SYLKWVRM

A Short Story

Original Photo by Егор Камелев on Unsplash, cover made by me.

SYLKWVRM
A Short Story

by Dylan Bosworth

The sun leaked into the still lake, low, pierced and spilling over like cut yolk. It bled until it died. “There,” Royce said, finger carving through the black night.

His silhouette muted a flame burning in a black brazier, hoisted off the deck of a three-masted infection fatly impregnating the bay.

The raven at his arm was silent, but Royce watched the flames rise higher in the thing’s glass eyes and smirked. “You like that, don’t you?” he said, turning back to the bay and the docks and the black ships that seeded it like a taken field. “Hungry bird wants a worm?”

He heard the flutter, dark fletching exploding like a fell grouse, and knew the raven was gone before he turned his head. Before he could think on this, he made his eyes hard as screams bounced off the wet docks, made wetter by his friends descending from the dark.

It was time.

He slipped over the side of the dock into the cool water without a ripple.

Guided by the burning, the underside mapped the docks, obscured like through ice but clear. Bodies, falling, running—thumped off the damp wood and plumbed the depths with quiet thuds, and—

hiss

HISS
HISS
HISS

—streaks of torched arrows. They still smoldered as they sank, soaked in urine before being lit and arced at loose sails. Bubbles coiled as they twisted through the water until they stilled and turned heavy toward the dark below. Royce pulled one from where it stuck shallow in his shoulder as he climbed from the water near the merchant’s ship.

His head bowed the water, the flat fold clinging to his hair until it broke in a silent splash and his ears filled with screaming and dying.

The thick sounds of axes on breastbone, sharp drags, rakes of dinted steel over unguarded flesh peeled like wet fruit. Screams hurdled, choked, and snapped off, left gurgling into boiling quiet.

All music.

He pulled his hatchet from the loop at his belt and advanced down the darkened edge of the dock near the foreship. The silk merchant. The thief. The going-to-die.

Low in the shadows, curled like a newborn, tip-toieing along the slats—more guards rushed by near the docks on the shore. They pounded past him, and another arrow nearly slid into his flesh. He put its fire out before the light could give him away.

Something in the water pulsed, a deep thrum that rippled the stars in sequential torrents, quivering the wood planks like the earth moved. Like the glacier gasped.

The barrel was where he said. Lidded, in the shadows, low. Royce jammed his knife in the side between the slats. Not too far. Someone inside yelped and Royce smiled to himself, pulling the cork out of the side so he could peer in.

A blue eyeball met him, the whites tinged red, frantic, with long black hair obscuring it in sliced fragments. “You fucking stabbed me!”

Royce chuckled harder and tilted the barrel back, edging it closer to the water where it teetered.

“No. No!” The man in the barrel thrashed. “Please! I’ve done everything you’ve asked.

“How can I be sure?”

The man grunted and shifted around in the box, trying to slam the tilted edge back down. “Please!”

“They’re in there?” said Royce, letting the barrel finally land flat.

The little man gagged and vomited. Royce couldn’t see it, but he could smell it—empty bile with a tinge of salted fish. His fish.

“Yes.” Barrel man said. “Yes…I make no promises on their fates, however. You must understand.”

Royce’s lip twitched, and in his mind, his belt dagger went into the man’s eye through the peering hole, digging around, grinding at the socket unto the gray turned to liquid.

“I’ve given him the drink.”

That snapped Royce out of it. The little traitor—hemmed in with the conquerors, stayed behind with the silk merchant’s fleet, sucking up whatever it could still steal from the village. The land.

They came in the night, and the merchant, they say, never stops eating.

They came in the night, and they came for the children.

“He’s asleep then?” asked Royce. Normally, it would not matter, but for this foe, it did. This was the last of the men. The last attempt. The worms were dug in, cold, clawing through the world until nothing was left. Royce brought his last resort.

“Fast.”

With that, he pulled his blowing horn, and let loose a violent wail. It echoed over the fjord, rumbling something deep in Royce’s chest that cleared his head and made his blood frost. From the docks, the Bassaria ended their stabbings and beheadings and turned toward the boat, their pale white skin and hair almost glowing in the firelight.

Royce drove his axe head through the lid of the barrel, cutting off a sharp cry. He kicked it into the water and headed up the ramp to the merchant ship deck.

###

A man’s neck hole pissed hot blood in his face, and Royce had to cover his mouth with his free hand while trying to wrench his beltknife from where it gouged into bone.

The screams of the merchant’s tongueless cabal, dying as skilllessly as they fought, grated at him as he cut another one down, and another; this feeling enshrouded him in black thoughts like the fur cloak of oblivion.

