A high-pitched ringing hounded my head, and for a time it was all that I could hear, see, feel. After a while, the paralysing effects of the dog-whistling relented its hold over my mind and my senses were slowly returned to me. It took a while, but even between the sound of bells and the painful pressure which pounded against the inside of my skull I was almost instantly aware of two things: a throbbing, fiery agony throughout my hands, and the foulest most putrid stink imaginable, somewhere between fish guts and bloated corpses and just as ghastly as either.

The miasma of rot roamed the air unrelentingly, a suffocating stench which strangled the breath from my throat and threatened to choke me as it wrestled its way into my lungs through constricted airways. I gave a gurgled sputter as I gradually regained consciousness; it took me a moment after blinking open my eyes to realise that they were indeed open, and that it was simply extremely dim in… wherever I was.

‘Wait- where in the Realms am I?’

Good question, and one which shook me enough to snap me from my daze somewhat. I struggled into a sitting position, cursing incomprehensibly through numb lips and a thick tongue as daggers tore through my palms. Although darkness huddled in every corner, a feeble candle flame perched upon an elevated surface offered a glimpse at the ruin of my hands; black ooze glittered wetly in the half-light, slick and congealed like sticky gloves encasing my fingers. The brief query as to where my actual gloves had disappeared to had darted across the forefront of my mind, for they had cost much more than such small items of clothing had any right to and I had only purchased them but a few weeks before, but more pressing matters pushed those inconveniences away. For example, that nagging question as to where I was. Which I still hadn’t answered.

My breath whistled tremulously through cracked lips as I shifted stiffly and with a great deal of pain onto my feet, and I stifled another gag as I attempted to refill my bruised lungs, grasping at a cluttered table as the shadows swam before my eyes like fearful fish darting across my path. It was as though death itself stalked that room, reaching a rasping skeletal hand down my throat to steal the life which resided within. My sight steadied, and I caught my breath. From the looks of it, the rest of the creatures which bestrew every portion of the room- perishing pelts, clattering bones, birds and fish and things made unidentifiable by the decay which had consumed them- had already felt the reaper’s touch. Some decorated the walls, others littered the floor and every spare surface, while there were a few which even hung from the rotting rafters of that tiny hut, gruesome chimes of bone which chittered like clacking teeth in the feeble breeze which whispered through the cracks in the creaking hovel- my only gasp of fresh air.

I shuddered. What was this place? A faint beam of white light streaked across my path to illuminate a slither of the room in moonlight, something silver glittering dully across a scarred tabletop. Timorous as a mouse, I leaned forward to get a closer look, only to identify it to my dismay as the magical sparkle of scattered scales and fish guts. I hoped beyond hope that this was simply the hut of some fisherman with a severe lack in personal hygiene, and not the home of… well, of a less savoury character.

An impish titter haunted the room, nervy and high-pitched.

“Oh… You’re alive.”

Three words and I received such a terrible fright that, after all the near-death experiences I had suffered over the past couple of days, I was damned sure that the shock which gripped me right then was going to be the one to finally send me into the ground. I gripped my chest in an attempt to keep my heart from escaping through my ribs as I span on my heels to confront the shadows. Honestly, you would think that people would at least have the decency to make themselves known before creeping up on a man. That was twice in two days, godsdammit…

Putting aside the lack of social etiquette of peasants, however, he did raise a very good point. With all the traumatism and confusion, I had failed to note the most important thing: I wasn’t dead. Perhaps luck was on my side after all.

“Yes- oh, thank the Gods, yes I’m-“ My moment of ecstasy was quickly drawn back down to earth by a creeping realisation, and although I couldn’t see who I had assumed to be my saviour through the thick wall of darkness, I peered suspiciously in what I assumed to be their general direction as I continued a tad more hesitantly, “…Wait. You… You sound disappointed.”

“Of course I’m disappointed,” A strange voice, male but jittery, high at times and lower at others while constantly pestered by a whisper-like hiss, like a strong wind over pebbles tumbled by the waves, and laced with a foreign twinge; the hag’s words of a man harking from the White North rang a silent bell in the back of my mind. A creak of protesting floorboards- or rather, rotten wooden planks dumped over sand- harked my unknown companion’s entrance into the candlelight, “I thought you were dead. Why should I be happy you’re alive, you treacherous corpse, I was going to steal your boots!”

“You… you were what-?“ I blinked. Well, this was certainly going in a different direction than I had expected. Especially when the man made himself visible…

At first I thought I was being met by some larger-than-life stick puppet, for the figure who approached me through the gloom looked to be one-part man, nine-parts tree branch; his limbs were long and spindly, though his lanky form was shrouded in layer upon layer of bits and pieces of scavenged clothing and pelts which came together like some kind of poor-man’s motley. He must have stood at somewhere nearing six and a half foot and walked with an odd loping predatory gait, head and shoulders hunched as though fearful he might bang his head on the sky as he walked beneath it and resembling in my mind a strange and bedraggled vulture.

The precise details of his features had remained anonymous until he slid closer and slouched onto a stool, one which I hadn’t even noticed had existed until its legs groaned across the ground as he shifted it closer to where I stood rooted to the spot. Whatever I had been expecting, it certainly wasn’t what greeted me. His hair was a dirty blonde- and by ‘dirty blonde’, I mean I suspected that it might have been blonde, though it was so coated in dirt and grime that it could have been anywhere from black to bright ginger- and was styled in a way which resembled the raised hackles of a savage hound, cropped close to the sides with a shaggy crest of longer hair along the centre from front to back.

