Session 03: Buzzed

Night’s bruise still clung to the sky when the SCVM lurched from Sarkash’s timber-shackled depths and found the wagon’s clearing. The pond there shimmered—an impossible jewel of clean water in a world of bile—and the Butcher squatted beside his cookfire like a basalt idol, turning a slab of nameless red meat upon a spit. Oil hissed. Sparks rose like dying souls.

Von strode first into the fireglow, gore-hound padding at his heel, nostrils flaring for blood-reek. Börda followed, twin monkeys chittering discordant harmonies upon his shoulders, his patched eye glimmering with covetous mirth. Alwrig limped last, lungs wheezing the hymns of the dead god Öde; her throat tasted rust, and faith burned sinister behind her ribs.

From the wagon’s gut a door burst wide and spat Grin—the cursed raven-thing—into the mud. Feathers clung to sweat-slick skin; yellow eyes gleamed with hunger. “More meat,” the Butcher rumbled, and the clearing felt suddenly smaller, as though the trees themselves leaned in to see which flesh would be carved next.

They feasted. The meat was gamey, sweet with an aftertaste of sin. None asked its origin. The wagon’s timbers creaked like a slumbering organ between heartbeats, and in its shadowed maw the harvested lich-moss found a resting-place. When darkness thickened, Von crawled into the wagon’s darkness for shelter; Börda bedded beneath it, Alwrig in the cold grass, and Grin curled where starlight could touch no feathered shame. No Misery of the End Times rode the night skies—an omen rarer than comfort.

Dawn bled grey across Sarkash. The Butcher fried thin strips of fat that popped like marrow in a forge. He spoke only once: “The wagon is meat.” That was benediction enough. They drank from the miraculous pond, shouldered rations of dried sinew, and marched south-east beneath trees forever strangling the sun.

Somewhere among those gnarled trunks the forest began to buzz.

It started as a fly’s whisper, became a swarm’s roar—then three great clouds of carrion bees burst from the underbrush. Each insect was the size of a starving cat, its chitinous skull-mask grinning with bone-white hunger. Terror sharpened to violence.

Börda swung his iron-bound lute like a war-mace, strings wailing as they crushed chitin. Von’s battles-axe hacked a crimson arc while his gore-hound tore honey-stinking wings from the air. Grin slashed, feathers swirling. Yet the bees were legion, their flight a plague.

Alwrig’s eyes ignited. Enochian syllables tore from her tongue—commanding one swarm to betray its kin—and the air filled with insect shrieks as bees rent bees. Still the horde pressed. With a final curse, flames poured from Alwrig’s sockets; fire blossomed in a searing cone, immolating a cloud entire and leaving her blind and black-eyed. Ash snowed upon the loam. The forest rang with the screech of a thousand shredded wings—then, silence broken only by ragged breathing and the fretful chatter of Börda’s monkeys.

They tracked the fleeing insects along a corridor of broken foliage until stench overpowered wood-rot: a corpse the size of a hillock lay rotting in a hollow. Its cavernous ribs thrummed with life. Honeycomb lattices—thick as a warrior’s thigh—webbed the chest cavity, dripping viscous brown bone-marrow honey that steamed in the chill air like sacrificial blood.

Von advanced alone, armor clanking a doom rhythm. He plunged a tin vessel into the oozing sweetness—then froze as the hive’s matriarch heaved into view. Dog-sized, scarlet-eyed, the queen’s abdomen pulsed with molten nectar. Börda’s bolt slammed into its thorax; Alwrig’s fire found it next, wreathing chitin in flame. Von’s hound lunged, jaws crushing burning flesh. The queen screeched, fled ablaze toward the hive—and died in its own doorway, setting the rotten giant aflame.

Fire raced through comb and carrion. Worker bees erupted in molten clouds, crashing into branches, igniting pitch-slick bark. The SCVM ran. Grin stumbled; a flaming drone struck Börda’s trailing monkey, and the creature shrieked once before becoming cinder. Grin rolled clear, feathers singed but soul intact. Behind them the forest smoldered like a pyre for forgotten gods.

Ash rode the wind as they emerged onto a dry riverbed, grey grass rippling like funeral cloth around their boots. Far across the barren plain a crooked steeple stabbed the horizon, half-swallowed by a hunch-backed structure—wood and stone rotted together as if the land sought to reclaim its blasphemy. Ember fungus, whispered Alwrig, grows where temples are properly profaned.

The wagon was leagues away, memories of safety fading with each smoky gust. Yet honey sloshed in Von’s tin, proof of purpose—and in every heart a different fire burned: Börda mourned his shattered accompaniment, whispering vows of richer harmonies in blood; Von’s teeth ached for the feast to come; Grin’s avian throat thrummed with feral glee; Alwrig, her sight slowly returning, heard Öde’s rusted song swell with promise.

They pressed on toward the leaning tower, toward the house that once was holy. The sky above them churned pewter and flame, and somewhere in the blackened timber behind, the forest kept burning.

So marched the meat-seekers—into new ruin, bearing the taste of ashes and sweet marrow upon their tongues, and every step echoed with the promise of darker hymns yet unsung.