The Forgotten Graveyard

  –Present day

  Clank. Clank. Clank.

  The sound rang through the dark like metal teeth gnawing on the sky.

  “Darkness and sand… everything a man could ask for,” Ade muttered as another sprinkle of dirt sifted into his mouth. Grit caked his tongue, turning his saliva into mud. He tasted it, as if considering a vintage, then spat.

  More dirt fell in.

  Clank. Clank. Clank.

  He wasn’t social, but lying alone in a shallow grave, staring up at an endless black sky, felt like a new category of isolation. Every time he tried to move, dread slid up his spine and sat heavy at the base of his neck. His body refused him. The hole was neither soft nor safe, but it was familiar.

  So, by default, it was home.

  Clank. Clank. Clank, the wind insisted, as if it had found an instrument and refused to put it down.

  Ade rolled his neck, vertebrae popping one by one, and waited for the next strike.

  Clank. Clank. Clank.

  He smiled, absurdly proud of how well he’d timed it. Whatever was making that sound was out there, circling. It wasn’t that he was too afraid to climb out and look. He just understood, with the miserable clarity of instinct, that the clanking and the suffocating dread pinning him to the earth were connected.

  He didn’t know who he was.

  He only knew this: he had crawled into this hole, and something in the world wanted him to stay in it.

  When the sky finally shifted, he almost didn’t trust his eyes. A darker blot of shadow crossed the already black canvas, cutting through the stars that weren’t there.

  Alien was still better than more dirt.

  The shape swept past once, then again, looping wide. When Ade thought it had gone, it returned, tracing tight circles over his little patch of ground. Not random; it was searching.

  Then it stopped.

  And dropped.

  Clank. Clank… thud.

  The impact shook his ribs, showering him with another mouthful of soil. Ade spat and turned onto his side, forearm over his face. Useless. Dirt found its way in anyway.

  Fine, he thought. I’ll just lie here until I merge with the earth. Become a dirt-person. Dirt-man. Lord of worms.

  The creature landed full weight above his hole, heavy enough to compact the soil around his shoulders. Ade risked a glance.

  The thing was wrong in a way his mind didn’t have words for.

  Metallic black skin, like armor left too long in the dark and oiled with something foul. Veins of dark green fluid threaded across its body, seeping from cracks and joints in slow, viscous drips. Its face was a hollow parody of human: crooked nose, gaping hollows where cheeks should be, and eyes that didn’t blink so much as tighten, like jaws.

  Wings, limbs, and too many jointed appendages sprawled from its frame. A bird, if a bird had been assembled by someone who had only read about birds in a bad translation and then run out of parts halfway through.

  Way too many human arms for a thing that flew.

  Whatever it was, at least the clanking stopped.

  Ade’s body wanted to sink deeper, but the earth had no more room for him. He stayed very still.

  “I saw you from above, thief,” the creature called, its voice scraping across the night. “Come out. You know it’s illegal to dig in the Graveyard of the Forgotten.”

  Silence answered. The graveyard held its breath.

  The creature snorted and moved away from Ade’s hole. Its limbs clicked and clattered against bone and stone, the wet patter of green fluid marking its path.

  “Come out,” it hissed again.

  The voice was wrong, too. It had the rhythm of someone fluent, but the sound came through a broken instrument. Whistled consonants. Notes that chipped at the end of each word.

  “I saw some Onye Nche a mile away,” it continued. “They would love adding your soul to their corpseware.”

  That threat sounded practised.

  After a long moment, another sound: earth shifting a few feet away.

  “This isn’t your business,” a man’s voice whispered from inside a second hole. The words were low but sharp, wrapped in an accent that hit Ade like a migraine.

  Something old in his mind stirred, then knotted itself and receded. He knew that cadence. He just didn’t know from where.

  The creature moved toward the voice. Ade, against his better judgment, pushed more dirt off himself and lifted higher, peering over the rim.

  He saw the tree first.

  It rose from the center of the graveyard like a spine, thick trunk and sprawling branches. Unlike the other trees, which rustled in the night wind, this one held itself rigid, frozen mid-sway. Glass bottles and bone ornaments hung from its limbs, chiming softly when the breeze touched them. Broken headstones leaned around it like crooked teeth, each with a skull placed neatly in front.

  The creature hopped through the graves, doing a jaunty little step each time it avoided a stone. It looked like a scavenger who had learned to pretend at grandeur.

