Silver—known more commonly as gilded iron—is the alchemical ingredient most often associated with dispatching unnatural and unholy creatures. I'm not unaware of the irony: in the days leading to the Harvest's ruin, these grotesque, otherworldly things found a haven in the damp pits where we spent generations mining for their destruction.
Utokayavok, the sign hanging loosely from the collapsing foreman's shed out front of the mine read—the Gilded Iron Company. Context is crucial as we start at the very beginning of my journey toward the abhorrent and desecrated world we now inhabit. After all these years, I remember that my father once worked for the company when I was a boy, and my sister was just a parasite gestating within my mother's womb. The true nature of Azrealiya's 'divine' lineage is now known, but there was no inkling of the horrors she would wreak in youth.
Perhaps the first indication was her birth, wherein she clawed through my mother's guts with putrid, sickly nails, and the contents of her bowels covered her before anyone removed her. She was born on the day of the Breadfather—the ancient god Talabyat, patron of the golden hills of wheat we once relied upon. And she was of his blood and loins, and I, as a sprouting from our shared mother's ravaged uterus, a bedfellow of evil.
Utokayavok once produced hundreds of tons of silver during the reign of Queen Jahlrayan of Cambray but had run dry some years before my excursion. I do not remember what precisely brought me there—a notice, I believe, posted boldly upon the heavy doors of the poorly attended church had drawn my attention as I passed through. Advertised upon the notice was a promising reward of some twenty lovok in exchange for discovering the fate of a girl who had gone missing a week before my arrival.
Assuming she was dead—and that I could find the body—the reward would be quickly earned. Even grown village folk would struggle in these woods, knowing now the monstrosities and abominations that had just begun to linger in the shadows of their canopy.
I spent two days gathering information as I enjoyed the room and board courtesy of The Church of the Saintly Vanbatar. Through conversation with the adults, I found many had worked the mines a day's hike up Jekrel's Mount. And through interrogation of the little ones that boldly lied in the Moonlight Carrel—a chamber within the church meant to pry confession and atonement from its attendees—I found that the boys and girls had been speaking with some strange, unbodied being that appeared within their soups. Each child described the same experience: that the being would urge them to come and play deep within the sprawling shafts of the old mine, promising them trinkets and foods never beheld by them.
My curiosity peaked at such a laughable claim, so I prepared myself for the hike. The evening I reached the mine, I set up camp and prepared a caged bird, which I placed at the mouth of the descending elevator and hurried down. As I enjoyed my meal, I had the forethought to prepare a soup—undoubtedly mostly potato, celery, and marrow stock. As the flames of the fire flickered against the seeping darkness of the new moon, I found my gaze entranced with the subtle swirls of fatty liquids and burbles within the broth.
No voice called out to me from within it, yet still, I could not escape the ominous, lingering feeling that just beneath the tiny whirlpools and waves, something's gaze met my own with equal wonderment and hesitation.
Before the sun rose the following day, I gathered my equipment: packs of sulfur, iron shavings, a kris in poor repair, rope, and a few other odds and ends. When I raised the elevator, I was shocked to find that my unwilling feathered compatriot was missing, the front of the cage torn asunder, and the interior smeared with a volume of blood or bile—I haven't any idea which it may have been now—far exceeding the tiny body of the little bird. Further, I descended as the morbidly curious cat would, and I watched my shaking hands as the breaking morning light faded from my perceptible world. The still and musty darkness within engulfed me as the weights and pulleys slowly shifted, and I traveled downward.
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With luck, I drew an old torch from the heated, moist walls around me and managed to ignite it. The relief of light, be it useless and limited in such a claustrophobic space, comforted my wandering soul, and for a few fleeting seconds, I paused to bask in its divine protection.
Down those winding, damp, salt-encrusted halls collapsing under the unbearable weight of the eons held above them, I tracked aimlessly, reacting to the most mediocre and minuscule sounds or instincts. Some unknown amount of time had passed before I found the corpse of my bird and discovered the cause of its unanticipated disappearance.
At the time, the sight and smell were horrid enough to shock me into a near stupor. I made a feeble attempt to conceal my wrenching and failed, feeling the vomit pressure and push between the minor gaps of my fingers. I lingered close to the fresh effigy born across the hollow wall; the light provided ill-suited for a meaningful inspection.
Someone or something had cleaved the poor bird and turned it inside-out, slapping its rotting flesh and crumbled bones loosely to the surface rock with its own drying blood and bodily mucus. I was most struck by the fact that no one had rendered any of its meat or tastier bits—the scarce fat, eyes, brain, and legs—from its body. Every little piece remained, rearranged and sorted with devilish fingers, yes, but all parts of the whole were present.
I found one of the feathers I had yet to see floating atop a small puddle of mineral water. And with it, I found a trail by which I might find the source of the mauling and, subsequently, the sickening display created from the remains. I felt as a hunter might, tracing the scraps of the carnage, believing that I sought some foul prey deeper in. But I was wrong.
I entered a chamber large enough to stand without the uncomfortable cocking of my spine and the unbearable heat of the torch battering my cheeks. After appreciating the miracle in that small pocket of fresher air, I soaked the sweat from my face into my sleeves. The labor now pulled from my face, I looked upward with untainted eyes for the first time in many hours and saw it.
A disgusting rotund belly lingered above, boiling and gurgling with pustule sores and canyon-like fissures. Descending from what may best be called a belly button was a bloodshot opal with a violently seizing iris. Its wetness pressed across my face, nearly large enough to consume my skull in its entirety. I felt flesh peel from bony fingers as it probed and wrapped my ankles before tucking into my shoes, and I heard from within that belly a hideous and gluttonous wheezing laughter that grew increasingly manic.
Left with no choice as the monster enveloped me, I sank my teeth into the demon's exposed optical nerve and felt as I began to cut through a vein. I repulsed downward and formed a ball as the contents of its innards slopped from my mouth. My kris drawn thereafter, I severed the phalanges from the wrist that sought to capture me, remembering even still the devilish instrumental plucking that came from the tautness of its tendons. The demon's laughter morphed into surprise, then suffering, and finally agony. I had gained an advantage I knew would not come twice.
Unsure of how best to kill it, I hefted my kris upward and tore through the stomach with little effort. This stabbing created a hole in its flesh that acted as a window to its innards, and I lunged my torch inside. The flame exited my view but raged within the belly of the creature, and its boils and lesions festered, growing and growing until their critical point and rupturing.
I shudder to recall my first experience with hellspawn, but I must recent it here for my own sake. I stood in sickened, deafening silence as the rumbling of its flooding acid and flesh filled the chamber up halfway to my knees.
Ultimately, I could not locate the missing girl among the muck and madness. But I haven't any doubt that her long-digested body wound up a part of me, and to this day, I carry some small part of her along on all my travels.