in the black water with the sun shining at midnight
this was written for @artanogon's lord huron-inspired dnd campaign, which I am having a wonderful time playing in. it is set 7ish years pre-campaign and features my pc, Acheron (great old one warlock with a normal amount of things happening to him), and @boonbeenblade's pc, Paz (fighter and probably the most [relatively] normal of the party), going through The Horrors together
this was also a writing exercise inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series (especially the 3rd book) because I am obsessed with how he writes. hopefully I managed to hit even a little bit of the vibes that he infuses this series with
The sound of a scream is what wakes you. You’re sitting up, already reaching for your spear, before your mind catches up with the adrenaline-honed instinct of your body. Something in the night air is off—you’ll realize later that it was the taste of magic and death that made your nerves stand on end, worse even than the scream that drew you from restless sleep. The sound of it lingers but doesn’t repeat, leaving you feeling wrong-footed from the start.
“Y’all heard that, too?” Paz asks, quiet and wary over the low-burning campfire.
You nod, still scanning the clearing. “Deveth, did you see anything?” you ask, turning to the man you’d met yesterday evening, who drew the short straw for second watch, and that’s when you realize that Deveth isn’t here anymore.
You, Paz, and Fira, clustered tightly next to the fire, your weapons in hand, staring out into the darkness instead of at each other.
Once it had sunk in that Deveth was gone—his pack and bedroll are still here, though—nervousness had spread through the three of you like a rapid illness. All of you know it, but no one has said it aloud yet: whatever is happening here is beyond the handful of nuisance but bandits you’d all come out here to stop, and there hadn’t been any sign of them earlier today, anyway. At the time, you’d assumed they’d heard that there were mercenaries after them and were laying low. Now, their absence has a more ominous weight.
“Are we just gonna sit here all night, waitin’ for somethin’ to happen?” Paz asks, barely more than a whisper but loud in the stillness of the night.
It’s too still, out there in the forest. The shadows don’t move like they should.
You glance away from the waiting darkness to tell the others that you think something is there—and that is when the wight takes advantage of you looking away, the unfocusing of your animal-shine eye, to surge out of the night towards your back.
Fira’s shout is what warns you. You turn faster than you thought you could, decades of instinct overriding your body, and barely manage to throw yourself out of the way, getting a glimpse of something once-human, now-monster, as you do. The wight’s claws catch on your cloak, but it misses your flesh.
Its momentum nearly takes it into Fira and Paz, but Paz is quick with his warhammer and with one heavy swing he sends it flying back into the darkness. Screeching, it skids to a stop in the dead leaves blanketing the ground. The sound of it scrapes through you down to the marrow of your bones. As if at its beckoning, the shadowed trunks ringing the clearing seem to shudder as shambling, empty bodies peel out of their hiding spots.
Paz swears. Fira says nothing but even from a handful of feet away you can hear their breathing, quick but leashed, like they’re trying to rein in their panic.
You aren’t afraid, though, in this eternity-in-seconds before the fight truly begins; the night hasn’t yet gone so horribly wrong that your memories will slip between the present and that day when everything shattered.
You ready your spear.
When the wight stands, it pulls a sword with it, leaves falling away as it does. The sword was Deveth’s, Paz will tell you later, dropped there when the wight dragged him away. He must have noticed that oddness in the dark and gone to investigate, but you can’t know for sure. All that’s left of him in the end is that sword, which you and Paz bury along with the ashes of everything else.
In the moment, though, the previous ownership of the sword does not matter because the wight is darting forward again, blade raised like whoever it was in life knew precisely how to wield such a weapon, and its zombies are stumbling after it.
You dispatch the first stumbling corpse to reach you with ease, your spearhead in its throat and then the blunt end of the shaft into its chest with enough force that you feel its ribs shatter. Behind you, you can hear Fira and Paz struggling against the wight, but for now it’s a secondary concern. The zombie does not fall, although it should, and something in you laughs even as the rest of you grimaces; this thing should not be alive in the first place. Why would a killing blow be so simple?
The fire behind you casts dancing shadows on all their rotting, desecrated faces. Revulsion rises in your throat.
The horde begins to close in.
Some amount of time later—the exact length will remain forever unclear to you, this night stretching forever in your memories—you stumble over a branch or root in the darkness and Paz has to catch you, pulling you both to a halt in the shadow of an outcropping. You lean heavily on your spear to catch your breath, lungs spasming in your chest. The air smells like blood, most of it yours; Paz’s armor has protected him from the worst of tonight, but you haven’t worn anything heavier than leather in years.
You managed, somehow, to get out of that clearing with only scratches and shallow cuts, but there are so many of these small wounds. The ones from the wight are the worst; something about them is wrong. You can feel the necrosis sinking into your blood, your bones. Even with your breath steadied, your vision is starting to waver. Between blinks: Fira’s torn body collapsing on the wight’s blade, then to the ground. Cédric disappearing in a wave of blackness which receded a heartbeat later to leave him broken. Death rising to take its fill….
A hand lands on your shoulder, heavy enough to draw you back out of your head. “Acheron. We gotta keep movin’. We ain’t gonna be hidden from that thing for long.”
You blink sluggishly and force yourself to focus on Paz’s face. It is so easy to envision a sword swinging out of the night towards his neck—living darkness crawling down his arm from where his hand clasps your shoulder—his drawling voice joining the chorus of the damned that sings incessant in your head—
“Acheron?”
