When the dying wolf dropped on the ground, it made no sound. There was no snow-dampened thud, ice-crunching thump, or even one last solitary whimper. There was only silence.
“April.”
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s a wolf.”
“What? Where?”
“Over there.”
April dropped her knife and stood up in a hurry, forming two solid fists with her brass knuckles. She looked where Shannon was pointing and prepared to charge at the enemy. But then she realized that the wolf wasn’t moving.
“I think it’s dead. You scared me for nothing.”
“I’m sorry … I thought it would get up again.”
“It won’t, scaredy-cat,” April laughed. “It must’ve lost against a goshawk or something. Those monsters kill each other all the time. Just leave them alone.”
“You said it again.”
“Said what?”
“Scaredy-cat.”
“No! It slipped out, I swear!”
At that moment, as Shannon frowned in disapproval, as April struggled to earn forgiveness, and as the clouds covered the pale sun with a gray shroud, five concurrent howls echoed west of the glade. They were loud enough to cause panic and horror, and for the first time, it seemed that Shannon’s excessive fears had been justified. The wolves should have been chasing cervine prey farther west, as indicated by the footprints in the snowy forest path—the marks that Shannon had fretted about and that April had casually examined. But it seemed that the pack had changed its course and made an abrupt U-turn. To resume the tricky chase eastward? To seek new hunting grounds? To avoid a stronger predator? It was impossible to tell.
April picked up a broken cenbear claw and ran toward her companion. “We completed the job. Let’s just get out of here,” she said, with only a step between them. But then she stopped without explanation. Her body froze as if the harsh weather had finally got the best of her, but her eyes were moving as if she had seen a phantom. The blue irises were darting from side to side, and the pupils were scampering to harvest light. She was searching the spaces among the trees—the piles of snow that had sifted through the branches, the unmarked paths leading into icy depths, the venous roots and the rotting logs.
“Why did you stop?”
“Can you hear them?” April said.
Shannon listened for a sound, and the more she concentrated, the more she could make out an approaching stampede. In the blink of an eye, tens of wolves appeared among the trees. It wasn’t one pack. There were enough jaws to form five discrete groups, and they all ran toward the young women at an incredible speed, with their tongues hanging out of their mouths and their ears flattened down against their heads.
Shannon fell on the ground, as if the sheer force of the advancing wolves had knocked her back. Her ears were beating as loud as her timid heart—lub-dub, lub-dub, I will feed you to my cub—and her lungs refused to take in another draft. She had had an uneasy feeling ever since she saw the footprints of the monsters, but the sudden concretization of the threat turned this manageable uneasiness into a crippling helplessness.
“Shannon! Shannon! Shannon!” April’s voice grew louder and louder until she forced her companion to look up. “I’ll try to hold them off, but I won’t last long! Use this time to get your shit together and create some kind of barrier so that we can retreat behind it!”
There was no time for another word. April took one last breath before she dashed to confront the wolves. She stood in their path and readied her fists, while Shannon continued to watch the mission impossible from the ground. The wolves entered the glade. It seemed that April would be overwhelmed and that Shannon wouldn’t stand up again. Both women imagined a future where their limp bodies would be dismembered and divided among competing jaws. But in the decisive moment of the clash, as April swung her fists and Shannon closed her eyes, fate played the card that it had been saving for the last turn.
Defying the long-standing logic of nature, flirting and then trifling with the human imagination, the wolves ignored the easy prey. They avoided the three punches that April fired at their protruding ribs, and raced past Shannon as if she didn’t exist in their busy world. They continued to run, whimpering as if they were weeping and weeping as if they were mourning. They exited the glade and disappeared among the trees opposite their origin. Instead of putrid carcasses, they left behind two wide-eyed adventurers who couldn’t understand what had just happened.
“We’re saved?” April said in disbelief, as she watched the last wolf vanish.
“It’s Amirani,” Shannon said. “God must’ve saved us.”
With the mystery still unsolved, with the behavior of the wolves still baffling and uninterpretable, there came a loud, vaporous exhale that filled an uneasy gap of silence. Hearing heavy footsteps from the west of the glade—from the origin point of the lupine stampede—April quickly turned to look behind, and Shannon raised her head to see who or what was there.
