Chapter 8
Eight
Two weeks later, Ivy dropped a rib-bone into a pile and stepped back with a triumphant smile.
“Done,” she declared. She looked around the newly cleared eastern rib-thickets, but Vale was nowhere to be seen.
Taking away another armful of excess bones, Ivy assumed.
Once the bones had been stripped from the trees they were strangling, Vale took them to the nightbeast lair.
Apparently, the nightbeasts used them as nests.
The bones were also used for Vale’s tool-crafting or, occasionally, crushed up for spell fodder.
Nothing in the void was wasted. Everything thrived off each other.
Ivy loved watching it work, and she especially loved it when Vale explained things to her.
His explanations were usually short and impatient, but sometimes he seemed to enjoy her questions rather than get annoyed by them, which was nice.
Ivy hated being an annoyance. She hoped she had been less of one since that disastrous first day in the wilderness void.
“Master Skullstalker,” she called into the trees. “We’re finished! Should we weed the teeth-lilies next? Or untangle the skull-saplings?”
No reply. Ivy craned her head, watching for a flash of antlers. When that didn’t work, she hesitantly reached toward the void in her head.
The void immediately pulsed back at her.
It felt happy enough. Tired, but that was normal.
It felt more tired with each day that passed.
The crack that started next to the silver pool portal was bigger now, reaching trees and bushes and sapping the darkness out of them.
Everything that surrounded the silver pool had gone white.
Ivy had never realized how intimidating that color could be until she saw all the poisoned plants around the pool.
Ivy looked around the dark forest, its bright bones and leaping corpsefrogs. It was horrifying, yes. But it was also alive, in its own strange way. How could she possibly be the one to kill it? To steal its keeper?
Vale emerged through the trees, stopping Ivy’s thoughts in their tracks.
“Master!” Ivy beamed, waving like an idiot until she caught herself and stopped. “We’re finished! Isn’t it great?”
She spread her arms to display the trees ahead, which were mercifully un-strangled by wayward ribcages.
Vale barely glanced at them before stooping to gather the last pile of bones Ivy had plucked from the trees. He betrayed none of his tiredness, which Ivy knew he felt. The void let it creep into her sometimes: every day it got worse. Slowly, with Vale sleeping regularly, but still worse.
“Come,” Vale said.
Ivy followed him, hiding her disappointment. And then, of course, her discomfort.
Vale glanced back at her. “Are you well?”
“Yes,” Ivy said hastily.
“You are limping.”
“Well, yes. That happens when…” Ivy flushed as she remembered the past two weeks, every day the pollen making itself known. And every day, he helped her through it.
Thoroughly. Roughly. Each time, she was afraid it would be the last. If she wouldn’t literally die without it, would he still want to have her? She didn’t want to find out. But she would have to. Even if the pollen didn’t wear off before their month together was up, her Circle was still coming.
“I can just use my tongue,” Vale offered. “I could ignore your begging.”
Ivy giggled awkwardly as she remembered her fevered pleas. When the pollen came over her, she would say almost anything. Like how much she craved his big, inhuman cock and wouldn’t have anything less.
“Do you…” Ivy avoided his eyes, watching a branch bend out of her way instead. “Do you want to ignore it?”
Vale didn’t speak for several heart-stopping seconds. Long enough for Ivy’s mind to race to every time that he touched her softly: pushing her hair out of her eyes with one gentle claw, shielding her face from the waterfall as he cleaned her after.
“It does not matter what I want,” Vale said finally. “If you are too sore to work, you are useless to me.”
It was a blow. But it was nothing Ivy hadn’t heard before.
It was why she had agreed to be the Skullstalker’s offering in the first place: to be useful.
Her uncle did love her, of that she had no doubt.
But if she wasn’t useful—gathering food, darning socks, and helping with the never-ending chores that came with constant travel—he would have left her at an orphanage when she was small.
“I’m not injured,” Ivy insisted, flushing harder as she thought back to how Vale had examined her yesterday, prying her hole gently open to check for blood. “I’m just… tender.”
The next step made pain radiate all the way up to her core. She winced again, and Vale stopped walking. Ivy started to protest, scared he would order her back to the nest again, but Vale only knelt on the forest floor.
Ivy frowned, unsure what to do. His arms were full of ribcages they picked from the thickets.
