Chapter 02

Under the failing light, Hal crept out of the woods. He kept as low as possible, moving between the walls of swaying laundry hanging out to dry. Every footstep felt impossibly loud as it crunched on the dry grass.

So far he only found bed linens and women’s clothes. Up ahead he saw the dark cloak he spotted from the forest and made a beeline for it.

The brown cloak was in direct view of an open window. And on its sill was something that looked a lot like a pie. Hal crept closer to the cloak, but his eyes – and his stomach – could only focus on the food another five or six yards away.

A distant echoing boom resounded and he found his vision drawn up and over his left shoulder to the dark, bruised sky. He managed to catch the tail end of a flash. Then another series of dull explosions, like distant fireworks, and more flashes.

Isn’t that out of order? He thought, entranced by the spectacle. The lights came after the sound. It should have been reversed.

The booming flashes of light came again. This time, he paid closer attention. Two booms, three flashes, two booms. 

A signal. It was too regular to be anything else.

It repeated again a few seconds later. Hal turned his attention back to the cloak and pulled it free from the line. In the flash of the signal fireworks, Hal looked back to the pie. All thought of taking it flew from his head at the sight.

A young woman stood at the window watching the sky, a heavy knife in her hand to cut the pie. In the bright revealing light of the fireworks, she saw Hal. Her expression sprang from one emotion to the next. Worry, confusion, then anger when she realized Hal was stealing, and finally wide-eyed horror when she caught sight of his forearm.

And the glowing golden light that stood out in stark contrast to the gloom that fell between each flash of the night sky.

In the hours since Hal covered it in mud, the masking stuff had dried and cracked apart. When he went to pull the cloak down, the gold light of the mark shone clear through the dried dirt.

He didn’t wait for the woman to recover her wits. Hal turned and fled back into the forest. All thought of getting any food or more clothes abandoned.

Glancing over his shoulder, Hal saw the woman cock back her arm. He was already halfway to the forest. There was no way she could hit him from that distance.

The woman didn’t seem to agree.

Hal watched in horror as the knife flipped end over end toward him. Its graceful arc put it on a collision course with the flapping blankets of laundry. 

At the last second, the wind shifted like some cruel joke. The knife that should have gotten tangled up in the sheets, sailed clear over the dozens of yards right for Hal’s back.

Hal dropped to the dirt as fast as he could. He felt the blade slice through the air where he was standing a heartbeat before. It made a dull thump somewhere in the treeline. The distance worked in his favor. It gave him time to react, no matter how impossible the woman’s throw was.

He scrambled to his feet. Hal tried to find the knife but gave up when he didn’t see it after a few seconds of searching. He didn’t have the time.

The small village came alive with the sound of shouts and a chillingly discordant horn that sounded throughout every home.

Any guilt he had about stealing the cloak vanished.

What’s petty theft matter if they already wanted to hurt me or kill me? 

Once he was beneath the thick boughs of the forest, Hal took a moment to don the cloak. It was rougher than anything he’d ever felt but he immediately felt warmer.

It struck him as odd that the effect was so complete and stark. Body heat simply did not work like that. It was almost like….

Magic, came the unbidden thought, and he pushed it roughly away. But it came back with a vengeance as he made his way deeper into the woods with no course in mind beyond putting as much distance between him and that last village. 

If there was magic, and he was marked, shouldn’t he have some way of defending himself? He was as weak as a toddler compared to everyone else. 

Rather than feeling like he was in an epic movie, he felt scared and alone. 

Night came swiftly in the covered forest. A steady downpour tried to drown him. Thankfully, the cloak held up. His feet ached, and he was covered in at least two dozen bleeding scratches and bruises from slips, falls, and stray branches.

No movie, video game, or book ever prepared him for how impossibly dark it gets when there are no street lights, no moon, and no stars. In the depths of the forest, it went beyond simple darkness to an abyssal ink.

He couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face. Fear was the only thing keeping him going, yet the worry of stumbling into a dry gully or worse finally forced him to stop.

With the cloak about him, he was reasonably dry and it was large enough that he could prop up against one of the massive tree trunks and tuck up beneath the brown material.

His second night was less miserable than the first. Though he had nothing to eat for two days, and little to drink, he was dry and relatively warm.

Blissful, dreamless sleep claimed him that night and the following morning he awoke to the distant baying of hounds. 

In his groggy, half-asleep state Hal thought it was another nightmare and he tried to go back to sleep. But when the baying came again, this time even closer, he recognized the danger he was in.

His eyes shot open with the burst of fear-laden adrenaline. Rather than leaping to his feet and continuing his panicked flight from the day before, Hal stared down three feet of gleaming steel pointed at his face.

Trailing his gaze down the subtle curve of the blade to the young woman that held it, Hal wondered just how he could get away. 

A quick glance as the woman’s piercing blue-gray eyes told him she wasn’t about to fall for any tricks.

He kicked himself for ignoring the earlier warning. But he had been so exhausted. Nobody expects to find themselves alone in a savage world. Not any normal modern-day adult.

This was his third day without food and the constant exertion was taking a heavy toll on his unfit body. 

Armchair adventurers – a group he had once been part of – could wag their finger and say that they would have done that differently, but Hal was finding out firsthand the utter havoc starvation and dehydration could wreak on a person.

Back in his apartment, he could analyze a scene from a movie, a game, or a book even for hours on end. He was well-fed, properly hydrated, and sat in a comfortable chair in an air-conditioned room.

Being tired, afraid, with a dozen aches in places he didn’t know he could ache in, not to mention starving and severely dehydrated, played a massive impact on his ability to think clearly. Let alone make “smart” choices that he would have easily seen had he been back home.

As he stared at the sword, his likely death, he very much preferred to keep his fantasy separate from his reality.

The woman was still holding the blade, its tip a clear threat, but she made no move to use it. She eyed him with those sharp, intelligent eyes that took in the filthy, disheveled mud-caked man before her.

As she looked over him, her eyes inevitably fell to his left arm. The cloak’s roughspun fibers let out just enough light from the mark to draw attention to it. Under the shade of the forest canopy, it was fairly conspicuous.

She barked a command in a foreign language. It was melodic and lilting. Even her rough tone could do nothing to strip the music from the words.

Seeing his obvious confusion, she spoke again in a different language. Every syllable was filled with a guttural sound. Seeing the lack of Hal’s comprehension, she spoke in a third language, this time in clipped sentences.

Of all the languages, the last one sounded closest to English. The utterly foreign words, however, made it impossible for him to grasp what she was trying to get across.

Hal spread his arms out wide, shrugged his shoulders, and shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

The way her face screwed up at his foreign words told him enough. There would be no overcoming this language barrier. He had to admit, this was about as good as he probably could expect. She wasn’t hurting him or locking him up. Nor had she run away in fear.

Attempting to communicate was never a bad sign.

Eventually, like every other person, she focused on his mark. Hal watched her inch the blade toward his left arm. He kept very still indeed, aware that the slightest twitch might set the girl off.

Sharp eyes flicked toward Hal as she fell into an easy - and impossibly deep to Hal’s limited mobility – squat and moved toward his outstretched arm. She paused halfway there to regard his brown eyes. “Heljei,” she breathed in awe. 

“Heljei?” Hal asked.

The girl looked at him and with her free hand pointed to her eyes with her index and middle finger. She pointed to the dirt, then to Hal. The closest Hal could get out of the miming was that he had… dirty eyes?

Brown, answered his awakening brain. Heljei means brown eyes? Why would that matter? While Hal wasn’t the most observant at all times, especially not in his present state, looking back he couldn’t recall a single dark-eyed person.

Every other human he’d seen, including the one in front of him, possessed bright and colorful eyes. He even recalled a few with impossible colors like lavender and rose.

