Hunt with your bare hands!  This is the world of grabbling, where the mightiest warriors in the land equip themselves with wildlife by ramming their arms down various throats and making them into weapons.  Delve deep underground in this low fantasy epic where the grabbler Beocroak, sole survivor of a petty bloodbath, must battle his way out of a rising ghostly city capitalizing on all that foolish subterranean death.  Should he make it out of that cavernous grave, there is still the harsh world beyond, of Goodly and ghastly gods, of giant floating eyes watching your every move, and of sinister curses illuminated by green witchfire.

Grab

by

Blaine Arcade

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 22 minutes) (time for entire novel: 10 hours, 44 minutes)

Curse

Bound in hide, scorch-writ on wood, death diverse and plenty harvested this tome from the minds and lore of men. Safe and content it sits upon the owner’s shelf, in the author’s legacy. You are a guest in its pages. Do not smudge with your fingers. Do not mar with your drool. This is a meal for the soul, so do not eat or drink near it to avoid damage.

If you are unwelcome, if your eyes be thieves of words, know that you are cursed when these contents leave the shelf, lose their blanket of dust, and are not properly and primly returned. This curse has fingers that can touch in different ways. Should you abscond with the book you will die, and you will know it before it happens. Should you steal it with a lie, and claim to be its author, or its subject, your spirit will die, and your words will seem to reach no living ear, shouted from the bottom of a sinking wet hole.

Our ire against thieves must be understood, and it will be in the detail of a curse wrought.

Purloiner of these pages, may you be skewered and fried and fed to those so desperate they do not identify their meat, and whom strip their meat of names and titles should it have them.

May you garden in shards of glass, with only lead onions to harvest, and be only rewarded with them when you can uproot with nothing but your bloody wrist nubs and set them down away from the glass.

May your sword run black with ink and turn into a brush when you most need a sword; your enemy will strike you apart while you write your pleas for mercy, each becoming a laughable relic when stained with your blood.

May your bedfellow secret serpents into your sleeping presence, free to envenom your body and dreams alike.

May you find calamity upon the road, and have all your bones and organs trampled by the horse and cattle that pass until you are of the dirt: a smear too indistinct to draw remark.

May a fissure develop in your nethers, and from it you will birth discharges of diseases you never had to catch, but are caught from you instead. May your bedfellow witness and reject you in horror. Only the diseases will call you parent, and celebrate you when they claim the title of plague.

May a smart tiger injure you and leave you in a clearing, your miserable squeals to serve as bait for better prey. Slowly you will die, and many times it will use you, keeping your wound open with a claw. You will have to eat your own kind, left from its meals, just to continue on as this wretch.

May you boil in the sun, not under it.

May two arrows, fired across the world, change direction as the compass needle does and each find one of your eyes.

May your bones be rearranged to arthritic catacombs.

May a rhinoceros find your bung fascinating. It will obsess him as the alchemist obsesses over a blotch of gold in a brick of lead.

May you become fixated upon this tale until your mind reads it when it is not there, when you have long discarded it to hide the evidence of your crimes. Its pages will stick to your back and not peel, its characters will join you when you bathe, in the forms they took after the page of death, and look into your eyes while you wash, blaming you for their fate. Its burned words will forever be in your palms, and when you flex them the page will turn and they will burn closer to the end.

This is your curse for trying to own this book with your hands, or for trying to master it with your own words. It does not belong with you, to you. Let it pass through you without greed. You can hold the hide, but nothing else. You are supposed to be empty enough to desire the contents, you fool.

And so, cursed or no, continue.

Hole

Do not die underground. That is what they say. Goodly Gods live in the sky, clear of the gnarled grabbing hands of filthy lowly man. They look down and witness death, descending to take righteous spirits to join them in endless gardens of cloud. If you die underground they do not see. If you die underground you fall into your grave. There you remain. Only those lower than the lowly will ever take note.

Four thousand people did not heed this wisdom. Two thousand of them were under the banner of Sovereign Reyvathird, and had marched into the mouth of Wormskoll Cave with no intention of dying. What they intended was the taking of the cave itself, and of the frosty iron gates deep within. Through those bars man and demon and Subtlerrannean god could barter and bargain. Poisons and potions could change hands, but no bodies, and no possessing spirits.

The two thousand others did not live in Wormskoll, not until they had word Reyvathird marched for it. Then they made themselves camp there, backs to the demon gates, which made for poor sleep. The most peaceful dreams, cast waxy in confidence, belonged to their leader: Matriarch Bedlamoyne.

Women are better at dealing with demonkind, they say. Some claim a closer relation, say also that a woman’s ambition is eviller and smarter than a man’s greed. True or not, Bedlamoyne knew her rival Reyvathird would be no good at this resource. The contraband of malice would escape the gates under his stewardship, and so he could not even have what he wanted: the civilization she had built around her pacts with those spawned and serving under the Subtlerrannean queen of infested skulls.

The drinker of lava. The biter of bitumen. She who bedded oldest thing on oldest rock.

Tauntalagmite

‘Do not die underground’, all four thousand should have whispered to each other, and shouted at their charging foes, instead of their base cries of glory and victory and no prisoners. Nearly a day had to be spent by Reyvathird’s force just traveling deeper and deeper under, further from the eyes of kindness, like vermin beneath the rug determined to be stepped on, their crunchy squish dismissed as a squeaky floorboard.

At the gates, and a good deal back on the trail given the numbers present, battle began with no attempt at negotiation or truce. Among pillars of lime rock and boulders glittering with a frost of sharp crystal Reyvathird’s blue cloaks clashed with Bedlamoyne’s yellow capes. Pikes with shields. Dirks with plate gauntlets. Shot of sling batted out of the air by defending mace.

Wormskoll echoed with clang and bash. Roar became scream when first head was split. Demons snickered behind rusty bars, licking the backs, goading and cheering. They did not care whose flag was planted this deep; they would deal with any. Little else there was to do away from the sun, where fires are lit only to discern the pips on the dice and the scratches on the rolling bones. If there was no one left to deal, then they would feast.

Four thousand claimed domain, and rock thick as Wormskoll cannot be easily divided. Better, in the cosmic schema, to divide the bodies of the men, end the conflict soft and soon. Better to let lives that thought so little of themselves as to willingly become arrowheads and thatched targets find and burn a fuse’s fate, attached to nothing. Throw a fire out of the window, so the cottage does not catch.

And so two thousand died and took two thousand with them. Underground. Half sunk in thickening pools of fools’ blood. Demons lost interest as broken and drained bodies lost heat, retreated from the rusty gates. The bodies could be devoured no matter how long they sat there. First they had to wait for the gray dead to colonize. Demons are not suited to exploration or building, only to suffering and ruin.

Yet, there has been a lie. A granular falsehood yes, but one upon which the two hands of this tome cling to life. Among the dead was one alive. They wore not blue or yellow; a handful like them were mixed into the force of Bedlamoyne. The matriarch had hired mercenaries to even the odds, plucked from the road near her settlement and offered magical potions as payment, often without mention of the Subtlerrannean cauldron that brewed them.

He who lived was a good find, a grabbler. Normally his tribe did not stray so far from the font of Lazuli Pawlm. Perhaps he had done something to earn banishment. If a grabbler had, performed something so violent as to be expelled from the gut-wrenchers, the rabble who grabble, then he was perfect for tearing through Reyvathird’s invaders.

If perfect was surviving then he was perfect. Reyvathird and Bedlamoyne had demonstrated they were not, both smote and wet upon the cavern floor. Neither banner was raised save for those that happened to skewer fallen bodies and still stand at a nauseating angle. With decay they would fall too. Only the grabbler would rise.

For something to stir hours after a battle, in the exact center, was an ill omen, nay, a fatal one. Enough death can spawn life, but not a good one, one that seeks only what it already knows: its cold and still welcome. The body closest to the center of the bloodshed, its belly will swell as if with gas. Then it will churn. Will Squirm. Will rip. Woman or man matters not, for it grows in the gut and not the womb. From it is born a reaperweed, which is not a plant, but something in Death’s garden with roots that are difficult to fully rip out.

A reaperweed looks like a man or a woman, but the more death you have seen the less true that is. They are vicious, cunning, and they last, as they do not seek power, knowing that is what will get them found out and burned, that being the best way to destroy them. At the sight of something stirring in the midst of those dead in Wormskoll, were anyone there to see it, they would fear it a reaperweed.

But he was a grabbler. They could be almost as bad. To his knees. To his feet. Only then did he breathe. Many a battle he had seen, but more fights, and more uneven unfair struggles beneath those; still he was staggered by the numbers of dead there. The stark truth of being the only survivor stilled and stalled him for a time, as he waited for someone else to rise, or at least spit their last blood. He might even have welcomed a reaperweed as neighbor and friend.

What you will look for first on a grabbler, and what you would have seen more than expected on this one, was scarring on the upper arms and shoulders. Uneven, asymmetrical, white scars, red scars, faded scars, old and new, deep and shallow, sealing away veins of lingering venom, flaking off caustic toxins, swelling and pitting. Grabbler calluses.

