From the darkness wafts the apex of unholy stenches. Soft and warm, like maggot-ridden flesh. It seems to squirm; oscillating between a feeble wretchedness and a smell that threatens to crawl up a mortal’s nostrils and eat their brain from the inside out. A smell that heralds mountains of rot.

It comes from the surroundings of a vast hole, where layers of terraces rise from the shadows. Their gardens are formed of bodies at varying stages of decay; thousands of distinct creatures putrefying into a reeking, liquid mash. Worms, insects, moulds, mushrooms and other detrivores swim through it as the buzzing of fist-sized flies fill the air. Delicate bones stand from that sediment like blades of grass; their solemnity desecrated by a layer of slime.

Grains, bushes of fruits, and stakes wrapped in vines heavy with berries sprout in a careful arrangement. Tall, disparate trees hold vigil over it alongside meticulous rows of flowers and the protective shade of ferns. None are exemptions to the rule of this place: each decays and collapses as surely as anything else. Rigid law will gradually process them to reeking mud.

Through these entropic tiers comes the squelching of a lone figure: one arm a scythe and the other a shovel. The first takes plants that cannot thrive where they are. The second digs a furrow in more fertile soil, and using both mishappen arms rehomes them there. The sculpture wades through the bog, one arduous torque of its torso at a time. Its journey clothes it in strings of vaguely-identifiable fibres and a coat of foul liquid. Fungi dig their spores into its wooden skin. Colonies of insects make their home within it. Its face is cast in a perpetual grimace. A seed hangs around its neck.

This sculpture is not the only thing that moves through the garden of decay. Many of its banks and islands are composed of bodies. Most are silent and lifeless. Yet a noticeable amount breathe still. Of their number, several speak to the sculpture moving past as termites and worms writhe through their mouths.

They speak of petty grievances. They speak of fatigue. They speak of crimes they have performed and not recognised as such. They speak of lust; of manipulation; of tongues assailing rigid bodies. They make obscene gestures. They speak of people they have never met and the many ways they will hurt them for imagined transgressions. They speak of their foot on the backs of others. They flail at the sculpture as it passes. They speak of what they believe they deserve. Their voices puppet their putrefying bodies; another layer of rot settling over this place.

Despite the carving turning its face away, their words are always intelligible; carved with undeserved clarity.

As it passes, a pair burst from the muck like flayed dolphins, disgusting anatomy bared to the naked eye. Its empty gaze follows them as they beat each other with the bottom of their fists and dig bony fingers into their counterpart’s sallow skin. Insults hiss from their infested mouths as they roll through the mash; pieces of themselves stripped away at the violence. The pair’s skin crawls with fungus and insects and their bodies rot away.

The same rot that lays in the sculpture.

It does not know that these bodies – whether still or active – are empty husks. That there are no physical words in this place. It does not realise that the rot is not caused by the passive pull of entropy, but the mad design of a larger mind. It does not know that the plants would survive. Once, it might have questioned these things. But the act of questioning yielded no insight.

The sculpture’s arms delve through the hot, stinking muck to penetrate the unseen depths. Its body is not made for the task. It has no dextrous fingers to aid it. Only wood and bone bent into a shovel and sickle, and neither the revolution of scythes nor the uprooting of ploughs can clear the muck. So it gropes as best it can as it moves through the terraces; tending to the rotten gardens therein.

Methodically, the farmer makes the circuit around the pit: trimming plants under the leering gazes of the bodies they grow in as insects crawl over its form. It creaks through these tasks without any indication of impatience – each movement as careful as the last. Eventually, its dowsing through the bog stills.

The sculpture halts, as still as stone, mask of wood turned downwards. Thunderous heartbeats mark the passing of time. Eventually, it darts into furtive motion – like a child anticipating rebuke – and heaves something from beneath. A piece of land emerges from the liquid filth, damp with mould but drier and firmer than anything else here. When the land has settled and seems in no danger of sinking, the shovel and scythe scratch out a patch of earth. Then it reaches for the seed tied to its neck.

Except it has no hands to hold such a delicate thing. Instead, its movements become a study in inefficiency: sharp and blunt bone first struggling to lift the necklace off it without catching on its neck, then nearly dropping it into the sea of decay, then having to cut it from its cord without breaking it. Yet after much labour, it manages to settle the seed within a cradle of dirt.

The sculpture pauses before burying it.

It examines itself: the layer of fungi and filth accrued in its every crevice. Its neck creaks as it turns. Jeering bodies, pestilent with rot, lurk beneath a fog of swarming insects. Only the small cavity in the centre is free of filth, but that place is no more welcoming: just a rotting place barren of warmth.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Beside it is the amalgamate: covered with slime from their dogged pursuit of the sculpture.

Why are you stopping?

I… Its voice is stiff from disuse. I oughta not do this.

The larger sculpture glances down. Bury that seed?

It nods.

You don’t think it deserves to exist?

It deserves better than that. Than this place. To turn from somethin’ whole… into this godsdamned stench.

Surely you understand that this isn’t all that exists.

It chuckles. Outside ain’t any different. Grief; excuses; empty justifications: you’ll find dung in spades, out there. Jus’ hidden better.

