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Aberration – Jake Ozga

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Accursed’

A Black Library Publication Imprint

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Aberration

by Jake Ozga

A girl walks alone in the forest at night. Her bare feet leave a trail of perfectly defined footprints in the crisp, freshly fallen snow, a trail that weaves between the grasping shadows of winter-bare trees like the tracks of a small and hunted creature. She is guided only by moonlight, but at times it is so bright that when it shines upon the snow between the trees, the radiance dazzles her. Walking alone in the sempiternal Shyishan hinterlands is not without danger and though she has done this many times before, she has rarely strayed quite so far from the village that, until so recently, she thought of as home.

She is lost in reverie – as she so often is – and so does not realise that she is also in danger of becoming truly lost, until a stumble upon a toppled tree branch startles her from her tangled thoughts and she considers her unfamiliar surroundings. Nothing stirs. The absoluteness of the silence can be overwhelming, yet she has always found it a comfort. She has lived in these woods for all of her young life: playing in them as a child and exploring them as she grew into adulthood, and because of this she knows that the forest is not to be taken lightly, not when so much has changed, and especially not now, when there is no one to come to her aid if she should call out for help.

The girl’s name is Marianne. It is an unremarkable name in this unremarkable, isolated corner of the Realm of Death. And Marianne herself is not remarkable. Or at least, she is not beautiful. Certainly not in the way that the Shyishan aristocrats are beautiful, when glimpsed through the windows of their dark coaches as they rattle along the amethyst-stone roadways from their castles on the northern coast to their palaces in the Innerlands. She knows this well enough: her face is not gaunt enough, her skin is not pale enough, and her hair – though dark – is not so pure a shade of midnight black as that of those nobles, who seem to her so otherworldly. There is too much evidence of vitality about her for her to be considered beautiful: she is too quick to smile and laugh; her wide, brown eyes restlessly consume every detail of her quiet world. She is too interested in her surroundings. She is not distant and unobtainable, as beauty should be; she does not remain detached and uninvolved. She participates too much. She takes too much pleasure in the simple daily rituals and circumstances of the living, even in times such as these when there is little pleasure to be found.

She is – was – the middle child of a large and unruly litter of seven. When she was younger, she was protected in all things by her older sisters, just as she was in turn fiercely protective of her younger siblings. Her parents were the rarest of people: kind and happy and deeply in love. They were well liked in the village, and never raised a hand to their children even though some would say that the children, hellions all, would often have deserved it. The children were left to their own devices, confident that they would always have each other. During the day they would play in the woods or among the villagers, who tolerated them well enough. And at night they slept together in the single room of their modest cottage, lying intertwined in a tangle of skinny arms and legs, whispering and pinching and squirming until their father, exhausted from his labours, would shout at them to quieten down, inevitably sending the children into paroxysms of silent giggling. And so, even though she is only an unremarkable peasant girl in a cold and cruel region of a cold and cruel realm, her life had managed to be comfortable and secure. More than that, it had managed, for so long, to be happy.

Now, Marianne’s cheeks are flushed pink with exertion as she carries a heavy pack on her back. All of her worldly possessions, every memory of her eighteen years of life is in this pack, and it is not so large as all that. Her footsteps bite through the crisp, fresh snowfall. There should not be so much snow at this time of year; her feet are becoming numb. Her breath comes heavily from between her lips to vanish in clouds of steam in the piercing cold. She is an aberration: she is a creature of youth and life in a place of the perfect and immaculate tranquillity of death.

She comes at last to the foot of a hill and begins to climb, following a twisting trail to emerge above the trees. She pauses to look back the way she has come, back towards the distant village, where even now the smoke from a handful of hearth fires can be seen coiling up into the bright night sky, illuminated by moonlight reflected on the snow. At the top of the hill is her destination: a place of legend from her childhood, a place that the soothsayers speak about in hushed and reverent tones, lest they invoke some ancient curse. The trail leads now between ruined stone walls and across a ditch that might once have been a moat and into an enclosed garden surrounded by skeletal birch trees. Her footsteps are hushed by a carpet of desiccated catkins that turn to dust as she passes. She cannot help but feel that she is being watched. In the distance, a wolf howls.

The castle itself is hewn from crumbling black stone and shaped like a hand grasping at the moon, with tumbledown towers that remind her of the mutilated fingers of thieves and pickpockets. Not even this place, hidden away in a remote and forgotten region of Shyish, has entirely escaped the earth tremors and aftershocks that so recently wreaked havoc upon the realm. Arrow-slit windows and embrasures in the remains of these towers look down across the forest and upon the distant village, and in these windows there is the flickering glow of torchlight.

The torchlight triggers a memory. Those few villagers that had dared to visit her at the blackened remains of her cottage in the days before she left had asked her: What will you do now? And she had answered them with a shrug and a sad smile, and the villagers, upon seeing that strange smile, had surreptitiously waved their hands in poorly concealed gestures of warding, or spat in the bloodstained snow when they thought she did not see.

What will you do now, now that everything has changed, now that you no longer have each other, now that you no longer have anyone?

