The Knight of Rot

This story is free to read online, or you can purchase the epub at the bottom of the page for £1.

---

1.

Sir Urvald sits on the sharp rocks that line the edge of the cliff, stares out over the vast wastes of Wästland, and drinks in the scent of his own wounds festering. Some are years old, green and suppurating, their smell so familiar that he barely notices them. He keeps them wrapped purely for appearance’s sake. They won’t heal, can never heal, and he’s learned the hard way that the so-called civilised people of the cities prefer not to see a man walking the streets with his insides on display.

The new wounds will join them, in time.

Wounded he may be, but at least he isn’t dead. And the monks lying in the dirt behind him are, he’s sure, dead. He’s seen to that. But the killing is only half the job. The flickering light of day is already beginning to dim, and there is still work to be done.

With a groan borne more of habit than need he pulls himself to his feet, propping his weight on his blade as he stretches the tightness out of his joints. This curse he bears may keep him apart from pain, but fatigue is another thing entirely, and murder is tiring work.

He grips his jaw, squeezes hard to try and set the broken bone back in place - is this new? - and staggers back up the dirt path to the towering walls, the walls the monks were sure would protect them.

The inner courtyard holds the evidence of what he’s done. Bodies wrapped in coarse brown cassocks lie atop one another across the ground, the dirt stained black with their pooling blood. His feet crunch on loose prayer beads as he steps through his work, cautious not to disturb the newly-restful bodies. He may have ended their lives, but he won’t disrespect them in death.

With slow care he begins turning the bodies over, staring into their glazed eyes, hunting for the face of the one he’s come to destroy. All of this slaughter could have been prevented had they just handed him over when asked. Alas.

“You won’t find him there, lad,” a voice says, and Urvald freezes in place. The sound came from somewhere ahead of him, somewhere among the pile of bodies yet to be checked.

“Who speaks?” he asks, drawing his blade. All he gets in response is a deep, throaty chuckle, more of a rumble than anything else.

He picks his way through the bodies, his boots brushing against cooling fingers, smearing blood into the dirt, cautious as anything.

“I make you the same offer I made when I arrived, before all of this. Tell me where he is and you will live.”

Again laughter, and this time he spies the source, a body lying on its side on the edge of the massacre, knees tucked up to its chest, its back to him. With two strides he is upon it, placing a boot on the shoulder, turning the man over to face him.

Dead eyes above a throat torn to shreds stare up at the sky above him, blank and unfocused. A fat black fly crawls across the lolling tongue, rubs its forelegs together as though saying a prayer for the damned.

“It’s too late for that,” the voice says, words rattling out of the slashed throat, syllables forming around a tongue that doesn’t move. “Far too late for that.”

Urvald wheels around, sword raised, eyes scanning the shadows beneath the arches set back on the edges of the courtyard, the walkways atop the walls.

“Sorcerer!” he calls. “Show yourself.”

“No sorcerer, lad,” the dead thing says from the ground behind him. “Just you, and me, and destiny.”

He turns back to the undead thing at his feet and stabs, plunges his blade into the throat, finishes the job he started in his blood rage earlier in the day. Free of its bonds the head rolls heavily onto its side, the nose bumping into the dirt.

For a moment the silence is broken only by Sir Urvald’s heavy, rattling breaths, the bubbling of his punctured lung. Then the voice speaks again.

“Prick,” it says.

2.

“Your problem,” the head says, once Urvald has satisfied himself that nobody is hiding in the shadows with a bag filled with scrolls, waiting to turn him into a crater in the crowd, “is that you weren’t looking in the right place.”

“I know he’s here,” Urvald says. “He’s always been here.”

“He has. But not above the ground.”

“What are you saying?”

“He is interred,” the voice says. “If you want to find him, you’ll need to dig.”

Urvald shakes his head. “No,” he says. “He isn’t dead. I’d know if he was dead.”

“I never said dead, dimwit,” the head says, and Urvald wonders whether it’s possible to kill someone twice. “I said interred.”

“Where should I dig?” There’s a pause, and despite the complete inability of the severed head to move, Urvald is sure the dead thing has just shrugged at him.

“Pick a spot,” it says. “And dig.”

“Is there a shovel?”

The only answer is laughter.

So he picks a spot, kneels down in the dirt, and begins to claw at the ground. The light dims and fades until he’s alone in the dark with the corpses he made earlier and the now-silent head, and still his fingers tear into dirt, pile clumps of it beside him. Night noises begin to filter in from the hills surrounding the monastery, wolves calling to one another, the wind moaning as it threads its way through the monastery’s crumbling stonework, a hollow bell ringing out from the valley below. Somewhere in the darkness the sharp, barking laughter of a jackal is abruptly cut short.

