Vin-
Or Kit-
No, I-
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⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛. ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛, ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛. ⬛⬛⬛⬛’ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛, ⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛’ ⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛?
⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛. ⬛⬛⬛ though I’d never thought myself a coward, I’d catch myself shying away from the others. It was the habit of a weakling; someone who’d never watched the life bleed from another’s eyes before. Back with the band, every second or third skirmish ended with one of our own dead. The unskilled; the aggressive; the green; the fools – they’d all been trimmed away until what remained was just lean and wiry muscle. Death had made us fitter.
Jana didn’t care. When… Whip’d died, the old madam had made the same damn expression she always made: lips pursed in slight disapproval. It was all another click of the abacus to her. Mother had always laughed seeing it, and I’d laughed along with her. When Jana’d done it in that stone building, I’d nearly cut her head off. Crumpet and Tippi’d stayed quiet near the rest, but out of sight I’d hear them playing their little games. They’d seen enough people die to know how to pick themselves up. I hadn’t so much as stumbled in years. But just a few short months after it’d all come crashing down, and I kept catching myself mid-fall.
I wasn’t the only one. Vin hid it best, but the quiet oaf had only grown quieter. Before he remembered to half-heartedly laugh at someone’s bad joke, his frown would deepen. He’d said more words with his boy, Taja – the kid sobbing and snotting himself to sleep – than he’d shared with anyone else in the week since. The Dolphin itself couldn’t coax Gast’s thoughts from her, but even Ronnie talked more than her. Davian had become a jumpy mess pointing swords at shadows. The only thing stopping me from knocking him out was his accusations filling in the godsdamned silence. Because without Whip, Ronnie could only use hand-speak – which no one really understood – or slowly make shapes in mud. Vin and Davian could read, but I was at their mercy if I wanted to know whether they had something legitimate to say or were hiding mockery in the lines of the dirt.
Father had tried to teach me letters when I was a kid, but it’d been a waste of time. Mother had kicked apart our first lesson, pointing out that I was too thick to learn. The sword was better suited to me – I only had to keep track of two edges, instead of the Siik-knew how many ways you could spin a letter. The spelling of my name had stuck throughout the years, but that was all.
I’d seen Whip read a whole sheaf of pages in-
“Bloody weak,” I spat. “Weak, weak, weak.”
My words reverberated over our small gathering. Andros – the ratbag who’d killed Whip –, drugged senseless as he’d been for the past several days, lay insensate in the dirt, because no one gave enough of a damn to make him comfortable. Tully stirred from within her bedroll, but the rest – Maddie, Aron, Willow and Daisy – slept like the dead. They might be dead, if they didn’t learn to wake up at sudden noises. Trusting the sentry to keep watch was fine; trusting the sentry to avoid getting nailed in the head by an arrow was not.
As I sneered at the sleepers, I noticed Vin staring at me from where he sat atop a branch. The tree stuck out like a sore thumb in the prairie we’d spent days crossing, but beneath it was a tangle of roots that offered the only reprieve from the bristling tallgrasses that had sliced up everyone’s pants and legs for days. We’d slept in similar patches every night – making camp in the tallgrass threatened to poke holes in people’s faces every time they rolled over.
A special kind of loathing had stirred towards the ubiquitous weeds. All flora in the Heartlands liked to slice skin open, given the opportunity, however I’d held knives blunter than the long, sharp reed-like grass that covered the area. Most other animals took the hint when getting pricked the first time and cleared out of the prairie, leaving the only creatures present rodents small enough to scurry beneath the blades’ sharpest portion and humans stupid enough to repeatedly slice themselves on it. Shifting the grass out of the way with a long stick kept most of our blood in our bodies, but it left everyone with sore arms and cuts from the patches that remained. My knuckles were still bruised and beaten from the battle -- making them spend a day closed around a stick was even more painful than the grass's cuts. The worst part was, sacrifices didn’t even yield grain – just more hatefully sharp grass – meaning every leaked drop of blood was shed for no purpose other than to keep cutting. We didn’t even have space to carry excess grain; it just annoyed me on principle.
Everyone else’s legs should’ve been scabbed over from repeated cuts. The princess’ armour was good enough to spare her the worst of it, and Vin had carried Daisy on his shoulders, her mother in a harness on his back, and Andros in his arms; Aron had to carry his halberd. He didn’t have the most powerful Lizardblood – he seemed too clever for that – yet despite a day of carrying his own weight twice over, he refused to collapse into sleep. Maybe he was stupid, after all.
My lips twisted as they addressed him. “You need somethin’, oaf?”
He only shrugged, and returned to whittling away at a chunk of wood.