He had a beard. It dripped with another’s blood. Thick eyebrows bristled most over the nose, like two rams about to collide. Weathered eyes were betrayed by twinkling corners. A dent in his bald head suggested he had been thrown to the ground as a babe, not dropped. A mortal sorrow had sewn a chain through his dark lips, forever burdening his expression, giving him sadness he felt on his face with every step.

Only that body could bear those scars and still rise. Flesh he had as dense as the surrounding stone. Ogre’s muscle bullied and squashed other internal features, drowning his veins, suffocating his bones so that when one popped or cracked it couldn’t be heard. Big hands and big feet were so layered in their creases as to have grayed. His anklebones were like tortoiseshells. His big toe could choke a man. Had. The key was to step on the bottom of their tongue and press that back as well. His hands would do worse, and their best was to give back the life they had stolen. A grabbler would say it had been earned.

Bedlamoyne’s armorers knew not to insult him by offering weapons or mail. His tribe fought without them. The gray tunic he’d been traveling in, and the even more tattered pants, were sufficient. No sleeves of course. The high water marks of the scars were displayed as a matter of reputation.

Payment was far from his mind. In its place he overflowed with unfamiliar sympathy. These were not good folk, mostly. They fought when unnecessary, out of pride and camaraderie. To fight for another individual’s pride was to admit you had none of your own. It was why a god would talk to a ruler and not their subjects. Every battle in another’s name brought a man lower.

He had fought to see the cave, and to fill time, and to give Death a shot at having him after months too quiet and sleep too restful. The adage was known: do not die underground. He couldn’t be called foolish, for he had not. It was not the wounds he’d taken, not the close call, that made his whole chest move with his breath after he rose and surveyed the blood-watered crop. It was sorrow. Had he hoped to save them all by fighting alongside? Now that would have been foolish. Land robbers or devil dealers… what was worth saving? Life could have been his answer, but that would have been selfish, as only his life remained.

The stillness of the cave asserted upon him, forcing his numb into retreat. Pain returned. It danced across his shoulders, blood filling fang-wells. Yes, he recalled, the fang-wells. Freshest among his intentional wounds. Perhaps he owed his survival to them. As a grabbler his mind quickly tugged along that chain of thought. Gratitude to them was gratitude to his own skill, then to himself for manipulating it under a cool head, then to his tribe for instilling it, then to the land of Lazuli Pawlm for spawning it, and then on to the warrior-philosophy of grabbling that took man out from under the topsoil of subsistence farming and placed him atop the other creatures of the world.

Grabbler recalled, but not so far back as that, what had put him at the center of the battlefield. He hadn’t been on the front lines at the initial clash, preferring instead to see how Wormskoll reacted to the upset in its bowels. Which of its parasites and gut-friendlies fled at sound and rumble? Which remained, too curious for their own good, or hoping to find a piece of dismemberment and drag it away?

Other mercenaries flowed around him, experienced enough to know they shouldn’t shoot him a withering glare or knock his shoulder for the crime of standing still when they were potion-paid to fight. A grabbler would of course kill anyone for such disrespect, regardless of side or its expression in the moment.

He couldn’t be the best fighter he could be without acclimating to his new environment. His arms had been underground plenty, just not the rest of him. A volley of sling shot. Rogue pellets struck stalactites, disturbed ceiling shadows. The grabbler’s eyes narrowed to sharpen. Flutterers. Demons to the weak. Mere moths to him.

Boldly he raised his right arm and fist, set as lure. If there were no takers he might bite his knuckle, produce alluring blood. Something else scared them away however. The demon gate was still in sight behind, its captives howling and snapping. The enchantment separating each realm was too powerful, so they knew their throats were safe from his grabbling hands, and they could taunt all they wanted.

He waded forward, without dropping his fist, to escape their pin-drop eyes gleaming in the chalky dust scratched up by their bored talons. Yellow became scattered among blue. Many of Reyvathird’s men were smart enough to give him berth; the grabbler could be saved for last, fought when they outnumbered him, or not at all once he saw there was no one left to pay him. Anyone fool enough to try would suffer most; it was considered bad form, by the grabblers anyway, to attack them before they had armed themselves.

A young recruit did not know enough of the stories, charging at the man with a lowered pike, Reyvathird’s banner flapping beneath it. He assumed the raised fist was an early attempt at surrender, which he would exploit rather than honor for a slight bump in title that, in all the wide world, only Reyvathird would recognize.

With his left arm the grabbler pulverized these crumbs of ambition. It shot up with scorpion speed, crumpling the banner against the weapon, breaking the head off the wooden shaft. The boy needed that promotion to get a weapon fully metaled. Stunned, he skidded to a stop, pole slipping in his hands as it bounced off the chest of the man he had foolishly made his foe.

It would’ve been child’s play to reverse his own point and drive it in, but the grabbler didn’t want to end the boy. He would, no creature that had gone that far without learning respect was human, but his purpose was to create the best bait for his weapons. So he grabbed the lad by the shoulders, used his right to snap his collarbone like a kindling branch. As the scream bubbled up he tore on the bar of bone, ripping skin, opening a book of blood to its terrifying climax. Then the grabber turned him around, hoisted him into the air, and held him flat as a dinner table for all the ceiling-shadows to smell.

Once they had, and seen the skinned meat above most of the hazardous iron spines, and heard the victim’s mewling equally above, one descended experimentally, the others waiting to see if their kin was shrewd or dumb.

The moment its teeth were in Reyvathird’s volunteer flesh the grabbler felt it. The body dropped, startling the creature, which shrieked and spat blood as it beat its wings, hovering for only a moment to judge. More time than the grabbler needed. He knew the beast with one look, despite the flickering dim lit only by the giant braziers at the demon gates.

A faceless bat. He’d grabbled them before, in much shallower caves. Each did have a face, but they were made individual by varying trenches of flesh mostly overtaking their eyes and noses, each an experiment in how best to savor and then arrange sound as a map. Wingtip to wingtip they were large enough to steal unsheltered lambs in the night, large enough for an adult man to grabble.

Faceless, but not mawless. As it shrieked the man of Lazuli Pawlm struck through its noise, as a heron does through water, his arm passing between the top and bottom threats of its sharp teeth and sharper fangs. It choked on a muscle, the flex of which threatened to snap its jaw. His hand plowed flustered flesh aside, dove into stomach juice, and found the pucker of flesh separating sections of bowel. Then, with his skill that disregarded every slip of every internal slime, he grabbed the guts and clenched them in his fist.

This is where the faceless bat came to understand grabbling more than the four thousand in the midst of their dying. The man was not feeding the bat, as Reyvathird fed his sacrifices to Wormskoll. Felt in its core, in its bottom gut, now seeming so much more vital than the heart or the mind, the bat knew the grabbler had taken control of its body.

One twist could yank it inside out. A tighter squeeze could cause it to leak into its own cavities, a slow and miserable death where even if your limbs could carry you they would only be carrying a sloshing tub of anguish and torment until it spilled its contents. The bat’s life, fate belonged to the grabbler. Its only chance of survival was to accept his dominion, understand that this larger creature did not need to be invited in, that it could just enter as it pleased because it walked in a different, more massive, more solid world.

With its fangs now dug into his shoulder out of cooperation rather than rage or panic, the bat had become his weapon. It would try to hold the claws on its feet out, poised, to assist him with any strike. It would flap its wings to maneuver him, change his angle, all in the hope that the grabbler would release his grip when the battle was over and allow the bat to live under the illusion that it controlled itself once more.

And now that we have seen the grabbler grabble, which he has done as all of his tribe do, we can clear the haze of battle and know his name, which is his alone.

He is called Beocroak.

Beocroak of Lazuli Pawlm, of the sixth generation to drink from the cupped hands of Gaw Digi-Tally, of the few exiled and abroad on the wider continent of Hexaclete’s Land, now armed, became the single greatest threat on the battlefield.

The bat had forfeit its life by drawing too close, so Beocroak owed it no respect beyond the most cursory of effort to keep it alive. If it wanted to live it would serve him better than anything forged served Reyvathird’s throngs. If it failed there were more, cowering and clinging to the ceiling, and Beocroak could fill his quiver whenever he pleased.

He did batter his foes with its flat belly, knocking the sense and balance out of their ears, followed by claws raking down their face, latching onto armor plates and pulling them free. Much could be communicated to the animal with slight changes in gutty-grip, like when to flap and grant him a leap better than any unaided man, or when to flap with but one wing and drag him away from an incoming strike, and even when to use a single wing just to turn his trunk of a body that much faster.

Bedlamoynites surged behind him yet escaped his recognition. All present, aside from him and the others for hire, assumed their strength was in numbers, in names, in banners and causes. This was a weakness; it meant they had nothing to fight for in moments where it was unclear what they should latch to like calves famished for milk.

