Crown of Ash bs-4

by Steven Montano

The mist envelops him in frozen arms. His boots sink into dust and silt. He presses through the mire, and enters the trees.

  W eb-patterns of shadow mark the path. Brackish fluid drips down and collects in rancid pools. The air is cold and raw. He smells organic waste and feels the tang of smelted iron on his tongue.

  There are no paths, no means to find his way aside from following his false instincts. Soulrazor/Avenger cuts a swat h through the corpse-dry trees. The ghost wind drowns out the sound as he crash es through the underbrush.

  He senses a presence nearby, a malign entity as much a stranger to th e dread wilderness as he is. W hatever it is, it keeps its distance.

  He carries on. He ponders the dire reality of his situation.

  W ithout his spirit, even Soulrazor/Avenger isn’t likely to do him much good against a cadre of mages.

  This is suicide. But I have to try.

  He walks. There seems to be no end to the forest.

  Eventually he escapes the mist, and the trees thin. He moves through clearings filled with black earth and dead leaves. Piles of dark branches stand ne xt to long-abandoned campfires. He smells charcoal and mold. T he whispers of the dead are stronger there.

  He looks closer. What he’d thought were branches are actually bones, burned to black and stacked in heaps.

  Some of the trees are made o f bone, as well. Their blanched hue has been discolored by a fire that seems to have ripped through th at part of the forest some time ago. He runs his finger against a tree and wipes away a film of burned grime. The bone underneath is yellowed and cracked.

  Skin flags dangle from the bone trees. They hang placid, as there is no wind that deep in the forest. The flayed flesh is coal black, the skin of some shadow-infused beast. The hide banners stretch like standards and mark an uneven path through the haunted woods.

  He smells meat in the air, and he grimaces at the taste of salt and acetone.

  The ground ha s been disturbed by the passage of other creatures. C rude blades made of fused carbon lie scattered on the ground. He hears a faint groan in the distance.

  Mountains loom ahead, still many miles away, barely visible through the dead branches.

  Bla de in hand, he follows the new path.

  Tendrils of web stretch between the trees. Dark silk play s against his skin like smooth fingers. He feels dust on his skin and burned wood on his tongue.

  Bodies dangle from the trees, suspended by necrotic threads. They appear frozen in mid-fall and hang at violent angles. Most of the ir flesh and clothing has corrod ed off the bones. They bob like grisly marionettes.

  He pushes through the perpetual gloom. His joined arcane blade lights his way with a subtle shine like blue moonlight.

  The forest grows darker. He smells dead fish and glacial moisture, a raw ice-water breeze that clings to the trees like saliva.

  He sees m ore signs of passage, bla des and bedrolls and cold camps that have long-since been looted for anything of value.

  The presence he sensed earlier return s. It shifts in the dark. Being close to it makes him f eel like he stands at the edge of an abyss.

  The air is grey. His feet swim in a cold wash of shadow that obscures the forest floor. The air is so cold he feels crystals in his beard, and every breath freezes in his throat and lungs.

  He realizes he hasn ’ t passed through any of the black webbing for quite some time. He’ s moved past its outer perimeter, past the warnings, and straight into the home of whatever made them.

  A bone-white and bladed arm as long as a lance launches at him from out of the darkness. He uses Soulrazor/Avenger to knock it aside, then hacks through the carapace and severs the knife- limb. T ender layer s of pulsing red meat lie be neath the cracked bone shell. White puss oozes from the maimed appendage.

  He sees the trees and the darkness, and nothing else. He stands surrounded by a world of shadow, and it grows thicker as the curled howls of his attacker draw close. Fear ices his gut. He holds the blade ready, and calls his spirit. H e remembers that she isn’t there, and his heart sinks.

  Another blade-limb erupts from the dark. He barely rolls away before it slices by him and cleaves a bone tree in two. Another limb flies out, insanely long, a bone needle mounted on a pale and twisted tentacle. He can’t see the source of the limbs — they stretch back into the vertical sea of darkness beyond the trees.

  He rolls beneath the hacking a ttacks and ru n s forward, leaps over piles of skin and bones left to wither and freeze on the soiled forest floor.