She was bent over his arm, her free hand pulled up the rough cloth of the brown cloak and her reaction was the same as every other. The gold light from the mark dazzled her eyes and she stared with great awe at it.

If he had any hope of escaping, now would be it. While she was distracted. Hal tensed, readying himself to slip out of her grip and spring away as fast as he could. He certainly wasn’t going to wait around for her to skewer him with that sword, or worse, wait until those baying hounds found him.

The slight twitch of his muscles alerted the girl and she tightened her grip. It wasn’t painful but it might as well have been an iron manacle about his wrist. At the same time, she angled her blade toward his heart, resting the flat of it on her raised forearm.

All it would take was a casual lean from his captor, a few inches, to kill him. Embarassed at being so thoroughly foiled before he ever got the chance, Hal relaxed and leaned sullenly against the tree at his back.

With a nod that told him she expected no less of a sensible reaction, she withdrew the threatening blade. Even without it aimed at him, Hal was certain she could cut him down before he rose to his feet.

Hal watched her as she became enamored with the mark once more. The light seemed to fill her bright, wide eyes. He wasn’t sure whether she was a woman or a girl. She looked around the same age at him, mid-twenties, but that was where the similarities stopped.

She wore an outfit that, at first glance, looked like a thousand leaves sewn together. But upon further inspection, he found they were cunningly worked leather plates. They overlapped and were perfectly colored to give the appearance of individual leaves.

Most of her skin was covered except for the fingertips at the end of her gloves and her face. She had a slightly plump cherubic face with golden blonde hair that made her look several years younger than her body hinted at. A single red thread was wound throughout a thickly plaited cord of golden hair that ran down the side of her face.

She was beautiful. Shorter than Hal but lean and strong like a gymnast, readily evident even under the camouflaging armor she wore. 

She caught Hal staring at her and her lightly tanned skin flushed. From the way her blue-gray eyes narrowed to dangerous slits, he knew that was no blush of embarrassment. It was anger.

He did his best to paint an innocent look on his face and smile but it didn’t lessen her scowl. She jerked his arm and pointed at the dirtied mark, caked with dried blood and mud, while she let loose another stream of urgent-sounding words.

All Hal could do was shake his head. “I don’t have any idea what you want. I don’t even know what that is!” He jabbed a finger at the golden mark, suddenly angry.

None of this was fair. He wanted to be back in his apartment, ordering so much takeout from the local Chinese restaurant that he was on a first-name basis with the delivery guy. 

The Huntress, as Hal was beginning to think of her, took out a cloth and a canteen. She poured the water out onto the dark cloth and Hal’s eyes went wide with thirst.

He licked his dry, chapped lips.

That look had not escaped her notice and in an act of kindness, she handed him the leather-wrapped canteen. While Hal hungrily drank from the relatively small canteen, the Huntress scrubbed the blood and mud from his mark.

If she thought the mark would be wiped away, she was sorely mistaken. Hal watched out of one eye as he forced himself to slow down and sip the water, knowing the dangers of drinking too much, too fast. The mark shone even brighter than before. Its many intricate lines were as clear as the day he first arrived.

The baying of the hounds echoed all about them and the sound of distant voices filtered in through the trees. There was a strangeness to the forest, the way it warped and twisted sound. 

Hal stopped drinking from the canteen that seemed to hold a suspiciously large quantity of water to better listen. They were close now. He watched the Huntress for any sign of what she would do. He was at her mercy and under no illusion that she was going to let him go.

Would she kill him, or hand him over to his pursuers? It would be nice to know why they were chasing him. It wasn’t like he hurt anybody or did anything bad. The theft of a single cloak surely didn’t warrant such an aggressive response.

Without any preamble, the Huntress released his arm and stood. In one smooth motion, she sheathed her sword and offered a gloved hand to Hal. He grabbed it and she effortlessly hauled him to his feet.

