The stone stairs made no sound whatsoever. I could hear my own breathing as if I were right next to myself. Something wet dripped, either behind or in front of me. I couldn’t tell. Leafy plants hung down from nowhere —for there was no ceiling for them to be attached to, even in this cave structure— making me do double takes every so often as their wet finger-like stems latched onto me. Roots jutted out at odd angles.
It was weird. This cave, I mean. It was supposed to be all rock, but there were patches of dirt mixed in, like whoever made this cave couldn’t make up their mind about how it was supposed to look. I got the impression that it wasn’t really a cave at all. It was some sort of underground imagery of whatever was supposed to be scary. Almost like a storyteller took tall tales from different sources, melded them together to create a general setting that was supposed to create suspense and fear, except they weren’t too keen on the details.
Maybe that was a hint at what followed the Wickermen back into their homes.
Tagalong and his brothers. Shit. If only I were a bit more savvy on this side of things, I might be better prepared for what was lurking in the basement. I felt more naked than ever without Wol and Hwari. They were a constant sanity check, not to mention mentors, friends, and a general support system whenever I came up against the unknown. It also didn’t help that the foreboding feeling continued to grow the closer I got to the bottom. A dreadful sensation that made me want to turn back, and every time I waved my glowing cast, my heart kept speeding up because I was afraid of what I might find.
I think having a flashlight is worse when in a haunted house. Sometimes, you don’t even want to see. Just want to curl up in a corner, cry, scream, whimper—anything until daylight or help comes.
But here’s the thing. I had a feeling daylight wasn’t going to reach this house. Not the inside of it, anyway.
Worse: I was the help.
Tagalong had been pretty harmless. Maybe his brothers will be too, and his tales of them being dangerous were just an exaggeration. Maybe they’ll just sneak up behind me and yell ‘boo!’ and that’s it. As long as I managed not to have a heart attack, it would be a harmless little encounter.
I scoffed. Yeah. Fat chance. Knowing my luck…
I shook my head to clear myself of negative thoughts.
My feet hit solid ground. No more stairs. Soil, dirt, rocks. Not concrete, nor wooden floorboards.
I was in the basement now.
The darkness here was thicker somehow. Back when dealing with Maw, it had felt similar—a sticky weight to the black fog that seemed to cling to my every movement. Here, it was less about sticking to me and more about absorbing light. The boundaries of shapes seemed to blend and fade into one another. The flimsy light from my Sowilō inscribed cast was being devoured by the dark. I don’t think it was an active thing, but rather another law of this pseudo-Lost place—that the darkness was simply too vast. God knows, I knew too many horror movies where light did little to help you see in the dark.
That’s what this was—a story. A group of friends in the woods is separated, and one of them sets out to save the rest of them. I just had to figure out how to turn it to my favor.
I reached into my back pocket and took out my eldritch gravity knife, holding my cast high to try —an exercise in futility— and see more of my surroundings. Nothing.
“Shit,” I cursed. I fatfingered the gravity knife, and a piece of chalk fell from my pocket. The eldritch creature awoke from its slumber, just a slanted opening of its eye, and casually raised some of the spines on the handle of the knife. They caught on my fingers and held so that the only thing I dropped was the chalk.
The knife vibrated in my hand. It was satisfied. I felt the creature return to dormancy.
Huh. That was neat.
I laughed a little, bending over to pick up the chalk I dropped. “Jesus, an eldritch creature is bound in my knife, and I’m happy about a party trick. My sense of reality is fucked.”
And I saw a pair of legs standing behind mine.
I froze.
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The knees were dirty, like they had been crawling through the dirt. Said dirt caked the space between its claws and toe-like appendages, filth sticking to the greyish smooth skin. The edges of a tattered t-shirt hung a little above the knees. Long black fur hung down towards the ground from inside the t-shirt.
When you see scary things, you freeze. Especially when they’re out of the ordinary. A few days ago, I would’ve been one of those people.
I fared a little better.
An impossibly long stretch of two seconds passed by before my brain kicked my butt into gear. I spun on one leg, slashing the knife around me wildly.
But the creature was nowhere to be seen.
Then it began to laugh.
Its laughter came from multiple different directions at once—above me, a little to the left, a little to the right—but always somewhere behind me.
“Little logger, come to help his friends?” The creature spoke with lots of slurping, and deep guttural, heavy, breathy sounds mixed in between his words.
And there was the unmistakable hint of an accent.
An accent?
I spun in a half circle, and the voice followed—always staying behind me.
