Josh was stuck. He’d been half lying in cold water for what had felt like an eternity, long enough for his skin to have wrinkled, and his teeth where chattering. At least there didn’t seem to be any ghosts. He longed to move out of the water, but Varian was still pacing up and down on the walkway. Varian had ordered Mistrz back to the camp near the shrine to bring Ophala and Wook, and he’d sent Frenxy to search the shoreline for traces of Josh.

That meant Josh couldn’t move. He’d tried to crawl out of his hiding spot about fifteen minutes ago, but the moment he had, the muted bubble effect created by the fur cloak had disappeared, and Varian had come running, as if he’d sensed something.

That meant the cloak’s effect was for camouflage or invisibility, but it only worked if Josh stayed completely still.

After a while, Frenxy came back to report that she had found no sign of him.

“He must be somewhere,” Varian said, frustrated. “It would be such a waste if he drowned … we need him to open the gate to the dungeon.”

“Why do we need him?” Frenxy asked, scornfully.

“Because it needs a sacrifice, idiot.”

They both went to inspect the sacrificial pool, which gave Josh just enough time to wriggle out from underneath the walkway. He clung to the post holding up the boards, standing up to his ankles in muddy water, and lifted his foot to inspect the marsh shoes. He knew they were magic somehow, but what if they needed to be activated like the cloak?

It was hard to see in the darkness, but the ties to the shoes had a small bone toggle which, when he fumbled at them with cold, numb fingers, had tiny inscriptions on them. He sent a burst of magic into them, and immediately heard Frenxy exclaim in the distance.

Varian and Frenxy came running back. All Josh could do was freeze. His heart was thumping rapidly and there was a roaring sound in his ears. He found he was trembling, whether from fear, or cold, or both, he couldn’t tell. He clung to the post.

“I’m sure I felt something about here,” Frenxy declared. She was standing directly next to Josh on the walkway. His head was level with the wooden boards, and he was looking right at her boots, but she didn’t react to him.

Neither did Varian as he paced up and down, staring out over the marsh with his torch held high.

“Was it him?”

Frenxy hesitated.

“No, it felt different. Like, old. Dark. Bloody.”

That couldn’t be coming from the cloak or the shoes, could it? Josh couldn’t feel anything of the sort, but then his magic sense was probably a lot less powerful than Frenxy’s.

“That open chest from the cave,” Varian said. “The idiot found something magic in there and he’s using it to hide from us. Shit!”

He started walking up and down the walkway, using his torch to swipe at the air. Josh was glad he hadn’t tried to climb back onto it, because he didn’t think the invisibility effect would work if Varian actually collided with him. He was terrified that Varian would start brandishing the torch to either side of the walkway. If he swiped low enough, he might hit Josh on the head.

“Do you have ingredients to brew up more sense potions?” Varian asked eventually, after he had given up trying to find Josh via bodily contact.

“That will take hours!” Frenxy exclaimed.

“He’s still in the area. If he was going to run away he would have done so already. Maybe he thinks we’ll open the dungeon for him and he can sneak in, the little rat.”

Josh couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less than go into the reflected world he’d seen in the sacrificial pool. Varian’s gang were so desperate for experience that everything they saw, said, or did was through that filter, and it was as if they couldn’t envision other outlanders having any other sort of motivation.

“Let’s keep patrolling while we wait for the others,” Varian said.

It was a long wait, and Josh’s feet were like blocks of sodden ice, to the point that he was struggling to stand. In the brief times that Frenxy and Varian were patrolling at the other end of the walkway, and out of his direct line of sight, he tried moving to a better position, and that’s when he discovered what the magic of the shoes did.

They let him walk on water, but only if he was moving. And if he was moving, the invisibility of the cloak immediately dropped. He spent a few minutes cursing the inefficiency of the druids, who had left two completely incompatible magical artefacts.

Still, he had the tools to escape. He could walk directly across the marsh with the shoes, and every time he found a solid bit of land he could stand on, he would be hidden from sight.

He just needed Frenxy and Varian to be distracted for a short while.

