The Death of Yorik Mortwell

by Stephen Messer

  “Yorik, no!” said Doris in alarm.

  Beside the void was an old stone tablet, broken in half. Beside the tablet was a sledgehammer.

  There were two runes carved into the tablet, carved so deeply that they would survive centuries, even millennia. The runes were dyed red with blood, and as Yorik studied them, he felt a warm thrill course through him. He could see that if the broken tablet were whole, it would completely cover the void.

  “This tablet,” Yorik said. “It blocked this portal. The Princess told me that there was only one Dark One here, until recently. Then the others found a way to come through. This is how they did it, isn’t it? The single Dark One made Thomas come here and break this seal.”

  “Perceptive, Yorik,” said Doris softly. “Our ancestors made this seal long ago, and our family has guarded it for millennia. Over the long centuries, we forgot our duty. Now my father is the only thing holding back the horde, though he is unaware of the true depths of the struggle. But his will is fading. You have only moments left. Please take my brother and run.”

  “Can I repair the seal?” asked Yorik. His ghost hands passed through the stone, tingling as they did.

  “No, Yorik, you can’t,” replied Doris. “And your time is gone.” Behind Doris, Yorik could hear Thomas’s burbling cries.

  Yorik thrust his head into the portal. Doris screamed.

  A warm stench blew over him as he blinked in a sudden wash of raw blue light. Confused at first by what he saw, the images slowly came into focus. All around him, for what seemed like thousands of miles, was a vast blue expanse. The light was not blue like the sky, but blue like the color of cold flame. Floating everywhere were rich green masses, stinking like rotting plants dug up from loamy earth. And there were Dark Ones, millions of them, numbers beyond counting. Some were small like the ones he had already seen, and some were as immense as mountains or moons.

  Yorik pulled his head from the opening and turned. “Doris,” he began.

  But Doris was no longer there. In her place stood Dark Doris, the girl he had met on the stone bench, the girl with the beautiful dress and expensive hat and perfect shoes. The girl with the proud laugh and flashing eyes, behind which Yorik could now see lurked the Yglhfm.

  And behind her, filling the mammoth graveyard, perched on ribs and skulls and spines, were countless Yglhfm, thoroughly blocking the passage out.

  This land was once ours, said Dark Doris. Now we will possess her again.

  “She is dying,” said Yorik. “If Erde is dead, you can’t possess her.”

  Dark Doris chuckled. She is not dying. She is only returning to our service. Now you will serve us as well. Come, Yorik.

  Dark Doris drifted raggedly toward Yorik, her body dragging like a marionette on a string.

  Yorik backed away. But there was nowhere to go. The Yglhfm were everywhere.

  Then Thomas, crying, waddled toward his sister.

  “Ds!” he cried. “Ds!”

  “No, Thomas!” shouted Yorik. “Don’t touch her. You can’t—”

  Thomas grabbed his sister’s shoulders.

  Blue flame coursed over him, and he staggered. When he straightened, his neck cracked into place and his eyes flashed with the cruel, angry look Yorik had last seen when a large rock came hurtling at him in the elm.

  Yorik, said Master Thomas. It is time.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A wave of chittering laughter swept over the Yglhfm horde. As Yorik listened, he felt a tremor in the air, and a lambent blue light flickered through the cavern.

  Come, Yorik, said Master Thomas, sweeping forward. Lord Ravenby has broken at last. Everything changes now.

  Dark Doris approached too, murmuring sweetly, her teeth bared in a maniacal smile. She and her brother glistened with new strength. The darkness beyond, full of Dark Ones, was deepening. There were more and more of them each moment, the floor of the cavern slowly filling like a pond in a downpour.

  Dark Doris reached her small white hands for his.

  Then Yorik spotted a faint red glow, a space on the floor of the cavern where there were no Yglhfm. The broken stone tablet lay there.

  With a leap, Yorik was astride the tablet, one foot on each broken half. Power tingled in his feet.

  Master Thomas chuckled, then cleared his throat. When he spoke, he sounded almost human again. “Give in, will you, Yorik? My father has. Let us take back what is ours.”

  “Erde isn’t yours,” said Yorik. “And you’re not Thomas.”