A man stepped out of the forest and onto the toxic roots of the Venozon. His staggering height dwarfed the two women, and his brawny body had twice their weight in muscle. He was barefooted and bare chested, as if the thick hair that covered his pectorals and toes was enough to keep him warm. The only proper clothes he wore were a pair of white-gray pants that were folded up at his shins and fastened to his waist with a thick belt. A burlap mask covered his head like an upside-down sack. Two dark eyes glared from its upper holes, while a foggy vapor exited the lower—his condensed foul breath. He carried a long brown whip in his right and a throwable steel hammer in his left.
“Who are you? And what do you want from us?” April said.
A white cloud of vapor was the only answer.
“I’m warning you. Stay away, or we’ll do to you what we did to the cenbear.”
The burlap mask rotated slowly until it was facing the monster’s corpse.
“That’s right. If you don’t scram, we’ll beat you up, bandit.”
The mask returned to its previous orientation and released another cloud.
“Then it’s a prison sentence for who knows how long.”
Another cloud, like the steam of an engine.
“This is the last warning. Walk away, or face the consequences.”
The brown whip rose high in the air and fell like a diving falcon. Before April could even blink, it had coiled around her neck like a constricting snake. The muscular man pulled hard, and she found herself falling forward. She watched the reeling world as if through consecutive images on a film—the sky, the trees, the snow, the poisonous roots—then her head hit the ground, and there was only darkness. She lay unconscious, with blood trickling from her temple onto the corner of her right eye, along the curve of her cheek, and down to her chin, where it joined another stream that originated inside her mouth.
“She talked too much,” the man said.
The sun appeared from behind the clouds, but despair enveloped the clearing in a new darkness. The muscular man—the bandit, the brute, whatever he was—unwound his whip from April’s neck, and Shannon watched him with a shocked face. A wave of nausea engulfed her. Every other moment, her otherwise immobile hand would cup her mouth to hold back the rising vomit, and when she wasn’t struggling with her queasiness, she was thinking about how her best friend had just died before her eyes and about how she would be next. She prayed to kind Amirani; she wished the wolves would return; she dreamed of a bounty-hunter who would appear out of nowhere and claim this brute’s head—futile prayers, illogical wishes, impossible dreams.
The brute turned to face her. His eyes glared, and his breath formed another menacing cloud. Staring at him, with nothing separating them except a meager distance, she realized that no one could save her now. She was on her own, forgotten by the living, abandoned by the Divine. If she survived, it would be through her own effort. If she died, it would be through her own weakness and cowardice. Paradoxically, she felt as if there was nothing left to lose. Her nausea subsided, and she stood up—knees shaking, heart racing, mind blanking out. She activated Geo-manipulation and waved her arms as if on instinct.
Like her poor knees, the earth trembled. A sharp-edged pillar was forming in a place that saw no sunlight: her geo-magic was shaping an underground spear of solid rock and jagged stone. And for the first time in her pacifistic life, she attacked with the intention to kill—perhaps for revenge, perhaps out of panic. The spear rose from under the brute’s feet. It was about to split him in half from crotch to neck, but he stepped back with a quick reflex and brought down his steel hammer. In a flash, the spear shattered into a thousand pieces, and the rubble scattered far and wide.
“This,”—a long exhale—“this is better than talk.”
While the spear turned into grain and dust, Shannon stood dazed, with her mouth agape, with her heartbeats fluttering on an invisible cardiograph. For a moment, she felt as if she couldn’t fight anymore, but when she saw the brown whip moving, she collected herself and readied her remaining defenses. The whip followed a predictable trajectory, rising high before plummeting toward her neck, and she raised a pillar to intercept it. There was a loud crack of leather against rock, but this frightening sound announced a favorable outcome.
“Well-blocked,” the brute said.
It was her chance to attack, and she didn’t shy away from using the precious moments during which the whip was retreating. She cast her magic and created a void under the brute’s feet. Her plan was to bury him alive and wait for him to suffocate in an airtight grave. And she might have found success in a different setting, but the girthy roots of the Venozon got in her way and hampered her ambitions. Her face turned even paler, although it had already been bloodless, as she watched the Herculean brute use these roots, not as rope but as stepping stones, to cross the treacherous void and escape the maw of his assigned grave.
