Hello Intrepid Reader,
This is a free excerpt from the book Vixen II: Ink and Ichor. A tale within a tale, so to speak.
For context, this is told as a campfire story on a dark Lethain (Halloween) night. Folk have gathered in the yard of a church and under the light of a fire, a Chronicler shares this tale to a gathered crowd.
You can download a free copy here, read it on Kindle Unlimited or buy on Amazon if you want to support me.
The Twisted Tale of Decan Burke should give you a glimpse of the dark underbelly of Vixen II’s plot. And yes, you may add this to your yearly book goal when you are done.
You can find Vixen’s tale on Kindle Unlimited and Amazon, or you can snag copies from www.thetomehall.com.
Now, I recommend you cower under candlelight with a spooky playlist for the following tale…
We have always been told to fear what lurks in the dark. To be wary of what skulks outside our city walls and what whispers in our ears—telling us evil things. But people forget that not every bad decision is the coaxing of some malevolent monster. On nights like Lethain, we forget who we should really fear: our friends and neighbours. Those with deep secrets within their hearts, and those who are more evil than any demon can fathom to bite.
Long ago, before the Dragon slaughtered his way through Skylar, but after the Great Freeze had thawed away… When Albion was not yet united, even before each of the seven kingdoms held a knife to their brother and sister’s throats, the city of Tyne was a fortitude of knowledge and innovation. People of all creeds from around the world flocked to Tyne to learn and master great things. The studies of science, the flow of ink and quill, and most dangerous of all… the art of Harmony.
For centuries, Tyne had stood as a place of learning, and the grand castle that stood in the centre of its walls became the home of all that knowledge. Its students were able to aim higher and dive deeper to allow all forms of arts to be shared and learned. Thus, the Sanctum came to be. A beacon of hope and knowledge. A symbol of magic and wit. For years the sanctum brought in and groomed Wielders of great talent, furthering our knowledge of history, science and magic, but none more than the study of healing.
This was in the Age of War, when common plagues tore through cities like felling wheat, and wounds festered like rotting meat, already dead on the bone. A man with an arrow in his side was just as dead as one with a spear in his heart. Therefore great scientists and scholars built a tower dedicated to the study of healing, in hopes to save lives and mend wounds.
At first, they dabbled with alchemy and Harmony, knitting together wounds like a grandmother would knit a blanket, and healing hearts like a cobbler would a shoe, but with all magic comes a price.
For you see, those of you who know not of Harmony and magic—there is always a trade. For just as fire needs oil and a storm needs wind, healing needed pain. To heal with magic, the Wielder must take on parts of that wound, and many lost their lives to such experimentation.
“There has to be an easier way,” the Anatomists moaned in their great tower. “There must be a cure for all without the aid of dark magics,” they wailed.
“Well,” began one, a quiet and dark man from Derrian. “We have studied the natural properties of bark and flowers, of livers and oils, and we know that these each have their own properties and cures. As the bark of willow clears the head and the essence of poppy numbs the sense of pain, there must be a vast well of untouched remedies we are yet to discover… and I believe I have the answer.” The other Anatomists looked over to the Derrian man, knowing that what he had said was true, but this was the first time he had spoken up. This was the first time he had ever made himself known.
“Yes, we have had Aquizitionsers search the world for remedies used throughout history, but much has been lost since the Thaw, Doctor…?” The head anatomist drew a blank at the gentleman's name.
“Doctor Decan Burke,” Burke answered.
Yes, there was a time before the name Decan Burke was met with spits and shudders, and a time when he was yet to become the best—and the cruellest—doctor anyone had ever known.
“Then what do you suggest, Dr Burke?”
I cannot sell to you the cunning of Decan Burke. His beauty and charm were unmatched. No actor living today could capture his smile, knowing the evilness that lay beneath.
With an alluring smile, Decan Burke spoke to his fellow Anatomists and Doctors. “With so many ill and dying, I believe we must conduct trials of medicines and cures to study their effects more closely,” Burke said. “Willingly, of course. We can observe the effects of these medicines, operations, and remedies in hopes of understanding them much better. Then we can find paths of improvements and pave the way for real cures.”
The doctors nodded along, as they were all great scientific minds. Burke was logical and grounded, but one doctor thought deeper. She thought about the souls involved and the pain this would cause. “But Dr Burke,” she began. “Might this not be better conducted on rabbits and animals, or even on corpses.”
Dr Burke laughed, “Oh my, rabbits are not people, Dr Milburn. As every Anatomist knows, the body of a person differs much from any normal mammal. Besides, if I were to feed a corpse lye and ask it how it feels, I doubt the blighter would give a good description for our studies,” Dr Burke mocked. “Not that we’ll be feeding anyone lye, of course.” The other doctors muttered in agreement when Burke cut in again. “However, Dr Milburn, the idea of studying corpses is most ingenious. Imagine the secrets we could learn by pulling apart the dead, seeing their ails in the flesh and the effects on their bodies.” Burke pulled a ponderous face as if thinking about this for the very first time.
