by Chase Erwin
“This is only a theory, of course, but I think the only thing that could destroy a Cursed Amulet of this type is someone who is the polar opposite of its creator – an equal in form, but opposite in action and behavior.”
All eyes went back to looking directly at me.
“This is ridiculous. I was a prisoner under Dr. Kane. For eighteen months,” I stressed. “Do you all remember the night I was placed in your care? Ricken, you were there – what did you tell them?”
Ricken, working on the behest of a vigilante-spy organization called The Daggers of Allech, had been the one to rescue me from the Ravens’ evil lair. However, I was too close to insanity to know that, or that I had been escaping the Daggers’ protection for hours before The Winds of Andusk happened to cross paths with Ricken.
“I… I told them to take special care of you,” Ricken said. “Because you had gone through a terrible ordeal and I didn’t think you were yourself yet.”
I looked out the windows as snow began to fall. I tried to fathom every possible explanation in my head as to why I knew about the amulet but nothing about its meaning or its use.
“Pardon me,” Rook said. “I mean no offense – I speak as I find – but who is this Dr. Kane?”
I sighed, and as I sat back down at the window box I tried to succinctly tell Rook about Kane and his role in my past.
“And you say you remember the pendant but nothing beyond that?”
“That’s correct,” I said. “I know of it, but nothing else.”
“Put it back in your hand.” Rook stepped towards me and held out the cracked amulet. “Close your eyes and focus on its texture. Look into it with your mind and tell us what you find.”
I looked at him. “Are you crazy? The last time I touched that thing, it” –
“As I already explained, its charge is gone,” Rook said. His voice was soft, but his tone testy. “Whatever its purpose, it has done that. You must now tell us what that purpose was.”
Grimacing, I held out my hand. Rook placed the amulet in my hand and curled my fingers around it.
“Now close your eyes and focus,” he intoned.
No sooner had I done so, than I began to see dark shadows forming shapes. I couldn’t see details, just… visages. I saw hands holding two beakers of fluid. The left hand poured the contents of one container into the one being held by the right hand.
I “heard” words – rather, I remembered them as they were being spoken. “Bring me the dead one.”
Two figures dragged another humanoid-shaped figure towards a table and placed it on the tabletop.
The figure holding the beakers held out its left hand, and from my darkened vision, I could see the outline of an orb being created out of thin air – the person speaking was invoking a spell of some sort.
The orb floated to the body on the table and enveloped it. The figure of the body seemed to shrink, contort and curl into the orb. The orb then shrunk down further and further, until it was as small as an acorn.
The figure carrying the beakers poured the filled one over the orb. The liquid formed a crystalline shape… the amulet!
The beakers were put to the side and a hand picked up the amulet.
“Dracht k’yll vampirus slaff-ten mi kinbel,” the ‘voice’ said. “Tracht burgen flim y’koven esiencza, pluss’gava trekva prem!
“In the Name of the Grey Raven, I commend this soul to the Cursed Amulet. Vy’kallai Nachtremord!”
“Long live Nevermore,” chanted the two other figures.
The vision dissipated and I opened my eyes once more. Rook had a look of extreme displeasure on his face.
“Do you have any idea what you just said?”
“I didn’t even know I was speaking,” I said, “but I heard that foreign language. I don’t understand it.”
“Allow me to educate you,” Rook said. “It is Valkallian. An offshoot of the infernal language – long thought to be a dead tongue. Scholars have yet to make progress on converting most of it to common, yet it seems whoever was speaking had a full grasp on the tongue.”
“Vampirus,” said Taryn. “Could that by any chance mean vampire?”
“Quite,” affirmed Rook. “If I had to take an educated guess, I’d say what Abel described was the creation of a vampire spawn. A spawn that was housed inside that amulet.
The wind outside began to howl, blowing the snow in a million different directions as it fell.
I went pale as I realized what Rook was saying.
“And in breaking that amulet,” I said, “I just unleashed that vampire into the world.”
