Famine

A folk tale of cyclical and reversing nature

In a little ramshackle thing that one could hardly call a dwelling there lived a figure, something dangling from the precipice of being, which sought to evade all living interest, and so it stayed out in the middle of a great fir forest, where the enormous trees shamed the sun with the shadows they cast and the light they hid. The figure was afflicted, but did not seek out the affliction when it first came. These things happen when we least expect them to.

The figure stayed there because the trees obscured the seers’ view, the veiny brooks caused men and beasts alike to stumble, and the brambles would snag deep into their prying hands and eyes. The frightened figure stayed there not because of its own affliction, but because it didn’t want its eyes to meet strangeness, and did not want to be brought back when it would soon be long gone.

Some days the affliction left it feeling so weak that it could not leave its shelter, and its only solace were the ever-rushing brooks which graciously turned its thoughts into static. Those days were only its forewarning for what was yet to come-for the inexperienced could only last so long in the woods before an ancient and pervading hunger conquered their thoughts.

And on nights when I ascended above all natural deterrents, when fog clouded all soulful consciousness, I could watch that shadowed figure lurch out of its crumbling abode, lantern in hand, the only weak light there below, the moon vanished and the stars hidden. But through my half-opened eyes, another light was cast onto the searching, rotten and pale face in the fog below, and I hated to see that figure for how it was. Despite its wretched face, it was so forlorn, so anxiously looking all about, first sharply that way and then freezing there on the other way. It did not suit the figure to look so distraught, I thought, and through my dreamlike gaze I continued to observe its strange habit.

It struggled through its home terrain, slipping on the brooks, snagged by the brambles as well as any unfamiliar intruder would have. I wondered if it was because of the affliction, and several times throughout any one of these nights I watched the lantern tumble down through a snarly hill, the figure feebly going after it. The repetition of these nights never seemed to give it any experience with the land, and by the end of the night, as the day began to grace the sky, the figure would be crawling and limping all at once, all the way back to its deteriorating home. But if I drew ever so slightly closer, I could see that its arms were desperately clutching a pile of small animal corpses, and it kept and held every one that it found, every one that had fallen to the land’s roughness, although they fell far more severely than the figure had.

When it finally made it through the door, which hung by just one creaking hinge, it heaved the creatures onto a table of damp and rotting wood, which I saw through the great light in my eyes. Then it pushed itself up so as to see the top of the table, and I saw the foam bubbling at its mouth as it shakily held one of the creatures, and was just about devour it when all of the corpses sizzled and dissolved into the wood. After this was the only time when the figure would make a sound, and it was barely audible, a pathetic little whimper, preceding a collapse into fetal position where it would lie there for many days and nights, sometimes until the next new moon, when this strange cycle would begin again. I watched this happen countless times over and over, trying to make sense of the affliction and the hold it had upon the figure. But like all else, I had to leave before anything changed in the ramshackle dwelling out there in the deep fir forest, and I left the melancholic and agonized figure to be consumed, either by its own decay or the progressing, unceasing hunger cycle of the affliction, coiled deep within its heart. Whichever it was that would turn it unto death (if such a thing happens in those woods as it does here) I could not be certain.

But I heard in the rushing brooks, in the heavy, pressing fog, and in the rustling of the bramble-bush and fir branches, that one day, all afflicted will find rest in the becoming of scattered soil, of nervous regrowth that takes the familiar form of lightning above, veins within, and roots below.

Transcriber’s Note: I comprised an orally told Necrocian folk tale warning of the wandering Reanimated, or afflicted, that haunt the endless, sprawling woods of Druxy, left behind and forsaken by the most unsanctimonious of practioners who forgo all instructed rites and respects of their hereditary magicks. Who the narrator is or becomes, the all-seeing being from above, I am not certain. It may very well be some preliminary being of Necrocian legend, for in the early days it was said that slme developed a higher state of existence above the rest, in both body and soul, so that they could indeed rise above the still-developing existences of their kin.