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hexmixthe fun thing about writing this one has been the worldbuilding, which i honestly wasn't expecting to have to do much of and then i ended up 1) writing poetry and 2) coming up with a folktale on the fly. was having fun with it tho :p
quick warning for: gross bugs (parasites)
The caravan stopped for the night some ways past the walled city of Eversdin. Its merchant owner sought him out by his small fire, lowering the great bulk of his body to sit there next to where Ethan squatted, stoking embers.
The man had been titled, and so Ethan had tried to avoid him as much as possible on their journey, but it seemed that wasn’t currently an option.
The man grunted, settling himself into what looked to be a rather uncomfortable position; Ethan didn’t think he’d ever even seen him step down from his carriage, and now here he was, sitting right there next to him in the dirt.
“You’ll continue on alone, then?” the man asked him.
Ethan had been casting glances at him from the corner of his eye. Turned to stare resolutely at the fire. “I said I would.”
“Nothing I can say to convince you to reconsider, I assume?” the man said.
“No,” Ethan agreed, “Nothing.” Wasn’t really sure why the man would even want to; Ethan had traded travel with the caravan for work as a guard, but he hadn’t been needed in all the weeks they’d been crossing the Wildlands. As far as this man was concerned, he should have been little more than a wasted investment.
“It’s not so easy to return,” the man said musingly, “once you go out as far as you aim to.”
Ethan bristled. What did this fucker even think he knew about where Ethan was going? Ethan sure as shit hadn’t told him.
“Don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Ethan grumbled, regret spiking acidic and much too late. The man was fucking titled.
But the merchant only chuckled. “I take it as my business to offer fair warning, Winter. I’ve been on these roads for years. Decades. It’s a kind of hell that awaits you out there, one of the dark ones. The cold ones. There are no signposts, no gates. So I take it upon myself to give you that last opportunity.”
Ethan shoved the stick deep into the fire and turned to face him. “For what?” he asked, fighting to keep the frown off his face.
“To turn back,” the merchant said. He smiled then, not unkindly. “Whatever your business beyond the Wildlands, I’d merely ask that you think it through one last time. Once you cross that border, you won’t be returning. At least–” he said quickly, just as Ethan opened his mouth to refute him, “not the same as you were.”
Ethan snorted. He’d heard the stories too. Old wives tales. Ghost stories children tried to spook each other with. “Thanks for the concern,” he said, and turned his attention back to the fire.
The man hummed, possibly in acknowledgment, and began the laborious process of getting back to his feet. “Take a few days' rations from our stores,” he said, voice a little strained with his efforts. “Consider it a gift, or, if you prefer, an investment in your future services, should we meet again.”
“Thank you,” Ethan said, trying not to sound as begrudging as he felt; who knew what the man was actually after. Experience told him it’d be nothing good, but he’d be an idiot to refuse all the same.
The man bowed his head, a surprisingly graceful motion, and stepped back into the darkness beyond the dim glow of the fire.
+
It was all moorland beyond Eversdin. Wavy, fogged over hills greeted him in the morning, and then the morning after. He walked on foot, having left the caravan-loaned horse behind with no small amount of regret.
But, even if he’d been able to afford to buy it off the merchant, it wouldn’t last for long beyond the moor.
From everything he’d been told, the hills would give way to a forest, and the forest to a bog. Beyond that–
Well, going by the stories after that he could expect anything from the land of the dead and dying to one of the endless hells, just as the merchant had claimed. Ghostlands and monsters.
Ethan knew better than to put any stock in it beyond the fact that the land beyond the Wildlands was going to be dangerous. Ghost stories alone weren’t enough to keep the Road and merchants at bay, after all, so there had to be something there.
He’d be finding out what, one way or another.
+
Mia’s amulet was the chill of frigid metal against his throat; a little circle of ice pinned there between skin and shirt collar. Sometimes it almost seemed to hold his voice in. Like a spell.
He was very careful not to touch it, even though he wanted to; found a strange kind of reassurance in it.
But such a motion would tell the man across from him that he had something valuable on him.
He was a rat-sharp creature; pale with patchy, close-shorn hair and too-thin clothes for the weather. A bandit, Ethan guessed. Or some unlucky thief or exile.
“Pretty thing to find all the way out here,” he said, his voice thick with the accent of the Urdish Mountains.
