by Heath Pfaff
“Are you sure, that could be anything.” Clover said, sounding uncertain.
“They told us which direction to go.” I answered. “They wouldn't have done that and not given us the tools we needed to find that direction. It’s a compass.” I said more confidently. “Nothing here is impossible, just difficult.”
I was thinking about the warning to “beware the hunters.” That didn’t sound good. We hadn’t been given any weapons for this trek, and that meant we were either supposed to find or make our own, or avoid whatever was hunting us entirely. With the snow and the wind it would be easy enough to cover our trails, but I didn’t like the idea that we had nothing to fight with if we needed it.
“They didn’t exactly leave us with any supplies.” Avan said, looking annoyed. “Normally they give us something, but all we have is the letter, the compass, and a cloak. That’s really not enough for this situation. In a few hours we’re going to be hungry and we don’t have anything to eat.”
“Eating is going to be the least of our worries.” I told him. “There is something out there that is going to come after us, either a person, maybe a Warden, or some kind of monster or monsters. Either way, we’re going to have to move quickly. We won’t really have time to eat. We need to get to the cabin as fast as we can. They didn’t say how far the trip was. Maybe it’s only an hour or so.” I was trying to be hopeful, but that seemed unlikely.
“It’s never that easy.” Clover said with a sigh. “I hate these team events. They’re always exhausting, and I always end up running the Rift afterwards.”
“Yeah, but now we have Lillin. She’ll get us through.” Avan was grinning. “No Rift for us this time.”
I shook my head, angry. “It’s not that simple. These are hard work. If you don’t put everything you have into this, we could lose. Zarkov and I won because we gave everything we had to the effort. If you want to win, and you don’t want to run the Rift for the next week, then you have to pretend like this is the only thing standing between you and death.” For me it was. I couldn’t come in last.
Smiles fell away a bit, both of them looking just a bit uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure what they’d expected from me, but apparently anger and purpose were not what they’d had in mind.
“Listen, we welcomed you into our group even though you are what you are, so you could be a little less . . . abrasive.” Avan said, a small flick of anger in his voice.
“I don’t need you to welcome me into your group, Avan. I don’t even care if you both hate me. For you this is apparently a game. You’re used to losing, but if I lose I’m dead. This isn’t a game. What’s more, this situation could kill us. People die at every single one of these events, and this one is particularly dangerous. The environment is designed to hurt us, the path is designed to hurt us, and there is something out there that wants to hunt us down and probably kill us.” I’d become increasingly angry as I spoke, and by the time I was finished I was shaking where I stood.
Avan turned away from me and refused to speak.
“We get it, you need this to live, but we’re just not that dedicated. We’re here because we want a good paying job in the private guard when this is all done. We don’t want to be recognized, and we don’t care if we make it to the end. If we finish even the first year here it’ll look good.” Clover said, shrugging. “You’re here because you did something terrible. Do you really think we should care about you? You’re probably a murderer. We’re not going to risk our lives or push ourselves harder than we have to. If things get too dangerous we’ll do what we always do, find someplace safe to hide until we can be pulled out.” She gave me a half smile and shrugged.
I’d never been so furious in my life. “I am here for murder. I killed someone in cold blood. He had a family, and I stabbed him in the chest until he died.” None of this was lies, though it certainly left out surrounding circumstances. “He didn’t even have anything of value to me and I killed him. I didn’t even dislike the man. Now here we are, and I actively dislike both of you, and I have nothing to lose at all. If we don’t get out of here fast enough, I lose, and that means I die. I am not going to roll over and die. I will kill both of you and drag your corpses to the end of this event if I have to, and if you think for a moment you can stop me from doing that, remember that I have placed high in every year one activity. I am far more dangerous than either of you. Even if you did manage to team up and take me down, I will kill at least one of you. It is time you start being very concerned with my life, because yours now depend on it.”
They both looked at me, incredulous, but I stared each of them down, and saw the look of defeat in their eyes before they turned away. This fight was over. They’d lost before they even tried to stand up to me. They were weak, and that made me angry. It wasn’t even really that they were weak, but that they simply didn’t care that my life was at stake. They didn’t want to get better. They were too concerned with what they wanted and couldn’t see beyond it at all.
“Would you really kill us?” Clover asked after a few minutes, voice timid.
“I’m dead if we lose this. Killing you and dragging your corpses with me gives me at least a small chance. Yes, I’ll kill you.” I wasn’t as certain of those words as I made myself sound. Killing them would get me kicked out of the school if I was caught. It was the last thing I really wanted to do.
“We’ll tell people you threatened us when we get back.” Avan said, voice dark and angry.
I laughed. “Is that a good idea? You’ll tell people that you were going to give up but I threatened you and made you go on? That just makes you both look like cowards, and if they believe you and decide to act on it, you’ll have to wonder for every moment if I’m going to find you and take you out before they get me, and believe me, I will.” It was shockingly easy to play the monster they thought I was, and I wondered how much, if any, of this was true. It all made sense in a way, but I wasn’t really a killer.
