Chapter 6 Daesra #3
“What? Why?” But there’s already stirring and moaning both in the distance and far too close, coming from all around us.
The ground shifts under my feet and I nimbly dance away, only to nearly trip over a rotting arm bursting up through the sand in a different spot.
I sever it at the elbow, spraying the air with more droplets of putrefied blood.
I deal with the horrors nearest us in the same manner, hacking them apart, but by then the moaning has only increased.
Orseus tsks. “It’s the blood that calls them, even as old and stagnant as it is. You’ll only bring more the more blood you draw.”
“So what do I do?” I demand, setting Pogli at my feet—after checking that the ground is free of grasping hands. I raise my sword before me.
“Not that,” he says warningly.
I ignore him, chopping more partial corpses into even smaller pieces as they pop up from the earth like the rankest of crops.
But by now the things are crawling out of the ocean.
Horrible, slimy limbs flail in the low waves as they heave shapeless hunks of bloated meat that used to be torsos along with them.
Some don’t have legs or even heads, but that doesn’t seem to slow them down.
Others are already free of both sand and sea, lurching as upright as possible in the distance where they were hidden among the heaps of bone, only to start shambling or dragging themselves down the beach toward us.
I knew that arm I’d first seen in the water had moved on its own.
“Shades usually avoid the beaches for this reason,” Orseus says conversationally. “The waves encourage them to head inland.”
“That, and the fucking moving corpses!” I shake my head in disgust as they draw closer—close enough for me to make out the gory details and hear the clacking of their teeth. “Do all shades end up like this?”
“No, no, don’t worry.” He pats me on the shoulder as if to be comforting. “These corpses aren’t shades anymore, not after soaking for so long, but rather creatures preserved and birthed anew by the sea.”
“Like salted meat, except not.” I’m rather worried and not at all comforted, since more of them come from every direction, even farther up toward the head of the beach behind us, too many with heads and limbs for seizing and biting.
We’re being slowly surrounded. I want to take Pogli and run, but I don’t know where to go or if I’ll only charge right into something worse. Perhaps Orseus can enlighten me in our very dismal-looking situation.
“So I gather that’s not normal water,” I say, pointing with my sword.
I was born the son of Sea and am still rather adept at swimming, and yet the sight of these particular waves makes me want to recoil in bone-deep horror and perhaps even whimper in fear like Pogli currently is, though I won’t admit that aloud.
“Almost all the rivers of the underworld save the River of Fire drain into it—Hatred, Regret, Misery,” Orseus explains, ticking them off on his fingers.
“And so it has taken on a sort of afterlife of its own. These creatures are an extension of it. Its limbs, yes?” He chuckles at his own apparent cleverness before I hurriedly and somewhat threateningly gesture for him to continue.
“So they’re different, whereas when most shades’ corporeal forms are damaged or depleted beyond a certain extent, they can no longer hold themselves together.
They fade, though evanescence is a more poetic description. ”
“What’s the least poetic?” I want to know what I’ll be dealing with later on, if not this.
“They turn to dust.”
“Perfect. I like that.” I toss my head at the stumbling, putrid corpses closing in on us. “I don’t like this. These things have not turned to dust.”
He purses his lips as he considers them. “No, they have not.”
“They’re more like waterlogged, festering revenants.”
He snaps his fingers and points at me as though I’ve said something brilliant. “Exactly! You have such a way with words. I just call them ghouls.”
I lift my sword again. Although I already know, no matter how many of these ghouls I cut down, we’ll be overwhelmed.
Slowly but surely, and most likely unpleasantly.
I’m a god, and Pogli is sometimes a lion in disguise, and yet I don’t like how the numbers are stacking against us—numbers that will only grow if I fight back, but I don’t know what else to do.
Jaws click and grind all around us, a horrible hissing rising in the air from torn throats.
When Orseus gestures for me to lower my blade, I glare at him and snap, “We’re surrounded!”
“So?”
Pogli starts to growl instead of whimper, which isn’t a good sign.
I shush him, but time is running out in more ways than one.
Soon I won’t be able to keep him from erupting and tearing into the gathering mass, which will only lead to more blood, which will in turn only lead to more of them.
Not even Pogli can fight them off forever, the main reason being that he can’t hold his greater size for long.
He needs to save his strength for when we truly need it.
Besides, I don’t want Orseus to know about his trick yet, if I can avoid it. I want to keep any advantage that I have here quiet—especially since it isn’t looking like I have many at all, save Pogli and my sword, neither of which are helpful at the moment.