The Huntress put a finger to her pursed lips. Hal nodded his understanding. She pulled a bow off her back and fit an arrow to the string. Keeping low, she guided Hal around the tree he slept beneath and up a nearby slope.

He did the best he could to keep up and stay silent but he was noisy and slow. His stomach twisted in a tightening knot of pain. Every few feet the Huntress stopped and waited for Hal.

The forest changed around them. Thick trunks gave way to smaller ones with larger gaps in the canopy overhead letting in streams of gray morning light. The storm, it seemed, had spent most of its fury last night and was content to leave the sky overcast.

Thick underbrush grew up between the thinning trees. The Huntress led him through, pulling branches and bushes aside to aid in his passage. 

Every so often Hal took another drink from the canteen. By his estimation, he drank enough refreshingly cold spring water to fill the oblong container several times over. No matter how long he drank, the canteen never emptied.

Before Hal had time to ponder the implications – or the impossibility – of the canteen, the Huntress grabbed him and pulled him roughly to the ground. He would have fallen face-first if she hadn’t put out another hand to catch him inches from the dirt.

The Huntress guided him deeper into the thick underbrush until they were both well-hidden.

Like every other person here, the Huntress was ridiculously strong and had no problem moving him about like he was a doll. Hal grit his teeth and might have said something if he hadn’t caught the sound of a twig snapping less than ten feet away.

Through the bushes, he couldn’t see much, but the Huntress could. She had an arrow nocked and murder in her eyes.

Hal didn’t know what was going on. A running theme he was fast getting sick of. And while the villagers didn’t seem to harbor any good intentions toward him, he didn’t know if they deserved to die.

For all he knew, the mark meant he was some virulent plague bringer. 

If only he could speak their language, understand what they were saying. It hit him how important communication was. Discerning friend from foe was so much easier when intentions were obvious.

The whole ordeal could be a misunderstanding. Not that Hal was willing to risk himself on that theory.

While Hal couldn’t see the villagers, he could hear their many feet stomping around. They spoke in that same harsh, guttural language the Huntress tried to speak to him in.

Next to him, the Huntress tensed like some great hunting cat. Her eyes focused on the scene before her. Hal held his breath as the tension drew itself out to the breaking point.

Just as he wondered when she was going to spring out in a blur of violence and kill every man and woman there, the Huntress relaxed. The voices grew distant and a dozen shaky breaths later, she pulled him out of the bush and took off, strangely, in the direction the group had come from.

They had many more run-ins with the villagers. The baying of the dogs was background noise to their constant traveling. The Huntress pulled Hal along the entire way, never threatening but always insistent. 

Hal didn’t know if she would stop him from leaving but he had no intention of fleeing. She was the only person that had helped him so far and he imagined he would be caught within minutes of being on his own.

The wily woman led them in strange, circuitous patterns that at times came uncomfortably close to his pursuers and at others seemed to place them far behind. Hal could make no sense of the direction and eventually gave up trying.

Instead, he focused on the Huntress and doing his best to follow her. 

Sometime around midday, she held up a hand and Hal froze mid-stride. She cocked her head to the side. They hadn’t heard a villager or much of anything for the last hour. And rather than constantly changing their path, they were making a steady progression in a single direction.

Ever since he woke up, he had a buzzing sound in the back of his head. Like a phone set to vibrate.

He chalked it up to the lack of food and did his best to press on. But now, stopped as they were, it came back with a passion. Everything grew faint and blurred at the edges.

It vanished a second later, leaving Hal reeling. He put a hand out to brace himself against the nearby tree. Through the bark, he felt a faint tremor.

Hal looked to the Huntress and their eyes met. He saw her worry and concern.

And a moment later, coming down from the high branches of the tree he was leaning against, he saw the monster.

It reared up ahead of them, the strangest creature Hal had ever seen. It stood well over ten feet tall. Covered in a mixture of chitinous green plates and coarse black fur caked with green moss.

