The Krivvian

Solitude is never empty...

There are places that look alive and yet remain unseen. Today we enter a realm dense with growth, sound, and heat, dismissed by those outside as empty. A man steps through a gate seeking solitude, unaware that in Krivv, solitude is never empty.

Heat closed around Drenn the moment he entered Krivv, and it settled on him with purpose. The air stank. Split fruit, mud and insects all working together unseen. Behind him, the Groaning Gate sealed itself with the usual wooden shudder, Gragg’s last words following him into it.

Krivv’s a joke. A steaming prank. Look at me, I’m alive. You’ll be out again within the hour, Drenn.

Drenn stood among roots thick as sleeping beasts and let the memory sour in him. “You may be right,” he said aloud, though Gragg could not hear him.

Krivv offered neither answer nor path. Vines hung in slack loops from the canopy, and when he pushed one aside it dragged against his wrist before letting go. Broad leaves leaned over one another, and moss climbed the bases of trees in swollen pads. Ahead of him, fallen trunks lay half-sunk in the black mud. The Yewdeep had its own ugliness, but at least it understood corridors. Krivv understood only crowding. He sat on one of the trunks, his back against a still-living tree, and closed his eyes.

For a while he heard only Krivv’s noise. It was a different noise to the Marchlands. No wind, distant birds and the occasional crack of a branch here. This was constant and layered, with tiny wings, drips and a slow groaning creak somewhere high above. Something chirred in mechanical rhythms, then stopped abruptly, causing Drenn to open his eyes. A beetle the size of his thumb crawled over his boot, its shell glossy and striped. It paused, probed the air with its antennae, and then vanished into the leaf-mould. He watched the place it disappeared and the leaf-mould settled. Nothing else moved or showed itself.

He could have decided then and there that Gragg was right and that the realm was, after all, just suffocating life with no meaning in it. He could have stood up and walked back to the Gate and gone home, calling it a lesson. But he remained sitting. Time passed, and sweat gathered and ran beneath his shirt. The air was hot, but he had the solitude he was seeking.

The first sign that he was not alone was that the chirring rhythm he had heard earlier began again, and then stopped. The jungle did not pause with it. The drips and the buzzing continued, but that one small, precise rhythm was cut off. Drenn remained still and listened. A leaf fell somewhere to his left, and he watched it land like a torn scrap of green skin. A moment later, something rustled behind him, but it was not caused by something advancing through the leaves. It was the leaves themselves moving.

“Enough,” Drenn said. Then, at the base of the tree beside him, a patch of moss stirred. It lifted in a slow wave and an oily, green shape pushed through, the moss clinging to it for a moment before sliding away. It was no larger than a squirrel, and its body was narrow, the limbs long and spindled, the fingers ending in hooked points. Its skin was scaled, deep green and glistening with mucus. Its eyes were amber beads, hard and unblinking. It stared at him, and Drenn stared back. The creature’s mouth was a thin slit which grew wider in a movement that might have been a grin, and revealed tiny jagged teeth. Drenn did not trouble his sword or speak. The creature clicked once, and then slipped back into the moss as quickly as it had appeared.

Drenn remained and waited. His sense of being watched intensified until suddenly he saw them properly. But not one. Many. They clung to the inner curves of roots where they arched out of the ground and re-entered it, their bodies pressed flat against the wood. They were half hidden behind curtains of vine, and they hung beneath broad leaves like bats, fingers hooked into the veins, and their scaled bellies glistening. Dozens of them. Drenn could have stood and drawn his sword, but he chose to speak.

“I’m not taking anything.”

The nearest one clicked. Another answered from above, a faster series of clicks that sounded almost like laughter, but too dissonant to belong to anything amused. The sound was passed between them quickly.

Drenn wiped sweat from his brow. “I’m not here for that,” he said.

Something moved in the air near his ear, too fast to see, and he felt a sting on the side of his neck. He had been bitten, although not deeply. It was just a warning. A glob of something struck the trunk he sat on and hissed, eating into the softened wood. Drenn looked at the smoking patch and spoke to the creatures again.

“All right,” he said. “I understand.”

He did not mean he understood them. He meant he understood the boundary. He would not push or make demands. He stayed where he was, and in staying he gave them a moment that did not require escalation.

The testing continued. A shape assembled and collapsed when he tried to focus on it. A rustle to his right suggested something large moving through ferns, but when he turned his head there were only plants, leaves and the slow bobbing of a flower. Drenn wondered, briefly, if he had done something foolish, then one of them came closer, appearing on the root beside him, its fingers hooked into the wood. Mucus beaded and slid along its narrow forearms, and it looked at Drenn and clicked, almost conversationally. Drenn turned to see the slit of its mouth widen into a jagged display.

“You’re ugly,” he said, because he did not know what else to say, and because honesty was the only thing he had. “I’ve heard of you. You’re the Krivvian.” The creature clicked again and a series of clicks answered from above.

