Saintess Summons Skeletons

In the middle of a dense dark jungle, Pestle and Bookie were hiding from bush to bush.

“I- I think it lost us,” Bookie whispered to the invisible fairy hovering next to his face.

“Pesle check, Bokie not move.”

Pestle flew out of the bush, hiding behind a thick hanging vine as she went up. The jungle was dense, but there was a clear area between the brush and the canopy where she could see quite far. “Ackh!”

The giant green wolf they tried to escape was still on their trail, sniffing the air and approaching stealthily, not making a sound as its massive body swerved through the jungle.

Pestle immediately returned to Bookie.

“Still here!” she warned in a hushed voice, “we escape… Go big tree! Maybe it not climb.”

There was a gigantic massive tree in the jungle that they had seen before even stepping foot on the island. They had been reluctant to approach the tree, as dozens of basilisks circled the top right under the storm cloud, now it was their only option to escape the wolf that Pestle had tried and failed to harm at all.

Bookie summoned his four vampires to act as a distraction, and while they surrounded the great wolf, he and Pestle made a run for it toward the tree.

Other weaker jungle creatures attacked as they ran, springing from the bushes and dropping from the canopy. Pestle riddled them with bloody holes before they could get too close to Bookie.

Finding a long vertical crack in the dark wood of the giant tree trunk, Pestle and Bookie jumped in without thinking. The giant wolf was right on their tail, it had already reduced the vampire skeletons to shreds. It looked at them from outside. It was definitely too big to enter the crack after them, but without a doubt strong enough to blow open a hole in the tree if it wanted to. Bookie raised his staff, ready to defend.

The green wolf growled, and turned around.

“It… It just left?” Bookie asked, confused.

“Understand is Bokie not leg maybe?” Pestle wondered out loud, appearing near Bookie, completely dripping in blood.

“... Ah… No, look,” Bookie said, turning around, “the wolfie must be scared of the owner of the tree!”

Deeper in the crack, there was a bamboo ladder propped up against the wood, leading up into a dark hole.

“Look very danger. We is go?”

“Sofia would go so we should too!”

“Pesle first!”

Pestle reactivated her invisibility and flew up through the hole. After a bit, she returned to Bookie who had been patiently waiting.

“Pesle think it dungeon!”

“A dungeon?! Does that mean there’s a treasure?!”

“Yes! Pesle is see! Big big bird house in tree. We crown bird very kill, get bird rock! It look skill Sofia is want!”

“The mirror thing?!”

“Pesle think is yes!”

“Then let’s!-- uuuhh…”

“Bokie? What wrong? Is need leg?”

“No… I… Can we really do a dungeon without brother Pareth and Sofia? What if we’re not strong enough? If the bird is stronger than the wolfie…”

Pestle gave Bookie a few bloody headpats, “Not worry hmmhmm. Crown bird is no see Pesle. Wofl more strong.”

“Really?! Hnn… Then let’s do like Sofia would! Heh eh… She’ll be so happy that we got the mirror for her…”

Bookie carefully climbed up the ladder, which took him to some kind of house basement carved directly into the tree, where several heavy sacks of grain were stacked on crude bamboo shelves. Faint orange light illuminated the room, coming from crystalized sap of the tree that had oozed out from the walls.

“First… She would send the rats!”

Bookie closed his proverbial eyes, and summoned more rat skeleton that the tiny basement room could comfortably contain, they climbed up the walls, and through the trapdoor on the ceiling, invaded the bird house.

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Bookie looked through the eyes of his favorite rat from the bunch. The house looked somewhat human, if a bit primitive. But what immediately stood out were the bamboo spears decorated with blue feathers adorning most of the walls, and the heads of various jungle animals mounted above those as trophies. Bookie felt like he understood why the wolf had not followed now, even though there were no wolf heads to be seen among the trophies.

Low to the ground, the rat quickly separated from the others, dashing from one shadowy spot to another. Under a chair, behind a sofa, through a cupboard, the rat quickly made its way to the window. The window was just a wide mesh of bamboo lattice that the rat easily squeezed through.

Finally Bookie got to have a look outside.

The house was at the very bottom of a sprawling village built like a spiraling staircase around the tree giant trunk. Too low to rest on the tree’s branches, the lower level was entirely made of bamboo structures halfway carved out into the trunk. The residents seemed to enjoy a certain kind of decoration, as the putrid decomposing corpses of jungle monsters could be seen everywhere outside, impaled on dozens of bamboo spears. Some were quite old, and already only a skeleton remained, while others still dripped blood.

