“I was called a fool by many—most even—when I showed them my designs for Yaharan. ‘Impossible,’ they said! ‘The whole thing will fall down!’ Where are those voices now that the city stands tall and triumphant, casting its mighty shadow across their pathetic villages?”

* from the diaries of Lee Corpicus, the Mad Architect.

The smoke rising from the chimney of Wilhelm’s hut was like the last bell of school interrupting a terrible lecture and gave me an excuse to quickly walk away from Jacob and our conversation that seemed to be going nowhere.

“Hey, wait up!” he called out, chasing after me.

The door to the old shack almost tore from its hinges as I pulled it open and was greeted with an acrid cloud of soot and ember.

“Come on in, boys!” Wilhelm’s voice called out from within. As the smoke cleared, I saw his massive silhouette against the growing flames of the forge, which he stoked with a thick iron rod. It was like a toothpick in his enormous hands.

“Alastor gave me this,” I told him, selecting the Scourge Steel Chunk in my inventory. It appeared in my hand and I held it out to him. The pale man smiled when he saw it.

“Oh, he did, did he? And you want me to use that on your axe there?” I shrugged. “I’m happy to do it for you, but I’d wait if I were you. That’s just a starter weapon. You’ll be replacing it soon enough.”

“Are these chunks that hard to come by?” I asked.

“They ain’t fallin’ out of the sky, that’s for sure.”

“Fair enough,” I replied, slipping it back into my inventory. “I’ll save it.”

“Can you do anything with my bone, smithy?”

Wilhelm stopped and cocked his head to the side, flashing Jacob a mischievous grin. I chuckled. It took Jacob a second to get it.

“Oh, come on!” he protested. “You know what I mean!”

“Uh huh,” Wilhelm joked. “No, sonny, I can’t do a damn thing with your bone. For that you’ll need the witch, Grecia.”

“And where is she?”

Wilhelm shrugged. “She fled the plague same as I. But she ain’t in the woods, that’s for sure. Might be she’s found shelter at the Cragstone Plains. Real shit-on-the-boot kind of place, but what around here isn’t? If you’re lookin’ for her, I’d start there.”

“Shit-on-the-boot?” Jacob whispered. I hid my smile and nodded.

“Thanks, Wilhelm,” I replied. “And welcome back.”

“’Preciate it, boys.”

I stepped from the thick hut and back into the cool air of the night and looked up at the moon, bright and unwavering in the sky. It was hard to picture what the Weeping Hills would look like during the day. It was almost as if the place was born of the darkness and that was where it had to stay. In a way, I didn’t want day to come.

“So, you wanna get going?” Jacob asked eagerly.

“You know where it is?” I asked, realizing I’d forgotten that question entirely. But Jacob raised a hand and pointed beyond the dying fields behind town.

“Beyond there, I’m pretty sure. A few of us went out there for a look around, but turned back at the Withered.”

“Withered?” I asked.

“These sort of man-wraith things,” he replied. “Blue and kind of vaporous…level 4s I think. We were level 1 at the time, so…”

“I heard ya,” I replied, remembering the Firebomb in my inventory. Picturing what it could do delighted the gamer in me, and I still had a full head of steam behind me from my victory over Dorrin, so I was ready to go. “Yeah, let’s roll.”

Jacob grinned and we set off. Passing through the town square, Jacob nodded and waved to a small group of Seekers grouped up around the lamppost. I averted my eyes as they waved back. I’d taken a leap of faith and allowed myself the possibility of making one friend and that was good enough for today.

Baby steps.

I strode quickly through town, my Young Seeker’s Boots clopping across the heaving cobbles like the sound of horseshoes, until I reached the fields. As before, a ghostly mist hung heavily across the weeping vegetation. The thick stalks stood strong until they began to bow over at their tops, like the neck of a man dangling form a hangman’s noose. The spectral vapor made it hard to see. I estimated the visibility at around twenty to thirty feet, if that, and it seemed to only get worse as we progressed.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Desiccated crops snapped and crumbled beneath out feet. I’d expected the fields to be waterlogged and rotten, on account of the mist, but it was as though the life’s blood had been sucked from the place—like a strong wind might turn the whole place to dust.

“Do we need to worry about anything here?” I whispered to Jacob, my axe at the ready.

“Not until we get a little deeper.”

I nodded and kept moving. To our right, a cart similar to the one I’d brought Wilhelm back to town in, lay shattered and splintered, one of its wheels cracked in half and splayed out like a bisected ribcage. Large gourds lay scattered here and there, a cross between a pumpkin and a squash, food for the silent crows that swept down from the black sky.

From somewhere ahead of us, came a creaking sound that reminded me of the rocking of the Midwife’s chair, but as we kept moving, the sweeping blades of a windmill came cutting through the fog. It turned slowly, like some internal mechanism that had grown tired still fought to keep it spinning. As we made our way towards it, something moved in the mist.

