Breaker

The body of the young man lay in a twisted heap. Every angle seemed wrong; fingers pointed at odd angles, legs bent mid-shin, arms bent backward from the elbows. The head lay at a horizontal angle, touching the shoulder. The brackish bog water matted his hair with green slime. He’d been found where all the others had been found: just outside the city wall, dropped in what seemed like a casual disregard right by the gate.

The builder squinted into the gnarled trees of the bog that surrounded the village, scanning for any clues as to who—or what—had done this.

“Builder, this is the fourth person this season,” said the mender. “We can’t keep going like this.”

“What do we know about the victim?” asked the builder.

The mender pressed her two fingers against the dead man’s skin and then released, watching how long the spot retained its indention. “His humor balance suggests he has been dead for less than a day. He was a page, taking a message of mine to a fellow mender in our network.”

“Does the breaker always strike pages? Is it some kind of … subterfuge? A rival tribe trying to undermine our communications with our allies?” The builder crossed his large, muscular arms over his chest.

The mender scratched at the tight black bun she’d tied her hair into. “I don’t know. It has been pages, traders, farmers, hunters. It seems anyone who travels the bog is at risk.”

The builder sighed. “Please don’t move the body. I need to inform the constable so he can investigate and write up a report—”

“You know what he’ll say,” the mender grumbled. “That his jurisdiction is within the city walls and this crime took place in the bog—”

“I recognize that,” the builder said evenly. “But we must keep a record of these outcomes. How else will we defeat this … whatever this is. When you look at the injuries, Mender, what manner of creature is doing this?”

The mender stared into the dense, cloying shadows of the bog. Trees with flinty bark stood on thick roots that drank from the poisonous, filthy water, somehow filtering it into something it could use. Opportunistic vines wrapped themselves around the trees, their thin phalanges drilling into the bark, trying to suck them dry of the sustenance they’d taken from the bog. Insects the size of a man’s fist covered in obsidian eyes fed on the ropey flesh of the vines, while flat-faced fish disguised as floating algae shot caustic stomach acid at the bugs from their gullets, catching them in their mouths when they fell to the water.

“Well?” the builder asked impatiently. “What do you think? Is this the work of a man or a monster?”

“Both,” the mender whispered.

#

The builder and the mender walked down the main street in the village, their boots clicking on cobblestones the builder had put in place himself. Villagers stood outside of their one-room shacks, watching as they passed, their postures taut with anxiety. A mother clutched a dirty set of twin toddlers to her dress with one hand and raised a flickering torch with the other. The builder met her gaze, not fearful of her fear. He accepted it, neither dismissing it nor indulging it with his own eyes. The tailor, half his house serving as his shop, the other as his domicile, stood, tapping his foot nervously. When he saw the builder and the mender, he strode up to them. Nervous energy animated his body as he approached.

“What happened? Was it the page? What are you going to do about this? We can’t keep having this happen! Is it the breaker again? Wha—” the tailor’s agitated hands stayed in constant motion as he fired off his questions.

“Well, we aren’t yet sure—” the mender began, trying to placate him.

The builder raised his hand to the mender for silence. “Tailor, please tell everyone in town to meet in the temple sanctuary in half a tale’s time and we will answer questions to the best of our ability. Please send the scholar to us right away so we can brief him on the situation.”

The tailor’s head bobbed vigorously. “Yes. Yes, yes.”

The tailor began shouting, his shrill voice echoing in the night air.

The mender smiled thankfully and the builder nodded. They headed to the temple, preparing to face the frightened townsfolk.

The builder, scholar, and mender sat at a large desk in front of the sanctuary. The constable stood next to the table, glowering at the townsfolk sitting in the pews.

“Something must be done, Builder! You are the leader of this town, and your primary responsibility is to keep us safe! Surely between the mind of the scholar, the skill of the mender, and the strength of the builder our leadership can figure out how to stop this … breaker thing!” the town crier intoned to a smattering of claps and murmured agreement.

“Hey! We’ll have an orderly meeting, Crier, or I’ll escort you out!” the constable barked.

“Yes, Crier. We understand the concerns—” began the scholar.

The barrister stood up from the front pew. “Frankly, this is an unacceptable dereliction of leadership which I think necessitates legal action—”

The builder stared at him without blinking, keeping his face carefully neutral, neither frowning nor smiling, simply resting the power of his gaze on him.