“Terrain matters, shortie.”
The whip traveled toward her again. She predicted the same trajectory as before and acted upon her prediction, but this time the whip danced in mid-air before it struck her side with a flesh-rending lash. Heat and pain crawled like an octopus somewhere between her left kidney and lung. Fearing that a second lash might paralyze her frail body and end the fight, she raised a protective wall in front of her, turned around, and started to flee, nauseous, short of breath, arm stretched across her stomach and toward the source of the burning pain, shoulders humped and legs stumped—“Anywhere but here! Anywhere!”
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During her fourth step, she heard the sound of the steel hammer destroying her wall, and during her sixth, the whip caught her neck and knocked her cold.
***
Frostgeist Forest was a harsh environment for both humans and monsters, but the inhospitable north had worse locations to offer the unwary traveler and overcurious adventurer. To the northwest of the white oaks lay an ice-covered wasteland by the name of Arachnia.
In the First Age of Zephyr, human settlers followed scribbly dwarven maps and arrived at the remote area, which was known back then not as Arachnia but as Verglas Forest. Two types of trees were thriving: scattered Venozons and dense Balmerici. Seeking to create new farmland, the humans cut down the Balmerici but left the Venozons, whose trunks acted as natural traps for pests, absorbing them into galls and knots and digesting them over time. Little did the humans know that the Venozons released toxins into the soil. When they were clearing the Balmerici for farming, they were disrupting a delicate chemical balance, creating toxic soil and inviting spider monsters to lay their eggs in it. A saying was born: “Ignorance created Arachnia.”
And it was there, in the heart of that hellish terrain, that Shannon and April woke up, a few seconds apart and by the same apparatus—the brown whip that lashed at their thighs. It was a terrible way to come to themselves. Their arms were tied painfully behind their backs, and a thick rope was wrapped around their ankles; so when the whip cracked, they floundered like two fish in muddy shallows. Again and again, they twisted and turned like epileptics. It took them time to re-establish their positions in tottery space and jiggery time, but then they raised themselves, with another struggle, until they were sitting on their bruised knees—one of the standard positions for a beggar.
They were, in fact, ready to beg for their lives. They could bear any form of humiliation if they could return to their families. But their kidnapper had no interest in their pleading, and he forced them to shut up with two resounding slaps before he said, “Open your mouths.” They did. And he emptied two bottles into their throats. The bitter liquid that he made them drink was the Prisoner’s Potion—a gray concoction that prisoners across the Federation were forced to gulp down daily. Immediately, Shannon and April received a system message. It informed them that their HP was restored to the brim but that their Stamina and Mana dropped to zero. And all regeneration would pause for 24 hours.
It was now impossible for the two women to break into a run, and this fact alone brought fresh tears to their waxen faces. They imagined the bleak fate that awaited them. It seemed that their kidnapper wanted them to live longer, but there was more to fear in life than in death—sadistic torture, habitual rape, inhuman slavery, human experimentation. The deranged man behind the thick burlap mask seemed capable of everything odious and atrocious, but what followed—the only grievance of the present—was plain abuse. He kicked their stomachs and backs, and after they fell on their faces, he continued to roll them with violent kicks until they tumbled into a large pit.
Numerous arms stretched up and caught them before they hit the ground. Thinking they were being molested, they screamed, wailed, and convulsed. But then several voices reached to them with reassuring words:
“Easy, girls! Easy! We’re not gonna hurt you!”
“We’re adventurers like you!”
“Stop kicking! Give us a chance to lower you to the ground!”
There were ten other victims trapped in the pit, and they were only trying to help the new arrivals. As the screaming and wailing subsided, they lowered the two women and untied them with slow, gentle movements.
“What’s gonna happen to us?” April blurted, as soon as she was free.
“Calm down,” a Warrior said, kneeling next to her, with his bandaged hand on her shoulder. “Forget about everything for one moment. Take a deep breath and calm down.”
“I can’t,” April said. “Just say it, please … What’s gonna happen to us?”
“Nobody knows,” an Electromancer replied. “My best guess is that we’ll get smuggled across the border … to be sold to elves. We’ll be the new bitches of the long-ears. Men get castrated. Women like us lose their wombs.”