I was. What I’d done in my past was horrible, but that didn’t mean I wanted to, or could, kill again. Still, they needed to believe I could do exactly that or I’d be dead. The other two were quiet. They looked sullen and unhappy about the way this was turning out.
“Look at it this way, it’ll be hard work, but in the end you won’t be last place, and maybe you’ll have earned some small amount of respect. You have to hold here for three years if you want to get a fancy guard job. Is everything you’ve been through here worth it for a little bit of respect from your friends who will think it’s impressive you lasted a few months? You should have more respect for yourselves.” I said, my anger fading a bit. It was pathetic. They were pathetic, and it was hard to even keep my ire up at them.
We sat in an oppressive quietness for a time, only the sound of the wind to keep us company. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, though each time I’d looked at the compass watch it had only been a few more minutes. Time was moving slowly.
Finally there was a loud ding, and the compass alarm went off. It was time for us to go.
“Come on, we’re going.” I said. I walked forward and handed the compass to Avan. “Make sure you keep the black dot on our right side, and the red dot in front of us. If you don’t, we’ll die. There is no room for error. Keep your cloak bundled tight.” I looked at both of them. “Make sure every button is down, and keep your head low. We don’t have anything to cover our eyes, so snow blindness could be a problem if you stare at the white for too long. Avan, you’ll lead with the compass. Don’t take your eyes off the compass. Just keep going forward.”
“Wait, why do I have to lead?” Avan asked, suddenly sounding scared.
“Because you’re the one who thinks you can overpower me from behind and kill me before I kill you.” I said, guessing he’d at least have had that thought. “I’m not walking with you at my back. If you want to fight over it, I’ll win, and then you’ll have to do this journey badly beaten.” I told him plainly. I could tell by the look in his eyes that I’d c
alled that very well. “Come on, we’re wasting time.”
He started forward. The bitter cold wind was soon wrapped around us almost as tightly as the cloaks we wore on our backs. The constant whipping of the wind drove the cold through the fabric and into us far more quickly than I’d thought possible. Within an hour of walking I was beginning to wonder if we’d even make the pass. A half an hour later, we finally did. We ended up coming in a little to the south of where we needed to be. We reached a massive stone wall and followed it for a bit before we entered the narrow chasm, and just finding the pass was a massive relief at first.
Wind did rip down gap between the rocks, but it didn’t hit quite as directly. The forces of nature were far more powerful high above at the top of the pass, but by the time they got to us they were greatly diminished. Without the wind, it actually felt a bit warmer, though I was shivering, and it looked like the other two weren’t doing any better. My fingers were stiff and hurt where they clutched at the front of my cloak. I forced them to move and it was painful, but I could feel all of them and they all still responded to me, which seemed like a good indication that I’d avoided frostbite. Running the Rift in the snow had taught me lessons on that. Broken bones hurt, and they hurt a lot more when the healers worked on them, but frostbite was so much worse, especially when the healers fixed it.
It was amazing how something so cold, could burn so badly.
We pressed forward through the biting chill. The stone walls above us went up high enough that I guessed it was twenty times as tall as we were. The pass itself was just wide enough for all three of us to walk abreast and have a little extra room, though we didn’t do so. Thankfully the snow wasn’t so deep here. I was vaguely aware that my boots were cold and I feared that the melting snow may have come through them. That was never a good situation to be in.
A few minutes after we’d started our trip through the narrow pass, a strong gust of wind above sent a rock the size of my head smashing down into the chasm ahead of us. It landed just a few feet from Avan, causing him to shriek and fall backwards in terror. If it had hit him, I was fairly certain it would have split his head in two.
“We should go back! This is too dangerous. Maybe we can go out and around this mess.” Avan said, adding a few choice curses as he tried to recover himself.
“No, the instructions said to go through the pass. We’ll do as we were told. “ I growled back, cold and miserable. “Keep your attention at the top of the pass.”
“You said to watch the compass!” Avan snapped, voice angry. “Make up your damn mind.”
“We hardly need the compass now, Avan.” Clover said, and even she sounded annoyed with him, which was nice. I didn’t have to yell at him this time. “The pass only goes one way.”
We started forward again, Avan complaining about the fact that he was in the lead, and that we were being intentionally cruel to him, but I managed to phase most of it out. It was far easier to keep focused on the pain I was in. The physical discomfort was quite acute, but pain told me nothing had gone numb yet, which was what I was afraid of. A dark spot along one wall of the pass caught my eyes.
It looked like a lot of other indents I’d seen, but it seemed darker, deeper. I stopped in place. “Wait up.” I said, and the others stopped. Avan even shut his mouth for a minute. I moved closer to the strange indent, stepping around an old fallen boulder to get a better angle on what I was seeing. As my eyes adjusted to the darker area I realized I wasn’t just looking at an indent, I was looking at a cave. “There is a cave here.” I reported to the others, and then I moved forward cautiously. A cave was the perfect place for an animal to be hiding. I remembered that I’d been told we would be hunted and I wondered if this was a smart thing to do. I could be walking directly into the layer of something dangerous, but curiosity drove me forward.
