A hammock woven from tweeds hung from between two artificial palm trees. On it, a figure lounged, cooling himself with a dainty, painted hand fan that depicted sights from a long-gone forest.
In his other hand, a book rested, though his mind was elsewhere.
His future visit to Lizaną loomed on the horizon, and the inquisitor Flōsblome had yet to decide what he would have the serfs pack for him. He could not quite divine the details of how the trip would go, had yet to unravel the matter of where the wagon would be found.
It was perplexing.
Nearing the start of this year, the first sighting had been reported. A human woman, pale of skin and hair alike, traveling in a strangely large wagon, covered in stained fabrics. A prisoner they had questioned could only provide the faintest hints—the man had only encountered her once, and all he knew was that the female had referred to the wagon’s style as ‘western chic’.
Why could humans never use descriptions that made sense?
At least the interrogation had not been a complete waste, for the captured human could at least serve. He had been allowed to work in the gardens and cook for them, in exchange for the sparing of his life, and the Ban had rewarded the inquisitor for it. Long had it been since they had a dedicated cook.
The damage the female could do was likely minuscule, but this inability to foretell where she may next move to had Flōsblome disturbed. There was nothing more dangerous than human cowardice—even knowing death held no meaning to them, the worms would still flee at the sight of the slightest threat.
They had never earned that privilege, no—that right belonged to those who got naught but one chance at the sisyphean toil called life, and to them alone. Death mattered to them. They deserved the right to flee and safeguard their lives.
But not the humans. Never the humans.
Their ignorance of their own privilege was the greatest offense of all.
In time, the inquisitor would depart—for all he loathed entering the fray half-blind, this wagoner could not be allowed to run rampant. His sight brought clear enough tidings of what she could do, down to the expression on her face when she showcased a crystal ball that fit within her palm.
They could not stand for this.
As Flōsblome’s book flipped to another page on its own, the world shook, enough that his carefully timed fanning felt out of sync. That alone would have been cause for anger, but that which he became aware of was far more vile.
Somewhere amid countless threads connected to him, something had shifted, trembled. He had brought justice to far more pretenders than he could recall names for—after all, what would be the point of slaying those who could simply come back?—and the tremors did not repeat themselves.
To identify the source would be impossible, yet he found no reason to fret. He sought beyond himself, and onwards to the time ahead, and nothing gave him reason to be wary. As such, he would not waste any time in mindless curiosity.
After careful pondering, Flōsblome returned to his ruminations, his gaze idling on the book once more.
The future was bright.
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After The Fog descended, Veit found he was finally at peace to explore in truth. Elaborating on the exact circumstances that led to him finding those seablooded remains was something he could not afford to do, not without exposing far too much about himself.
But with The Fog, came opportunity. Few would dare step beyond the wards of their abodes for most of the month, making it the perfect time to act unnoticed.
Though he had once agreed to search through the area, he had not gone out of his way to do so as well as he could. Without his preference for bones as materials, Veit would never have noticed those skeletons.
But it was not obligation that led to his decision, no. Veit was frankly too curious about what lurked beneath the surface here, not only through its eerie landmarks but in the unintelligible actions of its people.
He had not derived this much amusement from small-town politics in centuries—that was perhaps why he went as far as to excuse the idiocy oftentimes displayed by all parties involved. Houses led by ignoble lords, missing people, and what had to be the most rampant cluelessness Veit ever recalled encountering in a population.
Veit had wished for a distraction, and he had attained just that.
Pola had never been fond of The Fog, and for that, if he ventured outside during it, he had to do it on his lonesome. Mortals, overall, dreaded the season, but for one who could go without breath, it was not impossibly limiting. Once, he might have more actively indulged in this. All seasons predated the sea’s rise, for all most forgot that.
The touch of shimmering fog was peculiarly soothing. Some centuries ago, health professionals had gone through a phase where they sought ways to trap it and use it on patients, especially those addled by stress.
He did not intend to go out exclusively because of that, but Pola would have approved, nonetheless.
