by Logan Jacobs
“On foot?” I pondered aloud. “Those mountains are massive. It’ll take hours to get over them safely.”
“Well,” Danira said as she peeked over the edge of the canyon to the depths below, “Then I guess we’re going rappelling, team.”
“No way.” Maaren shook her head as she peered over the edge of the canyon. “I’ll just fly us.”
“Alright.” Danira nodded knowingly. “We can try it, but I have my doubts.”
“Doubts?” the hunter scoffed as she lifted herself into the air. “Ye have little faith, Danira. Here, I’ll take two at a time.”
Maaren reached out her Hand and swirled it in the air a little, and I felt a surge of air beneath my feet as the hunter’s magic pulled Ariette and I up into the sky. This was old hat for me, so I let myself fall backward into a seated position, cushioned by the swirling winds below me.
We rose slowly until we were a good five feet above the ground, and then Maaren brought us toward the craggy red rocks at the end of the canyon. A tumbleweed blew in the breeze below us, and I looked down to watch our progress. A river roared through the basin of the canyon, and I could see the frothy white tips of rapids as they flowed dangerously quick over jagged grey rocks.
“Don’t drop us, okay?” Ariette requested as we flew over the center of the canyon.
The elf glanced down at the long drop to what would definitely be a gruesome death before she quickly turned her attention to the fluffy white clouds that floated above us.
“Don’t worry, Ari,” Maaren chuckled and picked up the pace so we made it across the canyon quickly.
My feet touched down lightly on the dusty earth just before Ariette’s did, and I nestled down into the soft soil with my toes as a small dust storm kicked up, twisting in the strong wind. I coughed a little as some of the particles filled my mouth, and it instantly became dry.
Maaren spun around to pick up Danira and Kalista, and the commander gasped with joy when she was lifted up into the air. She stared down at the canyon below her with an obvious excitement as it grew smaller, and touched down with a small sigh, like she was upset the ride was over so quickly.
“Alright,” Danira said with joy in her voice. “I’ll admit, I was wrong. That was impressive.”
I turned to take in the huge rocks before me. They were the only thing that separated us from the Nahul Plains now, but they were giant and craggy and stood almost fifty feet tall. The rocks were piled haphazardly onto one another in a pattern that only nature could create. They melded and folded together so neatly in places it almost looked like the giant red mountain had been carved up by the very hand of God himself. Some rocks had been eroded by wind and the elements into smooth, round curves, while others were still jagged and sharp like pieces that had been broken apart.
“Do you think you can fly us over those?” I asked Maaren, right when an impossibly strong wind picked up and blew straight into us.
She paused for a moment and turned into the wind with her Hand in the air. Then, she rose up a few feet before her entire body was blown backward by a strong gust of wind. Despite the turbulence, she still managed to land gracefully with a thump on the ground.
“Just our luck,” she snorted. “The Nahul Plains are notoriously windy, and they are really acting up today. I could try to fly us over, but the second a strong gust hits we’d all just end up as bloody mangled messes against the rocks. It’s just too unsafe.”
“Of course,” I muttered. “I was crazy to think it could have been that easy.”
“So, we climb then,” Kalista said perkily and made her way toward the base of the rocks excitedly. The small dwarf found a hand hold in the rock about a foot above her head and lifted herself up with practiced ease.
“When did Kalista learn how to rock climb?” I asked Ariette.
“This is new to me,” she replied with a shrug. “Come on, I’ll race you guys.”
The blonde took off toward the bottom of the rocks with Maaren close on her heels. Amazingly, in just those few moments, Kalista had already climbed her way ten feet off the ground.
“How’s your rock climbing, Milton?” Danira elbowed my bicep as we strode toward the rocks.
“I made it to the top of the wall in my high school gym,” I said with a laugh. “This shouldn’t be much different, right?”
I looked at Danira, half joking and half serious, but the commander just shook her head with a soft smile and hauled herself onto the rock.
