Chapter 102 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 102: Tower of Crows 10
The woman's voice was low and hoarse: "Where does our guest come from?"
A few strands of pale golden hair fell over her shoulder. The lower half of her bloodless face already bore the marks of age. The night wind, carrying slanting rain, suddenly swept through, stirring the edge of her hood.
Lucita's gaze sharpened abruptly. She stepped forward.
As though startled, the skeletal crows perched among the trees suddenly burst into flight, shrieking as they scattered in every direction.
Lucita stared at the woman, as though trying to see through the hood to her face. Her lips moved, and she said: "Irttat."
The instant the word left her mouth, the woman gave a visible start, and her voice took on a sudden urgency: "You said…where did you say you're from?"
"Irttat. I am from Irttat, madam."
The woman remained silent for several breaths before stepping aside: "Please, come in and sit, traveler."
Her voice rasped like a worn-out bellows.
Lucita climbed the steps, and the wooden door creaked shut once more behind her.
Atop the silent tower, the circling bone-crows settled back down. Two oil lamps stood by the wooden door, steadily shielded by glass, their flames still flickering faintly in the wind and rain.
The furnishings inside looked very simple: a wooden bed, a few wooden chairs, a round table cut from a tree stump, covered with a coarse, hand-woven floral cloth. In the center stood a blackened brass candlestick, its wax pooled into a thick ring, a small stub of candle still burning, occasionally crackling with a small pop.
In the corner against the wall stood a cluttered workbench, with a few oil lamps that, though unlit, still looked clean and orderly, showing faint signs of wear — clearly things in regular use. Several bottles held liquids of varied colors and properties; there was a balance scale, a few mortars, and a messy stack of wooden boards. Carving knives, cleavers, and a hunting knife were lined up along the inner edge of the table, and a longbow hung on the wall beside it.
Along the other wall, a stone-built fireplace held a small, weak flame still stubbornly burning.
The woman added a few logs to the fire, watched as it slowly grew, then sat on the edge of her bed and pointed at the wooden chair by the table: "Sit."
Lucita sat down accordingly.
Perhaps sensing Lucita's gaze fell on the bottles and jars on the workbench, the woman gave a low cough and asked: "How did you come to this place?"
A place like this, hidden within the world of death, was not easily found.
"You’ve managed to settle here, and naturally I have my own way of arriving as well. Perhaps it's simply fate." Lucita had no wish to elaborate on this matter. "I'm searching for a friend, and passed through here by mistake. My apologies for the intrusion."
"Oh? A human friend?" The woman sounded faintly interested.
"Yes, a human friend."
"Someone from Irttat, willing to befriend a human?" The woman's voice had grown noticeably colder.
Lucita pushed back at once: "You're an elf yourself, living among humans. Why ask a half-blood such a question?"
Earlier, when the wind had lifted the edge of the woman's hood, Lucita had caught sight of the pointed ears hidden beneath it. That was why she had answered with "Irttat."
The woman reached up and pulled back her hood: "Do you think I want to be here?"
Lucita looked at her face. Her voice caught in her throat.
Like every elf, she possessed golden hair and long pointed ears. But the pale golden hair cascading over her shoulders was tangled and untrimmed, and one of her ears had been severed entirely. A strip of black cloth covered her eyes, making it impossible to see what lay beneath.
Beyond that, unlike other elves, her face looked aged, just as her voice did. Her skin was wrinkled like weathered bark, and dark age spots spread across her cheeks.
Lucita was stunned for a moment before she found her voice again: "What... happened to you?"
It was the first time she had ever seen an elf show visible signs of aging.
Unlike humans, the long-lived races could live for five centuries, yet their appearance ceased changing once they reached adulthood. Their physical constitution was far stronger than that of humans. Even as old age weakened their strength and diminished their innate gifts, their faces never acquired the visible wrinkles of human aging. Not even at the very end.
So this elf before her...
Afraid of causing offense, Lucita repeated more gently: "You — what happened, exactly?"
The woman's expression darkened: "Nothing worth mentioning. An old injury from escaping a dungeon in Eaton many years ago."
"Eaton? That was ten years ago?" Lucita said, noting that the woman showed no sign of intending to return to the Esti mountain range. "Yet you don't seem to want to go back to the Esti range..."
The woman gave a melancholy smile: "Everything has changed, and the people I knew are scattered. What would be the point of going back alone?"
Lucita's lips moved as though to say something, but in the end she said nothing.
To escape such a place of horror, refuse to return home, continue living alone in the human world, somehow end up dwelling within the layer of Death itself, surrounded by dead crows...There were far too many unanswered questions. Far more than could be explained by a simple "there's no point."
But whatever hidden story lay behind it was none of her business. She and this woman were strangers with no kinship, at most fellow countrywomen of a sort — She had no right to pry further.
At the moment, she was more concerned with the fate of Vivian's remains: "I'm very sorry to hear that. May I ask…have you seen my friend?"
"A living friend, or a dead one?"
