Days in the wagon train blended together as they crossed from waving grassland to thick deciduous forest. Wide tracks had been worn in the forest floor by wagon trains which roamed between villages, tamping down saplings and keeping the ground bare. The trees made Willow feel claustrophobic in a way she’d never experienced in Bridgewater.
It was the first time she’d seen a forest.
The routine of the journey asserted itself aggressively, and became aggressively boring by the third day. By the fifth she felt almost as if she were in a waking stupor as she stared through the back of the wagon at the endless tress receding along the worn ruts. Sometimes she’d see a squirrel in the brush, or rarely a deer. Once she saw a flash of flame from beside a creek.
“Did you see that,” she asked Leopold, but of course he hadn’t. As usual he was nose-deep in an introductory magic text. He didn’t seem affected by the nausea which afflicted Willow the moment she opened her own books on the rocking caravan..
“What? No,” he said, looking up and pushing his glasses up on his nose. Willow pointed into the foliage, but the flame didn’t appear again.
“I thought I saw a salamander,” she said.
“Really?” And just like that she had his attention. Magical creatures were rare around human habitations, and most of those that got too close were the dangerous variety. Willow had never seen a wild magical creature alive before.
“Fire, near the stream. I can’t think of what else it could’ve been.”
“I wonder if they’d stop the caravan, let us try to catch it. I heard they give you a boost in essence if you eat them.”
Willow knew an offer of help when she heard it, and appreciated what Leopold was trying to do. When he wasn’t reading up on magic theory he practiced his spells, but Willow just didn’t have that kind of energy to spare with how strenuous just keeping herself upright in the wobbling wagon proved to be. She barely had enough in her by the end of the day to practice her waning magelight a couple of times before she went to sleep, and even then the effort did more to exhaust her into unconsciousness than it did to enhance her casting ability.
“Stop the whole caravan for one salamander? I doubt it. Can you imagine Bryan pacing while you hunted in the brush?”
“No, I suppose not,” he said, and smiled. Despite their rocky start they had become, if not friends, then close acquaintances during the journey. There wasn’t a lot they had in common with any of the other passengers, but they both had an interest in magic.
Later that day the wagon train broke through the edge of the deciduous forest to a wide-open plain. The raggedy edge of trees seemed almost lonely as the plain-grass swallowed the world, the horizon expanding until its furthest features were lost in a haze of distance.
“We must be getting close,” Willow said, and rubbed her thumb along the metal of her cane. “Durum is supposed to be on a vast plain, barren and scarred from the warbeasts.”
Leopold looked up from his book again and leaned out the back of the wagon to survey the countryside.
“You don’t think they’re out here, do you?”
“Bryan said they weren’t,” Willow said, and suppressed a smirk. Leopold was strangely afraid of the warbeasts; Willow herself found the idea of them so inconceivable as to render fear moot. Creatures created in war whose size and destructive ability challenged even the defensive might of the walled cities. Those that were left alive after the end of whichever war they were birthed for usually proved to be the prowling type, seldom attacking the walls themselves. They were created to keep up a never-ending siege against an enemy that had long since become their masters’ friend.
It was cheaper to construct and maintain the warded tunnels than to attack and destroy the beasts directly using the city’s offensive measures.
When the caravan stopped near dusk, Willow and Leopold disembarked and were finally able to take in the surrounding countryside as they set up camp.
“You see there,” Bryan said, pointing off into the distance. He’d just gotten the wagons circled and Leopold was casting the sustained magelight that would last them partway through the night, allowing the caravan to conserve its store of firewood.
Willow didn’t have the best eyesight in the world, but she thought she could just make out something dark on the horizon near the tip of Bryan’s finger.
“That’s Durum. You’ll be able to see it better in the dark. There are lights atop the walls brighter than stars.”
“Can you see the warbeast from here,” Willow asked, thinking of Leopold.
“No, you needn’t worry about that. Chances are we won’t even catch a glimpse of it. Its territory is so vast that it probably won’t even be in sightline while we’re within the tunnel. I’ve seen it once, though. It’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.”
