The Giant's Graveyard

I woke up in the morning to heavy footsteps.  I picked my head up and looked lazily around the room to find Colt walking into the office.  I saw bags under his eyes.  He must have been up all night.  Blood covered his right arm.  Upon further inspection, a green vine was weaving itself in and out of his arm.

“What the hell!” I exclaimed.  “Are you okay?”

“Oh!  You’re here.  Perfect.  There’s a ghoul that took up residence in a fucking golf course in a town north of Boston.  I need you to go and take care of it.”

“Have you seen a doctor yet?” I asked.

“What?  Oh, no.  That’s why I need you to go take care of this ghoul right now.”

Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I nodded and shot to my feet.  I felt gross in these clothes, but I had to tough it out for now.  “What’s the situation?”

“It’s been killing local pets.  We’ve played it off as a coyote infestation, but this ghoul is different.  It knows it’s being hunted by us, so it’s going to disappear soon and pop up in some backwater community we never hear from where it can kill indiscriminately.  I texted you the address.”

“Gotcha.  Can I use magic on this one?”

“I don’t really give a shit as long as you talked to Morgan,” he said gruffly.  “Just get the job done and don’t forget your training.”

“Sounds good.”  With that, I took off out of the office at a light jog.  I ran through the twisting maze of hallways until I got out into the parking lot where I jumped into my car and tossed my phone on the phone mount.  I pulled up directions to the address.  Glancing at the time, I was shocked to see that it was already one in the afternoon.  Shit.  I’d slept for sixteen hours.  I guess I needed it.

I pulled out of the Seventh Sons parking lot, and began the drive to the town.  It was actually Lynnfield and the golf course was literally right next to Lynn Woods.  Funny how close I was to this thing the entire time.  It was a bit of a drive to get there since I was coming out of Boston during the lunch hour, but when I finally got to the suburbs my drive sped up greatly.  I pulled into the Lynnfield parking lot for Lynn Woods since the golf course was a good stone’s throw from there.  Time to go hunting.  

Ghouls never killed wild animals.  They liked to absorb magic from the emotional connections the pet’s owners had with them.  The pets would then be eaten so it could continue to run its normal metabolic processes as well.  Humans were obviously it’s prey of choice, but ghouls had a sort of vague intelligence to them.  They killed smartly.  They knew how humans thought and knew that if a group of humans caught wind of something killing other humans, they would hunt it until it was either killed or forced to flee.

So, that made catching ghouls particularly difficult.  Luckily, Colt was able to scry this thing and we caught up to it before it moved on.

Alec appeared next to me, his ghostly form casting a faint blue illumination on our dark surroundings.

“Can’t yeh think of a way ta track them with yer magic?”

“I—” I said, pausing a bit.  “I don’t really trust myself to do that yet.  I’ve got no idea how much magic it’ll take from me.”

“That’s a damn shame,” Alec said wistfully.  “Welp, I’m going to go for a bit of a stroll and see if I can’t find the bastard on me own.”

“Ghouls can see ghosts,” I told him.  “You glow.  It’d probably be best if you just stayed inside me.”

“Fine,” Alec replied.  “But let me control yer body.  I’m the better tracker.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled.  “I’ll let you take over.  Just give me back control if you find the damn thing.  I’m the better fighter.”

“Barely,” Alec grumbled.  He stepped into my body with a soft woosh and a puff of blue mist.

I relinquished control of my body.  It was strange to feel my body move without me telling it to.

For the next several hours, Alec scoured the dark golf course using my body.  I noticed the sun getting close to the horizon.  I’d rather not face this thing in the dark, so I guess I’d give the damn tracking spell a shot.  However it was at that moment that I noticed a spot of red out of the corner of my eye.  He quickly turned away from it.

I tried signaling to Alec to let me take over, but whatever let him perform rudimentary communication with me obviously wasn’t working for me.  I wouldn’t get my body back until Alec let me have it.  Shit.  I really wanted to look at the rainbow.  I tried moving my arms, but they refused to do what I wanted.  My legs also refused my commands.  Beginning to feel claustrophobic and trapped, I began to push at the boundaries holding me in my body.  There was some give.  I kept on pushing and pushing until I felt a rip and I regained control of my arms and legs.  They began to obey my commands.

“Finally!” I exclaimed.

“Jesus fuck!” Alec yelped.

I looked at him with a grin on my face.  “I need to tell you something,” I said.

“Uh,” Alec began.

“You need to turn around and look at something I found,” I said to him.

“Uh—”

I turned to the blood patch and began to lead Alec to the patch of blood I found.

“James!” Alec said.  “I’m still controlling yer body.  Look at yer bloody hands.”

I did and saw that they were glowing neon blue.  “I’m a ghost?”

