Gaze of Fire: Sequel to Veins of Ice

by Melissa Kellogg

  Upon seeing the two, glass masses hurdling towards them, the nargoths screeched. Though the sharp projectiles slowed in their rapid ascent, the harsh soundwaves couldn’t stop them. The shards of glass cut the nargoths to the degree that they looked like holey cheese. Putrid blood rained down from their bodies. One of the nargoths fell to the ground and didn’t get up. All three of its blood sacks had been cut to shreds. It was unable to regenerate without its precious life supply. It was dead, leaving only two nargoths left. The surviving two flew off. Through the cracked, glass walls, she watched them limp to where Evelyn and Hadrian were. They wanted easier prey.

  “NO!!!” Karena screamed.

  She had to get into that keep and open the doors. Hadrian’s and Evelyn’s life were in jeopardy. She looked around. There was glass and ice everywhere. How was she going to find that tunnel? She knew there had to be a tunnel. Her blood rushed as she panicked.

  We are here. We are not far. Have you seen what is unseen? Close your eyes and you will know that it’s there her blood sang to her, ever present and helpful.

  She did so, trusting her intuition. She searched mentally across the ice. Her powers had frozen the ground solid, and consequently, she could use her mind to dive deep into the soil and map out the flooring under the plants. Suddenly, she mentally bumped up against a wide gap in the middle of the area where there wasn’t any ice.

  From knowing what this was, Karena opened her eyes, and she raced towards it. A bed of unruly, blue, tomato-like plants covered the area that she had discovered with her mind. She iced them again and ripped them out. The chunk of plants and soil hit the nearby wall with a thud. She looked at the gaping hole below. Stone steps greeted her. She didn’t hesitate, and padded down them.

  Torches burst into awakening. The runes on them, though faded, still worked. She entered a large room. Storage shelves had been chipped into the walls. Discolored jars filled with fruit and pickled preserves lined them. On the far side, there was an opening. Karena peered into it. Sure enough, it was a tunnel and it seemed to lead back towards the keep or at least, in its general direction.

  Karena sprinted through the deteriorating tunnel. She vaulted over piles of rubble and slimy water. Parts of the brick ceiling had collapsed because roots had forced their way in from above and from the sides. She had to sidestep past one of their intrusions as their roots reached for the other side of the tunnel.

  A set of stairs came into view and she bounded up them to a landing, and after that, a door. It refused to open. There weren’t any sound waves to stop her this time. She iced it solid and then threw her hands against it. Raw energy surged through her like gunpowder igniting. The door was ripped off of its hinges and from its lock. It slammed onto the ground, slid, and caused a bookcase to come crashing down.

  Lamps lit themselves and revealed what could only be the interior of the keep. Somewhere in the keep, music began to play. The eeriness of it made her want to dive back down into the tunnel. Her skin prickled. Something wasn’t right.

  Screams alerted her to her friends’ dire situation. She raced into the keep, found the back door, and undid the locks on it. She lifted the bar off of the door and heaved it open. After dragging Hadrian and Evelyn inside, she attempted to close the door, but the nargoths rammed themselves against the outside of it, preventing her from doing so. All three of them leaned against the door. Their feet slipped across the stone flooring.

  Karena turned around and put her hands against the door. One of the nargoths poked their head through and screeched at them. She cried out from the noise slamming through her ears and into her brain. Her hands froze the door’s wood. The wood fibers cracked from the extreme temperature change.

  Now that the door was frozen, she pushed with her elemental abilities, which was more powerful than using her weight or humanly strength to close the door. The sonic soundwaves couldn’t pierce the coldness inside of the wood. Ice crept across the floor and flaked, unable to survive the sonic blasts. The door shuddered, and she struggled to keep her grip on it. She panted from the effort. Sweat beaded and trickled down her face. The door inched towards the doorframe. Before it was decapitated by the closing door, the nargoth withdrew its head.

  When the door closed, Evelyn fitted the bar back into place, securing it shut. The noise level dropped to the point that she could hear the music in the keep again.

