Along the cold beach—that black shore of Nauvár—there lingered echoes of the final few: shields high, jaws clenched, shoulders set. She saw it still, how her ambush finished the ring of thirty, during the storm the night before. Neceros, alone, now wandered up and down that empty shore, arranging the decorated dead in rows, shutting wide eyes and closing the lolling mouths, turning down the dead faces; into the sand they hummed instead, voices drowned by the coming tide, heads turned from Lady Night. So laid the decorated liches, evenly along the shore. One still hummed; its mouth was open.
“Come, Danndra; come Tecmed; Warped Men of the spear of day!” came the echoes; Neceros twisted among the sea-froth, holding her breath to catch that seldom chant of the nearly-decorated lich. “O, you sorry lot of the Younger Forest, where flee you to, O Nansed, O Un, O soft-soled Órlil? The Chrysalis arrives, but I hear my friends’ war-cry not at all. Would that your spear, O friend, could—”
Neceros snapped the slack mouth shut.
On three sides the shore threw up sandstone cliff faces, and the bowl itself spilled sand into the sea, calmer tonight: on the ridge, atop the bowl’s edge, were the hints of a building of old, hardly more than three huddling arches.
In one of the pits at the centre of the bowl, there held a pair of hands furiously to its spear. Neceros heaved the body, spear and all, fog clouding her path except for the seldom glint of her own star-coloured armour under her cloak, its Sigil of the Chrysalis now pale. Back to the wind and the sea; hot breath. Within the gap between her face and the helmet it was known that she was Lord.
Sand hissed. The previous week of Summer storms lay thickly in the earth. Over the beach, the body carved a line, buried under the night-haze. The sea-froth billowed landwards, washing off the body’s blood-crust and lightning burns. At the third row of Folk of the Three Points (for that was the name of their ransacked standards, halls, and burial grounds), Neceros dropped the body. It sank into the wet sand, its night-like livery wrinkled and stained and half-wet with sandy mud. She bent over the body, peeling off its helmet, its metal collar, swiped hair aside, then peered into its dull eyes.
A sigh, lost beneath the froth of the coming tide, decorating the liches that would disappear among the currents.
Then Neceros stood, one hand out—rings of moon-silver filigree around each gauntleted finger glittering—the other hand over her chest, and she hummed the song of the Lich-Watch, again.
Lubelór, silent shores, lands of an inner rhythm.
People weep
Before the season
Of the sleep—
And long for the country
Of the staved
Foreign men,
With gifted things—
Whose eyes reminds us
Of the hollow dome
And the rings of the Folk of the Wren;
Then they, all, will learn to shake.
Lubelór, silent shores, lands of an inner rhythm.
She drifted up the coast, back to that flat plain of the massacre, and in the hollows and nooks and little dunes at the beach’s edge shifted her assassin hirelings: pale white appeared—on every assassin—the frigid night-glow tattoo of The Chrysalis (the impaled coat-of-arms, one half outspread wings, the other half a wreath of ice). There, Neceros smiled.
Then she waltzed straight into the bowl, past the bodies, brushing the careful shoulders of the assassins of The Chrysalis hidden among corpses and sand.
“Assassin General.”
She pointed to his hollow behind a dune, the gesture throwing off her cloak to let flash her ringed gauntlet and steel vambrace and the shape of a dagger set within that vambrace. He gulped, twisting his head towards Neceros. Others of the assassins sneered or jibed from the bowl’s edges, kicking up dirt. Her pale silhouette, gathering fog about itself, reflected in their eyes.
“Neceros,” said the general.
“That is Master, thank you.”
He went to speak, then choked on his own spit.
“And, as a Guest of the Chrysalis, the only title appropriate for you to utter would be Master of the Paper Butterflies, yes, Assassin General Dannulf?”
“Erm— No offence … Mercies, Master of …” He raised his voice as Neceros turned her back on the man, plucking the next body from the ground. “Sorry, but—”
Neceros smiled. “You wished to speak to me?”
“I—” He coughed once, clearing his throat. “I just wanted to … about your dance.”
Bending over the body, here instead of further up the shore, Neceros licked her finger to wipe the blood-crust from the body’s brow, under the heavy dent in its skull. “Of course, Dannulf, ask away,” she spoke back, closing its dull look. Then, backwards, she waddled, hauling its blank features towards the general’s hollow.
He sprung out, a quarrel set in his crossbow, some rare technology marked with the wear of a carpenter’s and a marksman’s hands from before Nethilaig. Neceros eyed the weapon long, then continued with the body. The general’s frown deepened.
“Don’t strain your voice.”
One of the assassins closer to the bowl’s edge spat.
Neceros dropped the body at the general’s feet, stood, then pulled the cloak about her armour so only the rim of her visor, her steel toes, her Sigil’s glow through the narrow slits, her ringed fingers, were each visible. Then she danced, continuing the song.
Lubelór, silent shores, lands of an inner rhythm.
In a world
Of muted, wordless
Folk who hurled
The People of the Urn;
Yes … Those alive
Who wish to learn
To throw back
That hacking
Of the very tree
That is their spine;
Spying Liches, like a snake.
Lubelór, silent shores, lands of an inner rhythm.