There’s no beauty to be found, then?

No. Its empty eyes are fixed on the seed. An disgustin’ things can’t make pretty places.

Are you sure?

Mm, it grunts. Each day I wake to find my heart grown colder. The light blunter; the shadows deeper. The reek of this grey land a little stronger. I’m growin’ accustomed to it. Can hardly remember what it was like to be clean. Can hardly remember why I’d wanna be.

…

Even if I could, there ain’t no changin’ what we wade through. Or them voices. The low, crouching thing that patiently waits in the heart of all men. I seen people die. The way they breathe and shake and stare, eyes wide and as innocent as they themselves are not. Good people and bad ones all made the same, before the end. The great revealed as small. The petty ugliness of it. Like worms slippin’ off the side of a bucket into the water beneath. Livin’ ain’t different. This is what we are.

But is that all we are? Is that all you are?

For a long time, there is silence. The farmer gazes upwards. Soon, it begins to shake.

I don’t want to be this person. Moisture trails from its hollow eye-sockets: pure lines dragging the filth away. I want to hear a joke and laugh. I want to see a beautiful thing and fall in love with it. I want to smell a flower and think it good instead of jus’ there. I want to stand on a tall place high above and look over the world and see the shape it should take, instead of jus’ the one it does. I want to be someone that can believe and be believed in.

I want to be that person. But they ain’t here. I suspect they never was.

The amalgamate wades through the foul rot that sucks at their feet to place a hand on its shaking shoulder. Around them, the bodies cease their babbling to grow still.

Then SEARCH, they tell it.

And the pair fall to dust.

***

Wil follows the trail of carrion beneath a canopy of crimson leaves, leaning heavily against his bloodied spear. He’d fallen badly during the Oxkin’s furious last moments – sprained his ankle, he wagers – but barely notices the pain. Seems like it fades into the long line of buzzing flies and stinking meat that leads him to his destination. The gnarled trunks of heartwoods and ghostly thrust of speartrees sometimes block the sight, but he can still smell it. He’s been smelling it for years.

It's a hot day. Sweat clings to his skin, mingling with the blood of others.

He recognises the faces of most of the Growers that make up that path. But some don’t have faces to recognise. The corpses are mutilated: bodies rendered inhuman by the sheer violence of their end. Wil avoids stepping on their pieces, but it’s hard to tell what’s the pink, fleshy dirt of the earth and what’s someone he once knew. Beneath the draining corpses, grain and food are beginning to spring up. The Heartlands keeps its end of the bargain, even when its contractors’re dead.

Wil doesn’t recognise his wife at first; just the monster eating her. The farmer’s half-hoping it’ll give him the same treatment, however it’s laughably easy to limp behind the Spiderkin and stab it in the back of its head. Only when he rolls the monster off the body does he realise who she was.

Even now, kneeling beside the eviscerated body of the woman he married, the man doesn’t know his wife well. She’s a mystery; one he never really understood how to clear up. Death gives him no further insight.

Yet Wil knows he needs her. She’s rotting, now, but he’s been rotting for a long, long time. And he knows a carcass like him can only endure. Knows it can’t teach his son how to live.

For the first time in months, Wil thinks of Pa. Wonders if he could’ve done better. Might be he could’ve. Pa’s not here, though. Just corpses.

Bile rises to his throat as he stares. Despite his best efforts, his lips tug into a disgusted sneer. To ward it off, Wil leans backwards and turns his unfocused gaze upwards. Behind the canopy of red, he finds a clear blue sky. But in the vision of his heart it is lousy with maggots and decay, and the world around him is haunted by the mocking ghost of worthiness, drifting just out of reach.

No tears leak from his eyes. “I don’t know what to do,” the widower tells his wife.

A body can’t reply. But a child can.

“Dadda?” comes a trembling voice.

And then he’s scrambling, hands squelching through guts and blood as he surges towards the roots of a nearby tree, where his boy is tucked away, and embraces young Alton in his arms as the kid begins to shake and give harsh, strangled screams. And Wil finds himself weeping as well, throat tight with his own small grief:

The passing of something he only ever knew the shape of, and that he yearns to know in truth.

***

Amongst the terraces lays the bodies, once gap-toothed and leering, now fossilised by the press of the darkness. Just as the narrow-eyed march of a sculpture has silenced, so too has its absence left it quiet. It waits gormlessly: a vigil that to it may be momentary, but to others eternal. Ignorant, in the way of ice and other eyeless things.

The amalgamate lays atop what was, a short time ago, the putrefying sap of this place. It’s unclear what it is now. Unclear what they are. Some remnant of the place still clings to them in the shape of a small seed that bejewels the pommel of the blade. They take it in their large, dextrous hands. Hints of the shovel and the sickle can be felt within them: a sharp edge to one forearm, and a flat side to the other. They are content with that.

There’s a crispness to the air, as if an essence of ablution awakens within it. Sharp, in the manner of cold water at twilight. They are not perfectly clean. The rotten gardens have not vanished, nor magically ceased to be. But they and the world are altered.

They get to their feet and check the sword and its seed. They peer through the tenebrous void ahead. Then they continue their search.