Transcript – Revenant

[The Pensive Tower theme plays]

ANNOUNCER
Scroll & Dagger presents
The Pensive Tower
Episode Thirty Four: Revenant

[A click, and the strange whirring of the venoscribe begins]

PAXTON
Thank you for coming in.

AUREAN
Oh, it’s not a problem. Nice to have an excuse to get out here actually. I’ve wanted to see the island for a long time.

PAXTON
I can understand. And you’re sure you’re comfortable with the venoscribe?

AUREAN
Oh, yea , sure. Quite exciting to see one up close. But I thought you guys wrote it all down, put it in books, that sort of thing.

PAXTON
That is how we still handle the majority of donations. But we’re phasing in this new method. Got to keep up with the times and all that. So we’ve been asking a few people who come in to participate in an inscription rather than using the old method.

AUREAN
Ah, I see. So, how does it work? I just speak and it records my words?

PAXTON
Exactly. I just need to do the notation. This is the memory of Aurean duFaenis. Human, aged thirty-seven, identified as male. Memory regards…

AUREAN
An old underground… temple, I think? And… and the thing that was guarding it.

PAXTON
Inscribed straight from donor on the eleventh of Riverfill, 730.

We Begin.

AUREAN (STATEMENT)
Alright, so, not sure where I should begin really. It all just kind of happened, and it happened so fast I’m not sure I’ve really processed it all yet.

Iana, she’s a friend of mine, Iana SinRift, she said I should come here straight away, while it was still fresh in my head, you know? She would have come herself to but she needed to go straight to the hospital. Maybe that would have been the smarter option but I know myself and I think if I had come straight away then this memory would have been a tangled mess of over-excited ramblings. Hopefully I’ll be able to make this at least halfway coherent now.

I suppose I should start with myself, right?

So, for the past five years, ever since I left the military, I’ve been doing mercenary work around the Middlelands of Senteria. I’m a member of the Stoneriver Company. One of the higher-ups in the Company used to be my staff sergeant and he put in a good name for me when I was putting in my application.

We don’t do as much heavy work as other mercenary groups, like Redsteel, but what we lack in individual strength, we make up for in numbers and in determination. I think our results speak for how good Stoneriver is.

So, when this job came in, I didn’t think much of it. Seemed pretty straightforward, easy even. A farmstead a couple of miles outside of Elalton was having trouble with a wild animal killing their livestock. The contract poster was the farm’s owner, orklin guy named Maurik DuZad

Seemed straightforward enough, I figured it would be wolves or maybe a bear or something like that. I could camp out at the farm for a few days then either kill or scare off the animal and it would be a nice easy payday for the company.

So, I took Iana with me. It’s company policy to never go alone, no matter how small the job may seem. You never know what’s going to happen and it’s always good to, um… Well it’s always good to have someone watching your back.

So we set off for this farmstead. It was a nice warm day, a few scattered showers. Pretty good day for travelling.

We got there a little bit before midday.

A lot of the workers had cleared off, I don’t know if they’d left to get out of the way of whatever animal was there or if the farmer had sent them away but when we arrived there was only a handful of them left in addition to the farmer and his family.

He looked really jumpy when he was giving us our instructions. He looked like he was trying to look every way at once when he told us to set up our sleeping stuff in the barn. He did look relieved to see us though. They all did. And… well, looking back, that really should have been the first sign that something was up.

Most people get scared of wolves and bears and other predators, sure, but farmers tend to react more angrily or annoyed when beasts like that come prowling. Not with the fear I saw in the faces of him and his workers.

So anyway, we did as he said. We went to the barn, climbed up to the hayloft, set up our roll mats and got our supplies unpacked. I’d recently bought a new SinVale rifle, one of those new designs with the breach load, and I’ll-

[chuckle]
I’ll confess I was looking forward to trying it out.

Iana’s never been much for ranged combat, she prefers the kind of close quarters stuff. Maybe that’s why we make a good team, we make up for the talents that the other one lacks. She knew though, that since we were likely dealing with a wild animal, this was probably going to be a hunting trip, so she’d brought along her old Red Willow rifle.

We didn’t waste any time. As soon as we were set up, Iana went out to sweep the area. We’d decided we were going to patrol the area in shifts. Iana would do eight hours while I slept, we’d do the night together and then I’d do eight hours while she slept. We’d brought two portable apovoxes with us so that we could stay in contact. If one of us saw anything while the other was alone, then we could vox the other and meet up before going together to deal with the problem.

The first few days passed pretty uneventfully. We patrolled the area, keeping an eye out for anything but neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary.

We got chatting with some of the workers whenever we passed through the fields, asking questions about anything they might have seen or heard, how long livestock been going missing, how many were usually taken, that sort of thing.

