The Hellven Song of the Eightrees

ll was still.

The dead filled the road before them and crowded the trees to either side, hundreds of pale, ruined figures standing beneath the black canopy of Ilvarin’del. Torn silks hung from their bodies. Ancient armor caught what little light remained in dull, broken edges. Some stood straight. Others leaned at crooked angles that no living body would have tolerated, heads bowed or tilted upon ruined necks, arms hanging loose beside rusted weapons. Green fire smoldered in their hollow eyes.

And every one of them was watching.

The seven stood together in the middle of the road.

“What... are...” Lunara whispered.

Av'elyth never took her eyes from the dead. “Hellves.”

The young archer glanced toward her, confused.

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Av'elyth murmured. “Elves that... came back.”

Her grip tightened around her daggers.

“This is very bad.”

Navian held his sword and shield before him. The Light upon the blade had diminished to little more than a pale shimmer, barely enough to silver the edge. His breathing came slowly through his nose, measured despite the blood upon his armor and the exhaustion pulling at his shoulders. Beside him, Oesora kept one hand raised near her chest. A weak glow rested within her palm, trembling softly with every breath she took.

No one spoke again.

Somewhere among the dead, something wet struck the leaves.

Plip.

The sound seemed impossibly loud.

In the silence, even their breathing seemed to echo.

Lunara had Aloy raised but had not yet drawn. Her fingers rested against the string, an arrow already waiting between them. Av'elyth stood slightly forward upon the balls of her feet, one dagger held low at either side. Jaeshu watched the ranks through narrowed eyes, his hand reaching across his body for his shortbow. Gaz’s hands remained fixed around his staff. Its faint amber glow painted the nearest trunks and caught upon the dead faces gathered beyond them. He was doing his best to recall any spell from his teachings that involved this specific situation.

There was none.

Karneth stood beside Beeps. The dwarf’s axes were already in his hands. He tightened his fingers around one grip.

Leather creaked.

Nothing happened.

A breeze wandered somewhere through the upper branches, stirring leaves too high above them to see. The faint rustle crossed the canopy and faded again. Below, the forest remained utterly still.

One of the Hellves opened its mouth.

Its jaw descended slowly, sagging farther than it should have, until a strand of dark fluid stretched from its lower teeth. The strand lengthened.

Broke.

Another soft patter against the earth.

The Hellve did not blink. Neither did the others.

Jaeshu shifted his weight by scarcely an inch. Across from him, several dead faces seemed to follow the movement.

He stopped.

Silence returned.

Oesora swallowed.

A Hellve somewhere in the crowd released a faint, dry rattle from the back of its throat. The sound lasted perhaps a second before dying away.

Still nothing came.

No charge. No raised weapon. No command from whatever terrible will had drawn them from the trees.

They simply waited.

Navian’s gaze moved slowly over the first rank, then the second, searching faces that no longer possessed enough of themselves to betray intention. There was no impatience among them. No fear. No nervous shifting beneath the weight of the silence.

Hundreds of dead elves could wait forever.

The living could not.

Another breath left Navian.

Av'elyth rolled one shoulder almost imperceptibly, loosening it without taking her eyes from the dead. Lunara’s fingers curled a fraction tighter around Aloy’s string. Gaz lowered the head of his staff by an inch. Jaeshu’s stance changed so slightly that only the others would have recognized it for what it was.

Ready.

The dead watched all of it.

And waited.

Beside Karneth, Beeps lowered his head. The bramblehorn’s nostrils widened. A hot breath rolled from them into the cold night air. His ears flicked once, uneasy at the smell of rot surrounding him, and one thick foreleg shifted beneath his weight.

Karneth’s eyes narrowed.

“Easy boy,” he breathed.

Beeps planted the hoof. Then dragged it backward. The scrape tore through the silence. Dirt rolled beneath the hoof. Dead leaves crumpled. Stone grated against stone.

Every Hellve turned its head in slow unison, hundreds of dead joints groaning beneath the motion.

Karneth himself went still. His eyes dropped slowly toward the bramblehorn.

