The Blunt Reaper

Mara looked around the inn again. The arguments, meals, and complaints no longer seemed like imitations of life. They were acts of preservation. Every bowl carried across the room, every room rented to a body that did not require sleep, and every coat worn by someone who could not freeze represented another refusal to surrender something human.

"So you eat to keep yourselves sane," she said.

"Some of us have had mixed results."

The ferryman came downstairs long enough to take a cup from the innkeeper before returning to his room. Mara watched him go. "Does he sleep with that pole?"

"I’ve never cared enough to investigate."

"You’ve travelled with him before."

"Unfortunately."

"How many times?"

"Enough to know that he charges too much, explains too little, and always smells like the bottom of his boat."

From the stairs, the ferryman called, "I can hear you."

Rook raised his voice. "Then wash your boat."

The old man continued upstairs without answering.

By the time Mara finished eating, exhaustion had settled over her so completely that standing required deliberate effort. The meal had not physically nourished her, but it had convinced enough of her mind that the danger was over. Every day spent running, fighting, and sleeping lightly seemed to descend upon her at once.

She followed Rook upstairs and stopped before her room. His door stood only a few paces away.

"If someone comes to alert us about the current, wake me immediately," he said.

"What if they wake you first?"

"Then I’ll wake you."

"What if something attacks?"

"Shout."

"I did that on the boat, and you nearly crushed my face."

"That was different."

"How?"

"There was real danger then."

Mara opened her door. "Good night, Rook."

"Don’t try and use the fragment here. Nothing good will come from seeing such horrors."

Her hand paused near the inside of her coat, and Rook’s eyes followed the movement.

"I wasn’t planning to touch it."

"Good."

Mara closed the door before he could continue.

The room was small but clean. A narrow bed occupied one wall, with a wooden chair beside it and a washbasin beneath the window. Someone had placed a blue lantern upon the sill. Its flame cast a soft glow across the stone without producing smoke or heat.

Mara secured the lock and remained there with her hand resting upon it. Nothing happened. No footsteps hurried toward the room, no hooked limbs scraped across the outer wall, and Voss did not emerge from behind the curtain with a knife. Rook did not order her to climb inside the coffin because something was approaching.

She was alone.

The realization felt so unfamiliar that she checked beneath the bed, but only dust waited there.

Mara removed her coat and hung it over the chair. Her single boot followed, since she had yet to replace the one she had lost. She sat upon the edge of the bed and pressed one hand into the mattress. It was old enough for the stuffing to have gathered into uneven lumps, but the blanket smelled clean.

She intended to lie down for only a moment.

Then the memory fragment shifted inside her coat. The sound was faint, little more than glass touching wood as the fragment settled deeper into the pocket.

Mara looked toward it.

Rook had warned her against touching the memory without knowing how to separate what it contained. Voss had tried extracting information from it, and the Fourth Rank had reacted violently when it realized the fragment was being taken. Whatever memories remained inside had belonged to the creature or the souls it had consumed.

One of them might explain why it recognized Rook.

Mara told herself she would only look.

She retrieved the fragment from her coat and carried it to the bed. It fit snugly within her palm, dark and faintly translucent, with no consistent shape. Its surface possessed smooth curves in some places and fractured edges in others. Whenever she turned it toward the lantern, distorted shapes moved deep inside it.

Most resembled shadows seen through dirty glass. One briefly looked like a hand, while another opened into something too wide to be an eye.

Mara lay back against the pillow and held the fragment above her. The lantern’s blue light passed through its thinner edges, revealing dark strands suspended within it like smoke trapped in ice.

Nothing happened.

She adjusted her grip and tried to remember what she had done before. There had been no ritual, spoken phrase, or visible use of an ability. Mara closed her eyes and immediately felt ridiculous.

Then something scratched across the stone beneath her bed.

Her eyes opened to darkness.

Mara tried to sit up, but her body would not respond. She was lying beneath something heavy, pressed against cold ground with one arm trapped beneath her chest. Broken pieces of wood surrounded her. Through the narrow space ahead, she could see the wheel of a collapsed cart and a strip of ruined street beyond it.

Something moved outside.

A sword-like limb descended beside the wheel, its point scraping slowly across the stones as it searched for vibrations. Mara held her breath, and the limb stopped.

A second sharp point entered from the other side, followed by a third. They surrounded the cart without touching it, probing the street while something walked closer.

She knew it had heard her.

The certainty did not arrive as a thought. It existed inside her bones, absolute and suffocating.

The cart lifted, and Mara screamed.

Darkness shattered. A field replaced it, lanterns burning across broken ground while a thin creature rushed toward her with both arms shaped like blades. Mara raised a weapon she did not recognize. Her hands were larger than they should have been, scarred and covered in someone else’s blood.

The creature disappeared.

Pain split her face from forehead to jaw, and the world tilted apart. Before either half struck the ground, Mara was running through tall grass.

Something pursued her.

She could not see it, but each impact shook the ground beneath her feet. Her lungs burned even though souls did not need breath. When she looked back, she saw only darkness moving between the stalks.

A vertical mouth opened ahead, and long, sword-like appendages pierced her from behind.

The memory changed before she could die. She was pushing against teeth now, but her strength failed, and the teeth entered her skull.

Another death crashed into the first before she could feel them meet.

Mara looked down and saw that her body had already been opened. A blade protruded from beneath her ribs. The lower half of her torso hung several feet away, connected by pale strands that stretched and snapped as the creature lifted her. She understood that she should have felt pain, but terror had consumed everything else.

The owl-like eyes above her widened with fascination.

The blade moved, and she returned in the dark.

There was no Beacon nearby and no familiar face waiting beside her. She stood within the ruins of a place she had never seen and reached desperately for a name that should have meant everything.

Nothing came.

Someone had been waiting for her before she died. A man, a woman, or perhaps a friend. The shape of their importance remained, but the person had vanished.

Mara tried to remember, and the effort opened another memory.

She died beneath hooked limbs. She died beneath a bladed arm. She died running, hiding, begging, and fighting. She felt jaws close around a throat that was not hers and watched unfamiliar hands attempt to hold in organs that no longer belonged inside the body.

A Reaper drove a spear into the Fourth Rank’s chest, but the creature seized him by the head. For one instant, he saw the weapon break between its ribs. Then his neck turned farther than it should.

Another soul returned without remembering why she had been afraid. Another never returned within the fragment at all.

The deaths became faster.

Mara no longer escaped one before the next began. Pain remained even when the surroundings changed. She tried to release the fragment, but she no longer possessed hands. She tried to wake, but she could not remember what waking meant.

Then the darkness vanished.

White surrounded her.

It was too bright to be the Underworld and too cold to be daylight. The light had no visible source. It reflected from smooth surfaces and a pane of glass somewhere beyond the limits of her vision.

There was no grass, no broken street, and no Abomination.

Something began to whir.

The sound was low at first, almost gentle. A vibration travelled through an arm that felt like hers. A clear tube trembled against the skin, though she could not turn her head far enough to see where it led.

Indistinct figures moved beyond the glass. Their bodies appeared as pale shapes interrupted by darker outlines, and one leaned closer to the pane.

Something inside the unseen machine began turning faster. The tube against her arm shuddered. Cold travelled beneath the skin, followed by pressure so deep that it felt as though something had reached through the flesh and closed around the bone.

Then came the pain.

It consumed the white room, and Mara screamed.