“The Shortcut.”
A dark-fantasy excerpt featured in Tales from the Magician’s Skull.
When a shortcut strands two travelers in a haunted ruin, a reluctant swordsman must follow his friend—freshly murdered and unnaturally reborn—into a cursed swamp where ancient love and unholy vengeance still stir. The Shortcut is a dark-fantasy tale of spectral possession, decaying empires, and the dreadful cost of loyalty.
The following short story first appeared in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, No 13 in January 2025. In this issue, Anton Kromoff even adapted the short’s antagonist as a playable “Strange Specter” for 5E tabletop RPGs!
Illustration by Ger Curti.
“I think I see your town.”
Fazoul, his wide-brimmed hat drooping, rain splashing off his broad shoulders and into his face, turned to face Wells through the downpour. Thick gray clouds churned from horizon to horizon, belching fits of hot rain as they rolled low across the fens.
Wells, his robe and coat sodden and clinging to his thin frame, clutched his hood together at his neck and squinted through the storm. He pointed with a nod. Ahead of them, perched above the rippling swamps, sat a solitary wooden house, its roof sagging and broken, its steps and hitch collapsed in the mud. Shutters hung open, swaying in the waves of rain.
“You’re kidding me …” Fazoul muttered.
Wells shrunk in the saddle and absently stroked his mare’s drenched mane. “You said it would save us two days, taking this shortcut,” he said, his voice quick, keeping pace with the patter of rain. “Your map showed a town—”
“I know.” Fazoul interrupted.
“And that,” Wells said, pointing, “is not a town. If I’m not in Ghenno by—”
“I know, I know.” Fazoul shook his head, water spraying into the wind.
Wells frowned and peered through the curtain of rain at the dreary marshes beneath—and occasionally flooding over—the raised track.
“Funny name for this place, Denenor,” Wells said, whipping his reins, his horse reluctant to move down the hill toward the ruined house.
“All the towns and rivers in this part of the country have good Durockian names. But Denenor is ancient Lasinex. From dene, meaning city, and nore, for scavenger.”
He looked across the nearby fens, raising his head to the wind, the loose edges of his hood flapping against his cheeks and brow. “It’s been thousands of years since empire. Why hasn’t this place’s name vanished along with everything else?”
Fazoul chuckled as he hopped off his horse. “Guess no one’s been around to rename it.”
They called into the small house unanswered, tied off their horses and pushed through the rotten, rain-soaked door.
Fazoul explored the single room, lifting decayed rugs and pulling aside moldy curtains with his drawn sword. Out of the rain, Wells shed his hood and shook the water from his curly blonde hair. He crouched in a corner and watched Fazoul pace around a sagging hole in the floor beneath the ruptured ceiling.
“No one’s been here for a while.”
“Your keen pathfinder skills tell you that?” asked Wells, smiling.
Fazoul shook his head and looked up through the hole in the ceiling. Rain poured through. “I should have listened to my mother and avoided that no-good sorcerer’s son.”
Wells pulled off his gloves and rubbed his clammy hands.
Fazoul gestured toward him. “Get to it.”
Wells looked up, surprised.
“You get one going. You’re the outdoorsman.”
Fazoul set his wide-brimmed hat on the bench and sat beside it, the brittle wood and rusty nails squealing in protest beneath him. “Shall I start it with the wet wood or the wet curtains?”
Wells sighed in defeat before rising on legs still shaky from the ride. He closed his eyes. Tight. Then his body shuddered—as if struck with by a chill—and Fazoul was surprised to see the wet hairs on Wells’ arms and neck stand in the heavy air, charged. Wells stretched one hand toward the open hole in the floor, his thumb, fore, and middle fingers loosely pointing, while with the other he reached into his robe and clutched the small amulet around his neck. He gasped, as waking under a lover’s touch.
And where once Wells strained to flip a coin or enflame a candle—the veins at his temples pulsing, his hands gripped white—an easy electricity washed over him, now. The bright stain of a thief stealing a kernel of power—the most meager portion of the awesome might of Iax, the ever-god.
Wells tightened his grip around the amulet and, for a moment, it looked as though the sorcerer’s feet threatened to drift up off the rotten plank floor.
Wells opened his eyes and looked down the length of his arm, over his sleeve black with rain, past pointed fingers, and toward the yawning hole in the timbers. He inhaled, tightening like an archer about to loose. Then, with an exhale, shuddered.
Green flame erupted off the muddy earth beneath the hole. Enough to fill a brazier. Warmth filled the small ruin.
Wells leaned back against the wall, his head light, his cheeks flush.
“The flame won’t burn you, but it will warm you,” he said, his voice quiet and spent, breath short.
Fazoul watched his friend for a long moment.
