by Matt Forbeck
Having nowhere else to go, Archie decided that he should head north. The village lay on the Squid Coast, to the south, and beyond that only the open sea tumbled away. If he wanted to keep moving, he had to make sure he didn’t get trapped up against it.
Archie had never learned how to swim much less how to build a boat. Even if he could find something that would let him float on the waves, he didn’t know how to sail or row it. It didn’t seem all that complicated, but making any mistake in water that would be over his head should he fall into it could easily prove fatal.
Higher ground seemed like the wisest choice. Ideally he’d find someplace from which he could see any threats coming from miles away. There he could carve out a home in which he could finally feel safe.
If that meant he had to be alone, then he would bear up under that. At least that way no one could kick him out ever again.
High mountains ranged to the northwest and northeast, but a wide and easy valley forged its way between them. Archie decided to follow it and see where it would lead him. He didn’t have any particular destination in mind, and no well-trodden path presented itself to him. Instead, he navigated by the sound of threats emerging around him. Anytime he heard a zombie’s groan, a creeper’s hiss, or the clattering of a skeleton’s bones, he walked directly away from it. He had no way to know if fate, luck, or something more actively intelligent was steering him, but his path brought him more or less straight north.
At one point, a few days into his journey, Archie decided that he’d made a mistake. He needed to go back south to where the mountains were easier to climb. From there, he could either make his way into them properly, or he could try his luck in the Creeper Woods, as horrifying as that seemed.
It didn’t take long, though, for him to hear the groans of zombies and the rattling of skeletons coming from ahead of him. The noises of the mobs seemed to be hemming him in on three sides. The only way that stood clear and open was to the north.
Steeling himself, he began marching south again anyhow. With every step he took, the groans and rattles grew louder and louder until he felt sure that undead mobs were about to lurch out of the darkness straight at him.
And then they did.
He’d secretly been hoping that the noises had been some kind of trick. A ploy to get him to go north. A bluff without any teeth.
But the crowd of zombies that appeared out of the darkness, groaning and reaching for his living flesh, told him that he was flat-out wrong.
Fortunately, he spotted them before they could surround him. The closest one actually got within arm’s reach of him, and Archie had to duck to avoid getting grabbed and pulled toward the rotting mob’s busted-up mouth. He threw himself backward and rolled away on the ground before shoving himself to his feet and sprinting away back north again.
The best thing he could say about zombies was that they were slow. If enough of them surrounded you, they could cut you off from escape, but otherwise, he could easily outpace them.
The worst thing about zombies was—unlike the living in general and Archie in particular—they never got tired. They could keep walking all night long, right until the moment the sun came up and turned them into smoking piles of ash.
Skeletons were a bit faster, perhaps because they didn’t have all that rotten flesh on their bones slowing them down. And they carried bows, which meant that running from them wasn’t always effective. Even if you were much faster than they were, they could put an arrow or two in your back before you managed to race out of their range.
Archie could hear a bunch of skeletons rattling nearby, just behind the groaning zombies. He couldn’t see them under the cover of night, but if they spotted him and started firing arrows at him, he had no doubt they would fill him with enough arrows that someone passing by his corpse later might think him to have been not an Illager but a porcupine.
He had no choice but to run north and to keep running until he couldn’t hear any pursuit. He set to doing just that, but while the rattling and groans grew fainter and more distant, they never entirely faded away to the kind of silence his hammering heart demanded.
As the night wore on, Archie thought that he saw the sun rising before him, and he wondered how he’d gotten turned that far around. Had he been heading east ever since the zombie attacked him?
It wasn’t until Archie topped a low-sloping rise in his path that he realized the crimson light wasn’t the product of a rising sun. Instead, it came from a glowing river of lava that stretched before him.
CHAPTER NINE
Despair knocked Archie’s knees out from under him.
The lava seemed like it blocked his way entirely, stretching from one side of the canyon he’d been hiking through to the other. This meant that he had no way forward and countless undead mobs behind. He was finished.
Archie sat there and watched the lava flow as he tried to come to terms with his impending doom. He wished once again that he could have lived in peace in the village. Perhaps in time he’d have found a place of his own, maybe even next door to Yumi’s. They could have been neighbors, working in the fields and doing chores together.
She’d even started teaching him to read. There had been books in the woodland mansions, but Archie hadn’t been granted access to them. Even if he could have swiped one for a moment, he wouldn’t have been able to decipher it. But Yumi had shown him how.
That had seemed so magical to him, the idea that you could make shapes on a page—letters—that would put words from your head into other people’s heads. That you could store knowledge or feelings or even epic stories on those pages for other people to put into their heads whenever they sat down to read them.
He wished he’d been a better student. He wished he’d had a chance to read more. To learn more. To do more.
To be a better person.
To transform from an Illager into a Villager.
But now he would never have that chance.
