Gentleman’s Guide to Fantastic Beasts 28

Gentleman’s Guide to Fantastic Beasts 28

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Wordcount: 2500

Commissioned by Sivantic.

…

“This is wrong. This was supposed to be a safe haven.”

On Cornelius’s back, we observed the ruined town below.

It reminded me of a fortress and a town combined, a change from the usual villages that we encountered in our path. Three rings of walls surrounded by a large moat. Between each ring were domiciles and workshops and the very center was a tall structure meant for the flying ships to dock. Part city, part fortress, its walls bristled with weapons aimed at every direction. Much of the surrounding forest around it was cleared, so that the approaching hordes would have no cover during their advance.

However, the whole fortress city was dead.

A fire had ravaged one quarter of it, and only ashes remained between the immense walls. Flying ships lay either on the dock or floating listlessly without crews just above the city. Many homes and workshops lay untouched, and the gate-bridges were raised. There were no signs of fighting, no cracked soil outside the city, and as a whole the city seemed deathly silent.

I chill went down my spine as a memory from my previous life reared its head.

“We need to get closer—

“No! Wait.” Averi moved to throw herself over the side and fall to the castle below with the usage of her magic to keep her safe on her descent. But I stopped the scarlet-eyed woman before she did. She looked at me with questioning eyes, as did Gale and Djet’Is, but I swallowed thickly before moving Cornelius so that he might allow us to gaze on the side of the drawbridges looking inward instead of outward. “Look.”

“By the gods!”

“What happened here?”

“What is that?”

“Poison. Spread in the air.” I’d encountered chemical weapons in my past life. Mustard gas and chlorine gas both. The terrible things they inflicted upon men, before preventative measures were developed, remained seared into my mind… or, rather, my soul. Men coughing up blood, their skin burnt by gas and with nothing for us to do besides make sure they could breathe, that they had to breath, and nothing else. This was worse. “Hold on. I will form a shell of wind around us.”

I gathered my power and affected the winds around us and formed a hollow shell. Djet’Is observed my power and in a few moments conjured a similar barrier around herself. Averi and Gale struggled but did the same. Still, I maintained the shell around the entire group, as I lowered us into the city.

I needed to see the symptoms… but I upon our landing I realized the true horror of what I looked upon.

The street was filled with dead and their filth. Emptied bowels with stool more blood than feces was in every direction. Many had faces covered in blood, trailing from all their facial orifices, and mouths and throats clawed into disfigurement with bare hands.

None were spared.

Pets in the arms of children died with their owners. Parents died trying to shield their children. All had clawed at their mouth and throats and died with faces stuck in perpetual agony. The barrier protected us from the scent, but by sight alone I could see that the whole street leading outward was utterly covered with filth, waste, and decomposing bodies.

“What could do this? What form of poison or magic?” Averi whispered. Abject terror turned into a form of curiosity. Her eyes took it in and tried to find a reason. Her gauntleted hands curled into fists. Anger, hate, confusion, and panic all condensed into one singular emotion as she looked upon the horrors wrought. “Who could stomach this much cruelty and inflict it upon the people?”

Any nation with the ability was my answer, but I did not utter the words, as I left Cornelius’s back and approached one of the corpses. I wrapped my hands in layer after layer of powerful cloth and scanned the air for anything malign. I heated the surrounding area to just past boiling for a second, steam forming and dissipating in an instant at my power, just as I approached the body of one of the dead.

No.

It was two bodies.

A father holding his child in their last, excruciating moments.

I moved the child away and began to look upon the father.

There were words behind me, questions, but Djet’Is’s voice and command in my absence was simple: allow me to work.

And, so, I did.

…

“It is a poison that courses through the air and it is alive.” I held the sample I extracted during my autopsy. Most of the body had been covered in the virulent, pitch-black substance, many organs becoming soft and rupturing at even the slightest touch, but one organ had differed. The lungs had hardened, grown more robust, and become breading grounds for the virulent poison. After infection, those who breathed out spread the disease. Or, so I assumed. “It is a living thing with a simple mind and simple goal: infect and kill all living things from within by obstructing their breathing and destroying their internal organs.”

It was not a chemical weapon as I had feared, but some sort of living plague. In my enhanced vision, I could see it at its smallest form. It was a hundred times smaller than an ordinary ant, but it slowly moved by extending out a piece of itself, grasping onto something else, and dragging its body. The samples I had all gravitated towards one another, as if seeking allies, despite not being able to see, hear, or feel.

“The work of the Demons, or something that is a Demon itself?” Averi questioned. My autopsy had taken time and in that time she had raged, asked questions, and then began the process of burning the bodies. A thick plume of smoke spread in the sky. I checked it for signs of life, for the organism that I found, but found nothing. The flame cleansed the bodies and so I had not stopped her. The fact that the miniscule creature persisted in the lungs of the body made it so it would be dangerous to bury. What if it seeped into the soil and infested plants or small animals? I have yet to check the dogs and cats and rats of this place. “Do you know, physician?”

“I do not, but I believe that I have discovered why an eternal night has been forced upon the world. Watch.” I called light forth in my hand. It was something just a tad stronger than a bonfire’s light. The sample in the lungs began to burn away into dust. Its terrible efficacy concealed a great weakness. Whatever creature this was, it came from the darkness, and needed darkness to survive. I cast my gaze upward and held out my hand and cast the orb above us. A bright light began to shine… and then something began to scream from outside our vision.

Djet’Is, Gale, and Averi all raised their weapons and looked toward the sound.

But the deed was already done.