His skin, though it was difficult to tell in the flickering light, was lightly freckled and held the same bleached tone of most Northmen, yet was tainted by a sickly grey hue; a memory came to me of a tale told by the wetnurses back home in the nursery so many years ago, of the folk who traced their ancestry back to the worshiped Black Mages of the White North, folk who still had magic flowing in their veins though the ebony of their skin had dwindled to a paltry grey.

Then there was his eyes, though it perhaps was not his eyes themselves, which were as restless as his voice and a piercing stormy blue-grey in colour, which struck me so. It was what surrounded them. It was as though the skin around his eyes had been consumed by a malignant black rot, pale eyes peering out from oozing pools of ink which seeped across the flesh of his face like some hungry disease, defiling the sharp features of his face in ghastly fissures of shadow. I half expected a maggot to worm its way from the black holes of his eye sockets.

But then he moved, and though it was only by an inch it made all the difference. The light cast its full glow upon his face, ceasing its play with the shadows residing there, and suddenly all it was which smeared his face was a disgusting black paint like a terrible attempt at a lady’s eye-makeup which had somehow gone so wrong that it had obscured most of his face and even his ears. I realised I had been holding my breath, and I almost released it in a gust of laughter at how ludicrous he now looked compared to how frightening he had a moment before, but in a viper-quick movement which almost had me falling backwards into a basket of fish the lanky male had darted toward me and slammed a fist down upon the table top with a growling hiss.

“Give me the damn boots.”

“Wh- no! No, these are mine! You can’t- wait a minute…” I had barely composed myself and stilled my jarred musings when a particularly bitter gust of cold had me losing my trail of thought completely as dawning realisation and then outrage took a hold of me, “Where’s my cloak?!”

“Finders keepers.” Another girlish giggle, all the previous menace suddenly vanished from his voice, and I found myself disliking the man with as much venom as I had the birds. I wasn’t considering eating him as I had the gulls, but I might have roasted him over a fire all the same.

“It wasn’t lost!” I continued in my infuriated retorts; now that I was aware of my lack of a cosy fur cloak, I was suddenly acutely conscious of the cold which threatened to bite my arse off, which wasn’t helping my temper any.

“Was so.”

“No it bloody well wasn’t! I was wearing it!”

“Exactly. A dead man doesn’t need his fancy-pants cloak.”

“I’m not dead!”

“Pfft, that’s what they all say...”

I was getting close to losing it now; how dare that stinking swine speak to me that way! Me! Almost a nobleman! And him a giggling hermit living in a hovel with not even the least bit of fashion sense! I should have had him dragged home tied to the back of my horse to face the consequences of his impudence. The only problem was my lack of a horse… and the fact that, albeit looking like a beanstalk in drag, he had a certain aura which screamed ‘I’m a crazy murderous lunatic, don’t fuck with me’, and I didn’t quite fancy testing whether that was true.

“Well clearly I’m not!” I continued, exasperation draining the dangerous edge from my tone, “I’m sitting right here talking to you! For crying out loud, you were complaining only a moment ago that I’m alive!”

“Exactly. Now give me the boots!”

I gave up trying to argue my way out of being dead, and instead made a display of my astounding stubbornness. If he had any sense, he would let me leave or stand there for days haggling for my shoes; back home I had a reputation for not giving up in this kind of thing, and everyone knew just to let me win lest they be forced to suffer my torments for weeks on end.

“No! It’s freezing! If you want these boots, you’ll have to take them off my cold dead feet!”

A pause. For a minute or two, I thought I had won. Then he brought out the knife.

“If you say so.” The crazily crooked grin alone would have been enough to have me retracting my words, but the knife almost had me making a run for it out the door if only I knew where the damned thing was. The blade was a vicious thing, small and handy but brutally barbed with a nasty edge, and I could tell just from the way it sliced the air that it was shockingly sharp. My stubbornness fled. Had I a hefty sword or hatchet at hand with which I could answer his confrontation I might have done so, but bare-fisted as I was I’m not quite so willing to blatantly offer up my life after having it so recently returned to me.

“Ahaha…! Nono! No need for that, eh? OK! Right! Boots. Here. Take them!” I already had the things off my feet and thrust in his weasely face before I had finished the sentence. He seemed satisfied by that, at least, and peered at them in scrutiny for an extra moment before dumping them unceremoniously in a corner. My feet were already frozen stiff by the time he turned back to face me, but after making sure he had replaced the dagger upon a shelf I managed to continue without my teeth chattering, “…Alright, dammit, you have what you want. Now where’s my horse?”

He stared at me as though I had just told him that an army of blood-thirsty warriors were about to burst through the door and tear him limb from limb.

“A horse?” Intense paranoia narrowed his eyes, which darted about the tiny room like he expected one of the beasts to step from the shadows and declare that it knew his deepest darkest secrets.

“…Yes… A horse,” I mouthed the words slowly, eyeing him sceptically, “One of those big things with four legs that people like to ride around on. Long face. Neigh a lot. Now come on, stop fooling around! The sooner you give me my horse back the sooner I can get out of here.”

“What horse? I didn’t see a horse.” He had shoved past me now, pushing his hand against the wall and revealing the exit as he cast furtive glances at the quiet coastline, “Why did you bring a horse?”

“Why not? I wasn’t going to walk all the way here! What’s your aversion to horses, anyway?”

“They’re slimy little shites, that’s what. Never trust a horse. Evil bastards…” He slammed the door and retreated once again to the darkness which gathered in the corners. I could tell this was going to be a bloody long night…