  Dark Doris’s pretty laugh echoed through the cavern, piercing the sea of Yglhfm whispers. “Oh, dear Yorik. Erde was ours for many millennia, more than you can imagine. Long before the humans came and spoiled things. For ten thousand years, we longed to draw her back into us, to embrace her, to drain and diminish her, to bring her back into bondage.” She licked her lips. “And now we have.”

  “You can’t take her completely,” said Yorik, his eyes casting about for a means of escape. “You’re still scared of the Princess.”

  “Dear Yorik,” sighed Dark Doris. “Our masters have nothing to fear anymore. Look!”

  She gestured to the portal. Yorik saw that it was no longer small enough to be blocked by the tablet. Now it dwarfed even the mammoths. With faint pops, giant Yglhfm were bubbling out, one after another. Ignoring Yorik, they rumbled toward the cavern entrance, stretching to fill it completely with their vast bodies, squeezing up toward the surface.

  Thousands more of the tiny Yglhfm surged around them. The cavern was filling, pools of Dark Ones flowing in swift currents all around the tablet but never close enough to touch it. He felt their hunger grasping for him, as it had outside the mews. And as before, he felt a crawling sensation of panic and fear. His head filled with nightmare images of Erde enslaved by the Yglhfm, her defenders lying dead around her.

  No, Yorik thought. It’s them. The Dark Ones do this. He concentrated on Susan and the clear lament she’d sung in the attic. He hummed a few bars, and the nightmares receded.

  Master Thomas growled and edged closer, grimacing as he eyed the tablet.

  “Yorik,” he began—but Yorik darted forward with ghostly speed, his right hand flashing into Thomas’s pocket. Then he was back on the tablet. He opened his hand and revealed Erde’s last two mud-balls.

  Master Thomas hissed and spat.

  “I wanted these back,” said Yorik.

  Dark Doris laughed like tinkling glass. “Yorik, Yorik, poor little ghost. Two muddy bits against a million Yglhfm? Now that Lord Ravenby has succumbed, we can consume you quite easily, you know. Why don’t you come and take my hand?” As she reached toward Yorik, she began to change. Her face hollowed, her eyes became voids, and her skin smeared and faded. Master Thomas, too, seemed to be melting.

  You will ssserve usss, they hissed, reaching out with their spindly arms, the remains of their flesh blackening and burning.

  “I’m not anyone’s servant any longer, ever again,” said Yorik, and he jumped.

  He clung with one hand to a mammoth’s rib jutting several feet over his head. Yglhfm pooled around Doris and Thomas, then boiled up into a mound, bearing them regally upward.

  Yorik mounted the rib, then slid down to the mammoth’s spine, but Yglhfm were flowing onto that too. He leapt to the next skeleton and the next as Yglhfm tumbled after him. He spied a pile of mangled and broken bones with another skeleton lying on top of it, the highest point in the cavern, its ribs poking up toward the ceiling. In three swift, vaulting leaps, he landed on the pile. All around him the dark tide rose, lapping at his feet as he ran to the final skeleton and climbed its last rib.

  A cluster of small Yglhfm blocked his path.

  Ghost …, they began, their formless mouths gaping.

  A mud-ball struck the cluster, bowling them aside. They fell into the swirling pools below. Yorik heard children’s laughter behind him.

  At the tip of the rib, Yorik leapt, his hands thrusting into the stone ceiling. Like swimming, he reminded hims
elf, hoping. And it worked—up and up he went, swimming into the stone, swimming up as fast as he could, the chaos of the cavern passing into silence as stone became dirt. He swam until his fingers broke into clear air and he emerged from the grass under the light of Pale Moon Luna.

  He pushed himself up onto the Manor lawn, which was crawling with tiny Dark Ones.

  Oke and Dye raced by in their green spirit forms, snarling and biting, seizing one Dark One after another in their teeth and ripping them to wisps. But there were far too many now, and Yorik knew the valiant hounds had no hope of fighting the enormous Yglhfm rumbling up from below the Manor.

