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Dozens, nay, hundreds of ships waited out amidst the waves at the edge of the harbor. They would be disembarking through the night.

A glare from atop the old lighthouse continued to whirl about, scarcely visible in the immediate post-afternoon. But Calaf could see it whirling about up there from the dunes.

This was the site of Baldr’s massacre of the thieves’ guild. At least the ones that hadn’t left Port Town. There was something he wanted to check. Something his intuition kept telling him to investigate.

Calaf entered the lighthouse. No golden barrier covered the structure this time, locking prying eyes out -- and helpless victims in.

There were no living quarters within. Maintenance personnel would have taken the short walk out to visit, rewind the whirling lantern apparatus. But a thin layer of dust indicated nobody had visited the lighthouse in some time.

Firstly, he tried the stairs going up. Calaf found the lighthouse beacon, which he’d lit some time ago, twisting slowly, casting a beam out on a complex fire and mirror apparatus. The fire was still burning, with little evidence that anyone else had been in there.

Twisted, spiraling vines ran up the lighthouse’s lantern. A kudzu-like growth flooded the fire pit, filling it with excess plant growth that kept the fire going at a reasonable luminosity. And yet another set of leafy shoots wrangled the mirror and appeared to prevent the usual loss of momentum that would gradually affect a mechanism of this sort.

Yes, Calaf was reasonably certain that no soul had entered this lighthouse since he’d activated the beacon and promptly fled Baldr’s wrath.

Next, Calaf peeked downstairs, following some flowing vines that had crept up from somewhere far below. The basement, sunken deep into the lighthouse’s foundations, was lightless and deathly silent. If there were still corpses down there, he certainly didn’t want to trip over one. So, he grabbed a dormant torch off an interior scone and used the lighthouse beacon as a makeshift matchbox. Now with a proper torch, Calaf returned to the basement.

Vines had not crept in through the door, instead emanating out from cracks in the foundation. Calaf followed the spiral staircase to the familiar basement.

Tables and other aspects of the thieves’ guild safehouse lay smashed apart in a dozen different ways. Maps and documents had been burnt to a crisp once the sordid affair was done. Dried blood marked the sandy ground where the church hunter had slowly, with great revelry, torn his victims apart using only his protective barriers.

Even by torchlight, the far end of the basement was not quite visible. A few scones and torches still stood here and there, extinguished shortly after the massacre. Calaf lit a few. But as he made his way counterclockwise around the room, his relic-heightened senses couldn’t help but pick up something ruffling about in the darkened portion.

“Yhhhhr,” came a wet, gurgling vocal sound. “You, there.”

Calaf froze.

“You, there.” The raspy voice coughed up again. “Won’t you throw that torch into the fireplace?”

A divot in the wall was just barely visible with the current lighting. Calaf angled his torch over, catching a shriveled, wriggling leg flopping about before dragging itself – or being dragged – back into the dark.

Calaf exhaled, sharply. He set a nearby scone aflame to create a buffer of light, then chucked the torch into the divot in the wall.

Piled vines curled themselves into a ball where firewood had burnt itself to ash. Just like at the lighthouse lantern, this was intelligently, calculatingly placed here to prevent this sacrificial tinder from spreading to the rest of the starchy organism.

Light rapidly filled the chamber. Calaf eyed the vines as they snaked about along the floor and up the walls, coalescing in a jumbled mess opposite the stairs. As the fire caught and the glare grew brighter, this brittle, yellow-flowered vine seemed to catch the light and glow with an illumination of its own.

There on the floor, pieced together haphazardly, with three legs trying to share a socket, and four and a half heads spliced here and there along a jumble of torsos, lay the remains of the various thieves’ guild patsies.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

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“Ah, that’s much better. Finally, enough light to photosynthesize from.” Warbled one mouth, then the other, creating an echoing groan.

The creature, cobbled from corpses and roped together with vaguely autumnal plant growth, gazed upon Calaf with five glassy eyes. Though it relished light, seemingly requiring it to properly function, it situated its body in a nice shaded neutral zone, not too close, not shrouded in darkness. Many eyes reflected the firelight.

“Hail, young man,” said the entity.

The entity swayed about, catching Calaf in one set of eyes or the other.

“That cadence. The shield and armor. That stride. Wait for a moment…. Yes. You… I’ve heard you. Seen your story from the visage of a slain dire-rat, through a dead bandit’s senses along the roadside, and from the hollowed eye socket of a dire-camel outside of Firefield. Hmmm. Yes, Calaf, is it? Come, listen to my entreaty.”

