Cassie was grabbing my hand so tightly it hurt as we were sucked into the In Between. I’ve been through a lot of portals. Way too fucking many in fact, usually, you step through, and there’s no lack of continuity. Air pressure normalizes on either side of the portal before you step in, you can smell, hear, and see things from both sides, etc., so when you don’t feel any different on either side of the portal. This portal… was different. The very instant it opened, we were pulled into it resulting in a very nauseating experience. Which direction was up changed in an instant, and we began plunging through the air very suddenly. It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings; Cassie and I were thirty feet in the air above the river Styx and several hundred yards out away from the shore. Presumably, this was the intruder protection Cassie warned me about; it might not sound too distressing. At least we were above a body of water, better than being thirty feet above a parking lot, but Styx is not just any body of water. Many human souls are too fearful to board the boats in the river and instead flee to the surrounding areas, but others do get on the boats and regret their decisions. The ferrymen do not alter course regardless of what their passengers say, so the only way to escape their destination is to jump into the water, and many, many souls decide to do this. The problem is this: the water of Styx is the purest expression of the In Between; it takes only seconds of exposure for a soul to become a goblin, and many have. There are millions and millions, possibly billions of goblins who are eternal prisoners to the water. Even if someone could escape the influence of the river, the goblins who reside there pull them under the surface. I could tell from Cassie’s screams that she knew exactly what our fate would be if I didn’t do something, so I did something.
I let go of Cassie’s hand and grabbed her around the waist with my left arm and with my right I summoned a very strong gust of wind directed up, right at the two of us. It slowed our descent, and we stopped midair about 7 feet above the water’s surface. I let the wind fade, and right as we began to fall again, I froze the water below us. This was a tricky spell: I didn’t need to freeze a large area, but I needed the ice to go deep below the surface of the water all while keeping the top of the ice as flat as possible. I didn’t quite succeed; I made a relatively large ice burg: it was about 10 feet by 4 feet and decently deep, but the top was not at all flat. I struck the ice before Cassie, and all of our combined wait was directed on my side. The wind was knocked out of me, and I let go of her. Unfortunately, the incline meant she rolled off the ice; I came to my senses about half a second too late. I grabbed her arm preventing her from completely plunging into the water, but her foot still broke the surface. I pulled her back up and out of the water right as a grey hand burst from the water and grabbed her ankle. Well, fuck. If there’s one aquatic zombie monster, there’s a thousand. I pumped pneuma into my muscles and pulled her free of the goblin’s grasp.
“This is very, very bad, Dante,” she shrieked.
“Well, you’re not wrong but also not helpful,” I said as dozens of arms started reaching out and grabbing onto the iceberg. I raised my hand, a blue sigil appearing before it, and I made a large wave that forced the goblin down and away while at the same time pushing the iceberg in the other direction – away from land. Unfortunately, the momentary reprieve came at a cost: dozens of hands began rising up out of the water grasping for anything. Two of them grabbed the ice and began pulling themselves onto the make-shift boat. The monsters didn’t look like any goblin I had ever seen before; they had the same grey skin, but they weren’t deformed. They had regular human proportions aside from minor shriveling; the only other notable features were their eyes: they were all white. No iris or pupil, just white. Excluding those eyes, the creatures could have been mistaken for a drowned person. Despite their appearances, they were still incredibly dangerous. The goblins… You know what? I’m going to call them the drowned. It sounds cooler anyway. The drowned blindly reached around trying to pull anything under the surface of the water. I raised both hands this time and created a wave this time going in all directions away from the ice. All of the drowned save for one which held onto the ice were pushed away, but the surface rocked back and forth dangerously. Not enough to capsize but not too far off either. I turned to the creature that was crawling closer to us, but before I could do anything, its head shot backward. I turned to see Cassie holding a smoking handgun. The drowned slid off of the ice and back into the water leaving a trail of black blood where it had been.
“Get us to land!” Cassie shouted. “I’ll handle the goblins!”
“The drowned,” I replied.
“What?” she asked in frustration.
“They’re not really goblins, so I’m calling them the drowned. I hope it’s going to catch on,” I said matter-of-factly.
“Will you shut up and go?” With a smile I raised my hand again and pushed the water behind us away from us propelling us forward. I had to balance my desire not to get buttfucked by a bunch of water zombies with my desire not to flip the iceberg… which would have ended with getting buttfucked by a bunch of water zombies. It was a real rock and a hard place situation, but I managed it with grace and dignity: I screamed the whole way. It wasn’t all fear; there’s a unique exhilarating feeling you get when you’re fighting for your life, and I hadn’t felt it in a while… unless you count a few hours earlier.
“SHUT UP, DANTE!” Cassie yelled barely audibly over the repeated bang of her gun.
“Sorry, I’ve got a thing about drowning. I don’t want to,” I replied. I was looking toward the beach trying to steer using the directions of the waves I was creating which believe it or not is extremely difficult when Cassie screamed. I whipped my head around to see one of the drowned had managed to dig its fingernails so deeply into the ice, the creature was being pulled along with it. That wouldn’t be so bad except it was behind where Cassie was standing, and it had managed to grab Cassie’s gun with its other hand. I only had a moment to do something that I hadn’t done successfully in several years. With my left hand I maintained the spell propelling us forward; I pointed my right hand at the drowned’s head, a white rune appearing before it. I froze the ample water in the damp air creating an icicle which I launched forward as fast as I could manage. The drowned used to be a girl; not a woman but a little girl, no older than 13 or 14 when she died. She was wearing a pink night-gown plastered to her skin with the water from Styx; her hair was long, stringy, and plastered to her face. From the way I was angled, I could see the creature’s face even though it was directed at Cassie. It was odd seeing a look of hatred, of hunger for blood on such a young face, but it was nothing compared to watching an eighteen inch icicle puncture her head from the side. The momentum of the ice jerked her head to the side as it embedded in her. More black blood splattered as the drowned let go of Cassie and slipped back into the drink.
