Most common spirits, or iele, dislike iron. They dislike the perversion of bronze about as much, depending on the spirit. We were free to learn to fight, though the battles with iele were carefully observed. I preferred my fists over other weapons. My claws are as much a part of me as my skin.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  Dragos fell back. His body hit the ground with jarring force, and he rolled back from the lemniele’s sweeping wooden blades. In the angle he crouched, the blades smashed into the wall. He grabbed the handle and squinted past the rain of wooden needles that plucked at his cloak.

  With little luck to his name and no momentum, he gripped the tool and thrust in a jab upwards. The iron head bit into the whirling blades like it was soft butter. The ribs of its barrel-like chest splintered. A darkness crept across the leminele everywhere iron touched.

  A voice like sandpaper issued from somewhere within the wooden cage of its bent ribs. “No!”

  The black goat charged. Dragos caught its motion out of the corner of his eye as it crashed through one of the lemniele’s legs. The spirit’s vessel listed. The legs on its other side scrambled ot keep its rounded body upright. More broke away and dropped, peeling the ribs of its chest downward.

  The flail of a plank blindsided Dragos, sweeping up as it teetered, striking the sledgehammer hard enough to crack the haft and knock it out of his grip. But Dragos saw triumph ahead. He spat splinters and grinned, tingling fingers clenching around the boning of his gloves.

  It wore dead wood. It was not like the fanea??iele, which inhabited living plants. The body it wore couldn’t be replenished with more life, only more death.

  Wood still lay around the yard.

  Dragos looked through its hollow chest at a heart-shaped lump of wood that dangled in the open, a discarded knot from an imperfect log. It pulsed gently in the parody of life.

  He stepped in on his injured leg, teeth clenched, and drove a hook up into the cavity, through the gaps. The round black lump didn’t feel like wood as his claws bit into it. Instead, it felt soft against his knuckles, like something putrid and rotten. It stuck to the talons as his arm recoiled.

  The fibers holding it popped and tore away. One stubborn thread clung as he yanked at it. Dragos ducked the slash of a splintered limb while a blackened one smashed over him, cracking into dusty chunks.

  His box, which had been scattered across a third of the yard, lay face up. He lunged for it. The whole monstrosity, tethered to the lump impaled on his fist, fell towards him. The daylight dimmed as the lemniele obscured the sky, but Dragos grabbed what he wanted. The small cistern of salt in his palm was just big enough.

  It struck earth, and Dragos with it. The empty cavity of its chest crashed down around him as Dragos smashed the knot of the lemniele’s vessel into the waxed cloth. The cistern cracked. A fistful of salt spilled forth. The detritus pushed him down, jagged wood digging into him at all angles as he murmured, “A reveni la cel?lalt t?ram.”

  What little form it had crumbled all around him. Dragos was left half-buried in a small pile of rotten wood, and a mess of four dead thieves scattered around the yard.

  The goat trotted over and jumped on the woodpile and stood there like a triumphant conqueror, chin up, little beard quivering with pride. Dragos peered up at it from his woodyard grave and growled, “Get down.”

  He wiped blood from his cheek and realized it wasn’t his own. The dead thieves were as much at fault as he. It soured his outlook even more than it had been on the walk to Cenu?a Mare. Witness to the gore, he lost any sense of vindication or justice.

  His good leg under him, he stood up, rotten lumber falling away. With the flick of his wrist, what was left of the iele’s heart hit the ground with a soggy splat, like waterlogged firewood left out for years.

  Zgavra headbutted some of the planks, enough that he could carefully gather his things. He lingered over the box, checking the vessels of precious liquid. The theriac would have been a loss. He pulled the void black glass vial out and checked it for cracks.

  True horror would have been wrought if the nightweb’s vessel broken. Next, he checked the silverlace. The glowing mercury-like substance was secure. Likewise, a different kind of disaster, but a disaster all the same, had it broken.

  Dragos flicked a glance at the entrance to the workshop yard, half expecting someone to have come to see what the noise was about. No one had, that he could tell. Strange, but then, he didn’t know what went on in Cenu?a Mare. His hood had been knocked back, so he righted it.

  He found his things, what was left of them, and stored them away quickly. The sachets of poison and herbs, the box of iron filings, his black handled ritual knife, and the rod for channeling, dowsing, and stirring potions. One his way out of the yard, he felt more than spotted someone above the workshop, peering from a window.

  Dragos tilted his head up to see them

  “Albstrig?,” one of them murmured from above.

  “Say nothing of me, or you’ll follow your friends in death.” Not that he meant it, but it was wiser for them to stay silent. Better for him.

  He snatched the box and hobbled away, and he heard the woman’s voice behind him.

  “I never really believed…”

  Dragos found a barn unattended on the outskirts of town. The hayloft welcomed his weary bones. In the dark, his hands inventoried his box once more, plucking stray splinters from it as they had his own skin earlier.

