(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 55 minutes)

In the fog, in the fervor, in the distress, and in the uncertainty, it became impossible for them to tell how much time was passing. A grabbler can known an hour by the number of breaths, but not these grabblers. A grabbler can know autumn by the lethargy in a beetle’s wings, but not these grabblers. These grabblers were sinking in Rooth Tugt.

Falling, Jeremiad realized dumbly as she took a false step and tumbled. The fog tried to trip her with arcing roots and smooth flat rocks underneath, but she managed to put a foot down. It struck a larger rocks, which slid, so her other foot did the same, creating two little sleds that she could use to reach the bottom of the incline as long as she jumped over a few more roots and caught the slipping stone shoes on the other side.

Inertia forced her to continue on once the slope leveled off. She ground to a halt before the rocks became glittering mud, before the mud became still waters. Beocroak came up behind her, stopped beside. He grabbed her shoulders again; if she needed catching this time it was just because she’d been floored by her awe.

This was not the barrier between Wormskoll’s depths and demon-infested underbelly. There was no gate engineered to separate one place from another, unless the jungle itself counted. Not a single guard was posted around the lake of lights. No sign warned them to turn back, and no curse kinder than the ones that might be stashed among the horde, like the one prefacing this tome. Its name was not chiseled into a stone standing in rigid exclamation.

It was just a humble lake, albeit decorated by, perforated with, items and phenomena most arcane, alienating, and enigmatic.

The jungle had not retracted to catch her off guard. A clear line where growth stopped all around the lake’s irregular shape marked what had to be the collective magical emissions of the Many-Spotted Hoard. The flat stones, gray, black, and white, were all as glittering as the mud in one thin ringing stripe, possibly the flaked metal dust of enchanted armors, weapons, and tools.

Hints of those hues did indeed exist in the lining of a few items here and there, with here being skewered atop a wooden post sticking out of the lake higher than a barn and there being a slot in a polished stone wall flanking one of the embankments. The Many-Spotted Hoard was present, and nowhere in the collection did a single item touch another.

The lake had many posts with things lashed to them or dangling in nets that had algae and moss overflowing in the seams of the ropes, the only plant life that had snuck past the invisible border. Every post was at a different height. The net of the lowest contained a massive opal fishhook that generated ripples just beneath it, ripples that faded almost immediately, leaving that small circle the only disturbed water on an otherwise glassy surface.

Taking stock of them all would’ve taken days, and such an act might be dangerous in itself, triggering a spell tailored against bureaucrats and coin counters. Still longer would be needed to chronicle the tales of each one’s creation and its journey to Rooth Tugt. The grabblers, having been raised in the enchanted air, water, and soil of Lazuli Pawlm, could almost see the spheres of magical color surrounding each piece: a pastiche of spaces where reality was altered in some way that belonged in the empty cosmos where it could do no harm.

Then there were the lights. Underneath the lake’s stillness, swimming in blurry rivulets somewhere between aurora and the running gluey guts of crushed fireflies, were slow pulses of blue and green. Something told Jeremiad the lights were not part of the collection, nor were they part of their welcome, drifting left and right to make a dark path in the water, out of which came stepping stones connecting the grabbler’s part of the shore to the center of the lake.

A final stepping stone rose and grew until it couldn’t be called such; now it was a featureless island barely a hand high of porous stone scored with many blade strikes and chipped by many hammer falls.

“The hidezinhide,” she whispered. Between the trees tendrils of fog leaked once more. A milky curtain of it bulged and flowed like slime over the embankment wall and its filled hoard slots. It crept up behind them, pressuring them forward.

“This is his realm,” Beocroak said, “and we are without weapons. Do not attack unless we are attacked first… and do not touch any part of the hoard.”

“Yes Master.” He took the first steps out over the water, across the path laid for them. Jeremiad followed. When they looked down they could see the lights snaking between the stones, wrapping and loosening like ribbons, alive with anticipation. Despite their electric color, a chill rose off the water and stuck to their legs until the limbs felt like sausages hung to dry out their casings.

Nothing impeded them as they walked to the central island, but the fog did close in until the jungle was gone; they’d dropped into the nest of a gargantuan eagle that used only the highest clouds as construction material. Now the closest they had to the trees were the scattered posts of the hoard, some of which were so tall they disappeared into the vapor as well.

Rain resumed. The lake absorbed it without making ripples. Every drop they heard as loud as they normally would, louder even, but the lake refused to disturb. It only prickled like gooseflesh. By the time Beocroak and Jeremiad stepped off onto the gnarled scarred island and its hundred rain puddles, the lake’s collective sound was a dome of ten thousand trickles, as if the whole world was awash in the din of a single cosmic frog splash, something that could raise the Half-Bite all the way to Hexaclete’s Land and flood Subtlerrannea like a cellar.

Stepping stones sank as the caretaker of the hoard approached. Both grabblers watched as a feline shadow of peaking and collapsing shoulders formed in the fog ahead, strolling on wide paws more than a man’s height off the water.

The rain leopard was real. As a real animal, there was no reason a hidezinhide could not take its skin and pull their trick, gaining its cloudy companion in the process. Was this druid the very same creature that stalked them not long ago? Perhaps out in the tangle he fed his wild side, and only pulled back his flayed hood and displayed civility around his artifact collection.

It plodded just close enough to be revealed as a cat somewhere between cougar and tiger in size. Its drab fur of stormy gray was riddled with irregular darker spots like someone had flung buckets of rotten oysters at it. A wet beard refused to drip. The eyes flashed violet, reflecting magic, before giving way to marine blue.

Walking on air above eye level, the rain leopard briefly circled before deciding to flop to its stomach, slanted legs resting on mist, tail tip flicking capriciously. It was waiting, and cats had infinite patience as long as the stillness irritated other parties present. Beocroak’s mission, Beocroak’s plea.

“We take you to be the guardian of the Many-Spotted Hoard,” he said, to which the leopard nodded once, close to nodding off. “I have come bearing a curse I wish to break, inflicted by a scratch of Tauntalagmite. Can any item here do this?” The cat looked into the middle distance, causing the grabblers to listen for the emergence of Graychild, whom they could easily picture being birthed from a fog bank the way the Thumbscale had crossed the Half-Bite. Hearing nothing, they assumed the druid saw through the mist itself and scanned his collection.