The red stone loomed over me as another huge gust of wind knocked into my side and forced me to stumble a few steps. I looked for a good place to grab hold of the rock and found a small indentation that stuck out just far enough to give my hand a secure grip. I jumped up to grab it and pulled myself up as my right leg found stable footing. The gusts of wind made it hard to move sometimes, and I found that when a huge current of air blew through, it was best to shrink against the face of the hill and wait for it to pass. Despite the windy climate, the sun still beat down relentlessly, and I felt the sweat drip down my face to my chest as we ascended.
“Is this anything like high school?” Danira called down to me with a total shit-eating grin.
“Oh yeah,” I panted cheekily. “Exactly the same as I remember. Good view of girls’ asses and all.”
“I wouldn’t brag about being able to see our asses, HC,” Ariette shot back with a quick grin. “It means you’re behind. Waaayyyy behind.”
“But I’ve got a good view!” I hollered back. “So who’s the real winner here?”
“I think it’s me,” Kalista shouted as she made it to the top well before the rest of us. She turned to sit down on the edge, her legs dangled over it, and waited proudly.
“And I’m number two,” Ariette sighed out as she slapped her hands on the top of the rock. “Don’t get used to it.”
“Hey, three’s not so bad,” Danira grunted out and toppled over the edge rather ungracefully.
“Better than four,” Ariette chuckled to Maaren as the hunter crawled over the edge and fell into an exhausted pile.
“I think I have a future in rock climbing,” I gasped out sarcastically as I finally made it to the top of the rock and flopped down on my back to catch my breath.
Danira, Maaren, and Ariette all slumped lazily against the rocks in sweaty messes as they caught their breath, but Kalista just smiled at all of us with sparkling violet eyes.
“That was fun, guys, come on!” she exclaimed.
“Where did you learn to climb rocks like that?” Maaren demanded.
“My dad taught me.” Kal shrugged. “He said it was a skill all dwarves should have, and that it would come in handy someday. Of course, I’m pretty sure he was talking about attracting mates, but I guess he was right nonetheless.”
“So those are the Nahul Plains,” I said distractedly as I looked over the swells of red and brown hills before us.
The mountainous rocks we were on towered above the hills, but the land before us was filled with dense trees and brush that hid the actual ground from view. There was no green at all to the place. Instead, the foliage and terrain was an assortment of different hues of brown and red, from light and earthy to dark and ominous.
“Yep!” Kal turned around and looked down over the rock edge. “Are you guys ready to climb down?”
“Ready is a state of mind,” Danira pointed out, still a little breathless. The commander hauled herself to her feet and started to climb down the rocks toward a flat area at the bottom, just before the rolling hills.
“Let’s go, guys,” I said as I stood up and ignored the way my muscles cried out and the gross amount of sweat that collected on my body.
I spun myself around and grabbed onto the ledge of red rock before I lowered my body down until I found a foothold. The backward climb was a lot more harrowing than when I had climbed up. At least when I went up, I could easily see where I was going. The downward climb made me feel completely unbalanced.
My stomach felt like it wa
s ready to drop out of my body at any moment as the wind blew through my hair and rocked my body ever so slightly to the side. The rock was a bit crumbly, and more than once, a narrow ledge crumbled under my feet, and I wound up holding on for dear life as I stared down at the long, deadly drop below me.
“Oh shit!” Danira grunted as one of her handholds fell away under her grip. I watched in tense horror as the commander, ten feet above me and totally out of reach, clung to the rock with one hand as her body flailed about. She fought with gravity for a split second before she managed to swing herself far enough forward to grab a solid hold again, and I breathed an audible sigh of relief.
With the crisis averted, we kept climbing.
Then, my worst fears came true. As I took another step, the rock beneath my foot gave way. My heart jumped up into my throat as I lost my grip and fell backward helplessly. There was nothing between me and the ground but a solid two hundred feet, and I desperately looked around for anything to halt my trajectory. I threw out my left hand and felt it brush against the rocky cliff, but I was falling way too fast to get a hold on anything solid.
“Milton!” Maaren cried from above. “Hold on!”