These last things they did not say aloud, but she saw the questions in their eyes. And of course they did not say that she could no longer stay in the village, but this too she read as plain as day on their ashen, downcast faces. She saw their fear, their mistrust, and she knew they now thought her cursed. The villagers had suffered too, they reminded her. They had all lost someone to the storms of wild magic that pillaged the land, setting trees ablaze with smokeless fire and cracking the earth. But none had suffered like Marianne, who had gone alone into the forest one night, and had returned to find her home, her life, reduced to nothing but scorched bones, picked over by wolves that had been drawn to the scent of death and sorcery. She had buried what little she could.

‘Are you a witch, Marianne?’ the village children had asked.

Though she was not much older than they, and though they had played together not so many years ago, now there was a distance between them that seemed to her to be immeasurable and insurmountable. She was gathering herbs and mushrooms, as she had every day since she was old enough to safely do so, for the poisonous varieties far outweighed the edible.

‘Did you kill your brothers and sisters with magic?’ They were wide-eyed, pale children and no strangers to death. ‘Can you teach us magic?’ they had whispered. When she had not replied, they started to lose interest. ‘Will you kill us too, Marianne?’ they said and then they had run, screaming and laughing into the woods. An image had appeared in her mind’s eye unbidden: a vision of a hangman’s noose, the black rope coiling and twisting around the pale skin of her neck. And she had thought: It is time for me to leave.

And now, she reaches the entrance to the castle. Her feet and hands are numb from the cold; she staggers under the weight of her pack though it contains only a few mementos, relics of the life she has lost. The walk has been much harder than she anticipated. The castle entranceway is hidden from sight by piles of fallen stones: the earthquakes have reduced the castle in stature, but its presence remains undiminished. It looms, ancient and foreboding, the black stone infused with an indescribable sense of menace. The great door is made from ghostwood, ashen white against the dark surrounds and ice cold to the touch. In the centre of the door there is an iron knocker in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head.

She hesitates. The last time she saw such a creature, the fur of its muzzle was stained crimson with blood.

The ring gripped in the wolf’s jaws is so heavy she has to set aside her pack in order to lift it with both hands. The sound of iron against iron echoes across the midnight forest. Inscribed on the wolf’s head is a symbol she recognises immediately: a single letter ‘V’. For as long as she has been alive, and indeed for many centuries before that, these lands and all the people in them have belonged to the Vyrkos.

She waits in silence at the threshold of the ancient castle, feeling like an intruder, like she does not belong here. Nothing stirs. Even the wind seems to hold its breath. Part of her wants to turn and run back into the woods, but where would she go? You must keep going, she thinks. Else what will become of you? She lifts the iron ring once more and is about to knock when from deep within the castle, she hears the sound of footsteps approaching.

The door swings heavily open and the figure that now stands revealed in the doorway causes her to take an involuntary step back. He is huge, so tall and broad-shouldered as to almost fill the doorway in its entirety and eclipse the glow of the torches coming from within, casting him for a moment only as a monstrous silhouette in a flickering penumbra of firelight. A shape more beast than man. Marianne falters.

Then the figure steps out towards her into the moonlight and she can see him more clearly: a man, then, though savage and unkempt. He is older than her, perhaps as old as her father. And he is handsome: his face is weathered with cracks and scars, but full of fierce character in the way of a well-travelled antique. He wears a blood-red brocade coat, a military fashion from some faraway land. It is threadbare, the golden buttons either undone or missing. His shaggy hair is the colour of dark iron and tied back from his face with a loose ribbon, and his skin – bare beneath his open coat – is as white as a river-dredged corpse.

Yet it is his eyes that consume her attention. His unblinking eyes seem to glow in the cold light. They are the palest shade of yellow. His pupils are huge and dark, like the bottom of a well sunk so deep that no sunlight ever graces it. The eyes of a predator, a creature that hunts by night. He looks down upon her. He fixates her with a look of such intensity, such vehemence, that she does not know if she will ever move again.

‘Do you know where you are, child?’ he says. He speaks quietly, yet his voice carries like the rumble of a distant storm heard across the valleys. His lip is curled with something like amusement.

She nods once.

‘And do you know what I am?’

Her heart is fluttering in the cage of her chest like a bird caught in a trap. She nods again, slowly and precisely, and on her lips the fated word Vyrkos: a word shrouded in mystery and superstition throughout her short life, a word that explains both everything and nothing at once.

He regards her in silence for a long moment, and then slowly blinks, just once, and whatever spell had seemed to hold her in thrall is broken. She exhales.

‘You came all this way barefoot?’

‘I hadn’t anticipated snow such as this.’

He nods. ‘A result of the great sorcerous works afoot in the realm. Death magic steals life even from the air itself. Come inside, out of the cold.’

His voice is deep and melodic. He does not sound unkind, she thinks, but she knows she tends to only see the best in people. The huge figure stands aside, and she steps across the threshold. He takes her pack, lifting it effortlessly from where she has put it down, in a single enormous hand that resembles nothing so much as the paw of some great animal. And what’s more – a detail that causes her to gasp – at the end of each finger is a claw, hooked and black and entirely, undeniably inhuman.

‘Why are you here?’ he asks. His soft voice rumbles near to her ear and causes the flesh of her neck to pimple and the whisps of fine hair to stand on end.

‘I have nowhere else to go. My family are dead. The villagers think me a witch.’