Answering Beocroak required some preparation. The beast contracted in the middle as if a great hairball was amassing, then scrunched up into a sitting position. While its head hung its belly fur split down the middle, ten fingertips emerging to widen the gap. Much of its mass shrank away and left wrinkles in the dragging hide until they saw an old man, wiry without being decrepit, standing with no clothes but the hide, its snout and teeth hanging over his forehead as visor. His beard curled the same as his feline form’s.

Humanity had fallen into disuse, thus it was the rain leopard’s eyes that remained open and alive, its brows that furrowed, and its lips that curled. The man underneath seemed asleep, only his mouth used to speak, throat first cleared of phlegm and growls.

“Yes.”

“I request your permission to use it.”

“Permission is irrelevant,” the druid claimed. If his voice was tinged with emotion it was of an animal stripe and indecipherable. “The unhinged door of Oibiswa can break most curses.” His opening hand emptied a bubble of mist nearby, revealing the top of a post with a hanging net. An item had was separate, resting on the flat wood above the net in a prism made of a few tied sticks and much more air. Inside it was the door of a bird cage, pristine copper. “But,” the cat’s eyes flickered violet again, “what you suffer is not a curse. It is a heavy gift.”

“Master?” Jeremiad uttered, unanswered.

“Is there anything here that can free me from the burden I bear?” he instead posed to the druid.

“No.” Beocroak collapsed to one knee. Jeremiad almost did the same, so startled that she hopped backward and covered her nose and mouth with her hand. Grabblers stood like mountains. She’d never seen one felled by grief. Caustic rage inflated his veins. Together they formed a tempest of anguish, the outlying winds of which blew icy daggers into and through Jeremiad’s own flesh.

“There are but two ways to separate you and your burden,” the druid continued, suddenly unwilling to wait for Beocroak to recover his feet, “loss of the afflicted appendage… or loss of life.”

Appendage, his apprentice echoed in thought. Her master would be branded Jeremiad if he were freed. One yoke for another. If she chose her new name he would be struck by what she cast off. This was his decision, so she kept her lips sealed, ready as she was to declare that no, there were no Jeremiads in her heart, no shame between them, regardless of what he chose. If he lost a limb they would still be complete between them, still more than any individual.

“Master,” she said, forced to address something else, the sound of tumbling stones and bending trees, “we’re out of time! We’ve nothing to fight with!” Beocroak took a moment they didn’t have before rising. He looked at her even as they heard the splashing crash of something breaking loose of the jungle and careening toward the lake of lights. The sadness in his eyes pressed into her, as if she was cloth and his gaze two stones.

“Then I shall try wielding the truth,” he offered her. “Please my apprentice. I have asked for help once before, and I swore I would never again w-“

“We have lead life together truly,” she interrupted him, voice quivering. “I am with you Master Beocroak, no matter what other truths there are.” Much more ungainly than the druid’s emergence, a raft of soggy undergrowth plowed water and fog, skidded onto the barren island, and jerked to a stop. At its malformed bow was Captain Roddery Graychild and his iron grip on plunged Breakwater, almost immediately flanked by pairs of disembarking sailors until his crew was safely on solid ground. It appeared they’d lost not a soul to the trials of the jungle: seventeen excluding Graychild. And it seemed the leopard’s downpour had provided the current necessary to float one of his rafts, allowing them to catch up.

Victorious, he withdrew Breakwater, the raft slowly collapsing into a heap, a swamp exhaling. Sword on his hip, masterful in stride, he made his way to the loose circle of discussion, his spreading crew tightening it considerably. The floating druid did not seem to disturb him, his sights set primarily on Beocroak.

“Finally, we have a chance to talk man to man,” the southerner scolded, “and fight hand to hand.” His crew drew swords. “So what will it be grabbler? Will you give me what I am owed or botch its use once more? Did you mean to drown all those poor Beerbetters? And not even in beer!”

Jeremiad thought she was ready for any truth. Beocroak could’ve been a hidezinhide himself, a much smaller and weaker man wearing a traditional grabbler, and she still would’ve trusted their bond above all else. What Graychild suggested hadn’t tapped her imagination. If it had she might’ve had some resistance, some denial to aid her, but the implications were an avalanche, freezing and burying her alive and upright.

Beocroak had lied about the man. He was not after vengeance over a slain deckhand cousin; he was after the hand of Hexaclete. Or perhaps it was the hand of Beocroak. She thought back.

In Beerbet the hand had appeared and turned away the eye. If that was the action of her master, why? There was only one thing he wanted: the Many-Spotted Hoard. With Rooth Tugt unmapped, it was impossible to find unless one had an eye in the sky. And briefly, Beocroak had that. He turned the eye toward the distant jungle, and through the familiarity of eye and hand, borne of the same body, the knowledge of what it saw was transferred to him. The notion that he had learned it from the guts of a scavenger was a lie.

Next had been the basin. Beocroak had expressed a desire to neutralize the conflict, to make peace, and she now saw it as a more active attempt. Wanting to purify water for the thirsty, he had wielded the hand with clumsy inexperience and accidentally caused the disaster.

A third incident was reforged in her mind with a deafening crack: the supposed thunderclap in the jungle that had driven off the first rain leopard, who may or may not have party to the current situation. Much too loud. Unlike any she’d ever heard. But if she imagined the snap of Goodly fingers it made far more sense. His efforts had succeeded that time, but not without drawing blood from their ears.

Awareness of her surroundings returned only momentarily, as one look at Xeams, who licked his lips in anticipation, sent her back into recollection, slotting in some of the final pieces of the puzzle box she’d been unwittingly trapped inside. First, she saw him for more of what he was; his reaperweed nature was brought into greater focus by the battle at Rockrain. When she saw that man swallowed by the giant teeth of Rooth Tugt, Xeams’s mask thinned. Now his skin had a greenish hue, his eyes yellow and red like off-putting veins in a frying egg. His neck and limbs swayed like a calculating cobra in protection of a torso that was now held further back: a marionette made to sit on nothing.

