For several days, they split up and the only contact they attempted was at dinner time. This was also part of the plan, to keep from drawing unwanted attention.

On the fifth day, when Brian slid into the table for dinner, late, the other two gave him a queer eye. He usually arrived punctually as dinner was beginning. “I think I may just have found something. I got a brief look through ole’ grans books and jotted down some notes. She was pretty suspicious of me, so I didn’t get to look at the book for too long. It was a book about advanced farming procedures to increase crop yield per worker. I know, that is a lot of words. I don’t try to make too much sense of that. Instead, I just tried my best to skip all that talk and find anything about just what we are dealing with. I did.” He said the last bit in a hushed tone. He pulled out the notes that he had written on the locally-grown material they used for paper.

Mathew snatched it quickly and started to pour over it. “Wow! This is really great. Just your notes here, though hard to read, should be good enough for us to experiment!” His words were excited, but he did his best to keep his voice low.

Some field work kept the three busy for the next few days. They occasionally got together to study the notes and share anything they figured out. The excitement died down a little bit.

Max was working on cleaning up the wheat field, getting it ready to lay fallow until the growing season returned. He heard elevated voices arguing. It was coming from the direction of the hamlet. There were sounds of great concern in all the voices. He could sense that concern even from here. He dropped his tools and made his way over. Apparently, the argument had drawn a good number of others to it. Ole’ Gran Valia and one of the younger fathers of the hamlet were heated. “My daughter is out there! You want me to just leave her be. Leave her to the whim of the goddess? No one has survived that ordeal in any of your records.”

“You should have kept an eye on her. The sun will be down within minutes. The sirens are soon to wail. You want to lose the whole hamlet? I can’t let that happen. If you go after her, it’ll be your own life as well as hers that we lose.” She was stern, but she did have a point.

Only one thing, she didn’t know that the three companions probably knew how to stop the thing from carrying out its terror. Max acted quickly. He ran into the center of the hamlet and looked quickly for Brian and Mathew. Fortunately, the ruckus brought them from their work as well. He ran to them. “We’ve got to get back to that panel! We can’t let that girl die. It isn’t her fault. Many kids get lost out there and don’t know any better.”

They both nodded in agreement. As they started to move in the direction of the beast’s lair, Mathew huffed. “You two need to go. I will never make it before dark. That thing will tear me apart.” They both looked at each other nervously. Mathew definitely comprehended this thing more than the other two combined probably did. “Go on. You are wasting time.”

Max and Brian ran up the path towards the forest with only a moment more of hesitation. They sprinted as fast as their legs would carry them and their hearts pounded, trying to keep up. The last rays of light were disappearing over the horizon. They probably were not going to get to the stream bed!

There was a slight rumbling sensation as they smashed their way through the forest. The trench and the bowed trees were just up ahead. The primary path of the beast was their last major hurdle before the stream!

Brian started to become very animated and was making wheezing, gulping sounds. Max looked to their left, following Brian’s gaze. There it was. The black, floating, liquid entity in all its glory seeped through the cracks in the hatch. The only way the outline of the thing was visible is that the trees behind it completely disappeared. In the near darkness, it was almost invisible.

Whoosh! It flew by right behind the pair of them. When it picked up speed, it was nearly impossible in the darkness to follow its path.

“Oh Shit.” They both yelled pretty much in unison. They could see the stream bed now. So close, but that thing was so fast, they could never possibly outrun it.

Whoosh! It flew by Max this time. He could have sworn that it bumped him, but he didn’t feel any pain, just the force of something hitting him.

They both leaped into the stream bed. The leaps were both desperate and would give them no chance to defend themselves from the fall. They both impacted the ground at about the same time and rolled through the cold water. Their bodies bounced about against rocks, onto twigs, and finally slammed into the far bank.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Whoosh! The beast was directly over the opposite stream bed. Max looked at Brian and knew that they both felt as if it was staring at them even though it possessed no visible eyes. In that moment, Max also noticed that his empathy with Brian had reached a certain level of comfort. He could feel Brian’s feelings. There was time to explore that later.

Whoosh! It disappeared from sight and headed towards the fields. They both knew their time was limited.

They stood up to hop their way across the stream to the controls. Brian pointed at Max’s arm. They were both covered in bruises and small bloody cuts. The cut at Max’s elbow was more than the scratch of a rock or poke of a branch. The thing must have touched him after all. His entire forearm was covered in blood. He shrugged, the pain was non-existent.

