PD.2.15 (Patreon)

Something was coming.

Ouz kept one hand pressed to his side and lifted his head a little higher. The movement alone hurt. Firelight shook across the camp and turned the snow beyond the trees into patches of dim orange and black. For one breath he thought it might be one of Lubau’s men who had hidden or run and come back to finish the work.

The smell reached him first. Rot. Not the thick stink of opened guts. Not old shit. Something sweeter than that. Wrong in a different way. Crushed berries left too long in a cellar. Strawberries gone wet and soft. Raspberries rotting in a bowl no one had touched for weeks. The scent rolled into camp in slow waves and settled over the blood. Ouz’s fingers tightened around the sword hilt.

A figure stepped between the trees. A woman. She walked into the edge of the firelight without hurry, her feet quiet on the snow. No cloak. No fur. No thick winter layers. A thin dress clung to her frame and moved with each step, too light for the cold, cut low enough to leave pale skin bare to the night. At first that was what looked wrong. Everyone in Zhanar and across the Steppes wrapped themselves against winter. Even the fools who thought themselves tough knew better than this. Yet she moved through the dark with her shoulders exposed, calm, untouched by the cold.

Her laugh came next. A soft sound. A little breath of amusement. Too high for the dead camp around her.

She carried no sword. No spear. No bow. A bell hung at her waist. In one hand she held something long and pale, maybe carved bone, maybe wood bleached almost white by age. In the other she rolled a coin across her fingers with practiced ease, letting it pass from finger to finger and back again without looking at it. Firelight flashed over the metal. Round. Whole. No square hole in the center. Not from Zhanar.

She stepped over the first corpse and looked down at it with open disappointment. Her feet passed between the bodies. She looked down at each one with calm interest, head tilted a little, like counting losses only she cared about. Nothing about her matched the night. She stopped over one of the corpses, crouched, and touched the dead man’s cheek with two fingers. A laugh slipped out of her. Light. Girlish. Wrong.

“A butchery,” she said. “Not a harvest. You’ve left me nothing but scraps.” Her voice was light. Almost playful. It drifted over the camp.

Ouz tried to push himself upright again. His leg shook under him and nearly folded. He stayed half crouched with the sword planted in the mud, breathing through his teeth. If she was with Lubau, he would kill her too. If she was not, he still did not like her coming here with that smile and that smell.

She turned toward him. Her face found him in one quick motion. Her eyes widened. The movement was sudden enough to pull his full attention at once.

Her face came into clear view. Young. Beautiful in the way a carved statue could be beautiful if someone gave it a pulse and taught it to laugh. Her skin was pale enough to look dusted in ash. Dead pale. Her eyes opened wider when she saw him, and that was when Ouz caught the detail that made him understand something had gone wrong with the world again.

Her eyes were white. Not clouded like an old man going blind. White all through, with no color in them that he could see.

The smile spread wider. She started toward him in slow steps. Excitement rose on her face without shame, without restraint. By the time she stood over him, she looked on the edge of laughter.

Ouz did not move. Partly because he was watching her. Mostly because he could not.

The smell of rotten berries thickened until it sat in his throat. She came close enough for him to hear the soft scrape of the coin crossing her nails. Close enough for him to see the fine cracks in the skin near her lips. Close enough for him to feel that none of this was normal and none of it belonged in the world he knew.

She stopped one step away. Her head tilted. Another little laugh slipped out.

Then she stepped right into him until there was no room left between them. “What are you?” she whispered.

Her face hovered inches from his. Her breath touched his cheek, sweet with rot. Ouz could see now that her dress hid a body too still for a living one. No trembling from the cold. No mist of hard breathing. No heat coming off her skin.

Ouz said nothing. He barely knew what she was saying. He only knew one thing. This woman was wrong in a way that went deeper than madness. Every part of him felt it. Mage, his mind said.

The Hermit’s voice rose from memory, plain as ever. “If you see a mage, the first thing you do is run.”

Ouz almost laughed. He could not stand. Running was not an option.

Two cold hands rose and cupped his face. Her fingers pressed into his cheeks with a strange tenderness. Her fingers were cold enough to burn. Her thumbs rested under his eyes. Her smile pulled wider, stretching her mouth until it looked painful. Still she leaned closer, almost nose to nose.

Something in her expression had changed. The amusement was still there, but excitement sat under it now. Hunger too. He could see it building.

She inhaled. Another breath. A third, deeper than the others. For the first time, the smile slipped. Confusion touched her face. Delight followed a heartbeat later.