4. Undefined
Remi took a bite of an apple and continued speaking to us at the dining table.
“Felinials have two names,” she explained. “We have our birth name, which is longer, and which we only use amongst ourselves, and a shorter name we use interacting with anybody else.”
“So what is yours?” Beltrin asked, nonchalantly taking a napkin and dabbing a drip of apple juice from the corner of Remi’s mouth, causing her to blush.
Remi felt strong enough to make her way downstairs the morning after Rook’s arrival, so I made an impromptu brunch for the party.
She swallowed her bite of apple. “My given name is Remy’Lin Ghantyr Mandoleaf Imel,” she said. “Our shorter name is usually the first syllable or two of our given name, so… Remi!”
The Winds of Andusk, along with Caeden, had gotten into a spirited discussion about each other’s heritage. I was conspicuously quiet, the memories of my parents being small in number and generally fuzzy.
“Taryn, your turn!” Remi said, winking at them.
“Not much to say about my birth, I’m afraid,” Taryn said, twiddling their thumbs. “My adoptive parents told me they found me beside the body of my mother.”
“How horrible,” Fame said as she appeared with a basket of more fruit. “She died during childbirth?”
“No,” the purple fae shook their head. “It was much worse than that. I was told the gnomes that adopted me came across someone in the process of… of removing me from her womb.”
We all recoiled in horror at their words.
“They assumed whoever it was planned to kidnap me and sell me on the black market,” Taryn continued. “Evidently whatever he used to stab my mother had caught me in the spine. Which is what put me here,” they patted their chair.
Beltrin discussed his estranged parents, who had disowned him when they learned he was a snake-oil salesman; and his much younger brother, Belquil, whom he hadn’t seen since the tot was one year old. Caeden and Rook talked about their nomadic commune. Irek discussed his family, a band of thieves, and how he felt compelled to break away to study religion and follow a path of honesty and virtue.
When it came down to me, I sheepishly went through my background, though they knew most of it based on Ricken’s report to them the night I first met them.
There was a certain vibe I picked up on as I talked: unease. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it seemed as though I was becoming estranged from these people I had come to know as my friends.
That night, I went to bed early, complaining of a headache. Ricken took a labored sigh when I told him. He knew that a headache was a precursor to a nightmare.
My hair blew backwards against the icy blizzard winds. Nothing looked familiar, even if swirling snow and freezing rain hadn’t been occluding my vision. Everything felt foreign.
My arms were bare. I looked down at myself; I had nary a stitch of clothing. Every drop of sleet hitting my naked skin pierced like a knife.
There was no time to discern how I got there, or what had happened to my clothes. The familiar sound of evil laughter echoed behind me, flowed through my body.
Kane.
I didn’t dare look behind; I took off running. Each step on the frigid ground below hurt, blistering my skin. But I had no choice; I had to escape.
There was nothing but snow on each horizon as I sprinted through the s
eemingly endless field. Until suddenly…
Suddenly, I was on a frozen lake. Before me stood eight trees. Eight dead trees with broken branches, weighted down by the heavy snow.
On six of the dead trunks there was an unmoving body. I narrowed my eyes in order to focus past the storm.
Beltrin? Remi? No… Please, no…
Each of my friends was splayed across a tree. Taryn… Irek… Caeden… Rook… They had iron spikes driven through their middles, nailing them to the wood behind them. Each of their faces was contorted in pain, frozen in a permanent pose of torture.
But there were two trees untouched…
“Won’t you join them?” Kane’s voice echoed. I turned around, intending to fight… but there was nobody there.
“Ricken?” I called out into the open Deepfrost storm. “Ricken, where are you? Ricken, help” –
I had not noticed the ice splitting underneath my feet, so my plunge into the subzero water caused me to gasp in shock – instantly filling my chest with water.
Flailing wildly, I struggled and kicked my way towards the edge of the hole. I reached and tried to climb out, but the thin ice snapped with my grasp.
