by Mark Mulle
showed up, bringing them back to the farm on leads.
The trek back to the house didn't take terribly long, though we stopped once or twice for rest, food, and collecting wood and apples. By the time we got back to the house, the sky had begun to glow that sort of orange-purple mix it turns when you know the monsters are gearing up to come out, and all of us had full bags of stuff to sort out and get into proper places. As we opened the door to go inside, an arrow thudded into the wall right next to me. Good timing.
The topic of the giant, black monster-things needed to be breached, but nobody wanted to do it. Katy openly avoided it, instead setting off to cook up some meats and soups for the evening. Austin was obviously thinking about it, but not saying anything. Mary tried to bring it up a few times, but it seemed like that subject would just have to wait until later.
She took out the glass ball, and set it on the table carefully. “At least,” she said, “let's talk about this thing.”
The information we could gather on it was only rudimentary: that they seemed to be terribly fragile, that they seemed to make some kind of high-speed acceleration happen when they broke, and that they came out of killed black monster-things. That brought up the subject of how the things were killed, namely best by arrows from far away or by water. Melee weapons did not work well because it would teleport away to somewhere else as soon as it got hit, which finally breached the whole subject! There we go, I thought.
“So, what on earth are those damn things?” Mary asked, sticking a paring knife into the table and pulling it back out idly. “They showed up when Austin went into that shadow. What was over there, man?”
Austin shrugged. “I saw a box, but it was black like the lava stone and had green fittings. When I went to open it, that thing appeared, startled me. I had to get away from it, so I ran, and that's where you guys come back in.” He nodded. “I mean, I could not take that thing alone, so . . .”
“Of course, of course,” said Anne. “But it appeared when you touched the box?”
“Yeah, it sort of warped right in front of me just when I put my hand on it.”
“Then,” said James, “the source of our problems is that box. We go find it, see what it is, see if we can't get rid of it and the black things.” He held up a pouch full of gunpowder.
It was the best idea we had at the time.
Navigating back to the ledge took no time at all, and we were prepared this time. No loot bags, no extra stuff. I strapped an axe and a sword to my belt, swung a bow over my shoulder, and then slung two big buckets of water over the other shoulder. The piton Austin had used before was still there, and we added five more to lower ourselves down on pulleys. All six of us stood on the shadowed outcropping of stone on which Austin first met the creature.
Anne lit a torch, the sulphurous flash casting a grossly distended shadow of our forms across the ground. She pounded the butt of the torch into a crack in the wall, and as my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw the black box.
I cannot describe how captivating this box was. Its smooth obsidian surface incandesced with a scintillating glow, first green and then red and then blue from another angle. The lock on the front was a smooth emerald stone that, when I gazed into it, felt like it was trying to draw my very breath from my chest. I just had to open it, just had to get the treasure I absolutely knew was inside.
I was not the only one who felt this urge, it seemed, as my hand met with Mary's and Austin's as I reached for the emerald latch. Together, the three of us slowly opened the top of the box while Katy, Anne, and James made sure that nothing came from the shadows.
The inside of the box seemed to be deeper than it should have been and was impossibly black. Inside the box, there were four bundles of a yellow powder that was almost hot to the touch and gave off significant light when exposed to the air. I wondered briefly who put them there, but my thoughts were mostly on the box. I had to focus.
Why had the box called those creatures? Why didn't it call them this time? Where were they, and where did they come from? What did they want? I didn't have a lot of time to consider these things, as when Austin shut the top of the box, that dreadful low, dull, long sound that grew in intensity and signaled the oncoming of the creatures came from all sides, just like before.
“Stand your ground!” We made a circle, our backs together, and waited for the first one, all bows drawn and ready.
They came in waves, two at a time, for what seemed like forever, but our plan was phenomenally successful. When the first one appeared, we would dump some water at our feet. We would shoot it, so that it would warp—most likely nearest us—and be affected by its aversion to water. As it would start expressing its negative opinion of the stuff, we would douse it with more water and then let it do its thing. Then we’d simply collect all glass spheres at the end.
