The Witchstone Amulet

by Mason Thomas

  “Stay down,” Dax hissed.

  Hunter ignored him for a moment. The figure drifted behind the four kug’ra like a grim shepherd, dressed in black leather and with a cape that caught the wind and flowed behind him like waves of oil. He looked small in comparison to the others, frail almost, but Hunter still put him above six feet. He glided through the grass as if floating, his shape lissome and delicate. His complexion was ghostly pale, like fresh plaster, and black hair ran in a slick sheet down either side of his gaunt face.

  A curl of horns extended out of his temples. Horns like a ram.

  Hunter lowered his voice to a whisper. “Tell me that is part of a helmet.”

  Dax didn’t respond. He was closely monitoring the movement of the four kug’ra with narrow eyes.

  “What is that?” Hunter pressed. “Some kind of demon?”

  “That is a Heneran. A powerful one at that,” Dax said low in his throat. Hunter didn’t want to ask how he knew that or what it meant. The eyes of the Heneran turned to gaze directly at them. “Get. Down,” Dax repeated.

  This time Hunter obeyed.

  Dax, crouched on one knee, frowned and scratched his chin in thought. “Our work back there clearly attracted the attention of someone important, and your inept blundering through the woods likely led them right to us.”

  “What do we do?”

  “You’ve done enough. I’ll handle them. Did you see the far tree line? Straight east.”

  Hunter nodded.

  “Stay low, and head for there. Once in the trees, wait for me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Save our asses,” Dax said, and then he slunk off silently out of their hiding spot. A second later, he vanished. No movement. No sound. It was as if the land had consumed him.

  Hunter opened his mouth to call out “Wait a minute,” but caught himself. It was too late. Dax was gone, and anything said above a whisper risked him being heard.

  Fuck. Hunter’s heart spiked with a fresh surge of adrenaline. What was he supposed to do if he ran into trouble? And how would Dax find him again anyway once he made it to the trees? And if Dax got himself killed or captured, what then?

  He risked another look out. The search party was spreading outward, and a couple kug’ra were angling his way. He had to move or they’d stumble right into him. Dax had left his pack behind; Hunter slipped his arm and head under the strap, grabbed the sack he’d been carrying and the mace, and scurried out awkwardly from the seclusion of the brush. Every movement seemed to announce his location. Even his breathing seemed too loud.

  How had Dax done this so effortlessly?

  Trying to minimize the shifting of the grass stalks around him—and silently grumbling curses at Dax—he shuffled along the ground as fast as he dared. Dax had probably abandoned him. Let the search party find Hunter, and then Dax could make a clean escape. With his mom’s amulet.

  Behind him, he could hear the grunting and the swoosh as their clubs swiped through the grass.

  Hunter kept crawling—and with the two unwieldy packs and a mace to contend with, it was a slow and inelegant progress. He had no idea how close he even was to the tree line. Or if he was even still heading the right direction. He could be crawling in circles as far as he knew.

  The sound of rustling grass was alarmingly close. One of the kug’ra had drifted closer and was maybe ten yards from him. It grunted out something, and from the other side of Hunter, a second kug’ra responded. Hunter was stuck between them.

  If he moved, they’d hear him. If he stayed put, they could stumble right into him. He set down the sack and let the strap from the leather pack slip off his shoulder, then brought his feet under him in a squat. He tightened both hands around the handle of the mace and was ready to spring if it got close enough.

  The sun was at the horizon and the light was failing quickly. The sky was still indigo, but on the ground, packaged within the clumps of tall grass, night had snuck up on him. He scanned the direction of the noises for movement, but everything around him was now choked in shadow. The sounds seemed close enough for him to see something—anything. But nothing. Beyond his tiny sphere was only thickening darkness.

  His thighs burned from the low, constricted squat. But he was afraid to change his position now. Any move might make a sound or shift the tops of the stalks around him.

  Something darker than the shadows swooped through the grass two yards away from him. The kug’ra was nearly on top of him. He adjusted his grip on the mace’s handle.

