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He'd never imagined it was possible, so when it comes right down to it he’s really not sure if it takes more or less time for him to notice than he might’ve expected.
The freak windstorm is kind of a surprise, he has to admit. A gale like nothing he can ever recall blasts out of the Winter Wilds and screams across the land. It flattens fields of corn and picks pumpkins up and hurls them yards away from their vines. It actually blows over one of the oldest shacks and screams up into his barn, pummeling open the doors to rake through his ribbons, flinging them out and buffeting them this way and that, before shrieking out the back door and leaving him askew and wind-tossed and swaying like a swing from his grip on the rafters.
Later, Flagsman Brown tells him that the storm blew itself up into a twister over the bone fields and touched down. The sentinel says that it didn’t rip up dirt or mud too much, just pierced the ground and kind of sank in, and disappeared beneath the soil. There wasn’t even a vortex in the dirt to show where it had been.
He’s wary for several months, but at last the harvest is upon them and everybody turns up fine. There are many more people than usual--eight, this time--but they join in the party and decorate themselves with every sign of cheerfulness.
It’s strange, and in many ways unaccountable, but it’s not precisely stunning. He doesn’t really worry about it.
Now, when the wolves pass by, just a few yards away in the trees and heading north, he wonders a little. The nights are silent, but that’s nothing peculiar in the grand scheme of things. He only really has the one visitor--trespassers don’t bother Pottsfield often--and sometimes ten or twelve harvests together will pass without a glimpse of his charming neighbor.
When it begins to happen, it starts so subtly he wonders if he's not seeing things. He is a creature of the harvest time and no mistake, but he can still see the cool vapors as they dance out of the wilds. The earth has opened its mouth and breathed, and it gasps the wet, startled breaths of a drowning thing.
He watches, perturbed. But perhaps, perhaps his neighbor is just far away. Perhaps his friend is carving out new spaces, miles and miles and miles from here, and at the edge of August, on the husk-barbed fences of heat-lit summertime, his neighbor’s land grows a little stale. It is like his dear neighbor, is it not, to bite off more than he can chew and try to cover too much ground. His neighbor is surely somewhere far within his own realm, working. Lit by nothing but the light of his own lantern, his neighbor is likely reaching into the nothingness beyond the brink and is making ice, drawing death out of oblivion and spinning new vistas of cold-cracked desolation.
Surely.
He puts it out of his mind. Entirely. He has his own concerns, of course. There are little farm-town squabbles to worry about, trespassers to address, interactions with other towns to oversee. The Schoolhouse, for one, and the Tavern wants pumpkins for pies. It makes for exciting times, the prospect of these trade agreements. There’s work to be done. People to be vetted. Dances and meetings and councils and chambers of commerce to think of.
He takes his nightly patrols with an eye not too penetrating. He does not look to find the moon on bright, clear nights and does not seek to compare her with the cold stars that do not pass through the woods. He does not think with a smile about battered corpses and frigid hands, about the soft sucking noise his neighbor makes when he drinks fear from the air, the great and terrible vacuum of his neighbor’s hunger that he senses like a buzzer pressed and rumbling against his mind, begging him to overflow and pour into that starving void, fill its bottomless emptiness with his own unending plenty, if he can.
He does not count the harvests, no. Some of his folk bed down once more to sleep in the spring and others come up again in fall, but he knows all their names and he does not let himself count the seasons.
He is hanging in the barn, still and silent and submerged in the peace of his own being, when he hears it.
Deep, deep within the Winter Wilds, something cracks and shifts. A glacier ruptures. A subterreanian iceberg, colossal and lurking in the dark, snaps apart and breaches the crust of the earth, turning itself towards the sun. A gargantuan frozen tree drips water only barely liquid. A root digs. In the darkness, things remember what it was to feel and move the edges of their bodies.
He stares into the dimness of his barn and feels the innermost tangle of his streamers tighten to an agonizing ache.
Winter is beginning to Thaw.
The Beast is gone.
He consults the stars for some days immediately after his realization and at last there comes a midnight when the sky is covered over in storm clouds.
He can’t precisely go out himself, not if he wants to avoid the rain damage. Instead he throws open the loft doors and lets her come to him.
When she speaks, it is with a voice softer than a southern breeze and clearer than the hiss of rain. She sighs like a zephyr skating along a cloud under full sail. He has heard that she burns with sunlight and the souls of birds dress her hair.
She condescends to pause above the loft door, her radiance lighting the clouds beneath her feet and illuminating his land in flashes and crackles. She does not reveal herself to one who does not dream, but that’s just as well. Heavenly beauty has never entranced him and he has never longed to touch the sky.
They do not talk often. They do not often need to.
“Hello, Lord of the Harvest,” she says.
“Hello, Queen of the Clouds.”
“What brings you to open your loft door so wide in one of my storms? Aeolus himself was not so bold.”
“Your winds have come this way before,” Enoch says, “and all my barricades could not withstand them. I think I might as well let them have their way.”
