It had been overcast since midday, but Farisa felt, as they walked through the flat forest, that twilight had crept ahead of itself. The day’s miles had been eventless and uncannily quiet, every hundred paces passing into the next hundred, the going almost unreasonably easy, for they were no longer hungry and no more tired than it seemed they had always been.
“The silence makes me nervous,” Garet said.
Runar said, “We haven’t seen orcs in a while.”
Claes said, “This suggests there’s something even orcs are afraid of.”
“Maybe it’s us,” Farisa said.
“Let’s hope it is,” said Garet.
It was September 15; they were behind schedule, due to the prior spell of hunger and the need to forage more often to make up for the lost supplies. Still, they were coming closer to Switch Cave, a place Farisa knew they would have to go through—it was part of why they had come here—but that she regarded with sufficient dread to give the miles along the way a sinister light. The elevation would soon start to drop—the temperature would thereby increase—and not come up into the mountains again till they’d crossed the Ashes, and who could say how far that desert went?
This forest had a number of dark places in it, concealing the things in the world that could not stand sunlight. A certain force, without the courage to make itself known, seemed to be lurking in the soil, poisoning the roots of trees, and expressing itself with an inaudible sigh but, so long as this element also remained fearful, it was no more than a ghost’s clammy hand in the heat of summer—unsettling, but devoid of real power.
Still, there were times when the wind died and birds fell silent. Insects burrowed in decayed logs. Untas halted; the huskers knew by instinct to go cautiously.
Garet whispered, “Something is watching us.”
Eric said, “What if it’s a jaguar?”
“We’d be lucky, then. A jaguar is smart enough not to muck about with a herd, which is what we and our animals are.”
They were all carrying firearms, even Eric. Farisa gripped her seven-shot revolver.
On they went. There would be no setting camp here, and they would use lanterns—dimmed as much as possible, to conserve oil—and keep moving even if night fell before they left this place, because no one wanted to rest here. Ferns and fallen leaves stretched everywhere, the bad light turning their colors so spiritless that life and death looked the same.
The sight of an insect would have been surprising and welcome; a scarab or ladybug, a treasure; a kingfisher's call, a welcome omen. There was nothing but heartless green; nothing in her scanning eye but a slight maneuver that she would have credited to her own misperception had she not seen the clod of dung, no larger than an acorn, roll over. A milky bluish tentacle slung itself around the morsel and put it in a mouth, freshly emerged from the soil, that swallowed it.
“What’s that?” Farisa asked.
“A skrum,” Garet whispered. “They’ll pass us by if we’re quiet. They find it quite cold up here.”
She had read about skrums, as a child, in the Encyclopedia Veridica. The diagram showed them as a menacing creature with diamond-shaped teeth, more than a dozen tentacles, and a mouth that doubled as the digestive tract’s other end. She remembered reading that these creatures could liquefy their bodies and move unseen through soil, which caused her, at the time, to be thankful they existed far away from Tevalon.
Rotting leaves rustled. A pair of skrums emerged; they tussled over the detritus. There was no dignity in their movement—these creatures shambled like demented rats with fifteen left feet—but, in a repugnant way, skrums were agile. For a creature ostensibly so ill-designed, they scurried as fast as scorpions. More of the things—seven of them, disparate in size on average like that of a human hand—emerged from the soil. When hungry or aroused, they emitted an eerie blue light, visible increasingly as the forest darkened.
Garet bid them to stop. Farisa looked at her pocket watch. It was 5:33 and six seconds. The sky would blacken soon; she hoped these creatures, which seemed to be moving north, would all have passed them by then.
They waited. This happened over and over: a tentacle emerged from the soil, felt about for leaves and stems, grabbed enough decaying matter to comprise a meal, and disappeared. The leafy sound of chewing filled the forest, often mixed with a percussive clicking sound, as if teeth were being rubbed and clacked against each other. Farisa dared not look down; there was no point, because even the desired sight of clean soil did not mean nothing was slither-swimming beneath her feet.
It seemed a minute or two had passed, so she checked her watch again: 5:33 and nine seconds.
A pine cone disappeared into a gaping anus-mouth, in which the creature’s four rows of teeth were plainly visible. It returned to the soil, leaving nothing but a sap stain to suggest something had been there.