“When you do that,” he asked, “does it hurt?”
Wells shook his head and let a weak smile creep across his face. “It feels wonderful.”
Wells dozed beside the hole in the floor, the light of the green fire dim on his face. His robe dangled from low rafters.
Fazoul slept in the corner of the small room, eyes flickering as Wells’ robe began to sway in the breeze between eldritch flame and wet weather. And as he drifted back into dreams of dry beds and cool stone keeps, he almost remembered someone else in the room with them.
Fazoul snapped awake, heart surging against his ribs, and jumped to his feet.
“Wells!”
He wasn’t even aware he’d called out his friend’s name. Only of the scant few feet that separated him from his sword, propped against the wall. And of the woman, radiant as a harvest moon, hanging in midair over Wells’ arcane flame.
Wells woke with a muffled yelp. But when he saw the spectral woman above him, he screamed a sharper, higher call and scampered backward across the floor, his soft palms and bare heels digging into the rotting wood.
Between them, hovering over the hole in the floor, the woman was pale and translucent, her blue glow muted against the green flame. She was young, thin, and smooth. Naked except for the long fine hair that swam around her head as though swirling in a bath. Her eyes, featureless but for hard white pupils burning bright against her blue body, searched the small house. And as her gaze passed over the men—unseeing—her fingers lingered in the folds of Wells’ student robe, hung from the rafters to dry. Like a woman in the water, she wrapped herself around the robe, her limbs and body passing through the sodden wool, her hands dragging through the material, turning and pulling it under her vaporous touch.
Every muscle and sinew in Fazoul’s body coiled tight, ready to spring. But even as he let his sword sing out of its scabbard and as he braced his back against the wall, he found his heartbeat calming the longer he looked on the woman. Her face was sad. Her expression and her body tired. But there was something desperate in the way her eyes searched the room. Something lost and piteous.
He relaxed. His scabbard fell from his hand, clattering on the rotten boards.
Her white-hot eyes turned and found him.
Fazoul’s heart leapt again. His breathing short. But he found himself unable to move as she drew closer. As she slid up to him, her feet floating just off the floor, her sad face and blank eyes regarding him without expression.
She touched his shoulders. An electric rush ran down his arm, standing hairs on end and sparking between flesh and nail and the metal of his sword’s cross guard. Not since he was a boy studying swordplay with the princes had a blade felt so useless in his hands. She drifted closer, her naked vapors pressing through his clothes and against his flesh. Her hands passed across his chest and arms, her ethereal thighs against his waist, her head curled into his neck. Fazoul closed his eyes as his body raced—pumping with furious blood, ragged breath, and hot arousal.
She pulled away, smiling faintly in the dim green light of the fire and her own low blue glow. As she moved away, her hand lingered on his chest, sweeping his skin and hair over his heart. Fazoul caught his breath as her touch passed. His heart pounded.
Her eyes took in the ruined house with new recognition, seeing it for the first time. Fazoul watched her gaze drift down the length of his blade, across their scattered gear, and, finally, over to Wells, huddled in a corner across the room.
Wells rose to his feet, fear fading as she drifted closer. Her hair flowing behind her in the humid air, she reached out and ran long insubstantial fingers through his blonde curls and around his cold ears. She pulled herself close to him until her breasts passed against and through his shirt and into his chest.
There, and all at once, her smile faded. Her expression drew tight and she pulled away. Wells looked to Fazoul, panic and nerves taking shape in his eyes. But Fazoul just shook his head. The woman drew her hands together and, reaching through Wells’ shirt, pushed his small amulet into view. Myopic, she bent close until her eyes were mere inches from the silver-wrought pendant.
She flew backward. For an instant, Fazoul could see a look of struck horror on her sad face. But that sorrowful fright vanished as quickly as it appeared. Her hot eyes narrowed, streams of painful blue-white light issuing to either side. And her body bent forward in midair, stabbing toward Wells. Fingers, long and wicked, stretched from tiny open palms. Her face became a mask of anger and rage and hatred, her mouth stretching wide in a soundless fury answered by the echo of a distant scream, faint and terrible, rolling through the door from miles away.
Her pale blue glow surged until it filled the small cabin.
She flew at Wells before he or Fazoul could react. With one long-fingered hand, she grabbed him beneath the chin and lifted him off the floor, fingers passing though his skin and bone like vapor, into his mouth and throat. The other she plunged into his chest. Fazoul watched as Wells opened his mouth to scream but found no voice. And as she pressed her face close to his friend’s, he saw her speaking but heard no sound. Just the ringing echo of that distant, smothered scream.
With a quick stroke she pulled her hand from Wells’ chest. Held tight in her fiercely-glowing fingers, a beating spectral heart. It pulsed, quivering. Its blue-white glow dull between her enraged fingers.
