I followed the path past the orchard, scanning the ground, until a good-sized fallen branch caught my eye. It was a smooth length of wood, as thick as my wrist and twice as long as my arm. Strong, too. It must’ve fallen pretty recently.
I angled the branch against a rock and stomped down with my sneaker.
On my second stomp, it snapped.
I grabbed the half that was about the size of a baseball bat and gave a few practice swings. There. A weapon. A crude club, but hefty enough to bash someone’s brains out.
The weight of the club gave me a little confidence and I followed an overgrown path onward. Twenty yards past the banapple trees--the, uh, rahico trees--I caught sight of a curving length of wrought-iron fence. An ornate, black fence of iron curlicues, maybe eight or ten feet tall.
Except as I approached, I realized that the fence wasn’t iron.
It was smoke.
“Huh,” I said.
A fence of smoke, like those chains on the altar. When I closed my hand around a post, the smoke felt both unbreakably strong and completely nonexistent. Which was as strange as it sounded. Then I peered between the posts, at the land outside, expecting to see more forest. Instead, I saw nothing but swirls of haziness, like the fence was surrounded by an impossibly-thick fog.
“So that’s freaky,” I muttered.
I headed leftward, paralleling the fence, and soon realized that I was curving around the temple. The whole place was built around concentric circles, with the altar in the center, then the stone temple walls, then maybe sixty yards to the impassable exterior smoke fence.
The temple complex seemed entirely contained, enclosed inside this fence. At least if it was a closed circle and didn’t open to the rest of the world on the opposite side of the property. Which must’ve covered five or six acres. That’s why it didn’t take long for me to come to the Hole
Yeah, the Hole.
I was following the curving fence when a grove of tightly-packed green-barked trees blocked my path. They were skinny and tall, with narrow leaves and lumpy burls that clung to the trunks twenty or thirty feet overhead. When I stepped around them, the first thing I noticed was a leaf-littered stone path cutting through mossy mounds, leading back toward the fountain and temple. That was to my left.
To my right, the wide stone path led toward the Hole in the fence. For no reason I could see, the posts of the smoke fence suddenly darkened and combined, swirling together to form a ... well, a round, black hole. Twice my height. A void, hanging vertically in the air where the fence should’ve been. My breath caught and I almost stumbled backward in fright.
But everything else seemed so normal that I simply stood there and stared, and tried to remember how to breathe.
A minute later, I noticed blurred shapes inside the Hole. The blackness wasn’t a void, there was depth there. An open space stretched past the Hole, with rectangular silhouettes scattering the ground. Rectangles that reminded me of ... gravestones.
Which made the whole area inside the Hole look like a creepy cemetery at midnight.
Nope.
No way.
Not for me.
With my hand clenching my club and my gaze fixed on the smoky Hole, I backed away, following the stone path back toward the temple. After I got far enough, I turned and trotted until I reached the fountain, where I collapsed with relief like I’d just escaped a haunted house.
Damn. Too creepy. Okay, well, I’d just consider everything near that Hole as ‘already explored’ and move to the rest of the courtyard.
I drank more water, then took another bite of fruit. So that was my day so far: an altar, a head-crushing stone, a courtyard. Weird messages. Cute wolf cubs, a smoke-fence. A terrifying cemetery hole. I was clearly a little in shock. I felt like I was missing things. Missing connections. My mind was too overloaded to function smoothly.
Still, I could complete that quest. Finish exploring. Clean the courtyard.
Get stronger.
So when my pulse stopped hammering, I followed the path past the temple, heading away from the Hole, toward a spot on the exact opposite side of the grounds. That half of the courtyard was less wooded and more like an overgrown moss garden. Reedy flowers rose from a small pond, the water’s surface dappled by the slanted light of the early evening sun.
Just past the pond, a few lichen-covered steps climbed to a platform ringed by knee-high statues of elephants and lobsters and demons, and even a few people. The center of the platform was charred black from a campfire or something, and vines with orange-red leaves draped the statues.