What was this thing?Daemon?No.I didn’t feel the familiar sickly air of sulphur.Or maybe that was a Maw thing.But my instincts told me that I wasn’t dealing with a daemon.This was something else.
“Show yourself,” I said, trying to think.
Something tapped me on the shoulder on one side.
I whirled, slashing the eldritch knife again. But it was already too late, the thing wasn’t there. I continued the circle, dragging my feet. Shit. I should’ve felt the unmistakable hum of power as the circle came into existence. I’d been dragging my feet through the dirt. How had I not completed a full—
I looked down.There were no soil marks.Just scuffles where I dragged the toe of my sneakers.
This thing. When it came to tapping me on the shoulder, it messed up my circle on purpose. It had rubbed the ground with its own feet. It knew what a circle was and was messing with it.
It must have noticed that I realized what it did, because the surround sound laughter came again. “Little logger and their circles. Me smelt the magic on you and your kind the moment you set foot here. Just like the others. Reeking of false fire, and false water. Did you think me would let you draw?”
Crap.
On a side note, he definitely had an accent. A strange cadence stringing his words together, like he was chewing bits of tobacco and pausing every other word to nudge it aside with his tongue. More than that, it was the way he pronounced certain vowels. Like I was watching a—
“The news. You speak like a news anchor,” I panted.
The laughter stopped, and I got the sense that I’d thrown the creature off with my words. Just as well. I started limping in a circle again, quicker this time.
Something came from the back and shoved me, hard. Before I knew what was going on, I was face down and eating dirt. I saw its filthy feet hurriedly smudging the circles around my shoes before running off into the trees again.
Fuck.
Circles were the basics of any practice. You had to draw it, not just for the sake of concentrating your mind, but because it was a part of the ritual. That’s why practitioners had staffs and other doodads—a lot of them could be activated without the circle. Like a pre-built program that could be activated on the spot, except even my wardstones required a circle. Without a circle, they’d be unforced and just go up into a curtain that would fade over a few minutes. And in a space that was as wide open as this, I wasn’t sure the wardstone could stretch the barriers far enough to make a different.
And this fucking thing knew it.
Was I this helpless without my familiars?
“Hahaha. Boy logger. Keep trying. It’s funny.”
Boy logger. It had called me that again.
I heard before that news anchors try to adopt a specific accent, because that’s what the majority of Americans used to consider the most proper form of English. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what I heard. Also, the fact that it called me logger… my brain itched. There was a connection there.
Keep it talking.
“Logger. I’m not a logger,” I panted, trying to get to my feet. I winced in pain. Shit. My ankle. I twisted it again in the fall. FUCK.
“No? You walk into my woods holding sharp things. You reek of ice and fire, of madness similar to stupid whiskey. Me thinks you are a logger.”
Whatever this thing was, it was American, and from a time when loggers were a thing. Tagalong and this thing… they both hung around people who spent their time in the woods. Or maybe, they both hung around loggers. Period. I needed its name. I needed to chat. Get some information using the information I already knew.
Iambic Pentameter? No. Too much structure. This thing didn’t feel that structured. It felt more free. More casual. Free verse then?
Damn it. And Shit. I had to free style this?
I sucked in a shaky breath, getting to one knee and forcing myself to my feet. “You of the woods, give me your name. I will ask you twice more, and if you do not answer, I will challenge you to show yourself to me.”
The air tensed like a taut bowstring. The strange bird calls stopped, and the bug chirps immediately disappeared. An eerie quietness that was threatening to boil over.
“Little logger dare try to bind me? Me, who was sitting around fires before you were—”
I didn’t wait for it to finish. “You who despise ice and fire. Give me your name, or I swear upon the power of frost and sickness,”—The daemon tattoo on the inside of my wrist burned with frost—“and by fire and madness”—and the knife went cold—“that I will make you show yourself to me.”
I had chanted, purposefully naming the two things that the creature appeared not to like. Not just because they had been dropped by the creature, but because they were connected to me. Ice from the Sumerian daemon who had branded me, and fire from the eldritch being trapped in my knife. I had no familiar to draw on, but I could make the words in my chant make a bigger mark in the world if I gave it a nudge through who I was on an existential level.
The thing groaned this time, a dozen different voices echoing from behind me.
“You who always stand behind—” I began.
I never got to finish.
I felt fingers wrap around my throat from behind. Not fast. Gentle. Slow. Caressing.
Then a single voice whispered in my ear, “Me name is Hidebehind, little logger. And you will pay for that.”