We wandered until the green meadows of my home faded into memory. Fields of livestock traded for marsh and fog. Flowers ceased to bloom for there was no sun to greet them. No longer did the sly fox chitter in the night. Our village fell to rubble. Swallowed slowly by the weeping earth. The land fell to silence like the long hum of dawn fog, though noon never reared its bright face.

We wandered from our village and hoped to escape the silence. But the howls of wretched beings cursed the air around us. They clambered from the fog with limbs bent and stiff. Atrophied muscles hardened to stone. Jagged bone burst from their flesh. Black blood spilled upon the soil.

They captured us and led us through the wastes. For untold days we walked without landmark to guide us. My kinsmen travelled by my side, though in time, I could no longer distinguish them from one another. I could not even recognise my own body, withered and dry. My bones crackled with each step. Every breath brought the stench of rotting flesh. I had become one of the ambling dead.

My heart ached in its loneliness. I searched for any shape beyond the heavy mist, but there were no stars or creatures to behold. Fear strangled me tight. I feared the strangers at my side. I feared the skeletal mass I had become. I found myself before time, in a swirling void of grey nothing. The strangers retreated behind the veil of mist, and I was alone. Truly alone. Moons must have passed before I found solace in the silence and the hands of fear softened around my neck. I no longer grimaced before each step or trembled at the thought of taking another breath. For all eternity I would walk. For all eternity I would be content. Though my peace did not last.

A structure grew from the earth ahead, obtrusive in all facets of its being. Even the fog grew wet like mucous in its presence. It stirred me from my meditations. Steam whistled from the black blister that sat atop its fleshy foundations. It reeked of rot and death. I turned away and fled. Desperate and afraid. Though each time I turned, the structure would reappear before me. It spun and spun. I fell to the ground and clawed at the marsh. I tried to pull myself away. A doorway peered from the meaty foundations. It gleamed in its repugnance. Inside its hollow was an endless black. The shadow breached the fog like a ray of light and struck me where I hoped my heart still lay. My abdomen contracted and I gasped, anchoring my hands and feet into the ground. It pulled me forth. My efforts hopeless. I slid along the ground, hauled by an invisible hand.

I continued to stare at the gruesome thing. It distended until it conquered even my peripheries. In its foundations were severed limbs. Slimy ligaments lit by the dark light of the doorway. It yearned for me. A sacrifice to the nameless one. I found myself walking willingly towards the doorway, until a pair of white eyes opened from within. Its gaze struck me to the ground and a fog descended upon me. Dark and bitter. I retched on hands and knees, the air too heavy to breathe. The fog fell heavier still. A burden on my broken body. I closed my eyes. I waited for silence.

It never came. I woke to an unfamiliar face above mine. His eyes were pale white. Thin whisps of silver hair fell from his balding head. Rancid fumes fell from his gaping mouth. None from his piggish nose. His breath stung my eyes, so I rose to meet his towering frame. He was more flesh than matter, overflowing in his abundance. Not even his sickly green armour, bubbled and battered, could contain him. He carried no weapon, bar a hoe as tall as he.

“Follow,” he commanded. His gaze wandered and I realised I was not alone.

The strangers had returned, wretched beings. No soul behind their depraved eyes. Their bodies folded like wilted flowers, weak of body and spirit. It was only when I looked upon my own flesh, grey and cracked, that I realised I was no different. We walked beside each other, following our new master. Never once did we lift our hanging heads. Not once could I bare the sight of them.

The way was long and wearisome. Straight and dizzying all the same. We came upon a ruined village. Starved cattle cast their judgements, maggots crawling in open wounds. Black bile bubbled from a collapsed well. Small black mushrooms pocked rotting wood, and black lichen veined across stony rubble.

“Rid it all. Pile it. His servants will collect,” said the master.

I knelt and began to collect small artefacts from the ground. Bone needles, scraps of cloth. Ceramic sherds painted in barely legible pigments. I collected some in my arms, investigating the red and brown swirls. A pig? A tree? For a moment I was elsewhere. Not here, writhing in this stinking heap of rubble, flinching at every sound. I traced the lines of paint with my finger, running over the coarse sandy clay. The line was as thick as my finger, the paint thickening at the edges. I followed the line, the action natural and easy.  

The fragments of pots and vases led me to a ring of purple thistle that surrounded the skeletal remains of a cow. The flowers’ stalks were set with thorns, as if to guard the cow within its walls. I reached out towards the cow’s skull. Tiny bugs leapt and squirmed between the flowers. They were the first living things I had seen. I let them buzz over my skin. I tried hard to feel them, to know that I was not alone here, but my flesh was so leathered that their little bodies made no impact.

Before I moved on, something soft caressed my hand. A flash of grey feathers flittered between shadows, retreating into the skull. I froze, savouring the brief touch. After a few moments, the creature clambered from its den as slowly as the sun had set long ago. Its face was black, and its eyes were an even darker obsidian. The smooth silver feathers on its body were like the head of an old woman. It was a black-faced cuckoo shrike. The bird made its home in the cow’s skull, adorning the bone walls with loose fibres and course thistle leaves. It seemed carefully curated yet abstract in its beauty. A pocket of life in a sea of decay, like the strange mushrooms and flowers that grow atop a grave.