In the time Cassie had been incapacitated, eight or nine more of the drowned had crawled onto our ice float. As soon as she was free, she began shooting again. After two shots, she through her empty clip (magazine? I told you I don’t know shit about guns) into the water retrieving another from her bag. I hazarded a glance back and saw we were only a few yards from shore. I took a deep breath and raised my right hand; dual blue sigils glowed brightly in the grey world as a wave began forming. It was small at first, only a few feet hide, but as it traveled, it grew taller and taller. When the wave reached our make-shift boat, instead of swallowing us, we were pulled to the top of the wave, and the whole iceberg was deposited onto the sandy shore. Both Cassie and I were launched forward tumbling on the ground; I jumped to my feet, grabbed Cassie’s hand, and pulled her several yards away from the shore. Dozens, maybe hundreds of grey hands sank back under the surface of the water.
I collapsed to the ground and pulled out a cigarette lighting it with a small flame emitting from an orange rune a centimeter above my thumb.
“Was that good for you? It was good for me,” I said jokingly.
Cassie shot me a nasty look and replied, “What now? Clearly, the scroll did not take us to Athena, and even if we find her and stop her, how are we going to get back?”
My heart dropped. “I brought this,” I said gesturing to the shattered pieces of one of the necklaces that previously housed spirits. “I should be able to trace it to the place where the spell was cast. As for getting home, I have no idea. Hopefully, they’ll have a portal open? Those assholes got to us somehow.”
Cassie smiled at me, “Don’t worry. I expected your lack of foresight; I brought more than just guns!” She pulled out a scroll that was not too dissimilar from the one that brought us here. “My mother made this years ago when she opened the shop.”
I looked in amazement. “Your mother was a Wiccan? This is amazing; did she have the pneuma to use it?”
Cassie laughed, “Not by herself, but when her coven worked together, they could do amazing things. I saw them myself.”
“Why didn’t you join?” I asked in confusion. If the entire group of them working together could be half as powerful as a wizard, they could do almost anything. Certainly more than prayer has ever done for anyone.
She squinted her eyes in disgust, “They taught all of these amazing ideals: protect the earth, save the innocent, do no harm, help the less fortunate, etc., and yet I watched them use their power to benefit themselves over and over again. The coven helped my mother get the money to buy Strange Attractions; one member got a better mortgage rate, another cursed someone else up for the same promotion. The hypocrisy sickened me, and it still does.”
I took that in for a moment. “It’s not unique to that one coven; go to any Baptist church on any Sunday, and half of them will be gossiping about the other half,” I tried to reassure her.
“And I’m not apart of their congregations either,” she said with a smile. We were silent for a moment when she said, “The first time I had a vision was when I was 4; I was playing tag at preschool, and when I touched another little girl, I watched her get hit by a car. I started crying and warned everyone, but no one would listen. Two weeks later it happened just like I saw it.” She looked up and met my eyes. “My mother did that to me on purpose; the coven blessed me with ‘Great power’ before I was even born. Now, enough of talking about me. We have a job to do: find Athena.”
I nodded and retrieved the necklace around my neck, and then I realized the problem. Tracking spells are extremely complicated, and I wasn’t sure I 100% remembered the corresponding sigil. “Uhh, Cassie,” I said stomping out my cigarette on the grey ground. “Did you happen to bring a spellbook in your bag?” I asked hopefully.
Cassie did a weird combination of sighing and smiling and pulled a book out of the duffel bag. The book was called, “Useful Spells for Wizards and Practitioners, Twenty-Seventh Edition,” by Eduardo Bamonte. This was the same book I had used at the Krymmeno; the first edition had been published sometime in the fifteenth century. I flipped through the pages until I found the one I was looking for: the tracking spell. It was a very versatile spell; with a drop of blood or a hair, it can track the individual it belongs too, but with an enchanted object, particularly one with a strong enchantment, it can lead to the place where the enchantment was performed. I placed the book on the ground with the necklace at the center of the sigil drawn on the page and pressed my right index finger on the symbol. With a bit of pneuma sent into the page, the sigil began to glow pink, and the broken pendant on the necklace twitched. I sighed and added a bit more pneuma as the pendant began to levitate and shot forward two feet before I could catch it.
“I guess we should go in that direction,” Cassie said. I looked in the direction the pendant had flown; there was bare sand for a few hundred feet and a very dark looking forest with looming trees and deep shadows. The In Between has a large variety of biomes; basically, any environment on earth also exists in the In Between, but they are placed somewhat randomly. For instance, a 110 degree barren desert could be adjacent to a -15 degree frozen tundra. Anyway, this was an ominous forest undoubtedly filled with supernatural predators.
“We’re going to have to be very, very quiet; there are creatures here so alien the human mind can’t contain them and others so vicious they’ll rip anything that moves to pieces just for fun,” I said somberly.
“We won’t have to worry about that!” Cassie announced proudly as she dug around in her bag again; she retrieved what looked like an oil lamp from the 19th century. “It’s moon oil!” she said, beaming. Moon oil is oil which has undergone an extensive ritual that involves a practitioner (or in her case likely a coven) performing a spell for three hours every night under the light of the moon for a full lunar cycle: from full moon to full moon. The result is when the oil is lit, it produces moon light; supposedly, both the sun and the moon are expressions of the gods’ love for mortals. I seriously doubt that’s true, but they are undeniably powerful weapons against monsters; for instance, sunlight burns vampires to a crisp, and moonlight reveals werewolves to be their true selves. Moonlight would deter the vast majority of nonsentient entities here.
