Valarie and I approached the derelict dwelling, moving past what might have been a chicken coop, the structure having fallen apart from weather and age, a tangled cloud of thin-stemmed plants with tiny late-blooming flowers carpeting what was left of it. My movements were silent on the forest floor, carefully placed and light of foot. Not that I was looking to obscure my presence, but simply because it felt wrong to be here. An almost undetectable hum, unsettling and ominous, thrummed through the air.
The forest had twined itself around the cottage, strangling it with ivy and creeping vines, while lichen and rampant moss crept up the mismatched stone walls. One side had collapsed in on itself along with part of the thatch roof. Twisted, claw-like trees grew inside, poking out of the roofless area, and sickly-looking honeysuckle climbed in through the open windows.
I edged past the rotting door that had fallen off its hinges and stepped inside. A chilling, ghostly breath whispered across the back of my neck and made all the fine hair stand on end. The packed earth that had once acted as the floor had given way to nature. Spider webs caught in my beard and across my nose. I quickly brushed the sticky strands away, rubbing my fingers on my armored chest to remove the webbing from my skin.
Valarie followed closely behind and palmed a knife. Apart from spiders and nature stealing inside, it seemed as if nothing had been disturbed by forest critters. Everything lay untouched on the kitchen bench, utensils, and clay canisters, and what once could have been flour scattered over the table, a dusty, wooden rolling pin nearby.
My sister picked up a jar from a wooden shelf that held preservatives. Bottled food that was now a muddy-brown color. She put it back down, turned around, and swept a curious, troubled gaze around. "Creepy," she murmured.
Cracked plates, mugs, and dull cutlery neatly set, remained on the small dining table, along with a rusted metal pot right in the very center, as if what had occurred here to those who had lived in the cottage, had been swift and abrupt.
An eerie chinking sound had us both whirling around. The wyrmbone hunting knife clenched in my hand rose. An icy shudder rippled down my back to see that the sound had come from a mobile hanging above a baby's crib. The empty crib stood in the corner of the room beside the deteriorating frame of an old straw bed. A slinking breeze stirred the tiny carved birds that had been hand-whittled and made them dash against one another once more—chink-chink.
"Creepy as fuck," I agreed. I jerked my chin toward the cottage's doorway, wanting out, and my sister and I made our way back to the forest, glad to be gone from the creepy tomblike dwelling.
We wove around thickly knotted trees and waded through wild rushes that feathered against our boots and calves until we found the water well not too far from the cottage.
Valarie's hair, braided into a rope, fell across the shoulder of her fish-cut armor. Both of us leaned over the stoney side of the well. It was deep and dark down there. A dull shimmer like oil on water came from below, and something else...a collection of things that were mottled-white and mostly still intact.
"What is that?" Valarie asked, squinting downward.
My blood ran cold.
The well had dried up somewhere along the years and the shaft was lined with smooth stone that wouldn't give anyone enough purchase to climb out. At the very bottom, near a small shallow pool of infested, stagnant water, I counted a dozen remains, perhaps more, lying down or sitting up against the sides of the well shaft.
"Human sk-skeletons," Valarie murmured in shock.
"Yeah," I agreed. Our gazes met and reflected a disturbed look.
Amongst the skeletons there were bones: ribs and forearms, pelvis and skulls that were fractured, or completely snapped in two, I assumed, when whomever they'd been, had fallen and abruptly met the cruel bottom of the well.
"How?" my sister asked, her brows drawing together, mystified.
Sirro came to mind and what he'd shared with me after I'd burst out of the Hemmlok Forest in rage and heartache at being pincered in by my family.
What I find most strange is what the Houses do to one another in there.
The Horned God assumed that they were the bones of servants that had forgotten their place and been removed by the upper ranks of Houses.
I cursed quietly. "I expect they were thrown down there and left to starve."
My sister gasped, before saying, "Murdered?"
I nodded. Sirro seemed to think so.
A skeleton's upper body leaned against the wall shaft with the tattered remains of rotting clothing wrapped around its ribs and a deteriorating leather shoe near its stretched-out boned foot, which seemed newer compared to the others.
"Who w-would do such a thing?" Valarie breathed.
There were a few Houses that shared the forest: the Denaiuds, Lyons, and Szarvases. I rubbed a finger along my mouth, frowning in thought. Though a small part of me urged that Sirro had said there were old paths that connected the estates and any one of the Houses could be responsible, there was only one estate that was closest to this place. Valarie followed my train of thought, both of us looking back the way we came.
