Lucas stared at the object in his hand for a long moment, blinking dumbly as he tried to shake off the fog of sleep. He’d woken up clutching it to his chest. His vitality flowed through it as easily as one of his own limbs.

Easier, in some ways. If anything, pushing his vitality into it was almost too easy. It was an empty vessel for his life force, going beyond readily accepting and into demanding. When he cut off the flow, it kept pulling, though not strongly enough to overpower his control.

It was a dull yellow-ish white. Slightly curved in the middle, with rounder knobbly stumps at either end. Rough to the touch. Slightly brittle.

A human bone.

Heart suddenly in his throat, Lucas let out a yelp and tossed the bone away with such strength that he lost his balance and went tumbling off the bed, hitting the hard stone floor with an embarrassing thump. He wheezed as the air was pressed from his lungs. Then he lay there for a time, gazing unseeingly up at the domed roof.

The sky was grey this morning, only little hints of sunlight peeking through the clouds. The air was chilly as always, but it felt too crisp for rain. Something to be thankful for, he supposed.

There was a distant rustle as the bone landed among the plants. The discombobulating haze of having just woken up slowly parted like a curtain, and Lucas’ brain kicked into gear.

He had been cycling his vitality through a human bone. A dead one. It was the easiest external manipulation of his vitality he’d managed so far, as natural as circulating it through his own channels.

He felt nauseous.

Ever since he’d first sensed the strange energy flowing through him and the surrounding plants, he’d been thinking of it as life force. It seemed obvious enough. No two auras were precisely the same, but they were so close it hadn’t seemed worth seeing them as different things. It was all just vital energy that, as far as he could tell, only occurred in and could manipulate living things.

But now that he thought it through more, that last part didn’t necessarily make sense, did it? Sticks weren’t living, after all, and they were easier to empower with his vitality than the living plants. There was no will in them. No desire. They were empty vessels to impose his own will upon, welcoming his vitality.

Same as the bone. Dead things were less capable of resisting life force, it appeared. If life force was even the right term for magical energy.

The thought turned his stomach once more, but he couldn’t put it down now he’d picked it up. There was an aspect to this he’d misunderstood, and understanding the mechanics of whatever the fuck it was he was doing here was imperative. Magic had evidently brought him to this place, and it was most likely going to be the thing that got him home. Obviously, there was more magic than messing with plants.

Slowly, grimly, Lucas sat up and turned his attention to the collection of bones he’d gathered. Yesterday he’d been too tired to deal with the ones resting in his sack, and he’d lazily dropped them to the ground by his bed, hence how he’d thoughtlessly picked one up instead of a stick. Now, he reached for one with intent. It sickened him, but he needed to understand this.

His fingers closed around a smaller bone than the last. A rib, he thought. It was rough and dry, and mercifully large enough that he could be confident it was an adult’s. It was stupid, but he didn’t want to be messing around with children’s bones. Handling any of them felt wrong in a visceral way, but experimenting with a kid’s corpse would be extra fucked up.

Lucas hesitated. As much as he knew he had to, he really didn’t want to do this. It felt like he was standing at the top of a steep hill pocked with deadly sharp stones, and if he stepped off he’d go tumbling down, bruising and battering his body and helpless to stop the fall.

Drawing in a deep breath, he pushed a sliver of his vitality into the bone.

Instantly, it lit up in his senses, drinking hungrily of his vitality. Life essence moved on its own, following familiar channels like water returning to a dried riverbed. Paying unerring attention to his own vitality, he sensed an uncanny confusion. For a moment it seemed to be reaching out beyond the edge of the bone, as if looking for something that wasn’t there, and he got the impression he could’ve pushed it further. It felt incomplete, somehow.

But then the moment passed, the flow doubled back on itself, and in seconds his vitality was cycling through the bone like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It was, to be frank, a hundred times easier than cycling his vitality through the plants. His control was instant and absolute. It barely dented his concentration.

Live plants had their own vitality, constantly intermingling with his own after he pushed out the larger will that suffused those in his surroundings. There was nothing like that in dead things, human or otherwise. It was just his vitality. Just him.

But, now that he was looking at it closer, there was something there. A hint of an impression. He turned his attention to the other bones, reaching out with his vitality senses, and there he saw the distinction.

It came down to the vessels themselves, he realised. Everything that lived and died was fundamentally a receptacle for vitality, but that didn’t mean everything was the same. Their channels performed the same function, but through different… wavelengths, maybe? Alternate designs?

He’d already known that, with the contrast between how his vitality flowed through him and the plants. But now the difference was stark. Sensing them took different frames of mind, minutely different configurations of his vitality. He’d adapted his supernatural senses to the plants unconsciously.

Like tuning into different channels on a radio.