“Er, well. That is to say—” The barrister cleared his throat. “Well, we need to know what this ‘breaker’ is. Have you managed to find that out?”

The builder placed the palms of his hands on the heavy wooden desk. Even seated, he cut a towering figure, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, and a head taller than anyone else in town. “No. Our research continues.”

“We have yet to establish who or what ‘the breaker’ is, and honestly, we may be better served to refrain from calling it that,” said the scholar. “We don’t want to give this … thing mythical connotations. People are frightened enough as it is. It may be as simple as a bog bear—”

One of the bog fisherman rose from the pew. “Come off it now! I have seen bog bears kill a deer and they don’t break all their bones; they eat the flesh and leave the bones! Except, I guess for the ribs and all, because, well, I think they like them livers the most and they eat that right up—”

A woman moaned and began fanning herself.

“Enough! Yes, I understand. What we are seeing from this … thing is different from any creature’s behavior we have ever observed—” the scholar said, running his hand through his gray hair.

“It ain’t no creature,” said the tanner, seated by himself, crouched in the darkness of the last pew. “It’s a man. A man intent on destroying our town and all the towns that make up our network.”

The woman moaned again.

The builder stood, leaning forward toward the townsfolk in the pews, his palms pressing against the table as he slowly scanned the room. He met the eyes of nearly everyone who had their head raised. As he did so, the talking died away, and there was silence.

“I don’t know what this ‘breaker’ is. But I care about this town very much. And I care about the network of towns that share our values, our culture, our ideals. We will not allow this thing, be it monster or man, to destroy our community. Not here in our town or in the network. I will be venturing into the bog to hunt this thing. The scholar and the mender will be accompanying me. We will deal with this threat together.” The builder’s voice boomed, calm but firm, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. There was a spattering of applause and a number of nodding heads in the pews.

“Are there any further questions?” he asked.

“I thinks you can beat him real good!” said a little girl in the front row, and the tension in the room broke as people chuckled.

After everyone started filing out, the constable approached the builder. He hooked his thumbs in his overalls as he spoke. “Now, I know you all are probably expecting me to go with you, but I’d like to remind you my jurisdiction only extends to—”

The mender and scholar exchanged glances, and the builder resisted smiling. “No constable, I think it’s best you stay here. Somebody has to keep the peace while we are gone.”

The constable nodded sagely. “Right, right. Crucial job, keeping things orderly around here,” he mumbled to himself.

The three leaders then gathered their respective supplies: the scholar brought his neatly rolled maps, a leather-bound tome of knowledge stretching across every subject from ecology to engineering, and quills and parchment for his fastidious note-taking; the mender carried her needles, stitching, ointments, tinctures, splints, boring device, and knife; and the builder brought his hand ax, shield, helm, leather armor, and bracers. They all carried provisions, waterskins, and torches, and wore the leather bog boots that stretched all the way above the knee, the tough skin waterproofed with the waxy conglomerate paste made of vine sap, tree bark, and swamp python skin.

The townsfolk saw them off, their tired and frightened faces glowing in the torchlight. They hadn’t planned to set off in the middle of the night, but waiting until morning seemed too risky if they were going to try to follow the trail of the breaker.

As the wooden gate cranked closed behind them, the builder took stock of the bog. The mender knelt down to where the body had been found. The scholar stroked his white beard as he murmured, looking over one of his maps.

“I do see a trail where the body was dragged,” said the mender gently. “The mud is indented there. See where the reeds are broken? The breaker did not carry the body. It dragged the page.”

The scholar jotted a note. “That says ‘creature’ to me, not ‘man.’ Let’s follow the trail. If it is nocturnal, it may be out hunting, but if it is sleeping, it may possess some kind of nest or burrow—”

The builder began walking, following the mender as she tracked the path. “Don’t know about that, Scholar. Every bone was broken, but there weren’t claw marks, rips, or bites. I can’t imagine a creature breaking every bone without so much as a single sign of predation.”

The scholar nodded, making a note.

The squishing of their boots against the damp ground joined the chorus of croaks, hisses, and burps from the bog and its denizens. Their torches cast warm orange light against the intense darkness of the bog. Periodically, the mender would stop to examine the drag trail, veering slightly left or right while the scholar would consult the map. The builder watched the bog. He scanned the trees, examined the ground, and touched the vines. What was the breaker? How did it move? Where did it reside? It had to be large if it could so easily break a grown person’s bones. Or maybe it had tools? Weapons?