Instead of continuing to hiss at him, I huffed and returned to pacing around the tree, trailing my eyes through the grasses. Any approach would have to be underneath the sea of stiff vegetation, but without knowing the right places to shift the grass aside the would-be ambushers would soon find themselves with a sheaf through their throat. I wondered if Whip had that skill, then beat my feet fiercely. There was no way of knowing.
Another lap around the tree and a shiver ran through me; my body’s vain attempt to fortify itself against the Frost chill reaching through my skin and into my bones. A campfire would do us all good… right up until the moment Baylar followed the smoke towards us like a wolf smelling day-old carrion. Grass wasn’t a match for heavy armour, and neither were we.
Or something worse could track the scent.
At the edge of the horizon, over the bristling grass and snarling shrubs and leering patches of herbs, the beginnings of a forest stretched like a pair of open arms. The moons and stars glared fiercely in the night sky, but even they could not light the features of each trunk. I knew what they looked like anyway. Gnarled black bark spitting sharp branches. Yet in the daylight, we’d seen something new.
Jagged lines ripped into the pink flesh beneath each tree, each parallel to the other and trailing in bizarre tangles of lines. Sometimes there was only one, sometimes there were more – but the pattern was never the same. As if they were made from the claws of a thousand raving, manic hands.
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I hopped on one foot as we walked through the marked forest, frantically scratching at the thousand itches scampering across my scabbed leg. With the other hand, I clawed at my stitched cheeks; then winced as doing so jarred my fractured pinky-finger. In front of me, Aron, our so-called woodsman – who’d probably never eaten a cold meal in his life – did the same.
“Stop that,” Tully droned tersely. “We cannot afford to open wounds here.”
“You try to withstand this godsdamned itch,” I snapped back.
“We are,” the scarred woman replied quickly, gesturing to Vin. Both of their faces were scrunched in deep concentration.
I swore quietly. Determined to beat them, I gave my leg three final scratches and withdrew my arm, then immediately regretted it as the agonising sensation returned threefold. My eyes bulged. Breathing through my teeth, I leaned forward and slapped Aron on the back of his bald head.
“You heard the lady.”
The stupid little conman turned, face twisting with rage which vanished when he saw my face was a mirror of his own. Yet his hands didn’t stop.
“You got ears?” I cocked my head sideways. “Stop.”
“How- “
Vin’s low rumble conquered Aron’s whine. “All of this is a sign of what waits nearby. Don’t forget that.” He winced and shifted Andros, who stirred on his shoulder. “Keep walking and keep quiet.”
The man tore away his hand, but couldn’t help but let loose a mutter. “It would make more sense if the forest weren’t so damn loud.”
Aron was a weak coward, but in this instance he was also right. The forest was godsdamned loud, in every sense of the word. Heartwood branches rustled in the wind with the sound of a thousand jangling spears; birds sung drunkenly off-beat, pitch staggering into piercing highs and sonorous lows; the indecipherable calls of distant animals echoed through each trunk; insects and rodents skittered against the inside of my ears, even though they walked through the dirt and shrubs and trees.
It wasn’t just the sounds, either. Every colour detonated: red leaves and bushes and dirt dividing into shades of lavender, salmon, vermilion, russet, scarlet, crimson and another thousand shades I hadn’t the words to express, all staring garishly towards us. Its silent violence rattled my skull, but there was nowhere else to look; our armour and clothing had spun themselves into excruciatingly detailed images of filthy strips of fabric, and even my furs sung a chorus of matted greys and bloody blacks, every brush of them against my skin so unpleasantly intense it was almost painful, and gods the itching was enough for tears to start threatening to spill down my face.
Underneath the immediacy of all that, the forest reeked like a noble’s dresser, with smells that would’ve been pleasant at any other intensity taken to a level so cloying that it felt as if each distinct scent were leering at me, swimming up my nostrils without so much as ‘by your leave’ and groping the insides incessantly leaving everyone snorting and coughing because we could even taste the smells every time we opened our mouths and the whole thing was too much for my palate and the feeling of my legs compacting against the ground and the pain from the beating my hands had taken redoubling and the sunlight reaching through the canopy to stab at my eyes and the relentless sounds and smells and sensation and still I staggered onwards and the relentless itching of my cheek's stitching everyone was pained from Daisy leading a still feverish Willow groaning at all to Vin wild-eyed and breathing heavily as the entire forest wailed as we walked beneath it and over it and yet I found godsdamned Maddie of all people looking unbothered by it all beneath her helmet and chitin armour so well-made it could probably buy a mansion with just the helmet so I said “What’s so bloody fun about this, princess?”