“I’ll bet,” Ethan said, palm fitted to the pommel of his sword. “You gonna get out of my way?”
The man grinned, revealing rotting teeth. “Don’t think I will, no,” he said, and Ethan drew his sword. The man eyed it, grin widening. “Well,” he said, drawing the word into several extra syllables.
His fingers, white and knob-knuckled and boney, twitched at his side.
And to Ethan’s left something exploded.
He dove into the loamish earth, pin-pricks of heat scattering up his side, forcing himself into a roll, surprised but moving as habit, head up to get his bearings and–
Another explosion–closer–heat and pressure and it knocked him back–wind whooshing out of him–treeroots digging into his back–his sword–
He scrambled for it, vision a little blurry, moving too slow–
A thin-soled boot slammed into his hand, pinning it in the dirt mere inches from his blade.
A voice came to him–garbled through the ringing of his ears. He knew it was the man but he couldn’t make out the words.
Left hand at the scabbard strapped to his thigh. Knife hilt in hand just as one of those boney hands grabbed a handful of his hair and tugged.
He let his head be pulled back so he could see and plunged the knife into the man’s thigh.
He screamed, staggering backwards, pale fingers quickly covered in a dark red.
Ethan fell forward, trying to shake the dizziness from his head even as he made for his sword–hilt in hand, secure, already feeling a burgeoning relief.
He shoved the blade into the earth and used it to push himself to his feet, yanking it free after and seeing—
The woods around them were on fire.
“This ain’t done!” the man shrieked, eyes wild, spittle flying. “We ain’t done here!”
“Fuck yes we are,” Ethan hollered right back, barely even able to recognize his own voice beyond the ringing; feet only as steady as he could make them. His sword was a silver line between them at least; a still and solid threat.
The man staggered back a step, glaring with Ethan’s knife in his hand. “I’m gonna split you open slow, you shit,” he said. Smoke billowed black between them and he pointed the knife at Ethan in a clear mockery of how he held his sword. “Gonna make you sorry for this,” he said. He smiled then, like he had been earlier. “Gonna make you beg,” he said.
There was enough blood pouring from his leg that Ethan knew he wasn’t gonna do shit.
He stepped forward all the same; knew better than to give a potential threat the time to bleed out. Didn’t know how many more powder-bombs the fucker had between them, either.
He moved into an easy stance, weight shifting, and found holding it more difficult than he was expecting. Still off balance.
He’d kill the bastard and then figure out how bad his injuries were. He only felt heat, and beyond that a prickling numbness.
“Good luck with that,” Ethan said, and lunged forward, calculating the space between them, heel down, planted, moving into a pivot and a swing–
His sword cut through smoke and nothing else.
Ethan spun around, lashing out, thinking it was impossible the man could have moved faster than him with a leg injury but–
Nothing behind him either.
His eyes were stinging, the smoke ever thicker, but he turned a quick circle, casting around for any sight of the man.
The only thing he could see was the smoke and the flames.
It itched at his lungs and he coughed, pain blossoming sudden with the motion.
He didn’t know where the fucker had gone but he couldn’t stay here.
Ethan stumbled back to where he’d first dropped his pack, grabbing it and rushing for the only remaining breach in the flames.
The heat was impossible, and even after he was through he kept checking his arms and legs for burns, thinking surely that fire had caught.
It chased him though; eating up the trees at his back. He heard the frantic calls of birds. Thought once that there was something running right behind him, some animal, but the steps cut off suddenly and he was alone again, gasping for breath as he ran, trying to outrun the blaze.
He ran. And ran. And then when he next stepped down his foot sunk further into the earth than he was expecting and he stumbled, tripping forward onto his hands and knees, wet muck splashing up at him.
He was already rising, wiping the back of his hand across his face, removing the mud that had splashed him.
The bog. He’d made it to the bog.
He laughed in sick relief and grabbed his pack from where it had fallen, shouldering it and fighting through the mud to a little copse of trees, brackish water puddling at their roots.
He turned back to see the flames had already reached the edge of the woods. He didn’t have any choice but to go deeper and hope that all the wet and muck would slow down the fire.
“Fuck,” he said, his own voice stinging his throat, coming out ragged.
Hadn’t the merchant said it’d be a dark, cold hell?