His yellow eyes flicker in the dancing light of the fire. ‘And are they right to think so?’ In a moment of profound strangeness, he sniffs her. A single deep inhalation. ‘The taint of sorcery, perhaps. Wild magic found you, I think. It has left a mark.’

‘There was black fire that burned without warmth…’ She thinks for a moment. ‘What great works? The works of the God in the Star?’

He smiles as if surprised, flashing long, sharp teeth. ‘Not him, no. The other. By whose tolerance you are permitted to draw breath in this realm.’

‘We must live unseen,’ she whispers. A fragment of something her mother used to say. She moves closer to a torch held in a sconce upon the wall; it is a blackened animal bone, the end wrapped in twisted tow and soaked in pine resin. The smoke is pungent, but the heat is welcome.

‘Yours is an old tribe. But unseen or not, it makes no difference. The gods do not tread lightly when they stride upon this realm. There is no safety here for such as you. So young. So powerless.’

He gestures broadly towards the debris that has fallen from the towers. ‘Even I was not spared.’ He laughs. His laughter is a strange and deep thing. ‘This castle has remained unscathed by the touch of any invader since the Time of Myth, and now this. Still, I did not suffer quite as you have.’

He pauses. Considers her.

‘Now, you are all alone.’

He is in such close proximity to her that she is overwhelmed by the smell of him, a smell of unfamiliar spices and leather and the earthy odour of an unwashed beast. It is not, she thinks, entirely unpleasant.

‘But so,’ Marianne says, with a sad smile upon her not-quite-beautiful face, ‘are you.’

He leads her into a wide corridor of dark stone. A threadbare rug is strewn with broken masonry and desiccated leaf litter, blown in from outside. Disintegrating tapestries hang crooked upon the walls and flutter as they pass, briefly animating the depicted renditions of wolves – for each of the dozen or so images she sees depicts a wolf in some form or other. He explains each piece as they walk, the heraldry they show, the events they describe. His voice is quiet and sonorous. Her mind is wandering so that she finds it hard to concentrate. The place looks as if no one has lived here for decades; the dim light from torches and candles is the only evidence of habitation. Her head is spinning. She staggers slightly.

‘My Lord Vyrkos…’ she says at last; her speech is halting and uncertain. ‘You must excuse me if I faint. It will not be due to fear, but because I have not eaten for some time.’

He smiles again. ‘Of course. You left your home in a hurry.’

‘I had a vision of a grisly end.’

‘Perhaps a witch then, in truth?’ He picks up a stool from the floor and sets it upright, beside a small side table. She sits and rests her head in her hands.

‘Do you need a servant? I could clean for you.’ Her voice is shaky. She is reluctant to accept charity, even the smallest things.

‘Are you unwell?’ he asks.

‘No, I…’ But that is all she manages to say. She closes her eyes for a moment. An after-image of the flickering torchlight fades into abstraction against the inside of her eyelids; the twisting coils of flame turn from red to grey to black and become indistinct. He reaches out for her, cradling her head in one huge hand as she succumbs to sleep.

Marianne dreams. In her dreams black flames dance like leaves caught in a sudden eddy of wind, spiralling up and up into a vortex. A terrible dancing column of cold fire that devours all that it touches, its fuel the very essence of life. And then the vortex is no longer flame, but instead it becomes a thick black rope, a rope that twists in coils around the pale flesh of a young girl’s neck, looping around and around. This young girl turns to face Marianne. She is pale: pale as if crafted from the finest porcelain, pale to the extent that her skin is almost translucent, and a fine tracery of indigo veins can be seen beneath. She is beautiful in the way that death itself is beautiful. And the girl says, in a voice little more than a whisper:

‘You must know how this will end.’

Marianne wakes with a start. She is lying in a dark and unfamiliar room. He has carried her to a bed, she realises. There is no one here with her, but the echo of the whisper lingers in her ear. Her skin is pimpled with dread, and her heart races. She pulls the bedclothes up around her.

The chamber is large and barren save for a vast, empty fireplace and the remains of a dismal-looking wardrobe, reduced now to splinters under a heap of fallen masonry where a corner of the room has collapsed to reveal the crepuscular light of false dawn beyond. Snow drifts down into the room in a gentle breeze, vanishing into nothingness before it can settle on the bare stone floor. Fleeting shapes dart in the half-light at the limits of her perception as bats circle outside the castle.

She can smell food being prepared elsewhere in the castle and her stomach groans. After a time, she rises, standing unsteadily on feet which still feel numbed from the snow. She is distressed to discover that she is wearing only her underclothes. At the foot of the bed there is a pale blue garment that shimmers with a dull shine like oil on water. She looks around for the clothes she arrived in, but they are nowhere to be seen, and so with no other option she examines the blue dress. It is a simple shift, but finer than any garment she has set eyes on before. It is delicate and weightless but brittle with age, and in places the fabric has rotted such that it crumbles when she touches it.

Fragile and impractical, she thinks, but what else can I do?

She leaves the bedchamber and steps into the corridor beyond. It is a liminal space stretching between unknown, unseen parts of the ancient castle like a cadaverous artery, drained of blood and left hollow and decrepit. Dust motes hang suspended in the smattering of half-light that falls lazily from narrow windows. As she walks along it, she feels like she is the first living soul to walk here in a hundred years or more.