Then I whispered a cuss at myself, but the young woman had already clattered, “What?” and I was in too deep for an apology to be anything except a retreat.
“Must be nice.” I winced as my own words drove nails through my skull. “Wrapped up nice an’ tight in there. Four an’ a half people carryin’ you away from yer own dung-smeared mess. Scarface ready to wipe yer behind for you.”
“Is now really the time for this?” Despite being over a head taller than her, she still somehow looked down her nose at me.
“Oh, yes Missus Head; sorry Missus Head,” my tonsils chattered like a hundred chipmunks, “I’ll never gainsay you again.”
“Why are you so mad?” she whined, and the tone and tack of the sentence scratched the coffin I hadn’t finished sealing. Which was stupid and weak, because she was nothing like Whip; or maybe she was and I just didn’t know enough to figure it out.
“Why’re you so calm all the time?! What’s there to be calm about?! We’re in the worst damn situation a person can be in, and yer jus’- ” I rocked a hand through the air slowly, snarling, “ -trottin’ along.”
“Kit, have some respect- “ Tully’s voice crackled and popped, but I barrelled through it.
“Why don’t you do yerself a favour an’ go back to whatever animal mauled you an’ lie down in front of it?” I snapped like the jaws of some massive beast. “Might improve yer looks.”
Everyone winced at the volume, yet it was still nothing compared to everything, wriggling through eyes and ears and nose and tongue and skin to set blood writhing. The branches screamed from above, swaying gently as we hurriedly stomped past the tightly-packed trunks, shrubs, and over the ground teeming with roots.
“Be quiet, woman,” Aron muttered, every ‘buh’ and ‘cuh’ and ‘tuh’ a hammer on my skull, rattling everything.
My bandaged hands shot out and shoved him in the back of his shoulder, sending him ricocheting off bark and tangling with the halberd he held on the ground. “That what you say to yer wife an’ kid? What a strong, tough man – so strong an’ tough he can’t help but whine every two seconds.”
He lay there for a few moments, before getting a grip on the root-laden ground and pushing his body up against the weight of his pack. His neck twisted, revealing a weeping gash on his cheek.
His lack of response stoked the flame trembling through my limbs. “Oh, yer silent now? Is it cause I’m a woman you can’t hit? I reckon you could – yer just too damn weak t’give it a shot.”
“Raven’s bones Kit,” Vin spat, and that was the worst of all, “this is not the time.”
I whirled. “When’s the time, Vin?” My wide eyes stung against the cold air. “Guy here stole chits for years, then went an’ turned an’ hid behind th’ people he stole from, and one of ‘em died; so when’s the time t’talk about that or are we jus’ gonna brush over it like her entire godsdamn life got brushed over?”
“You’re just bad news,” Aron grated from the ground.
“Well you’re bad too ‘cept you’re too small an’ pathetic t’even make news, so I’m one up on that.”
“Kit,” Maddie began, “we are all tired of this place, and, and, hurting- “
“I’m not hurting,” I sneered. “I’m pissed off.”
Vin’s ire strained against the confines of his whisper. “That’s a crock of steamed dung and you know it. This is not how you mourn.”
I threw my arms open. “An’ how should I mourn, huh? Like you? Yer entire damn life’s been nonstop moping since I met you. It’s pathetic – a grown man actin’ like a beat dog. What: yer sweetheart screwed someone else? Get over it, and get on with it.”
“Oh, okay.” He raised his arms in surrender. “I’m sorry for being sad. Instead, I should yell and scream and get everyone killed – that’s a leagues better way of mourning.”
I turned away from his gaze, frowning slightly. “I’m not mourning.”
“Are you- “ He groaned and cast his eyes towards the canopy. “Really? Really?”
Tully’s voice cut ours into ribbons. “Walk, you two.”
“We’re walking,” the large man rumbled.
“Walk faster.”
I snorted. “Not gonna tell us to shut up?”
She turned in a whirlwind of scars, and despite her having a completely different colour of skin for a moment I couldn’t help but see Mother. “You have already made certain it knows our location.”
Involuntarily, I flinched away. “I, uh…”
From behind, a hand pressed me forward. “Come on.”
I moved, but couldn’t stop words slipping out my throat. “Don’t touch me, oaf.”
“Bloody hell,” he growled, and I frowned at the unfamiliar term. “Not mourning,” he cast into my ears like a wriggling worm, yanking Aron to his feet and shoving the man forward.
