It wasn’t there. They traveled all the way here and it wasn’t there.

To say Dimas was panicked would be an understatement. This was their one chance—the only thing they knew for certain. And it was gone.

He got as close as he dared to the shattered glass and broken obsidian walls, using the trinket Hadar gave him for light. Honestly, he wasn’t sure what he was looking for; just something that would tell them where they were supposed to go now.

Anything that said that they missed their opportunity completely.

He turned to Hadar. “Are you sure you haven’t gotten anything from Kiah?”

The soldier shook his head. “Not a single word since I sent in my last report.”

“Ask her about this right away,” Dimas mumbled. “The sooner we understand the situation, the better.”

Hadar nodded dutifully.

“So, what’s our plan now?” Lieke wandered around a bit too casually for the situation. She ran her hand along the wall before pulling it back when she cut her finger. “Damn, these are sharp…”

Lyron rolled his eyes after observing her but went to do something near identical himself. “Are we just going to wait for the commander to give us more information? Isn’t that going to take a couple of days?”

“No,” Dimas sighed. “We need to figure something out on our own. There’s a town nearby, we can ask if anyone there has seen—”

“Where are you hiding it?”

They all froze when they heard the voice, and Lyron was the one to say what they were all thinking. “Oh, shit. That can’t be good.”

“I don’t suppose Lydia told you how this thing was supposed to work?” Dimas prompted, looking between the trinket and Hadar.

Despite the dangerous situation they were presented with, Hadar gave a casual shrug. “Light banishes the darkness, doesn’t it?”

They didn’t have any more to lose by testing the theory than not. When the shadows began to morph around them, Dimas showed the light in their direction; in a moment, the shadows returned to how they were supposed to be. Only time would tell the true extent of its usefulness against them.

“Where are you hiding it?” the voice repeated, more of the shadows moving now.

“We need to get back to the entrance,” Dimas instructed as clearly as he could through his growing panic. “There should still be some daylight left. We’ll be safe as long as we can get in as much light as we can.”

Hadar took the lead back out, Lyron and Lieke in the middle and Dimas shining the trinket in front of any moving shadows behind them. They couldn’t rush ahead in fear of getting trapped. They couldn’t stay too long or else the Skiá would have time to properly generate.

“Hey, don’t these guys feed off of fear?” Lyron asked when they got close enough to the entrance for it to share a bit of its outside light. “Why are we all obviously panicked?”

“They don’t feed off of fear, they feed off of your life force and energy,” Dimas muttered. One of the shadows had materialized enough to try to lunge towards him, though he was thankfully quick enough to banish it with the light. “But this really isn’t the time to be clearing up myths about Skiá, don’t you think?”

It sounded like thousands of voices moaned in unison, “I know you have it. Give it back.”

They all emerged from the exit. Dimas was glad to see that there were no more Skiá waiting for them outside and the ones in the cave stayed right where they were.

“Let’s get going,” he said, untying his horse’s reins and mounting it. “We need to leave before they think that they can follow us.”

…

“It’s funny, when you think about it, that I thought this would be shorter,” Dimas mumbled. “And here we are, traveling halfway across Seothia without knowing if we’re actually going to find anything…”

“Do you always nervous ramble?” Lieke questioned. “I swear you haven’t shut up about it. It was fine at first, but it gets a little bit annoying after a couple of weeks.”

He thought back to the past couple of days spent traveling and, somewhat embarrassingly, realized she was right. “Sorry. Nothing good ever comes from silence.”

“You’d think it would be better,” Lyron remarked. “Then at least we can pretend that they don’t know we’re here, just like we don’t know they’re here.”

“It’s… personal,” Dimas said quietly, as if that would really answer anything for them. He didn’t know if he actually wanted it to answer anything, yet kept them from asking more questions all the same.

Hadar was the only one to have a bit of understanding about it, though it didn’t sound like he really cared. “Waiting for a fight?”

“I guess you can say that.”

Another uncomfortably familiar sound caught his attention, causing Dimas to stop his horse and look around.

“Hey, what the hell?” Lieke tried following his gaze and saw nothing. “Are there more Skiá somewhere?”

“I thought I heard glass shatter.”

“In this part of the woods? It’s probably—why are you going off the trail?”

It was funny. Every time he heard it, he thought of it as a warning to get as far away as possible. Yet he always found himself coming to the source.

Perhaps a part of him still believed that, if he was there, no one else would need to get hurt.

He only acknowledged in hindsight how lucky he was that everyone else still followed him. They didn’t question him and, eventually, they reached what had made the noise: a teenager who was desperately trying to piece together something that looked to be a trinket of some sort. Though there wasn’t anything obviously special about it, it was clear that she cared for it.