  He heard crashes and shouts from the Estate’s far meadow. Turning as he raced across the lawn, he saw the black shadow of the Indomitable against the flame-blue clouds. The dirigible’s cabin was half lit, and the ship was listing nose down away from its mooring tower, crewmen hanging from dangling ropes. It swerved against the dock, and the gangplank fell, crashing into the meadow, followed by splintered beams from the tower.

  Yorik sprinted toward the aviary glade, evading the dark voids gliding everywhere. He dodged through the forest and along the wooded paths. Horses were running free, and shots could be heard, along with the screams of men and women. The deadly pale light of small fires sprang up all around.

  As he neared the glade, he glimpsed through the trees what looked like a wall. It blocked his way, and he was forced to stop before it, puzzled. The wall was broad and made of nothing at all, and for an instant he felt again as though he were gazing into the black void of the universe. He reached for it, and his hand grew cold. He pulled back. He could see what this was now—a blockade of Yglhfm, thousands of them having joined the wide circle around the glade. They were piling up as he watched, already nearly up to his shoulders. This time there was no opening in the line. He gauged the height carefully. He thought he had jumped at least that high in the mammoth graveyard—an apparent advantage of weighing almost nothing. He raced back, turned, and charged the darkness, leaping up and over and landing within the safety of the glade.

  He found the Princess sprawled facedown beside the grass cradle. Erde had dwindled to the size of an acorn at the bottom of her bed.

  “Princess, Princess,” he said, shaking her shoulder. “You have to get up!”

  The Princess raised her tear-streaked face to look blearily at Yorik. “No,” she said. Her face plopped back onto the grass.

  “Please,” begged Yorik. “I know what Thomas did. I know how the Dark Ones managed to return. There’s a portal under the Manor. It had been sealed with a tablet, but the Dark Ones made Thomas break it. The tablet had runes on it. I think they had the red lion’s blood in them—”

  The Princess lifted her head again and sniffed. “Runes? What runes?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never seen them before—”

  “Draw them,” ordered the Princess. She waved her leafy twig, and a patch of dirt appeared on the grass.

  Yorik used his finger to draw what he had seen on the tablet. His whole hand tingled as he drew.

  “Hmph,” the Princess said, sitting up. “That’s a powerful spell. Humans did that? I’m impressed. Those were the old humans, though. These new ones are worthless.” She gestured toward the world generally.

  “Can the runes help? Can I fight the Dark Ones with them?”

  “Too late,” the Princess said. “And anyway, you’d need a new lion, and … oh, it’s completely beyond your capacity to understand.”

  “Then you have to fight them,” said Yorik. “You have to leave the glade and fight them! You’d only be doing it to save Erde. Your father would forgive you.”

  Her eyes filled with silver tears. “No, he wouldn’t,” she croaked. “You don’t understand. Gods don’t think like humans. I can’t defy him!” The Princess dropped her twig and threw herself into the dirt, sobbing again.

  Yorik was about to reply when he was interrupted by a rackety, droning sound in the sky overhead.

  He looked up. The Indomitable loomed directly above.

  The rackety sound was wrong. The dirigible normally purred as it prowled the sky, flying straight and proud in the service of Lord Ravenby and his guests. Now it careened over the trees, and Yorik could see people running through the cabin brandishing weapons. Flame burst from an engine, and then the ship disappeared from view.

  Yorik stood, counting the seconds. Susan, he thought. Lord Ravenby’s last loyal servant would surely be on board.

  Even the Princess had looked up from her sobbing. “Now that is the most ridiculous way to travel I have ever—”

  The aviary glade shook with the power of a massive explosion.

  The speed and direction of the dirigible told Yorik the terrible news. “The topiary garden,” he said to the Princess, and then he was running.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The dark blockade around the glade was becoming taller. Yorik barely cleared it with his leap, the tips of his toes growing cold as they brushed the void.

  “Yorik!”

  A cry on the Wooded Walk slowed him. The Matron held a blazing torch and was stumbling through the dark, her dress muddy. She was staring at him with wild eyes. There were no Yglhfm on her shoulders.

  No, it’s a Dark One trick, he thought. The Matron can’t see me. He ran on.

  “Yorik!” another voice thundered. This time Yorik stopped.

  The Kennelmaster was striding along with torch and shotgun. Beside him was Oke, limping and bloody.

