by Scott Hale
“Some of the guards wouldn’t do it, but eventually, everyone gave in. When it started, they only beat them, but then it got worse. I saw everything, heard it in my sleep. The priest told… he told—he forced the men upon the women, their husbands… the kids. I don’t know why it had to be… When there was no one left, he made the soldiers go in the pit, and that’s when the others turned on him and themselves. I—it was—after a while, it’s not so bad. It doesn’t even… I just pretended they were monsters—everyone—it made it easier not—not to care.”
R’lyeh bit into a heel of bread and stayed there for a moment. A trail of tears ran down her hand and off her arm. “They came for what was left of Alluvia. We tried to fight them, but we were too weak. I saw an opening, and I got away; climbed up, up there. Everyone was dead the next day. I got my mask, ate what was left, but I heard voices, footsteps, and whispers, so I came back here, climbed back up, and found a hole in the wall.” She started laughing. “I got turned around in there. I thought I was going to die. I was okay with that. I know there’s worse ways now. Then I heard you.”
“Are they all dead?” Lucan moved closer to R’lyeh. “Did no one survive?”
“I don’t know.” The girl pulled her knees close to her body, held them tightly. “The soldiers were from Penance, but there weren’t many of them; that’s why I couldn’t figure out how they’d taken the city. I don’t see how they could have moved without Eldrus or Traesk noticing. I wish you had come sooner.”
Deimos sat silently as R’lyeh finished her portions. Serra grunted and mumbled a few more wordless questions for the girl, and she answered him with no difficulty. Vrana struggled to fathom the consequences of Penance’s actions. Is this how it starts? Is this how the world ends? She felt homesick, and she found herself worrying about Caldera.
“What’s going to happen now?” R’lyeh asked. The pit hissed as its bloody contents sloshed and spilled over onto the ramp, as though it had its own tide. “Will there be war?”
Deimos contemplated on this, then spoke. “The world is such that one city does not have much favor with the other. Eldrus will not respond unless provoked. People will want revenge and will seek it, but they will do so under their own banners.” This was the Bat Vrana had initially met, cold and to the point. “Alluvia will not go unanswered, R’lyeh.” He sensed that she didn’t believe him. “I swear it.”
Serra growled and groaned: What were they trying to do?
R’lyeh shook her head. “I don’t know. They didn’t speak much, the soldiers; only the priest did, and I think he had his own reasons for being here; he said he had to prove himself. I think some of them wanted to stop the killing, but they couldn’t.”
The lake’s fetid waters seemed to have risen while they were away, washing farther up the ramp and leaving behind a stain. As they marched toward the top of the spiral, Vrana found herself staring at the girl, trying to determine if her composure was one fortified by shock. We’ll never be the same, Vrana thought as she looked into the pit, watching an infant sink below the waters, its belly ripped apart. Nothing will be the same. How romantic it had all seemed, discovering the fate of an abandoned city. She wondered if she would have felt differently had the events not been clouded in mystery. Would she have approached Geharra, not with nervous excitement but burning hate and blinding pride? Yet, for all her revulsion and the doubts it instilled, Vrana knew with some sad certainty that this was still the place for her to be. Maybe I should have been the Vulture; maybe that would have been more appropriate than the Raven.
“There’s nothing,” Lucan, who had moved ahead with Serra, shouted from the top of the ramp. “It just ends.”
With little else to investigate, they turned their sights to the ledge. The fabric of the corpse’s robe was draped over the edge, hanging like hardened candle wax above the pit. The man appeared to be in his late forties. Around his wrist were golden bands with the sacred marks of Penance. In his fist, he held a small wooden block engraved with a circle. There were no marks upon his body to suggest a cause of death. Perhaps Death had been resentful of the man who’d done Its job so well and punished him for it.
Deimos inspected the priest for quite some time before saying, “To whom did this man answer?”
“No one,” R’lyeh said. “There had been messages, but he threw them into the pit. He said he was doing the will of god and that nobody questions god.” She laughed.
“There’s not much to see here, Deimos.” Lucan put his hands on his hips and sighed. “I say we gather what we can from the tunnel and be on our way. Blix can carry word of what’s happened till we return.”