It seemed the skrums understood formation, because it had been mostly small ones to come first, but now they were larger. Something rustled in the bushes and a rodent squealed. The sound caused a three-yard radius of soil to bubble with feverish light—a hundred tentacles flung out, and bones snapped, and the mammalian shrieks grew louder and higher in pitch, then ceased.
A skrum materialized at Farisa’s eye level on a rotting log, no more than five yards away. She doubted these creatures had brains, but fear’s body language proved universal in the cowering skrum as another, flinging itself up from ground level by an outstretched tentacle, rose to meet it, then vomited a steaming mucus that hardened quickly, immobilizing the first. More skrums joined in the orgy; this was their mating process, and the coital noises sounded like a chainsaw gutting a season-old pumpkin. The victim did not survive its impregnation.
Farisa checked her watch again: 5:33 and twelve seconds.
Something snapped. A rifle had been fired, and the cold blue light of the forest brightened everywhere at once. The noise, though probably intended to scare the skrums off, instead stoked anger. A tentacle lined with white suckers, flung itself at Farisa’s leg.
“Fuck,” Garet shouted. He looked around, as if counting the eight others. He cupped his hands around his mouth, because it would be hard to be heard over the rising skrum chatter, and yelled, “The brain is in the beak. Destroy the beak.”
The forest was chittering fury. Untas and huskers stomped on tiny creatures, bucked their heads to gore them, and slammed their tails into anything that might try to take them from behind. Pulsation in the skrum light showed coordination of some kind; they had become aware of war. Claes and Saito had grabbed swords as the enemy crashed in. Swordsmen and animals severed tentacles, squished eyes, and cracked beaks. Farisa’s trigger finger scored a killing shot on a skrum that had lunged at her.
Eric had grabbed a sledgehammer. Talyn stood, face frozen in panic.
Farisa yelled, “You heard Garet, right? Get the beak. That’s the only part they can’t grow back.”
A slashed tentacle, Farisa realized, would heal back in a second or two; at the same time, while skrums lacked vision they had a sense for sound and, presumably, air currents by which they could protect their beaks from direct strikes. A teamwork approach—Claes and Saito had already figured this out—seemed to be the most efficient way to kill them. Saito would slice off a tentacle as soon as one reached for him, and Claes would use its delay—the creature’s energies diverted into regeneration—to score a direct hit on the beak, holding a sword by the blade, crushing it into pieces with the hilt. Runar and Garet copied this strategy, the younger man cutting skrums apart and the older one wielding a sledgehammer.
Runar cleaved a tentacle from a skrum’s body, causing it to fly into a tree. “I could do this all night.”
Don’t wish for that. We might have to.
Mazie fought with her boots, stomping every skrum’s beak she spotted. They had piled up thick enough now that just by kicking and squashing, one could kill something. Kanos grabbed one of the creatures by its tentacles and slammed its body into a tree; the beak broke. Untas continued their attack, taking lashes on their forelegs, some starting to show blood, but nevertheless undaunted.
The skrums varied in size—the smallest were comparable to wolf spiders; the largest one Farisa had seen was about as large as Ouragan—but each wave that crashed in was larger, both in the size of the bodies and the number of them, and she was starting to worry because there was no end in sight of the assault. Fifty of these things would have been no fight at all—between them and their animals, they had already killed three or four times that number—but there seemed to be thousands, in all directions.
Atop a mossy rock, a skrum stood on its twelve tentacles and shrieked. At once, chittering broke out and hundreds of the creatures likewise stood, and their digestive orifices emitted an inky fog. The forest floor became invisible; the fight continued, but the humans’ stomping and slashing and hammering less often produced the satisfying crunch of a broken beak, because it was harder to kill the things.
The black fog rose. Farisa’s lungs tingled and she started coughing. The skin on her face broke; she turned around as tentacles ensnared her neck and their force pulled her head toward a quivering anus-mouth, forcing her to look through rows of teeth. She removed the slimy tentacle from herself, severed it by hand, then tore off another one to make her point. The creature refused to detach itself, so she moved toward a tree and slammed its head into the trunk. It disengaged, but she felt so violated by its contact that she fired her pistol in blind anger and did, after a few shots, managed to bust the beak.
The noise doubled the forest’s anger; its floor shone brighter than the fading sky. The skrums’ chittering and hooting hurt the ears. Runar was coughing. Garet, still hammering the enemy with one hand, held his stomach with the other.
