Chapter Fourteen
Avelina
Gloomsdale wasn’t so much a city or a town so much as it was a massive, sprawling swamp full of trees, mud, and buildings on stilts.
There weren’t grocers or markets or gardens.
Just a maze of dilapidated houses made up of rotting wood.
She wished there was a silver lining, like the people there were friendly.
They weren’t. In fact, every face she met on her walk with Neddy merely scowled.
Either they glared at Neddy with a darkness that even she couldn’t comprehend, or they glared directly at her.
“Don’t pay them any mind.” Neddy waved off a random woman perched on the stoop of a cabin that didn’t even have a roof.
Avelina couldn’t help but stop and stare.
The woman hunched over her lap, dressed in nothing but rags, hair ashen and matted at the scalp.
A sliver of her wanted to be compassionate, until the woman snapped her attention from Neddy to Avelina, her sneer showing off a mouth full of blackened teeth.
They were sharpened nubs, oozing with ichor.
The woman climbed to her feet and that’s when she saw that the villager was missing half her torso.
Like she was cleaved in half, from her top rib to her hips was nothing but a tangle of roots.
She was a corpse, animated by the swamp itself.
Avelina stumbled away from the roots that pulled up and out of the damp earth.
The dead woman’s house hoisted by the veins of the swamp, stilts dangling from beneath.
Something yanked the building into the pools of standing water.
The splash echoed around them as Avelina raced after Neddy.
The other warlock was already several yards away, strolling up a root wide enough to be a sidewalk.
In fact, there were several like that. She only noticed when the dead woman’s house scrambled away, that all the other roots seemed to be headed in one direction.
A massive tree. There was a tree the size of a mountain at the heart of Gloomsdale.
All the thick canopy branches merged into the intimidating greenery that made up the heart of the swamp.
Made of several woven trunks, it was a tangled web with many vines braided around it, and even more chunks of moss and mushrooms.
And Neddy walked up one of the roots, off the muddy path they’d taken, and stood atop one of its mighty veins.
Avelina never knew magic to pump like a heart.
Yet she could hear it in her ears as she stood before the behemoth.
Thump, thump, thump. There was a pulse coming from inside that tree, she’d bet her left foot on it.
Cold air brushed over her face, as if the tree was breathing on her.
She grimaced. “Neddy, what is this place?”
“My home.” The other warlock slid down the root till she stood before Avelina, a shadow bearing down over her. She itched to pull out the seeing stone again, to observe Neddy as she really was…a dark and ominous tree with a cruel face.
“Why does everyone glare at you like that?” Avelina could only imagine why.
She was a stranger. Small towns notoriously disliked outsiders.
She was, also, currently under Cottonmouth’s thumb.
That was reason enough for them to glare at Avelina…
but not Neddy. “Why do I get the feeling you don’t work for Callum? ”
“I don’t,” Neddy laughed, sauntering forward.
Vines slithered over top of the roots to like nosey serpents studying the pair.
Avelina steadily turned, finding that all the houses they passed earlier were either gone or closed.
Her eyebrows furrowed. When she returned her attention to Neddy, a slow, icy horror crept up her spine.
The dissociative stare returned to Neddy’s gaze.
It was a hard cut off from where she’d displayed emotions earlier, the woman before Avelina no longer wore a mask.
Oh…oh no. Neddy spoke in an even, monotoned drawl. “Cottonmouth and I have an agreement.”
“What kind of agreement?” Avelina grimaced, hands up like she might clutch some exasperated pearls around her throat.
She wasn’t even sure what she was doing other than standing still like a fool.
Avelina was a sitting duck. An unpracticed warlock in a strange swamp?
She didn’t even have Callum at her disposal; she was all alone at the heart of Gloomsdale with a much older warlock.
One who distinctly stopped pretending to care… oh no.
“The Bark Father requires feeding. Callum provides me with sustenance from time to time. In exchange, I allow him to live in my swamp.” Neddy’s head tilted to the side in a creaky fashion, her expression almost like a doll. Her silvery eyes were reflective glass stones, flashing as a warning.
Avelina let out a wheezy, nervous laugh. “Is this where I find out he’s not been keeping up his side of the deal?”
