by Darius Hinks
For a moment, Ordaana saw the daemon as it truly was – a repulsive little lump of fat and claw with a mass of tentacles for a face, but then, as she considered her part in its creation the present and past became jumbled in her mind. As she stared at the pathetic little creature, she realised it was smiling at her. The smile triggered something in her memory and then she began to see it as something else; something she had long dreamt of.
‘Alhena,’ she breathed, her eyes wide with astonishment. ‘My child. I thought I’d lost you.’
As Alkhor gurgled in the darkness, Ordaana scooped her new offspring into her arms and held it tight, her slender body rocked by deep, heaving sobs of joy.
The white, blubbery lump nestled in her arms and her skin began to blister at its touch, but she was oblivious, smiling blissfully as she crushed it tighter to her chest.
‘I will never let you die. Whatever happens. I will never let you die.’
Chapter Five
They entered the grove at midnight, handmaidens, twelve of them, dressed in sombre colours and holding flaming bundles of birchwood. As they stepped from the trees and crossed the royal dais, moonlight revealed robes adorned with berries and pressed flowers, and faces hidden behind masks, carved to represent forest spirits. A ghostly carnival of animals seemed to be gathering in the darkness: boars, wolves and ravens, their features rendered in bold, angular lines. They met in silence at the centre of the dais and held their torches over a mound of ferns and copper-coloured leaves. As the flames lit up the heap they revealed a pitiful collection of objects: broken arrows, single shoes, remnants of bloodstained clothes and cracked, wooden masks.
Once the twelve had assembled they turned to face a towering mountain of bark and shadow, looming over one end of the clearing: the Oak of Ages. A white-robed figure was standing in the arch of its roots, watching in silence as they took their places.
One by one, the torchbearers raised their brands and began to hum. The sound was a gentle drone at first, but it quickly swelled in volume and complexity, becoming a roaring, wordless threnody, filled with mourning and pathos.
As the sombre chorus climbed towards a crescendo, the figure in white raised its arms and the sound tripled in volume, shaking leaves from the trees and causing the torches to sputter and snap.
The melody reached its climax and drew the figure in white from the tree. Ariel drifted, smoke-like through the air and took her place in the circle. She wore no mask, but she had black tears painted on her pale cheeks and her hawkmoth wings glittered with dew and spiders’ webs.
The final strains of the music died away.
‘Lord of the Forest,’ said Ariel, addressing a handmaiden in pale blue robes and a fox-shaped mask. ‘What would you ask of us?’
‘I ask only that you protect,’ replied the handmaiden. Her mask was designed in such a way that it covered her ears, nostrils and mouth, and when she spoke her voice sounded flat and unnatural as it resonated through the wood.
Ariel repeated the question to each of the twelve and received the same answer each time. All of them had their ears blocked and they spoke in dull, loud tones.
Ariel dropped to one knee and lifted a torn dress from the mound of objects. ‘And what if we are sundered from our souls?’
The twelve handmaidens answered in turn, placing their flaming brands into the mound as they spoke. ‘We will bind you to the trees. We will bind you to the earth. We will bind you to the air. We will bind you to the lakes. We will bind you to the pools. We will bind you to the birds. We will bind you to the grass. We will bind you to the leaves. We will bind you to the roots. We will bind you to the beasts. We will bind you to the flowers. We will bind you to the hours.’
As each of the torches dropped into the mound, the flames grew, until, after a few moments, Ariel and her handmaidens were forced to step back.
Ariel took the hands of those either side of her and the others followed suit, until the whole circle had linked hands. Then she looked up at the stars and spoke again. Her voice became less formal and it was clear she was no longer simply reciting a prayer. ‘Bravest of friends, the slopes of Drúne Fell will always ring with the sound of your final words. We will hear your breath on the summer breeze and see your tears in the morning dew. In the gossamer and in the gloaming we will see your faces. While the asrai endure, you will endure. While there are trees to grow and a sun to shine, your sacrifice will never be forgotten. Whatever the manner of your death, we will not abandon you.’
