II

All knowledge of self, time, and position bled dry in the gray twilight that claimed him. The unquiet corpse awoke in its coffin, the lifeless womb that was to bear it’s occupant to the next and final shore. Rancor roused with the brine of trepidation. A bloodless frame rose to berate its walls, blunting bone against this carriage to the nether. But what rage could upset this hovel when cold talons scraped a cage that cracked his proportions? What ears might strain to hear the scratching from one already given to the ground?

Ruinous cords dragged the Buried’s sinew into farcical animation, wrenching life past the dearth of a heartbeat. Confined to a contorted pose in this shrine of wood in offering to the dark country, the awoken shade did not wish to tarry in putrefaction. He flailed against the fetid efforts encroaching on his carcass. Those scurrying insects that lapped the pit of his being and spun him toward profane renewal did not deign to chip & gnaw at the casket nor the chains that snaked its body. He was abandoned to this end yet would not perish. Entwined in oak, the resurgence of sensation from the dreamless void sent him howling against the agony inside. All too lucid in awareness of the worm tunneling through his wretched vessel, snaking his tissue to rife perversions.

The haste with which the shuddering cadaver was inlaid in coffin refinement belied the perilous nature of the ignorance which left him in this plight. His body lacked the poison juice of formaldehyde and other aspects of a proper embalming. They had not cared to wager many prayers for the man they shoveled into a crypt to match his length. Nor did they expect the horrible chance of the rogue’s return to the lot of Gorgotha, ambling but ailing as his city.

Rot leached into his flesh, clumsily pressed against the asphyxiating walls of his coffin. The harrowed shape knew himself a leper; undergoing torturous surgery to reclaim what digits and strips had flayed from his skin by half-hearted finality. Perdition refused him, belching the spirit impaled & munched by the teeth of that infernal gate. Envenomed saliva from this trip to hell’s borders slathered Harrow’s remnants, coating him in bile from the throat of Styx.

A fanged pestilence kept him from serving the full course of the maggots, pinning him in its jaws. Cells slaved to thwart the advance of decay. A week’s worth of corrosion was strangled by quickening labor of an alien malice. Sweltering perfume from befoulment and the force which proscribed it invaded his nasal flumes. Abyssal lightning sprang to lick him with balefire tongues; with cloven thunder to rally his tissue to its chime, reclaiming what was pillaged by immurement.

The man, condemned by life and yet not by the Fates, lashed his skin to feral purpose. He tried to scream his wrath but had lost his tongue. His lungs were trapped with the bloat of death’s feast. Breathless spirit choked his screeching chords, denying the flight of his cries and yet allowing him to sieve unearthly matter from his joints, bones, and tissue. Through these channels that remained to the frightened soul, he furrowed all thew and divvied feckless doubts from needful instinct. He wrenched and wrung that passing strength to batter his hurried tomb until that delirious virtue of desperation undid all method of defying this starvation; this becoming of the death which had not yet drunk his inner basin.

Fingers broke and bent to inversions as the buried soul flailed against his cage. Damning his immurement with brute clashes against shackles and splinters, he flayed his nails and what lay beneath to grind the wooden belly. This mewling aspect of carrion wailed in heaving whimpers, bruising what sound and strength had returned to it to break those black palisades that encroached on his eye. What agony was in his mouth. Aberrations of his mold jutted fresh bone from his dying maw, rending gums and splashing bile to poke out with elongated measure of his hunger for life. Rows of teeth jostled anguished fervor, like tombstones unearthed. A fading glimmer in his sockets spat fire for envy of the sun. Yet sight could chase nothing outside the enclosing shadow, growling back and binding retinas to black, stitching fibrous ether over seams.