This location’s general isolation, coupled with the utter lack of anyone leaving their homes during The Fog, granted Veit freedom from worry of being noticed. There was really no reason to refrain from going for a walk through the mangal now, quietly.
He exited the hut through a window, careful to exert pressure on the world around him so the fog would not enter where he left—even he would wish for reprieve from it eventually. Ensuring the window was sealed, he let go of the bubble around himself.
The fog all but collapsed inwards, shrouding him. Veit took a single deep breath. Far more power than that single breath should have warranted poured into him, as though he had taken in a generous gulp of water. It tingled, making its way down his chest as his lungs stilled, an itch-like trill left in its wake. He almost laughed, unresisting as unnatural ripples of relaxation coursed through him.
Veit remained unsure as to when he had allowed his eyes to flutter shut, but he reopened them. It was ever-shifting, wondrous iridescence given form, and it shrouded the land with preternatural softness.
He could push the fog away just enough to clear his vision, just enough to see where he might step. A bubble of clarity formed around him, though its edges were not strongly defined. The fog directly beyond it was no longer as thick. Veit’s surroundings were now easier to observe, and he was careful not to make the change visible from beyond the fog’s domain.
Today, he would not push his limits—Veit had before, and though he knew he could sustain this for over a day, the fog would eventually fight back. That would not be pleasant, no matter how soothing the fog itself could be.
This would not take long.
Veit rose slightly, allowing his senses to roam free now that he need not worry about witnesses. He sunk under the stagnant waters, beyond where he had found the skeletons.
Mindful of remaining within the bounds of where he could sustain secrecy, he searched around mangroves, through the sand, and beneath rocks. After holding back for so long, Veit almost found the experience liberating.
It could have been the fog speaking, though. Some did deem it a form of intoxication, but the dubiosity of this act’s wisdom was not enough for him to give the opportunity up.
Though he sought beyond, Veit found himself returning to the area where the three had been buried. He’d returned them to the waters below, though with far more care than they had been placed there initially.
He suspected they might have simply sunken with time.
A strange echo lingered throughout, a synergistic mixture of energies from different times. Cold metal brushed against his senses, mingling with something old and new, something so subjective Veit could not begin to guess what it even was.
Interesting.
Veit was no coroner, ill-equipped to identify why the three seablooded creatures had died. All he’d seen was their bones. Still, it did not take a genius to assume they had met a violent end, even without accounting for their kind’s agelessness. So-called natural deaths did not exist for them.
They’d been cut, perhaps stabbed. Someone had slain them, yet seemingly left no trace.
Only… this. No more than two decades ago, someone had faded away here—that was it. Veit was no stranger to the way mana and the energy of existence alike coalesced when obits were formed, and he was sensitive enough to identify it for what it was.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Someone died here, other than the seablooded.
But the echoes were too faint for it to be the missing woman. Too much time had passed for that, not the five-to-seven he had been told marked her absence.
Curious.
Veit shifted closer to the ground, allowing the water to reach his knees.
It did not get any clearer. What he’d felt from above was apparently all there was to be detected here. Puzzled and thrilled in equal parts, he lingered for another moment, as if additional clues would simply manifest before him.
Instead, he caught a glimpse of something else. Movement, somewhere close. It brushed against his senses strangely, almost forcefully, and then it was gone.
It startled him out of his reverie.
Veit could not help but frown—he had not imagined that. Something had moved, just beyond his field of view. Though the fog thinned the closer it got to him, clarity still worsened the further away he looked.
That did not keep him from getting a decent idea of where it had come from.
Veit gave chase.
In a better state of mind, he might have considered the idea inane, but Veit found he had never been fond of overt caution, even to his detriment. The incident in the caves, what felt like an eternity ago, had reminded him of that.
The presence faded in and out, close to the edges of that which he could feel. If he ever got close to locking in on it, it shifted away with practiced ease, before nudging him again.
He moved further and further away from the hut, from the mapped sections of the mangal.
And closer to the waves.