They never really wanted to say much, not on that subject anyway. Answered our questions with quick, one word answers and then started walking off. The only exception was one taurox woman, I didn’t catch her name, who said she’d seen something she thought was… Well she said she saw what was doing it and that it was big. Like, really big. The others gave her warning looks, then she wouldn’t say any more.

But even then, I didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary.

Then the night came when I saw this predator.

It was nearing midnight on the fifth day since we’d arrived. Everyone told us that since the attacks had begun two months ago, the predator had attacked at least once a week. So both me and Iana were on alert. We knew something was bound to happen any day now.

I was heading back to the barn to trade off with Iana when she came running out to meet me, rifle in hand. She told me she’d seen something moving over by the sheep pens, something big moving on all fours.

I had been to the point of nodding off as I walked I was that tired, but hearing that jolted me right awake with excitement and I followed her as she led me to the animal pens.

We heard the noise of a sheep in distress but arrived only just in time to see the poor creature being dragged into the dark with one last forlorn bleat.

We didn’t waste any time. I led the way now, holding up my lantern to light the way. And we quickly found signs of a struggle. The sheep had scraped deep gouges into the field and had clearly lost quite a lot of blood.

I mean, the good news was this gave us a clear trail to follow. It took us a while but we ended up at the edge of a small forest.

I was a little nervous about following the thing in there, after all who knew what else might be lurking in the dark, but Iana took the choice away from me when she all but charged in there.

Despite the dark and the closeness of the trees, the trail was actually easier to follow in the woods. Thanks to the undergrowth, it was clear to see what had recently been disturbed, even by the light of the lantern as we followed it deeper and deeper into the depths of the forest.

It was the smell I noticed first, then the sound of buzzing.

For a second, I thought it was a bog or something similar. But then I realised just what it was I was smelling and I stopped dead in my tracks. Iana, she didn’t grow up down the street from an abattoir, didn’t recognise the smell and she kept going, not noticing I had stopped, apparently.

The scream finally snapped me out of my stupor and I ran forward to stand beside Iana.

It was… It was meat. An enormous pile of meat. Bits of cow, pig, sheep, just heaped on top of each other and left out in the open to rot. Stuff at the top looked pretty fresh but, the stuff at the bottom had been there for weeks.

Mixed in with it all, I assumed, was the skins of the poor animals, but they were rotting as badly as the flesh. The only bits that were missing, from what I could tell, were the bones. In the whole pile, I could see no glimpse of white, no bones, skulls or anything like that, just… Just meat.

The smell was overpowering.

The foulness of all that rotten flesh had seeped into the ground around the piles and the air was thick with flies. The smell of corruption was heavy on the air. I gagged and did my best not to vomit. Iana looked like she was having a similar problem.

But as disgusting as this was, there was something – a more unnerving, I guess – implication to consider. Predators don’t heap meat into piles and they don’t take away their bones. So just what in the Depths were we dealing with?

I did consider heading back. We were equipped to deal with wild animals. We didn’t know what this thing could be and so had no idea if the gear we had with us would be enough to handle it. But when I broached the subject, Iana scoffed.

Whatever this thing was, she said, we had rifles. Generally speaking, it doesn’t matter how big or nasty something is, you shoot it in the head and it won’t be a problem any more.

This reasoning was enough to convince me to follow the thing further into the forest. There were tracks of… something. Something not like anything I’d seen before. Deep indents in the soft ground, disturbed by detritus on the forest floor and snapped tree limbs. Whatever this thing was, it was big, heavy.

A little ways further in, we found an actual print in some mud. I’m no zoologist and I’m not going to embarrass myself by guessing anything. All I can say is… well I’d never seen anything like it before. It was five times bigger than a human foot and ended in eight claw-like toes. I know it was eight because, I counted them three times. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

The trail wasn’t hard to follow and eventually led us to a cave in the side of a hill.

By this point, I was about ready to put my foot down. It was dark, and the noises of the night time forest very much had me on edge. Whatever we were hunting, there were still wild animals out there in the dark and that was bad enough without wandering into a cave.

But again, Iana took the option away. Though, this time, it wasn’t her fault.

There was a crack of breaking wood, a cry of surprise and Iana vanished out of sight.

I ran over to where she had been and found a dark hole.

Iana was alright, the fall was only about ten feet and, her being a turshen, she was able to land lightly and roll with the fall.

She’d landed in a long, stone corridor that apparently ran just below the surface.

I fortunately had some rope in my pack so I set about securing that to a nearby tree. It was my intention to lower the rope down to her, pull her out and get back to the farm. But Iana had found some engravings on the walls of the corridors that she now wanted to get a closer look at and was insisting I lower the lantern down to her.

So, not wanting to be left alone in the dark woods, I rappelled down, bringing the lantern with me.

