The Empress of Beasts, page 1
part #13 of The Wandering Inn Series
The Empress of Beasts
The Wandering Inn
Book 13
pirateaba
© 2024 pirateaba
ISBN: 978-1-961108-05-9
Cover art by John Anthony Di Giovanni.
Cover design by Mario Dhima
Copyright Notice
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Copyright Notice
Table of Contents
Note to Readers
6.48 T
6.49
6.50 I
6.51 A
6.52 K
6.53 K
6.54 K
6.55 K
Interlude – The Titan’s Question
6.56
6.57
6.58
6.59
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Further Readin
g
Note to Readers
This novel is the e-book version of the free web serial. You may read the entire ongoing story at wanderinginn.com free of charge. It encompasses chapter 6.48 T to 6.59 of the serial found on the website.
*Best read on Kindle dark mode due to font coloration.
6.48 T
“Toren? Toren. Where have you gone, you silly skeleton?”
A young woman called out cheerfully in an old inn. She stood by a table, turning left and then right aimlessly. She had a blank, vacuous look on her face. But her voice was clear.
“Toren! Get over here!”
At her words, a skeleton obediently trotted over. He was wearing a ragged apron, and he had a sword at his side. The young woman ignored both. She turned, and pointed.
“There’s some dirt over there. Someone made a mess. Maybe me. Clean it up, will you?”
The skeleton stared at her. Then he grudgingly walked over to a broom leaning against a table. Erin Solstice turned her back again and bumped into one of the few tables in the room as Toren went over to the tiny amount of dust and dirt and began sweeping it towards the entrance with the crude broom. Erin’s voice continued.
“And here’s another mess! Toren! I told you to keep the inn clean! Sweep this up too! And is that blood?”
She was indicating another splotch on the floor. The skeleton looked up, spotted the other messes, and redoubled his efforts. He swept the first patch of dirt out of the door and scurried over to the next. Erin wasn’t satisfied, though.
“You’re so slow. Honestly! This is why I hired Lyonette. I mean, even though all she does is complain and steal stuff. But to be fair, she never blew up my inn.”
She turned back to the table and bumped into it again. Toren’s shoulders hunched, and he paused in cleaning up the dirt. The action wasn’t missed by Erin, even though her back was turned.
“Hey! Get back to work, lazy bones! Clean up the mess! That’s what you’re good for! That’s all you’re good for.”
The skeleton’s head slowly rotated around on his shoulders. Two purple flames stared at Erin through the eye sockets of his skull. Erin, undeterred, kept speaking.
“What’s your problem? I’ve got places to be! Chop, chop! Clean up the mess!”
The skeleton threw down the broom and stepped on it. He snapped the thin handle and heard Erin gasp.
“How dare you! Toren! Clean that up right now and fix that broom!”
He ignored her. Toren advanced on Erin. She turned left, stared blankly at a wall. The furious skeleton circled around her, but Erin wouldn’t look right at him.
“Toren! I said clean up the—”
The sword cleaved Erin’s head open. Toren raised the blade, wrenching it out of Erin’s head as she jerked. Then he stabbed her through the chest.
Erin stumbled. But she didn’t fall. At last, her eyes focused on him.
“Toren? What—”
Toren yanked the blade free. He ran Erin through a second time. She still didn’t fall. And—she made no sound as he stabbed her. He did it again and again, piercing the pallid, rotting skin of her chest. And she was silent.
At last, Erin fell to the ground. Toren stood over her, silently staring at her open eyes, her gaping mouth. He wasn’t panting; skeletons had no lungs. And Toren was a skeleton. An undead creature brought back to life by necromancy. But he wasn’t mindless. In his head, he was…relieved.
He’d done it. Erin’s stupid voice and her stupid orders were done with. Forever. He’d killed her. Silenced her at last, as he’d fantasized about doing. She was dead.
Again.
Toren stared at Erin’s body. Then suddenly, he stumbled back. He dropped the sword, clutched his skull of a head in his hands. What had he done? He’d killed her. He’d—
Erin jerked back upright with a groan. She didn’t get up like normal people did; her feet found the ground, and she flopped upright without pushing herself up. It was an unnatural display of midriff strength few Humans could hope to equal.
Oh, and she also had half a dozen stab wounds through her chest. But she wasn’t bleeding. Her mouth gaped blankly at Toren, and her unfocused eyes stared right through him. She groaned. But it was more of an unconscious sound; zombies didn’t speak no matter how hard Toren tried to make them.
Toren stared at ‘Erin’ as the zombie of the young woman lurched upright unsteadily. A few maggots squirmed in her open mouth. The zombie lurched past Toren blankly, but Erin’s voice still rang in Toren’s head.
“Toren! You stabbed me! Rude! Now, go pick up that broom and fix it. And get rid of all this dirt! Did you hear me? I said—”
The skeleton warrior shook his head. He walked away from Erin, picking up his sword, and sat down at a table. The zombie Erin bumped into a table again, and the momentum carried her down onto it. Toren heard a crash as the flimsy wood broke. Zombie and table collapsed onto the ground. Toren whirled—
And the illusion fell apart. He stared around at the crude tables made of bits of wood held together with string or primitive nails. At the few chairs, which could barely support his weight, let alone an actual person’s. At the bar—a slab of wood on top of some rocks. At the ‘kitchen’, a metal door at the back, and the three doors that he’d created that led into this room. The stone walls.
