The river carried our nameless, thoughtless, gibbering mutant far away. He didn’t know how to swim. Clinging to consciousness, his weapon, and a scrap of driftwood, he could only submit to the current’s whims.
At one point, it spat him out over a series of waterfalls. He might’ve drowned a few times. It was hard to be sure. Life, death, survival – they were complex concepts. His lungs filled with water, he blacked out, woke up.
A motherless pup, he would have to learn things the hard way for now. For instance, too much water was bad. Those monsters were bad. Sharp teeth, pointy claws, the pointy things in the hands of all those figures on the hill – bad, bad, bad.
The river was merciful in that eventually, after he was so waterlogged he could have been wrung out, it eased him onto the shores of a grand, sparkling lake. The lake was home to a dilapidated tower mill and little else.
There was a small island that might have been a better place to hide from all the scary, sharp things, but he could not reach it. He didn’t know how to swim.
The tower mill was his best bet. He climbed up its ancient ladder one-handed, rolled onto the topmost floor, and let darkness claim him.
His first sleep. He slept for a long, long time.
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One year passed in the blink of an eye. Though he never left the safety of the tower mill, he didn’t spend the whole year sleeping. He spent it healing, watching, waiting for something to rip him from the empty stasis he was born into.
Speaking of stasis, his body had very few urges. It rumbled and grumbled on occasion, but otherwise just sat in front of the cracked attic window like a long-forgotten statue. The only thing about him that changed in all that time was his hair – it grew out of its braid.
Some meaningful events took place during that first year. A few months in, those dark things started sniffing around the lake. They behaved exactly like the ones that almost devoured him.
Some of their features varied, like size and shape. Some had too many limbs, too many eyes, too many heads. Horns. The constants were: colorless eyes, grey skin, too-big fangs, black claws, black blood.
He must have smelled like them, or maybe like the putrefaction they spread, because they ignored his presence. He watched them drag their twisted bodies around the bottom of the mill, searching for life to take.
They traveled in packs. Ate anything they came across in the foliage. Sometimes they inexplicably collapsed in steaming piles, but they always, always got back up. After exhausting the lake’s supply of flesh and blood, they moved on.
The meandering, slug-like paths of ichor left in their wake corroded over time. In a matter of months, the lake’s pretty grass was gone. The trees withered and rotted. The water started to stink.
Nestled away, he…he needs a name, doesn’t he? Since he had deserted both his own and the undead army, we can call him the Deserter. For now.
Nestled away, the Deserter had no way of knowing that what started as a single outbreak in Fort Faellen snowballed almost overnight. Too quickly for anyone to comprehend.
Everyone who was at the fort, including the five-hundred or so Faeltan riders he failed to warn away, succumbed to their injuries and turned. The resultant swarm was thousands strong.
Though he had been the one to open the gate and unleash hell, it wasn’t his fault. How could he have known the black blood, the same blood coursing through his veins, was toxic, infectious? How could he have known it would eat everything in sight?
That first year, the countryside – once bonny and lush – was laid to waste. The smallfolk couldn’t defend themselves; war had already taken its toll. Most lived in ramshackle huts, wood and straw. Like the breath of a naughty wolf, the swarm knocked them all down.
Six months was really all it took for the bloody virus – the bloodborne plague to leech its way into every pore and crevice of both Maul and Faelte indiscriminately. The seasons came and went, but the swarms persevered. Multiplied. Strengthened.
This is bigger picture stuff, though. Throughout all the madness, the Deserter remained in his tower mill battling some madness of his own.
The voice in his head, the confident, commanding one, never went away. It was so chatty.
Sometimes it felt like it was part of him. Others, not so much – like when it urged him to eat the critter he found burrowing in his wall. He held the poor thing in his claws, saliva dribbling off the tip of his long, grey tongue.
The voice demanded, bargained, begged. Eat. Eat. Eat.
He wanted to. Oh, how he wanted to. The creature was small and crunchy. He was big and hungry. It was natural, wasn’t it? To want to?
Eat it.