Suddenly, I felt a pocket of air swish up from under me, and my descent slowed. Almost instantly, the wind from the plains blew against my body, and I was thrown violently into the side of the cliff with a hard thwack. The impact caused a wave of pain to shoot through my body, but it also meant that I was now close enough to find another foothold. I reached out panickedly and grabbed the first thing I could find.
I ignored the pain coursing through my body as I hung by one arm and frantically moved my feet around below me. Finally, I felt a small platform beneath my shoes, and I let out a sigh of relief as I reoriented myself.
“Are you okay, HC?” Ariette called down from above.
“I’m--I’m fine,” I tried to laugh off my near brush with death. “I’m perfectly fine. Hey, it looks like I’m in the lead now!”
I scurried down the rest of the cliffside as quickly as I could. The moment I was close to the bottom, I leapt from the rock and hit the ground with a thud. Ariette and Kal did the same, but Maaren used her Hand to gloriously float down the last few feet, only to be blown sideways by a gust of wind.
“Well, this should be easy,” Danira said sarcastically, and I turned around to look at the Nahul Plains with her.
We were met with a towering forest of dense foliage. There were giant brown trees and huge red vines that looped around the branches. The plants were so thick it was hard to see anything beyond the very beginning of the forest. The ground sloped upward gently in front of us, and the treeline was uneven as it went along the slopes of the hills. Danira was right. Searching for a tiny mushroom in the depths of the forest was not going to be an easy feat.
“This doesn’t look like any sort of plains I’ve ever seen,” Maaren muttered.
“Limmer said the Nahul Plains are a strange place,” I pointed out.
“So should we just walk around?” Ariette asked hesitantly. “I don’t even know where to start.”
I pulled the crumpled drawing from my pocket and scanned the picture of the mushroom-like plant again before I peered back at the forest. A large set of trees, vines, and detritus completely covered the floor of the ecosystem and made it difficult to see anything, let alone a tiny mushroom that could be anywhere.
“I think that’s our only option,” I sighed, and then I took off into the tangle of vines and limbs of the Nahul Plains.
I was careful to keep my eyes peeled for any sign of movement and my gun at the ready. Professor Limmer had mentioned how dangerous it was out here, and the last thing we needed right now was to be taken off-guard by some horrific monster. The footsteps of my team crunched behind me as we all advanced slowly and scanned the forest floor for the Ghoul’s Bread. I could tell by the harrowing silence that everyone else was just as much on edge as I was.
“They grow around death,” Maaren reminded us. “Milton, do you think you could try and feel for blood that’s not ours? Maybe like a recently-killed deer or something?”
“I can do that.” I nodded. “But keep your eyes peeled. If there’s a fresh kill around, whatever killed it can’t be far behind. Let’s spread out a bit. We can cover more ground that way.”
Each of the women gave me a nod and then spread out into the forest. Ariette remained by my side as I concentrated and called upon my Hand. I felt the vibration flood into my cells, and I looked around for any feeling of blood. I could feel the hot liquid that flowed through Ariette’s veins, as well as the more distant tingles from the rest of my team, but there wasn’t any feeling of the cooler, dried-up blood that a dead being would possess.
We wandered further into the forest, wary of the dangers that laid ahead.
Then I finally got a sign. I felt a strange tingle in my Hand that signaled blood.
It was a light feeling, cool and still. Just a little spilled blood, but enough to make a connection with my magic. I closed my eyes and concentrated until I felt it slightly pull at the cells in my hand. I walked about twenty paces further, and then I came upon the origin of the strange sensation.
A small clearing opened before us in the dense foliage, and the mangled stumps of what were once huge tree trunks indicated that this was a man-made landscape. The dead foliage had been cleaned up from the ground to reveal soft red earth, and rows of what had to be Ghoul’s Bread lined the small space in a tidy little rectangle.
“That doesn’t look natural,” I muttered to Ariette, and the elf nodded in nervous silence. “I’m no botanist, but I don’t think they’re supposed to grow like that.”
