Ulma, and the Beginning [3/6]

Ulma was a curious girl, and explorative. There were few places she avoided, at the behest of her parents. But the older she grew, the further she roamed and the more boundaries she pushed. It was all quite normal, except that she was the child that brought things home. Living and wild things. The habit never changed, no matter how old she grew.

And Ulma loved ruins, loved quiet and abandoned places. They were her pied-piper, summoning her away from her home and safety. She was careful, still, to take a ghost lamp with her. And, she was an excellent mage; top of her class, even. So an eighteen year old Ulma is not afraid of very much, least of all exploring some of the better managed ruins alone at night. Perhaps she should have been, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret it.

She crept along the half decayed walls and columns, tracing reverent fingers over ancient carvings and runes alike. She loved the way they still came to life, all these centuries later; they were only preservation spells that some bygone person had written into the stones to protect them from wear. To her, they were beautiful works of art, no matter that some of the matrices had failed over time and left those places to the nonexistent mercy of the elements and time.

It was on the periphery of one such ruins that an informal graveyard still existed. The graves had all likely long since become epitaphs; the corpses they use to watch over and honor already risen from their rest and later purified or destroyed. Not even the undead should tread here, there is nothing left for or of them. But there was cause, in the empty graveyard of a fallen and forgotten temple, for a hungry half-ghoul to hunt the rabbits that served as the only grave keepers here. Her small figure sat crouched in the dirt beside an eroded headstone; uncaring, as she ate, of the person that had snuck up on her.

Ulma gasped when the light of her ghost lamp finally touched the little girl well enough to see. She thought the little girl was still alive, a lost precocious child, like Ulma had once been. She thought it was finally her turn to receive the torch of guiding lost kids home after dark from places they really shouldn’t have been playing. What she found was a blood encrusted and mud caked thing, and worse, it was tearing into a rabbit raw. Ulma didn’t hesitate to cast a light spell on the undead before her; it knocked the small creature off its feet.

That was when it finally noticed Ulma. It leapt up with the agility of a cat and sprang away, running into the desiccated temple. That gave Ulma pause. Undead don’t run away like that. She suspected the little thing was a fresh zombie risen from a recently dead child, based on how much flesh it still had. But even a well fed zombie wouldn’t have brushed off a point-blanc light based attack like that, nor would it have the intelligence to flee if it did survive. It should have come straight for Ulma, abandoning its already dead prey for the freshest meat around to feed on. It would attack without fear, and without thought.

Ulma pursued the undead into the ruins, there she found her in the best preserved room; she was huddled against a wall and humming a song. She squeezed the remains of her meal in her hands and increased the volume of her humming the closer Ulma got. The girl was eating raw meat, and covered in filth, and her eyes glowed, although only faintly. Was she an undead, or not? Ulma had never encountered or heard of one that had this level of intelligence, but also seemingly retained all her flesh. Intelligent undead were always skeletons or incorporeal, without exception.

Except, of course, for this one.

Ulma knew the correct course of action was to purify the girl. Regardless of what she was, it was better to send her on to the other side. But when she was close enough to touch her, magic at the tips of her fingers, the child had flinched away. She couldn’t have been older than eleven, poor thing. Yet here she was, undead and terribly afraid. Undead and without the only mercy granted to them. All alone.

Ulma couldn’t do it.

She took the child home and washed her off. Her parents really hadn’t known what to do with this one. This wasn’t some innocent woodland creature. However, they, too, acknowledged the bizarre circumstances and condition of the child. It was like she was only half-dead, somehow. She didn’t like the dark room they had prepared for her, but she only ate meat. She hummed that same song over and over, but she avoided light magic like it hurt. That she felt hurt, at all, was strange. She was a practically feral child, and moved like a beast, but she didn’t smell like decay. Once they cleaned all the old gore off of her, she smelled like anyone else. Fleshy undead always smell of decay; they reek of it, constantly falling apart and eating to maintain their rotting flesh.

Her appetite was endless, but if they didn’t feed her more than a normal child would eat she wouldn’t start rapidly losing tissue. Ulma’s parents were researchers, so they studied the child. They spent time observing how she reacted to various things, if she would play, if they could get her to speak. She wasn’t exactly like an average child, not at all like Ulma had been at the same age, but she wasn’t quite unlike a child either. She liked runes; would trace over the ones in the house to see what they did, always looking around after for some change in the environment. She was curious, and learning; genuinely learning.

There is a simple, immutable, fact that applies to all corporeal dead and undead things: they cannot grow. They do not learn; or change, in any significant way except to decay. The child changed; if they hadn’t noticed her personality start to develop, they definitely would have noticed her hair growing longer. Without anything to wear them down, her nails grew too. The more time she spent around them the better she could speak. She was able to make inferences about things she didn’t know, and able to plan, to predict outcomes.

One day, purely for convenience, she insisted, Ulma had started calling the child by a name. It wasn’t hard to catch on, spreading easily among their family and the staff of the small household. Yew, she had called her, for a living thing often found among dead things in graveyards. Yew, for she was like a lost sheep, and a similar color besides.

Eventually, the little girl named Yew was just a member of the family. Odd origins and unusual physiology aside, she was growing and aging. She was alive, and learning everyday how to live.

After she stopped catching and eating animals in the garden, everyone more or less forgot that she was a half-ghoul, or some such, at all.

The more Yew learned, the more she wondered about her experiences at the first ruins where she had woken up. She told them about the stone table and the endless ruins and cold darkness. Yew was fifteen then, when she asked if they could go look for those ruins. And still fifteen, when they couldn’t be found in the place she was sure they should be. The vanishing ruins were singular in nature, appearing and disappearing randomly. No one could tell her when they would be back. All she had of it were her memories, buried by so many others now, and the song she was half convinced she had scarred into the flesh of her throat.

Yew carried on with her life, for another five years. Graduated from school and joined the college her sister worked at and learned to fight with a rowan wood hook and how to draw ancient ruins. She was always searching, hoping that she might stumble across some of the ones she couldn’t quite remember. She became an adventurer, made a name for herself as an exorcist, which everyone in her family found extremely ironic except Yew. And then, on an ordinary Tuesday when she was twenty, the vanishing ruins had reappeared. After nearly ten years, she would find the answers she was looking for!

Yew had lost her sister instead.

And that was when she learned about heartbreak.