Ten minutes later, Jasper galloped out of the village, hastening back from whence he’d come. He’d learned a great deal about qas̆pa in those few minutes, much of it alarming. Qas̆pa were not necessarily evil; if the villager was to be believed, a qas̆pa was only formed when a child died and was brought back. Most remained unchanged save for the trauma of their deaths, but a few returned fundamentally altered.
The exact nature of the change varied from child to child, but one thing remained constant - a talent for some sort of magic and the ability to see and interact with the dead. This reason alone might have been enough for many to shun them, but the second sealed their fate. Most of the qas̆pa eventually succumbed to a strange psychosis, believing they needed to consume human flesh to remain tethered to the land of the living. Not all indulged in this impulse; some resisted it for years while others slew themselves rather than resort to such foul measures, but those that fell became dangerous, unhinged mages.
Worried about his troops, he spurred Dapplegrim faster. It only took him a few minutes to reach the patrol, who were steadily marching toward the small village. “Have any of the men returned,” he asked the captain.
“No, my lord, they’ve only been searching for an hour.”
Jasper’s face tightened. “Sound the horn to call them back. The villagers fear their qas̆pa has gone mad.”
With a sharp nod, the captain called for a halt and blew his horn. Jasper winced as it emitted the same hideous screeching that woke them up each morning directly in his ear, but he was too worried to complain. They waited by the side of the road for half an hour before the first stragglers returned. The soldiers hadn’t had time to go particularly far, so by the end of the hour, five of the seven volunteers had emerged from the woods unscathed. Of the two that were missing, one was a soldier named Dannu Jasper didn’t know; the other was Erin.
Growing restless, Jasper decided to wait no longer. “Wait here in case they show up,” he ordered the captain, “but I’m going after them.”
“Are you sure you don’t want us to come with you, my lord?” the soldier questioned.
“What’s the average level of the soldiers here?” Jasper asked.
“Thirty to fifty, my lord,” the captain admitted reluctantly. “The opportunities to level during peace are limited.”
Despite his offer, relief washed over the man’s face when Jasper shook his head. “Then no. From what the villagers told me, the qas̆pa is a deadly mage. I don’t want to risk the men unnecessarily. I should be strong enough to deal with the witch myself.” He turned and started to nudge Dapplegrim down the road. “If you don’t hear from me in a couple of hours, though, feel free to head back to camp and get up.”
“Very well, my lord,” the captain replied with a salute.
Leaving the men behind, it didn’t take long for Jasper to find the place where they’d discovered the little girl. The snow around the ditch was well trampled down, and the original two sets of footprints had now been bolstered by another two feet, leaving an easy path below. Spurring on Dapplegrim, he dashed into the woods.
----------------------------------------
His eyes cracked open, only to slam shut immediately as a searing pain pierced his head. Erin bit down on his tongue hard, drawing blood, but he managed to hold in the whimper of pain. He waited a few beats for the searing pain to stop and tried to organize his thoughts. What the hell happened?
As the scattered memories of the snowy cabin, the abandoned child, and the missing soldier drifted hazily through his mind, his spirits sank. Damn it. That witch must have caught me. Thin, scratchy ropes looped around his hands and feet, but they were strangely lax and he found he could wiggle his limbs a bit. Still not willing to risk opening his eyes again, Erin listened for any sign of the qas̆pa, but the room was mostly silent - save for the steady, but barely perceptible, sound of breathing to his left. His mind conjured an image straight out of a horror movie for him - a witch standing above him, with green skin and ugly warts and a bloody kitchen knife clutched high over her head. Overcome by imagination, he could stand it no longer and, opening his eyes, snuck a peek to the left.
Squiggles and stars squirmed their way across his vision, the pain in his head pulsing with every beat of his heart, but Erin forced himself to focus on the darkness beside him where the breathing was coming from. Two large, dark lumps sat beside him, but the cabin was too dark to make out any of their features. All he could detect was the faint rise and fall of their chests. Fellow prisoners?
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Erin tried to reach out and touch the closest one’s shoulder, but his hand rose only a few inches before being jerked back to the floor as the bindings around his wrist tightened. He tried again and the ropes constricted even more, dragging his hands down to the floor. What the hell? Abandoning his efforts to move, he tried whispering. “Hey, is that you Dannu?”