“You’re mistaken, Lord of Joy. I have not sent so much as a breath to you in many moons. You and yours have little need of fresh air.”
Enoch frowns to himself. Then that whirlwind…? Strange.
But it would have to wait.
“You see all the world pass beneath you,” he says. “I am seeking one who has been lost.”
The Queen of the Clouds laughs like a roll of summer thunder. “Oh, yes. Of course. I have seen you together some nights. Is he a good neighbor, King of the Dead?”
Enoch says nothing.
“Then I will tell you what happened. A little hero rescued my city from the Beast’s treacherous pet,” the Queen of the Clouds reports. She sounds bitter. Killing cold and winter winds have always been too well-allied for her to control the North Wind as she should. “The child broke the North Wind, so I gave the tiny champion a wish. He sought to pry his brother from the Horned One’s twisted hands.”
“I see.”
“I believe he was victorious.”
“Indeed.”
“I hope he snapped off the Old Man’s fingers,” the Queen of the Clouds hums.
“Your Majesty,” Enoch says in a tone of recrimination. They should be above these things. Each has a dominion vast and terrible, necessary and ancient. The heavens need not resent either earth or the abyss, and all the less when someone is missing.
“He’s dead, Harvest King.”
“He is not,” Enoch replies. His voice is just a little hard. “Death does not die.”
The light shifts. She’s ready to move on. “He was nothing so pure. He is dead, Lord of Joy. I am grieved, out of the friendship I bear you, for your loss. But it is true: his servant blew his soul to smoke and he is dead.”
His ribbons tighten into whips and he labors to keep them from cracking one of the barn’s beams. Vile, perfidious mortal! To presume so far, even in rage, even in heartbreak, to destroy his Beast--
Stupid, self-aggrandizing Hope-Eater! The Beast had known that his Woodsman was a traitor and had dawdled over putting him in the ground, where he belonged. And now…
He shakes his barn, furious.
“He was felled by his own foolishness,” the Queen of the Clouds says. Her voice is gentler. She is trying to comfort him. She is doing a bad job. “He was old, Harvest King, and set in his ways. He grew sloppy in these last epochs--we both know it to be true. He was no grand deceiver, in the end, just a tattered husk of what he once was. He did not weave truths into his lies as he once could.”
Enoch silently seethes. If the Beast is dead, then the Queen of the Clouds is gloating over the fallen, mocking a dead thing. It cuts him through to his core and twists it; it still would, even if he didn’t love his neighbor. The love merely serrates the blade.
She is still talking.
“All trees fall. It was his time to die. He deserved it. All his death should be to us is a warning, nothing more.”
“You would not say that if you knew what happened in the Woods,” he growls. “If you knew what I felt--”
“I felt it, too,” the Queen of the Clouds snaps. Outside, a bolt of lightning chars a spot on his field. She might as well have slapped him. “Do you think I am ignorant of the events in Hell? You presume a great deal, Lord of the Dead.”
“Winter’s heart is cracked,” Enoch pushes. “The Thaw has begun. Things are going to come out of the Woods.”
“There is no part of that that belongs to my concern.”
“You filled the lungs that extinguished the Lord of the Wastes!”
Another thunderbolt, and then another. “Tread lightly, Autumn King,” she roars, “I do not love you as well as the Old Man did!”
Outside, his pumpkin vines writhe and tear at the earth. The core of gnarled tentacles at his center begin to twist and shred. He comes back to himself as actual physical pain, still so alien and bizarre and unsettling, lances through his head and he has to throw his tentacles all out and shake them hard in an attempt to loosen the ache. He’s sure he looks like a dandelion puff. If the Beast were here, it might amuse him. Pottsfielders would find it odd. The Queen’s tiny champion might only be bewildered, as children are often bewildered.
A bad, vicious little part of him hates that he ever let those boys go. He could’ve made them stay, and in time they might’ve even been happy. But he had been being fair, then, and the punishment had been just for the crime. He could not have known.
It is a horror, he feels, that even if he had known, he could not have been so selfish.
He stays silent for a long moment, because he doesn’t trust himself to say more without irreparably damaging this friendship the Queen of the Clouds allegedly harbors for him. Through the loft door he can see lightning rippling through the clouds to the east, and he only speaks up as the glow outside the barn begins to diminish.
“Wait,” he says quickly. “Please.”
Thunder rolls far away. He waits.
“What is it, Harvest King?” she asks in a gusty sigh.
“Have you seen his lantern?” Enoch asks. “I would like to have it. It...if there is to be a Thaw, I would not have it nested in by sparrows.”
The Queen of the Clouds lets out a sharp, hard laugh. “Not the most inappropriate fate for him! He used my pet--let my pets use him!”
“It would be defiling a corpse,” Enoch intones, using his most resonant voice. It throbs on more than one plane, carrying just how seriously he takes this matter. “I would consider it a personal insult.”
