Once they had rounded the bend, it was as if the battle had never happened. The sun was gold, the crunch of dead tree-matter was peaceful, and the trees themselves stood like slightly bored sentinels. The smell of bodies was left behind, replaced by the soothing scents of candle-quality balsam and cedar. To cap it all off, the trio began to hear the faint chirping of what sounded like semi-joyful birds.
“Should probably eat something, don’t you think?” asked Barrow. “On account of our exertions.”
Fats opened his pack and passed out more biscuits, along with rolls of smoked meat wrapped around crisp lettuce and crumbled cheese.
“Ah, I remember these!” said Barrow. “Damn tasty. Like when we’d go on those picnics with you and—” Barrow saw Gill giving him negative-looking hand gestures, and he faltered. “And, um … we’d …”
“It’s a good recipe,” said Fats.
“Yep, sure is, sure enough,” said Barrow, who decided to immediately forget about nebulous concepts such as old tragedies and awkward conversations, and instead focus on the more tangible things in life, such as the tasty little roll that was about to enter his belly. “Mm.” His lips smacked as he minced the meat and crunched the lettuce. “Mm, hmm, hrrmm—” The cheese had glommed to the roof of his mouth, and he was having difficulty ushering it to its final destination. Fats passed him his canteen—not to be confused with his flask, which contained very different contents—and Barrow washed the mess down with a very audible glug.
“Ahh. Mm. That hit the spot. You know, Gill, I’m man enough to admit, I’m glad we came out here. Some fresh air is good, and it’s little trips like these that remind us why our village is the best place in the world. If it wasn’t, why would so many evils try to destroy it? Honestly, why would anyone ever want to leave?”
Gill squinted sourly at the sunlight streaming into his eyes, musing on the desirability of an item that could prevent such a thing. “I’ve thought about leaving,” he said with more than a pinch of spite.
Barrow looked over in shock. “You have?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t actually do it, but I’ve had the thought. It’s a long time to spend in just one place, you know? And all these brave exploits start to take a toll. Sure, my wife is here. But even so, there’s a lot I love about the place.”
“What about you, Fats? You ever thought about leaving?”
“I can’t leave,” said Fats. “My wife is here.”
“Huh,” said Barrow, scratching his beard. “I suppose you’re right in a technical sense, but—oof.” He was cut off by a discreet elbow from Gill.
They walked in silence. Barrow started to squirm. For him, silence was like a pothole: unseemly, potentially hazardous, and begging for a responsible citizenry to fill it.
“How’s that map looking, Gill?”
Gill studied the scroll. “Looks like if we want any chance of defeating the Tricker, we need to head towards something magical. Some kind of vortex.”
“The swirly bit!” exclaimed Barrow. “Got to have a swirly bit or else it’s not proper.”
Gill eyed him. “The swirly bit?”
“Where we get the thing that helps us do the thing we couldn’t do before. Like when I got my magic sword!” Barrow smiled as he basked in the warm glow of memory, savoring the moment he had gained a possession that made him more special than everyone else.
“Right … like that,” said Gill. From Fats’s and Gill’s perspective, the sword was not very magical. It did not glow, nor did it speak, and it wasn’t especially good at hitting things, though much of that could be attributed to the wielder. By their estimation, the only thing magical about it was that it hadn’t sliced off Barrow’s own foot. Still, they would never try to explain that to him. Not if they wanted to avoid a tantrum.
“So we go to the swirly place, get all juiced up, then show that tricksy fellow what for,” said Barrow. “Easy.”
Gill studied the map with increasing apprehension. “Might not be so easy.”
“Why not?”
“Looks like there’s some stuff in between.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Gill’s face was worried. “I’m not sure.”
When it started, it started slowly. The shadows grew larger. Then they grew darker. The light of the forest changed from gold to red, then from red to an ominous purple, and then to nothing at all. The trees could no longer be compared to anything. They were simply black silhouettes, rising up until they faded into the greater blackness above. The background noise of the forest gradually disappeared. No more rustling, no more birdsong, nothing but the soft hiss of the wind.
“Huh,” said Gill.
The three friends could still see, but only enough to differentiate between the somewhat reasonable darkness of the path and the completely unreasonable void beyond it.