On one wall there is a huge oil painting. It hangs crooked, in a decaying gilt frame. The painting depicts a wolf of such magnitude that it towers over the forests and mountains at its feet. The wolf’s jaws are closed around a star, the brightest star in the night sky. This star she has always known as the god of her ancestors, always watching over her even though her tribe are lost and alone, far from his reach.

‘Hrunspuul, the god-wolf.’

The lord has approached her so silently she did not hear him until he spoke, his voice deep and gentle near her ear. She shivers. She had been lost in thought.

‘This land is his gift to the Vyrkos. It is said when he returns, he will devour the star of Azyr – he will pluck it from the heavens and swallow it and so plunge the realm into true darkness.’ He laughs softly. ‘My kind are forever conflating myth and memory. Nevertheless, there must always be a Vyrkos here in this castle, to await the return of the Hound of the Cairns and to protect his gift from invaders. So here I am, so here I remain.’

‘Have you always lived here?’ she asks. ‘Did your parents live here too?’

‘That was… another life.’

He takes her by the hand and leads her like a child.

‘Come, let us find some food.’

They descend a narrow flight of steps. At the bottom is a door which opens into a room that is something like a servant’s kitchen. It is in obvious disrepair: furniture lies broken and coated in dust and debris, plates and glassware are smashed upon the flagstone floor. There is an overwhelming smell of animals: of blood and musk and urine and of meat cooking on skewers over a stone firepit. He finds a chair and places it so she can sit at the head of a large wooden table.

‘You prepare your own food?’ Marianne asks. She looks around uncertainly.

On the table there are some small plates of fruit, fruit the likes of which she has never seen before, for none grows in this land. He gestures for her to eat and so she does. They are small, brown, shrivelled things, but they taste sweet.

‘I have no cook, no servants. This fruit has come from Ghyran.’

‘I could do this – I could prepare food for you.’

He places a wooden bucket filled with churning water on the table and rolls up the sleeve of his red coat. The bucket froths with activity: there are living creatures within that struggle and thrash. Long black tails coil around his arm, and for a moment she imagines the hangman’s rope, come alive somehow and following her here from her dreams.

‘These too are not native to this realm, though they come not from Ghyran – they have many kinds of eel there, of course, but this is something else, something I believe has been drawn here by the sorceries unleashed on the land. An unnatural phenomenon. The stream beneath the keep is infested with them. Parasites.’

She watches one of the creatures as it writhes in his grip, and she pities the wretched thing. It seems so pathetic, fighting for what little life it has left. It has a face unlike any eel she has seen before: it has no eyes and looks more like a worm than a fish, with a hideous funnel of tiny teeth in place of a mouth. As she watches, the creature loops itself around unexpectedly and bites into the skin of the Vyrkos’ forearm, latching on to the pale flesh as would a leech. He grunts and pulls it free, leaving a circular wound. There is a shocking amount of scarlet blood.

He dashes the creature’s head against the corner of the table with a sickening wet thud. Then he reaches into an inside pocket and withdraws a small hook-bladed knife. Holding the eel’s head with one hand, he cuts a shallow line around its throat. Placing the knife to one side, he uses his free hand to peel the skin back away from the eel’s head. With short, sharp tugs the skin tears free from the fish, revealing the palpitating meat inside. The creature is still alive, she realises; it thrashes helplessly, and even when it is decapitated the bloody core still squirms and the grotesque mouth still gasps. This he then carves into chunks and skewers. The head and skin he discards, tossing them through a blood-smeared iron waste grate in the floor, where they splash down into the darkness below.

She sits wordlessly for a while, listening to the meat sizzle and spit as he places it to roast over the fire. She waits for a wave of nausea to pass, and when it has, she asks him if this is how he usually eats his meals, here alone in this empty castle.

‘No,’ he replies, ‘this is not how I usually dine.’

He places a skewer in front of her. The meat is burnt and greasy. It tastes strangely flavourless. She has noticed that certain things seem to be draining from her world: flavour, colour, warmth. She sighs. Something is not right. She knows this.

He doesn’t eat with her. He says he always eats alone.

The next day he takes her to the topmost battlement of the keep. Anaemic sunlight dapples the forest far below. The horizon seems infinitely far, as if the land goes on forever and this castle sits atop it all. On a clear day you can see to the coast.

‘Why did you come here?’ he asks her. ‘What are you looking for?’

She doesn’t know how to answer, not precisely. The question is too big, it encompasses too much. She can’t articulate her thoughts – thoughts about how she yearns for some place in the world and some soul to share it with. She can’t explain that she wants to simply have an opportunity, a fair and equal chance in life. And above all how she hopes: an unspecific, unqualified hope that encompasses everything she sees and touches. And that – even though it seems so forlorn – this hope includes him.

She shivers in the wind, and he offers her his coat. An heirloom, he explains, a gift from a compatriot in a distant land. There are not many memories he treasures; there are not many he would call friend.

When he says this, for a moment his face changes: he looks older and there is a sadness about him, or perhaps a vulnerability, and in that moment, she wants to take his hand; in that moment she thinks that maybe she is where she is supposed to be.

‘That sounds so lonely a life,’ Marianne says. ‘My mother used to say that without love, a house becomes a den of starving wolves.’

He laughs again and a silence settles across the pair. It is not a laugh with much warmth in it, she thinks. It could perhaps even be considered condescending. Despite the coat that she has pulled tight around her, she is chilled. The moment passes.

