V1.01

Eldran Gorse counted breaths the way he counted leaves for tinctures.

Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

The rhythm betrayed him.

The tight little room of his cottage reeked of boiled willow and raw, suffocating grief, wrapping tighter and tighter around his chest until breathing was war.

His wife, Maelen, lay still on the table, hands folded the way the death midwife, Morrith, had arranged them, as if modesty could somehow help the dead.

Eldran, a skilled Herbalist, had saved many individuals in the past. However, when it was his own wife, he faltered under pressure. The correct herb, Tallowreed Root, lay just within his grasp, the ideal remedy for the fever she was currently suffering from. But his mind was lost in panic, and the moments slipped too quickly, and the fever grew as if in spite of his failings. He knew which herbs to use and when, but none of this helped him in the moment. The fever took Maelen hour by hour, until there was no hour left to take. The cottage went quiet; the world felt knocked out of tune. In helplessness and guilt, a single, consuming thought pressed on: if there was anything at all to undo his loss, he would have to try it, no matter how desperate.

He did what the living do. He washed her and braided her hair. He set out the bowl of salt. He told himself rites would steady his hands, but they did not. When Morrith finally slept and the neighbors went home with soft voices, Eldran lit a lantern and walked into the hills.

He told no one where he was going because he had no plan, only a need to move, as if walking could lessen his pain or undo his regret. He walked frantically along goat tracks and old washouts, driven by the ache for something, anything, that could give him back what he’d lost. Eventually, he stumbled down a path and came upon a marker stone with strange symbols carved into its face. It seemed to speak to him, appealing to his grief. He felt compelled to dig, as if his longing for Maelen and need to do something, anything, had been given direction. And so he dug.

Anything to stop the maddening cries in his mind.

Near dawn, he found a vein.

It was neither ore nor stone, but some other weird crystalline substance that rested inside a clump of clay, a piece of night that had learned to glow. Purple, faint at first and growing stronger when his lantern leaned close, it hummed with a familiar, unsettling energy. Eldran had heard stories, rumors of Fae in the deep forest tending crystals that could call breath back to a faltering chest and mend even the gravest wounds.

He had never believed these rumors; belief was not his trade. But the thing in the clay hummed against his pick. The hum settled into his bones and would not stop.

If these rumors were true, could it also reverse the process of death? Could it repair the irreparable?

He pulled the shard free with careful hands, the clay giving way in stubborn clumps until it finally lay in his palm, slick with earth. The glow made his skin appear bruised. He wrapped it in cloth and carried it home, driven now by a fragile hope and a gnawing question: if this could undo even a fraction of his failure, how could he not try it? All the while, he was wondering if pursuing these rumors meant he was losing his mind.

Maelen had not moved. Morrith still slept. Eldran set the shard in a bowl on the bed beside her and cleansed his hands. Without prayer and without plan, he took the shard and pressed it against Maelen’s ribs. The illumination from the shard immediately spread through her body in an eerie fashion. Her back arched, causing the bowl to clatter to the floor. Her mouth opened and drew a breath that sounded like that of the first time a child finds air.

“Mae?” he said. It was not a question, but a plea with a shape.

Her eyes did not focus; they were not eyes one could meet. Her hands twitched, then found the edge of the table as if it were a shoreline she could lift herself from. Eldran reached out, and for a heartbeat, he believed.

She stood because the crystal told her body to do so. Where his wife had been was now a familiar shape with awkward, puppet-like motions. He spoke her name until it lost meaning, but she did not answer. She moved about the cottage in a circle, fingers grazing tables and doorposts, as if exploring a house she had lived in but was not able to recall. He tried to hold her, but she simply stepped past him, or through his embrace. Like a river ignoring a stone.

As he observed her moving aimlessly through the house, the realization slowly dawned on him. Contrasted with her movement, the chill deepened, amplifying the emptiness as he realized fully that what rose was not his wife.

At sundown, she faltered. The glowing within her torso began to thin, and her knees weakened over the course of several minutes. The dimmer the illumination became, the slower she moved, until she lay upon the floor once more, as if for rest, and did not rise again. Eldran felt the light go out, not only with his eyes, but in the hush that fell over the room. Even though it was obvious to him that it was not his wife who had just roamed his house, it stung like losing her all over again.

Morrith woke to find him on the floor beside his wife, hands slick with clay and face wet from tears. She asked what he had done, but he could not form an answer that would survive until sunlight. They buried Maelen that evening in the yard beneath the ash tree, as they had planned to do at dawn, and the neighbors came once again with soft voices and bread. No one mentioned Eldran’s clay-stained clothing or hands, or the mess in his house from where Maelen had roamed and knocked things over.

Night came howling, strange, and hollow, and the ache he felt made reason slip from him like a memory. Every room was foreign, every breath a wound.

He went back to the hills.

He returned to the area he had dug the day before, and once again began to dig, this time specifically for more of the shards. The second one came from deeper ground after hours of digging. He dug so deep that he had to support the sides of the hole with shelves of root and stone. He told himself that he would not do what he had done before, that he only wanted to keep it for study. He wrapped the shard in a cloth and brought it home.

Upon arriving back at his house, he lit the lamp and unwrapped the cloth, setting the shard on the table that Maelen had laid upon, watching its eerie glow until his eyes burned from not blinking. He stared at the shard until the sun of the following day came. He arose from the chair and spent the day absent-mindedly crafting potions and concoctions to fulfill the orders from the nearby village. They had told him he could take a week or two off in mourning, but he could not fathom the idea of being unoccupied that long.

