by Dan Avera
You will die here, a voice said in his head, though Will could not be sure if it was the specter or simply a memory. Turn back. But he could not turn back. The wall of fog—much closer now than it had been only moments before—loomed behind them. There would be no going through it. He shook his head in frustration. Gefan's Holy Light, how in the name of the Void am I supposed to turn back? Leave me alone, damn you!
“I can show you the way.”
Will whipped his head up in surprise, just in time to see the Eastland girl dart off to his right, her little body glowing like a beacon between the trees. No, he thought, impossible. It's only my imagination. And yet he hesitated, unsure. What if it was indeed a spirit from the Void? But if it was the little girl, why would she help him? It made no sense—she had no reason to.
“Captain?” Sam said, a note of anxiety pitching his voice. “Your orders? The fog is getting closer. We need to move.”
Will looked off in the direction the girl had gone, hesitating for only a moment more. No, he thought again. No...she isn't real. I'll get my men lost. Or killed. He stood and glanced at the blood on the tree. “We can't go back,” he said aloud, “so we press forward. Stay sharp.”
They followed the blood on the trees, the streaks pointing the way like ruby arrows that led them further and further from the wall of mist at their backs. It was never far behind, though, never out of sight. It loomed behind them, a pale specter that seemed to hound their footsteps no matter how quickly they ran. To Will it did not seem natural—perhaps it was some Void-spawned thing conjured by their enemies to herd them into the waiting trap. But no, such an idea was ridiculous. Those powers did not exist, just as the Eastland girl no longer did. This life is taking its toll on me, Will thought as he brushed his fingertips against another stain. After this...I need to leave Castor. He will understand. I just need to live through this, and then I can be done with sellswording.
And as if on queue, he found Rik's body. He skidded to a halt, his boots digging furrows in the soft earth, and like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside he felt his heart plummet.
The villagers had been horrifying, to be sure. Their bellies opened and their bodies splayed in an archaic symbol for a long-dead god, Will was certain they would haunt his nightmares for years to come. But Rik...
“Spirits above,” Sam whispered, falling to his knees beside Will and covering his mouth with his hand. “Spirits...spirits above...”
The boy had been hung by his remaining leg from the lowest branches of an enormous oak; whoever had put him there had used his intestines to tie his ankle to the thickest part of the wood. He had been opened from belly to throat, his organs exposed and his ribs broken outward as though to welcome whoever found the body with an embrace. Only half of his face remained; the other was a shredded, bloody mess, undoubtedly the work of whatever creature had gnawed the fingers from his left hand.
Wait... Will froze, caught suddenly in the thrall of memory. He had seen this before—the same brutal, animalistic pattern that, when inspected closely, inevitably began to seem less bestial and more human.
“Yaru,” he whispered, and with blinding speed he cast his torch to the ground and drew his war hammer. “Yaru!” he cried, and his men paled visibly as they, too, cast their lights at their feet and drew their weapons with shaking hands.
He should have seen it before—red eyes. Sand dragons and dhe'ghar glowed a yellowish green at night, but only yaru had eyes the color of blood. No, he remembered, his eyes darting frantically around the forest, only red at night. They're black during the day. Black as jet.
There was no scream when the first man died—just a strange, sickening squelch and a muted gasp, which was followed closely by the thud of metal into soft earth. Will whirled to his left just in time to see a man's arms disappear into the wall of fog.
The second man did scream—a short, clipped, ragged thing that ended as abruptly as it had begun. It sent a shiver down Will's spine. Grown men were not supposed to scream like that.
“Circle!” he cried, standing with the mist to his left and the oak to his right. “Form a circle! Get your backs together!”
They did, but not before he saw from the corner of his eye a pale, ghostly shape dart from the fog bank with impossible speed. There was a flash of crimson and a glint of teeth that shone orange in the torchlight, and then it was gone, dragging a third flailing man into the fog. The mercenary screamed in terror, and then again in pain before his cry was cut short with a loud, wet crunch. Will fancied he saw for the briefest of moments a spray of darkness that marred the unbroken mist.
