On the banks of the Klamath River

Roger Carson leans over on his rocky perch to overlook a camper. There, he sees a solitary woman, what looks to be a powerful woman. This woman has the stupidity or knowledge to camp this deep in the woods all alone.

**

At Your Cabin

You grab the axe for chopping fire wood and fill a back pack with water, a map, and some snacks. Mysticalis waits with no illusion to its lack of patience, wanting to get on Roger’s trail.

Even under these circumstances of duress, it is hard not to be carried away by the serene qualities of the pure air and undiminished sunlight that breaks through the deep green pines. You trudge along with Myst, who tirelessly treks for miles while you struggle just to keep him in sight. It stops at the top of many hills and stream crossings to stop you from being lost. It barely gives you time to catch your breath before it bounds down into the next valley, moving with a grace you could never hope to replicate.

You finally collapse into a pile of leaves that has gathered via wind and a couple of deciduous trees bunched together, exhausted. Not long after and not far away, you hear Mysticalis speak, and it is not addressing you.

**

“Greta?” Myst seems utterly at a loss and in confusion to see the young woman. This woman, which is one of the dark creatures, it spared. Its new quest for a philosophical medium between indiscriminate killing and forgiveness started around the time of this sparing.

“Stay out of my way.” Greta responds to it, turns, and starts trudging up stream.

“I can’t. I have to stay in your way.” Mysticalis says with his usual inability to truly understand the English language.

Even with the fatigue overwhelmingly aching through your leg muscles, you summon the effort to get back to your feet and get to the scene of disturbance.

Myst draws its runic blade and holds it in a two handed en’garde stance, blocking the way of the upstream path.

Greta brandishes a pair of long blades with one sleek and shiny, jagged edge and the other side serrated like it could chew through an elephant hide.

She dives in at the unicorn with one blade singing against the large sword, holding it high in the air and the other of her blades strikes at the midsection, cutting away a piece of Myst’s robe.

“This can’t be you, Greta! Who put you up to this? Why are you doing this?! I’m talking to you.” You try to interrupt the fight with your stinging questions, but you seem to do no more than annoy her and make her commit deeper into the now intense fight.

“Well, too fucking bad!” She rolls along the ground, covering her jacket in leaves and needs both knives to parry a reluctant overhand swing from Myst. “This is what you get.” Greta shoves the big sword into the air with a forceful leap and her feet carry forward into Myst’s chest, knocking him back into a shallow bit of rocky stream.

You heft the axe in your hand, trying to get used to its heavy end weight, “what did they tell you to do?”

Greta splashes into the stream next to Mysticalis and brings the back of one knife across right below its right knee. Gore leeks out as the serrated bit peels away the flesh in chunks. “I’m to get a pack of the water at the source and then blow up the spring. So what of it?!”

“No!” Myst finally makes more than a grunt and ignores what must be the agonizing pain from its knee. It hurls a rock from behind its back and out of the stream at Greta.

She reflexively moves to parry the blow, but a knife can’t do much against a fist sized rock. The rock nails Greta’s hand. The knife slips from her grasp and bones in her hand crack. “I must! I’m not alone! They’ll kill me.”

After a few strides, you stand upon the bank, overlooking the other two. “I won’t pretend to know what’s...” You leap down from your high perch, swinging the axe with a complete lack of formal training. “Goin’ on,” the blade of the axe misses, but you knock Greta down with the haft.

“Then stay outa’ it.” Greta croaks as she exerts effort to only fall to her knees and not on her back.

“I may be an observer in most,” Mysticalis rolls through the water and flips to its feet on the near, lower shore. “But this you WILL tell me. I’ll do what I must!” Its sword returns to ready position in front of him with both hands holding the blade high.

“Kill me then!” Greta shoulders you in the gut and the axe drops into the water as the wind is knocked out of you. She spins and faces Mysticalis with her one remaining knife. “Like the murderers your people are.”

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“You... you, how dare you?!” Myst pushes off the solid ground and thrusts its sword straight through Greta’s defenses and it lodges deep in her rib cage.

Greta tries to let out a victorious laugh, but instead she lets force a strange reverberating wheezing sound due to the sharp blade piercing her right lung. The second knife drops and she collapses. The water starts to turn a viscous dark and unnatural red from the deep wound.

She slides back off of Mysticalis’s blade and splashes into the water. It moves face to face with her, the small horn on its head, almost puncturing Greta’s forehead, “Why seek the source? Why steal its essence and then destroy it? Do you know what you would do?”

Greta attempts to speak, but her blood filled mouth emits only gurgling sounds. The unusually dark substance emits a putrid smell as it leaks across both of her cheeks. She coughs out dried chunks of coagulated blood.