“Nice!” I said with a smile.
“There’s one thing that’s bothering me though,” Cassie stated as she began lighting the lantern. As the oil ignited, a bright white light shone in all directions; it brilliantly lit about five feet around us in all directions and another two or three feet more dimly. “Where were the boats? Every description I’ve ever read said Styx was filled with boats ferrying the souls to heaven and hell.”
“It’s true,” I replied as we began walking toward the forest, Cassie holding the lantern held aloft. “Just like rivers on earth, Styx has tons of offshoots, little rivers that flow from the main river. Some of them go back around and meet the main body while others end in lakes; this one is huge though. I only know of one,” my eyes widened in horror. “I know where Athena is.”
The Gnosilepides has (or had) numerous strongholds in the In Between; their purpose could be anything from tactical stations away from the mortal plane to containing sensitive materials. The largest lake in the In Between has an island in the center of it, and the order built a lighthouse on it where they stored books and scrolls on black magic. That must be where Athena was or at least where she learned to incarcerate human souls into pendants. I told all of this to Cassie, “Who knows what else she could have learned there,” I said in horror.
“It doesn’t change what we have to do,” Cassie said with determination in her voice. I was still very iffy on her presence here; if she hadn’t come, I probably would have died in the river, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had put her in danger. It’s true, the goons attacked her as well as me, but if she had never met me, that would have never happened. There was nothing I could do about it now though. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m glad I’m here with you!” she smiled punching me in the shoulder. “Now let’s go!”
The grey, sandy beach transitioned abruptly into the grey forest; it wasn’t quite a line where on one side was sand and the other was trees, but it wasn’t too far off from that either. The sand became dirt with a few trees here and there, but by the time we had walked 50 feet, the trees were so dense, we had to duck and walk in jagged lines to avoid them. I had to summon my sword to chop through the vines and various other plants growing in the limited space between the trees. We heard numerous forms of wildlife, but the lamp kept them at bay; with so many obstructions, the light only lit about 5 feet around us. I saw multiple sets of eyes watching us as we went but none of them seemed to be following us. Occasionally, I had to recast the tracking spell to ensure we were going in the right direction. I don’t know how far the forest extended, but it took us hours to walk through it partially because we were moving so slowly dodging trees and cutting through fona. After several hours, I realized I was sweating; it wasn’t hot, nor was it cold; I’m not sure if there was really even air in the In Between, but as long as I didn’t think about the temperature, it was perfectly comfortable. So why was I sweating? There was something else wrong too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Some strange discontentment. With a gasp of understanding that Cassie noticed, I realized that withdrawals had started; the potion I had made to substitute Vicodin was wearing off.
“Hold up a second,” I said. I really didn’t want Cassie to know I was a drug addict, but I hoped she wouldn’t question me taking a potion in a strange dangerous land before combat. I retrieved the concoction and a dropper from my pocket and estimated a milliliter and dropped it onto my tongue. Within seconds, my symptoms vanished. It was enough for my body, but even with the demon being as quiet as he had been, I missed the high. When you’re high, there’s a glorious few minutes where all of your problems melt away, and everything is just right. Without that, I felt empty even though I was doing something worthwhile, something that would help someone besides me for the first time in too long. Cassie eyed me knowingly, and I felt tired. I was tired mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, other lly ways.
“You know I know right?” She asked.
I sighed deeply, “Know what?”
“I’m not an idiot!” she exclaimed. “You’re a functioning drug addict; you go to work without missing shifts, and you’re not spiraling lower and lower or anything, but you’re not living up to your potential, and you’re content with that. You have power most people can only dream of; you could help a lot of people.”
I gritted my teeth, “You don’t know what’s happened to me; I devoted myself to helping others, and all it ever got me is dead friends and a girlfriend that tried to kill me. Not to mention there’s an evil god that lives in my soul and wants me to… Well, I don’t know what it wants me to do, but he’s an evil god. It can’t be good!”
She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You’re right. I don’t know everything that’s happened to you, but I do know you, and I know you could be more. And deep down, you know you should be more.”
Somewhere deep down, I knew her words rang true, but it was something I’d intentionally tried not to think about. I looked away from her as tears welled up in my eyes. I tried to step away from me, but her hand was still on my shoulder; she gripped harder and pulled me into a one-handed hug. Unfortunately, that meant my body blocked the light of the lamp on one side of the forest. I was still looking away from Cassie into the now darkness, and I saw two glowing grey eyes in the pitch black.
“Cassie!” I whisper-shouted urgently; she let go of me, lifted the lantern high, dropped her bag on the ground, and pulled her handgun out of her waistband. The moonlight from the burning oil revealed a large grey cat similar to a panther but two or three times bigger crouching on a low-hanging tree branch; that normally wouldn’t be unusual as many of the creatures native to the In Between are nearly identical to animals on earth, but this creature was not afraid of the moonlight. There were only two possibilities: either the entity was not from the In Between, or it was sentient. The sentient monsters from the In Between, and I call them monsters for good reason, are capable of ignoring the negative effects the light causes them. I tensed my muscles, clenching my left fist and pale pink light joined the white light of the lamp as I summoned my sword. Luckily (or not so luckily) I didn’t have to wait long to see which possibility was right.