  A high-pitched squawk erupted in front of him, and a dark shape bulleted directly over his head. A large wing batted Hunter in the face as the bird soared up into the air, making angry squawking protests as it lifted.

  Hunter fell back onto his ass, and it took all his willpower not to cry out in surprise. He held his breath, waiting for the reaction from the kug’ra. In front of him, he heard snorting laughter. It had surprised them too.

  Then it started moving closer.

  Through the tassels that waved in the evening breeze , he saw the head of the closest one. It was looking to the right, at its companion, still chuckling deep in its throat. A turn of its head and it was over. All it had to do was look down and it would see Hunter on his ass. In no position to attack.

  Every muscle tensed, ready to act. He tightened his knuckles around the wood. His heart was in his throat.

  A sound blasted from across the field. A horn. The kug’ra started, and it spun toward the sound and constricted in surprise. It pulled back its upper lip in a snarl. Long yellow teeth glowed in the fading light. It and the nearest companion grumbled and snarled a quick exchange, and the two of them bolted through the grass in the direction of the horn.

  Hunter collapsed to the ground and rolled onto his side. Eyes closed, he waited for his panting breath to diminish. Once his breathing was under control, his heart no longer threatening to rupture, he rose and peered over the top of the grass. The kug’ra were on the move, galloping across the field—toward what, Hunter couldn’t see.

  The Heneran glided in their wake. His palm was extended outward, and a blue glow seemed to race from him across the surface of the grass, shards of light darting over the tassels like manic fireflies. The shards whirled and zigzagged. Searching.

  Searching for Dax.

  Hunter watched the chasing lights with dread in his gut. Dax was out there somewhere, not only hiding, but leading the search away from him. Was he equipped to hide from something like that?

  Dax had been true to his word. He was risking his life to lead them away from him instead of taking the opportunity to ditch him and make it to safety himself.

  Every muscle compelled him to run toward them. Every instinct told him to fight. Maybe he could sneak in behind and take one or two of the kug’ra out. He’d been trained to run toward the action. On the rugby pitch, that was his one job—get where the ball was and stop others from reaching it.

  But this wasn’t a rugby pitch. And this wasn’t his world.

  It was the jets of light skimming over the tops of the grass that convinced him to resist the impulse to follow. He had no way to fight against something like that. And who knew what else that demon-looking thing could do? The search continued—which implied they hadn’t located Dax yet—so he was, for the moment, not captured. If Hunter tried something, he might only manage to make things worse. He had no choice but to trust that Dax knew what he was doing.

  Yet as he collected the gear and scrambled off eastward at a low crouch, his insides were twisting with guilt for running away.

  Hunter spotted more of the kug’ra, a separate search party inspecting the area closer to the tree line. Keeping his head low, he tracked their movement, studying the pattern. They seemed less vigilant. Almost bored. This was a perfunctory search—they didn’t expect him and Dax to be this far. Hunter stayed at a crouch and drifted the opposite direction to avoid them, then circled back into the low brush that bordered the grassland. The sun was
well below the horizon now, and the last vestiges of the day faded from the sky. He pushed on blindly through the scrub until he was deeper into the cover of older forest.

  It was too dark to continue, so he settled onto the soft forest loam and leaned against a large tree to wait.

  Wait for what? he wondered.

  Was there really a chance that Dax would escape that? And even if he did, how would he ever find him here in the dark?

  A gust of wind sliced through the trees and bit at Hunter’s skin. Now that the sun was gone, the temperature was dropping rapidly. He knotted his arms in front of him. Cold was something he was accustomed to. He’d played plenty of matches on a frigid March day. But he wasn’t running around right now, pumped with adrenaline, and it was going to get worse before it got better.

  A pale light pressed between the tree trunks to the east. Two moons. Thick crescents, their light reaching under the canopy and giving the forest floor a ghostly sheen. One was familiar. The moon he knew—though the face of it was slightly different. The second was smaller and higher in the sky.

