Episode 11: Life and Rot
Written by: Tehri
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A bitter cold wind blew across the western moors. Late in the year as it was, there was little left of their summertime beauty. Half-withered heather clung to life still in the cold, nourished only just by days of falling rain and what little sunshine it could get through the iron gray clouds in the sky, and small patches of wild chamomile waited patiently for the first proper chill to finally end their vigil.
Yet it was beautiful all the same, and Tariya had to remind herself to stay close to her friends as they trudged wearily along the road. She watched the land around them with wide eyes, taking in sights that she had never seen before. She had not come to the moors before, had not wanted to come close. As dearly as she had missed Luzem during those long years spent apart, the reluctance to see their mother had kept her away.
Ah, but the sights she had missed in never going there! There were moors in the north too, and in other places she had gone to, but not like this, not so vast and seemingly endless! Highland elves often spoke of how beautiful their home was, and Woodlanders were ever quick to tell them that they did not know what real beauty was – and now Tariya walked there and thought to herself that neither Highlanders nor Woodlanders really knew what they were talking about.
Of course she missed the forests, missed laying her head down on the soft moss and the dead leaves of autumns past to just breathe, but the soft turf of the moors bore its own scent and its own memories that she could only dream of interpreting.
The rest of the group certainly did not seem to share the druid’s enthusiasm. Perhaps what they were walking towards weighed more heavily on their minds, or perhaps they simply did not see any beauty in the land around them.
Lily certainly did not. She had visited the moors and the various Highlander cities before, had even been to Altùin once or twice – long before the city fell to ruin, of course. But that had been in the spring and summer, never this late in the year. She had never wanted to be caught there in the autumn storms or in the winter’s heavy snowfall. To her, it seemed like little else than madness to come to this place at such a time. If the weather turned, they could be stuck there for only gods knew how long.
They already had to stop early in the evening and start late as fog rolled in and rested as a thick blanket over the moors until the sun had to be high in the sky behind the stubborn clouds. They were sitting ducks for much too long for her liking, and forced to camp on the road for fear of losing track of it in the mist. Tariya had tried to lead them in animal-form, but had been forced to shift back to tell them that all the scents were distracting and too new to her. All she had been able to say was that they should stay on the road.
That had not been much of a comfort to the others either. Luzem had stuck close to his sister at all times, unnerved by both the dense fog, the thought of their destination, and Kajo’s presence.
Still neither of the elves could convince themselves to truly look at the god, and still hesitated to speak to them. Kajo certainly did not seem bothered. They were content to speak with Kae, or to respond to Lily’s occasional sniping questions.
The road wound itself like a serpent between low hills or snaked lazily across open plain without much change for several days travel. But when they at last reached a place where an old stone bridge stretched across a narrow river, Luzem suddenly raised one hand and pointed.
“There,” he said. “There lies Altùin, just behind those hills. Can you see the spires?”
“We should make it there tomorrow,” Kae mused. “Should we rest first? Or do we want to push ahead?”
“We shouldn’t rest in the city.”
Since they reached the moors, Tamrus had been very quiet. Something felt wrong, something that gnawed at his thoughts and had him on edge and tense as a bowstring. Hearing Luzem speak, seeing the spires of the city rise above the hills, had a strange sense of dread rising in him, threatening to throttle him, causing him to speak without thinking.
“We shouldn’t rest there,” he repeated after a moment. “If the city was abandoned just like that, it won’t be safe. Let’s make camp here and continue in the morning.”
“Really? You don’t want a roof over your head tonight, pops?” Kae glanced at the sky above. The clouds threatened with rain, had done so for two days already without making good on that threat. “We could at least be warm and dry.”
“The dwarf is right,” Kajo interjected impatiently. “Listen to him. We shall make camp here tonight, without making any closer to the city.”
The silence in their camp was tense as the fog slowly crept around them, obscuring them and their little fire from view. The moors were silent; no sounds of stray animals or birds could be heard, not even the faintest rustle of a mouse searching for a meal.
So near to their destination, they were all unnerved. An entire city emptied of people overnight, but no refugees had ever appeared. No one who had gone to the city since the mysterious calamity had ever returned. The thought alone was more than enough to cause unrest.