Kane’s figure materialized a few feet away. I still couldn’t see his face, but I could see his outstretched arm; I could hear him speak in a foreign tongue.
The ice began to reform from the broken edges – it was coming closer to me by the second.
“No!” I cried. I tried to think of some power to get me out of this lake before the ice entombed me. But the pain of the deathly cold water was preventing me from the necessary focus.
The pressure of the rapidly forming ice block pushed me under the surface. I watched, helplessly, as Kane walked with little struggle across the ice. He held another iron spike in one hand, a mallet in the other.
I was running out of air. I knew that no matter what happened, these were to be the final seconds of my life.
Kane placed the tip of the spike on the ice, just an inch or so away from my skull. He lifted the mallet and swung it down—
“Ricken!” I gasped, as my eyes snapped open. I looked wildly from side to side but saw nothing but the barely-lit furniture of our room. Not another dream? I sighed and rubbed my forehead.
As my head moved against the pillow, there was a strange sound coming from underneath.
“What is this?” I felt paper underneath the pillow. I stirred, unfolded the paper, and gasped.
“He left me another note,” I said, panicked, as I burst into the tavern.
Ricken, Beltrin, Remi and Caeden looked up at me from the table. They all had straight faces. They did not look shocked at my revelation.
“Didn’t you hear me? I got another note. It said” –
“Your time is coming,” Ricken and I said in unison.
“You saw it too?” I cocked my head to one side.
“I saw a lot more than that,” Ricken said, frowning. He looked towards the others.
“Abel,” Beltrin said, his voice soft and hesitant. “We’re not sure how to say this, but the last few nights, we’ve seen… strange behavior coming from you.”
I shook my head in confusion, my mouth hanging open. “What do you mean, strange behavior from me?”
Remi stroked her chin as she struggled to put words together. “We’ve each seen you walking around on the keep grounds for the last few nights.”
“You were digging through the snow underneath the sickly tree behind the keep,” Caeden said. “Rook confirmed it was you and reported it to me.”
“The night before, you were pacing around the tavern dining room,” Beltrin said. “I asked if you were alright, but you just ignored me. It was if you were possessed.”
The word possessed sent a chill through me. This all sounded so ridiculous and yet felt like it all had a ring of truth about it.
“And tonight,” Ricken said, his voice quavering, “you were at the writing desk in our room, a-and…”
“And?”
Ricken gulped. “You were writing, Abel. You wrote that note.”
“No…” I said. The room felt like had begun to spin. “No…”
5. A Taste
“Abel, where do you keep your garlic?”
I lifted my head from its perch, my right fist, and looked at Ricken absently. “Hm?”
“Your garlic,” he repeated from the base of the tavern stairs. “Where do you keep the bulbs of garlic?”
“Oh, um, in the basement larder.”
“Great, thanks!” In a blink, Ricken disappeared downstairs.
“I can’t believe I’m responsible for this,” I muttered to myself. I had been staring at the shards remaining from the amulet. They weren’t sharp, so I picked up a pinch of the remains and shook them around in my hand.
I looked out the large gabled windows of my tavern. It was the morning after another, heavier snowfall. The beautiful landscape of our keep was covered in a layer of white that shone in the sun.
Somehow, I felt colder inside than the snow that lay so peacefully outside.
“Abel?” It was Ricken again. “Do you have any wolfsbane?”
I looked at him oddly. “Wolfsbane is poisonous,” I pointed out, “why would I have any in the food pantry?”
“Ah. Good point. Disregard,” Ricken replied.
I blinked. “What are you” --?
Before I could finish my thought, he was back to the basement.
I shifted uncomfortably in the stool set up for me behind the bar. This was annoying. Fame was overseeing the hired cooks in the kitchen. Beltrin, wearing a cream-colored apron over his usual attire, was busing tables and delivering food.
This was causing me great frustration. All I was doing was pulling pints and mixing cocktails. It’s all anyone would let me do!