“How can I grieve?” I replied as we jogged, half-expecting the volume to tear my throat to shreds. “I didn’t know Whip. I didn’t know her childhood, or the food she found tastiest. Didn’t know her favourite colour. Or where she was born. I didn’t even know the moment Whip died – I jus’ kept holding her hand like a godsdamned idiot, trying and failing to find the tune she’d asked for.”
Lowering my head, I moved my legs faster. “How’s a person supposed to mourn somethin’ they never knew?”
“You’re a hypocrite, Kit.” In the warped confines of the forest, the grinding of his teeth was audible. “I told you how this would end. Do you remember what you said? ‘Killing’s not some great wrong’; ‘Living means fighting’; ‘It’s all worse than nothing’.”
I stopped, splaying my bandaged hands in front of the group. “Vin.”
The Lizardblood’s lips peeled with the sound of a dog licking its chops. “It can’t get worse for them, you said. But I told you there’s no way of- “
“Vin.” This time, he heeded the urgent note beating within my voice. “D’you – do any of you – see that?”
Several hundred paces in front of us, a shape had coalesced. Something sat on a branch. The glaring colours of our environments conspired to make its orange contours blend in with the thousand reds of the canopy, yet I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the way the forest stretched every senses. But once my eyes had fixed on its form, the creature was clear.
At first glance, it appeared similar to a human. Yet on closer inspection, that impression faded like the light from a dying man’s eyes. Four limbs dug into the branch where it squatted in a manner similar to a lazy tomcat, each as long and sinuous as a snake. Its naked skin was an orange almost entirely concealed by all varieties of rashes, scabbing cuts, boils, burns, grazes, and bruises. It had no genitals. Sunlight filtering through the trees set the fields of fine hairs sprouting over its entire body alight with a fiery glow. Large, fleshy bowls extended from each side of its head, riddled with pulsing veins. A long snout was raised in the air, wrought with stretch-marks and panning around at an almost imperceptible speed. Peering from its face were two orange eyes dominated by endlessly dark holes.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
It saw us – seven of us, from shivering Daisy to wide-eyed Aron, all seeing it in turn – and began laughing hysterically, oscillating between high and low as it did so. The cackles were mishappen, inhuman, and unmistakeable gleeful.
I licked my lips. “D’you think- “
“Yes,” clattered Tully, unslinging a crossbow from her back. Whip’s crossbow had gone with Ronnie.
I slowly drew my sword, thumb against its blade to avoid noise. Sound escaped anyway, and I winced as it rung through our skulls, and winced again when Vin drew his own sword. “We runnin’?” I managed.
Our leader shook her head. “That’s the direction we need- “
“Yeah,” interrupted Vin. “Start backing away slowly.”
“Vin- “
“We can try another day.”
“We do not have another day. It has sighted us – I’ve preparations- “
“We don’t have to use- “
“There’s no point in keeping him alive if we don’t.”
“Except for basic decency.”
Maddie’s eyes whipped between the two, clutching a small crossbow.
“Make a decision,” I snapped, but it was already too late.
Its stance made it difficult to size up, but when it lazily swung down from its perch I placed it as several hands taller than Vin at full height. With a slightly hunched posture, it walked behind a black heartwood trunk and never emerged from the other side.
The Lizardblood’s eyes were wide; his jaws audibly groaning as they ground against one another. “I can’t locate it. This place is- ”
Within the movements of birds and wind and insects screaming from every direction, Aron’s whisper was excruciating. “Surely we’ll see it coming- “
“It’s a god, you dumb bastard,” I hissed.
“If you hadn’t started- “
“Listen for it,” Vin commanded with the force of an avalanche, and we shut up.
Yet there was no silence. There was no stillness. Ignorant of the enormous danger dwelling within its confines, the forest sung and danced manically. Our breaths were harsh and jagged and our hearts beat to a tune made available to our collective ears by whatever bizarre divinity the Fox wrought upon the area. It blazed across every sense we had, and Vin demanded we sink further into its agony.
As it turned out, most of us were looking in the wrong direction.
“There!” Daisy shrieked and we all turned the opposite direction the creature had vanished from to find it inches away and my sword swung and it backflipped away, spinning through the air like a dancer, laughing and laughing. It flipped, sailing behind a trunk, and vanished.
“Look in every direction,” Tully breathed, and I could’ve hit her for making such a redundant statement.
We spread into a loose circle, Vin and I on opposite ends. Maddie and Tully stood between us, crossbows jerking in every direction. Aron had Vin’s halberd clutched like a spear, but with the root-ridden ground making such poor footing, I didn’t trust him to use it. Cruelly, my legs and cheeks still itched like fire.
“When it’s in the air, someone needs to shoot it,” the Spiderblood continued.