As the day ended and the sun once again set, he finished all his pending orders, leaving him again without a distraction from his grief and obsession. He returned to the shard that sat on the table all day, his thoughts vacant, driven by the same restless urge that had led him before. He wrapped it and immediately took it to the burial ground, compelled by the belief that he had to try again, anything to change what had happened, or to prove to himself he was not powerless.

It did not matter that this was madness. He had already seen with his own eyes things that should not be possible; madness was denying what could be, so he dug at the foot of the ash tree. Careful, like a thief returning stolen coin to a chest. He uncovered what he had laid to rest with his own hands. He held his breath as he raised the shard between himself and his beloved. This one was larger and glowed more intensely than the last. Perhaps that would make a difference. Once again, he pressed a shard against her sternum.

Lights seeped through her ribs, much more exaggerated than last time. Her back arched, and fingers clawed at the roots that bound her. She rose, once again not as Maelen.

He watched her sway in the lantern glow, following her intently. Her head would tilt occasionally, as if listening for a sound only she could hear. She turned once, stumbled, and reached out with a motion that almost looked like memory. He whispered her name until his throat felt it would bleed. She did not answer.

Hours later, she collapsed, the light in her chest dimming gradually until it was gone. He stared at her body. Not with horror, or even sorrow. With resolve.

Twice. He had done it twice. The shard was not chance, not miracle, not madness, and not imagined. It was a method.

He buried her again, carefully smoothing the soil atop her temporary resting place. This time, he did not linger in grief. He immediately lit his lantern, took up his spade, and returned to the hills.

The earth became his ledger. It was almost as if, when he closed his eyes, the shards beneath the soil would whisper to him, and there were seams like roots connecting the shards together, and every shard he obtained was a line added to his record of the possible. Each one hummed differently in his hand, some faint like a dying ember, others so strong his teeth ached from the resonance.

He learned quickly that small shards burned too fast, their light gone within hours. Larger pieces carried a body longer. He learned where to press them, against the sternum, into the hollow of the throat, and against the base of the skull. Each time he found a shard he deemed sufficient, he would return to Maelen.

Again and again, he brought her up from the ash tree, pressed light into her, and watched her stagger through the cottage or the yard. Each time, she would return to the earth sooner. Each time he buried her again, but he no longer saw futility. He saw instruction.

One evening, he struck upon the corpse of a hunting dog, one that seemed to have strayed too far from its owner and had met its unfortunate end. Eldran kneeled down beside the poor creature and looked down at a shard he had planned to take to his Wife. Looking back to the creature, he grew annoyed with himself that he had not expanded his experimentations outside of his partner. Why had he limited himself so?

He pressed the shard into its ribs, and almost immediately, the beast lurched upright, foam rapidly forming at its teeth. Its legs moved stiffly, but they moved. He set it to digging beside him. When its body failed, he raised it again soon after.

A week passed, and he pressed a shard into the chest of a field hand whose family had buried him after a fever. The man rose, glassy-eyed and clumsy. Eldran placed a space in his hands, and with some minimal, strange methods of instruction, he began to dig without rest. Almost seeming to mimic the behavior of Eldran and the Canine.

The hills above his cottage became pocked with cuts and trenches. Lanterns bobbed in the dark like restless stars. Where Eldran’s strength flagged, husks carried on, tireless, heedless, their silence broken only by a cacophony of iron scraping on stone, and shovels displacing dirt.

Eldran no longer called himself an herbalist. He no longer mixed salves or poultices. His new occupation became that of earth and death. He moved the earth to obtain the ingredients necessary to raise the dead, and in turn, used these dead to find more of these ingredients to further expand and sustain his workforce.

Word spread. At first, only in whispers: strange lights on the distant ridges could be faintly seen from the surrounding villages, and shapes moving stiffly in the night.

The first to approach him was a widow. She wore a veil that partially obscured her face. She recoiled at the sight of husks shuffling in his yard.

“What?” she yelled as she brought both of her hands to her mouth, stifling back frantic tears.

“Briar?” she continued, crumbling to the ground, her face contorted into a writhing display of despair.

Eldran said nothing, the overwhelming emotional reaction piercing him like a blade, reminding him of how he had just felt only weeks prior. He hung his head as the widow navigated the situation.

“Briar. Is- is that you?” she pleaded and begged with the husk, crawling across the mud and dirt to her husband’s reanimated body, grasping tightly around its legs. “Please don’t leave me again.”

She was the first to stay.

Others followed. A soldier with his brother’s corpse wrapped in canvas. A farmer with his daughter’s small body carried in his arms. They came to him not as followers, but as broken mourners, unwilling to let go. Some fled in terror when they saw the husks of their loved ones. Others stayed, their horror overcome by need.

And so the digging grew.

What began with one man and one body became many. The husks multiplied, clawing tunnels through the hills, carrying stone and soil in endless procession. Chambers widened, braced with beams. Bones were set into walls for strength and as a reminder. Runes scrawled in haste began to appear, half-prayers, half-warnings.

Lantern light painted the walls of the first true chamber that formed. Eldran stood there, Maelen’s husk at his side, and listened to the sound of dozens of tools striking stone in unison.

As Maelen collapsed beside him, this time much too soon from the point he had raised her, Eldran understood that his obsession had transformed into determination. He knew that he would not be able to effectively raise her again, not with the shards as they currently are. He would need to find a way to strengthen them. The diminishing returns were becoming far too great for any sustained reanimation, but now, his purpose had shifted from grief to relentless pursuit of a solution, no matter the cost.

He looked back at all the people before him, a smirk growing across his face as he knew it was possible, and he would find out how.