Serra nodded, tapping his fingers on his sword’s scabbard.
“My mom and dad! They’re still alive. They left for Eld a week before the soldiers took us.”
“You’re welcome to go where you please, R’lyeh,” Lucan said softly. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to do whatever you like until your final days.”
Deimos agreed to this. “Vrana, take the man’s charm, the object in his hand.”
“Why do we need this?” she asked as she bent down and pried it from the corpse’s clutch. She turned; something had brushed against her leg.
“Because charms are not given; rather, they are earned.” He watched as Vrana flipped the object over. “And those who hold them are held as Exemplars of the charm; therefore, there can be only one who’s its keeper.”
“What does it represent?” She rubbed the smooth face of the charm, feeling something like static bite at her fingers.
“Restraint.”
“A new Exemplar is chosen only when the previous one dies,” Lucan said. “We can’t trust that what we see here will remain here. This will tell the elders who this belongs to, for Deimos and I both know the last to keep it.” The Beetle took another glance at the body. “And unless his god has given the power to turn back time, that man is not Samuel Turov.”
Vrana stood up. She felt an urge to send the corpse into the pit with her foot but resisted. Again, something stole past her, and she spun in place, trying to locate it. R’lyeh seemed amused by her behavior, but Vrana was not. As she fixed her ax to her side and reached for the two daggers, she felt movement in one of her satchels. At this point, all of Vrana’s companions were captivated by her performance. Eyebrows furrowed, she tossed the charm to Deimos and dug into her belongings for the source of the strange vibrations.
“What is it?” Deimos asked, stepping forward. He slipped the charm into a pocket. “Vrana, mind your footing.”
The lake of the dead gurgled like a slit throat as bodies gave way to organs, limbs, and bones, building with themselves a monument of suffering. Vrana ripped the silver necklace from the satchel and held it high, its gem catching the light, and shone it across her companions’ masks. The hollow went quiet, and then she gasped as her arm began to lower, not of her own will but by the will of the necklace, as though it had become heavy with intention. Vrana strengthened her grip on the chain and tried to push herself forward, but a searing pain coursed through her body. It felt as though the scars from the Horror of the Lake had reopened. Clenching her teeth, she doubled over and held herself, waiting for the agony to end. Stop, please, she begged, feeling lightheaded and unsteady.
“Vrana!” Lucan cried out, stepping onto the ledge.
She held her breath, looked up at the Beetle, and found that the pain had stopped. He outstretched his hand to guide her onto the ramp. She took it without hesitation. As Vrana’s thoughts cleared, she realized that something was amiss. She pulled her hand away from Lucan’s. The necklace. She scrambled backward, looked down into the yawning mouth of unending rot, and saw upon a ribcage the glow of the necklace’s gem.
“Damn it!” she cried.
“It’s okay, Vrana,” Lucan said as he helped her to her feet, catching her against his body. “I saw Serra playing with one earlier. Maybe he’ll let you borrow it.”
“No,” Vrana said, stepping
onto the ramp. “It was…”
Her words were lost as a deafening drone shook the hollow, splitting stone and sending rocks into the lake of blood. All of the air in the burial chamber was sucked inward, past their feet, through their fingers and hair, into the pit. Vrana, shielding the girl’s body with her own, pushed R’lyeh back, down the ramp and towards the tunnel. Deimos and Serra followed after, supporting Lucan, whose shoulder had been struck by debris. A red light flashed through the hollow and drank the rest of what little color was left in the grave.
“What’s happening?!” the Octopus yelled into Vrana’s ear.
The lake was no longer a lake, but a torrent of flesh and blood and bone spewing upward through the center of the hollow. Swathes of muscle and putrefying organs rained down upon the ramp. Thousands upon thousands of bodies were heaved from the pit; they twisted and tore through the air from the force of the explosion. Blood showered Vrana and her friends in thick sheets, flooding their masks and mouths with the taste and smell of death.
