by Ember Lane
He gave it a practice swing. Swift ducked just in time.
“Hey!”
Lincoln bellowed a laugh. “That’s for leaving me on my own.”
Swift retraced their way back to the path. “Meh, you had it covered. Say, can you teach me how to fight like that?”
“What, dirty?”
“If that’s what it was, yep, dirty.”
“Sure. It’s easy. You take that close-q-fighting skill, and you just throw all the rules outta the window.”
“What window?”
“No window,” Lincoln said, as they hopped onto the path.
“Then why…”
“It’s a saying. Don’t need the rules, toss them away.”
“Got it,” Swift said, without a hint of humor.
“Say, do apachalants ever laugh?”
Swift shrugged. “I doubt you’d understand our humor…it’s observational, so yes, we laugh. In fact, I was laughing as you flew backward into that tree.”
Lincoln harrumphed, lifted his ax up, practicing swinging. “Definitely,” he muttered. “You’re definitely gonna be my favorite weapon.”
The path meandered around, the gloom constant. Though he kept an eye out, he could see no red-tops stalking them, nor any more zombie ogres. It puzzled him. The forest oozed danger, he felt it on the heavy, dank, fetid air, but yet none became apparent. It was almost like the fungi had sapped the energy from the forest, killing everything including the monsters, and as they ranged farther into the place, the forest seemed to die even more. But though silence would have suited the area, Lincoln began to hear a rushing. It was like wind getting funneled into a cavern, or the noise of a raging storm. The sound grew as they forged deeper and deeper, but curiously, the trees began to thin.
“I think we’re getting to the middle,” Swift muttered, and Lincoln knew what he meant. Even the mushrooms had become sparser. The trees now letting light spill into the forest, but it was a gray light, a dour light—a stormy light.
“What the hell?” Lincoln said.
They broke through into the clearing just as he said it. The trees there were no more than stumps. The sky above was a roiling, swirling, spinning white-and-black spiral that seemed to suck the essence from everything. It looked like a portal to hell.
Wind whipped around them, blustering in ever decreasing circles up into the twister-like sky, pulling everything up into its clouds. Nothing lived; all was black, apart from a small cottage right in the eye of the storm.
“There!” Lincoln barked over the crescendo of chaos.
Swift took a step back away from the hurricane-like wind and into the comparative still of the dead forest behind. Lincoln joined him.
“What the hell?”
The apachalant scratched his head. “It’s magic—that’s for sure, yet I see no caster. You?”
“Nope. So, I’m guessing the challenge is to get across there and rescue the damsel in distress.”
“The what?”
“Belzarra Mistprowler.”
“I doubt she’s a…”
“Damsel in distress? Perhaps not. So, hurricane-force winds, a stretch of no man’s land—any ideas?”
Swift already had his sack out, fishing inside. He pulled out two coils of rope, a few dozen barbed and U-shaped spikes, and a mallet. He winked at Lincoln.
“Apachalant—it’s a land of death and rock, of treacherous cliffs, and formidable jungles. Imagine nature’s dungeon, and you have my land. So,” he said, “we’re always prepared.”
Lincoln crouched next to Swift. “And, what’s the plan?”
Were they always this gloomy?
“Tie this rope around you. You ease forward, maybe burying the ax in the soil and using it to drag you toward the hut. As you go, you hammer in the hooks. Thread the—”
“Nope,” Lincoln said. “That doesn’t work for me. I’ve got a better idea.”
He took the rope and tied a noose in it, then handed it to Swift. “Bang that into the hardest trunk we’ve got near here.”
Once Swift had done it, Lincoln held out his hand and took the hammer and another couple of hooks. “I’ll walk around the other side and secure it to another tree—how about that? Simpler?”
“Probably why you’re the builder, and I’m the scout.”
Lincoln nodded, slung the coil of rope over his shoulder, and dumped the mallet and hooks in his bag. “Back in a bit—try and make sure the rope doesn’t snag.”
He edged his way around the clearing, feeding out the rope as he went. Though he looked out for monsters, he reasoned that none would stray this close to the swirling, magical disturbance.