One time she wakes and he is at her bedside, as if he has materialised, manifested out of the substance of her dreams. Lethargic sunlight illuminates the bedchamber from the collapsed ceiling and bathes him in gold. It is as if he is the subject of a painting, she thinks, an oil painting of a war hero perhaps, captured in a moment of thoughtful repose. She has never seen anyone like him before. But the more she looks, the more she is disturbed by the realisation that his face seems unreal, as if it is somehow false. He is still beautiful, she thinks, but it is not genuine: like the deceit of sorcery that makes as if to be fire when it is not true fire. It is as if he wears a mask that smiles and laughs, but which conceals some hidden true face.

Do you know what I am?

She thinks of this moment as she looks at the portraits that hang throughout the castle. Most are badly faded with age, the canvases warped and discoloured, but the beauty of the subjects is undiminished: it is no simple mundane beauty to be constrained and damaged by time and the elements, but something transcendental, something eternal. She knows these are the enigmatic nobles she has glimpsed from afar in their black coaches, or others as alike to them, these secret rulers of an unending, undying land, where her own presence is merely tolerated, as one might tolerate a mouse so long as it does not cause a disturbance. She knows they too have some hidden aspect. They all have the eyes of a predator.

One is not like the others. His countenance is less lupine; indeed, it is almost ratlike and his stature diminished. She asks the lord about this portrait, and he snorts derisively.

‘Not all Vyrkos run with wolves,’ he tells her. ‘There are some that lie with vermin. Be careful where you rest your head, little mouse.’

For the next few days, she rests in the bedchamber. She feels intermittently too hot and too cold, sometimes waking with a chill, at other times in a pool of sweat. She is in a state of constant discomfort, as if her skin is too sensitive to touch, and the fabric of her nightdress scratches her like the claws of a thousand tiny animals. She thinks sometimes of the discarded skin of the eel, of how it is sometimes possible to think you have nothing left to lose, only to discover that you can lose even more. To lose more until only a bloody core remains, a fundamental core of being, a core that writhes and squirms, exposed to the cruelties of the world. She feels frustrated in a way she cannot articulate: frustrated with herself, with her life. And she feels disappointed.

When she sleeps, her dreams are vivid and ferocious, like the passions and prophecies of a moon-touched madman. She dreams of a string of black pearls that he places around her neck. In her village this would be one of the intimate rituals of bonding, such as between a couple on the night of their nuptials, such as she has fantasised about since she was old enough to understand what happens in those private and secret moments between two lovers, but there is no tenderness in the touch of her phantasmal suitor; the pearls are too tight and they constrict and coil around her neck like a rope until she gasps for breath. Then the pearls are suddenly sharp, and the rough edges draw blood. One huge hand holds her, then, by the hair. The other hand reaches into the crimson circumference of the wound around her neck and with sharp, clawed, bestial fingers prises the pale skin from the flesh. And begins to pull.

When he visits her, she studies him with lidded eyes, heavy with sleep, and as he smiles at her without warmth she shivers. She has a fever, he claims. He brings her soft brown fruit and watered wine.

‘Did you poison me?’ she asks.

‘You are the poison. Something in your blood.’

He seems to find this whole process distasteful now. He visits her less and less frequently. Some days he does not visit her at all.

She exists in a place between waking and sleeping. In the early hours of the morning, the distinction is blurred. Sometimes she imagines there is movement in the shadows, that there are things crawling in through the void in the ceiling, the ever-present void that reveals the darkness beyond as if to remind her that there is no safety to be found behind stone walls or behind closed doors, and that these constructions are transient like life is transient – like her life is transient – and only death is eternal. And in this darkness, she can almost see fleeting shapes at the limit of her perception. Shapes that are almost, but not quite human.

Another time, she imagines murmuring voices, the faintest susurrations coming from somewhere inside the room. In the darkness she cannot tell if her eyes are open or shut. She does not dare to move; she only listens, unsure if she is dreaming. She hears three female voices, speaking so softly they might almost have been her own thoughts, as urgent and formless as the wind.

There comes a whisper. She should run.

There is nowhere to run. A reply, as faint as a dying breath. The wolf will track her through the forest. Do you not know how wolves run down their prey? Hunting is his favourite game.

She should hide, a third voice says.

There is nowhere to hide. The wolf will sniff her out, even in the darkest corner of the deepest dungeon. Hiding will only make him cross.

Then what can she do?

Only what we three did.

Marianne strains to hear the words that are spoken next. She holds her breath.

She can die.

How many nights since she came to this place? She has lost track. She stands at the corner of her bedchamber and looks out through the shattered wall towards the distant horizon, where the grey night sky bleeds like leaking oil into the infinite vista of pine forests and hazy purple mountains. The villagers will be watching this same sky tonight, she knows, because it is a night when the Whispering Moon so revered by the soothsayers eclipses the ever-vigilant star of the god whose name she does not know. For this one night, this god is blind, and his people are abandoned. She has never felt more abandoned than now.

This night must also hold significance to the Vyrkos lord, because earlier that day he set out into the woods, a scabbarded scimitar worn beneath his coat, the red coat that flutters in the wind that rushes down into the valleys from the distant coast, and that she watches until it is only a red speck lost among the shadows of the forest.