Thick trunk-like legs supported a wide fur-covered torso with an insectile head and long serrated arms like a praying mantis. It clicked its two-foot-long mandibles at them, its bulbous eyes regarding them as little more than snacks.

The Huntress moved into swift action. She unslung her bow and had three arrows leaping into the air before Hal could even take his hand away from the tree.

Hal looked around the ground, found a rock, and hefted it in his palms. As much as he wanted to run and hide, he could at least prove a decent distraction. 

The arrows struck deep into the thick fur and the creature loosed a disorienting wail. The Huntress staggered for a brief moment. 

Somehow unaffected, Hal hurled the stone as hard as he could. In a feat of atypical strength, he managed a decent throw. The rough stone tumbled end over end and struck the thing on its bulbous compound eye, just as it leaned down to strike at the Huntress.

That was all the Huntress needed. The creature swiveled its head to regard the annoyance. With its deadly arms slowed by the distraction, the Huntress jumped over the scything arms. She cleared six feet into the air like it was nothing.

The monster lifted one serrated claw and struck out at the easier target. Its arm came down at an angle that would cleave Hal from shoulder to hip. He tried to dive to the side but already knew he would be too slow.

But the Huntress wasn’t. She pulled back on her bow and let fly a glowing arrow that cut a streak of red lightning through the air. All before her feet touched the ground.

The arrow intercepted the claw and exploded. Waves of heat washed over Hal’s face and rolled over his back. But the arrow had done its job and when the smoke cleared, the claw’s reach had been reduced to eight feet.

The broken four-foot-tip of the claw laid near Hal on the ground, leaking an ichorous briny fluid.

Feeling somewhat useful, Hal pushed himself up to his knees and looked for another rock. If he could distract the monster again, the Huntress could capitalize on it.

What he found instead, was a wriggling length of rope he initially mistook for a snake. He leaped to his feet away from it at first, only to pause and regard the curiously mobile length of rope.

The rope lashed out like a striking viper and coiled itself around Hal’s ankles before he could even shout. A second rope soared out from the side and perfectly encircled his wrists. In less time than it took him to say, “What the fuck?” Hal was tied up and lifted off his feet by the magical rope.

The Huntress moved one hand through the air like she was conducting a symphony, her fingers left trailing lines of light in the chill air. In response, the ropes tugged harder and pulled Hal behind a row of sheltering trees.

He tried in vain to wriggle out of the bonds but they held tight. In one move, the Huntress had removed him from the fight. Hal could still hear the sounds of battle but could no longer see anything. And it seemed like it was getting fainter.

His embarrassment and frustration soon gave way to amazement. He was floating in the air, suspended by magical ropes. His mind spun with the implications. Judging from the way she had cast the spell – or so he assumed – it was an easy thing, as she did it mid-combat.

Hal stopped struggling and examined them closer. They seemed like any normal rope, except faint silvery threads were wound throughout the weave. They glinted every so often in the wan light.

A chilling screech echoed through the forest, followed immediately by a heavy thump he heard but could not feel. The ropes lowered until his feet touched the ground a moment later. 

They slithered from him and went around the side of the tree to join the Huntress. She knelt down and opened one of the many small pouches she carried – far too small for so much rope – and the two ropes obediently slithered up her thigh into the pouch.

In the distance behind her, Hal could just make out the charred and arrow-riddled remains of the monster.

She cast him an appraising, vaguely angry look.

Hal started to say something when she raised a hand to forestall him. Without a word, she moved past him and continued on ahead.

He had plenty to think about as he followed in the wake of the Huntress.

The untiring woman walked on, and though Hal tried to sate his hunger with more pristine mountain water from the magically infinite canteen, his stomach was not buying it.

It growled, continually and loudly. Enough that the Huntress finally looked back at him as if he was doing it intentionally. She took the canteen and took a sip before giving it back, spoke to him again in a melodic voice before giving up and miming.

She rubbed her stomach, the leaf-molded plates of leather shifted with her touch.