He’s waist-deep in the ground before he uncovers the bones. The skeleton is old and yellow, two silver teeth shining dully in the low night light. He tongues his own teeth, remembers replacing the broken ones not because of pain but just so that he could chew without food getting trapped. Two coins pulled from the dead eyes of a crypt wraith, melted down and formed into new molars. He brushes the dirt off the face, feels rough lines beneath his fingers. He scrambles out of the hole, picks through his threadbare pack until he finds flint and steel, strikes sparks over a torch mounted on the inner wall of the courtyard until it flickeres into life.

In the wavering light of the torch he ses that the skull has been carved, a sigil of concentric circles and slashing diagonal lines traced through the flesh and right down into the bone, right in the middle of the forehead and up over the crown of the dull white dome. The flesh may have rotted away but the mark is still clear, and he recognises it. He runs a hand over his own shaven head, feels the scars there in shapes that he knows match the sigils on this skull.

“This is the mark of my order,” he says. The head says nothing, and the skull he holds in his hand says even less. “What does this mean?”

“You are not the first of your kind to come here, lad,” the head says, at last. “And you will not be the last. We have died by your hands a hundred times, and will die a hundred times more.”

“There is much here that I do not understand,” Sir Urvald says, and the head laughs.

“So fucking formal. You understand nothing,” it says. “But you will.”

“What do you know of this?”

“Everything. But you’ll have to discover it yourself.”

Urvald places the carved skull back at his feet, turns to the head that sits beside the hole.

“Tell me,” he says, and it laughs again.

“Fuck off.”

With a snarl he lashes out at the head, kicking it across the courtyard, watching it tumble in the dirt. A sharp crack rings out as it strikes the wall, and when it rolls back around he sees that one of the orbital sockets has collapsed in on itself, the eye rolling out to sit on the flaccid, pallid cheek.

“I’m already dead, idiot. I feel even less than you do.”

Urvald looks down at his exposed flesh, the weeping wounds glimmering in the torchlight. His forearm is bent at a wrong angle, a shard of bone poking through torn skin. When did that break?

“You know nothing about me.”

“I know everything about you,” the head says. “Tell me. Do you ever long to break that curse of yours? Or are you happy, wandering the earth broken and bleeding? Unfeeling, unloved by even yourself, pariah everywhere you go?”

Rage rises up inside him, his head swimming with it for a second, but it’s an empty, hollow rage, a rage that already knows in itself that it’s impotent. What use is there in kicking a dead head around a dark courtyard? It will solve nothing.

How long has he borne this curse now? Time is slippery anyway, hard enough to pin down at the best of times, but he can no longer remember the days before he bore his wounds, before pain failed to find him. His life, for as long as he can remember, has been one of unending violence, of a quest for retribution for a crime that his memory has lost hold of years ago. It led him here, somehow, and it’s broken him in the process. But somehow his broken form still lumbers on.

What would peace feel like, after all these years?

“You’re here because you want to be free,” the head says. “That’s all there is to it. And I can tell you how to achieve that.”

He looks down at the two heads, the skull and the face, one silent and at rest, the other rotting and broken, the intelligence inside it unable to be free of its destroyed form. Much like him, he realises.

“Tell me,” he says, at last.

“You must atone,” the head says.

“For what?”

“For everything.”

3.

He finds his way to a chamber beneath the monastery. The passages down here are cold, narrow stone, carved in a time when men were smaller than they are now. His armour scrapes against the walls, his shoulders catching and jarring with every other step. No space to swing a sword, should he need to. No free hands to swing one with, either, since he must carry both head and torch.

The chamber is frigid, his breath coming out in clouds, every surface shining wetly in his light. The ceiling is low and uneven, a flat slab of unbroken stone, part of the mountain itself. The thought that this is all that holds up the crushing weight of the monastery above him sends a shiver down his spine. All very well to be unable to die, but there may be worse things than wandering the earth with open wounds. Like being pinned forever beneath the heart of a mountain.

Beneath the roof, right at the heart of the chamber, a carved rectangle of stone like a bed, as tall as he is and big enough for two of him to lie atop it. The top surface is carved with with words he recognises, the language known to him but archaic. A litany of sins, etched into the rock and stained with blood.

“This is where you will atone,” the head says, and then it explains what he must do.

In a storage cupboard upstairs, inside the sparse emptiness of the monastery proper, he finds files and chisels. And for two weeks he works at the flat surface of that rock, eschewing food and water and sleep, smelling worse with each day, growing weak but never failing. He scrapes and polishes, erasing the evidence of whichever sinner was here before him, until all that remains is the stone.