A flap of the bat’s wings, which was now a flap of Beocroak’s wings, changed the waving direction of one of Reyvathird’s banners, causing no fewer than ten people to surge that way in the hopes of a retreat. They were caught in the side by a charge of the matriarch, bludgeoned and downed.

In the face of the grabbler, fear took over the reins of invention, those with wild ingenuity anywhere in them trying to deploy it to save their lives. They came in from the side that bore no bat, only to have their worst fears realized, as the man’s bare hand fared no poorer in combat than the one enclosed in a flesh gauntlet; his weapon served mostly to increase reach and make the limbs slightly less vulnerable.

They had their noses crushed and twisted off their faces between just two of his fingers. Bottom teeth were shattered in his grip before he used their jaw to pull the whole soldier down. He stepped on their toes and somehow did damage, though his own feet were bare and some of theirs armored.

Nor were the Reyvathirds the only beings willing to take risks to avoid his directest ire. Another of the faceless bats was too. The others on the ceiling had been observing, the hunger quelled as long as they were aware a kindred gut was already full of tyrant grabbling arm. Most tried to flatten wing and body to avoid notice.

Always in such a group there is at leas one, that thinks forward and fearfully, and that cannot overlook the power of a grabbler. They, terrified by prospects alone, think it better to submit themselves to the man immediately, in a minion’s loyalty, in the hopes their freedom will never be taken from them down the line. What is given cannot be taken.

So down it flew, opened wide, offered its own damp cave to the bare arm of Beocroak. He accepted with all the entitlement of his tribe. With four wings at his disposal he could now leap over thirty men, glide into the patches that cringed at his shadow. If the numbers became too great he would employ the smaller claws on the bats’ wings, small enough to escape notice but not exposed neck.

Before long the original color of the bats’ coat was gone, dyed full red. Beocroak moved from one divot in the rock to another mostly to avoid being slowed by the puddles he had created. From this you would think the battle was won, that Bedlamoyne could claim victory from one prudent bargain alone, armed with nothing but a pair of bat-hide gloves.

Still, Beocroak was just one man and two animals. Four thousand had pledged their lives to Wormskoll. The field of battle was so large that no chamber contained all of it. Elsewhere, a few of the mercenaries turned traitor at better offers. Reyvathird himself plunged at a deep angle toward the gate, destroyed many of the back lines compelled by idiotic fear to look over their shoulders at demons that couldn’t possibly escape. Those who pushed with Beocroak didn’t notice as they were surrounded.

A thin skin encircled a small bubble, both forces mistakenly thinking they had the numbers advantage. Last stands gave out unexpectedly, into last leans, and final falls. Beocroak too fell, from a blow he could not reasonably anticipate given it was not intentional. One of Reyvathird’s last, who might not have tried if he’d known his sovereign had already fallen, eyes now forever open on a cave he couldn’t claim, took aim at one of Bedlamoyne’s last with his sling and launched an iron pellet.

The dazed and drained head at which he aimed fell over before the pellet could reach them; it sailed a great distance and struck Beocroak in the back of the skull, almost hard enough to give it a second dent. Temporarily his senses were knocked from him and left to flounder in the blood. The man fell unconscious for some hours, both his bats, keenly aware the grabbler had kept them alive and not so much as ripped in the wing, scrambling backward and free, regurgitating his hands and fleeing back to the ceiling.

Wisely none tried to feed on what might have been his corpse. Any such attempt would have roused him from his fitful swim back to the firelight prematurely, and the dead would become an even four thousand. And so for a time Wormskoll Cave was still, demons quietly retreating, faceless bats sneaking upside down away from what should have been the greatest banquet they’d ever known, not just to avoid the risk of Beocroak’s fury, but because they felt the chill at the root of their furs, that of another claim on this consecrating blood.

Beocroak rose. Some of this he had created, yet still the sadness came. For the time being he had to target the reason: both rulers being power mad. They didn’t know the grabbler philosophy, the way of Gaw Digi-Tally, which spoke of power and dominion as only in the flesh. It cannot be stored in resources, goods, pacts, or even sorcery, where man pretends to be a god when they think no god is watching.

Manipulate the other lives, and do it with your hands. Keep your power to yourself, share it only with those who are forced to become you. This way is not evil or unkind, so says the grabbler, because it cannot spread. They are the greatest fighters the mortal world has known, but they have raised no empire, levied no tax, and often cannot be bothered to raise all of their own children.

By not following his way these thousands had died, and done so underground. Sometimes a man has a spirit, and sometimes he does not. A man without much will has no spirit, and so dies when he dies. Others linger incorporeal, busied with affairs unfinished, cursed to hold up their end of a Ghastly God’s bargain or ushered into a Goodly God’s halls for as long as they can reign supreme.

In this field there would be ghosts. Already he had tested his luck by sleeping in the gore, where a reaperweed might have spawned and fed on him first. It occurred to him that his survival might have been what prevented such a foreboding birth. Do not linger underground, he silently tacked on to the old adage. Beocroak took his first steps toward the entrance, a journey that would take more than a day, longer if hindered.

Hindrance would come in the form of the gray dead, whose semi-existence spoiled the demons’ fun and got them to temporarily abandon the gates. The way up to the bars did not have to be cleared for them, their bodies were long gone, but the demons did so, dragging away cauldrons, spilling them, rolling them, extinguishing fires, as a show of respect for their Ghastly god Tauntalagmite, who ruled also over the gray dead in her realm that started at the gates and continued on for half the underbelly of the continent: Tauntalagmite’s Underbelly or Subtlerrannea.

She of the infested skulls, of the body that produces vermin as they sky produces stars, had roles for all her underlings, to further the illusion they still lived, or had ever started. Her rotten bastardization of life was a good one, most convincing to some, and there were those among the gray dead who knew nothing else, nothing of a life like Beocroak’s, despite having had one in their distant past.

So it was that they took to her errands and chores with the utmost commitment, fretting lifelike, rattling under the net of imaginary nerves, fearing unemployment and inactivity more than the oblivion that would be the true consequence of failing their Ghastly queen.

Those with the most work, the laborers, the to-be citizens of experimental homes in need of breaking in like stiff boots, muttered and worried their ethereal rags behind a procession of undead explorers who were ready to treat Wormskoll beyond the gates as newly discovered, despite the carpet of strewn and puddled bodies.

For to lay claim was their assignment and purpose. Tauntalagmite was banished to the darkness, to the underside of the world, where crawled and slithered the vermin and bugs from which she borrowed her favorite cloaks and armors. Never could she leave, or suffer even a single ray of sunlight without pain.

Expansion of her dank prison was rare, and often it did shrink when the world coughed and caved some of it in, any trapped demons left to madden further with naught but dirt in their mouths and guts as the most miserable pebbles there ever were. Here, with the four thousand dead, was an opportunity to extend her borders, to the very mouth of Wormskoll, where only the sun would stop and turn her back.

The Goodly magic on the gates was strong, yet not as strong as the fools’ death was wanton. Blood so absurdly spilled, so wasted, lives both volunteered and spent for greed, was the unholy salt that consecrated land as defiled. That magic was far older, its roots deeper than Subtlerrannea. When its pooling first touched the bars of the gates, the old seal would be undone, and new territory would be opened to architects who were only previously tasked with making crypt shelving more efficient and dense.

In their full regalia, hats big and hollow and bearing balding wispy feathers, ceremonial sabers nocked on their exposed pelvises, Subtlerrannean banners posted at their side with designs only complete once they bore moth holes, the gray dead stood at attention and watched with withered eye and dark socket as the spreading blood approached. Silent in their mounting nerves. It didn’t have to reach. No god pulled it. This was just nature, human nature, and they had to put their faith in its cruelty and excess.

All who do are rewarded, especially underground. Now intertwined in ways that would have better served in carnal life, bloods of Bedlamoyne and Reyvathird touched the rust of the gate, wrapped the base of one bar. Wormskoll quaked. Faceless bats fled as a single mass, to shallower roost. A grabbler whose footsteps no longer left red prints on the rock glanced over his shoulder.

As if eaten through by rust so completely that a breath could collapse them, the bars became a moat of dust, dispelled like phantoms slapped by Goodly gods. The first gray boot took the first step, not corporeal enough to make the blood ripple. It took to the new ground plenty fine though.

“Lay claim!” one of them rasped with her lipless mouth, stumbling forward as if seasick-green storm waters rolled behind her. Specters made swirls in the drifting rusty dust that had imprisoned them for ages as they came forth. The air was not fresh, but it was to them. There was only the dying light of the braziers and the blue of Ghastly necro-craft in their faded flesh, yet to them it was a bright dawn. All that was their future, all the nothing upon which they subsisted, was laid out before them: a feast of cobwebs.

Their tide washed over the darkening crimson, forming rivulets around the towering stalagmites, as for now the stone was all they could not pass through. Soon, very soon, they could begin construction. With the license of the land, enacted by the unblessing clerics who walked the front with the explorers, bureaucrats and architects behind, would come permission from their goddess to dredge up memories from the bog of time and use them as raw materials.

