55th of Spring, 512 AV
Swells of insects lazed in the basin’s flinty folds, chittering their manifold disregard. Tusked scarabs jostled with droning, chitinous wasps, nests swarming over the spindly pulses of proboscis.
Ulric glared at those ruby casings, furling the tip of his tongue over chapped lips. Shyke, he grunted, and shambled further through the forest. The fissures yielded, eroded of their vegetative crusts. The pines towered before him, draped by umber needles. Then receded, leaving only clusters of locust buds, and the stragglers with their cakes of thick, sticky resin. Though he trudged with a deft regard for the rough defiles, he found himself lurching. The junipers crowded him, corroded his carriage.
Harshly, he jerked away his heavy crossbow, all chafing lumber, parched bone, and dented, scaled metal. Kept trudging, scrambling down the knoll where clots of loam plumed from the juncture of boulders. Below, the forest undulated, quilting in the sodden joists of sycamores. The priest forced through their drying bristle, finding himself under the rafters of a swamp.
Feldspar ribs dredged from the marshy blanket. Tufts of walnut grass lofted from stagnant puddles, greasy with algae clumps. The muck was fetid. Turbid with decaying leaves, hung over by hammocks of subjugating creepers and ropy, flaking vines. Knobs of fungi cozened to twisty roots, wisps inlaying the pasty-bulbed tubers. They disgorged from baskets of skunk cabbage, cinched by ferns dyed ruddy. Trickles ruptured the gravel in tiny gulches, tepidly dispersing under the braided saplings. Their limbs protruded, kinked and plunging to a feral drapery. Red thorns, black lichen mazed the creases, mottled by an offending pewter. Their leaf funnels rustle, diffusing to broad trunks fuzzed by moss.
Every so often, he discerned the bulge of petrified boulders. There was a crumpling of hills lolling around the muddy fringes, and this tapering gorge made him feel as if he were in a kind of kettle.
Ulric cuffed the ridge of his cheek, bursting an offending midge. The lilac guts streaked his skin, drying in the tangle of his beard. They limned his sweaty shuffle, gimlets slitting under the buzz. Grudgingly, he lifted a heel, forced it over a rocky knuckle. There was a squelch, a scrape. The slimy voiding of a grub. Dirtying his lungs with a reluctant whiff, he skipped over the length of a fallen trunk, squishy from the half-drowned blitz of weevily termites. Hastily skewing, he shunted to another patchy atoll in the quagmire of jumbled archipelago, heel sinking deeper, and deeper. He ripped it loose, and grimly forced it over snarled nettles.
Hazily, he plucked out the croaking, tandem refrain of bullfrogs, lowered his gimlets to make out the skitter of beetles over the slimy skim. They vaulted over kayaks of floating twigs, shirked from ripples. Tacking his shamble was a blistering, glacial fatalism that he couldn’t shake. The rusty slither impeded, but he didn’t relent. That clamping of molars was his only grudge, his complaint of this paludal tyranny. Squelch, and his heels canted meagerly into the muck, buoyed by luxuriant tufts. Hurling over a gravelly ledge, he found a huddle of bullfrogs, their blotch-riddled chests puffing in a pulsing, croaking refrain. The patina of rock began to swell, forming the choked spine of a creek.
Ulric was by the worst of it then, though he kept his ears peeled for noises. They assailed him with a discordant buzzing, flanged mandibles scuffing over husks of discarded chitin, filled carapaces. There was the warble of a thrush, mixed with the yammer of jackdaws. They blended into a kind of frayed mantra, and he despised them for it.
Presently, Ulric yanked at the thongs of his padded jack, the abrading girdle that caged those dented, jet-pocked wedges of steel over his shoulders. This drifting was not unlike him. There’d always be walking, but he’d fled from the suffocating, trundling fetters of what he’d gleamed. Though he flushed at the brush of tawny skin, every muffled grimace was a dirge for what he’d mislaid. The vengeful rattle had stilled in the pit of his chest, and now, confined by a waning zeal, he grasped at straws. Xhyvas, bide with me, he grunted, but felt only the heavy yoke of disregard.
But for now, it’d suffice.
Hulled wheat, pulverized on the wheel, Ulric reflected as he tilted over a slimy protrusion. Husked, and shelled, and pounded until it was grist. That’s how he wrung me out, for him and never for my sake. The dismantling of the incarnate, winged tusks a deceit shackled to my chest. If I usurped him, then I did him no injustice. I tasked with a grim fervor, but though the others doubted, and forgot his name, he proved them wrong.
Ulric swaggered through lichen carpets, rubble creviced by thick layers of poison sumac. They’d raise angry, itching bumps, but there wasn’t any avoiding that. The mangonel of his jaw wound closer. I may’ve raised him a temple, but I won’t kneel. I won’t be subjugated, not by him, not by any of the gods. I’ll rupture their homilies, and shatter their homage. That’d rightly jangle the scales, and jolt the profane from their pedestals. The crowkind may cackle in the barrens, but it’s for me, not for him.
But kneel he did, a slow growl rumbled from his chest. The stock of his burden swiveled to crutch upon a clavicle, and he extended his fingers, inscribing them over a scuffled print in the soggy gravel. There’d be no mistaking its derivation, nor its import. This was the heel of a man.
Finally, the twisting of a bitter grin.