A human being covered in the pitch-black creature stumbled into the street from where it hid in shadow. Wearing clothes similar the rest of the people of the fortress-city upon a frame now grotesquely malformed, it cried out in agony and pain as it contorted, bled its blackened blood, and came undone.

The creature, the infected person with its guts hanging from its stomach, died and fell onto the floor with a final cry.

A silence permeated the air, until I broke it.

“It seems that the old tales are true. The Demons are simply us mutated by some sort of monster from the darkest depths of the world. Those who received too much died, those on the cusp became beasts such as that, and those who receive the right amount…”

“Become hosts.” Djet’Is finished for me and glared at the remaining bodies. Many were still and the light that I cast above us were burning away any traces of the black ichor on their bodies. However, she looked at the cadaver I had cut open and the accumulation in the lungs. Her gaze hardened, and she raised her hand towards the pile of bodies at the gate that Averi could not manage to burn through without fear of losing her power. Her gaze and my own met… and I nodded at her. “Stand back.”

I did, pulling back the specimen that I had towards the creature I had just killed from exposure to the small, strong light I had created, before Djet’Is did as she planned.

From the palm of her hand formed the weapon she’d devised after hearing my lessons, a blue flame that did not flicker nor sway in the wind. Instead, it was a simple sphere, compressed heat in its purest form in the size of a marble… and with the same method I used to control my wires, she sent it flying towards the pile of bodies that remained of the crowd trying in vain to escape the city.

The small marble of heat cleanly cut into everything it encountered, until it reached what Djet’Is desired… and then she closed her open palm into a fist, grunted, and released her control over it.

There was no force involved.

Just pure, concentrated heat.

So, there was a flash of light that made all shadows disappear, and the next moment… there was the cracking of stone as it fell into a molten half-sphere once occupied by a fortress gate.

Averi and Gale stared at Djet’Is chosen method of using the techniques I shared with her, while I focused on my newest specimen and my old one. For a long time, I had spoken against her usage of what I taught her, and she refrained from using it until I had nodded now. In the past, I had believed such terrible might was unnecessary, but now things were completely different.

We will need such fearsome power against our new foe, because it not only kills, but also creates more monsters in its wake.

…

I finished my autopsy after a few hours and discovered the truth of the matter.

“This occurred less than a month by state of decay. It is likely that this weapon was deployed in the brief moment that the tree of light flickered, and the light that reaches this place is too dim to kill the infection in the air.” I burned the bodies and cleansed myself from head to toe with scalding steam and pressurized water, before drying myself. Only the harshest of soaps could hope to kill the thing with its tough membrane, though I could imagine alcohol of high potency could do the trick. The issue was that it was airborne and I had very little knowledge of what plants could be used, burned, and inhaled to slow or stop it once it reached the lungs. It was the perfect place for the creature to place itself. A fragile organ such as the lung was both the target and it shield. “So, since this is the outermost fortress city and there has been no flickering again, this attack has not been replicated… yet. Or, if I am wrong, the monsters could have stopped attempting to use it against those who are protected and will begin targeting those on the very fringes of the tree’s light.”

I wrote everything down carefully in the As’Kari script and in the language used by Gale and Averi’s people in two different scrolls.

Averi took it with trepidation, while Djet’Is nodded when I gave it to her.

“Should anything go wrong, then the two of you must find your way back to your homes and protect your people.” We were continuing our journey. Hopefully, I would be able to present my findings to the ruler of the land, but if such wasn’t the case then the information would reach those it needed to reach. Djet’Is, most assuredly, wouldn’t fail. “There are many tests that need to be made. If it can infect animals or plants, perhaps by being mixed with soil and course through it, then everything shall be at risk. The fact that it cannot survive in water, but can float atop it is of great importance, too.”

“I understand.”

“Yes. I understand, physician.”

Gale’s brow was furrowed as she continued to write and make her own copy, and had her hands on a copy of the As’Kari’s language. She was the last resort, the least educated amongst us, but one capable of learning and relaying information nonetheless. She was finding it difficult, but it was obvious that she understood the stakes.

There were no signs of people having investigated this place, and we could not assume that such an investigation would take place. Not only that, but we couldn’t be sure that they’ll discover as much as I, if they do arrive. At this very moment, the four of us were the sole individuals who understood what happened to this city and could prevent it.

“This disease is something that must be destroyed. The best method to do that is to unmake the darkness that hides the sun from us. If it cannot withstand a blazing light, then it cannot hope to even withstand the midday sun.” I mourned the fact that I did not know how to create electricity. The inner workings of a human being were no secret to me, but the truth about the science of electricity was beyond me. Search lights, perhaps even lightbulbs, would be a most eminent boon after my findings. “As we have found, the harshest light cast by a blue flame kills it with ease, but there are stronger lights to call upon… but only by those who can understand it. I have provided an explanation and a simple diagram to explain it.”

I’d treated the specimen with the spectrum of colors. My faraway knowledge of the prism theory in my few classes of physics came to play. Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries continued to be an immense boon to my utilization of this world’s power. The passage of light through a crystal, even a small one, in the setting I prescribed would allow those who used magic to understand and hopefully create countermeasures.

The best delaying method would be if the immense tree of light could be made far stronger, until its light could destroy any trace of the creature that we found, but such a thing was not possible. Not even with me surrendering myself to it and throwing my lot in with the ilk that abandoned so many of its citizenry. All that would accomplish would be prolonging its life as it could not shine brighter.

No.

The only path forward now was to unmake the night that threatened to give the malign creature the whole world upon a platter as hosts and victims.