First would be built an encampment. On top of that a village. On top of that a city. What the gray dead mistook for hope was the idea that, so shallow and close to the light, what they built would be invigorated and become the capital of all Subtlerannea, a dishonor that currently sat far away in the sub-continent’s bowels, ruled and policed by demons instead of them.

At one section of their forefront, stepping daintily through mounds of blue uniforms, was one of the clerics, carrying the staff that marked him as such, topped with Tauntalagmite’s mark: a skull with headless centipede bridging the eye sockets. His conical hat, affixed in place by articulated bug-legs of ghostly pewter gripping a moldered scalp like an old book cover, stood as tall as any of the pikes and banners of the downed army he now picked through.

The unblessing didn’t have to happen all at once. He was free to bite at any chunk of land that looked sizable. But! his fastidious mind reminded him. Nothing was without consequence; there would always be a ghost more bored and pedantic than himself, who would be not only free, but encouraged to investigate the records, which would of course be made, to see the maps of every parcel of the city’s foundation.

They could find fault with the tiny bites he had taken, with the extra lines that had to be drawn, with the individual names that would be needed for every home, street, and alley. What was consecrated could then be settled, and built upon, using only the space his spells provided. It had to be a proper parcel of land, hence his fretting.

He had been, in his better moments, lost in a life of his worst, called Crosscup. In death he got to be called Cleric Crosscup, his first title on either side of the grave. If hard-pressed, a difficult state to enact upon a ghost, he could be forced to painfully recall that his name was an insult that had something to do with a dinner table. The man had poor timing, and was illiterate when it came to the expressions of his fellow men. When the toast was proposed he aimed his goblet wrong, either to the wrong person or at an awkward angle or a confusing height. His cup crossed where it shouldn’t, somehow turning moments of celebration into tangle and traffic and spills of their finest libations.

Already prone we are to little mistakes, Crosscup reminded himself as he searched the sullied cavern floor for the best spot to lay his first claim. Errors here would only be exaggerated with time, and time was his only fortune. Something had to be a clue for him, signify the spot so he wouldn’t have to rely on the general insufficiency of his best judgment.

What did a landmark in a lifeless battlefield look like? Should he plant his staff on the fairest of the fallen? That too was difficult to judge, for the character of a face changed in death, which was the source of the living’s discomfort when they looked upon the departed with presumed familiarity. A radiant dead could’ve been a homely scowler in life.

Besides, none of them looked very pretty to him. He liked beards, and there weren’t many about in this garden, most trimmed for the occasion. A beard hid a quivering lip, and uncertain contortions, like those that occurred when your toast at the table was received terribly.

Crosscup stuttered and stopped, almost amazed. Here was his sign, handed out much more freely than expected. There, in the midst of bodies piled atop one another like sandbags, was a bald patch, covered in nothing but blood. Everywhere else in the vicinity had fresh dead, so what could have happened, or not happened, on that spot hardly larger than a man?

Or not any bigger than a large hardy man, he pondered. It was easy to forget how full and tall the living were, despite the fat gargoyles of gravity perched on their shoulders all the livelong day. The gray dead rose into near-being at some point after their death, only immediately following it if they were the most determined of spirits, or caught most off guard by their attacking condition.

The cleric only rose from his body after he got too bored to cower inside it, and so his countenance reflected its state at that point: face mostly rotted away, loose threads of throat hanging below it, and putrid flesh merely wrapping the bones. Most looked better than he did, but few looked much better. So yes, his mind came around, that empty spot could’ve held a big man.

If there had been one there he’d gotten up and left. Crosscup’s jaw slowly went lax as he realized parts of what that meant. A survivor. Was one a threat to their colonization of this new cave? Not unless he was the mightiest sorcerer, and had the specific motive of stopping them from claiming land that was utterly worthless to surface dwellers. Crops could not be grown there, save for mushrooms, and the regular rainfall of bat droppings meant no worker with dignity would brave these depths just to pick dung-drenched fungus.

Assuming the man was only as big as the hole he’d left, he could do nothing to stop them. They were the threat to him, of that Crosscup quickly became sure. The sweep of ghosts across their first new sights in ages would be faster than a limping drained fighter. Progress would not make way for him, and if he were to interfere in the dredging of memory he would be interfering in the construction, which the city planners would not be tolerating, seeing as the center of their souls was nothing but every minute detail of the city they never got to build on the surface.

Regardless of his fate, he’d done Cleric Crosscup the favor of giving him a sign that was nigh impossible to misinterpret. Here was where life lingered underground, here was where death was refused, here was where the gray dead could claim they were closest to living again, and all because he had consecrated it with his perceptive unblessing.

He raised his staff, for driving it declaratively was the first step of the ritual. A clunking note of his wisdom was about to ring throughout Wormskoll, but it was beaten to the beat, undercut by a mere unpleasant scratch, as the staff of another cleric slid in. The unman gawped down, saw a kneeling competitor already ritualistically waving his flask of ichor. The twisted prayers were already half out his mouth.

“Find your own claim!” Crosscup barked at him, slapping the tip of his conical hat, which turned his whole head on his neck, failing to stop him from completing a prayer that was twisted beyond recognition by mortal ear.

“I did,” the other cleric said once he’d finished that first incantation, mentally readied the following convocation. “Your timing remains abysmal Crosscup. This is the first claim you know; that means I get to name the whole settlement!”

“No it isn’t, there hasn’t been a-” Necrotic white light, the aetheric pus of a cosmic scrape, lent to them most remotely, same as the ichor, by Tauntalagmite herself, generated at the base of the competitor’s staff, then traveled out in waves fast as wind, crawling over all the bodies, like the progress of mold given the speed of hounds. It was done now, the first claim. Crosscup had missed the toast, and now had nothing to say, what could have been the very name of what they drank to.

“Hear me, hear me,” the victor boomed, rising to his feet, bravado practically pushing Crosscup to the side, out of the empty spot entirely. The convocation begun, all the heads of the gray dead turned toward them and listened. They wanted the name. Despite time bound only by their goddess’s lifespan, language didn’t flourish in Subtlerrannea. It laid dead as everything else, a black vine, as if the very concept of the tongue was cut from their mouths and there was no bleed to staunch. Echoes of the living, every statement of the gray dead. A new word was rare, a name for an infant city a coronating jewel even among those, and it came out of the victor’s mouth while Crosscup watched, flabbergasted and crestfallen.

“Toeteld!” The name rang like a bell, mighty as the necrotic light. Together they claimed the first chunk of land of this new dark peninsula in a stagnant ocean. “Toeteld!” repeated the gray dead, their utmost enthusiasm still but a shade of the cry of charge that came from both armies just hours prior.

Many came to shake the naming cleric’s bony hand, for that was now the highest honor they could hope for, at least until the first builder erected the first hut. Pathetic Crosscup couldn’t bear to watch their concupiscence for his stolen honor, so he turned and scrabbled far, far ahead of the rest of the clerics, whose eyes and sockets more carefully swept the ground in front of them for good places to add neighborhoods to the city now called Toeteld.

He had to find something, and it still had to be good. Having nothing but a dead end to his name could leave him worse off than before. What could be better than the survivor’s patch? Nothing. Fine then. What was second best? I’ll know it when I see it, he resolved, stomping on and up, already feeling the slight incline as the cave broadly turned toward its opening.

Alone, and somewhere behind the body of the soldier with the sling, who had incidentally downed Beocroak, Crosscup’s staff did his work for him, sounding a different sort of clank when it struck a breastplate of a finer grade than all the rest. Its seams had a minor glow, something that wouldn’t be spotted outside Subtlerrannean shadow. It was blessed, by something Goodly rather than Ghastly.

That didn’t mean the man wearing it was good, merely that he possessed it. It was a primary quality of the mortal realm that things good and virtuous could be misplaced and misused there; that was how it had fallen, under the weight of poorly handled treasures. Crosscup knew only of the man that he was the richest among those that wore blue, which made him Sovereign Reyvathird.

His face was mostly cheek, nose bottom-heavy and red. No crown was on his head, nor had one rolled away as he fell, in a futile attempt to disguise himself in the chaos of the battle. Any discerning eye could see his full thick armor made him a leader. Crosscup saw it too.

“You’ll do,” he said, practically salivating. Hefting his staff once more, the cleric was able to drive it this time, yet was denied again, by a pair of gray hands emerging from that fancy breastplate and grabbing the end of it. A gray face rose out of its more solid shell and snarled.

“No one will have me, you bastard!” the ghost of Reyvathird shouted. “Not until I have this cave!”

“We already have it you blithering boil!” the cleric shouted right back. “Welcome to the city of Toeteld! Let me show you our hospitality!” He wrenched his staff free and repeatedly tried to jab the sovereign in the shocked mouth, finally succeeding in consecrating something, only incidentally as Reyvathird rolled out of the way, leaving his body behind. A weak spurt of the white light reminded Crosscup to not half-commit. Out from his robe came his bottle of ichor, which he waved about in a much more coordinated fashion. His tongue began to twist as he prayed to her disgrace, to the overflowing infestation of her magnificent soul.

