This is the twenty-seventh chapter of the Fang & Bone serial; click here to visit the previous installment of Fang of Triseria. Please share your thoughts on the story in the comments, or visit the project hub for more information.
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Previously on Fang & Bone, Corea, Fang, and Erryl had encountered a ghoul, and Erryl’s tough teaching style is creating some tension. However, the intrusion of a ghost quickly diverted their attention.
It had become very clear to Garen that these tunnels were the work of the Necromancer. When he had emerged from the hidden church, he had wandered into an ancient crypt that ran below Gordhurst, but as he traced his way south through the damp stone tunnels, they gave way to raw earth and rock, bored through haste and with little support. It was as though a tremendous, frantic mole had hastily carved its way through the soil in an attempt to flee from something.
But Garen also knew that it was no mole, but rather the torn and broken fingers of ghouls with the meager accompaniment of old tools and boards. Chipped finger bones and broken, rusted equipment littered the path as he continued to move out. But all of that paled in comparison to the unearthly green, glowing tendrils of light that were weaving through dirt and stone, and even between the cobbles and blocks of the old catacombs from where he had emerged. Whisping trails of light that seeped from surfaces all around him.
Garen had seen someone in the barracks once who had been poisoned in a skirmish with a bandit. This must have been a few months back. Garen did not know him well, but his name was Thurmin. The man was carried back, limping, to the small barn that had been designated as the barracks for the town guard. He was placed on a cot, more a bale with a blanket on it. Garen had been ordered to summon the healer – “healer” being a charitable term for the old man who mostly tended to bleeding goats and dabbled in hedge -heals. When Garen had finally returned with Old Fenwyck, Thurmin’s pale flesh had become latticed with dark purple, zigzagging marks. As Garen had overheard, it had been the poison spreading through the man’s veins. It was the first time Garen had heard that term, “veins.” That stuck with him.
Now, in this dank and darkened underground, the only light present came from similar marks, but as a bright and unnatural green. These green veins ran the length of the tunnel in a seemingly incoherent series of lines that would dart, split, and converge in ways that reminded him of early-winter fungus and the sickly threads stretched out along darkened soil, beneath rotting leaves, feeding on death. The veins he saw here and now would glow, casting a sickly light within the tunnel. But the veins would also pulse irregularly. For some strange reason, Garen was reminded of water lapping against the edge of a pond or puddle, something that felt like a pattern, but was not.
Garen knew it to be magic. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. He made a wide berth around the veins where he could and made sure he did not set a foot on any that snaked across the tunnel floor. He wasn’t even sure if they could be stepped on, as they did not appear solid.
He had yet to see any actual ghouls since he made his way from the crazy old bandit’s hovel, but he heard them, constantly, ahead. Down splitting paths carved into stone that led to stranger, darker spaces where even the unholy green tendrils would fail to cast light. Whenever he came to a cross tunnel, he’d steel himself for attack and then encounter nothing beyond his increasing unease. He’d been following what he felt was the central tunnel, larger than the offshoots and with the greater concentration of green veins. But just because he hadn’t encountered a ghoul yet only meant that an encounter was inevitable the further he crept.
After about an hour of his slow march, he’d come across something new. The sound of ghouls was rampant as he approached a hole in the earth above his head with the slightest cascade of sunlight spilling forth. He stepped into the pillar of light long enough to look to the green sky above him. He quickly stepped away, back into the dark, the moment he saw a moving shadow above.
This was the first tunnel to the surface he had encountered, but it was wholly useless to Garen as he could not reach the height of the hole and did not trust the soil not to collapse upon him even if he did manage to reach it. Perhaps the undead had been using it, but he didn’t know how.
A sudden and violent crash of a ghoul to the ground before him explained how. The ghoul was followed by tumbling remains: feet, hands, and a head. Garen had taken several steps back, further into the darkness, and the ghoul who had landed on the ground began to shift. Garen watched it slowly rise into a sitting position, adjusting and resetting a dislocated shoulder with a sickening snap. It paused, almost dazed, but then began gathering the assemblage of remains that had tumbled down with it.