Hmmm, he thought. It just doesn’t feel magical…
Though he had no magic, unless you called a measly 10 mana, magic, he knew what it felt like. He could sense when magic was around, and mana, and he was fairly sure that a heck of a lot of mana would be needed to create this maelstrom. The possibility that it could be some kind of glitch in the actual fabric of the game crossed his mind.
In a land as large and clearly as complex as Barakdor, would it be unreasonable that there might not be the odd error? He’d already seen evidence of it, what with Alexa Drey’s start, and he’d also wondered if the chaos portal wasn’t a similar thing. Could it be that the gnomes were a symptom of some corrupt programming that had affected their entire race? If it was that, and the artificial intelligence in charge of this game couldn’t fix it, who was to say that it hadn’t made the best of the situation and just invented the chaos portal?
Shrugging, he continued edging around the clearing, feeding out the rope. The longer it got, the heavier it became, until his strength was getting severely tested. He stopped trying to pull it tight and just left it laying on the dead ground. About twenty yards shy of being halfway around, he ran out of rope. Tracing his steps back, he found the best trunk he could, hammering the hook into the back of it. He threaded the rope through and sat, taking a breath.
Now for the hard part.
He pulled up what slack he could and then took his staff out of his sack, winding the rope around it, and then turning it to pull the rope in bit by bit. It was a slow and painful process, but when he had enough slack, he ambled to the farthest trunk he could reach, hammered the second hook in and wound the rope around his staff again. Once satisfied that it was secure, he took out the first hook and then reeled in the slack. By the fourth trunk, the rope crossed the clearing right by the house.
“All done,” he told a sitting Swift after he’d ambled back, and he dumped the hammer down. “How precious are your feelings about these hooks?”
“They’re just iron, why?”
“’Cause I feel like bashing a few in as I go, make it a bit more secure.”
“Like I said, they’re just—”
“Iron, yeah, you said.” Lincoln looped a half dozen through his belt, shoved the mallet through it for good measure. Stashing everything else in his sack, he started crawling along the rope.
The strength of the wind took his breath away—howling, gusting, lifting him off the forest floor until he was barely holding on to the rope. He edged along, passing one hand over his other, his lips set in a firm, determined line. A couple of yards in, and it lulled suddenly, and he smashed into the forest floor. Quickly hammering a hook in, he carried on.
As he neared the center, the wind was more blustery, but it also sucked upward far more. One minute, he was clinging on for dear life, the next he was crashing back to the mud floor. Stones, twigs, and branches battered him as they were sucked into the vortex. Still, Lincoln soldiered on. For every lull, another length of rope was secured, and once he’d done the sixth or seventh, he finally chanced a look toward the cottage.
He was close, maybe a dozen yards. Gritting his teeth, he carried on. Another yard gained, another hook in, another few feet closer. On he went, getting battered and bruised, holding on for dear life in one second, plunging to the forest floor and eating mud the next, until the wi
nd lulled one last time, but then didn’t pick up again. He rolled over and over, suddenly thankful he was now in the eye of the storm. Ending up on his back, he looked up into the vortex. It was then he realized how wrong it was. The vortex didn’t go straight up into the sky. It stopped about a hundred feet up, just a plug of black at its center.
At least it explains why I couldn’t see it from up the hill.
Studying it further, Lincoln saw where the vortex hit its top, and he realized that it did indeed just stop. There was no blending, no spilling into the seeming void above, just a near circular line as though it was a pool of darkness that swallowed everything—a black hole.
Sitting up, he looked around. Having not thought much further than getting past the maelstrom, he realized that he had no plan. Swift was waiting on the other side making sure the ropes held fast, and so that left it to Lincoln to persuade Belzarra Mistprowler to come and join their team—a thing that seemed mightily insignificant in the light of this seeming tear in the fabric of the game.
Jumping up, he brushed himself off as best he could. Lincoln then did a quick check of his weapons, though in truth they were fairly useless in the face of a witch—especially one that could be responsible for all that surrounded him. It was then he realized that the land immediately around Belzarra’s cottage was…normal.
