FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Comments welcome!

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The tower sat atop a squat hill, the round fortification standing as a foreboding sentinel over the deep-rutted, flooded crossroads whose legs vanished into the rain not a hundred paces in either direction.

Around its base, a scattering of corpses lay half-buried by the rain and muck. Timid winced at the pain of using just his footpaws for support, as he lifted the crosier staff to prod at one, hearing a clink as the silver base cap pushed through slimy mud to slide against chain mail.

Just a corpse. If it were one of the cursed, it would have lunged at me

He clutched the Finder's Star in his left paw as his weight went back onto the staff in his right, and he brought it up to touch his cheek, closing his eyes and rubbing his cheek against the one bit of warmth he felt in the driving, chill downpour.

A few paces ahead, Tomasj knelt, his knee displacing puddling water as he rolled a stiffened corpse over with his sword held at its neck in case it decided not to be dead just yet.

As it wasn't moving, he began to search the slain creature, and as Timid caught up to him, spoke in his scratchy-voiced foreigner's accent.

"Killed with arrows."

The wolf seemed pleased, and as he let the corpse flop back into the mud, Timid saw the witch hunter checking pouches on the poor dead rat's sides. Its tabard, black with hints of red, was too muddied to identify.

"Tomasj, for the gods' sakes, stop looting the dead."

Timid was too tired, ears flopped and tail dragging in the muddy water, to muster much anger or vitriol. Instead it was a tired plea, that felt as if it took more effort than moving a mountain just to say.

As he spoke, and as Tomasj ignored him and continued rummaging, the young priest scanned his eyes past the tower, along the hillside and the road, then back to the tower's base.

His eyes felt two sized too large, ached, and seemed to no longer have the capability of resolving blur into form. On the edge of his exhausted vision, in the driving rain that stirred the dirt roads into a soupy morass of misery, he kept noting motion and having to remind himself that in such a rain he could easily see phantoms of motion that were, truly, just water falling to earth.

The wolf spoke, and grabbed Timid's soggy habit with a paw, tugging it for all the world like an excited child. His voice sounded gleeful, quite at odds with how the priest felt they should act in the presence of so many slain folk.

"Whoever killed these took the arrows but left the gold. Not bandits. Probably afraid to become sick by stealing from the dead. Pff. Foolish lowland superstition."

The sad, soggy housecat looked down, and saw only the top of the wolf's pointed hat. It was slightly cracked here and there, rough from many years on the road, though he could see the water beading atop oil no doubt rubbed into it religiously. It was marred with spots of wax, dribbled here and there, likely from many times using that trick of his with the candles.

"This from the wolf who believes in miracles, visions, and some...Some woman he keeps talking to when he thinks I'm not listening."

The hat shifted, and Timid's tired mind realized he might just have tread on a serpent. To taunt madmen was not only a sin in the eyes of the Finder, but dangerous besides in the more physical sense.

Nothing came from the wolf, not for long moments, the splattering thunder of the pouring rain his only partner in conversation. With a shock, Timid noticed Tomasj's shoulders were twitching, shaking. The wolf raised a gloved paw to his face, wiping at it.

"I...S-sorry, Tomasj. I don't mean to mock you, I just...It's...It's been a bad day."

It rolled off his lips as a weak excuse, a sodden noodle filled with the strong flavor of regret. Timid knelt down in the mud, and ducked under the brim of the wolf's hat in a moment of un-self-conscious disregard of the danger posed by the madwolf.

The wolf's face looked sunken, sickly, pale beneath the bristly black fur. Timid had never been so close to the wolf for this long without some threat being spoken, or being shaken by the stranger, and it was thus the first time he'd had any chance to get a close look.

Timid had tended to many sick furs since he became an acolyte, medicine being one of the many duties of the Finder's clergy, so he knew what death looked like. The wolf's eyes were flat, deadened inside, like someone who had given in to knowledge they were to die of long illness. The eyes were yellowed, too, perhaps from years of too much drink, or illness of the liver.

His fur was thin around his eyes, normally a sign of age, but still retained its gritty texture and coal-black coloring.

You really are dying of something...

"Tomasj? We should get inside the tower, where its dry. You...Don't look so good."

The wolf's eyes flashed, and focused on the cleric, sharpening like a blade on a grinding stone as the sinister smile reappeared. They were too close, Timid realized, nearly touching snouts. This time, though, the wolf didn't grab him or shove him as he had when last they were this close together. He just spoke in a voice quiet enough to be barely audible over the rain, yet harsh enough to raise the housecat's hackles with a tremble of fear.