Neddy’s lips curled up high on her face despite the fact her eyes were dead. She showed off rows and rows of teeth, opening her hungry maw. “He has been very generous. You have nothing to worry from me.”
“Right,” Avelina gulped. Yeah, says the lady with a thousand eldritch teeth and eyes of a porcelain doll.
Drying her sweaty hands on her skirt, Avelina took a tentative step backward.
The mud swallowed her boots and she was stuck.
Her eyes darted down, just to check she’d not sunken in deeper than her ankle.
When her attention rose from the mud, she found Neddy looming inches from her face.
Avelina swallowed a scream with her fists raised.
Neddy’s smile lowered, but there was no fury or displeasure in the rest of her features. Instead, she merely spoke in a low, raspy whisper. “You want to know a secret?”
“Sure,” Avelina squeaked.
“The problem with bein’ a vessel for a god, with bein’ a warlock, is that it’s really, really, hard to kill us the longer we’ve been alive.
And the gods?” Neddy lost all her smile for a dead, thousand-yard stare.
Her arms dangled limp at her sides as the elder warlock stalked around Avelina.
Trying her best not to squirm or flinch, Avelina took a deep breath in through her nose.
Movement crept along the roots of the tree.
She tried to catch it with her eye, but it disappeared in a flash.
Avelina kept nearly spotting it as Neddy continued to circle her.
A pair of hands, drenched in shadow, with her fingernails digging into the bark.
They clawed their way up from behind the roots, from beyond where Avelina could actually see.
Neddy snatched her jaw and brought Avelina’s gaze back to her.
“The gods, they’re all hungry. They just wanna be fed.
They want everyone elses scraps too. And so, they bicker.
They fight. They eat each other, fillin’ their bellies with the sinew of their brethren.
And so, some of them tie themselves to the mortals.
They make it impossible for the others to eat ‘em, or at least, entirely. So, we’ve got these hungry beasts in the sky who just wanna devour…
and we are house plants to ‘em. We’re just tomato and basil and thyme. We are spices. We make it taste good.”
“Neddy,” Avelina whimpered, fists trembling as she was torn between trying to see who it was crawling over the massive roots and paying attention to Neddy’s bizarre rant. “Neddy, there’s—”
“Don’t pay them no mind,” Neddy giggled, the sound too pitched and frenzied to make sense. Not when Neddy’s face was so hollow. The other warlock dropped Avelina’s face and continued to pace. “You’re a warlock, little one. A Maaaa-ideeeeen.”
The way Neddy drew out the word ran a shiver down Avelina’s spine.
She felt fingers, familiar ghost digits, tickling down her damp back.
Catalysta was a firm presence behind her.
Fingers spread around her ribs; her goddess held her still.
It was almost comforting if Avelina didn’t see that multiple hands were clawing their way up the backside of the roots.
More vines drooped over the top of it, dancing in a wind that didn’t exist.
“A warlock’s gotta know how to strike a deal,” Neddy continued. “It’s kind of our thing, ya know?”
“What kind of deal?” Avelina ignored the prickling along the backside of her legs and arms. The mud seeped continuously into her boots.
She was too cemented to do anything about it.
Her mind raced for a way out. She couldn’t escape her boots without making it obvious.
If she so much as bent to grab at herself, Neddy would be on her in a second.
She definitely couldn’t attack Neddy; she didn’t even know how to cast on command.
“I’m gonna teach you how to use your powers,” Neddy waggled a finger in her direction. “But you gotta do something for me when we’re done.”
“Do what?” Avelina saw the faces. All the ones who glared at Neddy, the corpses, they’re all corpses, they crawled overtop the roots and threw themselves into the mud behind Neddy.
Avelina’s heart skipped a beat. She tried to pick up her feet, but the mud sank her another half an inch.
Cold, murky sediment seeped into her socks, and she was hit with a sudden clarity.
“Neddy? I thought you said I didn’t have to worry about you! ”
She was a fish in a barrel. Neddy led her to the heart of the swamp, and she was stuck between two giant roots that blocked her off from anyone or anything else.
However, from her angle, either she was the fish or she was the spear.
All the animated dead stood at the end of a tunnel made by the roots.