Besides which, if the way the heroes and Villagers like Salah had treated him had taught him anything it was that they would never accept him. He could have become the model Villager, and they still would have looked down on him, kicked him, sneered at him.
In the end, they would have found some excuse to kick him out—just as they had. Working so hard to become one of them had been a fool’s errand from the start, and Archie now regretted even embarking on it.
A chorus of zombie groans shuffling up behind Archie thrust him to his feet. He had given up hope for survival, but that didn’t mean the mobs didn’t scare the wits out of him. He was too much of a coward to lie there and let them eat him when he could still try to run.
If it came to it, he wasn’t sure if he would run into the lava or let the zombies have him. His brain wouldn’t let him think about that. Not yet.
As Archie moved farther north, though, he saw that the cliff face to his right didn’t run quite all the way up to the river of lava, as he’d thought. A narrow passage stretched between the side of the canyon and the molten rock, off to the east. Scarcely believing his eyes, he sprinted for the clear and level strip of land and raced along it as fast as he could.
The entire time, he expected the land to end, leaving him trapped between the undead and the lava once again. The land turned from rocky to sandy as Archie went, and hope rose in his heart. If he could just hold out long enough, he might actually survive.
The barest hint of the breaking dawn—the actual dawn, this time—began to show in the east as the strip of land widened and spilled fully out into an expansive desert that sprawled before him. He stopped there for a moment, stunned by the fact that he had somehow managed to escape what he’d thought was certain death. Then he heard the groans of the undead mobs growing closer once again.
Archie walked into the desert. After he got a fair way out into the sand, he turned around to watch the mobs still c
hasing him. As they grew closer, the sun grew higher. It caught each of them in its rays, setting them ablaze one at a time and leaving nothing but ashes behind.
Now that he got a good look at them, these creatures seemed different than the standard zombies that he’d encountered before. They seemed older, drier. Less like zombies and more like husks.
A warm, whispering wind blew in off the desert and swept the ashes away. Soon there was nothing left of the mobs at all.
Archie walked all day long, putting the lava far behind him. The moment darkness enveloped the land again, though, the low groans and rickety rattles of the undead filled the air behind Archie once more. He decided not to give them a chance to catch up with him this time, and kept marching as fast as his aching feet would carry him.
Rain started to fall then, pelting Archie with large, wet drops that soon had him soaked to the skin. It turned the sands of the desert dark, and the clouds that blanketed the sky made the night blacker than ever. Soon Archie could barely see beyond the ends of his arms.
He kept walking.
Just as the rain transformed from a shower into a downpour, Archie heard a particular kind of hissing that came not from creepers but from giant spiders.
He peered through the drenched darkness behind him and spotted a row of glowing red eyes that could only belong to those spiders. Unlike the undead mobs, the spiders were fast and could keep up with Archie’s short-legged gait. He had to move faster if he was going to avoid them.
Though he feared he might fall into a pit, Archie tossed caution aside and picked up his pace. If he wanted to escape the giant spiders, he had no choice.
Something seemed to be drawing him forward. Something more than a simple sense of self-preservation. It felt less like he was fleeing something than closing in on it.
Lightning crashed, and Archie saw that he was approaching the side of a dark mountain, something that was almost invisible on that stormy night. He didn’t see any crack in it, no pass or cave into which he could escape. It was like someone had planted a wall there, and the only choice he had now was to climb it, treacherous as that might be.
The ground sloped up sharply, but Archie kept toward it, moving away from the spiders as fast as he could. Soon he had to change from scrambling over the rock to clambering up it. While the rain made the rock slick, he still managed to find some decent handholds and footholds, and soon he was climbing straight up.
Archie looked behind him and saw that the steep slope did not deter the spiders in the slightest. They crawled right up it on all eight legs, moving nearly as fast as they would if they were walking on level ground. He couldn’t match their speed, not vertically, and it was only a matter of time before they caught up with him.
Despite that, Archie kept climbing. As he went, he knocked a loose bit of rock off, and it went spinning off beneath him. At first the sight of it terrified him, as it reminded him that he could fall just like that at any moment. But then the rock smacked into one of the spiders and knocked it off the side of the mountain, sending it tumbling to its death below. If he’d had any breath to spare, Archie might have shouted in triumph. Instead, he kept climbing as steadily as he could manage, and any time he found a loose bit of rock, he sent it falling behind him.
Soon the last of the spiders following him had been knocked to its death. Archie stopped to rest for a moment, but another flash of lightning showed him that he wasn’t that far from a ledge above his head. Happy to have found a place where he might be able to rest for a moment, he hauled himself up to it and collapsed on its rocky surface.
The thunder and lightning reminded him that he shouldn’t stay outside if he could manage it. Now that he’d escaped the spiders, he needed to find shelter from the rain. It bothered him to settle down in one place during the darkness, for fear that mobs might catch up with him and trap him someplace, but exposed as he was on the side of this mountain, he didn’t see any other option.
