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ALOD - Part 25
🕑 Added 2021-02-22 17:37:03 +0000 UTCTykhon slowed to a halt as they passed over a brook, edging out into a clearing. Efrain slid off his broad back, searching for any sign of the offending creatures they had been sent to hunt.
“Can you feel anything?” he called back to Innie, who, contrary to her usual behaviour, was sitting alert on the saddle.
“No. There’s nothing. Not even a trace.”
“How could they just disappear like that?”
So far, they had been mostly following the marks on the tree trunks, as well as the piles of dead needles. Beyond that, there was a gut-churning sense of coldness that clung to the environment like the threat of rain. That coldness, however, proved to be tenuous at best, vanishing as quickly as the animals that darted out of their path.
“You’d think their passage would leave more of an impression,” he said, looking over the brush for some kind of tracks.
“We should be about the mid-way point of the valley, right?” Innie said.
“Yes. And?”
“Well, we’ll have to make a choice soon,” she said, “north or south? Which way do you think they went?”
Efrain hesitated, well aware that making the wrong choice could lose the creatures. The forests fanned out as the valley ended in the south, radically increasing the ground to cover. Efrain pulled up his own mental map of the valley, as spotty and obsolete as it may have been.
“Well, going by the trees, they’ve kept heading east. We can continue to the east and see what we have. Then we circle south, I think, unless we find something that says otherwise.”
Innie agreed and the two of them resumed their seats on the mount, who took off through the trees. Efrain was sure to keep a sharp eye on the trunks as he passed them, searching for any claw marks or dead branches. Unfortunately, as the slope once more began to increase, there seemed to be little sign of the creatures. As the trees began to thin and forest floor grew yet steeper, Efrain pulled Tykhon up once more. A coldness plagued the edges of his bones, an unpleasant chill he’d been feeling all morning.
“Well, there’s something,” he said, as Tykhon trotted up the hill.
“That we do,” responded Innie as they broke out into a small clearing.
Something laid on the brush, in the shadowed overhang of a stone outcrop. The group approached hesitantly, Efrain scanning up and down for any sign of additional creatures. Once he was convinced he wasn’t about to receive a nasty surprise, he clambered down and approached the pile of… whatever it was.
At first impression it appeared to be mostly bone, human in character. They were distorted however, some twisted and elongated beyond anything he knew. The angle of the rips were wrong, and their was no cartilage to bind them to a sternum. A single arm, phalanges curved and sharpened like an raptor’s claws, lay separated from the rest of the pile.
But that was not the most alarming thing about the osseous mass. That would’ve been the pale fog that twisted out from the black crystal, enclosed within the ribcage like a dark stamen in skeletal petals. As Efrain stooped to examine the remains, he noticed scape of pale flesh clinging to the bones, bubbling away as if tallow on a stove.
He carefully touched the edge of the ribs, only to find that they crumbled like burnt logs. Innie saw fit to join him at his side, sniffing at the corpse.
“What is it,” she said, measures of disgust, awe, and confusion in her voice.
“I don’t entirely know. They bones look almost human in some ways, but in others, well…” he said waving to the obvious alterations.
“But the flesh, is, is… I don’t even know what I’m looking at?”
“Dissolving? I’m not entirely sure either,” he said as prodded the substance.
It didn’t feel like anything in particular, just rubbery, and very, very cold.
“Either way,” he mused, “I suspect I know what might be happening to it.”
He reached for the crystal in the centre of the corpse and tapped it. As his own magic flowed and disappeared into its depths, there seemed to be the barest increase in the mist.
“Oh, that can’t be good,” he said, his suspicions being confirmed.
“What? What is it?” Innie said.
“I think… I think that this crystal, whatever it is, is breaking down flesh and bone into this,” he said, gesturing to the fog.
Innie said nothing for a moment, then red and white began to drift down the length of her hairs. As soon as he saw that, Efrain quickly retreated back to the horse. With a puff of glimmering dust, the area around the bones ignited, flames leaping to the afternoon sky.
Efrain walked closer to the wisp mother, saying nothing as he watched the flame flicker and die. Nothing was left of the bones or flesh, save for a circle of ash. But still, at its heart, the crystal sat, apparently untouched by the inferno.
“Get back Efrain, I’m going to try again,” Innie said, little sparks now escaping her fur.
“I don’t think it’s going to-” Efrain said, before the fires flared up, higher and hotter, sending him stumbling back.
When those fires died, the crystal remained on the ash pile, black and hungry.
“I don’t think that it can be destroyed through magical means,” he finished.
He advanced forward, producing a length of cloth, and pried the thing from the ground.
“Please don’t tell me that we’re taking more of those things with us,” Innie said.
“Would you prefer I left it in the forest? To grow?” Efrain said.
The wisp mother grumbled in discontent, but offered no further objection.
“Well, at least we know that they passed this way,” Efrain said as he carefully placed the gem into his bag.
As he turned, he found Innie half-fire, half-cat, staring intently up at the ridge.
“I don’t think they just ‘passed’ this way,” she said.
Efrain looked up, to see the trees submerged in a twisting fog, pouring off the edge like a waterfall. Coldness radiated down toward them, only the heat of Innie keeping it back from settling into his bones.
“Alright,” Efrain said, “Uh. I think there was a path up to the left. Slowly. Last thing we need is to bumble into a horde of these things.”
Then a scream shattered the relative quiet of the clearing. Innie and Efrain looked at each other, as if to confirm that yes, they both heard that, and yes, they’d have to investigate it. They quietly set off, the sequential screams were muffled by the fog, creeping up the slopes. After ducking through the brush, they came out onto a expanse of flat earth, studded with various small cairns of various shapes and sizes. Despite the fog limiting vision to only two dozen steps, Efrain could spy engravings on further formations.
“Gravestones,” he mused.
“Efrain? Now? Really?” Innie said as she bounded ahead of him.
“Right, right,” Efrain said as he hurried after her, more out of a not wanting to be left alone rather than an sense of urgency.
The screams had almost fractured in quality, sometimes closer, sometimes farther, coming from this direction and that. Finally, Innie stopped, trying to sent out a path among the necrotic fog banks.
“I’ve got nothing,” she said, “this fog is… doing something to me.”
Efrain looked around, making sure that he wasn’t about to be set upon from some dark shadow out of the mists, and reached out. The flow of magic was generally much easier for him to feel, rather than see, though he’d gotten far better at it over the years. As he probed the various roiling banks and dancing streamers, he started to eek out a pattern, a method to the madness of the frigid vapours.
“This way, I think,” he said quickly, turning to the right.
The crept through the lines of stone, the graves becoming more regular and newer as they did. The mist swirled around them, movements growing almost angry as they moved through it. Efrain felt sudden dread grip his heart with a icy hand, as some unfathomable, violent emotion crackled at the back of his mind. The maelstrom spun around in his head as angry whispering voices began to echo and grow louder. Every step he took, the dread and the storm grew in tandem. Efrain’s head throbbed with a burning choir - now screeching with rage and pain.
Innie to his side already was beginning to flicker and burn as her hackles raised, no doubt feeling the same way he did. Finally, they broke out into an open space, where fog abated slightly. There was a young girl, cowering against on the stone as she wept and prayed almost unintelligibly.
Innie skirted toward her, Efrain following with slightly more caution. When she saw them, she shrieked all the louder and pressed herself against the gravestone. Innie stood patiently by, waiting for the girl to look at her again, smothering herself into the form of a cat. Finally, the girl looked at them, her eyes glistening with confusion.
“W-w-w-who?” she barely managed to stammer out.
“We are not here to hurt you,” Efrain trying not to sound exasperated.
“B-b-but, the, the thing. Where did that creature go?”
Efrain knelt down, the girl turning away as his emotionless visage came close.
“What thing?” he asked her blond braids slowly.
“The, the thing, the monster. It came from the mist, it was chasing me and-”
The girl was speaking so fast she was practically tripping over her own words.
“But what thing? Describe it for me, please.”
“It was, was in the mist,” she said, looking around the graveyard, “where did it go?”
“I know that,” Efrain said with practised patience, “but what did it look like? What did it do?”
“It was crawling toward me, out of the mists, it was- it was-”
Efrain had just enough time to recognize the look of horror in the girls eyes as she opened her mouth to scream.
Stupid, he thought as he turned, you left your back open.
It started as a small thing, a slight rise among the mist that otherwise drifted aimlessly. It flopped up and down as it advanced, becoming more definite as it departed from the bank of fog. Dragging itself out of clouds before fading back into them over and over, it quickly closed the gap between them.
“Fascinating,” Efrain said, “it’s possessing the mist?”
Then, it vanished back into the mist as quickly as it arose.
“Well that was-” Efrain started to remark.
Then the thing rose before him, thin limbs formed from the tracery of the mists, pale talons curling up and around to slam down upon him.