“What- what have you done to me you ghoul?” Reyvathird demanded after standing and taking stock of his transparent gray form, and also of the wound in his side that had undone him and spilled him from his body.

“I haven’t gotten to do anything yet,” Crosscup griped once his tongue twisted back to the words of an ordinary drudge, “except declare this nook of the city… and that’s more your doing.”

“What do you mean?” the fresh specter asked, his plan of throwing a punch cast aside to examine his hands, as well as the ground, browning blood, and stacked corpses he could see through them.

“You came to lay claim, but all you did was lay yourself down, your life and your liquids. If you want to have liquids again you’ll need one of these.” He shook his ichor bottle in Reyvathird’s face. It glowed green and shook itself some more, almost escaping the cleric’s grasp. “You and your friend have salted the land, seasoned it just right for us.”

Crosscup waited to make sure the rock did not reject his claim, then he pulled his staff from the sovereign’s body and continued on in search of another good spot. There could still be so much more to Toeteld. By the time the cleric returned to his first claim it would already be slums, noisy with conversation, busied with the trading of paled air, which some considered the ghostly flesh of livestock, which others considered the pus of the underworld, and which most considered money that could be swallowed and kept safe stuck to any remaining ribs.

The man he had planted a flag in followed, pestered him with barked questions and orders. Acceptance of his fate was somewhere in Wormskoll, but not there, and Crosscup was not leading him any closer.

“How could I have lost?” Reyvathird babbled, stumbling over his own, only a few of whom then rose, yawning, from themselves. “I had numbers like you’ve never seen! We attacked from a perpetual high ground and backed Bedlamoyne up against the very gates of the demon hole! We even… yes, we turned her own sellswords against her. An infiltration bought and paid for, hand delivered to her warm lap, heated by the asses of perverse creatures that sat only upon her indignity and hot coals.

I remember now, paid many of them in bags of silver dust myself. Look, it still glitters under my nails!” He held up his hand for Crosscup to ignore, prudent given that the dust was not there, and did not sparkle. It was in the blood pools, forgetting how to shine as it was buried in scab and muck. “Six out of Dreary Fields there were. A greedy lot. You starve a man for two years, two winters more like, and then he can always be bought and his children can always be sold and his wife can always hide in his shadow because there’s nothing left of her.

Aye they took it, they took the dust. And they would betray her too, even without me seeing it, because they knew there was more where that cam from, for I am the sovereign! My giving hand was- is- is more reliable than the harvest that had already failed them.

So it was the dreary six, but there were more, I had more bags than that, a mountain of bags, enough to fill this hole in. I paid a woman with her braids tied around her spear, smart girl, that way no one could take it from her. She tied one around her bag too, kept it safe. I saw in her eyes that the silver made her honest, a better money it has always been than magic waters drooled by demons. Only a firmer hand could squeeze this sponge of its profit most effectively. Why then!?”

“Do shut up you dung turkey!”

“Why then, you gray bastard!? Why did my plan fail? Is it because I could not tempt that grabbler? Was it he alone that turned it? If only I’d gotten close enough to make the offer myself. I still had the biggest bag; none of those idiots had the brains to hold out for more, too scared to haggle in the middle of battle. How do you think I got to be sovereign? Talked a man down from a hundred head of aurockin to thirty-five while our blades clashed at the-“

“Wait!” Crosscup blurted, spinning on his heels, slowing his backward walk but not stopping. His skeletal hands choked up on his staff in the scheming fashion that transformed walking sticks into scepters. “A grabbler? Of Lazuli Pawlm? Does that place still exist as it did when I walked warmly?”

“Of course the water still falls from cupped Pawlm,” Reyvathird barked, swatting away the notion that it could have stopped like a rabid faceless bat. “That hand is Goodly; her sister lights the skies. And I’m sure visits the grave often.”

“Where did this man fall?” the cleric probed. “Where is his grave in this mess?” His skull swung around, found mounds of the fallen, and in their cascading faces none of the fearlessness that would be carved onto a grabbler’s. If Crosscup could lay claim in that rib cage he wouldn’t be able to raise Toeteld, claimed and named as it already was, but he could raise the mightiest burrow of it. The topmost pleasure palace of the city’s highest spire could be his, and gray women could dance out the lost possibilities of carnal indulgence before him.

Sovereign Reyvathird didn’t know, said as much, as he had fallen before Beocroak, but Crosscup was already figuring it out, the withered rats in the tunnels of his officious and squeaky mind now racing. Toeteld itself was already founded on the grabbler, the one blessed by the petrified fingertip of Gaw Digi-tally, a magic twine that would not break no matter how far he roamed from Pawlm, as long as he stayed out of the seas that surrounded Hexaclete’s Land. The empty bloody pool. That was where the grabbler had sampled death, found it foul-tasting, and sent it back to the cook. He still walked Wormskoll, a survivor. A complication for Crosscup, but not insurmountable, he reasoned to a large nodding audience of himself.

Such a living man would seek the light of the surface, leaving but one direction to search. The cavern was deep, and his progress would be slowed by the toll the battle had taken. A mount might have allowed him escape, but he was a grabbler, and they did not ride. To allow a horse to determine your path was subservience those people could not abide. They could not brush a mane in affectionate maintenance, only brush the guts of their current weapon with their knuckles.

On but two feet he would not be faster than the rising tide of Toeteld. Once overtaken by civilization he would disorient, as the living could not navigate the realms of the dead. Then he was Crosscup’s, and Crosscup’s future, but only if the two were together when the grabbler fell to despair or a gray warrior. For that the cleric would have to have perfect timing, something he’d never known in life or death, not even once.

“It was no doubt because you could not turn him,” Crosscup goaded, unaware of what fresh tirade of Reyvathird’s he was interrupting. It silenced him far more than the corpses of his army, a jungle still thickening around them. Just to their left a stream of blood over and through a stacked edifice of partly armored flesh finally ceased its flow and became a snot rope of jellying darkening crimson.

“There was no opportunity,” the sovereign said gravely, the accusation that he had not spotted an opportunity being the worst such a man could conceive of facing.

“Not until you perished my friend. Your chance is nigh. The city of Toeteld will need rulers just as the potion floodgates did. Your victory can still be had, with you stood past the mortal line in the sand. All you have to do is help raise the spires, help me plant this scepter in the most fertile ground.”

“Where is this ground?”

“Between the heartbeats of the grabbler.”

Those heartbeats were but an hour away by tireless spectral foot. Beocroak had recovered his composure, banished the sadness now that the fallen were thin on the ground. He could smell fresher air ahead, sense the less oppressive shadow of the clouds. They could be thick when he emerged, he reasoned, which might mean rain or might mean the Goodly Hexaclete was above, drawn by the pain of the bloodshed, distraught and unable to help her people as they dwelt out of sight and out of reach, which could, again, mean rainfall: her tears.

First he had to reach the mouth, which he could not do along his current path, only made true and apparent when the staffs of gray clerics started to hammer and further defile the blood and water-weathered stone. Unblessings rippled and echoed through every material of Subtlerrannea, excited raucous demons to horseplay, including those fat enough to rival the rocks themselves.

Spirit-like things older and ever-dreaming, embedded in the molten mud plates of the world, were also aware, aware as they could ever be, of the colonization of the new city. Together their celebratory rumblings shook Wormskoll with tremors, none of which could unsteady Beocroak’s bare feet, callused as gray as the dead, but which could dislodge the less solid boulders in the cavern roof.

A rain the grabbler did not expect came down, in a stroke of luck, as a veil of rock and dust before him, rather than overhead. Only a few stray rollers threatened him, and he was easily able to evade those that needed to be evaded and stop those weaker than himself with the wall of his palms.

Before the first rock had struck the floor he had filled his barrel chest with air and held it. A grabbler knew their body, and the flaws they did their best to lock away inside, so he was no stranger to the consequences of breathing the sharp dust often found in caves rife with dull crystal and fibrous peeling walls: a shortened life and broken lungs.

His heart slowed under his order. This breath would last. Some aquatic animals, foolishly slumbering in their submerged dens with no fear of the hand-fishing of Lazuli Pawlm, would eventually be drawn out by the grip on their guts and learn that a grabbler, in order to conquer them alone, could hold their breath for minutes at a time, and could withstand the pressure of a loving squeeze from Gaw Digi-Tally.

Beocroak placed his hand upon the fresh wall now blocking his escape, ran it along as he walked to find his way, as he could not see through the dust cloud. Minuscule daggers glittered in the air, what wanted to bury themselves in the labored pillow of his inner lung, and could already be felt in the exposed corners of his eyes. He closed them as often as he could. Another weapon of his people was deployed, patience. They had it in spirit and body, so much so that a grabbler’s limbs never fell asleep, no matter how contorted or slept upon by the greater body.