‘My duties take me away from you,’ he had said. He had expressed remorse; he had kissed her hand farewell. For her part, she felt nothing but relief.

While he is away, she explores the castle, lighting the torches in every sconce she can find, trying every handle to every door. Some are locked. Some she is able to force open, but every room is the same – dusty and disused. In one room she finds an animal hide rug, the fur of a bear or something similar. Though she does not particularly feel the cold, she wraps it around her and covers the flimsy shift that is all she has to wear.

On the upper floor of the castle, behind a door of wormbitten oak at the top of a winding stair, she finds a small library. Here too the ceiling is broken in places, and in the mounds of tumbled, snow-dappled masonry a small birch tree has taken root. As the door opens a dozen or more winged creatures take flight in alarm – bats, or birds that look like bats.

She enters the room, her fur trailing behind her like a cape. Books are stacked in heaped piles, some covered with sackcloth to protect against the snow. Others are strewn about the flagstones or have been left to rot beneath the caved-in ceiling on bowing, moss-covered shelves. Upon a small lectern there is a stack of books that appear to have been spared the worst of the depredations of the elements. They are ponderous-looking tomes with titles such as A Treatise on the Shapeshifters of Ghur and Alchemies of Transformation. Another book with an indistinct name contains woodcut illustrations, and as she leafs through the brittle, jaundiced pages a sequence of engravings that depicts a naked woman catches her eye: the woman’s bare flesh is marked with a dividing line that appears to be intended as a point of bifurcation, for in the next image in the sequence the skin is peeled away by unseen hands like the rind of a fruit and the woman steps out of it as if it were mere clothing to be discarded.

She slams the book shut.

An ancient wooden shutter swings open, caught in a sudden gust of wind to crack against the frame of a window that once would have been glazed with coloured glass but now stands empty and destitute. Marianne stands at this window in the spectral light of the Whispering Moon, the wind tugging at her unbound hair. At the border of the forest, in the shadows at the feet of a copse of silver birch, she senses movement. Three distinct shapes coalesce from pools of darkness, finding lithe and wolfish form. Three sets of yellow eyes that seem to glow in the pale light look back at her, unblinking.

It is some time before the lord of the castle returns from his expedition into the godless forest, and when he returns it is clear that his mood is foul. The castle reverberates with the echo of slamming doors and heavy, booted footsteps.

He seeks her out as she waits in a room that must once have been a banqueting hall, but whose furnishings have long since been discarded or used for firewood. Even the oak panels that surrounded the chamber have been mostly torn down, and the intricate tapestries and black silk brocade hangings that once – Marianne could only imagine – decorated the walls most opulently, now lie in rotten, dusty heaps. This room, she had thought upon discovering it, perhaps more than any other place she has found, is the heart of the castle: empty and lifeless, a monument to desolation. She sits on a chair upholstered in faded vermilion velvet beside a fire which has dwindled to naught but some few glowing embers. Here she sits alone, lost within her tangled thoughts: as alone as she ever is, as lost as she ever is. The comfort of the silence is shattered by the lord of this ruination, who enters like the storm itself. His hair is wild, his knuckles white where he still grips the hilt of his sword, and his clothing is crusted with dry blood.

‘Invaders to this realm.’ He curses, by way of explanation. ‘Barbarians that whoop and howl in idiot worship to their benighted gods. Humans, warring among themselves to lay claim to this land. Do they not know that this realm belongs to another? Do your wretched kind not comprehend that you are in the domain of true predators?’ He is pacing back and forth as he rants, his footsteps echoing in the empty expanse of the hall.

‘We know this,’ she replies. ‘But we have to live anyway. What else can we do?’

Doors and shutters rattle as the wind echoes through the castle, through corridors and down the chimney so that the fireplace wails and groans like a hungry ghost and the ashes within stir.

She gestures to the firepit. Among the ashes there are fragments that she has recognised: charred mementos and relics and trinkets.

‘Why did you burn my belongings? Those were all that I had to remember them by, my brothers and sisters. I have so little, yet you took that from me.’

He snorts. ‘There are no possessions save that which we can hold in bloodied hands when others would take them. There is no family – they can leave you in a heartbeat. There are no friends. Strength is in walking alone.’

‘Yet you seek a mate. Isn’t that why I am here?’

‘You came here of your own free will. And besides, you are…’

‘A disappointment. I know. We are both disappointed. I dreamt I would find something important here. Love, perhaps. Family… Ah, it was a pretty dream, what a shame it did not come true.’

‘You are a naive child,’ he says.

‘No. No, it’s only that I… I hope for the best in people. But…’ She sighs. ‘I’m not naive. Will you kill me now? Or do we prolong this?’

‘Which would you prefer?’ The timbre of his voice has changed, as if the words come from somewhere deeper within him.

He takes the fur from her and spreads it on the flagstones in front of the embers of the fire. He motions for her to lie on it. Instead, she approaches him and removes his coat, much as lovers might undress each other. He shrugs it off and it drops into her hands. She throws it into the firepit to sit among the burning embers. It is a churlish, childish act of defiance. He laughs a cruel and bitter laugh.

‘I know there is fight in you, I see there is resolve in you. But it is not enough. Don’t you understand? It is never enough.’