“That won’t anger it?” Maddie asked, voice trembling like a beehive.
“Vin?” Tully asked, eyes panning.
“Kani doesn’t anger over pain.”
“We don’t…“ Willow paused as she bent over, panting. The fact that she was standing in the throes of infection, in a place like this, seemed otherworldly. “…have anything besides knives.”
Vin cracked Andros over the head, then dumped him in the centre where he groaned. Without looking, the large man dumped his sling next to Andros. “He knows how to use this.” He ripped a pouch from his belt, passing it to Daisy. “Throw the rocks if it’s in the air, and- ”
A wordless cry ripped from my throat as it sprinted on all fours from behind a trunk, then stopped scarcely ten feet away, and tensed. I braced, only for it to laugh in my face and backpedal.
“Bastard!” I yelled, but it was already gone.
Vin’s sweaty fingers squished around his sword. “We need- “
Maddie yelped and I turned to find the thing retreating from the Blooded’s slash. It scurried back into the woods.
“Kit,” groaned Willow, stinking of vomit, and I returned my gaze to find it charging again from an entirely different location. Instinctively, I delivered a horizontal blow -- wincing as my sword's hilt pressed against my hand's bruises -- but instead of retreating again it rolled underneath in a tangle of limbs. I stomped down on it to find the creature coiling around my leg and slowly running filthy talons down it. A yell escaped my mouth, and I stabbed down at it, but when it rolled again I anticipated the manoeuvre and flicked my blade sideways, nicking an arm.
It laughed as if that was the funniest joke it ever heard and slipped around every single one of my ensuing blows, then fled into the woods. My mouth opened to curse after it, only to release a gasp as I finally felt the agony blazing through my leg. A ravenous core of molten iron lived in my calf, consuming every sensation around it and commanding a scream to rip from my chest. It was catastrophic; apocalyptic. It was the worst wound I’d received in my life. Through a haze, I felt vague astoundment that I hadn’t collapsed outright.
I breathed shallowly and looked down, expecting to see a calf swollen purple with poison, already in the process of rotting off. But I found three long gashes instead. I stared. They were nasty. They wouldn’t kill me. They wouldn’t even stop me from moving.
Vin asked me if I could fight, and in a voice that would’ve been baffled were it not for the pain, I told him yes.
He said something to the others as I tore my focus away from the sensation of every ounce of flesh in my leg sloughing off under the weight of immense rot, and settled it back into my torso. Unconsciously, I shifted my footing to account for the injured leg, then swore and shifted it back.
“This godsdamn thing’s a cracked nut,” I slurred.
“Focus up,” Tully demanded.
“Screw yerself,” I replied, and did so.
I heard a roar from Vin, rushing wind, and a cackle. A glance revealed it rushing away, the cut on its arm gone.
“It heals?”
“No,” Maddie said.
“I got my sword in its skin and the nick’s gone.”
“That shouldn’t- “
A yell from Aron and laughter as the thing halted nearly a yard away. It flipped behind a trunk and vanished again.
“It’s not going to stop,” Tully quietly declared. “We need to start moving.”
Maddie immediately asked: “How much more forest- “
“Ghh.” Andros groaned, body scraping against the solid roots. The sound boiled out from the back of his throat. “Agh.” He panted. “Where’s my dose?”
“You’ll get it when we’re out of this forest,” Vin hissed as if the words pained him, “and to get out, you need to hit a monster with that sling.”
Maddie’s voice squeaked out. “How much more forest- “
“Don’t matter,” I snapped, “so shut up an’- “ Stirred by a flash of movement, my eyes flickered to the canopy.
A dozen meters above us, it spun around a trunk, onto a branch, and then dove downwards. With barely enough time to form a thought, I spread my arms and shoved everyone back several paces. Tully yielded instantly; Maddie a fraction of a moment later; but Daisy and Willow tripped in a tangle of limbs, imploding our circle into a shape far less solid.
The thing landed into an extended roll. I stepped forward, sword pointed towards the ground, and ripped the blade upwards with every muscle in my body. Before it could connect, its arms touched the ground and sprung into a graceful flip over our formation. Its cackle briefly halted when Maddie shot a bolt towards it, which thudded into a warding arm and flipped it sideways.
“Good shot,” I said, and moved to pursue the wounded creature – arm wrecked by the projectile and still bleeding lightly from a small cut.
“Do not leave formation!” Vin bellowed.
“If we let it get behind the tree it’ll heal,” I protested.
“It is playing with us – if it tried we would already be dead.”
“But- “
“It will kill you and it will not heal. Now.” He addressed Tully. “What direction?”
