Brother Cassowar walked along the Dream Road, though little told it apart from the rest of the hellscape around him. For years settlers had sought to connect the cities of Voyeur and Purity together by a safe highway, but the effort had been long since abandoned.
He had been taught all about the Dream Road during his time at the Schola Divinitus. It had been a lesson about the corruption of their environment, as well as the ego and fallibility of man. Teams of workers had set out, cutting back the skycaps in a wide lane, then took fire to the mold and rotting puss that coated the pale skin of the god below. Nothing could hold back the spread of decay though and in the end the road was once again consumed.
Despite this, it hadn’t been an entirely fruitless venture. While it was no pristine highway, the road still carved a path between cities that was clear of larger obstacles, and gave a line of sight between the traveller and the oppressive gloom of the skycap forests to either side. If a group of trained guards were present, it could almost be considered a safe journey.
Brother Cassowar didn’t fear the journey. He had travelled the wilds often since his initial trials back in the schola. Twenty children around the age of eight had taken that journey. Only six returned. The harsh landscape was a home to Cassowar. He feared nothing out here. He feared nothing at all for all the fear had been stripped from him and purged.
It was his given crusade to find and return stolen church property from somewhere within the city of Voyeur. On the surface it was a simple task, but it had been given to him directly by High Father Leonardo himself. Such an honour was intoxicating. Cassowar was eager to please the High Father, just as all Icuri were.
Cassowar stopped and studied the roadside. Someone had been attacked here. His sensitive nose picked up an undercurrent of scents below the ever-present pang of decay. Those of blood and urine. It was impossible to see traces of any liquid through the fetid slime and mold but he knew they were there. Faint lines in the grime suggested something had been dragged away from the road to the right.
It was no business of his to investigate. His objective was clear. This didn’t stop him from following the trail into the murky gloom of the forest’s edge. He was naturally inquisitive and liked to know things. He found it helped to keep people alive longer. The air was suffocating here. Spores clung to the stagnant air and the ground sucked at his feet, the colourful growths seeking to claim anything that came into contact with them. Cassowar paid them little mind.
Sure enough, a short way into the skycaps lay the remains of a body. Beasts had picked most of it clean and fungi was already spreading across the strips of flesh that were left. It had only been there an hour or two. Cassowar had seen the rot grow across sleeping men, softly and slowly, until they awoke unable to move. Those screams had been haunting.
Cassowar studied the scene from a distance. Stalks and tendrils of fungi rose up around the body towards the ceiling of mushroom caps. In the inky haze it was difficult to tell species of fungi apart, or more worryingly, the fleshy legs of giant predators. His enhanced eyes picked out shapes where others would only see darkness. A creature with too many legs towered above the corpse. He could make out a spiky body at the centre of a dozen spindly legs.
Stiltstalker. Adult male. No injuries. The analysis flashed through Cassowar’s mind in an instant. The creature hadn’t been the thing that had killed the man. No doubt it planned to use the fresh body as bait. Stiltstalkers hunted in plain sight by standing still, their legs blending with the stalks and tendrils of the litany of fungi, while the hardened carapace of the body waits patiently above to strike down on unsuspecting prey.
The body was none of his concern, and neither was the stiltstalker. Cassowar was curious though. Few travelled the roads alone. A broken spear lay on the ground nearby but a single spear wasn’t enough out here. That meant the man had either been a desperate nobody, or had a well charged soul cell that he expected would have saved him. The minimal risk to find out which it had been was worth the potential reward.
Cassowar took a step forward. The faint squelch of his boot pressing into the spongy earth was the only sound. Noise, just like everything else, was consumed by the damp rot. He carried no weapons. He didn’t need to. Cassowar was a weapon, just as he had been trained to be from his earliest memories.
He approached the closest leg of the creature, careful to stay outside of the ring of limbs, and placed a hand on the cold surface. From touch alone it was near impossible to feel any difference from an unassuming fungus, but Cassowar felt the faintest ripple of anticipation flutter through the stalk.
Life and death was mostly a matter of mathematics. His earliest instructor had taught him to see everything as a series of equations. Knowledge is power. Though Cassowar knew that knowledge without practice and physical alteration still meant little in the grand scheme of things.
Often people would turn to fire to combat dangers like a stiltstalker. It worked well enough if the flames could consume the flesh fast enough, but the fungus coated carapace was cold and damp, difficult to set alight. It took a surprising amount of energy to do more than startle such a creature. Cassowar knew better. He drew upon his soul cell to manipulate the invisible particles beneath his palm that made up the fabric of the universe. With the immediacy of a whip-crack he commanded the particles to freeze.
Ice crackled around his fingers, spreading up and through the stalk in instantly. The stiltstalker howled its thin, piping wail of panic as it tried to pull away. Cassowar didn’t wait for the ice to encase the creature. All of the energy that he had stolen from the heat around him he channelled through his body and into his other arm. He struck out with the force of a hammerblow, shattering the beast’s leg in a rain of ice shards and ichor. It toppled with an agonised screech. Cassowar stepped past thrashing limbs and drew a small knife from his belt. He drove it into the body, piercing its tube-shaped heart. The thrashing stopped.
The whole fight had lasted a handful of seconds. Cossowar wiped down his knife as he approached the man’s body. He knelt beside the corpse and checked the shredded clothing. There was a torn envelope soaked in blood, and a small blue disc. He pocketed the envelope then took a closer look at the disk. It was a soul-cell, damaged but still usable, filled with currency. The unfortunate man had clearly been taken by surprise before he could utilise the power he had possessed within the disc.
Cassowar took out an identical blue disc from his own pocket then drew lines across both. There was a glow of light as the contents of the man’s soul-cell were transferred to his own. He dropped the spent cell and returned his own to his pocket.
A damp squelch sounded behind him. He turned and peered into the darkness. A new figure was stalking through the undergrowth towards him. Cassowar stood but paid it no mind as he opened the envelope. He already knew who the figure was.
“Brother Cassowar, you seem distracted from our task.”
“Brother Krann,” he greeted in a respectful tone. Cassowar didn’t like the man, but brotherhood transcended such petty issues as being a sociopathic arse.
Krann was a large man in both height and muscle mass. Cassowar was still young but he was by no means small yet next to the older Icuri he felt like a child. He wore the same simple brown robe as Cassowar but that was where their similarities ended. Cassowar couldn’t feel fear but he knew that if he could then all of his senses would be screaming at him to run every time he was in the man’s presence. Perhaps others felt the same around Cassowar himself.
“Such scenes are always worth the time to check. Lone messengers tend to offer excellent blackmail opportunities, or political information,” Cassowar explained even though he knew he may as well be speaking to a particularly ugly rock.
“Leave such mundane tasks to those deserving of them. We were given gifts and a higher calling. Come. My spectors have a sighting. They report an informant found the white haired witch. She left him screaming for days straight. The spectors are closing in on her location as we waste time here.”
Cassowar nodded. “Understood. Let’s go. Father Leonardo’s relic clearly won’t return itself.”
Matthew Roys 