"Nastasia is here. She is with us right now."

His paw wrapped around the curved, worn butt of his pistol, thumb trailing over the rounded butt and the iron nail at its base, like a lover's thumb caressing a peaked nipple. Timid's shiver wasn't of arousal, but of dread at the wolf's strange, unpredictable behavior. Yet his muscles seemed locked, his eyes fascinated with the wolf's eyes as he continued to speak, and he couldn't bring himself to move away.

"When she...When she stopped being alive...I broke the rules of my people. I used the witchcraft we swore to destroy, and bound her to the pistol. The one I killed her with. For being a witch."

The wolf laughed, a harsh low bark that shot shivers up Timid's spine. His tail felt like it should be puffed, but was far too mud-caked.

"She talks to me. She...She still loves me. Hahaha..."

The laugh was weak, and suddenly the dulled gleam was back in his eyes, the focusing madness falling away as the mania faded from his voice, rendering it a softer whisper, like a child speaking naughty secrets under a blanket to his best friend.

"She cursed me. When I killed her. I'd shot her, and she pulled the gun into the hole in her chest. Whispered some words..."

Tomasj had drawn the pistol, and was now rubbing his cheek against it, the barrel blessedly pointed off to the side, glistening with blood somehow still wet despite the hours that had passed since he'd seen it gout blood while firing inside the cathedral.

"When I fire it, her witch power comes forth. The explosion you saw...It was her will, her strength. It comes with a price."

His eyes met Timid's again, and the cat realized, suddenly, that for the moment the wolf had no furious glare, no scarlet spark of murderous intent seething behind the crystal-fragile control he managed to exert somehow.

"It takes a bit of my life, every time I use it. A day...Maybe a week. Who knows for sure?"

The spark was back, the manic grin slipping free, like an adder slinking from its cracked cage. The wolf's paw moved slowly, passing the gulf between them over an eternal instant in the mind of the paralyzed cat, and curled its fingers into his habit just below the Finder's Star, as Tomasj's eyes fixated on it.

"I will die. Perhaps today, perhaps ten years from now. It does not matter in the least where or when or why. I murdered my own wife, betrayed my order, lost my mind and my homeland. Now, all I have is survival, killing...And you."

The wolf looked confused, his brows furrowed, his eyes trapped by the concentric stars of the holy pendant, the ancient relic Timid had only just begun to truly believe in, though his understanding of its sudden show of magic was near nothing.

The cat fell back on his training, and folded his soggy paws around the wolf's stiffened, gloved one, bringing it up such that their arms blocked sight of the Star as he put his forehead to the jumble of fingers. The sense of comfort he got from the act far outweighed the fear and annoyance he had felt towards the wolf since they'd met.

"The Finder of the Lost fell from grace, at the dawn of time they say. He was cast out much as you were. You may not be among his faithful, but that doesn't matter to him. He chose to shepherd the lost, no matter who they believe in, to save them from the demons beneath the earth. If there's anything I can do to help you...Just say it, and I will try, alright?"

The wolf's eyes wavered, losing the hypnosis of the Star's visage as Timid spoke soft, gentle words. Tomasj's lips curled slightly in a sneer, then softened again, resting against his gums as he shrugged and gave a gravelly sigh.

"Don't waste your salvation on me, priest. You'll need it for all the world before we're done."

He pulled his paw back and stood, leaving the kneeling priest back in the rain as it blew in on an angle, and gazed towards the tower.

"No howls or groans from inside. Probably already cleared by whoever killed these."

Timid looked around, picking the crosier up from where he'd dropped it, and grunted as he pulled himself upright despite the surging sting of his bruised, battered, soaked and blistered footpaws.

The wounds in these corpses, he noticed, were mostly arrow holes in the head. It was safe to assume they had re-animated, at least briefly, and been shot down by some smart soul with one hell of a sense of aim.

Tomasj strode off through the sucking muck towards the tower, the filthy water sloughing off his hardened boots giving Timid a pang of jealousy overlaid with throbbing pains from his footpaws. He struggled to catch up with the wolf, curtains of rain obscuring the tower, rendering it a forbidding black spire out of nightmare until they were nearly close enough to touch it.

The witch hunter pressed a paw against the stone, and lowered his shoulder to push his weight against it. Satisfied, he began to circle the tower, and made a circular gesture of his paw, then pointed, sending Timid the other way.