The smell wafts up to your nose and the ability to resist nausea leaves you just as your vomit does a moment later.

“Come on now.” Mysticalis starts to look concerned by the devastation that its blow placed upon this woman, no matter that she is not innocent. “Tell me! Don’t... don’t die...” Its voice trails off.

The life fades from her eyes and you move back into the stream, next to your friend, placing a hand on its far shoulder and trying to pull it in closer to you.

“What?” It shakes free of your embrace and inhumanly leaps to the high shore where you just were.

As you are about to strike up words with Myst, the body before you surprisingly turns to ashy dust in a gusting implosion.

You gasp and Myst turns over, looking wide eyed, at the spot in the stream where Greta had just been. “I don’t understand. Her kind are supposed to be nearly... unkillable. I should have been more careful. My rage, like a Slayer’s passion got the better of me. I was too aggressive.”

“Stop it! She was here to do great harm to something that you and the locals care about greatly! She didn’t give a crap at all. There was no way to prevent it without losing what you cherished, one way or the other.”

“This is still a path of learning.” Its head hangs low. It brings a tear to your eye to see a creature of such serene beauty now showing such tragic sorrow, and for the killing of something not even human. “I must know that I will stumble. It will happen and I must use it to grow. Philosophies are not born from mere conjecture.”

“Somewhere in that statement you feel sorrow, but you’re ready to move on.” You grab what’s left of Greta’s possessions and start to wonder when you got to be so spiteful and apathetic.

You travel back to the cabin, mostly in silence. Once or twice, you reach into your pocket and feel the rough textures of the dream catcher there. You resolve that it can’t hurt to try to put it out while sleeping. You look back to your friend and wonder if it will open up to you, ever.

The cabin is a welcome sight by flashlight as the epic, pain pulsing through the foot, hike finally ends. You collapse on the bed and Mysticalis does so on the couch.

**

Klamath River, Northern California

A grouping of slimy, moss covered rocks and a couple of fallen trees form a small, natural dam. A strange film covers the water in the small pool where the river waters slow, briefly. The film is grey and sickening to behold. Slowly, along the edges of the rocks by the side of the pooling water, the grey starts to collect. The particles start to stick to one another and build up. A couple of short minutes later, Greta coughs and hacks clotted blood and ash into the once clear water. Her head aches and her body twitches almost uncontrollably. She sits up and looks around for Mysticalis and sees only a few forest creatures that quickly leap away.

**

Your Cabin on the Reservation

In fevered dreams, you encounter, over and over again, through the haze, a somewhat familiar man. When you wake with a start and practically launch yourself out of the bed, you place the figure to a memory. The strange man that stared at you on the way to Manhattan!

You frantically start to search your suitcase, your jacket pockets, your pant pockets, and every other nook in your belongings. You become aware that Myst is watching you with some level of passing interest, but it says nothing.

“Ah ha!” In victory, you lift a now somewhat tattered business card up into the dim morning light that leaks through the curtains.

“What do you behold?”

“Our next destination, or at least... mine. I need to find...” you glance at the top of the card in the slight light, “Kepler Hawking.”

**

You are not who you thought you were. You look down at your hand, warm blood (not yours) dripping down off of your fingertips and dripping down onto the ground.

You stand in stunned silence. Your job is not really yours, it is this person’s. Your family is not really yours; they belong to this person. Your memories are not really yours; they fill your head, yet they belong to this person.

You wonder how you could have ever fallen for these foolish tricks.

You lean against the wall and start to sob. You slide down the wall as you no longer will your leg muscles to hold up this body.

You lay there, flexing your arm muscles as you clench your fist rhythmically tight and loose around a screw driver that has carelessly been left on the floor.

You are a husk. You are built. You are still flesh and blood.

You just aren’t sure what about it is yours and what is this new person that you were forced to become. You still have a past.

You don’t remember it. You are sure that you have a unique personality of your own. You are now absolved of any horrible things that you have done. It isn’t you. It is this mind fucker that made you into something else.

Questions like, why did the mind fucker decide to do this to you(?), hardly cross your mind. You are more concerned with stitching things up and finding some way to get back to what must be a better life on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

Certainly, there are experiences and people that you want to keep in your life since the change. Now that you think about it, when exactly did the change take place? Can you at least draw a line in the sand as to the side you need to jump onto? What if it isn’t so much a Berlin Wall that separates the true you and the new faux you? Instead, what this bastard did to you could be more like a needle with yarn weaving through the blanket of your life. In that case, you might be better to just say fuck it.

You are stronger than that. You believe that there is something within you that is worth fighting for.

You need to find answers. You won’t give up.