The Queen of the Clouds mulls this over for a moment or two. At last, she says, “He died in his Woods. Perhaps a two minute flight from the mill where his servant lived.”
He has no idea where that is. He’d only met the Beast’s treasonous little fountain once, and that was only to pass his eyes over the man. The lands beyond Pottsfield are a mystery to him.
“I see.”
“My winds wish to run,” the Queen of the Clouds says. “And I am not of a mind to deny them. I must leave you, Lord of the Harvest. We will meet again.”
“We will meet again, Queen of the Clouds,” Enoch allows, and listens as she rumbles away and the night grows perfectly dark. The moon does not hang above Pottsfield tonight. He’s grateful for it, even as he misses her cold, strange light.
Blown out. Hideous. He’d always know that the Beast was horrifically vulnerable, wearing his heart on his antler as he did. Still, he’d never really thought that anything ever could actually extinguish it. The Beast was so canny and secretive about the contents of his lantern, and so ruthless when it came to protecting himself, that Enoch had slowly become convinced that nothing would ever dare try to attack him. He had always played mortals so masterfully, even those that had raged and hated him, that Enoch had believed that he could not be brought low by mere breath.
But it had always mystified Enoch that the Voice of the Night would prefer to be feared and hated than to coax mortals into loving and worshipping him. Even witches had familiars, for goodness’ sake, and it would’ve been a bit of security, to have people who revered him protecting his interests. Enoch would’ve helped, even. He had eons of experience overseeing a healthy community and would’ve been happy to help the Beast establish himself and move beyond the Blood Days and into the calm era of quiet devotion. It would not have been hard, either, because the Beast was eminently worship-worthy, and with very little effort they could’ve ensured he had something solid for him--an ever-burning lake of fire in a temple somewhere, roaring for virgin blood and attended by devoted supplicants. At the very least it would have been preferable to that measly little lantern with its flame never more than one flicked latch away from smoke.
It made no sense, all the Beast’s protestations about preferring an existence as a monster. No one disdained a hungry god, and it would’ve been Enoch’s pleasure to help him feast.
Oh, his dear neighbor, his dear friend...
Enoch lets his ribbons drape and hang across the rafters of the barn, resettling himself in his preferred position. He meant to have that lantern. He dares not leave Pottsfield himself, whether in cat flesh or as he stood now. There was no knowing what would happen to his town without him to preside over it and as much as he grieves his friend, he cannot endanger his own domain.
It seems he is going to have to get creative.
***
The excuse he eventually settles upon is expansion.
It is not without a bittersweet smile that Enoch recalled the terms of his original arrangement with the Beast. The agreement had been a transparent ploy to see more of the strange creature that haunted the Woods so close to Enoch’s own land, but in time the infrequent consultations regarding a felled oak here or a chopped ash there became something like a joke they shared, haggling like fishwives over a tree’s worth of land.
(Only once had there been any question of a strange, twisted tree that the Beast had called an Edelwood. They’d bartered over it for some moments--originally the tree had been planted when there were still three acres between it and Pottsfield, ah but time had marched on and now it was right on the edge of the fields and it did tend to loom like such a bad omen, well surely that a good thing for him since it would keep watch over the borders and prevent trespass, et cetera, et cetera--before they agreed to have it removed. The Beast had reached out with a withered old dagger and gored the bark of the tree, catching up the black sap that ran thickly from the open wound. The Beast had rubbed it between his fingers, as if checking the texture, and took a discreet sip of the fragrance of the sap. The low, rustling hiss of quivering leaves had almost made Enoch wish he’d come out to the meeting in cat skin, in which he might’ve smelled the scent that the Beast seemed to like so well. The Beast had shuddered, licked his fingers clean, and asked Enoch to wait another few weeks. He agreed, and by then the tree was gone on its own, even the stump.)
But there’s little time for such reminiscence now. His people murmur doubtfully among themselves for some time: Old Mr. Hapsborough, whom even Enoch’s charitable affection cannot name as anything less than a crank, is perhaps the most vocally annoyed by this kind of folderol, and even some of the ladies are skeptical of the value of such an enterprise. But at last they agree that a new silo would be an indulgence scarcely to be dreamed of and perhaps another few little shacks would not be the worst thing to happen to the town, not when it’s looking to be another big harvest.
His sentinels agree to go out in pairs, often with a friend along. Miss Clara Deen and Flagsman Howards, one of the risen from just after the whirlwind, are among the first to go and scout out new land beyond the borders of their village. He specifically suggests that they find houses and other townships, in an attempt to establish something more of a trade system in the world.
It is a very exciting time, he’s sure.
The earth draws him out to do the work of the field, so he slithers into the suit of cat flesh and whips the turkeys into position before tending to the crops. Standards cannot fall, never that, and he does not let on to any of his people that he is concerned about anything. They do not seem to notice that the Woods are not as they should be, that they breathe and melt. And they do not notice that he is different. They see the pumpkins pile up as their own skins rot, the turkeys pant and strain, and they cannot tell that anything haunts their lord mayor.