Ouz took the chance. He drove the sword forward with everything he had left. The blade should have punched through her belly and out her back. Instead it stopped. Not fully. It bit into her. A little. Enough to tell him there was flesh there. But the resistance felt wrong. Dense. Layered. His arm shook with the force of the thrust and the sword only went in a fraction more. The woman giggled. Their bodies locked around the blade.

Ouz looked down.

Her upper hands were still on his face. But under them, beneath the torn front of the dress, a second pair of arms had caught his blade. For one blind beat his mind refused to make sense of what he was seeing. Two pale forearms pressed against the flat of the weapon. Two more hands still cupped his cheeks, cold against his face. The dress had torn open around the lower arms. Those extra limbs had not been hidden under cloth by accident. They had been built into her. Body work. Flesh changed by intent. She had stopped the thrust with her own body.

Ouz had no word for what stood in front of him.

She leaned to his ear and whispered, “Clever.”

Pain ran through Ouz’s side and shoulder in one hard pulse. Blood still soaked his clothes. One knee was barely off the ground, his weight split between his leg and the sword trapped in her grasp. He could feel how close he was to the edge.

She bent closer until her lips brushed the shell of his ear.

“Are you afraid?”

He smiled anyway.

“What should I fear?” Ouz said. “Pain? Death? I’ve met both.”

She pulled back just enough to study him. There was delight on her face. There was also hatred.

“You do not understand the beauty,” she said. “You cut and split and ruin. No shape. No care. Just meat.” Her upper lip curled. “You are a butcher. An imposter. I hate imposters.”

Ouz barely understood half of it. He understood enough. This woman was mad. Maybe a mage too. The Hermit’s lesson rose in his head again. But there was no running left in him. He let her words pass through him. His mind had already moved somewhere else.

He had already died and reset many times. The Hermit had not remembered him after the first time. If he died again, Dafu would not remember him either this time. Everything would reset and he would have to start over from the beginning. The Hermit would forget him again. That hurt more than the thought of dying. For one moment he saw Dafu’s face in his head. Saw the trust there. Saw the way the boy had looked at him. He shut it down. He would lose this night. Lose the path that had brought him here.

If I die now, I start again. And maybe he would not need to go south to save the boys. Maybe next time he could do it cleaner. Faster. Better. The thought settled him more than fear could.

All right, he told himself. If this is where I die, I die. I start again. He stopped trying to pull the sword free.

The woman watched his face. Confusion flickered there for a beat, and the smile returned.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Keep that look.”

Her lower hands released the blade. She stepped back. The sword slipped from Ouz’s weak grip and fell across his lap. The extra arms folded in close to her torso, twitching under the torn cloth. She lifted the pale instrument in her hand. Up close it had looked like polished bone. From this distance, under moonlight, it looked worse. Too smooth in some places. Too rough in others. Human. Animal. He could not tell. The bell at her waist gave one small chime when she shifted.

“Do not die too quickly,” she said. “I want to hear what pain makes of you.”

She raised it to her lips and played. The first notes came soft. Almost gentle. A low thin sound that could have belonged in a shrine or a dream. Ouz felt it pass over him and through the camp. For one breath nothing happened.

The next note scraped.

The one after that turned wrong.

The sound crawled under his skin. It found his ears, his jaw, the back of his neck. His teeth clenched without his permission. Around him the dead gave tiny movements. A twitch in one hand. A shoulder jerk. A foot dragging once in the slush.

From every corpse in the camp something began to rise. Threads. Purple, though not the color of cloth or dye. A ghost color. A dead color. Thin strands leaked out of mouths, wounds, sockets, split throats. They floated upward in wavering lines, still tethered to the bodies below. Their tips sharpened while he watched. Needles. Ouz braced too late. They drove into him all at once.

The violet strands punched into his chest, his throat, his arms, his face. Cold slammed through him so hard his back arched off the crate. A sound tore out of him from deep in the throat, half growl, half broken breath. Every wound in his body lit up at once. Shoulder. Side. Thigh. Fingers. The back of his skull. Places he had stopped feeling in the middle of the fight. Pressure flooded him. Too much. Too fast. It felt like swallowing fire through his skin. His fingers clawed at the ground.

The woman lowered the flute and laughed with pure delight.

“Yes,” she breathed. “There you are.”

She stepped through the mud toward him, white eyes shining. “Death-energy. Poison to the living. A drop can stop a heart. And I am feeding you all the filth you made.”

Ouz heard her. Barely. He hunched over and one hand hit the mud. To her, it must have looked like agony.