It had yet to notice Garen in the shadows. The boy had slowed his breathing as best he could, taking shallow breaths. He gripped his spear so hard he worried for a moment that he was going to snap it in half. But the spear held and Garen continued to observe the strange display.
The ghoul had gathered the assemblage of parts into a pile and began to rise to unsteady feet, clumsily reaching for them. The ghoul’s fingers were in no way nimble; instead it relied on stiffened arms with cupped hands. After a moment, it had completed its work and began to step lazily north, toward Garen. It hadn’t seen him, at least as far as the boy could tell. Without hesitation, Garen thrust the spear forward with all of his strength, shoving the tip right into the face of the ghoul, just at the rotting nose, and pierced into the head. Garen rapidly shook the spear tip to scramble its brains and swiftly withdrew it with a steady hand, a ribbon of gore lingering from skull to spear until it finally broke and plopped. Within a moment, the ghoul collapsed, and the hands, feet, and the head it carried spilled onto the tunnel floor.
Garen did not recognize the person to which the head had once belonged. It was little comfort. He chose not to linger and pushed further into the tunnel, putting as much distance between himself and the earthen chute as he could.
…
He could not be sure where he was relative to the surface. While Old Gordhurst was not a large town, it had seemed that way to him as a child in the time before fleeing from it. Childhood memories did little to give him a sense of where he was, and he was growing increasingly convinced that somehow he had become turned around with the tunnel. He knew it was impossible; he’d only been walking in one direction, and the curves of the tunnel did not seem particularly tight or looping, but he still worried that he’d become turned around somehow. Between the darkness, the echoes of the undead, and the unholy green trails, it was not surprising he’d begun second-guessing his route.
The few ghouls he’d encountered so far told him that this tunnel system had given the Necromancer an incredible amount of reach. Garen had only followed one path, and it seemed like it had gone on and on. He’d not strayed into other major lanes, but if they existed, that meant this tangle was so much larger than he could comprehend. Even the path he was on seemed like it would not end anytime soon. Whole legions of the dead could be moved around, and if they were still digging, who knew how far the Necromancer could reach?
The grim realization of this all was this: they were likely beneath New Gordhurst even now, maybe for a long time.
The people of New Gordhurst would need to know about this; he needed to survive and get back to them, to warn them of what all this was – an invasion. As far as Garen could piece together, the tunnels would allow the ghouls to tirelessly spread further and further from Old Gordhurst and out into the surrounding lands, creating spaces where ghouls could emerge and harvest whatever it was the Necromancer needed. As Garen had gathered, these chutes were a tool for the harvest. Garen was not quite sure of what these green magical trails meant, but they were certainly a key part to all of this.
Soon, the boy came upon another chute dug into the earth above him, and like the last one, it was out of reach. The only thing that broke up the similarity between this chute and others was the presence of heavy, gnarled roots emerging from the tunnel wall, just past the hole.
In the center of the rough-hewn chamber were remains scattered beneath the chute and bathed in sickly light. Nothing together enough to function as a ghoul, but Garen gave it as wide a berth as he could as he worked his way toward the roots. He stopped before them and took them in. They were thick roots, some-nearly as thick as his waist in some cases, and about as thick as his arm in most. They had heavy, knuckle-like joints, and spreading off those roots were much thinner, finer ones, similarly gnarled and drawn like an uneven curtain. Many dangled from the soil and stone above like burlap strands.
He had a suspicion he knew where he was, looking at these strange roots.
He remembered his parents taking him and Corea to a large tree a couple of miles south of town, not long before the fall of Gordhurst. They had been quite upset those days, and as Garen remembered, the strange tree was a place of respite because his father loved plants and his mother loved the forest. These were not the same thing; he recalled his father constantly writing and drawing about plants, while his mother preferred to wander.
He wished he’d had his father’s writings and drawings. But such was the past. In the present, he knew these roots for what they were.
It was the Knuckle Tree. Garen remembered climbing the branches and being yelled at for climbing too high. He would hide among the giant roots at the surface and chase Corea around, who would shriek when he found her. He’d heard his father say once that the tree was a stranger to the forest – older than most things in the area, but not of the land.