The panther pounced, jumping from its branch ten feet into the air and above me; I raised my left hand to summon my shield when BANG! A gunshot interrupted my concentration as the panther’s face exploded launching grey goo everywhere around us. The creature’s corpse hit me and knocked me onto the ground; I threw it off of me, a task which required pumping pneuma into my muscles as it was at least five or six hundred pounds. I jumped to my feet and watched the carcass suspiciously. “Is it dead?” Cassie asked quietly.
“I don’t know; anything from here that could resist the moonlight should require more than a single bullet to kill. Let’s get out of here before it heals or reforms or something,” I replied.
We began moving as fast as we could in the direction the necklace pointed; it was easier now. For a few seconds, I couldn’t figure out what had changed until I realized the trees were thinning out. What’s more, the ground was becoming wet. We had walked into a swamp. “The water here is coming from Styx; if you step into anything deeper than a puddle, there could be one of the drowned hiding beneath it!” Right as the words came out of my mouth, I grabbed Cassie around the waist to prevent her from stepping into a deep puddle. From the lantern, I could see what looked like a grey, pupilless dead body in the water below; it was a young man, maybe twenty to twenty five with long hair separated into to strands floating in the water. He was wearing a tight t-shirt and bell-bottom jeans. We side-stepped the puddle and stayed on dry(ish) land. There was still the occasional tree, but the muddy ground was covered in grey moss with deep puddles spread throughout. To my left, I was able to see the same offshoot river we had come in on to begin with. We must be getting closer; if I was right about what we were looking for, this river fed into a large lake. I couldn’t see the lake as I looked ahead, but it had to be there.
Our speed dropped considerably as we jumped over puddles and balanced on thin land bridges; after about twenty minutes, a deep growl emanated from behind us. I looked behind us, and the panther slowly walked into the swamp; it didn’t run or even walk quickly but leisurely went straight for us. It stepped into the puddles and even swam through a larger one… the drowned completely ignored it. That meant it must have been an In Between native. Cassie gently placed the lantern on dry ground and rummaged through her bag pulling out a shotgun. I took up a fighting stance with my sword gripped firmly in my right hand and a pink sigil appearing in front of my left ready to summon a shield at a moment’s notice. Once the panther was ten feet away from us, it shifted. It stood on its hind legs, shrinking some parts and elongating others; after about thirty seconds a woman stood before us. She was roughly seven feet tall and naked with blue-grey skin. She was covered in mud and grime so much so her fingernails were brown; her hair was raggedy and matted all throughout. With a wicked green she squinted the same glowing grey eyes the panther had; she was neither pretty nor ugly but rather plain looking with the exception of some quality I couldn’t put my finger on that made her seem odd in an indescribable way. “Oooh, mortals in the In Between! It’s been so long since I had a snack,” she cackled. Her voice was simultaneously high pitched and gravely, and she was speaking some ancient tongue I didn’t recognize though the meaning behind her words was clear.
“It’s a skinwalker,” Cassie grunted with the shotgun trained on the girl; I could tell she was terrified. Her voice was shaking, but her hands were perfectly steady.
“I am honored by your knowledge, Seer!” the thing shrieked. “Boy,” it said referring to me, “I see you wield the arcane. It’s a crude magic fit only for lowly beasts such as yourself, but it is useful. I will make you a deal; I’ll eat your little girlfriend, but I will allow you to leave unharmed.”
“Why would you want to do that?” I asked, buying time. Skinwalkers were extremely dangerous creatures; they were shapeshifters that made the knights of New Byzantium look like amateurs, and their ability to generate matter from thought was second to none. The worst part is, they wielded an ancient magic, a type of dark shamanism, that required no sigils and thus could be cast with no preparation necessary. The only way Cassie and I were walking out of there is if I trapped this thing and sealed it. Skinwalkers can’t die nor can I permanently trap the thing, but maybe I could hold it in place for a few hours, a day or two at most. I needed to cast a complicated spell if I wanted to do that though. I slowly altered the sigil I had in front of my left hand praying the creature wouldn’t notice what I was doing.
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“Mortals have never understood magic; all you do is transform the energy inside of you into different forms. Magic is about will! Imagine the world you want and will it into existence; that type of pure magic has one downside though: it cannot allow one to walk into another world. You can though; open a portal to the mortal realm, and you can keep your pathetic little life.” She smiled wickedly in a self-satisfied matter.
“What would stop you from killing me after I open the portal?” I asked still forming the spell.
“My word,” she said with a smile. “You must see me as a bloodthirsty monster, but you are but a bug to me. Do you think flies comprehend humans? To them you are gods that decide whether they live or die on your whim; would they not consider you cruel? But killing a fly doesn’t make you evil; they are so far beneath you, their lives don’t merit a second thought, and that is precisely our relationship, mortal. Your life isn’t worth my consideration. However, that doesn’t make me evil, nor does it make me a liar. My word is good; I will honor any pact I make.” Her face became serious with the second half of the statement, and I believed her, but I couldn’t unleash this monster on the world, and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to let her eat Cassie.
“Even if you make it back to the mortal world, the Gnosilepides will detect your presence and send you back.”
“Not if you send me to the Americas!” she sang in delight. I was surprised she knew anything of recent history; most of the skinwalkers were driven out of the mortal realm before the Gnosilepides ever came to the “new world.” I’m not sure how exactly it was new when people had been living there for thousands of years but whatever. The spellswords systematically elimanted the rest of the monsters that had avoided detection by the 19th century, so how did this thing know about something from a decade ago? Her grin widened as she figured out what I was thinking. “Oh, I keep up to date on my hunting ground.” It didn’t matter; I wasn’t letting this monster get anywhere near any other people.