He let it go. The voice went back to pointing out the simpler things around him – sky, cloud, grass, flower – like nothing happened.
The encounter left him shaken and made him acutely aware of the hole in his stomach. He didn’t know what days were, but each that passed made it grow.
It and the voice would consume him if he let them. That he knew for certain.
༻❁༺
The drama with the mouse was around eight months in. With no food for fuel and no professional treatment, the Deserter’s right wrist and shoulder healed wonky.
Just as his body revived itself after drowning, his nerves, tendons, and bones cobbled themselves together. Now, he couldn’t close that hand into a proper fist.
Damaged, the voice taunted when he tried. Weak.
It could be so mean. It was always telling him to leave the mill, be curious, taste the world, but when it was mean, all he wanted to do was curl up in a ball.
He spent so much time in the mill’s attic, he tended to forget he wasn’t part of the woodwork. He would lay flat for hours on end, staring up at the sky through the broken roof.
The sky started to look a little fuzzy towards the tail end of the year. It flickered unnaturally; if he squinted, it almost looked like there was a veil separating him from the moon and stars.
The tail end of the first year. That twelfth month. That was when it happened – when he finally saw his first living, breathing person.
He was roused one night by an explosion that made the mill tremble. He crawled to the window and watched the far side of the lake light up.
The following afternoon, she appeared. The grass around his mill had long since died; the whole area was black and bubbly, treacherous. She wasn’t wearing shoes.
She didn’t need to. Flowers grew wherever she walked. They varied in color and type but were all equally plush, petals fluffy. They safeguarded her every step.
He could only see the top of her head. He watched her stop in front of the singular patch of life left untouched by the horde. Carefully, she harvested some spiky buds, piling them in the skirt of her dress.
The smell of their sap trickled in through the window – he had nothing to relate it to, but it smelled off. Pointy. Pungent. Avoid.
He blinked and she was gone. The flowers she left behind wilted into the fetid grass.
He thought at first, she must be a dream. The world as he knew it was cruel, barren. Things without fangs and claws, things that made flowers grow, didn’t belong.
That night, there was another explosion. The night after that. Each blast was closer than the last.
On the fourth night, he curled up by the window. He didn’t know how, but he knew she was near. He knew the loud sounds were her making.
Sometimes he sensed her out there on the island, alone with her thoughts. Did she stare up at the fuzzy stars through a broken roof of her own?
Another explosion ripped him back to the present. Only a few yards away. He shrank against the wall – he wasn’t curious anymore. He was scared.
That last one attracted a dormant pack of monsters. Their howling, shrieking, and barking filled the frigid night air.
He hugged his legs to his chest and tucked his head, trying to make himself as small as possible. The voice prowled impatiently at the back of his mind. It knew something was coming.
Something strange happened, then. It was a difficult feeling for him to grasp, but suddenly, it didn’t feel like he was alone. Suddenly, it felt like something – or someone – was touching the top of his head.
He lifted it with a sad, stuffy sniffle. Nobody was there with him that he could see, but just as he could sense her, he could sense them. They were crouching in front of him. Their touch moved from his head to one of his hands.
They held there a moment. Their touch was soft, warm, and terribly gentle.
The doors of the mill burst open, and they were gone. Cries filled the air below. Non-monster cries. Her cries, desperate. Mutant limbs and jaws snapped at her heels.
Before he knew it, she was climbing the ladder – his ladder. Across the room, he pressed harder against the wall. He flinched when the ladder cracked and gave.
She screamed, only just managing to catch the ledge.
He watched the tips of her fingers go white with effort. She was slipping, slipping.
Weak, the voice hissed. Weak. Human. Prey.
Some new words in the mix – bad words. He dove forward to offer her his good hand. Shockingly, she took it.
Just as he poked his head over the ledge, the veiled moonlight poked through the roof and illuminated his face.
She let out the most horrid sound he had ever heard. It would haunt him for years to come. Her hand released him as if he burned her; she fell, and the swarm gathering below converged.
It was odd, how he didn’t think twice about grabbing his spiked maul and leaping down after her. He didn’t know, but some day would learn, some of the best things people did were when they weren’t thinking.
