T Lain - The Living Dead

Zalyn finally moved. The little elf, her back to Mialee, raised the golden symbol of Ehlonna overhead. “ Ehlonna hinue, mormhaor shan!” the tiny cleric bellowed in a booming, supernatural voice.

Metallic, gold-flecked, green energy shot in every direction from the holy icon. Mialee felt gentle coolness spread through her body in the hot, confined space.

Every rat in the room burst with a splatter of orange fire and hot gore. They flamed into cinders within seconds, leaving smoldering guts all over the room. An unholy chorus of hideous, rasping shrieks erupted around the tiny little house, and the mangled talons flailing into the room jerked back as one. Many of them, Mialee noted with disgust, left dripping strips of flesh hanging from jagged boards. Even a few clawed hands dropped to the floor and twitched momentarily before flaming out like the rats.

Zalyn turned and faced the wizard. She looked suddenly drawn and frail, and her breathing was heavy and erratic. Still, her eyes twinkled as she spoke.

“I’ve given you all a lot to take in. There is more, but the night has already gone on far too long. Ehlonna will give us her protection for a few more days. We all need rest. Tomorrow, we can discuss plans.”

Mialee retrieved her charcoal and paper, which had fallen to the floor. She scribbled.

“Favrid?” Zalyn asked, and looked like her heart would break. “He knows the Buried One dare not kill him for a few more days. As I said, he has grown very stubborn in his old age. As long as Darji remains, I will know he lives. And as long as Favrid lives, there is hope. Think on that, child. One thing, though.”

Mialee nodded.

Zalyn pointed to Mialee’s pack, resting under the table. “I’d recommend you meditate, then take time to study and prepare yourself. We will rest, and soon, you will recover you words. You must.”

A sober hush fell over their little band of survivors. The only sounds that reached Mialee’s ears were of the crackling fire, the bawling of the terrified little girl, the distantly screaming zombies, and the reverberating thuds of Clayn and Soveliss pounding the barricade back into place with the butts of their swords.

Mialee sneezed twice into her spellbook and went into another coughing fit. Devis sat on the floor beside her, noodling around with a new ballad on his lute, and sympathized. Between the festering rat residues already buzzing with tiny flies, the days-old gore encrusting everyone’s clothes, and the foul, but necessary, waste bucket in the corner, drawing breath in their little sanctuary was a dangerous adventure. Devis set aside the lute and opened his leather vest. Most of his under-tunic was still clean, at least relatively so. He shrugged and tore two wide strips from the bottom, tied one around his own nose and mouth—winced at how long it had been since he’d taken a bath—and offered the other to Mialee. She looked at the rag with distaste, but relented after she sneezed violently one more time.

“Thistle—” Mialee frowned, and said more slowly, “Thanks, garlic.”

She sighed with a weak grin and tied the covering over her lower face. She shifted closer to him and placed a hand on his knee as she returned to her spellbook. Devis looked over her shoulder—he couldn’t make out the details, but it looked like she was studying ways to make things disappear.

“It’s always easier to surprise someone when they can’t see you,” Devis said.

Mialee looked up at him in mild irritation, and scooted a few inches away, turning the book’s spine to the bard.

“All right, all right,” Devis said, and resumed work on his new melody, plucking idly.

It had been nearly a day since Zalyn annihilated the swarming rats and sent the wightlings packing, for a while. Hound-Eye and Nialma played in one corner—the halfling would bark the name of an animal, and the little girl would pretend to be the animal. She was giggling, and Devis was gratified to see his old pal Hound-Eye had actually begun coming back from the dark place he’d inhabited since Takata’s death at the bridge. The little girl particularly loved to play pretend rat, which seemed to disturb her mother and father, but the girl was giggling and laughing. Pell had opened up a bit, and Devis learned that the man was a scholar. He and his family had just returned to Silatham when the wightling rats struck the sleeping town. Now Pell’s family was less than half the size it had been a week ago.

Humming over the idle notes, Devis’s thoughts turned to something more pleasant. He regarded the elf woman beside him out of the corner of his eye.

Mialee confused the daylights out of him. Obviously, Devis had grown attached to her during the journey south, and thought that she just might have been feeling the same way. His instincts about such things were usually sharp. Then, the wight attacked and unexpectedly killed her and shattered him.

After Mialee’s return to life, she and the bard joked with each other, shared a few awkward moments, but Devis sensed her mind was distant. It wasn’t just the residual effect of Zalyn’s aphasia potion. Occasionally, as when she touched his knee and called him “garlic,” he closed the distance, but she drew back as soon after.

As his fingers played over the strings, Devis speed-picked a progression of chords he had never played before, a collaboration of notes that created a sound entirely new, yet as familiar as a timeless hymn. The bard smiled beneath his ersatz facemask. The hook was exactly what the ballad needed. It just took time for such things to emerge from the jumble of random melodies in his fingers.

As the song’s magic surrounded him with simple, twinkling lights that flitted about the room like fireflies, the wightlings seemed very far away, even as the corrupted, rotten victims of Silatham screamed and howled outside in the early morning. The air itself seemed to get cleaner, if only a little, an unanticipated side effect of the new spell song.

Zalyn’s face was drawn and sallow, and her breath came in steady, pained wheezes. She leaned against Clayn, who had leaped to her side when she began wobbling. Devis saw that she clutched the golden symbol of Ehlonna in tiny, white-knuckled hands. Acrid, foul-smelling rat-smoke drifted through the hot, cramped room.

The elder of Silatham had just turned back another wightling onslaught. There had been fewer rats but more humanoids, and something new, at least inside Silatham—vultures and wolves, dozens of them.

The barricade was badly damaged. Devis, Pell, Soveliss, and Mialee raced to pound the cracked and broken boards back into place.

“It seems,” Zalyn said as Clayn helped her to a seat on the floor, “my usefulness is beginning to wane.”

“Elder,” Clayn began, “Holy Ehlonna will protect us. She must find a way to—”

“Ehlonna is not the problem, dear, brave Clayn,” Zalyn said wearily as the ranger crouched beside her. Devis wished he could help the old woman with an uplifting poem, but dared not stop his efforts on the windows.

“Moradin,” Clayn spat, “he betrayed us. Released the Buried One before the Mother was ready.”

“No, if anything, Moradin has done more than his fair share. Do not speak ill of the Dwarffather, only his strength kept the Buried One in check while Ehlonna convalesced,” Zalyn smirked.

“The problem is not with the gods, my boy,” she said with resignation. “It’s with me. I am dying.”

Everyone in the room froze. Devis winced as a heavy, jagged chunk of table dropped painfully on his toe, but he bit back a yelp.

“Don’t all of you look at me like that. I am well over eleven hundred years old. Even among elves, I am ancient. The effort of fighting back so many of the Buried One’s minions has forced me to draw on my own strength as much as the Mother’s,” Zalyn smiled weakly, though Devis saw pain in her eyes. “Ehlonna does not share her gifts with the world lightly, and she always asks for them back. Favrid and I have led very long lives with the Mother’s help. We had to, for the sake of our cause. But,” she coughed, a wheezing hack that filled the bard’s gut with sickening certainty, “we always planned to enter Ehlonna’s embrace together. I fear he may have to catch up with me.”