Something So Deathly

"Leadership in Clivilius means pretending you have answers whilst standing shirtless and blood-crusted beside a rotting monster corpse, trying to remember which of your people are still alive."

"That thing is still hideous," I said, my gaze drifting back to the shadow panther's corpse lying beside the campfire.

The creature looked different in the full light of morning—somehow both less terrifying and more disturbing. The supernatural menace of the night had given way to something more viscerally awful: a dead animal, massive and wrong, its black fur matted with dust and dried blood, its sightless black eyes staring at nothing. In the darkness, it had been a nightmare given form. Now it was simply a carcass, and that felt worse somehow—the reminder that nightmares here left behind physical evidence, bodies that needed disposing of, meat that rotted in the heat like any other dead thing.

Charity's arrow still protruded from its chest, a grim flag of victory in a war we hadn't known we were fighting until it was already upon us.

"And it's beginning to stink revoltingly already," Karen said, emerging from her tent with a hand clamped over her nose and mouth. Her eyes were watering, and she kept her distance from the corpse as she approached me. "I've never smelt something so deathly before."

She was right. There was a smell now that hadn't been there an hour ago—something sweet and rotten, like meat left too long in the sun, but with an underlying wrongness that no earthly decay possessed. It clung to the back of my throat, coating my tongue with something I couldn't quite name. Not just decomposition. Something alien. Something that reminded me, with every breath, that we were very far from home.

What does death smell like?

The question arrived uninvited, and I found myself turning it over in my mind despite the urgency of everything else demanding my attention. Duke's passing hadn't brought with it an overwhelming stench, or perhaps my senses had been too numbed by grief to notice. Perhaps the love we held for Duke had somehow softened even the biological reality of his death—made it bearable, made it something we could approach and touch and mourn. This creature had no such protection. No one had loved it. No one would grieve its passing. It was simply dead meat rotting in the heat, its biology breaking down in ways that offended every sense I possessed.

"Are you okay, Paul?" Karen asked, her voice pulling me back from the morbid reverie. Her approach was cautious, her eyes scanning my face with the kind of concern usually reserved for people on the edge of collapse.

I must have looked worse than I felt—shirtless, covered in dust and dried blood that wasn't mine, eyes probably hollow from a night without real sleep. The kind of figure that inspired worry rather than confidence. Not exactly the image of leadership I was supposed to be projecting.

Focus, Paul!

Joel was missing. Jamie had collapsed. A Portal pirate was stalking our camp. I didn't have time to stand here contemplating the philosophy of decomposition or worrying about how haggard I appeared.

"Have you seen Joel this morning?" I asked, deliberately bypassing her inquiry. My wellbeing could wait. Our missing companion's whereabouts could not.

Karen paused, fingers tracing lines of thought across her forehead as she searched her memory. I watched her face with an intensity that probably bordered on unsettling, hoping for a flicker of recognition, a sudden memory of seeing the boy somewhere obvious we'd all overlooked. He went to the lagoon. He's sleeping in one of the other tents. He wandered off to find food. Any answer that didn't confirm my worst fears.

"No," she admitted after a moment. "I don't think I've seen him since we were all at the campfire last night."

Last night. Before the screaming. Before the shadow panthers. Before Duke. Joel had been here, recovering from injuries that should have killed him, and now he had simply vanished—as if the darkness had swallowed him whole and refused to give him back.

"That's what I feared," I said, and the words came out heavier than I'd intended. "And Chris and Kain?"

"They're at the lagoon," Karen said. "Chris is helping to clean Kain's wounded leg. Glenda thinks the water may actually speed up the healing process."

The lagoon. Away from camp. Away from the group. Away from whatever protection our numbers might provide—not that our numbers had done much to protect Duke, or to prevent Joel's disappearance. Surely they know the risks? But even as the thought formed, I recognised its futility. None of us truly understood the risks here. We were all stumbling through this nightmare, making decisions based on incomplete information and desperate hope.

Glenda's faith in the healing properties of Clivilius's water was well-documented—I had experienced it myself, that strange accelerated mending that defied everything I knew about biology. The water here did things that shouldn't be possible, healed wounds that should have festered, knitted flesh that should have scarred. If she believed it could help Kain, she was probably right.

"That doesn't surprise me," I said. "Regardless, can you go and bring them back to camp, please Karen."

"What? Now?" she asked, and I could hear the incredulity in her voice. To her, this was still a morning of dealing with the aftermath—tending wounds, processing trauma, trying to make sense of what had happened in the darkness.

"Yes, now."

"But Kain's leg—"

"I'll make it brief, I promise."

I didn't know if I could keep that promise. I didn't know anything anymore. But I couldn't afford to have people scattered across the landscape—not with Joel missing, not with a Portal pirate lurking somewhere out there, not with the growing certainty that our camp was no longer the sanctuary we'd tried to make it.

Karen's head tilted slightly, her silence loaded with unspoken questions. She deserved an explanation. They all did. I was asking her to interrupt a medical treatment and drag two people back to camp on my say-so, and I hadn't given her a single reason why.

"We need to do a final headcount," I said, rolling my shoulders back and standing as tall as I could manage. The gesture was as much for myself as for her—a physical attempt to embody the confidence I was far from feeling. Stand up straight. Look like you know what you're doing. Lead.

"Why?" Karen asked, and the confusion in her voice was genuine. She had no context for this sudden urgency, no understanding of what had shifted overnight beyond the obvious horrors we'd all witnessed.

"Joel appears to be missing."

I watched the words land, watched her eyes widen as the implications sank in. Not just absent. Not just elsewhere. Missing. The kind of missing that might mean something had happened to him. The kind of missing that meant someone—or something—might have taken him.

Whatever questions she still had, she swallowed them. Whatever objections about Kain's leg or the lagoon or the timing, she set them aside. She nodded once, a sharp decisive movement, and then she was gone—her strides purposeful as she headed for the lagoon to retrieve our scattered members.

I watched her until she vanished beyond the first dusty hill, a solitary figure growing smaller against the vast ochre landscape until she disappeared entirely. The weight of responsibility pressed down on my shoulders with an almost physical force—the task of keeping everyone safe in a place that seemed determined to kill us, one by one, in ways we couldn't predict or prevent.

I was supposed to be the leader. I was supposed to have answers.

All I had were questions, and fear, and the growing certainty that the worst was yet to come.

The stench of the shadow panther seemed to grow stronger with each passing moment, as if the creature were mocking me even in death. I turned away from it, facing the direction Karen had gone, and waited for my scattered people to return.