How many of these damn things are there? Farisa, spotting an owl as it fled, entered the blue and tried to get inside it, to get an overview of the battle, but the bird resisted entry—clearly, it knew something was going on that it wanted nothing to do with—and could grab only a moment’s image: concentric throbbing rings of disgusting blue fire as far as a bird’s eye, now twenty yards high, could see. There were half a million skrums out there, maybe more.
Natural light disappeared. Her senses accepted only what they deemed relevant to survival: mostly sounds, an occasional flicker of sight or scent. Kill, kill, kill. She found a machete in a husker wagon and severed tentacles, because gunshots weren’t improving the matter—they made too much noise, and they would run out of ammo before they were done killing these monstrosities. She stomped beaks. She screamed. The inky skrum gasses had risen high enough to limit visibility to one’s waist, and everyone was coughing.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Something as heavy as a dog thumped Farisa’s back. A tentacle slithered around her neck. She, remembering that a boulder existed nearby though she could no longer see it, backed into the rock with all the force she had, and this sufficed to dislodge the monster. She swung with her machete hand and missed. Her pistol-trigger finger clicked—empty. The creature’s tiny eyes quivered as she delivered a fatal stomp on the beak of the largest skrum she had seen yet.
Fighting continued—this was raw survival; this was pure hatred—but fatigue would come on soon. Some of the skrums were bigger than coyotes, and many were as fast as rats. The puffs of noxious gas they continued emitting had left Farisa unable to see her own arms. The inside of her chest burned with the kind of itch a person would turn herself inside-out to scratch. The inner rings of her eye sockets had become shuddering knots of pain, and the colors of ground and sky had mixed together.
A jet of liquid flew over her shoulder; the tree branch it landed on sizzled like boiling sap. She turned around to see a skrum in full bloom, six feet high on two tentacles; from its anus-mouth came a wet convulsive sound. Vapor spilled from the star-shaped orifice, thick enough for her to see the gas’s violet-gray color; disgust and terror took ownership of her reflexes, and she threw a useless punch at the thing. A tentacle thicker than a man’s arm swung at her neck; it would have ensnared her, had a husker’s horn not ripped a hole in its body that led to full separation. Tendrils of fluid emerged from the severed halves of its body as it tried to gel itself back to wholeness, but an unta’s hoof crushed its beak.
Claes had already discovered what Farisa had seen—that central bodily separation stunned skrums for longer than a lost tentacle, and he switched to that approach. Mazie, too, had taken a shovel for dual purposes: the blade cleaved it, and the palm broke the beak.
Farisa, noticing a clear path to one of their wagons, sprinted to it and grabbed a repeating rifle. She fired into the advancing blue waves of milky hatred, imagining she would kill them all; but, by the time she had exhausted its ammunition, the volley of bullets had delayed their advance no more than a few yards.
She heard an unta shriek behind her. A white-and-black mottled skrum, the size of a bobcat, had coiled its foremost tentacle around an unta’s leg. The bone cracked. Three more skrums, in less than a second, mounted the lamed animal. Violet-black vomit sizzled on its hide, exposing ribs. Farisa, machete in hand, slaughtered the skrums; but there was no saving the unta. Its skin had sloughed off; it rolled on the ground in pain and Farisa, though she would have to wait because she could hear but not see the tortured animal, would have to kill it.
Skrum gas continued to rise; Farisa could not see her own shoulders. Jets of fluid ejected upon trees caused bark to sizzle and blacken and run like viscous snot. Eric was coughing, so Farisa put him on an unta. The fighting continued, but they were all getting tired... fighting slower, slower... the animals would suffocate... cramps tugged at Farisa’s arms and sides as the tide of fatigue rose in her body. A thousand skrums, maybe two thousand, maybe five thousand, had been slain by this group; such a number fell far short of enough, because angry blue glowing death stretched to the horizon and beyond, well into those darkling miles east of all places where night was made.
Fucked. We’re fucked.
#
The little girl imagined a bear—Raam’s dog Seneca, a beautiful brown mutt, played the part—was chasing her. The gentle beast knocked Fay over to lick her face. Fay gave Seneca the biggest, goofiest dog hug there ever was.
Focus, Farisa. Focus! You are not here to live in the past.
A moment ago (or years later, in an incomprehensible future) in the blue, the mage had used rishona, spell of spells, the infamous practice of a desperate mage in which a possibility existed of a new sorcery being learned. She had built up the animus requisite to enter a mind; she had, instead, swung around to trace a tightly looped glyph, set in space precisely so as to crash into (and risk shattering) herself. Inside became outside; outside, inside.
