Khalim took a breath. Cold, wet air, heavy with the scent of rain and decaying vegetation, chilled him from the inside of his chest, where his heart only shivered instead of beating, down to his feet and the tips of his fingers. He took a step back.
The beast rose up out of the underbrush, its forelimbs thick as tree trunks. Thick, black hair covered each arm and the shadowed body, wet and shiny in the scarlet glow of its eyes. A mask of bone, the larger mirror of the one on the creature still clinging to Khalim’s back, reflected an oval of burning red light. Below the mask, two rows of sharp teeth stretched out in a sinister smile.
Khalim had the distinct impression that this was a smile, not just an animal’s threat display in response to the sound of his approach. It could see him, and the sight of him amused it.
“Is this your mother?” Khalim whispered to the creature on his back, “or did you just take me here to be eaten?”
In response, the smaller beast unhooked its claws from Khalim’s shirt. He let it slide down to the ground, where it paused at his feet. He wouldn’t take his eyes from the larger one’s face.
“I mean you no harm,” he said, louder this time. The little one could understand speech; it wasn’t impossible that this one could, as well. Perhaps it could be persuaded not to eat him.
The beast only smiled, lowering its great head with ponderous slowness. Its small counterpart left Khalim’s side, striding on all fours like a monkey, and climbed up the nearer pillar of its leg. In an instant, the little one was gone, disappearing into the carpet of fur. Other shapes, black on black, moved around in the beast’s thick coat–more little ones, the edges of their masks catching slivers of red light.
So this was the mother. That didn’t mean it wasn’t also about to eat him. As it bent down, sniffing the air with nostrils obscured by its mask, its eyes glowed brighter, setting its body, the trees, and Khalim ablaze. As much as it looked like fire, the light provided no warmth. The mask was as wide as the reach of Khalim’s arms, its polished surface pitted and scarred. He took a step back. If he ran, it would chase him–but if he didn’t, its spearhead teeth would bite him in half. What would happen to him, then? If he died here, in the land of the dead, he couldn’t even begin to imagine where he might go.
The forest canopy closed in from above. No, that wasn’t right–the beast wore a mantle of crooked branches, a grove of twisted trees growing from its shoulders, fur tangling the roots like grass. As it bent down to examine Khalim, these trees drew closer, and the blaze from its eyes casting eerie shadows on deep knots and rough, ridged bark. This was a creature of the forest, in the most literal sense. It carried part of its environment on its back. The knots made faces in the trees, open mouths and hollow eyes limned in red, frozen into expressions of horror.
The creature’s face came closer, its breath stirring Khalim’s hair. He held up his hands and tried to say something about returning the little one, but it stuck in his throat.
A face in the tree just above the beast’s left eye stretched its mouth into a huge dark hollow and screamed.
Khalim ran.
The forest turned dark around him as he fled from the creature’s light. Beneath his feet, the roots were slick with rain, and he stumbled and slid, his hands striking smooth bark and damp earth. The beast pursued, slow and inexorable as time, its huge long legs carrying it over the forest floor. It didn’t need to run to remain only a step or two behind him.
He lost all sense of distance. He was running, he thought, back the way he had come, but where there should have been gaps in the canopy to allow the strange whirling starlight through, there was only more darkness. His chest ached with cold and with the habitual, futile attempt to breathe.
I’m going to get lost again, he thought. That was something to worry about later, when he wasn’t in danger of being eaten. It wasn’t as though he’d ever not been lost since he stepped out of the citadel.
The ground shook with each of the creature’s steps. It was toying with him, Khalim was sure. All it had to do was reach out and grasp him in its claws.
On its back, the faces in the trees moaned and cried, a chorus of pain and suffering that drowned out even the crash of its footsteps. The forest was full of ghosts, and Khalim was just one more of them.
His hands struck the smooth, wet bark of a giant tree, and he followed it around to what might have been the east, out of the creature’s line of sight. Maybe he could hide.
On the other side, the tree was hollow, eaten from the inside by fire or insects or any number of disasters that might have occurred in this place. A jagged tear gave way to a lightless, airless chamber that smelled of rot and something that might have been smoke.
Khalim slipped between the edges of splintery bark and fell into the tree.
His back met soft, wet wood, rotted into an earthy mass that cushioned his fall and flattened under his weight. Something with many tiny, prickly legs crawled over his hands, chittering in agitation.
I’m sorry, he thought. Please be quiet.
The opening in the tree lay above his head, a gash of dark gray against the blackness of the hollow space. He drew his knees to his chest, moving backwards with his hands until a wall of hard wood stopped him where he was. Another crawling thing dropped from above onto his head, its legs tangling in his hair. The tree shook with the approach of the beast, and the wind sang with the keening cries of the cursed grove upon its back. Insects moved around Khalim’s ears, fleeing to their tiny burrows and hidden nests.