Brian pulled the damp notes out of his pocket as they crawled under the ledge. There were distant sounds of panic. Max could feel his eyelids growing heavy. He must be losing a lot of blood. He put his head down to think. What could they...

Max awoke to the feeling of shaking. He opened his eyes and looked up to see Brian shaking him gently on his good arm. Max then pulled himself up to sitting position. “What happened?”

“We need your help. It’s going to take all three of us to get this thing figured out.” Brian insisted, Max glancing over to the complex console, sitting seemingly idle.

Brian backed up and out of the way. Max feverishly looked over the notes and the buttons, levers, displays, and blinking lights.

Cold sweat covered Max’s spine and dripped down to his britches as the barely audible screams of the adults filled the air. The screams in the distance got more urgent as the two boys looked over everything. Max started to get desperate as he started to toy with levers and buttons without any guidance, relying on luck.

A loud thump and a crescendo of panicked voices signaled a climax to the far off encounter.

“Move.” Brian screamed from behind Max leaning over the console. Almost before he could get out of the way, Brian fell forward with little control as he hurled a large rock from above his head down into the controls.

The distant encounter grew quiet. Brian heaved and sighed as he looked down at his handywork.

“Well, I managed to stop the thing. I think we might be in trouble though.” He motioned towards the console. There were a couple of large rocks near the panel. Max quickly looked back to the panel. It had been smashed to bits. There were wires, smashed glass, and other bits of the device that Max could not give names to.

“Uh oh.” This was bad news. It would become apparent over the coming weeks that the beast was gone. They could either admit to it now or be blamed for it and have a witch hunt come after them. “We better go find Mathew and come up with a plan.”

They made their way back in town as quietly as they could just before the sun came up. With any hope, they could at least claim that they were in the hamlet all night. That would give them some time to come up with a plan.

#

Max made his way to his parent’s home, ever so quietly stepped into the foyer and winced as the door clicked closed. He curled up on the floor, hoping for just a few winks of sleep before his parents came to after the sun rise.

He ducked out the front door before being disturbed by his supposed loving family. With the harvest being completed in his absence, the field workers would be called in to help with making ale, cooking bread, and preserving vegetables. Max did his best to shirk these extra duties most of the day and snuck out to meet up with Brian at the back of the amphitheater.

Max noticed Mathew sneaking along the backs of the houses also leading up to the amphitheater. With the harvest being complete, soon would be time for the next seasons dramas to be performed. Most of the hamlet did not want to be spoiled by seeing the rehearsals. That fact made the back of the theater the perfect place for the boys to meet in private. Once Lelamar departed and left Brian to clean the practice props, Max and Mathew burst out of the nearby shrubs.

The conversation got as heated as one could with all three of the boys not letting their voices get above a whisper. All they needed was someone to happen by, Lelamar coming back for something, and they’d be busted. Max struggled to keep his own opinion straight. Mathew pushed for honesty for a while, which convinced only Max. Almost before solidifying his own opinion, Brian managed to bring back the discussion to keeping things quiet and letting people figure it out naturally.

Max finally thought of a sort of compromise, “What if we told them we found the panel and that someone else must have sabotaged it? Then we’ve told them what happened and yet we won’t be the center of the blame.”

Now, with the descenting ideas, the boys split for the night to stew in their own thoughts.

#

As Max worked with Belka and some of the other girls, baking hard breads for the off season, he overheard much discussion from those girls and folks that stopped by. The talk of the hamlet seemed to be on just how quiet the nights previous had been. Since the incident with little Haley not getting gobbled up by the Goddess’s protector, the winds had been dead. Some mentioned the unnerving nature while still others described feeling a fear and a burden released from their shoulders. Max teetered between keeping dead silent and shouting to all that felt relieved that he and the boys had been responsible.

#

Another day passed before the worst happened. Wade came running back into the hamlet. “Raiders. Outsiders. I knew it. They’re armed. We’re in trouble. I always said there were others.”

“Raiders in the distance? If we can just hold out until nightfall, our goddess will protect us. Those wild men from beyond must be looking for some of our harvest,” the chief clergy of the Goddess, Helondeth, said while looking up into the heavens at the harvest moon.

The three companions overheard all the commotion as they sat continuing their discussion on whether they’d share their recent experiences with the control panel and what they’d been up to since the harvest. Now it was time to make some kind of decision. If they said nothing, the raiders might just make their way through their home and take everything that the folk here worked hard to have.