Pink Rot, Short Story
Finn the Knight Sol, Concept Sketch by Micah White
Finn stood outside the castle wall, its stone silhouette looming over her. The vagabond knight held her shield close to her body, a torch blazing in the other hand. Curly brown hair erupted in small rows from underneath her helmet. The stars swam in the black sky above the massive keep, and a shadow hovered over the structureโthe same shadow that hovered over Finn. Zimbarah, disgraced elf-king, nekromancer. The stories of Zimbarah's rule, century-old, were whispered by the villagers around the ruin. Human lives demanded as tax in his undead armies. Sacred ancestral grounds blanketed by poisonous fog. Untold wealth, the profits of carnivorous expansionism. This keep bore his name, and his foul odor crept through its brick.
โ Mossy stone stairs rose in front of the keep, their steps leading into the small bailey around the tower. Finn knew better than to enter through the front door, yet had lost her climbing tools to the bandit, Neglect. After this I better have enough to buy a thousand more grappling hooks, and a crossbow just for fun.
โ She climbed the stairs to the entrance and stood for a moment before the gate. She snubbed her torch into the ground and pulled her short sword from its sheath. She snubbed her torch into the ground and pulled her short sword from its sheath. Holding the blade upright before her face, concentrating, three runes at the bladeโs base began to appear in the steel. From these marks warm light spread over the sword, from dull orange to crackling yellow-white. Illuminated in the sword's glow, the knight breathed deep through her nose. One cannot live on chivalry alone. She sighedโand steeled herself for what lay behind the gate.
โ The spiked tips of the iron lattice hovered inches over the cold dirt and dragged across her pack as she crawled under. Inside, the small bailey was blanketed with dead straw and grass. The rising mephitic moisture stuck to her skin. Floating on top of this dull miasma was the lingering smell of something sharper. Rotting flesh. Finn's stomach turned.
โ As she began to march forward, Finn raised her sword overhead, casting its magickal light as far as possible into the venomous dark. Her eyes scanned the ruins of the once-opulent keep. The bailey was pocked with broken carriages and half-slumped hutsโthe skeletal remains of a kingdom that had once been full of promise and life. Soon, at the edge of the sword-light, a hunched figure broke the darkness. Dressed in tattered peasant's garb, the figure stood erect on a mound of pink mushrooms. The knight slowed her march, pulling her buckler close.
โ "Who's there?" Finn called firmly, adrenaline creeping into her voice.
โ The figure's head twitched in her direction, and its gaunt features were revealed in the sword's magickal glow. Finn swallowed a gasp. A standing corpse! The gaunt figure made no motion to acknowledge the question. From a hole in the corpse's neck grew a massive bole of mushrooms, and a slow gurgle escaped from the zombie's throat. The offensive thing was fixed to the ground by the fungus growing through it. Finn fought the rising disgust in her throat. Atavistic thoughts bubbled up from dark places, deep in the base of her skull. Seeing no answer in this zombie, the knight approached the corpse and raised her glowing sword above her head. In one stroke she brought the sword down on the monster, splitting all the way through the fungal stalk. The corpse slumped forward against the remaining growth as pale pink spores drifted from the wound. The particles quickly filled the air around Finn, obscuring her vision. She coughed hard, and suddenly the earth began to vibrate. Mud and rotten straw flew into the air as the ground erupted, spattering Finn's armor. Startled, she struggled to steady her footing, wiping mud from her eyes. Staggering figures shuddered and squirmed free from the disturbed earth before her. At least four or five by her count. As the creatures gained footing and awareness, swaying in Finn's direction, she scrutinized her surroundings from behind her buckler. In my way, of course... Her eyes fixed on the squat stone structure on the other side of the bailey.
โ The zombies rose in a loose U shape and advanced on the invading knight. Finn flicked a curl from her eyes, and a spark of inspiration danced through her mind. There, on the far left corner of the group, one of the zombies struggled to free itself from the mud. She drew all her strength into a lunge, and sprinted forward. She closed the gap between them and leapt, shield forward, into the zombie on her left. The small iron buckler smashed the fiend's skull with a loud CRACK, and the zombie went sprawling into the dirt. Nearly through the leap, above the body, she jerked to a stop against her momentum. The zombie to her right had grabbed her chainmail shirt. Finn landed on her back, the breath leaving her lungs in a percussive blast. The illuminated sword skidded from her hand. Disoriented, she twisted on the ground and broke the grip on her sleeve.
โ Not good. Finn searched for her sword and caught its glow some distance behind her. Definitely not good.
