The Bookwyrm

The empty silence of death intruded on Nashira’s mind.

It was subtle. She wasn’t sure if anyone other than a Speaker would have noticed it. To the common observer, the forest around her would have probably felt the same. The narrow dirt road winding between the trunks of towering, moss covered trees that shaded the area with a sprawling canopy that was filled to the brim with the calls of birds and insects. Critters darted between what sparse underbrush there was, or leapt from branch to branch high above. Glowing spirits of the forests wove lazily between the thick towers of wood, looking like disembodied wings or clouds of motes or anything in between. A figure that looked like a small, pale child dressed in a tunic of pine needles and with a pinecone for a head peeked out at her from behind a tree, before promptly vanishing as soon as it noticed her watching.

On the surface, all was right. But Nashira could sense a feeling of…wrongness, emanating from the direction she was traveling. Her mount, Tanti, could feel it too. She noticed that the silver stag seemed on edge.

“What do you think it is?” she asked him.

He huffed and shook his head back and forth, causing Nashira to lean back slightly to avoid getting smacked by his intricate antlers.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me neither.”

As they progressed along the path through the forest, the signs that something was wrong only became more obvious. Birdsong faded, becoming more distant. The squirrels and creatures of the canopy overhead all seemed to travel in the opposite direction of their solemn progression. The sunlight filtered through the green veil of the canopy overhead seemed…less vibrant somehow. And the spirits…

Nashira had always been able to sense something more about the spirits. She’d heard of monks in the Kingdoms that had to spend years learning to catch the faintest glimpse of their essence, but she’d never struggled to sense their thoughts, their beings. Even among the Tribes, she was gifted. It’s why she was a Speaker, and such a sought-after one at that.

And it was this attunement to the spirits that gave her true reason to fear as she drew closer to the source of wrongness.

She sensed spirits fleeing from the silence ahead. Smaller spirits, almost like animals in behavior, ones that were simple manifestations of concepts of life and nature. They balked against this wrongness in the forest. The older, sturdier spirits, with memories and personalities, stood their ground, but felt the same wrongness as Nashira did, and they hated it.

But when Nashira stretched her sense to the source of wrongness itself, something became horribly wrong.

There was nothing.

No sense of life, no stirring from spirits, no indication that there was anything in that place at all. A profound sense of death, but not the natural kind of death; an unholy death, one that bled out of its place like an ink stain of blankness spreading across a vibrant painting. She’d felt death before. It was peaceful, natural, part of the cycle.

This was a horror.

Nashira urged Tanti forward. He hesitated at first, but sensing her resolve, picked up speed. They traveled at this low run for several miles, and all the while, the sounds of the forest around them dwindled, growing sparser and more distant. An unearthly silence took a hold of the woods.

Eventually, Tanti slowed to a trot, then a walk, and eventually refused to go further.

“Come on,” she said. “We need to see this.” Still he refused.

Nashira’s first thought was to be annoyed. But then again, few things scared Tanti. Perhaps he had good reason to be cautious.

She swung out of the saddle and unstrapped her bow from the saddlebags. She strung it and strapped her quiver to her back, over her green Speaker’s cloak, then pulled her bow over her shoulder as well. She left her short sword tied to the saddle; she didn’t think she’d need it. Either that or it wouldn’t have done her any good anyway.

She reached instinctively for the long flute case tied to her belt. She guessed that if any weapon would truly be useful in whatever lay ahead, it would be that instrument.

“Stay here,” she told Tanti. “I’ll be back.” He bowed his regal head in acknowledgement. 

Nashira moved forwards through the silent brush. Her footsteps against the detritus on the forest floor felt unnaturally loud in the bleak silence. She could see past the last few trees a clearing, washed out in the light of the sun. Nashira made her way towards it, finally stepping out into the clearing, into the wrongness.

She found a field of the dead.

The ground was covered in ash, almost as white as snow. It rose around her feet in light puffs as she slowly walked forward, overcome by horror. Bright sunlight almost blinded her after the darkened canopy of the forest, reflecting off the ash, but the brightness did nothing to subtract from the feeling of wrongness she felt.

Scattered across the ash were the bodies of countless soldiers. Half of them wore black armor, accented in the red of the Kajuri Empire. The rest wore the silver and white of the Kingdom of Ohiro. All lay limp, silent, lifeless.