“It’s a tempting offer,” I lied. “But, I think I’ll pass.” Before I finished the word pass, the pink sigil in front of my left hand became brown, and rock began growing out of the ground encapsulating the creature. The skinwalker didn’t struggle or even move as the rock grew around her; I made it as close to her body as I could manage to prevent her from gaining much momentum. As the rock covered her face, she flashed me a wicked smile. I only remembered the simplest binding rune, and I didn’t exactly have time to look through Cassie’s book, so with a wave of my hand, I began inscribing the rune onto the rock over and over again. Even if each individual sigil was weak, I hoped they would work together to create a proper cage. I let my sword vanish, walked up to the stone, and placed my hand on it; with my right hand, I pumped pneuma into the binding spells and with my left, I drew more. Each time I finished one it began glowing with faint pink light. As every square inch of real estate was filled with symbols, I stepped back to admire my work.
I looked back and saw Cassie was flipping through the spellbook. “Here!” she cried. “A level three binding! Place it around the stone. I stared at the symbol trying to capture all of its intricacies; with another earth spell, rocks began rising from the muddy ground in the shape of the sigil with the stone prison at its epicenter. Once it was complete, I knelt, placed my hand on the symbol, and it began glowing the same pink as the weaker bindings. I was breathing hard at this point; the earth magic wasn’t very difficult, but the last spell took a lot out of me.
“Will that hold it?” Cassie asked uncertainly.
“Not even close,” a voice boomed out in all directions as every rune began glowing an intense pink. After about half a second, they all went dark in unison, and the stone surrounding the skinwalker exploded shooting rocks like shrapnel in all directions. I ran in front of Cassie and summoned my shield just as multiple rocks pelted it. Once the dust cleared, the creature was standing in the exact same spot; she hadn’t moved an inch. She broke all of the bindings and stone with her will alone. With my shield around both of us, I pulled Cassie to her feet, and we began backing away.
“Where are you going, Spellsword? I’m not done playing.” Suddenly, her arm shifted becoming bulky and muscular; when she was done, it looked like a body builder’s arm. She then rushed toward me at an incomprehensible speed; even with pneuma increasing the firing speed of my nerves, I could barely track her with my eyes. This was on par with my speed when I embraced the demon nearly completely; she basically vanished and reappeared in front of us, and with a single punch from her newly muscular arm, my shield imploded. I fell to my knees as one of the loudest sounds I’d ever heard rang out a few inches from my head. I grabbed my ears in pain; when I looked up, I realized what had happened. Cassie shot the creature with a shotgun at her center of mass. It was one of the most disturbing sights I’d ever seen; the creature’s naked torso was ripped to shreds with huge chunks missing. It looked like someone had taken a garden shovel and scooped out the black viscera beneath her skin, but somehow she was still standing…. And smiling. Her body shifted, regenerating as little lead spheres began falling out of her wounds as they healed.
“Well, fuck,” I said. I grabbed Cassie’s hand and began running. You can’t run very fast in a swamp where stepping in a knee deep puddle is a death sentence, but we tried. I looked back and saw not a naked woman but a dragon. A fucking dragon. There are a lot of beings with the ability to shapeshift; shapeshifting is a very useful ability. You can grow claws, wings, tentacles, etc., but generally, the only advantage gained are physical ones. You can become stronger if you grow bigger muscles, you can fly if you grow wings, you can alter your mass or shape, but you won’t gain any nonphysical abilities of the creature you’re duplicating. For instance, a knight of New Byzantium (at least a very, very powerful one) could take the shape of a dragon and fly or eat stuff, but he wouldn’t gain the dragon’s ability to breathe fire (if it was a fire dragon.) Skinwalkers are different though; the dragon behind us took flight, opened its jaws as a torrential onslaught of white hot fire shot forth. I could never match the power of a dragon, but maybe, I could deflect the attack. “Get down!” I screamed; without a second thought Cassie dropped to the ground, and I crouched near her lifting both hands, a white sigil before each. I summoned as much wind as I could manage. Trees all over the swamp began creaking, and a few were even knocked over. As the dragon’s fire struck the slipstream I had created, the flame was pushed along with the wind and narrowly avoided incinerating the two of us.
The moment the skinwalker was above us, it shifted again, this time back into the panther form it had when we’d first seen it. That was a mistake; it was a pretty big panther, but a fiftieth of the weight of the dragon and susceptible to the wind. With a wave of both of my hands, another gust of wind knocked the panther off its course and into a large tree. Without wasting a second, the sigils changed form and turned orange, and I shot the largest fireball I could at the monster. As the flame collided with the tree, it completely incinerated within seconds. I dropped to my knees breathing deeply as a human figure walked out of the fire completely unscathed. “I underestimated you little mortal. Perhaps I’ll show you what real magic looks like!”
The skinwalker raised her hand, and thousands upon thousands maybe even hundreds of thousands of arrows appeared in the sky above me hung there frozen, head pointed down. I stared up in horror; as the creature had claimed, there was no sigil. She created all of them using only her thoughts. “I’m putting faith in you, Spellsword. I still need you; don’t die.” With a flick of her wrist, all of the arrows surged forward; there were so many of them, Cassie, I, and even the skinwalker herself were within their path. I ran with every ounce of speed I had until I was within a foot of Cassie who had ducked with her arms over her head, and I summoned fire once again. Instead of a fireball, I launched a continuous stream of fire as hot as I could make it. Arrows struck the ground, trees, water, and dozens pierced the skinwalker but not us. The arrows directly above us were disintegrated into nothing; Cassie cautiously opened one eye and stood when she realized the danger was gone.