โ Out of the spore cloud, flailing arms tore at her armor. She held her buckler defensively against the gnashing jaws of the rabid zombie, whose exposed bone grated loudly on the rough-forged metal. She began to shuffle backward, while her other hand groped through the wet earth. Finally, Finn leaned back and released a powerful kick into the creature's ribs, which sent the zombie stumbling backward. She dove right and found her fingers around the hilt of her sword. Upon grabbing it, she spun decisively and caught her pursuer with her newly recovered blade. The swing swept off the creature's skull cap, and in one motion Finn brought the blade around on its leg, severing it above the knee. The abomination collapsed in front of her, and pink dust pillowed from its wounds. However, just behind the dismembered corpse was another fungal nightmare. The undead's mycelium-covered arms had melded into its torso so that the zombie leaned forward, its mouth agape, spewing forth a wriggling medusa of hyphae that reached out to find the knight as the mutant approached her. Reflexively, Finn stepped forward and skewered the zombie's head on her sword; as it died, it released a peculiar mumble from its crowded mouth. Finn didn't notice. She dashed for the tower, leaving the last zombies stumbling in the cloud of spores behind her.
โ When Finn reached the tower, she was winded, mud-splattered and grumbling. The tower, one hundred feet tall, stood before her. It was spotted with small framed windows, and the doorway was at least double her height and width. Dense vines, thorny and thick as ropes, covered the door and stair-set leading up to the architrave. She approached the growth and made a small slash at it with the tip of her sword. Crimson liquid spurted from the cut in a stream. New vines quickly grew over the wound, tightly coiling over it until the stream was only a trickle. A ward, Finn thought. Looking around, the knight spotted a set of windows closer to the ground than the others, the shutters hanging loosely from their hinges. The frame was narrow, and six or seven feet off the ground, but Finn concluded that this was her best shot at entry. She neared the wall and felt the stone brick. The gaps between were just large enough to make workable hand and foot holds. She wiped her blade on her pants and sheathed the glowing sword. Then she began the brief climb to the window, disinclined to waste any more time in the bailey with the undead. Finn climbed the mossy brick until she reached the windowsill and pulled herself through the broken shutter. Sitting sideways in the sill, she looked back into the bailey, where the cloud of spores faded slowly in the distance. Then she dropped off the other side, into the keep.
โ โFinn landed on the other side of the window in a wide stance. The humid murk of the late-summer Lowlands disappeared, replaced by motionless, stale air. The uncanny shift in temperature set the battered knight's teeth on edge. She drew her sword from its scabbard; the blade still glowed, the electric yellow replaced by a less dazzling orange.
โ She stood in a large kitchen. Spots of dust hovered and sparked like fireflies in the magickal glow of her blade. A huge brick oven sat against the adjacent wall, surrounded by wooden cabinets. In the middle of the room stood a wide table piled with pink mushrooms. She jumbled through the many rows of drawers. Inside were several sets of finely crafted silverware; she placed these in her pack and smirked.โ
โ On the right of the hearth was a door with an ornate frame and a golden knob, opened inward. She approached and peered through. On the other side, illuminated in the moonlight, was a massive dining chamber, centered around a long wooden table fogged in pale pink dust. In tall chairs around the table sat parallel rows of the festering dead. Great mushroom-capped stalks bloomed from their mouths and eye sockets, disfiguring the bodies that hosted them. At the table's end was a mound of fungus, dense and towering as a cypress tree. It had grown so large that the head of the table simply disappeared inside the mass. Sinewy branches grew from its apex and forked out, draping the high ceiling in drooping fibers.
โ Finn slipped into the room. The air was dense with spores, and she could feel them stick in her throat with each breath. At each corpse, she stopped to peruse the adornments of the unfortunate dinner guests. The corpses wore articles of finery, and each shifted hopelessly against the fungal restraints within them when she approached. Much of the jewelry was unrecoverable, grown over by the mycelium. Recent memory dissuaded her from cutting any pieces free. While the knight fought to free a jade bracelet from the meandering hand of a zombie, the silence of the keep ruptured. A voice, like creaking tree limbs, reverberated across the room.
โ "HAaaaan iNvaderr in mYYyy hHhhommmme..."
โ Finn dropped the bracelet and spun to face the speaker, her illuminated sword and buckler held ready. How did I not see... Sprouting from the mass of fungus were the distorted limbs and skull of an inhuman skeleton. The remains were buried so deep that only the hands, feet, and skull broke the surface of the mound. A silver crown sat crooked on the tall skull. Its disconnected jaw hung slack, and the skeletal hands curled into fistsโ.