  What had Dax said? His home and this world were variants of each other. The same, yet not the same. The stars too were different, he realized. He saw no constellations that looked even remotely familiar to him.

  The face of the moon—his moon—tugged on his heart. Something about that one familiarity, that one shining equivalence between there and here, made all the other differences stand out in stark relief. He missed his home.

  A memory came to life in his mind, a distant recollection of how the sight of the moon always seemed to sadden his mother. He asked her about it once. “I can never see it the same way I once did,” she told him.

  He hadn’t understood what she meant then. He was beginning to now.

  The night sounds pressed in around him with fervor. Bugs, birds, frogs—other critters Hunter could not identify—sang out in a cacophonous chorus. A woodpecker repeatedly tapped out exactly four beats against a tree, providing the percussion to the ensemble. But fatigue had settled deep into his bones. The long day of action and anxiety had amassed in his system and finally taken its toll. Head against the tree, his eyes drooped, but the sharp wind and a persistent rustle of leaves not far from him kept jarring him awake—fear that the kug’ra were now sweeping through the trees. Or perhaps, hopefully, it was Dax’s return.

  But from the movement of the two moons, rising higher into the night sky, hours had drifted by. And Dax had still not returned.

  Captured? Or had he abandoned him? Either seemed likely.

  So what now?

  The sounds around him eerily cut out. They simply ended, as if someone threw a switch. The forest around him fell into an uneasy silence.

  Hunter waited, very still. Something was happening. Some inner sense warned him of danger. He lifted to his feet.

  A light emerged from the darkness a short distance away. Hunter blinked at it. The trees obscured the source, and the light stabbed between the trunks, pure and intense, like a headlight. But it possessed a warmth too.

  He wondered at first if someone was approaching, another of the Heneran maybe, and this was more of the power Hunter had witnessed emitting from its fingers. But the light was steady, unwavering. And strangely, nothing about it felt alarming or threatening. More the opposite—it piqued a curiosity in him. He needed to know the source of it.

  He drifted left to glimpse the source, but it remained just beyond his sight. He stepped closer and angled right. Same thing. Every time he moved for a better vantage, the source of the light was still obscured. He saw no movement, heard no sounds. But the light remained, pure and welcoming.

  He considered ignoring it, sitting back down and waiting for Dax to find him, but something about the light confounded him. He needed to know what was producing it. It nagged at him until he started moving toward it. Beyond the next tree he’d see it, he told himself. And if Dax was going to find him somehow, it didn’t really matter if he was here or over there. He rounded the nearest thick trunk, but the source remained outside his view. He kept going. Passing the next tree. And the next. And the next. But always the source stayed just beyond his reach.

  He picked up speed. Eventually he had to arrive at the source.

  The terrain rose beneath his feet. Stone outcrops broke the surface of the forest floor, shining like ashen blisters on the landscape. He broke from the trees at the base of a rocky hillside. The light radiated from a small cave halfway up the hill, the warm entrancing light dusting the sides of the stony walls within. It beckoned him onward. He was so close now. He could feel it. The source was there, just within the entrance.

  He jogged up the hillside, nearly giddy with excitement.

  Hunter slowed as he reached the cave entrance, a feeling of unease coming over him. But he fought against it. He had no choice but to keep going now. He was almost there, and he had to know.

  He stepped into the cave.

  Something tangled around his knees, and Hunter dropped to the ground. He landed hard, air rushing from his lungs. With a grunt, he tried to roll over, but a weight was scrambling up to his torso. A hand pressed his face into the dirt.

  “Shut your eyes, you fucking prat,” Dax hollered into his ear.

  “What are you doing?” Hunter mumbled as he tried to push himself up.

  Dax shoved a knee into the center of his back. “Shut your fucking eyes.”

  It was a relief he was there. Hunter hadn’t thought Dax would ever find him, honestly. But irritation burned through his blood. Why had Dax tackled him to the ground like that? All he wanted to do was keep going into the cave. He complied with Dax’s demands, begrudgingly, only because he was so insistent about it.