In the distance, Bookie saw one of the village’s inhabitants. It looked like a goofy fat blue-feathered avian, for lack of a better description. It wore a giant seashell as a hat, which barely hid its two huge globulous eyes, each the size of Bookie’s skull, which topped a curved orange beak a third of the size of its own body. The rest of its clothes were made of a mix of tanned hide and pieces of bamboo-carved armor.

At this sight, Bookie immediately abandoned his naive hopes of somehow negotiating peacefully with the bird people to get the skill.

Instead, he let the rats map out the village.

There weren’t too many birds around. Fewer of them than houses, in fact, and from a distance, one of the rats observed what Pestle had seen earlier, a bigger bird with a crown, guarding a tall stone stele engraved with stuff he could not read from that far away.

A bit disturbed by his findings, Bookie canceled his direct vision link with the rats, finding himself head to head with Pestle stuffing her face with bloody meat, covered in mangled blue feathers.

“Bokie! Got leg!”

“Wh- What happened?!”

“This house bird is fly from hole in roof! Pesle kill. Lot leg, want skelton?”

“I- I… I don’t think I can eat that…”

Bookie poked the bloody half-eaten corpse of the birdman filling the basement with the stench of blood and poultry, expecting to feel the same empty void as usual ever since he entered this space, but to his surprise, his instincts were telling him that this skeleton could be eaten.

Sofia stopped rowing, stunned by Henry’s random revelation. “Wait, really?! You’re telling me that you took the entire enemy armada with you in here?!”

Henry slapped his femur. “Damn right we did! What’d ya think? That we wanted to sign up for eternal solitude like that? Admiral knew there was a good chance we’d be locked up, so let’s say… We enrolled some unwilling company as a last present to them. Heheheh…”

“Weren’t you all still enemies though? Did you win?”

“We battled it out for a while. Everyone is more or less immortal here, as ya know, so we got bored of it eventually. Some of the smart ones live at port, some have gone their own way, livin’ in their own places… But most of them…”

“Most of them what? Did you like, enslave them like they did to humans in your time?”

“After we had our fun, we threw ‘em nasty fuckers into the sea.”

“Oh. That would do it… Were they that bad that they are better dead than having them as even reluctant company here? The blood sea seems pretty lonely.”

“Yes. Absolute yes. I’d chain ‘em and make ‘em all walk the damn plank all over again, not a shred o’ doubt in my mind. Just thinkin’ about their ilk is makin’ my damn blood boil!”

“Didn’t know you still had that.”

“Ya know, I got a sudden urge to see what the inside of a ‘human’ horn looks like.”

…

Back in the bird village, Bookie made a gruesome discovery. As he watched Pestle eat, the dead birdman’s meat was actually regrowing on its bones. Scared about the potential of Pestle discovering this infinite leg source, Bookie hastily ate the thing’s bones, which stopped the endless regeneration.

With a burp, Pestle finished swallowing down the last stray feathers.

“Bokie has skelton? Can guide?”

“I’ll try!”

Bookie summoned the birdman skeleton in the cramped basement. The skeleton looked confused, and Bookie couldn’t even begin to understand its thoughts, which seemed entirely alien to him even compared to his weirdest skeletons. It was like this entire birdman’s existence was a garbled mess, even his skeleton a pile of misshapen bones somehow assembling into something that worked.

Bookie turned toward Pestle, shaking his skull, “I don’t think it’s very smart…”

“Is not? Good. Smart Klepra danger. Klepra klepra, not danger.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Now? Leg!”

Pestle left the basement, making signs at Bookie to follow.

“All bird leg, all skill us! Kill!”

With Bookie haphazardly casting buffs on Pestle, and the fairy rushing forward like a sentient cannonball, the village’s birdmen fell one after the other, barely able to fight back. Every time, Bookie would quickly eat the skeleton and leave the meat, replacing the same birdman page over and over, hoping that Pestle would never notice anything wrong. On the contrary Pestle took that as Bookie’s enthusiasm for leg, and hunted with renewed vigor, making it all the way to the highest level of the village where the crown bird resided. It somehow seemed to still be totally oblivious to the complete carnage that had unfolded below.

“This more strong. Need serious!” Pestle warned.

“Then I’ll summon more!” Bookie exclaimed, out of breath, resting against his staff. “Today, we’ll make Sofia proud!”