“Keira, wake up,” my mother says, peering down at me, her face knit in concern. “It’s time to wake up, Kiddo.” I feel outside of my body as she puts her hand on my cheek, her movement urgent, her other hand grabbing my shoulder. “Keira. Keira, wake up.”
Groaning, I pull myself to consciousness, finding Jonas leaning over me, a scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth. He gives me a wide-eyed look of absolute relief when I cough and stir, and Tyrus on my other side hands me one of my scarfs. He also has his tied around the lower half of his face.
I feel like I’m drunk, or still asleep, or both. Everything is moving slowly, and the world around me is too bright but yet hard to make out at the same time.
“What the fuck,” I grumble, taking the hint and tying the scarf around my face. “Where’s Flynt? Meg?”
“They’re already up. You and Flynt were more sensitive to the fog,” Tyrus says.
“The fog?”
“It’s some kind of magic effect,” Jonas replies. I realize they both have their voices hushed and I was imitating their volume. “Someone is out there and they’re closing in.”
“Goblins?”
Tyrus shakes his head. “Goblins don’t have magic. Not like this anyway. We need you up, we need your range. You good to stand?”
I nod and attempt to, but it takes a few tries to convince my body to respond. The campsite is still and quiet, the fire seeming all but snuffed out as the fog rolls over us. It’s thicker than it was earlier, I can barely see five feet in front of me, and it has a purplish edge to it that shimmers in the dim light. The sky shows the first indications of dawn, but even it is all but blotted out by the effect around us.
I pull on my boots and armor as fast as I can—it doesn’t take long, I’ve been drilling myself on this for weeks now—and gather my bow and quiver. I’m still dizzy but slowly starting to get my bearings. Tyrus leads me toward the trees from which we originally surveyed the camp, and Meg stands there, pressed against a trunk. I don’t see Flynt anywhere.
“Time for me to disappear,” Tyrus says. “See you at the end of this. Try not to blow me up.”
“I haven’t blown anyone up yet,” I reply, though select one of my remaining explosive arrows out of the quiver, then lean in toward Meg. “What do you see?”
Quietly, Meg aligns herself with my line of sight, and slowly guides me to a gap in the trees from which a purple energy glows.
“Can you hear them?” she asks. “Just below the buzz of the silence.”
I pause and listen hard. At first, I don’t hear anything, just the still quiet not even broken by an insect. Then, it comes up at me, the low groan that I’d previously thought was just my imagination.
“What is that?”
“Undead,” Jonas breathes. “And their necromancer is nearby.”
“Are they after us?”
“I don’t know,” Meg says.
“Where’s Flynt?”
“He’s getting another angle. When we give him the sign, he’ll throw an area effect spell. We’re not sure how many there are, but if we can take the necromancer out, it should take care of the rest.”
I meet Meg’s eyes and nod. “What’s the sign?”
“That.” She nods toward my arrow. “You think you can hit it?”
I frown, following the trajectory. It’ll be tough. What I’ve come to think of as my archer’s intuition tells me that it’s almost three hundred feet away, which is farther than anything I’ve hit to date—and the explosive arrows don’t fly as far or as true as my usual fair. I learned that yesterday when it landed early, and that was just sixty feet or so.
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe with a mundane arrow but… I think I have to get closer.”
“You move pretty quietly,” she says. “Go that way.” She points off to the left away from the camp. “I’m not… feeling anything that way.”
“Feeling?”
She dismisses that. “It doesn’t matter. Just… you don’t want to run into these things on your own.”
“No, I really don’t,” I agree, but slot my explosive arrow back into its separate compartment in my quiver and then lift a mundane one to have at the ready just in case. “I’ll be back.”
“Be careful.”
“Yeah, sure.” I offer what I intend to be an encouraging grin, but that I can feel comes across more as a grimace, then I slip off to the left, opposite of camp and the direction that Tyrus—and presumably, Flynt—went. I try to ignore my hands growing cold.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The fog starts to lift quickly and my head immediately begins to clear as I draw huge lungfuls of fresh air. I pull down my scarf to breathe more freely, and I follow the edge of the fog, which is clearly emanating from a single focal point, and purposefully being channeled down toward our camp. Whomever they are, they know someone is there and they don’t seem to like it very much.
The faint purple light gets brighter as I approach, and I move a little more to the left from the fog to try to get a clear sight into the small dell. There’s a woman in the middle of it. I can’t really make out details except that she wears dark colors and has blond hair piled on top of her head in ringlets. She’s focused on the light, which seems to be where the fog originates.
In front of her, there are at least a dozen shambling skeletons following the fog’s path. They’re all different types: orkish, elvish, human, even a pair of what I assume are dwarvish skeletons. Some of them are still gooey, others look like they’re half rotted away, their bones infested with mold and moss. Most have a look similar to Aragorn’s army of Oathbreakers. They’re all held together by a faint purple energy that fluctuates like electricity trapped in a plasma ball.
A shiver creeps up my spine as I watch. I’ve seen a lot of impossible things during my time in Qeth. I’ve even already seen undead when we battled that zombie ogre. This is creepier though. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it looks like Halloween run amok. And I used to love Halloween. I’m not so sure I ever will look at it the same way again (assuming I ever get home to appreciate it).