“My direction. Step in time to the beat. When it approaches, yell ‘halt’; yell ‘clear’ when it’s gone. Keep the formation cohesive.”
Andros released a strangled growl. “This will get me- “
“Yes,” Vin snapped, furious enough to have Daisy yelping.
“Step- “ the scarred woman began, only to be interrupted by Aron.
“Stop, stop, stop!” the man frantically stuttered, backing into those in the centre.
I glanced over. Almost idly, the acne-ridden, boil-covered creature loped towards our position. The halberd in Aron’s hand wavered unsteadily. With less than three seconds remaining before impact, Vin’s hand grasped the weapon’s haft and yanked it upwards to brace against the ground.
It slowed, giggling in a volume that would’ve been inaudible were everything not so loud, and halted. Standing on both legs at a height just shorter than Vin, it leaned forward and traced its hand over the halberd’s head. Its fingers carefully ran downwards, from the weapon’s point to its quivering blade. Consideringly, the creature brushed its hand around the hook embedded in the back of the haft, then in a blur of motion slammed its palm onto the halberd’s point and ripped it out in a spray of orange blood.
The thing’s giggles rose into outright laughter. Aron blanched, shakes wracking his body. In that moment, I doubted he could have killed a crippled ant. But the divine creature simply cackled and ran back into the woods. We stared after it.
“It’s gone,” Aron said after a few seconds.
“It is still there,” Vin retorted sternly. “But we can move.”
We held our breaths.
“Step,” Tully drummed out.
We stepped.
“Step.”
We stepped.
“Step.”
She gave the order and we obeyed. Aron screamed ‘Halt!’ multiple times, but whatever scared him seemed nothing more than a phantom; a shadow wrought by a conspiracy between shapes and a mind not large enough to parse the enormity of the situation. For once, I couldn’t blame him.
Our assailant didn’t reemerge, but that fact provided little relief. In its wake, the exuberance of the forest ceased being insipid and began feeling menacing. Somewhere in the incomprehensible cacophony of birdsong and the breeze through crimson leaves and the barks of distant animals and infinitely intricately scarred patterns on bark and the beating of Tully’s voice and the burgeoning tension in the centre of my chest, the secret of its location waited. But if any human alive could swim through the incredible pressure of all that information, I wasn’t that person. All I could do was watch, hoping that something would give it away.
Then it started laughing. And dashing between the trunks of heartwoods. From every angle, sound and shape changing as it emerged from a new direction, to flicker through the trees and vanish. To reemerge and laugh and vanish.
The moment Vin said, ‘Halt,’ I’d become certain that we were dead.
The creature, unwounded, ran at the large man, duking left and right to avoid flung stones from Andros and the girls, and leapt at him. He readied his sword, but it contorted midair, turning an impalement into a long gash down its torso. Vin thrust his buckler towards its head, only for it to latch onto the shield and use its momentum to flip around, onto his back.
A long howl dominated the air as it dug claws into the sides of the Lizardblood’s neck. For a moment, I thought it would tear out his throat, however instead of killing him it smoothly withdrew the offending digits when Willow thrust a dagger towards it. It pushed off the big man’s back and leapt behind us. The fevered woman’s knife slid against Vin’s torso with a long screech as it ripped through his coat and slid on some sort of white armour beneath. She barely steadied herself from a fall by grabbing his coat.
But there was little time to help, because I was hurling Daisy away from the thing’s outstretched hands and slamming my sword-hand into its guts. The creature allowed the impact – its laughter temporarily transforming to a wheeze – then trapped my arm with two of its own and began twisting it around my back. I flipped a dagger from my belt and swung blindly behind, only for it to extend a foot onto my spine and kick me away, forcing me to release my sword lest my arm snap in two.
I whirled, hastily adjusting my stance to account for a much shorter weapon, and it swung my own sword at me. The blow was obviously untrained, but what it lacked in skill it made up for with raw finesse. I moved to slap the flat of the blade away, only for it to roll the weapon with impossible control and crash it into the top of my hand.
I stumbled backwards, hissing against the pain and the horrible laughter ringing in my head. Its posture was uncannily straight-backed, resembling a wolf that’d learned to walk on two feet. It advanced in a mockery of my own stance – pointlessly off-balance and yipping with glee – writhing aside two bolts from the crossbow-wielders.
A testing blow was easily ducked under, but when I barrelled forward, intending scratch it a few times, the creature whipped its leg upwards into my shoulder. I pirouetted away from it, barely fending off another two half-hearted blows with my tiny weapon – even as the impacts sent shudders through my bones – when a halberd cleaved towards its centre. It squatted downwards, but I was already snatching Vin’s tossed sword out of the air and bringing it down on the thing’s head.
