Chương 20: Chapter 271 - Sing the Dead to Life

Siobhan Month 5, Day 16, Friday 9: 20 p. m. Siobhan ran like she had never run before in her life, like a panicked deer fresh with hot lifeblood. Once she made it to the woods, she kept running, but tripped over something in the darkness and sent herself tumbling along the ground. She slid to a stop, then lay there panting as her leg muscles screamed and newly formed bruises and scrapes bloomed in her awareness. She tried to suppress her heaving breaths enough to listen for sounds of pursuit but heard none.

Once her racing heart and the pain had settled down enough, Siobhan sat up and took stock of herself. She was absolutely covered in loam, mud, and half-decayed leaves, and though bruised and scratched, was not broken. She was lucky that she'd spent so much of her childhood running around barefoot, despite Grandfather's dislike of the practice. Shoes might be a mark of civilization and wealth, but the callouses on her feet had kept her from tearing them to shreds.

Siobhan sat with her knees together and her feet splayed out on either side, her head hanging low for a long time. She didn't know how long. Belatedly, she realized that the compass was gone. If the bone bracelet hadn't been attached to her wrist, and her pack to her back, they would probably have been lost, too.

"What do I do?" she asked, reaching out and rubbing her fingers over the knobby roots of a tree beside her. As if in answer, her stomach cried out with biting, rapacious hunger. The urge to eat was overwhelming, and she had emptied out her pack and shoved half of the shaman's stolen food down her throat before she even realized what she was doing. She tried to stop, but it was as if the animalistic urge to consume was more powerful than her Will, and she couldn't control herself.

Siobhan choked, opening her mouth and letting the last of her barely chewed rations fall to the ground as she coughed violently. She heaved a couple of times but managed to keep from vomiting up everything she'd just consumed. Saliva was pooling in her mouth and dripping out onto the dirt, and she spat. She tried to drink from her canteen but was trembling too hard. She grabbed it with both hands and lifted it carefully to her lips, then took a small sip. As suddenly as it had come on, the hunger receded.

When she closed her eyes, tears spilled down her cheeks.

"I'm not hungry," she whispered. Silently, she reassured herself that she did not want to eat human flesh, the thought of raw organs and entrails was disgusting, and despite her sudden bout of gluttony, her belly was not distended. She rubbed it several times to make sure. After a few minutes and several more careful sips of water, the food in her stomach settled into a reassuring weight that calmed something she hadn't realized was on the verge of breaking inside her.

It was like an anchor to her own version of reality and a tiny step taken towards a future where she continued on despite what she'd experienced. Just as she drank the last drop of water, tilting her head back to let it fall onto her tongue, a small ember flared to life in front of her, tiny and yet overwhelming as it destroyed the encompassing shadow in a small radius around Siobhan.

Every speck of attention that Siobhan possessed narrowed in on it, and she watched, frozen and unblinking, as the ember grew into another tiny incense-Paimon, lightly smoking. Despite the fevered excitement igniting within her chest, the smell helped to settle her mind and body further, almost making the things she had experienced in the curse-touched village seem like a dream. Siobhan began to cry but kept her eyes open, tugging at her cheeks to help the tears flow down without disturbing her vision.

"Mom?" she whispered. If Mom was doing this magic, that meant she wasn't dead, right? Paimon quickly crumbled away to ash, but where he had stood, a small model of Siobhan's house grew, layer by layer from the ground up.

"It's the house," Siobhan narrated encouragingly, leaning forward. As if in response, the model crumbled away even faster than Paimon had, despite being much larger, and was replaced by the tower again, bigger and standing alone, as if the view had lifted off the ground and gotten closer. Siobhan labeled it again, and the tower was replaced by Grandfather. He was as big as her finger, and he burned, crumbled, and reformed at the same time in such a way as to mimic the impression of movement.

It was actually quite clever, and only made Siobhan more sure that Mom was in control of this spell. The miniature incense version of Grandfather pulled his cloak tighter around himself, hunching against an unseen wind as he looked around. Of course, he didn't seem to see her. Whatever he was looking at, wherever he really was, it was not the forest floor.

"Grandfather is somewhere far away, traveling?" Siobhan tried. Then Mom showed her the tower again.

"It's the tower." Grandfather again, and then the tower once more.

"I don't understand." Siobhan angrily wiped away her still-flowing tears, rocking forward and back.

"I'm sorry, Mom. I don't understand! Are you in the tower? Did Grandfather lock you in there?" Paimon rose from the ground once more, but this time, there were two of him, facing each other on either side of a frame. They mimicked each other. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"A mirror." Both miniature Paimons fell away, but the frame remained. Grandfather rose up again, this time in front of the frame. He tripped and fell through, and then his arms flailed and his cloak fluttered as if he were falling in slow motion for a long, long time. He landed, and the tower rose up in his place once more.

"It's a fake mirror?" She didn't remember seeing one in the workshop, but Mom was obviously depicting a secret entrance to a hidden room.

"There's a secret cave beneath the house, maybe? And Grandfather fell in? Is that where you are too?" When the incense burned away this time, nothing rose to take its place. Siobhan breathed in hard and wiped away her tears one last time. She needed to get to them and free them. If she could do that, they would protect her. Mom, at least, would protect her. Just as Siobhan rose to leave, the ember came back. It showed the house and tower again, this time with the roof missing so she could see inside.