Second was his eye patch, lifted and put off to the side of his head. And no eye in the sky. It would have been useless there, the mist just as obscuring as the treetops. The patch hid the eye, which meant it could be somewhere else. If that was true then the same principle applied to the hand of Beocroak. Had it been hidden each time the Goodly extension manifested? In Beerbet his arm had been buried in a wall burrow, then in its animal dwellers. At the basin he had it down one of the clayhog gullets. And in the rain leopard’s creeping cloud all was shrouded.

“When?” was all she asked him, the word perhaps the weakest she had ever produced.

“Oh he hasn’t told you?” Graychild interjected with a snort and the sharp half of a smile. “Before you were traveling companions I’d imagine, given that he was alone when his meteoric self came falling out of the sky and punched a hole in my ship… and my cousin to boot.”

“It’s my fault,” Beocroak told her, his emitted voice wrapping around him and constricting. His knuckles were white. “It’s all my fault. I failed. I should have died underground, but I asked for help I did not deserve. In her superior nature she risked herself for me… and she died.”

“I haven’t heard this bit,” Roddery muttered, digging a strip of dried meat out of a belt pouch to chew on while he stockpiled the information: one ration spent to gain another.

Beocroak spoke more there than he’d ever spoken in a single instance. It was unavoidable, momentous as the events were, walloping as the effect on his core had been. While it had been happening he still didn’t know if he had died in Wormskoll and just done so improperly.

Hexaclete, stronger sister, goddess of the land called hers, had extracted him from a hole in the ground of his own making and caught a pair of scratches from reaching Tauntalagmite in the process. Ghastly venom, brewed for such rare occasions that are nonetheless inevitable on the scale of immortality, penetrated to her heart, her swallowed fallen sun, and killed her. And dissolved her. And sent her pieces and powers raining across her land in a destructive yet seeding process.

She knew the moment she was scratched that it was over, chose not to voice any concern to the curled-up grabbler in her hand, hardly more than a grub frightened into playing dead. Instead she took the opportunity to walk the golden fields above and of the clouds, where the rays of dawns on other worlds reached as crystalline dappling and dusted the blanketing intensity of their own golds, silvers, and whites.

Her cradling hand was held high to make sure Beocroak could see too. He felt small, but not small enough to be accurate. That capacity he lacked. Too many people around him had told him he was large. Too many small things had bowed to him as if his gravity was stronger than theirs.

Only when his heart and mind struggled to contain the terrifying, petrifying radiance of the rolling golden sky-swells and sky-peaks and sky-geysers under the blue-black eternity did Hexaclete stumble.

She enclosed him in her palm and fingers, cocooning him against harm as her core essence scattered in bursts to powder that struck the world like rays of light. All of her land saw the display as day through the clouds as if they were crowded bubbles of blown glass.

Her giant steps brought them close to the southern coast. When Beocroak fell from the sky, wrapped in the deforming membrane of the hand, the unfortunate Thumbscale sailed into his trajectory. Impact was worse than any cannonade. The deckhand was punched through, then the deck, then every lower level, and then the hull. There was a crater on the seafloor, but that was the residual force of the hand alone. Beocroak had tumbled free halfway through the ship and climbed to the deck out of instinct.

Too much water had been taken on before he even laid eyes on the southerner crew. Breakwater was in place as the helm, its magic keeping it afloat, but it was too large a vessel to be held together. Beocroak’s hole quickly split it in two, then five. Captain Roddery could only keep one section buoyed at a time, unable to do anything but slide and leap from piece to piece, wherever his crew was most numerous, and driving the sword into the boards to bring it back up for a few seconds, hopefully giving those below decks time to free themselves from flooding chambers.

He had to watch and bark orders while his crew vacillated between salvaging life rafts and battling Beocroak. Fighting him was as bad as the sinking. As soon as he appeared some had drawn swords on him and charged, holding him accountable the only way they thought they could attempt. For his part the grabbler was nearly out of his mind, madly gripping the ledge of understanding regarding Hexaclete’s death, his own responsibility, and the power that had seeped into his flesh under the pressure of streaking falling sky.

The name Graychild was shouted over and over, and to the confused grabbler that could mean only more gray dead, somehow escorted above ground under the shade of Tauntalagmite’s outstretched arm to chase him down and drag him back into their sticky bloody hole. In the Half-Biters he saw the pallor of godless people, of life-sustaining lichen scraped off otherwise barren rock, of cold stinking embrace in winter’s snowed-in hardship and bloody double-deaths in childbirth. No wonder he thought them ghosts.

In the broken wood he climbed to reach the deck he found the burrow of a shipworm, actually a type of barnacle, and had armed himself with it. The mariners failed to identify his undulating fleshy sleeve for what it was, or its hard peach-pit shell around his first for its intention. More of them took injuries from his rampage, some as they were tossed into the waters, made to tread with broken bones and torn muscles.

As the last of the Thumbscale sank beneath the surface, dragging with it bodies and those soon to be, three lifeboats were launched. The captain took stock of his supplies, saying a heartfelt word about each and every soul lost, not making a special case of his cousin. Beocroak was nowhere to be found. If they’d had Hexaclete’s eye then they might have spotted him already swimming back to the mainland, faster in his four limbs than any boat with ten oars.

The captain had nothing left to make but a speech, words never in short supply, only sunk when the lungs were. Without a ship he needed to set them all to a unifying task, or risk losing them. Revenge was both the way of singular man and all men. It was breakfast, as long as there was someone who could’ve conceivably stolen the food. Everyone had witnessed Beocroak robbing them of their hard-won future, so his choice of target was trivial.

“That ship was the key to our lives,” Graychild interrupted Beocroak when his tale was clearly winding down. “Now what we were going to be is in a lockbox on the ocean floor. Then I come to learn with my investigative skills, and the winning personality of Odebtte here,” a woman cocked her head next to him, “that not only did you drop in announced, but you’re part dying god: a bounty you did not see fit to share with us, who you so wronged.”

“I cannot control it,” Beocroak said. “You would have been further injured.”

“Because you don’t know anything you miserable son of a bitch! You have to try, no matter what gets broken in the process. I’ll grant you it’s harder to master than an eye, but you’ve had the means. Up here gods give you a hand from birth and all you people do with it is stand around holding your balls like they’re the best future you can dream up!”

