Eida couldn’t say how long the corpse had been there.

Water always made things difficult. Water ate at the skin and bloated everything. There was a time when the mere sight of that bloat was enough to make her stomach lurch, but the years dulled the effect down to a mild twinge. Now she only saw the colors, the paleness of his face and the stiff rigor in his fingers where his hand thrust up from the mud. She didn’t know this man, and not knowing him made it that much easier.

Then again, his features were twisted enough that she might not have recognized him even if she had known him.

“How long has he been missing?” She asked.

The alderwoman behind her squinted at her question. She wasn’t sure if it was because of her tone, or because it took scrunching up those half-blind eyes to remember the answer. She was old, those eyes said as much. They’d seen enough death that Eida doubted she even felt the twinge anymore.

“Three days or so,” the woman replied. She shrugged bony shoulders beneath a thick shawl, a sturdy weave made for inclement weather. “Took a while to notice him missing. Liked his liquor, he did. Reckoned he’d had too much of it one night and wandered into the cold.”

She turned to stare down at the body. She didn’t say it, but Eida knew what she was thinking. Only his face and that desperate, grasping arm stuck out from the mud. Gentle eddies of water rippled around him, the creek he’d been sucked into merrily forking, unimpeded. Eida’s boot prints were visible in the mire, mere inches from where he was planted. The ground had sucked at her feet, but it hadn’t pulled her down to more than her ankles.

Something had pulled him in. Forcibly.

“You’re gonna pull him up, then,” the alderwoman remarked. Her lips twisted, either in disapproval or distaste. “Just to see how much of him there is.”

“I’ll have to. You’re welcome to bury the rest after I’m finished.”

She lingered, shifting on her feet, moving her hands along the staff she clutched to keep her balance.

“It is unlikely to be a pleasant sight,” Eida said gently.

There was a snort from her. Derisive, but with an edge of something maternal. Those rheumy eyes fixed on Eida again. “Not a wrinkle on you, yet. When you have my years, dear, you get used to unpleasant things.” She looked back towards the man’s tortured, upturned face. “Didn’t have any family. Someone should be here for him, some face he knew at least. Someone his spirit’ll recognize.”

She stood there, planted as stubborn as an oak, and Eida decided it was worthless to argue.

So she moved in again. Closer. Clutched in her hand was a satchel, stained with the marks of her trade, the herbs and potions and poultices that aided in her craft. Her other hand gripped a stick, a long, thick and sturdy article which she immediately thrust into the mud at the shore. She thrust it deep, so she could hang on. Just in case.

Just in case whatever pulled the man down yet lurked below.

There was an eternal grimace locked on his expression. His eyes were wide, his tongue lolled out of his mouth. It was swollen. Grotesque. She didn’t spare any time looking at it before reaching out and clutching at the collar of his tunic. It would take time, she imagined, to get him up. She was built sturdy, but he was buried deep, up to his neck, and surely weighed more than -

With a loud, sickening squelch, he came free of the creek bed. She was bewildered by the ease of it until she realized that the body ended at the waist, where someone or something had sawn off the rest. Entrails glistened faintly in the dim light of dusk, where they weren’t subdued by the mercy of the mud. The scent of bowels and rot hit her with enough force that she had to fight to keep from gagging.

Behind her, she heard the alderwoman immediately whisper a prayer to the Mother, clutching at the crescent around her neck and bringing it to her lips to kiss.

Eida ignored her. She ignored the body too, or at least what it meant. She settled into that quiet, cold place she held within herself, silencing the reflex of panic. The instinct to run. The desire to look down the hole left behind by removing the body to see whether anything stared back at her.

There would be time for horror later. She had work to do, now.

One look told her that he hadn’t been cut. No blade did this to him. The edges of that fatal wound were far too ragged and violent for that. This was something animal, something bestial and hungry. Eida removed a knife from her satchel, a small, sharp thing, and sliced a cut across his throat, right beneath the jaw, where she knew an artery should run.

There was no blood. Not a trickle. Even with his lower half missing, leaking into the stream, into the earth, something should have remained behind. Should have stayed, pooled, at his throat.

“Ain’t natural,” the alderwoman was whispering. “Ain’t right.”

Eida still said nothing. She swam in that cold place, letting it envelope her fully. She turned the corpse over so that the man faced up at the dark, dreary sky overhead. Overcast. There would be rain soon, and she had to move quickly before whatever remained was further washed away.