“Now,” the head says, at long last. “Confess.”

And so he does. With the chisel and a small rock hammer he begins to undo all of the purifying he just did. He has made this stone into a palimpsest upon which he will carve his own truth. Every sin he remembers, every life taken, every moment of cold brutality. He has done years of evil, he realises.

His confession takes days. His fingers rub raw, the flesh first blistering and then coming away in thick chunks to reveal raw shining red meat beneath. His blood spills into the words he has carved, running into the rivulets in the stone, marking his confession. On the second day a finger snaps, and he is vaguely aware that he felt it happen, that there was the slightest tinge of what he might once have termed pain. Not strong, as fleeting as the twitch of an eye, but still. It is something he hasn’t felt in decades.

When the surface is filled with his confession he opens a vein in his wrist and bleeds onto it, bathes the words in his essence, grows woozy as he watches the channels fill.

And then it is done, and there is only one job remaining, a job that he already began weeks ago without realising it. He returns to the surface, to the place where he dug up the skull. His broken hands once again claw at the ground, freeing the rest of the bones, piling them neatly beside the grave until they are all freed. The ribcage is shattered, the ribs pulled apart and opened, and the bones bear the scars of a thousand blades.

In the cold dawn light he pulls of his armour, his underclothes, the wrappings that hide the worst of his wounds. His body leaks from a thousand small holes, his skin flapping and gaping, the edges of the wounds green and yellow and purple, soft to the touch, like overripes fruit. A slash across his ribs has begun to sprout fruiting bodies, soft green fluff like moss coming out of the very core of him.

He lies down in the grave, and waits for death.

4.

“Are you having a nice time?”

It’s been hours since he lay down. He’s naked and cold and it’s begun to rain. This is the first time in a long time that he’s done nothing, and it’s boring.

“Nothing has happened,” he says. “The curse remains.”

“Did you atone?”

“I confessed,” he says. “You saw me. It took weeks.”

“You confessed,” the head says, “but did you atone?”

He lies there, silent and cold, cock shrinking up into his body as the temperature drops more. A soft snow begins to fall, flakes settling on him like ash. Purple lightning ripples across the far horizon, much too distant for him to hear the peals of thunder that must be shaking the earth beneath the storm.

“I don’t know how to atone,” he says at last, and this is the first honest thing he’s said in a long while.

“You have to mean it,” the head says. “You have to understand the weight of it.”

He pulls himself out of the hole, tucks the head beneath his arm, and begins to make his way down below again, this time wearing only his wounds.

It’s colder beneath the ground than it was when he started all this. The moisture on the walls has begun to frost, and everything is rimed and shining. He clambers up onto the stone, runs his fingers over his confessions. He closes his eyes, and he begins to speak each one aloud, beginning at the beginning, which is the only place to begin.

It’s only when he reaches the monastery and the massacre that he begins to feel something. As he speaks the words his brain lights up, begins to replay the scene across the back of his eyes, not as he remembers it but as they remember it. He sees himself through the eyes of the monks as this bleeding, suppurating devil descends on them, blade and teeth spinning and slashing. He watches men he has worked with in silence for years fall beneath the fury of it, feels the splash of hot arterial spray on the side of his face.

He dies a hundred times, skewered and sliced, chopped and spiked, bitten and chewed and torn at. And each time he dies with a smile in his eyes and thanks on his tongue, the pain washed away by the bliss of knowing that all will be fine now.

“What is this?” he asks. The head says nothing.

The last monk falls and now he is outside himself, watching as this monster in gleaming iron stands in the carnage. And then it kneels, and begins to dig.

“This is not how it happened,” he says, not understanding.

The head says nothing.

He watches as the he from the past digs a grave, and he waits to see the bones revealed. But the grave is empty, simply a hole in the dirt.

His heart lurches once in his chest, a hard, juddering thump that pushes his ribs outwards.

The he from the past is naked, now, just like the he from the present. He takes a knife and thrusts it into his own chest, tears down. Fingers dig into the sides of the wound, pulling the flesh open, clutching at the ribs.

In the present he feels a jolt, a warm tingle in the worst of his wounds, the memory of pain.

In the past he is breaking his own ribs, tearing out his own heart that still beats limply in his fist. Cursed, he cannot die, even as he devours his own flesh, as what was inside is taken outside only to be taken inside again. When it is done, he lies down in the grave, and begins to scream.