Shannon put her hand on her abdomen and shrank back as if into a shell.
“Don’t say that!” the Warrior shouted. “You’ll make them panic!”
“It’s best to be honest in these situations,” the Electromancer said.
“Yes, honest—not delusional!”
“We have to get out of here,” April said, interrupting the two. “Shannon can do it! She can free us!”
“Shh! Keep your voices down!” a Hydromancer snapped. “The psycho has fuckin’ ears. Y’all wanna get us killed or what?”
“I want us to get out of this pit!” April retorted.
“There’s no point in that,” a one-armed Archer said, rather miserably. “We’re in Arachnia. Whoever tries to escape gets eaten by spiders … That’s how I lost my arm … Your friend might have the power to get us out, but I don’t think she can fight tens of monsters alone. We’re stuck here for who knows how long.”
“We’re stuck ’cause y’all are spineless pussies,” the Hydromancer groaned. “Y’all should’ve split up and run in different directions like I told you. But no! Y’all see the spiders, and the next thing I know, I’m part of a wooly flock!”
“That’s enough, everyone,” a Paladin, the unofficial leader of the group, said. “If we make any more noise, we’ll attract the spiders again. And this time, the psycho might not be in the mood to protect us.”
The adventurers looked at each other and then at April and Shannon. With little more to be said, they dispersed and sat at different locations around the pit. Some began to write goodbye messages on the soil with their fingers; some stared at the sky as if they could see the darkness of space through its disguise; some wrestled and grappled with malignant injuries, flagellatory wounds and swollen spider bites that would soon force them to amputate their limbs if they didn’t receive proper treatment. The one-armed Archer wandered around like a mendicant, asking people if they had any alcohol to spare, but he couldn’t even find a drop of water. There were only the unpalatable tears of a Geomancer.
Shannon cried for hours. And when her eyes dried up, she began to sob and gasp. Unable to see a way out of this situation, she clawed at April’s clothes and pushed her face against April’s shoulder as if she was trying to smother herself. Then she grew weak. Her head slid down until it rested on warm thighs, and she closed her tired eyes and surrendered to a calm state of half-consciousness. Exhaustion emptied her mind of the fears and worries, which promised to return more brutal, more ruinous, at a future time; and she felt nothing but the touches of a gentle hand—light strokes along her hair and across her forehead.
***
At sunset, the masked brute returned—a heavy tread, crunches and stamps, somewhere on the so-close-yet-so-distant surface of the world. Shannon looked up with an imploring face, saying without words, “Enough. Let us go. Please.” But there was no sympathy and no answer to her silent pleas. A cloud of vapor hovered over the pit. Then it started to rain pens and paper. There was nothing unordinary about the pens, but each sheet of paper had a number on it. The one April caught had “5” centered at the top like the title of a book chapter, while the one Shannon received had “12” in the same position.
“Everything I say you will write down,” the brute announced. “In your own handwriting. Without changing a letter.”
The obedient adventurers picked up the writing tools and distributed them among the rebellious. When everyone had their fair share, they looked up and waited for their kidnapper to dictate any words.
“Father, Mother,”—the pens began to scratch and slide—“Princes of the Free Cities, Priests and Cardinals, while you celebrate the Night of the Effigies, while you burn your statues to condemn the forces of Primordial Chaos, a generation of thinkers rots in prison. The wise and sinless are trampled and tortured. The wise and sinless live in fear and misery.
“Father, Mother,”—the pens hesitated but continued—“Princes, Priests, you are perpetuating injustice. You are taking away our rights and freedom in the name of economic prosperity. I have never agreed to this devilish trade. And so I demand the release of all philosophers from your prisons. I demand freedom for all. I demand that the Chaos Factor calculations be changed. And I burn myself on this holy night as an effigy”—the pens stopped writing—“Write it down! Word for word! And I burn myself on this holy night as an effigy to protest the tyranny of the Church.”
Shannon wrote it down, with shaky hands, as slimy mucus fell on the paper.
April wrote it down, with a lop-sided smile on her face.
The rest wrote it down, some laughing, some crying, some silent like mimes.
“Sign your names and classes, and collect the statements.”
