Editor’s note for audio version.
Please note that the date is incorrect in the audio version. It reads Harvest 72, but should be Sleep 12. Where the seasons of Waking and Growth have 90 days, Harvest only has 60, and Sleep has 120.
Sleep 12, 855
The struggle for dominance among the humans entertained Tuag. The posturing, the brief, pathetic violence, the smell of fear and submission as the pecking order settled. It made sense to Tuag. As much as he hated the uniformed soldiers, he knew they carried the sharpest weapons and had stronger grips. They should be in charge. Of the other humans at least.
When the captain grabbed Buu, Tuag considered ending them. But the captain only took Buu from the room, firm but gentle, so Tuag just followed, falling into step beside Idah. As more soldiers joined their march — the captain asserting their dominance — Tuag grinned. If it came to fighting, he could tear through any number of soldiers, and happily would.
Not that he knew why he bothered anymore. Buu had tried to send him home to no avail. The boy had lashed out with magic that should have been able to kill the grimm, but he had come no closer to going home. Perhaps he had made a mistake, and the boy had nothing to do with his home — with the place beyond death.
But the ghosts gathered around Buu everywhere he went. They clung to him as thick as tree sap unless Tuag stayed close enough to dissuade them. His magic smelled too similar to be coincidence, and Tuag had seen home when Buu banished that ghost… hadn’t he? There had to be some connection.
As they entered the infirmary, Tuag blinked at the freshness and abundance of ghosts. Usually, the spirits at the university had the papery quality of older spirits, stuck in the mortal air by choice and having lingered too long. But these ghosts had an almost white cast to them, that lost, confused look of the newly dead.
Tuag shifted uncomfortably as he scanned the crowd of spirits. These dead should have passed on, should be wandering the afterlife waiting for Tuag to shepherd them to the campfires. The odd ghost did occasionally get lost among their mortal trappings… but this? Too many to be good.
He’d never known his home to have boundaries — it had always seemed endless: the only lines those separating life from limbo, and limbo from the campfires. But he had not seen his home in over a year. He could not perform his duty. He had presumed that spirits would go to the campfires without him eventually, with a few more than normal slipping back through the veil without his direction. But if not… Could death overflow?
Tuag followed Buu and the captain to the back of the large room, the smells of old, spilled food just noticeable below the visceral scents of injury and infection. The dead lay in rows covered by a myriad of inoffensive pastel sheets that did little to hide the fact that rot had begun to set in. Tuag felt the moment one of the injured soldiers laying along a table joined their ranks, slipping from unconscious to dead without the notice of his nurse.
The monkeys jabbered in heated tones as Tuag turned his attention back to them. The captain moved quickly, grabbing Idah in a strong hold and clamping their arm around her chest. A dagger gleamed at her throat in the same moment magic erupted in the hands of Aru and the headmaster, flames bubbling in their palms with the warm smells of compost and wild ginger.
The soldiers to either side of them pulled their own blades, and after a tense moment the magic dissipated. Tuag considered interposing — he liked Idah and held no love for the captain — but other than the attack the night before, nothing this interesting had happened since they’d arrived at the school, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to end it. He wanted to know what the captain aimed to achieve. Tuag couldn’t bear the thought of returning to endless days following Buu from dorm to classroom and back again, listening to meaningless, droning lectures and watching the boy test his powers one tiny step at a time. He’d go mad.
When Buu reached out his hands to the dead, Tuag felt the shift. It was as if Buu had removed the lid from a pot of flies, magic buzzing out of him in wild, unpredictable peals. No, being pulled out of him. The spirits crowding around Buu had their arms in him, up to the elbow anywhere they could reach. They pawed through, pulling magic out and wriggling into the space left behind.
Tuag hesitated, trying to process what he saw. Buu’s frail little body had drained itself of magic the night before. Not a minute earlier, Tuag could smell the depletion, the lack in him. But the dead dragged more and more power from the boy, filling the room with the dark, heady, familiar smells of peat and woodsmoke. Of home.
The magic had to be coming from somewhere else. Buu could not hold that much — no mortal could. As the first spirit disappeared wholesale into Buu, it finally dawned on Tuag.
The ghosts began appearing shortly after his capture and forced servitude on this plane, but they had grown thicker and more numerous after he first met Buu. After that first time he smelled his home, really smelled it, since arriving in this cursed body.
The boy blocked the door. Or he was the door. Regardless, the ghosts knew what the grimm could only guess at, and Tuag growled at his own arrogance not to follow their lead months ago.
Something about the set of his body must have given away his intent, as Buu flailed and screamed and Tuag tensed to leap through the clot of spirits bombarding him, Aru stepped in his path, seeing the threat of him and facing him down.
Silly human.
He liked the doctor, but nothing would stop him from going home. He had waited too long. He pounced, letting his claws sail through Aru’s body with a wet tearing sound. He landed at the same moment her body hit the floor behind him, cries of disbelief and heartbreak coming from the other monkeys.
They’d grown complacent. They should have always feared him. They would know better now.
Tuag did not wait for the headmaster to retaliate, the fiery scent of the man’s magic following Tuag as he tore into Buu, teeth ripping through his skin like tissue.