Gerald of Humanity's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Gerald left the burial mounds with the sack of bones knocking at his hip. The bog steamed under his boots. He needed heat, real heat, and the bog gave only wet smoke. Then he saw it on the far rise — a dark tower of stone and red sinew, growing where the ground had burned. Its mouth was a gate. Its breath was hot. He walked toward it. Inside, the floor sloped down to a forge that roared on its own. Flames climbed a black spire and folded back into themselves. The heat pushed against his armor and made the burning metal sing. This was a fire that could shape bone. Gerald set the sack down and drew out the king's skull. He needed fuel to feed it hot enough to hold. He went back out and gathered what the witch had left behind — dry roots, the cracked husks of the burning bugs still smoldering in the moss. He dumped them into a stone pit near the forge mouth. They caught at once. The pit swirled black and orange and would not go out. Gerald worked. He snapped the jaw from the skull and threw it aside. He pressed the long bones into the flame and pulled them out white and soft. He bent them. He set them into the cracks along the skull's crown, points up, like teeth pushed through the bone from inside. The skull cracked wider where he wanted it to. He widened the cracks on purpose. He held the half-made thing up in the firelight. Jagged spikes of worked bone rose from the brow. It was ugly and it was his. He had the forge. He had the shape. The crown was real now, not just an idea in his head. Then the tower shuddered. The walls of red sinew pulsed and climbed higher around him. The gate behind him narrowed by a hand's width. The forge had not been free. Something in the stone had been feeding while he worked, and now it wanted the rest of him paid in.