Things That Don't Even Come Back Around

When Finn was young, there was a forest out behind his house. Deciduous trees, in clustered patches. A well on top of a hill. Beyond that, a lake, with swans, dazzling white, thousands of them, swimming on the surface.

It did not occur to Moone until later to question why a well would be set up on a hill- and especially not when a lake is directly adjacent, why there would need to be a well at all.

The hill has corroded and crumbled since then, revealing jagged clay underneath. It has half dissolved, leaving the well like a bone exposed at its core. The well was no well- a tower, disguised by building an artificial hill around it.

What did the tower hide?

Why was the tower hid?

If the well hill had stood for generations, why had it only started to crumble now?

...

The swan is dead. It lies on the side of the lake, partially rotten, matted with crawling flies the way that the lake used to be covered by swimming swans. Its carcass dank, mudstained, surprisingly heavy, especially for something hollowed of so many of its entrails. Swans necks curve gracefully in life; there’s no curve intrinsic to the vertebrae of the neck, and in death, the neck is straight, long and useless, and the head also heavy, flopping freely as though to emphasize the unnatural state the swan is in in both life and death. The half-heart curve of the neck, a lie, but the swan’s most defining feature- in death, a swan bears no resemblance to a swan.

It must live in agony, mustn't it, the muscles of its shoulders and neck perpetually straining to keep its head aloft, to maintain the idea of its elegance.

...

The weregiraffe, struck by the plane, now resembled such a swan, which flooded Moone with horrible guilt he could not name-- the form of the giraffe no longer resembled a giraffe at all, its limbs mangled horribly, lacerations up the neck, its ribcage crushed so badly as to cast doubt on the idea that there had ever been anything inside the cage at all-- and if there were, where was it now? The one eye that remained intact stared lifelessly.

The corpse shuddered, as if settling. Or beginning to ferment- the body of the weregiraffe began rising, like bloating yeast. It twisted as it rose. The limbs, cast at unnatural angles beneath the body, rotated and snapped in place, spreading outwards to come to a rest under the giraffe as its body elevated higher and higher from the ground. The rib cage did not inflate itself, the angle of the head at the end of the neck did not right itself. It was merely as though the giraffe corpse had been a marionette puppeted by an unskilled puppeteer, who was now raising its puppet by the strings from its heap on the ground.

The giraffe swiveled weightlessly, on broken legs that shouldn’t have been able to support it. Some life returned to its one eye, which searched, and found Moone on the ground nearby the plane. And the giraffe, trailing juices and ichor from its many perforations, began barreling straight toward him.

The weregiraffe just had to be a lich as well...