With a tweak to his vitality, using the bone in his hand as a guide, the next pulse of his vitality sense lit up the bones around him in his mind’s eye. Except no, lit up wasn’t the right word. It would be better, perhaps, to say they darkened in his senses.

Because he wasn’t sensing them directly, not really. None of them held any vitality, but they didn’t need to. They were passively hungry for life force, and they’d take anything readily; they were empty receptacles, and by nature they sought to fill the void, the lack of life.

When his vitality misted the air in a sphere around him, he could feel the minute pull as they sought to welcome his life force in. Their effect was what he was feeling, not their form.

With little effort, he was sure he’d be able to feed them vitality even from a distance, filling their channels in order to… he didn’t know what. Enforce them like he had with his lost stick. maybe?

Lucas let out a shaky breath. He grimaced at the rib in his hand, turning it over and over in his fingers, feeling the little nicks and fractures. It had been part of a person once, filled with vitality. Now it was just… calcium and collagen, inert.

It was sad. Maybe he was just anthropomorphising them too much, but he imagined it was a lonely existence, to be created for a purpose only to be abandoned. Its enthusiasm to welcome his vitality rang of desperation.

But that was assigning too much will to the remains of a person long dead.

Shaking his head, Lucas pushed himself to his feet and strode to the edge of the circle, a new idea in mind. If this worked, things would be much easier, and leaving wouldn’t seem such a far off goal.

Closing his eyes and levelling out his breathing, Lucas lifted his free hand and placed it against the nearest plant, pulsing his aura into the wider flow. The plants came to life in his vitality sense, spanning miles.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Then he switched his vitality to that other channel, using the bone as a conduit, and pulsed once more, searching for that now-familiar pull on life energy. Over the course of seconds, thousands more faint signatures winked to life in his mental map of the area, flickering like candles in a mild breeze.

Lucas’ lips trembled as he counted up how many bones he was going to have to collect. Triumph and horror went to war inside him. On the one hand, he’d drastically reduced how much longer he was going to have to spend here; he no longer needed to search the whole place room by room.

On the other hand, there were so many skeletons littered around this place he didn’t even want to count them, trapped beneath the plant life, gone and forgotten.