  Something changed. It was like being jarred from a nightmare. What was he doing?

  Where was he?

  “Keep your eyes closed,” Dax told him. Hunter felt a length of cloth tied around his head, covering his eyes. He felt dizzy, disoriented. His brain seemed to remember that it controlled his body, and his limbs spasmed all at once.

  “The effects will fade,” Dax said. He grabbed his arm and guided him to his feet. “But we have to move.”

  “What… what the fuck happened?” His memory seemed fuzzy, with pieces missing. He remembered moving toward… toward something he thought was beautiful.

  Blind, Hunter stumbled along with Dax leading the way. His legs were shaky, ready to buckle, but Dax’s surprising strength held him upright. The ground was sharply angled, and loose rocks rolled under Hunter’s feet. The two of them skidded down the hill at all possible speed.

  “All right,” Dax said finally, slowing them to a stop. He let go of Hunter’s arm. “I think we’re safely out of its range.”

  Hunter pulled the blindfold off. Dax had dropped to the ground and was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his head low between them. His back rose and fell from heavy breaths.

  “Zefora’s mighty hammer,” Dax said, “I can’t leave you unattended for one fucking minute, can I?”

  8

  DAX PULLED out the hard bread from his pack, tore it in half, and dropped half on the ground between them while keeping the other half for himself. “This is the last of it.”

  Hunter picked it up and dusted off the dirt and a small leaf stuck to it. He turned it about in his hand, scowling at the depressing breakfast. The cheese was gone. So was the honey beer. He pinched off a spot of green that might have been a flake of herb and took a bite.

  “Too dangerous to hunt,” Dax added. “We’ll have to wait until we are out of Heneran territory.”

  “How long will that be?” he asked.

  “Depends how quickly you get up and we start moving. Midday at the earliest.”

  A dark energy radiated from Dax. Hunter suspected he was in a perpetual state of ire—but the dial seemed to be turned up to nine this morning as opposed to his default setting of six. And Hunter was fairly certain it was directed at him. Presumably about the cave incident the n
ight before.

  Hunter climbed to his feet, his body still stiff from sleeping on the cold ground, though it was debatable whether he’d actually slept at all. He probed the flesh around his eye socket with his fingertips. Tender still, but less puffy. He could at least fully open his eye.

  “That light from last night,” he began haltingly.

  “The fey lantern,” Dax corrected, slipping the pack on his shoulder. “Will o’ the wisp.”

  “Yeah, that. Those don’t exist in my world. There’s no way I could have known about it. Or known it was dangerous.” He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to defend himself.

  Dax glanced over with a cool, indifferent look. He considered Hunter a moment before his eyes shifted away. “Just as there are dangers in your world that you know to avoid, there are dangers here. I’ll be more mindful of what you might not know. But more caution on your part would be appreciated. Assume everything can kill you.”

  Dax started walking, as usual not checking to see if Hunter followed. Hunter grabbed the mace leaning against a tree and slung it over his shoulder, lifted the burlap sack, and fell in behind him.

  “Surprised you came back for me, to be honest.”

  “As am I,” he replied in a low voice. “Be thankful I did.”

  “So, what would have happened if I’d entered that cave?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  THEY HEADED east through wooded lands that rose and fell, rose and fell. The day warmed quickly as the sun climbed in an unblemished blue dome, and Hunter was grateful the journey was spent under the cover of the heavy canopy.

  With no food in reserve, Dax reasoned there was no need to stop, and he kept them at a hard pace. He moved as if Hunter wasn’t there, not speaking or acknowledging him except when Hunter stepped on something that snapped, or walked through a dry branch he hadn’t seen. He would scowl back at Hunter, a silent reprimand to stay quiet. Hunter did his best to limit the noise, but there was simply no way he could compete with Dax’s freakish talent of moving without a sound. And when Hunter tried to mimic his movement, he only succeeded in slipping farther and farther behind.