She had entered herself, if she were to put it in a way at all, as she might another. This could become a swim through the black cave river of a hundred past lives, or it could leave her in the dry sightless void between ice-colored stars a billion miles away. It was not hard to find diamonds below the crushing weight of endless time; the challenge was to find one’s living body again, if it was still living at all.
“Darn that boy,” Fay said. A pebble of rock salt had been lodged in Seneca’s paw. “Boof’s a real piece of poop, isn’t he?”
Salt had become the miscreant’s new toy. He had come back from a supply closet with a stupid smile on his face, and the adults hadn’t figured it out yet, but the kids all knew why. He could make slugs and snails shrivel with it. Last night, at dinner, he had blown the crushed powder into Fay’s eye; it stung and she couldn't see and she cried in front of everyone.
Garet screamed. “Runar!”
Farisa landed in her body with eleven times her weight.
No new spell, just a shitty old memory.
It enraged her that rishona had failed, that her last living thought was going to be some child, one she barely remembered, torturing tiny animals.
A tentacle slashed her face. She used a machete to cut the skrum in half. She could not see where the body had fallen, but by a lucky guess, she crushed the beak with her boot, because even if she were to die here, it fucking felt good to kill all these things that wanted to kill her, to survive in such a physical way as by swinging a blade and stomping and hearing the chitin crack. The scrum of skrums, still closing in, had no fear of death, but every second in which she was breaking these things apart, she was not concerned with her own mortal terror.
A jet of fluid flew over her head and would have hit Eric, atop an unta, had he not dodged in time. Nevertheless, he fell.
The boy disappeared in the acrid fog that had covered the forest floor.
“Eric!”
The boy stood up. Carrying a sword that looked too large for him, he climbed a tree. Skrums followed him, swinging from limb to limb by tentacle.
“Runar!” Garet yelled. “One’s got Runar!”
Farisa dodged a flung tentacle; she ducked another; she cleaved a body in two, she stomped a beak. She cleaved a body in two, she stomped a beak. She cleaved a body in two, she stomped a beak. It felt like all this might not matter. She was tiring herself out so that, when the end came, it would be more like sleep than a screaming fight. The skrum gas was now burning her eyes, causing them to shudder shut, and she saw... she saw...
Not this again. Boof. When her eyes shut, she saw the hateful boy with the hateful face, the gleeful smile as some insignificant creature died, and it made her only more angry as an adult because she suspected they had died in great pain—when the boy had put the palm of his stupid ugly hand to his stupid ugly mouth, the salt had gone right in her eye, which hurt like hell. The snails must have felt the same tearing pain in their whole bodies—chemically, burning alive—and not a one of them, being as they were harmless snails, had done a thing to deserve it. The creatures, had they had voices, would have shrieked in agony, and it would have given delight to that worthless boy, but, but....
She saw Boof; she hated that ugly mouth of his. She hated the half-million mouths about to crash in on them as soon as fatigue plundered their will to fight. She....
Salt. Fucking salt.
She ran to a husker wagon and grabbed a heavy glass jar and a fresh pistol. Eric had climbed twenty feet up a tree. “Catch!” She threw the jar; the boy caught it. Farisa pointed in Runar’s direction; it appeared that a skrum’s body covered the man’s face, tentacles writhing around his head and neck. “Throw it as far as you can, Eric.”
Eric did so. Farisa fired her pistol. The jar exploded in midair. She entered the blue and willed herself into something like a gust of wind, able to shape herself so as to disperse the tiny white crystals in an arc. Salt fell on the skrums like toxic snow. Their skin shriveled and their innards boiled. Such indignation could be heard in their screams, it seemed these primitive creatures had risen to the next level of consciousness, only to be aware of the osmotic violation. The sound they made was not the silence of death—there was hatred and misery in it.
The skrum that had latched onto Runar’s face—the vapors were thinner, she could see now—emitted a loud shriek and fell. It was likely a shriveled nothing, as thin as paper, when it touched the ground.
She had only managed to kill thirty or forty skrums with the salt spray, but she had found something they hated strongly enough that the living remainder’s sounds shifted in register from chittering taunts to the plaintive moan of a departing train. All at once, using the same gait, the skrums skittered north, melted into the soil, and left nothing but a horrid glow that, in time, faded too.
