Month: September 2018

Back out on the lake, James and Matthew pulled the sled bearing Maeven as its blades ground along.

As blowing ice grit swirled around their feet Matt muttered, “Maybe this was not the best idea.  The fog seems to be growing thicker.”

“How much further do you think it is?” one of the unnamed younger men, asked.

James shrugged, but no one seemed to notice the non-committal gesture, but the silence of the rest seemed to suggest the same answer to the question: It really did not matter.  They were committed to carrying out this service if there even were the slighted shred of hope that Maeven could be saved, regardless of time or distance.

Christie followed behind, close to the sled to watch for any signs of worsening of Maeven’s condition.  Nell and Begglar and Dominic took the lead, each advancing ahead until one or the other could barely be seen, then pausing to wait, until the others joined them.  Begglar called it getting a bearing.  They rotated positions in succession, aiming diagonally across the lake toward the falls using the last known land bearing they had before leaving the shore.

The young lady, my advocate, walked to the right side of Maeven’s litter, and one of the other young men walked to her left, flanking Maeven as she was born forward.  Two others, another woman and a man, brought up the rear of the procession, keeping a close watch on their back.

From the line of the sled’s ski, just off the curved point, Begglar aligned Nell and Dominic in the fog, speaking lower but loud enough so that they could find each other in turn.  Moonlight shone overhead, just enough so that Begglar could guide their progress with some degree of dead reckoning, and some measure of shadow casting.

Both Nell and Begglar were confident in their method of trans-navigation, so the party acquiesced.

“Maeven’s in a bad way,” Begglar answered, “We have no time to lose and no options.”

***

Under the cover of the thickening and swirling fog, the susurrant movements of the slithering packs of young sprites murmured and proceeded inexorably towards the falls.  Their black beaks clamped against the cold and slush of the ice and frost glaze thickening the ice sheet.  Their silver eyes strobed and pulsed as if they were groveling little paparazzi eagerly pursuing actresses and rock stars.  They sensed the movement of a lone figure trudging blindly just ahead of them.  Their bloodlust was piqued, but they were being drawn to something else entirely.

***

Beneath the frozen falls, Mason and I stared at the strange glow coming from the back of the cave.  The floor of the cavern was covered in thick moss where the ice abated, further in the moss gave way to the darkness and cold stone, pitted with calcite forming a treacherous, razor-sharp lip, that would cut a man if he fell upon it.  We carefully made our way further in, while casting wary glances over our shoulders for any floor movement indication that more of the Moon Sprite had made it through the frozen teeth of the falls.  Both Mason and I bore tight fitted knapsack packs, called rucksacks, bound to our shoulders, riding just between our shoulder blades.  Within, each of us had a torch pole, made of a kind of hardwood that burned very slowly when lit.  I suggested to Mason, that now might be a very good time to pull out these torch poles if we expected to go further in, and he readily agreed.

“We will have to go back out there soon, but while we’re here we might as well have a look around.”

Mason knelt while I untied the hasp on the protective flap on his shoulder pack.  I reached in a drew out a torch pole of roughly two and a half feet in length.  Upon the end, a singed wrap of foolscap, that he’d used for tinder was bound to it, and it had further been coated in a sort of paraffin wax to keep it from getting wet.  I peeled back the paraffin and handed him the torch pole.  Mason unbound my pack as I had and soon presented me with my own torch, a darkened teak wood, polished by the oils of my hand carrying it through many a dark place over the years of my life.  Soon we had both torches lit, a flickering flambeau of orange and yellow light which slightly hissed and spat in the damp air.  The pitted rock at our feet gave way to drifts of sand and silt, a much softer and smoother feel as we trudged forward.  Shadows around us jumped and danced with the firelight, no doubt delighted to celebrate the approach of the light within the recesses once more.

Stone daggers of mud seemed to drip silently down from the ceiling, some of which formed pillars of calcified rock.  The air was faintly coppery to the taste and felt lacking as we approached the soft wavering glow reflected along the cave wall.

As we moved steadily we noticed that pools of cave water softly lapped at a shoreline we were walking upon.  The light’s glare increased as we approached, and we noticed a curve in the stone corridor shielding us from a more direct view of the source of the light.  As we entered the short tunnel we were stunned.

There before us was a pool of water glowing with a soft turquoise light emanating from somewhere deep within.  A figure stood opposite us on the other side of the pool, dressed in a fashion I could not help but associate with someone from a very ancient culture.

“You’ve come at last,” he said, rising.  The man was thickly bearded, broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned, and had powerful-looking forearms and when he had obtained his full stature he stood at least seven feet tall.  Mason and I looked at each other in shock, and then at the man standing on the opposite shore studying us with wise and discerning eyes.

