Leaving the capital provided only a fleeting moment of relief.
Once the gilded towers of Memrot’s palace dipped below the horizon, and the stifling stench of the city gutters yielded to the fresh air of the open road, the crew expected the usual travel hardships: dust, blistering heat, and the occasional bandit.
However, the southern route leading down into the valley where Silent Bliss lay proved to be a challenge of an entirely different nature.
It was a descent into a land that felt diseased; not with decay or necrosis, but with a suffocating excess of life.
With every passing mile, the sun grew paler, as if suspended behind a pane of dirty, milky glass.
The sky bruised into a sickly, stifling purple-gray, hanging oppressively low.
The landscape along the trail morphed in subtle ways that grated on the senses.
The trees bordering the road grew grotesquely thick, their bark resembling bloated, damp skin, while their leaves bore a waxy green hue so deep they appeared pitch-black in the shadows.
The grass didn’t rustle in the wind; it was dense, fleshy, and dead silent, as if simply waiting for someone to step on it so it could coil around their ankle.
Figlin Smarsson lurched violently on a perfectly straight stretch of dirt, snatching at Perval’s massive arm to avoid face-planting in the dust.
The monk didn’t even flinch under the dwarf’s weight, his sweaty skin gleaming in the pallid light.
“This blasted land…
it doesn’t move at all,” Figi slurred, his face; usually flushed from sea winds and spirits; as pale as a canvas sail.
“The ground is too damn stable, Perval.
My legs keep bracing for a roll that just isn’t there!
This dead, unnatural stillness is about to turn my stomach inside out.
It’s worse than a bloody gale!”
The monk supported his friend with the effortless ease of someone carrying a light rucksack.
His blue eyes, normally dancing with good humor, now sharply scanned the treeline.
“It’s just your curse acting up, Figi.
The ground is hard and steady,” he said gently, though he too felt a bizarre, crawling sensation spreading through the soles of his feet.
“But you’re right about one thing.
Something stinks out here.
And for once, it’s not the swill in your mug.”
Figi took a desperate, life-saving swig from his tankard.
Drops of liquor settled in his white beard, where a small crab twitched nervously amidst the braids, also sensing the uncanny stillness of their surroundings.
Only after a large dose of rum did the dwarf regain a semblance of upright posture; the bitter paradox of his existence being that he needed an alcohol-induced spin in his head to counteract the sickening immobility of the accursed, stable earth.
“What?!
Hard?!” Figlin bellowed, pressing his dented brass ear trumpet to his head as if Perval were shouting from across the valley.
“Of course it’s hard, that’s why my feet are killing me!
But it won’t budge, I tell you!
Not a single tilt!
This dead, relentless stability is going to wring my guts dry!
If this is the road to ‘Bliss,’ I’d rather rot sober in the bilges!”
Yerga strolled down the center of the path, humming a jaunty, upbeat melody that grated like a knife on glass against the dead silence.
Her generous bust swayed rhythmically with each stride, and her wild mane of green curls seemed to possess a life of its own despite the absolute lack of wind.
Though a serene smile graced her lips, her fingers danced ceaselessly over the hilts of the two sickles at her belt; tools that, in her hands, reaped a harvest far bloodier than wheat.
In the tall grass along the shoulder, her skeletal cat prowled, pouncing on invisible insects and occasionally trotting back to drop mouthfuls of rotting roots at its mistress’s feet.
“Void is hungry today, darlings, but terribly picky,” the necromancer remarked abruptly, not breaking her stride as she lightly kicked aside her familiar’s ‘gift.’
“Do you hear that?
The birds aren’t singing.
The crickets aren’t chirping.
Everything has held its breath, as if terrified of being heard…
or eaten.”
Neira, walking right beside her, adjusted the violet braids cascading over her shoulders.
Her serpentine tail, usually concealed beneath the folds of her clerical robes, now dragged openly through the dirt, leaving a winding, restless groove in its wake.
As a priestess of the Goddess of Lust, she could read the aura of this place on a level entirely inaccessible to the others.
“It is not emptiness, Yerga,” she corrected gently, a deep unease shimmering in her pink eyes.
“It is absolute fullness.
This place is so saturated with…
desire, that it is suffocating everything else.
This isn’t the aura of death.
It is the aura of fulfillment taken one step too far.
Like a bee drowning in a sickening excess of honey.”
Taking the vanguard, Zedora let out a low, guttural growl.
The barbarian felt like a caged beast in this suffocating forest.
Her instincts, honed on the brutal southern wastes, were screaming of a threat she couldn’t quite name.
She tightened her grip on the hafts of her axes, and the tribal tattoos inking her skin seemed to darken as her muscles coiled with tension.
“I don’t give a damn if it’s honey or poison,” she threw over her shoulder.
“If something steps in our way, I’ll cleave it in two.
Memrot’s thousand crowns don’t cover philosophizing over bushes.”
Suddenly, Duria came to a dead halt, raising a hand in a sharp demand for silence.
The abrupt motion made the purple silk sashes of her lamellar armor flutter, and hundreds of tiny, red-lacquered plates clattered together with a soft, rattling sound like rain on a tin roof.
She stood perfectly still, her buzzed white hair catching the sickly light.
Her hand dropped instinctively to the black silk-wrapped hilt of her katana.
“Chotto matte (Wait a moment)…” she said, her voice entirely stripped of its usual mocking levity.
Her nostrils flared, catching a scent entirely imperceptible to humans.