Untouched as he believed himself to be, something within had cracked in that moment long ago, when the waves had held him tight as he watched his wife’s obit be shattered and discarded. Destroyed. Veit had since found he could hardly care for the risk of getting this close to the waves anymore, unable to name whichever spark had been snuffed out, some instinctive fear having been excised.
Certainly, the sea was close, but the safety of cave walls still shielded him.
A figure stood close to the rocky wall, its back turned to him. Dark hair, tangled and dripping water, reached all the way to its knees.
Veit reached forward to identify it by instinct.
He froze, soul-deep anguish piercing his very existence like a dagger before withdrawing. It happened at such speeds that, had his attempts at examining the figure not failed in their entirety, he might have questioned whether he had even felt it.
So fleeting, it had been.
Yet for Veit, there was never a need to focus on the specifics of how he performed tasks—they simply happened.
That was how he grew aware of something being unequivocally wrong.
Skills and techniques he never consciously thought of trembled within him, rebuffed by something he suddenly understood he could not begin to parse.
He did not try again.
Abruptly, the figure started to turn, its limbs twisting in place. The feet shifted, but not a single movement looked natural. The puppet-like form faced him then, and Veit found himself staring into the lifeless eyes of a sybil.
He’d never had the misfortune of seeing one this close. Never.
“Niemat Khödan,” a voice far too smooth for the form’s waterlogged appearance spoke. The sound of his true name sent a shudder down Veit’s spine—there was no room for doubt here, that the sybil meant to speak to him specifically.
Had he been willing to expose himself further to the fog, he would have breathed to steady himself. But in this moment, he wished for nothing more than to return to his full senses, and fought within, pushing through the daze to the best of his ability.
“Why are you here?” Veit asked, somewhat foolishly. Sybils were not conversationalists. They spoke in riddles, made a mockery of spoken language.
“You are heard easier than most,” the sybil’s mouth moved. Dark spots marred the inside, as if teeth had been yanked out with little regard to the jaw, and its breath, even at a distance, reeked of sour brine. “You mentioned.”
Not once had Veit considered whether he should have shared the information he had with the teenager who visited—not something he had believed to be so close to common knowledge, something well understood.
This had most certainly not happened when his father told him about them.
“I have not willfully called upon the sea by mention,” Veit forced out. Listening too closely to them was ill-advised, but the sybil before him was far more verbose than he had ever known any to be—most did not address people directly, at least.
Yet this one did.
The sybil’s mouth remained open, its tongue moving in silence. Its features did not shift in the slightest—it was a corpse, preserved only by the very sea that hollowed it out. “See. See.”
Veit did not take his eyes off her, off it. “I apologize, if I must. Your presence was not intentionally requested.”
If only she would actually leave quietly—no matter how harmless they supposedly were, the sea itself still flowed through their veins.
She did not leave.
“Those who wish to be here, are grateful to be brought here,” the sybil’s tongue rolled, her jaw still hanging open. “Grateful.”
The soaking-wet corpse drew closer. Every word their kind spoke could be open to interpretation, for it passed through whichever of the unfortunate victim’s faculties remained, spoken as they would have spoken.
But none could truly understand something as unfathomable as the sea.
Sybils were but shells, mouthpieces. No spark of reason, of existence, burned behind those beady eyes.
He had avoided going into detail when speaking of them to the young Rīsan, but enough was known of their kind that he was aware of what supposedly happened when they were turned. Their very souls were consumed by the sea.
“Do you fear?”
Veit’s eyes narrowed. “Do the waves mean me harm?”
“No,” the sybil’s head hung limply as it tipped to one side, then the other, each movement accompanied by a wet thud. “Never.”
What Veit found the most frightful was how genuine it sounded.
The sybil moved closer still, reaching out. “Let these hands touch you. A gift.”
“No,” Veit refused reflexively. The fog’s effects clung to him still, but his thoughts were far from muddled enough for him not to shift away.
He debated the viability of returning to the hut, locking himself in. Would the sybil’s puppeteered body be capable of breaking in, even with wards in place? This was a puppet of the sea, after all.