***

Back on the ice, within the enfolding fog, Will crouched low, trying to get a sense of the enemy or enemies.  The flashes were low to the ice, clustered indiscriminately and then spreading out.  These could only be the sprouted sprites from the nests, as Maeven had called them.  Ugly, beaked worms the size of moray eels, white as the cold walls of a mausoleum.  As he approached the direction of their coming, he noticed a darkening form of something much larger in their midst, clarifying more and more the closer he came.  Panic raced through him, causing his carotid artery on his neck to pulse with adrenaline.  His odds of surviving this encounter were nil.  He had no illusions.  But thinking of his father’s death, he tapped into the deep-seated rage and sense of injustice he continually carried with him and determined that if he was to die this day, he would fight his way into the dark night rather than surrendering to it.  He wished he’d had time to get the short sword from its back sheath, but he could not risk taking off the layers of protective clothing, and the chill of the icy air would bring stiffness into his muscles that would not help him.  The sprites were one thing, out of water eels, that he could cut and stab easily.  The unknown dark form ahead was something else, though.  An unknown factor.
He’d progressed another ten feet when finally he recognized it, and almost stumbled backward.

***

It was Dominic’s turn in the rotation to take the lead in scout position.  And so it was he who first saw the low lying flashes ahead of them, and knew that this was a very bad development.  And, given the situation, the decision to go back out onto the ice in this dense fog, despite Maeven’s wishes and need, was a dangerous and foolish venture.

The young Moon Sprites had left their nests.  He remembered that Mr. O’Brian had even asked him to watch over the first Moon Sprite horde that they had slain, in the off chance that the young would flee their parent, but it had looked like these had died when their host had been slain.  They had hung limply from its hoary head as it slouched forward over the ice, its silver eyes gone black and dull, cataracted with a glaze of frost.  He’d watched for any movement for a time, but there was not a single writhing twist or twitch.  To his mind, they were dead too.  Perhaps, he had thought, they were too young to separate from their matron.  But seeing the flashes ahead, the evidence was clear.  These creatures, birthed from the lie in the ether natural between, deceived even in death.  Visiting delayed vengeance upon their slayers ten to fifteen-fold in the writhing forms of their hellish offspring.

He wished he had the eyesight of young Mira.  That kid could see almost anything at a distance.  He was glad, however, that she had remained safely on the shore.  These new disturbing developments were portending more and more against them ever being able to join them there again.

When the shout signal came, Dominic jumped with a start.  He was to wait until the others caught up to him.  The shout came at each point when his mother or father could no longer see his form ahead, but strangely enough, he didn’t think he’d gone as far as he previously did when it was his turn.  He’d counted paces and was still short of the previous distance.  Either the fog was growing thicker or…  He paused.  Come to think of it, the shout did not quite sound like the voice of his mother or father.  Someone else was out on the ice ahead.  Mason and Mr. O’Brian were at the falls, he’d seen them go, before the fog descended into the cirque canyon, and poured down onto the ice.  Only one of their group remained unaccounted for.

***

Will could not help himself.  He’d cried out when the sight before him clarified.  It was the Manticore, of course, he knew that, but the sight of it was disturbing and nightmarish.  Its face was burnished by the scorching of flame and with frost, the blackened flesh bitten again by the latter.  Its eyes were piercing staring beyond him and bluish in color, marbled with cold veins of ice.  Its matted and scorched mane hung with icicles and a dusting of white frost, the ice tinkling like chimes in the wind.  Its mouth hung slack and open bristled with sharp pointed teeth and an icy glaze of frozen drool and blood pearls hung like red rubies dusted in powdered sugar.  He couldn’t tell whether the ends of its mouth had been pulled by rictus into its present mocking grin, or if it’s last relished private barb at O’Brian had given it its dying pleasure.

In the shock, he’d suddenly reversed his forward movement and lost his footing.  Will landed hard on his seat and the tip of the short sword and scabbard, below his outer tunic, caught the ice and forced his body backward, slamming his head just as hard.  Light flashed behind his eyes, and for a brief horrible second, he believed that the Moon Sprites had lunged upon him, cut his feet out from under him and their flashing eyes strobed him into blindness so that he would not see their beaks rip into him and tear him apart.  His breathing escalated into short mewling gasps, as blind panic made him shake violently from side to side, slashing as the sprites he believed were mobbing him with his kukri blade.  Its thickened curve scything through the air, plying and slashing, finding nothing to add blood to its dangerous edge.  Darkness descended into his mind and sprung up from memories too painful to bear alone.  He wept and wept, mewling and mouthing a single word over and over again.

“Daddy!”

“Daddy, please!”

But there was no one who could hear his cries.  No one.

