Rainclouds often hung too low to pass over the Nice Mountains, and drenched instead the surrounding foothills. Flux felt the last of the drizzle bounce and steam from his surface as the clouds finally broke, revealing that familiar, cold sunlight that heralds the long drying-out.
"Enough skulking. Come, hairknots. Our duties are not over."The triplet fiberlings heeded his call, picking their way over the new grasses with most of their mass held gingerly high above the sodden mud, tangling and bristling irritably. It was a strange thing, to see a fiberling bristle with its whole body, but though he was patient enough, Flux had little time for their antics. He hoped dearly that they would not break back to their grotto as soon as he gave them any slack. It was a thin hope.
This was the last rain of a clammy day and night, and it seemed to have finished the job of filling the great dykes of Grot's footprints with water. A few were only puddles. Most, marking the line of his run, were metres deep. And the two that lay where the Demon King's feet had dug into the ground as he finally fell were, indeed, nearly lakes.
Mud would soon fill the shallow pools, Flux knew. Thousands of heavy battle feet had stripped the plain of grass. Both sides of Urtelem, especially, had gouged apart the flora as they moved. The oil-spirit had much to do if this place were to be restored to splendour. This was just the start.
For all their complaints, the fiberlings did go about their assigned business. It was a rare task, this, that Flux would not rather assign to the Mockdjinn. Especially not now. They had earned his highest respect in the dark day they had dubbed 'the breaking of the peoples', an ugly, subtle set of signs with connotations of earthquake fissures and heartbreak, and 'peoples', the sign being plural for two, referring, of course, to their own divided kind. It was what some had already started calling Angelblood Ridge. A hollow name, for such grief.
No, Flux held the Urtelem close to his heart, and he would not interrupt their time of mourning for petty responsibilities or trivial harm. A matriarch was gone, struck down in her prime. Every single survivor now bore scars, wounds which were no less debilitating for being cracked into rock. More than twenty others lay broken, now sleeping deep in the earth. Many had been parents. There were children who had started refusing to eat.
Besides, fiberlings, those mute sadists, were good at this. There was nothing about a rotting corpse that reviled them. Their senses were keen and they worked fast. If anything, they thoroughly enjoyed the process of tickling a dead warrior to see if it would move, and if it did, lurking around like three huge sharks until Flux allowed them to tear it apart.
Carrion crows had come, gorged, and bloated until they could no longer move. Maggots were too slow. The dead lay unburied and undisturbed, and without Flux, those fated to rise again could simply get up and kill like the war had never ended.
The softly luminescent liquid spirit was hundreds of years old, if not a thousand, and had buried many drowned bodies in time. Yet never had he seen such a proportion of undead. Grot's sorcery had seeped out of him and into the very dirt where his army collapsed. Most, true, were altogether harmless, even some from the horde. To these, death had been a harsh lesson, one taken to heart. Flux made them pledge a solemn oath of peace and reparation, repeated until he was satisfied it was genuine.
Those who woke up and still thought violence could help them cling to an overdue soul, well. That was one thing fiberlings could do reliably enough.
Flux cupped some water from a puddle and poured it over the face of the latest to rise. She was a goblin, or had been. Her neck sat at an odd angle, and most of her bulky chest and shoulder had been crushed. More importantly, her limbs worked, even if she clearly didn't have enough lung left to talk in more than a rasp.
Spluttering, not yet aware that the need to breathe was over, the goblin began scraping her arms on the dirt, slowly gaining strength. A fibreling touched the tips of her fingers and Flux flicked it away as she tried to speak.
"'uk're eeeyou?""My name is Flux, of the Fractal Sea. Tell, quickly- How much memory do you still retain?""Mem'ry o' wot, ya jibb'rn freak?"Patience, now. Either dignity would return, or it would not. For all the muck and slander involved, waking up the dead was never boring. Flux no longer heeded insults, and his ascendant curiousity always picked out something different about each awakening.
"There was a battle.""Pfyeh, an' I died in it. Doncha hav'ny fresh news?"This one was remarkably quick on the uptake. If the goblin turned out to be a keeper, Flux would let her talk to some of the other repentant horde warriors. Some of them believed everything he told them, other than that they were dead.
