by Tara Maya
It was a bog mummy. Dindi had heard of such things but had never had the ill fortune to encounter one before. Nasty fae who were caught by humans were sprinkled with salt, tied down with stones, and left in bogs. Salt ate away all their flesh, leaving nothing but bones, but as with burning in a kiln, it could only keep their immortal bodies dead for a few dozen decades. Slowly their magic flesh would rebuild itself—rotting in reverse, as it were.
The bog mummy must have been here for decades, perhaps even centuries, tied down at the bottom of the bog until Dindi had inadvertently cut him free. This was no naughty pixie. He was as tall as a human, a head taller than Dindi. Though his flesh was eroded with sog, and in places, completely eaten away, his body structure was mostly intact. His rib cage was a gaping hole, with disgusting pulp oozing inside, garishly aglow. Half of his head was rotted away. Nevertheless, his resemblance to a human corpse in the process of steady deterioration was deceptive, because the fae would actually continue to grow more and more whole with each passing year.
His eyes gleamed with a feral light. Talons protruded from gruesomely veined hands. Dindi could see no more of the fae’s true substance, so thickly was he encrusted with mud and crumbling peat.
No time for screaming. Dindi skipped back from her assailant, trying to find room to dance, but the waterlogged cranberry vines betrayed her, tangling her ankles. She fell back. The bog mummy grabbed Dindi by the hair and whipped her around so that she now fell towards him. With a raspy roar, he wrapped a desquamated arm around her neck. He squeezed.
Agonizing pain jolted through her.
The mummy did not just strangle her. It sucked the light from her aura. She felt herself wilting, and saw the mummy gaining flesh and strength. The face flushed into life. Less and less did it resemble a corpse. More and more, it grew into a handsome young man, now with just one rotted cheek, with wings like a dragonfly and an aura of six Chromas.
The thing was no ordinary bog mummy, no simple fae trapped and left to decay.
It was an Aelfae.
But that’s impossible.
Time slowed. She could see nothing but bright dots in a haze. The mummy’s squelching steps thundered loudly in her ears. Her heart felt too tight. Her lungs felt ready to burst.
Then someone punched the mummy in its putrid cheek. Umbral, thank Mercy! The mummy did not release Dindi, but its grip was loosed enough for her to gasp for a breath.
With a growl, Umbral splashed into the bog and bodily attacked the mummy, slashing at it with the ax which Dindi had dropped. Umbral chopped off the arm that held her by the throat.
The disconnected arm still did not release its grip.
Dindi stumbled from the rest of the mummy. The animate arm continued to do its best to choke her, but for all its enthusiasm, it now lacked effective homicidal leverage. She ripped it off her and threw it on the ground where it flopped around indignantly.
A hissing screech, almost too high-pitched to hear, made Dindi wince and cover her ears. Threads of blackest shadow streamed from the mummy’s mouth, like a snake’s black tongue, as if it were sucking in the lifeforce of the whole world. The vile tongue of darkness lashed out and curled around Dindi’s ankle.
Another jolt of shear pain racked her body. Once again, she felt her energy draining out of her body. The mummy regrew its lost arm. The hole in its cheek healed over. There was no mistaking the mummy now: an Aelfae lord, in all his shining power and glory, his lip curled in an arrogant sneer. The more power he stole from her, the stronger he glowed and the fiercer he glowered.
“Behold, I have returned to Faearth, mud-made human scum!” the Aelfae bellowed. “Now you and all your kind shall pay the uncounted deathdebts you owe my kind!”
Umbral sliced the black coil around her ankle. The tongue of darkness thrashed, but he grabbed it and knotted it, which made it wither up and withdraw.
“Go on, go, get out of here!” Umbral ordered Dindi.
“But you—”
“It can’t take Chromas from me, it’s after you!” Umbral shouted. “Go!”
The Aelfae launched onto Umbral’s back, its claws digging at his eyes.
“Watch out!” Dindi cried, too late.
