Weathered
It isn’t until Isabel has passed through the iron village once more that the eerie dirge her following of ghosts is singing begins to form words. “It’s coming,” they chant. “Stone crumbles and bone turns to dust.”
They repeat this in rising and falling cadences, their hollow eyes wide with fear. They’ve abandoned their more or less orderly queue and now crowd around her in a semicircular mass, their mist-colored shoulders overlapping and their feet an indistinguishable mass a few inches above the rutted, metal road.
Isabel wraps her coat tighter around her and puts her hands over her ears. They’ve become so loud, her ghosts, and there are more of them than ever. Somewhere, people are dying, and their spirits are making their way here. Flashes of tortured, twisting motion tell her that a few of them are broken from contact with the thing beyond the wall.
“Why are you following me?” she asks again.
“It’s coming,” is their only answer. “It’s coming.”
As much as she doesn’t need the reminder of the perilous state of things, she can’t blame them for repeating the message. All she wants to do is find a dark room to hide in, put a blanket over her head, and babble about the end of the world until it finally comes for her. She’s so far from qualified to deal with this that she doesn’t know where to start. If only she could get to Vernay, wherever it might be now. The way back to Mondirra, in the shadow of the forest’s plane, is all the longer for her empty hands.
Maybe the church in Vernay still exists, and someone there is working on a solution. Then all Isabel has to do is keep as much of Mondirra, and its people both living and dead, safe until that happens.
It’s a faint, false hope. In any case, she can’t be sure, so she has to proceed as if there’s no one else.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the ghosts, stopping at the edge where the iron grass gives way to greenery. “I wish you had someone better.”
They murmur in a buzzing drone, like a swarm of bees. “What can last? What will survive?”
Isabel sighs. “I don’t know.”
She eats another piece of bread from her pocket, flour clinging to her fingers and dusting her sleeves. It’s still soft, though the warmth of the oven has long since fled. She doesn’t normally like eating in front of the dead, out of politeness and sanitary concerns, but they’re not going anywhere. It’s possible that they can’t really see her, anyway, and are following her out of the same senseless homing instinct that keeps a ghost to its former residence or the place of its death.
Feeling a little better, she brushes crumbs from her hands and wraps up the rest of the bread. “Are you ready?” she asks the ghosts, knowing full well they won’t answer her either way. “We need to get back to the Temple of Isra before dark.”
In the forest’s shadow, the wind has turned cold, biting at her ears and the ends of her fingers. Isabel puts her hands in her pockets. Dark is relative, at present. At least she’ll have light when she crosses through the pines. For now, a false evening is on the unseasonably green field, and the village of iron is a shadow behind her.
“Nothing can stand,” chant the ghosts. “It is coming.”
There must be something that can last against the thing, Isabel tries reassuring herself. I just have to find it. The barriers are holding, at least for now. She has a little time.
This time, she steps from the field onto the plane of the forest in one smooth motion, gritting her teeth against the wave of dizziness as the world shifts. Now her earth is the forest, and her sky is the looming shape of the city. She follows the southern edge of the plane until she finds the river, flowing cheerfully on without noticing that it’s been cut off from its headwaters and sparkling in the sun, now directly over Isabel’s head. Her ghosts crowd after her, stepping into the water without making a splash. Changing planes did nothing to slow them down.
A blanket of fog has gathered over the riverbank. It smells of rain, and Isabel wonders what it might look like if a storm were to come over the forest—would Mondirra be in the thick of the clouds, with lightning traveling between the spires of tall buildings? She hopes she’ll never have to find out.
Entertained by this idle thought, she doesn’t notice the fog thickening until she can’t see more than a stone’s throw ahead, and the river at her right-hand side has dissolved into a shadow. Her ghosts have all but disappeared, though she can still hear them murmur. Rays of sunlight form ephemeral shapes as they burn their way through.
Isabel’s next step sinks into soft, wet sand, and her ankle twists. She stumbles down the bank and into the water, startling herself with the loud splash. Cold grips at her feet—her boots are still watertight, but the water is like ice, as though recent snowmelt from some far-off mountain has been feeding the river. She gasps in surprise and pain.
After the initial shock, she tests her weight on both feet. Despite the tumble, she’s uninjured, and her ankle will support her weight. She breathes a prayer of thanks to whatever god might be left to listen. The last thing she needs now is an injury.