Having handed her paper to the Paladin, Shannon sank into April’s arms and said, with an almost inaudible whisper, “He’s going to kill us.”
There was no reply. April was watching the coercive brute as he received the statements from the Paladin; she was waiting to see what would happen next. Would the brute douse them with lamp oil and start a fire in the pit? It seemed like the fastest method to carry out his ugly crime, but no one had heard him transporting barrels or canisters, and there was no oily smell in the air. What, then, was the plan?
“I don’t want to die,” Shannon said, with a shiver.
“Stay strong.” April hugged her. “Don’t close your eyes. Try to stay awake, or your body might just give in to the cold.”
The brute vanished for an entire hour after he informed his starved, parched victims of their impending doom. At eight sharp, he returned, without lighter or fuel, with whip, hammer, and wooden ladder. “Paladin, come.” He lowered the ladder and guided the Paladin with his whip, as if in a circus act, until the latter climbed to ground level. “You were the first to come here. You’re the first to go. Isn’t it poetic?” The brute cracked his whip against a boulder and led the Paladin away. From an unseeable source, there came a metal slam. Then there was uninterrupted screaming—distant and muffled but also shrill and piercing.
The clock struck nine.
“Archer, come.”
The ladder descended; the Archer ascended.
The slam echoed; the screams resounded.
The clock struck ten.
“Warrior, come.”
The ladder.
The slam.
The screams.
The clock struck eleven.
“Hydromancer, come.”
But the Hydromancer refused to climb the ladder. He grabbed one of the pens that were still scattered on the ground and tried to stab himself in the neck. He showed no hesitation and almost succeeded, but the brown whip was faster. It coiled around his craned neck and, as he struggled to take paradoxical breaths, dragged him up and out of the pit. Despite the variation in the sequence, the grim outcome was the same: the slam silenced the world, and then the screams shattered the silence.
“Shannon,” April said, still hugging her petrified friend. “I died in Frostgeist Forest. When it’s my turn, don’t try to save me. Don’t attack that brute.”
Shannon looked up and found a stern expression.
“You still have that ability,” April continued. “It’s your only chance, so don’t waste it on me. Save it for the last moment. Use it when you find yourself in the middle of the flames.”
“I can’t … It won’t work,” Shannon said weakly. “I’m worthless. I can’t do anything right. I can’t save anyone … I can’t even save myself.”
“Shannon, trust me. You’re not worthless.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a good fighter, but you have a really kind heart that gets in your way. You respect life more than anyone else, and maybe that’s why you unlocked this ability in the first place.”
“I tried to kill him. I’m not strong enough.”
“You don’t need to kill him,” April said, pinching Shannon’s cheek. “If you play it right, you’ll make it out of here without even a fight.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Convince the brute that you died. Wait until the effects of the Prisoner’s Potion wear off. Then go back to Engelsburg.”
“It won’t work.”
“It will.”
“It won’t.”
“It will, Shannon. It will.”
The clock struck midnight.
“Martial Artist, come.”
April hugged Shannon one last time. She squeezed her as if with all the love that she would have given the world if she had lived longer. After this warm embrace, she let go and stood up. Shannon caught her leg, but she smiled at her with tears in her eyes. “It’s time for me to go,” she whispered. “You can do it. You can make it work if you believe in yourself. Trust me.” She took off her brass knuckles, which the brute had forgotten to take away, and slid them onto Shannon’s blue fingers. “If you feel afraid, look at them and remember what I told you. You’re gonna make it. You’re gonna live till you’re a hundred. Trust me, scaredy-cat.”
Leaving the brass knuckles, April climbed out of the pit.
Shannon watched in silence. She wanted to say many things—“Don’t go!” “Don’t leave me alone!” “You promised to be there for me!” “I don’t want to save myself!” “I don’t want you to die!” “I don’t want to lose you like this!”—but she had already lost her voice. Her feelings raged inside her chest, unknown to the human world, like a volcanic eruption on the ocean floor or a supernova in an undiscovered galaxy—a calamity without meaning, an apocalypse without effect. The slam still came as if someone had dropped a boulder on her heart. Her body lost its strength, and her head fell against the icy ground. The screams of her best friend followed, but she heard none of them; her world had become mute when she realized that humans could die twice.