The color drained out of Wells. The woman released him, his body crumpling to the floor as his eldritch flame sputtered and went out.
Fazoul, unthinking, charged the floating specter. But never turning to face him, she darted through the air as a fish turns and darts away from a spear. The rotting door shuddered in its meager frame as she passed through it, into the night rain, plunging the dying house into fresh dark.
Fazoul burst though the soaked wood and ran barefoot across the road, chasing her down into the fens even as she alighted over it like a sheet on the wind. Rain beat on his head and shoulders, ringing dully on his drawn blade. Night closed in around him as she fled further and further over cattails and grasses. Stumbling in the marsh, he fell to his knees and lost sight of the specter. When he struggled to his feet again, her blue glow was faint and tiny across the receding fens.
Fazoul stood, breathing hard and holding his sword ready. Still as a statue, he sank into the swamp up to his calves. Hot rain soaked his hair and thin shirt. And when the specter’s light was finally gone, lost among mists and tumbles of low clouds and the dark shapes of hillocks rising from the wetlands, Fazoul hung his head and squeezed his eyes tight. He screamed until his throat was burned and raw, tears mingled with rain.
He trudged back across the road and up the steps into the ruined house, mind blank, chest heavy. Wells’ flame extinguished and the light of the enraged specter gone, the room was almost pitch under the cloudy night sky. Fazoul knelt beside his friend and pulled him onto his back. Wells’ skin was already cold and pale. His chest still. Fazoul let his sword fall to the boards and pulled his friend close.
Wells’ eyes opened slowly. He reached up and gripped Fazoul’s wet shoulder with weak, cold fingers.
Fazoul looked into his eyes, dumbstruck.
“What did she do to me?” Wells struggled to say, breathless.
Fazoul stood in the doorway, looking south through the rain. Darkness collected around the small house in mists and shadows and stillness, hugging mud and water and wood alike. And no matter how much he squinted or how far he strained to see, there was no sign of the spectral woman or Wells’ beating heart clutched between her incandescent fingers.
Wells stood in the house behind him, shrouded in night and shadow. He didn’t shiver despite his cold flesh, clammy with rain and damp.
Wells reached into his shirt and took hold of his amulet. It was a simple thing. Silver, pressed flat on four sides into a thin rod no longer than his thumb. A token of the sorcerer’s craft passed down to him from his father.
He squeezed it tight and closed his eyes. And, as in his youth, he fought to touch that other place—that luminous place just outside the world where Iax and his arch-angels dwelled.
After a long minute, he let slip the amulet, his fingers creased from clutching.
“Nothing,” he said, a whisper barely audible over the rain.
Then, with great effort, Wells pushed the muscles of his chest out, forcing air into calmed lungs. He pulled those same muscles back, forcing out the wind as words.
“I’m dead.”
Fazoul stood just out of the rain in the shattered doorway, watching. “I know.”
Wells slammed his hand against the wall. A splinter shot into it. Thickening blood dripped from the wound but no cry escaped Wells’ lips.
“Damn.”
He moved up behind Fazoul and pulled the splinter out with his teeth.
“Where?”
Fazoul gestured south. “That way.”
He watched, grimacing, as Wells struggled to inhale and exhale to say, “Then let’s go.”
Fazoul rounded on him. “What are you talking about? We’ve got to get you to a leech or a priest. There’s a temple of Or the Swift in Brion. We could be there by midday.”
Wells shook his head. “That woman has taken my …” He forced the air in again, his hands already darkening—heavy with blood—as he spoke. “I don’t know what. But she’s … left me dead … Or worse.” He clutched his inert amulet again. “We have to go after …”
“And do what?” Fazoul asked, sighing, shaking his head.
“I don’t know!” Wells barked in a queer wheeze.
“Wells—”
“No!” Wells cut him off. And Fazoul leaned away from him, quieted as much by Wells’ tone as his dull eyes and blackening hands. “I can’t go back like this,” he said more softly. “If the college ever … they’d make a study of me. And a priest?” He choked a laugh. “I’m an apostate.”
Wells looked south. “I’m going.” He stepped into the rain and started toward the horses, head slung low.
Fazoul shook his head and started after him.
Wells’ every step was torture to watch. The leather of his boots were stretched to bursting, his swollen legs heavy as iron. And as he struggled to walk the muddy track, his arms flapped uselessly at his sides, their regular swing forgotten until he looked down at them, concentrating—telling those shrunken muscles to move his heavy, darkening hands in their rhythm.
He walked like a poorly strung doll down the side of the house toward the fallen hitch. But when Wells reached for his horse’s bridle, the animal neighed and bucked wildly, turning and kicking, eyes wild.
