This story originally appeared as “Worms Of The Earth” in the limited edition hardback of The Moss Mother’s Maze. This is a slightly edited version of that story, with a new title.

If you’d prefer an epub, you can pick one up from itch.io.

What It Is To Burn

1

“No matter what happens,” my father used to tell me, “no matter where you end up, always remember this. You were shaped by this land, where the last of the dragons was buried. That’s where your heart comes from. You’ve magic in your veins.”

A nice story, I always thought. A way for a hard old man to tell his daughter he loved her without actually having to say it. What I didn’t know then, but would soon learn, was that it was true.

This land does have dragons buried in it.

2

It’s not hard to believe there are dragons buried here. The moors roll on for miles, broken and scarred, barren and empty. The ground is soft, boggy, split open by great steep cloughs of peaty black earth, like some monstrous beast raked its claws across the land.

In winter the mists rise like exhaled breath. The earth blends into the clouds like someone dreamed it. In summer, with no shade for miles in any direction, the sun is merciless. The ground smokes. Our world burns. Great walls of flame tear across the scrub, inhaling everything in their path. But in the cool dark valleys of the peat cloughs the earth still weeps water, still turns to mud that steals boots and drowns the unwary. And when the flames meet the wet, exposed flesh of the moors that water turns to steam that mixes with the smoke, making the air heavy and hot and thick.

Have you ever smelled peat smoke? Have you ever woken to your house filled with it, to the distant crackle of flames as the earth burns around you? Have you ever lived somewhere where the only things that grow are mosses, and mushrooms, and hard berries so rank and poisonous that at night owls drop out of the sky dead because the mouse they just caught ate one earlier in the day?

Easy to believe there’s dragons in the ground here, rotting beneath the earth, leaking their vile toxins into the soil.

The knight arrived on a burning day. We heard his dog before we saw either of them, its barks flat and distant through the smoke and haze. I remember the sky was clear of clouds, the sun a hateful white eye staring through the shroud of smoke.

When the sun is up and the wind is down the smoke twists the light. Everything is thrown into stark relief, a world of sharp, blinding contrast for a few feet before it disappears into the orange haze. The only good thing about a still day when the burn is up is that there’s no wind to drag the flames across the village.

So this was how we first met him, the sound of his dog breaking through the distant crackle of fire. Then a silver-black shape came looming out of the smoke, a silhouette that occasionally flashed with brilliant, dazzling white as the smoke shifted and the sun caught his metal plates.

He came to us in armour, dull and smoke-blackened and glowing with heat. His face was blistered and red, the skin peeling away in great wet strips. He strode proud out of the fires of our poisoned land, eyes grim and full of purpose, hands clutching his razor-studded helmet and the saddlebags from a horse we later learned he’d left dead and burning somewhere on the moor. As far as I know, nobody ever found its bones.

That night I sat on a stool by the bar with Dad and we listened. This was a rare treat for me. My father preferred to stay away from the drink, said he couldn’t be trusted with it, and so we rarely visited the pub. But a strange man in armour covered head to toe in razorblades had just walked out of the fire with a three-legged dog by his side, and a few hours later the heavens opened and dumped a rain so torrential onto us that the fires vanished almost as fast as they came, and he said that seemed as good a reason as any to indulge for a single night.

The knight picked a table off in the corner of the pub, not wanting to be the centre of attention, but what he personally wanted in that particular moment didn’t matter to anybody but him. The pub was packed, everyone in the village squeezed in and hoping to hear whatever story he had to tell - because of course he had a story, how could he not? I remember feeling sticky and closed in, the air hot and filled with the smell of a hundred people damp from rain and growing sweaty from the heat of each other.

Out of his armour, dressed in clothes still wrinkled from his saddlebags and only approaching clean, he was almost a more intimidating sight than when he’d arrived. He was built like a brick wall that sprouted legs and begun to walk. His skin was red raw, blistered and oozing from where he’d nearly been roasted alive inside his plates. All along one side of his head his hair was missing, his scalp a mass of years-old knotted scar tissue as white as bone against his cooked skin. Three of the fingers on his left hand were gone, replaced with long tapering spikes that looked like they’d been screwed directly into the stumps of what remained. When he opened his mouth, rows of dark black stone looked out in place of his teeth.

“What is he?” I remember asking my Dad. He just shrugged, muttered the word “foreign”, as though that meant anything.

We were here for his story, but this was a man who looked like he had a thousand of them. And we didn’t know which one to ask for first.

