Ragnarok Fan Fiction ❯ MVP Anthology ❯ Zealotous ( Chapter 6 )

Glast Heim, a city besieged and abandoned, created and ruled by monsters, is a sad and foreboding place. Though the sun may shine and the birds may sing inside the city walls, a pallor hangs over the place; one of death both old and new. In the Golden Age, Glast Heim had been a sprawling metropolis; its towers lit with the luminous spirit-fires of the monster realm, and was often called the City of Destiny… Now, it is a necropolis, populated only by malevolent spirits and horrible wraiths. One such wraith inhabits the vast underground of Glast Heim’s castle, which had become a vast dungeon during the siege of Men…

In the final days of Glast Heim, in which a massive army of Men stormed the city’s sprawling castle, the lower levels of the massive keep were converted into a prison to hold captured humans and their generals, in the hopes of securing an end to the siege through ransom. The men, in their bloodlust, ignored all ransom threats, sacrificing their brightest soldiers for the sake of conquest… On one occasion, the prison-city held as many as five thousand humans, some dead and dying… others were forced to endure countless and horrible tortures, all thanks to the stubbornness of their countrymen.

One such prisoner was a beautiful raven-haired woman, a mistress of one of the captured generals. Upon the capture of her lover, she begged to join him, and so she was offered to the castle to negotiate a temporary cease-fire. After only a day in the horrible gulag, however, the general died, leaving his mistress to endure the horrible sufferings of the Glast Heim Pit. The cease-fire also turned out to be a ruse on the part of the humans, and they attacked the castle while the monsters were off-guard, causing huge losses. The citizens of Glast Heim were outraged! The ruler of Glast Heim, known simply as “The Lord”, swore revenge even after he passed into the next life… but that is another story.

In retaliation for the unspeakable offence committed by the Humans, the monsters of Glast Heim turned on the prisoners, who before had not been treated with fantastic cruelty, unless their conditions warranted it. Civilian and soldier alike soon faced unsurpassable suffering, and the mistress of the former general was not exempt. She was subjected to the cruelest, most horrendous acts of torture known at the time, but did not die… Her body was wracked beyond belief, but she never broke… And so it continued, and the woman soon spiraled into insanity, her mind finally disintegrating under the pressure…

And yet, she did not die. Even after the castle was toppled, and the monster race forced to scatter to the four corners of Rune-Midgard, she did not die. For almost a decade, the being that had once been a beautiful woman lived, or merely existed, as those around her wasted away to nothing…

Finally, the poor creature reached the end of her mortal life. She welcomed death, falling at last into its icy grip, knowing that now she could find peace… But it was not to be so. An evil presence hung over all of Glast Heim, and the woman’s spirit was wrenched from Death’s threshold and thrust back into the mortal plane… Baphomet, the Ninth Devil, had made a pact with the being once known as “The Lord”. “The Lord” wished for an army, and so every spirit and ghoul that had once passed the great halls of Glast Heim now inhabited physical shells, and could once again join their once-great city… The woman, too, was reincarnated, though she had had no affiliation with Glast Heim or its residents… As any hope of sanity left her, she implored Baphomet to at least return her beauty to her, so that she could be reminded of her life as it had once been… Baphomet, sensing the strong Human soul, did more than just restore the woman’s original beauty; The Ninth Devil also granted her power, far more power than any Human had possessed before. The new being, tied inexplicably to the city of Glast Heim, never left the cell in which she had been imprisoned, tortured and died… To hide her only flaw, which was a scar above her left eye, the demon-woman wore a split oni mask, to symbolize her demonic half… The other half of her face remained beautiful and sweet…

Travelers to Glast Heim, at least the few that have returned alive, have reported that the woman contains a zeal that is unlike anything they have ever before experienced… The demon lures them towards her with her lithe and beautiful figure, claiming to be a warrior’s abandoned servant-girl, and purrs and coos her thanks to the unwary traveler… But, upon the reciprocation of these imitated feelings, the woman transforms into a demon, brandishing an iron-studded whip and becoming furious, demanding unbridled love and passion… The she-devil then regresses to sobbing pitifully as soon as the victim escapes, creating an endless cycle of pain. Pain is all that she seems to thrive on; pain of others and pain for her own tattered soul, which still clings feebly to the corporeal shell that has become known as the Zealotous…
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