After taking a scant moment to catch his racing breath, Archie pushed himself back up to his feet and staggered forward. He moved slowly and carefully across the rocky, rain-slick shelf, making sure that he didn’t accidentally stumble into an unseen pit. When he reached the far side of it, he discovered another wall, this one smooth and vertical, and he realized that climbing it would be impossible.
He wanted to collapse there into a dreamless sleep, but he couldn’t bear the thought of a spider sidling up and sinking its fangs into his neck while he was unconscious and helpless. Instead, he forced himself to make his way along that cliff face in the hopes he might find some means of escape. He would have been satisfied with a reasonable slope to climb, although he wished he might stumble upon a protective cave as well.
To his amazement, he literally stumbled over an unlit torch. It was just lying there on the ledge, and he didn’t see it until he tripped over it. At first, he thought he might have found a tree root, even up here, higher than the trees seemed able to reach, but when he closed his hand around it, he knew what it was.
Archie had nothing to light the torch with, and he feared it might be too wet to burn anyhow. But when he held it up, some sort of magic caused the tip of it to burst into flames. He didn’t understand it, but he wasn’t going to complain about it.
In the light of the torch, Archie could see a bit farther and noticed that the shelf he stood on seemed wide enough to house a small army. He wondered if there had been an easier way to reach it. The thought bothered him in two ways.
First, he felt a little stupid for having climbed up a sheer cliff face if he could have found a much easier trail up there instead. Second, if there was an easier trail, then mobs might use it to get to him. His momentary sense of safety vanished.
The new fear that gripped him at least spurred him awake, back from the brink of total exhaustion. He raised his new torch high, even though he worried that it might bring curious mobs toward him. It showed him a path carved off to the left, and he followed it.
The path wound into a pass that cut deeper into the mountain, around a few secondary peaks that stood much shorter than the one in the mountain’s center. Once inside the pass, Archie could no longer see the land that sprawled below him, from which he had begun his climb. However, the rocky formations around him at least offered a little shelter from the whispering wind.
As Archie reached the end of the pass, he spied the flickering of torchlight ahead. He came around the final bend in the pass and gasped to see a massive doorway towering in front of him. Gigantic braziers mounted atop high shelves framed the double doors. When lightning flashed, he could see handles on the doors placed high above his reach.
Archie could only imagine who could have built such a place. If anyone had ever lived there, they seemed to have deserted it long ago.
The smart thing to do, he knew, would be to turn around and leave. To head back into the storm and face the horrible weather and wandering mobs that had plagued every step of his nights. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that.
A horrible foreboding filled Archie’s heart as he gazed up at the doors. It felt like whatever lay beyond them could only be swollen with the sort of horrors that swarmed through his worst nightmares.
Still, his curiosity prodded him forward. He couldn’t stand the idea of leaving those doors alone. Of walking away from them and never knowing what might stand beyond them.
He steeled himself, held up his torch high, and pressed a hand on the massive doors.
They began to give.
CHAPTER TEN
To Archie’s surprise the gigantic doors swung open as if they had been waiting for his touch. Inside, it seemed that nothing but darkness awaited him.
He crept through the doors and found himself standing on a large, flat expanse in a massive chamber that stretched so far he couldn’t make out the ceiling or walls. All he knew was that the rain and wind that had how
led around him outside could not reach him in here, and for the moment, that seemed like enough.
As he moved forward, his torchlight showed him that the shelf on which he walked ended abruptly. He found nothing but a bottomless pit on every edge but one. In that direction, a naked bridge of rock stabbed out into the darkness.
Something emitted a soft glow so far below the edges of the shelf that Archie couldn’t make out what it might be coming from. A part of him wondered what he would find if he leaped over the edge, but the only thing he would be sure of then was a sudden and terrifying death.
Archie feared that the bridge might collapse under his weight if he ventured onto it, but he didn’t see any other way to move deeper into the chamber. His throat suddenly dry with fear, he made his way forward as carefully as he could. He peered over the edges of the bridge as he went and saw nothing below him but that mysterious glow.
He reached the other side of the bridge without incident and discovered a steep slope waiting for him there. It seemed as if someone had hollowed out the mountain but left another peak inside of it for him to discover.
Archie shaded his eyes from his torch’s light and spied a faint, golden glow coming from the top of the internal peak. Without an easy way down, the only way for him to go was up, so he set back to climbing.
The light grew stronger and brighter as Archie made his way higher and higher. The closer he got to it, the more he felt like a voice was whispering something in his head. In fact, he recognized it now and realized it had been whispering softly to him the entire day.
Closer, it said. Closer.
Archie froze as he finally understood the words. For hours he’d thought they had only been a part of the wind’s whispers. To hear them now and know that they had always been words struck fear straight through his brain.