“The smell.
It’s far too…
intense.”
Lengos approached her, instinctively raising his battered shield.
“What do you smell?
Bandits?
An ambush?”
“No,” she murmured, narrowing her crimson eyes and sniffing the air like a predator.
“Roses.
Thousands of roses.
A scent so sweet it scrapes the back of the throat.
And beneath it all…
something I know intimately.
Copper.
Salt.
Heat.
Blood.
A vast amount of fresh blood.
But there is no stench of decay.
It smells like…
a slaughterhouse drenched in perfume.
Kimochi warui (Disgusting).”
Cautiously, maintaining a tight combat formation, they rounded a sharp bend in the road.
The sight that greeted them was so surreal that for a long moment, no one spoke a word.
Dead in the center of the trail stood a guard wagon.
It wasn’t overturned, it wasn’t scorched, and it bore no marks from axe blows or arrows.
It looked as though it had been placed there as a deliberate monument.
The draft horses were gone, but their harnesses lay on the dirt, arranged in perfect, almost geometric patterns, with no signs of being cut or torn in a struggle.
The entire bed of the wagon, along with the driver’s bench and the wooden wheels, were entirely overgrown with a thicket of crimson roses.
The flowers weren’t wilted in the slightest; they were in full, vibrant bloom, boasting petals so fleshy and glistening they looked as if they had been meticulously carved from raw meat.
They spilled from the wagon like a river of blood, carpeting the packed dirt road in a tapestry of velvet and thorns.
“What sort of sorcery is this?” Figi whispered, lowering his tankard and adjusting his brass ear trumpet, as if trying to ‘hear’ the bizarre spectacle.
“Looks like someone puked up a garden.”
Even the dwarf realized this was no ordinary bandit handiwork.
Lengos stepped forward, his boots crunching on the gravel.
He was the only one who dared approach the wagon.
Atop the floral barrow, dead center in the madness, lay a gleaming steel guardsman’s helmet.
It looked pristine, polished to a mirror shine.
The paladin drew his bastard sword and carefully, using the very tip of the blade, pried the edge of the helmet to flip it over.
He fully expected to find a severed head underneath, a skull, or perhaps just empty space.
What he saw made him recoil a step, his usually stone-cold face twisting into a grimace of pure revulsion.
No head tumbled from the steel casing.
The interior of the helm was packed tight with a dense, pulsating mass of roots and vines that burrowed into the metal as if seeking nourishment.
But these weren’t ordinary plant roots; they bore the sickly, bruised hue of human veins and throbbed to the rhythm of a phantom heartbeat.
Tangled within this botanical tissue were fleshy remnants of a human face: a scrap of a cheek, a single, wide-open, still-moist eye that stared up at Lengos in mute, frozen terror, and a mouth from which a stunning, golden rose bloomed.
“Gods…” he whispered, lowering the sword but pointedly not sheathing it.
“They weren’t killed.
They were…
planted.”
“Nobody touch a damn thing,” Zedora ordered, spitting on the ground in utter disgust.
She scanned their surroundings, looking as if she expected the very trees to launch an assault.
“This whole place is one giant trap for fools.
Memrot said they disappeared.
He conveniently forgot to mention they became fertilizer for some cursed gardener.”
Neira stepped closer, though she carefully refrained from touching the wagon.
Her serpentine tail lashed restlessly against her calves.
“This is no ordinary druidic magic,” she assessed, a slight tremble in her soothing voice.
“Druids revere the natural cycle of life and death.
What is here…
this is a violent violation of nature.
It is forced life.
This guardsman’s body is still alive within these flowers.
I can feel his presence.
It is fragmented, twisted, but…
he is in there.”
Yerga approached the wagon with a grim fascination that would have sent shivers down anyone else’s spine.
She leaned over the roses, deeply inhaling their heavy scent.
“Life feeding upon life, completely bypassing the grace of death,” she noted casually, idly toying with her pendant.
Her skeletal cat tried to swat a bony paw at one of the twitching roses.
“Leave it, kitty, it bites.
Bregg wouldn’t like this at all.
It’s far too…
sticky.
Too permanent.
But you have to admit, darlings, the aesthetic is quite striking.”
“Striking?” Perval growled, wiping a bead of cold sweat from his brow.
“It’s abhorrent, Yerga.
These were men.”
“Were,” the necromancer echoed with a smile that entirely failed to reach her eyes.
“Now they are décor, sweetheart.
And a warning.”
Duria rested her hand lightly on the pommel of her katana, her fingernails tapping a quiet rhythm against the black lacquer.
“Kawaii…
(Cute…) in a very, very macabre sort of way,” she stated, tilting her head.
“A warning, or an invitation?” the vampire asked quietly, peering further down the trail where the violet mist had begun to thicken, cloaking the valley below from view.
“Whoever did this isn’t trying to hide from us.
They left this wagon dead center in the road just so we would find it.
They are confident.
And I quite like that.
I do love it when the prey believes itself the hunter.
Omoshiroi (Interesting).”
Lengos turned back to the group, sharply rapping his sword against his shield to call them to order.
“Enough staring at flowers.
Combat formation.
Zedora and Perval, take the vanguard.
Duria, watch our rear.
Yerga, keep that wraith of yours ready; whatever this is, mere steel might not cut it.
I don’t know what’s waiting for us in that village, but one thing is certain: Memrot didn’t send us to collect a tithe.
He sent us to war against something he couldn’t even name.”
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