“Oh come now, this is ridiculous,” said Barrow. “There was way more daylight left! The sun thinks it can just slink off early, does it?”
Fats took his axe from its loop and gripped it tightly.
“Good thing we know it’s just the Tricker messing with us,” said Gill.
Barrow’s eyes darted back and forth, scanning the impenetrable trees. He drew his sword. “Yeah. Good thing.”
“Chck.”
Barrow looked at Gill. Gill looked at Barrow.
“Chck-chck.”
Barrow and Gill both looked at Fats.
“Chck-chck-chck REEEEEEEEE!” A creature burst onto the path and rushed towards them, jaws frothing as it screamed.
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“Ahhh!” yelled Barrow. He swung and missed, and the creature darted back into the shadows.
“Easy boys, it’s not real remember,” said Gill.
“REEEEEEEE!” Another creature rushed them, and Gill stared it down with the nonchalant confidence of someone who had seen past the veil, right up until the moment it bit him in the leg.
“Ow! Shit!” He kicked and wrestled with it, trying to dislodge the jagged teeth. When he finally did, the creature scuttled away. “Bastard!” He launched several arrows after it, shouting curses as he did.
“You’re wasting arrows!” said Barrow.
“Don’t tell me what to do with my arrows!”
“Maybe you just think you’re bit.”
“Feels pretty damn real to me!”
The three friends circled together. Silhouettes assembled at the edges of their vision. First a few, then a few more, and a few more, until they saturated the treeline. They shared a resemblance with the creatures from the earlier battle, but with enough variation to suggest a healthy level of biodiversity in their monstrous ecosystem. They began to approach. Some scuttled, some lurched, and some slithered, all making deeply upsetting noises as they did.
“Ahhhhh!” yelled Gill. He started firing arrows. “Not today you freaks! How about I put your ugly skulls on my mantel! Make you into a conversation piece! Upset my wife! How would you like that?”
Between the darkness and the constant ghastly screaming, it was impossible to tell if any of his arrows found their mark.
“Wait, I think I get it,” said Barrow. “Maybe only some of them are real.”
“Great idea!” said Gill. “How about you go over and ask them?”
Barrow swung at a creature. His blade passed through while another creature jumped and clamped onto his arm. “Not fair! Not fair!”
Fats wrestled it off him, flung it down, and stomped in its head with his boot. The skull crunched, and black liquid seeped out.
“Ow, ow,” said Barrow.
“Don’t worry,” said Gill, “maybe you only think you’re bit.”
“Argh!” Barrow swung at another creature, and again the blade passed through. “Really! Not fair! Are they illusions or not?”
Fats swung at what turned out to be air. He looked back to where he had crunched the creature and saw the body had disappeared. He sighed. “We should move.”
Barrow and Gill began half running, half fighting, while Fats retreated behind them, only swinging at the creatures who came close to striking his friends.
Then they heard a new sound, far more horrible than anything that had come before. It was legs. Lots of them. Worst of all, they were moving fast. All the trio could see was a far-off silhouette, but it was clear that something very large and very long was twisting through the trees.
“Oh holy hell …” Gill started firing arrows towards the shape at a breakneck pace.
“Wait,” said Barrow. “What if it’s not what it seems? What if we break more eggs?”
Gill continued to shoot, his face fixed in a snarl. “Barrow, I’ll break every damn egg in this forest if it means not getting swallowed by that.”
The smaller creatures kept coming. Two of them latched onto Barrow, and he whirled around as he tried to shake them off. Fats dashed over and relieved him of his burdens with two precise strikes.
“Rik-rikkah,” mumbled Barrow. “T-take that.” He continued to swing his sword, but each strike brought him closer and closer to a fetal position.
Gill was still shooting, but his bow shook in his hands.
Both of them had stopped running.
Fats looked at his friends and at the horrors around them. He made a decision. “Sheath your sword,” he said to Barrow.
“Wh-what?”
“Do it!”
Barrow complied, and Fats threw him over his shoulder. Fats dashed over to a wide-eyed Gill and threw him over his other shoulder. Then, Fats began to run.
For all his bulk, Fats could move well. An athletic young man still lived inside him somewhere, and the current burdens on his shoulders were insignificant compared to the belly he carried on a daily basis. Gill did not weigh much, and neither did Barrow once you found his equilibrium.
