Deep in the forests northwest of fallen Marrow came a song in the lost village's honor. It was a melody of arpeggios and plucky roulades roughly spun by unpracticed hands. If one were to follow this charming if imperfect tune it would lead to a clearing, emerald and untouched, where a pool of water glistened and the birds chirped merrily in encoded broadcasts of sexual braggadocio and territorial claim. It would be a fine place to live forever and that was just what the golem Bramble wished to do. But his companion Dimia pined to be with others of her own kind, the living. And so the girl and her monstrous friend had continued west toward the village of Wolfwall (named so for the pelts hung from the town's perimeter since its earliest days as a trapper's post) where her nearest kin dwelled. Dimia's hope was that her extended family of cousins and uncles and aunts would take her in and help find her a new home—where she could then turn her efforts toward tracking Skelen down and making him pay for his vile malefactions against Marrow. The sandfolk, too, for the murder of her fellow younglings. Dimia shivered at the thought of the hobgoblin who'd come up the steeple looking for her as she hung from the tongue of that bell, with his cruel deathstick and robe of wretched faces. The wasters' leader had called this one 'Tecneli.' The fiends had snuffed the lives of her last few friends, the children to whom even Skelen had shown mercy. At least the pariah had that small shred of humanity. Not so the sandmen.

Dimia continued to strum her song using the lute Bramble had stolen. She had admonished the golem for stealing the instrument but was in truth grateful. In this world of endless sin it was a small crime done in generous spirit. Bramble had no comprehension of their laws. He only knew Dimia had broken her previous lute when trying to defend herself from attack by one of Marrow's deranged survivors. Bramble had come to her rescue then, dismantling her assaulter into grisly pieces. The golem was now placid, humming with his many mouths to accompany Dimia's tune. It was a surprisingly pleasing sound against the babble of the water and the chatter of the birds and the sighing of the leaves in the wind. There was peace, ever fleeting.

But this glade too held threats. Dimia once had to rescue Bramble from the hypnotic charms of a knot of polliwogs in the brook's eddies. The golem had found himself enchanted by their furtive dance beneath the water's surface, unaware of the tadpoles' true and dire aim of drowning him and claiming the revenant for a meal. The amphibious larvae fed on those they caught in such fashion so that they may grow into the abhorrent froglodytes that blustered their way through the bogs and lent their foreboding croaks to the cacophonous night. Bramble fought their adult kin off many a time, shielding Dimia from their gulping mouths and viscid tongues. His unnatural appearance and horrific composition were often enough to drive the deathly bogfolk back into their humid dens in wait of easier prey. And here Dimia had now saved Bramble from their younger and seemingly more innocuous kin. Dimia only later realized Bramble probably could not have been drowned, for he drew no breaths.

It had been weeks of ponderous travel. They saw and avoided conflicts between men and other things. Hobgoblins, beasts, themselves. They stayed away from the roads when they could, except for a stretch spent quietly huddled under the tarp of a bale-wagon to more easily cross the long network of bridges stung through the great sinking marshes that divided the region. Biting insects, the sweaty days, the shivering nights, hunger. Dimia suffered all these things but Bramble felt none. It pained the golem to see his little friend in such misery and wished they could trade forms. Perhaps through this thing called sorcery, they could. Would she even want such a thing?

The duo arrived to find that Wolfwall was gone to ashes. Dimia's kinfolk with it, too, hung in agony from hooks and chains by the barbarous sandmen for the wasters were more interested in their victims' pain than their deaths. After torture the villagers had been left to slowly die and be dismantled by sun and beak and mandible. Scavenging beasts milled and dined in the bone-strewn aftermath.

Dimia fled back into the wilderness hysterical and the golem chased her and found her curled into a ball at the base of a knurled tree. A fountain of tears was the girl. Bramble scooped her up in his many arms and carried her deeper into the forest where he discovered this untouched glade. "It's all death," Dimia cried feebly into his shoulder. "All death..." As they huddled there on the soft moss the tears began to subside. Dimia felt odd in the golem's myriad arms, but protected. Some of those body parts had belonged to the very people of Marrow, possibly souls she had known. But there were also strange nonsense limbs comprised of the joints and appendages of animals from the wild. A deer's leg that ended in a hookling's crescent talon. A spindly appendage that terminated with a shaggy simian fist. Was this some form of animated art in Skelen's mad mind? Dimia tried to think of all these people and creatures that comprised Bramble as things of harmony. Natural and safe. What mattered was the mind that controlled those limbs now. Not who they belonged to in the past. Dimia's own brain was still occupied with mortal reckonings in the wake of their discovery of ruined Wolfwall. She spoke as the golem stroked her hair with a dead man's hand.

"Before Skelen returned to Marrow," she said, "I used to go to that church with my parents. The one I told you about, where I hid and all my friends died. One time I asked the priest after service whether all the pigs that our people killed went to the stars to live with their ancestors, as we humans did. He said only people had souls and so we should not grieve for the dead animals. Perhaps he thought that would be the end of my questions, but as my parents tried to pull me away so they could go home to their drinking and cursing I asked the priest if that meant only humans live on in the After, and not animals. He said yes, that was true. My parents dragged me away before I could pry further. I tried to understand what all this meant. So when the pigs die... that's the sum of it? No life in the skies of After? No nothing? In my eyes, if what the priest said was true, to kill a pig was a worse sin than to kill a man. For them it was the True End. And there I lived in Marrow whose livelihood depended on slaughtering pigs without pause. I became blind to it, numb to it, with it right before my eyes and unstoppable. I fell into my music and reading. But I still fear it, death. Who knows if the priest spoke true. I felt like he was making up his answers when I pushed him. I trust no one but you, Bramble. You don't seem to need or want the things a normal man does. The need to eat, to have power, to lie, to..." Dimia trailed.

"Doesth Bramble havth soul?" asked the golem. Too many brains and mouths competed to articulate. His words often spilled out a jumble but Dimia had come to understand them clearly. She felt an achingly deep empathy for her friend and an overwhelming guilt for inviting such dragons into its mind. Of course he would begin to wonder about his own death, his own soul. He was man and animal. A composition of many life forms. Or, rather, death forms. Did Bramble have a new, artificial soul, emergent from those runes canvasing his body? Or was he a cornucopia of warring minds that were forced to work in uneasy concert to animate its body and create a voice? Had the priest in Marrow been a liar? A fool? Were there no souls at all?

Bramble's question lingered in the air. Dimia now understood why the priest and her parents and all of them went so readily to the most comforting answers despite their own secret misgivings and reckonings with mortality and the uncertainty of what might lie beyond its veil. Here the golem was the child. Dimia chose the easy road as well. "Yes, I think so. I think you have a soul and it is beautiful." If anyone they knew had the keys to such existential questions, it was the man who'd made Bramble, the one who gave him life but brought so much death into Dimia's—Skelen. Perhaps Dimia would ask the villain for those answers before she drove a knife into his demoniac heart.

— • —

Men came in the night with torches and pitchforks in their fists and stalk-hounds at their heels. The mob had surely been roused by the merchant travelers Bramble had robbed on the road.

"Go," Bramble said to Dimia. The golem knew she would be accepted back into the fold of humanity if she would only quit him. It was the golem—the freak, the monster—that their pursuers wanted to burn. "Be winth your like ones."

Dimia did not. Instead, the budding bard took the malformed hand of her friend into hers and said a silent goodbye to that temporary paradise they had shared and, forever fated, together they fled into the thornwoods.

— • —