"The Szarvases?" my sister asked, surprised.
Both of us shared a concerned look.
"Shit," Valarie whispered, her violet eyes gone round.
I straightened, unnerved by it all, wondering who could be responsible for these deaths. It could be any one of the Szarvases. It could even be another servant. After one last look down into the dark depths of the well, a morbid resting place for those who suffered a terrifying slow end, I silently indicated to Valarie for us to push on.
It took a few more hours of trudging north-easterly as Sirro advised. My sister and I kept together as we searched the forest, avoiding beasts and lesser creatures hunting smaller critters or each other. There was no way in Nine Hells that either of us would split up to make the search faster, not at night, not in the Hemmlok Forest. Eventually, as the full moon began to make its ascent, we found the hole in the ground.
Brisk night air nipped at my cheeks and forehead and my breath clouded in front of me. A creepy sensation crawled down my spine. My fingers clenched tighter around the hilts of my wyrmbone daggers. Valarie crouched down beside me at the edge of the forest, long fern fronds grazing her thighs where her crossbow was balanced.
Silence hung thick and oppressive in this part of the forest as if nothing lived nearby, nothing crossed nearby, nothing dared to. All that could be heard was an eerie wind sighing through the gnarled trees.
This place felt wrong. It was darker, more sinister and menacing thrumming than what had vibrated from the derelict cottage. We weren't near the Heart of the Hemmlok Forest, but it felt as if we were.
Just as Sirro had explained, there was a rocky outcrop. What he failed to mention was that the jagged, gray stones with striations of black and blooms of murky white sat in the middle of burned, barren earth. This place had been a battlefield, and left almost exactly as it had been a long time ago—pitted and fissured, with broken calcified trees upended near the newly grown tree line.
I suspected the outcrop had been one gigantic rock that was now two main peaks. And in the blast area of blackened earth that circled the outcrop were half-buried stones, their serrated edges now smoothed and weather-worn.
The cracked terrain gently sloped upward to the outcrop that looked like it had been cleaved apart by the Gods. Gouges, long and deep, ran against one rock's grain as if enormous claws had slashed its side, and silver scars marred the stone too—magic.
A terrifying battle had taken place here.
The Kinslayer.
What the hells was it that made even a Horned God reluctant to return here himself?
That those we served would place us, the Houses, between it and them.
Rising, I stepped out of the forest into the clearing.
My approach was quiet.
Valarie checked her surroundings and then joined me, her footsteps silent.
We made our way across the dry and dusty dirt to the outcrop and climbed the rough and cracked rock. My sister slung her crossbow back over her shoulder and I sheathed my blades. Our fingers dug into small grooves to assist our way upward until we reached the peak, uneven beneath the soles of our boots.
It was as if the world paused. As if every creature and critter within the forest turned their attention from their hunt or stopped chewing on flesh and sinew or awoke from sleep to watch me and my sister.
I studied the crevasse—the hole in the ground—and its inky-black depth.
A void. An abyss. Unfathomable darkness.
I half-knelt at the edge of the hole. I shrugged the backpack off my shoulders, dug out a flare, uncapped it, and struck it alight. Bright, sparkling, crackling light illuminated the night sky and the rock, bleaching my sister's complexion.
Holding the flare outward over the hole, I dropped it.
Light plummeted downward, banishing the black emptiness in small pockets of light and shadow as the flare fell, fell, fell.
Then, it mysteriously disappeared, as if the darkness was a beast that yawned its mouth wide and gulped the flare down its throat. Gone.
Goosebumps chilled the flesh beneath my armor.
Valarie and I shot each other an apprehensive glance.
I threw my senses downward, trying to pick apart all the nuances in the vast depth within the ground...nothing.
"Is it down there?" my sister whispered. I had told her what I knew, and that was only fucking scraps of information I'd gleaned from Sirro.
I sighed through my nose and rubbed my chin. "I don't know," I whispered back, glancing up at Valarie. "Can you feel anything?"
She slowly shook her head. Her skin had paled and there was wariness tightening her features. "I'm not sure... I can't get past the darkness."
I couldn't detect anything that Sirro was worried about, no threatening otherworldly presence that would try to tempt me down. Unless this was its plan: to remain quiet and silent and still and entice me in another way.
Fuck it.
I had to be sure.
I had to know.
I grabbed a pair of adamere gloves from my backpack and tugged them on. I flexed my fingers before pulling out the long coil of Zrenyth's rope. Magic infused the fibers, and it would be as long as I needed it to be. I stood and moved to secure the rope around the peak of a rock that jutted higher than the rest, tugging it to test that it would hold in place.