“No shite,” Alec said.  Now that Alec mentioned it, I also saw that he wasn’t glowing.  He was normal colored.  I get it was a big detail to miss, but I was caught up in the fact that blood was spattered across the damn golf course.

“Why do you not look like me?  You look like you, just not glowing.”  In fact, he also wore his normal kilt.  I saw that it was colored very plainly, a detail that I had never been able to see before.  It was dull green.  His face was also smattered with faint traces of dirt as well that I had never seen before.  I always thought his skin was unblemished.

“I don’t bloody know.  Maybe it’s yer fucked up brain trying to cope with being a feckin’ ghost.”

“Whatever.  We’ll figure this out later.  Right now I need to show you something.”

“Is that what that feeling was?” Alec asked.  “Yeh were tryin’ ta tell me somethin’?”

“Yeah!  Why didn’t you respond?”

“I thought I was losin’ me mind.  Yeh never told me it felt like that when I tried comunicatin’ with yeh.”

“It’d kind of hard to explain,” I replied.

“I don’t rightly care.  What did yeh want ta show me?”

“Look,” I said, pointing at the spot of blood behind me.

“Shite,” he muttered.

“Do you think it’s animal blood?”

“It’s tough ta say.”

I continued to look more closely at the surroundings when I found a wallet in the reeds near the little pond where the blood was.  Droplets of blood splattered the wallet too.

“A damn wallet,” Alec said.  “A person was killed.”

“Why would the ghoul do this?  Sure, it loves to eat human flesh, but it’s smart.  It would want to avoid detection, so it shouldn’t have killed a human.”

“I don’t rightly know.  It knows we’re here to kill it.  Maybe it wanted to taste human flesh one last time.”

“Maybe.  Maybe not.  We need to find this thing ASAP.”

“Aye.  The blood leads into the water, so I don’t think I’d be able to track it usin’ the blood.”

“No need,” I said quietly.  “Odds are it’s still in the water.  Give me control of my body right now.”

Before he could, a streak of putrid flesh tackled him.

“Alec!” I shouted.

Alec grunted, his brand hands streaking through the air looking to get a handful of the rotting corpse’s face.  At that moment, the ghoul jumped out of the water in a violent spray of water and began to attack Alec as well.

I quickly assessed the situation.  The ghoul had created a zombie out of the man to set an ambush for us.  Seeing no other alternative, I jumped into the fray to possess my own body again.  It took a fraction of a moment for me to gather myself, in which time the zombie had planted its teeth into my arm and the ghoul gouged out a chunk of my outer thigh.  I had managed to twist my leg at the last moment, so it missed my femoral artery.

Since the zombie’s teeth were holding its head in place, I grabbed the back of its rotting skull with my free hand and melted it in an instant.  At the same time, I summoned red hot flame in my foot and kicked the ghoul off my leg, branding its side.  It was harder to summon my power in parts of my body other than my hands, but it was still doable.

The damned thing flew back several feet and quickly squirmed onto its feet.  The sickly pale skin glistening with water as it’s upside down body turned to run away.  I quickly drew my gun and let off a few shots at it, the bullets piercing it’s flesh and throwing it back further.  I hissed at me and ran away from me quickly before I could shoot it more.

I jumped to my feet, grunting as the pain set in in my thigh.  Blood was seeping out of it.  I couldn’t let that continue.  I exchanged the gun in my hand for a knife and grasped the blade with my brand hand, heating it up to a glowing red.  I couldn’t directly burn myself with my brand hands, so I had to do this in order to cauterize my leg.  I pressed the knife into the wound, melting my flesh together.  The pain became so intense that I almost passed out.  I checked my arm to find that it wasn’t bleeding all that bad.  Not bad enough where it also needed to be cauterized at least.

Gasping through the pain, I hobbled after the injured ghoul, firing off a couple of shots of my gun.  I managed to clip it, but it ran off into the dark.  It left a trail of black blood that I could follow though.  I checked my magic reserves to find that I was a in a descent position to keep using it.  My brand hands used up a lot of magic, but so long as I didn’t use them sparingly I didn’t have to worry about it.

I chased the ghoul into Lynn Woods, which grew darker by the minute as the sun set, Golden rays flooded through the trees, casting shadows everywhere.  I could see movement ahead of me, the blood trail leading directly to it.  At this point in my trek, I was very much off the beaten path.  It looked as if nobody had been in this part of the woods for years.  No trash or any structures created by humans that would otherwise taint a forest.