There was no smell. Despite the ash, and the sea of corpses before her, there was no scent of smoke, of blood, of rotting death. An unnatural stasis seemed to settle over the area, freezing it in time, leaving everything dead but not decaying. 

Slowly, she moved forward. The lack of sound and scent made her feel like her senses were being stolen from her. Part of her wanted to say something out loud to be sure she still could hear, but a greater part of her held too much fear to break the horrid silence. It almost felt holy, in a way. In the most perverted of ways. 

She reached the first few corpses. Soldiers from Kajuri. They had no evidence of wounds or injuries. No blood, no arrows penetrating their armor. No reason to be dead at all. They just…were. Lying limp, swords left sheathed, arrows still in quivers. The men lying face up gazed upwards with looks of utter horror, dead eyes seeing nothing. She shuddered. Senses stolen indeed…

When she eventually reached the front lines of the battle, she saw that not all these men had died of…whatever had killed the first ones. A scene of gory death met her; blood and guts spilled by swords and arrows, a deadly struggle for dominance and survival. Despite the gore, there was still no scent. Despite their wounds, these corpses were as frozen in time as the unnaturally dead ones. 

What happened here?

Nashira moved closer to the center of the battlefield, staying on the side of the Kajuri corpses, as to avoid crossing the battle lines filled with blood. Eventually, something caught her eye; among the sea of black armor there was a set of white robes, almost camouflaged against the ashes. She made her way towards it, trying to avoid stepping on the bodies around her.

She found the wearer of the white robes to be a woman of middling age. Her robes were embroidered with red silk in patterns reminiscent of a sun. Her unnaturally pale face held the same look of wide-eyed horror as the soldiers she’d dared to look at, which wasn’t many. 

Next to the woman’s limp hand was a flute.

A Speaker?

Had a Speaker been responsible for whatever had happened here?

Nashira repressed a shiver. There were spirits in the world that were not to be contacted, not to be tampered with…If this woman had reached to them, then perhaps it was no wonder this had been the consequence.

She looked around and could see the robes of at least two other Kajuri Speakers among the sea of dead. She moved to investigate them, and found another woman and a man, both with flutes, both with looks of indescribable horror on their lifeless faces.

Nashira didn’t want to know what they had seen.

She stood there over the corpse of the third Speaker for a long time, thinking. She wanted to leave. Desperately. She understood why the spirits fled this place. It was more than just the death, there was something wrong about the place. The unnatural stillness and silence went beyond just death; it was as if what made things real had died in this place too, removing it from the world in some unnatural way.

But at the same time, a thought had firmly planted itself in Nashira’s mind.

If Speakers did this…can I fix it?

Slowly, hesitantly, she reached for the case tied to her belt and undid the drawstring. She carefully pulled out her Speaker’s flute. It had been carved out of a special stalk of bamboo years ago by her mother, who’d taught her the ways of a Speaker. The sturdy wood was familiar in her hands, and was painted with intricate green patterns. There was no other flute like it, and it was a part of Nashira herself.

She closed her eyes and lifted it to her mouth.

Nashira blew, and a calm, clear note sung out across the silence. Tears of relief sprang to her closed eyes. She could hear again. Nashira held the note, letting its solemn sound carry across the frozen air.

The connection to the spirits normally forged by her music was absent; there were no spirits here. But she sensed something; whatever Speakers tapped into to communicate with the spirits using their music, she was able to reach it here. She was no longer alone.

Nashira released the note, sighing. Then she began to play.

She played a mournful melody. A song for lives once lived, now passed. Whatever tragedy had occurred on this plain of death, the souls of these men, whose time was so swiftly stolen, deserved better. No one should have to die like this.

The solemn notes echoed across the empty field of ash. Slowly, she built them up, bringing life into her music. Her melody wasn’t wailing, mournful; that wasn’t right. Death was a part of life. Instead, she celebrated the lives of those who onced lived, and expressed a solemn regret at those lives cut short. A respect, a dignity. She showed that in her music, filled with emotion; sorrow, yes, but not at the exclusion of all else. These men deserved more than that.

At the same time, she sought to purge the sense of wrongness from the area. Into her melody she brought recognition of the loss of the forest around her, sorrow at such beauty lost. But she also brought a promise of future life, of regrowth, of progression. She reached out, and invited the spirits of the forest not to forsake this desolate waste, but to nurture it, and bring it back to glory. She tied motifs of growth and life into the solemn melody, lacing the elegy for the dead with the promise of growth and life.