“We’re only here because I hoped to be rid of it,” Beocroak admitted. “If I could have discarded it early on, when I took my apprentice, only to show her what could be done with ordinary hands, I would have. I cannot give it to you without removing the hand it is attached to.”

“I know that,” Roddery said in a tone of effortless mastery, as if he fluidly rolled a cannonball across his shoulders. “How do you think I got the eye off Escaboulnté?”

“This is the Many-Spotted Hoard,” the elder grabbler tried. “It is full of magical wonders, many of which might grant you powers to rival the remains of Hexaclete. Allow us passage and forget us. Deal with the druid, who is the owner of these items.” Both parties looked to the bent man standing on air, human eyes closed, whiskers adjusting above them like long eyebrows.

“I have plenty of offers to make the druid,” Roddery said in the guardian’s direction to acknowledge him and his authority before turning right back to Beocroak, “but first comes the hand. My bargaining position will be so much stronger with it being my grasp.

Another thing I know is that none of this is his problem. We’ve dragged it to his doorstep, and he can correct me if I’m mistaken, but I imagine it would be most convenient for him if these two trespassers settled their issues amongst themselves, halving his burden.”

Everyone with feet upon the slippery rock turned to watch the druid, who gave his response as one big exhale from his hood’s nostrils. A human hand pulled the snout down over his face. Hairless arms and legs retracted into underbelly shadow to make it a rain leopard once more. Then it turned and plodded away into the mist.

Impartial as he may have been, the caretaker was still a participant. His tightened veil of cloud did not ease, and it remained impossible to see anything beyond the island but a few of the dark posts, their associated pieces of the hoard, and the murky flickering aurora beneath the lake’s surface.

“Positions crew,” the captain ordered. Xeams broke away to wrap around Beocroak. Roddery moved in himself with Breakwater leveled at Jeremiad’s throat. Each of the officers was accompanied by two more that staked themselves at set gaps around their targets, as if pitching a tent of no escape. They understood outnumbering them three to one was more effective than sending the whole hodgepodge of the crew in. This way everyone would be able to see what happened as it happened and accidental friendly strikes would be prevented.

All avenues of retreat had been closed. No animals in sight to wield. Graychild knew so much, a hoard of wealth already, and one of his trinkets was the understanding that Beocroak could not even use Hexaclete’s gifted hand in their defense, not at this close a range, without destroying themselves as well. The grabblers were forced back to back. Jeremiad tilted her head, running her bristly hair across the back of Beocroak’s neck; it was the last act of affection she had room to offer him. Dying at his side was better than living in banishment.

“My apprentice,” he said, choking back the welling sorrow she now realized had been his core as long as she’d known him.

“My master.” The Thumbscale crew held their positions. Grabblers were still strange and impressive to them. As such their last words might be worth repeating, good fodder for storytelling around free drinks. Roddery had taught them well: always learn what your enemy teaches.

“I see now why Hexaclete made h-her hand m-my own,” he stammered, his first separate from physical trauma. “Five fingers… and five grabblers I was supposed to help. You came first; I found you only days after she fell, and in my fervor to undo what I had caused I took you in. I don’t regret that. But I was supposed to do more. The accursed…”

“We were kind to him,” Jeremiad reminded.

“I owed him more. He was the second. Then the witch Gilgalunge. She was once of us, and we parted ways so quickly. Then Conquerobber, left to fight our battle.”

“The fifth?”

“The one who convinced Hexaclete I needed a push toward action. The one it was too late to help. Dignidog. Five grabblers, my grabblers… but I was afraid. With you I was raising a partner… and with all of you I would have been-“

“Our leader.”

“Child, do you think someone who can lead must? I know I ask so much of you at this dark time.”

“It’s midday,” Graychild retorted, showing rare impatience.

“No Master Beocroak.” She flexed her shoulder against his, indicating to him the direction of the captain. “There is a man who thinks he must. He will never have what we have.”

“I’ll have it in the next five minutes,” Roddery claimed, intentionally penetrating her point.

“And!” Beocroak roared, scaring the sailors back a step, one teetering on the edge of the lake. “They will never have you!” Jeremiad was faster than him, but not when he acted unexpectedly. He was the stronger, so she couldn’t resist the vice of his whirling embrace. None on the crew were close enough to reach them in time, nor were they sure they should. All they saw was the larger grabbler snatching the smaller one, spinning her once, and hurling her over their heads into the mist.

A moment later there came a splash, confirming the water was at least ordinary enough to do that. What didn’t follow were the sounds of swimming, suggesting she’d sunk or stayed under deliberately.

“What’d he do that for?” one of the denser Half-Biters in the back pondered.

“Because we have no quarrel with her,” the captain explained, flicking the tip of his sword at various underlings to make sure they weren’t distracted from their real prize. “We just want the hand, and perhaps this one’s death, though I’m content to watch his stump bleed. If that doesn’t take him he can live as long as he wants.” Beocroak wasn’t listening to the southerner; he was preparing a breath that could speak to someone else submerged.

“My apprentice!” he roared, low as he ever had, rocking the rock and making ripples in water that resisted them all around the tiny island. “I know you can hear this!” She had a perfect breath too, keeping her suspended beneath the surface and off the bottom. Minutes she could hang there, barely giving off signs of life aside from the tears adding to the lake of lights as she tried to look up to mighty Beocroak. “Swim! Live free in your new name! I am Beocroak! And I am not as hard as they say! The softer sister shaped me! Look ye fools! Despair as you learn how soft these baubles are!”

Graychild’s mind raced. What could he mean? He had no weapon, no reinforcements… unless. Now that his girl was underwater he could use the hand and not harm her… but how? He couldn’t obscure it, nowhere to hide it, no patch to pull over it. He couldn’t.

He couldn’t without the puddle between his feet: a pore in the rock with no visible bottom. Roaring to keep them skittish, the grabbler plunged his fist and arm down, just like Breakwater, into the puddle.