He ducked away, his hood catching and tearing on a shod hoof.
Fazoul caught the horse’s bridle and stroked the animal’s long neck. And as the animal calmed, it watched Wells, kicking whenever he drew close. Wells stomped back up onto the road and started south, yelling. “I’ll go on foot!”
Fazoul ran across the road and grabbed Wells’ arm.
“We’ll do this.”
Wells stopped and looked up at him, rain falling unblinked upon his eyes.
Fazoul shook his head. “I’ve ever been there for you. And you for me.” He shrugged. “I’ll follow you until I can follow you no longer.”
Wells reached out and clutched Fazoul’s wrist. “Thank you.” He looked down at the sword hanging on Fazoul’s hip. “I hope that’s all the magic we’ll need.”
Fazoul held the reins of both horses. Wells’ steed brayed and snorted, shaking its head and mane with his slightest movement. So, he remained motionless, a stillness that came as natural now as breath and fidget and chatter once had.
When the rain finally stopped, Fazoul led them up a low rise above the marshes. On wet earth he pulled down a dead and hollowed trunk to sit upon and began piling rocks to make a dry fire pit. Eyeing the wet sticks and jetsam about, he looked up at Wells.
“Would you had your ways, now.”
“Would a lot of things … were the way they were,” Wells said as he sat on the log.
Fazoul tried to start a fire from a wad of old parchment and flint. And with each strike, Wells flinched, cold hands raised against each flash of flint against steel. Every clack and scrape of the stones, every bright spark jumping from rock to kindling, pushed him toward the end of the log sure as a bonfire raging.
Fazoul blew on the smoking embers and watched Wells slide away.
“Feel any different?”
Wells shook his head, tearing his gaze from the terrible flame. “Stiffer. Fuller, maybe.”
Fazoul nodded. “Bloat. This place is just so wet. So warm. I don’t think we can avoid it.”
“How long?” Wells asked.
“Since we left that house?” Fazoul asked in reply.
Wells fought to keep his eyes off the glowing embers. “Seems we just left.”
Fazoul sat back on his heels and watched Wells, unsure. “We’ve been slogging through these swamps all day. Ten, Twelve hours by my reckoning.”
Wells stared around at the low fens, “Are we going in circles?”
Fazoul turned his attention back to the fire. “No. My pathfinding is true. You can hold me to that.”
Wells nodded. “I think you’re right. It’s just … My mind wanders. I think I’ve been here before.”
Fazoul shook his head. “Wells, you never left Stormweather until you went off to that college.” A small flame began to grow among the kindling and he let it start on some stones, blowing to stoke it.
Wells looked around, clouding eyes passing over dim bogs and fens, cattails colonizing the flats. “I can hear the distant cries of threshing gangs … fat hills rich with wheat … barly and rapeseed.” He mumbled to the wind. “There’s a town on the water. A causeway. An island. The stink of rot on sea air.”
“What are you talking about?” Fazoul asked, a flutter of fear causing his heart to race.
Wells’ face was blank. “I don’t know.”
A long silence hung between them.
“Did they teach you about specters or this kind of death in your school?”
Wells nodded, absently. “These are not common creatures. But I’ve read of the undying. Some are bound. Some choosing to stay. Not all are bad.”
“That’s good to hear.” Fazoul said, his face lost under the broad brim of his hat.
Wells turned glazed eyes on him.
“Good? To rot as I walk? To bloat? To force the breath … every time I want to speak? And what when this body decays … is eaten by maggots and worms. What unlife is there for me then?”
Fazoul sat back from the small fire and looked at Wells. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Wells frowned, staring into the fire.
“I’m not even tired,” he muttered, eyes fixed on that horrible flame. His stiffening flesh jumping with every crack and pop of burning branch and debris.
Fazoul laid out a rough-spun mat on the wet ground and lay on it. “Then you can keep watch. I need an hour. We didn’t sleep last night and it’ll be dark again soon. We’ll have an easier time finding her in the dark.”
Wells said nothing.
Fazoul rolled onto his back and touched Wells’ leg. It was hard and cold. Calves black with pooled blood peeked through hose and robe.
“We’ll find her.”
Wells just stared into the flame
When Fazoul awoke, night was falling behind the overcast and the world was dim, the fire dwindled to embers. He thought of the woman, sensuous and terrible. Of the way she’d stroked his chest, her fingers trespassing through his skin—hesitant, as though looking for something. Of the way she’d recoiled from Wells. And of his pumping heart shining through her long fingers.
They had to find her.
He rolled over, words forming on his lips to stir Wells to action. But the log behind him, where Wells sat when Fazoul drifted off to sleep, was bare.