His staff squelched into the mud with each step, seeming to want to sink in, to bury itself away from the world. Timid sympathized, sighing at the thing as it kept sticking and having to be yanked back out, each step hurting his bleeding paws more and more. The wood and steel staff and its muddy fate occupied him, and it came as a surprise when he rounded the side of the tower and found the entrance arch occupied by a slouched, bloodied body, wrapped haphazardly in bandages so soaked with patchy blood he thought, in a horrified moment, that they were shards of flesh peeling from one of the walking dead.

On instinct, he raised the crosier, preparing to knock the thing in the skull pre-emptively. Then he froze, staring at the mutilated thing as a gleaming silvery-bladed sword shot up from the mud covering it, the cold, sharp tip bringing a sting of pain from his throat as it touched just under his chin.

One of its eyes was open, a piercing blue half-lidded orb that wobbled back and forth feverishly, though the paw holding that blade showed not a single sign of slacking or dropping. The mutilated creature's legs were out to its front, wrapped in long strips of poorly-applied, loose bandage, and covered in mud and angry red lines, scabs washed away in the rain.

Father Timid's breath hitched, and he held it, afraid to move at all, lest the gleaming blade cut into the soft flesh of his throat and end his journey at that very moment, victim of some poor wounded...

The Slaughtered Knight.

Timid didn't dare shake his head to shake off the dream as it momentarily slid over his eyes, veiling the world in the nightmare vision of the prior evening. He simply closed his eyes, wincing, and slowly began to lower the crosier to one side, begging his footpaws to let him stay upright just a few minutes longer.

"L...Lay down your sword, please. I swear I won't harm you..."

Hurry, Tomasj...Where the hell are you?

A gurgly whisper caused him to open his eyes, though they were stung by a blast of rain and wind, making him blink and tear. The sword hadn't left his throat, and he was certain he could feel a ribbon of scarlet warmth joining the freezing water dribbling down his chin.

His eyes, stinging and blurred until he blinked them clear, shifted up and down along the bandaged creature's form. The rag-wrapped, bloody, blue-eyed creature matched closely the appearance he'd seen in the dream; short muzzle, muscled yet sleek body, and silvery blade. Far too unique for simple coincidence, and the young priest swallowed against the pressure growing in his chest.

Timid's paws, already shivering from the drenching rain and gusting wind, began to shake harder at this evidence, though what it was evidence of he was unsure. In that moment, as if lightning had scored his brain, he realized he never truly had believed in the otherworldly. He'd believed in the church's ability to help the downtrodden, but everything else had just been ritual.

She tried another gurgled set of words, her voice harsh and frustrated, nostrils flaring as she shifted slightly in the muck, sword staying pressed to his throat. The bandages had been self-applied, by wounded paws, and as she shifted they slid. Timid's wince at the sight of her wounds seemed to take the fight from the slaughtered knight, and she abruptly dropped the sword as her paw went limp, dead weight on her exhausted arm.

The priest blushed, the bandages having shifted enough to prove she was, indeed, female, albeit badly bruised all about her breasts and the peeking flesh of her groin. He averted his eyes from the sight, and knelt down, pressing a soggy paw to her cheek. The stark blue eyes met his own, and in the wet hardness of that stare, he saw determination, pain, and fever confirmed by the heat fairly radiating from under the bandage on her cheek.

"We must leave, there are undead coming th..."

Tomasj's boots squelched in the muck as he came to a stop in mid-stride, his brutal blade already drawn, to spot the little priest cradling the face of a mutilated, shaking, bloody woman to his chest.

The wolf's lip curled back as he took in the swollen knee and obvious crippling injury, a heartless sneer that displayed all of his intent as he strode forward, raising his sword.

"Out of the way, priest. We cannot stay and she will just slow us down."

The cat's soggy tail flicked, and he looked up from her, as the woman's face rested hot against his chest, her arms limp and body sagged, having passed unconscious at the relief of a friendly face.

His face was blank a moment, unable to understand what the wolf was asking, brows beginning to beetle in confusion.

"We have to get her inside out of the rain so I can do something for these wounds. She's already ill from them."

Tomasj smirked, and lifted the tip of his sword with a dipping of his wrist, just enough to waggle it towards the woman. Somehow, to Timid, it just seemed obscene, as if the wolf were waving his dick at her.

"I have her cure right here. It's a mercy, better than leaving her for the dead."