Ethan could have laughed if it wouldn’t have wrecked his fucking throat.
+
He was right: the fire fizzled out once it hit the bog.
That was about the only good news he could see. He was up to his thighs in freezing water that threatened to suck him under with every step downwards into the muck, and absolutely no end to it in sight.
He was shaking, teeth chattering, and walking with his sword and scabbard in hand to keep them from the water. Mia’s amulet was an icepick at his throat, a counter to the raw feeling the smoke and his coughing had left behind.
He didn’t have any choice but to keep going.
What was it the merchant said? An opportunity to turn back? That had never been an option for him. Not since Mia had–
Ethan blinked, sure his eyes were deceiving him, and stopped, water splashing weak and docile at his legs.
Some distance ahead he could swear he could see a horse.
He blinked again. The shape was still there. Something that looked like a horse, anyway.
It wasn’t moving. Maybe it was just some tree, dead and misshapen.
Or maybe he was hallucinating. Stranger things had happened in bogs.
Stranger things had happened to Ethan in bogs.
His teeth clacked and clattered and he made the decision to keep going towards it.
Maybe if it was real he could hitch a ride.
He laughed, and it quickly turned into a cough, his chest and throat burning, his eyes stinging.
At least if that skinny asshole didn’t bleed out the fire would have gotten him. There was no way he’d followed Ethan out into the bog without being seen. Aside from the horse it was just a vast stretch of fucking nothing.
Maybe-horse, Ethan amended, watching it continue to remain frozen.
What in the hells would a horse even be doing out here? It could have belonged to the skinny man, Ethan reasoned. It wasn’t impossible that he’d ridden it out here from Urd or where-the-fuck-ever he was from, only for it to spook and run, leaving him on his ass back there in the woods.
There was a petty sort of satisfaction in the idea of stealing the prick’s horse. Maybe-horse.
Ethan struggled onwards, and eventually, slowly, he could make out the horse ever-clearer.
It was definitely a horse, and he’d be damned if it didn’t have a rider too.
Whoever the rider was, it wasn’t the skinny man; he was much bigger, a match for the brute of a horse he sat astride.
It was a mottled gray draft horse, and even from a distance Ethan could tell it was far bigger than any he’d ever seen before.
Ethan could feel the man watching him, even though he couldn’t make out much in the way of a face; the man was wrapped from head to toe in what appeared to be thick furs. A floppy wide-brimmed hat sat atop his head giving the overall impression of some kind of dancing bear dressed up for a performance.
“Hello!” Ethan called once he was close enough that he thought his voice would carry. The man didn’t say anything, but he didn’t make to leave either. Maybe he was waiting till he had a better look at Ethan?
Ethan could understand that; the first person he’d met out here had pretty much instantly tried to kill him.
Which was a kind reminder: if this man wanted to kill him, he’d certainly have the advantage astride that beast.
The only thing he could do was keep going and hope for the best. Trust to his blade and his fickle luck.
He kept it in its scabbard for the moment, unwilling to spook potential aid, but kept his eyes peeled for the slightest hint of movement: a hand going for a weapon, heels to the horse’s sides to spur it on.
Nothing. Both man and horse sat still and continued to watch him approach.
Ethan came to a stop a few feet away, looking up into a scarred and bearded face mostly hidden by the long brim of the hat. The man regarded him, head canted a little to the side. His eyes were squinted a little, and they looked light-colored. Lighter than Ethan thought he’d ever seen before.
“Hello,” he said again, trying to hide how tense he was; trying not to look like he was one too-quick movement away from attack.
“‘Lo,” the man said, barely even forming the word. “Not from around here,” he pronounced, tipping his head to the opposite side, the corner of his mouth twitching as if threatening a smile.
Ethan blinked at him, wondering for the first time if the man might be touched. Wondering, then, why he hadn’t assumed that from the start; what else would he be doing out here?
“No,” Ethan said slowly, “Just passing through.”
The man nodded as if considering the answer, and then grinned, wide enough that Ethan could see his teeth, white-yellow between full lips cut through with a pale scar.
One of his incisors was chipped; jagged.
“Not exactly a nice place for a stroll,” he said, and the more he spoke, the more Ethan struggled to place his strange, out-of-place cadence.
