The afternoon passed, and the evening was drawing close when they returned to the area around Jillin. This time, as they got within about half a mile of the town, they felt very clearly the effect of the curse taking hold.

“I can’t believe I never noticed what was happening before,” Brand said. He stopped where he was, and then got his Raptor to walk back a few steps. “Come here, you two. Look at this!”

They found a distinct boundary beyond which the curse simply did not take effect. This boundary was as clear to them now as stepping through a door. On one side of the boundary, the weather was pleasant, the sky a clean, pale blue as the summer evening unfolded around them.

Then they took a few steps toward the town, and everything changed. The sky above was a lowering gray, threatening rain. The temperature dropped, and the ground changed from green grass to sticky dark mud.

Outside the boundary of the curse, Jillin looked like a perfectly nondescript little town. There was nothing unusual about it at all, except the fact that it was oddly quiet.

One step through the barrier, and it resembled a dead town, a place of doom, a place where ghosts walked.

“A spell like this works by concealing itself from view,” Zorea said. “You don’t notice it when it takes over you. That’s why no one here has paid any attention to it. They just think that life is intolerable and everything is terrible, and even we were beginning to accept that as truth, I think.”

“But now that we’ve seen the cause and the mechanism more clearly, the curse is not working so well,” Saul said. “The sooner we can get to the bottom of this, the better,”

They rode around the edge of the curse area, looking at the map to guide them. They stayed as much as possible out of range of the influence of the magic, for no other reason than that the spell was just so deeply unpleasant to be around.

But as they came around closer to the woodland that cloaked the low hill to the northwest of the town, they had no choice but to plunge into the area of the magic’s effect.

Brand made a sound of disgust. “Ugh, this is a horrible feeling. I can think of nothing worse than living under this all the time. Whoever’s doing this to the poor people of Jillin deserves to be killed.”

“We’re going to do our best, Brand,” Saul said. “Let’s keep moving. Zorea, do you feel anything?”

“That way,” she said, pointing ahead of them toward where something glinted through the trees. She seemed almost choked by the intensity of the power of the curse, but when Saul met her gaze, she shook her head. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

They dismounted the raptors and continued on foot. The trees were thick, and the ground tussocky and uneven, and that was not good territory for the raptors to fight on.

The three humans moved together toward the gleam of light through the trees, their weapons in their hands. Saul took the lead, sneaking up behind a wide tree trunk, peeking round it to see what was beyond.

In the space beyond the trees was a wide, still pool of water. To Saul’s left, water trickled out of the pool in a little noisy stream, and on the other side, another trickle of water was flowing into the pool. The water itself was dark gray-brown as if thick with silt.

Pale light filtered through the canopy, glinting on the surface of the water. That was the light that Saul and his friends had seen through the trees.

Saul looked at Zorea and raised his eyebrows in a question.

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She nodded, and tipped her head toward the water.

There was no sign of anything, but the curse felt so intense that even Saul could feel it. There was a malevolent presence about the pool. Without doubt, there was something in there.

Saul and his friends stepped out into view. At first, all was calm.

Then, the middle of the pool bubbled.

They dropped into a fighting stance, ready to take on whatever crawled out of the water.

Without warning, there came the whizz of arrows in the air.

“Back!” Saul snapped and flung himself back into the tree line. The others did the same, and just in time.

A volley of arrows thudded into the ground and the trees where Saul and his friends had been standing only moments before.

“Where are they?” Brand said, looking around himself.

“Up there,” Saul said, pointing. “In the trees beyond the pool.”

“What… Saul, they’re humans! Xornians, by the look of them”

Saul stuck his head out from behind the tree and looked up. Brand was right.

A group of dark-haired men crouched in the trees on the other side of the pool, dressed in greens and browns and armed with short hunting bows. Their faces were covered with dark masks that only left their eyes uncovered, but their heads were bare.

“Some kind of Ranger troop,” Saul said. He leaned out again and shouted. “Hey, what are you doing? We’re trying to help!”

An arrow was his answer, and he snapped his head back out of the way just in time.

“It’s a trap,” Saul said. “Who these people are I don’t know, but we’re going to have to deal with them before we can tackle whatever’s in that pool.”

“How do we do that?” Brand said.

“I’m not so keen on killing them outright,” Saul said, “not until I know more about who and what they are, but we may have to. Let’s see if we can try a different approach before we resort to that.”

He was smiling, as he thought of a new way he could use his magic, a novel approach he could take that might not involve simply killing the folk in the trees.

The System options flickered before his eyes as he looked through them. He was searching for something he had seen just earlier that day, in the new options opened up by the School of Glade.

He found it.

Enhance Growth

There was a potion in his inventory that he’d only recently discovered how to make. It was called Boost Spell, and was a short-acting potion that did exactly what it said in the label. The potion needed quite a lot of ingredients, and some were not the easiest to find, so Saul only had two of the potions available.

Brand and Zorea were both able to see Saul’s option lists as he went through them. As they saw what he was doing, they both grinned.

Would it work? Saul was not sure, but he wanted to test it out.

In the days when they’d been training back in the Holdfast, Saul had taught Brand and Zorea a set of hand signals so they could communicate without speaking aloud. Now, he made the gesture that meant, ‘Create a distraction,’ and pointed at Brand, then in the direction away from where he stood.

Brand nodded once, then ducked out from behind the tree and blasted a jet of fire out from his left hand over the water of the pool.

“Take that!” he shouted, waving his flaming, fire-enchanted sword with his right hand.

The jet of flame that he was able to shoot had increased steadily in diameter and length since he had first got it, and it was certainly an impressive display.

A shout came from the trees, and a flurry of arrows was directed at Brand, but Saul leapt out and fired his Enhance Growth spell directly at the trees that the archers were hiding in.

Zorea let out a whoop of laughter as she saw the effect that the spell immediately had on the trees. With a creaking and a shuddering groan, the trees all increased in size rapidly.

Wood groaned, and the archers screamed in fright when the trees suddenly shot upward, firing the archers themselves up into the air. The three of them fell out of their perches, and the others found themselves suddenly a hundred feet up in the air.

The three who fell landed in the water. Saul and Brand ducked back into hiding, then peeked out.

The men fell into the pool with a great splash. They were dressed only in light ranger armor, and so they were able to swim. They paddled toward the shore, but only for a moment.

With a terrifying abruptness, all three disappeared under the muddy surface.

Water bubbled, and a dark stain of blood spread.

The arrows from the trees above had stopped. The archers up there were too high up to attempt to shoot, and they had seen the fate of their fellows who’d fallen in the pool. Their frightened faces peered out of the branches high above.

Something moved in the pool.

Saul looked toward the water and stepped out.

A dark, round shape raised itself slowly from the pool. It had a bald head and a pair of lilac eyes gleaming with malevolence. Then the rest of the face was revealed as the figure emerged, lifting up out of the water.

It was a face that Saul recognized.