Escaping was an agonisingly slow process. Each time there was a window during which Josh could move, he had to trust that he would be able to find solid enough ground to stand on before Varian and Frenxy got close enough to see him. If he stopped in the wrong place, where the ground wasn’t solid, the shoes would stop working and marsh would probably swallow him instantly.

Josh made it about twelve feet away from the walkway, but when he scanned the marsh all he could see ahead of him was water, where the marsh had turned into a small lake. To skirt the lake, he would have to backtrack parallel to the walkway, either towards the shore or towards the sacrificial pool, and that would give Varian and Frenxy a chance to spot him. Frenxy carried a crossbow, and he had no idea how good she was with it, but he had to assume she would be able to hit him at such a short distance, even at night.

He was still standing indecisively in the middle of the marsh when Mistrz returned, leading Wook and Ophala along the walkway. Mistrz strode ahead, his expression abstracted, but Wook looked terrified. Ophala seemed to be reassuring him. Josh caught snatches of her words as she went past.

“Just … tell …” she was saying. “You … done anything wrong …”

Josh couldn’t see Wook’s expression clearly, but his shoulders were hunched and he had wrapped his arms around himself.

Now that there were five of them to spot him, it would make it even harder for Josh to escape. Should he try just running directly away from the walkway and hope they didn’t react in time? He would only have one chance to get it right.

It was at that point the moth haunt attacked.

Josh had all but forgotten about her. She had done well to take out Shuriken, but he had assumed the others had killed her when they had chased after him into the druid caves. She must have hidden, and then followed them all the way here, waiting for the best time to strike.

Wook’s form disappeared in a boiling cloud of inky shadow and he screamed, high pitched and desperate. Ophala fell back, also screaming loudly. Mistrz turned and swore, drawing his spear and shield, but hesitating.

“Fren!” he shouted.

Frenxy ran in, pulling a vial from her belt.

“Fire,” Mistrz said.

To her credit, Frenxy faltered.

“But what about Wook?”

“Dead already,” Mistrz said shortly. “Get it now.”

Frenxy tipped the vial into her mouth, and Josh realised he had the perfect distraction. He gulped a breath, and then turned and splashed as fast as he could, directly away from the walkway, out onto deeper water of the lake. If the others saw him go, they were too busy to point it out. Josh looked over his shoulder and saw a bloom of fire, like something from a flamethrower, light up the night. It was the moth haunt’s turn to scream, in its multitude of voices.

The moth haunt had sacrificed itself to save Josh. He felt obscurely guilty about that, even though it was monstrous and terrible. He couldn’t let its sacrifice be in vain.

As soon as he felt he was far enough away from the walkway that he wasn’t visible, he dropped back to a walk. He thought he was currently heading south, so now he turned in the direction he thought was west. He would walk around the edge of the marsh, avoiding the sacrificial pool in the centre, then go north.

The shoes however, didn’t make walking easy. Josh had to keep his feet far enough apart that the they didn’t get tangled, just as with snowshoes, and the surface of the water still felt liquid beneath him. Every step he took had the dangerous, wobbly feeling of being just about to overbalance, and before he had gone very far he was aching and exhausted.

Finally, he came across a half-submerged tree, a blackened, dead thing with branches clawing out of the water like skeletal fingers, but it looked solid enough to stand on. He collapsed onto it gratefully. He was cold, his wet clothes were chafing, his real shoes were completely ruined, and his thighs and calves burned from the unaccustomed mode of walking.

Josh couldn’t rest for long. He had no idea what time it was, but dawn was probably only a few hours off, and he had to be far away from the marsh by the time the sun rose.

It was at that point that a thick mist suddenly rolled in.

It happened fast. One minute Josh was looking over water as flat and silvered as a mirror in the moonlight, decorated with a filigree of dark sedge and rushes, and the next moment it was blanketed in fog, which muffled sound and obscuring everything, until Josh could only see about six feet in front of him.

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The fog would make it extremely difficult for Varian’s gang to find him.

On the other hand, Josh thought, this doesn’t feel natural.