This was not The Wandering Inn. And the zombie flailing uselessly on the ground wasn’t Erin. Toren was in the dungeon. Erin Solstice was dead. Months dead. He’d killed her. Left her alone in the snow outside a city far from her inn. And he was trapped in the dungeon. The skeleton buried his head in his hands. And he heard it closing in on him.
Madness.
——
It was just one small room in hundreds, thousands of others. A single spot in the labyrinth, the maze of Liscor’s dungeon. It was a tiny place, barely fortified by some crude doors. The inn had some tables, some chairs, a few bowls, and a barrel or two of ‘food’. And a skeleton and a zombie.
The zombie was just a zombie. It was a young woman’s zombie, and she had dirty and bloodied hair that might have been brownish once. She was—had been—Human and fairly young. She wandered about aimlessly, occasionally groaning, bumping into tables, chairs, walls, and the doors, looking for a way out.
The skeleton was different. He was not aimless. Everything he did had a purpose. And he could use doors. Sometimes, he left the inn. Sometimes, he came back. Always, always, he kept the three doors that lead out from the inn closed, lest the zombie escape and fulfill her vocation of trying to kill anything alive. And he seldom opened the fourth door that led into the back of the inn. The sturdy, metal door that led to the…kitchen.
There were a lot of sounds coming from behind the metal door. But the skeleton ignored them. He had a job to do. With one hand, he held a crude dustpan, which looked like a bit of iron armor flattened out into a funnel of sorts. Which it was. And in the other hand, he held the head of a broom.
Toren swept the stone floor, found a dustrag and a bucket of water and polished the floor, despite the water having tiny particles in it that made keeping everything perfectly clean impossible, and fixed up the broken table. The zombie lurched past Toren, groaning, doing that thing with her arms that was so trendy among zombies.
Toren ignored her.
He swept the floor diligently.
He polished the bar.
He didn’t open the door to the kitchen.
He stood blankly in a corner of the inn.
He stabbed zombie-Erin repeatedly.
He banged his head against the wall until his skull cracked and began to magically mend itself.
He lay on the ground.
He stabbed the giant fly-thing that tried to force its way into the room.
He cleaned up the blood.
He chopped up the fly thing and added it to the barrel of food. The
He swept the floor again.
And through it all, he wished—oh, how he wished—that he could go back in time. Because Toren was miserable. He was empty.
Erin was dead. And he was lost.
Not lost in a physical sense. Or even in terms of the dungeon. Toren didn’t know how long he’d been down here. He lost track, sometimes. The dungeon felt like a home to him, in a way. He knew the layout: he could navigate the threats of the dungeon, and he could pass through most areas without needing to see. Literally; the skeleton’s memory was flawless. But Toren seldom went out of the inn he’d built here. There was no point. All he wanted, the source of his misery and regret, was right here.
Well, sort of. Zombie-Erin lurched past Toren, and he stared at her. It wasn’t Erin’s body. He knew that. It was just some Human’s body he’d found among all the dead corpses. This one looked most like Erin. Well, she had. Now, she had a bunch of holes in her chest, and half of her head was sheared off. Toren might need to find another ‘Erin’ soon. But this one was good.
The skeleton waved a hand and felt a perverse sense of delight as the zombie obediently lurched over to him and halted in front of the table he was cleaning. That was one of his abilities. Commanding the undead. He could make the zombie-Erin run, hit things, lie down, or even pick things up, albeit clumsily. But he couldn’t make the zombie speak. Or think. Or—be Erin for him.
The zombie halted in place, staring aimlessly past Toren. Her mouth was open, and Toren saw something wriggling inside. He absently picked out the squirming worms out of the fake Erin’s mouth, tossed them into one of the snack bowls, and patted her on the head. A few hairs came out, and the zombie made an ‘urghfshh’ sound that was half-voice, half gas and liquid escaping from her deflated lungs.
“I’m sorry, Toren. I’d never get rid of you. I like you. You’re my favorite worker. Not like that jerk Lyonette.”
Erin’s voice echoed in Toren’s head. He stared at her and pointed at a chair. Zombie-Erin sat, with Toren’s help, and wobbled unsteadily in her chair. It creaked, but held. Toren stared at her. At Erin.
Slowly, tentatively, he sat next to Erin. He could hear her voice in his head. As bright and cheerful as always. A perfect replica of how the real Erin had talked. That was the problem with Toren’s memory. It was too perfect. He could remember Erin too well. It never faded.
It. Never. Faded.
Toren realized he was slamming his head against the table. He looked up. Erin stared at him, concern on her face. A maggot wriggled in her cheek.
“I really need you to keep it together, Toren. I rely on you for all kinds of stuff.”
Toren nodded. Sorry. He was just having a bad moment. He was always having a bad moment, now. He edged closer. Gingerly, hesitantly, Toren leaned against Erin.