I enveloped the bird in my hands. It trembled, its heart beating so softly against my palms that I had to close my eyes to feel it. Behind my eyes I was thrust pack a lifetime. I saw the black-faced cuckoo shrikes, like the very one I held against my chest. They soared in the hundreds in the spring, so multitudinous that they would blacken the sky. Though then, we knew that the black would pass. The wind was sweet with blooming flowers. The air was warm as honey. Dewed grass tickled my bare soles, the moisture crisp and welcome. I sat in the memory. Running my hands down my cheeks, soft and pudgy. Full of life. The moment faded. I returned to the creature in my hands. I saw my reflection in its eyes, A life past and gone. My hair was thick and brown, rich like oiled wood. My eyes were bright, always wrinkled in smile.

I bundled the bird in rags and nestled it against my chest. Peering around, my past life receded to a chamber of forgotten memory. I felt my cheeks shrivel and hair weaken. A nearby stranger met my eye, their face a dreary mirage of the beautiful reflection I just saw. Neither of us could stand the sight of the other a moment longer.

I hunched forward, concealing the bird from their sight. I must have filled and emptied a dozen baskets of waste before I felt the burden of my prize. The stranger bore into me once more, their stare heavy with knowing. I noticed the others, too, leering at me. Snarled lips pulled back, eyes wide with hunger. They knew.

They spoke without moving their mouths. Whispers echoed off the fog, falling from above as rain. I could not make out the words; they spoke not in a tongue that I knew. Or perhaps I had just forgotten language. Their murmurs and mutters engulfed me.

I cradled the bird and clenched my eyes shut. I waited for the memories as they had come before. I thirsted for the solace, no matter its falsity. I built the image, form by form. A leaf falling onto spines of green grass. Water gurgling through a creek. Then they returned, the swarm of cuckoo-shrikes. I heard the flutter of their wings and their cacophonous song. The bird I held perked at the sound. The fog above me, from where the whispers fell, appeared darker than before. It swelled and swirled. The whispers turned to churrs and warbles, the sound sweet and pleasant. The bird broke through the rags and sung up toward its kin as a supplicant to their god.

The strangers all turned towards me. Their eyes wide and feverish. All shared a look of depravity, of a want to take the one thing this wasteland had graced me. They creeped forward, spines and limbs crackling as they did so. My breath ceased and my body fell to the ground.

“You.”

The master bellowed with his swaying jowls. The fog parted at his word, and all cowered at the sound. He looked at me with his pale eyes, pale as fog. “What do you harbour? Rid it.”

I held the bird closer still, trying to silence its cries. It peered up at me, fearful, but it would not silence. The master scythed an arm through the fog, gesturing to his hidden servants. Peeling through the black mist came a tangle of pus-laden limbs and keratinous growths. Their eyes were black and unfeeling. Their grey skin left the lingering stench of death.

“Rid the creature, stranger. You have nothing to lose but this,” the master taunted.

I dragged my limbs across the mud, my body stiff and slow. The dark mass followed overhead. They sung down to me as they had done in springtime past. My body’s burden lessened and I made it to my feet. More servants breached the fog. Black mud flicked up the back of my calf, scalding my skin. They could not reach me; I wouldn’t allow it.

The wretched structure of meat and bone appeared again before me. It struck me with dread and cursed my leaden body. I stopped in my tracks, slowly sinking into the black mud. White eyes shone through the chasm at its foundations as before. It called me closer. Its voice was a controlled hunger, with more want than any stranger or servant. I turned away, but the servants loomed all around.

They groaned and stamped their hoofs into the marsh. The sound like battered meat. They howled at the entity, whose eyes were whiter than bone, letting it know of their victory. They clambered over one another toward me like rats, slicing the flesh of those beneath.

With desperate pants they crawled forward and prod me with gangly fingers. The act was lazy. They knew that they could take their time. That I hadn’t the strength to fight back. The birds above spiralled faster, drawing the fog into a fluttering tornado. I clutched the bird tighter and tighter against my chest. It clawed my skin, but I paid no mind. I would hold it there until it burrowed into my body.

I looked once more at the bird whose fate I bound to my own. In its eyes I saw my reflection. A giggling babe, a smiling child, a joyous woman. It looked at me without hate, though it should have. The way I hated the master and his servants, and the loathsome strangers who I once knew by name. I was no better than any that surrounded me. A foul beast.

The birds above thundered. Their divine calls so unlike the foul yelps of the servants beneath them. I hurled the bird from my clutches. The tiny silver creature shone brilliantly, blinding all beneath it but me. Its silver body once hidden, was now free.  

I slumped to the damp ground. The servants clambered over me as a vile shroud. I could not feel their sour breath as they consumed me, or the pain of rending flesh. I could no longer hear their cries or their moans. All became peaceful. Though not silent, for the calls of the birds continued. My skin pricked at a crisp wind that washed over my face, and my body felt warm as if by the sun. I dared not open my eyes, fearing that I would lose the illusion.

Then I did. I lay on a bed of black-faced cuckoo shrikes rising high above the sea of fog. The sky was blue above, and the sun shone bright.