He took a deep, shaky breath and leaned cautiously to look down into the water. Sure enough, reflected in the surface was the priestess he had seen earlier, with the wolfskin hood.

She smiled at him.

This time, Josh had nowhere to run. Nevertheless, he hiked his feet up as far away from the water as possible, until he was almost sitting in a cross-legged position. The water-walking shoes forced him to cock his feet at an odd angle, making his ankles ache, but that was the least of his worries.

The priestess spoke. Or at least, her mouth moved, and a voice came out of the air around him. Whatever magical effect allowed her to speak to him had never heard of lip syncing, because the words didn’t match the shape her lips made. After a moment, Josh realised she was speaking a different language. There must be some kind of magical Google translate in effect.

She said: “The way to the Otherworld will soon be fully open.”

Her voice was a low alto, full of command. She had the same kind of presence the Fey Queen had exhibited. Josh wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Did she want him to go through the sacrificial pool, which he assumed must be the gateway Varian had talked about?

“I’m okay here,” he said. His voice sounded quavery, and he cleared his throat. “Thanks.”

She laughed gently.

“The Otherland has answers to deepest of mysteries,” she said.

If she was trying to lure Josh with mysterious knowledge then she had him bang to rights, which was an unsettling thought. What mysteries was she referring to?

“Do you know anything about the Dreamer?” he asked.

“Nothing so trivial,” she said, seriously.

The Dreamer? Trivial? Josh shifted uneasily on his tree.

“The pool … there was a gallows … it’s ... I mean, human sacrifice,” he said, inarticulately.

She nodded, slow and sombre.

“Death weakens the path between the world of the Six Spires and the Otherland. With two deaths, the barrier becomes thin, but another is needed if you wish to pass, one that is dedicated and true.” She held up her hand, and a dark moth alighted on her finger. She studied it for a minute, then turned her head, as if looking elsewhere. “The children of the outlands will find the way soon.”

Of course they will, Josh thought, a pit forming in his stomach.

“Who are they going to sacrifice?” he asked.

She turned back to him with a slight smile.

“Watch,” she said. She vanished from the reflection, and the scene changed. Now, Josh was looking at the walkway from a vantage point within the sacrificial pool itself.

Varian was standing near the post with the noose. On his right side was Mistrz, and to his left were Frenxy and Ophala.

“Goddammit,” Varian was shouting. “How the fuck did none of you notice a moth haunt?”

No-one said anything. Varian made an impatient sound and paced up and down in front of the gallows. Josh wondered whether blaspheming in front of a site of ritual human sacrifice was a sensible thing to do, but maybe the druid gods didn’t care about that sort of thing.

“God fucking dammit,” Varian said again. “Someone’s got to be the one. Wook let the low-level go, so I would have used him, because god damn he needed to be taught a lesson, but you fuck ups let the moth haunt get him. So it’s got to be one of you!”

“You said we wouldn’t ever do each other for xp,” Frenxy said. Her voice sounded small and resentful next to Varian’s expansive anger. “You said—”

Varian rounded on her.

“I know what I said! But this is different. This is a gateway to a dungeon, full of monsters and experience and loot. We can’t pass up this chance.”

“One of us got to,” Frenxy muttered. She cast a snide sideways glance at Ophala, and said, “You should sacrifice your fuck toy. It’s the only thing left to do.”

Varian looked impatient.

“Fren—” he began, but Ophala spoke over him.

“It wasn’t Wook’s fault the boy escaped,” she said. In contrast to Frenxy, her voice was high, clear and carrying. “Someone helped him. Someone here. Someone let him go.”

Varian stopped pacing, and the others all stared at her. Mistrz’s expression was closed and blank, whereas Frenxy’s brow was knotted.

“I saw,” Ophala said, once she had everyone’s attention. “I saw someone leaning over him. I didn’t realise it at the time, but they were loosening his bonds.”

Had Ophala really seen something, or was she making it up? Mistrz had helped Josh, but he had done so by giving him a flake of flint sharp enough to cut the ropes, not by untying him.

Varian’s jaw tightened.

“Who did you see?” he asked.