“So,” I say with absolutely fraying patience, “we have to carve a path and run!” Or maybe Pogli could roar at them—which sends out a tremendous blast of force from his mouth, even when he’s small—but I haven’t exactly taught him to do that on command.
I don’t know if he’s capable of learning any commands.
Orseus only arches his brow. “Do we? You’re a god, aren’t you?”
Sure, I have nearly unbreakable skin—in the mortal realm—but I’d rather not test its durability upon arrival in an entirely different world. “Yes, but—”
“Then drain their remaining aether. That’s what’s truly powering them—the string that the lively sea is pulling for them, so to speak. They’ll still be corpses, but no longer moving.”
I look frantically between him, the throng of hideous bodies pressing ever closer to us, and the sword I desperately want to use. “How?”
He rolls his eyes, and I’m tempted to smack him, despite everything. “Even I know how, if only on a smaller scale. Here, watch.”
He raises his hand, flexing his fingers into the shape of a claw, and he simply walks to meet one of the closest ghouls.
He’s utterly fearless, I’ll grant him that.
Just as those wasted arms reach out to embrace him, he presses his fingertips into its rib cage, which caves grotesquely under the pressure.
There’s a brief flare of light in his palm, and the thing freezes—and then crumples into a jumbled ruin on the ground, just like that.
It even looks dried out, somehow. Flakes of its remaining skin begin to blow away in the salty, rotten breeze.
“Like so.” Orseus glances at me over his shoulder, smacking his lips as if he has a bad taste in his mouth, seemingly oblivious to the horde of mortifying creatures still in front of him. All around us, rather.
I spin in a circle, kicking up sand as Pogli’s growls increase in volume beneath me. Both of us are barely containing ourselves. The shriveled hands and the stumps are within arm’s reach of us, endless rows of teeth following close behind. “There are over a hundred of them!”
Orseus only scoffs. “You can handle more than a hundred. A lot more.”
Time is up. Pogli screeches, I duck, and the stinking masses close over us with snarling and snapping teeth.
I have no idea where Orseus went. I crouch over Pogli and clutch him to my chest as hands and heads in all states of decay collide overhead, seeking me where I just stood, while I’m lost in a forest of peeling skeletal legs, huddled up in a very ungodly manner and thinking wildly.
How can I stop them without using my sword?
I doubt I can influence them like I did the townsfolk, since I don’t think they have much left in their heads to influence.
They have only the hunger that the sea preserved. I can feel it.
I can also feel something else. And I have a hunger of my own.
A god’s hunger.
Orseus is right in this, at least—I’m stronger. I close my eyes, blocking out the nightmarish scene around me and ignoring the hands beginning to grope and claw at my back, and I call out silently like I did to the townsfolk. Beckoning.
And there it is, glowing in each of these creatures—an internal light, deep beneath a poisonous black ooze.
I can see dozens and dozens of quivering little lights as clearly as candles in the darkness.
They’re beautiful, really, despite the horror that contains them.
They begin to flicker and pulse together like a collective heartbeat.
That bright, thrumming energy calls to me, much like I called to it. Because we’re the same.
It belongs to me. Not to that desolate, lonely sea.
I grip that pulse somehow—in my mind or on some other plane of existence, I’m not sure—closing an invisible hand around the invisible throat of it.
And then I violently rip it out.
All that light, all those many lights, flood into me.
Power slams into me like I’ve never felt before, and wailing fills my ears—dozens and dozens of screams. Releasing Pogli, I cover my ears and curl into myself.
It’s too much, overwhelming. I can feel these many presences thrashing inside of me, panicking like rats in a barrel.
No, as if I swallowed them whole.
And then I’m screaming, my arms thrashing, my legs flailing in the sand. Somehow, I’m still on the beach, and yet it’s me who’s drowning now. I can only feel, not see, blinded by the terrible brightness filling me.
The light of the many souls I just consumed.
Distantly, I can hear Pogli whining. And Orseus laughing. Much like his taunting in the cave, his laughter both wakes and stills something within me. I stop struggling against the rising tide inside of me, and I slowly drag myself onto my hands and knees.
I should be sated with what I absorbed, but no—now I have the combined thirst of a hundred ghouls. They didn’t even know what they wanted anymore. They had only a horrendous need. It’s inside me now, and it’s compounded by the hunger of a god.
I know what I want. Blood.
I look up at Orseus through a red haze, a snarl on my lips. And then I launch myself at him, teeth and claws bared.