The sybil’s head turned again—on this occasion, it flopped back to the point the throat seemed to jut out, before being tipped in the other direction. “Gratefulness would be expressed gently.”
“I am afraid I will have to refuse nonetheless.”
“Hm,” was the unnatural noise that came from the sybil, an eerie imitation of what such an inflection would sound like coming from a living voice. “You reject it? But gratefulness is not fragile.”
Veit took another step back—a creature such as this could not be fought, only avoided, even had he been a fighter in the first place. What would it do if he tried to flee outright? The sea was not above them, not directly—it should not be able to pin him down as it had then.
The sybil straightened, its mouth opening wide. “You have right to reject. But to gentleness, no longer.”
It screamed, impossibly loud, and Veit stiffened. Water rose around it, spraying the surrounding rocks. The horrid stench lingered, but the sybil was gone.
Veit stared at the area for minutes on end.
The sybil was truly gone.
He had to breathe out, for suppressing that sigh of relief would be an impossibility. Fog coiled around him until Veit pushed outwards again, forcing it back.
As men fueled by wisdom and cowardice alike often did, Veit ran.
Gone was his intent to further canvass the mangal—Veit himself was clearly far from the only being the fog was providing cover for, and though the sybil appeared to have left, who was to say he would not encounter her again?
He hovered then flew, all regard for secrecy fully gone by now, and did not allow himself to settle until he had fortified the hut’s wards thrice, then thrice again.
Grateful.
Veit tried—tried oh, so much—to not read into the sybil’s words. They could speak nonsense, after all. There was no guarantee that what they said held meaning. They were mouthpieces to something that could not be understood, and mistranslations were only natural.
That logic did not keep Veit from locking himself in for the rest of the month.
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Licking her lips, Luitgarde Maryem repositioned herself on the tree that had become her new base of operations. Though she had considered hiring a craftsman to build her something proper up here, it would have drawn too much attention, so the strength of her hands would have to do.
Spying on random farmers was not something she did often, but Baldur had paid them a visit first, and she had to know why. Only then could she prepare accordingly.
Her throat and mouth were painfully dry from the days she had spent here, but Luitgarde was well-prepared. If things got truly desperate, she would summon more water from her inventory.
It wasn’t as if she could return to Beuzaheim now, having chosen to remain here for the month… mostly because The Fog had descended before she could leave.
On the third day, she caught sight of the furniture the villagers were passing around. Whatever Baldur had not taken, no doubt.
By the fifth day, she’d heard enough to hazard a guess about their origin.
Baldur had recovered them from one of the many crumbling mansions that once belonged to the fallen House that ruled the city, mere decades ago. Well, the villagers had recovered them for him.
What they kept had been their cut for it.
Luitgarde could not have cared less for the belongings of some nobles—most commonly defined as the echelon of society that believed itself superior because the stick up their ass was shinier than average—but she drew the line at Baldur getting nice things.
In truth, Luitgarde hadn’t the faintest clue as to why farmers would even want these. To sell, perhaps, but to whom? She had done many questionable things in her seven decades, but at no point had she come upon the knowledge of how Beuzaheim’s underground market might have worked.
She wasn’t that deranged, no. She sold her stolen goods at the flea market, like normal people did. Like her idea of normal people did, at least. Gilded furniture was simply not on the list of things that made sense to take—surely, there must have been something tamer for them to keep after Baldur’s cut.
Knowing him, he left them with these intentionally. If he wanted to turn on them, this left him an easy way to. Undeniable evidence.
None of that answered her question—why? Just for the money? Baldur didn’t even have that many properties—Luitgarde had staked out all thirty of them in the prior weeks, and she’d found no sign of the stolen objects.
This was really pushing the limits on for how long Luitgarde could care.
Sighing, she removed her shawl, revealing somewhat tattered clothes beneath. She exaggerated her wrinkles once more, and turned her hair the color of eggshells. That should do the trick.
Luitgarde dropped from the tree, careful not to mar the ground as she hit it. She would investigate further, one way or the other.
The villagers would gladly offer charity to a destitute old lady, lost and starving in The Fog, no doubt.