The walk continued, no breath, eyes closed, naked feet and sliding palm silent, so that he barely existed, and what presence he had was elsewhere. Memory. Mercenary jobs forged weak memories, especially so for a man grown in the grip of a god, calcified as the little sister of Hexaclete was. Lost to him were the number of the years he’d done such work, and most of the rewards too, for he insisted on being paid in items his body could spend like food, drink, balm, and if he felt like hoarding a most obscene treasure, fresh skins and rags to clothe himself with. As he walked the memories that came were from his youth, from the time until he abandoned his home to spread his grip and master creatures that knew not kindness such as his, forceful and ultimately merciful.

Stone on his palm, stone of Wormskoll, soon of Subtlerrannea, transitioned into the stone of Lazuli Pawlm itself, that partly buried statue from whence his home had drawn its name. A giant hand, weathered smooth rather than pitted, rose out of the tickling emerald grasses and held its fingers open, its palm flat.

Below and behind, the crown of Gaw Digi-Tally’s head, once flesh, rose to only a fraction of that height, enough for the eyes to be half-submerged in soil. Her perpetual stare was not to be ignored, but it was nothing to the activity that remained in her grip, which was the founding font of the grabbler way.

Always did fresh water flow from the crease of her flat palm. No pores. No passages. No slow collection from the air. These life-giving waters simply manifested, so copiously that there was a waterfall between each of her stormy gray-blue fingers. Their streams reunited in the pool Tallybirth, which was not to be disturbed. Taking of water, ritual bath, these things were done a short ways downriver, and all the way until the blessed waters joined the murky river Plur, making them just potable enough to support many settlements on its further banks, none of which dared encroach on grabbler territory.

Gaw Digi-Tally’s hand was a navigation landmark. Its gesture split the unworkable river Plur into greater tributaries. Its presence on a map came with an expanded shadow, the five fingers of which marked the edges of Lazuli Pawlm, where only grabblers were permitted. They took no visits, suffered no tax, and could not be married into. Those in the tally who wed outside their home had to leave, settle beyond the divine shadow.

More restrictive yet was Tallybirth. Eyes were scared off, so that Gaw might work her lingering power undisturbed. Gods both Goodly and Ghastly did their mightiest behind veils and under cloak, the very reason the more benevolent ones hid themselves above carpeting clouds and the vile ones used ceilings of soil and stone.

Legend had it, in both wider peoples and the grabblers themselves, that when no one watched Gaw could produce more than water from her palm. She could birth between the lines of fate that had cut canyons in her stone skin. A man or woman could be produced, groping blindly until they tumbled between the fingers that were the sides of their birth canal, plunging into Tallybirth, breaching for their first breath.

Never had this been witnessed, or if it had never verified, and the age of such a creature at the time of its birth was but a guess. They would have no mortal parents, no one to rely on, so they must have formed as at least an adolescent. If so they could live the grabbler way without knowing that was what they were doing, absorbing it as they went, for these were people of few words and fewer rules outside the etiquette forbidding various liberties with the petrified yet upright remains of Goodly Gaw.

Among the grabbling folk the children belonged to the place, and not to any one union. Many forgot who they had emerged from, as no body made a greater impression on them than Gaw’s, and nothing looked like the wellspring of life but her hoisted palm and its four falls. People changed their own names when they started to feel like someone else, and there was never any objection.

If the palm could birth and if its children could walk, listen, quickly pick up a chore, then it was conceivable that some portion of the grabblers had come from there. There always seemed to be fresh faces more than there were pregnant swells. Rare it was to hear a babe cry, as those cradled could always look up and see the underside of the palm, and know peace.

Lazuli Pawlm’s font watered the crops, and no grabbler needed to do a farmer’s work outside the harvesting and the eating. Such an immense blessing could so easily go to waste, spoil in mounds in the field and spoil the people themselves, gild them in fat and blooming sloth. The philosophy prevented this, brought them into an elevated balance that some said, though these were the bellicose, lifted grabblers close to demigods.

Thus it was made that grabblers would take these saved energies, these shoulders not drained by the plow, these fingers not stiffened by the spade, to fully master animals, their goddess having handed all the vegetation. A normal level of skill with the animals produced livestock, provided meat, trained the dog to herd goats and the parrot to repeat messages.

The ultimate level of skill was to grabble, to seize an animal by the guts, speak to its lowest stomach and spine with a vice of domination, and become a god they could understand. Grabbling kept its people from needing any of the industries of the outer lands, which could only build their engineery workshops and run them when Hexaclete was away, as the sight of their output disturbed her. Grabblers did not need to forge armor, for a living sleeve of arboreal dillo was armor. Nor did they need swords, as the stiff barbed tail of a hilt ray more than rivaled most blades. No need to brew poison when toads, snakes, and spidercats could fill a tavern with barrels of better bitter medicine.

Generations ago, when the shadow of Lazuli Pawlm was not on the maps, when the victims of grabbling had not felt the fear or the fingers in their gullets and guts, some had attempted invasion. The art had repelled them with ease, as the very sight of it filled most typical soldiers with nausea and terror. How? How could a man make a glove of a fox without killing and skinning it first?

And as quickly as word spread through man, to every harbor of Hexaclete’s Land, it moved faster through the animals themselves. Birds carried it on the wing, silkbugs on the strand, and it was taught to pups and calves by their parents until that was unnecessary, as the knowledge had become ingrained instinct. No matter what you had domesticated, it did not belong to you if a grabbler appeared, but to their higher authority. Your loyal hounds, raised from whimpering nursers, sleeping in your bed every night, might obey the commands of grabblers they had never so much as sniffed.

Their legacy was firm on the continent by the time the name Beocroak was known among the grabblers. He had no claimed mother or father, and called all grabblers his siblings. Gaw was their government, prayer their appeals, with no offices for leaders to hold. If a leader at the time of Beocroak’s departure from his home had to be named,

he was named Dignidog.

Notions were more than names to their people, and epithets more to the ordinary folk along the brightened river Plur. Dignidog was known as a houndmaster, who could grabble but one member of a wolf pack and recruit them all. His deeds were carried on the howl, and when he learned to howl himself he learned to summon wolves from the dark wood. On a full moon he could move through the lowlands with what appeared to be a flock of sheep, but which traveled too swiftly, and also too swiftly for his prey, revealing itself to be an army of wolves, the scraggly garbage-eating dog that rarely got a name, and ferals of hunting and warring breeds.

His arms were blotched with the scars of dog teeth all the way down and up, and he wore red at the shoulders, since that was where many bulging tongues settled anyway. Bug-eyed, gray and peppery in the close beard, and with ears that stuck out like moth wings, Dignidog cut an imposing figure among men but one that vanished into a crowd of grabblers.

Similarly, he could not consider himself inadequate in the frame of mankind, but he could in the squaring hands of Gaw Digi-Tally, whose judgment may have passed into her living sister Hexaclete, lordess of the entire continent. It was ultimately this that led to Beocroak’s separation from his people, his self-imposed exile that eventually found him taking jobs he should’ve been too wise to take, like jobs underground.

Dignidog’s insecurity, existing within a grabbler, sought to reforge itself as a virtue, in his case ambition. In the shade of dream falling away and becoming stark dawn he had visions of the shadow of the hand of Gaw, of it expanding to encompass more of the map until a five-fingered canyon of inscrutable darkness made many roads impassable without leaving flowers at the fallen sister’s grave: a paid tribute to the grabblers that tended it.

Not so greedy as to think this could be achieved by military might alone, Dignidog sought signs of Gaw’s remaining power, in order to reposition them as symbols, weapons, and strategies. Tallyweeds rose most prominently into mind, the name they had for those supposedly born straight from the waters of the palm, their clay molded by the gentle imperceptible rub of two of Gaw’s destiny lines coming together.

These, if they existed, were the grabblers who would know what their mother wanted, who could bless such campaigns of expansion, who could truly rally the grabblers to a single cause separate from a quiet and secured existence. And Dignidog suspected no one more than Beocroak.

Without formal schooling it could not be said that the pair grew up together, but that they crossed paths frequently, Dignidog estimating he was only older by a handful of years. They took up similar chores, met eyes as they carried baskets and tools to opposite ends of the village. United by place, united by art of grabbling, friendships were informal and fluid. Friends were those who bathed in the same pool, who ate the same meal, who played the same game, even on opposite sides. Good friends were those who entwined their flesh, together made a beast that couldn’t be grabbled. With slowing breath and clarity those bonds were undone.

Confrontation was for the wrestling ring, a dirt arena that could be erased with the swipe of a foot, but Dignidog had to break with tradition at some point if he was ever to break the invisible fences and grow his people into an empire. He didn’t dare test these waters in Tallybirth, instead behind Gaw’s mountainous stone head, out of her line of sight.

Both were still considered young men; they had only grabbled animals that already knew to respect Gaw. Their scars were training scars. Their jaws were not yet so practiced in clenching to broaden the muscles, which was as signature to grabblers seen abroad as their thick wrists and ankles.