“Climb on my shoulder,” Vale explained.
Ivy hesitated. Should she just… hop on? She’d never climbed on someone’s shoulder before. Not even when she was a child and liable to be carried around. Besides, he grew weaker every day, even though he tried to hide it.
“Ivy,” Vale prompted.
“You’re tired,” she said. “I shouldn’t—”
Vale growled, more annoyance than threat. “Just do it.”
Ivy sighed and heaved herself onto his robed shoulder, her legs dangling over his chest. Before she could settle, he stood up so fast she shrieked.
“Sorry,” she said, clinging to his antlers.
She expected him to growl at her. Or brush her hands off his antlers, which she would let go of if she weren’t so high up in the air. He was always startled when she touched them.
But Vale simply kept walking, his glowing green eyes fixed on the shrubbery as it peeled back to let them pass.
“I will fix this,” Vale said. “There will be no more pain soon.”
Ivy paled. Was he going to eat her? She thought they were getting along!
“What do you mean?” she stammered.
“There is a spell,” he began, and she sagged against him with relief. “I would have gotten it sooner, but…”
He glanced down at the bones in his arms with an unreadable expression, his gait faltering. Then he looked up and his stride went back to normal—fast and focused, always heading to the next task.
“You are hurting,” he continued. “I cannot have you distracted. I will do it today.”
“Oh,” Ivy said quietly. “Thank you.”
Part of her was disappointed. She liked the pain, in an odd sort of way. It added to the pleasure of it all, like adding spice to her dinner.
She swayed with his steps, unable to shake the feeling that she should say more to thank him.
But she knew he wouldn’t appreciate it: whenever she let her touch linger, he pulled away.
Sometimes there was a strange look on his face before he did so, or his eyes stayed on her for a long moment. But he always pulled away.
But she couldn’t help it. She squeezed his antler, mostly because she wasn’t sure he could even feel it. If he did, he didn’t let her know. But his tail started to swish.
“The pollen,” he said as they started coming close to the nightbeast territory, which was marked by significantly fewer trees and a giant skull that they resided inside. “How is it?”
“It’s quiet today,” Ivy said. “Maybe it finally left my blood.”
Vale grunted. He stopped at the edge of the nightbeast territory.
The giant skull where the nightbeasts resided sat in the middle of the suddenly sparse trees, stretching high above the tree line.
It was so massive that Ivy hadn’t even realized it was a skull at first. When she first asked what the skull was from, Vale had mentioned a “Titan.” Ivy had never heard of them before, and Vale hadn’t explained.
Vale emptied his armful of ribcages into the nightbeast territory.
As soon as they clattered onto the forest floor, a long, cat-like creature poked out of the giant skull’s eyeholes.
Then another. One eyehole could fit at least a dozen of the huge beasts, which looked like they could take Ivy’s head off with one clean swipe.
Ivy held back a gasp as the nightbeasts headed for the ribcages.
They looked almost identical to the panthers she had seen in illustrations, except their black fur and skin were transparent.
If the daylight caught them right, she could see all their muscles moving under their skin and their blood moving through their veins.
Then they shifted out of the light, and they were solid once more.
“They’re beautiful,” Ivy whispered. “Should we leave?”
As soon as she asked, she realized it was a ridiculous question. No animal would attack a Skullstalker. Especially not when they were connected to his void.
The nightbeasts ignored them. They stalked up and started gnawing on the ribcages, their strong fangs crunching into them easily and licking at the marrow.
Some of them—the older ones, Ivy noticed, with stiff joints and scarred fur—kept looking around expectantly.
Not for other predators, Ivy realized. They looked almost… hopeful?
Ivy tugged on Vale’s antler. “What are they looking for?”
Vale took a moment to reply. “The light-motes. They used to play with the beasts.”
“Light-motes,” Ivy repeated. “You mentioned them before. Your last assistants, right? A long time ago.”
“Centuries,” Vale said, watching the nightbeasts feast with distant eyes, as if he was remembering. “We thought it was a mistake when the first one died. Then they all started to dim. We never knew why. I asked for more, but the void never gave me any.”
“The void gave them to you?”
“Yes,” Vale said simply. “When I was chosen to come here, the void was overgrown. As it is now. The work was insurmountable. So, I asked for help. The void gave me the light-motes.”