The chest was next. She carved into it, using the dagger she kept at her hip. She didn’t dwell on the sounds it made, didn’t think about how it looked to have her knelt there, looming over the dead man. She needed his heart, and she got to it, reaching in to cut it free. It all had to be done carefully, and in some distant part of her she was grateful for the gloves she wore; for the cold, distant leather that stretched up to her elbows beneath her sleeves. It was better when she didn’t have to touch anything directly. Safer, too.

The heart was shriveled. As bloodless as his throat. Moreso, as though it were a sponge that’d been squeezed too long and too hard. Eida wrapped it carefully in lengths of cured sheep’s skin and placed it into a box pulled from the satchel, turning the clasp and ensuring it was secure.

When she packed it all away and stood again, she found the alderwoman staring at her, all that hint of motherly warmth vanished, those clouded eyes holding a glint of disdain.

“Ain’t right,” she repeated, and this time Eida knew she meant the words for her.

“You called me,” she answered, calmly.

“Been through enough, he has.”

“Yes. And there will be many more like him if we don’t learn what did it.”

She fell silent, her lips twisting again, downturned at the corners. “We can take him now, then? Take him back, find a place to bury his bones?”

Eida shrugged the satchel across her shoulders. It felt so much heavier now than it had before. She knew that the heart didn’t weigh much, but the burden of such things was always weighted.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“Yes. Stay away from this place until I can figure out what we’re dealing with. Do not let anyone come here, not for water, not for anything. It’s likely tainted.”

There was a sharp, tight nod. The ire hadn’t left her eyes, but she complied. Out of necessity, Eida knew. Out of need, and nothing more.

She turned, peering at what remained of the hole beneath the softly running water. It was closing already, forming over itself, caving in on itself, erasing whatever passage might have run beneath.

