I have to find the Waker. But how? How am I meant do that when my informants are either mad or useless? I flip through the reports on my desk. I paid for these. I traded secrets and artefacts; the talisman I was given by the seer who was my former employer. It saved my life multiple times and I traded it for twenty pages which amount to “The Waker might be here, but it might also have been the echo of a long-dead monstrosity. I really don’t know.”
The data is too conflicting: while one person writes, “the Waker is long dead, only her ghost remains,” another says she makes regular trips out to drag the Old Corpses back to her home.
After all this time, I know nothing more than anyone else; The Waker woke them up, the world suffered into its current sorry state, and then she vanished.
Not that knowing more about what she was like three hundred years ago will help me find her now. Not that finding her now means I’ll be able to kill her. Not that killing her will help anyone at all.
Not that any of this is worthwhile.
But what else is there to do? If all the options are futile, might as well pick one.
I find myself staring out my study window into the soggy garden Rowan and I share. It’s been doing better lately. The shrubs are getting bigger, the weepers have leaves for once, and we had to cut the grass for the first time in years. There’s a particular patch that grows teeth and we don’t trust it. One time we found a mauled cat next to it. We burnt it away and collected the teeth in a jar. We were disappointed to find new ones growing a few days later.
There’s a strange child—well as strange as any child—beneath a willow, poking a bird with a metal rod. That’s the futile thing the child chose to do today. The bird might be dead for now but it’s as big as the child is. It’s folded awkwardly, and its long neck snakes into a nearby shrub. The child lifts its black wing up to inspect its side. They stare for a while before letting it drop down.
The child is almost certainly emptied, but they might not be, and I’d rather not have a death on my property. I get out of my desk, take the shotgun down from the wall, and hurry down the stairs and out the front door. Cold from the wet grass seeps through my shoes and I shudder at the sudden change in temperature.
I beeline towards the child who looks up at me only when I’ve nearly reached them: they’re wearing an oversized shirt and torn trousers. They don’t shiver and their face is slack.
“Oh, I came out for nothing,” I say. The child looks away, back at the bird. I point the shotgun at his head. “Well, get gone you. You can poke dangerous things to your heart’s content, just don’t do it here.”
And as if it was waiting for me to say that, the bird snaps its neck out of the shrub, crashes its beak into the child’s head. Crunch. The child is flung to the ground with a half-imploded face. The bird points its almost spherical, armoured head at me.
I fire. Holes are blown in its neck and its wings spasm in an attempt to fly. It’s almost in the air when I fire again, and this shot destroys its left wing, forcing it to the ground. It charges towards me, dragging its head with it like a ball and chain. It’s disorientated and veers off to the left where it runs into a weeper. Confused, it lashes out again, but the strain must be too much for the weekend limb because its head separates and goes flying to who knows where.
It runs around for a little while before it bleeds out.
I put hopes of organising my papers away for the time being and go yell into the house to ask Rowan to help me before the garden gets overfed on corpses.
She emerges after a few moments and isn’t busy so she carts them away. According to her they’re good enough quality for her dilution tank. I’m not comfortable with eating an emptied body even if they’re not a person anymore. They were one once.
If Rowan wants to eat them, though, I won’t judge. Apparently, it’s socially accepted in some places; their diet is mainly emptied rather than mags.
Once the bodies are disposed of Rowan lets me know about a new lead on the Waker. A seer has come to the village, asking for me. Or rather, they’re asking for the one who’s stupid enough to gather so much information in one place. It took them long enough to notice.
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