And then the chittering began. It was exactly as he remembered it—the lure, the ambush, and now the noise, that high, keening giggle that could have been a child or a small dog. It came from everywhere at once, punctuated randomly by long, piercing shrieks that fell somewhere between a woman's enraged scream and the roar of a plains lion.
“Gefan have mercy,” one of the men whispered, the sound of his chattering teeth nearly drowned out by the nightmarish din.
And then they came. It was not fast as Will had anticipated, nothing at all like the time he had hunted them in the mountains. The noise never stopped, not even when they crept on all fours from the swirling veil of fog or the dark shadows that the torches could not touch. They clambered cat-like from the trees, the muscles beneath their naked skin rippling with anticipation.
That was the thing he remembered most—the skin. There was no hair, nothing to shield the yaru from the elements, and their pale hides glistened from sweat or mist; he could not tell which. They were man-shaped, but Will knew from the past that had they been standing, they would be a head higher than him at the least. There were no lips, just a mouthful of yellowed, grinning teeth that seemed to be far too plentiful. Where there should have been a nose there were narrow slits that flared as they caught the mercenaries' scents. Where there should have been ears, there were only holes. Fingers and toes ended in long, deadly claws that could open a man from chin to navel as easily as any sword. And there were no genitals—just smooth, uninterrupted skin.
One yaru clambered from the branches of the oak, pausing on its way down to sniff at Rik's corpse and tear into his side, wrestling free a mouthful of bloody flesh that hung with stringy bits of viscera.
The noise stopped abruptly, and the sudden silence that followed in its wake was deafening. Will unconsciously yawned to pop his ears.
“Clever,” said a voice, the single word cutting through the night air with all the cold, emotionless precision of sharpened steel. It was a man's voice, dull and devoid of any inflection. “Always so clever. And yet...Davin would never have fallen for such a ruse. Not even as a boy.”
Will felt his heart skip a beat. They can talk? he thought in a sudden panic. What else can they do?
“Clever of you to follow the signs. Clever of you not to follow the girl.” The voice seemed to curve upward at the very end, giving the last statement the hint of a question. “Or perhaps...not. Time will tell.”
A chill ran through Will's body. How had the yaru known about the Eastland girl? Was she...real?
When a little boy stepped from behind the oak Will felt his heart sink. The same boy I saw in Prado, he realized. The one who was staring at me in the tavern. But when he turned to look at the boy face-on his breath hitched. The child was not afraid in the slightest. He simply gave Will a blank stare, his dark eyes reflecting the flickering torchlight with a dull, dead luster. It was...cold. Calculating. Completely devoid of any emotion. Will felt his blood run cold.
“Very clever,” the child said in that grown man's voice. It sounded almost flanged, as though there were multiple people speaking in unison, but the effect was so soft that it may very well have been Will's imagination. “I can see it even through the eye slits in your helm. Even in the darkness. You recognize me. Perhaps you do not realize it yet, but something deep inside of you stirred at the sight of me.” The child sighed, and it was such a sad,
defeated sound that Will felt his heart twist deep in his chest. “You have the same eyes as Davin. Beautiful eyes. Chilling eyes.” The boy shook his head. “I hated those eyes.”
Several of Will's men were darting confused glances in his direction. “I...didn't know you could speak,” Will said lamely, his mouth oddly dry. “That's new.”
“Perhaps not as clever as I thought,” the child-thing said, and its eyes flashed momentarily red. “No questions about who I am? About why I was in Prado? How I was in Prado?”
“Well...” Will said slowly, feeling somewhat ridiculous for having a conversation with a yaru. “Who are you, then? Why and how were you in Prado?”
