Yew, and the Beginning [2/6]

Her clearing head allowed her to focus finally, on the sensations other than pain and cold and hunger. She could hear animals in the woods, could smell the earthy musk mixed with the oils of their skin, and the blood beneath their skin. She stood up and made her way to them, unobstructed. She didn’t notice how eating more also made the vague impressions she’d had of anything from before this dissipate like dust into the wind. All she knew was hunger and eating. It was endless, no matter how much she ate. Increasing and decreasing, but never nonexistent. Never satiated. She didn’t understand, nor did she try to. Driven purely by her instincts, she hunted and ate.

Sometimes she would sleep, returning to the ruins she had awoken in. She explored them passively, finding nothing but vacant and decrepit rooms. The rubble dug into her feet, but she paid it little mind. It would go away when she ate again. The thought of food brought saliva gushing from her mouth, rivulets escaping down her chin that she absently wiped away. No matter how she looked, she couldn’t find her way back to the first room; the one with the stone table. She did find more glowing shapes; some of them did things if she touched them, others just lit up.

She didn’t always like them. One of them had cut her arm off; it was okay, because she could just eat and get better, but it hurt. But there was one she like a lot; when she touched it sounds came out. They were pretty sounds, much louder and more varied than what she heard in the woods. None of the animals or bugs made so many sounds; and none of those sounds filled her ears so pleasantly like these ones. It was still a cold stone floor, but this is the place she liked to sleep most. She often hummed the sounds when walking around and hunting.

It was a while before she encountered a monster. It was weird. A moving corpse of a deer. She thought it was just sick; it smelled strange, kind of like her, but not. It was mean. It tried to eat her, lunging at her with jaws open too wide and gnashing blunted teeth. It was falling apart already, so it wasn't hard to beat, but it wouldn’t stop moving. She broke all its legs off, and still it tried to eat her. That made her angry. She bit the deer instead. It didn’t taste as good as the other deer she had eaten, but it was still edible. In the end she gobbled the whole thing down; problem solved.

She fought strange corpse animals a few more times after that, and ate them.

Then she met a different kind of undead creature.

It drifted through the air, flying around, but not like a bird. It had a shape somewhat like hers, but it was entirely made of bone. It was wrapped in a rag that moved against the wind, both transparent and not; like a shadow, obfuscating the exact detail of the body but not the outline. It was covered in the shining magical symbols, but none of them were like the ones she had seen before. Every inch she could see radiated faint light from curving, dotted, and overlapping lines. Nothing was as bright as its eyes, which seemed to burn with a distinct focus that every other undead thing she had met lacked. It was drenched in magic, too.

Standing before it in the grassy field of the ruins, she felt fear for the first time. Whatever this was, it was dangerous. It was too late to run or hide from it, unfortunately. However, it did not move to attack her. Instead, it seemed to regard and observe her beneath the light of the third full moon she could remember. It floated lazily around her as she stood crouched and tense, head whipping around to track its path above her.

“How peculiar…,” it spoke in a horrible rasp, but not to her. She mimicked the creatures of the woods and growled at the thing. Being near it unsettled her. Its energy was oppressive to her, cloying and choking, and sort of sticky. It tingled uncomfortably against her skin and singed the edges of her consciousness. It told her to sleep, to surrender. She didn’t like it. Things that surrendered got eaten. She refused to become food for this thing.

It tried to reach for her, but she jumped away. She scooped a stone from the ground and chucked it at the thing. The rubble flew right on through it without pause and the creature laughed at her, chuckling dark and humorless at her attempt. Suddenly, it flew straight at her, one skeletal hand outstretched towards her. She wasn’t fast enough to evade, it pressed its bone hand through her and to what she would later know was her soul. The symbol covered creature had left a magical brand on her soul, marking her.

It hurt, worse than anything else until now. She cried out, falling to the ground in white-hot pain that gouged invisible furrows into her. She tried, instinctively, to resist its creation. Her own mostly untapped magic kicked up under her skin, fierce and unrelenting. It couldn’t stop the brand completely, but it managed to keep it from the innermost parts. She didn’t know, but it had saved her from becoming the mindless puppet of this malevolent being. It took all her strength to resist just once. If it had bothered to try again, it would have fully succeeded.

But it was a being of great hubris. It was far more entertained that this weak little half-dead ghoul had managed to push back at all. It decided then, that it would wait and see what it would become on its own. Through the brand it would always be able to find her until it was no more, but she did not and could not know this. She only knew that it circled her twice more and left and that she didn’t see it again.

For the next several days, she stayed in the room with the pretty sound and remained curled into a ball. No matter how her stomach twisted, begging, pleading, threatening her to eat, she refused to leave. She sat and starved and did not care; she felt like the sensation was familiar to her, anyway. The sun rose and fell many times, the glowing symbol for the sounds constantly alight. Her body grew heavy and weak again, in the time she sat there.

Then, one day, the sounds stopped playing. No matter how many times she pressed on it, or scratched at it, it never glowed again. Her refuge had become terribly silent. Only then did her hunger manage to drag her from the room. Without the sounds, there was no reason to stay. Without the sounds it was just another dark and cold place.

Her voice was hoarse, weakened by her lack of eating and the yet unhealed damage from when she screamed. It was only compounded by the relentless humming she forced across her vocal cords; she was afraid she would forget the sounds. She stumbled out to the field, and beyond to the woods, emaciated. She fell upon the first animal she found there, and gorged until nothing was wrong with her body anymore; it was too bad that eating would do nothing for her mind or the new fears that lived there.

The little half-ghoul never returned to those ruins, but Yew did, years later.