How do you even kill these things? They’re already dead. An arrow isn’t going to do shit, neither is a dagger, and I don’t have many explosive arrows left. Maybe the fire spell will help, but I don’t see how it could do near as much damage as I’ll need it to—plus I have absolutely no idea how long my meager Essence will last. I was really hoping to test it outside of a life-or-death situation.
The good news, though, is that I have a much clearer shot than I did before. Carefully, I replace my mundane arrow in the quiver and remove the explosive one; as quietly as possible, I tap it against the bow to initialize it, then nock it and draw, anchoring it back against my jaw.
As I sight on the female necromancer with her pretty blond hair, short elven ears, and slightly dipping neckline, I try to get a read on the distance and the air movement. Taking into account the weight of the explosive arrow head, I angle a little more upward than I would usually, and draw it almost as heavy as I can before I say a quiet prayer to the universe—or perhaps to the [System] running whatever my life is right now—and I release.
The arrow flies exactly as I hoped it would, and it impacts the ground right in front of the necromancer, exploding, showering dirt and bone debris everywhere. It should have at least seriously injured her—but it didn’t. Just before my arrow made impact, a huge undead ogre came out of nowhere and wrapped itself around her, taking the damage instead.
The event is still enough to disrupt the energy. The purple light dims and then dies, the fog production stopping with it—though the skeletons beyond the blast radius continue on their quest toward the campsite.
There’s a fraction of a pause, then another eruption—this one flickering with Flynt’s familiar red energy. A flurry of too-distant-to-read numbers comes flying off the skeletons, but there’s too much ground between them and the necromancer for her to get caught up in the force blast.
I look back toward her only to find her staring fully in my direction, hands open at her sides, collecting what look like balls of energy. Her undead ogre companion looks hurt—I guess? It was already looking pretty rough just by virtue of being a zombie—but it stands beside her, menacing.
“Shit.”
I throw myself behind a tree just as two bolts of white hot energy blast toward me. The first singes my arm, raising a black 14, and forcing my muscles to painfully contract from my shoulder to my fingers. Thankfully, it’s not my bow hand, so I don’t have to worry about dropping it, but it takes a few seconds for the sharp tingling to go away. The second blast, fortunately, misses me.
My hand doesn’t want to cooperate at first, but I finally coax it into action, pulling one of the mundane arrows out with shaking fingers. Yeah, I have magical fire arrows on me, but there’s no time like the present to try this [Essence] thing.
I’m not entirely sure how to initialize it, but I think really hard about a magical fire arrow. Vaguely, I find myself muttering something—I’m not really sure what, it sounds something like arazus shural, though I don’t consciously know the meaning of it—and the arrowhead gleams red. It doesn’t glow, it doesn’t emit any light, but it gleams.
Ducking out, I sight quickly on her, and release. Again, the ogre moves stunningly fast to block the arrow, which emits a red pulse on impact; a brilliant red 22 rises in the air. Not quite as much as I hoped, but it’s better than a standard hit.
I’m about to check my character sheet to see how much [Essence] it used (why I thought that would be a good idea in the middle of a fight I don’t know), when the ogre moves out of the way, revealing the woman again.
She makes eye contact with me. There’s a stutter, like everything freezes for a moment, and suddenly, her face is right in front of mine, formed out of gray smoke. It grins, causing goosebumps to fan over my skin and the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end. I cry out in surprise and fear, and then she’s solid.
She’s thin, thinner than I am, wearing long sleeved dark clothing that looks like it stepped out of the late Victorian period. She has a brooch pinned to her chest with a symbol that I recognize from the coin Jonas found: the forward-facing skull ringed with vertebra.
She looks like a necromancer—and yet, not really. She seems far more alive than the Crypt Keeper I would have expected: her eyes are bright green, her cheeks flushed with excitement, her full lips a vibrant natural pink. When her eyes meet mine, they’re so fierce and present that it stops me in my tracks.
Of course I expected an attack, but even still, I didn’t expect her to reach up with shocking speed and shove me like Tina Miller in seventh grade. Her palms land with a crunch just under my collar bone. The power behind it combines with the surprise, and it throws me backward, landing me hard on the ground, knocking the air out of my lungs. My bow flies out of my hand and clatters into the undergrowth a few feet away.
But there’s something else, too. I thought it was just the landing that knocked the wind out of me, but I can’t catch my breath. My empty lungs struggle to fill as she grins at me fiercely, her fingers curled like tight claws up in front of her, and I can actually see mist flowing from me to her.
There is absolutely nothing that I can do.
I gasp as my vision starts to blur, everything getting soft around the edges. I can see the hit points bleeding off of me in threes. It gets to the point where, if I hadn’t leveled up, I’d already be gone. I can’t feel my hands or my feet. I think of hearing my mother’s voice in my dream before Jonas woke me, and my heart hurts that there’s a real possibility she’ll never know what happened to me.
The point of a large magical sword pierces through the necromancer’s chest, and she disappears the way she came: into a puff of smoke.
Then, well, so much for twenty-two days without falling unconscious.