It is that kind of inattention that throws into high relief what a hole the Beast makes in his existence. It is not easy to be surrounded by mortals. However much he loves his, it is never the less true that they have their one tiny plane of existence and they lack nuance. They do not comprehend what it is to hear the stars cleave and jangle or feel the earth rebound to one's song. They do not sense the instant before a gesture or even perceive the symbol-language that composes his first thoughts.
The Beast did not always understand him--to say the least, since he was never a very subtle flirt and yet it had all winged merrily over that charming antlered head--but at least the Lord of the Wastes always saw Enoch as he really was.
The scouts come and the scouts go. They do not like the outside world and say that they are eager to find the right land and be done with it. He thinks that perhaps this has brought a good thing, independent of the search for the lantern. He is not above keeping his townsfolk in the dark about the realities of the world outside his peaceful borders, but he prefers that they come back home with disdain for the rest of the wilderness. They choose to stay where they are, with the knowledge that flesh-wearers are meaty and repulsive and wild animals are strange and savage.
At last--at last, he has been counting moons, and it’s been nearly three moonless nights since the Thaw began--Miss Clara and Flagsman Howards take their turn in the wilderness and return with the news that they have found a mill.
He sends them out again, asking them to search around further out and see if there’s any sign of habitation, any sign that they would be intruding. He dares not tell them to find the lantern, too uncertain that there will be anything to find. Perhaps it is already lost.
Within the week, however, and just days before the harvest, they approach him in the fields.
“It’s strange,” Flagsman Howards says of the object. “I’m sure I’ve seen it before.”
Miss Clara wordlessly buffs the cracked and muddy glass window on her apron and offers the thing up to Enoch. He wraps his tentacles around it, central arms aching even as he clasps it tight, rakes a ribbon across the handle, cups the body and presses an experimental tendril into the mouth to feel how cold it is within. It is dirty and cool to the touch.
He squeezes the lantern hard. Here it is, then. Proof undeniable.
The Beast is dead.
He had not doubted the Queen of the Clouds’ word, precisely, but he had hoped that in spiteful humor she would have been too quick to determine the Beast extinguished. Now he could not longer justify his foolish hope.
“Well,” he says, his voice artificially light. “I’ll just put it somewhere safe in case anyone comes looking for it.”
“What shall we do about the trees, Enoch?” Miss Clara asks quietly. He cannot remember, just now, if she’s ever seen the Beast. She’s had a near run-in with him and occasionally transcribed Enoch’s messages to him, but he does not know if they were ever formally introduced.
“I...we’ll have a meeting,” Enoch replies. He should’ve thought more about what he would do if the Beast was really dead. He does not have the heart to gore out more of Thawing winter, but he supposes he does not have the choice, now. As for his townspeople...if Miss Clara knows to whom the lamp belongs, she will draw her own conclusions from the fact that he will not ask her to take a letter.
Let her draw them. Let them all wonder. It hardly matters anymore.
Miss Clara nods but Flagsman Howards stares at the lantern for several moments before Miss Clara touches his arm and he slowly turns away.
Enoch retreats to the barn with the lantern in his coils and holds it for some hours, trying to digest its reality. At last darkness falls and he finds that the only way to soothe his mind is to fill the tank with Pottsfield oil and light it.
It glows merrily, as if it were nothing but an ordinary lamp. No cold, motionless light within, distant and terrible as a star. It illuminates the world around in it a sweet yellow haze and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything so horrible in his entire existence, but he can’t bear to snuff it out now that it’s lit.
He tries to let the oil just burn itself out, but the way the flame gutters when it is low is almost as bad, so he feeds it and tries to put it out of his mind the rest of the time.
Winter--or perhaps it is now Spring?--is encroaching upon him. Half-starved wolves come out of the forest, as do vast hordes of long-frozen insects and on one memorable occasion, a bear. Stranger things than these come near the treeline, and stare at Pottsfield, and some of them dare to cross the border. He’d always known that the Beast kept Winter things in their place, and to have that belief vindicated is a comfort, however cold.
The creatures must be beaten off, of course, and they lose one field of corn to the bugs before they manage to protect the rest. Work begins on a much bigger fence than the token one that surrounds the Southern side, and he hopes that they will stave off the worst.
Flagsman Howards comes by to stare at the lantern most nights a week. Enoch watches him watch its flame and wonders in a disinterested kind of way just what is happening within that white skull.
More Pottsfielders rise up. Almost five, this time, another large harvest. The newcomers are feted and brought into the community as the time-honored tradition requires, but he leaves early to linger in his barn, pleased to oversee the festivities from within.
He knows he’s beginning to grow strange. He cannot bear to look at the lantern longer than it takes to dose it, but he begins to talk to it when he is alone. He dips his voice beneath the range of hearing, beneath the range of light, and just murmurs what’s on his mind. He’s not at all sure that it helps his state.
