CHAPTER 1.05 - THE STORIES WE TELL; OR DON’T: II
6AM TODAY
Thae had insisted that Hugo get some rest. Magical healing is grand, but he was suffering twinges from his still-undisclosed evening. Hugo’s slightly in awe at the half-elf’s diplomacy. He can see the questions in the cleric’s eyes, but Thae seems unshakeable. Even when Hugo dug into the inside of his shirt and came out with a small red squirrel, stroking and soothing it, the half-elf had wordlessly retrieved some waybread, a variation on hardtack really, from their pack. Thae had pulled off a corner of the unenticing snack, handed that to Hugo for his pet. Then the half-elf had stared at the remainder of the chunk of dried, floury oats, a look of absolute focus, before handing that, too, to Hugo. The halfling nodded gratitude, the action becoming a wry tilt of his head. Small wonder he feels so much warmth for this person. Having swum in waters filled with sharks his entire life it feels remarkable to encounter someone so unflinchingly giving, nurturing.
-x-
So, a couple of hours later (Hugo struggles not to think of the time as “wasted”), with dawn approaching faster than he would like, they remain in silence. Hugo’s lost in thought, Thae radiating supportive distance while noticeably walking closely enough to grab or shield him. They’ve navigated from the safehouse shaft to a series of ancient tunnels abutting the outer edges of Caladria’s sewer system. A thin trickle of dirty water from the sewers still runs down the centre of the tunnel, despite the latter pre-dating the founding of the the city (hells, the town before the city) by…a century? More?
They had been walking in near-total darkness, but the quality of the dark has lightened, hinting at pale dawn in the forest ahead. It’s probably fine, Hugo reasons. They’ll have to circle around the city, deeply enough into the trees to be invisible from the walls, to meet the road away from the city’s gates. May take a few hours, but he’d rather that than be seen. His absence will probably have been discovered by now, but even the busy road carves through forest on either side. Easy to secrete themselves, or even to travel, in the fringes of the forest. He knows they make an easily identifiable pair, so is contemplating the slower, safer latter option. Safe from discovery, of course. As fervent as the work is to denude the Emerald Forest, one doesn’t have to move far from the road to be in amongst the wild animals and…worse. Assuming, of course, that the scary stories people tell aren’t just that: scary fictions of monsters and wild spirits.
Hugo jerks, startled from his thoughts as he feels his companion’s open hand on his shoulder, looks up to see a silhouetted shape in the tunnel ahead. Some light peeks through from their way out, well past the walls of Caladria. A human figure is silhouetted standing there, apparently oblivious to their presence.
Panic grips him, his adrenaline spiking as his worst fears sweep in. COULD X know about this place? The hours they had spent below the safehouse had elicited no sound, no indication that his hidey-hole was compromised. WAS this some hapless grunt tasked to watch over this escape tunnel? Hugo had, after all, found hints to this series of tunnels beneath Caladria, but fancied that neither X nor the kind of violent imbeciles attracted to his organisation would have spent as many hours as he had perusing dusty, mostly pointless, tomes of the city’s legends and lore.
Hugo gathers himself, nods at Thae. He swings the lute round on its strap and begins to play. The melody, though light, is still jarring in the dark and silence. He waits for a moment, looks confused that nothing happened beyond an awful, grating groan from the figure as it swings round herpily to face them. Then his frustration melts into horror.
The motion shockingly highlights the ruin of the figure’s silhouette. Something in the stance, the motion, the missing pieces of it causes Hugo to recoil. He feels his face heat, certain he couldn’t suppress a yelp. Thae, however, advances swiftly and with grace, apparently undaunted by the intrinsic wrongness of the figure. The half-elf’s sonorous voice intones “Back, spawn of undeath!” as Thae raises a golden symbol towards the figure with one hand, already starting a brutal swing with the warhammer. Thae sprints, quickly covering the distance to the dead thing. Hugo sees, in a soft golden light from the symbol itself, the skull-and-stretched-skin face of the creature fall into a mime’s scream. Its body tries to twist away but the relentless swing of the warhammer removes a corner of the thing’s skull, dust ejecting rather than blood and brains.
Hugo curses himself. It makes sense, in retrospect, that his Ode to Sleep had no effect. Pretty difficult to send something to sleep when they are already dead? Some sense, at least. Does the music, the magic, work only on living brains? The horror show in front of him clearly HAD one of those, but the dust shaking from the thing’s skull as it shambles in Thae’s direction suggests that rotted to nothing long ago.
He's never thought of himself as ‘brave’, not precisely. His adage has always been that fear is healthy, that bravery is not an absence of it. And – yes – true bravery may entail carrying on despite one’s fears, but Hugo has always preferred to have enough preparation, enough failsafes in place, to minimise risk. He feels shame that he has no preparation for this instance, doubled by him freezing in place, mind empty of anything but terror. Then again, he hasn’t pissed himself (not yet, at least) nor has he screamed and run back towards the safehouse. No matter WHAT his instincts are telling him.
As he stands frozen, Hugo’s mind is racing. After Thae’s incantation, the undead thing had been twisting, withered muscles in a dumb show of ‘flee’. The half-elf’s first swing would have fully shattered the bone-and-parchment skull of the thing had it remained stationary. But in clipping the monster (Hugo’s gorge rises again as he considers that this would have killed any regular, biological thing), the holy terror on its face has been replaced with a horrifying hunger.