I eyed the platform--the shrine?--for a moment, then realized what I’d just thought, about ‘the early evening sun’: the daylight was fading around me. The sun was lowering toward the horizon, which made me wonder about shelter. Where would I sleep tonight? Maybe the temple door would open after I finished the quest. Maybe I’d find a lovely pavilion with a feather bed.
In any case, I had two or three hours before I needed to worry, so I kept walking. Past the shrine on the platform, past the pond, and along the path. When the fence came within sight, I braced myself for another cemetery hole.
Instead, I saw what looked like a gate, with two doors that seemed like they’d swing open on smoky hinges. Oh! It looked like a gate because it was a gate, the one that the quest notification had mentioned. Right. That made sense.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
At least as far as any of this made sense, which wasn’t very far.
I breathed a few times to calm myself, then felt a sort of itchy sensation. Like I was being watched. The skin tingled on the back of my neck, and I spun quickly, raising my club.
There was nothing there.
I watched for a few more heartbeats, then crossed to the gate. The exit. The way out of the courtyard and away from the temple. If it was unlocked. I put my hand on a gatepost to see if it would open and--
QUEST: Depart the safety of the steps to explore and clear the courtyard.
REWARD: Gain enough strength to survive outside the gate ... if only briefly.
FAILURE: Don’t gain enough strength to survive. See how that works for you.
“I know, I know,” I grumbled. “I’m not leaving, I’m just checking.”
Still, I lowered my hand, just in case opening the gate would magically shift me to the other side. The dangerous side. When I looked through the posts, the smoke cleared ... and that time, I saw a forest. A dense, old forest with huge trees. Not as big as redwoods, but not far off. They had shedding trunks like dogwoods and huge leaves that collected in drifts on the forest floor, around massive ferns and sea-serpent-like roots.
An ancient, primordial forest? That’s what it looked like. I wasn’t about to find out more, though. Not yet. Not until I gained enough strength to survive, whatever that meant.
So I left the gate and followed a path to my right, toward the part of courtyard that faced the temple veranda. I passed more of the green-barked trees with the high, fat burls. The pebbled path snaked into a field with a dozen scattered boulders, each about the size of ... well, of the SUV that had killed me. Or that had sent me here.
The area felt almost like a hedge maze, except with boulders. I entered the maze ... and a pained cry broke the silence.
A yelp, a squeal, then a rumbling growl.
I acted on impulse again--the first time since the SUV--and threw myself at a boulder. I wanted to get somewhere more defensible than ‘lost in a maze’. I climbed to the top then jumped to another one, a few feet higher. I needed to move, in case something was hunting me--and to seize the high ground.
Which I did, without even losing my grip on my club.
The yips and squeals continued and I readied myself to beat back any attacker who started snapping at my heels. Nothing happened, though, at least not near me. The sound of fighting grew louder, and were coming from somewhere in front of me. The sound of bestial tearing and rending and dying. I crouched on my boulder, praying that I hadn’t been spotted.
Then the horrible sounds grew quieter. Quieter, quieter ... then silence returned. The silence of the graveyard.
Well, shit.
I stayed low on the boulder, trying not to breathe. My club suddenly seemed terribly inadequate. My everything suddenly seemed terribly inadequate. I figured I’d wait until my legs started working again, then I’d haul ass for the safety of the temple steps.
Probably wouldn’t take more than a week for me to shake off the fear.
Except, to my surprise, I felt better after just a few seconds. Huh. I sort of suspected that I should be more frightened. I wasn’t, though, so I took a wide step to the next boulder, then crept ever-so-slowly to the edge of that one.
Peering around a leafy branch toward source of the sounds, I couldn’t see much. There was another boulder in the way. Yet again I considered retreating, but I hadn’t been spotted, and I needed to know what the hell was going on. I needed to put a name to any dangers, any threats. So I climbed ever-so-silently to the next boulder. That one was at the very outside of the ‘maze.’ From there, a small meadow of feathery grasses and modest wildflowers stretched toward the smoke fence.