Her cottage had quite the quaint air, with a red-slate roof, lapped-wood sides, and round windows evenly spaced along it. A pair of wicker chairs graced a small stoop, looking out over a patch of sunflowers that had a circular well just in front of them. Apart from the tightly packed, white, gleaming pile of bones it sat on, it was quite the idyllic forest cottage. Wind chimes sang in the slight breeze that occasionally broke from the fierce maelstrom just a few yards away.
“Surreal,” Lincoln muttered to himself.
He tried to think of a cunning plan, but the best he could come up with was walking up to the stoop, climbing up its steps and then knocking on the front door and hoping that Belzarra was in a good mood. Something, though, was troubling him about the whole scene. Suddenly, it dawned on him. Bones, why build your house on a pile of bones? He edged closer.
Though he was no biologist or doctor, Lincoln knew a human tibia and fibula when he saw one. He knew what a ribcage looked like—and how it felt when it fused together—and he could recognize a human skull from a few yards.
A quaint hut built on the bones of humans…but then…she might not be all bad…
He cleared his throat and marched toward the hut, determined to face her head-on. Bounding up the stoop, he knocked on the cottage’s quaint front door.
A piercing scream rang out, followed by a shuffling noise, then muttering, and a small clap like a puny thunder growl. Emerald light burst through the door, slamming into Lincoln’s stomach and knocking him off the stoop, sending him sliding back perilously close to the maelstrom.
Damage! Belzarra Mistprowler has cast Stun and Stay on you. You will be immobile for five minutes, unless you wish to counter with your own magic…oh, you don’t have any… You have received 56 damage. Your health is 144/200.
Lincoln tested the spell, but he was held fast. He stared at the cottage’s front door—not that he could stare anywhere else. The door slowly opened.
5
Belzarra Mistprowler
Lincoln was expecting a hag. He had no particular grounds for his assumption that Belzarra would be a hag, but that was what he’d expected. A twisted old thing, with a single tooth, crows nesting in long, gray hair that flowed from a wide, floppy-brimmed, pointed hat. He expected a hooked nose, a stooped back, a black cape, and sallow, green-tinged skin. What peered out of the doorway was slightly different.
Belzarra was tall, thin, and decidedly pasty. Flame-red hair cascaded over her narrow shoulders, settling on a long, black coat that was all laces and tassels. She had skin-tight, black trousers tucked into knee-length leather boots, one of which she rested on a hitching rail that hemmed in the stoop, planting her elbow on her knee, and her fine chin in her upturned palm. Piercing blue eyes looked Lincoln up and down.
“Tell him, tell her,” she yelled, “that she can keep me isolated, keep me in this vortex, but I will never yield!”
Belzarra held her free hand out, turning its palm upward. A ball of green light appeared just over it, and it grew, its light intensified, and she pulled her arm back, clearly ready to toss the ball at Lincoln.
“Who?” Lincoln cried.
Belzarra launched the now glowing, emerald light at him. Lincoln saw it coming, saw it getting bigger and bigger as it closed, but he was helpless, rooted to the ground. It smashed into him, spreading, crawling all over him. His nerves became alive as what felt like a thousand electric shocks ran through him. He shivered from head to toe, then shook, then shivered again, then began to spasm as the pain pulsed through him. At first, he stifled his scream, but the pain grew in intensity, and eventually he couldn’t stop himself, and he wailed in pain.
The witch had a huge smirk on her face. “She must really hate you! What did you do? Try and run from her bed?”
“Huh, huh, huh, who?” Lincoln shivered, and then cried out again when he saw another green ball growing in the witch’s palm.
Damage! You have sustained 30 damage. Belzarra Mistprowler cast Hornet’s Embrace on you.
She raised her hand up, kissed the edge of the ever-growing emerald sphere, and Lincoln looked on in horror, as it grew even brighter.
“N, n, n, n, nooo!” he tried to shout, but his jaw was clamped shut in pain.