The cadaver seems unperturbed by the hole in its skull, and has raised its gnarled, twisted arms, nails like talons trying for purchase on Thae’s face. Like a bare-knuckle boxer driven to desperation, the thing’s ruined teeth are clacking together an inch from the half-elf’s nose. While its proximity is making it impossible for Thae to swing effectively, the monster’s back is fully turned to Hugo. He could do something. He should do something.
Limbs moving as though glued to his sides, Hugo pulls the dagger from his belt. Watches the short weapon as he flips it, catching the blade between thumb and forefinger. He could swear this is taking minutes, realises that he isn’t moving slowly at all. The panic, the terror from this abomination, his already saturated flight instinct is drawing the moment out. He raises his arm arduously, ready to snap the weapon into the thing’s centre mass, then stops. He’s been a fool. He has literally just seen the thing shake off an incapacitating blow, and his short blade will accomplish…what, precisely?
Thae is in danger of being pinned; Hugo can see trickles of blood on the half-elf’s face from the creature’s claws, tries not to imagine the smell of the thing as its teeth begin to affix to his friend’s cheek. This couldn’t work, though, could it?
Demoralised, certain he is about to see his comrade torn apart, consumed by a thing that cannot have a working digestive system, Hugo bellows, rending the eerie silence in which the struggle has been taking place. It’s an old trick, one of the first he learned, but if the thing can’t sleep, how could it have feelings to be hurt?
It isn’t even eloquent; Hugo screams all of his frustrations, all of his anger and betrayal, all of the pain of discovering that his entire life has been a lie. It comes out as a string of expletives. Vulgar, idiotic slurs and hatred. Things he doesn’t even believe ARE insults, graphic and sexual and so narrow-minded, so simmered in back-brain, lizard hatred that he would feel horrible to have thought the words, never mind bellowed them in the presence of a holy person.
BUT.
Where he had felt the threads of magic extend earlier, in the failed attempt to send the thing to sleep, those had seemed to find no purchase, to slide off the monster. Screaming out his brainless rage he feels this connection grab and take hold, knit and find purchase. The thing cranes around unnaturally – Hugo swears he hears vertebrae grind and snap as its face turns to him – and its dark, blank eyes lock on his. The thing’s jaw is still distended, and Hugo is certain he hears a lungless, sickly inhalation. He fully vomits, stomach clenching as one of the thing’s eyes implodes, rendered into dust and mucus inside its socket.
The creature is stunned, unbelievably to Hugo’s sickened, terrified mind. Then, it’s thrown violently, a cloud of dust expelling from its frame as it impacts the tunnel wall across from Thae. The warrior takes a step forward, torso twisting to execute a vicious double-handed swing. Hugo shakily wipes his mouth as the creature’s left shoulder and collarbone is decimated by the beautiful weapon. And yet, while this is a killing blow, no doubt about it; and while the catastrophic impact of it sends the monster crashing to the floor of the tunnel, Hugo feels his recently evacuated stomach drop. The thing should have shattered apart. Its stick thin bones, its dry, dusty skin, should by all rights have separated, smashed. Even in the way it lands, that side of its body has been dislocated, pulverised. But not nearly as much as the violence of Thae’s attack should have wreaked. Thae looks equally concerned, but steps the other foot forward, raises the hammer and arcs it down cleanly onto the thing on the ground.
The sound is like that of a walnut thrown under the wheel of a heavy cart. The thing’s face, still turned towards Hugo, compresses unnaturally. He sees the skull hole under where its nose should have been buckle and crack. And then there’s silence. Silence until Thae, gasping for breath, intones earnest thanks towards Hugo.
Relief floods him. Normally, the breaking tension would have made him laugh. Mortal peril suddenly snuffed should have made him gleeful, but instead Hugo hears a half-moan, half-sigh escape his lips. He suddenly feels parched, swears he can feel his lips cracking despite Thae’s insistence that he wash down the dry snack with as much water as he needed. As ever, the half-elf’s generosity had flown in opposition to Hugo’s concern that they were already travelling with too few rations. One light pack between the pair of them. But he had needed the food and water. Thae’s food and water, he corrects himself.
The moment’s broken, unbelievably, horrifyingly, as the dead thing – dead TWICE, now – reanimates. The now eyeless skull chitters, dislocated jaw working as it jerkily grabs at the flagstone beneath it, trying to crawl towards Thae. The half-elf curses, the first Hugo is certain he has heard from his companion, as the cleric repeats the invocation from outside the safehouse. For an instant, Hugo’s blinded, the afterimage of the pillar of light engulfing the corpse, its spastic motion as it’s consumed, and a wave of a stench worse by orders of magnitude than burning hair rolls across the halfling. He’s momentarily glad that he has nothing left to throw up as his stomach cramps again.
Thae quickly returns to the stunned Hugo, lifts him bodily and sprints for the exit, a portion of collapsed tunnel leading up and out into the forest. As he is carried, Hugo spots a gap between the exit and the (he previously assumed) collapsed, inaccessible tunnel’s progress deeper beneath the ground. The thing must have come from there, right?
As they emerge into the post-dawn light filtering through the canopy of the trees, Hugo headshakes Thae’s apologies away, begins to thank the half-elf wheennn…
Reality winks out. For the first time today.
