My Taboo Harem!

Phei arrived in darkness first.

Then the darkness looked at him.

Something ancient and ravenous behind the black — something that had been waiting, possibly since the first scream ever torn from Kyle’s throat — registered the arrival of an intruder in its sanctum, and the entire ambient weight of the place shifted a fraction of a degree to account for him.

Phei felt it on his skin before his eyes had even begun to adjust: the attention of the realm settling across his shoulders like cold, sentient oil poured into the hollow of a palm — patient, slow, conforming perfectly to his shape, tasting him, remembering him, deciding what to do with the new morsel that had dared trespass.

Then red bled through the darkness in slow, arterial pulses, not illuminating the place so much as confessing its secrets in reluctant, throbbing confession.

With each crimson heartbeat the realm revealed itself a little more: a throbbing low ceiling of crimson vapour thick as congealed blood, fine tendrils of red-and-black energy drifting through it in patient, seaweed coils that seemed to whisper forgotten agonies as they passed.

And below him, beneath the soles of his boots, the horizon of —

He took one step forward.

His boot sank three inches into the ground and the ground cracked beneath him with a dry, splintering sound that was wrong for earth, wrong for anything that had ever pretended to be a floor.

He looked down.

His heel had settled unevenly into the dome of a human skull, staved in at the temple where his weight had landed. Fine bone fragments were still drifting lazily away from the impact site like dust in a tomb.

A detached jawbone lay beside the skull, its teeth bared upward in a rictus that seemed, dimly, to be laughing at some private cosmic joke.

The jawbone clicked once.

Slow. Deliberate. Two clacks of old yellowed teeth against each other, exactly the rhythm of a throat clearing itself before delivering judgment.

Then it went still again as if nothing had happened — but Phei knew it was listening.

Maybe it was just his thoughts?

He took one very deliberate step backward.

His other boot came down onto a ribcage that expanded slightly beneath his weight — expanded, as though the ribs were remembering the motion of a breath they had not drawn in centuries — and then gave way with three small, dry pops that sounded almost like relief.

He took another step back.

A femur. An ulna. A smaller skull — a child’s, or the skull of something small and not quite human.

The crunching followed him with every careful retreat, but beneath the crunching there was a softer, continuous undertone — a settling, a shifting, tiny constant adjustments in the bone-drifts around him that had nothing to do with his footsteps.

The bones were repositioning themselves.

They were accommodating him. Welcoming him. Making room inside their endless grave.

He raised his head and looked around.

The realm stretched outward from him in every direction with no horizon line he could trust. There was no grass. There was no stone. There was no earth.

There were only bones.

An entire geography composed of the slaughtered. Human skulls in their millions, if not billions, piled into and against each other in obscene cairns, mandibles half-buried and half-exposed, the hollow sockets of their eyes staring everywhere and nowhere at once with the patient hunger of the eternally dead.

Ribcages upturned like the hulls of wrecked ships swallowed by an ocean of death. Long bones stacked in drifts the way dead leaves stacked in forgotten corners.

Dense fields of vertebrae gleaming in the low red light like pebbles on an ossuary beach that stretched into eternity.

And the beasts.

Between and around the human remains lay skeletons Phei did not recognise as anatomy. Skulls the size of dining tables. Ribcages that could have housed warhorses. Limbs arranged in impossible geometries.

Skulls with the long sinuous curvature of serpents — enormous, impossibly so, single bone-lines stretching the length of a city block before tapering into nightmare.

Others bore curved horns as long as lances, still stained with the memory of gore.

Others had no recognisable shape at all, just heaped clusters of ivory fragments that had once, presumably, belonged to things that had moved and breathed and screamed in languages long erased from creation.

The one Phei had stepped onto next was larger than any ordinary human. A giant’s skull. A being eight, perhaps nine feet tall in life. The brow ridge was massive. The mandible could have swallowed a man’s head whole and still had room to chew.

But not all of the remains were old.

Phei’s eyes caught it on the third sweep of his surroundings: a ribcage perhaps thirty feet to his left where the bone was darker, wet, still carrying ragged strips of blackened meat clinging to the inside of the curve like burnt offerings.