It was an opportunity that an ambitious man could never pass up, the ultimate weakness of such a man, but he was too young to know and Beocroak too young to take advantage. The latter had assigned himself the chore of moving a stubborn snake that had burrowed into the field fed by the root-like tendrils of Gaw’s lithified hair sinking into the ground.

Vegetables were plucked there, often by children who were not ready to grabble such creatures as that snake, which could swallow one of them whole. It was a banded flesh-head: a small-eyed small-fanged cranky thing of soft orange and brown that relied on its crushing girth to capture its prey.

Beocroak’s technique was good, plunging his arm into the darkness of its burrow with no fear. In its surprise its lips parted, and in another lightning strike of oiled muscle the young man’s arm was inside, but the serpent was much longer than expected. He could not reach to the first crucial bend in its gut where a grip could be found about the single enlarged lung that did most of the snake’s breathing.

Without its breath restricted, and without a solid grip, Beocroak had to rely on his legs to contest for position. He would have to pull the flesh-head out inch by inch until enough of its body was exposed to stomp and knot, the forced bends providing new grabbing points internally. To make these mistakes, to take so long to grabble when the technique was meant to function in a single strike, as it was nothing more than the unsheathing of a sword, was not shameful for the young. The only shame was fear coupled with bad technique, which resulted in the loss of limb or life, a permanent mark of defeat, and the knowledge that the animal had mastered them and carried trophy bones within its own, perhaps for the rest of its life.

All the same, Beocroak would have rather had none witness his flailing practice as he slowly won the tug of war with the flesh-head. The snake would have acquiesced if he was older, larger, so he resolved to become both older and larger during the contest, driven on by the knowledge that doing so would impress upon his weapon that grabblers could do that, have a growth spurt of soul and body in the middle of battle, and if the snake eventually sired eggs the hatchlings would know it too.

At that time it was the only sort of legacy Beocroak wanted, the same legacy as the rest of his people. He had not one individualized dream. He, like them, was the property of Gaw Digi-Tally, was wielded by her in death, hence the stoicism he’d grown up with, as reliable and dignified as rows of statesman statues, more so, as they didn’t need the tools or robes of their trade immortalized with them to stand tall, weathered only by weather, as the most magnificent of things are.

He missed his first stomp. There was enough slack in the snake now, but it coiled out of the way, granted the tiniest reprieve by a distraction flitting in young Beocroak’s peripheral vision. One could say it was a snake, but not the same one, and not in the same skin. Young Dignidog had appeared. The youthful were expected to keep busy, to stay in sight, to ingrain themselves in the community since their creators would not do it for them. Such a meeting was rare, and rarer still when there was no entwining.

“Having trouble?” Dignidog had asked, drifting in front of him, behind the snake, his plotting face seen through a rising loop of the wyrmling beast as if wreathed in dusty rolling flame.

“What I have will be the snake’s,” Beocroak growled through gritted teeth, “and nothing else.” He didn’t know why his peer was there, but expected him not to interfere. Grabbling was a one on one contest. Aid was dishonor. Continued conversation could be called aiding the enemy.

“I know you will win.”

“As do I.” The snake still disagreed. Beocroak was dragged toward the burrow. He stomped once, burying the foot, to halt the process. A good yank put the neck of the flesh-head around his shoulder, allowing him to twist and pull. Continuing the twist would wrap him up however, give the snake opportunity to squeeze, so he had to return to strength alone. Dignidog sidled in his apparently pre-established circle, made himself visible again, the hands behind his back meant to signal his harmless lack of interference.

“A tallyweed could not be bested by a mere worm of the garden. His aligned fingers are the very spade of Gaw Digi-Tally.”

“I am prying,” Beocroak said, yanking anew, “I do not need any from you.”

“Who’s prying?” A step forward, away from the burrow, was matched by a step forward from Dignidog, so that their faces were closer, Beocroak’s red through the tan and straining, Dignidog’s sharp and intent, young yet gray eyebrows knitted together in plotting better than flesh knitted in the womb. “It is no secret among the people. No one asks you because they do not need to know for certain. I do.”

“What need could you have?”

“What other than tallyweeds? They should lead us, speak for us. Plur is fed by the waters of Tallybirth, by the very palm. We can feed what it feeds our collective arm, wield the world along the river. I believe Gaw demands it.”

“Do it yourself.”

“I would brother, but it is not my role. I am born of flesh and blood, not divine stone and wept cloud. None would follow me. I can strategize, but these tactics must be wielded by the appropriate instrument. Only tallyweeds will do.”

“I am no tallyweed. I have not even proven I can yank this snake out of its hole.”

“As I said, I know you will win,” Dignidog repeated, turning and leaving around a petrified lock of Gaw. It was not a vote of confidence, but a threat. If Beocroak won Dignidog would only take it as further proof of his theory, that he was not born, but crafted for a purpose, the inheritor of her will now that she had died.

And of course Beocroak did win. He grabbled the snake after looping its body several times under his foot, extracted it from its burrow, and punished it by using it as a grabbing whip, agreeing to free it only once the tip of its tail had harvested one hundred turnips. Afterwards he kept to his word, flung the beast far out of the productive fields into one far less tame. There was a new scar on his shoulder, which troubled him far less than the open scrape on his mind, made by the rhetorical dewclaw of Dignidog, who could not lead, and who would make that the problem of his brother, and likely other brothers, and sisters too.

Beocroak could handle any claw, tooth, or thorn in his muscle, but he wasn’t sure how long he could tolerate any of those on his mind.

Finally the rock wall ended; he had only air to grab. The grabbler opened his eyes, then his lungs. The dangerous dust cloud was gone, but had been replaced. Where had he wound up? Wormskoll had vanished just as much as the dust. He was in a room, blue and gray and dreary, but also close knit, wrapped into itself, somewhere that at least mimicked a loving den where children had been promised, even raised.

The corners were ethereal cobwebs inseparable from the walls. A wooden beam overhead looked creaky, but was silent. Rickety wooden chairs were prevented from stabbing sitters in the back by animal skins thrown over, leopard spots faded into the base coat. A fireplace was just a place of cold stones like flattened eggs. Ash was its primary indicator of purpose. Brooms and branches hiding amongst them leaned against a door, blocking it to keep out any scouring breeze that might steal the room’s dust and collection of dead upside down bugs, little claws tented and locked in prayer to Tauntalagmite.

All of it as gray and incorporeal as the walls. Including the hut’s two residents. The elderly gray dead stared at Beocroak as if it was he who haunted them, jaws slack more than decomposition would suggest, which was already a lot. They were a couple, man and woman, each holding stone cups in both hands as if preparing to drink. Both were empty. The woman stood. Nothing remained of her face in life; she had only her death mask. By those standards it was not beautiful either: long, self-pitiful, a caricature of grief. To see the hints of enthusiasm and curiosity on it implied by her bent body language was most blood-curdling. Many would have instantly reviled the specter, none more so than its living family, but the grabbler had already turned to the mystery that brought them together.

“Oddy oddkins, he’s alive!” the twice-aged woman told her presumed husband, neck pivoting back and forth in a swoop, as a bird does when searching a particularly round fruit for a point of entry.

Beocroak was not looking at her. His eyes adjusted to being open, to no longer needing the struggle of reconstructing memories in the body heat black. They pierced the hovel’s walls. Beyond they saw Wormskoll once more. He’d not gone anywhere; somewhere had come to him. What he saw of the cave was its roof, so he returned to eye level. There he found more walls beyond these, just as ghostly, layered and layered. Faint bodily shapes moved about between them, heads not down as they commiserated with themselves, which was what ghosts were supposed to do. They searched around, oddly alert, some even looking up in facsimiles of hope, wonder, and awe.

“No he isn’t, and cannot be,” the husband scoffed, blowing imaginary steam off his drink that did not exist through material and through poverty. He was probably bald before the back of his head was nothing but skull. Strips of twisted brow flesh became a hybrid of eyelash and whiskers that hopefully never caught on. “Toeteld was founded on exactly four thousand dead. Read it on a plaque, and that plaque had a statue on top. Can you imagine? A brass plaque, and on it a fool’s rambling number like three thousand, nine hundred, and… ninety-nine.”

“You can’t read,” his equally terrible half squawked at him.

“I can read numbers,” he shot back combatively, still careful not to upend his drinking vessel. “There’s only ten of them, isn’t there? And that’s only if you count the one that is nothing.” Beocroak chose to speak, often the last tool a grabbler will reach for, if they reach for a tool at all.

“How have you escaped the gates?” he asked, acknowledging the gray dead for the first time.

“Oh we never got around to the gates,” the woman said, circling him, shuffling on chicken bone feet time-pickled just enough to keep her from trembling. She walked like a roaming witch-house about to collapse and plant its boards as saplings. “Rich folks live by the gates. We never even seen’em, did we Father?”

“I seen’em once Mother.”