Why did you come here?

He had asked her this when she first arrived. She hadn’t told him the whole truth: Because I dreamt that I would find love here, family here, and dreams are all I have. Because that is what you must do, you must keep going, you must not stop. You don’t go back or run away. Else what becomes of you?

He lies atop her. His scent is overwhelming. His lips brush against her neck. His hands, those monstrous hands, encircle her throat. His breath is hot and loud, like the snorting of a beast.

‘There were others before me,’ she says. ‘And there will be others after me. But you won’t find what you are looking for. Your den will never know warmth. Your pack will never grow.’

She has his knife, taken secretly from his coat as she undressed him. She pushes the hooked blade between his lower ribs. He does not so much as flinch. She twists the blade and pulls with all her might. The curved tip catches on bone like a fisherman’s hook. It scrapes along the rib, then snags. She hears something like a crack. He grunts in pain. This then, she thinks, will have to be enough.

And then his mask falls away. She is almost relieved to see it happen, to see his true face. A transformation. A wolf’s aspect. His mouth distended into a muzzle filled with teeth the length of her fingers. His yellow eyes are huge and unblinking and contain the promise of annihilation. The wolf’s jaws open impossibly wide. There is a smell of ancient blood upon its breath, and in its yawn the heavens are plunged into darkness.

Do you know what I am, child?

Vyrkos. Vampire.

The wolf’s lower canines pierce the pale flesh of her mouth beneath her cheekbone. Its tearing, crushing teeth close around her skull. In a welter of blood, it rips away her face.

You had to know how this would end.

A girl lies unmoving in the dark, in the bowels of a castle shaped like a broken, grasping hand, in an unremarkable, isolated corner of the Realm of Death. She lies among refuse and animal bones and the rotting carcases of fish and vermin. Faint torchlight comes from somewhere behind an iron grate in the ceiling, illuminating the shallow stream that washes over her feet: an underground rivulet of icy water that stems from a spring further up in the mountains, and trickles down over broken, moss-covered stonework and between fissures in the basalt bedrock from which the castle was hewn, long ago. Back then, this stream was lifeless. Now, it teems with sinuous black shapes.

The girl does not stir for some time. And then…

‘I had a dream,’ she whispers into the darkness. Her voice is raw, as if from disuse. ‘I dreamt of cold fire. I dreamt of biting. Of teeth and blood. So much blood!’

‘How did it end?’ a girl’s voice whispers in her ear.

‘I am not sure it did,’ she says. ‘I am not sure it ever will.’

She can feel her new siblings beside her, lying intertwined in a squirming tangle of skinny arms and legs. Something cold and wet coils around her naked flesh, slithers around her neck. A moment of panic and then it passes. Nothing flutters in the hollows of her chest. So not a hangman’s noose after all, she thinks. It will not bite her, she knows, not now.

‘Then what comes next?’ a different girl’s voice whispers in her other ear.

‘I could lie here forever.’ Marianne smiles. Her smile is stranger still.

‘Show us, Marianne,’ a third girl says. ‘You are stronger than he thinks. He didn’t see the strength in you, but we do. He tasted you and he didn’t like what he found – but we do. You didn’t run and you didn’t hide. He discarded you, as he discarded us once. His mistake!’

‘I am poison – that’s what he said. But in truth, I think it is life that has poisoned him – he is so alone, yet he cannot tolerate being otherwise.’

‘Show us, Marianne. What comes next? Tell us your dreams. Tell us of blood.’

‘I feel… different.’ Marianne holds her hand in front of her face, but she cannot see it. Visions dance in her mind’s eye, and among the cascade of images there is one she remembers from her dreams. She hadn’t recognised herself at first. She walks barefoot through forests she used to play in as a child, and in her bloody hands she carries new memories, bound up in a charred, red bundle.

‘You look beautiful,’ her sisters tell her. They help her to her feet, their touch as cold as death.

Marianne walks now, no longer alone. She shakes off the skins of her old life, and they drift to the ground like snow.

About the Author

Jake Ozga is a lifelong Warhammer fan and horror fanatic with a particular interest in exploring the dark corners of the Mortal Realms. He lives in Leamington Spa with his partner, Abi; his dog, Freya; and his cat Horobi. His first story for Black Library, ‘Supplication’, featured in the Warhammer Horror anthology Invocations.

An extract from ‘Skull Throne’ by Jake Ozga, taken from the Warhammer Horror anthology The Accursed.

I walk barefoot beneath the silent, predatory sky. I step carefully among brittle indigo flowers and leave no trace of my passing. I watch – unblinking – the line of trees as they tremble and fade away. The sky sighs and the flowers blur in the wind, their petals becoming indistinct smears of colour.

Time passes; it flows around me like a river. I settle back into its currents and drift. I close my eyes and when I open them again I am elsewhere. Day has turned to night and in the weak light of the moon the grass is blue and ethereal. I crouch among it and become invisible. I whisper to myself, ‘To live peacefully, we must live unseen.’ I whisper it over and over like a prayer. My mother taught me this when I was a little girl, when I was still a thing of flesh and blood. There is no sound in this Realm of Death, the place I once called home. There are no birds, no insects, just the barest breath of the wind. I listen. Any moment now. Here they come.