The plan went off without a hitch, no major errors or mistakes. Nobody was seriously injured, and in all, we came out with almost a dozen of those glass balls.
We finished the excursion by taking a pickaxe to the box, breaking it from the stone on which it had been bonded, and bringing it back up to the surface with us.
“And so ends the story of the horrible black monster-things,” said Anne, back in the house, as the six of us sat, eating grilled fish and baked potatoes and pumpkin pies. “I don't think they will be coming around any longer to make small talk,” she added, and everyone laughed. It seemed honestly like we were safe, but I had no idea what we had just caused. That night, I slept peacefully, thinking we were once again safe from those terrible warping things.
I woke up first the next morning. It was my day to get milk from the cows, so I grabbed a stack of buckets and opened the front door. Everything was silent, as it should be, but something in the early morning silhouettes was wrong. I could see almost as if there had been a fence built out of what looked like solid iron blocks, T-shapes going along in a row sticking out of the ground some twenty meters outside of the house line.
“What on earth . . .” I approached the closest one, a huge, heavy T-shape standing on the ground, its root buried in the soil. Strange marks all over its surface belayed that these were somehow melded or bonded together, but a single tap of my knuckles proved them to be solid iron.
Definitely not here yesterday, and definitely not put up by us. I turned, bolted back into the house, and roused everyone from their sleep.
“Dude, what the—?” James said, rolling out of his bed. “It's like the crack of dawn. What on earth would you—”
“No, listen, everyone, look outside. Just look,” I said, swinging the door open. Sure enough, there they were, silent, iron monoliths in the morning sun. It was only then, when the sun had finally come up over the horizon fully, did I see the faint, violet shine on them, like someone had spilled some dye on the stone and tried to wipe it away in spots.
Everyone knew exactly what that meant. “Bring them down,” said Katy, calmly and lowly. Pickaxes out, the monoliths all came down in less than an hour, the iron blocks all buried by the beach. None of that around my house, thank you.
The next morning, they were there again, closer this time. Again, we tore them down, and again, we buried the blocks down by the beach next to the first set of blocks. This was a great deal of iron, but where was it coming from?
On the third morning, a sort of hushed panic buzzed through us. These things kept getting closer every night! And the iron from the day before was never even taken from the beach! Where was this coming from, who was putting it there, and could those things really come above ground? We needed answers! We needed a plan!
We'd torn them down yet again, but before we took the pieces to the beach, Austin stopped us. “No, bring it inside. Let's make us some armor and weapons from this stuff and stake out the top of the house tonight. We figure out just how these things are getting here, and we stop the things that are doing it. We all know it's those creatures, but if we can fight them on our terms, then we'll have no problems at all. Let's get to wo
rk.”
All six of us worked at anvils and work tables until noon settled over us, except again for Anne, who, seemingly having noticed something about her anvil, had scurried off to the storage room. She came back a few minutes later with the stack of books we'd found in boxes in the mines and plopped them down on the floor.
We didn't ask because we knew she would explain anyway. “See how these anvils have this sort of v-shape here? And how there's always this little ledge at the bottom of the v? That's to put books here, I bet,” she said, opening the one on top and settling it onto the little stand portion of the iron tool. As soon as the book found its place, the pages suddenly fluttered, turning to a page full of diagrams and symbols and glyphs none of us could read. There was one glyph that we could all understand, though: it showed a man hitting a sword with a hammer and the sword glowing.
Taking up a newly-forged sword, she laid it on the anvil, picking up a hammer. It seemed to ring in her hand, and when she struck the sword with the hammer, the most extraordinary thing happened. The book exploded, all the glyphs and symbols on the pages flying off the paper and lining the sword's edge, burning into the metal. It all happened rather quickly and was over just as soon as it started, but the sword that lay on the anvil now gleamed like