“Are you a demon?” Calaf asked.

What else could stitch corpses together so? And reanimate them in a foul act of necromancy?

“Oh, heavens no,” it said, repeating “No. No!” in its other mouths.

Interface designations popped up here and there on the beast. Identifying its host bodies, often in multiple places, as Baldr was quite messy. HP designations were in bright red at -110, -204, maxing out at negative-1,024… Calaf looked away, the arrested decay of the bloated, mismatched moving corpse having inflicted a ‘nausea’ effect.

“Demons? Ay, do they not have those in the current day? No demon would have such a zest for life as me. Mayhaps you have even seen a demon and not realized it. They’re terrible boors. More automaton than living entity, really. Demons and I do not, ah, get along.”

The entity moved, lurching upright. Only, it couldn’t self-right. Hands, legs, and one of its borrowed heads were nailed to the floor, incapable of moving.

“Ah, the Shackle. The Shackle.” The entity said. “One of these I can finagle, gnaw off with enough time. But when you leave bodies here out of the crypts, everything gets jumbled up.”

Calaf took a step back towards the stairs. His boot landed on a vine.

“Hey. You.” The entity said, talking frankly with just one mouth this time. “Do you mayhaps have a knife, young man?”

“Yes…” Calaf said, quietly.

Even so, the entity heard him.

“Good. Very good. Won’t you lop these brands off me?” the entity shifted about to allow access to the brands still visible on its various constituent parts.

“What… are you?” Calaf raised an eyebrow. “You’re not a demon, you’re…”

“Just a being that loves life, in all its myriad forms.” The creature laughed out of every available mouth. “Speaking of, won’t you free me from these accursed Shackles? So that I may venture out and be reacquainted with this world’s myriad life?”

Again, the entity motioned to a Menu Brand stamped onto one of its foreheads. “Hmmm, right on the noggin? Well, that seems like a rare location.”

“It is,” Calaf said. “Rare, but not unheard of as a location for a Brand.”

“Ah, well, it would be hard to Scour. Unless they take off your head.” The creature let out another guttural laugh. “Still, that will be one less mouth by which to feed. Quite troublesome. Yes, troublesome indeed.”

Calaf turned back to the fireplace. His torch still poked out, unburnt on one end, easily selectable. He took a lateral step in that direction.

“So, what is it that you… do?” Calaf asked the entity.

“What do I not do?” the entity warbled once more. “Anything you can do, really. Perhaps you wish to know what ecological niche I serve? Why, on rare occasions you lot neglect to place a corpse neatly in its crypt. These Shackles are hardly necessary, but you when so-branded, one may detect this decay as a negative amount of life essence or vigor in your Interface. Anyway, once this decay gets past a certain point, it allows for the muscles, vocal cords, neurons, and so forth to be… borrowed, as the old hosts are no longer using them.”

No response from Calaf, who took another step towards the fireplace.

“Do free me from these Shackles,” the entity said. “I can hear the hustle and bustle of a town from here. I’d quite like to introduce myself.”

Now in range, Calaf selected his thrown torch and brandished it again. He raked the open flame along the vines running along the floor. Fire caught on the brittle wood, spreading quickly along the vine, burning its way back to the fire in one direction, and burning its way to the entity that it both bound in place and stitched together in another.

“Ah, and I was hoping to parley with a friendly face,” said the entity. “Pity. Pity.”

Calaf climbed the stairs in silence, not even glancing at the entity as it swiftly caught alight like arid firewood.

“This vessel was quite unwieldy anyway. I’ve heard the drums of war from the ears of a dead dire-rabbit, being devoured by a dire-owl from the outskirts of Twelthnight. That will offer up many a host.”

“It’s all just a bad dream,” Calaf muttered as he approached the door.

“Dream? A dream?” The creature laughed as it readjusted one of its heads so that it slumped over facing forward instead of back. “My friends do not dream, alas. They’re a bit too far gone.”

The fire consumed the menagerie of mangled corpses, eliciting a laugh from its many mouths. Calaf stopped just before leaving to look downward. To confirm that the entity was fully consumed by the flames.

“Your foster father would be with me,” it said, vocal cords melting. “If they hadn’t interned him in the crypts...”

The entity’s dying laughs did not echo as Caelus left the cramped confines of the lighthouse. He stepped out into the dunes and kept walking. It was late afternoon, several hours still before nightfall, and just a quick jaunt back to town.

Good. Good. It would remain day for some time. Calaf’s previous disgust at the seedy oceanside town abated. He’d be safe. Safe in the light.

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