Dark shapes separate from the deep blue shadows of the treeline and walk into the field, down where the grass is shorter. I am as still as a mouse and if I breathe it is not so anyone would notice. There is a new sound, the sound of something scraping. It does not belong here, it is so vulgar in this place. Three men walk under the light of a burning timber, most likely taken from a homestead nearby; they make no secret of their presence. The first of the three drags along a girl by her hair. A second is lost in the shadows at the edge of the field, a darker shade. Moonlight picks out the edges of his form; it reflects on sharp corners and cutting angles. The third pulls behind him a great axe with hooks and barbs that furrow the earth as he walks.

I watch as they make the girl kneel in the gently swaying grass. She is like a bird, so skinny and delicate. Her bare arms and legs are almost translucent in the light of the waning moon. Her face is hidden by long, lank black hair. She doesn’t cry out; she knows better. I bite my lip and draw a bead of blood – a test to see if I am dreaming. They pull her head back and I see her face. Her wide, dark eyes seek out my hiding place, and just for a heartbeat her gaze meets mine. I see that she is me and I am her. I am her and I am there in the field, and they hold me by the hair as I kneel and I am scared but not for myself and then the axe swings just once and my head comes away from my body, which topples lifelessly, like a broken doll, to lie discarded in the grass.

I gasp, and the three men turn to look towards where I lie hidden, but they do not see me. The second man takes my head and ties it to his belt. I watch them do it. I watch them do it over and over and over. She is me and I am her. I lie down and curl into a ball. The scraping sound is changing and getting louder. From here, I know, things only get worse. I close my eyes.

Behind my eyelids the edifice looms from the pulsing, rusty haze. It is cyclopean, limitless, the colour of dried blood. There is a thunderous noise that I feel in the base of my skull, that I hear in the bone behind my eyes. It sounds like a boulder dragged across gravel or broken glass but repeated ten thousand times. I squeeze my eyes tight but the shape of the monolith is revealed to me: a monumental throne, built from skulls in numbers beyond my ability to comprehend. They grind against each other like teeth under the weight of the throne’s occupant, a form I cannot make out, lost in the haze. And in dark heavens at the limits of my perception, a burning eye holds me in silent regard.

We are no strangers to death, we who live in his realm. I am no stranger to death; it has always surrounded me. But this is not a vision of death, this is…

Violence. Always the same visions of violence. Even now, when I’m awake, I see the throne. I see the cutting edge of a jagged blade across a fragile, delicate neck. I see a burning, hate-filled eye. I see these things with my eyes open or closed. I see them interwoven with the mundanity of my hidden existence: they are there as I gather my herbs, as I walk under the blanched and sallow sun, as I whisper through the floorboards to the bodies down in the darkness, as I watch from the shattered windows of my ruined home in the realm of silent ghosts, and as I sleep alone under cold and lifeless stars.

Days and nights pass without distinction. Their edges blur as if viewed through a raindrop, remembered only as a dream upon waking – real in one moment and nothing but fragments in the next. I too am blurred. I am a figure without definition, a form without edges. This numbed existence – this fugue, this dream – I float through it like a ghost. Live unseen, but how do you live a life without hope? In truth I do not live, but I exist still, I remain. A heavy blade scrapes a furrow through freshly tilled soil and the skulls grind together under a crushing weight. I remain in incoherence. I linger in madness. I do not know how long it has been this way and I wonder if it will ever end. I am missing a part of my soul.

I open my eyes. Daylight. I am in the charred remains of my crumbling home. I am standing at my favourite broken window that looks down onto a field where nothing grows and no animals graze. The glass panes are long since gone, but there is no wind in this place to speak of and I no longer feel the cold. I am rarely hungry and eat sparingly; instead I make tea in a heavy iron cauldron that hangs from a chain over a modest firepit that I do not remember replenishing. The fire burns white, the pale smoke drifts away towards the stars through the ruin of the roof. The water takes time to boil. I add more of the herb than last time: a pinch of mhurghast root adds a bitter taste but too much can cause paralysis or even death. Brewed to the correct strength the tea removes my dreams, replaces them with this confusion of non-existence, though every day it takes more and more to grant me peace, and every day the dreams return like an invasive weed with roots grown deep inside my head. The herb is found everywhere in this quiet corner of Shyish and I have harvested enough to kill myself a hundred times over.

I do not know if I will kill myself. It is not that I want to be alive, it is that I am unable to decide. It is too much to decide a thing like that; I need guidance. I used to have help, but I have lost a part of my soul and so I am as a ship adrift, alternately becalmed or borne on indiscriminate tides. Decide to die, decide to live.

I see three shapes emerge from the shadows at the edge of the field. I quickly drink the tea and feel its effects immediately. The figures blur into nothing. The world loses its hard edges. I deliquesce, I slip away.

Wait. Wait. I wade back towards the shore from some impossible, dreamless depth. Something has disturbed me from my sleep; some primal instinct sets my heart fluttering as if a predator’s shadow has fallen upon me. I lie awake on my cot and listen. There is something… Far away I hear a man’s voice, raised in rough song. It echoes across this silent, dead land. This is new. My dreams have never sung before.

Click here to buy The Accursed.

Warhammer horror

A Black Library Publication Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1,D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Nuala Kinrade.

Aberration © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Aberration, Warhammer Horror, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-745-9

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