Page 22 of The Blight of Hollowmire

I cannot decide if it is luck that gives me the respite from whatever horrors continue to lurk in the dark here. Perhaps my earlier fight with the mimicking thing has earned me a night off. Or perhaps the forces within the verdant confines of the Verge are simply regrouping, waiting until I’m asleep to send their next tormenter.

Magnar is quiet—dare I say, peaceful—tonight. The small fire in my paltry camp crackles with just enough warmth to make me question my sanity, because it doesn’t seem to be as hot as a fire should be.

Or perhaps the cold simply bothers me more than it did when this life was all I dreamed of.

Embers drift upwards on a thin column of smoke, and my gaze follows them up toward the night sky—blacker than pitch, studded with stars in constellations I’d swear I’ve never seen before, different even from the ones I witnessed last night.

My gut twists with equal parts unease and hunger, and I finally relent and pull out a strip of dried fish from my pack, plus a heel of bread that something, clearly, has been nibbling on. I’ve given up trying to catch the little snacking thief in the act. Whatever it is, it’s too clever, quick, or powerful for me to pin down, and I don’t mind sharing a little of my evening meal with someone as long as I’m not meant to be the main course later on.

Hunger pains alleviated—though not abated entirely—I try to shift my pallet as close to the fire as I can without fearing a stray spark. Sleep will only come in fits and starts, partly because of the cold, partly because of the hardness of the ground, and partly because of the readiness that has always and will always linger after a lifetime of battlefield terrors.

I wake often in the night, heart hammering, certain that something lurks just at the edge of darkness, only to find the fire reduced to a dull red eye and Magnar standing over me like a sentry carved from shadow. Every time I close my eyes, I dream of water rising in a slow, deliberate swell that fills my mouth and lungs with cold, iron-tasting silt while unseen shapes move just beneath the surface, patient and ravenous.

When dawn finally begins to bleed into the forest, it does so reluctantly, the light seeping sideways between trunks in thin, lilac gray ribbons that illuminate the clinging mist and fog. The fire has died to cold ash that doesn’t even offer to smolder. My joints ache with age and the frosty cold, a persistent throb that reverberates throughout every bone in my body.

The bandage at my shoulder has stiffened with dried blood. My mouth tastes faintly metallic, as though I have been sucking on old coins in my sleep—perhaps one of the reasons for my visceral nightmares. Magnar turns his head when I stir, his dark eye finding mine with an unreadable expression.

“We’ve both made it through the night, I see,” I offer in a rough scrape of sound. “I wonder if we’ll have as much luck tomorrow night.”

Breaking camp takes longer than it should, given how slight my camp is—bedroll, needlessly banked fire, an apple for me and the core for Magnar. My fingers are clumsy with cold and fatigue, and twice I have to force myself to stop and breathe rather than lash out at some imagined movement in the undergrowth. This forest watches. I’ve known it since the first time I ventured in here with my men—each of us haughty with the assurance that we possessed whatever it took to best the threats it could send up. How gut-wrenchingly wrong we were.

Both Magnar and I are dragging with exhaustion, but we ride on, until the Verge thins before us.

One moment the trees stand close and oppressive, roots snaking across the path in knotted ridges and whorls meant to trip the careless, the next they draw back unevenly, as though they, too, fear what lies beyond the comfort of these shadows. Dread crystallizes in my belly. The ground slopes subtly downward, and the air shifts, as though it is weighed down by the suggestion of open water.

I rein Magnar in at the edge, pulse tripping in my chest with a line of memories ready to sound off in my mind. I swore I’d never return to this place—this cursed, awful, stinking place—even to try and retrieve the bodies of my fallen brethren.

Before us sprawls the bog.

It stretches to the horizon in a vast, undulating expanse of dark water and treacherous, moss-choked ground, broken by low islands of reed and twisted willow. Mist lies over it in slow-moving sheets, thin enough in places to reveal the glimmer of stagnant pools beneath, thick enough in others to conceal whatever moves below their surfaces. The color of it is wrong—not the rich brown of peat or the silver-blue of the salt marshes along the coast, but a dull, bruised green that scarcely reflects the weak morning light.

In the far distance, barely visible through the shifting mists, something rises above the haze—a dark, angular silhouette that can only be Hollowmire Castle, its towers like the broken teeth of a colossal beast yawning against the sky.

The sight of it makes my stomach drop unexpectedly. When last I stood here, I did so with a company of the finest men in Valehar, certain that whatever lay within this bog would be no match for the skill and steel of experienced knights.

But then… we never made it to the end. I watched helplessly, my confidence eroding like everything before water, as the cursed mire swallowed our path, sucked up our horses and our supplies, and made short work of our bravado. Countless days we wandered in circles—the sodden mossy ground pulling at our feet—only to find ourselves making less than no progress. Better men than I succumbed to madness, despair—to the monsters that ripple beneath the green murk.

I have never spoken aloud of the horrors that took my friends—my trusted brethren—but they crawl through my dreams almost every night.

Magnar paces anxiously, nostrils flaring as he no doubt scents the expanse of remembered horror before us. In that, we are the same. The bog may appear calm and passive, but if you watch long enough, it seems to breathe—its stagnant pools dimpling and smoothing in slow, deliberate rhythms. Here and there, reeds will tremble without wind, and occasionally, I’d swear I hear the soft susurrus of a breeze that moves nothing.

“Walk on,” I murmur to Magnar, fighting to ignore how unsteady my voice sounds at the edge of the unnatural space. Magnar’s ears flick at every whisper of sound, tension gathering in his muscles, yet he obeys.

A narrow causeway, little more than a raised scar of earth and woven brush, snakes from the edge of the Verge out into the bog. Was this the way we came last time? It must be—there is no other path forward. Yet it doesn’t seem familiar… It looks fragile enough to lure unsuspecting travelers into the midst of the swamp and leave them to the hungry mouths within. I dismount, unwilling to trust its integrity beneath both our weights at once, and test the first stretch with the heel of my boot. It holds, though water seeps up around the edges with a faint, sucking sound that sends a shiver of wariness all the way up to the crown of my head.

Taking a breath that doesn’t feel quite as deep as it needs to be, Magnar and I step onto the causeway together.

The sensation is unpleasantly soft and pillowy, reminding me that beneath this thin layer of rotting vegetation and cold, green water, there is nothing solid beneath for a considerable distance. The water to either side is dark and opaque, its surface broken by patches of floating vegetation that drift lazily in patterns perhaps a bit too regular.

Halfway along the first bend, something brushes the side of my boot.

I freeze, panic rising sharp and sudden, like the tide of water in my dreams. My vision begins to tunnel, my breath coming in labored gasps as I fight a barrage of visions—men and horses disappearing, some without a sound, some with shrill screams and guttural bellows of surprise. Then the flash of white, gnashing teeth and the blood—gods, so much blood—until eerie silence reigned once again.

The water remains placid, reflecting a pale strip of morning sky and the spear-like silhouettes of reeds. Perhaps it was nothing more than a stray stem, or a submerged willow branch dislodged by our passage. I force my memories to sink down, down, down.

Then the brush comes again, firmer this time, accompanied by a faint pressure against my ankle that instinct tells me does not belong to plant or current.

I step back instinctively, nearly colliding with Magnar, who lets out a low, warning rumble that vibrates through the reins and sends small ripples outward through the water.