The heart inside the ribcage — shrunken, dried, but still present — gave a small involuntary twitch against the bone as his gaze passed across it, as though the dead thing were trying one last time to beat in his presence.

Further out, a skull whose lower jaw still held its last scream frozen in the shape of its open mouth, teeth bared, tendons at the hinge not yet fully decomposed.

A giant’s hand half-closed into a fist, the fingers still flexing a fraction of an inch inward every few minutes as if it were dreaming of closing around something warm and living.

The realm was not dead.

The realm was still feeding.

On the far horizon — so far that his eye initially read it as a mountain range — rose the long slow curve of a vertebral column. Rib by rib. A spine belonging to something the size of a continent, jutting up from the bone-scape in a long ridge that curved away into the red mist.

Somewhere beneath those drifts of smaller bones was the rest of the creature, buried and dreaming.

The skull, wherever it lay, was too far off to see — but Phei could feel it watching.

Closer in, what Phei had taken for distant pillars were femurs. Standing upright. Planted in the bone-field as though a gardener from hell had driven them vertically into the earth centuries ago.

Some were as tall as three-storey buildings, their surfaces etched with the faint, spiraling runes of forgotten suffering.

And the horizon itself — where the red mist met the bone-scape — was not a horizon at all.

It was a row of teeth.

Upper teeth only. Curving across the full visible arc of the distance, each one the size of a railway carriage, set into a jawbone so vast that the lower half of the mouth had to be buried entirely beneath the drifts on which Phei stood.

He was, he realised with a slow, crawling dread, standing inside the open maw of something that had died mid-swallow and never finished its meal.

Phei took another slow step.

Somewhere, in one of the nearer skull-drifts, a single skull rotated fifteen degrees on its own axis.

It was a small motion. Easy to miss. A human skull, eyeless, turning on the axis of its own foramen magnum to look at him.

Phei’s gaze snapped to it.

The skull did not move further. It simply held.

Then — slowly, silently, without any of them touching each other, without any sound of bone against bone — every other skull in the visible bone-field began to turn.

Human skulls rotated on their buried necks. Beast skulls shifted within their drifts. The enormous serpent-skull a block to Phei’s east tracked through an arc of perhaps twenty degrees until its empty socket — the size of a carriage door — was pointed directly at him.

The giant’s skull under his original step did it too. The serrated jaws of things he had not even identified as skulls turned themselves through the drifts to face him.

Every eyeless socket in the realm fixated on Phei.

Held.

The attention was not hostile.

But the attention was not pleased either.

It was the attention a body gives to a splinter — a small foreign object lodged where it should not be, the tissue around it deciding, slowly and with infinite patience, whether to expel it or seal it off and learn to live with the irritation forever.

Phei’s breath came slightly harder than it ought to have done.

The air in here, he understood, belonged to something else, and was being loaned to him on conditional terms that could be revoked at any moment.

Then — just as silently — the attention released.

Every skull rotated back to its previous orientation. Every socket returned to staring at nothing in particular. The bone-field resumed its slow, constant settling, the tiny ceaseless adjustments of a graveyard still digesting its dead with leisurely, eternal hunger.

The realm had clocked its visitor.

Phei exhaled.

He looked up.

The red ceiling pulsed.

The red tendrils threading through it had paused their drifting — not much, not completely, but enough for Phei to register that the sky, too, was now aware of him.

Each tendril carried something.

He could feel it when his gaze brushed one: a flicker of not-his feeling passing across the back of his tongue — fear from a thing that had not yet known it was dying, the texture of a feeding, teeth sinking in, warmth surrendering, a century ending in a single wet minute.

A dozen small impressions packed into a single drifting coil of vapour and then released into the next one. The whole sky was a slow, living archive of everything that had ever died in this place, and the archive was idly, continuously, reading itself aloud in the language of agony.

A dense cloud of the red hung perhaps twenty yards to Phei’s left — lower than the rest, almost brushing the bone-drifts, thicker, a bruise in the air.

It was watching him too.