  It stopped at another hole, roughly thirty feet away.

  “This isn’t going to end well for you,” the man said from below, voice roughened by grit and defiance. “So fly away.”

  The creature laughed, a thin wheeze. “Where is the satisfaction in that?”

  “You think I’m digging up graves in the middle of the night for fun?” the man shot back, louder now. “Frame harvesting is miserable work.”

  “Frame harvesting is barely a trade,” the creature answered with a kind of hungry amusement. “But soul trading…” It let the words hang, savoring them. “That is worth breaking laws for. Worth the Corpse Brigade. Worth the first law of the plane. You must believe the reward outweighs the risk.”

  The man climbed out of his hole.

  Tan skin, lean frame, unruly dirty-blond hair that looked like it had given up being brushed years ago. His shirt was torn, his blue trousers dust-caked, his boots cracked and scuffed. He didn’t flinch as the creature prowled around him. Didn’t react to the oily liquid rolling down its face, tracing bright green tracks over decaying metal.

  He just dusted himself off and sat back on the lip of the hole as if settling onto a park bench.

  “Didn’t know four-legged chickens understood market value,” he said, a ghost of a chuckle in his voice.

  The creature’s eyes narrowed.

  “No need for insults,” it said. “I was a god once. Tribes from the Remembered Plane carved my name into stone and burnt my stories into the sky.”

  The man barked a laugh, then coughed, spitting out a clump of dirt.

  “Good thing this is the Forgotten Plane,” he said. “Here, forgotten gods are just vermin with good press.”

  The creature muttered something in a language Ade didn’t recognize and then sighed, lowering itself to sit behind the man. “Vermin. Parasite. Dead god,” it said with a bitter hiss. “You Trueborns have many names. I don’t care which one you use. I want one thing.”

  It leaned in until its ooze-soaked skin almost brushed the man’s back.

  “A Fable,” it whispered. “One mythic Fable so rich I never feel hungry again.”

  The man pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at a stain of black fluid on his shoulder as if dealing with spilled wine.

  “A soul trade, then,” he said lightly. “Didn’t know dead gods had anything left worth trading.”

  The creature hopped back a step, laughing softly, almost shy.

  “I was a creation god once,” it said. “Mortals believed I made the Living Plane. The details are… hazy now. My true name has eroded, but my Fables have not. I carry myth in my Soulframe still.”

  The man stood and hopped across the hole, positioning himself directly in front of it.

  “Mm.” He clicked his tongue. “How does a creation god misplace worshippers and end up here? Isn’t being remembered your entire job description?”

  One of the creature’s limbs slipped loose with a wet pop. Another hand caught it and jammed it back into its socket.

  “I am a rarity,” the creature said stiffly. “I exist in the tension between being remembered and being forgotten. Pulled back and forth, over and over. It is… unsatisfying.”

  The man’s lips twitched.

  “You being a rarity feels like generous marketing,” he said. “You’re a decaying pseudo-deity who doesn’t know his place in the hierarchy of things.”

  He crossed his legs, utterly relaxed, as if the whole graveyard belonged to him.

  “Why are you flying over a restricted graveyard in the middle of the night?”

  He pulled a pair of glasses from his coat, wiped them carefully, and slid them onto his nose. The gesture was precise, practiced, almost dainty.

  The creature said nothing. Slowly, its frame swelled again, dark mass doubling, then tripling. The air around it tightened.

  The man looked vaguely entertained.

  After a moment, the creature shrank back to its original size.

  Silence dropped over them like a shroud.

  The tree didn’t move. Bottles tapped softly against one another. Somewhere, something small scurried across stone. Ade could hear his own heartbeat, thudding harder than it should.

  The man eventually broke the stillness.

  “Seems we both have our secrets,” he said. “So what shall we trade? Fables? Secrets? Both?”

  “Fables,” the creature said. “We keep our secrets. They are all we truly own.”

  “That,” the man said, “is the first sensible thing you’ve said.”

  He smiled and reached into his left pocket, drawing out a pocket watch. It was simple and old-fashioned, the metal face dulled by time, chain draped casually over his fingers. He held it out, not to offer it, but to let the creature look.

  “Let’s raise the stakes,” he suggested.

  The creature stared, suspicion and hunger warring in its unblinking eyes. “What is inside that trinket that makes it worth my myth?”