Belzarra launched it forward. He screamed in horror as it enveloped him. Its fingers of pain stabbed into him, each sending electric pulses into his body. His body burst free from her very first spell. Suddenly released and allowed to convulse properly, Lincoln flapped around on the floor like he’d been tasered, the spell forcing his muscles to contract randomly as they were shocked.
Damage! You have sustained 40 damage. Belzarra Mistprowler cast Hornet’s Embrace on you. You have 138/200 Health left…she’s playing with you…
Even though consumed by his pain, Lincoln knew that to be the case. If she wanted him dead, she’d hardly cast the spells so far apart, giving his health time to recoup.
“Huh, huh, huh, who?” he screamed again.
“Who?” Belzarra queried.
“Huh, huh, huh, who d, d, d, you th, th, think s, s, sent me?”
The witch swung her leg off the hitching rail, standing with her hands on her hips. “Your mistress, Pellevere!” she screamed, and jumped off the stoop.
“P, P, P…who?”
For a moment, Lincoln thought he saw her doubt her resolve, but then she smirked, held her palm out and she coaxed another ball of magic into life. This one was violet. Lincoln gulped. He watched with morbid fascination as it grew. He watched as she brought it up to her crimson lips and kissed its edge, and he watched as its light intensified, glowing white in the center. She kissed the ball again with those mesmerizing, lush, crimson lips, and then blew it toward him. It slowly flew across the narrow distance between them, and Lincoln’s mouth draped open in pure fear as he wondered what fresh horror she was going to visit on his body.
The violet washed over him like a wave breaking on his head.
Damage! You have received 10 damage…
Eh? No pain? Where’s the pain?
Belzarra has cast Zombie Affliction on you. You are now under her control. Your will is hers. The only further damage you’ll receive is to your pride. Zombie Affliction lasts for one minute for every difference in level between the caster and the recipient. In this case, a long time, you puny thing!
But Lincoln could only smile in relief as the pain from the Hornet’s Embrace finally left his body.
“Get up,” she ordered.
Lincoln’s body immediately responded, and he stood, though his pose was a tad bit droopy for his liking, but waited for further instruction as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
; “Follow me,” Belzarra commanded.
Although he didn’t resist, he thought it quite peculiar when his legs started limping toward her. He thought it rather odd that one arm and shoulder hung lower than the other. He wondered why one leg started trailing behind the other—getting dragged along, and his mouth drooped open, like he’d had a stroke.
“Come, my little zombie,” Belzarra chimed. “We’re going to have a little chat.”
Lincoln started dribbling. He even groaned. He hated zombies. Belzarra disappeared into her cottage, and he dutifully followed.
Well, at least I know what happened to the ogre.
While Belzarra wasn’t quite what he’d expected of a witch, the inside of the cottage was. A large cauldron bubbled away over a central fire pit. A vast iron flue hung over it, vanishing up into the timber roof and appearing to defy gravity. Sprigs of herbs, muslin bags, pelts, and wisps of silver webs hung from every strut, cross timber, and beam. Every bit of available wall space was shelved, with pots and vials dominating their space. There was a single bed in the corner, and a tin bathtub, a table pushed against the adjacent wall, and a workbench opposite.
“You stink, Zombie. Did you kill all my Satanshrooms? No matter if you did, I can always make more, though I think they might have grown out of control since I’ve been stuck. Now…”
Belzarra spun around, her hands once more on her hips. “Sooner or later, I’m going to get the truth out of you, so, what do you say you to sooner? But first, let’s get that awful stink off you. Zombie, fill that bath while I…deal with your friend. You know, I’d have assumed you’d have landed inside the vortex, not outside. Clever, very clever.”
Lincoln made to speak, but as she hadn’t commanded him to, he soon realized he couldn’t. He did feel a huge compulsion to pick up a nearby bucket and start filling the bathtub. So, as he grabbed it and limped over to the cauldron, he watched her leave, knowing full well she was going to do something to Swift, but completely unable to stop her. He’d half filled the tub when she came back in.