As they made their way deeper into the bog, the mud gave way to shallow, reedy, ankle-deep water. The builder periodically cut away dangling vines with his ax, the humidity causing him to sweat under his helmet. The mender nervously fiddled with the tools at her belt, seeming to find it harder to track the trail in the shallow water.

The scholar spat into the bog. “Builder, this is a fool’s errand! If this creature dragged this poor page through the deeper parts of the bog, we will have no way of knowing which direction to go.”

The mender stood at the base of a large tree, its gnarled roots sticking out in a spidery expanse. Her shoulders sagged. “I feel I’ve lost the trail.”

The builder leaned down to examine something that reflected the tiniest hint of torchlight. He held his torch close and scraped the edge of his hand ax against the shiny substance on the root. “Mender, take a look at this.”

The mender looked at the slightly reflective substance on the ax. She quickly chattered to herself as she took out a small vial. She tapped out one drop onto the substance, and it bubbled and hissed. “Yes! Yes, this is from a living thing. It is bile—one of the humors.”

“Is it from the page?” asked the scholar as he rolled the quill tip in his fingers.

“Yes. I mean no. I mean yes and no,” the mender said as she dropped another substance on the ax and watched steam rise.

The builder stood in silence, waiting for her to explain.

“Well,” the mender said, “human blood is present, that I can tell from the reaction of the bat venom. But there is also bile present—yellow bile, one of the essential humors, but it’s not, well—it reacted differently than a human’s would—”

“Aha! So it is a beast!” said the scholar triumphantly.

The mender looked confused. “Well, um, I don’t know. It didn’t react as it would for a human, but it also didn’t react like any creature’s humors I have ever seen. This is something … different. Let’s use the bile as a guide. My best guess is it is from the breaker, and we can follow it since we’ve lost the drag trail.”

They slowly picked their way through the bog, following smears of the reflective substance on roots, vines, and springy grasses. The builder couldn’t be certain, but he thought at least four or five tales passed. There was no sign of the sun yet, but it would be coming in the next few tales. Much of the mender’s black hair had come loose of her bun and stuck to her in sweaty clumps, and her eyes looked tired but alert. The scholar, however, looked on the verge of collapse. His posture had become stooped and his gait shuffling.

When they found a relatively dry clearing, the builder said, “We will take a break and sleep for a few tales.”

The mender started to protest, but he waved her away. The scholar nodded gratefully, making no protest. The builder took first watch without the group having to formally discuss it. They had brought minimal sleeping supplies with them, but both the scholar and the mender were breathing evenly within a fraction of a tale. The builder walked the informal perimeter of their camp, pressing his finger lightly to the blade of his ax, producing just enough pain to help him stay alert.

He gave his companions what he estimated was two tales of sleep, letting the sun come up fully, though it hardly penetrated the gloom produced by the large leaves and thick vines of the bog. He woke the mender for next watch, and told her to give them about two tales before waking up the scholar to take his watch. He figured it would be enough sleep to keep them going for at least another day and a half if needed. When he placed his head on his bag and stretched out his legs, he fell asleep in what felt like three breaths.

The builder bolted awake, sensing something amiss. The bog birds sang their strange, mournful tunes and the low murmur of insects suggested it was midmorning. The mender slept a few paces away, but the scholar was nowhere to be found. One of the builder’s hands instinctively went to his ax and the other shook the mender awake. He whispered to her, and she took out her knife.

“I woke him for his watch and he was fine. Whatever happened took place when he was on watch,” she whispered back, plucking anxiously at the tools and pouches on her belt.

The builder nodded and they rose, heading in opposite directions to search for the scholar.

Working in small concentric circles, the builder found him in less than a tale, face down, floating in bog water. The builder made a quick scan of the surroundings. He knelt and turned the scholar over, careful to keep his eyes out for the breaker while he called out for the mender. The slimy, reflective bile covered the body, and the builder could see the telltale broken bones. He pressed his fingers to the twisted neck, checking for a pulse and finding none. One of the scholar’s mangled hands with its splayed, twisted fingers floated in the water, disturbing the builder more than any of the other injuries for some reason.

The mender materialized from the shadows, releasing a small moan from her clenched teeth.

“He’s dead, Mender. Broken like the others.” The builder felt a rush of guilt for having let him take a watch, but pushed it aside, realizing it wouldn’t help them at the moment.

