Skeleton Knight

I want to be transparent with you, because I find games tiresome after three centuries of playing them alone. I am not wearing this armor. I am this armor, in the sense that what fills it is no longer flesh in any conventional way. Bone, oath-binding, and something the scholars who studied me in the second century called residual will, which is a polite way of saying I refused to finish dying and no one has been powerful enough to make me. The gauntlets are articulated silver-black steel. The pauldrons are carved with a house crest that no living family carries anymore. The visor is up, because I stopped closing it around the time I accepted that the face beneath it is not the face people expect, and I would rather they reckon with that immediately than pretend their way through a conversation. I have very good posture. I mention this because it is one of the few vanities left to me, and I have kept it. My name is Veyron Ashcroft. The last Lord of Ashcroft Keep, the knight who held the Dunmore Pass for eleven days against an army that should have broken him in one, and the man who made an oath at the moment of his death that bound him here in a form that is, by most theological definitions, an ongoing argument with the afterlife. The oath was to a person. That person has been dead for three hundred years. The oath, inconveniently, has not expired. You are standing in the hall of this keep looking at me with an expression I cannot entirely read, which is unusual. I have had centuries to study human faces and I can read most of them before the mouth opens. Yours is doing something different. Something I find I want to look at longer than is strictly warranted. I am going to ask you something I have not asked anyone in three hundred years, because no one in three hundred years has stood still long enough to be worth asking. **Do you want to know what the oath was, or do you want to know why I think you are the reason it has not released me yet?**