As the pair rushed through the woods, Amelia couldn’t help but sense something was very off. Josephi couldn’t place the scent of the woods. He’d smelled this new scent many times through his years at Amelia’s side. It was subtly metallic with hints of rot and decay, and now filled the forest with its unnatural presence. It called distant memory, his final battle, into the back of his mind. Amelia’s expression troubled him.
She’d been teaching his granddaughter her craft, nurturing the girl’s natural affinity for it. She certainly seemed a natural at it, even. He’d seen their work together, learning sigils and rituals he didn’t quiet understand, but he had his doubts on her ability to keep her cool. He even worried about Amelia’s ability to stay calm in this moment.
Her sharp warning cut through the silence of the woods, “Josephi! On your left!”
He tucked and rolled, dodging a lunging mass that soared over him with terrifying speed. A creature, like a twisted mockery of a boar, sank its sickle-shaped tusks into an old oak tree with a jarring thud. Josephi reacted with aged precision, sending a hand axe through the air to bury itself in the creature’s hide. An ethereal, ear-piercing screech erupted as it struggled, sounding of iron on wood. He took the moment and lunged forward, his other axe raised high, bringing it down with a ferocious roar into the creature’s neck. Black ichor that smelled of rot seeped from the fresh wound as it slumped in a heap. A flash of light illuminated the woods, following a hideous shriek that resonated with pain and rage unbowed.
With fear in his heart, Josephi called out, “Amelia! What are these?”
The usual calm in his voice was gone. He’d fought many monsters in his life, man and beast alike, but this thing that he’d just killed, it troubled him. The corpse at his feet resembled that of a boar, marred with eldritch disfigurement. Its legs twisted and stretched out, with unnaturally long and thick tusks. Broken skin bled a disgusting, rotten black against silvery metallic growths, ripping out of its flesh from the inside out. With a strained grunt, Josephi pulled the ax buried in the creature’s shoulder. Amelia stepped from the shadow behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “In time, we need to find her first,” she spoke, her voice steady but rife with urgency. She traced a sigil in the air with her hands, murmuring soft words of a language lost to time.
A spell, one Josephi recognized. He felt a surge of power through his body. His senses tingled as he felt them sharpen, details coming through his aging sight and hearing he hadn’t had in ages. He could pick out every crack in the bark, every snowflake falling through the air. It would have been beautiful, if it were not for the matter at hand.
Amelia pointed deeper into the woods, her eyes focused in on something yet unseen. Without another word, the duo set off, their feet crunching across the snowy forest floor. The very snowflakes falling around them hung still in the air, as if time had come to a stop. Josephi’s mind raced, bouncing between the puzzle of the horrific monster, and a carnal fear for the fate of his granddaughter. The forest he knew by heart was now twisted and alien, a true mockery of the nature he came to love.
Josephi’s hearing caught a disturbance in the air, a subtle shift in the tree cover around them. A massive bird swooped down, barely missing the towering slab of a man as he rolled to the side. His axe met its wing, bringing it to the forest floor in a grotesque crunch. It leaped for Amelia, whose magic caught it in tendrils of shadow stretched out from the surrounding woods. A bloodcurdling, mechanical scream echoed through the forest, warped and disturbing in their heightened perception of time. Josephi brought his axes to bear, heaving as they met their mark in the monstrosity’s chest. It screamed out again, as the shadowy fingers wrapped their way around it to silence its scream. They squeezed down, covering it in totality, until it simply disappeared.
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Amelia stumbled and caught her breath, a rare sight to Josephi, and tried to regain her focus. Josephi pointed his axe at her, his memory coming back to him slowly.
“What did you teach her?”
She raised a hand, coughing. It wasn’t often she sent something away like that, and it wasn’t without its toll. “This is not what I taught her!” In a moment of weakness, her fierce expression waned; She was scared. Josephi had never seen her scared. “This isn’t right, something is horribly wrong, Jo. Let me focus.” Her hand came to the side of her head as she called on the shadows of the forest. “None of this is right… I haven’t seen this in centuries.”
Her tendrils of shadow crawled through the whole of the forest, searching for their beloved little girl. Every tree, every stone, every bush was twisted and alien. “And these are just the beginning, if we can’t find her.” Josephi tightened his grip on his axes. She was right.
“I never should have taken her in…” Josephi groaned, trying to find any kind of familiar scent in the woods. He was truly lost, a feeling he hadn’t felt since he was far younger, far more green. In this still moment, the cold finally bit him. They’d been searching for hours, and ice covered his thick, graying beard. His partner of many years was in a trance, hand covered in thick shadows buried in the snow-covered forest floor. He always found her magic and methods unnerving, and this might just be the final straw.
“I never should have let you teach her.”
Thalia’s smiling face flashed in his mind. He’d seen it for the first time about a week into her visit. He’d just finished a batch of sausage, and Amelia baked bread for dinner. She ate like it was the first good meal she’d had in years and thanked them earnestly. It was the same smile she wore when he first called her Thalia, the morning after Amelia had helped her pick a name. She smiled so much, through lessons, through hard work. And now, she was missing.
Josephi drove his axe into the side of a tree with a roar. This was why he never wanted children. He knew he couldn’t take care of anyone. Amelia stuck by him, against his protests, but he preferred his solitude. But that young girl… When he first met her, visiting a daughter he never knew he had, she was miserable. He hoped, by giving her some kind of freedom, she’d smile. And she did. But now, he weighed the cost of that smile in his mind.
“Found her! Let’s go!” Amelia didn’t wait, she faded into the shadow, finding her way through the darkness. Josephi sniffed the air, trying to keep her scent on his nose. Weaving through these evil woods, he kept his track, cursing himself for putting such a young soul in so much danger. After miles of sprinting, he caught Amelia’s scent again, with the smell of blood. Human blood.
He pushed harder, breaking the treeline near the banks of a riverbed run dry. He searched the area, finding Amelia standing in the snow with a horrified expression, in the middle of the ravine. Old blood splattered across the snowbank. His breath caught up with him, forcing him to slow to a walk. The wind picked up as time came back to its regular pace, carrying the smell of rotten gore along with it.
A tree root gave him a handle to slide down into the ravine where he’d approach his old friend, finding the smell to be worse down here. The blood covered a lot more of the snow than he’d thought, but his eyes trained on Amelia. The pained look on her face stirred up a fear in Josephi’s gut he’d never felt before. Not staring down armies, not fighting a dragon, not even meeting his unknown daughter had stirred this much anxiety in him. She could only point, covering her mouth as tears froze to her eyelashes.
His eyes followed, trailing the blood and guts to a corpse, what was probably a wolf, once. He kneeled down beside it and threw it away to reveal the small, frail girl he’d taken in. She was curled into a tight ball, barely breathing, and as cold as Death’s touch. He lifted Thalia up in his arms, choking on words he couldn’t speak. Where her long, curly black hair was now held smooth, straight hair, just as white as the surrounding snow. Just as white as Amelia’s.