“Are you out here on your own?” Dimas prompted as he dismounted. She looked up at him but, after a moment of surprise, turned back to the trinket. “It’s getting late and it doesn’t really look like you’re prepared to be out here by yourself…”

In fact, it didn’t look like she had anything. There was no sign of a camp or any of her other supplies. Just her and her trinket. He supposed it was the first thing to suggest that something wasn’t exactly right with her.

“You don’t need to worry, I’m a lot more capable than you think I am,” she mumbled. She once again tried and failed to put the broken trinket back together. After a moment, she showed it to him. “Would you happen to know how to fix this?”

“I don’t, but we can bring you to a town that might have someone who can,” Dimas offered. Her face lit up at the idea. “What’s your name? I’m Dimas, and these are Hadar, Lyron, and Lieke.”

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“Talia.”

…

“So, isn’t taking in a kid you found in the middle of the woods the reason we’re all out here to begin with?” Lyron asked. They’d arrived at the town and now watched Talia desperately dart from person to person to try to find someone who could fix her trinket. She still hadn’t told them what was so special about it.

“Natheniel’s a lot more complicated than that,” Dimas remarked casually, vaguely aware that it wasn’t truly helping the situation. “I just wanted to make sure Talia got to where she needed to be. She’s probably going to continue doing whatever she was meant to do before we found her once she’s done here.”

“There’s someone else I heard of that matches her description,” Hadar mumbled. “I don’t think we should interact with her any more than we need to.”

Dimas sighed. “Was it something you randomly heard or knew about because of the army?” He knew that asking that was the quickest way of figuring out how worried he should be.

“Nothing directly from Commander Kiah, but something a few of the soldiers were discussing. Every now and again there are reports of a ‘mysterious woman’ coming into towns or walking up to travelers. They never catch her name. She stays there for a couple of days before mysteriously disappearing during a Skiá attack. None of them were sure if they were truly reports, though, or just urban legends… and there’s nothing that says that this is definitely the same person.”

“I’ll make sure she has everything she needs and we’ll go our separate ways. There’s no reason to risk something like that.” Not when they had so much to lose already. Dimas’s words did signal the end of the conversation, though, at a rather good time; Talia was walking back to them with a satisfied expression. When she got closer, he prompted, “Did you find someone who could help you fix your trinket?”

She nodded. “He said it’ll be ready tomorrow, good as new. I can’t go anywhere without it, though… and I don’t have a place to stay until it’s fixed…”

Despite his better judgment and almost contradictory to what he just decided, he said, “I have enough money to spare to get you a room, too. There’d be no need to pay it back.”

…

They’d stayed in town a bit longer than he would’ve preferred; it was nearly noon by the time they were actually ready to leave. It was only made longer when Talia noticed they were there and walked up to them.

“Are you leaving?” she asked, as if half of them already mounted wasn’t enough of an answer. She was holding the trinket—all in one piece now, though perhaps not perfect, it resembled a swan.

“We’re looking for something and it’s not going to magically show up if we stay here,” Dimas responded honestly.

“What are you looking for?”

“Something to help keep my family safe. It’s not much. I’m not even sure if we’re going to be able to find it anymore…”

“You know, when I broke this, something fell out of it. Bozul should be guarding it. You can have it, as long as you’re able to get it from him. She wants you to have it—things can’t quite work if you don’t.” Then she proved to be unwilling to answer any possible questions, walking away as if she’d said nothing at all.

“I’m guessing we’re still going to go back to where we found her?” Lyron prompted.

Dimas mounted and began ushering the horse back into the forest. “It’s not like we have any better ideas.”

“And what if she’s just tricking us?” Lieke questioned. “I don’t know if you’ve listened to anything we’ve said, but I don’t see a lot of reasons to trust her.”

“We’re just going to need to be ready for whatever we come across…”

…

He stayed on high alert the whole way there. There were no moving shadows, no ambushes of any kind… there was hardly anything, really. He didn’t know if he should consider it a warning or a sign that things might actually be normal for once.

Though it was somewhat hard to distinguish anything from the talking of his companions. It seems their wonderings of being tricked were soon to leave them.

“We’ve covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time,” Lieke pointed out. “He’s using magic.”

“Then why don’t we know it?” Lyron asked.

“It looks normal to us, obviously. Since it’s happening to us it doesn’t look like anything’s different. Someone outside will see that we’re actually going super fast.”

Dimas sighed. He didn’t really have anything that he needed in order to properly deal with this. “What are you two arguing over..?”