However, the grasses and flowers were trampled and specked with blood.
Wolves lay on the ground. Dead wolves. Three adults, three cubs. Except the biggest adult was still twitching slightly. Barely alive, mortally wounded. I watched his chest move as he struggled for breath ... and his neck sprouted legs.
“Fuck,” I said, but those weren’t just legs.
The creature who’d been feasting on the wolf’s neck heard me speak, and lifted higher to scan for more prey.
And here’s where I mention that I wasn’t afraid of spiders. In fact, I liked them. They were fascinating and cool. They were often beautiful. Hell, I hooked up with this goth girl who had a pet tarantula, and after a few weeks, I preferred the spider to the girl. Why not? The arachnid was less venomous, and had a better fashion sense.
However, my fondness only applied to spiders smaller than my head. Once they reached the size of my head, fuck it: nuke them from orbit. I’m sorry. I’m sure they were still cool and fascinating and maybe even beautiful, but I’d prefer mushroom clouds.
The spider that had been eating a full-grown wolf was definitely larger than my head ... not including its claw-tipped legs, which must’ve stretched for three feet. It had two huge black eyes with smaller ones--still too goddamn big--to either side. Orange-gray spikes covered its body and orange-gray threads covered its legs.
For a long moment, we both froze.
The only thing that moved was my gaze, snagging on another lump in the meadow behind the dead wolf. An orange-gray lump. A dead spider. So the wolves had extracted a price. Though I didn’t see any surviving wolves, which probably meant the spiders had slaughtered the entire pack. On the other hand, I didn’t see much at that moment, other than those terrible spider eyes staring at me.
The breeze died.
The leaves stilled.
The spider leaped at me.
From thirty feet away. For a terrified second I thought it was flying. Its middle legs spread wide to reveal a bright red splash of color. Probably a threat display intended to make prey flee so the spider could take them down from behind.
It almost worked, too. I almost panicked and ran.
Instead, I planted my sneakers. I bent my knees and shifted my club to a two-handed grip. Baseball had never been my game, but I’d played for years and this eight-legged fucker was coming at me like a beachball into the strike zone.
My swing caught it in the face. There was a crack and the club vibrated in my hands and the impact flung the spider away. It hit the ground in the meadow and rolled another few feet. Dead? Yeah. Yeah! Yeah, I’d killed that fu--
One of its leg stabbed into the dirt. Then three more. Then the spider pushed itself from the ground and trembled. So not dead, but not unhurt, either.
“There’s more where that came from!” I called, brandishing my club. “C’mon, you little fuck. Try again and see what hap—“
It tried again.
It leaped at me, that time from only ten feet away. I didn’t get a full swing in. Instead, I bunted the spider a few feet, with a solid smack. It landed on the edge of my boulder, snagging the rock with its claw, then came back at me from way too close.
I panicked.
I kicked wildly and my sneaker connected, but the spider grabbed my leg and chomped on my calf through my pants. The pain shocked me. Which wasn’t all bad. Because the pain shocked me like an ice-cold shower: it shocked me into alertness, into clarity.
My panic vanished.
I spun my club and jabbed the broken pointy end at the spider. My first jab hit exoskeleton and slid off. The spider’s fangs pierced deeper into the flesh of my leg and my second jab speared the fucker in the eye. It kept chewing on me, but I had leverage now. I pried that thing off me by the eye socket and flung it away again.
It didn’t fling far. It travelled in a short arc then crashed to the top of the boulder, not three feet from me. Because it had anchored its ass to the rock with a silken string. Golf wasn’t my game either, but I put my whole body in 200-yard drive. My club snapped one of its leg clean off, and it reared back to show me its red threat display again and I beat it to death.