But for all rebellion left in that shape, natural force still reigned supreme over stars, streams, and soil. The roaring rattle from the discontent corpse only burrowed it deeper, rustling the crust of the earth to amass in worming legions to oppose his effort. A meek jangling of the chains over his casket answered his gormless labor. All his fevered entreaty availed him was the puncturing of oaken splinters and the seething caress of his casket’s silver lining. From that thin crack vermin crawled to seek a hearth in him. Slobbering, skittering migrations of pests sought the promise of his stubborn corpse; powerless to evict them. The centipede might scurry into his eye, but the flesh it tested would push back with a dull ache that yearned for renewal. This purgatory would be his evermore; eaten by the insects and splinted as endless supper for them; coiled in a gnawing eternity as an estate for their nests.

Exasperation seeped into the broken and spent shape. Desiccation siphoned veins which death should’ve severed. The writhing thing struck a fetal pose, falling into a numb and dreadful torpor.

High above the spectral battle, where the wretched soul met again with the formless specter that pursues each & every living breath, only ghouls & night-gaunts inhaled the midnight air. In the gloom of predation those visitants of morbid might & minds of mint stalked umbral prospects from the ripe fruit of perished branches and noble roots. All who crawled from the womb were bid by forces beyond to suffer and decay. And yet why should the living who still had their time on earth play stoic and deny the riches given to the honored dead? Even in the murk of many wakes and the ebb of fair fortunes by the flow of biting plagues, a profit must be had. What were gilded fetishes and silver totems lining caskets worth when those buried sat in their sunken limbos. None! No worth lay beyond the pale rites that cast them down. No nectar to sap, save to those brash and serious few. Riches were inlaid for those who made it their toil to break open earth & oak to wring gold from carcasses; both freshly mourned and those forgotten.

One such scavenger, grown as bold as fat from the wealth of the damned, sliced through the moonless drapery. Glissading like an eel under the docks of gilt shipments, the fiend anchored his eye on presumptuous plunder. Cloaked in threads of midnight, with a blasé grin fit only for a hangman’s grip, the vulture swam casually through his fond haunt. Two burrowing sockets set upon the trove of deathless delight, spotting then the grave which might earn him a flight from the walls of Gorgotha through a mere night’s despoilment of Galloden.

The lone prowler’s darkling glare fingered the stay of a newly dead man, one ‘Arden Harrow’. Gibbous glints birthed promises of eternal renewal and security in the market yet unknown to him to espy the grave of the affluent sorcerer. Palms grubbed together, a mixture of slovenly elements and the might by which a ravenous pauper could fine purchase. The ghoul diverted a vein of false manner, though none were around, to forfeit the urge to rub its own manhood at the hysterical promise of soon cracking open this coffer. For in that sullen mound where lay the bloated vestiges of that scion of loathsome lineage winked the aurum of finery and wicked secrets. Such recompense would be awarded for divining the treasure and stealing the lifeless jewels that packed the oaken husk therein. If no hoard was entombed with his game the resurrection man would fetch his coin from the sorcerous corpse – on the promise of the fallen warlock’s use to men of blasphemous science.

Copulating frenzy was in the hum and chatter of that dusk-fiend’s jaw. He knew no citizens’ militia would patrol the barrow of a reviled warlock & charmer of women. The only competition and guarded watch he needed to fear was that of his fellows in the business. He’d waited long enough before setting out on the prize. He only prayed that those others who’d cut their teeth on the work of breaking chained coffins were still arrested by superstitions surrounding the host of such rife wealth. Yet this ghoul held as little favor for the laws of man and heaven as he did for any whispers of curses. He was a man of the soil, sculpted of that mold, after all.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

So boastful and unafraid of the witlessly occupied constables was the grave-monger that he began to lilt a grave tune. His song, a mockery of hallowed procedure and the palls of good sense.

“The fever sets, our skin turns sallow.

The lords turn their sight, their hearts too shallow.

O! Pay me for a tune or sing me to the gallows!

This toil is the hammer of our time.

You are but rot, yet we are of earth, and we must feed.

Don’t leash me to this plot but grant me my fallows!

Woe to the buried, who can’t hear the day’s chime.