"I see you would prefer it if I made haste. Very well, goblin, answer this: Should I spirit you away into the village of the one who killed you, at night, and put in your right hand a burning torch, and in the left a knife, what should you make of yourself?""I'd drop 'em both and drag 'er outta bed just to punch 'er in the face, ya goddam smart-tits sponkus, an' then drown yer ass in 'er pisspot. My name's Yulosi, not 'goblin,' ya daft soggy blob."The test, of course, was not so much whether the undead would choose to take revenge so much as they would extend it to innocents. By either measure Yulosi passed with superb credentials, even if courteous society would clearly remain forever beyond her, and she still spoke as if she was a conscientious objector to the letter 'h'. Flux decided that this one could stay without further screening. All he needed was the oath.
"Acknowledged. However, in order t-"One of the fiberlings was gone. Almost instantly it was followed by another, the third on its heels. Flux whirled, abandoned Yulosi, and swept after them in a gliding motion, leaving a streak of light. Not as fast as the hair monsters, the wing-like shape nonetheless held onto their trail close enough to see what they were sprinting over the damp earth for.
Ashling.
And yet, though they drew closer in measured instants, Flux alone saw that it was more than that, or less.
"Halt!"It was too slow to be a true Ashling. Too calm. Too bright. It had the form of what had been a mountain goat, at least up to the neck.
"HALT!"The disembodied predators slowed, momentarily, at the force of Flux's command. It was enough. At an ungodly sprint the Sculptor veered to the fore of the lead fibreling and snapped himself at it like a whip, the sound ricocheting into the distant ridge, and the whole world blurred with their speed as they tumbled over one another in a cloud of drifting hair detached by the shock of impact.
Flux recovered before the fiberling and watched it scatter to reclaim its missing filaments. The others circled him, distrustful, edging slowly towards the not-quite-ashling on either side. He backed up to match them. There were no organs in him to choke, no solids to tear. He feared not.
"This is not an ashling."In the distance, Yulosi was running after them. The fiberlings silently judged. They knew what they saw.
"This is not an ashling!"With that Flux smacked the glassy flank of the entity, sharply, and it staggered, its lower body lilting, top-heavy. It wobbled and backed away, making no move against him, failing to reform the thin crack that had been split in its side.
"Look! Gaze upon it with what semblance of a brain you hide in all that filthy shag! It is feeble and dim of mind!"They were slowing, at last, realising that whatever its appearances, this shambling, brittle piece of work was no real threat to the biosphere, and certainly far less of a threat to
them than the oily black faery-charmer. Their sibling had taken its hair and fled to find dry ground, and they reluctantly turned and followed it.
Yulosi was catching up, tireless with zombie vigour. Flux composed himself, his vivid sunset glow dulling somewhat. This one was unusual.
"You have returned.""Well, shit." She seemed to be questioning the wisdom of her decision.
"Good. Remain where you are." Yulosi promptly ignored the command and sidled in front of him, towards the curious organism. In a strange move, Flux's halo of fae also made their way to its body, their downwards-balanced blades resting on it with small tinking sounds.
"'ell is this?"From the neck down, the goat's body had suffered the same brittle blight as any other ashling, at least in shape. Glassy plates scratched over one another along fracture lines that had been joints, and there were pockmarks and cavities where the material had reforged itself under strain. Its colour was clearer than other ashlings, revealing the delicate organosiliceous structures beneath. Where there should have been a head, the neck only branched and cracked, spreading, like a flat-topped tree upon which the fae were perched, into a wide, heavy crystal matrix, in a translucent scarlet that could only be called
blood. The closer he looked, the more Flux could see the semblance of
veins and
nodes in the construct, shades of red and black no less beautiful for their grisly origin.
Yulosi rested her palm on the once-goat. It shuffled at her touch, turning slightly, as if to direct its faceless gaze towards hers.
"'sdead," she announced.