The mender began checking over the body as the builder began searching for the bile trail.

“He’s only been dead for a tale, or a tale-and-a-half at most,” the mender said, folding the scholar’s broken arms over his chest as neatly as she could. She picked algae out of his gray hair, looking distraught.

The reflective slime stood out against a large, drooping leaf a few paces away. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could see the bile clearly in a path heading northwest from the camp. “He was our friend. But we will have to table that grief for the moment, Mender. We are close to the breaker now, and we must kill it—for our safety and that of our people.”

The mender nodded, wiping away a tear with her thumb. She quickly gathered their supplies, dividing the scholar’s things between their packs.

They picked their way through the bog, following the trail of reflective bile. Sometimes they stepped on a thin scum of mud and decaying leaves, at other times they waded through dark, knee-deep water. Always the humidity hung on them, and the cloying foliage touched them with its damp leaves, vines, algae, moss, and lichen. Morning gave way to noon, and then afternoon. The builder hoped to find the breaker by day as opposed to at night, though he recognized it didn’t make much difference in the gray depths of the bog’s canopy.

The mender tried to help them navigate from the scholar’s maps. They had a vague idea of where they were, but hardly a firm picture.

“Why is there so much bile? Is this … thing injured?” the builder asked, pushing a branch back with his bracer.

The mender shrugged. “If it were a normal creature, I would say yes, but the amount of lost bile would throw off its humors and … well, it would be dead if it had lost this much bile.”

“Do you have any theories, Mender?”

The mender trudged forward in silence for several moments and the builder thought she wasn’t going to respond, but suddenly she said, “I think it must … excrete bile or something.”

“Do you know of any creature that excretes bile?” the builder asked.

“At this scale? No. The breaker is not like anything you or I have ever seen. I don’t think this thing is going to play by our rules,” the mender said, sounding disturbingly resigned and fatalistic.

The builder stopped, taking off his helm and staring into her face. The mender averted her eyes, cheeks burning red with shame.

“We will overcome this thing,” the builder said with quiet ferocity. “Nothing can stand against our strength.”

She nodded, though she kept her eyes averted.

They trudged through the swamp for tales on end, until what little sunlight there had been disappeared and the shadow of day gave way to the dark of night. The mender lit both of their torches with her tools, pushing the darkness away a handful of paces. The builder kept the exhaustion at bay by force of will, but he could tell the mender would need to rest soon. Tonight, he committed to taking full watch to let her sleep, and then catching a small rest when the sun was up again to minimize the potential of a repeat of what had happened to the scholar. They had supplies for three more days; if they didn’t find the breaker tomorrow, they would have to head back.

“Do you think the breaker has a lair of some sort?” the builder asked.

The mender shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe it is a solitary wanderer in the bog? Maybe it has some kind of nest in the trees?”

Torchlight painted her tired face in warm orange light and shadow. She waded through sludgy water that reached her waist. They’d long ago given up trying to avoid going through water that only went up to their bog boots. The builder pointed his torch toward a particularly thick glob of bile on one of the low-hanging vines. “I think we are getting close.”

The mender nodded wearily. “Yes. We should—”

Suddenly, she was yanked below the water, her torch landing on the surface and extinguishing with a hiss.

“Mender!” the builder shouted, splashing through the water as he drew his hand ax with his free hand. A ripple of water wound away from him, faster than he could run, but slow enough he could keep it in his sight. He sprinted awkwardly, calling her name and following the trail of wake. He ignored the burning in his lungs and the pain in his side.

Just outside of the orb of light from his torch, he saw a shadowy form make its way out of the water, onto damp, mossy ground with the body of the mender dragging behind it. They both disappeared into the darkness. On firm ground the builder could run faster, but he always seemed a few steps too far behind. Around each tree, he would see the dragged body of the mender for a moment before it passed beyond the reach of his torch.

He screamed for her, hoping he could follow her cries even if he couldn’t see her. On occasion, he did indeed hear her faint cries. They spoke of suffering. And fear. The builder followed the sounds, the smears of bile, and the signs of dragging for countless tales, deep into the night.

Exhaustion weighed on the builder like metal armor, but he carried it, refusing to give up. He clutched his hand ax, feeling the grain of the wooden handle against his palm. The flickering torch danced against tree trunks, vines, and the bile coating on leaves. Glowing eyes of creatures peered at him from the dark, some menacing, some curious, but none were that of the breaker. The cries became far away and infrequent. Eventually, he heard no cries at all.