“Jacob,” I hissed. He stopped beside me and I pointed. “Withered?”

He nodded. I watched as the fog stirred, swirling and pooling around the thing’s shape, which slowly emerged. Jacob was right; it looked like a man, but its body seemed to be made of a ghostly blue smoke that peeled and drifted as it moved, circling nothing, doubling back on its track every few seconds like it was lost or searching for something.

Withered—Level 4

“Just one of them,” I remarked.

“There will be more.”

“Well, let’s take this one before they show up,” I told him, pulling my Firebomb from my inventory. It felt weighty in my hand, and I saw it was made from shards of metal, glued or epoxied together into something resembling a globe. I eyed Jacob with a grin as we stalked forward.

Something snapped beneath my foot, and the Withered whirled to face me. Its eyes, impossibly white, seemed to flare with licks of blue flame. It opened its mouth to cry out, but that’s when I threw the bomb.

It hurtled awkwardly through the air, off kilter, wobbling like a badly thrown football, before striking the ghostly apparition straight in the jaw. Flames burst like a everywhere, spilling like globs of thick liquid that clung to the monster’s limbs. Some of them reached the ground, setting the crops alight, and I watched happily as the thing’s health plummeted to well below half.

340

“Damn!” Jacob cried out, raising his bone and firing. Jacob’s golden arrow appeared and sprang forth from the massive femur in his hands. It cut through the fog to slam into the Withered’s stomach, ripping away half of what was left of his HP. Springing into action, I leapt forward and plunged my axe into his chest. Only a sliver of health remained, but as I followed up with a broad, backhanded swing, the force of my own blow almost tore my arm off.

I’d expected to meet resistance as the blade found its mark, but the Withered had a surprise in store. Its body melted into blue and white smoke, maintaining the outline of its shape, but allowing my axe to pass right through it. My legs caught against each other and I toppled down among the corpses of the crops beside me. Dust of the dead vegetation sprang up, coating my throat, causing me to cough heavily.

“What the Hell?” I grumbled, staggering back to my feet as the Withered took shape again. His ghastly knuckles met my nose with enough force to knock me back down.

65

Pain flared through my nose as a second arrow burned through the air above me. I heard the Withered’s tortured cry as it found its mark, and looked up as the vile thing died.

“You could have warned me!” I shouted angrily as I got to my feet for the second time.

“I didn’t know!” Jacob cried back as Quintessence swirled around me. “I told you we didn’t fight them.

“Oh, right…” I grumbled. “Sorry.”

“S’alright,” Jacob replied, bending down to check for loot. “Figures, he doesn’t even drop anything.”

“Well, where would he carry it?” I joked. “He’s just a ghost man. What was that anyway?”

“What?”

“That spell you cast.”

“Oh, Mortal Arrow?” he replied. “Not bad, eh? You wanna check the windmill?” he asked. I glanced up at the blades, scattered holes the worn fabric of the sails as they creaked slowly above us.

“Duh,” I smirked, walking over to the front door. I gripped the handle tightly and looked back at Jacob. “Ready?”

He nodded, and I pulled hard.

The door came right off its hinges and collapsed at my feet, exposing a single, milky black room within. The only light came from a shaft of blue penetrating a single shattered window high on the back wall. It appeared empty, but I kept my axe at the ready as I stepped across the threshold.

A strange smell filled the air, what I imagined old grain smelled like, despite never having smelled such a thing in my life. The sound of the windmill’s mechanism groaned through the mortared stones as my eyes searched for any tasty loot.

A single table lay three-legged on the floor. Heaps of broken wooden buckets were strewn about haphazardly, but in the corner, sat a chest, intact, an iron lock holding it shut.

“Bingo,” I grinned as I walked over to it. I tugged at the lid, but the lock was thick and heavy and despite a few hard blows from the handle of my axe, wasn’t going anywhere. “Locked.”

“Probably need to find a key around here somewhere,” Jacob mused, kicking a pile of planks by the door.

“Think it’s worth it? I mean—low level chest?”

“Hey, you never know,” Jacob shrugged. “I mean; can you really pass up a locked chest? What kind of gamer are you?”

“I’m more concerned with levels,” I told him. “Let’s find the witch so we can get her back to town. If we run into some special mob who has the key on the way—awesome. If not, you’re free to keep looking for it all you want.”

I exited the windmill with a renewed sense of purpose. It angered me that I couldn’t spend the usual amount of time on loot hunting, lore hunting and side quests. But Rey was missing and there wasn’t any time to waste. We had to find the witch and get her back to town so Jacob would have somewhere to upgrade, and then I had to start gaining levels—fast.