Then the battle ram seemed to make up his mind. Beeps straightened and unleashed a bellow into the night.

For one suspended heartbeat, nothing in Ilvarin’del moved.

Then the dead screamed back.

The sound erupted from hundreds of throats at once, one vast and hideous shriek that tore through the forest and sent the branches trembling overhead. Birds burst somewhere from the distant canopy. Green fire flared within hollow sockets. Mouths stretched wide around broken teeth as the dead surged forward together.

Navian raised his sword.

“Hold!”

All at once, the Golden Quiet of Ilvarin’del came for them.

The first rank struck them hard enough to drive Navian backward.

Rusted steel screamed across his shield. The impact shuddered through him, and the dead elf behind the blade kept coming as though neither weapon nor shield existed. Its ruined face stopped scarcely a handspan from his own—grey skin drawn tight against the skull, one cheek split to the teeth, green fire smoldering in sockets where eyes had once been.

Navian turned the sword aside, drove his own blade beneath its jaw, and ripped it free. The corpse sagged against him, but before it had finished falling another was climbing over its back.

Av'elyth reached that one first. She slipped beneath a sweeping sword and stepped close enough that the Hellve had no room for another stroke, one dagger finding the seam beneath its breastplate while the other punched through the green light of an eye. It folded against her shoulder. She shoved it away and found two more already coming.

“Stay together!” Navian yelled.

The companions closed around Oesora as the dead poured across the road and through the trees on either side. Lunara and Jaeshu loosed from behind the line, Aloy’s brighter song answering the harder snap of Jaeshu’s bow. Lunara’s first arrow buried itself deep in a Hellve’s chest and barely slowed it. Her second entered through the eye and dropped it at Navian’s feet.

Jaeshu had found the same answer. After that, neither wasted a shaft on anything but skull, socket or mouth. The trouble was that every corpse they put down became footing for the next. The dead simply climbed over their own.

Gaz made the first true space. He drove the foot of his staff into the road. The air before him pulsed outward with no visible shape at all, yet the front rank lifted from the ground and crashed backward through those behind it. Ancient armor tore loose. Rotten silk snapped in the sudden wind. A jeweled clasp spun once through Gaz’s amber light before vanishing among the leaves, and one Hellve struck an oak hard enough to bend around the trunk before sliding broken into its roots.

Gaz swept the staff toward the opposite flank and another invisible blow followed. For several precious breaths Navian could see the road again. More importantly, he could breathe.

“Closer!” he called.

They tightened around Oesora. Gaz’s amber light burned clean above them, brighter now than the sickly white rim clinging to Navian’s sword or the glow trembling between Oesora’s fingers.

The dead closed again before anyone had properly caught breath.

A living swordsman would guard himself. He would recoil from pain or hesitate before a blade already waiting for him. A Hellve did none of those things. One walked directly onto Navian’s sword. He felt steel slide through mouldered silk and rotten flesh, then grate against bone before the point broke through its back. The creature kept coming, forcing itself farther up the blade while another hacked down over its shoulder.

The paladin caught the strike on his shield.

His heel landed on something slick.

A severed arm rolled beneath his boot.

His footing vanished.

Navian slammed one knee hard enough to jar his teeth. The opening lasted barely a heartbeat, but a heartbeat was enough. A rusted sword came through it and Lunara twisted away too late. The edge tore across her upper arm.

She hissed, drove the arrow through its eye, and turned on the next.

Navian regained his feet. “Lune—”

“I’m fine!”

Blood was already running down her sleeve.

Three Hellves crowded Oesora at once. She threw both hands forward and pale Light flared between them. The barrier stopped the first corpse and bowed beneath the second. Fine fractures spread through the glow.

For an instant it illuminated the dead faces pressed beyond it.

One wore a delicate circlet fashioned from intertwined golden leaves.

Av'elyth’s knife hesitated.

She knew that pattern. Children in Oth’golimn had once crowded the road to watch Grand Elven emissaries pass beneath gold like that.

The barrier cracked again. Oesora’s Light collapsed before the third could strike.