Joy to the bold, who walk through ruin and barrows.

We shovel blight, till soil, cut coin from the grime!

Against our efforts, guarded & afeared were even the pharaohs!

But by dark my hour is paid & these debts recede.

Or else take this heart & let your slave bleed.”

Through thin, caked, and pursed lips the ghoul sang. His whistling work-tune fended off his nerves more than it blared any sign of mirth in his base pith. With his spade, ties, rope, vice, and mallet did the wretch gash the iron fetters and pry the beauteous coffin. Smash! Clip! Crack! Then the trove he’d roped up from the demimonde garden unleashed the glory of its contents before him. Smack! Thwhiissshhh!

Once the cold surface of closure was peeled and the irons shed, instinct awoke. A hunter’s intuition combined with carnal pacts in the buried man, whose gangrenous black iris stabbed at the unwitting savior. Vermillion lightning burst from the black. Molten light from the pits beneath the world frothed an effulgence that slew the gross confidence of the ghoul in an instant.

The thing that was once Harrow leapt from his incarceration in the crypt. Pouncing from the shattered abyss, the famished beast went right for the carotid. Elongated bones from his maw plunged through muscle, cord, and exquisite crimson. That rotted corpse reformed its body on the promise of the shivering draught generously offered by the robber. Fingers like daggers pierced pressure points and slashed sinew. New fangled claws and a hex in the gleam of the broken grave stifled the screams of the fiend in a flurry of vile motion. To subvert death, the body – the Other; the non-Self; the lamb - must be slaughtered, and the blood must be siphoned. What yet untapped majesty thrived now in his chasmal shape under the slumbering welkin.

Euphoria to surpass all human joys and divine ecstasies took wing on the gaps between clenching flesh. Among the viscera he chewed and the slurping gulps of another’s dying cadence a resurgence of intellect awash his conscious. A parasite of ageless decadence transfused power from the tips of fangs, sapping incarnadine spirits through the deathless course of his gullet. The interred then thrust the gaunt creature of opportunity into the chipped casket. Hurrying to replant the odious dirt, with halfhearted chains, the ghastly vestiges of the scavenger were left to take Harrow’s place. Defenseless (yet complacent enough for a corpse) against the leaching of sully & vermin. Crudely it was done and without sweat – for that faculty of body would not be known again, even by any serious effort.

Arden’s ghost commandeered his vessel. This form that was still nameless & opaque to him, the wielder, usurped a power foreign to earth and his former toil. Stringent laws of nature and her once inevitable festering transformations were now repealed. Stygian rivers, charnel streams, ran the course through his marrow. He awoke now to find himself a beast of prey and higher order. By the changeling bliss & agonized acquisition of stolen vitae tendons & features rewove themselves. Renewed unto unfathomed muscle, a force surpassing the matter which confined its imperious power, the strigoi pounced from the shoddy hill that had caged its hellion terror.

That first sampling of life, the supernal draught of a torn throat, bled the way to the gulf of greater hunger. Among the eerie tailoring of the night-mists and the starless curtain of eventide pulsating auras beckoned to the Leech’s leering eye. Those seals, thrashing simultaneous torrents of midnight spheres & sallow lacerations that emulated cold stars in entropic voids, refracted ephemeral joys & the wasteful vitality of distant shapes. A hundred heartbeats lashed back at the cavern in his chest, howling back to call them to his nectarine feast. Flares of mortal insomniacs, crumbling worriers snagged in wretched prayers, and those neurotics who professed their studies with cerebral need glistened in his skull. Though they were uncounted meters from him, the blooded fiend sensed that their deliverance could be his to claim with a few meagre strides.

In the scoria of what might be wrongfully claimed a ‘soul’, resplendent flames licked the shadows that had congealed upon breathless muscle. The lacuna lanced by ire’s powder fed on fresh sinew. Kindling in that quarry, borne by animosity that recalled a life no longer of him, bore up the dancing sprites that cohabited the hateful wax. An irksome name swept over the morass in his wit. The cloven tongue within his distended jaw traced gorgon ire from feelers on its length to scry that murderous name. It was not his own, this phantom moniker, yet so intimately, so fatally, entwined with the one still lost to this cancerous shape. “Vince-Ent!”