Claes panted, his face white. Garet had bent over with hands on knees. Eric struggled to move from the tree he had climbed; his limbs were shaking. Runar kicked a rotting tree stump in anger. Mazie sunk fingernails into her own bare shoulders and coughed. None of the nine had the wind inside themselves to speak.
The skrums’ inky flatus was dispersing, but not quickly enough, so they knew they would have to move out of this place. The thousands of dead bodies on the forest floor could not be seen, but the few that clung to tree branches had translucent skin, comparable to peeling shellac. Farisa, as she stepped on a beak, felt its hardness despite the sole of her boot. In her prior rage, these had been easy to break—now it was as rigid as a turtle’s shell.
Garet stood up and shouted. “Be careful! We’re not yet—”
As Eric descended the tree, a pair of long orange tentacles with purple stripes whipped around his body, pulling him to the ground. Farisa hoped to find, somewhere on the ground, enough salt that she could destroy the assailant, but she found she would have to rush to a husker wagon on the way for a second jar. She poured two-thirds of its contents on the massive skrum that clung to Eric’s face. The salt caused the monster to detach from the boy, writhe on the ground, and retract itself in size, but only by about twenty percent, and this had been insufficient to kill it. Instead, it raised itself, putting its anus-mouth at her eye level so she could see chewed-up leaves and decomposing small mammals inside the thing. She flung the rest of the salt; she threw the jar at it. Orifices opened like pores on its front tentacles and ejected dark fluid in fast streams, which Farisa managed to dodge, but as she did so a tentacle lashed her arm, removing the sleeve of her leather jacket.
She backed away until her shoulder blades struck a tree. The salt was working, and this skrum was losing water mass, but this one seemed, unlike the others, immune to fear, destined to fight to its end. She stepped aside, realizing she’d left her weapons in the husker wagon, and her boot got caught between two tree roots, but the creature did not advance. The salt had done its job—it shriveled, it fully died, expelling a slurry of stringy mucus, cloudy white fluid, and thick red blood.
To be sure the skrum was dead, she stomped the beak seven, nine, fifteen times.
“Die, you fucking—!”
It’s not going to hear a word.
The forest was quiet, excluding Farisa’s breath, which had taken on a rattling sound similar to Lucy’s during the unta’s last days. Her chest burned; her head ached as if a gorilla were driving its thumbs into her eye sockets.
Have we... won?
The giant skrum was no more. As its component fluids mixed, they began to sizzle and it smelled like leaf litter was burning, leaving her thankful that it had lost the power to eject this materiel. Seeming to slow down the reaction, as the vapor cleared for a moment, was the thick red stuff—the blood—mixed in.
Human blood. Eric! I still have work to do.
Eric lay unconscious, twitching on the ground. Farisa lifted him and put him back on one of their living untas. Talyn, the first to see the state his face was in, screamed. The skrum had removed every layer of skin; the boy’s head was a bright red skull, with an open hole where his nose had been. One could see the workings of his throat through his shredded neck, and a flap of skin that had once been his cheek dangled from his jaw.
Farisa said to Talyn, “Don’t ask me how I’m doing this, and never ask me to do it again.”
She caught Mazie’s attention and beckoned her.
Farisa looked down; the skrum gas was still waist high. “Put your arms under mine so I don’t fall into this shit when I pass out.”
Mazie did so.
Farisa put her hand in front of Eric's face and went into the blue. She would do as much as she could, while she could. The boy’s features emerged, like land after a flood, from the bloody mess, muscle and connective tissue stitching itself back together, the skin wrapping back into place, all signs of damage reversed except for two scars: one on his forehead, and one on his jawline.
Talyn said, “How’d you...?”
“I said—”
“How can I repay—”
“You don’t,” Farisa said. “I’m not doing it for you.”
“He looks normal now.”
“He’s not. I can’t do a thing about hypovolemic shock—blood loss. Keep him warm and keep him upright, and there’s a ninety-eight percent chance he lives.”
Farisa’s body grew heavier and heavier; Mazie’s arms still supported her weight, somehow.
Runar, I have to get to Runar, because he’s injured too.
She could walk with Mazie’s support, she reasoned, and she readied her lungs to say something, but the world became a lattice of sparkling points, a web of overtaxed nerves, and before she could open her mouth, she slipped into oblivion.