  The creature bleeds into his vision like a white wound. It’ s humanoid, but only barely, a pale and writhing mutation with an elongated torso that twists like an eel. Its head is bald, with tiny black eyes and an enormous maw of razor teeth. Its many arms are spindly whips of flesh dotted with bone spurs.

  It resemble s the strange creatures he saw before, back at the edge of the forest, only this one is white where they were dark. It’ s somehow resisted the corrupting pall of the Whisperlands, only to evolve into something much worse.

  It whips another bone-claw at him, but he ducks beneath it and charges. The creature releases a blood-curdling scream that rattles the ground and chills his blood. He smells vomitous fumes and rot gases. Its teeth are curved and black, stained with ebon flesh.

  It can’t raise its limbs in time to defend itself, and even with its fearsome fangs he knows he can kill it, and he does. Soulrazor/Avenger plunges into its skull and cracks it open like ice. White blood sizzles when it hits the dark ground.

  The hunter falls without another sound. Its body melts into a milk pool. He stands over its remains.

  He finds its lair. It isn’ t far away, a deep cave system built into the side of a massive hill, a dark orifice in a darker cluster of stone that’s been camouflaged by the shadow landscape. The forest continues on past the hill. He ’ ll scale the stone and ascend to the Shadow Lord’s next layer of defense.

  The Eidolos had named the Shadow Lords leader: the Witch Queen. What was she looking for? Why had she built her stronghold t here, in that dreadful place?

  H e feels that it ’ s important to search the hunter’s lair. Something drives him, a base instinct he can’t ignore.

  The inside of the cave is dank and cold. He finds m ore skins, some of them human, most not, all tainted by the ebon touch of the Whisperlands. Tunnels lead off into deeper chambers. He smells rot and ice. Pools of neretic slime bubble up from the ground.

  There are tools and weapons, spears and shreds of clothing. This thing has feasted on creatures in the Wh isperlands for some time. It’ s gorged i tself on travelers and refugees and natives and other mutations. He isn’t sure how he destroyed it so easily, except that it seemed unused to direct confrontation. It normally took its prey by surprise.

  He wonders if m aybe it hadn’t wanted to die. Maybe it didn’t understand why it had n ’t changed like the other creatures, and it couldn’t go on living in a land carved from nightmares.

  In a way, he feels sorry for it, even after he finds it’s young.

  They a re grotesque. They mewl like sick kittens and writh e like lampreys thrown from the water. Their mouths have not yet fully formed, and their limbs have yet to grow their blade appendages. They are a mass, a pile of pale flesh and slime held in a bowl in the earth. They look like they ’ ve just been born.

  They were, he realizes. That wasn’t the mother I killed, but the father.

  He presses deeper into the cave. He isn ’t sure how, but he knows he is n ’ t safe, not w hile these creatures live. They evolve quickly, and they will hunt him.

  The mother i s still weak from birthing the offspring. Her body is bloated, not thin an d flat like the male’s but fat and bulbous. She looks like a living egg-sack.

  Her limbs whip out at hi m, but he’ s able to elude them easily. Without thinking he charges into the room and slaughters her. P art of him believes he is meant to do this.

  That this family of hunters is not meant to be here, and that he
is meant to set them free.

  He finishes the young quick ly. His heart p ounds as he exits the cave. White blood covers his chest. His limbs shake, and he isn’t even aware of his own tears until he’ s halfway up the rocky hill side.

  His feet tread across dark stone. The hill is steep and covered in drifts of black ice and frozen clay. Ooze clings to his boots. Rocks dislodge beneath his feet and tumble down to the forest below.

  The trees grow thin ner as he climbs. They stand at slanted angles, aimed at the blood sky like jagged spears.

  The forest beneath him is like a black ocean. A dead wind chills his skin. Shadows scramble just out of sight. He sees child-like shapes and hears cackling laughter.

  Memories flash back at him, and it’s difficult for him to hold them off. He sees ghouls in the darkness as they chas e him across a mist-covered landscape. He sees a dead city at the edge of the world.

  He thinks of Snow. He remembers her, burning on the train.

