[ WP ] Three hundred years ago your enemies buried you in a casket , but you are an immortal . When at last you are exhumed , you vow revenge .

My old bones creaked as long disused muscles hauled me up the cold mountain road. It's been sixteen years since the floodwaters released my coffin from my grave, since my eyes burned at the first light in countless decades. My mind had long since lost language and misplaced memories. The dark will do that to you. The first few days, or months maybe, I had passed the time remembering the songs from my village tavern, the stories from my family's past, and the lovely girls who no doubt awaited my return. I expected my family to release me any moment, as soon as the cemetery sexton could be bought off. Days turned to months, and I felt the ground grow cold around me. 
 
 I do n't remember giving up. I did n't care at first, I knew I could pop up in another village a few hundred miles away, build a life, and forget the circumstance of my unfortunate disposition. As my waiting grew longer I grew more angry at the bastards who put me in that hole. They knew what they did to me. 
 
 I do n't remember going mad. But surely I did. 
 
 And then nothing. Nothing until I felt my coffin sliding, and breaking up, and water filling my mouth and nose and lungs. I washed up on the shore, no idea who or where or why I was. Months later and with the kindness of strangers, I started to think again. In time, slowly, my memories returned, in little snippets at first. Confusion as my new language clashed with the tongue of my memories. And then, hatred. Anger. A desire for revenge. 
 
 It took me four years to piece together enough memories to fully understand what happened to me. I was a John Smith, an unknown, a medical marvel with amnesia. Once I understood what my memories meant, I could n't share them any more. In time, i researched my family, finding old baptismal records and death records. My death record. The records of my village and my people. 
 
 I walked on, leaning heavily on my walking staff, years of nutrition and life not having fully made up for three hundred years of waiting. I passed the loch where my family watered their animals, and found the outline of a foundation, and then another. I turned to face the bastards, the men who sent me to my hell. Four weathered stones marked their final resting places. I spit on their graves, and finally my walking staff could no longer hold me up against the pull of the ground. I wept, cursing their names as I felt the futile anger burn. I can have no revenge. The plague, the only thing that could take any like us from this life, took them. 
 
 And left me.