The cat's eyes widened, a burning bilious sensation growing in his gut at the realization of what the much larger, stronger wolf was going to do.

"No, Tomasj! The prophecy! We need her!" He knew not to bother with a call for sympathy. To his knowledge, the crazed creature had none, only some strange sense of self-preservation and a duty to kill the dead. Or maybe he just enjoyed it too much not to.

"Pah! Only a fool listens to prophecy when he can see sense says to do otherwise! The undead are coming this way down the road, they will be here in minutes!"

Timid's face was tightening, clenching, his lips pulling up to show his small, sharp teeth. His arms released the slaughtered knight's shoulders, and he settled her back against the water-sheeting wall, gripped the crosier to help him stand, then pulled himself up to his full height, nose almost to Tomasj's chin. One paw balled into a fist as the other clenched on his staff, and he glared harshly, hotly, despite his drenched drowned and altogether pathetic appearance.

"I don't know what you want, wolf. I frankly don't care. The Finder says you're to lead me somewhere, teach me how to survive. But if I have to abandon everything I believe to do it, you can go to hell. I'll find my own way."

Tomasj smirked, and rolled his shoulders in an uncaring shrug, then whirled and lunged for the woman, sword leading like an arrow from a bow. Timid's crosier swung up, trailing droplets of the wet, and smashed the witch hunter across the jaw, whipping his head back hard enough that his body followed, footpaws sliding in the muck and flying up from under him.

Timid stared, blinking in startlement, as the deadly creature crashed to the ground and simply lay there, rain puddling on his until-now mostly dry clothes, his head tilted back with a weal already showing across his upper jaw, a dribble of blood slipping from his snout and trailing down, diluting in the water that slicked his coarse fur.

He blinked again to clear the fuddlement, and looked down at the crosier staff, then recalled something Tomasj had mentioned in passing during one of his lectures in the day they'd known one another. He knelt down, uncaring about the mud seeping into his already-sodden habit and breeches, and took the sword out of the insensate wolf's paw.

The thing's grip was wrapped in a fine, small-link steel chain wire that seemed to grip his paw as if of its own accord. Its weight, as he held it up, rested towards the center of the blade, but it seemed to pull forward, as if seeking blood to spill. The thing was stained in places, though the blade was razor sharp and well-kept, mostly along the crosspiece and paw guard, and the stains looked to him like blood.

With a shiver, he carried the sword to the door of the tower, which hung slightly ajar, and set it on the floor, kicking it away with a skitter of metal on stone, then returned for the wounded woman, hooking his arms under hers to drag her back inside.

"My apologies, miss, I need to clean you and it will hurt..."

Once he had her inside, next to the stone hearth that still smoldered in the center of the large open stone chamber of the tower's base, he looked back outside, torn in indecision.

If he sealed the door, the unpredictable, merciless wolf would be trapped outdoors and be unable to further frighten and intimidate him. He'd be no further risk to either of them, and would have to run off, no doubt taking the undead host with him in time for Timid and the woman to escape in a few days.

On the other paw, he realized, the vision called for the wolf's presence on this 'hunt for the heart', whatever that may mean.

He frowned, considering the fact that the vision never mentioned who would be alive upon finding it. Just that he needed each of them for some part of the quest.

On the first paw, though, he would not be able to live with himself if the dead found Tomasj before he could regain his senses.

Damnit...

Timid lurched to his feet, wincing as the blisters on his paws started to burst, leaving bloody blots on the floor, as he went for the door to bring the wolf inside. Even unconscious, laid out flat in the rain, slowly sinking into the mud, the black-clad buckle-decked creature intimidated him, and the priest chided himself for being so easily frightened.

Then he heard the groan. A low, wind-like sound, that seemed to come from all sides albeit distantly. His heart thudded, wriggling in his chest as he looked about, and saw only the driving rain, even as his ears perked forward and took in another groan, then another, until they were everywhere, cacophonous heralds of the coming swarm.

Despite his frame, Timid's strength was up to the task. He wrapped both paws under Tomasj's armpits and heaved, grunting as the sucking mud tried to keep claimed its taken prize. With a slowness like winter molasses, the wolf slid free of his mucky prison, and with a heave that ended him on his rear, striking painfully against the hard stone, Timid yanked them both inside.

Slamming the door shut was the work of an instant, accomplished by sliding the smooth-sided crosier to the door's back and levering it closed. Then he stood, grimacing at the pain that seemed to crawl serpent-like from his bloody, muddy footpaws, and heaved the heavy bar into place with a resounding, resonant thud.