The woman's bluntness made Lucita frown slightly in discomfort, but she said nothing further about it: "She has already passed. I've come to find her body."
"I thought as much." The woman seemed unbothered, apparently unaware of how cutting her words sounded. "No living person has ever come to this place before, though I've seen plenty of the dead."
Lucita bore with it once more: "Then in the past two days, have you seen a short-haired blonde woman brought here? She would be in her thirties, a bit taller than me, fairly thin. She may have been wearing glasses, unless someone removed them."
The woman raised an eyebrow with a cold smile: "I can't see. Hadn't you noticed?"
Lucita choked on that for a second.
Of course she had noticed, she simply hadn't said it, still clinging to some faint hope: "Then have you seen any new... new bodies these past two days? I'd be grateful if you could point me in the right direction. I can identify her myself."
"Ah, that I have seen, a few of them." The woman rubbed her fingers together, her smile somewhere between amused and not.
Lucita's eyes followed the gesture, and she noticed the woman's little finger was missing a joint.
She drew her gaze away, unable to dwell on it, and watched the woman before her stand up and — as though she could see perfectly well — make her way with familiar ease around to the short corridor behind and to the right of the fireplace. She pushed open a heavy wooden door, her voice distant: "They're all back here."
Lucita's heart gave a jolt. She rose and followed.
What lay beyond was not a room, but the outdoors.
Strangely, there was no rain outside that door. Rings of dark, dense dead trees stretched out into the distance, enclosing a field of gravestones of all different sizes. Some carved from stone, some from wooden boards, crooked and tilted, packed close together, spreading out across a vast area. Here and there, dim greenish flames floated among the bare trees, giving off an icy, eerie glow that reminded Lucita of the cold fire that had burned over the bones at the place where the dragon fell, sending a chill down her spine.
She looked up. The night sky was a still, quiet blue, with a pale, ghostly full moon hanging among the black tangle of branches. Night owls startled into flight, but none of the bone-crows were anywhere to be seen.
As though drawn by some unseen force, Lucita looked up and saw half of the woman's face lit by the moonlight, the other half hidden in darkness. The sight made Lucita's heart tighten.
"There are vultures in the forest, and other predators too. Leaving these bodies piled up like that was never good." The woman's words broke through the eerie atmosphere, and Lucita's heart settled somewhat. "Besides, the only people brought here are those who died of contagious illness. Left piled up too long, in the heat of summer especially, it's easy for plague to breed. So I've taken to burying them all myself."
As Lucita listened to the woman's explanation, she walked carefully forward to look more closely.
The instant she passed through that door, a ripple of space passed through her.
Lucita knew this kind of spatial ripple all too well. Her heart gave a heavy jolt: This is another layer of space — or of the world!
No wonder there was no rain here.
Natural rainfall extended across every natural layer of the world. So what exactly was this place, separated so completely from everything else?
She concentrated. The air remained saturated with the same dense death energy she had sensed earlier. As far as she could tell, it was indistinguishable from the layer of Death she had just entered.
Lucita cautiously glanced at the old elf's friendly expression, then turned her attention back to study the scene before her.
At the center of the graveyard was a lake. She couldn't make out the color of the water — only that, even in the moonlight, the rippling base color of the lake itself seemed to be black.
A thick reek of death-energy hung over that lake's surface. Lucita had only just begun to sense this kind of power, and her grasp of it was still vague. But the presence here was so overwhelming that there was no possibility of ignoring it.
The gravestones standing nearby were carved with numbers of unclear meaning, crooked and uneven.
Lucita drew closer to examine them: "What are these...?"
"Those are the dates of burial," the woman said. "I don't know their names, so this is the only way I have to tell them apart. The ones buried these past two days are in that row."
Following the direction the woman pointed, Lucita moved closer to examine it, while still keeping careful track of the woman's movements: "Did you use coffins for burial? Or were they simply laid into the ground directly?"
"Well, I..."
Before the woman could finish her unhurried explanation, a vine shot up out of the ground without warning and coiled tightly around Lucita's ankle.
Before Lucita could react, the vine yanked her violently off her feet. With a tremendous splash, she was hurled straight into the black lake at the center of the cemetery.
Water exploded skyward.
Pitch-black droplets landed on the woman's outstretched palm. Where they touched, they slowly ate through her flesh, exposing gleaming white bone beneath.
She smiled faintly. Her palm began to heal back together as she murmured quietly: "Enjoy your meal, a half-blood is a rare delicacy..."
At that exact moment, a sharp, urgent knock sounded at the door.
The woman's eyes sharpened. Pulled abruptly out of her moment of unexpected delight, she hurriedly pulled her oversized black hood back over her head, passed back through the wooden door into the room, stood behind the door, and spoke in a gentle voice: "May I ask who comes calling, and for what purpose?"
A faint voice came from outside, carrying clearly to her ears: "I have come from the Esti Mountains. Having heard that one of my own kind dwells here, I have come specially to pay a visit."
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