The eye of Xeams emerged slowly in its manifestation, out of swirling clouds, a fledgling bird wriggling free of loose nesting. Not the hand of Beocroak. It struck out of the sky with an earthquake punch, bronze and brazen and unstoppable. The island cracked, one fissure so large as to swallow a sailor, get him stuck, and start drowning him as the lake flooded in. While his compatriots tried to pull him free Graychild stared, aghast, at the hand. He didn’t have long, for it disappeared as quickly as it came.

That punch could have easily shattered the island like a fired vase, but it ceased to exist the moment the man who threw it did the same. Beocroak had obliterated himself. Only flattened viscera remained, so pressed into the island it had become the color of the stone. No bone was more than an almond slice, and no blood was collected enough to run, and no organ was separable from the blood.

“He could’ve gotten us too,” Xeams said, stepping into the grabbler grime, crouching down and running his fingers across it. “It was a closed fist, not open handed.”

“Worried he might hit the girl,” Graychild muttered. “He said he couldn’t control it. Only because the bastard wouldn’t practice. He sure put our fire poker in the pig shit…”

“So we smell him whenever it gets hot,” Xeams said, completing the Half-Biter aphorism.

“Do you see the hand anywhere in that mess?”

“No, I think he destroyed it.” Graychild was inclined to think his first mate was right, recalling the fragility of the eye of Escaboulnté in his palm.

“Damn it,” the captain sighed, looking over his shoulder to see a man dragged out of the water, a hand slapping his back so he would spit some of it up. “Finish with that will you and get over here. We’re going to scrape this man up just in case his tissues have something left in them. Now where’s that druid?”

“What did he say about a tissue?” the half-drowned Half-Biter said as he staggered to his feet to show his resilience, knocking more water out of his ear.

“The grabbler’s goo,” one of his rescuers clarified.

“He wasn’t wearing shoes,” somebody else said as they shuffled past, toward their unpleasant task, “but I think I got some of him in mine.”

“At least it’s over,” another member said.

“Over?” They all stopped. Long campfire nights of too much bawdy song and not enough sleep meant they had camaraderie of voice. One word was enough to know that wasn’t one of theirs. Nor did it sound like the druid.

Could it be the girl? Too foolish to flee? Impossible. The voice was in the air, above them, and they doubted she had grabbled the rain leopard and borrowed his air-strolling paws. And it bore a quality inhuman. It was so elusive they couldn’t put a word to it. Words like vibrating and searing were close, but not exact.

Only those in the know of engineery had the word they were looking for: electric. Lightning they knew, but it was natural. Electricity was tamed lightning, bolts bent to a will, the white-hots of the heavens cast into tangible implements. And where would a one-armed girl get something like that?

These were the wrong questions for the Thumbscale crew to ask, idling nothings, less consequential than moths battering their ears. If they had turned the wheels Graychild had helped them construct properly they might retrace their steps and remember what the captain himself had asked, and what had went unanswered:

Why is it called the lake of lights?

Jeremiad learned the answer in suspension, just after the wall of gleaming bronze had descended, shook the world, and disappeared. Instantly she knew what it was, what had happened. Sadness sank her. A toe tip touched the lake bed and there she stood, eyes wide and wet, world rearranging against her will, until she remembered that all worlds bobbed and had Half-Bites. Sometimes you were under. Surfacing was often a decision.

The water was clear, she recognized now that she stared straight ahead at the column of the island, at a fissure Beocroak had just opened in its side. Magical power glittered within, bright yet frigid. One of the lights crept out of the crack. In the green haze there was a par of illuminated unblinking eyes. Then there were the frosty peaks of teeth.

It stalled before her, gaping mouth flexing in slack-jawed gilly-breath. An eel. Not an animal, a curse, and her own. One had taken her arm before, and now that she couldn’t fight back its friend had slunk in to take the rest.

Except, clarified in her smoldering held breath and the dagger tiptoe keeping her aquatic balance, she knew that she could fight back. Graychild and company had cornered her master and forced out of him this terrible irreversible choice. They had stolen him. Now her only teachers would be trials of fire, quicksand, water, and lightning.

The last the eel seemed to have, she noticed as it slowly approached, picking the best spot to bite. Its sides had pores and slits radiating the ethereal greens and blues they had seen above, complete with the flicker of flashing lightning. In the north they were called electric eels, and they were so valuable that the Injured Party had carted them along in glass tanks when fleeing the land the jungle would soon claim as Rooth Tugt. Even now, tens of thousands bred to the purpose were powering mechanisms in that colder realm.

She watched the eel back, dared it to strike. Here, in the heart of a land where men only had power in the shape of animals, the eel would not cower. A lunge. Teeth flashing. Eyes ablaze. Jeremiad thrust in turn, turning it into a sleeve, gripping its body wall against the slime’s grain so her hold wouldn’t slip.

Teeth sank into her flesh, much of it already scarred, sheathing them well. It missed the vital waterways of blood and her clenched hand held firm, forcing it to use its ultimate trick. Lightning meant to paralyze prey lurked in its muscles, letting off steam as dreamy light; it surged along the body, conducted through contact into the flesh of Jeremiad.

Seizing involuntarily, her muscles contracted, sending her to the lake bed on her back, eel dragged along. Mind sizzling, joints locking, the electrocution had an unintended side effect for the issuing eel; the muscle contractions only tightened her grip on its insides. Pain informed it that continuing would tear up its innards, but it wasn’t ready to give in to her grabble, so it reduced its emitted power.

Which cost it the battle. Suddenly the lightning rampaging in her body seemed meek, lost, cornered in a trap she’d inadvertently set for it. On a hunch she tried to exercise control over her nerves the same way Beocroak had his blood vessels to dam up jellyfish venom. It didn’t take much to convince the electricity it belonged in that system, filling it up faster than she could understand what was happening, until it spread into her brain and set off ten thousand explosive epiphanies. She’d done it. She’d grabbled an electric eel, and its power was now hers to wield.

Straightening out, ordering the fish to swim them to the surface with undulating tail, Jeremiad saw two others approach. She showed them her eyes, lit like theirs, and with a human ferocity they couldn’t know, the one that furiously invented and constructed instead of rending apart.