  “Can you see me?” asked Yorik, astonished.

  “Aye,” replied the Kennelmaster. “The Dark Ones are victorious. The worlds of man and spirit are joined.”

  “No,” said Yorik desperately. “There’s still time.”

  Mr. Lucian spat. “Perhaps a bit o’ time, to flee. But too many have flooded in from the outside. We can fight them no longer.”

  “But they didn’t come from outside—they came from within. From beneath the Manor.”

  “Ah, then I was wrong all along.” The old man slumped wearily. “Ye fought yer best battle, I know, lad. Run while ye can.” He went forward with Oke at his side.

  “Where are the others?” called Yorik after him. “The other hounds?”

  “Dead,” came the reply. “They shot them all.” Then Mr. Lucian and Oke disappeared around a bend in the path.

  “No,” Yorik pleaded. No no no. He ran for the topiary garden.

  He found the topiaries burning, each of them—lion, elephant, swan, even the great hare—a pillar of flame. The garden was sundered by an enormous furrow of earth where the Indomitable’s cabin had struck and slid through. In the forest beyond the garden, the airship’s envelope was ablaze, billowing free from its steel skeleton. Flames from the burning engine were spreading.

  In the smoke and firelit shadows, a human figure crawled from a smashed cabin window.

  Lord Ravenby.

  Two dark things were with him—not Yglhfm, Yorik saw, but a pair of shadows in the shape of children. Each shadow held one of Lord Ravenby’s arms and helped him stagger away from the wreck. In one hand, Lord Ravenby held his mammoth rifle.

  Behind him, the engine exploded, and Lord Ravenby was thrown forward onto the grass, the mammoth rifle clattering away.

  Yorik recognized the two shadows.

  “Doris,” he said. “Thomas.”

  The Thomas shadow looked at him. yorik, came a scratched, tiny whisper, though the shadow had no mouth. i’m sorry.

  “What happened?” asked Yorik.

  yorik, moaned the Doris shadow. the yglhfm don’t need us any longer. they’ve abandoned us. won’t you run, yorik, at last? there is nothing left.

  She pointed, and Yorik looked. There was the Manor, or what had been the Manor. Now, even as he watched, it was transforming into a mountain, the many giant Yglhfm piling up into a single vast, dark presence, its peak breaking above the flame-blue clouds.

  Yorik turned away. “If there is nothing left, Doris,” he said gen
tly, “then why are you still helping your father?”

  As if in answer, Lord Ravenby moaned and stirred, and his shadow-children floated to him and helped him rise.

  Then he spotted Yorik and cried out, his eyes crazed and panicked. He crawled forward and grasped his rifle. He swung it wildly, seeming to see enemies all around. Apparently mistaking a topiary bear for the real thing, he fired.

  The bear exploded in a cracking cloud, and the bullet smashed through the garden behind.

  Yorik heard animal screams.

  He watched the shadow-children trying to calm their father. He thought of the Princess, tending to the dwindling Erde. And thinking of the Princess, he remembered something he had seen, just before the crash of the Indomitable. One last chance. But he would have to move as fast as he could, as fast as a ghost could ever move, swifter than a deer, quicker than an eyeblink, for he was about to do the most dangerous thing he had ever done.

  Just before leaving, he paused as a movement in the wreckage caught his eye—behind a blackened window there was a toss of hair, a frightened face, and two hands pressed against the glass.

  Susan. Yorik longed to run to her. He could see she was unhurt and safe for the moment, and he knew this was likely his last chance to speak with his sister, ever again.

  But there wasn’t time. Gathering himself, he raced back toward the aviary glade, hurdling the blockade once more, the chill reaching into his ankles.

  Fast as he was, events around him crawled slowly by. There, under the cherry boughs, crouched the crying Princess, huddled over the last dusty crumbs of Erde in the grass cradle. A teardrop hovered between the girls. In that instant, the Princess did not yet see Yorik.

  Beside her, glowing in the grass where in her anguish she had dropped it, was the leafy twig.

  Yorik aimed for the twig. He put his fingers down as he passed.

  The Princess opened her mouth and began to turn.

  Yorik snatched the leafy twig.