She ended the song with a flurry of notes moving upwards, landing finally on a high trill that invited the souls of the departed into the next journey.

Nashira lowered her flute and opened her eyes.

The first thing that struck her was the stench of death. Her eyes watered at the stink. A soft breeze blew across the waste, bringing the smell of blood and decay. It was horrible. But it was also right, for what this place was.

Then she sensed something.

The lingering awareness her performance had given her drew her attention to a stirring of life among the dead. A single soul, one she’d been unable to sense until the curse of silence had been lifted. The sense was fading, both because her awareness was not unlimited, but also because whoever she’d felt was dying.

Nashira slid her flute into its case, then scrambled across the battlefield, towards the source of life. It lay on the side of the Kajuri troops, far from the front lines. How could someone have survived…whatever had happened here? It defied reason. But she knew what she’d sensed.

She searched among the Kajuri soldiers, following the dwindling sense of life. Finally, she came upon a young man dressed in armor accented with gold and stylized in a way that marked him as someone of import. An officer of some sort? He looked awfully young. He couldn’t have been that much older than Nashira herself. His eyes were closed, but his face held that same paleness as the rest of the soldiers she’d seen. She knelt and pressed her fingers to his neck.

She felt a faint pulse.

Nashira turned and let out a shrill whistle, to call Tanti. To her relief, the silver stag eventually came into her vision, bounding across the battlefield towards her, looking concerned.

“This one’s alive,” she said, after he’d stopped and looked at the young man with a curious expression. “We’re going to see if we can help him.”

Nashira took a knife from one of the saddlebags and began to cut the straps of the young man’s armor. She hoped he’d forgive her for discarding it; it looked important. And expensive. Actually, she wasn’t sure how a Kajuri would think about being rescued by a tribal woman like her anyway. She knew very little about the Kingdoms.

Under the armor, the young man wore a red and white tunic and sturdy trousers; simply in design, but obviously expensive in material. His light brown skin was unnaturally cold. Even if he was alive, something was clearly wrong with him.

He had a sword tied to his belt. It was a beautiful weapon, with an intricate hilt in some golden metal and a sheath covered in a flame design. She tied it to the saddlebags. She assumed he’d want to keep that.

Eventually, with some difficulty, she managed to get the young man into Tanti’s saddle.

“Be careful with him,” she told the stag. Tanti huffed.

Slowly, she led Tanti across the waste towards the forest, opposite where she’d entered. As they reached the line of living trees, she noticed spirits hovering near the border. They seemed to watch her, no matter if they were simply ambiguous shapes of light, or humanoid beings with intricate bodies and outfits. Many of them were slowly making their way into the ash-covered clearing, responding to her invitation.

She led Tanti into the forest, relishing in the sense of life after the solemn parlor of death. She took a few steps into the forest, then froze.

A grandiose presence watched her.

She saw a beautiful woman, towering over her with the trees. She was clothed in intricate, detailed robes of various colors of green and brown, accented with the bright hues of flowers and fruits. Woven into the robes were scenes of life, trees and leaves and animals and spirits; the embroidered silk almost seemed to move. Her skin was a deep brown, as rich as the soil from which the towering trees around her grew. Her hair shifted between hues of brown and green, woven into intricate vines that seemed to spread and merge with the foliage. Her face looked youthful and more beautiful than any she’d ever seen before, and yet her hands were as old and wizened as the oldest crone, twisted and knotted like the roots of the oldest tree. Her eyes contained the fullness of shifting seasons, of life, death, decay, and rebirth. Animals, plants, and spirits surrounded her, a beautiful aura of life that enriched Nashira’s soul.

She stood frozen under this goddess’s gaze for what felt like an eternity, taking in her presence. Then she closed her eyes and bowed solemnly.

Thank you, a voice said in her mind, soft as the smallest breeze and as eternal as the tallest tree.

When Nashira opened her eyes, the spirit was gone.

She turned to Tanti, who had clearly seen the same thing. The silver stag stood silently, regally, as touched as she was. The young man on his back still lay unconscious.

“Come on,” she said. “Let's find a place to set up camp.”

Slowly, she led Tanti away from the field of death and into the forest.

Also, if you've been paying attention, you'll be able to name the piece of media that directly inspired this story idea! Bonus points if you do!