Eida marched away from the alderwoman and the corpse, feeling both sets of eyes boring into her back as she left.

~~~

She let the heat soak into her to chase the chill out again.

The hearth was large, roaring, a work of rough stone shoved together. There wasn’t anything fanciful about it. All function, like the tavern around her, its sturdy walls made of rough-hewn wood that had only a bare suggestion of sanding. Functionality was the point, which was common in Blightwatch. Most of the buildings weren’t that old, but whatever got newly erected was made to last. Made to weather.

She tended to approve of it. It made sense in a place like this.

“They’re looking at you.” The voice was gruff, low, male.

She grunted noncommittally in response.

“Doubt it’s because you’re a looker.”

Eida blinked, but didn’t tear her gaze away from the book in front of her. It was thick, leather-bound and old enough to have cracked along the spine from the number of times it’d been opened. She turned another page, remarking dryly, “Maybe they have more taste than you do.”

Tadrin laughed at that, a low, rumbling sound that rolled through him like some overly large cat. “What do you know about my tastes?”

“I’d be the wrong person to ask,” she replied, her tone still wry. “I’ll talk to one of the barmaids. I’m sure one of them can answer.”

Another laugh, and a fist against the table. Tadrin was large, broad-shouldered, and that extended to his hands. He had the kinds of fingers that could easily wrap around a man’s throat without really trying. It was good for his profession. He looked every bit the sellsword, right down to his sun-tanned complexion and the dark, steely eyes peering out from his unkempt mop of a beard. It was black, though in recent years it’d start peppering with hints of grey.

“They don’t like your book,” he said, after a brief silence. The words were sober again.

Eida sighed. Her gaze lifted up from the pages with reluctance. The room wasn’t big, because the village wasn’t big. Coniston was the sort of place you only passed through, and only when you had to. The people knew that, and it resulted in a kind of collective, mutually assured bitterness. They were the only ones who could really see their slice of heaven for what it was, after all, right down to the cracked cobblestones and the way the tavern’s chimney leaned slightly to the left. Travelers were tolerated. Oddities were abhorred.

And Eida was certainly an oddity.

It had nothing to do with her appearance. She knew that much. She was perhaps a bit stout for a woman, maybe just a bit too much bulk in her that denoted an amount of wanderlust considered unhealthy in a woman, but that was where her physical strangeness ended. Her eyes were blue, but touched with enough dullness to stop them shy of pretty. Her hair was brown, straight, and generally unkempt, thrust up in a bun at the back of her head just to keep it out of her way. There were days she considered shaving it all off, like she’d seen Tadrin doing to his own scalp most mornings with his hunting knife. She’d certainly get plenty of odd looks then.

It was little things that made her stand out. It was the stains on her fingertips, like she’d dipped them over and over again in too much ink and couldn’t scrub it off. It was the supplies she carried with her, the vellum hanging from the back of that satchel by thin leather straps, the empty vials that wouldn’t fit in with the rest of her things and were at less risk of shattering if she simply left them dangling there. She carried around the tools for cutting and sampling and testing, and she smelled of the herbal, wild things one crushes in a mortar and pestle.

These things in and of themselves were no indication of alchemy, but it bore the kiss of it to people in Coniston, people who’d likely never held a book in their hands.

Her watchers consisted of three men.

Seated in a corner of the tavern’s main hall, they’d sequestered themselves away from the fire. Two of them were young, probably just barely coming up out of their teenage years with the gangling remnants still clinging to their limbs. The third was older, harder looking - their father, most likely, and his glare was the most brazen. It didn’t shift or flinch away when Eida met it.

They held, for a while, simply matching stares across the room. Eventually, he looked towards Tadrin, studied him in his ensemble of chainmail and cloth, eyed the broadsword at his side, and reluctantly looked away again.

“This is why you pay me,” Tadrin said. The smugness leaked into his voice.

“To sit there?”

“That’s right. Sit and look pretty.”

“You’re fired. I’m hiring the barmaid.”

He laughed, that great guffaw of his, and in spite of herself, Eida smiled. Most of her sellswords didn’t last as long as Tadrin. The stares eventually got to them, even if they always gave some other excuse. Tadrin’s broad shoulders were evidently made for shrugging things off. He’d never indicated he cared at all, not in the three years they’d known each other, not once. She was grateful for that.

“Should probably get back to the room, though,” he said, his voice softening slightly. She could feel him looking at her, even though she’d turned her attention back down to the book again. “Be easier to read for you there anyway, yeah? Gonna get loud here soon, with sundown.”

“I found it,” she replied, simply.

Tadrin immediately leaned over her, loomed over her, casting her smaller frame in his shadow. His dark eyes couldn’t read the words - she’d offered to teach him, and he always insisted he had no need of it - but he could see the image there, etched in ink long ago, stark in contrast to aged and yellowed parchment.

It was a worm. A massive worm, the width of a man standing and six meters long. Its head was a bulbous, eyeless mass intended to sense vibrations trembling down into the earth. It had a mouth, though, and the mouth had teeth: a void of teeth, sharp, impossibly sharp teeth, meant for exsanguination and churning through dirt. The lower half of its body was shown coiled around a shriveled organ.

A heart.

“Shit,” Tadrin muttered under his breath.

“No,” she said. “Smoke, actually. And fire. Smoke to get it to slither out of the lair. Fire to burn it. The flesh is like paper, once you expose it enough. Dry off the mucus…”

He pulled a face and squinted at her. “Just tell me how to kill it. I don’t need the why’s, just the how’s.”

Eida chuckled. “Squeamish? After all this time?”

He just looked at her, puckering up his lips and splaying the whiskers of his beard in a way that said he was displeased. She rolled her eyes.

“It moves through damp, loose soil. The teeth aren’t strong enough to bore otherwise. That means it’ll be sticking to the creek-bed, most likely, or that there’s some reservoir beneath it we can’t see. That’ll narrow down our search.”

“Search for what?”

Eida lifted a brow at him. “For where it comes up to hunt.”

Tadrin groaned. “This one’s gonna be a bugger, isn’t it.”

“The ones who go for blood always are.”

He made another face, this one grim. “True enough.”

Blood. Flesh. Bone. The foundations of what contained the essence of a living thing. The components that held the power to change, to twist and alter. She didn’t know how it worked, she didn’t want to know, and even if she did, she’d never risk studying it to learn more.

Alchemy, true alchemy, was best left untouched. She would remain forever at the fringes, only taking what she needed to undo what had been done.

Eida closed the book with a muted thump. The trio was looking at them again, especially the father, his position changed so that his gangling boys had to lean around him to peer at her. At Tadrin.

She decided she’d had quite enough of staring for one day. Of eyes. The dead man’s eyes, the alderwoman’s, whose name she couldn’t remember. They made her skin itch.

“I’ll see you upstairs, Tadrin,” she said quietly, before standing up and heading towards the room they’d rented for the night.