The pain was real. Terrible. He felt stretched from the inside, his body trying to contain something too large for it. His veins burned with cold. His bones rang. His teeth clenched until his jaw shook. But beneath that, under the violence of it, another truth emerged. His wounds prickled. Heat ran across torn flesh. He looked down and saw the gash at his thigh tightening. His side no longer poured blood. The cut at his shoulder drew inward little by little.

More energy poured in. His vision blurred. Words crashed into it.

[Energy source increase detected]

[17 years of lived time increasing → 38 → 89 → 101 → 264 → Error]

[Capacity limit exceeded.]

[Excessive energy dividing]

[Skill acquired: Death’s Harvest]

[Skill acquired: Death’s Call]

[Skill acquired: Dead Flame]

[Energy overload detected. Upgrading system.]

Ouz stared through the messages and laughed once, breathless from the strain of the violet threads still pouring into him. He lifted his head.

The woman’s smile had faded into puzzled attention.

Ouz planted one hand on the earth. The other closed around his sword. He rose. Slowly at first. His body shook once. Twice. The shaking stopped. He stood straight. The wounds across his body had sealed into ugly dark lines. Blood still covered him. Mud clung to his boots and calves. His chest lifted and fell with a strange calm. His grip steadied.

The puzzlement on her face cracked. “That is not possible,” she said.

Ouz looked at the threads spearing into him before his gaze found her. Black flame crawled along them in thin lines, but the energy had already sunk too deep to pull back out. “Thanks for the gift.”

She snatched the bell from her waist and rang it. One clear note cut through the camp. Every corpse rose. Men Ouz had killed moments ago staggered upright with violet threads still running from their backs and mouths. Lubau’s men climbed out of the slush with broken throats, split jaws, opened bellies, bent limbs. The sentries. The wounded. The broken. Some with weapons still in hand. Some with guts dragging in the mud. The bowman rose with half his face gone and fingers reaching for a bow that no longer mattered. Club-man lurched upright with the arrow still in his neck. The shield-bearer dragged half a shield behind him. The spearmen came in jerks, fingers missing, heads hanging wrong. Lubau himself pushed to one knee first, one sleeve burned black, his sword lying a short distance away in the slush. Their eyes glowed dim violet. They moved like bodies that remembered fighting and had forgotten life. They came at him.

Ouz went at them before they could form. He stepped and the world jumped with him. One heartbeat he stood by the broken crate. The next he was ten paces to the left with a dead man between them, sword already cutting through the corpse’s neck, a blur of motion and dark breath. His blade cut through the shield-bearer’s neck and black fire burst from the swing in a low wave. The reanimated body split and dropped, and stayed down.

Another step. Another jump. Ouz crossed the camp like a streak of black smoke, there one heartbeat and somewhere else the next. He passed through a spearman and left the upper half sliding away from the lower. Black flame licked out from his free hand and struck club-man in the chest. Fire ran through the corpse in a rush. Purple threads spilled out and burned to nothing. Lubau rose fully and Ouz was already on him, sword taking the head before the body settled into its stance.

The camp turned into moving corpses, firelight, and black flame. Ouz cut through them in short violent bursts, each step too fast for tired muscles alone. Dead Step carried him where his body should have failed. Dead Calm kept his breathing steady and pain away. He saw lines before they formed and moved through them before the dead could close. Corpses came with old skill still stuck in them, but he was beyond what they had been a short time ago.

His sword flashed. One corpse lost both knees and fell screaming without a voice. Another opened from shoulder to hip. A third took a slash across the throat and burst into black fire from the wound out.

The flame was wrong. No warmth. No light fit for life. It clung to dead flesh and ate it down in silence until bones cracked and the corpse folded.

Ouz cut through three more before the first body hit the ground. One of the risen lunged from behind. He turned, raised his empty hand, and black fire leaped from his fingers in a hard violent stream. It struck the corpse in the chest and blew it backward through a cart wheel, where it burned down into a heap of stinking cinder.

The woman stared. “How?” She rang her bell. Its sound spread across the camp in tight pulses. The remaining corpses changed direction and rushed him together.

Ouz smiled.

The first blade cut into his shoulder. Black smoke rolled over the wound and sealed it. He split the attacker down the face. A corpse clamped onto his arm. He headbutted it hard enough to crush the nose inward and burned it with a touch. Another came low. He leaped over it in a blur, landed behind two more, and swept his blade low. Both corpses lost their legs. Black flame crawled up their backs, cold as it burned. Another dead man rushed him with a spear. Ouz met him head-on and cut once. The violet thread snapped. The corpse dropped and stayed down. That much he understood immediately. Anything he killed now stayed dead. The camp became slaughter again.