  “I hate those things,” Hadrian said. He put his hands on his knees and tried to regain his breath.

  Evelyn agreed with him. She had endured heavy scratches from trying to fight off those nargoths. Hadrian hugged Evelyn and thanked her for defending him. Evelyn’s face softened from knowing how appreciated she was by him.

  Karena listened to the keep. Laughter pealed like bells ringing. Footsteps ran down the nearby hallways. Misty forms flitted around in the mirrors. A dense coldness rushed through her. She was nudged by unseen presences. Having been tapped on the shoulder, Hadrian whirled around to see who was there, but no one was.

  A girl’s voice said, “This is our keep.”

  “You can’t banish us back into the portal,” a man’s voice growled.

  Curious about whether they were self-aware, Karena said, “I’m not here to do that. I’m not a spiritwalker.”

  “Good,” several voices said at once.

  Her blood chilled, and a mist sparkled around her with a gritty, knife-like quality to it.

  A suit of armor rattled in the hallway. A baby cried, while a man shouted at it to stop. A little, semi-transparent boy stared at them from the hallway to their left. He grimaced at them, and loped away, screaming that there were intruders.

  “This is madness,” Karena said. She was unsure about what they were up against.

  Hadrian asked, “What’s going on? These can’t all be spirits or a residual energy imprint.”

  She knew that there were certain types of hauntings, ranging from active to residual. Spirits often remained confused and attached to items and places that they were familiar with when they had been alive. In residual hauntings, memories played out, as though it was the earth or the place reliving it in an effort to release the negativity that happened there. But residual hauntings didn’t contain any self-aware ghosts, even though they might appear to include several or many ghosts at once.

  There in the keep, she counted at least ten separate voices speaking, and at least fifteen ghosts roaming around in their immediate environment, and multiple poltergeist activities. Ghosts didn’t congregate in large groups or have enough self-awareness to interact with the living. Something intelligent was orchestrating their presence. She frosted the floors and walls, but she didn’t see any runes. If a necromancer had been or was currently in the keep, they would’ve seen some kind of sinister sign to indicate that. As it was, the keep looked abandoned and unlived in with its cobwebs and layers of dust.

  They walked into the main foyer. In a room to the side, women and men danced. Laughing and carrying on, they whirled around. The room wasn’t big enough for all of them to dance in.

  Something tugged on Karena’s sleeve. She looked down. A little girl in a blue dress offered her a teddy bear.

  “This is yours. I want you to have it,” the little girl said. Her honey-colored curls had been pushed back from her face with a green ribbon.

  “Don’t take it,” Evelyn warned.

  Karena hadn’t had any intention of taking it in the first place. She stepped back. The little girl in the blue dress stamped her feet, threw her teddy bear onto the ground, and stormed away. The teddy bear morphed and became a dead crow on the ground.

  “Demonic entities and poltergeists can carry objects, but ghosts can’t,” Karena said. Poltergeists were semi-demonic and sometimes worked in conjunction with ghosts and demons if they wanted to. Ghosts were just energy, and nothing more. Paranormal activity could be difficult to identify because not everything was as it seemed and there could be several entities influencing whatever was going on.

  Ha
drian fidgeted by wringing his hands and putting them against the sides of his face. He kept turning in circles to watch what was happening. He said, “Then who is commanding the demonic entity?”

  “The question isn’t who, but why would they be playing mind games,” Evelyn said.

  Evelyn was right. And what was absent was an omnipresent sense of evil or death. Karena felt like she was being watched, but that was to be expected. There were ghosts everywhere. They floated by while staring at them with such intense expressions of pity and ridicule that she almost felt embarrassed that she was alive and not dead like they were. Nothing made any sense.

  Hadrian threw up his hands. “It has to be the portal. They leaked through it,” he said.

  “If that was the case, then we wouldn’t need to be here. You can’t pass through it unless you are pulled out,” Evelyn said. She inspected her wounds, giving up on paying attention to the horde of activity going on around them.