And that’s when the strangest thing occurred.  Before me was a naturally occurring archway made by two trees.  The branches wove together in such a way that magic had to be responsible.  It resembled the archway Morgan had brought me to yesterday, but this one was much larger.  The symmetry and intricate swirls made by the tree branches indicated some sort of intelligent design.  And there was the ghoul.  It was waiting just before the archway.  I drew my gun to end this thing once and for all, taking quick aim at it’s head.  But as I did, the air changed.  It became ionized and smelled of ozone.  Not only that, but I could sense magic in the air.  The archway the creature was standing under sparked once, twice, and then with a blinding light, a portal opened.  It rippled with a blinding intensity that I had never seen in a portal before.  In fact, no portal I’d ever seen emitted light like this.  They always led directly into the world they were connected to.

The ghoul hissed at me and jumped into the portal.

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered and ran after the damn thing.

As soon as I stepped through the portal, I knew I was in a place that had been completely untouched by humans.  Never.  Not in all of human history.  That isn’t to say something sentient hadn’t touched it.

The sun shone through the leaves with the same golden color as before, but it seemed richer.  What I had thought was a normal grove before had become dotted with large quasi-pyramidal stones.  The ground was covered by fallen leaves, the trees themselves were still covered with the yellow, red, and off-green leaves of fall.  Tracing the pathway before me with my eyes, I found that it lead to two chairs overlooking a vast valley.  And the ghoul was nowhere to be found.

Alec popped out of me.  “What the hell is this place?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “It looks like some sort of sacred site.  It’s definitely not man-made.”

“What makes yeh think that?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Yeah, well whatever this place is, make sure yeh don’t get jumped by that damn ghoul like before.”

“That was you!” I exclaimed.  There was a feeling in my head telling me to stop arguing with Alec and focus on the task at hand.  It was like a small drill causing my skull to vibrate in the most irritating way.

“Whose leg has a big old chunk taken out of it?  Mine’s perfectly fine,” he laughed, pointing at his ghostly leg.

“Shut up.  You don’t even have a real leg,” I said quickly, scanning my surroundings.

“Ah, jeeze,” Alec frowned.  “There yeh go reminding me I’m dead.  Just go f—look out!” he shouted as he faded into my body.

I jumped as far as I could to my side, sprawling on the ground.  I rolled onto my back, readying my hands.  Right where I had been standing stood the ghoul.  It quickly shuffled to me, trying it’s best not to let me regain my composure, but to no avail.  I was quicker than it, kicking out with my good leg right into its jaw.  I jumped to my feet, unfortunately putting too much weight on my bad leg, causing it to give out.  Stumbling to the ground again, the beast was upon me faster than I could react.  However, as trash a fighter as Alec was, his reflexes were still better than mine.  He managed to thrust my arm out, grabbing its neck.  I took the opportunity to ignite my brand hand, melting its source of air to one solid mass.  I stood back as it writhed on the ground, struggling for air.  Not taking any chances with this thing, I drew my gun and emptied the magazine into it’s chest.  I reloaded it quickly, and put it back in it’s holster.  The ghoul lay on the ground, motionless.

I checked my magic reserves again and found that they had noticeably been drained now.  About a fifth of the way empty now.

Surveying the land around me, I found that whatever portal that had brought me here had disappeared.  This was obviously a pocket dimension.  I’d only read about them, but this had all the telltail signs.  It’s features closely resembled my reality in the location of the portal, save the addition of the architecture around me.  In addition, the portal leading to this place had that blinding white light, indicating this was an off shoot of my reality and not a completely separate time streem.  It also seemed to be activated by reaching a certain time of day, meaning I may be stuck here for the next twenty four hours when it activated itself again.  Seeing no clear way out of this place, I decided to investigate the stone structures.  There were two large ones with several other smaller ones around the glade.  I walked to the large ones.  A hum of energy came from between them.  I took a step back, the power lessening.

“Do you feel that too?” I asked Alec.

“Aye.  It feels like what happens when yeh weave a spell.”

“It does?” I asked. 

“That’s right.  Only, it fades quickly after you finish the tracing.”

This was good news.  Seventh Sons had a way of visibly seeing tracings after they had been cast.  Reaching into my back pocket, I took out a bag of baby powder I always carried on me.  Tracings were gravitational distortions left behind by magicians whenever they cast a spell.  The tracing itself was from the magician writing on the fabric of reality in order to cast a spell.  That writing faded after a while once the spell itself was done, giving us a window of time where we can lay eyes on it and get a feeling for the type of spell that was cast.  We couldn’t actually determine the absolute nature of the spell cast, but there were common features among some groups of spells that we can point out and understand to an extent.  I remember learning about them, and finding that particular part of Seventh Sons training especially painful.

I took a handful of the baby powder and threw it at the invisible tracing.  The gravitational distortion the tracing created would hold the baby powder in place long enough for Alec and I to analyze it.