The trunk had been broad, wide, and flat, ringed by strange branches that rose up, angular and joint-like, to a broad canopy of reddish-brown leaves. Thinking about it now, the tree resembled a hand with far too many fingers rising, the tips exploding into large blotches of red, flat leaves. The exposed roots had resembled a hand digging into the earth itself, as though the tree was to be plucked from the ground.
Garen studied one of the thickest roots in the darkened tunnel as it tore from the soil at the makeshift wall and plunged back into the floor. He touched one of the angles and felt the folds, taking a moment to compare the root to the back of his hands. He folded and flexed his fingers, watching the skin on his knuckles wrinkle and stretch with his movements. This was the Knuckle Tree.
The smaller threads of roots that tendriled out from the larger ones began to shift, as though a breeze had suddenly caught them. But there was no airflow, let alone enough to make that so. Garen peered into the gaps and spaces between the roots to see there was a pocket of nothing – a seeming gap that dug into the wall of soil ringed by more roots. He began to spread away a curtain of finer threads with the tip of his spear, marveling at the delicate forms seemingly wrapping themselves along the point, beckoning him forward. From within the darkened space there was a glow. Not the unholy green he’d become accustomed to, but something purple and blue and red, shifting and fading and pulsing. Inviting.
Before he knew it, the larger roots enveloped him with soft creaks, pulling him into a hug, pulling him into the space between. The thinner threads clung to his body, doing their part.
He found himself released into the space, unharmed, staring at glowing threads that weaved along soil and the tree itself, the very edges of this space taking on pale green light, as though the tree were fighting the influence of the Necromancer’s magic. The air felt cool and smelled of good, fertile soil.
Garen did not understand why, but he turned his back to the glow and fell into it, and was nestled by roots, dirt, and rocks. He took a deep breath and felt safe for the first time in a long time. Maybe years, even. He leaned back, peering through the curtain into the larger tunnel. If these were his final moments, so be it. He thought of that family outing.
A severe crackle and whine stirred him from his moment of peace, and he shifted to look toward the source, which was just on the other side of the space where the remains of who knows who were sitting, rotting. More remains tumbled in from the earthen chute, and Garen kept very quiet, his eyes drawn to the vibrant green glow on a wall near the pile. It was popping and flashing little bursts of green, as loud cracks punctuated each one.
One of the tendrils of green began to widen, like a cut being ripped open, like pulling the hide from a pig. The jagged tearing of unholy magic did not seem to disturb the soil around it. Garen watched and listened to the cacophony of energy dance around the widening vein for a few seconds. He nearly yelped as the first limbs began to emerge from the tear – too many limbs.
This was not any undead form Garen had seen before. This abomination seemed to be an unsteady collage of several bodies. He kept quiet as he peered through the rooted curtain. What he saw was a torso that was too long, one chest stacked upon another, and two sets of elongated arms. The arms had too many joints, bending and flexing in spider-like motions The two uppermost arms ended with small hands that gave way to fingers, more fingers than should be on a hand, that were all very long and filed into extremely delicate points. The lower arms had broader hands that were more like claws, with fingers arranged like pincers, splayed outward.
The neck had also been stretched, the vertebrae exposed and reinforced by what seemed like leather and wires. It had to be two feet long. The head was still mostly flesh aside from what appeared to be a leather skullcap sewn directly into the skin and a myriad of lenses suspended over the eyes, each supported by a spindly array of thin metal tubes. As the creature emerged from the portal, Garen had watched the most delicate fingers on the left hand adjust the lenses.
The last of the feet were free from the portal – all six of them. The creature’s waist had been ball-like in his roundness, but with three pairs of legs radiating outward, insect-like. The construct rocked and wobbled unsteadily, too tall for the tunnel, needing to lean forward. It planted its two bottom arms against the tunnel walls to steady itself as the top chest folded downward over the lower chest. It was leaning in to inspect the remains below the chute.
The vein that had been torn open had begun to suture itself shut, returning to the size it had been as Garen passed it earlier. Had Garen not witnessed this creature emerge, it would be hard to believe that vein had been stretched into some sort of doorway.