  In the same pitch, Zgavra’s voice stirred. “Southeast tomorrow?”

  “For the foreseeable future,” Dragos whispered, and burrowed into hay, briefly and blissfully concealed from the world.

  Dragos found a girl.

  Weeks had passed since he'd been in a village larger than a hamlet. But a peddler must trade, and people need medicine. He hadn't abandoned the world, though it would have abandoned him.

  As for the girl, it wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, but it was the first time he’d seen one running along the road toward him with a trail of sludge in her wake. He glanced past her to the village, glazed in a dark greenish slime, much like what collects on still ponds and gathers in the bends of lazy creeks.

  Zgavra drifted beside him like ribbons of darkness in the brilliant golden light of afternoon, a shadow banner lingering longer than Dragos ever wished. Its fiery orange eyes swivelled from him to the woman who ran straight for him in a dead panic.

  It was not how Dragos imagined the day would go.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The dry, rutted road wound through the countryside, a pleasant enough stroll. The forest gave a fine yield of greens and a few surprise wild turnips. Despite the seasonably warm day, Dragos wore the dark hood of his cloak pulled low. Trickles of sweat slid down his cheeks and pooled around his neck. His spine tickled with hot rivulets.

  The woman’s terror-wide eyes fixed on him. From the waist down, she seemed to wear a gown of glistening pond scum, though her smock was clean and her loose ashen brown hair streamed behind her.

  She flung out hands that were as green as her skirt. “Prin harul lumini! Ajuta?i-m?!”

  Zgavra drifted away, the better to watch the drama from the sidelines. Dragos shot it a hard look, then sidestepped and backed away quickly as the woman flung herself at him.

  Women rarely threw themselves at him, and when they did, he preferred they weren’t dripping pond scum.

  “I don’t know what this is!” She sobbed, panic robbing her breath, stubbornly following whenever he backed away. “Please… help us! My whole…”

  She flung an arm back to point at the spreading plague on a few small barns, houses, and burdei clustered together in the heart of open fields divided by copses of trees and brush. The substance splattered on the dry ground, dotting the dusty earth with deep green beads.

  The wanderer knew he wanted no part of this—yet knew just as surely he would not walk away. Wisdom and instinct recoiled within him, but... The weirding gloss was strange. Fascinating. He already felt that old, irritating desire. Help was requested. It should be given.

  Dragos put his palm up. “Stop. Breathe, and then tell me your name.”

  He spoke calmly, but with a hard, authoritative note. When he began wandering Calruthia, unmoored and rootless, he had no idea what to do when confronted with panic that he hadn’t caused. Time had taught him how to manage people’s fear. Breathe first.

  “Alina, I’m Alina…” Her hands shook as she held them up, gesturing at herself. Tears slid down her cheeks as freely as sweat slid down Dragos’.

  Dragos tipped his chin toward the village. “This is Lunc?re?ti. Your home, yes?”

  A whimpering sound came from her throat as her head bobbed. Her hands clenched at her sides, gunk squeezed to drip on the soil. Dragos raised his palms, gesturing a silent stay still. She did.

  He knelt before one of the quivering droplets that fell from her.

  “Nerostit?… it’s nerostit?—but I don’t know what it is.”

  He stayed wary of her. Until he understood the warp and weft of this Unspoken, he dared not let it touch him. He did not consider walking away from Alina. It might end less badly if he got involved. Maybe.

  “Softhearted Dragos, champion of peasants,” Zgavra mocked, hovering, a whisper of shadows in defiance of the sun that blazed over them.

  Alina gasped, her whole body shuddering as she saw the zmeu. She pointed, flinging another spray of muck across the path. Dragos flinched away. A shriek spilled from her lips as she backed up. “What is that!”

  She saw Zgavra. Alina was truly afflicted with the Unspoken.

  “A zemu, and the least of your problems. Which reminds me…” Dragos said, gaze shifting from the wobbling droplets on the cracked dirt to Zgavra. “You may not fall in love with or kidnap any women.”

  “She’s not the sort of dripping I prefer,” Zgavra huffed, its form solidifying into a ghostly serpentine dragon, translucent black scales and mane floating in defiance of gravity’s laws.

  “Beastly,” Alina frowned, shaking her head. Her doubtful frown said the rest. She shuffled back a few steps further but didn’t run away, hesitant as a bird intent on the worm, ignoring the danger of a predator until the prize was gotten.

  Alina’s voice carried a note of frustration within her weary fear. “Please, can you help?”

  Dragos found this to be strong evidence that her predicament was much worse for her than being confronted by Unspoken things. He flung his hood back and shrugged the peddler’s box from his shoulders, peeling away his cloak. The box hit the ground with a soft thud, and he opened it.

  “Zgavra, a small stick or stalk. Please,” Dragos asked, a hand extended towards the zmeu.

