The freezing rain, sharp as splintered bone shards, sluiced down the terraced slopes of Qeng-Dhar, turning the funeral procession into a miserable, slick crawl. Khaydruk pulled the coarse wool of his hood tighter, the damp chill seeping into his joints. He wasn’t here for mourning, only observation. The merchant, Joryn Vrak, lay stretched on a bier of rough-hewn pine, his face a waxy yellow under the grey light. Even the heavy shroud couldn’t quite conceal the unnatural angle of his neck. A full one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, it had snapped, leaving his chin pressed into the small of his back, his vacant eyes staring at the sky he would never see again. Not an arrow, not a blade, but a grotesque, internal contortion. A curse, plain as the nose on his face, Khaydruk thought, a slow, internal sigh of apathy escaping him. “A tragic end for Joryn, wouldn’t you say, Master Khaydruk?” A reedy voice, far too close, startled him. Khaydruk didn’t turn, knowing it was Pobur, the perpetually anxious incense-peddler whose wares smelled more of desperation than sanctity. “He seemed well just yesterday, haggling over my finest Dhark-root sticks. And now… backward.” “Unless you believe he merely tripped and tried to look behind himself with exceptional zeal,” Khaydruk drawled, his voice a low rasp, “I’d say it was an ending of the precise type that keeps me from getting involved.” He adjusted the leather pouch at his hip, the cold brass casing a familiar comfort. “A grudge-curse, most likely. Someone felt cheated. Not my purview. My purview involves the flow of mountain energies, not the ebb of human spite.” He watched as four gaunt men struggled to lift Vrak’s bier, the corpse’s head lolling with a sickening elasticity that suggested the neck was less broken bone and more pliable gristle. The villagers, their faces pinched with a cold grief that had little to do with Vrak’s passing and everything to do with their own hunger, shuffled deeper into the mud. Qeng-Dhar was always a place on the edge, a few terraces clinging to the Dhalangar’s unforgiving peaks. Their survival was a geomantic miracle, a delicate balance of earth-lines and spirit-warding. Now, with a cursed merchant and an impending sense of doom, the balance felt precarious. Khaydruk had been hired, begrudgingly, to check the village’s foundational arrays, supposedly ‘skewed’ by recent rockfalls. An easy job, a quick payment in cured blazewort and dried gristle-fruit, then out. The payment was his only motivation. He’d seen enough suffering in his years, enough twisted earth-lines and twisted fates, to cultivate a thick skin of indifference. It was safer, cleaner, to observe. To *not* intervene. He began to turn, his focus already on the narrow, treacherous path leading out of Qeng-Dhar, a path he hoped wouldn’t be too slick with the day’s relentless rain. The sooner he was out of this miserable valley, the better. His palm instinctively went to his belt, brushing the smooth, polished wood of his geomantic lodestone frame, the Glass Eye of Vorun. It was a habit, a check. He froze. Beneath his fingers, the device vibrated. Not a gentle hum, but a frantic thrum, like a trapped insect beating against its glass casing. The needle, usually a placid indicator of the telluric currents, began to spin. Wildly. A dizzying blur of motion, clockwise then counter-clockwise, faster than any natural flow could dictate. A high-pitched whine emanated from the instrument, a sound like grinding teeth. “What in the name of the Stone Spirits is that?” Pobur shrieked, clutching at Khaydruk’s sodden tunic. His gaze, bloodshot and wild, darted between the instrument and the desolate landscape. The whine intensified, rising to a piercing shriek. A spiderweb of fissures erupted across the dial's polished obsidian face, starting from the needle’s pivot point and radiating outwards. With a sharp *crack*, the Glass Eye of Vorun shattered, shards of black glass and finely ground sapphire spraying across Khaydruk’s cloak. “My lodestone,” Khaydruk muttered, staring at the ruined artifact, his apathy momentarily replaced by a prickle of genuine unease. The Glass Eye hadn’t failed him in two decades, not even amidst the deepest earth-quakes. This wasn’t a mere localized disruption. This was a scream of the land itself. An unnatural, violent warping of the earth-lines. “Master Khaydruk! Look! The pass!” Pobur’s voice was a frantic bleat, his grip like a vise on Khaydruk’s arm. Khaydruk’s gaze snapped towards the narrow mountain pass, the only exit from Qeng-Dhar. Where minutes ago there had been a clear, though muddy, trail winding between two colossal granite formations, now the rock itself seemed to writhe. A deep, guttural groan, not unlike a wounded beast, echoed through the valley. The granite shoulders of the pass shifted, visibly buckling inwards, as if being squeezed by an invisible hand. Loose scree tumbled, then larger boulders, until the entire mouth of the pass was a choked, impassable maw of fresh rockfall. It wasn’t a landslide; it was a deliberate, malevolent sealing. “The earth-lines,” Khaydruk breathed, the words tasting like ash. This wasn’t a simple grudge-curse. This was a geomantic assault, an active rewriting of the landscape. Qeng-Dhar was no longer just a village. It was a trap. And he, the cynical observer, was now caught within it. “We’re trapped! We’re all going to die! The curse! It’s not just Joryn, is it? It’s all of us!” Pobur wailed, his legs giving out. He latched onto Khaydruk’s leg, a quivering, whimpering anchor of desperation. “Save us, Master Khaydruk! You’re a geomancer! You can fix it!” Khaydruk looked down at the pathetic figure clinging to his leg, then back at the sealed pass. He was trapped. His payment now seemed a paltry sum for this inconvenience, this terrifying, forced involvement. His bones felt suddenly lighter, a phantom hollowness in his spine. The cold dread he usually kept at arm’s length began to prickle. This was not a problem he could observe from a safe distance. A sharp, choked gasp ripped through the rain-soaked air. From the cluster of mourners nearest the bier, a woman, her face streaked with soot and tears, stumbled backward. Her hands flew to her throat, her eyes bulging. A sickening *crack* echoed, wet and brittle, over the sound of the rain. Her head began to twist, slowly, agonizingly, her chin inching towards her shoulder, her breath gurgling in her throat. The sound was unmistakable. The curse was spreading.

The Backward Dead