Holding R’lyeh closer now, Vrana felt her way to the tunnel; she could not hear the Octopus among the chaos, but was sure she was screaming. From the corner of her eye, Vrana saw something moving beside her, and thinking it was her companions, she turned to face them.
It was not Deimos, Lucan, or Serra, but a massive beast moving among the murdered, swimming through the river of gore, hurling itself at the earth, through the earth, until it was vomited onto the surface, where it washed in waves the plains with its vile afterbirth.
CHAPTER XX
There was little they could do but stare at the gaping hole above. Blood trickled and streamed down through the layer of roots ruptured by the beast. The sunlight, which seemed so severe, poured through the hole and revealed the grisly scene in all its detail. While there were still remains of Geharra and Alluvia scattered across the chamber, the majority of the dead seemed to have been taken topside by the creature.
Lucan groaned as he yanked pieces of rock from his forearm. “We need to go.” His voice shook as he spoke.
“I’m sorry,” Vrana said. It’s the attack on the village all over again. “I didn’t know. If I had known, I wouldn’t have dropped it, went out there with it…”
Deimos shushed her. “We didn’t either, Vrana. We all took a look at it.”
“What was that?” R’lyeh asked, trembling; one more trauma and there would be nothing left of the girl.
“Let’s get above ground first,” Deimos said, trying to remain calm, while Serra moved aside rocks that had fallen in front of the tunnel.
Vrana felt numb. There was nothing she could do but keep going. She wiped the blood off the hilts of her daggers so as to grip them better. She set the bow on the ground; its string had snapped free of the limbs. Bjørn would be mad, but she didn’t care. Serra took the remainder of her arrows and consolidated them with his own. She found herself staring at R’lyeh, and R’lyeh at her, as though one was waiting for the other to say something.
“Where are we?” Vrana asked as she heard the beast lumber overhead.
“Near the mountains, the eastern side of the city, I believe.” Deimos had one last glance at the area, too wary to brave the blood-slicked ramp for more evidence. “Let’s go, before we can’t get away from it.”
Lucan, sounding dizzy, said, “I think that’s it. That’s why they captured Alluvia.”
R’lyeh turned around, desperate to hear his theory.
“People will come now, and they’ll find the masks,” the Beetle continued. “If they’re convinced we can do something like this, then they’ll either worship us or, the more likely of the two, hunt us to extinction.”
They were still near the hollow when they heard it: nails, scratching frantically at stone, and breathing, fast and hoarse and fevered. Vrana noticed the shine of Serra’s eyes as he turned to face the hollow, bow and arrow in hand. Lucan pressed himself against the cobblestone wall and dabbed his fingers at the bloody hole in his mask. He asked Serra what he saw, but there was no reply. R’lyeh tried to leave Vrana’s side for the Piranha’s, but the Raven took her by the wrist and held on tight. The sounds grew louder, desperate. Serra nocked an arrow and pulled it back as far as his body would allow and waited.
A hand—rather, a claw—reached up and clamped down onto the ramp. Another followed, and then there was a head, a pulpy mass of flesh that housed a dented skull and two sunken eyes. It was covered in blood from its hellish ascent out of the pit. The thing didn’t throw itself onto the ramp as one might expect; instead, like an insect, it outstretched one sinewy leg, planted it, and then pulled itself onto the ramp. Human. It appeared human and was clearly male, but the way in which it carried itself seemed wrong to Vrana.
“A survivor…” R’lyeh whispered.
Deimos shook his head. “No.”
Serra’s muscles tensed and twitched. He loosed the arrow. It whizzed through the air and burrowed into the center of the man’s chest. A thick, brownish fluid spewed from the wound; he pounded his fist on the ground. Skin began to drop from the man’s body as he pulled at the arrow’s shaft; he twisted it, tried to rip it free. The flesh sloughed off in wet sheets as though it had been grafted onto the beast, and from where it had fallen, pale white skin shone through, veiny and rough.
Vrana’s eyes widened. She took a step back, blocking the girl with her body. “It’s a… it’s a flesh fiend.”