"Died 'fore it got turned. 's n' arrow shaft in it."It was rare enough that a mortal noticed something accurately before Flux, much less a dead woman. As soon as he looked, he saw that it was indeed so. Black flint and a line of wood was visible beneath the smoky glass, sealed seamlessly by transformation.
"A commendable observation, Yulosi," he conceded graciously,
"but I require from you an oath of peace before I allow you to continue. Some hearts, once lost to the horde, do not turn; Even in death.""Don' do oaths." Yulosi didn't even look at him. Her hands stroked the head-branches of the mysterious creature, tapping aside the fae that settled there, casting strange shadows.
"Would that I could offer exemption! No, Yulosi, my precautions must be given fairly. All who rise again shall promise amends for the tragedy. I demand no more than this: Only that the wounded earth shall be healed.""Or what? Y'll kill me?" Yulosi glanced up and smirked with the side of her mouth. Her left tusk had been chipped in the battle, and that only made it sharper.
"If you wish. I respect your values, and I have no qualms with holding you to them. It is the only alternative.""Really? How 'boutcha 'splain t'me what this is then?" With her free hand, Yulosi abruptly pinched one of the fae by the base of its blade, ink running down her fingers, and impaled it into her other wrist, already comfortable with the death of her body. When the goblin withdrew the hand with which she had been examining the not-quite-ashling, its fingertips were coated in
glassy green, the shade of her skin, no doubt, when she had lived.
"Didjoo come up with that? Nah. Didn't think so. Grows on undead meat, zombie meat. 'ts a pox, a barnacle. All it wants is... Vigour. What faeries suck up."Yulosi cackled.
"Lis'n up, Flux. I'm make a deal wit'choo. Yulosi don't wanna kill no more. She just wants to live 'er life, keh keh. So how 'bout you just take me to the nearest Rockman nest n' jus' let 'em take me out if they see black on my dear zombie 'eart? Y'want peace wit' me? That's how you get it."There was a silence. Then Flux looped a sleek fluid limb around the neck of the goat-like creature and began to lead the placid thing back to the ridge.
"Very well, Yulosi. Do not leave my sight. Do not betray my trust.""Keh keh keh! Wontcha look't that?" Yulosi yanked the faery from her wrist and tossed it back into Flux's halo.
"Smart-tits blob knows what's best for 'im." Flux maintained a dignified cool.
Yulosi's cackling piped down after a while. Soon the two were solemn. She looked at the Sculptor, mouth a flat line, and cocked her chin.
"Ask it, Flux.""You are observant.""Don' need a big brain to guess when it's the same damn question ev'ry time.""You are observant," repeated Flux,
"and fear nought, and I do not believe it's stupidity that makes you so. Though you drawl out of habit, to blend in, you speak as one who recognises wisdom, and sees it in herself, and judges truely. You are different."Yulosi sighed. Without thinking, she snapped her fingers by her side. For a dying moment there flickered the smallest imaginable spark, an ephemeral ember lost in the night.
"Don't you underestimate us Gobbos, blob. But you aren't wrong. I'm part 'zibo. When the Defiling Demon came to the Rovaick in the distant days, when we were weak and hid in caverns, it fucked us, and it fucked our bloodlines. Some have those blighted souls among their ancestors, and most are still sick. I was born lucky."Yulosi spat, though her mouth was dry. Flux looked at her, and began to see that the horrible bend in her neck was not a battle wound.
"Does the Demon have a name?""Does. We don't say it 'cept when the rites n' Council call us to curse a traitor. 'ts a harsh curse, so we don' say it much. His name is Yah Vuh.""...I see." Flux bowed himself in memory for the victims, and the two walked in silence.
Some time passed.
"Flux?"Yulosi was looking back and forth between her crystallised fingers and the mineralised mountain goat.
"I think this is food." She splintered off a brittle vein from the entity, crunching it between her teeth, clearly regretting that death had robbed her of her Rovaick taste for stones.
"I think what this 'ere zombie glass tree-goat is growin' is some sorta... Rockman fruit."And she was right.
Vec
Timemaster
The irony is delicious. I love it.