“No you did not!”

“It counts if you see something in a reflection! And we just talked about knowing how to counts!”

“Point being the gates were down when we got there,” the gray dead so far called Mother said. “These lands are concentrated by futile blood now.”

“Consecreted,” Father didn’t quite correct. “We’ll have to teach you to read once we get that library they’re promising.”

“Toeteld?” Beocroak said, plucking out the one word he could use to make a whole question. He’d gotten better at finding the best grain in his scattered vocabulary since the days of bungling snake-yanks among the turnips behind Lazuli Pawlm. One could call him a grabbler of words.

“Our city!” Mother cackled. “We have a city now. Our son’s out there with the clerics, making his parents proud. Toeteld will be a very big city they’re saying. We won’t be in this wet footprint for long. I’m going to be a lady.”

“What’s that going to make me?” Father grumbled.

“You aren’t going to get any deader!” she yapped, looming beside a Beocroak shoulder to glower at her beloved loved once and never again. A sparkle caught her greedy eye, wet and red. The contusion on back of the grabbler’s skull had leaked blood and been caked in the dust of the falling rocks, but as he rubbed the spot, more in consideration of his predicament than soreness, it opened anew.

“But you are,” Mother murmured, reaching out and touching his wound. He felt it and whipped around, struck at her with an open palm and curled fingers, a move meant to peel the skin off the front of a man like a citrus rind. It had plenty of power, yet could not answer what was not a question of force. His hand passed straight through her.

She provided evidence aplenty of how the laws of solidity would be chiseled in Toeteld, standing there in dumb fascination of the bloody dewdrop perched on her raised bony fingertip. In the world Beocroak knew she couldn’t do that. Ghosts were almost always invisible in trunks of light planted by Hexaclete, only night providing them cover; even then they were rarely more than flashes, and rarer still seen by more than one person.

Above ground they were just the dead, out of place, frightened of their fate, foolishly unaware their open business could not be closed with vapor hands. Below, when shepherded by Tauntalagmite, they were the gray dead, given consistent appearance, and a home, little else. In neither world were they supposed to be capable of touching a living man so that it could be felt, let alone one such as Beocroak, who could not be called a continent because he was too small, and for no other reason.

The grabbler now realized they could, and were prevented from doing so by none of the living ever passing through the gates into Subtlerrannea. So the gray dead could touch him, and he could not touch them. A city was being built on this fact, at that very moment, completely surrounding him. If he did not escape quickly he would be buried in its foundation.

It was his luck that these dead were peasants, peabrains, at each other’s throats so long they weren’t contemplating any necks beyond. If not Father could have grabbed the sole gray knife owned between them and driven it into Beocroak’s back while he was distracted by this foreboding and threatening knowledge.

As it stood he was not without options, having entered their home unannounced, uninvited, and unimpeded. He could pass through their walls, which they likely couldn’t, as they would serve no purpose otherwise. That might not remain the case the higher Toeteld rose. Questioning the lamebrains could’ve allowed experimentation, gotten them to test whether objects they wielded, like the knife or the empty cups, could be used as solid weapons against him, but that information was not to be left in the hands of such blabbermouths, such smalltalkers.

“There’s something in there,” Mother muttered, face still chained to the dome of the stolen droplet. “A room even smaller than ours Father.” Beocroak stepped back, chose to observe, not just the couple, also those visible through and beyond the hovel, who so far did not seem equally capable of seeing his bright living hide through gray walls.

“Eh? What’s that you say?” The man rose out of his seat with posture so slumped that only the chair remaining behind was any indication he did not simply scoot it forward. He grabbed her raised wrist, twisted his neck as if to lick it off her finger before succumbing to the same empty yet rapidly filling stare. “It’s not smaller! That’s the cloak room where I worked right before Junior was born. See? See there? There I am! Carrying the furs of Hodmim Holz hisself!”

Both ghouls oohed and ahhed, forgetting Beocroak, who wisely believed their every utterance without approaching to look. It was his blood. He already knew what it contained, and exactly how much the heart missed it. Too much had already leaked into the flood that may have become the Toeteld sewers.

“There I am!” Mother shouted, hopping up and down, threatening to lose scraps of rag and flesh alike. “We both look so alive Father. Oh I cannot believe how we’ve forgotten!”

“It’s coming back Mother.” He grabbed her shoulders and squished them together. The former servant of wealth was correct. It came back. Not in the droplet. All around them. Beocroak saw it first, while the residents were still unaware the power wasn’t contained in that pinprick of blood.

The hovel’s ceiling stretched up, went from round to cornered. Housewares barely discernible from rocks upon the river’s edge melted into the wall to be reborn as items of silver, brass, and tin. Behind Beocroak the hovel grew a fur coat, then grew many as they separated into hangers, sleeves, hats, and scarves.

The grabbler did not recognize the hallmarks of that particular high society. It was far to the north, where cottages and halls were replaced by manors and second manors stacked atop. Gods rarely went there, and man fended for himself, developing craft and machine to new heights made terrifying by their intrinsic lack of moral alignment. It was a place without Hexaclete’s gold-horned aurockin, which never gored the faithful, without Gaw’s stones, which skipped across any body of water so reliably that messages could be carved onto them, without even Tauntalagmite’s frozen-blown glass, which could bottle a gray dead or a demon no matter the difference in size between vessel and cargo. All the north had was hammers perfectly happy to work on nails or skulls, and clocks of ice marbles and gravity that never granted the deserving more time or the guilty less.

No wonder these two had wound up in need of a caretaker like the queen of infested skulls. Any living master that had locked them away in a cloak room and told them their business was cloaks and the fetching of them had no sympathy or mercy in their hearts. Tauntalagmite hated the egos of men, the innocence of newborns, but even she had tender shoots sustaining thorns of lesser evil.

Lazuli Pawlm was a land that never saw such things as mechanized clocks or plows that had to be pulled by more than one animal. Despite this, Beocroak recognized the changing character of the hovel. This was the look of prestige. This status did not belong to them, but in Toeteld they might live in it. How?

The blood. Life force. What had been denied the gray dead so long. They now assumed their arteries opened into canals that had always been empty, overflowing only with dust. The blood caused Toeteld to sprout by reinvigorating memory like a shriveled desert mold under a decade’s denied deluge.

What Mother and Father remembered they constructed. That was how a ghost could build a city. It would take more than one drop, as the pair learned when Beocroak’s went brown under their gaze. The memory of the cloak room didn’t so much as fade with its luster as it did slow and solidify, as if carved from wood.

“What happened next?” Father asked his wife’s hand. “I can’t recall.” He knocked on the side of his head with the butt of his palm, jarred nothing loose.

“He knows!” Mother accused Beocroak, experimenting with which finger she could point best while her old reliable kept the dried droplet elevated. “Please good sir, those are our memories after all. Please hand them over. I want to remember Junior’s name.”

“He did have a name, didn’t he?” Father softly recognized, staring into the craggy cave floor and its black mold web of now-frigid blood.

Beocroak paused in thought. Devoid of kindness it was, as he doubted any such feeling warmed the bosom of these ghouls, or of any citizen of Toeteld. This was practical thought. Outside what could no longer be called a hovel eyes were being drawn. Other gray dead wandered closer, skulls tilting back to see Mother and Father’s roof cap a second story, then a third. One head nearly rolled away, it had to angle so far. Another spine bent into a bow, its owner scuttling away on all four limbs like a harvestman.

This was a distraction. If the building kept growing it might clear a path for him to sneak closer to the cave’s mouth. Faith told him sunlight’s furthest carpet inside Wormskoll would be the ultimate impassable border for the dead city. Prudently, he decided five drops of blood sacrificed now could save him the rest shortly after.

With the exact pressure needed he pressed each of his fingers to the back of his head, then presented to the ghouls a hand jeweled with tiny ruby claws. In five steps he crossed what would have taken two just a minute prior, putting him beside a table that became a counter, its cracks sealing and lacquering themselves.

Mother and Father fluttered about him like a pair of chickens that didn’t know which one was missing its head, not daring to touch him and spill a drenching drop of real life: an immersive inundation of memory. Beocroak tapped the counter with each finger, never feeling a thing, yet the drops did transfer and stay put.

Then he silently departed, through the wall with the fewest onlookers, in the direction he deemed least colonized. Mother and Father each chose a drop on the end of the row, crowded as close to them as they could without blurring focus, and saw in them bursting balloons of the lives they’d lost.

“There’s Junior, still cozy inside,” Mother cooed, seeing the face of a young woman, rough yet clean as if swept by barnyard broom, beaming as it glanced down at a held abdomen swollen with yet more life. How was life so full of itself? So over and over again? The gray dead even missed their fleas as family.

“Mr. Holz is congratulating me, after his dinner party with the regents,” Father reminisced. “I told him there wasn’t a hair out of place. And he believed me… so why is he coming back? Right to us! Quickly Mother! Clean this sty! Clean the way for Mr. Holz!”

continued in part two