Dancing bear, he remembered, eyeing the man’s thick beard and even thicker furs.
He sounded like a headman for a troupe of tumblers, intonation aimed to snag the attention of his audience.
“Wouldn’t have picked it if I knew a better way through,” Ethan admitted, hazarding a bit of the truth on the hope of learning more about what he was dealing with here. The man hadn’t attacked him yet, but the more he looked at him, and listened to him, the more Ethan was certain there was something wrong. Something pricked at him, just right at the edge of noticing.
“Ah,” the man said then, “So you’re looking for a guide.”
Ethan considered him. If this was him offering, Ethan wasn’t sure he wanted him as a traveling companion.
But…he did have a horse. A horse that, despite the man’s own considerable size, was more than big enough to carry two.
“I’m looking for a guide,” Ethan agreed. He couldn’t feel his feet for how numb they’d gone in the cold and the wet, but he’d trade a lot to be off them for even just a little while. “I can’t offer much,” he said, trailing off, cautious, watching the man’s face for any change in expression.
There wasn’t any; he just kept grinning. “Could maybe help you with that,” the man said, warm and easy. “What do you say, work out the particulars somewhere drier?”
It was a risk, trusting him. He could just as easily lead Ethan back to a waiting swarm of bandits, or strike him once he was close enough, the horse all the advantage he’d need.
But Ethan wasn’t fond of the alternative either: wandering forever, lost. Freezing to death out in some fucking bog. Maybe even offending the man enough by refusing that he’d attack anyway.
“I could do with drier,” he agreed, not really seeing that there was much of a choice.
The man laughed outright at that, a short bark of sound that echoed out over the still water. “I’ll bet,” he said, following it up with, “You can call me Karl.”
“Winter,” Ethan offered in return, after only a slight pause.
It had felt like… It sounded like the man’s true name, so much so that Ethan had almost given his own in turn.
“Well, Winter,” Karl said, leaning down and stretching out a gloved hand. “Sounds like we have ourselves a deal.”
+
Ethan dropped his pack on the opposite side of the fire from Karl, settling down on the ground next to it, crossing his legs and propping up a foot in order to reach the laces of his boots, eyeing Karl through the crackling flames.
He’d shed some of his furs, balling them into a pile that he was bunching up behind him, apparently intending to rest against it. He looked a little less bulky without them, but it was clear he was still a large man. Off the horse he was of a height with Ethan, but he was broader, with thick arms that matched the monster of a hammer he’d dropped headfirst into the dirt, leaning it up against a nearby tree almost absent-mindedly as he’d muttered about where to place the fire.
In the flickering glow of the firelight, he cut a handsome figure, from the slope of his nose to the orange light glinting in his eerily pale eyes.
Ethan made himself look away before he could be caught staring. He turned back to his laces, the sight of them enough to send any odd stray thoughts scurrying.
Still damp and caked with bog muck, they were a knotted mess that he sighed to think of untangling, but set to it nonetheless, fingers plucking away the worst clumps of muck and decaying plant matter till he could start picking at the laces with his nails.
“So you won’t tell me where you’re headed, but you want me to get you there,” Karl said, none of the earlier humor absent from his voice. He stretched out before the fire with an exaggerated groan, leaning back against the furs just as Ethan had expected him to and linking gloved fingers across the curve of his belly.
Ethan just kept picking at his laces. “I told you I just need to make it through to–”
“--Makkavha Kern,” Karl interrupted, curving his lips into a smile, like it was some joke between the two of them. “But that’s no destination,” he said, adding at Ethan’s blank look, “And I’m guessing you didn’t know that.”
Ethan dropped his gaze to glare at his boot. Yanked the knot the rest of the way free and set to tugging the damn thing off. “It was told to me as a place,” he said, not wanting to even admit to that much, but not seeing a way around it.
–off the fellbrew righteous way
Down sundered linkbones spire
In Makkavha Kern fain does it lay
The poisoned child’s desire
She’d made him repeat it, again and again. The whole thing. Repeat it until he was sick of it. Till he could recite it forwards and back.
Mia wasn’t one to be mistaken about something like that.
“It often is,” Karl said.