***

Eight Moon Sprites had died in the attempt to rush through the narrow crevice between the cascading teeth of the falls.  Six remained, squiggling and squirming along the outside of the wall of frozen water, probing narrow openings yet finding them buried partway in with packed slush and ice points bristling dangerously impeding progress.  Before one opening that seemed to offer ingress, a giant pearl oscillated and spun, its opalescent surface dancing with white energy, flashes of color swirling upon its smooth surface.  The sprites, though desperate to get behind the curtain of water, gave the Pearl a wide berth and would not go near it.  This was the one and only thing in this Mid-World that seemed to give them fear.

***

Begglar called out to Dominic as soon as he saw him start to move faster forward away into the fog.  At the risk of losing him, he increased his pace as well, causing Nell to react by calling after him from her position closer to the sled where the others followed with Maeven.  They each watched their moonlit shadow being careful to keep its slight tilt to their left.  Begglar knew that even within fog when all starlight and moonlight is obscured ambient light is still present and transferred through the moisture refraction in the air.  Because light still emanated from overhead, a shadow, no matter how slightly perceived, would still be cast.  In the night sky of the Mid-World, the moon was still the most prevalent source of light.  Back in the Surface World, any naval officer commanding a boat knew to look for the Pole Star, Polaris or the Southern Cross to navigate at night, if instruments failed.  He also knew that if the moon were to rise before sunset, the illuminated side would face the west.  And by turns, if the Moon rose after midnight, the illuminated side faced the east.  It was no different here.  The sun and the moon followed mirror courses as they did in the Surface World.  The Moon had presented itself long before the midnight watch, so its light faced the west.  The Trathorn ran predominantly from the northern highlands to the south, so that meant its greater light would be to the east of them, and the falls were on the northern side of the lake, so the shadows must be cast to their left side.  The moon had already reached its apogee and was now in descent.  The sun would soon rise, breaking dawn and perhaps provide significantly more visibility within the fog if its heat did not cause it to dissipate entirely.  Circling the shoreline had not been an option.  It would have taken much longer and from the looks of Maeven, she had very little time left.

***

Dominic burst into the area drawing his metal-studded cudgel from its sling on his side, responding to the whimpering cries.  A figure lay upon the ice, stabbing wildly but blindly at an unknown assailant.  The Manticore’s frosted back was before him an arrow bristling out of its frosted mane.  The figure he knew to be Will, lay on the other side thrashing wildly.  Seven or eight young Moon Sprites slithered nearby circling him, waiting for an opening to strike.

Dominic muttered to himself, “Rats in the barn,” and then circled the ice clutch of the Manticore careful to avoid the weakened punch hole that had been broken through when the Manticore’s barbed telson stabbed Maeven from below.

The end of the tail lay off to the side, amid a circle of Moon Sprites who probed and pecked at it for bits of flesh within the hard carapace.

Another eight or nine of them had made their way to the Manticore’s body but were finding it difficult to bite into its frozen flesh and these screeched in frustration.  So occupied were they with their bits of morsels that they failed to see Dominic land in the middle of them and proceed to crack their skulls with the cudgel.  Snap, thud, crack, click, his hammered blows rained down on them with force and power, pushing their fractured heads into pits in the ice.  Silver blood lifting and spraying with each decisive and deadly blow.

Dominic was careful to twist and pull away from each landed blow, learning from the others that the silver blood of these beasties scalded and burned human and animal flesh.

The sprites that dared turn and lunge at Dominic, he quickly swept away into spinning arcs, back into the fog, and those unfortunate enough to get close were pummeled into broken silver pulp, bristling with splintered bone.  Dominic worked his way across toward Will, deflecting charges, wounding, maiming and pulverizing the sprites that dared to impede his progress.

Will’s blindly stabbing kukri blade did manage to skewer a sprite, the flat wide blade cutting a long gash down its body towards its tail, silver running down the blade and flecking dribble on his hand.  The burn was like hot metal slag, bursting up from a vulcanor’s fire.  Will’s finger still flexed and gripped the handle harder, but his eye’s popped open, blurred by tears and anguish and misery.  He saw a shadowy figure making its way toward him, blurred by the tears in his eyes and the sting of the cold wet chill on his cheeks.  He twisted onto his side and lunged upward, inadvertently kicking at a Moon Sprite approaching his feet and legs.  He crouched and came up on one knee, still slashing blindly with the kukri blade, yet now slashing from side to side, rather than down upon the ice.

“Will!” Dominic called out to him, but the boy was in a blind panic and did not seem to hear.

The change in direction of the swing of the blade gave the Moon Sprites the opportunity that they needed, and they lunged for him.  A black beak clamped onto Will’s boot, biting into the tread, another slithered in and sank its beak into his leg tearing his leather pants piercing a part of his calf muscle, and Will grunted and cried out.

“Will!” Dominic yelled again, “Its Dom, let me help you!”