  “Listen,” the man said.

  He flicked the case open.

  A voice poured out. Soft, melodic, crystalline. Ade couldn’t catch the words, but his bones vibrated with each note. The song found the empty spaces in him and filled them with need.

  He was suddenly ravenous.

  Not for food. For the watch.

  If he could hold it, if he could press it against his chest, something inside him whispered he would be complete. Whole. Real.

  By the time he realized he was moving, he was already out of his hole, sitting beside the man as if he’d always belonged there, staring at the watch with hungry eyes.

  “What is that?” Ade asked, voice hoarse. The question snapped him out of the trance more than their reactions did.

  Because they didn’t react.

  “This,” the man said evenly, eyes still on the creature, “is a reincarnated siren. Her soul is worthless to me, but to others? Worth a thousand Fables. Enough to keep a Nyx-born fed for a very long time.”

  The creature shuddered. Its mouth stretched in a too-wide grin, green fluid spilling from the corners like drool.

  “Deal,” it hissed. “High risk. High reward. So hungry.”

  The man finally turned fully to Ade, as if only now acknowledging he was there.

  “Would you mind being our conduit?” he asked, smiling pleasantly.

  Ade swallowed. “What… what’s that?”

  The creature gave a delighted, ugly laugh. “A reincarnated siren and a Fresh Forgotten,” it rasped. “This night is a banquet.”

  The man sighed, exasperation theatrical and precise. “A conduit stands between us,” he explained. “Takes authority over both our souls. Ensures the trade is honored. If one party tries to cheat, the conduit enforces the terms.”

  Ade frowned. “How can someone survive without a soul?”

  “In this world,” the man said, “souls and Fables are commodities. Bought, sold, traded, hoarded. A body can stumble along without a soul as long as its Soulframe is intact. It will husk. Or, if fortune is particularly unkind, it will become Nyx-born.”

  He lifted one shoulder.

  “So yes, you can survive without a soul. You just won’t enjoy the experience.”

  “Can we proceed?” the creature snapped, talons scraping stone. “I am starving, and your exposition is tiresome.”

  The man glanced its way. “Patience,” he said. Then, back to Ade: “Conduit, what’s your name?”

  “Ah… Ade,” he said before his mind could catch up with his mouth.

  The creature recoiled as if struck. “You idiot,” it hissed. “Never give a true name. A true name, freely given, binds your soul to the asker.”

  “I don’t—” Ade started, panic rising.

  Something deep in his chest began to hum. His skin flushed green, light crawling out from under it in veins. Pain exploded in his arm, hot and sharp, as if his bones were teeth trying to bite their way out.

  He dropped to his knees, clutching his forearm, eyes squeezed shut as he sucked in shallow breaths. The pain climbed, peaked, held.

  Then vanished.

  He dragged himself upright, heart pounding. On his left thumb, a jade ring now gleamed. Across from him, the man inspected a matching ring on his own right middle finger.

  The man stepped closer. For someone so thin, his presence felt heavy. Ade’s instincts screamed at him to bolt back to his hole, but his body stayed obediently still.

  “From now on, your name is mine, Ade,” the man said quietly. “I asked. You answered. The bond is sealed. You’ll go by Conduit.”

  The creature’s grin wavered, pity and unease edging its ruined face. “Tricking a Fresh Forgotten in a graveyard is low, even for me,” it said. “Throw his name into the bargain.”

  The man circled it slowly, as if savoring the moment. As he passed Ade, he flicked him a quick, conspiratorial wink.

  “Very well,” he said. “His name and your mythic Fable for my pocket watch. Deal?”

  The creature looked from the man to Conduit. Hunger won.

  “Conduit, you had better be worth this,” it muttered. “Deal.”

  The man extended his right hand. The creature wrapped a limb around it, talons scraping his wrist.

  “Then let’s begin,” the man said. He reached out and took Conduit’s hand in his other.

  Glyphs flickered into existence around them. At first they were faint scratches of light, then they thickened, brightened, forming a loose circle that hummed against Ade’s skin. The bottles in the tree above them chimed harder, bone and glass ringing in time with the glyphs.

  The man’s smile widened.

  “Welcome to the Forgotten Plane, Conduit,” he said, voice smooth and almost kind.

  “Try to enjoy your stay.”

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