I think I got a weird feeling as soon as I got in there. Of course, that might be just down to hindsight. Maybe I didn’t really think anything was out of the ordinary.

It was long and narrow. The hole Iana had fallen through looked like it had once been for a chimney and been covered up with boards some time ago, probably by some conscientious soul who lived nearby.

Of course those boards had rotted through in the time since and now, well, here we were.

The engravings Iana had found weren’t anything I recognised but they looked old. Very old.

I couldn’t make out much about them. There was a lot of twisting shapes and spirals. They made me a bit dizzy to look at to be honest.

I turned to Iana and was about to ask her what she thought all this was when I saw her eyes had gone wide as plates. And then, I heard it.

The thud of a heavy footstep on a stone floor. I turned slowly and looked up the corridor. It was dark, of course, so I couldn’t really make it out but it was huge. And… I don’t really know how else to put this, but it was shaped wrong. The closest thing I could liken it to is… well I once saw a gorilla in a menagerie show. This thing moved like that creature had and it had that kind of shape. But was malformed. Grotesquely malformed.

One of the arms looked swollen to twice the size of the other. Its back seemed so twisted I couldn’t believe it could walk. Its head was too large on one side, too small on the other.

There came another thud as it took another step forward. I felt like my feet were fixed to the floor, I was that scared. I half-heartedly raised my rifle but I don’t think I could have pulled the trigger.

Then it turned its head towards us.

Two pinpricks of pale blue light shone in the gloom from where the thing’s… that thing’s eyes should have been.

I ran. I didn’t know what it could be and had no intention of sticking around to find out. Iana ran with me and together we ran down that corridor, not stopping even to consider the fact that we had no idea where it went or how we were going to get out. We were running away from the one place we knew we could get out but that didn’t matter, as long as we were putting distance between us and that thing.

I think my mind was so full of fear that I didn’t even notice when the corridor opened up and we were suddenly in this wide chamber.

It was impossible to get a shape from it, it was too dark, but from what I could tell it was big. The ceiling was low, not much higher than the corridor, but the room spread out for yards and yards in every direction.

We couldn’t waste time admiring the architecture, we needed to find a place to hide from that… that thing. I didn’t even know if it was chasing us, and well, I- I didn’t dare to look back.

We ran through the chamber, the meagre light of our lantern barely showing us the way. We ducked around the first corner we could find and then waited. I don’t know about Iana but my blood was pumping in my ears.

I don’t know how long we waited. But nothing turned up. No shambling monster came after us. Eventually the adrenaline faded and I was able to breathe normally again. That was when I noticed the whispers. And… how cold it was.

The lantern it… it didn’t seem to be giving off any heat. Iana looked at me and I could see that she was feeling the sudden chill as well. I held up the lantern to catch sight of the source of those whispering voices. I didn’t dare call out in case that thing, that monster heard me. We appeared to be in an antechamber; a small, oblong room with a ceiling that was so low it brushed the top of my head. And it was empty. There was no one else in there, I’m sure of it, there was nowhere in there that anyone could have hidden.

As we stood there, I felt as if the ceiling were getting gradually lower, as though it were trying to force me down. The whispers were getting louder, I coul … I could now hear the sound of weeping.

I felt a gentle tug on the front of my shirt and I jumped, nearly braining myself on the ceiling. Then I realised it was just Iana telling me it was time to go.

What’s strange is, I don’t remember having to squeeze through the door when we’d come in.

We carried on through that great chamber. We hadn’t seen the monster again so we started looking for a way out. Any door we found we tried but every time we just found another antechamber. Though each one was different to the last.

One was full of whispers. I’m not sure when I accepted that what I was hearing was real; disembodied voices was never something I believed was possible. But you can’t deny the evidence of your own ears and I could hear them, though not well enough to pick out any of the words. The tone of these voices was different, I remember that much. The whispers in the first room had been sombre and subdued whereas these once were excited. I remember a silver icon in the middle of the room, a strange shape, made up of thin bars all twisted together.

Iana wanted to take it with us but I held her back. I thought it would not be wise to disturb anything in this place.

There were many other rooms, though I’m afraid I can’t remember all of them. All of that is a bit of a blur to be honest. I remember a room carpeted with swords, some broken and others whole, all stabbed into the floor. The air in that room was heavy, almost too heavy to breathe, and I felt as if there was some great weight on my shoulders.

In another, fresh blood dripped from the walls, while in another one a metal shape twisted into different shapes while the word “Sha’atta Mot” echoed around the room.

Had I been there alone, I might have thought it was all a dream but Iana she says, she swears she remembers the same things I do.

After some time my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and I realised that the path were were following was leading us in concentric circles, towards the middle of the chamber. But when I was about to say this to Iana when she stopped dead. As did I.