Nothing but silence greeted him. Unable to rouse the unconscious bodies beside him, Erin turned his attention to the rest of the room. The cabin was almost completely shrouded in darkness. Its smooth wooden walls had not a single window on them, nor was any light provided save for the dying fire in the pit that sat at the center of the hut. A small hole at the top provided insufficient ventilation for the fire’s smoke and, while it might have served as something of a skylight on a sunny day, with the stormy weather above, no light was let in.
A small metal stand stood above the dying flames of the pit, with an oddly misshaped lump of flesh that had charred on the bottom. Still, the smell of roasting meat was enough to stir grumbling in Erin’s stomach, as he hadn’t had anything to eat since before the morning exercise. Until, that is, he realized that the lump of flesh cooking above the pit had a decidely human face.
His stomach revolted and he vomited what little was left in him between his legs, splattering the ropes that bound him. His head throbbed at his every movement, but Erin fought to stay awake, fearing that if he fell unconscious again, he’d wake up on the spit. When his stomach had calmed enough to stop the retching, he forced himself to stare at the body over the pit.
In the dark of the cabin, it was hard to make out any features, but he eventually decided that the man had a large, bushy beard. At least it’s not Dannu. His moment of relief was immediately followed by a surge of guilt as he realized that, if it was not the soldier, the body likely belonged to the girl’s father.
Tearing his eyes away from the grisly sight, he tried to think through his options. The throbbing in his head was doing little to help him think, and the ropes around his hands and legs were not helping. Though they’d started loosed, it seemed each time he’d tried to move, they’d gotten a little tighter. Are enchanted ropes a thing here? He wasn’t sure, but he tried to keep his movements to minimum, less what little give he still had disappeared, while he searched for a means of escape.
The qas̆pa, wherever she was, was clearly not entirely insane. She’d left him his armor, now caked in sticky blood, but the sword at his side was gone. His back too was free from the weight of the bow which usually pressed into his spine, but a crooked smile slipped across his face when he realized he still felt something hard and slightly cold pressing into his thigh. Though the small knife he had strapped beneath his tunic was not standard issue for the scouts, after a childhood of constantly moving from one bad neighborhood to the next, Erin hadn’t felt complete without his trusty knife and a replacement had been one of the first things he bought with his first payday.
He reached for the knife, and the ropes contracted again, slamming his hand into the hard wooden floor. “Damn it,” he cursed out loud, forgetting the need for silence. He froze, and his heart rate spiked, as he waited for the qas̆pa to come charging into the room and kill him. But nothing came, nothing but the continued sounds of breathing next to him.
Relaxing slightly, this time Erin moved his thigh closer to his hands. The ropes had now constricted so tight that they were beginning to dig into his skin, so he did his best not to move his wrists at all, lest they tighten further. Instead, he crossed his leg awkwardly above his hand, and, moving his fingers as slowly as possible so as not to disturb the ropes, he fumbled with the latch on the knife.
The latch came free easily enough, but drawing it out of its sheath proved a more difficult task. He pulled it out painstakingly, inch by inch, until gravity took control and the knife tumbled free. Erin’s fingers closed around it immediately, but he released it with a hiss of pain as the sharp blade sliced into his hand, and the blade tumbled to the floor with a clunk.
He struggled to pick it up, squirming in pain as the ropes tightened again around his wrists, digging into the skin so firmly that pins and needles began radiating up and down his hands. The knife slipped out of his bloodied fingers with another clunk, and then, the cabin door swung open.
Erin froze as a dark shadow stalked into the room. He could see little of the qas̆pa as it walked over to the pit, its body swaying back and forth in a strange motion that almost looked like a parody of a model’s walk. It stopped beside the fire and, though it made no move to stoke them, the flames brightened, sending shadows dancing across the walls. Grabbing the spit, the qas̆pa rotated the corpse, then stretched out its hand. Illuminated in the flickering light, Erin watched in horror as the pale, thin fingers slicked through the roasted flesh with nails as sharp as knives. Peeling off a chunk of meat, it lifted it tentatively to its lips. A moment later, it spat it out into the fire. “It’s ruined, all ruined,” it muttered to itself.
The qas̆pa spun around and stared directly at them.
Erin sat frozen in the dark, unable to do anything but peek through his partially closed eyelids as the creature stalked toward him. The first thing he saw was its eyes. The qas̆pa may have started as a human, but its orbs had long lost their natural shade. In the shadowed room, they glowed a sickly yellow, streaked through with bloodied veins and black pupils that were far too wide.
The glowing embers turned their baleful glare on him, and the creature laughed, a high-pitched feminine giggle that might have sounded downright charming if it wasn’t for the words that followed. “Our food awakes! Are you so eager to join us?"