“Daaht!” she roared underwater, losing a bubble of air that wouldn’t stand out in the blue gooseflesh of the leopard’s rainfall. Even submerged her voice crackled with their own character. They knew. Why fight her, when she could win and bandy them about as trophies? Why fight a chance to go above water and electrocute creatures that never had the opportunity to fear or respect them before? To the animal brain only one thing makes sense in the presence of a grabbling grabbler. Get grabbled. Gain glory. Pass it on in song and spawn.

“Over?” the voice echoed out of the crew’s sight. “I was not finished with my teacher yet! He only instructed me. He did not order me. And I have not fled.”

“Don’t be foolish girl,” Graychild shouted into the mist. “It’s over! Take your life and go.”

“I will have yours instead.”

“Then come out!” He held his arms wide and stepped what might have been forward relative to her position. He drew Breakwater. “We don’t fear your barbaric technique; we have Half-Bite steel!”

But the first bite would be a whole one, facilitated in the confusion of seeing a slick sphere of three finned bands and a human center bounce and roll into their midst. Before they could even cock their heads it unfurled, the bands shooting out and wrapping around the nearest neck, arm, and leg of three different people.

Struck in triplicate. The invisible force became visible as bolts between their teeth, strands breaking up into the air in a tortured gape. Most men could survive an eel’s shock, even several with long enough intervals between, but Jeremiad was the conduit through which the power of all three eels coursed, one on her arm and two sheathed on her legs up to her knees.

Jeremiad could add her body’s own to their discharge, the extra kick of a hammering grabbler heart. And the ground was wet, conducting the fringes of the electricity to other sailors who yipped and jumped back when they felt it bite their feet. As they landed their three tethered fellows fell in smoking heaps, the metal in their buckles and buttons having blackened the surrounding leather and cloth.

The grabbler rose to stare them down. Then she rose beyond her human height on curling eel stilts until she towered over them, each fish easily half as long as the python Beocroak had wielded at Rockrain. So risen her face fell into misty shadow while her eyes still glowed with a power that was very much the grabbler equivalent of alloyed and fired steel, if not more so.

“That’s why it’s called the Lake of Lights,” Graychild said before turning to Xeams, “kill her.” The reaperweed wasted no time, practically dancing in her direction as he avoided the rocky pockets that held conducting water. Jeremiad’s temporary feet slithered away from him, off the island and into the water, pumping tails keeping her silently aloft as she vanished back into the mist.

“Form a circle!” the captain ordered his remaining soldiers, who quickly turned their weapons into the spines of an urchin, protecting him at the center. “Rouxgalosh, you know a tripwire from a loose thread. Go look at those and see if there’s anything you can use.” One of the men backed into the circle, the gap quickly closed, and followed his captain’s pointing finger to the only net of the Many-Spotted Hoard that was within reach from the island. His head swiveled back and forth as he checked every angle of the items sticking out, separated by sheets of hide, trying to discern magical effects and triggers. How different could they be from the booby traps he’d disarmed before? Twice he’d saved Roddery’s life, which earned him the privilege of touching the hoard first.

Xeams patrolled the perimeter on all fours, though this could only be seen by those who had truer looks at him. Reaperweeds could smell death and its dealers even better than dogs could, but just as an ocean had prevented him from picking up Beocroak’s scent after the sinking, the rainy lake kept him from pinpointing Jeremiad’s position.

His nose, like their weapons, was pointed outward. Jeremiad next rose from within. The very fissure that had produced the first eel now connected to the very puddle Beocroak had plunged his arm through, creating a tunnel her eel armor had no difficulty traversing.

Beocroak had smashed himself into such compacted slurry that the rain had not even begun to wash it away, forcing his apprentice to rise with her master opened and flattened in a grotesque circle about her, but she knew it was like his awakening in Toeteld before it bore that name, like she became her own reaperweed as he did.

Silently she coiled her arm eel and cracked it as a whip, striking an unaware mariner on the back, sending her flying into the air where she collided with one of the hoard-posts. Her impact sounded like metal strike, not wood. What she’d actually hit was the grimy breastplate mounted atop the post. Its place in the hoard was immediately demonstrated, as was the source of its chunky browned grime.

The sailor screamed when she didn’t fall, her back magically glued to the armor. Some witch, warbolock, or demon had convinced the breastplate that it should do whatever possible to get someone to wear it, and in that hexed compulsion it did not require that wearer to be alive, or in one piece, or a solid instead of a fluid.

She was bent and broken against it, head sucked backward into the neck opening, legs up into the waist. Her tinny screams ceased as her clothing and skin broken apart at the front, muscles and ligaments snapping free, shriveling, and separating into wet morsels of sausage meat.

In moments she was nothing but a glossier coat on the object, her doom adding to that of her crewmates who could not look away, leaving them vulnerable to Jeremiad. She eel-crawled to one of them and wrapped them up, only to toss them into the lake for the other lights to tenderize with electric discharge and devour.

Xeams was on her before she could get to another, and Graychild joined him, swinging Breakwater at her eel-legs to chop her down. The sword cut an eel, buckling her on one side and granting the reaperweed an opening. His neck stretched out, as did his teeth, going for the same bite on her collarbone that had put Beocroak on the back foot in Beerbet. On contact he was denied, repelled by a shock, teaching him she could charge her surface with this flesh-bottled lightning as well.

With one weapon injured and the others drained of electricity, Jeremiad launched herself backward into the lake. Once submerged she freed them from her grasp so they could recover. Others feeding on the floating corpse she’d tossed them stopped their feeding to see if they might have a turn.

“Daaht!”

“Captain, what do we do!?” one of the remaining Half-Biters sniveled, for which she was resented. Graychild remembered her never being a sniveler, until now, which would not breed confidence in the others. Part of him regretted it, using people as his weapons, for there was a tendency to fail at the most crucial moment, for the content of character to transmute from gold into lice.

“Stay out of the puddles!” he shouted just to appear knowledgeable. “Distract her for Xeams! Xeams, bring down the eye!” That was it then; it had gotten so bad he would risk the one god piece they’d managed to acquire. In the mist it would be nothing but the threat to crush them all, their foe included.

The reaperweed flipped his eye patch down, his crewmates prickling, on the lookout for Jeremiad or her trio of tendrils that seemed able to strike and fry from any curving direction. They all felt the eye form above them, but it wouldn’t arrive that swiftly, not if the speed was moderated to protect them all, as they now understood the destructive power of one that wasn’t. They were stepping in him.