I was shocked to find that it was written in a strange language that I somehow understood.   I understood that it wasn’t English, but I could understand what the words meant perfectly.  “I can read that,” I said to Alec.

“Yeh can?  How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well what does it say?”

“It says: Here lies the last two members of the Lazarus Brigade.  Cadmus Edemus, possessed by Borus Edemus; and Karstag Boulderfist, possessed by Percival Greenwich.  For the sake of the possible revival of the Lazarus Brigade, they have left behind a trove of knowledge for a Possessed to find.”

“A possessed,” Alec muttered.  “This message was left for us.”

“Yeah it was.”

“Let me take over yer body again, and yeh can be the ghost for a bit.  I want ta have a peek around.”

“What?  Why can’t you be the ghost?”

“Because I need all my senses ta do me tracking thing.  I only have hearing and sight right now.”

“You do?”

“Yeh didn’t notice before?”

“You mean when we were getting attacked by a ghoul?  No.”

“Whatever.  Just let me control yer body.”

“Fine,” I grumbled.  I relinquished control of my body to Alec, and pushed free from the confines of my body once more.  I looked at my spectral arms and noticed that the same black veins that appeared on my arms without the enchantment were also present here.  Great.  There was no escaping the affects of the Poltergeist.  Also, I did notice that I couldn’t smell the fallen leaves anymore.  Nor could I taste the saliva in my mouth.  I tried pinching myself to find that I felt nothing.  In fact, my leg and arm felt perfectly fine as well, the wounds no longer registering in my head.  However, I looked to my body which now resembled Alec, I saw that he had a burned leg and a bit mark in his arm.

“This bloody hurts,” he said.  “Good on yeh for toughing through it.”

“Thanks.”

I walked around the gravestones, looking for any clues.  Nothing.  To my rear were smaller stone structures, almost like miniature pillars, just sticking up out of the ground.  Seeing nothing else on the main gravestones, I went to look at the other stone projections.  The pillar closest to me was definitely glowing a sickly emerald color at the top, which was itself the size of a large serving dish.  I could definitely comfortably sit on it.

Curious, I inspected the pillar, which was jutting up from the ground about six feet into the air.  The glowing was coming from the top of the structure.  “Alec, come over here.  I need my body back.”

“Aye,” he replied and walked into my spectral form, and I felt control over my body return.  As soon as that happened, the pillar shrank into the ground with a deep rumble, shaking the ground slightly as it did so until it was waist height with me.  I reached down to inspect the top of the oddly smooth surface and my hand began to glow the same sickly emerald, the light coming off my hand in droplets.  Simultaneously, the top of the pillar began to glow a brighter emerald light in the shape of a large handprint five times the size of my own.  The word Giants came to mind.  I continued to reach down, and the handprint shrank to the size of mine.

Whatever this was, it was made by ancient magic.  I matched my hand to the handprint, and the ground began to rumble again.  Not like before though.  This was a deep rumble that was emanating as if it were coming from the core of the planet.  I stood perfectly still, a deep fear building in the pit of my stomach.  After several moments of the rumbling, a stone archway  jutted up from the ground faster than I could blink.  Dirt and stones flew everywhere as if a bomb had gone off.  I shielded my face with my arm then slowly lowered it.

“What in the hell did yeh just do?” Alec asked, his spectral form walking slowly to the archway and freshly turned soil.

“I don’t know,” I muttered, amazed at the size of the archway.  Something three times taller than me could have easily fit through it, but that wasn’t the most interesting part.  A staircase leading deep into the ground had appeared.  It was made out of perfectly shaped black rock.  The surface was smooth, and every edge was a perfect right angle.  It almost hurt to look at the perfection of the finely made pathway.

As I peered into the darkness of the path, a sense of vertigo overcame me and I had to look away.  “What do you think is down there?” I asked Alec.

“I don’t rightly know, but I don’t think we have any choice but ta go down there… that is unless yeh see any other way to get outa this place.”

I shook my head.  “No, I think this is our only option.”  I took out a flashlight from my pocket and shined it down into the darkness to find that the stair way actually didn’t go down far at all.  It quickly led into some sort of chamber.

Shrugging back any doubts I may have had, I quickly descended the stairs.  Alec followed close behind me, keeping an eye on my six.  As soon as I got to the bottom of the stairs, I shined my light around the room to find it full of amazing contraptions.  It seemed like a workshop of some sort.  However, there was one thing that drew my attention.  Right in the middle of the room, on a solid stone slab, lay a body.  It wasn’t a normal body though.  It was humanoid in form, perfectly preserved, but massive in size.  It must have been fifteen or twenty feet tall if it were able to stand up.  This was a Giant’s grave.  I had stumbled into a Giant’s graveyard.