Enoch takes his patrols and watches the sky at night. He’s beginning to like to see the moon again. The similarity between her and a pair of eyes he once knew is lessening and he thinks in time that he might not think of the eyes at all.
He returns to the barn one night and finds that it is not empty.
And the lighting has gone odd.
Flagsman Howards is standing in front of the lantern. He’s covered in some kind of black filth, dragged in smears and splatters across his head and body.
The lantern is glowing with the white and empty light he remembers from the Beast’s visits. If Enoch had breath to catch, he would asphyxiate.
Flagsman Howards slowly turns his head to look at Enoch. In the dimness of the barn they stare at each other.
“It needs it,” Howards says. He’s slow to speak, as if words are coming strange to his mouth. “I need...we. Need to. We need it.”
“We,” Enoch says.
Howards’ head twitches slightly and he slowly rolls it back to face the lantern.
“We need the oil,” he says. “The right oil. It wants it. Needs it. We need it.”
“We,” Enoch repeats, approaching. He watches the lantern burn. What does this mean?
“We always wanted to be here,” Howards says. “Always. Even he always wanted to be here. We longed to be here. With you. Yours. To be yours. To feed. To rest. To be yours.”
Enoch stays silent, trying to understand. Mortals do not usually confuse him. This is most definitely a first.
Howards turns his head around to look at him again. “We longed to be yours,” he sighs, reaching out.
Enoch extends a tentative tendril and almost jumps when Howards seizes it and wraps it around his body, nuzzling.
Howards is hungry. Enoch can feel it and because Howards is his, he pours himself into his charge. Satisfaction burbles over Enoch’s banks and spills into Howards, who is deeper than he seems to remember and who takes him in greedily, as if he has been starving for weeks--months.
“Do not let him take us back,” Howards begs. “We are yours. We came to you when we were free. We always wanted to be yours.”
“Of course, Flagsman Howards,” Enoch says gently. He wraps more tendrils around Howards’ body and sighs as he feels his villager grow warm with satisfaction. “Come away, now. You don’t belong here. You should be in your home.”
“Our home,” Howards sighs. “With you. We always--”
“Come along, Flagsman,” Enoch repeats, coaxing his villager out of the barn. He puts Howards away to bed and comes back to his rafter when Howards is safely stowed away, and watches the lamp all night. He cannot look away.
When it starts to gutter, he picks up one of the bottles Howards had left and feeds the lantern until the flame burns bright and hard.
It is beautiful, even now.
He feed the lamp for a few days in this manner, and one night returns to find the rest of the whirlwind-born--Miss Agnes, Mr. Stevens, Miss Dolores, Mrs. Philips, Mr. Jacobs--standing around the lamp, all streaked in black goo. They all have bottles of oil and all wrap themselves in his tendrils, watching the lamp fearfully and insisting that they, each a ‘we,’ belong to him and him alone.
It is flattering. It is also very strange.
The lantern burns all day and all night. Enoch takes his patrols before dawn and returns in time to watch over his most devoted little congregation during the day. They like to take off their heads and lie down to sleep in the barn with him, bone exposed to the gloaming air.
Miss Clara Deen and Miss Elizabelle visit him during one of these occasions and look somewhat askance at the situation, but Enoch shrugs at them and they shrug back and if anything else comes of it it certainly does not find its way back to him.
For six moons the lantern burns in this manner, kept alive by the people clustering around him. They do not seem to want to fill the lantern, but they do it anyway, speaking vapidly of need.
Winter Thaws the more. The fences are built and the crops are harvested and Enoch sings quietly to himself in the dark. Some nights he finds the lantern to be a comfort--some nights it is such a cruel barb that he wants to throw it in a lake.
He suspects that this is something like what mortals mean when they go on about grief. It is not going away.
He does not sleep, not really. Sometimes he dozes, especially when he sings. It is easy to sway and feel the goodness of the earth and the low-thrumming joy of his people and to be perfectly at peace for a while.
It is from just this kind of peace that he is jolted one night by a scream.
Or, no, it is not a scream. Screams need breath and this is a breathless thing, shrieking and shrieking in supreme agony. It is beneath the range of light, beneath the range of darkness. It is pain, roaring through a cavernous waste. He’s never heard anything like it.
It’s exciting, honestly.
He sneaks carefully out of his barn, glad he does not have to dodge his pets as he goes, and walks out into the fields. He hunts for the noise, peering through the starlight for the source. It’s definitely coming from outdoors. The shriek has a depth to it, a hollow quality that he cannot help but find intriguing. He doesn’t know what kind of thing this is--maybe nothing more than some long-frozen horror from the Woods--but he wants to find out.
As he moves closer to the source, he can hear in the scream a thought. Just one thought.
IneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneed
It slices through the world, shaking at least one plane nearly to smithereens in ferocious desperation, and Enoch finds himself boiling to hear it. So hungry, so needy, so empty. He wants to pour satisfaction over and over and over again, to fill the void that has opened up on his land.
It takes him a long time to find the source. It screams and screams and screams but it’s all-consuming and all-terrible enough that he can hardly follow its voice to any one point.