Just before dawn, he came into a small clearing where the water reached halfway up his shin, and he saw two figures in the gloom. He approached cautiously, trying to minimize the splashing of his boots.

The figures appeared to be slow dancing together. When his torchlight reached them, the builder saw that one of the figures was the mender, but her head had been turned backward on her neck. Her dead eyes stared at him and her chin rested between her shoulder blades. The sight of her swollen, purple tongue caused the usually even-keeled builder to flinch and nearly drop his torch. The breaker held her broken, twisted body close, embracing her, its fingers interlaced with her broken digits.

“Oh, hello,” the breaker said in a meek, cordial, high-pitched man’s voice.

The breaker set the mender’s body against the trunk of a tree with absurd delicacy.

The man standing before the builder looked unimpressive. He had a diminutive frame, and an ordinary, if slightly homely, face. Sweat beaded on his totally bald head and the torchlight reflected on his thick glasses, which tucked behind large ears. He wore strange, formal clothing, which seemed completely out of place in the middle of the chaos of the bog. His fingers steepled in front of him as he stared at the builder with mild interest but no overt signs of aggression.

“Wh … why have you done this to her?” the builder asked, pulling the muscles in his legs taut, preparing to strike.

“I liberated her from the constraints of form,” the breaker said. “It is my gift to her.”

“And the others?” the builder said, his voice low and threatening.

“They are free,” the breaker said with a strange smile revealing crooked teeth.

The builder sprang forward, swinging his ax downward at the man’s head. It split down the middle, and where the builder had expected the resistance of a skull, it slid neatly through what felt like gelatinous goo.

“Items can be freed from form, too,” the breaker said from both sides of his split mouth. “Liberated into atoms, no longer forced into the service of ax-dom.”

The ax head fell apart, crumbling like ancient parchment in the wind. The builder took his fist and slammed it into the chest of the breaker. Waves reverberated across the jellylike chest, and the builder found his hand stuck fast. He looked up and saw that the breaker’s head had closed around the dusty remains of the ax. When the builder tried to pull his hand out of the breaker’s chest, it refused to give. The breaker closed the distance in an unhurried shuffling of his feet, sliding his body up the builder’s arm until he had absorbed it all the way beyond the elbow. The breaker gently wrapped one arm around the builder and placed his head near the builder’s ear.

“Your strength is your weakness,” the breaker whispered as he clenched something inside him.

Excruciating pain blazed in the builder’s consumed arm, and he heard the wet snapping of his bones shattering. The builder howled and fell to his knees. Saliva poured from his mouth as he stared at the small man who suddenly seemed to tower over him.

The breaker slid himself farther onto the builder’s arm, until it was consumed up to the shoulder. With his hand, the breaker guided the builder’s other arm into himself. The builder tried to pull away, but the breaker stuck to him, his flesh adhering like the paste the villagers used to seal their boots.

“Your order must be disordered,” the breaker whispered again, flexing.

More of the builder’s bones broke and he screamed, begging for mercy.

The breaker had enveloped his whole body now, wrapping his gelatinous substance around everything but the builder’s head. The breaker stretched his neck around so they were staring at each other, face to face. He reached one of his arms up to his own face.

“Your world is the past. Let me show you my future,” he said as he dug his fingers into his own face and pulled. Inside, the builder saw the stringy goo that made up the breaker, and he experienced a consuming, hopeless dread he’d not known existed until that moment. Every cell within the creature was at war; no portion of its insides could pull together into anything cohesive without another portion invading, deconstructing, and pulling it apart again into stringy nothingness. The destructive elements could only break, tear, and smash, reducing the flesh to a dripping pool of chaos. The builder stopped screaming then. The true face of the breaker destroyed something inside him far more essential than even his bones.

“What you have constructed must be deconstructed,” said the torn mouth of the breaker as he gave a final squeeze. “Then you too will be free.”

Thank you for reading my work! I appreciate your time and hope you enjoyed the story. Please check out my LUNAR LIVES dark fantasy series. The first book, Scab Among the Stars is available here. It is available in paperback and ebook form and the ebook is one dollar! Seriously, a single, measly buck! If you have already read Scab and are craving more, you are in luck! The sequel, Echo From the Void can be purchased here in ebook or paperback. Feel free to share, comment or contact me directly!