โ "PaaaaaaarasiiiTe." The word eeled from its unmoving mouth.
โ Finn steadied the tip of her sword in the fiend's direction and braced herself. "Zimbarah."
โ Zimbarah laughed. A shrill, howling cackle that bounced off the stone walls and filled the chamber with maniacal echoes. The sound swirled around her, shifting wildly in volume and frequency, assembling into a wall of noise that tore at Finn's eardrums. The thick strings of mycelium that lay across the table rose from the surface and wrapped around the dining utensils placed in front of the zombies. The tendrils snapped in the air, whipping the forks, knives, and plating at the discombobulated knight. Finn raised her shield sluggishly in an off-kilter stance, her sword hand held against her left ear. Thin trickles of blood ran out of her helmet on both sides. A barrage of metal utensils ricocheted off the buckler, followed quickly by a large glass platter from behind that exploded against her helmet, sending the knight onto her knees. At the same time, a dense rush of spores rose from the cobbled floor. Viscous mold bubbled and grew from every crevice, covering the room in a rising layer of amaranthine slime. In the distance, Zimbarah's laugh slowly intensified, streaming from his open jaw. With great effort Finn fought off her dizziness, stumbled to her feet, and bounded onto the table.
โ Starting from a stumble, Finn kicked plates and cups from her path as she built into a determined charge. She sprinted down the length of the wooden slab, past the ringing in her ears, past the anxiety and erratic pounding in her chest. Risen to the tabletop, the mold stuck to the bottom of her boots with each step. The ooze bled from the high ceiling in boulder-sized globs, splashing into the rising tide of slime. A monstrous tendril of fungal hyphae dropped from the ceiling and swiped down at her. Finn threw herself forward, landing in a roll as it crashed through the table behind her. Broken planks erupted from the impact and tossed her into the air, where an unseen tendril blasted into her from behind. Finn landed on the table, face down, skipping across the mold-covered surface. Stars filled her vision. Before she could gather herself, another tendril of hyphae snaked around her neck and dragged her toward the mass. It pulled her up by her throat, face to face with Zimbarah's skull.
โ "You have failedD, like your kinnnd always fails," he croaked. "You wilL serve a better purpose at mY taBle..."
โ From his wide, unhinged jaw, a torrent of pink spores materialized. The fog of noxious, living particles replaced any remaining oxygen available to the choking knight. Finn swung her sword uselessly and clawed at the thick curl around her neck. Tiny branches of hyphae grew from the fungal noose and spread across her face. All the while, images bounced around in her head: the overgrown forests, dotted with the infested bodies of dead soldiers. Knights, just as she was. Just as she always wanted to be. Even when she resented it. When she shirked her responsibilities. She was a Knight Sol. Here, faced with evil, the voice of chivalry that had led her to the orderโthe star emblazoned on her own tabardโburned with the same intensity it once had.
โ Finn planted her left foot hard against the surface of the fungal mound, bouncing off and swinging backward.โ On the return, she drove both feet into the mound with all her remaining strength, and flew back even farther. Deep red crept into the border of her eyesight and spread with every labored heartbeat. Threads of invading fungus crawled down her nose and mouth. Her lungs seized, unable to draw breath. Hurtling back to the mound, she plunged her sword toward the tyrant's skullโand closed her eyes.
โ Finn's sword sank to its hilt, through the giant skull, deep in the mycelium wall behind it. For a moment everything was still. Zimbarah's silver crown flew high into the air. Around the blade, the despot's skull crumbled to dust, and a quiet hiss escaped the growing split. A tremor went through the room. The mound of fungus shriveled, blackened, and collapsed in on itself, pulling down the tangled branches of hyphae and the ceiling with it. Finn fell into the pile of rubble below.
โ The knight awoke on her back, surrounded by an inches-high layer of receding, rotten mold. The roaring sound of fungus pouring into the room had fallen away, replaced by a dull ring that seemed to bleed from her own eardrums into the world around her. Amber morning sunlight flooded through the fractured ceiling. Finn sat up and rose to her feet. Exhaling through her nose, she looked at her surroundings. The corpses at the table had degenerated, the giant stalks escaping their mouths curling downward, turning to putrefied mush before her. Her sword stuck out of the festering mound of fungus, hilt-up, its magickal glow faded. She pulled it from the pile and wiped the mold and dust from its blade. Her buckler was nowhere to be seen. At her boot sat the glittering silver crown, half-buried in the dull black and pink slime. Gingerly she stooped to pick it up.
โ Finn grinned to herself and coughed weakly. Grappling hook and a new buckler... And a crossbow.
โ She spat pink blood onto the ground.