Finally, he finds it near the fence to the Woods. At first he almost didn’t see it, so dark was the night and so perfect the camouflaging grass.
At first he thinks it is the maggot-riddled carcass of a starved bear. What appears to be fur is black and matted, as shaggy and tattered as a wendigo as it shifts and ripples. Upon closer inspection he realizes that it is nothing so cohesive as a skin, but a writhing snarl of shadows, twisting and skating and dissolving and forming into thick strings.
The thing screams and screams and beneath the riotous shadows a pair of clawing, wooden hands reach out as if the thing means to drag itself forward. Unfortunately the creature is caught in the fence and cannot seem to free itself. Its fingers gore hard little trenches in the mud and earth, helpless.
Enoch does not know what this monster is. He has a hope, of course, but he cannot quite allow it to surface yet. What if he is wrong?
He comes very close to the screaming thing and stands carefully still, waiting to see if it will notice him.
IneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneedIneed, it shrieks. Its fingers claw and drag and pull, scraping raw against the earth. IneedIneedIneedI
The sudden silence is terrifying.
Enoch watches the thing very, very carefully.
A head emerges from the tattered shadows, just a little, and Enoch listens to the ghastly, choking snuffling sounds. The scream comes back as a high, fine buzz, underscored by the wet spluttering of the sniffing thing. The hands tear even more urgently, ripping up earth.
The snuffling stops after a few moments and Enoch lurches away as a hand snaps out and strains for his ribbons. The hand claws at the dirt, the scream rising and changing, IneedIneedIneedpleasepleasepleaseplease.
Enoch peers down at the creature and examines it as closely as he can. It has two empty, apparently sightless eye sockets in a wooden, shadow-riddled head. Black oil saturates the lower half of what should be its otherwise unmarked face. It has no mouth, no nose. He doesn’t know how it made those snuffling sounds, nor how it screams.
PleasepleasepleasepleaseIneedpleaseIneedpleaseIneedpleaseIneed, the thing screeches.
Enoch slowly, slowly reaches out with a tentacle, one that would be easy to rip away. The thing grasps it, tearing it off of his body in desperation, both hands clutching and clawing at it.
YouyouyouyouyouIknowIknowIknowpleasepleaseneedneedneedneedfeedfeedfeedIneedIneedIneedmyneedmyneedmyneedmyIknowIknowIknowIknowyouyouyouyou--
Enoch reaches out and easily pries away part of the fence, tossing it to the side. The thing’s hands try to skitter as quick as spiders but the body has to be dragged along, and it’s a slow, painful process to pull it.
Enoch dares another few ribbons and finds the thing actually trying to climb him. Moved, he wraps a few tendrils around it to support it--it weighs nothing--and begins a path to the barn. The thing rakes desperate fingers at his ribbons and shrieks youyouIknowIknowyouIneedmyneedmypleaseIneedpleasepleaseIneedneedmy.
He lets himself bubble over into his new charge as they walk, but the monster is a bottomless pit. He gushes satisfaction at it it still screams its hunger, clutching at him, needing and taking all his has to give. He wants to give it more, to give it everything, but it is not a long walk.
They approach the barn and Enoch puts it down. It scrabbles on the earth for a moment before clawing its dragging way towards the door. Here, on clean earth, Enoch can see how it leaves a trail of black oil behind it as it crawls.
It scratches at the door. It wants to get inside.
Enoch hastily throws open the doors and steps within, letting the thing pull itself along the floor. In the barn he can see it better. It beelines for the lantern, reaching with wood-grain arms for the lamp. Enoch intercepts it, holding the lantern away, hopeful but wary.
The screaming thing claws at him, blind and hungry. When it lays at his feet, the wooden hands disappear beneath the fur and return to view, depositing before him a few oil-sodden tokens. One is a dessicated human hand; another is a rope of braided hair; another is the empty shell of a black turtle; another is a scrap of brown, tough meat; another is a horrible, leathery thing, veiny and rippled almost like a brain, with a slender tube dangling from it.
PutputputputfeedfeedfeedIneedIneedIneed, the thing roars.
Enoch thinks he knows what it means. He takes up the tokens and puts them in a spare bucket. It doesn’t take long to pound them to mush, and he pours two bottles of the Edelwood oil in with it to make a goo. When he has it more or less liquid, he grabs a funnel, sticks it in the valve of the lantern, and pours the slop in as slowly as he dares.
The flame itself screeches for an instant or two, and then yawns deep and cold and brighter than the sun.
On the barn floor, the thing writhes and arches painfully, emitting a sound like a frozen tree bursting and twisting. The thunderous crack is followed by the sudden cessation of the scream, cut off by a terrible, choking gasp. It sucks in and in and in.
In the thing’s head, two white-burning eyes burst into flame. The skating, darting shadows racing across the thing solidify and cohere, and the wood grain of the body is quickly shrouded in impenetrable darkness, as if the thing had sucked in light along with air. The thing contracts, evens out, the scribbled raging of its body forming at last a thing that looks like a fur and limbs.