I made myself a mug of hot Rogue’s Cider and blew on the steam aimlessly as it wafted up towards my nose. Ah, the smell of winter. Apples, cinnamon, warm and inviting. Would that the world be such a comfort year-round.
Ricken finally came up from the basement, carrying a load of items in his hands.
“Care to tell me just what you’re doing now?” I gestured towards the garlic and the wolfsbane.
“Enwel sent for me a few hours ago,” Ricken replied. His tone was secretive, hushed.
“The Queen?” My ears perked up. Enwel was a close friend to the party, ever since we met at a royal function held by her late father. She, like myself, was a Wild Mage, unhappy with her powers and uncomfortable with her social status at the time of Princess.
When we discovered her own brother had orchestrated their father’s murder, the party and I did battle against him and a horde of undead. Ultimately we had to kill him.
Now forced into the role as leader of Galek, Enwel entrusted the Winds of Andusk and Ricken, formerly “The Kaa,” as intelligence and security for the kingdom.
“Enwel was put on notice that there was a rogue vampire of some sort making its way towards Galek,” Ricken explained. “I had to fill her in on what we knew… up to a point of course. And I wanted to make some silver bullets filled with a garlic and wolfsbane mixture should we need to dispatch one.”
I gazed upon his ingredients. “Well, you’re not going to get a good mixture with just the garlic and wolfsbane. You need to synthesize a coagulant to make sure it doesn’t stay a liquid.”
“Do what now?”
“Liquid in a bullet is just going to evaporate before it hits the target,” I explained. “You want the mixture to be lethal to the vampire, so like pellets in a shotgun, you need it to scatter throughout the body. A coagulant will do just that.”
“Always the chemist,” Ricken smiled, kissing my forehead. “Well, should I leave you to make the innards? I can get started on making the molds for the bullets.”
“Go on then,” I said.
As Ricken dashed back downstairs, I reached under the bar for a mixing bowl and my adventurer’s bag, within which I would find the chemical compounds
I needed to make the desired solution.
For about 20 minutes I pored over the bowl, firing off a charge of electrical energy or spinning the bowl on the surface of the bar to generate heat.
A reported vampire, I thought to myself… So soon after the amulet self-destructed. And it felt like some force, some being fled from the room after that burst of energy.
There had to be some connection.
“You’ve got a remarkable sense of focus,” said a somewhat familiar voice. I turned and looked to my left, at a far nook at the back of the tavern.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded from behind the bar. “I thought you were told not to show your face at my door again.”
“I know.” It was the drunken man who had disrupted the tavern the month before. At least this time he sounded sober. “I wanted to come and apologize for my beastly behavior that night.”
I arched an eyebrow and scanned over the man standing in the doorway. He was wearing the same shabby overcoat he had on that night, but his slacks and shirt were nicely pressed.
“Well…” I paused. “I suppose that is the least you can do.”
The man wiped his hands on a white handkerchief he drew from his shirt pocket and offered one of the hands to me. “The name is Sunfire, Driscoll Sunfire.”
I shook Sunfire’s hand firmly.
“Does that name not ring any bells with you?”
I released his hand. “I’ve told you; I have never met you before.”
Sunfire looked annoyed. “Fair enough,” he said. “I humbly apologize for the misunderstanding and the uproar I caused.”
“I accept that gracious apology,” I replied, my voice deliberate and low.
“Now, with that out of the way, may I order a meal?” He crossed to a far corner of the tavern and took a seat.
“I suppose so,” I said, following him with my pad, pen and a menu. I took his order and sent it over to the kitchen for the staff to begin cooking. Returning, I saw that Sunfire had whipped out a notebook and was scribbling inside it with a long-plumed peacock feather quill.
“Would you mind if I drew you?” he asked.
“Beg pardon?”
“I’m a screever by trade,” Sunfire explained. “Well, that’s what I do now. Before that I drew technical plans for a large company. Schematics, I believe the term. But lately I’ve taken a keen interest in drawing portraits.”