Paimon stood in front of the workshop's lead door. He pounded on it until the door crashed from its frame, but when he stepped inside, the tower was empty. Paimon shifted, now climbing up the outer wall of the tower. He tumbled through the window, and this time, the workshop was full of doors. Siobhan understood.

"Go in through the window." She waited, but she must have been right, because no further communication came. She felt a strange, almost ironic sense of vindication. Her plan to break in from the outside had been right all along! Despite the almost overwhelming urge to sprint back to her house, she took the last drops of the healing and stamina potions and forced herself to move at a fast but sustainable walk.

All the fatigue and pain she'd accumulated was still there, but a deep well of shining, piercing hope gave her the energy to continue on. She was almost bursting with it, and kept having to suppress tears as she circled around to the north to get the most distance from the village. When she saw the state of the house, she almost collapsed in despair. But it wasn't the red, vein-like fungus, and the structure hadn't been replaced by a scaffolding of bones. There were no pus-boil clouds above.

Instead, the tower was covered in orange-brown, fluttery coral, which crept out of the completely destroyed window hole and cascaded down the stone side like layers of tulle. It had pushed away a couple of the ward-stones Grandfather had laid around the base of the tower, and seemed to have been formed with suspiciously convenient, jutting hand and footholds—perfect for climbing. It wasn't even frightening. Siobhan gave a wobbly grin.

"Thanks, Mom," she whispered. She tested the handholds experimentally, and when they released some grainy crumbles but didn't break, she climbed nimbly up and through, using her toes for better grip and balance. As the wordless message from Mom had suggested, the workshop looked entirely different from what Siobhan had seen when Claudio let her and Rory inside. But it wasn't packed with dozens of free-standing doorframes.

It was cleared of furniture, and every inch of the floor and walls pulsed with power, carved with glowing spell arrays so complex, connected in sequence and bending into and out of each other, that she couldn't understand anything. The floor inside had a little more fluttery coral, but most of the area was covered in a thick layer of the red fungal tendrils. In the exact center of the circular room stood a frame, a bit taller than her.

Its back faced Siobhan, but she guessed that it might be a mirror, though how this fit into what Mom had tried to tell her, Siobhan didn't know. Though she'd seen a different version of the workshop before, the space warping had kept her away from the center. Had it been meant to prevent her from interacting with this frame somehow? Was everything she'd seen the first time fake? But no, she'd examined the ledgers, and Rory had touched several things.

Either it had all been an amazingly complex illusion, or there were two versions of the tower workshop, somehow differentiated by how one entered it. Did each have different passcodes at the doorway? Surely neither Grandfather nor Claudio would make a habit of entering through the window. The magic was fascinating enough to distract her temporarily, but she was here for something more important.

The thought of walking across the soft, slightly pulsing tendrils with her bare, scraped-up feet made her shudder, but she did so anyway. She reached the edge of the frame, which was made of gently smoldering brimstone, and rounded it, head craned eagerly to see what it held. For a moment, the glowing lines and glyphs of the spell arrays that hadn't been covered by the creeping red reflected off of something that looked a little like a rippling, liquid mirror.

Then, as she gained a better angle, the reflection disappeared, and she was left looking out over an alien landscape. Siobhan felt like her soul was being sucked in. She couldn't look away, horrified and fascinated at the same time. The closer she looked, the more she saw. At first, everything seemed foggy and muted, as if it had been painted in shades of grey and sepia.

Though she couldn't describe what colors had changed, soon the landscape beyond seemed saturated with realness in an immediate, piercing way that she'd rarely experienced in nature. It reminded her of the clear blue summer sky after rain, a color darker and deeper than normal, as if one might be able to see the stars twinkle through despite the daytime. The land was fertile, but nothing except red hunger could grow there, for it would eat everything else.

In the distance, hunched forms shuffled, but as she continued to stare, they became more defined. The spell arrays closest to the mirror-window flared bright with a pulse of power, and Siobhan gasped as the allure was suddenly muffled. She reared back, realizing that she'd gotten so close her nose was almost touching the surface—or, if Mom's message was to be taken at face value, the… barrier? Had Grandfather fallen through? Was he one of those distant, shuffling forms?

Feeling a touch of daring, she reached out and poked the surface, but her finger barely sank in before popping back out again. Siobhan stepped backward and, for the first time, noticed the frame. The image contained within the mirror had been too abnormally, magically captivating, or she would surely have registered it sooner. It was as if someone had taken a body, stretched it out, and then broken and crushed it to fit the shape of the frame.

At the bottom sat two crushed feet, the ankles broken and the bones of the foot itself pulverized so that the lines of the frame remained smooth. The knees were bent backward at the corner, with a bit of empty space where the skin was stretched taut between the separated joints, just on the edge of tearing apart. A couple of fingers had escaped the frame's mold to one side and were stretching out, as if in a last plea for mercy or freedom.

In fact, the only part of the body that hadn't been mangled was the head that poked out from the top like some taxidermied trophy mounted to a wall. At the top was Mom's face, frozen in a rictus of unadulterated agony. Her eyes were red embers, wide open and ever-burning, her mouth open in a silent howl. Siobhan screamed and screamed and screamed, until her throat tore and she tasted blood. She screamed like Mom could not.