"Bleghhh..."
Gherm's hand could barely wrap halfway around the doorframe. He hung there, his knuckles white against the wood, as his stomach tried to turn itself inside out. Nothing came up but a string of bitter spit. He was so small that he had to crane his neck back just to look into the room.
The smell didn't just drift; it pushed. It was a thick, sweet rot that felt like wet wool sliding down his throat.
The man on the floor was a ruin of grey skin and black cloth. The tunic had split open where the belly had bloated and then collapsed, leaving a jagged crater of ribs. The skin of his face had slid downward, pooling near the jaw, leaving the teeth exposed in a long, lipless grin. His eyes were missing—the sockets were hollowed out.
But across the middle of the mess sat the belt.
It was a violent, screaming red. It looked like it had been polished seconds ago. There wasn't a speck of dust on the buckle, no smear of the black fluid leaking from the body. It looked heavy. It looked expensive. It looked like it was breathing.
Gherm stared, his small fingers digging into the splinters of the door. This was a person turned into a house for things that liked the dark.
Near the neck, the skin twitched. A pale, thick shape pushed against the underside of the man's throat, stretching the dead skin thin before sliding back down into the chest.
Gherm's knees shook.
He was tiny in the shadow of the doorway, a child facing a nightmare, but the hunger in his stomach was louder than the fear. It was a dull, heavy ache that made his head swim.
Food. He didn't want to look at the face anymore. He only looked at the belt. If it was new, there might be a pouch. If there was a pouch, there might be a crust of bread.
He let go of the door and took a step into the rot.
The room didn't get easier to look at. But the belt did, and to his disappointment, there was no pouch on it.
But he didn't give up; he could not give up if he wanted to live.
Gherm moved along the wall, one hand dragging against the stone. His legs felt wrong — not hurt, just emptied out, like whatever had been holding them up had quietly left. He kept his eyes on the floor in front of him. Not at the middle of the room. Not at the mess of grey skin and black cloth that he'd already decided to stop thinking about.
He made it four steps before his knees found the ground.
He didn't fight it. He just started crawling.
The floor was cold and uneven and smelled worse from down here, which he hadn't thought was possible. He moved along the wall toward the far end of the room, breathing through his mouth.
There was a drawer set low into the far wall, no handle, just a groove worn smooth. He worked two fingers into it and pulled. The drawer ground against the stone and stuck. He pulled again, and it ground open. Slightly, but enough.
The food inside was portioned and deliberate. Strips of dried meat, dark and stiff, wrapped in cloth. A block of something dense and pale — hard tack, the kind that didn't go bad so much as stop pretending to be food. A small cloth parcel of dried fruit, the pieces shrunken and leathery, still faintly yielding when he pressed one with his thumb. Someone had planned to be here a while.
He ate on the floor with his back against the wall, below the drawer, methodically. The meat tasted of salt and something gamey that sat at the back of his throat. He worked through it. The hard tack needed water he didn't have, so he ate slowly, letting his own mouth do the work, jaw aching with the effort.
His eyes burned.
He kept eating. His hands were shaking slightly, which annoyed him. Salt reached his upper lip from somewhere, and he rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist as he took another bite. He stared at a point on the floor and chewed.
Slowly, his eyes again started to become blurry, but he didn't bother wiping them. He closed his eyes and let the tears roll down.
A figure appeared in his memories, a sword, it was slim but practical. The sword had been leaning in the corner of the room where his mother kept things she hadn't found a place for yet. It was taller than he was. The handle came up to his chest. But he could still lift it, although just barely with effort. It had been his father's... until it wasn't.
Although he was far physically stronger than boys his age, unsheathing the blade was much harder, and a much more alluring goal.
So he tried it, he tried to unsheath the blade, putting it on the ground and drawing the blade out. And then the blade came down and knocked the clay pot off the shelf, and the pot broke. His mother had turned from the fire with a face he knew.
He should have stopped talking back after that. He knew that. He hadn't stopped talking.
Because what was wrong with trying? His father had used a sword. He'd seen it. He wasn't playing. He was trying, and trying was supposed to be — she always did this, she got angry before he could even finish explaining, and he had almost unsheathed the first bit of the blade, which must be impressive.
So why did his mother scold him instead of praising?
Out of the house. Come back when you've thought about what you've done and reflected on yourself.
That was what she had said, maybe not word for word, but that was how he had remembered.
He chewed the strip of meat and thought about reflecting. He was reflecting. He was in a cave with a dead man, and he was reflecting very hard, and what he had reflected on was that he had not done anything wrong except drop a pot, which had been an accident.
He reached for the dried fruit.
He had gone into the forest because he was going to come back with something. That had been the plan, the whole shape of it. A bird, a hare, anything small and catchable, something he could carry in his hands and put on the table.
Something his mother would look at and then look at him, it would make the afternoon be smaller than the evening. His father had shown him the snares twice, how to read the ground, where the small things liked to run. He'd remembered everything. He had been completely sure he'd remembered everything.
But the forest hadn't cared what he remembered.
