The Wrong Body
The workers brought the wrong body to the Hall of Echoes.
They dragged it up from the fourth ward, fresh from a collapse that had turned two men to chalk. White dust still clung to their sleeves and work boots as they heaved their find onto the slab. It lay there, frost-veined and broad, but the proportions were grotesque. The ribs were too long, the throat too short.
“Leave us.”
The guards hesitated, eyeing the corpse with unease, before retreating.
The heavy doors closed. When the dust settled, the Warden of the Hall stood alone with the thing, and the air was filled with the scent of wet stone and utter silence.
He laid his hand on the corpse’s shoulder.
The flesh was cold. The bone shifted under his palm. The shape of the joint relaxed and flowed like tallow, rounding until it fit his grip perfectly.
It wasn’t quite dead, he thought. It is still adapting.
The Warden drew his blade and sliced the shirt away; the steel flashed close enough to taste, sharp and clean. The sternum didn’t end where it should. A pale tongue of bone continued down to the navel.
He pressed his thumb against the center. It was soft as wax. The bone molded itself to his thumb, encapsulating it. He withdrew it. It came out with a thwop.
Undeterred, he dug his hands into the seam and peeled the chest apart.
There was no blood. The cavity was slick with clear, scentless slime. Beneath it, where a heart should have struggled, sat a single black stone. It was perfectly spherical, glistening as if pulled from a wet mouth.
Leaning over the cavity, he stared into the polished surface of the stone. His reflection stared back. It was warped and stretching.
He tilted his head from side to side. The image mimicked him, first perfectly, then lagging. Then not at all. It smiled. The Warden’s mouth did not.
A sound like a long groan vibrated through the room. At the far end, the skeleton of the giant of old, the frozen Watcher, seemed to lean forward.
The corpse’s eyelids snapped open. A wet crack sounded through the hall. The eyes beneath were not clouded with death; smoke coiled within, grey and shifting, like his own.
A hand shot up, grabbing the Warden’s wrist. His bones ground together as the grip tightened. The corpse’s skin rippled, flushing with color, stealing the heat straight from his blood.
The black stone shone brightly and wobbled. Like a heartbeat. The sound it made was a heavy, wet badonk that echoed against the walls.
The thing opened its mouth, and when it spoke, it didn’t use the jotun’s rough growl. It used the Warden’s voice, perfect and terrible.
“I am the vessel,” it said, pulling him down toward the open chest.
“And you are the meat.”