“Wells!” he called as he bolted to his feet, blood and breath surging.
Both horses stood at their tethers. Their gear hung undisturbed, draped over the far end of the log. Among the darkening swamps or against the dimming clouds, all around, there was no sign of Wells’ shambling silhouette.
Fazoul gathered up his sword, sweat stinging his eyes in his panicked haste.
Where could Wells have gone? How far and how long ago did he wander off? He remembered those blank looks. Those far-away eyes drifting over the wetlands surrounding them. The murmured details of some distant place and the way he gazed, sightless, into the fire.
Did Wells even know where he was?
Fazoul’s heart quickened with fear.
Long, dragging steps left their tracks in the mud and brush leading south. Sword drawn, Fazoul chased the trail, eyes ever on gouges in the mud or reeds snapped by Wells’ passing. The tracks were perhaps an hour old—it was hard to tell in the wet earth. But Wells was at least wary of the water, sticking to the rises and higher embankments as much as possible, and for that Fazoul was grateful. But still, with each rise or rounding of a high crop of grasses, he feared seeing Wells’ corpse floating helpless in some stilled pond. Carrion for scavengers.
In his haste, Fazoul didn’t notice nightfall. Stopping atop a small rise, he was surprised to look up at a sliver of flickering stars breaking though the canopy here and there, the edges of cloud illumed in silver by the unseen moon. But even in that feeble light, he could still make out Wells’ trail. And in the quiet, rainless air, he could hear the patter of small animals moving south among the rushes chasing the stink of decay heavy in the air.
Fazoul struggled along the trail, his feet sinking in the long muddy gashes of mud Wells’ heavy limbs had left behind. Ahead, the embankments ran out and a pool of water stretched, shivering in the hot breeze.
And for the length of a breath, Fazoul saw Wells on the near shore, almost hidden behind a crop of cattails. His body pointed true toward the southern horizon.
Then Wells stepped forward, oblivious to the dozen fat rodents, eyes glittering, scuttling across the mud toward him. The ground slipped out from beneath him and Wells toppled into the water.
“Wells!” Fazoul called after him.
A crash of water banged through the quiet world, loud as sword on shield. Wells vanished under a skin of slime atop the water before bursting out again, eyes still cloudy but suddenly more lucid. Fazoul watched him struggle and splash in the murk, pulling himself back onto shore.
Rats crowded the bank around Wells as he tried to pull himself out of the water. They risked nips and snaps at his hands and feet whenever he didn’t move quickly enough and soon their ranks swelled to several dozen. Hair wet, scum streaked across his eyes, Wells didn’t flinch when the first rat sunk its rabid teeth into his hand. Instead, limbs stiff, eyes once more dull, he sagged into the mud.
Fazoul burst through grasses and willowed branches, skewering a rat crawling toward Wells’ hand. Two more quick slashes dispatched more rats and scattered the mischief into the water and rushes. With a final downward thrust, Fazoul skewered a final, stubborn rodent snapping at Wells’ face.
Grabbing Wells under the arm—and feeling his cold flesh move loosely around the bone—Fazoul dragged him to his feet.
“What are you doing?” Fazoul snapped.
Wells looked down at his pale hands, strips of skin and muscle torn away by rabid teeth. “I felt the grain … whipping against my skin,” he muttered. “The sun in my hair.”
“Wells!” Fazoul shouted at him.
Wells just stared at him, slackjawed. “Fazoul?” He struggled to exhale and speak, “What are you doing here.” He blinked dry eyes and shook his head. Turning, he saw the lagoon and the dead rats around his feet. He pointed southward, saying, “She went that way.” Then, looking back at Fazoul, he said. “But I’m so heavy.”
Fazoul nodded. “Let’s get back for the horses, okay?”
Wells only nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Crows chattered loudly on the wing, dipping close through the humid marsh air but wary of the torch Fazoul held aloft. And in that dim light, he watched Wells’ vacant eyes take in the low rises and stinking fens of the marsh, their shapes jostled into life by the lumpy cadence of his unhappy horse. Or by some fevered vision playing out inside his undead eyes.
Fazoul turned the horses toward a higher path above groves of drooping trees.
“Not … that way,” Wells stuttered, forgetting to breathe.
Fazoul stopped and turned in his saddle.
Wells squinted toward a large earthen mound rising from the southern bogs, veiled in distant mists. The skeleton of an island rotting above ground.
“I know where … she’s going.”
Fazoul trotted toward him and stopped within arm’s reach.
“Tell me.”
Wells shook his head. “I don’t know. I think … I see what she sees. Know what she knows.” He pointed across the bogs toward the southeast. “That way.”
Fazoul followed the length of Wells’ arm. “You’re sure?”
Wells nodded.