Lieke explained first. “You’ve got to be using magic while we travel, right? We just can’t tell. Because we’re inside the little time… bubble… thingie.”

“Except I think we should be able to tell,” Lyron interjected. “I mean, if we’re moving faster, wouldn’t everything outside look like it’s moving slower?”

“There’s a simple answer for all of this: I’m not using any magic,” Dimas said.

“But you’ve got to be doing something,” Lieke insisted. “Think about it. I’ve done some traveling. I don’t think we should’ve traveled as far as we did if we weren’t using some kind of magic.”

“No, it’s called slightly pushing the limits of what’s considered ‘safe’ to travel. Horses help too, if you’re just used to walking.”

“Then why aren’t you using magic? Wouldn’t that make this whole thing go by a lot quicker?”

“I don’t know that kind of magic.”

“But you’re a—uh, child of Fleyw Bresh. Isn’t knowing magic pretty much your whole deal?”

“This is pretty much all that I know.” Dimas used a bit of magic to pull some water out of his canteen, moved it around the air, and then put it back again. “I can move water.”

“Well, damn, that’s disappointing. Your sister knew all kinds of stuff, didn’t she? I would’ve thought everyone would know as much magic as she did.”

“She was more of an exception. She had a talent for Mávri Mageía—black magic—and I didn’t. She was taught by our father and Kadol. Odelle showed me what she knew; the base of Daphni’s craft and Life magic.”

“That’s the healing one, right? At least tell me you’re not as disappointing in that as you are with moving around water because… I’d been led to believe you were actually reliable, but this is changing my view on a lot of things and I feel like I should just clear all this up now.”

“I’ve grown up with a sister that really shouldn’t be alive right now and a group of friends that I question daily how we all made it to adulthood. I would like to imagine I’d be pretty good at it by now.”

Both Lyron and Lieke gave nods of mutual agreement. It must’ve been enough for them. Hadar was still silent, looking around the forest. He was probably waiting for Skiá and seemed completely ready to jump into action if he needed to.

To Dimas’s surprise, when they got to where they met Talia, Hadar was the first to dismount and motioned for the others to stay where they were. He bent down and began rummaging through the dirt. After a bit of mumbling—mostly about the remaining glass shards—he picked up something and showed it to Dimas.

“Do you think this is what we’re after?”

It was a small crystal, one that could have otherwise been completely overlooked, and in the light looked a dark purple. There was some inexplicable sense of unease that came from looking at it; some hint to what it was a part of that even regular humans could recognize.

Slowly, he nodded, took it from Hadar, and carefully placed it in a bag with the rest of his things. “Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not too keen on learning who this ‘Bozul’ is. Let’s get out of here and back to the border.”

Their leave was only quickened by the steady realization that the shadows were moving again. No one dared to point it out and, thankfully, nothing more ever seemed to come of it…

…

Little over five months, halfway across Seothia and back again, all the while wondering if they were going to find something and if that something was going to be taken from them. It felt too convenient, almost. But then he remembered Talia’s words—“She wants you to have it—things can’t quite work if you don’t.”

Perhaps having the devil on their side didn’t always have to be a bad thing… even if it was merely a guess on his part.

Dimas bid farewell to (and paid) Lyron and Lieke at the same border camp where they met. Hadar stayed a little longer, expressing a desire to visit the stronghold personally before returning to Levi Asari. Really, both of them were just pretending like they could finally take this time to relax.

They’d confirmed the crystal to be a piece of the Nightmare’s Heart and wrote to someone who’d help in the next step of the plan. Two very long, but hopeful, letters were sent. Home didn’t quite seem so far away now and Dimas could begin looking forward to his return. Yet there was still work to do and he couldn’t allow himself to rest quite yet.

Hadar poked his head into the tent. “The man you summoned has arrived.”

Nodding, Dimas took the things he needed and went to meet the man. By now the few people that were at the camp were occupied with something else, and Hadar also left to do other things.

“I was beginning to wonder when you’d contact me,” the man remarked. “You’re lucky I’m getting paid as well as I am for this—otherwise I wouldn’t have made sure I had time for you.”

“Thank you. It… took a lot longer than we’d expected.”

“So, what do you want done with it? If that’s all you got then there’s not much I can do. Round the edges a little and make it look pretty?”

Dimas took out the feather he’d brought with him. “We were hoping you could combine it with this. No matter what it should keep its abilities—all it needs to do is be something he’d be willing to wear as he gets older.”

“Alright. If all goes well, you’ll have your feather necklace and I’ll be paid by tomorrow night.”