As the word ‘endure’ left Ariel’s lips, the flames pulsed brighter and smoke plumed overhead.
It quickly became apparent that it was no ordinary smoke. As it rose from the shoes and broken weapons it fragmented, spiralling in a dozen different directions and paying no heed to the breeze. As the flames raged higher, the smoke’s true nature was revealed.
‘The lost of Drúne Fell.’ Ariel’s voice was filled with awe as a host of shadowy figures gathered above her. Dozens of them were drifting through the darkness. Their bodies were represented by only the most vague outlines, but their souls flickered, as bright as cinders on the breeze. As they rolled and tumbled through the air, Ariel caught glimpses of their faces. Some were familiar and some were unknown, but all were filled with gratitude.
‘Let the Binding begin,’ she said, lowering her head.
The handmaidens renewed their song, but this time it was laced with the notes of a new, less morbid tune. It spoke wordlessly of eternal peace and the endless beauty of the forest.
The shadowy figures responded by rising higher and drifting away from the flames, heading towards the enormous oak at the edge of the royal dais.
As the ghosts neared the tree Ariel joined her voice to the chorus and the flames blazed even brighter, throwing back the shadows and revealing the dead as they once were: noble young warriors and powerful, beautiful handmaidens. At their head was a proud young prince, dressed in an elaborate costume of eagle feathers and luxuriant, flowing hides.
Ariel’s painted tears were smeared by real ones as she recognised Lord Salicis – a brave captain of her Eternal Guard. He bowed his head in gratitude as Ariel guided him towards the Oak of Ages. She could feel his soul crying out to her in relief as he led the ghosts to the sanctity of the tree. She called on every realm of the forest to reach out and mark their passing. ‘Watchers of the Northern Sentinels, guide them home.’ As she spoke, the stars overhead rippled, as though seen through water. ‘Lords of the Crags, guide them home.’ Again, the air was filled with a strange lustre as her subjects sent their prayers. ‘Ladies of the Crystal Mere,’ continued Ariel. Then, as she named the southern reaches of the forest, she began to frown. Her words dragged power from the trees, but it was strange. The streams of magic were laced with a gaudy, saffron mist. The ghosts of yellow spores eddied around her, gleaming in the moonlight. Her frown deepened as a sweet, cloying aroma drifted from the shadows. ‘Guardians of the Wildwood,’ she tried to say, but her words were mumbled and confused.
Then her voice stopped dead.
The chorus faltered and the masked figures around the fire looked up in surprise.
‘My queen,’ said the figure in the fox mask. ‘The Binding is not complete.’
The spirits began to disperse, drifting across the grass, losing their way without the beacon of Ariel’s voice.
‘Something is in the forest,’ said Ariel, quietly.
‘My queen?’
Ariel looked up, her face drained of colour. ‘Something is here, Naieth.’
The singing ceased completely and the noblewoman at Ariel’s side looked up in alarm. ‘You must complete the rite, my queen. They will be lost.’
Ariel shook her head and staggered away from the fire, looking at the edges of the clearing as though expecting an enemy to emerge from the shadows. She looked up at the ghost of Salicis, her eyes glittering, and was about to speak to hi
m, when a new sound filled the Council Glade.
Salicis began to scream.
The sound was like knives on stone.
The handmaidens reeled away from the fire, discarding their masks and clamping their hands over their ears.
The young noble clutched at his spectral robes as though they were burning him and his limbs started jerking and thrashing, as though caught in a powerful wind. At the sound of his cries, the other spirits began to wail, clawing at their faces and grasping at the air.
Ariel watched in disbelief as the funeral rites descended into chaos.
The spirits floating overhead pulsed with sickly, yellow light and began to fall, hitting the ground with a series of heavy thuds.
‘They live,’ gasped Ariel as she saw how tangible Salicis’s body had become. His blissful, diaphanous face was gone, replaced by an ashen, bloodstained grimace.
‘No,’ replied Naieth, dashing to Ariel’s side. Like some of the others she had discarded her mask and she stared at Ariel with fear in her eyes. ‘They do not.’