“What did it look like,” Willow asked. Bryan had taken on a strangely paternal role toward herself and Leopold during the journey, and she wondered if he didn’t have a child back at home he was missing.
“Like a dog, I suppose. A dead dog. You could see its skull, and it had these things coming off its body. Like tendrils or snakes. They writhed on the ground, slipping this way and that. Slid right over the tunnel while we were going through; I think it was looking for us. I think it knows the tunnel is there, but it can’t get through. I wonder… I wonder how it feels about it.”
From its description, Willow wondered if it felt anything specific at all. Magical beasts were much like any other kind of animal, but warbeasts were usually driven insane by their creators to better harry their targets. Over time that insanity abated, which resulted in the prowling warbeasts.
Willow was still trying to make out the shape of Durum in the distance when a flicker of movement closer at hand caught her eye. She pointed.
“What’s that?”
Bryan narrowed his eyes. The setting sun cast the world in a golden hue, but soon enough it would be too dark to see anything outside their circle of wagons.
“Huh, looks like a deathworm.”
“Deathworm? Is it dangerous?”
Bryan shook his head. “No, not dangerous. I’ve never heard of one approaching a caravan. They’re pretty rare, it’s the first time I’ve seen one, but they’re cowards. Big, soft tubes of meat, they wouldn’t attack a caravan. Too dangerous. They go after smaller magical creatures, things that wouldn’t have any defenses against them. You don’t have to worry.”
“Right,” Willow said, but found it difficult to turn away from the undulating speck in the distance. It felt like a threat to her, no matter how cowardly it was supposed to be.
Stolen story; please report.
🜛
Willow woke suddenly in the darkness, thrust out of a dreamless sleep. The bonfire at the center of the wagon train was still crackling merrily, and in the circled wagons she couldn’t tell what had woken her. She shifted her weight around—a root of some kind was digging into her spine—and turned her head toward the flames.
Leopold was sleeping a few paces away, his mouth slightly open. He was strangely endearing, and she thought they might make fast friends at the Arcanum if they both got in.
That familiar worry began to gnaw at her stomach and she thought it had probably been what disturbed her sleep. No rest for the unprepared.
A clanking came from the darkness and Willow turned her head to see Bryan pass within the circle of wagons. He scanned the sleepers, found her watching eyes, and smiled.
“Just a tremor, go back to sleep,” he said.
“A what?”
The earth buckled under her body and threw her a good three feet toward the fire. Willow screamed and she heard Bryan shout from what seemed like far away. The metallic clank of an impact cut his yell.
“Uah! What,” Leopold startled awake to find he was tangled in his bedroll. Willow glanced around and saw the most disturbing sight she’d ever seen in her life.
The ground was moving. It heaved upward like the surface of a lake in a storm, then sucked back down again, as if there was something burrowing just under the surface. There was no sound, the world around them was eerily quiet, but as the wave slid through the circle of wagons, other sleepers were awoken by the jostling and began to scream.
“What the hell? What the hell,” Leopold stammered as Willow crawled along the upturned earth toward him and began ripping at his bedroll. She ached all over from being rolled on the ground and her hands bruised at the quick jerking she was giving the blanket, but she disentangled Leopold in a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Bryan—”
She turned and saw their guard slumped against a wagon wheel. Was he dead? Had he been killed by whatever the thing was that had moved under the camp?
“We have to get Bryan,” she said, but the strained wooden creaking of a wagon across the circle caught her attention and made her turn. Sure enough, the line of wagons on the other side of the fire was rising as whatever it was came back at them. Leopold pulled her up and they reached Bryan just as the central fire was scattered by the thing underground.
“Bryan? Bryan,” Willow shouted, shaking him by the breastplate. It was light steel, barely thicker than paper, and probably meant only to deflect claws and teeth. There was no way it could hold up to whatever it was that was coming right at them this very moment.
“Bryan!”
“He’s breathing,” Leopold said, his ear in front of Bryan’s mouth. “He’s alive.”
