Gabriel cocked his three heads at the lock.

“It’s a runic lock. Can’t you tell?” he clucked passive aggressively. “I am unable to undo it with my talons, but your human-appearing fingers should suffice.”

“My human-appearing fingers can’t touch it, either,” she said, exemplifying this by trying to fold her fingers around the small golden instrument. It was like trying to force two ends of a magnet together: futile.

“Hm. I registered that your level was low, but I didn’t realize the true ineptitude of your magic. Any proper mage would be able to resist the barrier.”

Akemi’s eyes slowly dragged from the lock to the bird, glaring.

“You’re not exactly in a position to be calling me inept,” she bristled. “Which one of us is stuck in the cage?”

“I did not intend to cause offense, brethren,” the rooster said apprehensively. It bowed its first and third heads. “It is the nature of my language to be direct. However, the longer I converse with you, the more apparent it becomes that you may not be a native speaker. That is alright. I shall make peace with any creature that is sympathetic to my plight.”

“Uh… huh.” She pursed her lips. “Look. I can’t touch the lock, and my spells can’t seem to, either. Is there any other way to undo a runic lock without touching it?”

The rooster stared at her thoughtfully, as if analyzing something.

“Yes. There’s a way. But I doubt you will be able to reach it.”

“I’m sorry, reach?”

“Yes. Your arms are… they are lacking.”

Akemi laughed. His way of talking alternated between annoying and amusing.

“Try me,” she said. “Where is it? Where’s this unreachable place?”

The rooster removed himself from the gates and walked left, to the other side of his enclosure. Then he thrust his neck through the cage again, and craned it off towards a point in the distance.

“There,” he said, and Akemi followed his ribbed neck past a few shallow coops and towards a taller building. It was rectangular, with a large water wheel attached to the side of it. The wheel was paused in the night-time, but stagnant water still sat in its open crevices.

A tall ladder was pitched to the side of the wheel, as if someone had been doing repairs on it recently. Buckets and wrenches and other tools littered the ground.

“The mill?” she asked skeptically. That hardly seemed like a difficult place to reach. There was a ladder, and inside, probably some stairs. “Is the key inside there?”

“Yes. It is a gem. A runic-gem, if you have not encountered one before. It dispels runes.” He laid it all out for her as if she was a five year old. She tried to remind herself that he was not being condescending—he was simply speaking a rooster-language that lacked a form of polite speech. “But it’s located at the top level of the mill. You must reach up there first. And then there is a guardian there that the manling keeps. The guardian is not to be underestimated. He has eaten all fowl who have attempted to steal the gem on my behalf.”

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

“On your behalf? Am I not the first person to try this?”

“You are the first person.”

He blinked at her. Akemi blinked back. Right.

So this guardian… was undefeated, but only when it came to other chickens.

“I think I can handle it,” Akemi said, tapping on the bars. “Just give me a minute.”

“Strength be with you, brethren.”

Shaking her head at the ridiculous situations she involved herself with in this world, she treaded towards the mill, arriving at the base of the wheel. It smelled powerfully of grain, hay, and days-old mossy water. It was nostalgically… pleasant. For as much as Akemi hated the people she grew up around, the farm itself had always been her safe haven. They never had a proper mill, but they kept a barn that smelled just the same. She’d spend her days enveloped in the hay, a book caught between her fingers.

Tolkien, at first. Then Dostoevsky. Nothing like reading Crime and Punishment under the straw and the stars.

She shook herself of the memory, returning to the problem at hand: reaching the attic. Seeing as the ladder was available, she didn’t bother with entering from the main entrance. She guessed that the direct route had been the strategy of all the previous invaders—read: chickens—and that this protector wouldn’t expect a human raining on his parade from above.

She lifted herself up onto the ladder, and her hands traveled easily from rung to rung. She was soon at the top of the water-wheel, with the mill’s attic just a few feet away. There was a small open window there, with a small sill jutting out beneath it, but it definitely was not intended for climbing upon. Several unruly nails jutted from its surface, and the plaster was chipping away.

Looking down at the ground from this height, an unfamiliar spike of fear struck her. Goosebumps ran up her arms, and she gripped the ladder tightly, her insides cramping.

The emotion felt totally foreign to Akemi. She hadn’t felt fear since arriving in Kodra. Really, she hadn’t felt fear since leaving Flyinge. That receptor in her brain had long since stopped functioning years ago, mauled to death by the ruthless, silent hammer of clinical depression.

Only now—it sprung back, as if revived from the dead. A simple fear of heights, resuscitated.

Was this what it felt like to care about your life again?

It was a stunning thought to have during a side mission about freeing a chicken, but here it was.

She was afraid—actually, properly afraid—to fall to her death.

Shaking her head, she willed the thoughts away. Stomped down on the emotion. It dissipated quickly. After all, she had been practicing the sport of compartmentalization for a long, long time. It was practically muscle memory.

With slightly trembling fingers, she leaned from the ladder towards the window sill. Then she raised a leg onto the wheel, testing its stability. The wheel quickly began to fall, and her leg with it. She gasped, hurriedly returning to the ladder, her heartbeat in her neck.

Damn it. I thought that the wheel would be slower to turn.

It was fine, she told herself. She just had to act quickly. She’d step on the wheel for just a millisecond, then throw herself in through the open window. She knew logically that it would work. She was fast enough. And yet…

Taking a long breath in, she hovered her foot above the wheel.

Just do it, scaredy cat.

Wincing, she thrust her leg down. It made contact and started to lower rapidly, but she jumped for the window just in time. Her stomach did flips as she managed to grab on the interior of the windowsill and drag herself through. She landed immediately on the floor with a thump.

“I did it,” she said, breathing out. “God. That was unpleasant.”

She did not miss fear.

Unfortunately, the universe, too, never missed a chance to taunt her.

Out of the bleak darkness of the room, a shadow painted itself long and large on the ceiling. Then, a hissing. Serpentine and high-pitched, bouncing off the attic’s pitched walls. Something was slithering on the floor towards her, and she couldn’t see from which direction.

All she knew was that it was coming quickly, and it was bearing teeth.