At the mention of its name, the creature became still. It sat as a dog would, in a puddle of blood, as its stolen face sagged and swung back and forth across its true visage. Serra grunted and launched another arrow at the flesh fiend. The impact forced the creature to stagger back, off the ramp and into the pit. It didn’t scream as it fell into the dredged lake, for it had long since mastered pain and all its forms.
“What the fuck is going on?” Vrana moved backward and encouraged R’lyeh to do the same. She strained her ears for the sound of the fiend’s impact, but she only heard its brethren and their sharp claws clicking against stone as they scaled the sides of the pit, all too eager to finally climb out of untold ages of nightmares.
They ran, because that was all they could do.
Vrana kept R’lyeh close as they barreled down the tunnel. Lucan struggled to maintain pace with the group as more blood seeped from the wound in his head. The fiends scrambled after them on all fours, leaving trails of dead flesh in their wake. Serra fired several more arrows, catching one fiend in the throat, another in its eye. They collapsed onto the ground and then were dragged away into one of the rooms to be eaten later by their own.
“Almost there,” Vrana whispered into R’lyeh’s ear.
Deimos lagged behind the group, urging them forward as he unsheathed his sword. Arrows flew over his head and past his shoulders as he put himself between the creatures and the faltering Beetle. In the dark of the tunnel, it was impossible to tell how many flesh fiends had crawled out of the pit. Deimos braced himself and then started swinging, slicing off outstretched arms, groping hands, and wagging tongues. Limp bodies smacked against the side of the tunnel, clogging the path with their sputtering corpses. The flesh fiends’ teeth chattered hungrily as they threw themselves at the Bat, and he knocked their crooked teeth from their white gums with his fist and elbow.
“Deimos!” Lucan cried groggily, having regained his senses and caught up with Vrana, Serra, and R’lyeh.
Vrana looked back; her heart pounded like a drum in her chest as a wave of flesh fiends swelled before the Bat. Deimos had reached his limit, and adhering to his own advice, he turned to flee but then fell hard against the ground as a fiend dug two fingers into his calf. He screamed in agony as more fingers found their way into his skin and peeled it back.
“Take her!” Vrana shouted, leaving R’lyeh to Serra and Lucan’s care.
She ran forward, dropped to one knee, and swung upward with her ax, running its blade into the closest fiend’s mouth. She pulled down and kicked the writhing thing off and into the others.<
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“Leave me,” Deimos begged, struggling to his feet.
“Shut the fuck up,” Vrana responded, cleaving a creature in two, causing it to dump its intestines onto the floor.
“Vrana, please,” he appealed, as though he truly wanted to die here.
“I’m returning the favor, now get the fuck up and go.”
Deimos screamed as the tender, dripping wounds along his body tore further open with his moving. Vrana ground her back against his as they moved together down the tunnel. The flesh fiends began to throw their grisly costumes at the Raven, obscuring her vision as the flaps of flesh slapped against her mask. Two lunged at her, and she caught one under its arm with a dagger and the other with an ax through its skull. Arrows flew past her, knocking out the rest of the fiends, but at the same time revealing the others that had formed behind them. Their numbers, it seemed, were endless.
“Vrana, the staircase!” Deimos shouted.
Vrana nodded and hurried past the Bat, leaving him to the care of Serra. She found R’lyeh and, simultaneously, they buckled to exhaustion. Like flesh fiends, they climbed each step on hands and knees, but they kept slipping on the condensation that slickened the staircase. Lucan kicked his feet as hungry hands grabbed for his ankles, smashing malformed noses into malformed skulls. Serra grunted and groaned and wheezed as he conjured weak wisps of fire and flung them at the beasts, which did nothing more than singe their skin.
“There!” Vrana shouted, pushing R’lyeh ahead of her. She shielded her eyes from the blinding white light of the midday sun. “We’re almost there!”
Don’t stop, damn it. Vrana rubbed her leg, muscles burning from strain. Don’t stop. She heard Lucan scream as four ribbons of flesh peeled away from his side. Don’t stop. Her hands landed heavily on the steps, the sound lost among the echoing madness. The inside of the church began to take form up ahead. Don’t stop. She reached for the final steps, and, covered in the substance of hell, lifted herself out of perdition.