If the power of the white city could turn Khalim to stone, he thought, then perhaps here he could turn to rotting wood for a short while and avoid the attention of this glowing-eyed monstrosity and its young. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists, feeling wet splinters bend between his fingers. Loud, snuffling breaths whistled past the creature’s bone mask as it approached. Could it smell him? Does a ghost have a scent?
He was going to die here–or something like dying, anyway. There would be pain, he was certain, and then maybe nothingness, or transformation into something else. The crying trees on the creature’s back had faces too like a human being’s, their voices too much like children in pain. They were rooted to the beast, the twisted branches of their limbs stiff and immobile, their faces frozen in a look of terror, able to do nothing but scream.
Khalim wanted to pray, but there was no one to listen. Once, he had carried a god with him, and though he did not ask for much, whatever he had asked for had been granted to him–safety, reassurance, and the power to heal. With these gifts, he’d had nothing to fear. Nothing could harm him in any way that mattered.
He should never have left the city.
This wasn’t a punishment. He had no pretensions of the continued attention of the god he had abandoned. No, he was alone, and meeting the predictable consequences of wandering with no guide, no plan, and no protection. He was little better than a child lost in the woods, not knowing which small, sharp-toothed creatures were harmless and which would feed him to their mother.
Huge, dark claws scratched at the bark of his tree.
If Khalim had possessed a spear, or even a sharpened stick of sufficient length, he might have been able to wedge it through the gap in the bark and injure the creature–if not killing it, then at least discouraging its pursuit. But Khalim had never had a spear. He’d never wielded any sort of weapon. In Nagara, there was no fighting to be done over a few square miles of rice fields and muddy embankment deep in the woods, far from any known road. Besides, he was a healer. Even if broken flesh didn’t call out to him to be made whole in a voice that could not be ignored, as it had when the god had been with him, he had been far more useful away from the fighting.
And what was he now? Another lost soul in the spirit wilds, about to be eaten and then forgotten, his name lost and his face worn by a god upon the earth. Soon, no one living or dead would remember that Khalim had ever been.
Red light flickered at the edge of the hollow like tongues of flame. Surely the beast knew he was here.
He put his arms over his head–the insects had long since hidden themselves away, and no more pinprick legs troubled his skin–and prayed to no one that it wouldn’t hurt.
The beast stopped, its earth-shaking footsteps stilling. The chorus of fear and pain that followed it quieted to a murmur. Its claws tapped together with a series of metallic clicks as it rummaged in the underbrush.
I’m just a ghost, Khalim thought. You can’t see me. I’m a ghost, and you’re a lot of ghosts, and none of this is real.
If he had stayed in the white city, he would have been safe now. He’d have turned to stone, a silent watchman over an empty square, years passing like minutes as the sun stood still above the pale horizon, but he’d be safe. Was that what he wanted? It was too late, in any case. He had left, and here he was.
At least he remembered his own name. He hadn’t had that in the citadel.
I’m not here, he silently pleaded with the creature. I’ve gone away. I’m somewhere else, where you can’t find me, and you can go back to your home and wait for some other unsuspecting soul to wander by.
I’m not here.
Light–bright yellow sunlight, something Khalim could only just remember ever seeing–flooded the tree. The rotten trunk gave way underneath him, and he fell, slipping between gnarled roots and softened splinters. He covered his eyes against the blaze. It had been night for so long, and before that, endless twilight. The air tore at his clothing as he plummeted through empty air–
–and landed hard on solid ground, dry grass crunching underneath him.
He got to his feet, blinking in the searing daylight. The sky was a vast stretch of blue, shimmering like water over an undulating sea of thin, yellow stalks. It was beautiful. It went on forever.
Khalim was lost again.
He turned in a slow circle, marking each identical horizon. No smiling, sharp-toothed monster emerged from the grass. The forest was gone, so far away that it didn’t even make a dark spot on the distant sky.
“Did I do this?” he said aloud. Even to his own ears, his voice was lost in the wind sweeping over the plain.
He reached out and broke a stalk of grass between his fingers. The edges of the blade scratched at his skin, and it smelled of heat and dust.
None of this is real, he thought once more. I’m a ghost, and this place is a ghost. So was the forest. I could go wherever I wanted.
He couldn’t begin to say where he might want to go, so he walked. The grass shifted around him, and the wind sang a song of long roads traveled by the unafraid.
Back to Chapter XXXI: Black Desert Night
Forward to Chapter XXXII: Svilsara
Sorry for the late post! I was setting up seedling trays and got distracted. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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