Before Dr Milburn could protest, the other Anatomists nodded in agreement. Suddenly there arose a debate on how many iron marks a body would be worth. Four? Eight? A whole argents worth? By the end of the evening, Burke had struck what he thought to be a fine deal: to offer an argent and a half for any corpse given for study, with no signs of foul play. In addition, willing participants would be paid to take part in experimental treatments… if they survived, of course.
In the following weeks, the anatomic field of study doubled its output of healed patients. New medicines and surgical techniques hit the forefront of hospitals and medic tents. Sepsis and rot were treated before they could cause lasting damage, wounds were patched, and soldiers could walk away from a battle without loss of limb.
Dr Decan Burke was praised for his discoveries and for saving thousands of lives, not to mention earning the Sanctum a horde of silver for their new cures. However, few knew of the darkness in Burke's heart—a blight worse than any demon, and an evil that few men could ever match.
Beneath the Sanctum, Burke hid in his morgue. He and his trusted surgeons would cut apart cadavers, pull tendons, and poke flesh just to see what would happen. When his discoveries had peaked, and his findings began to dry, Burke wanted to delve deeper. He wanted to know more.
Secretly, against the Sanctum and the Infirmary’s knowledge, Burke reached out to his dark contacts. These were people who he referred to as his Vultures. For Burke, his Vultures would sneak out in the dead of the night, under the light of the three moons and rob graves. Not for jewels or the treasures men took with them to Annwyn, but of bodies.
Before caskets could be burned and their ashes buried, they would exchange the cadavers with mounds of straw and lumps of meat, selling the fresh stolen body to Burke, to simply satisfy his nefarious and sick curiosities. In his mind, this was not a true crime, for nobody would know any different. To Burke, the true crime was burning away a perfectly good body to dissect.
It wasn’t long before Burke wanted fresher meat—fresher victims. Remember, this was a time of war. A time of malice and pain. A wagon might ride to Argentia but never return. A man might walk from Corick to Bernswood and not survive the night. There was no Ironclad to raise a spear and no Watch to guard every shadow. On days such as these, if a person went missing, you simply hoped that they had already passed to Annwyn peacefully.
Years passed and the Sanctum’s Infirmary became a renowned hospital. Every month, new medicines were delivered to every apothecary and Anatomist that walked between Albion and Skylar. Not only that, with the added funding for the Sanctum, the other studies began to thrive. Alchemy and artificery created more potent potions and precise tools. The library and its archives could suddenly afford rarer and better books and thanks to the resources available, the tracks of academia and architects became ever more knowledgeable in their fields. All thanks to Decan Burke and the Anatomist’s new-found wealth.
For the first time since the Ash King and his Ravens, magic and Harmony were no longer feared. The pagan notions of witches and wizards were now replaced with the more trusted term of Wielders and Arcanists. They were even trusted not to be blighted Warlocks—but of course, where there is power, there is evil and corruption.
In the following years, Dr Milburn grew suspicious of Burke's success. Yes, she did not want to squander the miracle cures that he had helped discover, nor did she want to halt the saving of lives, but it seemed that she was the only one to notice the pattern of Burke's findings and the rise of missing people.
So, giving into her curious nature, she began to dig. Her first discovery was that of Burke's financial records. They made no sense. Money came and went in large sums, all from unknown sources. Next, she realised that his research notes made little sense. They were already complete as if copied from a book, with illustrations and all. Finally, the number of cadavers was woefully incorrect. She realised that some samples were missing whereas other samples were pointedly in abundance. Nothing made sense.
And so she dug even deeper.
In the dead of night, she poured through Burke's notes. She investigated each and every soul that was part of Burke’s inner circle. Then…
Ka-thunk.
Pulling a book from a shelf, she discovered what she thought laid only in children's stories, a secret door hidden in a bookcase. Milburn had heard tales of secret rooms and passages that hid in the shadows of the Sanctum, but she had never actually found any. Curiously, she entered the secret room, discovering a secret wing of the Sanctum. She investigated deeper, turning over any loose stone, but was instantly met with the feeling to throw the contents of her stomach, as she had entered what she could only describe as a shrine to the body.
Jars of severed limbs lay proudly on display, as did diagrams of organs and cuts of flesh hung on walls as you would a piece of art. Guts had been draped across the ceiling like bunting, and flayed skeletons stood like ivory statues in various states of decay and disassembly.
Horrified, Milburn wanted to pull away, to run back and declare Burke for what he was, a monster wearing human skin. But her curiosity overcame her. Something compelled her to continue.