Fazoul took his friend’s hand. Wells’ face and voice were vacant. The quick clip of his tongue shortened by labored breath, the smile normally cut across his mouth twisted and drooping on a face forgotten.
“Okay.”
Wells squeezed Fazoul’s hand. A cold vice, hard and damp.
“She doesn’t see things … for what they really are. Only what was. When she was alive.” Wells adjusted his stiffening body in the saddle, stirring the horse beneath him. “But I think she’s beginning to. She’s expecting to see people. Places. But they aren’t here.” He hung his head.
Fazoul bowed to see into Wells’ glazed eyes. “What’s this about?”
Wells’ head rolled from side to side, a frown contorting his bloating face. “She’s Xynaxan. From the ancient empire. Before the Darkness came. A priestess of Eunica … the old goddess of pleasure.”
He closed his eyes. And Fazoul thought he heard a falsetto in his voice. Or a woman’s tone.
“The sun shining off the wide Xyna … below the High Hills of the Emperors. The vulgar icons inside the Eunatoria. The musk of love on the air. On everything.”
“Wells—” Fazoul started.
“A senator—a sorcerer—sent my husband here. Promised to bring him back … but only if I served him.” Wells shuddered, eyes still closed. “I labored in his bed for a year. Under his weight and sweat.”
“Sent him here?” Fazoul looked at the marsh around them. Waters stirred as if trampled through.
“I slipped out one night.” Wells said. “Came here on foot.” Then, smiling at some alien memory, “The insects were legion … running across the water. The harvest was coming in. The sun was hot on my hair.”
Wells shook his head, but kept his eyes tight. “I went down this valley to Sterae. The denimar. The city of the living. I bribed a causeway guard. Snuck across the water into Luxilus. The denenor. And over that heaving guard’s shoulder … the pitch fires and pyres of Luxilus … played on the water like ships on fire.”
“My husband was in there.”
Fazoul grabbed Wells by the cold arm and shook him. Shook him until his eyes flew open again, white and unseeing.
Wells stumbled, as though struck, but kept his feet. Then, his voice restored, said, “This is Denenor. A swamp stretching from Brion … to the sea. But twelve thousand years ago … this was the breadbasket of the empire. Fueled by sacrifice.”
He shook his head and frowned a weak, half-formed scowl. “I thought Denenor meant ‘City of the Scavengers.’” He drifted off for few minutes, eyes glazed and staring into the horse-churned mud. Then, looking back, continued as though he’d never missed a breath. “Languages aren’t my gift. But it was a city. Dene Nori. The City of the Dead.”
Wells shook his head. “The Xynaxans would cast out their unwanted. Embarrassing relatives … shamed politicians … caste rejects. Anyone who couldn’t be legally killed. It was a death sentence. No one ever came back. No one wanted them to.
“But she wanted her husband. So, she went there. To be with him. Even in the City of the Dead.”
“I’ve never heard of the like,” Fazoul muttered.
Wells forced out a muffled chortle. “We’re told stories of the old empire as kids. The height of civilization, so they told it.” He shook his head again. “But out our age has no dominion on darkness.”
And at the last, Wells took his hand away from Fazoul’s and examined it in the torchlight. The thickened fingers, the stiff joints, the cracked skin tearing back from where the rats had cut his ruined flesh.
“She looked for days,” Wells said. “She didn’t eat. Barely drank. Barely survived all manner of wickedness. And when she found him … Washed on the shore, beaten and … bloated.”
His eye lids drifted low. “I lay across him. Crying for days. His face crab-eaten. Staring toward our glittering gods in the night sky.”
Fazoul reached out and shook Wells by the arm.
Wells’ eyes flew open. He cast his gaze around, as if seeing the swamp around them for the first time.
“He died trying to get back to her.” Well sighed, breath fading.
Wells looked toward the distant, cloud-shrouded mound once spoken of in hushed voices. “She stabbed a hole in her neck … with a cloak pin. Bled to death on the hot rocks … beside her husband. At least she’d be with him in death.
“But she wasn’t.”
Wells pushed his stubborn horse forward, in the direction of his outstretched arm.
“For twelve thousand years … she’s been looking for him. But I don’t think he’s here.” Wells shook his head. “He’s waiting for her in the afterlife. In Eysia, they would’ve said.” Wells looked down at his decaying hands, his rotten body straining under his stretching skin, and added, “If there is such a place.”
He flexed his stiffened fingers into fists. But when the dead flesh stopped, unable to bend any further, Fazoul was shocked to see blue, luminous digits slide through the gray skin, thin and dexterous as Wells’ had ever been. Their color the same as those which plucked a spectral heart from his chest. And against the palm of his rotting hand, these ghostly fingers clenched tight before relaxing back into the unbending flesh.