Mud sucks at her boots as she lifts her feet to climb back up the bank. Here in the water, the fog is at its thickest. She can’t see the ghosts, and she can only barely hear them. Her first steps don’t find her dry land, and she peers into the mist, condensation clinging to her face.
Rising starkly from the opposite bank, clear despite the fog pressing in on all sides, is the stone wall.
It looks ancient, like centuries of rain and wind have ground it down. Isabel can’t see the top, but she can only assume that it’s lower than when last she looked at it. A crack forms a deep V a little to her left, farther downriver, and a pair of hands with ten deathly pale fingers each clings to the edges. A frill of tendrils glows and wavers behind them.
At the base, the wall is overgrown with thick, gnarled tree roots, lashing the stones together. It’s a fortification, of a sort. The wall bulges out against the roots’ hold, pushed outward by a very long time or a single, terrible blow.
Whose soul, mortal or divine, was given in exchange for this? Despite the roots, and the many patched-in places where the stones are a little lighter, a little smaller, the wall is so much closer than it was this morning. Distance doesn’t mean anything, Isabel reminds herself, but it doesn’t help. The appearance of the wall here can’t mean anything good.
“Stay away,” she tells her ghosts. She can’t ask them to help, not again, even though—and, especially, because—she thinks they might listen. It tastes too much of necromancy, of making the dead suffer in exchange for her own life. Her soul isn’t worth any more or less than each of her gathered ghosts. Their song has become wordless again, a wailing cry that cuts through the fog.
She’s begun to think of them as hers, she notices, and it fills her with disgust. The dead belong to Ondir and none other. Even thinking of them as her charges as they follow her to and fro is a dangerous habit. The Inquisition burned people for less.
Isabel backs away from the wall, and her feet find the riverbank. She drags her muddy boots onto drier land. Whatever time she thought she had, the appearance of the wall has cut it short. She needs to get back to the city.
And what are you going to do there? a cold voice in the back of her mind asks her.
Anything I can, she answers, but she has yet to come up with any plausible ideas.
The fog dissipates as she follows the river across, and by the time she’s over the University District, she can see well enough to leave the water and navigate through the trees. The wall and the thing behind it haven’t disappeared with the fog. A shower of pebbles falls to the forest floor, and an inhuman screech tears through the reddened sky.
Ghosts in tow, Isabel makes her way through the pines. They shiver with the cries of the thing beyond the wall, and the earth under her feet feels dry and unstable, as though it will crumble away at any moment. In place of the fog, a cloud of dust kicks up around her. She crouches down in the last stretch of browning grass and stretches her feet out to meet the city street. A pair of young men—university students, by the look of them, carrying a heavy solar compass and a compact telescope—cry out in surprise when she lands.
She waves off their incipient questions, and they return to their measurements with some reluctance. After a few paces back toward the Temple District, she turns around and looks at the vertical forest towering overhead. It has lost a third of its height. She can see the wall, parallel with both the forest floor and with the cobbled road she now stands upon at once, in a dizzying juxtaposition. Beyond it is a bank of cloud, shot through with glowing tendrils like slow flashes of lightning. A cluster of red eyes, bloodshot and rolling, blinks a few times at the jagged, crumbling top of the wall and disappears behind it.
Isabel can’t look away. If the thing breaches the wall, if the forest comes crashing down over the district, she has to bear witness.
Nothing happens. The thing oozes and undulates against the barrier, but the stones and roots hold, and the plane of the forest remains intact a little longer. Isabel rubs at her eyes and, with a steadying breath, turns back toward the Temple District.
Surely, there is a temple in Mondirra whose god still lives. She just has to find which one, and beg their high priest or priestess for help. It will be easy to tell, now that she’s got more than a hundred ghosts following her wherever she goes. The moment she passes through a doorway and is free of them—that’s when she’ll know.
She wills her tired legs to pick up and run, taking her around the corner to the base of the Temple District hill. Ondir’s dome is shrouded in fog, and a shadow lies over the left-hand side of the street, covering the temples of Numit, Galaser, and Alcos. Sunlight illuminates the right side, and the remaining three temples shine in polished marble.
As Isabel climbs the hill, the bank of fog resolves into a mass of piled bones, tendrils sprouting forth from it like from a wrecked ship. She can see the stone wall, hovering above the city only a short distance away. What happens when the walls meet? she wonders, and quickens her pace.
I’m debating some changes to the eldritch landscape. The vertical forest is a good first attempt, I think, but I also think we can get weirder. Thanks for reading!
Space Whales Press 
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