Navian caught her as she staggered.

“Save it!”

“I can still help!”

“I know!”

Another corpse crashed into his shield.

“Save it!”

Oesora’s jaw tightened. She lowered her empty hands as Jaeshu handed her a short blade from his belt and fired another arrow. The wall of bodies around them was writhing, suffocating, and closing in.

Then Beeps hit the line.

The bramblehorn drove both horns into a Hellve’s ribs. Bone gave with a deep, wet crack, and the corpse folded around one horn before Beeps tossed it aside.

Karneth caught the saddle while the ram was already turning. There was no scrambling for balance, no pause to settle himself. His knee shifted and Beeps cut left before an ancient sword could descend. The dwarf’s axe came through the opening created by the turn.

Another corpse lunged at Beeps’s flank. Karneth swung low enough that his shoulder nearly brushed the ram’s, severed the reaching arm, and let Beeps’s motion carry him upright again.

Lunara saw it while reaching for another arrow. Her fingers paused above the quiver, and despite everything around them, wonder flickered across her face.

The dead crowded Beeps too closely for the ram to turn.

Karneth dropped. His axes went low—knees, shins, ankles—making room rather than wasting strength on killing blows. Beeps wheeled through the press, shouldered one corpse aside, and passed him. Karneth never looked around. His hand simply went backward. Found leather.

Beeps’s momentum carried the dwarf into the saddle.

“Left!” Navian shouted.

Karneth was already going left.

“Mind your arrows, lass!” the dwarf shouted. “Plenty more comin’!”

Jaeshu tore a wire from beneath his cloak and caught Lunara’s next arrow before she could loose it. He looped one end around the shaft, then bound the other around one of his own.

Lunara looked at him. He turned toward the trees on his right.

She smiled and turned left.

Their bows sang together. The arrows vanished into opposite trunks.

Wire snapped taut across the road.

The first rank hit it running. Heads came away almost together.

One Hellve folded backward as the wire opened its throat to the spine. Another lost its jaw. Three behind them struck before the bodies ahead had even fallen, and for several savage seconds, over a dozen of the dead simply ran themselves apart against the line, until a Hellve came through with a rusted sword raised across its chest.

Steel caught wire.

Snap.

The broken length whipped into the leaves.

Jaeshu already had another arrow in hand.

Gaz’s magic kept the worst of the horde from swallowing them whole, each burst of force buying only enough room for Beeps to shoulder it wider and Karneth’s axes to keep it from closing again. Av'elyth slipped through whatever space remained, working so close to the dead that longer blades would have been useless.

Navian watched the whole thing.

That was what remained to him now. His Light was failing, but he could still count heads. He could still see the gaps before they became holes. He could still keep seven people from becoming six.

Something cold closed around his ankle.

Navian looked down.

Half a Hellve had crawled beneath the fallen and fastened both hands around his boot.

For one useless instant he stared at it, then stamped on the creature’s wrist. Once. Again. Bone broke beneath his heel, but the fingers refused to loosen.

Oesora stepped in and hacked through them with three brutal strokes. The severed hands remained clenched around Navian’s boot after the arms were gone.

He kicked them away.

The priestess wiped black blood from her cheek.

“We are even.”

A corner of Navian’s mouth threatened to move. There was no time for the rest.

The road beneath them became almost as dangerous as the dead. Broken limbs rolled beneath boots. Ancient mail caught at heels. Rotten ceremonial silk wrapped itself around ankles, beautiful even after death. Hands clawed from beneath fallen bodies. With every corpse opened, the stink thickened—sweet decay, damp earth and fresh blood—until Navian tasted it whenever he breathed through his mouth.

Jaeshu drew again. Pain tightened across his bruised throat. The release came wrong.

His arrow drilled a Hellve above the eye and skipped away harmlessly into the forest.

The creature kept coming.

Jaeshu slung the bow across his back and drew his sword before it reached Gaz.

Lunara’s first quiver was nearly empty. When a Hellve fell at her feet with an old curved blade trapped beneath its fingers, she kicked the hand loose, snatched the weapon up and kept Aloy in the other hand.