Ahead of us was a wall of darkness. And not the darkness we had been walking in, true impenetrable blackness. And whats more, I could feel something from it. A wave of malevolence emanating from it. Not like there was something in there that hated us and meant us harm, but like the darkness itself wanted us dead.

I took an involuntary step backwards and bumped up against something hard. I feared the worst as I turned around and had my fears immediately confirmed.

Two baleful blue eyes stared down at me. And now that my eyes had adjusted I could see they shone from a face that had no skin and no flesh.

Now I saw where all the bones that had been taken from the livestock had gone.

A face of pale bone leered down at me, a ram’s horn curving from the back of the smaller half of the thing’s head while a vicious bull horn curved forward from the larger half. The thing’s torso was a nightmare of criss-crossing, mismatched bones, its arms, legs, hands and fingers made up of bones that I knew did not fit together.

The thing opened its mouth and somehow, without throat, without lungs, let out a shriek of rage and hunger.

On instinct I raised my rifle and fired. Shards of bone showered down from the monster’s horrifying face but I wasn’t there to feel them, I had already started running. Iana was right behind me, pausing only to fire her own rifle into the thing’s back.

I looked back, but it had not been hurt at all, and now, now it was coming for us, shambling forward on all fours, not fast enough to catch up, but with an implacable air that told me it would not stop.

We ran back the way we’d come, ignoring every side door, every chamber until we finally came to the corridor we’d entered from.

We ran along it until we found the hole in the ceiling and the rope. The moon was out now, shining bright. So I put the lantern down and jumped at the rope, and it was fear giving my arms strength and speed.

Iana was right behind me. But that thing was right behind her.

I’d pulled myself out of the hole and had turned to help her when she suddenly screamed. It had her leg and it was pulling her back. I ran forward, I grabbed her arm, began pulling. I should have realised the monster, whatever it was, was so much bigger… It was going to be a lot stronger than I was. But, as it turned out, it didn’t want all of her.

There was a… sickening, crunching noise and she screamed again, this time in pain. Suddenly there was no resistance, I was able to pull her out… most of her.

It had taken her leg. Just taken it. No more effort than snapping a twig from a tree. Strange thing was, it wasn’t bleeding. To look at her, you’d think… you’d think she’d lost the leg years ago.

Iana didn’t even seem to be in pain. She was just staring down at where her leg had once been with this look of blank shock. I couldn’t blame her. I can’t even imagine going through that.

But it was on me to decide what to do next and we had to get out of there. That thing, whatever it was, didn’t appear to be coming back up after us. So I helped Iana up, took her weight and helped her back to the farm.

And that was pretty much the end of the matter. We came back to Elalton and Iana was hospitalised for shock. She’s undergoing the pre-treatment for getting a prosthetic attached.

PAXTON
What did you tell Mr. DuZad?

AUREAN
Well obviously I didn’t tell him everything. I did tell him where the cave we found was and I recommended he collapse it and block up the hole in that corridor.

PAXTON
They didn’t ask about Iana’s leg?

AUREAN
They assumed she’d lost it to the wild animal.

PAXTON
And you didn’t disabuse them of that notion?

AUREAN
No. I didn’t think “it was torn off by a giant bone monster” would go down terribly well.

PAXTON
I see. Do you know if your advice was followed? Regarding the cave and so on I mean.

AUREAN
Afraid not. We didn’t really stick around long after that. We took our payment and then came straight back to the city.

PAXTON
Hm. And you haven’t seen this… bone monster since?

AUREAN
[scoffs] No, thank the Three. If I never see anything of its like again, I’ll live a happy life.

PAXTON
Yes, quite.

AUREAN
You don’t seem… surprised by any of this. You just believe me?

PAXTON
It’s not our business to comment on the validity of the donations given. We simply document and store them.

AUREAN
Ah, of course. But… have you come across anything similar to what happened to me?

PAXTON
Well, if you’d like I can take you through our library, I think I do remember the name Sha’atta Mot from another memory and I-

AUREAN
No! No. On second thought, I don’t want to know. Thanks for your time, I should really get back to the hospital.

PAXTON
Yes, of course. Thank you for coming in.

AUREAN
My pleasure. Would you like me to send the next one up?

PAXTON
Next one?

AUREAN
Yeah, when I got here there was a young woman in the vestibule. Tall, red hair. Said her name was Aless or Alwyn or something like that…

PAXTON
Alayne?

AUREAN
Yes! That was her name. She said she was waiting to speak with you… You alright? You’ve gone very pale.

PAXTON
Errm, we should go down the hall, quickly. Inscription Complete.

[The venoscribe clicks, and the whirring stops.]

[The end theme plays and the Announcer recites the credits.]