Umbral flipped the Aelfae off him, but it came right back, clawing and kicking. When Dindi hedged closer to help, Umbral shouted angrily, “It feeds on your light! The only way you can help is to get out of here! That is a command!”
He was right. The Aelfae lashed out its terrible tongue again. It strove to reach her. She had to skip backwards to evade the questing tendril of darkness, while Umbral wrestled the Aelfae alone.
The Aelfae’s unnatural tongue did not bleed where sliced. It lashed out again, this time to strangle Umbral. Perhaps it could not suck any light from the Deathsworn warrior, but the Aelfae could choke him. Or drown him. The mummy dived deeper into the water, dragging Umbral down after it.
“No!” Dindi screamed.
Bubbles and ripples marked the water where they disappeared, and then the still surface of the water reflected only the gray sky.
The surface broke: something was flung out of the water, to land on the shore.
The ax.
Torn with indecision, she almost dove after them. But what if the Aelfae sought to lure her down to gain more power? The silence dragged on and she could not bear to do nothing any longer. No human could survive under water so long. She grabbed the ax and splashed into the bog.
The mummy burst out of the water. There was no sign of Umbral. Terrified, she realized the Aelfae had drowned him. Now it reached for her.
Umbral
The undead Aelfae dragged Umbral under the slimy surface of the bog.
Liquid darkness pushed in on him. The Aelfae grappled Umbral’s jaws open, forcing him to swallow water. His lungs exploded. The agony lasted endlessly. A wave of dizziness spilled into the pain. The Aelfae held him down, patiently waiting for him to drown.
A lost memory floated with him in the darkness. He didn’t know if it was his own or a thread cut loose from one of his victims. Watery darkness…a struggle against a huge and terrible foe…as large as a house... a shark. For days he had fought the fae shark, but how had he survived that long underwater? Perhaps it was not a memory at all, but a hallucination. The pain was intense, yet he was beginning to feel giddy.
Umbral knew he was on the edge of joining his dark Lady.
But he did not.
Gills opened inside his throat.
He gulped the water like air. It tasted foul and pungent, but it also reeled him back from the edge. He stopped thrashing, let himself relax, and, finally, the Aelfae released him. It must have thought he was dead.
Umbral opened his eyes under water. The murk did not allow much visibility, but the Aelfae mummy glowed with power. Umbral swam after it until they both reached the shallows again.
Umbral kept low in the water until he could brace his feet between two rocks. Then he grabbed the Aelfae’s legs and flipped him upside down. In the next swift motion, Umbral picked up both rocks and smashed the Aelfae’s head between them.
The head spit guts like a tossed pumpkin. Brains splattered on Umbral’s knees…but Aelfae’s head reknit almost as soon as it burst. It stood up, whole again, and rushed him.
Umbral blocked a series of jabs, then performed a takedown that flipped the mummy on its back in the water. Umbral smashed its nose in with his elbow. It should have been a killing blow, but the mummy just staggered back a few steps. Its nose straightened.
The Aelfae ripped a tree trunk out of the marsh water and bashed Umbral across the flank. He fell hard. His hands and knees sank into the muck under the shallows. The Aelfae jumped with both feet onto his back, slamming him even deeper into the slosh and mud. Umbral sputtered for breath again. There was too much dirt in the water for his gills to work and too much water in the air for his windpipe.
He squirmed forward. Made the mud work for him. The Aelfae could not hold on to him. Umbral surged back to his f
eet. The Aelfae cut him down to his knees again with slashing hand chops.
Out of the corner of his eye, Umbral caught sight of Dindi raising the ax. He wanted to shout at her to get out of there—why could she not follow the simplest of directions?—but dared not draw the Aelfae’s attention to her.
She hacked the ax into the Aelfae’s back.
Another killing wound completely wasted on the mucking undead thing.
Maybe not completely wasted.
The Aelfae was distracted only for the flicker of a moment, but at last Umbral realized what he had to do.
Moving close as if for an embrace, Umbral placed his hand flat against the Aelfae.
Umbral drew on his Penumbra more strongly than he ever had in his memory. He opened the void gathered around him. He wounded the very fabric of existence, which rippled, shuddersome, throughout the marsh and sky. He wrenched.