Drenn did not laugh or threaten, and the dread eased briefly as the situation stabilised. They had tested him, and he had neither snapped nor exposed them with violence. He had not chased them into open conflict because he knew that presence alone could be a weapon, and he chose not to wield it.

But that was the closest thing to peace Krivv offered, and it did not last.

The Krivvian felt it first. Their posture changed, and the ones clinging to the roots tensed. Those under the leaves began to move, chattering more rapidly, exchanging urgent messages. The one beside Drenn jerked its head toward the direction he had come from. Its amber eyes fixed on him. It clicked rapidly.

Drenn frowned. “I’m going back,” he said, and began to walk.

He sensed trouble and moved with purpose now, pushing aside vines and stepping over roots, the wet ground sucking at his boots. He expected, more than once, to feel a sting in his back, a warning turned into punishment for leaving perhaps. He felt them with him though. Not beside him or ahead. Around him, above him, and behind him. Unseen but present. The sense of being watched intensified, but the difference now was that the watchfulness felt directed. A glob of corrosive amber struck a trunk near his path and hissed. Drenn glanced toward where it hit, seeing nothing but growth, and he kept walking. He found himself breathing harder. A sudden rustle above him made him flinch, and something dropped onto his shoulder. A Krivvian clung there, its hooks sunk into his pauldron.

“Don’t,” he said, but it clicked and tightened its grip.

Another dropped onto his other shoulder. Then another onto his forearm, its hooks sinking into his sleeve. The weight was small, but the sensation was vile as warm mucus smeared against his skin. Drenn wanted to rip them off and throw them to the ground, but he kept walking. Soon there were more. One clung to the back of his cloak, two hung from his belt, a cluster gathered at his collarbone, pressed close and chattering in low clicks that vibrated against his skin. Then he understood that they needed him to be moving, but he did not know why. He did not know what they feared or whether they were bringing danger with them or escaping it.

When the Gate appeared ahead, Drenn stopped a few paces away and looked at it. He felt the Krivvian fidget on him, their chattering rising and the clicks sharper and more urgent. One of them bit his ear lightly, not enough to break skin, but enough to make him hiss.

“All right,” he snapped, and stepped forward.

After a short exchange with a bewildered Gragg, he paused in the passage, breathing hard. One clung to his cheek, its hooks sunk into his beard stubble, its mouth widening as it clicked near his lips. He turned his face away, fighting the urge to vomit.

“All right,” he said through his teeth. “All right. Enough.”

They did not release him, so he began to walk. The Yewdeep’s corridors narrowed and widened, and the Krivvian grew quieter as he moved deeper. They clicked to one another, and some crawled up onto his shoulders and perched there, to better scan the passages. Others clung to his belt and cloak, and one hung upside down from his sleeve like a bat, its mucus smearing a wet line down his arm. Drenn kept his hands away from them. He did not want to feel their skin any more than he already had to. He thought of stopping and calling for Rootkin, or of perhaps finding someone to take responsibility for them, but he knew who he needed.

He found them near the Heart Hollow’s outer passage. Matthis stood with his hands folded into his sleeves, and Wryke was beside him, his face set in that careful expression he wore when he was pretending he did not feel anything. Both of them looked up as Drenn approached.

“What in the Yew’s name,” Wryke said.

The Krivvian chattered at the sound of his voice, and the one perched on Drenn’s shoulder bared its tiny jagged teeth in a grin that was all threat and no humour. Matthis shook his head but did not step back, which steadied Drenn somewhat. “Where have you been?” Matthis asked. “And why have you brought… these… back with you?”

Drenn stopped in front of them and stood still. “Krivv,” he said. “The tether was there. I went through. I needed quiet. It wasn’t quiet.”

Wryke’s gaze fixed on the nearest Krivvian. “They chose you,” he said.

Drenn shook his head. “I don’t know what they chose. I didn’t take them.” He swallowed, feeling one of them click near his face. “They came with me, and they won’t let go.”

“What did you do,” Matthis asked, “to make creatures like this follow you?”

“Nothing,” Drenn replied. “That’s the problem. I did nothing.”

Wryke examined the creatures and sighed. “Then we have a question,” he said, and there was no comfort in it. “What does it mean, Drenn Falkor, when the unseen decides to be seen?”

Drenn felt one of the Krivvian crawl up onto his cheekbone, its hooks pricking his skin, its breath rancid and wet. He fought the urge to shove it away. He held himself still and looked at the two men who could give him answers.

“What do I do?” he asked them, and his voice was rawer than he intended. “Friends, please. Tell me what to do.”

Drenn Falkor learned that in a world surviving through remaining unseen, the greatest disruption is presence alone

Tales from the Woldwood is a free 40-story descent into the Marchlands. The forests, ruins, people, monsters, bargains, and histories that shape the world before the first novel arrives