“More of your little tricks; use real magic!” the skinwalker said as she healed from her injuries, her regrowing skin pushing the arrows out of her body. She vanished and reappeared in front of me grabbing both of my wrists with each hand. I shifted my hips and hit Cassie with my butt hard; obviously, I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t want her to be a casualty of whatever the fuck this creature was about to do to me. Cassie went flying twenty or thirty feet through the air before she tumbled a few times on the ground. She might have a few bruises and cuts, but she’d be alive. I pulled with all of my magic enhanced might, but the skinwalker effortlessly kept my hands in place. She winked at me, and her right shoulder began bubbling and expanding; a whole new arm grew out of her shoulder, and a glass bottle filled with a clear liquid appeared in its hand. She twisted my wrists until my palms pointed upward, and she spilled a small amount of the fluid on each hand. My gloves dissolved in an instant and then agony.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in serious pain before, but it sucks. My mind emptied of all other thoughts; there was only pain. My legs fell out from under me, and only the creature’s grip on my wrists kept me from falling on my ass. It was like that for several seconds: me hanging from her grip only aware of my suffering until it began to subside. I guess I don’t really know if the pain was fleeting or if my brain was being flooded with endorphins and adrenaline, but either way I began to regain awareness of my surroundings. The skinwalker let go of me as I stood back up and observed my hands. The acid or whatever it was didn’t disintegrate my hands, but it did burn my skin and maybe more importantly, it burned off my pentagram tattoos. I was a sitting duck now… with no access to magic. I looked up in horror to see the once again two-armed skinwalker had backed up to around ten feet away and materialized a large sword. She spoke, “If you’re as capable as I think you are, I might just keep you. I’ve always wanted a pet! You’ll learn more in a week than the Gnosilepides could teach you in a lifetime!” She rushed me again with the blade held behind her horizontal to the ground; I tried to summon my shield, but of course without the tattoo, I couldn’t create an illusion of the appropriate sigil. In desperation, I imagined holding a small steel shield; why that? It was just the first thing that came to mind, and for whatever reason, it worked. I suddenly felt a weight on my arm, and I was holding the exact shield I had imagined. I lifted it right as the creature’s sword would have sliced through me; as the blade struck the shield, the weapon sliced through it with little resistance, but I managed to partially deflect the blow saving my life.
The skinwalker cackled in delight, “You have exceeded my expectations mortal! Your shield was pathetically weak but still solid matter! It was an adequate first attempt, but your second will have to be better!” She once again distanced herself to about ten feet away and went into the same stance as before, but this time her sword was twice as long and three times as thick. I dropped the remains of my first shield, and to my surprise it didn’t vanish. It was real matter, as real as anything else in this realm. I took a deep breath and this time imagined the strongest shield I could: a five foot tall, foot thick piece of steel curving outward. I felt the pneuma leave my body as the shield materialized into existence; interesting, converting thought to matter consumes pneuma just like “regular” magic. The shield was so fucking heavy, I had to pump energy into my left arm just be able to lift it.
With a gleeful cry, the skinwalker charged me again with its sword outstretched; I positioned the shield between us as the creature slashed the large blade overhanded. The shield deformed under the force of the sword and I slid back several feet, but it remained intact… so the monster struck again and again. With each collision, I was pushed farther and farther back as the shield dented more and more. After the tenth or eleventh swing, I realized she was going to keep going until the metal was destroyed. I hid my body completely behind the shield and imagined a sword. I couldn’t summon my arcane construct sword without my pentagram tattoos, but I could make a similarly shaped physical one. It appeared in my hand just as I had pictured it, and immediately after the skinwalker had struck while she was rearing back to strike again, I dropped the shield and slashed her across the throat.
To avoid any counterattack, I jumped backward about ten feet still gripping the sword I had created. Light grey blood poured out of the creature’s open neck, but she remained standing making a gurgling noise. As the wound spontaneously healed, I realized she was laughing. “You are quite the talented mortal! You could be a very powerful weapon with proper training; I think I’ll give you a chance to kill my current apprentice and replace her. One needn’t two apprentices after all,” she purred. She had a mortal apprentice already? Athena? A necromancer also capable of reshaping the In Between to her will; things keep getting better and better. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cassie. She crawled back over the lamp I had booty bumped her away from; I’m never going to live that down am I? I didn’t look at her directly, but she could tell I was watching her in my periphery. She placed the spellbook on the ground and opened it to a specific page and picked up the lantern shaking it before she grabbed her bag and retreated several yards behind a tree. I’ll be honest: I had absolutely no idea what she was trying to tell me, but I hoped the page the book was open to would fill me in.
“I’ll take you to her; that’s why you’re here isn’t it?” the skinwalker asked. “She was looking for talent, and she found you!” As she spoke, she walked around me in a large circle; in the guise of backing away from her, I inched closer and closer to the spellbook. “This is my one and only offer: I’ll eat your little friend over there, take you to Athena, and you open a portal to the mortal world. I’ll come back later and see which of you is still alive.” I looked glanced down at the book; it was open to a chapter on oil elemental spells. I twitched my head toward Cassie to show I understood what I had to do although I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. In addition to the four basic elements, I knew a few combination elements: wind and water make ice, fire and wind make lightning, fire and earth make lava, but there are many, many others including three element compositions, compound element compositions, etc. The element of oil was a combination of earth and water; the book was open to an image of the basic oil sigil, but that didn’t mean I could actually cast it. Compound elements are always tricky; the elements involved aren’t always one to one. For instance, the lava element is created when 65-68% fire magic is combined with 32-35% earth magic. Mixing the elements in the wrong amounts can be disastrous, but I had to try.