Suddenly, the eerie quiet of the attack was broken by the splitting, snapping sound of rending earth. Willow and Leopold turned toward the fire to see a rent forming in the ground between them and the scattered coals—a chasm ten feet long and widening by the second. The sounds of tearing roots filled the darkening night like a roar.
Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, from the cracked earth rose a tubular thing. It was at least six feet wide, no telling how long, and its head ended abruptly at a puckered star which looked almost like an anus.
“His sword. Where’s his sword,” Willow turned back to Bryan and scrambled at his side, but the sword was gone. Thrown probably, as Bryan was incapacitated. On the ground though, beside his unconscious body, was Willow’s cane.
“Blazing inferno, blazing inferno, blazing inferno.”
Willow turned, cane in her hands, to see Leopold shaping his body in a spell form. From the motion she could see the spell was meant to explode. She almost stopped him before he began on the second layer.
“Directed motion, directed motion.”
The containing layer of esssence poured over the sphere of yellow light which had formed between Leopold’s hands. He was staring hard at the creature—which could only be the deathworm Bryan had so flippantly dismissed earlier in the night—as he weaved his body in the complicated spell form of shooting forward and dissipating upon contact.
Leopold grew still, the spell’s concept and form complete, and lowered his hands. The ball of yellow light, now encased in a glowing white sphere, shot forward toward the deathworm. Willow watched in awe as it crossed the distance between them almost instantaneously and smashed into the worm. The ball erupted in a burning flurry of fire, engulfing the entire right side of the worm in yellow flame.
Which then guttered out entirely. Save for the sound of the woosh of fire, the entire process had been completely silent. She had expected the worm to scream in pain, or start writhing in its death throes, but it did no such thing.
Instead, it opened its mouth.
The puckered orifice at the front of the worm expanded sickeningly into a vacuous hole, and it faced toward Leopold and began to suck. It wasn’t that it was sucking air, because there was no roaring like from a tornado. But it was sucking something, because she could feel the pressure too.
She realized all at once it was sucking essence. It was a magical creature, and its innate ability was probably to consume essence like a worm consumes soil. It was trying to suck the essence right out of Leopold. Why? To neutralize him? Would it eat him? Would it eat all of them?
Leopold fell to his knees and grasped feebly at the air as his essence deserted him. He attempted to start a concept, but the words were little more than blubbering as his arms dropped to his sides. The worm was a mere six feet away, sucking, coiling as if it would lurch forward and gobble him up.
Willow got to her feet and gripped the iron cane like a club. She wouldn’t be able to kill this thing, she wouldn’t even be able to stun it. Magical creatures were famously resilient, and even something as boneless as the deathworm would be able to fend off a strike from one as weak as her. But she wouldn’t watch as it killed someone she knew. And besides, she couldn’t run anyway. She’d rather go down fighting, like Leopold.
God, she wished Bryan was awake, or that she’d been able to find his sword. She lurched forward a step at a time, the cane burning in her hands with the pressure of her grip. The worm slithered forward—it was only a foot away from the kneeling Leopold who’s eyes were half-closed in exhaustion. It opened its maw even wider and poised itself above his head.
“No,” she screamed, and swung the cane around in an arc toward the vertical portion of the worm, just below its “head”. Her hands burned, then went beyond burning. She opened her mouth in shock even before the cane hit the deathworm… and then passed effortlessly through it. The metal bar shot from her hands and she barely heard the vibrating thunk as it lodged itself in the ground to her side.
Something was wrong—she was going to vomit. In the moment before the pain, that eternal moment, the pause tells how bad it will be. And this pause just kept going and going and going.
The deathworm’s upper half fell to the ground with a wet thud. Her eyes followed it down until she saw that her hands were covered in its blood.
No, not its blood. Not hands—white, shining bone. Her blood, her bones.
Supper came rushing up her throat, and she screamed and vomited at the same moment. The world swam and she tried to catch her balance, but there was so much pain. Her hands weren’t going to hurt, not ever again. They were done, gone. Only skeletal bone left, and ragged hanging flesh.
The night closed in around her and she was unconscious before she even hit the ground.