  A twig flew at him a second later. He rocked back on his knee to avoid it. He raised a pale brow at Zgavra, who merely floated, its draconic expression still, the amused gleam in its orange eye apparent. Dragos sneered.

  “Wh—who are you?” Alina said.

  Dragos looked up, and she gasped. Not as loudly as she had when seeing Zgavra, but the fear of the Unspoken pressed in every tiny crease of her tanned face. He knew what she saw. That which should be shunned; anatem?. He’d tied back his snow-pale hair, but the steel-pale brightness of his eyes was just as shocking.

  She’d almost said ‘what.’

  Dragos heard it in the pause before she reshaped the word into a more polite question.

  “Dragos. I’m like you, touched by what cannot be seen—until it is,” he said in the simplest terms.

  “I need a cure, quickly!” Alina begged, glancing back at the little village.

  “Yes,” Dragos agreed, gaze following hers. If he wasn’t mistaken, it seemed the glistening green sheen had spread. The path she’d run had not dried in the hot summer sun. It sprawled in defiance, wider than the skirt she wore, leading back to the village.

  “You were not always like this,” Dragos said. “When was the last time you were not, hm, slimy?”

  Alina moaned, looking down at herself. Another spell of desperate sobbing erupted from her, a cloudburst, piercing the haze of her panic. He took a slow breath and nodded.

  He dragged the twig through an ooze bubble. The quivering droplet glazed the dirt and clung to the stick. The viridian smear gleamed darkly, resembling neither mucus nor gelatin but carried specks of more solid matter. As he watched, the scum crept upwards, towards his finger. He dropped the twig and stood up.

  “Never seen the like,” he murmured, brushing his hands on his pant legs with unconscious disgust as he stepped away.

  “I was in the reeds, by the stream,” Alina groaned. Anger threaded her words as she went on. “I’m so clumsy! I slipped in some mud and it got on my hands, on my dress, everywhere… I got home before dusk… Why? Why did this happen?”

  The wailing was understandable. Also counterproductive. Dragos prompted her, “And then?”

  “I washed up! I hung my skirt out and went to bed.” Her breath hitched, and she snuffled. She searched for a clean spot on her sleeve to wipe it.

  “And you woke like this?”

  “Yes—I woke in a bed of it!” Tears spilled freely once more. “My house… my parents… Ah lumini, lumini, mil?, lumini…”

  The Light couldn’t help her. That thought drew an inappropriately wry smile on Dragos’ lips. He looked at her critically, with the depth of his mind’s eye. Not just her, but what was around her. Like to like, spirit to spirit, kind to kind.

  Darkness. When he looked with his deep mind’s eye, he saw them. Tiny motes of creatures, like insects, swarmed around her. She glowed with a black eminence, bespoke of the Umbregrin. Pure spirits, drawn to the one that had taken up within her.

  But how to appease, banish, or destroy this thing that had proliferated like a disease in the night? He had to see the effects. Dragos needed more.

  “It has killed people,” he said bluntly. Certain of it.

  Alina nodded, hands held out, away from her body. Her breath hitched with her pain and loss. He knew now what she wore. Just a nightgown, and the rest was the Unspoken that afflicted her.

  Dragos picked up his cloak and the wooden box he carried. He gestured towards Lunc?re?ti. “Let’s go to your village.”

  “C-can you fix it?” Alina asked, her tone pleading, her bloodshot eyes hopeful.

  He would have told her that faith was for fools, but her optimism could help keep her calm. Dragos needed her to believe in him. Even if there was a dim chance, he’d try; it was better than giving up. He considered Zgavra. The bastard could float above it all, untouched by the mess everyone else had to wade through. Still, he did not envy the fabled zmeu.

  If Dragos was incautious, he too would share their fate. Without a doubt.

  “I can make no promises, but I’ll do what I can.”

  [If this is found anywhere other than Royal Road or my Patreon, it has been scraped/plagiarized]

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  Leminele (lem-nyell): An iele made of wood, in which it is not natural like a forest spirit. Fated to decay.

  (Ah reh-veh-NEE lah chel-uh-LULT tuh-RUHM) “A reveni la cel?lalt t?ram: Return to the other realm.

  Prin harul lumini! Ajuta?i-m?! (PREEN HAH-rool loo-MEE-nee) [rolled r] (ah-joo-TAHTS-muh): By the Light! Help me!

  Nerostit? (neh-ross-TEE-teh): Calruthian word for all things unnatural or strange, synonymous with Unspoken. Places, events, and situations can be referred to as this, as well as beings.

  mil?, lumini (MEE-luh) (loo-MEE-nee): Light, mercy.

  (loo-MEE-nee):Light, sometimes used as an expletive.

  Albstrig? (ALV-streeguh): White witch. Barn owl. A pale ghost or evil spirit.