“There she is!” cried Rouxgalosh as he spotted the slithering stilted creature’s silhouette, trying to get at Xeams from behind. He had just completed the task he was set to by freeing a bident from its net. He held it fearlessly, and he was rewarded by not being reduced to sausage meat.

He reared back and hurled the bident, his aim excellent from years of triggering trapped cobblestones with tossed rocks. It would’ve skewered Jeremiad in the gut if it hadn’t disappeared in a silvery flash halfway there, reappearing behind Rouxgalosh and striking him in the back instead. He fell over dead.

The sight convinced Xeams to hurry the eye along, and to use its presence aggressively, even if it caused discomfort and a few injuries. As Jeremiad’s eels stepped between his protectors, taking her straight over them, the upside down dome of its bottom broke through the mist and began to press on the lake of lights.

First to buckle were the posts of the Many-Spotted Hoard, slightest deviations in their posture quickly exaggerated as the eye pushed them into the water, its Goodly power altogether stronger than any of the comparatively minor enchantments they bore. Screams of caution were undercut by the squealing groaning wood.

Graychild wasted no breath on that, spending it all on an exhale as he threw himself flat against the island, knowing full well Xeams would risk suffocating some of the others but only subjecting his captain to discomfort. The sinking eye pressed against Jeremiad’s back, forcing her eels to carry her lower, lower, more like a wide-set spider every moment. But she was still coming.

“You think you’ve seen death!? Xeams snapped at her, getting ready to drop to his stomach so he could press all the further. Jeremiad was close enough to give her answer; her arm eel chose a puddle and submerged, once again using a crack to slip through, this time into another puddle next to Xeams’s foot.

His illusory cloak never disguised the position of his extremities, so she aimed for the ankle, wrapped the eel’s tail around it, and yanked his leg into the crevice. Finally the reaperweed was caught off guard, falling to his back and cracking his skull on the rock when his long neck bounced.

Once his smarting cheek landed on the island all he saw was Jeremiad scuttling closer, the eye still forcing her lower. It would get her, squish her before she got him, he thought as his vision blurred. The crack over his brain clouded his sensation, granting no indicating pain when the eye pressed against one of his own raised knees.

The pressure mounted extraordinarily fast given the creep of the eye, and there was a dislocation. Then there was pain. Xeams cried out with a rolling growl, like a wolf grabbed by the tail and swung around. Instinctively he lifted the eye, the last mistake he would ever make. With the decompressing speed of the perhaps mythic piranha-rat squeezing under a cabin door, Jeremiad was over him, and shortly an eel was inside him.

Down his throat it snaked, choking, the lesser concern when the shock came and cooked his insides, leaving a ring of scorched blisters where his lips used to be. Reaperweeds avoided death without fearing it, so there was no final lament, no mournful cry of the soul. There was only the rage in his uncovered eye, dead enough to be paralyzed but alive enough to convince that he might rise an hour later.

Jeremiad didn’t linger on it, though there were many enemy-lessons to learn in his expression. In it was also the eye of Hexaclete, returned to her estate with Xeams’s fate. As it vanished the mist pooled once more to replace it, a tide washing over all the dead just created. Several of the crew had been squeezed breathless by the eye against the rock, one eyeless. In fact but one person rose, using his magic sword as a crutch.

“What are you even trying to get!?” Roddery Graychild bellowed raw at the snaking figure coming his way.

“This is what I am unguided,” her electrified throat answered.

“Well,” he looked around at the remains of the Thumbscale, crimson and spent, puddled useless layabouts, “I’m recruiting.” The grabbler spoke by striking at him, which he still had the vigor to evade. Cutting the eels risked transferring electricity to himself; on her next attack he poked the back of Odebtte and lifted her as a shield.

Lash after lash, Jeremiad kept coming. Graychild stepped back, on a back, back, on a back, this one bearing a bident bent by the eye’s descent. Cleverly he drew it, compensated for its irregular shape, and hurled it at the grabbler. It vanished halfway as it had before, but so did Graychild, out of its path with a bow. It flew over his head and caught Jeremiad in the side, failing to penetrate far into her taut muscle. For a moment it was overcome with blue-white light and sparks, then it shot away and clattered to the rock, sizzled in a puddle.

The Half-Biter took another step back while he dreamed up his next attack, only to find his foot plunging into the lake. No more room. Then there was only one plan: use the only friend that had never failed him. Breakwater bit the nearest body and bonded. He pulled them into the water and balanced on their back. The raft was too small. More.

Jeremiad was nearly upon him again, so time only for one strike. The magic would linger for a few seconds without Breakwater, so he could stay afloat long enough to drive the blade’s tip into the island instead. Cracking more rock as it dug in, Breakwater succeeded in separating the upper disc of the island, momentarily making it a raft and pulling it, only enough to tilt.

The grabbler had no purchase on the slippery stone, tumbling and falling along with the slacking crew of the Thumbscale. As bodies rained on Graychild he redirected them with the tip of Breakwater, combining them with his raft. It was too late to wonder whether he had lifted the island disc too far and it would now turn to flatten him.

It fell back with a crashing splash as Jeremiad sprung away from it, arcing over Graychild. She struck down with one eel, which he both sidestepped and countered, his swing leaving a slice in a fin, not the more vulnerable flesh. The raft was loosening, forcing him to drive his sword back between two bodies to tighten it back up.

His foe had submerged once more, left him in the rainy mist. Perhaps she was fishing fresher weapons; he took the chance to catch other bodies drifting by and add them to his raft, his arena. The more there were the more stable it would be, the harder for her to disrupt. If only she would make the mistake of attacking it from underneath, trying to flip him or rip through an old friend. Then the magic of Breakwater would apply to her, glue her body underneath his deck of skin and bone until she drowned.

But she didn’t take the bait. Instead she rose out of the lake and lights nearby, only up to her waist, able to circle him effortlessly as the eels did her swimming for her. Pushing Breakwater turned the raft, enabling Graychild to keep her in his sights, but that also kept him from looking at the lake itself, which began to overflow from the druid’s relentless downpour. There was an old path between polished walls of the horde, leading into a rocky canal, only revealed as such during flooding. The lake pulled his raft to it.