Valarie grabbed hold of my shoulder and squeezed hard enough that I winced. "What the hells are you d-doing?"
I shrugged her hand away, ignoring her to pass each end of the rope high around my back, crossing them and bringing them forward, before stepping over each length. In a series of quick moves to create a makeshift harness, I ended up with both lengths threaded through my groin and out to the side, wrapped once around my arm and held to support my weight and ease my descent. Keeping the rope tension tight, I edged back to take a position at the lip of the crevasse.
My sister growled low and worried, "Varen, are you supposed to go down there?" When I still didn't answer, she said, "I don't l-like this ... It's not right, you sh-shouldn't be doing this. What if the lingering afterlife is in there?"
I stared over her shoulder at the forest that edged the barren earth. Peering out from beneath the thick undergrowth, or sitting high in twisted branches, were shadowed shapes and bright night eyes that glowed round or gleamed in upswept lines or stared through thin-slitted eyelids.
My gaze cut to hers. "I'm about to find out."
I leaned back and began the descent.
There was just the sound of my breath, the rope creaking, and my boots meeting rock before it gave way to packed earth as I pushed and swung out or stepped my way down.
Darkness swallowed me whole.
Damp moisture within the swirling air whetted my lungs with every inhale.
And a repugnant smell, moldering and fetid, came from down below.
Down I abseiled.
Down, down, down.
I went slowly, checking everything with my senses. Cold sweat beaded my hairline. My fingers were heating from the rope's friction burning my gloves and my heartbeat drummed in my ears. Stones rattled and fell from my descent, and nothing, not even a hint of them striking the bottom of the hole.
My hair lifted with a strange oily breeze that whirled within the crevasse, bringing with it an eerie wisping, almost like a voice.
I paused, my senses alert and finely honed.
Did I feel something?
Is that a whispering voice down in the void?
A chuckle?
After a minute, nothing, and I began to descend once more.
It was getting harder and harder to see my sister leaning over the edge staring downward. Anxiety squeezed my chest as the darkness began to feel like an unwelcome presence. The dreadful feeling of being confined to a light-defying box, a coffin, overwhelmed me to the point I dragged in long, slow breaths to ease the rising panic.
Down, down, down I climbed.
And my sister faded as if I were staring at her through the wavering surface of a lake, squinting to see her outline, and then with one more step downward, she was gone and I was embraced by a sea of darkness.
Strange darkness that nullified my night vision.
It was so dark I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.
And down I climbed.
Further and further and further downward.
Until I wasn't sure when it would end. If it would end.
And time began to fold in on itself as if there were no beginning and no end.
My thoughts began to unthread and I lost sense of who I was. Where I was.
And on and on and on I climbed downward, drifting in a void of darkness, bodiless, only whispering thoughts remaining.
Then finally, finally, the ends of Zrenyth's rope met the pit of the hole.
I'd reached the bottom.
I let the pressure go from the rope and jumped, landing lightly, only to jolt off balance.
A terrifying crunch and clink-clink-clink as something light and brittle rattled and broke beneath my boots.
My weight drove me downward.
And I began to sink.
Unadulterated panic slammed into me.
It wasn't quicksand or loosely packed earth that was swallowing me. It was something strange—sharp and small and angular—as I sank and it rose around me. It raked against my ankles, shins, and calves, ate at my thighs, and consumed my waist.
I scrambled to grab hold of the rope and hauled myself out of the quagmire of cool, sharp things. My heartbeat ricocheted inside my chest and clammy sweat ran down my forehead to slide along my nose.
Fucking hellsgate.
With a shaky hand, I dug out of my bandoleer a small vial and unstoppered the cap. Out flew fireflies that danced in the darkness and lit it up in whirls and whorls of neon colors. Their glowing forms cast light within the pitch-black pit and illuminated the earth-packed walls.
I looked down.
Beneath my boots was something mottled-white and fragile that was stacked upon themselves and made the ground uneven.
I was standing on a vast, deep pile of slender bones.
There was nothing but tiny skeletons and broken bones littering the bottom of the hole.
Animal bones. Not human.
A breath eased out of me and my heart began to slow to find myself alone.
My next breath clenched in my throat as I realized that the crevasse was empty.
There was nothing in here. Not even a lingering afterlife.
What Sirro had feared was true.
The Kinslayer, whatever it was, was no longer trapped.