“Fren,” Ophala said. “It was Frenxy.”

Frenxy lunged for Ophala, but Varian was quicker. He hooked his arms under Frenxy’s armpits, got her in a lock, and hauled her back, kicking and screaming. There was a note of terrified outrage in Frenxy’s voice.

“I never did, I never did, you filthy little liar, just you wait till I get hold of you, I will tear your fuckin’ hair out, I’m gonna poke your filthy lyin’ eyes out, you fuckin’ bitch, you fuckin’ liar,” Frenxy screamed.

Josh jerked. He could hear Frenxy’s voice echoing across the marsh. The sacrificial pool wasn’t all that far off.

Ophala just watched this display with cool eyes, and then said, “I think she’s working for Harrow.”

Frenxy was so surprised by this that she stopped struggling for a moment.

“What?” she said. “What? You lyin’ bitch. I ain’t never … I ain’t never …”

Varian was still holding on to Frenxy, but his forehead was creased in thought.

“We have had bad luck recently,” he said, slowly. “We lost our camp at the old fort. We haven’t been able to get hold of any low levels to trade, except that feather-fucking idiot. The only good thing was the broodmother, and we lost Frenxy in that fight against Harrow after and had to run for it.”

That must have been why they were at the shrine, Josh realised. They had come here to pick up Frenxy after she resurrected.

Varian paused, and a thought occurred to him. “Why would Harrow’s group kill Frenxy if she’s working for them, though?”

Ophala and Frenxy both opened their mouths at the same time, but whatever they had been going to say was left unsaid, because Mistrz attacked Varian.

Varian had had his back to Mistrz, and only the dawning horror on Ophala’s face gave him the slightest bit of warning. Varian dropped and rolled, throwing Frenxy into the path of the spear.

Mistrz managed to jerk the spear to the side at the last moment, and it tore a line across Frenxy’s ribs, but didn’t penetrate. She screamed and dropped to the walkway.

Varian came up with his sword drawn and a buckler in his hands.

Josh didn’t know all that much about sword fighting, beyond watching the occasional video on YouTube, but he could see that he was witnessing masters of their art. Their movement was tight and controlled, and the points at which their weapons were engaged were so fast that Josh could barely track what was happening.

Mistrz must be a spy of some sort, but Josh didn’t know enough about outlander politics to hazard a guess as to who he worked for.

It was a close fight, particularly given their level disparity. But Frenxy, once she had recovered, immediately started pulling vials from her belt. The first she threw beyond Mistrz, where it shattered, leaving a slick of oil on the surface of the wooden boards of the walkway, forcing Mistrz to push aggressively into the fight to avoid being backed into it. It cost him though, because it meant he couldn't keep Varian at the distance he wanted.

The second vial Frenxy merely uncapped. A thread of smoke oozed out, which wove through the air like something alive and tried to slip into Mistrz’s mouth and nose. He countered that by taking a deep breath before it reached him, and holding it, but the lack of air made his face go beet red, and again it gave Varian an advantage.

It ended when Varian dodged past the point of the spear and went in for a grapple, managing to twist Mistrz’s weapon out of his grasp. His sword pierced Mistrz’s shoulder, and when Mistrz fell to the ground, the point of the sword jammed itself into the board beneath him. Mistrz’s left hand scrambled for his boot, presumably going for a knife, but Varian caught the hand and twisted his wrist.

“Quick,” Varian said over his shoulder. “Give me the potion the Old Man gave you.”

Frenxy hurried nervously towards them, one hand clamped to her side, which was red with blood.

“But I haven’t worked out what…” she began.

“Give me the goddamn potion!” Varian yelled.

“You gonna … you really gonna go for his core?” Frenxy asked.

She fumbled at her belt for another vial and held it out to Varian, who took it, and forced it down Mithrz’s throat. Mithrz’s struggles weakened, and his limbs slumped.

Varian stood.

“Ophala, did you really see someone free the feather wit?” he asked wearily.

“I knew it was someone, but I didn’t know who,” Ophala said.

Frenxy rounded on her.