As the bodies continued thudding to the ground, Ariel saw that their eyes were clouded and white, and their wounds were puckered and dry.
Ariel watched in horror as Salicis stood on trembling, broken legs and screamed even louder, sensing that the peace he almost attained had been snatched from him. His wounds were dreadful enough, but Ariel noticed something else as he lurched across the grass, back towards the funeral fire. As the firelight washed over him, Ariel saw that growths were swelling from his torso and limbs – grey, spongy discs, like brackets of fungus.
‘We must destroy them,’ cried Naieth, grabbing Ariel’s shoulder. ‘My queen, they cannot be allowed to defile the sacred glade!’
Ariel shook her head as the undead warrior staggered towards her. ‘We must bind them to the Oak of Ages. Their deaths were unmarked. We can’t just–’
One of the handmaidens cried out in horror as Salicis reached her. She had reached out to comfort the screaming corpse but it immediately threw her to the ground, pummelling her face with the hilt of its broken sword and screaming even more wildly.
Another of the handmaidens raced to help, but within seconds a whole mob of the corpses had piled on her, wrenching, stabbing and howling as they tore her apart.
‘My queen!’ screamed Naieth. ‘We must do something!’
Ariel shook her head, horrified. She held one of her hands aloft and the ground erupted, filling the air with a forest of crumbling roots.
‘Bind them to the earth instead!’ she cried, directing the roots to the front row of spirits and enveloping them in knotted tendrils.
Every one of the nobles was a powerful spellweaver. They were Ariel’s closest handmaidens and at her command they raised their palms to the sky, summoning a tornado of coloured growth, tearing magic from the earth and turning the Council Glade into a maelstrom of thrashing tendrils.
Hundreds of roots crashed into the corpses and dragged them to the ground. There were more falling all the time though, and as fast as the handmaidens could weave their spells, more of their fallen kin slammed to the ground and staggered towards them, each one more mutated than the last.
Ariel moaned in horror as another handmaiden was dragged into the mass of wailing spirits. They were so incensed by their abandonment that they had no idea they were butchering their own kind. Their blank eyes rolled in horror and fear as they crushed the life from the handmaiden.
The combined effort of the spellweavers was now hurling dozens of the undead onto the ground, but the violence of the spell had torn the clearing apart. Many of the corpses tumbled into chasms that opened up from nowhere.
The surviving handmaidens drifted up into the night sky, still weaving roots as they rose.
‘This is an abomination!’ cried Naieth, still at Ariel’s side. ‘We have to stop them!’
Ariel closed her eyes for a second as she considered the significance of her next command.
‘Drive them into the fire!’ she cried, her voice shrill with pain. ‘Destroy them.’
The handmaidens responded immediately, lassoing the spirits and hurling them onto the flaming mound, turning it into a funeral pyre.
The screaming doubled in volume as the flames took hold, but Ariel and the handmaidens were resolute, flinging their brothers and sisters to a second death.
The bodies caught like kindling and flames erupted into the night sky.
‘Burn them!’ howled Ariel, her voice hitching as she saw Salicis’s body collapse in the fire.
The loss of their sisters drove the handmaidens to a vengeful frenzy and the tide finally started to turn. Within minutes, they had dragged half of the undead warriors into the flames, tearing the glade apart as they cleansed it of screaming dead. Finally, as the last of the spirits smashed into the fire, filling the night with sparks, the handmaidens dropped to the ground, exhausted and wide-eyed.
Ariel fell to her knees, trembling with shock. The glade was unrecognisable. Where once there had been a perfect circle of grass, there was now a brutalised mess of churned earth and ragged trenches. The fire was still blazing, drenching the scene in a hellish, bloody hue. As the firelight flickered across the upturned soil, it revealed gruesome remnants of the spirits – limbs and organs, glistening on the ground like a hideous windfall. To Ariel’s horror, she saw that some of the body parts were still making a pitiful attempt to reach the Oak of Ages. Some of the severed limbs were dragging themselves across the ground, like clumsy, spasmodic snakes.