In the end, it was Kajo who broke the silence, turning their eyes on Tamrus suddenly to say:
“You said it was a hag that did this to you, dwarf. While it is most certainly not a curse you have been afflicted with, I’d like to know how this came to be.”
Tamrus did not even look up from the fire. If anything, he moved a little closer to it, silently staring into the flames for a moment.
“I used to be a merchant,” he replied at last. “I’d travel with a caravan from the mountains, and we’d stay in the Overworld for most of the spring and summer. Come autumn, we’d return home.” He sighed and rubbed at the back of his head. “It… should have been the same this time. But the caravan-leader made a stupid call, and we all suffered for it.”
“What stupid call?” Lily raised an eyebrow. “You’ve never even said this much to me. What decision could’ve been that disastrous?”
“There’s a place where the caravan-roads leading to the mountains split.” Picking up a twig from the ground, Tamrus drew a rough map in the mud with it, showing the eastern mountains and the path the caravans took from them. “Even the smallest pebble of my folk know to never take the southernmost road. Every dwarf who is to travel the Overworld is told to avoid it at all cost. If all other roads are blocked, then you either wait for the blockage to be taken care of or you go and help clear it. No matter how easy it seems, you do not take the southern road.”
“That road leads through the Stonewood,” Kajo stated, their tone grim. “Wise indeed to avoid it.”
“Well, the caravan-leader didn’t think so.” Tamrus gave a mirthless smile and shrugged. “Late summer rain had caused flooding on the northern roads. There wasn’t a way to get through. But instead of waiting for it to clear, or even for bridge-rafts to be built, that stupid bastard decided to force us through the Stonewood instead. Worst thing is, we nearly made it through without incident, too.”
“Stonewood,” murmured Tariya, unintentionally interrupting the dwarf. “Stonewood, Stonewood, I know that name… It’s the dead forest on the Stone Coast, isn’t it?”
“You know of it, lass?”
“I’ve been there.” The druid gave a sheepish little smile at the incredulous stares directed at her and pressed a little closer to Luzem, almost as though to seek silent comfort – or to seek a shield from the stares. “It’s really not such a bad place. There are rot-druids there. They have their own grove there and everything.”
“You mean the maniacs that make the place more dangerous than it needs to be?” Tamrus huffed and scowled at her. “Insane, the lot of them. They go out of their way to attack travellers! They’re at least half the reason why people need to avoid that place!”
“It’s for rituals,” Tariya explained mildly. “The hunt is part of the ritual, and travellers are easy prey. And if they chase the travellers out of the woods, at least the hags won’t get to them instead. That’s worse.”
The dwarf’s expression darkened even further, and he muttered a few words under his breath that were doubtlessly rather expletive. Lily rolled her eyes and reached out to pat Tariya’s knee before nudging her old companion again.
“Keep going,” she urged. “You said you nearly made it through. So what happened?”
“The damn hags happened,” Tamrus snapped. Guilt flashed over his face as soon as he spoke with such heat, and he shook himself and shifted just a little further away, forcing himself to relax and lower his head in a submissive stance that seemed all too well-practised. “We reached the final stretch,” he forced out after a moment. “One last part where the banks on either side of the road are high and make it hard to see anything among the trees. And suddenly there were five of those damn things, surrounding us.”
“Five?” Kae repeated doubtfully. “Hags don’t normally hunt in such small packs, pops, and rarely risk attacking an entire caravan.”
“I didn’t exactly stop to ask about it, boy.”
“Five…” Kajo interrupted sharply, wisely choosing to force the conversation back on track before a fight could erupt. “You are certain?”
With a grumble, the dwarf tossed the twig he had been holding into the fire.
“As certain as I am about that we have a fire burning,” he shot back. “There were five.” He glanced at his axe where he had set it down and reached out to pat the handle. “We didn’t have a choice but to fight. In the end, myself and two of the caravan guards were separated from the others and were forced to kneel before one of the hags.”
Lowering his head again, Tamrus fell silent for a moment, searching for the right words to explain. When the words finally came, they were slow and halting.
