The Chronicles of Dandelion

I - The Necromancer's Child (Part 1)

 His rebirth had many things in common with the original incident, not least because it was messy and involved a great deal of pain. Another thing was the weather.

Rain fell thick and furious, as it had done on the day he was born, softening the earth and stirring the worms beneath its muddied surface. One by one they came to life, wriggling up towards the source of the rhythmic pitter-pattering. They sought the rain like a wheel seeks grease; for its ability to melt a dry and brittle soil into something almost liquid, to quicken journeys and to aid in the attainment of rewards. The higher they climbed, the looser the earth became, allowing them to move more freely until their tiny pink heads sprouted atop the surface like fleshy blades of grass. Far below the fastest climbers, more worms still were rising to meet the topsoil. It was these latecomers, residing in burrows six feet beneath the ground, who cast the vital spark. It was they who finally hit bone.

He woke to darkness; entombed, with no sense of what or where or why. The creature should not have been conscious, yet he was. A skeleton, long since buried, should not have thunk thoughts without a brain, should not have made movement without muscles, tendons, a nervous system nor even flesh to hold his bones in place, yet he did. The capacity to think and feel brought panic, and so he began to claw, shovelling aside fistfuls of earth which only gave way to more earth, breaking down on his head like water, filling his mouth, pushing him back down until, zeal renewed, he forced himself up again. Even this was a miracle. Were it not for the incredible strength bestowed upon the undead, he would never have shifted the weight of the earth at all. Still, it became less like escaping and more like suffocating, despite the fact he had no lungs; like dying, despite the fact he was already dead. The creature stopped what he was doing and lay there, in the same position in which he had started, for just a moment.

Dead was the first word to have consciously formed in whatever was left of his mind. It was an unpleasant word, one that startled him and slowed his thinking, allowing him for one instant to tap into some long-dormant intuition about how best to escape deep graves. Dead, he repeated to himself, though he had only a faint sense of what the word meant. The creature drew his knees towards his chest and proceeded, in bare increments, to make himself vertical. Fortunate was he that bodies were buried facing upwards, else his occasional bursts of progress might only have shifted him sideways, or further down. Less fortunate was the ache in his bones, the weight of the earth like steel pressing hard into his shoulders. Standing turned to climbing, time passing to the point of becoming imperceptible, until at last his head sprouted like those of the eager worms, rainfall wetting his skull for the first time in what seemed like forever. Daylight graced his eyes, though he had none. He could feel himself gasping for air, though he inhaled and exhaled nothing.

The creature could finally see, but found himself struggling to make sense of what was what. Lines, shapes and colours crowded his vision, none of which he could pin a name to nor even grasp a sense of. Grass, earth, trees and rocks appeared not to be their own entities, but instead melded together into one amorphous whole. The chaos was broken only by a trickle of dirt falling into his left eyehole from somewhere atop his head. He must have come up under something when escaping his grave, which now he appeared to be wearing as a hat. The creature groped around for it and yanked it down by its stem for closer examination, quickly identifying it as a... Plant, yes, a plant, or better yet... Dandelion! A dandelion! It was in fine condition, albeit a little wet. Weather had reduced its fluffy mane to more of a droopy mop. Still, it was a dandelion. The faintest of all faint memories crept in like the shadow of a dream and he realised he knew what to do with dandelions.

"Y' bloh n'it!" he said, in his first spoken sentence of over a century. The creature tried again, speaking slower this time. "Yew bloow innit. Blow in it. Blow on it. You blow on it."

He did all this despite having no larynx with which to make sound, no muscles with which to move his jaw and no ligaments holding together the finger bones between which the dandelion was held. Lacking the self-awareness to appreciate this and the brainpower even to think of a wish, the creature decided to wish for nothing, or anything at all. He blew on the dandelion with this vaguest of all wishes in mind, and the dandelion remained unblown. Its seeds were unmoved by the creature's lack of breath issuing from his profoundly non-existent lungs.

"Fick. Foock. Fuck." Another word he'd remembered.

He tried blowing on it a few more times, all unsuccessful, before he had an idea. Somewhere in the back of his mind arose the memory of running; running fast, so fast the air pushed back against his face like wind. If he ran that fast again, he reasoned, the wind would blow the dandelion for him. The creature pulled his body out of the ground and launched himself forward before immediately falling over.

"Fick, fuck, fick, fick, fuck!" He'd tripped on something. A human skull, like his, half-sunk into the mud. He turned onto his back to stare at it for a moment, transfixed by the sight of another corpse, before he thought to look around and realised, it wasn't the only one. All around him, skulls, ribs and fibula lay scattered with wild abandon. Most of the bones were human, though others were not, and every one of them had been cracked, split open or otherwise eaten away by time. There was something else too; shards of metal, disintegrated by rust. Fragments of swords, shields, battleaxes, here and there a piece of armour, some of it still clinging to the body of the poor soul who'd died wearing it. The creature turned and came tooth-to-blade with a tarnished claymore, embedded in the ground. He shuddered.

Only now did it occur to him to wonder where he was. His gravesite, as well as the surrounding carnage, seemed to be contained within a large and shallow crater, which itself was surrounded by woodland. The forest looked dense and dark, almost impassable save for the slightest hint of a trail which issued from the crater's edge. There lay his path, and yet he strangely felt no urge to leave. This was his grave, the only one anywhere in sight, marked simply by a pile of stones. He wondered why there weren't any others. Why had none of these bodies been buried, even burned? The more he looked at them, the more he felt for them, the more he began to remember. These were not pleasant memories either, about dandelions or the wind. They came as snapshots; of people fighting, fleeing, begging for mercy. Of blood.

The creature got to his feet and stood, pondering, for the next few hours. He stood even until the clouds stopped raining and the sun hid itself beneath the horizon. He was standing there still when he heard something; hoofbeats, approaching from somewhere in the woods.

He hurried over to the lip of the crater, peering through the foliage to glimpse a distant light. A lantern, carried by a rider who was galloping along a nearby road. The road wound nearer and farther and nearer again, up and over hills until, at the point where the rider was closest to the crater's edge, they came to a halt. They were wearing a black cloak which hung down to their ankles, their face obscured beneath a similarly oversized hood. The horse was black too, with jarringly pale eyes and a wound that was more jarring still; a bright gash, extending across the full length of the horse's body. It was not a wound one typically survives, let alone rides on, which could mean only that the animal was dead. The rider dismounted from their steed and turned to face the creature directly. Though difficult to tell from such a distance, he thought he saw the rider extend a hand, beckoning him forward, before they remounting their steed and disappeared once more into the night.

"Wait. Wait for me," said the creature, all of a sudden desperate not to be left behind. He had forgotten about the dandelion in his hand, and paid it no further notice as he began to scramble through woodland, catching it on all manner of brush and bramble, scattering its seeds across the earth. At last, the weed was spent and his wish was sealed; for nothing, or for anything at all.