“Wells—” Fazoul started, aghast.
“When I wandered off earlier? I couldn’t help myself.” He pulled out his knife and watched stiff fingers try to close around the hilt. Nimbler blue fingers pulled through the flesh, passing into the leather and steel of the handle. “But I think I understand what’s happening to me, now.”
Wells took his other hand and waved it in the air. As his hand moved more quickly, a leaner, blue hand and forearm slid out of it, casting its glow on the flesh trailing behind.
“I’m beginning to come apart,” Wells said. He held the knife close to his chest, the blade angled up toward his stretched throat. “As the body dies, the spirit doesn’t need it anymore. And where I fall apart, she is reborn. Where I become spirit … she becomes flesh.”
He shook his head furiously. The same blue glow fringing his hair and jaw as they moved. Fazoul could hear dry eyes knocking inside their sockets. “I won’t wait to disembody,” he said. “We’re not moving quick enough.”
“I told you, I’ll stay with you,” Fazoul snapped. “We’ll find her.”
But Wells only squeezed his shriveled eyes shut. “The dead can only think of themselves, Fazoul. Of what they need.” Then, leaning out of his saddle, his breath moist and rotten, he said, “You should’ve let me go … back at that pool. You should’ve let the rats have me. I could’ve gone on alone. A mist on the wind.”
Wells slashed with his knife. His necklace and lifeless amulet fell to the ground between the horses.
“She found us by my fire. It was a beacon to her. And as a woman of the gods … I was an apostate. She felt no pity when she took my life. And if taking hers is the only way left to me, nor shall I.”
For hours, they trudged through marsh and fens toward the looming mound of earth—that cursed city of old, wretched and stinking above the swamps. By midday, Fazoul convinced Wells to stop atop a broad flat patch of sandy mud sheltered from the resumed rains by broad-leafed trees. The island that was Luxilus—the denenor—swam like a leviathan in passing sheaths of rain not more than a mile away.
Fazoul tied off the horses and dropped to the dirt.
“We need to let the horses rest before a last push,” Fazoul sighed, leaning against one of the trees. “We’re almost—”
He sat up with a bolt, his heart pounding against his ribs. In the space of a blink the world dimmed and untold hours passed, the clouds behind the mound turned from sunlit to the dull gray of an afternoon shower.
And Wells was gone.
Fazoul ran to and untied his horse, spurring the animal to a gallop before he could either catch his breath or slip his boots into their stirrups.
But now, he didn’t need to scan the ground for dragging tracks or snapped grasses. No, that ancient mound loomed like a signal tower over the swamps.
He rode as fast as he could through the marshlands in the mound’s shadow, crossing the last mile in a blur of frenetic thought and panicked breath until his horse galloped onto a low stone rise—an ancient causeway, perhaps—and raced toward the spotted ruins. On the wind, Fazoul heard a voice, a shrill female cry, above the din of rain.
He squeezed Wells’ amulet in his hand. Here, on the ascending causeway, he spied Wells’ tracks among the stones and moss. They grew fainter as they climbed toward the ruins, stretching and sliding in shallow courses. Less like steps, more like a body dragged.
When he reached the edge of the mound, Fazoul’s horse bucked underneath him in panic—the darkness and sorrow of this place palpable as the rain splashing in its long-vanished streets. He wrestled with the reins to keep the animal from bolting until, giving up, he dropped from the saddle and slapped his horse on the ass, letting it run back into the swamp and away from these grim ruins.
Fazoul followed Wells’ tracks among flat, half-buried stone foundations and the precarious remains of once-mighty walls. His friend had moved back and forth across the hilltop, searching, doubling back and confusing his already unusual tracks. But at a crossing of long gouges in the mud Fazoul paused, kneeling close to the earth. The long dragging marks were Wells’—Fazoul harbored no doubt—but the crossing tracks were smaller, more definite. A woman’s.
Wells had told him: “Where I become spirit … she becomes flesh.”
A cry rolled across the hill.
Fazoul drew his sword and ran through mud and rain and ruin toward the sound, searching every depression and pit in the hilltop, blade ready. And when he finally found them, huddled together against the rain in a shallow at the descending edge of the broad mound, he paused, uncertain.
Wells knelt against a woman, his stiff hand barely able to hold the knife to her throat. Vaporous blue fingers passed in and out of his gray flesh, coaxing the dead limb to hold the blade in menace. The woman shrank against a low wall of mud-slick stone, naked and pinned under Wells’ dead weight. Tears stained her face as she beat her fists against him with one hand, clawed at the wall behind her with the other. Her raw pink skin glistened with rain.
She looked up at Fazoul, desperate, and called out to him in a language he didn’t understand.