3

“You’re a long way from anywhere out here,” he said. Old Cowell had gone and sat with the knight, dragging over a stool and pushing a fresh pint across the table. The knight didn’t respond, didn’t even seem to look at Cowell, but he didn’t shoo the man away, either. So Cowell sat, quietly tamped his pipe, waited. The rest of us chatted quietly to ourselves, instantly forgotten small talk meant to disguise the fact that all our attention was on the stranger. We all waited for him to do or say something, and it was torture.

When he finally spoke his voice was low and smooth, and the chatter in the pub fell quiet in a second. He was talking to Cowell but it was obvious he knew he was really speaking to everyone. I think that was what he wanted.

“A long, long way,” he said. “Almost missed you in all the smoke.”

“Aye,” Cowell said. “Easily missed.”

“That’s no bad thing.”

“T’ain’t. Things stay quiet, f’t most part.” Cowell puffed on his pipe, fingers slapping on the end, purple smoke rising up through his moustache. “As we like it.”

A pause, the two of them locking eyes for a second.

“Not many visitors,” Cowell said.

“I won’t be intruding long. Tonight, maybe tomorrow. Then I’ll be off.” The knight stopped, looked again at Cowell, his face full of expectation. The way he spoke was strange to me. Not the words, or the accent, but something about the way he waited for his turn to speak, waited for Cowell to pick up the thread he’d left hanging. It was like he’d never really had a conversation, like he’d been taught the theory of turn-taking but never experienced the reality of actual speech, of people cutting in and talking over.

I expected Cowell would ask after the knight’s business. Why are you here? What are you looking for? Why are you leaving so soon? But he didn’t. All he did was grunt and suck on his pipe some more, send another puff of smoke up into the rafters.

The knight cleared his throat, glanced around the quiet room. He seemed unsure of himself, and it didn’t look natural on him.

“I’ve a map,” he said, finally. His eyes lit up with something like excitement and he jerked a little, like he’d gone to lean forward in his seat but stopped himself.

“Aye?” Cowell said.

The knight reached down under the table, mutilated hand patting the head of the dog curled up by his shins before rooting around in his saddlebags. When it emerged into view again it was clutching a long, slender tube. It looked like it was made from bone, hollowed out and capped with thick black wax that had melted and run down the sides in curling strands. He frowned when he saw that, tipped the open end over his palm to catch whatever was inside.

With a soft trickling hiss a small shower of ash spilled out of the bone, cascading over his hand and through the gaps in his fingers and onto the table beneath. He sighed, his breath coming out in a gust that pushed the ash across the wood in the direction of Cowell.

“I had a map,” he corrected himself, his voice flat.

Cowell tutted gently, thcing his tongue against the back of his teeth.

“A damn shame,” he said. “Fine things, maps. You never know where they’ll lead you.” He paused to take a deep, slurping sip from his pint. “Where was yours to lead?” he asked, and you could feel everyone’s attention focus in on the pair like the point of a dagger.

The knight glanced around again, eyes lingering on everyone in his audience. I’ve never known what he thought of us, then. I never thought to ask.

He swallowed slowly, wet his lips with a dark tongue then wet his tongue with a long drag from his so-far-untouched pint. I heard his fingers slide on the outside of the glass where it was slick with condensation.

“Well,” he said, at last. “I was told it would lead me to a dragon.” He looked up, met Cowell’s eye, and for the first time he smiled. “Don’t suppose you’ve seen one around?”

They chatted for a while and slowly people relaxed. None of us had seen a dragon, of course. We all knew the old story about dragons buried beneath the moors, but that was all they were - stories. And once they realised that the knight was just a foolhardy treasure hunter on a misguided mission to the arse-end of nowhere, people soon went back to their own business. But something about him held my attention, and so while my dad sipped a fresh pint of shandy I kept listening.

If I hadn’t, I never would have got involved. Never would have ended up deep beneath the earth, choking to death on spores, losing two of my fingers gripping the knight’s razor armour as I tried to drag him back to safety.

But I did.

“You don’t remember anything of the map?” Cowell was saying. The knight was deep into his drink now, growing a little maudlin as the reality that his journey had come to an end settled into him.

“Very little,” he said. “This place was named on it. But named something else. Something older.”

He muttered to himself, started trying to sound out a word, like it was on the tip of his tongue and he couldn’t reach it.

“Hy- Hym. No. Del? Mosdel?”

An image sprang to my mind then. Ancient iron, a thick slab of rusting metal out on the moors, older than I could possibly know. And a word carved into it, almost worn smooth with rain and time.

“Hytelmos,” Cowell said with a smile, a smile that faded when he realised he’d heard a small voice say it at the same time as him.