“Yaah!” Graychild cried as he swung at Jeremiad. She bent back out of the way, circled for another approach. The bodies loosened. Once again Breakwater bit them, pulled them tight. “I’ve kept this crew together through worse!” And he had. Crossing the Half-Bite was worse. That was a world’s trait however. That was besting a mountain, or a river. This was an angry young woman, half-eaten by loss.

He deflected an eel, felt a shock slip through. Breakwater down. She lashed his back, his counter too late. Breakwater down. Her face was there, tipped down to his as if out of a watering can. A syllable escaped him before he bit his teeth, as she bashed his skull with hers. His grip on the sword slipped off. Bodies loosened, and his foot fell between two of them. Water climbed his knees.

Roddery Graychild lunged, pulling himself back to his upright sword, his reliable helm, and to Jeremiad, who was on the other side of it. She coiled an eel down its blade and spent all the electricity she wielded at once. Briefly he had a glimpse, as his eye fluids boiled and burst, of a simulacrum of the Goodly fields Beocroak had seen while carried by poisoned Hexaclete. As a Half-Biter, it was the best he could expect. While many would call this unfair, they should recall the halves of bobbing worlds that can breathe because the other half cannot. The circumstances of birth are as fair as the flip of any coin.

And in his death his crew did not come apart at the seams he had arranged, nor did he leave them. The raft of their bodies was carried out of the lake of lights and down its drainage canal, into parts unknown, its captain letting off steam like some of the eel-powered engines just being invented in the northernmost waters. His blackened form knelt at the helm-sword, both hands wrapped around its hilt, and he was ready to voyage as far as he could before the world eroded too many of his features.

Jeremiad rode the raft as well. She freed her three eels while they still had the strength to swim upstream and return to the lake they lit. When their power left her system fatigue washed over her, so she rolled backward, all along the raft, until she landed in a comfortable sitting position, resting her back on the warm corpse of Captain Roddery Graychild. Ashen flakes of his skin sprinkled onto her shoulders, where they remained now that she was out of the rainfall and the sky was clearing.

Tall rocks on either side of the canal already had an unfamiliar character to them, something of the north. As long as the way seemed right, she would let the raft carry her. A flex closed the tooth holes the eels had left in her scar cuffs. No doubt the white dots they would eventually leave would stand out against the backdrop of her less competent grabbling days.

Beocroak had molded her from someone who could barely make a slug into a glove to a wielder of lightning bolts sheathed in fanged fish. And in the north she knew there were new levels to attain, with no god to oversee, to tempt her into crying out for someone else to undo her ruinous decisions. Grabble those with white fur. Grabble those that reside in boiling hot springs. Grabble the false men, the upright apes of the Morningless Mountains.

In time a new god would come out of Norncanaan’s third land, out of the eastern waters, a cavalier cousin. At the end of that voyage, too storied to retell here, two would set foot on the shore opposite Welkmadat, what had been Hexaclete’s for so long.

Graychild had picked a competent expert to tell him these tales, as they had correctly named the cousins Bamperaisin Oxmy and Trampulty Dayne, the crumb-collector and the blood-haired. They had dueled each other for the right to lay claim, and had become lovers in its stalemate. In a show of respect to their fallen Goodly sister, they kept with her tradition of foregoing surnames, combing their firsts to create the continent’s new name: Oxmydayne. And so the name stands at the time of writing and cursing.

As does the name chosen by Jeremiad as she sat on the raft, watching the lines on her palm to see if the rivers changed course as her fate did around her. No surname was necessary for her either, not for a simple grabbler who made friends and allies with a closed fist. In a plain voice she told the world she was called

Eelbouquet.

The cavalier cousins would reclaim some of Hexaclete back into Goodly stocks of blood, but not all, scattered as it was. Not the eye, which was in Xeams, who stared at the canal bed directly under a resting Eelbouquet. Not the hand given to Beocroak. It could not form into an obvious object, as it had when the eye was ripped from Escaboulnté, thanks to the extent of its flattening, but it was still within Beocroak. It took an expert to extract.

Out of a bloody puddle that couldn’t have contained it, the entrance it always made, came a centipede-like creature, a lesser demon that hid from daylight in logs and graves alike, a messenger and courier for bargains made by witches and warbolocks in the course of their natury.

This one had been in the company of Beocroak before, servant to Gilgalunge, who had come to him heavy with child, bearing a green flame of passion. Her clicking demon bug still carried with it her umbilical cord. The item finally served its purpose when the demon stopped in the exact middle of the patch of compacted flesh and blood that had been Beocroak.

One of the cord’s receptive ends was placed flat against his mixture of grime, oils, and marrow. The demon recoiled as the other end whipped and danced, producing an airy sound: the flesh flute played by the demon of lineage. Songs such as those were the tongue of their bargains. Those who heard them would always receive at least one visit from their twin sibling the demon of sleep.

The glued cord stiffened, contorted in the middle of its dance, and from out of its free end grew a new form of Beocroak’s siphoned residue. It branched and spread pink membranes until it became a placental tree nearly the size of the man. Then pulses of pink bloody magic in its translucent boughs competed with the lake of lights.

A spell of transference. The hand of Hexaclete’s destination was a distant field of tall dry grass in a cool quiet valley, a week’s walk removed from the muds of Welkmadat. The grass obscured a witch-house, which were as flat compared to typical homes as Beocroak was to a typical man. Only the room to crawl on the belly was needed, as witches were accustomed to dealing with lowly and fallen things. Those who would persecute them saw only grass.

The witch Gilgalunge heard her child stir, creeping through the loam carpet she had carefully mixed for the rearing, all the best scents and only the eggs of the wisest snails. Entering the nursery, she opened the wicker door of the flattened crib and pulled out the covered tray on which the babe slept. Normally the darkness in the witch-house was complete, but there was a faint warm light emanating from one of the infant’s hands.

“So soon?” whispered the witch. She rubbed the back of the tiny hand affectionately, but also with intent, the way one kneads dough. “Yes little one,” she cooed as if she had heard a conversation between Beocroak and Eelbouquet that was days past, “they are not born. They are made.”

The enD