“Kneel.”

Blood Ghoul fell to her knees and wept. One word alone was enough to shatter her will in an instant.

The killing projectile swerved through endless roaring skies—an edifice like tumescent sunlight reaching, eating, grasping—going toward and through sour splatter grotesqueries, upon the platter themselves parallels of Blood Ghoul.

Lightning slashing air; punishment flare.

Resounding footsteps and howling march into null-state hieroglyphs. The army of undead is falling apart into red waves and seemingness.

The humble arrow as weaponry's peak. Heaven itself shot all the bodies down.

Almost all.

Upon one edge of the aborted battlefield, spears of holy light neatly pin Blood Ghoul to a piece of rubble. Like a nail to her dusky red robes. Tears and soot roll down her gaunt cheeks.

Defective, cowardly Blood Ghoul, so weak that she had not earned a name among her kin, lets loose a low, keening wail.

Above her the crackling presence of the Lightspeed Archer lingers. Ten minutes pass before she raises her head to a thunderclap—and realizes the killer has long departed into the stormy sky.

----------------------------------------

Blood Ghoul trudges aimlessly over craggy ground. Without her pack, she knows she’ll be easy pickings for devils or fellow undead once night falls. Still, she can’t quite bring herself to care.

Again, there’s only one truth left in this world. I was born wrong.

Her kin knew how to cut all the arteries from a man in a minute flat. The strongest of them, Viscosi, could butcher a devil into raw meat before the light left its eyes. Fast. Strong. Cruel.

The wind breathes louder, so Blood Ghoul flattens herself against the ground in terror.

All that instinct I could’ve been born with...

She grits her jaw.

Damn it all! What good is a long-term memory? I'll hardly survive to exploit it!

She, a disgraced noble daughter hiding in Thirty-Seventh Rock Village, was torn apart by the pack and remade as a blood ghoul. Veins grew like rampant worms through her body, overtaking muscle and tendon both. It was only when the blood vessels began to burrow into her brain that she panicked and wrested control of the process.

I even thought my human mind was an advantage at first... naiveté! I'm a clumsy buffoon trapped in the body of a killer!

Ghouls constantly rot apart, and can only stymie entropy by nourishing their organs with foreign equivalents. Most of Two-Sow Village had not transformed into ghouls, but rather been-

She bites her lip. I don’t want to think about that right now.

Ghoul brains are fragile, and their use of memory is economical to make room for dense killing instincts. Still... important members of the pack earn names.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

I’m the only one left now, she realizes. It follows that I am the most important! I should just name myself, even if I haven't earned it.

As she walks, she sounds out potential names. “Lung... no, grotesque and irrelevant. I don’t think I have lungs anymore. Hope? Close, but this situation is really...”

Hopeless mutters to herself as she wanders beneath the first boughs of a verdant forest.

Sunset dips its orange fingers through the canopy and mottles the grass beneath her feet.

In the warm light, she almost thinks everything will turn out fine. Then she knocks bulbous knuckles on tree bark beside her. Don’t jinx it.

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In the depths of Phlegm Forest, where tombs litter the land like discarded furniture; Phlegm Forest, where colossal birch trees meet the cloudy sky—where their roots drink deeply of buried corpses—where vicious, snarling vermin travel in roving clusters to feast on unwary wanderers...

Below it all is a cult’s castle. Rather, a ruin of tumbling bricks. From it extends vestigial towers that dwarf even the trees; they lay empty, disused, but function as fine entrances to Death-Defying School proper, which is a mess of labyrinthine tunnels carved into the wet earth.

In one secluded chamber, a corpse-refiner deposits a rotten body in embalming fluid. It is so battered that telling its age or gender is impossible. Worse, the face is caved in.

As the decrepit thing languishes, miraculous healing occurs. Patchy skin fills in. Massive wounds scab over. A missing eyeball re-grows.

The refiner, supervising the process, eventually lifts out a complete and perfectly preserved dead man.

He frowns, then presses a finger to his temple. A psychic link tethers him to his colleague.

“Clamp,” he emits down the line, “The body of the one who attacked you... vaguely identifiable. The problem is his identity.”

“Oh. Lay it on me?”

“We can’t antagonize them further. He was with that Lightspeed Archer's cult.”

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Night falls. Cricketsong overtakes the air. Hopeless shudders in the cold.

She pumps blood through her labyrinthine body as fast as possible. Soon the intensity of it warms her up. She wanders on, not really paying attention.

Minutes later something hisses in the treeline. Hopeless stares up.

Draped along the branches like familiar entrails is the largest snake she’s ever seen outside of books. Its scales are striped black and brown. Nearly perfect camouflage. If I didn’t remember what a snake looked and sounded like, I’d already be dead.

She feels a slight spark of vindication at that. It quickly snuffs out as the snake tastes the air with its tongue.

Shit! My body is too warm! That snake-devil is certain to see me!

Hopeless reduces her circulation to nil, but the damage has already been done. The snake coils like a spring and lunges for her face.

She stumbles aside. Hopeless hits the ground, dazed, much farther away than she has ever moved before.

Huh?

The devil licks the wind in its distant clearing. It turns to stare deeply at Hopeless. Somehow, she has the sense it’s offended.

“If you’re not prey, don’t act like it!” emits the devil.

Then it crawls back up the tree.

No, what was that? How did I move so fast?

Hopeless stands slowly. It’s cold again.

Almost mindlessly, she speeds up her circulation. Then jolts in realization.

I’ve never done this for warmth before. Never needed to, since the pack always slept in one big pile...

She takes a step. It goes slightly farther than the normal distance. Hopeless smiles.

Of course! As a Blood Ghoul, it seems our unnatural strength is not derived from transformation and expertise alone... but rather optimization of the hemoclastic flow! A body of all blood vessels reacts far more strongly to such things than a body of muscle and meat would.

Maybe I should change my name? It’s not like anyone’s around to judge me for it.

Leaves crunch under Lucky’s feet as she skips onward. This fall evening smells like petrichor and freedom.