The general sniffed and met Neceros’s look. She glanced at the body, then nudged the undecorated lich his way with a steel-capped boot.
“Lady Night is impatient. Will you speak or not?”
He grimaced. “Yours is a foreign dance.” He shook the crossbow.
“A cultured man? Pity.” She tutted, letting her head drop to veil her glimpse at the assassin hirelings nearby, lowly creeping under the night-haze.
“But the reputation of the Chrysalis … These foreign rites belong in our nation.”
“The Paper Butterflies are native to all land that humans have called a Home.”
“Aye, ‘from the briar and the fire come I,’ I know … ”
“I gave you those words,” she muttered.
“ … I have culture, Master.”
“O?”
“We are done here. No shamans. Tough luck. The locals will wake in mere hours.”
Neceros wiped her hands together, then dusted her cloak, parted as she did so to display The Ice Rot, its foetid handle and foetid blade, embedded in her vambrace.
He stammered, now, “We should … should leave before Day wakes. Let the locals mourn in their … let them have their local way, lest they find the pale glow of our Sigil.”
Neceros uttered, coarsely, low, “You are more than welcome to perform the local rites yourself.”
“But I would need to—”
Neceros grinned.
The general swallowed, his crossbow’s stare failing.
“Dannulf?”
“They perform their own funeral-flapping dance naked. But the cold, tonight … ”
Neceros laughed, then bent to the body between them, grabbed its greaves, and pulled it half into the general’s hollow. There, she snatched The Ice Rot from its sheath in her left arm, exposing her arm to the silver look of Lady Night. The fog grew over the bowl, and a frigid smoke crawled up the spine of that blade, spilling into the hollow, eating at the body’s edge. There, Neceros split the body’s belts and buckles, prized off the damp steel and the slimy livery and the blood-wet gambeson, until the bare silhouette of a warped, undecorated lich rested in the sand; its dent in its skull glistened.
“One of your lackeys could remove your clothes for you.” She was not smiling.
The general gripped his crossbow harder, reaffirming its sight.
But Neceros—still in the hollow, The Ice Rot in her hand—caught the golden flash of something in a near face. She spun, facing the shore and the flashing eyes of that nearby body and its nearby look.
“Dawn comes, Dannulf.”
She dropped the body back into the hollow with the general, the flew to the pale looking corpse, stuck beneath another. Again, she bent, then snatched off the helmet and collar, wiped off blood-crust from the figure’s face, and eased open its squinting eyelids. One iris was dull, clouded-over; her heart sank, her breaths heavy. Under the lashes of the other weakly glowed a weary eye, something golden in its gaze. Her distorted face gazed back, through the glaze of death.
Neceros glanced at the horizon, where Day climbed, though the stars were out in full force, and the night-haze no longer so black over the bald rock beyond the beach, above the bowl. In the shining things, the mirroring things, which swam in the shallows and the tidal pools, those night-timers and early morning flailing threw up Day proper; Dawn arrived.
A quarrel whizzed through the air, pinning the body underfoot to the beach.
Neceros turned, watching the general, whose aim it was known had no rival south of the older forests around Áraþea’s shoulder. She nodded.
“I hear you,” she said. “Burn them as you see fit. Assassin General.”
He dropped the crossbow, shaking his head and turning to the bowl’s black lip and the upper ridge beyond: there, ruins rose, the arches of those peoples before, with sod lean-tos against their stone columns, fashioned by the Three Points’ folk.
“Good morning, hirelings,” she added, aloud, “My gifts were well placed.” Then the other hirelings stood and departed.
Then Neceros turned to the body in her hand, and let The Ice Rot have its time before proper Dawn arrived.
Lubelór, silent shores, lands of an inner rhythm.
Like the kin,
The thin, Fuorlings,
Them who hid
hmm him
…
olden din
…
Hollow Cup of Now and Then,
Men, maa … enn
him hmm…
Thus, it was known that Neceros stole an eye of utter gold, and thus, thereafter, was that coast beyond the Rimrath estuary known as the Lich Coast of Nauvár, haunted—in the land’s lore—by the Ice-Patterns of the Chrysalis.
*
Thank you for reading my little myth, ‘The Dance of the Lich-Watch.’ Look out for my next little myth in 2025, set not so far from Nauvár, called ‘A Repurposed Urn.’ To follow the evolution of my Gothic-Mythic writing, or if you are an avid fan of all things fantasy and science-fiction—from prose to poetry and even re-creative writing—then definitely check out my Instagram page @rio_wulfmare, where I post all things bookish, writing, poetry, and art; or, search for my other short stories I have published with Rebel Essex already. If you love medium-paced, character-drive science-fiction, try ‘Doze.’ We follow Coffee, a tattooist in a CyberSlowDown 80s-imagining of a near-future city, where everyone is named after their parents’ sole, legal personality faults. Looking for poetry? I have a collection of five poems perfect for this time of year, together called ‘Poems for Early Winter,’ from Haiku to re-creative poetry to free verse experimenting. Cannot find your taste here? Check out the other variety of creative pieces on the Rebel Essex website, such as our Head of Editorial’s most recent short fiction, ‘Perfect:’ I will leave the genre for you to find out.