“Then why did you say it was me, you bitch, so help me…”

“Enough,” Varian roared. “We need to harvest his core, right now, and use him to open the gate.” He glanced at Frenxy’s white face, and ground out, “He’s not one of us. He’s a traitor and he deserves only death. Real death.”

“Can you … we’ve never done it before…”

“Of course I can.” Varian said, arrogantly. He drew a knife from his belt, and knelt down beside Mistrz. “All we need to do is keep him alive long enough to cut the core out of him. Then if he dies after that, the core will stay here instead of going back to the guardian. The Old Man’s potion should stop him from dying.”

Josh stared at the reflection, feeling sick. That was how they did it? Yet another person was dying after trying to help him. Permanently dying.

But what could Josh do?

The last thing he wanted was to let his feet go anywhere near the water with the scary priestess reflection in it. He edged his way along the trunk of the tree, to a patch of water that reflected normally, and cautiously stretched down until the shoes were balancing on the water. There was no sign of the priestess, and when he looked back at the part of the water that had showed the reflection from the sacrificial pool, it had vanished.

Just as he stood up and started walking, he heard a scream not far away.

That sounded like Mistrz.

Josh broke into as much of a run as he could, and unslung his backpack to get at his bow and arrows. It was a good thing he had been so careful before to ensure the string had stayed dry earlier.

He headed towards the screams.

It was as if the mist parted for him, billowing out of his way as he splashed across the marsh. Ahead, the circular shape of the walkway loomed out of the darkness. Josh could see one figure spreadeagled on the surface, with another hunched over him, and a third standing behind him with its hands over its mouth.

The spreadeagled one was Mistrz, the one cutting him open was Varian, and standing behind him was Frenxy.

Frenxy was repeating, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” in a panicky voice. Mistrz screamed again.

Josh saw a thick tussock of grass he could take a stand on, which would give him a clear shot of Mistrz at a distance he thought he could reliably hit. Varian was too focused on his grizzly task to notice Josh’s arrival.

Josh nocked the arrow to the string, brought the bow up, and pulled arrow back to his ear. He concentrated on keeping his back straight, and his arm and elbow aligned. He took a deep breath, trying desperately to ignore Mistrz’s cries, breathed out, and loosed the arrow.

It thudded into Mistrz, taking him in the upper arm.

“Shit!” Varian leapt up, shoving the bloody knife into its sheath, and drawing his buckler. Josh stayed stock still as the camouflage effect surrounded him, hardly daring to take a breath. He needed to fire another arrow, because he didn’t think the one he’d put in Mistrz would kill him, but if he did that, Varian would see him.

Beside Mistrz, Frenxy had her crossbow out, and was scanning the marsh.

If Josh could kill Mistrz before Varian extracted the player core, then Mistrz would be safe. Well, he would be dead, but only temporarily dead, and Josh was sure that Mistrz would take that trade. There was a potion temporarily keeping Mistrz alive, but it sounded like the sort of delicate operation that would go wrong if it was disrupted.

But Josh had missed his chance. The moment he took a step in either direction, or moved his arms enough to set an arrow to his bow, the cloak’s invisibility would drop.

There was a wheezing, choking sound. Was that Mistrz dying?

No, it was Mistrz laughing. Or at least as close as he could get with multiple injuries and his chest all carved up.

“Brood ... mother … venom,” he whispered. “I put … on Josh … arrows. Now … I go.”

And with that, his body evaporated as he died, his player core intact.

The mist rolled in, hiding Josh from Varian and Frenxy on the walkway, and he took a shaky breath. He nearly let out a scream of his own when the mist beside him compressed itself into a humanoid figure, slowly coalescing into the shape of the priestess.

“The sacrifice is made,” she said. "The way is open."

“I don’t want to go to the Otherlands,” Josh managed to gasp out. He had a quest already. He was going to find the Dreamer and contact Earth. He wanted nothing to do with druids and their horrible gallows, and their horrible pool of human sacrifice.

The priestess tilted her head as she studied him.

“As you wish, child of Mayadth,” she said. “Fare thee well. I will see you again.”

And then, suddenly, she was gone.