“How about you go fuck yourself!” I replied. It wasn’t my cleverest comeback, but… well ok. It had no redeeming qualities, but she got the message.
“Very well,” she even sound disappointed. She shifted, dropped down to all fours, gaining mass and claws. I’m not sure what she turned into, but it was kind of like a lizard bear with spikes protruding from its back and along its long, thin tail. I imagined a thick brick wall between us and with a bit of energy, conjured it. A wall wouldn’t stop a skinwalker, but maybe it would slow her down. I dropped to the ground and placed my hand on the book. Oil is liquid; you’d think it contained more water than earth, so I decided to combine 80% water magic with 20% earth magic. I closed my eyes and pumped pneuma into the sigil, and it began glowing a pale yellow. It must have been in the appropriate range because the spell worked: I levitated the moon oil out of the lantern and forced it into a dense sphere of brightly glowing fluid. I could feel the power of the moon resonating within the oil; normally, it releases a small amount of power every second, but I needed all of that energy to burst forth in a single instant. The brick wall before me shattered into pieces as the beast barreled toward me; I sent the sphere of oil with all of my might striking the skinwalker in the face. The second it made contact, I liberated all of the primal power of the moon; that kind of energy wants to be free. Not that it has its own will or anything, but its natural state is to be free. To contain it within the liquid required power and ritual to change its behavior. Setting it free was quite easy; it’s like pushing a ball down a hill: it only takes a little tap. Suddenly, a bright light conquered all of my other senses, blinding and completely encompassing me. A tenth of a second later, I felt myself flying through the air; I must have traveled thirty feet before I hit a tree, knocking the air out of my lungs.
I guess I momentarily blacked out. When I opened my eyes, I was on the ground underneath a tree that was nearly broken in half. “Cassie?” I called out getting to my feet. A white-hot pain shot through my shoulder, it was dislocated. I looked down searching for other injuries and noticed something: the burns on my palms had healed. My pentagram tattoos had even been restored.
“CASSIE!” I screamed more urgently this time. She didn’t reply, but I heard some commotion from a few hundred feet away. The explosion must have thrown Cassie right into a large puddle, and I watched in horror as one drowned held her head underneath the water. The creature was a man at one point; he was short, maybe 5’2’’ or so with sloppily trimmed grey hair, he was wearing a loosely fitting tunic, and he had the characteristic grey skin and all white eyes. If I had to guess, I’d say he was a peasant from some time in the middle ages; I wondered how long he had been a slave to the In Between. It didn’t matter: I had to save Cassie. I lifted my right hand and with my restored pentagram tattoo, I conjured the illusion of a brown sigil. As I breathed pneuma into it, a small hunk of the earth, roughly fist-sized, lifted up into the ground and condensed, reducing in size by a factor of 5. I clenched my fist, and the rock shot forward piercing the drowned’s skull and going straight through it. He fell limp ceasing his pressure on Cassie, but she didn’t get up out of the puddle. I ran as fast as I could, maybe faster. My heart was beating a bajillion times per minute, and I couldn’t catch my breath. Not Cassie, I couldn’t lose her too!
The instant I reached her, I stuck my hands into the water to grab her. As my skin touched the water, I felt a cloud over my mind; I just wanted to give up, to sink into the water and let go. I shrugged off the influence; I had to save Cassie. I grabbed her and pulled her out of the puddle. I’ve been saying puddle, but you probably have the wrong idea; it wasn’t a two inch deep collection of water in a Walmart parking lot. It was wide enough to fit all of Cassie’s body excluding her feet which were still on the land, and about two feet deep. I pulled her out and dragged her a few feet away to dryish land; it was still muddy but without standing water. I stared closely at Cassie, and she wasn’t breathing. I started moving her head back and forth to wake her up but to no avail. It was pretty safe to say, I was no healthcare expert. In middle school, I watched someone perform CPR on one of those weird dolls with no arms or legs, but if I’m being honest, I was half paying attention, half imagining what it would be like to have a Green Lantern power ring. Regardless, I was the only one around; I pinched her nose closed with my one good hand and breathed into her mouth twice before doing one-handed compressions. After the third compression, she coughed up a mouthful of water and began desperately sucking air in. I fell over onto her hugging her and cry-laughing. “Don’t fucking do that to me, Cassie. I don’t know what I’d do if you died.”
After a few seconds I became concerned as she still hadn’t said anything. I sat up and looked at her; she was completely rigid except for her breathing which had reduced to a normal rate, and her eyes were wide open but focused on nothing. I put my face over where her eyes were pointing, and they locked in on me. If you look closely at anyone’s eyes, you’ll see ridges and various structures within the iris; Cassie’s eyes were no different, but the designs within them were altering like they were bits of algae floating on top a fluid. What’s more, the surface of the structures were growing purple.
“Fate Killer,” she said in a voice that wasn’t her own; a force emanated from her pushing everything away from her. I fell back several feet on my injured shoulder; I grunted with pain, and when I looked back, she was hovering a yard off of the ground in a vertical position. “There are but two paths ahead of you,” she started. Her voice wasn’t just vibration in the air; I felt my bones and even my soul resonate with her words.
{What’s happening to her?} I yelled in my mind. {Is it the gods?}
A prophecy? Cassie occasionally saw the future or the past, but nothing like this had ever happened before. “You have but two paths ahead of you,” Cassie or at least her body continued. “Divine justice or fulfillment of the aptitude of man. Your choices will decide the outcome, but be warned, any continued attempts to escape destiny will decide for you.”