In the heat of the moment, both Vin and I had mistaken its upright posture as an indication of some common anatomy between the three of us. If it were human, we would’ve had it. Yet it wasn’t human. So it bent sideways like a piece of rope and launched itself out of the way.
It cackled at us as it flipped to its feet, then tossed my sword back to the tangled roots beneath me. After staring at us for a handful of distended moments, it brought its talons – still wet with Vin’s blood – to its snout and sniffed.
Its laughter paused.
It closed its eyes and extended a long, sinuous tongue, which wrapped around the bloodied talons one at a time. As it did so, it made small murmuring sounds, and I stepped forward and slashed. The onyx blade severed its neck cleanly, cutting through bone and tendon as if flesh were nothing at all. Its head landed in a quiet roll, then settled betwixt two roots.
Its body collapsed, silent.
“That’s not right,” I muttered.
We held our breath. The forest held its breath. For a moment, the sky itself threatened to fall.
Then laughter. Exuberant, joyful laughter, emanating from every single direction at once.
From behind nearly every trunk I could see, figures emerged. Their heights were slightly different; builds leaner or thicker; wounds or boils or rashes or stumps or acne or scars or burns or swollen, rotting limbs unique to each – but all bore four clawed limbs, large, fleshy ears, equidistant hairs, and a constant, cackling laugh.
Hundreds walked and crawled and loped and staggered and leapt and climbed through the intense blare they generated, attention falling upon us like the weight of the world.
“How many are there?” Aron quietly intoned.
Before any response could be made, an uneven, stilted imitation emanated from the forest. “How men there?” it squawked.
The rest took up the cry.
“How men there?”
“Men there how?”
“There how men?”
Hysterical cackling ended each cry.
A dozen approached our group, and we shuffled until each of us was shoulder to shoulder. One came close enough that I could count every single hair on its body and hear the pulsing of its veins. It leaned down, provoking some alien odour to invade my nostrils, and picked up the blade between my feet. I gripped Vin’s sword tighter.
It turned and hacked into the shoulder of the one next to it, carving past flesh, muscle and tendon. It backed away slightly, laughing, and the other looked at its arm hanging from its body by a thin strip of meat and cackled as well. But the rest still watched us.
I heard Vin lick his lips as he unslung his backpack, hoisting its black, scarred leather in one hand. He ripped off the stone wing he kept tied to his straps and shoved it in a pouch, then slowly shuffled towards the creature nearest to him.
“Here it is,” he muttered. “The divinity that ended me.”
Gingerly, he extended the pack towards it, which was quickly snatched. It slithered closer to the ground, and in a maelstrom of movement that had us all flinching, dozens scrambled closer, until the bag had vanished in a crowd of flesh and limbs. After a moment, the cluster separated, each clutching different pieces from Vin’s pack. One snuffed Vin’s vial of spices up its nose, then shuddered into a small giggle and scraped the rest into its open eyeball. Another held a carving between its long, many-jointed fingers, carefully rubbing every contour. When it had completed shaking, smelling, and licking Vin’s work, the being crushed it between both hands, driving splinters deep into its flesh. Two faced each other: one poured an urn of foul-smelling oil atop its head while its alternate examined some flint and steel, tied together by a piece of string. It managed to coax a spark, and the pair laughed, delighted, as one set the other aflame. They laughed and laughed until the inferno stopped writhing and collapsed into a smouldering heap, and then laughed still; all recklessly celebrating whatever they could heap upon themselves. Reckless slaughter, manic observation, scars and agony, unimaginable pain; all held aloft as if it were the sun that lights the world. Within that collection of mad revelry, a god lived and died.
What revels in pain and pleasure? Exulting in the twist of a knife, whether wielder or wounded? Every man, woman, and child knows the answer: Kani; the Fox; the Ubiquitous; the Glutton; the Scarred; the one who feels.
The Foxes – or the Fox – sprinted and leapt and walked and danced and burned and laughed, and when they were done each turned their attention back towards us.
Towards me.
A Kani tore my sword from torso of its fellow, and trotted to the corpse I’d decapitated. Each part of the god splintered around us in a whirlwind of motion as their counterpart methodically butchered the corpse. Their shadows writhing according to their movements in a mad carousel of divinity. Some unplaceable stench filled the air as it ripped an organ from the body: a many-valved thing coloured an unnatural, radiant orange. The god took several steps towards me. Almost casually, it bypassed the trembling tip of the sword I wielded, and offered what I realised was a heart to me.
