Page 28 of The Withering Wood

She held the prince’s gaze, his face soft and open. There was more depth behind his eyes than she’d first noticed. Maybe he wasn’t just a rich, selfish, arrogant prince.

But if she spent too long staring, she worried she’d drown.

“You still haven’t explained how you know the stars,” she said, pulling layers of clothes over her like blankets, preparing to sleep.

“That is a recent passion of mine,” he replied, laying down on his back as well. He put an arm under his head and stared at the tent ceiling. “Did you see it? When Azkanix died?”

“I did.”

It’d be a memory she’d never erase.

She’d been tending the garden with Eirwen, back when the world had seasons and plants sprawled over their land. A great groaning sundered the earth and the skies darkened to a rippling mass of black and purple, Azkanix ripping his way through the broken mortal world to conquer the heavens. His skeletal fingers, as long as Tyrnoraen’s towers were tall, stretched over the sky. His gaping, unhinged maw, breathing rot and decay into the air, was wide enough to swallow cities.

In a blinding flash of golden light the heavens split like marble beneath a chisel. Beyond those fissures, beings large as kingdoms and too beautiful to comprehend, poured their molten magic through the rift. Azkanix screamed with the force of a thousand banshees while the Celestials ripped him apart, their light seeping into every unholy pore.

Azkanix erupted into fragments of death, hunks of cursed bone falling like meteors, shredded flesh and misty blood raining over Sylvenath. In the same moment Azkanix burst, Eirwen summoned the power of Zyrdriel, covering their land in a pure white shield.

Whole pieces of the Ix-God plummeted to the ground, the bright, sick green of his necromantic magic eating into the earth. The molten light faded as the Celestials sealed the heavens, abandoning them to a cursed plane. The Celestials may have saved them from undeath, but did not spare their dying.

“I did, too,” the prince said, shaking Cerise from the memory. “For days, weeks, it haunted me. It still does. I started to sketch it, hoping that would purge it from my head. In doing so, I spent too much time thinking about the curse. Wondering how to reverse it. It occurred to me, if we could find a way to remove the bones, could we lift his corruption, too? It would be impossible to remove them all, so what if we focused our efforts on those most essential to his being? Those most likely to store the greatest amount of his power? I started etching him over maps of the night sky, calculating based on memory and location where his body stretched over Sylvenath.

“I interviewed people from different parts of Tyrnoraen, asking them to describe to the best of their abilities how his body expanded over them from their viewpoint. I’m not a skilled astronomer or mathematician, so I consulted with various clerics and scholars with the map, and through anecdotes and equations, we came up with our best estimate for where he was when the Celestials slaughtered him, calculated the trajectory of his eruption and where different fragments of him were likely to lay. The next step was figuring out how to survive beyond the boundary of Tyrnoraen, which is blessed from several Celestials, similar to your cabin. We also needed to figure out how to remove the bones and what to do with them.

“While we worked on that, I spent more and more of my time beneath the night sky. Looking at the stars. Wondering where beyond that veil the Celestials were. The more I looked at the stars, the harder it was for me to look away. The untouched, uncorrupted beauty of them. A reminder of what once was, of what the world could be again. A reminder that somewhere beyond our mortal plane, this curse doesn’t exist. It alleviates my anguish, knowing that.”

“But I’m rambling. More to the point, it was natural for me to learn the constellations. I enjoyed watching them move over Tyrnoraen as the seasons changed, although I suppose one can’t really call them seasons anymore. Just gentle to harsh winter. I was stargazing when I saw Vraethik escape, and admittedly was deep in my cups, which I attribute to my terrible decision to chase after him on my own. I suppose I thought I could catch him. That alerting the guards would only waste precious time. Or maybe I’m lying to myself and hoped catching him would gain me the love and glory that had been beyond my reach my entire life.” The prince took a deep breath. “The reasons don’t matter. I gave chase and caught up to him. But it was too late: we were beyond the safe borders of Tyrnoraen, he’d summoned the lichboar and I couldn’t fight them both. Why he took my hair and changed me into a bear rather than killing me, I don’t know. But you know the rest of the story.”

In the abrupt absence of the prince’s rich voice, the tent felt strangely empty. Cerise’s mind whirled, mulling over the implications of his speech. Would it truly work? Could removing the bones reverse the curse? Yet the issue of storage remained, unless they found a way to completely destroy them.

“Did I put you to sleep?” the prince teased, though a tremor of insecurity rippled through the words.

“No,” Cerise said. “I’m just thinking. I never considered the possibility there could be a way to remove the corruption.”

Hope, fragile and fearful, flickered in her chest. She quickly squashed it. Hope was a dangerous thing, leading to laziness and disappointment. She recalled the scattered bone fragments from the eruption earlier, how it simply spread the curse. Even if they moved the bones, they’d just be relocating the curse elsewhere. With how the hex spread through the ground, the earth was likely too corrupted now to fix. The curse would remain in the soil, the trees, the air.

No, the best they could do was stop Vraethik from making things worse.

A hazy, green light shone through the tent fabric, shifting in brightness as it passed them. Cerise shot into a sitting position, watching the strange glow move around the tent.

“What is that?” the prince whispered, leaning up as well.

Cerise shook her head, uncertain. It moved from her side of the tent, around to the prince’s, then faded as if getting farther away.

She hadn’t seen anything besides the pool beneath Azkanix’s bones glow like that before. But it couldn’t be the bones. They didn’t move.

Cerise picked up Beloved and slid toward the tent flaps, quietly untying the laces.

Peeling back the fabric, she poked her head out into the frigid night. Light snow fell, shimmering green with the nearby necrotic light.

In the distance, a doe and her fawn traipsed through the woods, hooves soundless as they stepped through the snow.

Because they didn’t have hooves.

They didn’t have bodies.

As their wispy, translucent green shapes moved, their forms seemed to condense and spread like contained smoke. Stuck in the shape of deer, but ethereal and gaseous.

“Are those…ghosts?” Oberon asked, pulling back the opposite tent flap and peering out.