I didn’t know what that meant, and to be frank I didn’t give a fuck. The second the last word left her mouth, Cassie fell to the ground like a rock. I rushed back to her side; she landed on her back and didn’t look to have broken anything. “Cassie? CASSIE??” I cried kneeling over her.
“Mrghh, Dante?” she moaned only half conscious.
“I’m here! I’m here; are you ok?” I asked softly.
“MORTAL!” a voice screamed from behind me. “I rescind my offer; I’m going to eat you.” God. Fucking. Dammit. I took a deep breath, stood up, and turned around to see the skinwalker in humanoid form; half of her face had been eaten away by the moon bomb revealing grey skull. I couldn’t help but stare into her empty eye socket. It was so black inside, it looked like a doorway to nothingness. The rest of her didn’t look much better: her right arm was missing completely, and over a third of her skin was burned or disintegrated. This was bad; my only hope of survival was to rely on the demon’s power, but even then could this creature seemed pretty close to unkillable. I firmly gripped my left shoulder and pushed until I heard a pop; I’d like to say something cool like the pain didn’t faze me, but it turns out putting your own shoulder back in your socket hurts. I grunted aloud, and the skinwalker just looked at me waiting patiently. As I rolled my shoulder, the pain subsided, and the monster smiled at me. It looked particularly creepy considering less than half of her lips were still intact. The right side of her mouth was bare skull, teeth and gums.
Behind the skinwalker, I could see where the river met land and became swamp, and a large old fashioned boat floated a few hundred yards from the shore. All of my old-timey ship knowledge comes from a Fischer-Price pirate ship toy. I wondered idly if Kaine still had it put up somewhere? That was a great toy; anyway, the boat looked kind of like the toy ship; it had large sails and was made of wood. Currently, it was floating in place, and many smaller ships were carrying around twenty people in full medieval knight plate toward the shore: the knights of New Byzantium. Two of them were different though: of they were wearing purple robes kind of like a recolored version of the cult of the Mythic Dawn from Oblivion. Now, I know what you’re thinking: aren’t the knights of New Byzantium the good guys? Well, no. They’ll do anything to protect their own people, but they don’t much care for anyone or anything else… and I kind of sold my soul to Constantine one time. It wasn’t like a demon deal or anything, but I agreed to be a court wizard upon my death – a lie as when I die either the demon inside me will drag my soul to hell or shred it to pieces, but he didn’t need to know that. He might be kind of pissed at me for still being alive though, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance the knights would kill me on sight to speed up their emperor’s acquisition.
The skinwalker raced forward while I was looking away and grabbed me by the throat lifting me off the ground. I tried to make a joke, but it came out more like, “Blrghhl.” Maybe that was for the best. I gasped for air, but none came; the creature laughed, tightening her grip until my neck was about to break. I prepared a spell when one of the knights, this one with a plate helmet that hid his entire face save for two slits for the eyes jumped hundreds of feet bringing his sword down and chopping easily through the skinwalker’s arm. I fell to the ground on my ass with the monster’s hand still around my neck. I ripped it off of me and threw it.
“Flee monster, or I shall vanquish thee!” the knight said in a language I didn’t recognize. If I had to guess, it was Mandarin or another tonal language, but whatever mechanism translated it made it sound formal and old-fashioned.
“This is not your fight knight!” the skinwalker spat.
“Thou hast violated New Byzantium territory; thou will return to thy shadows or else suffer the wrath of the empire,” the knight replied calmly. By this time, more knights had arrived, but most, including the wizards, were nonchalantly walking toward us. These people sure were confident in their abilities.
“You forget knight, our transformation abilities are not in the same league; if I were to say, shift into a souleater, I could consume your entire platoon here!” the skinwalker flashed a shit-eating grin like she’d already won. “I will take these two mortals and be gone.”
“If thou were currently capable of such a transformation, thou would have done it. Thy injuries are greater than thou wishes us to know,” the knight said simply. “Now, flee!” he shouted. He was probably right; that moon light explosion (moonsplosion?) must have done more than just burn her flesh. Her severed arm was regenerating very slowly, well, unbelievably quickly but slower than her other wounds had healed. Her right arm and seared flesh weren’t growing back at all as far as I could tell. The creature hissed angrily but began backing up, still facing the knights and me.
She snarled at me, “We will meet again spellsword; I promise you that.” With that, she turned around and ran. The word “ran” doesn’t adequately describe what the creature did; she continually jumped from one leg to the other with each stride covering several yards, and she did it unbelievably quickly. Even as injured as she was, I wouldn’t be surprised if she could outrun a racecar.
I turned and pulled a groggy Cassie up to her feet, “We can’t trust them,” I whispered in her ear, but I wasn’t sure she was aware of her surroundings.
The knight was still holding his sword, and once the skinwalker was out of sight, he pointed the tip of it at my throat. “By order of the emperor, the two of thou are under arrest.”
I sighed deeply, “What crimes have we committed against the empire?”
“Thou hast violated sovereign territory no different than the beast,” he replied. His sword was incredibly stable; it wasn’t shaking at all. He could have been a surgeon in life.
“The Gnosilepides are allies of the empire; we are given free passage so long as we don’t disturb any of its citizens!” I protested knowing it wouldn’t help. The emperor’s word was the law regardless of what words they had written down in law books. Is there one book that contains all of the laws? Is that how America does it? I guess it’s online by now, but I doubted a feudal empire had adopted the internet if electrical equipment even works in the In Between.
“The branch of the Gnosilepides thou belongs to is no more, and thou hasn’t reported to another; the emperor is well within his rights to do with thou as he wishes. Now, come with us.”