  It wasn’t your fault, he tells himself, but he ’ s told himself this before, and he never believes it. He tries to convince himself she was dead already, that the girl he’d grown up with was gone, her identity wiped clean by the vampires of Koth well before he ’d found her.

  It doesn’t help. In the end, he ’d killed her, and that guilt has scarred him. He will forever bear that wound.

  Tears stain his face, but he pauses, breathes in air filled with grit and shadow, and thinks about wh at he wants to go back to. It’ s difficult, at first, to remember, and for a moment he feels a kinship with the hunter beast, a creature that had grown so confused and lost and desperate it no longer wanted to continue living in the nightmare it was trapped in.

  But after a moment more memories come to him, good memories, and they fill with him with light and warmth. He sees Mike and Ronan and Maur and Grissom and Ash, and especially Danica, so beautiful, so much under his skin, and if he sees her again, he tells himself, maybe, just maybe, he’ll tell her how he feels, he’ll take advantage of the chance he’s been given, he won’t make the mistake again of drifting apart from someone he cares about, not again, never again, not like with Snow.

  He wants to see them… all of them. No distance or obstacle will keep him from going forward.

  I have to try. It’s all that I have left.

  He comes to the top of the massive hill and steps over the ridge. A flat field stands before him. B lack skulls on the ground mark the border to another region of the Whisperlands. R ows of stakes protrude from the earth like broken fingers. Thin trails of blood smoke rise up from shallow pits and curl into the sky.

  A cold building made from black bones stands in the distance, right at the edge of a nother dead forest. The shrine is low and built in vicious angles, like something reached down and crushed it into splinters and edges. A pair of unmoving skeletons, their frames burned black and their eyes fi ll ed with cold fire, stand s vigil outside the twisted door.

  He steadies himself, readies his blade, and walks towards them.

  EIGHT

  Search

  The skeletons are motionless as he passes between them and enters the shrine. Their cold and burning eyes stare out in to the wastelands.

  Two of the arcane natives wait in side. The ir oily black bodies are so dark it’s almost impossible for him to make them out in the thick shadows.

  They a re folded in contorted prayer. Their fing ers end in steaming frost claws and their eyes shine like frozen moons.

  The rest of the shrin e is an endless void. E ntering is like s tep ping in to an icy pool.

  He quietly sets his blade on the ground, kneels low, and spread s his hands. Information plac ed in to his mind by the Eidolos makes him understand this is needed to earn their trust.

  They were once captives of the Whisperlands, just like he is, but they’ ve evolved. Decades spent in that fugue has destroyed whatever they once were. They are necrosis beings, more shadow than living.

  And they, too, have reason to oppose the Shadow Lords.

  They regard him suspiciously. He doesn’t understand what might be going through their alien minds, but he feels the darkness push against him.

  They gaze into his shadow-drenched soul. He’ s forgotten so much about himself he i sn ’ t sure what they ’ ll find.

  His body shakes. H e’ s afraid, but he knows this is necessary. He ’ ll endure anything if it will help him escape this prison, this quagmire in the endless dark.

  They’ re closer now. He didn’t see the m approach. The ir bodies are featureless except for narrow slits for eyes and the barely discernible outlines of grim faces. They stand shoulder to shoulder and look at him, look inside him. Their touch is as cold as death.

  H e’ s on his knees. He prays with them, only it isn’t prayer, not tru ly, for there are no g ods t here, no deities except for the soot angels, twisted succubi whose likenesses are cast upon a slab of stone: a mongrel avatar, an orgy of dark seraphim twisted together in a violent erotic dance. Claws and teeth and bat’s wings fuse together. T he trio of wom e n is locked in a tangle of shadow s.

  He’ s seen this before, in history texts and drawings. It was in the church where Dane Knight performed the sacrific e that created human magic. There had never been any reports of the triple-succubus likeness having been seen anywhere else.

  The statue bleeds darkness, a different dark ness than the air in th e Whisperlands. Theirs is an ancient and primal power. It fuels the mad arcane natives, tho se aboriginal marauders. They pay homage to the core of demonic flesh.

  He looks i nto its gruesome multiple faces and sees a force that has beheld ages. It is not of his world, or perhaps of any world. It bears a purpose. It searches.