The child stared at him impassively, saying nothing. “No,” it finally murmured, its voice so soft that Will had to strain to hear it. “No, perhaps I was wrong. You are nothing like Davin. Not yet. How fortunate of me to find you before they did.” Will opened his mouth to speak, but the boy was not finished. “No,” it whispered, its eyes flashing again, “I can see it in you, buried deep inside. And...something else. Different. You are him, but you are...not.” Something flickered across the boy's face, so quickly that it might never have been there at all. But Will had seen it so many times before that it was as unmistakable as the back of his own hand: fear. “Curious,” the boy murmured.
“Captain,” Sam whispered, “we should move—force our way out and—”
“That,” the child-thing interrupted, “would be most unwise.” He gestured expansively at the yaru that crouched anxiously around them. “They have not eaten for some time, and a chase would only anger them.”
“Then what do you want?” Will asked, his voice much harder than he felt. “If you're going to kill us, then be done with it. I'll not have this waiting around.”
“I am going to kill you,” the boy said, “but I wish first to speak. To understand.”
“To understand what?” Will growled.
The boy cocked its head as though curious, and for a moment did not respond. When it did, its voice carried the faintest flicker of emotion. What that emotion was, however, Will could not be sure. “You do not recognize me,” it said. “Nor do you recognize the name 'Davin'. This has never happened before. Even the sandwoman recalled feeling a brief moment of recognition when she met Davin for the first time.”
Davin, Will thought, wracking his brain. Something did strike him as familiar about the name, though he could not remember where he had heard it before. His mind was a jumbled, chaotic mess that refused to concentrate on anything other than the threat before him.
“Something is different,” the boy continued. “You are not the same.” He gave Will another long stare, the reflected fires dancing in his eyes lending him a disturbingly demonic appearance. “I am glad it was you who came first,” it said abruptly. “It would have been most tedious to kill the other one and wait for you to seek revenge. You have my thanks, such as they are worth.”
Will's men flicked another flurry of nervous glances his way, but he said nothing.
“Times are rapidly changing,” the boy said, having apparently expected nothing in the way of a reply. “The dawn of something new is at hand, as it should have been so long ago. Were I anything else, it would sadden me that you will never be a part of it.”
As though launched from the string of a crossbow the yaru snapped into action. They had been anything but motionless, fidgeting with mad anticipation throughout the entirety of the boy's conversation, but the sudden movement caught Will so completely unaware that he only barely brought the point of his sword up in time. The yaru that had leaped at him adopted an oddly human look of surprise as his blade slid easily between its ribs and out through the skin of its back. It hung there for a moment, red eyes staring stupidly at the reeking blood running down Will's sword, and then he planted his foot against its chest and drew his arm back, letting it fall to the ground. Liquid darkness, red as a ruby in the torchlight, pulsed rhythmically from the wound and ran down its front.
Then, to Will's surprise, something strange happened. Time seemed to crawl around him, moving far too slowly for it to be the familiar battle-calm that settled over him during a fight. He looked around in confusion.
To his right, Sam, his face creeping into the beginnings of a feral snarl, was bringing his sword down in a cleaving arc toward a leaping yaru, its claws outstretched and angled like knives toward his chest. Sam's sword would never fall in time.
To Will's left, a yaru had just begun to tackle another man and was drawing his throat toward its glistening fangs. The man had a look of surprised horror etched across his face, and the mace he had been holding was now tumbling from his loose fingers.
And then he looked back to the oak tree.
Something awoke inside of him at the sight of the child-thing, some deep, primal emotion that he had never experienced before. Rage, unbridled and white-hot, pure in every sense of the word, tore through him with all the force of a hurricane. It boiled his blood, scorched his skin, pounded against his skull until there was nothing else but the anger, the grinding hate that was centered completely on the thing masquerading as a child. He wanted to kill it, rip it in half with his bare hands, tear into it with his teeth like a rabid animal, and just as the fury threatened to boil over and consume him he felt, just as he had in Brightstone, that thing stir deep inside of him.
It shifted in his chest, writhing like a snake as it struggled to be free. It whispered in his ear, the words too soft to hear, but he understood their meaning all the same.