The thing lays on the floor, panting desperately for many long minutes. Enoch watches, hoping, praying to he knows not what or whom.
“You have my thanks,” the Beast gasps at last. “I am in...serious pain. Forgive me if I don’t get up.”
Enoch picks him up and squeezes him tight enough to make up it.
He is himself enough to be delighted by the way the Beast wraps his hands up in Enoch’s tentacles and clings.
***
“Don’t let him take us!”
Those who used to be the Beast’s souls are none too pleased that their former master is in Enoch’s barn.
Enoch cannot blame them, not really. The Beast is a hard master to serve, he is certain. But they are his people now, brought up on his land, clothed in his crops, and he won’t give them back.
The Beast, when he bothers to speak, does not even ask about them.
His friend is still very weak. Nothing more than a pair of unblinking white eyes in the shadows, he sits all day and all night in the darkest corner of the barn with his arms wrapped around his lantern and his fur wrapped around them both. He only moves to feed the lamp oil.
Even as joy sings through Enoch, he grieves to see his neighbor so humiliated. What’s left of his antlers pierce his skull like fractured bones, pathetically stubby in comparison to the splendid horns Enoch remembers so clearly. Enoch sings now and then, especially as he takes his patrols, but though he listens to every plane he can reach he hears nothing but cold-cracked silence from the Beast. That magnificent voice, if it is not lost, is deep in hiding.
A paltry three days after he was remade, the Beast makes a noise like an exhalation and rises to his feet. Enoch rolls his head around to watch the laborious process standing and waits for the Beast to speak.
“I must go,” the Beast says.
Enoch reaches for him.
“No, my dear,” he hums, ribbons slinging across the Beast’s shoulders. “Stay awhile. I’ve finally got you in my barn after who knows how many invitations. Stay a little while longer.”
The Beast pauses for a moment, tempted. Enoch rubs across his fur and the wood just beginning to grow gnarled again.
“You’re resting,” Enoch insists. “It was an ordeal--”
The Beast stiffens in mortification. “My own stupidity--”
Do he and the Queen of the Clouds have some kind of club? They have the same party line.
“Perhaps,” Enoch allows. “And I can assure you I am not pleased with you for stretching yourself so far. But you are not yet healed.”
One ribbon cannot restrain itself from skating across the base of an antler. The Beast shudders and bats it away and Enoch regrets taking the liberty. Even if they aren’t literally sore, he’s sorry that he might have embarrassed his friend.
“That’s irrelevant, Harvest King,” the Beast snaps. His voice is gentler when he speaks again. “It’s time for me to go.”
Enoch longs to touch him. Tendrils skate across his jaw and over the bow of his neck, trying to coax him into rest. “I do not wish it. I would have you stay.”
“I have my domain to think of, Lord of Joy. Could you leave Pottsfield for so long and in such condition?”
Ah. Yes. That does put another face on it.
Enoch heaves a sigh. “I suppose I see your point. Your Woods have grown peculiar in your absence.”
The Beast hums.
“Let me see you to the border,” Enoch insists, untangling himself from his rafters.
They walk together through twilit Pottsfield. The Beast’s pace is slower than it once was and Enoch actually dips below it, letting the Beast match him at an absolute stroll. Pain ripples off of the Beast in waves, and exhaustion snatches it up, lurking in every brush of the Beast’s fur and ever reluctant step of his foot. He’s never seen his neighbor like this, but perhaps this sort of thing has never before happened to him.
“How did you survive, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I do mind,” the Beast says. “But I cannot deny you an answer, when you have done so much to help me.”
Enoch is not above taking some satisfaction in that. He’ll use it. The favors of the Beast do not come cheap.
“My souls were ripped away,” the Beast says. “And obviously they went where they always wished to go--”
“I’m deeply flattered.”
“--so I was not, for a while. Hunger and fear don’t go away, but this…” He gestures at himself. “I. Was not. The body fell to rot and it rotted until the lantern was lit with Edelwood oil. My soul was kindled and each bottle poured another soul into me. I took them and consumed them, made them into me. For some moons I scratched across the earth towards Pottsfield, just a screaming, unthinking thing. It was all I could do to drink from my trees. It is impossible to think when one is like that.”
Enoch tries to imagine that depth of horror and suffering; fails; and hums thoughtfully.
The Beast stops and reaches out to lean against a shack wall. His voice is reedy and thin. “I am still getting used to thinking again.”
“I don’t mean to overtax your mind, my dear. Do not feel obliged to struggle.”
“You are the last thing I will talk to for some time, if I do this right,” the Beast said, sitting down on a barrel to rest. Enoch stood with him. Old Man indeed.
“Then I will indulge my taste for conversation. What were those things you brought me?”
“Tokens. Powerful despairs. One picks up interesting things when one has commerce with witches,” the Beast said. He looked up at the sky, as if searching for something.