Gaz raised his staff.

Force struck the nearest rank. This time the dead did not fly.

The first few stumbled down. Those behind merely lurched into them and kept coming.

Gaz stared. He had expected space.

There was none.

The wizard tried again. Amber flashed, weaker now, and the dead slowed without breaking. Navian’s shield arm had gone numb from shoulder to fingertips. Lunara’s sleeve was soaked dark with blood, and she was breathing too hard to hide it. Jaeshu fought with his shoulders raised, protecting his damaged throat without meaning to.

The Hellves looked exactly as tired as they had when the battle began.

Not at all.

The circle tightened by inches.

Navian surrendered a step beside Gaz, another near Lunara. Beeps lost enough room that Karneth had to turn him sideways through the press. The dead filled every space they abandoned before a living foot had fully left it.

Then Karneth vanished.

One moment Navian could see him above the crowd, both axes working. The next there were only pale faces.

“Karneth!”

Nothing answered but the screaming. Beeps bellowed somewhere within the mass.

Navian searched despite himself. No dwarf. No horns. Only ruined Grand Elves reaching and hacking and climbing over one another.

A Hellve slammed into his shield and nearly spun him. Navian killed it, looked again—nothing.

“Nav!”

Gaz.

The paladin dragged his attention back where it belonged.

They could not keep doing this. The dead did not tire. They did not care how many of themselves they stepped across. The living had become slower with every minute, and the road beneath them was disappearing beneath bodies.

Through the press ahead, the trunks had begun to thin.

Navian caught a glimpse of open trail.

Not freedom. Not safety. Just somewhere that did not yet contain a dead elf.

“Brother!”

He pointed with his sword.

The wizard followed the line toward the thinning trees and measured what stood between them.

“Two moments,” he said.

That was all Navian needed.

He struck the flat of his sword against his shield. The ringing note cut through the screaming.

“TO ME!”

Av'elyth reached him first, cutting a dead hand from Oesora’s shoulder as she came. Jaeshu pulled Lunara through a narrowing seam in the horde while she battered aside a sword with the stolen Elven blade. Gaz backed toward Navian’s voice.

Karneth still had not appeared.

Then the dead on the left buckled sideways.

Beeps came through them.

Karneth was still in the saddle, roaring with one axe black to the haft. He found Navian’s eyes.

The paladin looked toward the road. Nothing else was needed.

Gaz raised his staff.

The amber light burned suddenly violet. He spoke a word Navian could not hear through the battle and brought the staff down. The dead ahead lurched inward. Armor ground against armor. Limbs tangled. Bodies were forced together until the first ranks stood packed shoulder to shoulder in one writhing mass.

Then the pressure released.

Hellves flew apart. Some struck trees. Others vanished tumbling into the brush. A rusted sword cartwheeled high enough to disappear among the branches. The breach reached almost to the thinning trunks.

Gaz had bought them distance, nothing more. He sagged against the staff.

“Move!”

They forced forward.

Av'elyth took the wizard beneath one arm when his first step failed. Jaeshu guarded the other side. Lunara and Oesora moved ahead of them, cutting at hands reaching into the temporary corridor while Navian backed after the group behind his shield.

They gained ground before the dead began filling the space again.

Navian looked toward Karneth.

The dwarf looked toward the road.

Beeps stood beneath him with his flanks heaving and white breath rolling from his nostrils. Blood striped both horns and matted the coarse hair across his chest. One forehoof scraped backward through the leaves.

Beeps lowered his head.

Karneth settled lower in the saddle. His axes came down beside the ram’s neck.

“Dharûk vorn, maldrin khaz!”

The bramblehorn launched.

The first Hellve went over his horns. The next disappeared beneath one shoulder. Karneth’s axes worked above him with brutal economy, one knocking aside steel aimed for Beeps’s face while the other took the hand holding it. A spear appeared between the dead and braced against the charge.

Karneth swung low. The point passed over his back as his axe shattered the shaft. Beeps struck the wielder and drove it beneath the horde. They did not search for a gap.

