The mud of the Blackwood Basin did not merely cling to Mirella’s boots; it grabbed at them, sucking and pulling with a malicious, almost conscious hunger. The sky above had long since been strangled by the dense, interwoven canopy of the weeping ironwood trees, leaving the forest floor bathed in a permanent, suffocating twilight. It smelled of ancient decay, of crushed beetles and the sickly-sweet tang of rotting plums. Mirella ignored the stench. She ignored the way the shadows elongated and twisted around her like starved hounds. Her entire world was reduced to the heavy, burlap-wrapped bundle pressed tightly against her chest.
Elias was so cold. He had been cold for three days, ever since the winter fever had boiled the life from his small, fragile body. The village priest had refused to bury him in consecrated ground, citing Mirella’s practices in alchemy and herb-lore as a stain upon her bloodline. So, she had brought him here, into the mouth of the forbidden forest, where the old legends claimed the earth was so fertile, so saturated with ancient, primordial magic, that it refused to let the dead sleep.
Her arms ached, her muscles screaming in protest as she forced her way through a thicket of briars. The thorns were as thick as daggers, and they sliced through her woolen cloak, drawing thin, red lines across her forearms. She did not flinch. The physical pain was a distant, insignificant thing compared to the hollow, gaping chasm in her chest.
“We are almost there, my sweet,” Mirella whispered, her voice cracking, swallowed instantly by the oppressive silence of the woods. “The Mother of Roots will cradle you. The forest will give you back to me. I promise.”
As she spoke, the trees seemed to lean in, their bark groaning like the rusted hinges of a crypt door. The legends spoke of the Hollow King, a sovereign of rot and rebirth who held court in the center of the Blackwood. He was a creature of bargained miracles, a granter of cursed wishes. Mirella knew the risks. She knew the tales of men returning from the wood without their eyes, or without their memories, babbling about the singing worms. But a mother’s grief recognizes no boundaries, and it fears no monsters.
A sudden, wet snapping sound echoed to her left. Mirella froze, clutching Elias tighter. The fog parted slightly, revealing a creature that defied the natural order. It walked on four elongated, multi-jointed limbs, but its body was composed entirely of fused corpses, bound together by thick, pulsating vines. Pale, lifeless faces protruded from its shoulders and flanks, their mouths gaping in silent agony. It had no head of its own, only a massive, blossoming flower of jagged bone and dripping black sap where a neck should have been.
It was a Carrion-Bloom, a scavenger of the Blackwood.
Mirella slowly lowered Elias to the damp moss behind a thick root. She drew her silver harvesting sickle from her belt, the curved blade etched with protective alchemical runes. The creature smelled the fresh death on her. Its bone-petals twitched, and it let out a sound like a drowning man grasping for air, lunging at her with terrifying speed.
Mirella dropped to her knees, sliding beneath the creature’s sweeping, vine-tethered claw. She slashed upward, her silver blade biting deep into the creature’s underbelly. Black, viscous fluid erupted from the wound, sizzling as it hit the holy silver. The Carrion-Bloom thrashed, one of its heavy limbs striking Mirella across the ribs. The impact threw her against an ironwood trunk, knocking the breath from her lungs in a violent burst.
She tasted copper. The creature turned, its bone-flower opening wide to consume her. Pushing through the blinding pain, Mirella reached into her satchel, withdrawing a vial of refined phosphorus and sulfur. As the beast loomed over her, she crushed the vial against the silver blade of her sickle, sparking a bright, volatile flame. She drove the burning blade directly into the center of the bone-flower.
The creature shrieked—a chorus of a dozen human voices crying out in unison—before collapsing into a twitching mound of burning wood and burning flesh. Mirella sat panting, clutching her bruised ribs. She wiped the black blood from her face, picked up her son, and continued into the deeper dark, her resolve forged into something unbreakable and terrifying.