“It gave us a choice,” he murmured at last. “Us, or the others. Either we’d take on its curse, or it would inflict it on the entire caravan. If we chose to take it, it would allow the caravan passage. The guards refused to choose. When it made to kill them, I fought back. It… I was weary. Easily subdued. It held me down and ordered me to choose.” He swallowed roughly and finally looked up, meeting Kajo’s piercing stare. “I told it I’d take it alone. Just me, no one else. It cursed me. Turned me. And I killed and ate it and most of the caravan.”
He had never spoken those last words to his companions before; all he had ever said was that the hag had died by his hand.
But as much as he did not want to trust Kajo, they were offering him aid, in their own roundabout way. They had their own vested interest in the matter – but it was aid all the same, aid he would never get elsewhere. They needed to know the full truth.
“Animals do the same sometimes.” Tariya broke the heavy silence following the dwarf’s words as though she did not put much weight on what he had said, or indeed as though she intended her words to be comforting. “Sometimes, they find an abundance of food and lose their minds a little bit. If you set a weasel loose in a chicken-coop, it’ll bite as many as it can but might only eat one. Feeding frenzies happen.”
“Tamrus lost friends that time,” Luzem interjected gently, giving his sister a nudge with his elbow. “He might not see it the way you do.”
“Why not?” The Woodland elf blinked and looked up at her brother with a bemused expression. “Death isn’t the end of everything.”
“Oh, darling…” Lily sighed and shook her head, giving the druid’s knee another pat. “It is the end. You might not see it that way, but to most people, death is pretty much the final word.”
“But it’s not,” Tariya insisted, frowning as she bent low to draw a circle in the mud. “Everything is part of different cycles. Life and rot, and therefore death, are the same thing. Everything that lives will die, but everything that dies becomes part of new life. The Bear-king is the avatar of nature in all its seasons and stages, both life and rot. A plant may wither and die, but its remains will turn into soil and sustain more plants.”
“We’re not plants.” Tamrus shook himself and dragged his hand over his face as though hoping to wipe away the weariness and grief. He was too tired to be annoyed with her – and besides, she meant no harm. “And I’m not an animal, lass. But what you’re saying is the same as all druids I’ve spoken to have said.”
“And these druids you’ve spoken to, what else did they say?” Kae asked eagerly. “What exactly did you ask them about?”
“How to control the shifting.” The dwarf shrugged and gave another mirthless smile. “Once the rot-druids in the Stonewood drove me out, I reasoned that since their kind know how to shift into the form of beasts, then maybe they could help. So I started looking for groves. I don’t know how many I went to, but most of them said the same. ‘It’s not possible’, ‘this is beyond our skill’, ‘it would be better for the rot to take you’. All that. There was just one grove where they were apparently mad enough to at least try.”
“Winterlight?” Tariya guessed immediately, only to blink owlishly when the rest of the group stared at her in surprise. “What? They’re known to be a little bit… unconventional. They’re not rot-druids, but they don’t only guard the living either. They see connections between everything, living or dead. It just makes sense that they’d offer to help.”
“It was Winterlight grove, yes,” Tamrus confirmed. “They did everything they could and managed to return some control to me. It’s… To be fair, it’s not much. The scent or taste of blood still sets it off, and… Well. Most of you know I don’t eat meat anymore. Can’t stomach it.”
He fell silent again. Now they all knew, and he had nothing more to hide. But speaking of it did not ease his mind; the dread that had had risen in him at the sight of the city’s spires in the distance lingered, but it was more than dread now in the dark and the cold. A call, his thoughts supplied, quiet and hungry, urging him to hurry on and enter the city.
Kajo hummed thoughtfully once he finished speaking, but said nothing more. They turned their head and glanced out into the darkness in the direction of Altùin, something calculating in their eyes.
Somewhere in the dark and the fog, the wind howled across the moors, the sound sending shivers down Luzem’s spine.
“Let’s not speak more of this tonight,” he begged, shifting a little closer to his sister and taking her hand in a quiet request for comfort. “Let’s just… Let’s just rest, if we can.”
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