It takes some effort for you to dredge up the proper words from the mess of your head. “Yes. Right. You’re right.”
You press your hand down over his, feeling the living warmth of his skin, and then force yourself to stand straight. Your wounds are lines of dull fire across your body. Your chest aches, but that particular pain may be only in your head. It is…hard to tell.
“Let’s go,” you add, and your voice sounds steady enough, but Paz has to take some of your weight after less than ten steps.
The darkness is a shroud around the two of you, the forest fading away as your darkvision reaches its limits. Paz hasn’t asked how you’re seeing anything at all. Everything sounds muffled and heightened at once: your footsteps, your breathing, your heartbeat. The shifting of your clothes. You do not know where the wight or its remaining zombies are, but the back of your neck prickles like there are eyes on you. A hunted feeling.
They’re getting closer; you and Paz can only move so fast. Neither of you will make it through another fight like this. You don’t know where in the forest you are. Paz hasn’t said anything, but you don’t think he has a destination in mind; he’s simply trying to get away, but there is nowhere to go. This is the wight’s home, not yours.
Two mismatched feelings, resignation and desperation, settle in your chest as the pair of you continue onward in the dark.
It is not that you want to die, but you’re not convinced that it’s not overdue. Part of you isn’t sure you’ve been living on anything other than borrowed time since that day all those years ago. Another part of you isn’t sure you will die, even if the wight sinks its sword into your chest and twists.
Maybe you’ll wake up again.
Maybe you’ll find Paz’s body instead of your own.
That thought is what makes you grit your teeth. If anyone is going to escape this forest, it’s him. You will not watch him die.
You cannot watch him die.
It is not a conscious decision, to pray, but even now it seems as though your body remembers old comforts better than you do yourself. Between slow pulses of awareness—you can feel, distantly, your body trying to shut down on you, but you push on—you realize that your lips are moving, forming familiar shapes around words you haven’t spoken in years, not since it sunk in how useless it was to try anymore. Even now, you don’t expect your god to answer; he cannot hear you, if he’s even still trying to listen.
And you’re right—when the response comes, it’s not from him at all.
The first sign is when everything in your head goes—still. Not silent, never silent, but it’s as if a space has opened up somewhere within you for something to peer out. You slow, dragging Paz to a halt with you. And then: above you in the deep night sky, only partially visible beyond the bare canopy of branches, the clouds split open.
The Emerald Star shines down upon you both, dousing the world in distant green. Your fingertips tingle.
You know suddenly that the wight and the few remaining zombies it drags with it are nearly upon you, even though the forest is silent. It is as if for a heartbeat your awareness stretches beyond the confines of your body into the stars above, a dizzying sensation, and then you exhale and everything snaps back into place with a rushing roar that threatens to white out your mind.
You look at Paz. He’s watching you a little like he’s afraid you’ve lost it.
You press your hand into his shoulder, turn the both of you to where the wight is fast approaching. The zombies are circling around, slowly, but you’ll watch his back.
“They’re almost here,” you tell him. “Be safe.”
You press your intention, the strength of your odd magic that you try not to think about, into the word. He gets half a syllable through a confused question before green light ripples across his skin. Your bad eye pulses in time with the spell setting in. You can feel it there in the back of your mind, a point of bright concentration. It’s almost familiar—you could cast this before, too, but it was different then. No part of it was foreign to you as it is now.
“Well, shit,” Paz says. You’re not sure what the spell feels like to him, but he stands straighter, hefts his warhammer with a quarter of a grin. “Why the hell didn’t you do that sooner?”
“I—” don’t know. Forgot. Hate this feeling of unknowable power that runs through your veins in time with your heartbeat.
Whatever you would’ve said doesn’t matter, in the end. The wight bursts from the trees before you can reply. Even knowing it’s coming, it’s faster than Paz, but its strike goes a breath too wide past a shimmer of green light. He laughs.
His warhammer aims true.
In the morning, you and Paz will try to retrace the steps of that frantic flight through the forest. Daylight makes the trees smaller, kinder. The distance won’t seem as far.
You’ll find the clearing where you made camp. The fire is burned out; Fira’s body is still there beside it, bloody and already rotting, too fast, from the wight’s necrosis. You close their eyes. Paz finds Deveth in the underbrush, similarly ruined. He’d been so close the whole time.
Years down the line, the main thing you’ll remember about him is the scream. His face will be lost to you, but his terror remains.
Together, silently, solemnly, you and Paz rebuild the small campfire into a pyre. The sun will be high in the sky when you lay Fira and Deveth upon it to ensure they can’t return like the other lost souls the wight brought with it.
For the rest of tonight, though, you and Paz sit huddled together in the shallow cave you stumbled upon not long after the wight died, its zombies with it. You patch each other’s wounds as best you can with the meager supplies you have. It’ll be a miracle when neither of you get an infection.
Beyond the mouth of the cave, the forest stretches dark and empty. The Star is hidden again; you’re half-convinced you hallucinated it, even though Paz makes comments about the protection spell you cast on him and the bolts of green light you warded off the zombie with. He doesn’t ask, though. A small comfort tonight; you’re still not sure what you would’ve said.
Neither of you sleeps. And the sun, eventually, rises.