The zombie tried to lurch away. Toren grabbed its hand and patted his skull with it. It was something he had seen her do to Mrsha. And the little Gnoll had smiled. The skeleton sat there, patting his own head with Erin’s hand. Then he gingerly hugged Erin.
The skeleton smiled, but not by choice. And his purple eyes dimmed slightly. The purple fire grew weaker. He didn’t feel better. He felt worse. The zombie moved, unconsciously trying to seek something to kill. Toren ordered it to hold still, and it did. But he knew it wasn’t really Erin.
Then he heard her voice again, whispering in the confines of his skull.
“You blew up my inn, Toren. You blew it up! You maniac! And you killed me. You killed me, and I’m dead, and you will never leave this dungeon ever again.”
Toren jerked. He leapt away from the table, and zombie-Erin fell to the ground as the chair holding her collapsed. Shaken, the skeleton stared at the zombie as she picked herself up. She hadn’t said anything.
It was all in his head. All in his head. Toren smacked his skull with his bony hands. And he felt terrible. Because after months, after so long, he could finally admit it: he wanted to go home. But he couldn’t. The dungeon was his prison.
Toren lacked a living person supplying him with mana. Without it, he couldn’t go above without running out of magical energy in minutes. And without magic, the spells giving him life would wither, and he would die. Anything short of that Toren could survive; in the mana-heavy environment of the dungeon, he was very, very hard to kill because his body would automatically repair itself over time.
Those were the facts. Toren had lost his old home, The Wandering Inn. His master, Erin, was dead. He’d killed her. Well, not directly, but he’d left her in the snow far, far from home. So it was his fault.
Around and around, the thoughts went. Toren couldn’t avoid them. He’d tried. He’d tried to replace Erin, remake the inn, even find a clientele in the dungeon. None of it had worked. Toren tried to cheer himself up by killing things with his sword, but he’d given that up, oh, about two zombie-Erins ago. What was the point?
He’d gotten tired of killing things for no reason. And that was the most shocking thing Toren could ever imagine in the world. But there it was. If you didn’t have a reason, killing things got boring after twenty thousand six hundred and fifty-one times.
Toren mechanically got back to work after a while of beating his skull with his hands. He bent down and fixed up the broken chair. The stupid furniture was always breaking. Unfortunately, Toren didn’t have much in the way of stuff to fix it with.
The current chairs and table were held together with bits of twine, strips of monster hide or sinew, and nails fashioned out of bits of metal. Toren was wrapping a bit of antenna or something around the chair, hoping it would keep the fragmented wood together, when he heard a sound.
A voice. The skeleton froze, and his hand darted to his sword. Another hand grasped at something at his side. A mask. The hand tried to place the mask on his face, but Toren forced it down. He waited, listening. Where…?
It wasn’t coming from one of the three ramshackle doors leading out of the inn. Toren relaxed. It wasn’t adventurers. Or Raskghar. Or Cave Goblins. Or those annoying little monsters that pretended to be children. In fact, it was coming from the metal door.
The kitchen. Toren paused. But curiosity slowly propelled him towards it. He hesitated, listening. There were definitely voices coming from the other side. More than before. The [Skeleton Knight] paused as he reached for the door. There was a bar on this door. He slowly touched it, then glanced around.
Zombie-Erin was nearby. Toren looked at her and then hurried her into a far corner of the inn. Then he came back over, unbarred the metal door, and opened it. Quickly, Toren went through and shut the door behind him.
It was dark in the ‘kitchen’. It wasn’t a kitchen. It was really just a large room, empty when Toren had found it. Now it was full. Of corpses.
Four thousand bodies. Well, four and a few hundred if you wanted to be precise. Raskghar. Human. Goblin. Drake. Gnoll. All of them were piled up, some practically to the ceiling in places. Rotting. Decomposing. And now—wandering about.
Toren gazed around the room. His fellow undead had moved at the sudden influx of light and lurched towards the door, but now that it was shut, they began wandering again. It was nearly pitch-black in the room. There was no light, save from the countless eyes, staring, shining with undead malice. No light. But there were voices.
“Doombringer.”
Toren jumped. Someone was talking in the darkness. He glanced around and saw a huge, hulking, distended figure. A monster twice as tall as he was with bones for teeth, eyes staring out of the mouth, black liquid dripping from its gaping maw. Huge ‘hands’. Legs made of other body parts.
A Crypt Lord. One of the more powerful breeds of undead. It moved more purposefully than the zombies and Ghouls around it. But it hadn’t made the sound. Toren peered around it. The Crypt Lord held its ground, staring past Toren at the door. There was something like intelligence in the way it stood, but not too much intelligence. Toren impatiently raised his hands to push it out of the way, then thought better. He meekly edged around the Crypt Lord and listened.
“…it be an end to all of us!”
A voice screamed. Toren jumped a foot in the air and bumped into a Ghoul. The undead staggered, and Toren sheepishly edged back. None of the other undead seemed to notice the voice. Toren moved forwards. And then he saw the speaker.