Seeing that Ariel was too dazed to react, Naieth ordered the handmaidens to gather up the remnants and throw them on the fire. Then she hurried to her queen’s side and took her hand.
‘What happened here? What did you see?’
Ariel continued staring at the carnage for a moment; then she recognised she was being addressed and looked at Naieth.
‘What?’
‘My queen. You saw something, just before the spirits turned against us. What was it?’
Ariel shook her head in confusion. Then her eyes widened as she recalled the moment before the battle. She whirled around, staring at the surrounding trees.
‘Something has been born, Naieth.
‘It’s the Old Enemy. The Plague Lord. He’s here again.’
Chapter Six
A doe paused at the centre of clearing, draped in autumnal gold. Sunlight bled through its slender frame, causing its outline to glimmer and shift. It looked like a piebald ghost, barely discernable from the copper-clad trees. Steam plumed from its nostrils as it lifted its head and looked warily at the shadows, its body taut with fear.
Finavar was a few feet away, crouched in the upper branches of an oak, silently training an arrow on the animal’s flank. He had remained motionless for nearly an hour, confident from the tracks below that his prey would return. His chest was bound with scraps of old bark and he had joined his spirit to that of the oak, allowing his lungs and heart to slow, keeping time with the slumberous pulse of sap, winding its way through the ancient trunk. He was one with the tree: sombre, patient and powerful. It was only as he tried to draw back the arrow that he remembered the true state of his body. His arm shook and his fingertips burned as he prepared to fire.
The doe looked directly at the oak, sensing danger.
Finavar looked deep into the doe’s enormous eyes, preparing to let the arrow fly, then he recalled the face of his brother.
His thoughts slipped back to Drúne Fell, and his final goodbye.
He had laid Jokleel out on a bed of leaves by the brook and dressed his remains in an autumnal shroud. He had woven moss into his hair and smeared the juice of hawthorn berries across his sunken cheeks. He had sung the tale of Jokleel’s short life with tears streaming down his face. Then he had packed his brother’s hands full of earth, so that his flesh would remain bound to the forest; not doomed t
o wander through the underworld, searching endlessly for a soul.
Finavar had waited until the sun was at its zenith, so that Jokleel would leave no shadow behind when he entered the afterlife, then he lit a spark in the leaves and stepped back to watch the flames unfurl themselves across his brother’s skin.
‘To the forest, a gift,’ he whispered, trying to steady his voice. ‘A guardian, tireless and true. A soul of purity and wisdom. A child born of your roots and…’
His words had trailed off as the fire took hold. It had seemed, for a second, as though Jokleel had raised his head.
Finavar panicked. What if he was wrong? What if Jokleel had only been sleeping? Don’t be absurd, the logical part of his mind had replied. The boy’s dead. His flesh has been rotting for weeks. But Finavar could not shake the idea that he was burning his brother alive.
As the flames reached higher, the bed of leaves began to collapse and the body had shifted again, with a sudden, jerking motion.
Finavar had howled in fear and leapt forwards, reaching into the flames. The brittle, autumn leaves had already made a fierce blaze and he had gasped as pain exploded across his hands and forearms.
The heat had been too great and Finavar had lurched back from the fire, thrusting his arms into the brook and collapsing into the mud at exactly the same spot where Ordaana had fallen.
As he looked back at the fire he had seen Jokleel’s body jerking and shifting in the heat.
‘Jokleel!’ he had cried, reaching out with his throbbing fingers.
The fire was short-lived. Jokleel’s slight corpse could not sustain it for long and it soon began to die down, spitting and hissing as it lifted the fat from his bones.
Once the flames failed, Finavar had climbed to his feet and stared at the scorched remains. The momentary madness passed and knew he had done the right thing. He had muttered a few more words of prayer, committing Jokleel’s spirit to the trees and the earth. Then he had stooped and picked up a lock of hair from the ground, kissing it as he made a final, binding promise to his brother.