Page 74 of Tales of a Monstrous Heart
‘I’d be more curious as to what a lord was doing wandering the wood to see us?’ I smiled, watching annoyance turn her eyes reptilian as they narrowed.
‘She has a point. We’re already here,’ William interrupted, clearly not sensing my impending doom.
Before Alma could turn her rage on the unsuspecting boy, the crack of a branch echoed back to us. I grabbed their arms, dragging them both down behind a thicket. William’s lantern tumbling free of his grasp and was extinguished instantly by the damp earth.
‘What is it?’ he asked, pressing himself closer to my side.
‘You really couldn’t just go to sleep?’ Alma snapped in a whisper, one side of her face covered in dark panther fur.
‘Shh,’ I breathed, turning to peek over the brambles, and saw a tall, hunched form coming up through the earth. Its snout was long like a dog’s, its limbs covered in matted, filthy fur. Its body was skeletally thin, bent over so its long-clawed arms could drag across the damp earth.
‘A skelmor,’ I whispered.
Skelmor were earth scavengers. The myths said they’d once been fey who refused to join the Old Gods, fight against the ancient Queen Kysillia as she brought chaos to the earth.
The Old Gods had cursed the creatures for their cowardice to be eternally hungry, left to feast on the pain and anguish of the dead.
‘A skelmor shouldn’t be here,’ Alma hissed back.
The creature sniffed desperately at the earth, before a sharp owl’s cry caused it to vanish into the dark trees. They were large and powerful creatures, but violence wasn’t in their nature.
Yet they also weren’t known to waste time on places they didn’t need to be. Seeing that girl’s spirit suddenly didn’t seem to be a coincidence. She’d led me here after all.
I moved out of the undergrowth, hearing Alma snap my name before she followed, William trying to keep up close behind. I crossed to where the creature had been inspecting the ground. Raking my fingers through the dry, dusty soil, feeling the odd gritty texture.
‘Something is here.’ I followed my instincts, searching through the roots and brambles on my knees until my hands brushed against something hard and cold.
My magic flared, my caution quickly forgotten as bright flames of blue and lavender illuminated the earth and a dark shiny stone that I had uncovered. The stone was carved with intricate warnings for beings like me.
‘A Verr stone.’ I felt the bitter coldness of the rock, and the sharpness of the carvings on it. A marking stone to lead beings to places of worship. An impossibility, and yet here it stood, struggling to survive amongst the thicket and not be swallowed by the earth.
Verr worship was forbidden. It had been ever since the uprising. The King had indulged and become lost in the darkness of that worship. Yet here stood a marker.
Which meant a Verr temple was close by, or at least what remained of one.
‘Verr?’ Alma frowned, and I could sense her revulsion. Having been kept in a menagerie, she was well acquainted with mortals that found reverence in the tales of the Verr.The cruelty of such men, with their duelling hatred of and sinister lust for fey.
Despite the Council’s instance of peace, I wasn’t foolish enough to believe worship of Verr could be eradicated. Greed was an impossible monster to kill, and it infected faster than any plague.
Every fibre in my being told me to stop. To forget and run. Yet, I moved further into the woods, seeing shards of the strange black, glass-like stone that led the way to a large crack in the muddy earth.
The plants that had grown either side had crumbled to nothing but ash. Strange cold air came up from its depths, an odd sweetness to it that didn’t fit in the damp wet forest.
I grabbed a rock from the mud and tossed it into the hole, waiting a moment until it struck hard ground beneath.
‘William, what can you sense?’ I asked, watching as he dropped to his knee, letting the dark strange soil rest in his palms, fingers glowing faintly green.
A shudder of revulsion rolled through him, eyes almost des-perate as they found mine again. ‘Something is very wrong, Kat.’
It was here. Whatever it was, it was here. I moved closer to that hole, grabbing the sides to try and see how deep it was.
‘Kat !’ Alma seized hold of my arm. ‘Are you really going to crawl into a hole a dark fiend just came out of?’
‘A lesser fiend,’ I corrected, ‘and I want to know what it was doing.’
‘Something it shouldn’t have been, which is exactly whatwe’redoing,’ she hissed sharply, William nodding enthusiastically in the dark behind her. ‘We should tell Emrys, he’ll know what to do.’
A relieved sigh left William’s lips as if we’d unanimously decided that was indeed the best next step.