For a moment, I considered it. It’d been made clear we were at the mercy of greater powers back in the abandoned village, under the bone-wrapped fists of the Baylarian leader. No longer could I think myself the strongest person in the room – not with Vin standing beside me. I’d seen him work uninhibited by whatever shackles had tied him towards his pretence of mediocrity. If he and I were to fall to blows, I would either draw or outright lose – and the former started to seem more and more unlikely. Though the possibility wasn’t something I seriously considered, the knowledge still prickled me at my loudest, and hollowed me in my quietest.
But even before Vin quietly told me, “Don’t,” I had already dismissed the idea. Eating the flesh would kill me as surely as a blade through the heart. Even if that wasn’t the case, I had no need for a gods’ power. The thing’d barely known how to hold a sword, after all.
Yet it did not withdraw its hand.
“No,” I said.
It stared, and slowly brought the organ closer.
And closer.
Then Andros shrieked, “Did you just give away my vial?”, gazing at a small, black-smeared vial in the hands of a staggering creature, and for the briefest instant my turning gaze found Vin’s features moulded into deep disgust, as if he were gazing at the lowest of roaches. The expression only sat on the Blooded’s face for a moment-
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-and I thought, wouldn’t it be fitting if a noble – that rare human that needed human blood to rule – ended as the thrall of a god’s blood? Only for an instant; only for a moment did my hatred for this man burn in my veins-
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-but that was enough time for him to shove Andros out of the circle. When Vin’s revulsed expression drained away into horror, he groped for the man’s hand, yet the whirlwind of Kani had already torn the sight of the former Baylarian commander away. What remained were his deep, jagged howls, their contours mingling with endless laughter.
And even as his screams escalated to greater, more broken heights, the Fox did not withdraw its hand.
“How many more?” Vin mumbled to himself.
Though the statement wasn’t directed at anyone, Tully responded anyway. “We have three to spare.”
And before anyone else had time to parse that statement, Willow had shoved her husband forward. Her feverish body wouldn’t have been enough to overcome a grown man at any other moment, however Aron had been leaning backwards, to get as far away from the seething mass of orange flesh as possible. The shove had cause him to flinch away from its source, and then they had him.
Against a backdrop of screaming and begging and birdsong and leaves, the god holding the heart cackled, full of mirth and good humour. I saw Andros’ face shoved into a pool of orange offal; saw Aron’s arms stretch and fray into tendons of bone and meat between eight different figures. We watched and heard the men be stripped from themselves, and slowly, we stepped away, until the Fox left eyeshot.
Our eyes never brushed its form again. But from behind every tree and branch, a hundred gazes followed us as we carefully stepped our way out of the forest.
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We collapsed several hundreds yards outside of it, in the frost-licked tallgrass of the prairie. The cuts they made on my skin seemed muted, almost absent of pain. Everything felt distant, except for the pain in my chest and the rush of wind through my chest. Sluggishly, I dragged my mind towards the hours before and uselessly groped at the ungrounded images, then gave up and lay in the falling sun, empty.
When I was beginning to feel human again, Tully got us up and walking. Step after step came and went, until Maddie called everyone, excepting Daisy and myself, murderers. It was a vaguely pleasant surprise to find myself outside that particular category, even if her claim was woefully misguided.
“If he wasn’t doin’ what he should’ve done days ago, I would get Vin,” I drawled, “but you really think Willow’s done anything bad? Sure, she killed Aron, but I been waiting for her to grow a backbone an’ do that since we met.”
“What do you mean?” the Head asked.
“Come on.” I looked around. Both Maddie and Vin met my eyes with mild confusion. “Really? A sound proof wagon? Can’t see into it?”
When Vin shut his eyes and clenched his teeth, I knew he’d got it. The young woman took longer.
“Quiet kid.” I waited for comprehension. None came. “Lady’s bruises? They jus’ flew onto her?”
She blinked. “You’re saying- “
I trudged forward. “Didn’t think it had t’be said.”
“And, and…” Disbelief coloured her expression. “You didn’t do anything?”
“Look: that’s her life. She dug the damn hole. She wants to sit in it: that’s her choice. She too weak to get out? That’s her failing.”
A sharp blade of the prairies grass slid through my trousers and across my shin. I swore, and squatted down to grasp at my wounded leg. Maddie shook her head, and accelerated her walk through the fields of tallgrass. After checking to make sure I wasn’t bleeding to death, Vin patted me on the shoulder and followed.
Alone, I ran through my words again. “That’s her failing,” I hissed forcefully. “Her failing. Her damn failing.”
I said it, and found I’d repeated the phrase so often it’d lost all meaning.