The creature had been composed of many body parts, but also the sheer amount of non-bodily components made Garen sick. Thread, leather, wood, copper… it seemed that the effort to graft these forms together was so great any number of other materials had been attached to the structure to reinforce it. It was a form so twisted that it had to be braced like a wagon, just to remain upright. Even the torsos were braced by a heavy cord and rod, along the spine, like a tension line. Garen could see this as the creature had been hunched over, still sorting through the parts.
Fuck, Garen mouthed to himself.
He was terrified, but somehow still thinking rationally. He was confident. He felt this small space, a space apart from the tunnel, seemingly breathe with him. Steady. He felt himself feeling one with the space as he watched this creature arrange parts in the dim light under the earthen chute.
Something had to be done. He couldn’t suffer this threat to live, not when he knew this tunnel would be leading south, to his home. To his sister. Was this atrocity the Necromancer? Garen did not know, but he figured he would within moments. He tightened his grip on his spear and began to work his way to the curtain of roots. The space did not resist him or try to pull him back. His spear tip was the first thing to return into the tunnel proper, and then him, steady and silent.
This creature did not seem to notice him, and that gave him the courage to push forward. He would really only have one shot at this. There was no running. Not anymore.
The spider-like corpse shifted, a pair of delicate hands pulling at thread on its apparent hip, tightening the slack that supported the overlong torso. It returned to sorting.
Garen, too, felt a tension. He glanced back toward the roots and saw the thinnest roots were still attached to him in spots, even though he had moved away. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt comforted by that.
And with that, he stepped further and struck. He slid his spear between the creature’s back and the supporting tension rod, hooking the cord and pulling back as much as he could. The snagged line pulled and did not cut, extending the torso and pulling it back so far that it snapped at the joint where one chest met the other. All the while the strange construct flailed with the sharpest claws, lashing out fiolently and blindy as the two massive lower claws dug further into the tunnel walls to remain rooted in place. The uppermost part of the torso flopped over, the long neck whipping as the head chattered in anger.
Garen continued to pull. The upper chest began to tear from the lower one, and the construct now had enough of a presence of mind to begin lashing its arms toward Garen. The claws released from the wall and tried to steady the corso, fumbling at holding it upright and pulling against the boy. Garen felt himself pulled toward the mass of limbs, getting raked several times by the sharpened fingers that had been flailing at him. He felt a huge gash across his chest, even through the boiled leather armor, and felt blood pooling. He saw deep cuts on his arms.
He felt himself being pulled away from the ghoul, now. His grip remained firm on his spear and he put his full strength into it, plus more, as the roots began to entwine his body and pull with him.
And then it was done. A final jerk and the torso had snapped completely, along with the support rod. Garen fell back onto the damp tunnel floor, his arms burning with exhaustion and sticky from seeping blood. Without hesitation he climbed to his feet and ran toward the flailing, broken monstrosity. He could not dodge anything as he threw himself toward the skull. Garen’s body took every jagged slash and thrashing strike as he fell in range with the creature’s head. The creature’s neck whipped wildly as Garen approached, but he slammed his boot into it, holding it down and shoving the spear into the leather cap atop the crown of the skull. The leather split easily and there was no resistance as the skull cap had been removed. All motion instantly stopped as Garen stood over the horror, panting and bloodied. He collapsed onto his ass, breathing huge, gasping breaths, as he saw the spear remain firmly planted in the skull of the construct.
After a few moments he looked to see that there had been no roots clinging to him. He rose, his knees weak, and made his way back to the space where he had been out of sight, only to see the largest of the roots were dried out and the space was scarcely big enough to hide him.
All that remained of what he had experienced in the tree were flowing tendrils of purple and blue that were rapidly dimming as the unnatural green overtook them. And within a few seconds, the strange green veins were all that was left beyond rotting roots.
Garen felt a loss he could not quite explain.
He looked at his spear, lodged into the creature. The space was bathed in dim light from the corpse chute above. His spear called to him. There would be no going back. He thought of his sister and his parents. He thought of Donnel, Mr. Gorten, and the other folks of New Gordhurst. He wiped away what blood and mud from his body that he could. He collected his spear and marched back into darkness, back the way he came.
He made his peace as he followed the green veins to their source.
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