When the last one fell and did not rise again, the camp went quiet. Only the woman remained. She was no longer smiling.

“What are you?” she asked again. “Why?”

Ouz did not answer.

Around them, black fire chewed through the fallen corpses. Her lower arms were fully visible now through the torn dress. The light played over her pale dress, over the extra arms pressing through torn cloth, over the gold coin still resting in the cradle of her fingers. She rolled it over her knuckles once more. Her smile came back. Small this time.

“Good,” she said. “I knew there had to be something inside you worth cutting open.”

All four hands moved at once. One swept wide. Corpses near her twitched. Bones ripped out through meat and cloth in wet snapping bursts. Ribs tore free first. Spines followed. Arm bones shot loose from hanging flesh. Bodies collapsed into sacks of skin and ruined muscle while the bones twisted through the air toward her in a storm. The sight would have turned his stomach if he had anything left in it.

She shaped the bones into spears and lashes and came at him herself. She was fast. Stronger than she looked. One upper hand drove a bone spike at his throat while a lower hand slashed for his stomach. Another pair reached for the sword, trying to trap it. Ouz slipped back and cut one spike in half. She closed the gap anyway and a bony lash cracked across his ribs hard enough to numb one side of his body. So the monster could do more than command the dead.

Ouz said nothing. He advanced.

One of her lower arms whipped out faster than he expected. Bone flashed in her grip. A rib sharpened into a stabbing spike. Ouz knocked it aside and cut for her throat. She bent back far enough for the blade to miss by a finger’s width. Her upper right hand caught his wrist. The lower left slammed into his ribs with enough force to send him skidding through the mud.

She was on him before he stopped moving. No hesitation now. No soft voice. No teasing. She fought like something built in pieces for this exact work. Ouz met her in close range. Steel against bone. Flesh against flame.

Her four arms came in shifting patterns. High, low, inside, outside. One pair trapped. One pair struck. Bone knives flashed into her fingers from the corpses near her, pulled free from dead bodies with wet cracking sounds that turned the empty husks in the mud loose and limp.

One of her lower hands caught his wrist and nearly crushed it. He drove his forehead into her face and felt her nose break. She only laughed through the blood. A rib spear punched toward his eye. He twisted away and lost a strip of skin from his cheek. She kicked his wounded thigh. He answered with black flame from his palm straight into her exposed side. Her skin charred. The extra arm there spasmed.

She sliced his forearm. He cut one of her lower arms from wrist to elbow. Black fire took the severed piece before it hit the ground. Her smile twitched.

Ouz stepped in. Their bodies crashed together. Her knee hit his thigh. Her elbow smashed into his mouth. He drove the pommel of his sword into her cheek hard enough to split the skin. She answered by burying a bone shard into his shoulder. He twisted, broke her grip, and slashed across her stomach. The dress opened. Beneath it, stitched flesh. Scars crossing scars. Layers of old work. Body modification, he realized. Reinforced joints. Thickened muscle laid under pale skin. Dead things altered and grafted into one shape.

They broke apart for one breath. The woman laughed through blood.

“Yes,” she said. “Now you see me.”

She rang the bell. Nothing rose. For the first time, fear showed in her white eyes. She rang the bell again, this time with fury. The sound hit him like a nail driven through the skull. For a heartbeat his balance slipped.

She tried to pull bones from the bodies one more time. He crossed the distance in a blur and severed two of her hands at the wrist before the bones cleared the corpses. The coin slipped from her fingers and vanished into the mud. She screamed. A real scream this time. Her remaining upper arm swung the bone flute at his temple like a club. He caught it on the flat of the sword and shattered it. Splinters of bone scattered across the snow.

Her back foot caught on a corpse. She dropped to one knee. Black flame rolled along the wound and dead flesh shrank back from it. Her body was dense in strange places, reinforced where no body should have been, but the neck was still a neck.

Ouz raised the sword.

She looked up at him and smiled one final time with blood over her teeth.

“They’ll know this,” she whispered.

Ouz had no idea who they were. The blade came down. He cut her head off. The severed head rolled through blood and snow and stopped beside Lubau’s corpse. The body stayed upright for one second more, blood pumping from the neck in dark bursts, then collapsed beside the broken flute. Black flame clung to the falling flesh and began to eat at it in slow, crawling lines.

Silence took the camp again. Ouz stayed there over her for a moment, breathing hard, sword dripping black and red into the slush. The extra energy still burned inside him, too large, too new, pressing at the edges of what he understood. Around him the dead stayed down while the black fire slowly shrank.

At last he looked toward the black entrance beyond the camp.

The night still was not finished.