He landed heavily, crushing the head of a monster that had grabbed her. He swiveled, blindly knocking back the first wave and giving her some room to breathe.
His movements were clunky and erratic. He didn’t know how to wield the oversized weapon. And unable to use his right hand, he was forced to try with only left.
But she was safe behind him. She scurried under a rusted gear and only stopped screaming when he drove a spike into the chest of the creature he had crushed. Miraculously, it did not move again.
The others charged. They had no interest in him. They wanted her.
They crawled on the walls, dropping down from above. Mid-sized ones, slithery and quick. He snatched them out of the air and stomped them into the dirt until they too stopped moving.
The fight was going well considering he had no idea what he was doing – at least until one monster, a wretched, snake-like thing, sized up his weakness and launched at his right side. He raised his useless arm to protect his face. His eyes slipped closed as he braced for impact.
None came. Feeling warmth on his cheeks, he cracked an eye open and found his left arm encased in a glowing, flickering, translucent sphere.
The monster coiled and lunged again. The sphere crackled, repelling it with a burst of raw energy.
More warmth, more light, splashed the walls of the mill. After ensuring the creature was dead, he stole a glance.
It was her. She had crawled out from under the gears and was now standing tall at his back.
Her arms were outstretched. Upon her palms wisped two twin wells of heavenly light as pale and beautiful as the morning sun.
He left himself open by turning around, but every monster that tried taking advantage was sent flying back by that sphere on his arm. It grew with each blow until it encompassed his entire body.
His slack-jawed expression made her grin. She threw her head back and made another sound he’d never heard before – a happy one. He liked that sound.
The light in her palms sparked and overflowed in response to it, spilling through her fingers like water and setting her bright hair and eyes aflame.
Wonderful. She was a wonderful, wild sight. He felt his face do something beyond his control, his stale lips cracking into a far less wonderful mirror of her smile.
The mud beneath his boots quaked. That was all the warning he received before another explosion blew the wall of the mill in; it started collapsing on itself with a warbling groan.
He lost sight of her amidst chunks of wood, metal, and stone. Her pretty lights blinked out. The sphere around him sputtered and vanished.
The remaining monsters sped towards him on the falling rubble, leaping off it like frogs from lily pads. His weapon was out of reach, so he fought with fang and claw. Theirs ripped into him in turn, drawing his sizzling black blood.
Somehow, he triumphed. Didn’t remember doing it exactly. Like sleeping, he blacked out and woke to find every one of them had been wailed on with such ferocity, they were rendered mere splotches in the dust.
It had started to rain while he was out. The cool water combined with all the blood now tainting the dirt filled the broken mill with putrid steam.
He had to sift through several hunks of debris to find her. Her bony fingers were digging into a pulsing bite above her breast.
Remembering the way that invisible person’s touch had soothed him when he was scared, he took her hand.
Garbled noises were coming out of her, as foreign to him as any other language. “Maman,” she cried, “ça fait mal – maman.”
Death had yet to claim her and the mutations had yet to fully change her, but her eyes – like grass, he thought – were already being bled of their striking color.
Holding his hand must have grounded her. She focused on him, addressing him firmly, directly with her voice. When he didn’t respond, she squeezed her bloody fingers around his and brought his hand to the gash in her chest.
“Please,” she whispered in a different tongue. He still didn’t understand, but it tickled something in his brain. “No time – do it now.”
She forcibly dug his claws deeper into the wound. He pulled away in horror when he felt the heavy beating of her heart through her ribs.
“Kill me,” she implored.
In that moment, she reminded him of the mouse: trembling, small, scared. His mouth watered.
Human. Prey.
Language aside, he inherently understood what the voice wanted. He also inherently understood what she needed.
In the end, he couldn’t go through with either. He fell back on his heels and watched her writhe like a snake with its tail cut off.
She vomited black sludge, tore out fistfuls of hair, died in knots. Then she came back just as twisted.
Seething, she chased him out of the ruined mill, dark sparks erupting from the tips of her freshly grown claws.
He ran. He did not look back.
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