He nodded, once, a satisfied look creasing his muzzle with a half smile, in spite of all reason otherwise, and the priest turned towards the room, giving it his first real look.

The chamber was circular, built to the very walls of the forbidding tower, and rose some sixty feet over their heads, crowned with a pair of unlit chandeliers. Stairs ran up both walls, through passages past that ceiling no doubt to rooms above. They also ran below, through a pair of closed doors built into the floor, portals to the darkness below. He checked the bars, and once certain he had seated them both firmly, walked to the hearth, marveling that it still smoldered. Surely the thing could hold a bonfire, and several good kills.

Blessing the kind stars for his luck, he found a pitted iron pot, large enough to easily fit a small man, and found it blessedly full of water.

He stoked the flames, adding from the dry wood pile, as he looked back at his two charges.

Timid groaned slightly, though his spirit was cheered even with his body so full of ache and complaint. He had work to do, and the thought did him good.

The rain was a deluge, too heavy for bowstrings, which would water-log and stretch under its terrible power. The road warden stayed crouched on his overlook, hidden by long waving grasses in his grass and mud-colored cloak, shielded from the wet but not from the thunder of water striking him like a thousand tiny fists from above.

His bow was unstrung and stowed in the leather skins on his back, wrapped tight to keep the wet from ruining his second-best weapon against the shambling horde down below, which left him gripping his short, curved sword's simple wire-wrapped pommel in his gloved paw. The sword, too, was sheathed. Fighting such a swarm would be suicide.

Sadly, lighting a fire for warmth against the clawing cold would draw their attention as surely as would charging, screaming, into their ranks. Not that he would have done something so foolish regardless. Only an idiot, to his mind, would let the foe know where he was, even in the midst of battle.

The fox shifted his weight, carefully staving off the needle-tingles and numbness of the legs his position could easily give him. Such a disadvantage could mean his death, against these unknown and unknowable monstrosities he was scouting.

He glanced up, seeing no sign of the moon, and frowned slightly, a curl of his vulpine lips as he shifted his grip on the short sword, feeling its calming weight against his side. Two days, now, without sleep, waiting for any sign of the Duke responding to his message; 'monsters along the road, walking dead, border prison area.'

He hoped sending his cousin and uncle to deliver the message hadn't been a mistake. They were experienced, to be sure, but not official agents of the law as he was. Instead, he'd decided to stay and monitor the prison, to make certain none of the dangerous criminals incarcerated there escaped in the mayhem. Thanks to his diminutive size, however, he'd had to remain outside, uncertain there was even a soul left inside until the bandage-wrapped woman had made her way out.

To his chagrin, the escapee he'd initially thought to have collapsed and died on the doorstep was still alive, and now trapped inside along with a strange wolf who's look he liked not at all, and a Finder priest. He would have shot her down then and there, if not for the chance the others would raise a hellish clamor and call the dead to them all, risking himself in the process.

The warden had waited an hour now, with no sign of the dead host moving past the tower or managing to smash down the door behind which they seemed to know delectable morsels awaited.

The fox caught himself nodding, eyes lidding, leaden with fatigue, and shook his head sharply to wake himself, frowning slightly.

Time to make my own way in.

He stood, the rough cloth of his breeches making hardly a sound as he began to move, stalking along the softest parts of the leafy undergrowth to avoid muddy slurping or crunches of leaves. Since encountering the things two days ago, he knew they hunted by sound and sight more so than scent.

Within a short time, he was scaling a tall tree, mindful of the hazardous wet that threatened to dump him back to the forest floor in a fatal symphony of noise and injury, to look for a way into the tower that would not involve fighting the host.

The sight of a rain-slicked roof window near the tower's stone chimney won a grim curl of lips from the fox. Getting up there would be almost as dangerous as fighting the walking dead below. However, it would also have a chance of success, whereas he knew fighting his way in would be impossible. Better, if the window offered the right kind of entrance, he might just be able to get back out later.

As he clambered out on a long, thick branch that nearly tapped on the stone tower in the gusting wind, he mused that the inside of that tower would make a good spot for a few hours' sleep. If, that is, there were no shambling monsters inside.

Dealing with a wounded prisoner and an unconscious foreigner would be simple enough. The priest didn't look so tough either, so long as he avoided the wolf's mistake of being taken by surprise.