Imaginations from the inebriated gulf inside his mind spat a mien to match the name. “Gaaale!” The ridged aplomb and wanton handsomeness of that lordling’s face swept up into the dreary cloudbeds, projected on the translucent anonymity of those nymphs of murk. Yet no pulse attached to the murderer’s effigy sang the presence of the hated one to the hunter’s detection. No. He was not here to be reminded of his transgressions and dined on for them. Yet the feral majesty of the thing’s fledgling appetite drew his urge to a glowing vein that was no less delectable for being encased in a bulwark of marble, glass, and superstitious signs.

Erected by the gates of Galloden’s plots to remain tall in its vigil, the chapel of St. Ardway loomed above grey rows and stern walls. There, in the study below the belfry, flickering like a candle, the sleepless ripple of a chaplain’s pacing drew up the awoken one’s glare. The off-beat thump & scattered thunder of the old heart’s rhythm engrossed the eye of the scourge, seeming to the lurker like a vixen stripped bare before the nude moon she was clad in. Instinct, though lacking in knowledge of what attrition this fresh ghoulish form could suffer past, declared that steward of the spire as prey. No matter locks or warded doors, the vibrancy in that torch would be its to know through wet fangs.

Anchored to this uncanny thew, the gravity of this bloodless frame dragged low the hunter’s limbs. It prowled below the ashen halos of chthonic wisps and listless fog creeping in from mankind’s affronts to the earth in the name of industry. A scourge ambling with quadrupedal frenzy, the blight clawed hallowed turf with clumsy speed. Each bounding stride wracked its paws with quakes to feel the measure of its own ability.

This appetizing delicacy of aged red was not his to know this night. As a mane, a midnight lion, he chased after the draught, sprinting on all fours in haste. Approaching the little garden segmented & protected from the toothsome reeds of Galloden’s plains it was not the laughable second gate which denied the plague-hound but a baleful hiss occupying the lungs of the night winds.

A seraphic apparition descended from the celestial mounds which hung above the grove of mankind. An angel of anemia stepped down the formless stairs of aether, wearing a foreboding veil and blades of aethereal burning within her stare. A wingless Valkyrie was she. The woman, adorned in the armor of nocturne’s warrior-priests, waltzed along each unseen step, coming down from the air. By the ivory of her visage and those silver stars centering her stare was the moon resurrected, beaming with the authority of a celestial crown. Her eyes chased his shape and sang his withered name, bidding him to contort his animalistic farce back to human resemblance.

Arden bowed to her coming, quivering at the arrival of this ageless hierophant who broached the kiss of her goddess on those down-curled lips. Lucidity surged into the hollow place inside the scourge, knowing this alabaster priestess etched in envy of Venus and ornamented with selenic grace as the mother of his rebirth. Borrowed blood in his vessel brought a pale imitation of blush to his visage, immured in deathless marble and the writhing palls of the eternity she bore.

Ivory sailed the ether on her trail. Cloaked under a shimmering parasol, she was only a mere specter among her siblings of the dusk to all eyes but his own. In her lived the gleaming promise of kinship to the regents and mysteries of the oldest nights, wielding timeless insights that swam tirelessly beside & within her gorgeous sculpture. A flutter of phantom pinions across her membranous span ushered an end to her levitation. The woman’s heel effortlessly stamped the ground, appearing before the risen corpseling. Crescent lips cast the bridge of the trifold look she met him with. The glint there was far from longing yet wore a face of bonfire & a warming moon. Crepuscular, her mien; burning with a flame unlike the dawn. In her passion joined with purpose, pursed and damp with dreams outside the body - which for her was a thing of cadaverous stone, keen diamond & perilous proposition.