“Fire.”
The word was so quiet, so hushed, that even he could barely catch it as it tumbled from his lips. And yet, for a single instant, it seemed the world paused. There was no sound, no movement, nothing but that one, beautiful word.
He blinked.
The feeling was gone.
Sam screamed as the yaru drove its claws deep into his chest, bowling him over in the process. With his free hand he drew the dagger at his hip and plunged it into the yaru's neck, stabbing it again and again until fitful sprays of blood jetted from the wound and spattered across Will's arm and the side of his face. At the same time the yaru on his left tore into its victim's throat with its teeth, and Will felt wet warmth splash across neck and shoulder.
It happened too quickly for his reeling mind to react, and by the time he had regained enough control to swing his sword into the second yaru's neck its victim was dead. Behind him he could hear Sam drawing his last ragged, wheezing breaths.
Silence. It was so sudden and so oppressively thick that it stopped Will in his tracks as surely as a stone wall. The yaru, he realized belatedly, had not made a sound. Only the men had cried out, and now they, too had stopped. He pulled his blade from the still-twitching yaru corpse at his feet and looked around.
A lot of blood on the ground, he thought, and his gaze roved across the ravaged bodies of his men with an oddly distant fascination. It was almost as though he were viewing them from a long way off, or perhaps through another man's eyes. That was fast, his mind mumbled sluggishly. Thought we'd hold out a bit longer.
“What did you say?”
He looked up to find the young boy staring at him, its face no longer emotionless but twisted ever so slightly into a delicate mask of fear. Had the effect been on anyone else—a trouper, perhaps, or one of Prado's resident thespians—it would have been a remarkable bit of acting.
“What?” Will asked, his words coming hoarsely from a mouth suddenly dry.
“What did you say?” the creature asked again, its eyes flashing red. The yaru all began to creep away from Will, hissing in agitation at their leader's sudden fright.
Will looked around at his dead comrades once more. “Killed them,” he whispered. “Just like the villagers.”
“What,” the child hissed, “did you say?” The child began to grow then, its body twisting and stretching grotesquely to a symphony of snapping bones and squelching flesh. Its clothing melded back into its skin, which began
to bubble and churn as it adopted the pale hue of yaru flesh. Within moments what had previously been a young boy now towered into the air, fully half again as tall as Will. It tensed its muscles experimentally and gave a low growl. The other yaru shrank back in fear, chittering and hissing as they scuttled away to safety. “Answer me!” the monstrosity screamed. “What did you say?”
Will stared in mute horror, his mind finally snapping back into normalcy. His eyes darted from corpse to bloody corpse, and then to all the yaru growling menacingly at him from a safe distance. There were undoubtedly more behind him. I can't win this, he realized, the knowledge of his own doom settling like a leaden weight in his chest. He tightened his grip on his weapons and gritted his teeth. Won't take me without a fight.
“You have no idea, do you?” the massive yaru growled. “I saw it in your eyes, and still you do not recognize the call.”
The creature was right: Will had absolutely no idea what it was talking about. The night's events had all conspired to render him confused, angry, and more than a little frightened, and his mind had been left without even the faintest inkling as to the yaru's desires. But looking at the corpses strewn around him, Will realized that even if he was meant to die, he would much rather make his killers work for their meal.
So he ran. He turned without a second thought and plunged into the wall of fog, swinging the spiked end of his hammer into the nearest yaru's head as he went. It gaped at him in surprise and its arm reached reflexively for him as he passed before it slumped to the side, dead.
The mist's innards were just as solid as Will had suspected and he silently cursed his bad luck. He could barely see three paces ahead of him, and when he ran into the first tree he slowed to a quick jog. It did little good, though, and after only a dozen steps he was given the niggling suspicion that the yaru had somehow taken control of the forest. Branches lashed him like wooden whips, pinging off of his helm and plucking at his clothes. His boot caught on something and he fell flat on his face.