  “And ghosts wouldn’t be aware of any portal to seek out and hang out around,” Karena said. “It wouldn’t be a priority of mine if I was dead.”

  “But ghosts are known to wander from their surroundings. What if they all decided to gather here?” Hadrian said.

  “But to interact with each other like this and with us?” Karena said and waved her arm around. She knew Hadrian was trying to be helpful, but they were grappling for answers that were just as intangible as the ghosts around them.

  Water dripped down the stone walls. Couches creaked as they were being sat on. Paintings rocked on their nails.

  “Let’s ignore them and go find the ruins,” Karena said.

  A voice echoed, “Let’s ignore them and go find the ruins.”

  Karena’s back stiffened. What used mimicry? She didn’t know.

  “This is getting really freaky,” Hadrian said. He put Evelyn’s left arm over his shoulder to help her walk. She limped, but at least the scratches that she had sustained were clotting up and reducing in size.

  Karena resisted investigating the source of the voice, and wandered through the first floor of the keep, hoping to find some stairs to use to get down to the ruins below. Hadrian and Evelyn lagged behind.

  “What are you trying to find? Where did you last put it?” a man’s voice said.

  “The blockades have been breached,” another voice said.

  More sentences were rattled off, but Karena tried to not let them or the ghosts distract her.

  Mice crawled over the dust-covered furniture, but they were ghosts as well. Karena didn’t understand what was causing the paranormal activity, and prayed that it was harmless. She entered what looked as though it had been a library at one point.

  “Don’t take it,” Evelyn’s voice said behind her.

  Karena whirled around. Evelyn and Hadrian were gone, and in their place was something that horrified her to the core. In her mind, it was worse than the vampiric nargoths that they had encountered outside. She had nightmares about the very thing that charged at her from the library’s doorway. It was none other than a rougarou. The rougarou’s eyes gleamed with the desire to murder her. She didn’t have time to think about the validity of what she was seeing.

  Her adrenaline kicked into high gear. She forgot about Hadrian and Evelyn, and why they had disappeared. The air frosted as her powers gathered together inside of her. The rougarou’s doggish face twisted into a hideous snarl as it took massive strides with its two legs towards her.

  As it neared to the point that she could see the patches of matted fur across its elongated, canine body, Karena threw a blast of icicles at it. In a last ditch effort to protect herself, her arms flew up to her face. Her fear levels skyrocketed as its teeth neared. Its hot breath and rancid odor struck her like a volley of arrows before the final battle. She was going to die. She cried out, and was too consumed by fear to do anything more than stand there.

  But the teeth and claws never came. She waited there, and finally had to open her eyes. She stared at the empty space before her in disbelief. She had felt its hot breath on her face and smelled its rank odor of urine and blood. The last time she had looked, it had been six feet away. Where had it gone?

  Her eyes went to the doorway of the library only a short distance away. Evelyn had her back to her and it was riddled with icicles. Evelyn collapsed onto the floor, revealing Hadrian, who she had protected. How had they disappeared and then reappeared? She had nearly killed Hadrian, and Evelyn would be close to death if she wasn’t already dead. Hadrian looked at Karena in shock and then anger.

  “What did you do?! Why did you do that?” he seethed, baring his teeth as he spoke. He looked like a savage animal. He knelt down to Evelyn and checked her pulse.

  Karena’s mouth gaped open and then closed. “It was a rougarou. It was…. right there. It was charging at me,” she said. Her mind struggled to grasp what had happened.

  “I didn’t see anything, and neither did Evelyn. We were behind you the entire time,” he said. His nostrils flared and his eyes narrowed at her. There had only been a few times where she had seen him that angry, and never had he directed his anger at her, except for now.

  Hadrian carefully eased Evelyn into his lap, and put his back against the closest wall. He rested her head on his chest, and wrapped an arm around her waist. He pulled out the icicles, but Evelyn was too far gone to cry out.

  Karena approached.

  “Don’t!” Hadrian shouted.