Both of the men were looking at me. My dad’s hand gripped my shoulder, squeezing tight enough to make me wince. Cowell narrowed his eyes, scowled through the gloom of smoke that filled the pub.

“That you, Sen?” he said, and my dad grunted. “You and your gal, is it?” He beckoned us over. “Not seen you in a minute. Come and meet my new friend.”

Before I knew it I was sliding into a seat between Cowell and the knight and my dad was sitting down opposite me. The corner smelled like beer and sweat and cooked pork. Under the table something moved and I felt the cold nose of the dog snuffling at my ankle.

“What was that word you just said?” Cowell asked, turning to me.

I looked at my dad, unsure, and he must have seen something like fear in my eyes because he said, “It’s okay. You’ve done nowt wrong.”

I looked up at Cowell, then at the knight, who was staring at me with something like hunger. I quickly put my eyes back on the nice old man who’d known me my whole life.

“Hytelmos,” I said.

“That’s the one,” Cowell said. “Do you know what it means?” I shook my head, and I felt the knight shift back away from me. I sensed something like disappointment rolling off him. Cowell was smiling gently, the old leather skin around his eyes crinkling into dark valleys that made me think of the peat cloughs out on the moors.

“I’m not surprised,” Cowell said. “That’s an old word. An old name.”

“I’ve never heard it,” Dad said.

“No reason you would’ve. It’s what this place was called before the east folk came and drove everyone who was here away into the forests. Before they brought this tongue we’re speaking now. Probably it’s written down somewhere in some record, some great sheaf of parchment in one of the cities, but who here’s ever seen them?”

“That was what, a thousand years ago?” My dad laughed. “No way you could know that, you old fraud. You’re spinning us a tale, hoping this idiot” - he gestured at the knight, who narrowed his eyes - “will stand you another drink.”

“Oh, whisht,” Cowell said. “You know I’d never.”

“What does it mean?” the knight asked.

“Could mean a few things,” Cowell said. “Mews is moss, I think. And we’ve plenty of that up here. Hytel? That’s a little harder. Could be hydale, or hysael. Something like dust, or something like a container. A box. Some sort of hidden place.”

“A grave?” the knight asked.

I had a weird feeling, then. Went all cold and distant. It felt like I was pulling back out of my skin, retreating up through the back of my skull. All my skin came over with goosepimples. I felt at once like the smallest thing in the world, a tiny speck high above everything watching from a far, but also like a giant peering through a window into a nest of ants. I felt outside time, like I knew exactly what was about to happen next, like I’d already lived it.

My vision filled with the iron slab, the word carved into it, the heavy iron hoop that emerged from the ground and disappeared into the iron, a thick heavy ring pinning the thing to the ground. That huge bolt holding the door - because I knew, somehow, that it was a door - shut from the outside.

“Not a grave,” I said, and I felt them all look at me. “A jail.”

I told them about the iron slab, and the deadbolt. About how I’d found it years ago and never thought anything of it. Just one of those weird things out on the moors, a place nobody else seemed to know about, somewhere I could go when I wanted to be alone.

I told them about the way the air changed there, how it’s always a little warmer, the sun a little harsher, the shadows a little deeper.

I tried to tell the knight how to get there, but with so few landmarks it’s all but impossible to describe. I tried to draw a map for him, but that was even harder.

Eventually the knight looked at my dad. “You’ll let her guide me,” he said. We all heard the way he tried to make it a question rather than a demand and failed. My dad, to his credit, started to object, but then the knight’s purse hit the table with a heavy thud. A few coins spilled out of it - thick, untarnished silver. The pouch bulged with the promise of more.

“All of it,” he said. “Yours. If she’ll guide me.”

More money than any of us would see in a lifetime. Of course Dad said yes.

4

The morning was hot and wet, the ground thick with the rain of the night before and the air pregnant with rain still to come. All I had on was my thin dress and my boots and even then I felt like I was always on the verge of overheating. I don’t know how he went on in his armour.

We barely talked, but it was in a comfortable way rather than an awkward one. He seemed the type who preferred to be left to his thoughts, who only spoke when he felt he had something worth saying, and I was fine with that.

He followed me without question or complaint. I’d led people across the moors before and always it was an ordeal. Strangers can’t read the land the way we can, can’t see that if you step here you’ll go up to your hip in mud but if you step here, then here, then there, then back to here, then leap just so that you’ll be fine. He copied every step I took from the moment we left the village, never needing prompting or correcting, clanking along behind me like some sort of tin shadow. Even his dog followed perfectly, sometimes stopping to bark at butterflies but never running after them.

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