Rusty knew what was coming, when he impaled himself with the second rune fragment. He had been expecting the pain, knew that it would hurt like hell for a little while.

But as his shoulder burned, and the fizzling, sizzling black energy crawled over his body, Rusty realized that the pain was different, last time.

And that he had vastly, vastly underestimated it.

It felt like every nerve in his body was next to a lit match. It felt like snakes had crawled down his throat and were biting his guts, filling them full of venom. It felt like fire ants were in his brain.

This was NOT how the last rune had felt!

But the worst part of it all?

Rusty couldn't scream.

He couldn't scream, because the Grach were nearby. The sound would carry. They would hear him, and realize that he was still alive, and come hunting for him again.

Rusty clenched his teeth and thrashed instead, fell in the water and splashed and thrashed, pounding the gravel of the shore with both hands, and hyperventilating. It helped, a little. But once his eyes started losing their vision, started fizzing out and swimming with black bubbles, he DID scream a little. He stopped it by jamming his fist into his mouth, screaming into that instead.

He thought he was muffling the sound somewhat. There was no way to tell.

Eventually, it ebbed. And his memory, his now-perfect memory told him that it had lasted about forty seconds, give or take. He didn't go for a precise count, that would have recalled the pain, and he knew he didn't want to think back to that now, maybe not ever again.

And as he blinked, shining letters appeared in the dark of the back of his eyelids.

Rune: Hole, has been integrated into your chakra network.

Committed Chakra: 14/42

“Hole?” he laughed. It came out really shaky.

“Hole,” Roz confirmed, from his seat on the corpse. “I feel like we missed an opportunity. That one would have been really fitting if we jammed it up our butt.”

Rusty laughed harder. The pain was mostly gone now, though his shoulder ached a little, so he cut loose. Well, as much as he dared. The Grach were still around somewhere.

The thought sobered him up some, and he lay on his back, half in the water, staring up at Roz. Then he squinted, looked past the little gray figure. Roz considered him, then turned back around and looked up as well. “What? Something in my teeth? Wait, trick question, I don't have those.”

“No,” Rusty said, staring up at the edge of the pit he was in, then rotating his neck, to trace the edge of where the stone met the surrounding ground. “I'm just thinking that we're in a hole. And this one looks really, really circular. Like perfectly circular.”

“Oh wow! You think he made this with his magic?”

“Maybe. But why? He died down here.”

Roz tilted his head. “That's a really good question. Maybe he thought it would stop whatever killed him?”

“Maybe. Can you, uh, talk to the rune? See what it does?”

“I am. Woof, this one is hefty. This one took eight chakra. Memory only took three. Maybe because it's broader? Yeah, I think so. Um... this one is dangerous. Both to you and to others.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“To me? Did it kill this kid when he used it?”

“Maybe. So... now that I've got two 'instruction manuals' to look at, I think that it's possible to try too hard with things. If you try to cast too big a spell for your chakra pool, you might drain yourself.”

“Oh man,” Rusty stared at Roz, who was off the corpse and pacing back and forth. “What happens then?”

“I don't know,” Roz, said. “The instructions... well, the thing that's kind of like instructions, basically says don't do that.”

“So what IS chakra, anyway?” Rusty asked.

“The runes don't know. They just know they use it, and you've got it. And that Tarqual thing had some, that you absorbed.”

“So it was a little magical?”

“Maybe. I don't know if chakra is magic. Terathon said he could see the magic within you before you got the rune.”

“Yeah, that's how he knew I was the chosen one,” Rusty said.

“You're right. So who's this guy? What's he doing here?” Roz said, looking at the corpse again.

Rusty considered it. Now that he was coming down from the pain, and wasn't running for his life, the body had a smell to it that wormed its way into his nose. Blood, a faint undertone of shit, and something mustier. But none of that compared to the pain in his gut, and that was the priority now. “I don't know any of that, but he had a canteen,” Rusty said, looking over to where it bobbed in the water. “So maybe he had food, too.”

“You know what you're going to have to do to find out,” Roz said. “Are you up to that?”

“It's better than starving,” Rusty said, and got to work searching the body.

It was pretty gruesome. But Rusty had grown up on a farm, been through more than one butchering, especially since Dad had gotten erratic over the last few years. So long as he focused on finding food, this was all stuff he could worry about later.

He kept telling himself that.

The kid couldn't have been much older than him. He had a similar clothing size. The underwear was unsalvageable. He'd shit himself when he died. Most things did, Rusty knew. But the pants were mostly good enough after a quick scrubbing. The shirt was torn to hell and back, but his jacket was usable, if a little ripped and torn in back. He'd had a backpack at one point, but all that was left were straps and a torn flap of canvas. The shoes were a bit big, but laced tightly enough, they'd do. Rusty hung them around his neck by the laces to let them dry.

He DID have food. Rusty found a plastic wrapped pack of jerky in his pocket, with the label blurred and washed away by water. It was the sweetest meat he'd ever tasted, and it was gone too soon.

The treasure in the other pocket was a silvery metal folding knife with a bunch of attachments. Rusty recognized it instantly. It was a demo knife, just like the one his brother had brought home from Korea. Rusty folded out the main blade of the solid, stainless steel apparatus, and nodded in satisfaction. He had SOMETHING to defend himself with, now.

He looked down at the sad, stripped little body, with its face chewed off, and the other gouges where something had been at it. While he'd been working at it, small black bugs had flown down from above, and were slowly coating the corpse. In time it'd be gone, just bones in a hole.

Rusty knew he should get moving, that he'd come out of this about as well as could be expected, but something held him back. He wanted to know what had happened here. Who this kid had been, and how he'd died.

And as he studied the kid's gnawed head, he thought that he might have a way to do that.

“You think that'll work?” Roz said, sidling over to the body again and staring down. “I mean, it might. But it might not be too fun. Guy's been dead a while.”

“Does the rune think it'll work?” Rusty asked.

“The runes don't exactly think. And they don't include examples, so... sorry, charlie, I don't know. But it makes sense to me.”

“Do you think the, uh, spell, would cost too much?” Rusty asked. His gut told him this was a bad idea. But his curiosity wouldn't let him give it up. This was going to happen, and they both knew it.

“It might. Um... one thing I did get from the runes is that distance can increase the cost. So the closer you are, the less chakra it takes.”

“Right. Okay,” Rusty licked his lips, then squatted down next to it, and put his hand on the back of its head, away from the gnawed patch that had once been a face. Now that he wasn't in fear of his life or worried about the Grach killing him, he had time to consider how the dead flesh felt under his fingers. He was no stranger to dead things; you didn't grow up on a farm without handling your share of dead critters, but this was the first time he'd come across human remains that weren't in a coffin.

This could have been me, Rusty thought, staring at the kid. I might die here too, if things go really bad.

Then, before he could lose his nerve, he closed his eyes and thought carefully about the words he needed for the spell.

He whispered them to himself, sounding them out as he wrote. It helped get them straight.

“Show me this body's memories about how they got to Elythia.”

That was a pretty long spell, and it took a few minutes to get it all visualized.

Selective mnemonic recall and view on deceased juvenile human brain!

Committed chakra: 14/42

Cost: 4 chakra.

Remaining free chakra: 24/42

And instantly, Rusty knew this was going to be bad.