Ethan pulled the boot from his foot, grimacing at the wet sucking sound it made as he removed it. His sock was soaked through, and despite his proximity to the fire, his foot was still just as numb. “So what is it, then?” he asked, tugging at his sock. “If it’s not a destination but it’s referred to as one.”
Karl hummed, considering, and finally said, “You can reach it, but you can’t travel there.”
Ethan made a disgusted noise, only partially directed at his sock. “More fucking riddles,” he muttered.
Karl chuckled. “I suppose you’ll see for yourself if you’re set on finding it,” he said. “It’s not something I can guide you to, but I can set you out on the right path.”
“There some reason you can’t just tell me what it is?” Ethan grumbled, succeeding in getting the sock off and draping it near the fire to dry. His foot was pale; cast orange by the flames.
“Of course there is,” Karl said, the teasing note in his voice drawing Ethan’s gaze upwards, almost against his will. “It’ll ruin the magic,” Karl said, and winked.
Ethan rolled his eyes, scoffing, and looked away. “I don’t believe in–”
“Shit,” Karl said, and then, “No, fucking–Stop. Stop what you’re doing–”
Ethan stopped. Froze in place, half bent over his foot, trying to rub some feeling back into it. Karl was shoving himself to his feet. “You don’t– Of course you fucking don’t, hold on–” he was muttering, rushing to the packs he’d dumped next to his hammer.
“Don’t what?” Ethan asked, the tension he’d foolishly forgotten from earlier winding back tight.
“There’s leeches in the water,” he said.
Ethan looked down at his foot, still failing to see any leeches. “I don’t see–”
“They dig into your skin,” Karl said, having secured something from his pack and moving over towards Ethan, squatting down next to him and saying, “Lift your hand up.”
Ethan was revisiting his earlier assessment of the man as touched, but humored him, lifting up his hand and–
White maggoty bulbs poked out of the skin of his foot, right there around his ankle where he’d been rubbing. They were swelling up, moving, quivering, like they were reaching–
“Fuck!” he yelled, reaching back without thinking, only aiming to pull them out of him.
Faster than he could track, Karl’s hand shot out, grabbing his wrist and arresting his movement. “Careful,” he said, voice low, far closer than Ethan was expecting, than he’d realized that Karl had gotten. “They multiply by breaking off beneath the skin. You can’t touch them with your bare hands.”
“My knife,” Ethan said, gaze split between the worms as they sunk back down into his foot and the way Karl took his hand between his own, turning it over and back, pressing a gloved thumb down hard against each of Ethan’s fingers, trailing it up and down. “I lost my knife,” Ethan finished, thinking again of the skinny bastard. Hoped he’d burned to a crisp in his own fire.
“Don’t need one,” Karl said. “Your hand’s fine, but just don’t touch your legs.”
Six dark holes remained on his foot where the worms had poked through. He wanted to argue. Wanted a blade so he could cut the disgusting things out of him.
“I’ll take care of this, and then we’ll have to check the rest of you,” Karl said. He set a small stoppered gourd down between them. “Give me your leg.”
Ethan hesitated only a moment. He couldn’t trust this man. Couldn’t trust anyone he met out here.
But he’d also never seen bonewhite leeches that burrowed down inside people. Didn’t have a blade beyond his sword, and it wasn’t meant for little work; he’d end up butchering himself trying to get them out.
So he stretched out, letting Karl take his ankle, gloved hand cupping just above his heel. He pulled out a cloth, draping it over Ethan’s foot, and then went for the gourd, pulling the cork free with his teeth and then tipping out a trail of milky liquid over top.
Ethan couldn’t feel any of it.
“What are you doing?” he asked, fighting the urge to yank his foot away. To scratch at the skin. His foot was numb, completely numb; a blank. But he still felt as if those things were crawling all over him. Check the rest of you. How many were inside him? How long might he have kept on without knowing–
“You have to suffocate them,” Karl said, carefully wrapping the cloth around Ethan’s foot. “Block off the little air holes they leave in you,” he continued, smoothing the cloth flat and holding it in place.
Ethan chewed his lip; just about every word of this was worse than the one previous. “And the liquid?” he asked, figuring he should know if he were to be unlucky enough to encounter the things again.
“Root wine,” Karl said. “It’s a deterrent. Keeps them from trying to make their way somewhere safer.” He looked over at Ethan then; cocked his head to the side as he regarded him. “We’ve got time. Tell me, Winter, how much do you know about this place? About Makkavha Kern?”
