Weekly Drabble #243: Dead Lights (Patreon)

With the prompts of 'walking, talking corpses' from Henri Black, 'everyone welcome' from EBB and 'whispers from the snow' from Xpholia, we return to a wintery, red forest setting and a much put-upon elaphocentaur as she finds herself in charge of a band of humans. Enjoy! 

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Dead Lights:

“Don’t look at the water,” Silene told her charges as the elaphocentaur’s hooves tapped on the thick, rough ice of the frozen lake.

“What’s in the water?” Rysia asked, the woman keeping one hand on her heavy pregnant belly and the other on Silene’s back, helping her keep her balance.

Leading a gaggle of bloodied and haunted survivors to what might be salvation, Silene continued out across the lake. “The dead.”

The village had fallen to the green plague, flesh-crazed dryads slaughtering the defenders. A handful had stayed to buy time for rest to evacuate, though even then a third of them had been slaughtered by the infested humans and animals as they’d broken through the ragged, half-dead lines. Somehow in all of the confusion, the elaphocentaur found herself in charge of these humans, the fleeing men, women and children gravitating towards the blood-covered elaphocentaur.

She didn’t want to be. She didn’t particularly care for humans, fumbling and hacking their way through her woods. That didn’t mean she’d stand by and watch them die, even if she told herself that this was for her own interest. The green plague had never been this bad, not in generations. Denying it bodies for fodder and alerting the rest of the humans to its danger would control it and make her woods safer for herself.

But if that were so, why had she allowed frightened, injured human children upon her back?

There were none now. When she needed more freedom of movement, she would hand off whichever passenger she happened to be carrying to one of the surviving men to allow her to act without restraint. The Lake of Lights was one such place that she needed to be unencumbered. For generations, the humans had told each other stories of it, but none of those with her had ever seen it before.

Rysia looked down and gasped. Floating just beneath the frozen surface of the lake were corpses. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. Some were frozen in the winter ice, while others were just far enough down to float ethereally in the water column. In defiance of natural law, they moved seemingly on a whim, sinking down into the depths, rising back to the surface or drifting back and forth through its depths like clouds in the sky.

“I said not to look,” Silene reprimanded the pregnant human. “They know when someone is staring at them.”

“They... know?” That was Bestin, a tall, strong man. Two days before the village had been attacked, he’d fallen from his roof and broken his arm. He’d been unfit to help defend his home, tasked to help look after the women and children. Seeing so many of his friends and neighbours die when he’d been unable to do anything to help them had been wearing on him.

“They’ll know,” Silene confirmed. “They’ll hear us crossing and wake, but the longer they sleep, the better for us.” She hadn’t wanted to come this way. It was back into the forest, but the swarming dryads had cut off this small group’s chance to escape across the plains. Silene had lived in these woods her whole life and knew them well. There was other darkness within them beyond the old, hateful trees that had spawned the green plague. The Lake of Lights was one such place. Even the dryads would not pursue them across its frozen surface and that was their chance to double back out of the forest and escape. In desperation, she’d led the humans deeper into the forest, deeper than any of them had gone before, keeping just ahead of the dryads. Some had left rather than follow her; she didn’t know what happened to them, but the screams of one such group had reached the rest of the survivors as they made cold, huddling camp one night.

No one else left after that.

Centuries before the current wave of humans had come to these lands, there had been others. They were gone now, but pieces of them remained. Relics and ruins, if you knew where to look. A war had been waged here, and upon the shores of the Lake of Lights one of its greatest battles had been fought. The dead that slipped into the lake were taken by it, their spirits kept sealed in its deep, dark waters as much as their bodies. “The Lake of Lights does not give up its dead,” she told the humans. “Their souls are trapped here. Some say the cold and darkness of this prison has driven them mad and they crave, at any cost, the warmth of other living beings. Some say that instead, it is the lake that uses them to draw in more victims to hoard in its depths. If we’re lucky, we’ll be across before they wake.” Wide, frightened eyes stared at her. “Don’t look under the water,” she told them. “And don’t follow the lights. The Lake and its dead want you to join them. Don’t make the sacrifices of your friends and family worthless.”

Slowly, carefully, the handful of survivors followed her, trailing across the bumpy, uneven ice. Forewarned, none of them looked down.

“Oh,”  Rysia said when they were nearly a third of the way across. “The lights.”

Silene had already seen it. Gleaming out of the evening mist, drifting back and forth across the surface of the lake, were ghostly, ephemeral shapes. They moved in slow, sedate patterns, never drawing close enough to be fully seen and never rising too high above the ice. She saw several of her erstwhile band staring out across the lake and let out a loud, sharp snort that cut through the growing haze in their minds. “Don’t follow the lights,” she reminded them. “Not unless you want to follow them into the water.”

Leading the humans across the dead lake, Silene tried very hard to follow her own advice... and then the whispers started.