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357. Crawling
🕑 Added 2025-04-08 14:00:07 +0000 UTCIke jumped into the air with a shout, startled. Mag fluttered up, scared into flight, and Wisp jumped backward, hopping onto one of the tiny stones and perching atop it with her feet at improbable angles… for a human, anyways. Wisp stared around. “What? What happened?”
“I… something grabbed me!” Ike said, thoroughly spooked. He jogged a few steps from where he’d felt the sensation, picking his feet up high into the air. There was no sign of anything where he’d been, no being on the earth or hiding behind the stones.
“Did the fog touch your ankle?” Wisp asked, shaking her head at his foolishness.
“No! It’s not that. Something touched me!”
“Uh huh. Someone got spooked.”
Ike gestured at the ground. “I did not get spooked! I got grabbed. There’s something down there!”
“Yeah. Rotting dead bodies that are useless to everyone,” Wisp said, rolling her eyes at him.
“Rotting dead bodies with lingering spirits full of vengeance, that want us dead, more like,” Ike muttered, remembering some of the spooky tales he’d heard late at night as a child, sneaking out to listen to the teenagers trying to scare one another around the fire.
“That’s not a thing. If that was a thing, I’d be dead.”
Ike squinted at her.
“Because I’m full of dead bodies,” Wisp said, patting her belly proudly.
He considered thoughtfully. “You know, no one ever suggested that ghosts haunt the people who eat them.”
“That’s because they already got eaten by those people. The ghosts know better than to try again at a losing—eek!” Wisp jumped into the air and nimbly landed on a different stone, crouched on hands and feet this time. She shook the offended foot, making a sour face.
Ike pointed at her. “You felt it. That’s what I felt! I told you, it’s real!”
“It’s not real,” Wisp grumbled, but there was less conviction in her voice this time. She glanced back at the stone she’d been perched on and narrowed her eyes, only to wrinkle her nose in dissatisfaction.
“You don’t see anything?”
“No. Because it isn’t real.”
“You sure about that?”
Silence. Wisp scowled at the floor, her eyes narrowed. “You touched me.”
“I did not. I was way over here. How could I touch your ankle?”
She jolted upright and pointed at him. “Ha! How’d you know it was my ankle if you didn’t do it?”
“Because it touched me there, too—” Ike jumped to the side as something cold scraped at his ankle again.
Wisp hopped to another stone again. She kicked at the ground. “Hey, come on. Whatever you are, come out!”
“Wisp! These are graves!”
“They’re attacking us. They could be more gravey.” She kicked the ground again, harder this time. A blast of earth came up from under her heel, and a pale, soft something, almost like an albino worm, writhed underneath.
“What the…”
Before Ike could finish his sentence, that soft, writhing something whipped around. An infant’s head, distorted slightly by the earth and its softness, stared up at him with glowing silver eyes that reflected the low light of the sun like a deer staring at a torch.
“Holy fuck, eat it!” Wisp shouted, slamming her foot down again into the thing’s face.
The infant’s face distorted, but it took no visible damage. It reached up, its pudgy arms clawing for heaven, and sat up after them. It didn’t move quite right. Clearly it remembered that it had had bones, and limbs, but its bones looked soft, almost cartilaginous. As if they’d half rotted, but not all the way. Like soup bones at the bottom of the pot after they’d been boiling for hours, floppy and saggy. It spun as it sat up, swirling around in the hole like a worm climbing free. Its soft hands clawed at the earth, and its stubby soft legs kicked free of the ground.
“It’s like a grub,” Wisp said. She’d hopped to a slightly further away stone, but now that her initial shock was over, the usual hungry gleam was back in her eyes.
Ike looked at the baby, tilting his head. He could see it. Soft, wiggly and white, just like a grub. That didn’t invoke any hunger in him—sure, he’d eaten grubs, but never as a first choice—but Wisp was a spider. Even if she wasn’t an all-hungering beast, she’d still find grubs delicious.
As the first infant climbed free, a second pale mass unfolded from beneath it. Silver eyes shining like the moon, a second infant followed it out.
“Exactly like grubs,” Ike agreed, drawing his sword. It trembled, gnawing at his hands, which he automatically turned steel to hold the sword without harming himself. He wasn’t hungry for grubs, but like his arachnid friend, his sword was hungry for anything.
“Grubs?” Mag swooped down from the sky, taking interest.
Ike chuckled to himself. He’d brought his grub-eating best to this grub-killing battle. “Yeah. Grubs. All you can eat.”
“Nice!”
Grub-baby after grub-baby crawled out of the hole Wisp had cut in the earth. Wisp pounced on them, tearing them to shreds. Ike jumped forward, carving into them with the Hungry Sword. Mag flew laps, dashing down and snatching up grubs to tear them apart with his claws and beak.
With every grub they killed, ten more crawled out of the hole. It was an unending surge of grub-babies, hundreds upon hundreds of them.
One for every gravestone, Ike realized, lifting his head to look out across the field. Then… were these all infant graves? The graves of those who were immediately unsuited to Brightbriar’s services, whether they didn’t look right, had no proclivity for magic, had the wrong personality or wrong voice… he didn’t know how far Brightbriar’s perfection extended, but he knew that these were surely the victims of his endless search.
“I really hope these aren’t all biological kids,” Ike muttered to himself. That was way more sex than he wanted to imagine Brightbriar having. Then again, he was a puppetmaster; who was to say that these children weren’t all puppets, at some point?
Ike smashed another grub-baby into red gelatin and spun his sword. “Come on! Let’s see a real fight, huh?”
The earth trembled. Something unseen roared.
Wisp sighed. “You just had to say it, huh.”