Even in memory - or vision, surely? Can this be a memory if he knows it didn’t happen? But something tells him it is past, not future - that scream is loud and pained. In the present he clutches his hands to his ears to blot out the sound, but the sound is in his head and so he is forced to endure. It is the scream of a man who has felt no pain for a century, suddenly forced to bear the damage of a thousand cuts and breaks and scars, his blood and flesh suddenly hot with infection, every nerve ending overloaded with more pain than a mind was meant to bear.

As he screams the monks lying on the ground around him begin to pick themselves up, their flesh pure and unbroken, their wounds healed. They kneel around the screaming grave and begin to shovel fists full of dirt on top of him, the sound growing dull as the weight of the world presses down on him. And then it is done, and the knight is dead, and the monks go about their day as if nothing occurred, and the vision fades.

“I can’t,” he says, after long minutes. And somewhere deep beneath the monastery, something cold and ancient turns over in its sleep and laughs.

5.

He returns to the surface. He hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept in days, maybe weeks. He is a creature of leaden steps and foggy thoughts, so tired that he is barely able to walk, instead crawling out to lie exhausted under a rippling sky.

The monks are where he left them, their bodies bloating and ripening, the air thick with flies. The vultures and crows have been at them, scattering viscera around the courtyard. The smell overpowers the stench of his own body. He lies on the ground, clutching the head to his chest, fading in and out of consciousness.

“What do I do?” he asks, barely more than a whisper. The head does not respond.

The head does not respond. But something else does. A tickle at the back of his mind, the softest sensation. He feels warmth, relief, a flood of something that melts the fatigue from his bones.

Do nothing, that soft, sussurating voice says. Do nothing. I will be with you soon.

“Who are you?” he asks.

The warmth spreads over his mind and he is sinking into another vision, the edges of his thought tinged with purple and red and gold. He sees the slopes of Bergen Chrypt, cold rain and hail battering the black stone. He sees something birthed and discarded, something older than the concept of age. You craws across the land, sucking and seeping, scavenging what you can in your blind infant weakness. When you grow too big for your skin you slither out of it, leave it behind to rot and sink into the dying earth.

You see a mountain, and a cave, and a hole beneath a tilting slab of black rock. You see warmth, and safety, a place to grow older and bigger.

Time rips and warps.

The monks come, and they build their structure, and beneath them you sleep. They do not perceive you. They do not know that the tunnels are there.

In the night you slip from your bed, wrap yourself in a form that looks like theirs so that you may pass unnoticed between them, staying in the crawling shadows where your wrongness will go unnoticed. You pick the weaker ones, luring them down into your hole where you divest them of their skin and drink the marrow from their bones.

Of course they find you. You grew greedy, and you didn’t understand that those tiny, fragile skulls could contain an intelligence to rival your own. They find your hole, and while you sleep they plug it with a giant stone hewn from the flesh of the mountain, sealed with the marks and the blood of their faith. They cut themselves to bleed upon the stone, sacrifice their own to seal you away in the earth.

Generations pass. The monks make their vows to keep you sealed. But their numbers can’t bear the constant burden of sacrifice. They must find another way. They must find one who can bear the weight of this duty on their behalf.

In the darkness of the courtyard, surrounded by the rotting bodies of the monks he has slain, Sir Urvald remembers. He remembers a pilgrimage to the slopes of Bergen Chrypt, a ritual of fire and flesh and fucking. He remembers the woman, scooped from the streets of Galgenbeck and promised riches beyond imagining if she would bear a child.

He does not remember a childhood. It was too long ago. But he remembers a thousand massacres, and a thousand deaths. He remembers all of the times he has climbed the path to this monastery, sword in hand, duty fixed in his mind. He remembers the hundred thousand slaughters, the faces unfamiliar but the duty the same. The monks who fall smiling beneath his blade.

He remembers the waves of pain, and the jubilation at the last moments, as he knows that his work is done and the pit remains sealed for another generation.

I can free you of this endless cycle, the voice says. All you must do is do nothing. Do nothing, and I will come to you, and wear you, and we will walk together beneath the sun.

Sir Urvald lies on the cold, damp, blood-soaked ground, stares up into the flat black sky that should be turning to dawn but only seems to be darkening. He drinks in the scent of his own wounds festering. Beneath him, a rock gleams with the blood of his sins. Beside him, his grave gapes under the dull light of the moon.

He pulls the severed head to his chest, feels his heart beat beneath his ribs, thumping at his flesh.

“Say something,” he whispers to the head. And then he waits.

END.

---

'The Knight of Rot' is an independent production by Chris Bissette and Loot The Room and is not affiliated with Ockult Örtmästare Games or Stockholm Kartell. It is published under the MÖRK BORG Third Party License. MÖRK BORG is copyright Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell.