Chapter 14
Found and Unfound
He was floating in a body of water whose chill seeped through his skin like stinging sleet. The water around him was limitless, no walls or buildings or fish that he could sense, just a giant crab looming above him. It was illuminated by soft light that suffused the water, its white exoskeleton smooth and unblemished like polished bone. It was frightening but not menacing, alien but radiating compassion. This could only be Modroben, here in his guise as Nelktor.
“Your bitterness is understandable. Mortiss Waimbrill found that my plans for him did not coincide with his own. Do ye wish to know why? I must fight the entire war, and I can not win every battle, so I choose when to fight, and when to withdraw. This battle with the Church of Argon is one that I must win.
“I told you before that Mortiss Waimbrill would inspire you, and he shall, for he sacrificed himself for you, that ye would have a chance to seek glory in my name.
“He cared greatly for you. My followers have grave difficulty with those they love. This is in the nature of man and elf alike: soulcleaving concentrates pain and grief in the hearts of my servants, and this tears at their minds. It is not my design, for I but transfer bits of knowledge into the minds of claine and care for the affairs of the dead; the lessening of grief is all in the minds of those who are so affected.
“And it is that that makes my servants heroes, for they do choose to take the pain of others, without mine insistence.
“Mortiss Waimbrill was a brave hero in my service, who died in fulfilling his purpose, but that purpose was not the slaughter of Petromyza and the Argonite army. Nay, his purpose was in inspiring the goodness and bravery inherent in another, in someone who will take Mortiss Waimbrill’s memory and use it to achieve great glory in my name.
“That person shall be one who is brave, and gentle, and strong of arm and heart, one who has survived all manner of loss even as a youth, and one who braved the dangers of the Deepdark solely to prove his loyalty and love.”
Terredor was shocked into alertness by the sudden silence that filled the room when the chant ended. He heard Untegrin’s voice echo in the chamber. “Something’s wrong!” he shouted, “It didn’t work.”
The beast started ascending slowly, then gathered speed, shaking the walls of the temple as it blasted into a tunnel in the ceiling. Terredor tore the weight off his ankle and swam to its scaly body, ringed with thick fins every few feet and covered with thin yellowish scales that gleamed in the light of the ring.
The cold layers of its scales wrinkled and writhed at his touch. He grasped Petromyza’s body, which was bucking wildly now, slamming into the hard rock wall. The beast was moving faster than any horse Terredor had ever seen. Doubt filled his heart when he realized he was not armed and could not conceive of a means of harming Petromyza.
Terredor climbed forward on the beast’s body, reaching out with one arm to grab the next fin even while using his other arm to keep a hold on the first. He got close enough to its head that he saw its jawless circular mouth swallowing a community of olmians. They were screaming and swimming towards the cave walls, but Petromyza moved quickly, and one by one, each olmian tumbled into its open mouth, some helped by ghoulish hands and claws reaching out of her gullet to grab victims.
In minutes, they entered Al’hirrizad. Armored warriors attacked, throwing spears at the monster to no avail. Their weapons had no impact, and few were able to avoid being swallowed. Terredor wept for all the souls who would be restless and uncleaved this day, and prayed to Modroben to protect their souls.
Petromyza stopped its relentless journey to cycle from the top to the bottom of the large cavern filled with the pods and coral buildings that constituted Al’hirrizad. Then, at its apogee, Petromyza paused. Terredor was shocked at the sudden stillness, forcing his contorting gills to calm, and saw the monster bulge and squirm.
A hand, pink like rotten meat, appeared on the edge of the monster’s mouth. A derrador pulled himself out of the monster, chunks of flesh falling away as it tumbled into the open water. A living cave rainid with a long spear swam close and bellowed a warcry in an archaic dialect Terredor couldn’t understand. The zombie derrador floundered in the water, ignoring the repeated spear jabs of the rainid warrior. The decomposing derrador regained control of his muscles, and grasped the warrior’s arm. The rainid pushed the derrador into the light of Terredor’s ring, and he saw the rotten, partially devoured face of the creature. Terredor’s heart sank as he realized the derrador was Esterhund, his once-familiar features contorting with rage and bloodlust. The cave rainid warrior thrust his spear through Esterhund’s chest, and blood bubbled out, streaming into the water. The rainid turned in time for an undead vagramine to wrap his tattered arms around the warrior’s neck, squeezing until he fell limp. The vagramine let go of the body, purulent-cracked carapace oozing, hundreds of decayed and dessicated little millipede legs swaying uselessly in the water, which now thrashed with activity. Terredor glanced at the mouth of the monster beneath him. Hundreds of them were climbing out of its jaw, rotting-fleshed zombies, bits of exposed bone and shattered exoskeleton gleaming as they streamed into the caverns and corridors of Al’hirrizad.
The vagramine snarled and darted towards Terredor, who screamed again and kicked at the creature. Its toothless mouth dripped with bits of blood and flesh. Terredor hit its head with a flailing foot, and almost let go of Petromyza who continued to vomit forth the zombie army. Terredor, still panicking as his mind raced, stomped his feet down on the millipede-man’s head.
Amid the clangs and shouts and the smell of iron-rich blood filling the water, Petromyza moved again, and the vagramine grabbed onto its body just a few yards behind Terredor. It snarled at him and began slowly crawling up her body.
Petromyza swam through the rest of the Deepdark in a matter of minutes, swallowing the people they passed as well as animals Terredor barely had a chance to perceive before the monster devoured them whole. He moved closer to its head, trying to escape the vagramine zombie, but it caught up to him as Terredor realized they were was about to squeeze through the Fissure. He let himself drop to the side of the great beast so he wouldn’t scraped against the rock wall, but the zombie stayed and was torn off by the edge of the Fissure.
Thick green algae filled the water again, and Terredor was blinded. He removed the ring and held on tight until finally, lungs about to burst, the chill of autumn air shocked him, and he opened his mouth to scream. Lungs inflating, he gasped, as though out of the practice of breathing. The air in his chest felt impossibly cold. He choked and coughed, struggling to hold on to the monster, ascending with him still clutching its fins.
Clouds hung just a few hundred feet above him. He saw snow rainids, pale blue dots on the snowy slope of Mt. Rekkerkem, gathering and pointing at the flying beast. Below Terredor was the entire region of Crikland, and, sitting on the edge of the lake, was his people’s ramshackle stilt-town, buildings like smooth, slippery pebbles in a stream surrounded by fields and forests like tiny clumps of moss.
His mind was dizzy and clouded, and Terredor tried to meditate despite the great scaly beast beneath him. He realized what he had to do. The monster stopped moving, floating in the air just like it had right before the undead poured out of its mouth in Al’hirrizad.
He held tightly to the top fin as Petromyza pulsated, and rolled, leaving Terredor suspended upside-down and desperately clutching the monster’s slippery fins before it stopped with him on top again. Bulges moved along the length of its body, and Terredor felt the zombies beneath its scales and skin climbing on top of each other to get to the top. A human hand, blackened with rot, with one arm hanging on by a flap of flesh, grabbed the edge of the creature’s mouth, ignoring the teeth that penetrated the hand cleanly.
Unable to think of anything other than his rapidly approaching doom, Terredor attempted to meditate, trying in vain to ignore the mind-boggling height, and the massive beast and throng of undead beneath him.
He told himself to visualize a handful of pebbles, to picture himself throwing them away, to force his lungs and heart to calm themselves. He closed his eyes, but still, his mind endlessly warned him that he was about to fall, that he’d soon plummet through the air and splatter on the ground, spraying like a raindrop in every direction.
The human zombie, covered in blood and grime, fell out of the monster’s mouth, flailing as it landed on the ground. Despite the fall, the creature was unfazed and it crept towards a small farming town at the base of Mt. Rekkerkem. It was followed by a bevy of others: humans with eyes dangling from their sockets and toothless grins peeking through decomposing cheeks, skeletal elves with flayed flesh, rainids whose patchy green and blue skin peeled in ribbons to reveal rivers of pus that dripped into the air, putrid bofro with matted fur and the reek of rot, dwarves with black eyes soullessly screeching, spindly ghoulish goblins with a gray and ashy hue, and gnomes whose tiny bodies curled into little bony balls tumbling through the air.
As they fell out of Petromyza’s mouth, many of the zombies saw Terredor on its back, but none did more than futilely grasp in his direction before tumbling to the ground. Then one of them, an armored human stinking of rust and rot, hissed and growled at Terredor. It pulled itself up, and Terredor’s heart pounded as he frantically searched his memory for the words he needed. He couldn’t tear himself away from the zombie, whom he realized was none other than Lord Porthos himself, empty eye sockets crawling with maggots, skin pockmarked with seeping sores, swollen purple tongue dangling from his useless mouth. The zombie Porthos thrashed and struggled to pull himself out of the monster’s gullet.
Terredor gritted his teeth, and managed to recall the prayer he needed. He recited it, and his mouth and face transformed as he had seen Mortiss Waimbrill’s do so many times.
Master of life and death
Let us thy servants give thanks in thy name,
For it is through thy gifts of glory and grace
And our fidelity grown great,
That thy way bringeth rest in the end
And not turmoil and grief.
Through thy gentle tapping of time’s relentless beat
Dost thou pound the march of our lives, and the rhythm of our deaths.
In thy name, we thus give thanks
For the mercy thou dost grant in death
Even unto the meekest of us, the least, the lost, the lame,
Even unto our most terrible foes, who shall find redemption at last.
Thy works give serenity to evil and good the same, and man and elf
And paupers and princes, and all of them alike.
Though our hearts may ache despite thy words which bear truth
It is through thy will that, with the strengths of our souls and the songs of thy spirit,
We shall find peace amid the pall of death
His nose lengthened and twisted into the crooked beak of a vulture. His sharp snout smashed through the creature’s scales, and Terredor inserted his entire head into its flesh, which tasted of rotten meat and stale blood. Porthos’ bony hand grasped his arm, squeezing and pulling. Terredor cracked through its tough skull and devoured a tiny bit of brain matter.
The monster shuddered as a hundred emotions hit Terredor at once: grief and fear and rage and guilt all flowed through his veins, and he knew then that he had cleaved all of the people the monster had devoured. The souls of thousands of humans and olmians and others were now free, and their emotions were so overwhelming Terredor could think of nothing else at first.
He closed his eyes and muttered a desperate prayer to Modroben, feeling the hard pit in his stomach settle to a dull, grieving ache. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the monster was falling towards the ground. Porthos let go of Terredor’s ankle, and fell off Petromyza’s back, snarling.
The monster dissolved as it fell, and dead bodies collapsed out of its long belly. Terredor watched the corpses limply crash into the ground below. He thought for sure he was going to die, and a part of Terredor wondered if his death was Modroben’s last gift, for he had gained the feelings of thousands of grief-stricken lovers and friends, and already the emotions pulled at his mind, demanding attention even as he flailed and plummeted towards the ground.
But he only landed in a foul-smelling pile of rotting flesh, which cushioned his landing, chunks of offal bouncing and splashing into the air around him. He gagged and pulled melted skin and muscle, shards of bone and teeth, and bits of smashed organs away from his face, and, crawling out of the filth, collapsed on the ground, unconscious.
Terredor woke and lifted his head, exhausted, seeing Milo, the bartender at the resort, standing before him.
“It seems a local has proven his worth yet again,” said Milo with a grin, “I would very much like to know the story that brought you back to me under a cemetery’s harvest.”
Petromyza had landed on Bryndoth itself, and the weight of myriad corpses collapsed the buildings of the resort. A few women, bejeweled and adorned with fancy wraps, held their noses, gagging, while servants scuttled about, shouting for shovels and healers.
Terredor struggled, limping, to his feet. Milo led him through the decimated remains of the ruined restaurant, which already stank with the rot of decomposing flesh splattered among the rubble and shattered glasses, bone splinters scattered around piles of shattered bowls and plates. Milo found a bucket of water and dumped it unceremoniously on Terredor’s head; it was cold and clean, and it felt good to get the layers of flesh off his face.
“Greetings, gentle Terredor,” said a soft, delicate voice from behind him, “I suspect your victory today shall make an inspiring ballad for my repertoire.” Her jet black hair was unfussed, hanging in helixes symmetrically spiralling around her face, delicate features pristine and calm despite the chaos and death that had rained down moments ago. A faint, quizzical smile spread across her smooth-skinned face, pale like ivory, contrasting with the brilliant crimson flare of her painted lips and the vermilion dress that hung on her hips and breasts, its ornately looping lace framing her beauteous figure and grace.
He stood, and found that he had the courage to speak without stutter, to scour his soul for strength and boldness, and his tongue for the elusive words that had danced away so many times before. He said, “You are more beautiful than any woman my imagination could conjure, and if you give me a chance to prove these words bear truth, I can make you happier than you ever thought you could be. Since the moment you stepped out of your carriage on that wintry day, my love has been so intense it terrified me, churning inside, but now I know-” She stopped him by throwing her lips atop his own, and uncaring of the rotten flesh that still clung to his clothes, they kissed.
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