They made one.

The dead folded around them.

Beeps drove through bodies, hooves slipping once on silk and rotten flesh before finding the road again. Karneth dropped from the saddle when the press tightened around the ram’s legs, axes working at knee height, then caught leather as Beeps surged past and swung himself back up without breaking their momentum.

The hole widened.

Not merely three or four Hellves staggered aside. Beeps smashed a path straight through the thickest part of the ranks, throwing bodies outward until, beyond his bloodied horns and Karneth’s rising axes, there was suddenly something none of them had seen since the dead first screamed.

Road.

“THERE!” Navian shouted.

Av'elyth seized a fistful of Gaz’s robe and hauled him toward the breach. Jaeshu fell into stride beside them. Lunara hooked Oesora by the arm and drove forward while Hellves crowded immediately behind. Navian brought up the rear, shield taking one blow, then another, while the dead surged after them and from both sides.

They were still coming. Hundreds of them. But Beeps had torn a hole wide enough to move through. Navian could see the opening. They were almost there.

A tree fell and struck the road with a thunderous crack.

Navian stopped so abruptly that Oesora slid into him before he reached behind and caught her. The immense dark trunk descended almost perfectly upright and drove into the earth hard enough to send dirt and dead leaves jumping around its base. The impact shuddered beneath their boots. No roots tore loose. No crown of branches came crashing down around it. One moment there had been open road.

The next, a tree stood there.

For half a heartbeat, the seven simply stared.

Another came down.

It planted itself several yards beyond the first with the same impossible vertical violence, disappearing into the earth as though driven there by some enormous hand. A third descended among the trees beside the road. Then another farther back, dark columns appearing between the real trunks.

Navian’s sword rose a little higher.

Behind them, hundreds of voices cut off in the same instant.

Lunara turned.

The Hellves had stopped cold.

They stood frozen throughout the road and among the trees, some caught halfway through a stride, others leaning forward with rusted weapons raised. Green fire still smoldered in their hollow sockets, but not one advanced another inch.

The companions began backing away without anyone giving the order. Beeps came with them, hooves scraping over leaf mould as hot breath rolled from his nostrils. Karneth stayed in the saddle, axes raised, though even he had gone still.

Something creaked above them.

It was not the hard report of splitting timber. The sound was softer and slower, almost fibrous, as though some great bundle of wet rope were being twisted somewhere in the canopy.

Navian looked up just as the tree in the middle of the road bent.

A joint appeared halfway along it.

Lunara’s breath caught. What Navian had taken for bark separated into coarse black hairs thick as cord, and the whole impossible trunk drew backward through the earth. Another dark column shifted beyond it, then another, their bases lifting free of the leaves as the forest seemed to alter its shape around them.

The forest rearranged itself.

What they had taken for trunks were legs, black and bristling, rising among the oaks and ancient elms until their joints disappeared into the canopy. Each was mottled in the greys and blacks of bark so perfectly that whenever it stopped moving, parts of it seemed to vanish back into Ilvarin’del. Above them hung a vast body half lost among the branches, its swollen abdomen blending with knotted boughs and diseased timber until motion betrayed where forest ended and creature began.

Branches snapped beneath its weight as the giant arachnid descended. Plates of dark chitin overlapped across its body, dulled by streaks of grey that mimicked stone and weathered wood. Coarse hairs dragged through the canopy and sent dead leaves whispering down upon the road. Its head sank lower until eight ruby eyes caught what little light remained beneath the trees.

None blinked.

Karneth stared from the saddle for a long moment, then spat into the leaves and gave one short, humorless laugh.

Av'elyth had gone utterly still.

“An Oakweaver.”

Her eyes traveled up the impossible length of the creature. “How did you get this far south?” she whispered.

Navian looked toward her. “You know this thing?”

“Its name is Eightrees.”

Jaeshu stared upward through the branches. “You... named it?”

The elf did not answer at once.

“We name recurring problems.”

Navian took another step backward. So did everyone else.

Eightrees merely watched.