“Hey, guys,” the elf said into her comms with barely more than a whisper. “We’ve got eyes on Ghoul’s Bread.”
“Okayyyyy,” Kalista’s dramatically whispered response came. “Why are you whispering?”
“Because it looks like someone planted them,” Ariette snapped back. “They could be back for their harvest at any minute, so we need to get out of here asap.”
I reached out with my Hand of Blood and scanned the horizon for my friends. My Hand answered back with a small, twitchy vibration, and I calculated their distance.
“We’re about forty feet to the east of you guys,” I said quietly. “Just head in that direction, and you should be here in no time.”
“On our way,” Maaren replied, just as quietly.
I examined the strange fungi further as the rest of the team came upon the clearing. The pale tan tops glistened with dew and stood as a stark contrast to the dark, nearly black stems. As I looked more closely, I noticed the black stems seemed to glitch and waver, almost like a bugged program on a computer screen.
“Are they … moving?” Danira asked as she crept up behind me.
“That’s where they’re connected to the astral plane,” Maaren breathed as she frowned at the crops. “They only grow where there’s death.”
Ariette looked horrified as a look of realization spread across her face. “So are you telling me that--” she gasped, but couldn’t seem to get the words out.
“There’s a dead body buried in the ground,” Kal finished as she wrinkled her nose at the thought.
“Of some sort, yeah,” Maaren answered. “And this is a man-made garden. Which means--”
“Whoever wanted these Ghoul’s Bread doesn’t have a problem with getting their hands dirty,” I confirmed. “All the more reason not to hang out here any longer than we should.”
I took a quick glance around the forest to make sure nobody was watching. Once I was sure things were clear, I crept forward to the rows of Ghoul’s Bread with my team directly in tow. I put my hand carefully on the top of one of the plants and gave it a gentle tug. A cold burst of air shot up and smacked into my face as it’s roots were ripped from the dirt, and the tiny hole immediately iced over with an unnatural frost. The black stem became solid in my hands and no longer flickered and glitched like it was caught bet
ween two planes of existence. For good measure, I yanked a second mushroom from the ground and stuffed them both into a pocket of my combat pants.
“Let’s get out of here,” I ordered my team, and we all turned to head back toward the beginning of the forest.
Just as we did, a huge crack sounded in the forest. The startling sound bounced through the foliage and echoed off the hills, surrounding us in its ominous presence. Seconds later, another crack came. This one was accompanied by a monstrous roar and the sound of huge, pounding footsteps.
“That’d be an ogre,” Maaren said quickly and ushered us all forward. “If we don’t get out of here stat, we’re gonna be Ghoul’s Bread fertilizer. Run!”
We took off at a sprint in the direction we had come from, but our progress was immediately halted by an enormous brown foot as it came down through the canopy. The leg attached to the foot was twice as tall as I was, and I slowly turned my eyes upward to see a torn and dirty yellow loincloth, followed by a bulbous stomach and torso. I forced my eyes to look even further up and was met with a malicious head with beady black eyes and rotted, yellow teeth that bared down on us in a sickly, twisted smile.
Danira whistled out a command, and our team scattered frantically.
“I think ya’ve got me plants there,” the ogre said calmly.
We all drew our weapons and encircled the beast. I fled to my right with my gun at the ready, but I knew it wouldn’t do me much good against such a large creature. Suddenly, a grotesque brown hand yanked up a tree right in front of me and tossed it away angrily. I fled backward from the creature’s broken yellow nails, and I managed to dive to the side just in time. Instead, the ogre got a handful of another tree, which he ripped out of the ground violently. I must have disappeared out of his view, because he turned around and scoured for another target.
Through the thick mess of plants, I couldn’t see who the ogre was looking at, but it really didn’t matter. A distraction was a distraction, nonetheless. I reached out and connected with the mass of blood that filled the grotesque monster’s veins. My Hand vibrated and shook as my magic swelled in it, and the burn of exhaustion set in as I tried to get a handle on his viscera.