“I guess some things are universal,” Hal said, nodding along. “Yes, I am starving.” Hal thought he remembered reading somewhere that a person could last over a week without food. He was fast coming up on only half that and he felt like death warmed over.

The Huntress nodded and took him over a nearby rise. Down in a small grassy depression, pock-marked with muddy pools from the recent rains, Hal saw the strangest tree he’d ever seen.

It towered above the rest but it wasn’t the tree that drew his eye. It was the thousand different shades of virulently colored mushrooms that grew from the trunk. Many of them were large enough to sit on like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

The Huntress was already halfway to the tree by the time Hal realized he had stopped walking to marvel at the tower of fungus.

Weakened from hunger and the constant marching, Hal did his best to catch up but it was a poor attempt even by his standards. Now that the burst of adrenaline wore off, he was more sluggish than ever.

By the time he reached the tree of a million fungi, the Huntress was hard at work examining the colorful things. Mushrooms had never been his favorite but he was so hungry he would have eaten almost anything placed in front of him.

The Huntress stopped him at a pace or two from the tree and grabbed his shoulder.

Hal looked questioningly at her. It was obvious she was trying to find a way to tell him something without using words. Finally, she nodded and held up a finger.

Releasing her grip on his shoulder, she pointed at him then mimed covering her eyes with one hand. Her free hand reached out toward the tree and she pretended to take something from it. Without looking at it or removing her hand from her eyes, she mimed shoving it into her mouth and eating.

“I got it,” Hal said with a nod. “You want me to shut my eyes and pick a mushroom at random and eat it without looking.”

The Huntress smiled encouragingly, the first smile he’d ever seen on her typically dour features. She took the canteen from him and stepped aside.

Normally, Hal would have been skeptical. Or even feared that this was some horrendously elaborate prank but he knew it didn’t hold any merit. If the woman wanted to poison or kill him, she had more direct methods.

And besides, Hal had let his whole life pass him by as he weighed the pros and cons of every situation in his life. He was tired of over-analyzing and coming up with plans for events that would never occur.

He wanted to live.

I don’t want to be the same person. Not here. If magic can exist, then that means I don’t need to be the same version of me that I’ve always been.

Hal took the remaining steps to the tree and reached out with his free hand, eyes squeezed shut. Blindly, he grabbed a spongy top and ripped off a chunk.

Without daring to open his eyes, afraid he’d chicken out at the last second, he took a bite. His teeth crunched through the skin and into the dry spongey material below. It tasted about as bad as he expected. Like old gym socks or really expensive cheese.

He never could tell the difference.

Forcing down every bite, Hal ate the mushroom.

Hal opened his eyes to the worst acid trip in his life. Colors swirled and melted together then reformed entirely new never-seen-before hues. The Huntress stood before him but her eyes were swimming around her face and her mouth rippled and undulated like noodles in a bowl of soup.

The deep pit in his stomach was gone. Though he felt more than a little queasy, he also was strangely sated. As if he had eaten a large four-course meal.

The annoying buzz in the back of his head came back, insistent and unrelenting. Hal grabbed at it and realized his arms mimed the mental motion. The Huntress reached out and steadied him.

Everything spun and twisted around as the hallucination took hold.

I just ate a mushroom, what did I expect? He tried to talk but his words came out slurred and strange. The Huntress replied to him but he continued not understanding a single word.

As she laid him down onto the grass, a bright blue window appeared hovering in the air between them. Like something out of a classic RPG.

You eat the [Allspeak Fungus]. 

Language Unlocked: Common.

You are Poisoned!

You are Paralyzed!

Well, fuck. 

Darkness closed in around him and he heard the Huntress’s soft, lamenting voice, “…órë.” Her eyes found his, the only bright things in the darkness around. “Hlar mes’ifa? Can you hear me? What is wrong?” 

Hal tried to answer but found he no longer had control over his tongue. The last thing he remembered was the Huntress bending down to lift him into her arms as the darkness finally closed in around him.