In the end, he settled for feeling numb as he prepared himself for the grim task. He found he didn’t want to feel anything at all.

~~~

It took days. By the time it was done, Lucas felt wrung out. Hollow, like his emotions had been scooped out of him and dumped in a pile of foul black sludge on the ground.

His circle was well and truly overrun with bones now, just as he’d feared. Keeping them all in their ‘sets’ without mixing had proved an impossible task, but he tried his best. He didn’t know how many bodies he had here, and had no intention of counting.

There was a hole in his chest where his heart was supposed to be. He wasn’t suited to this kind of work. He’d never been able to handle death. Stepping on a snail had ruined his whole day, not so long ago. This was… too much. Overwhelming. He’d gotten so far past the point of emotional distress that he’d ticked over and reset to 0, but it was building again, a savage beast trying to break out.

He couldn’t stay here another night. He had to get out.

The sun was shining directly down through the gaps in the dome, motes of pollen dancing in golden columns of light. Noon. That gave him about six more hours of light; the sun set later than that, but the dome was at such an angle that it got dark inside a few hours before the stars came out.

So he had to get around half a hundred skeletons out of here before then. There was no way he could carry them all in one go, but he didn’t want to make multiple trips. His vitality was turbulent, tougher to keep a grip on. It would only get worse if this labour dragged out.

And he didn’t think he had it in him to turn around and come back inside once he was out.

An alternative solution was in order, then. Luckily, necessity was the mother of innovation; an idea came to him, and Lucas set immediately to work testing it. He moved to the nearest plants and laid his hand on a branch, forcing his will into the foliage and twisting them to his design.

There was a creak of moving branches and the air filled with the scent of wet wood. Lucas fought to keep his concentration over the next hour as he multi-tasked with his vitality; he commanded wood be fashioned into round logs, ropes weaved out of plant fibre with various thickness, and small baskets be latticed from vines.

He was out of breath and a headache was forming when it was done, but he didn’t dare pause for rest. Another half hour passed as he lashed the logs together with the rope, and for once he was thankful for scouts and Duke of Edinburgh and all that crap he’d hated as a kid. The knots weren’t great, but he hoped they’d hold with some help from his vitality. The final products were malformed and ugly, especially the lumpy baskets, but they’d have to do.

Next was the bad part. Gathering bones into individual baskets wasn’t that hard in and of itself. It didn’t even take particularly long.

It was just impossible not to count how many bodies he was transporting when he was gathering them one by one.

Fifty-two. Seven children.

That could have been him. Any one of them.

There was a lump in his throat that just wouldn't go away by the time he had everything ready to go. The baskets were stacked on the makeshift sled he’d bodged together. A few hours had passed, and it only now occurred to him that it didn’t matter when the sun went down.

It was going to be dark in the corridors anyway.

Gritting his teeth, he looped the larger ropes around his torso then leaned forward to give an experimental tug. The ropes strained, pulling tight against his chest, painfully so. The wood groaned under the sudden pressure.

Lucas grunted from pain and exertion and not a little bit of shock. He hadn’t expected it to be so heavy. He didn’t know how much the average skeleton weighed when divested of flesh and muscle, but they hadn’t felt that bad individually. With so many of them together, it must have added up.

His feet kicked and scraped against the ground, struggling for grip until enough detritus had bunched up beneath him to get some traction on so he could truly pull.

After a few tense moments, just when the thought that he was going to have to make multiple trips after all was starting to rear its ugly head, the sled shifted an inch forward with the scrape of wood on marble.

Once it had that forward momentum, moving became easier, though it was still far from easy. The strain was agonising, and the ropes felt like they were going to cut right through him.

It was working, but there was no way he was going to go the distance like this. If he stopped, he wasn’t sure he’d start again.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. Do or die. Et cetera.

Lucas reached into his vitality and slowed it all throughout his channels, even the sub-channels. Immediately, he felt heavier, but not like he’d increased his weight. He was just more now, his existence denser. He felt like he was turning to stone.

But pulling the sled was easier, if fractionally. The ropes didn’t hurt as much.

A silver lining in all this, he didn’t have to dedicate too much attention to forming a path through the overgrowth. He was moving so slowly that new plants only entered his range every few seconds, and it was simple to order them aside.

It was dark by the time he’d made it to the edge of the dome, and from there time lost all meaning. He felt disconnected from his own body, watching himself from two paces to the side. He was panting from exertion. Steam wafted from his sweaty skin. He was red as a tomato all over, and blood oozed out from where the makeshift ropes were gouging him.

And he kept putting one foot in front of the other. He had no idea how he kept going through the exhaustion, but he suspected his vitality had something to do with it. As time passed, it only seemed to glow brighter in his senses, solidifying into lava. The pain of his body became a distant concept, but his vitality burned hotter and hotter, scalding his insides.

He was an automaton. Inhuman. His mind emptied of all thoughts but the exit, his legs moving in a preprogrammed direction. If he’d had to think, his mind would have caught on fire.

Seconds stretched into years into decades into centuries into millenia. Corridors stretched on for miles. Turning corners was a herculean labour. He’d chosen the fastest route, taking underground passages, and now he sorely regretted it. Fresh air on his skin would’ve been a balm.

He moved past sights that would have surely fascinated him just a day ago. Artworks painted on the walls of an underground chamber; always depicting a group of five paragons resplendent in their gleaming white armour, facing a formless dark monster. Each had an emblem inlaid in silver: a sword, a shield, a bow, a wand, and a star. Words accompanied them in flowing scripts.

They barely registered, noted and discarded as irrelevant. Only the mission mattered.

Corridors. Darkness. Vitality sense. One foot in front of the other. Breathe in, breathe out. Keep moving. Don’t stop. Eyes closed, don’t need them. Focus.

Forward, forward, forward.

He was burning and drowning. He was on fire and trapped in ice.

Forward.

His body was coming apart. Every cell was separating, lightning filling in the gaps.

Forward.

He was in hell. There was no end to the torment. This pain wasn’t meant to be endured.

But endure it he would.

Forward.

Lucas was jolted out of his trance when a drop of something icy cold and wet fell on his head. Then another. And another. Soon, there were dozens of them pattering against his skull. They quickly blended together, and before he knew it he was soaked through. He opened his eyes.

His body was practically parallel to the ground, giving him the best angle to pull on the sled. Because of this, his face was close enough to the grass to count the individual blades.

Grass.

Strangely, there’d been none of it back inside. Not that he’d seen. Whatever fey intelligence controlled the plants favoured bigger or more inconvenient flora.

He reached out to run his fingers through the verdure beneath him. It was overgrown, untended. There were weeds and thistles battling with clovers, and all of them were damp.

Beneath it all was dirt. Soil. Mud.

No marble. No stone. No thorns or twigs or other plant detritus.

It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

Lucas’ vision blurred, and he slumped to the ground, uncaring of the damp ground and rain sapping the warmth from his body. He ached inside and out. Sore wasn’t an adequate word to describe the state of his muscles. His vitality was threatening to melt through his channel. A giggle escaped him, and once he’d started he couldn’t stop in spite of the pain it caused him.

Relief suffused him. His last thought before he let go of consciousness was a simple one:

I’m out.