The giant spider made no rush and offered no sudden strike as it lowered itself until the great head hung above the road. Its patience made the motionless Hellves behind them seem almost frantic by comparison. Around Navian, steel rose by instinct. Gaz dragged his staff upright with both hands, but the violet glow that answered at its head survived for barely a heartbeat before fading.

For several seconds nothing happened. Navian could hear Gaz trying to control his breathing and Lunara drawing air through clenched teeth. Beeps shifted once beneath Karneth, then froze. Somewhere among the motionless dead came the faint tick of cooling metal.

One of the Oakweaver’s forelegs shifted.

Every one of them flinched, but the enormous limb merely settled again. Navian looked up at Eightrees and became suddenly aware of how little sword he was holding.

Navian widened his stance. “Ready.”

They spread what little they could across the road. Beeps lowered his horns as steel rose around Navian. Lunara set an arrow against Aloy’s string, the shaft trembling once before she tightened her grip and stilled it; Av'elyth and Jaeshu sank into fighting stances beside her while Oesora closed both hands around the short blade Jaeshu had given her.

But Eightrees began to rise.

Its legs extended joint by joint until the huge body climbed above them, higher and higher among the trees. The motion was unhurried, almost ceremonial. Its head tipped backward, and the mandibles beneath it slowly opened.

Navian tightened his grip on the sword.

A wind.

The forest began to sing.

At first the sound was so low he almost mistook it for something beneath the earth. A hollow note passed between the trees, followed by another, each gathering against the last until the noise climbed through the canopy and became horribly familiar.

Navian knew that sound.

So did the others.

It was the endless moaning voice that had followed them through Ilvarin’del, rising and falling among the branches like wind passing through some immeasurable hollow.

It had never been the wind.

The Oakweaver spread its mandibles wider, and the forest screamed through it.

Behind them, hundreds of Hellves convulsed at once.

The companions twisted toward the sound without quite daring to turn their backs on Eightrees. Lunara ducked instinctively with Aloy raised while Jaeshu crouched beside her. Navian brought his shield around as far as he dared, caught between the giant spider towering over the road ahead and the dead writhing behind them.

One Hellve snapped backward at the waist until its ruined face stared upside down between its own legs. Another folded sideways, its shoulder collapsing toward its hip while its head remained fixed upon the travelers. A third sank to its knees as its spine arched farther and farther behind it. Throughout the road and deep among the trees, necks twisted and arms wrenched backward while ancient armor began to deform under ribs pressing outward from within.

Eightrees’ note climbed until Navian felt it trembling through his teeth.

Av'elyth’s daggers lowered by an inch.

The nearest Hellve jerked violently. Its chest swelled beneath the rotten silk, sank, then swelled again.

This time the ribs gave way.

Black fluid sprayed across the leaves as bone split outward and several dark shapes burst from the opened chest. They tumbled onto the road and immediately began to move.

Spiders. Each large enough that one alone would have been a nightmare.

One landed on its back, folded in upon itself for the briefest instant, then righted itself in a blur of thin black legs. Another crawled directly from between the splayed ribs, dragging a strand of dark tissue behind it.

A second Hellve ruptured farther down the road, then another among the trees. Within moments the sound was everywhere—wet tearing, snapping bone and ancient armor splitting as the convulsions spread through the entire horde.

Corpses folded and opened throughout Ilvarin’del. Bellies tore. Backs split along ancient spines. Ribs spread beneath the pressure of the things forcing themselves through, and spiders spilled from the ruined bodies in clusters, scrambling across rotten silk, broken weapons, dead limbs and one another.

Three spilled from one corpse, five from another, and still more clawed their way from bodies deeper among the trees.

The Hellves had never been the army. They had been carrying it.

Hundreds became thousands.

The spiders flooded the road beneath Eightrees, bodies overlapping in a frantic, many-legged rush as they climbed across corpses, armor and one another, filling every strip of exposed earth. Above them the Oakweaver towered among the trees, that same hollow song pouring from its open mandibles.

Karneth looked at the bursting dead, countless spiders overrunning the road towards them.

“…You’ve got to be kiddin' me.”