Gill held on tightly, burying his face in Fats’s back. Barrow, whose torso was too long for him to get any kind of grip, flopped up and down. “Argh—Fats—come on.”
Fats ignored him as he forged a path through the forest. He ducked branches and vaulted over logs, dodging creatures while his belly bounced.
Of the terrors that pursued them, Fats did not know which were real. He assumed some were and some weren’t, and that trying to fight any of them would just slow him down. He also decided to believe that the Tricker was not a god, and that there were limits to its senses, which meant that it was possible for the trio to escape. By weaving through the trees while staying close to the path, Fats hoped to shake off anything that could actually hurt them while ignoring everything else. If he was right about the Tricker, then they might survive. And if he was wrong, well … then it didn’t really matter.
Between heavy breaths, Fats said, “Gill—the map—it show an entrance?”
“What?” whimpered Gill.
“The vortex! The map! Did it show an entrance? Something we could spot?”
Gill tried to unfreeze and remember the scribbles. “Y-yeah, a cryptic archway looking thing. Farther down the path.”
“Cryptic?”
“Yeah! Like snakes eating their tails, skulls winking at you.”
“Keep an eye out!”
“But I’m not facing—ah!” Fats tossed Gill up and spun him around, giving him a prime view of their chaotic path. “Oh.” Gill fought the urge to look away.
Their current trajectory involved passing through a particularly thick patch of forest, with altogether too many branches, brambles, and the rest of their prickly friends. Gill whimpered as his face was jabbed and cut. While a warrior in his right, Gill did not have a high tolerance for pain, as the whole point of being a skilled archer was to keep the pain as far away from you as possible.
Fats was also being jabbed and cut, along with his ankles being de-girded, his thighs becoming estranged, and his upper-back getting woodpeckered repeatedly by Barrow’s bony head, yet he did not make a sound. Fats had a system for dealing with pain. First, he briefly acknowledged it and categorized it, though this was mostly a formality because the second thing he did was send it all to the same place: the deep place, where all of Fats’s biggest oldest deepest pains lived, and where the aforementioned residents would bully the new upstarts until they came to the conclusion that, in fact, they were not very painful at all, and would soon reform and no longer affiliate with those kinds of unsavory sensory stimuli.
“REEEE!” A creature rushed from the side, about to overtake them. Fats kicked it and sent it squealing into the brush.
“Fats!”
“What?”
“There! It’s there! I see it. On the other side of the path.”
Fats grunted as he changed direction, bursting out of the tree-cover onto the open ground where creatures swarmed.
“Oh dear,” said Gill as he closed his eyes.
Fats kept his eyes open and saw three things. First, the archway, overgrown with vines and decorated with carvings of an assuringly cryptic variety. Second, a portal within the archway, the texture of which was undeniably swirly. Third, the mass of horrible screeching monsters blocking his path. He was breathing too heavily to give a proper sigh, but the intention was there.
Fats barreled into the fray, kicking and thrashing, desperately trying to maintain his momentum. The creatures leapt and chomped at whatever bits of him they could reach. Some passed through him like smoke, while others made contact. Fats succeeded in shrugging some off, but others managed to hold on, weighing him down and slowing his progress.
Angry determination bubbled in his stomach as Fats began to roar, ferocious and loud. Barrow and Gill gave reciprocal yells of their own, though less at the creatures and more from the shock of hearing such a beastly noise coming from their normally quiet friend. His gaze set on the portal, Fats found a final burst of energy, smashing forward and dragging creatures as he heaved himself the last few yards towards the gate.
He heard a sound coming from behind him, like a thousand hissing scythes, and realized the large twisting shape had caught up. He could not see it and did not turn to look, but Barrow, who still faced that direction, began to cry: “Not like this! Oh sorry, I’m so sorry, I tried to be good! Sure I wasn’t always the greatest, but I meant well! I mean mostly, except for when I slept with the thatcher’s wife, but that was only one time, along with the other time I slept with her and stole their two best spoons on my way out, but I’ve been mostly good! Excepting those times I—”
Schloop.
They passed through the archway. There was a flash of light. A moment of weightlessness. Then the trio crashed to the ground.