchtower. The man's clothes were rags, his face gaunt with the kind of starvation that came from living in war zones where food was scarce and hope scarcer.
"The castle," the man clarified, pointing toward Stormveil's looming towers. "Everyone dies there. The grafting, the screaming... better to turn back now while you still can."
"I appreciate the warning," Gara said, trying for reassurance. "But I've got to get through. It's important."
The commoner's eyes focused on him properly for the first time, and Gara watched recognition dawn—not of his identity, but of what he was becoming. The same dead stare that marked Stormveil's victims, the hollowness that came from treating violence as routine.
"You're already gone," the man whispered. "Just like them. Dead behind the eyes."
"I'm fine," Gara protested, but his voice carried no conviction. "I'm not hollow. I'm just... focused."
"Yeah, but I'll come back," he heard himself say, the words emerging without conscious thought. "That's the difference. Death is temporary. Progress is permanent."
The commoner recoiled as if struck, scrambling deeper into his hiding place while muttering prayers to gods who'd stopped listening centuries ago. His terror was absolute, primal, the kind of fear reserved for things that shouldn't exist but did anyway.
Gara watched him flee and realized with crystalline clarity that he'd sounded exactly like a monster. Not the angry ranting of a berserker or the cold calculations of a sociopath, but the cheerful certainty of something that had moved beyond human concerns entirely.
The revelation should have horrified him. Instead, it felt like finally admitting a truth he'd been avoiding.
He was changing. Had been changing since the first death, maybe since the moment he'd opened his eyes in grass that shouldn't exist. Seventy-three deaths had carved away pieces of his humanity like water wearing down stone, each resurrection trading fragments of who he'd been for incremental improvements in what he was becoming.
The question was whether what remained was still worth preserving.
Castle outskirts revealed themselves as he climbed higher—broken walls, collapsed towers, fortifications that had once meant something before Godrick's madness turned them into exhibition halls for his grafting experiments. The architecture was impressive, if you could ignore the corpses incorporated into its design like decorative elements.
Gara paused at a particularly scenic viewpoint where someone had thoughtfully omitted railings from a cliff that dropped approximately forever onto rocks that looked eager to make friends. The OSHA violations inherent in medieval architecture had always bothered him in games, but seeing them in person triggered reflexive outrage.
"OSHA VIOLATION!" he shouted at the empty air, pointing accusingly at the unguarded precipice. "Who designed this death trap?! Where are the safety barriers?! The warning signs?! The—"
His foot slipped on loose rubble.
The world spun in lazy circles as he plummeted, wind whistling past his ears while the cliff face blurred into abstract patterns of stone and moss. Somewhere below, rocks waited with geological patience for their appointment with his spine.
"Well," he thought during the fall, "this is embarrassing."
Death #73: Stormhill Cliff. Terminal velocity versus rocky shore. 4/10 - predictable ending, excellent air time.
He respawned at the cliff's edge, body intact but dignity thoroughly shattered. The same loose rocks that had betrayed him lay scattered exactly as before, waiting for the next unwary victim to demonstrate why medieval safety standards were suggestions rather than requirements.
"Interesting," he murmured, kneeling to examine the fall distance. "Approximately two hundred feet, rocky landing, instant death on impact. But what about partial falls? Controlled descents? Could I use this for tactical positioning?"
Five minutes later, he was throwing himself off the cliff again.
This time he aimed for a ledge halfway down, testing whether precise positioning could survive what random falling could not. The experiment proved that precision was irrelevant when dealing with gravity and stone.
Death #74: Stormhill Cliff. Attempted tactical descent. 2/10 - physics doesn't care about tactics.
"Are you testing death intentionally now?"
Melina's voice cut through his respawn confusion like a blade through silk. She stood beside the Grace marker, translucent but present, her single eye burning with something that might have been concern or might have been professional interest in watching someone lose their mind in real time.
Gara opened his mouth to deny the accusation, then closed it as the words died unspoken. The honest answer was yes—he absolutely had been testing death, treating his resurrection as a research tool for understanding the world's mechanical limitations.
His silence stretched between them like a confession written in golden light.
"I see," Melina said softly. "The power to return from death becomes the compulsion to discover death's boundaries. A natural progression, perhaps. And a dangerous one."
"It's not like that," he protested weakly. "I was just... being thorough. Understanding the environment. Tactical reconnaissance."
"Through repeatedly throwing yourself off cliffs."
"When you put it that way, it sounds bad."
Melina's laugh was silver bells in winter, beautiful and sharp enough to cut. "What it sounds like is the beginning of a familiar story. Tarnished discover they cannot truly die, and slowly forget why living matters. The Grace grants resurrection as a tool for achieving great purpose. When that tool becomes its own purpose..."
She didn't finish the sentence, but the implication hung heavy in the air. Hollowing. The fate that awaited Tarnished who lost sight of their goals, who became so focused on the means that they forgot the ends entirely.
"I haven't forgotten my purpose," Gara said, though he couldn't immediately articulate what that purpose was beyond reaching the next checkpoint, defeating the next boss, accumulating the next increment of power.
"Haven't you?" Melina studied him with an intensity that made his skin crawl. "You treat death as learning. But what happens when you learn to stop caring about living?"
The question echoed in his head as he made camp at Stormveil's entrance, the massive gates looming overhead like the mouth of some architectural beast. Torrent refused to enter the castle proper—the spirit steed had limits, apparently, and those limits included places where sanity went to die screaming.
Smart horse.
That night, beside a fire that cast dancing shadows on walls decorated with human remains, Gara stared into flames that reminded him of dragon breath and considered Melina's words. He'd gained tremendous power through accumulated deaths, had learned to weaponize resurrection in ways that gave him advantages no normal Tarnished possessed.
But each death had cost him something beyond stat points—pieces of fear, fragments of empathy, portions of the basic human instinct that insisted pain should be avoided rather than embraced. He was becoming something efficient and terrible, optimized for survival in a world that specialized in making survival impossible.
The question wasn't whether he'd reach his goals. The question was whether the thing that achieved them would still be recognizably human.
Melina's voice drifted from the firelight, soft as starfall and twice as ominous: "You treat death as learning. But what happens when you learn to stop caring about living?"
He still didn't have an answer. But as the castle's tortured architecture groaned in the wind and distant screams echoed from Godrick's workshops, Gara began to suspect that the answer would find him whether he wanted it to or not.
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