The handsome Aelfae lord opened his mouth in screamless shock. His skin disintegrated, the muscle beneath ripped and rotted, the bones beneath that yellowed and shattered into dust. For a heartbeat an unbearable, high pitched keening rent the sky, then deadened silence.
Nothing at all remained of the Aelfae.
Dindi
Dindi smashed the ax into the mummy’s back, but she could see it did no good. Even an ordinary fae would have died for a day from such a gash, but the mummy regenerated itself almost instantly from any insult.
Umbral stepped close to the mummy, but he did nothing more than touch it.
Darkness shrieked.
Waves of shadow rippled like waves in a disturbed lake. When the shadow swelled past Dindi, the taste was so vile she vomited. The dark was so intense, it hurt her eyes, the way staring at the sun would, and the sound, the impossibly high shriek, made her dizzy. Dindi folded into a ball, unable to bear the assault.
The mummy had been an undead thing, putrescent and revolting. But what Umbral did to him—though all Dindi could catch of it was a flash of light swallowed by a greater blackness—abased the very order of nature, removing what could not be removed, leaving only a gap behind.
The darkness passed, but she still felt sick. She stood on shaky legs, knee deep in mud. Where the mummy had been, there was now Nothing. The rest of the world rushed in to fill the chasm of nonexistence. Except for a lingering echo of profoundest defilement, Dindi would have thought she had imagined the whole thing.
Umbral sludged out of the water. The bog mummy had scored Umbral’s back with bloody gashes, before he had destroyed the monster so thoroughly and abominably. Umbral still reeked of whatever unclean power he had employed, and Dindi shrank away from him.
“What did you do?” she whispered in horror.
“I absorbed his light into the void,” Umbral said. “Killed him, the only way a fae truly can be killed.”
“But the fae are immortal.” Yet she had seen it—felt it—and knew he spoke true.
“The fae are Life itself,” Umbral said. His face was dead white and drawn into harsh lines. He stood very tall, and she had never seen him look colder, crueler or more dangerous. “But we are Death itself.”
“You used that Curse.”
“Yes. I used that Curse.”
“But why… how had he escaped the Curse in the first place? Why was he even here and why could we not kill him by ordinary means?”
He blinked at her as if waking from a trance. The utterly heartless, almost inhuman, expression on his face gave way to a wince of pain.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Umbral
Hours of daylight remained, but the dark energy Umbral had gathered from killing the Aelfae still burned inside him, and he had to decide what to do with it. While he pondered that question, he automatically winnowed the wind for threads, looking for any nearby humans or fae. Ash would have led the Wolf Hunter on a merry chase to the south by now, so there should be nothing from Finnadro’s aura, but Umbral expected to find the sparks from many fae.
The wind was empty. Seldom, except on the tallest mountains, which every fae except rock trolls and frost giants found inhospitable, had Umbral tasted such a barren atmosphere.
“I think we know what happened to the hobgoblins,” he said aloud. “The Aelfae absorbed them.”
As a Deathsworn might. But since when did Aelfae have that power?
Ha. Since when had the Aelfae started defying the Curse by returning to life?
Dindi did not understand the significance. She just shuddered.
Buried in the wind, Umbral found a thin wisp of magic, a clean taste, faintly minty, with a hint of wet fur. Had the rest of the air not been so empty of magic, he might have missed it. Once he tasted it, however, the whiff of wolf was unmistakable.
Finnadro.
Muck the man. Ash’s diversion hadn’t delayed him one step. Did nothing stop him?
Dindi had started a good fire, which crackled inside a shallow pit of stones. Brooding, Umbral plucked the brace of grouse he had shot in the morning, before his fight with the undead Aelfae. He avoided looking at Dindi. She was sequestering hot stones from the pit to boil water in their single clay pot. He could not forget the expression on Dindi’s face after he had used his power to bring mortality to the mummy. She had been less afraid of the mummy than of him.