  We search, one of the natives tells him. The words echo through his mind and repeat, layers of sound filter ed over one another, a resonant and whispered meaning. We hunt.

  What do you search for? h e asks, but there is no answer. It occurs to him they might not even know.

  He stares back at that twisted triple angel, that masochistic altar of vampire pain. He is dwarfed by its presence. G lacial smoke billow s from between its curved fangs and its molten seductive smiles. He breathes it in, and it soils his soul.

  They walk through fields cleared of trees, over ground packed with clay and low mounds of rock and bone. He doesn’t remember leaving the shrine.

  The two natives are with him. He doesn’t know their names, isn’t sure if they even recall the concept of names. Both wear primitive battle dress, armor made from the carapaces of shadow insects and bladed gauntlets carved from bone and steel. O ne wears a helmet made from some sort of longhorn’s skull, and t he other wields a tall staff adorned with dark skins and sharp edge s.

  He’ s safe with them. They search, either for something in the Shadow Lord’s possession or something else that is located near their stronghold, the Black Citadel. The Citadel lies near a place called the City of Thorns, where these shadow beings are taking him. They believe he can help them somehow.

  H e has become a part of some sort of shadow rebellion. H e is allied with the se shadow people, who search for the means to oust their oppressors. He has been caught up in the politics of the damned.

  We can be more.

  They walk through shadow- soul fields and past towers of crumbling iron. The patchwork landscape is a conglomeration of detritus sucked in from other worlds and drenched in darkness.

  Flames send pale smoke into the sky. The fires form spot s of light in the perpetual dark.

  The y pass the burned homes of shadow villages, haphazard settlements littered with the corroded remains of dust corpses. He smells cooked meat and vehicle fuel. Ashen remains drift in the air and land on his tongue.

  If his escorts feel any sorrow for the carnage they witness, he can’t see it. Their grim visages remain unchanged, caricatures of human faces.

  We search, one of the natives says. It ’ s been some time since they spoke. Their voices are utterly foreign and f
alse, as if spoken by an automaton, but there is a soul buried somewhere deep inside, some semblance of the creatures they once were.

  The details of his f ormer life gro w hazier by the day. They are more like dr eams now than memories, distant and hard to recollect. He holds on to j ust a few vivid details, and with every step more of th em fade away.

  What do you search for? h e asks.

  The stone, they say. The stone, and the door.

  He fears that’ s supposed to make sense to him. It doesn’t, at least not in this world, or in this life.

  O thers join them, natives with skin so dark they resemble walking carbon silhouettes.

  There are only a few of them at first. A ll of them are attired like his two escorts, who he’s come to call Bull-Horns and Longspear. The new arrivals also wear battle-dress, and each of them maintains at least one article of armor or weaponry or clothing that sets them apart from the others. One yields a bone-white ceramic sword; another wears a steel helmet with no eye- slits; one holds a crescent axe in each hand; and yet another carries a dented iron shield with a skull emblazoned on its face. He doesn’t know if they do this for his sake, or for their own.

  Soon they are a dozen, then two dozen. They march across the Whisperlands in near silence. The black wind comes, hard and cold and filled with particles of sharp dust. The air smell s of toxins and industrial waste. Blood smoke fills the sky.

  Th e y march through barren fields, towards a fast-flowing black river. W reckage and war waste litters the path. The y see the s moking husks of burning homes and the opened c orpses of elephantine beasts. The e arth has been broken apart by cannon fire, and the fields are covered with poison fumes so dense they will never dissipate. There are d eep trenches where bone crafts fe ll from the sky. P iles of black corpses have nearly moldered to dust, and f lecks of collapsing bodies pull away in the wind.

  We search, Bull-Horns says again, and all he can do is nod. His body aches with fatigue, his legs are weary, and worry gnaws at his gut. We search.

  I know.

  They come to the dark river. Bony refuse floats on the surface, and h e sees the outlines of beasts swim ming below. The river stands between the m and the base of a wide path that cuts its way through an imposing onyx cliff several hundred feet high. The path is difficult to see in the darkness, but it’ s been marked with the pale bones of massive creatures.