With tentative steps, she pushed further into Burke's shrine of grim curiosity. She saw more organs in jars, evidence of burnt skin, and guts turned inside out. Then she came to the Vulture's cells. A ward of hundreds of locked iron doors, and behind each, lay a patient, an experiment, a cruel symbol of human evilness.
Approaching one door, she read a parchment that said:
“THE EFFECT OF HARMONIC CANNIBALISM,
SUBJECT 17,
TRIAL LENGTH - 2 YEARS”
Peering through a metal grate, she saw a haggard human inside of the room, with his face stained red hunched over a corpse, gnawing the flesh off its bone like a wolf. The subject gave no attention to the disgusted doctor as she backed away.
Running to another door, she didn’t bother reading the parchment. Peering through the metal grate she saw a woman strapped to a table. She thrashed against her restraints, calling out wallowed and empty cries. “Give it back,” she screamed. “Give it back!”
There was an open hole in her chest—a device holding the cavity open. Dr Milburn didn’t want to know what Burke had taken, or how long the person had been like this.
From door to door, Milburn ran and peered inside, her sick curiosity fuelling her every step. Behind the first few hundred doors she found sadistic experiments of the cruellest intentions, where there lay flayed bodies and dissected limbs. Men and women with torn-out eyes or kept awake for weeks on end. And in each room, scribbling away, was a black-masked Vulture, pushing the horrid experiment along.
Then she came to the Alchemical and Harmonic experiments, where the Vultures were trying to keep a heart beating without a body, to reanimate the human head as the Ash King once tried centuries earlier. And then finally, worst of all were the auditoriums and theatres where doctors were pulling apart living people on stage, as the Vultures watched through their beaked masks.
When Milburn came to the final door, she knew not what to expect. She had seen every horror she had ever imagined. From two bodies sewn together, from animal parts fused with subjects and flayed men being force-fed different acids and poisons to see how the body would handle them… but she knew whatever was behind the final door would somehow be much worse.
Pushing the iron door aside, and her expectations were dashed. She found not another barbaric experiment watched over by black-masked vultures, but a library. Hundreds of crimson leather-bound books lay upon dusty shelves surrounding a single desk where Decan Burke himself sat.
“Dr Milburn,” he said, unsurprised. He was more focused on the meal in front of him than anything else. “What can I do for you?”
Milburn’s mouth was dry. Her soul was as heavy as lead and her eyes were wide from the horrors she had seen. “Decan,” she screamed, “What in the name of the Mother have you done?”
“My research,” Burke said, as if innocently answering the simplest of questions.
“The horrors I have seen do not equate to research!” Milburn spat, disgusted and distraught.
Burk still showed no emotion. “But Dr Milburn, you see, I have saved hundreds of more lives than those who I tend to down here.” Burke blinked his eyes bashfully. “These are all beaten soldiers, rapists, and thieves. Not one of them is of any use to society at all. Here, these ingrates can add to society, and not cost us. Here, they are worth more than gold. They are tools.”
Disgusted, she shook her head refusing to accept what she had just seen. Dr Milburn tried to bolt—tried to run away. These experiments had been so cruel and so thoughtless that Milburn had to believe that Burke had been blighted by some sick demon. No man would do any of this of his own free will.
But Milburn was wrong.
Decan Burke acted for himself. Burke had financed and overseen every cruel experiment, while rewarding his Vultures and his snatchers. With a click of his fingers, Burke's Vultures ceased Milburn, and with the flick of his wrist, she was never seen again.
To this day, nobody knows what happened to Dr Milburn. Some believe that Burke locked her away, adding her to his host of games and studies. Some believe he devoured her, eating every last trace of her. But in truth, there was no sign of her after she delved into Burke's crypt.
This story would be lost to us, and Burke’s monstrous deeds would have continued unknown if Dr Milburn hadn’t sent her assistant away for help. If she hadn’t confided in him about her suspicions and findings before venturing deep into the morgue.
But days after her disappearance, finally, the Law of Tyne broke into the Sanctum and discovered the horrors for themselves. They found hundreds of preserved bodies and thousands of ongoing experiments. They found the ledgers bound in human skin and burnt them all. One by one, the staff of the Sanctum and the law hunted down the Vultures and anyone who had worked under Burke. They interrogated them, testing them for demons and signs of blight. But when they came out clean—when they were found to have committed these crimes while of sane mind and body, there was no other option but to tie them to the
Pyres of Tyne and burn them for their monstrous crimes.
Burke, however, was a special case. Yes, he had cruelly played with thousands of lives, and likely saved ten times as many—and would continue doing so until the sun failed to rise… but the Sanctum had to punish him justly.
Rather than sentencing Burke to death for his crimes, they instead preserved him with an alchemical formula of his own creation. This would allow students for the rest of time to practise Anatomy on his corpse. Even in death, he would continue to further the knowledge of medicine and the inner workings of the body.
Never to find rest and never allowed to enter Annwyn.
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