Free Hush (Dragon Apocalypse) by James Maxey Page A

wire. She opened a tiny door and the mosquito crawled inside.
    “Wandering spirit, thou shalt roam no more,” said Sorrow, her voice deeper than what should have come from her slender throat. “By thy blood I bind thee to this body of wood. Thy soul shall be its soul.”
    She shut the door to the cage.
    Long ago, before arriving in Commonground, I worked on a fishing vessel in the Green Straights, where swordfish are caught with hooks of tempered steel fed out on long weighted lines. I’d had the misfortune of running one of those hooks through my hand, the point slipping between the bones of my little finger and ring finger, just beneath my knuckles. I’d been beaten by professionals, during my years at the monastery, but nothing quite prepared me for the pain as the weighted line played out and snatched me overboard.
    That same pain now seized me in every pore. I felt invisible hooks slip into my mouth, scraping across tooth and tongue and bone. Hooks pierced my eyes and ears, slid into my neck bones, tangled in every rib. I thrashed against the unseen barbs that tormented me, beating the night air with my ghost limbs, to no avail. Fine silver threads appeared all around me, connecting my wraith-form to the driftwood man. With a sound like fingernails dragged along guitar strings, the lines all went taut and reeled me in.
    For a moment, everything went black.
    When I opened my eyes again the world was painted in shades of amber. My limbs felt numb and heavy. I could barely turn my head... and yet, to my surprise, I did have a head to turn. I was a physical being once more, my body cold and stiff, but undeniably present. I raised an arm that felt weighted with iron and brought it to my face. With my monochromatic vision, I could make out the gnarled remnants of the base of a mangrove tree, with five finger-length roots jutting out. Such was the resemblance of the root to a hand that I imagined I could close the fingers into a fist, and as I thought it, it happened. I felt the friction of finger against finger, felt the damp grit that coated the limb grinding into wooden flesh.
    Sorrow loomed above me. Unlike the rest of my monochrome world, she looked crafted from a rainbow, a being of pure energy swirling within the translucent flesh of a woman. Her voice was thunderous in my seed-pod ears:
    “Ghost, you are bound to this body of wood. It was alive once, but devoid of spirit, as you were alive once, but are devoid of body. I give you dominion over this form for a time, ’til decay and entropy reduce this shell to dust, and the last spark of your animating spirit fades from this domain. Until you meet this final death, you are my property, and shall obey my commands.”
    I attempted to offer my opinion of her demands in the form of a string of artfully delivered curse words. No sound emerged from my coconut lips. Despite having a mouth, I discovered I had no tongue. I sat up, feeling clumsy and disoriented. My eyes had difficulty keeping the world on the level as I swayed first to the left, then the right. I had only a muted sense of proprioception. I stretched out my driftwood arms, fingers splayed, to steady myself on the sand.
    It felt, I must confess, a good bit like being drunk. Had I really spent fortunes in pursuit of this sensation when I was alive? This had been my preferred state of existence, listing through the world like a ship with a damaged keel?
    Perhaps I’d paid freely for this sensation in life, but in death I’d grown used to sobriety, and wanted it back. Still seated, I scraped out letters on the sand using my gnarled fingers.
    P-L-E-A-S
    I don’t know what she thought I was about to ask, but Sorrow dropped to her knees before my wooden body and placed her lips upon the jagged gash of my new mouth. She sucked in air from my coconut and I felt dizzier than ever.
    She broke off the kiss and stood, turning her back to me. Of course, since she appeared to me as nothing but numinous energy, I could