She blanched at the sound of her own voice and began to shake. She babbled, tripping over her tongue as though she’d never used it before. She focused on Wells, rage behind her tears. Her words came more quickly, then. Fiercer.
“What’s she saying?” Fazoul asked, unsure of what he was seeing. Hearing.
“Does it matter?” Wells snapped at him, his speech slurred.
He pressed his dead arm toward her, the knife dancing at her throat. And with every move, Wells’ blue and luminous spirit moved first, dragging his hesitant body behind.
The woman turned her head against the stones and cried out. A name, perhaps? Her husband’s? She turned back toward Fazoul, casting her face side to side, twisted in grief. She stammered in some forgotten vulgate? Or some high imperial speech? He didn’t know.
“Who are you?” Fazoul muttered.
“Don’t talk to her,” Wells struggled to say.
Hatred flashed across her face and there was no mistaking the bile in her queer words. Wells’ spectral form leapt at her, snarling and barking, soundlessly. A deep roar of anguish rolled in the distance.
She shook her head, rain matting long dark hair across her face. She looked down at her bare arms and squeezed her small, pink hands. Rain splashing among tears.
“Wells,” Fazoul said, from above them, “Are you certain?”
Wells’ specter reared up, an inaudible scream on his lips, answered again by distant noise. His body shook, head rolling back, then snapping forward again—control regained.
Fazoul could see Wells struggling to press the blade into her flesh. And in that weakness, she shoved him aside and grabbed at his paralyzed arm, wrestling the blade free. It fell to the ground, out of reach.
Wells managed his body enough to keep her pressed against the rocks, his numb fingers closing around her throat.
Her voice broke, defiance gone. Sad and piteous as the spirit she’d been. And peppered among queer syllables and alien utterances, did he hear her say “dene nori?”
Fazoul stepped closer.
She fought viciously against Wells’ rotting body, twisting out of his hands and clawing against the low wall to her feet. She started to pull herself over the edge and out of the shallow, away from Wells’ fevered grasps.
Wells’ low voice whispered behind her, “Fazoul—”
He didn’t remember moving. As in a dream, he stood over the pair unable to act. Unsure what he was even standing over. But with Wells’ words—and with his whispered name—Fazoul moved quick, unthinking.
The woman was still clamoring over the low wall when she screamed. She slumped forward, bent over the edge of the pit, eyes fixed on the spot where hundreds of lifetimes ago she lay dying beside her husband.
She tried to push off the ground. To rise and fly across the mud and swamps and into this strange world. Instead, pinned, she looked down. Her life flowed out—a red almost black—along a length of steel onto stone and mud. And when Fazoul withdrew his blade—out of mud and flesh and into the dull overcast—she slipped back over the low wall. Her small body, nubile as the specter which once visited them in the night, sank into a puddle, head rolling back against Wells’ rotting legs.
Fazoul, blade lowered and bloody, stood over them. His face hid in the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat.
Wells’ specter bent close to her, his body wavering behind. His lips spoke inaudible words and, nodding, she began to cry. Fazoul could see her heart pounding against her flesh, pumping dying blood through the gash and onto her pink stomach.
Wells thrust a disembodied hand into her naked chest. Her body tightened and arched, her face twisting in pain. And when Wells pulled free her—no, his!—blue spectral heart, still beating, he watched its vapors pulse for just a moment before plunging it into his own chest.
He gasped, loud and long, and fell back against the wet earth.
Fazoul stood over them both, a watchman among the ruins. Rain pelted them—her eyes sightless, Wells’ desperate and blinking in the downpour, cataracts fading.
He knelt beside his friend and put his hand on Wells’ chest, surprised by the warmth suddenly returned. Ragged breath stirred beneath the frantic beat of his heart, renewed.
“Speak to me.”
The sorcerer coughed and shook in the rain and the mud. He reached up and hugged Fazoul’s broad shoulders, sheltering in them. His eyes were wet with tears.
“No one can ever know of this.”
Fazoul embraced his friend, the warmth of life flushing through his awakening body.
“Where she returns to spirit, so you’ll return to flesh.” he said, shaking. Then—even as he watched—those words played out through Wells’ mending body.
Fazoul let the amulet slide down its torn chain onto Wells’ shoulder. Wells clutched it tight in his weak hand, his breath caught at the electric touch of its arcane silver against his skin. He buried his face in Fazoul’s chest, the tears coming swift as the rain.
“No one.”
Fazoul nodded and, sheathing his bloodied sword, took Wells up in his arms, carrying him out of the ruins toward the lower swamps and Wells’ distant, tethered horse. He never looked behind at the naked woman, fetal in a pool of muddy water and blood.
“No one,” he agreed.