The trees were just trees, but the distance between them kept changing in ways he couldn't account for. The light came down differently than it had when his father was there, walking ahead of him. He found ground that looked right and bent stems that might have meant something and set the snare the way he'd been shown and waited.
Nothing came. The light went out of things gradually, the shadows going long and then longer, and the forest that had been large became the kind of large that had no edge to it.
There were prints that he found while he was trying to find his way back.
He crouched over one and put his hand flat next to it, the way his father used to do, measuring. It was longer than his palm. More than one set. The nearest trees were the same dark as everything else.
Fear crept into his mind as his legs made a decision. He was no longer the hunter.
He was running. His own breathing was enormous in his ears. His feet kept finding the ground in the dark somehow, and then there was a giant cluster of rocks in front of him.
The crack between the rocks had been nothing. A shadow between two stones, barely wide enough for him sideways. He'd gone in anyway because his body had made the decision before his head had finished being afraid, and his body, it turned out, had been right.
He had stood in the dark for a long time, not moving.
The wolves hadn't followed in. But they might wait outside.
His senses came back to him slowly. Crumbs on his hands. The smell still present, still the same. The belt, its red still wrong in the light. He sat against the wall and didn't move for a while, looking at the floor.
Then he got up.
There were papers on the shelf that meant nothing to him — tight handwriting, diagrams in the margins, page after page of something he had no way into. He pulled one out, turned it, and put it back.
The belt looked much more important than a warming ring.
He undid the buckle carefully, working it loose from around the sunken waist of what had been Jonathan Grave — he found the name after, stamped into the back of the buckle in deep cursive, Jonathan Grave. He tied it around his waist.
Yes, he stood there as he decided to wear a belt he got off a corpse. But he was still a child who hadn't been taught the dangers of artifacts and schema.
Nothing happened.
He looked down at it. He looked at the buckle. Disappointed, he decided to search around for anything interesting.
The belt was still interesting to wear, but he put it aside on a table for now. He found a necklace, a deep red stone with smooth edges tied to it.
There was a schema drawn in the center of the room, near the corpse. He crouched at its edge now and studied it in the light coming grey and thin from the cave entrance, beyond the door.
The runes covered a wide stretch of stone, etched deep. It was extremely complex. He couldn't read most of it. He recognized a few runes — his mother had shown him a few, early, before he'd learned much else. The Input Rune. The one that drew mana in. Then there was a rune to draw in ambient mana from the surroundings. But the rune usually came right after the input rune, but this was near the end.
He looked at Jonathan Grave.
He looked at the massive arrangement of runes etched into the ground. The giant schema fueled his curiosity.
He pushed a small thread of mana into it. And the stone on his necklace started to glow.
The schema took in the mana immediately. The circuit lit along each groove, rune to rune, the whole arrangement pulling the mana through in sequence — and then something behind his eyes went wrong. A pressure, fast, and then faster. The floor tilted. He had a brief sense of the room from a different angle, and then there was just the ceiling. And then all went dark.
An uncertain amount of time passed before he woke up. The stone was very cold against his back. His nose was running.
Above him, one of the ceiling stones looked faintly like a dog.
He stared at it for a while.
The schema had gone dark. It sat on the floor exactly as it had been, quiet, waiting.
He sat up. Something behind his eyes still ached, a deep ring of it. He took stock. Surprisingly, all his mana had been refilled, which wasn't supposed to happen unless he fainted for a whole day or so. The schema had taken most of what he'd given it and then — he wasn't sure. He'd almost felt it reach the end of the circuit. Almost.
He thought about his father, who had said that a man who quits has decided the thing wasn't worth doing, so the first question was always whether the thing was worth doing. He looked around the cave. Wolves outside. One exit. Dead man in the corner. The morning light not yet strong enough to risk moving.
He shrugged and pressed mana into the Input Rune.
He woke up staring at the dog-like stone.
He noted it was still there. He sat up. His head felt like the inside of a bell. He thought: his father had also said, once, that knowing when to stop was the better half of courage, but he was fairly certain that had been about something else entirely, something involving a bet and a neighbor's goat, and this was a different situation.
He pressed mana into the Input Rune.
The ceiling again. He was developing opinions about it.
After that, he lost count of the faints.
Not because the attempts blurred — each one had its own particular quality, and the moment of the floor rising was never quite the same — but because the numbers stopped mattering somewhere around the time the dog-stone became familiar as a face. He got up each time from a slightly different position. The light at the cave entrance changed slowly.
He sat up for what might have been the last time, or the tenth-to-last time, and looked at the schema and thought: he was going to figure out what this thing did, or he was going to figure out what this thing did. Both were different.
He pressed mana into it.
The schema lit from edge to edge. Every rune. The whole arrangement ran at once, and the mana moved through the circuit in sequence.
This was not the first time he had seen the whole schema light up; only the output rune remained. He still had mana to spare, and the necklace was still supplying him with mana.
Suddenly, as he watched, the output rune lit up—much to his anticipation. And the last thing he remembered was the output rune lighting up.
And something from the output hit him.
And then the floor.
And then nothing at all.