Ethan found himself looking back down at Karl’s hands around his foot, halfway expecting to see something like movement beneath the cloth. He saw nothing but the firelight flicker of shadow over skin.
He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know anything. That even having found someone else who had heard of Makkavha Kern was a kind of relief.
“They call it the ghostlands,” he said instead, having nothing else to offer.
Instead of laughing, which Ethan was expecting, Karl said, his tone serious, “It’s close enough.”
He scoffed, trying to ignore how uneasy it was making him that he could neither see nor feel the worms. Knew they were there. Knew there could be more of them.
Ethan made himself look back up, meeting Karl’s gaze. “I don’t believe in that shit,” he said.
Karl grinned, “What, ghosts?”
“Yes, ghosts,” he bit out, leaning back a little onto his hands; Karl felt much too close. “It’s all stories,” he continued when all Karl did was arch a brow at him. “It’s wild out here, and people make up tales about things they don’t know. About the things they fear.”
“Do they now,” Karl said, but he sounded more amused than offended. He shifted then, resettling, and lifted his hands enough to start unwinding the cloth from Ethan’s foot.
Ethan watched his motions carefully, a tension building all through him.
“People around here have a story about these critters,” Karl said, “so maybe you have the right of it, Winter.”
Ethan swallowed. “What’s the story?” He wasn’t sure that he really wanted or cared to know, but he needed to distract himself from the itching feeling that had started up as soon as the cloth had been drawn away.
The leeches bulged out of him in patches all over his skin, pink-tinged pus-like liquid oozing out around them. He dug his fingers down into the earth to keep from giving into the urge to scratch his skin raw.
“There were four hags for four seasons for four directions, that’s how all the stories around here start,” Karl said. “In the winter the ground was hard and dead, and because one hag angered another, it stayed hard and dead through spring, and through summer.”
He watched Karl as he talked, as he worked. Attention split between his lips and his fingers; the strange rolling cadence of his voice and the quick motions of gloved fingertips as they pinched and pulled the leeches from Ethan’s skin.
“Would have stayed hard and dead all the way through except that a third hag went to the people and told them, I can give you seed that will grow in any soil.”
Ethan still felt nothing. Just that crawling, itching feeling all up and down his body. He watched the pile Karl was making of the leeches grow there next to the fire and was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to like where this story led.
“So the people took it, because what the fuck else were they gonna do. But as soon as they touched it to their skin the seeds burrowed down inside them. Days and days of pain and misery–that’s another thing with these stories–and then something started growing out of them.”
Karl paused then to tip the gourd over Ethan’s foot, and he finally felt something, hissing at the sting but resisting the impulse to jerk away, out of Karl’s grasp. “There you go,” Karl said, and then, “Other foot.”
Ethan shifted, Karl shifting with him. “So the seeds grew the leeches?” he asked, watching as Karl repeated the process all over. Gritting his teeth at the burning pain in his right foot as feeling gradually returned to him.
“The seeds were the leeches. They fed on the blood of the people until they grew fat, and then the people buried the bodies of their dead in the hard, dead ground. Story goes that crops grew up from that, that the fields were full of food, that the hag hadn’t lied. Not exactly, anyway.” Karl held Ethan’s left foot firmly between his hands. Winked when he caught Ethan’s eye. “Stories around here are full of a lot of that, too.”
“Not exactly lying?” Ethan grumbled, no more enlightened for what he’d heard.
“Yep,” Karl agreed, grinning wide enough to show off that chipped incisor.
Ethan wasn’t sure what to think of him.
He watched as Karl removed the leeches from his other foot, as quick and precise as he’d been the first time. Tensed up when Karl went to pour the liquid in the gourd over him, expecting the sting and bracing for it.
It was, all things considered, an awful lot of trouble to go through for someone if you aimed to kill them later.
“Thank you,” Ethan told him when he was done, still a little off balance but his gratitude sincere.
Thinking about having continued on without knowing what was inside him…
Well, it was best not to think about it at all.
“Don’t go thanking me yet,” Karl said. His grin was, somehow, even wider. “Lot more of you to check.” He made an exaggerated gesture, hurry it on up. “Go on, Winter,” he said, “Strip.”