  “I swear I’m telling the truth. I saw it,” Karena said. Tears threatened to spill from her eyes. Evelyn’s back was a bloody mess.

  “Then where were we?”

  “You and Evelyn weren’t there. You were gone. Evelyn said something; she said ‘don’t take it’. I turned around and there was this rougarou charging at me. I could smell it and see it, and at the last second, it disappeared.”

  “Evelyn didn’t say that.”

  “Is she still breathing?”

  “Barely,” Hadrian said. He glared at Karena and she winced.

  Guilt and fear slaughtered each other inside of her. She didn’t know what to feel or to think. She knew what she had seen. But then the truth dawned on her. Evelyn saying something when she hadn’t, Hadrian and Evelyn vanishing, that rougarou appearing and then disappearing, and then Evelyn and Hadrian returning had all been an illusion. She sucked in her breath and her ribs contracted. It had seemed so real. What kind of a creature could create such a complex illusion?

  As her mind whirled and searched her archive of cryptid knowledge, she studied Hadrian and how he whispered to Evelyn. He had feelings for Evelyn. Hadrian was always a gentleman around women, but he usually had an air of indifference or amusement towards them. This time, there was warmth and concern for Evelyn. She couldn’t let their safety be jeopardized any more than it had been, or else they might not have one another when they made it out of the Markhan Territory. Hadrian was exhausted, and Evelyn needed to heal before she could try to stand, which also required energy to do. But Karena couldn’t leave them. She had to kill whatever was causing the illusions, or else she might kill her friends by accident.

  Feeling awful and ashamed, Karena stood there with weighted shoulders. She made a mental note about where Hadrian sat with Evelyn in his arms. No matter what appeared there, she couldn’t attack it if it was in that spot. Despite wanting to turn away from the horrific injuries that she had caused Evelyn, Karena couldn’t lest something happen.

  She searched her memory banks for a rare creature that could create illusions. It most likely had to be a level seven or higher creature, because in order to create illusions, it would have to possess a limited or full consciousness and a keen awareness of its surroundings. It was a creature that could learn from its prey and stalk it, and somehow hone in on its mind. Rougarous were something that she feared with every cell in her body, and it had appeared before her as an illusion. This rare creature had read her mind. Or had it been by chance that it had conjured up the one thing that she was the most af
raid of? Had this creature used that ploy so that she could kill off her teammates by accident? It was sadistic in every way, but probable. Where was this creature or humanoid?

  As she sorted through her thoughts, she glanced around, but always returned her gaze to Hadrian and Evelyn so as to make sure that they were okay and that she didn’t startle from seeing something in their place. Her vision fixated on an oil lamp in its holder on the far wall. The flame inside, which was encased in glass, was flickering when it shouldn’t have been. Then she realized that it wasn’t the flame, but a shadow flicking back and forth across it. This shadow tossed itself like a cat’s tail or a snake.

  Here, kitty, kitty her blood cooed inside of her veins. Why was it saying that?

  Her eyes traveled up this tail-like shadow. In the rafters, staring down at her with yellow eyes, was a creature that she hadn’t ever seen before. It was like some kind of mutated panther. She had to remind herself to breathe because her lungs wanted to constrict into a paper’s width out of fear. Whatever the creature was, it looked menacing.

  Upon noticing her upwards stare and that surely she had seen it, it snarled at her. Its coat rippled with some kind of energy. Its fur was a glossy, ghost-white color. Its neck was too long to be a panther’s, and it was arched like a crest.

  “Karena, what…is……that?” Hadrian gasped.

  Her mind ran back to the front door of the keep and the crude drawing of the cat etched into its wood with the words: Beware of the Mimecat. The sacred ruins were called the Cattail ruins. The fortress was named after the ruins. What if the word ‘Cattail’ didn’t mean the plant, but a ‘Cat tail’ or ‘Cat’s tail’?

  “It’s a mimecat,” Karena said in a hushed voice. Now everything made sense, the ghosts, the illusions, the supposed poltergeist activity. She had found the culprit.