After Umbral finished cleaning the birds, he reached up to snap branches from one of the trees to use as a spit. The deep gouges from the mummy’s claws sent tendrils of pain across his back. Gritting his teeth, he gathered the sticks and arranged the birds over the open fire.
He found Dindi hovering unexpectedly close to him. Since the fight, she had kept as much distance between them as she could without quitting his company entirely.
“Your back….”
“I’ll be fine,” he grunted.
“Your fine black wool tunic is all ripped up. The scratches are deep. You should let me look at it. Otherwise the wounds will fester.”
“It would do my wounds little good to have you vomit all over them.”
Dindi blushed, as he had expected, but she didn’t give way. “I took my Initiation in Yellow Bear. I know something of healing herbs and remedies.”
Umbral gauged her determination for a long moment and finally shrugged.
“If you insist.”
“Have you the herbs for Yellow magic in your packs?” Dindi went to the bags and began to rummage through them. “Never mind, I found what I want.”
“Oh, good, make yourself at home with my things.”
“Perhaps you prefer to sit there and bleed?”
“As a matter of fact…”
“Oh, honestly.” Dindi returned to his side. “I think you’re just afraid it will sting.”
“It’s going to sting?”
“You’ll have to remove your tunic,” she said.
He unlaced his tunic on one side, shouldering out of it with a flinch. The air was chilly, but not terribly so for the season. He would not have been uncomfortable except for the self-consciousness he felt baring his back to her examination. He remembered the way she had gasped at his scars the night they spent in the lodge.
She did not gasp now, but her brow furrowed. She traced the old scars welted into his flesh. There were even more on his back than on his chest.
“Do you fight monsters often?”
“It gives me something to do.”
“Is that how you became Henchman of the Black Lady?”
Umbral grabbed her arm, pulled her around and stared into her face. She met his eyes, challenging.
“Aren’t you? How else could you wield that Curse? You’re no ordinary Deathsworn.”
“I suppose,” he said slowly. “I never considered in that way before. She is not like the other Ladies. One does not have a choice to serve her or not.”
“I imagine not,” Dindi said. “Who would choose death?”
“You misunderstand,” said Umbral. “I did choose death. All of us who serve Obsidian Mountain would have preferred death. We wer
e given no choice but to live.”
He became aware that he clenched her arm. Embarrassed, he released her. His fingers left white shadows of themselves on her flesh. “Sorry.”
“For what? What you’ve done? Or for what you’re going to do?” she asked.
That question cut the throat of the matter a bit too sharply for his taste. He smiled without humor and did not reply. She returned his un-smile like a dare.
“Why didn’t you obey me?” he asked. “Why did you attack the Aelfae with the ax?”
“It looked like it was going to kill you.”
“You were trying to save my life?” His brows rose.
She blushed and busied herself mixing the herbs in her little pot of boiled water. With a soft sheepskin rag, she dabbed mixture onto the gashes in his back with gentle efficiency. She dressed the wound with sphagnum moss and a strip of wool which she tied around his chest. For the most part she was careful not to otherwise touch him, but every now and again, her soft fingertips grazed his flesh. That tantalizing hint of a caress was enough to flood his mind with wild urges to turn and pin her down with kisses in the soft moss and show her hands other places they might venture.
I need not make her sick, he thought. He would break down her defenses, feeding her own light back to her until she was overwhelmed with the exact emotions he wanted her to feel for him. Not only would that keep her tranquilized, it would multiply his physical delight in her by the pleasure he felt when he tapped into her magic.
Because of the direction of his desires, Umbral thought at first that he imagined it: a soft, multihued glow reaching out for him shyly, promising warmth and surcease and contentment in place of the cold, colorless void that perpetually sheathed him. When the light filled his empty aura, it was a bliss that surpassed even the pleasure he found when leaching light from another person’s aura for his own use. For a moment, he could not understand what was happening.
Then it dawned on him. Jolted with alarm, Umbral shoved out the intruding light with his shadow as he scrambled to his feet and away from Dindi.
She just sat there, stunned, staring up at him with wide eyes—the very picture of innocence.