As my eyes slowly adjusted to just how dark it was in the cave, more and more of the features of the inside of the area became clear. It didn’t seem all that deep, and there was a glint of something shiny ahead of me. I moved forward cautiously, wondering what could be reflecting light inside of a cave. I came forward a bit more and then stopped in my tracks as I realized what I was seeing. It was a sword, leaned against the wall. Occasionally the crosspiece caught the light and reflected it back.
I stepped forward and reached out to touch it, and then my eyes caught sight of the humanoid shape just beyond the sword and I jumped.
Clover screamed and Avan turned and ran.
“It’s alright!” I called back over my shoulder. Though it had taken me a long moment to realize that we weren’t in immediate peril. We were not going to die. Yet. “He’s dead.” I added, my eyes glancing over the thing in front of me again. It was a man, or what was left of one.
I came forward and took the sword. In many ways it was a standard weapon, but the crosspiece was an unusual bluish-silver, and the blade seemed lighter than I’d expected. It was in incredible condition for how long it must have set. The dead man it belonged to was nothing but bone and worn cloth, though that was odd as well. I came forward cautiously.
He was wearing a cloak, though it was a strange piece of fabric. It shimmered in a way, and for a moment I thought I could see right through it and the man shrouded in it, to the wall behind him. I lifted it with the tip of the blade and the obviously very old material ripped easily, the shimmering effect that seemed to pass light around the cloth dulled. “Magic.” I said quietly, though it was clear it was old magic and that it wasn’t working well.
Beside the man, on the wall, was a drawing that looked like it had been cut roughly with a stone and then stained in blood. It was black now, dried so long before that most of the blood was gone. The image looked like a sun in an ellipse like an eye. The beams coming from it were drawn in squiggly lines, and there were symbols next to it that looked like writing in a language I’d never seen before.
I looked more closely at the body of the man who’d owned the sword. His clothing, what was left of it, was torn open at the stomach as though something had attacked him and ripped into his entrails. The blood was black now, but I could see where it had stained the fabric. His leg was cut away at the thigh, and I found it lying near where his body was, as though it had been cut where he was sitting. That was strange. He had a bag next to him. It was old and partially rotted, the fabric black and fragile looking. I wondered what was in it and if it might be of value to us.
“Great, you have a sword, we should get out of here. This place can’t be safe.” Avan said, dancing nervously about the cave, his eyes on the body, no doubt imagining a thousand painful deaths that might have befallen the dead man, and were probably coming for him.
“Wait. He has a bag. I want to see if it has anything useful in it. We need weapons.” I told him, moving back to the body again. I found a knife on his belt and I pulled that and tossed it to Clover. The leather of the belt was fragile enough that I could pull the scabbard away with no difficulty, though the scabbard itself was only marginally better. I moved past that to the sack which I opened with the sword. The fabric fell apart as I poked it with the blade. I gasped and fell back as it came open. Arms and legs toppled out of the sack, or the remnants of them. The flesh had solidified in the bag, somehow partially preserved by being in the sack, though clearly far from fresh. It was all mummified, but the limbs weren’t like anything a man would have. They were monstrous, ending in claws that still gleamed and looked sharp despite their age.
Why did he have a bag of limbs with him? I shook my head. “Alright, we’re done here.” I told the others. “I don’t know what any of this is, but I don’t think we want to be here anymore.”
“Wait, we didn’t find me a weapon!” Avan complained.
“You can keep looking if you want, but I don’t think there is anything else here.” I told him. “And I’m not sure I want to stay here. We need to keep moving. I get the feeling we were supposed to find this, but I think it’s a warning as much as it is a place for
us to get some equipment. This man died, and he might have gone insane in the process. He cut off one of his own legs and was carrying . . . well, a bag of other legs. Something attacked him and tore out his guts, so I’d say he was in a pretty bad place, but it doesn’t really explain everything. Whatever killed him, I bet there are more of them out here, probably things with arms and legs like what he has in the bag. If they killed him, they can kill us to.”
“There are more of us.” Clover said hopefully.
“Yeah, and none of us are swordsmen, are we?” I replied, looking between them. “I’m proficient with a staff.”
“Bardiche.” Clover answered.
“Bladed gauntlet.” Avan added.
“I’m guessing this dead man was good with a sword.” I lifted the blade. “This is an incredible weapon, very well made. It’s simple, but perfectly balanced, and the metals are sturdy. The edge is perfect. This is not the type of weapon carried for show. This man was ready to fight, and he was still killed. That doesn’t bode well for us. The only advantage we have is that we’re not here specifically to fight whatever this thing is. We just have to get to the cabin. We can run if we have to, at least once we’re out of this pass.”