Why?

It shouldn’t have been so easy. These men were barely standing, let alone fighting. That so many of his brothers had met this final wall with their lives was an affront to the very gods.

Yet the raven’s circling—

It cawed, once.

Twice.

Royce’s hatchet held a small, spindly man aloft by his breastbone. The man groaned through cracking teeth, spurting blood, but Royce listened to the skies.

Three times.

—the coast was clear. The small man with the small, weak bones dropped to the deck in a heap of silk and metal.

###

The cabin was rank with death and something sour. Bones snapped into dust under boot by boot, and the wood vibrated thinly, like rattling honey locust. The room beyond the next door stretched into eternity with a blackness unknown to any, certainly not Royce. The skin exposed behind his ears writhed like tiny bugs coiled in shivering nests.

One of the torches came forth, slowed his steps as he approached and looked at Royce, eyes wild.

He nodded to the torch, and the boy stepped forward, slowly lowering the flaming head into the darkness.

A clawing blackness sucked away as much as it could devour, but soon the light took hold. Royce’s stomach clenched behind his teeth, and the torch fainted where he stood.

Strings of flesh glanced this way and that, coiling tighter toward the center of the dimly lit door. Intestines fell over the room in ribbons where they anchored the mass of meat and gore at the middle—a dark, trembling heart of muscle, hung by ripped willow-innards and slick with tallow brine.

Tiny skulls, birdlike femurs, toes, ribs like sticks and stones made piles around the walls. Picked clean. The ground pounded around Royce, pounded to match pace with the pulse inside his skull, and when he braced himself against the door, turning not to vomit on his furs, he turned to find that he was alone.

He got to cutting, his axe double the weight now that he was alone.

The first braid of intestines, dried, probably older than some, fell away, oozing black, foul-stenched fluid over the slatted floor. The cocoon lurched.

Royce hacked at another braid, the first blow shaking the ship like it was alive, the second skimming off the hardened core, and the third, finally blowing through. Blood spewed in shooting arcs.

His nose hairs coiled in on themselves, burning on the acrid stench like watered ash mixed with piss.

He hacked again. The walls shook and the few objects resting on the corner table shattered against the floor.

The waves below the deck thrashed and crested, splashing white froth against the window. Howling wind cursed him, slamming doors, breaking glass, drowning out everything until he squeezed his head between his hands.

A deafening crack split, cutting off all sounds, and for a moment, Royce saw only white. The bones of the children clanked around the cabin room, clattering as they rolled and bounced off his boots.

It could be Ghar. Maela.

He would never know. He would never allow the merchant to try to point to which white, sucked clean, picked apart figurine had once held aright his flesh, blood, and everything else.

Only death drove the axe. Only suffering.

Another crack split and wetness spilled from Royce’s ear and the last remainder of his hearing. He looked up to open sky, rain cleaning the splattered remains of unspooled children from his eyes. The cabin roof snapped in half, and both sides of the room suddenly fell inward, crashing Royce, the ship, and everything, down into the sea.

###

The icy grip of the glacial inlet snapped his eyes open and Royce’s lungs filled with frost. He was underwater. Lightning streaked the open sky above the inlet, hammering the fjord. Through the tracers—jagged lines, files of blue and purple that cut scars into the heavens—Royce made out the debris of the ship and the bodies following him down to the seafloor.

There in the center of the wreckage, a cocoon of butchered meat.

Crates of silk tumbled over end, one of them knocking off the crusted organs of the dead cocoon, glancing off and changing course. Then another, THOOM—Royce felt the reverberation in his chest.

He swam as the cracks appeared.

Hot fire like burnt blades seemed to strip the muscles from his legs. Fighting the cramps, pulling, pulling, and finally sucking water, Royce looked down at a sudden rush of bubbles and knew he never stood a chance.

The great thing broke from its cocoon, half-formed, half-transmutated—once this glutton of children and sin, now this coiled snake unspooling in the dark, lightning-wick depths. It untwisted and surged toward the surface, sending Royce spinning high out of the water, smashing him into the shore.

###

It crested from the water, a curved scythe, nipping its jagged mouth down to pluck men from the shore. Royce watched from the isle heights, sitting at the edge of the clifface a safe distance from shore as the sun broke the horizon.

The raven clucked to itself as it strut along his leg, staring out at the giant worm.

Royce watched his pet, watched those flames that still licked wetly at the blackness of her eyes, and he scratched her beak.

“Me, too,” he said, and cut the stitching for his wounds.