“That lantern is not enough,” Enoch says. Now they must come to it, before the Beast leaves. It must be said.
“It is all there is.”
“There could be more. A church with an ever-burning fire--”
“Too much,” the Beast says. “I would not be what I am.”
“What you are is vulnerable.”
“Do you think you are not?” the Beast counters. “Do you think you are safe? One fouled harvest, one rumble of dissent, one moment of shattered peace and you would fall into ruin. You may not think this lantern is much, but one ill-timed spark could burn this dessicated little town to the ground. With all your fleshes turned to ashes and your people so many charred bones, what would you be, Harvest King?”
“At least I would not have courted my own destruction,” Enoch snaps.
The Beast nods slowly. “There is at least that. You do not need to. You are not a monster.”
“You could be a god with just a little effort--”
“I am a monster, Enoch,” the Beast snarls. “I am a terror and a scourge, an eater of children! I am hunger and fear, the wasting wilderness! What use could I have for worship, for civilization, when I am isolation and terror incarnate?”
Enoch frowns.
“It would be a safer existence,” the Beast growls, “and it would not protect me. It would only change me into something else entirely and I would die more horribly than if my lantern had been drowned.”
Enoch shifts his weight, displeased with this line of thinking. “You are not just one thing, Hope-Eater. To be worshipped would not make you less of a monster…”
“Mortals may worship Death if they choose,” the Beast says. “They may even worship the Enemy, if it pleases them. Either way they only seek to take what a thing is, change its name, and try to control it. They would reduce Death to a god that can be bartered with, who will justify their service and worship.”
“They are made to serve. Let them serve you.”
“I do. One by one. I would rather endure one mortal at a time--if one can be treasonous, why put myself at the mercy of a cult of the things?”
“You were destroyed because you lied and coerced an unwilling servant. With a church, they would be willing. You would not have to lie.”
“Whether I promise peace after death or uprightness of spirit or the riches on the earth, I will have to lie to eat their hopes.”
“Ah, but they’ll never find out about the first two, will they?”
The Beast huffs something that sounds like a laugh. "And anyway, worship and hope are not the same thing. I would starve with a lit lantern, if they did not have enough honest fear to make their hopes keen."
"This is no time to be a gourmet, Beast."
The Beast hums. “I know what I am. I will take my lantern bearers and remain what I always was. I have an orchard to tend and a domain to freeze. And souls to burn.”
Enoch huffs himself. Stubborn ass.
“Well, you were missed and no mistake,” Enoch says.
“I could tell,” the Beast says. “Someday, when you owe me answers, I will ask how you found my lantern.”
Enoch grins at him. “You come on back soon, won’t you? I’ll only worry if I don’t get to see hide nor hair of you.”
“Mm.”
“And not out of obligation, my dear neighbor. Only out of desire.”
The Beast snorts. “That, I have in abundance.”
“I felt it.”
“A few thousand more souls and it’ll only be a soft buzz,” the Beast says. He lurches to his feet and they walk the rest of the way to the border.
"Oh, don't. It's delectable."
The Beast pauses. "I'm...flattered."
Enoch grins and brushes his tentacles against the Beast's ankles.
“Grow back those horns,” Enoch says as they step towards the treeline. “You don’t look like yourself.”
“I don’t feel like myself. I’m unbalanced.”
“I’ll see you soon, then, neighbor. Take care.”
The Beast reaches out and takes a fistful of Enoch’s ribbons in his hand. He holds them tightly and slowly brings them up to the latch of his lantern.
Enoch watches, amused.
“I am in your debt, Enoch,” the Beast says. His voice burns across the planes. “Beyond mortal debts of life and death. You have reformed me when I was without existence. I am at your disposal. I will honor the debt as you choose.”
His tentacles tingle. It was be wrong, worse than wrong, to touch him now, but oh, how could he not wish to? It is exciting, at least as exciting as that beckoning, aching hunger lurking in him. Enoch wants to fill him so many different ways…
“I accept it,” Enoch says. He taps the lantern lightly, caresses the glass window, and pulls his ribbons away. “I hope you won’t mind if I keep that in my back pocket. Might have need of a considerable favor someday.”
The Beast hums. “Goodbye, Harvest King.”
“Goodbye, Voice of the Night.”
The Beast walks through into the treeline and Enoch watches as his hand brushes across a tree trunk. In the moonlight, fresh ice gleams on the bark, and deeper in the forest a low rumble rolls in the air, snow beginning to fall as the Woods respond to their master’s footsteps.
Enoch watches until his neighbor is lost in the darkness, a cool breeze breathing out of the Woods. He nods to himself and turns for home.
As he takes the first steps away, a freezing gust of wind roars out of the forest, skating across Pottsfield grasses and gusting through his ribbons. Carried on that North wind blast is a voice singing quietly of wayward souls.
He laughs to himself, feeling his joy crackle hot and sweet across the planes. The Queen of the Clouds is not going to be pleased.