“Nobody helps me!” Will screamed back, “Nobody cares!  You guys left me to die!”

Will stabbed down at the sprite biting his leg and sliced into its body.  Another Moon Sprite circled him clacking its black beak, its eyes strobing and flashing, blinding Will to the other two moving in towards him from behind.  Without help, Will was going to die here, and Dominic would not let that happen.

Dominic jumped forward, sliding on his knees, ducking under Will’s slashing blade, and smash the sprite causing the flashing distracting, its eyes flickering then fading to dull flat black.  Dominic thrust his arm upward, catching Will’s descending arm in a block, and then jabbed the round and flat pommel end of his cudgel into the pit of his arm causing Will’s fingers to release the handle of the kukri.  It clattered to the ice lying flat and spinning like a minute hand on a watch ticking off the time remaining them.  Will tried to gain his feet, but the sprite latched onto the sole of his boot caused him to slip and slide on its eel-like body, breaking a part of its vertebrae.  Dominic clenched his fist and swung upward, catching Will on the point of his chin so that his head snapped backward, and he lost all touch with the world.  Blackness overtook him and he swooned and crumpled falling upon Dominic’s broad back.  He hefted the boy like a feed sack and kicked away another Moon Sprite lunging at his feet.  Dominic bore Will upon his shoulders and slung him up on top of the dead Manticore over its mane, and behind its horrible head.

“Hold this fool a minute!” Dominic said, knowing the dead Manticore could not and would not respond.  He’d realized it was the only way to keep Will safe and out of the fray while he dealt out deathblows to the remaining Moon Sprites.

Dominic spun the cudgel in his hand almost like a drummer handling a drumstick flourish between driving rhythms.  He used the Manticore’s large body as a back wall and began to smash and sweep Moon Sprites as they came at him from out of the fog.

Presently, he heard a voice call to him from behind.

“Dominic!  Where are you, son?!”

“Dad!  Be careful.  There are young Jengu out here.  I’ve killed several but there is a lot here.  Do you have your scythe blade handy?”

“Rats in the barn?”

“Exactly!”

Begglar reached inside his tunic and pulled out a long thinly curved blade from a wrapping of husks.  He reached to the top of his metal-capped quarterstaff and unscrewed the cap revealing a notched groove cared beneath.  He quickly set the end of the long blade into the T-notch which was also supported by metal to keep it secure, and then screwed the metal cap end back into place.  He let the staff end with the bladed hook fall down to the ice and gripped the staff so that he could swing the blade in a low arc.  The thin but tempered blade whipped through the air with a SSSSsssing noise, hovering just inches above the frosted surface, as Begglar wielded it in a familiar arcing motion he’d used for many years during harvest and cutting the grass around the Inn at Crowe.

He moved in, catching a grouping of Moon sprites from the side and sweeping them away in a slicing arc into their deaths along the blade.  Together the two of them made sport of it, almost as if there had been no real danger in it.  They were merely transported for a moment back to the Inn at Crowe, playing the game they’d made up for dealing with a plague of rats that infested their hayloft and grain stores in their barn back home.  Within moments they had made short work of the threats, such that no new Moon Sprites dared lunge at them from out of the fog.

When Nell and the others reached them, Nell wagged her head and could not help but laugh.

“You two.  I never know just what I’m gonna do with you.”

“Mind you be careful of the silver blood, dear.  It stings,” Begglar admonished.

Matt and James, helped Dominic get Will off of the back of the Manticore, and propped him up on the sled near Maeven until he came to.

Together they proceeded onward, avoiding the splashes and spillage of Moon Sprite blood and bodies strewn around the ice.  Begglar took the lead, armed with his improvised scythe poised to deal swiftly and decisively with any and all straggling Moon Sprites daring to oppose their progress.  It wasn’t long before they, at last, stood about twenty feet from the frozen mouth of the Trathorn stretching about forty feet across and towering about a granite face of the frosted rock.
Begglar swiftly made short work of the straggling Moon Sprites slithering back and forth between the frozen pillars of water, trying to get beyond its clenched teeth.  He noted the holding position of the giant Pearl and the one remaining crevice that it guarded against these slithering irritants.  As Begglar approached it, the Pearl shifted and spun away, racing beyond him, allow him access to the sole entrance passage within.  The Pearl rolled swiftly creating its slight trench cut, clearly headed back beyond the arriving party bearing both Maeven and Will on the sled they pulled.  Matthew and James and Dominic nodded know exactly why the Pearl’s path headed in the opposite direction, and when the others looked questioningly at them the all but answered in unison.

“It is going back for the blood.”

***

Begglar moved to investigate the narrow crevice passage, but before he could do so, from somewhere within the falls, a flash of pulsing light began to illuminate the interior passage within the falls.  The ice sparkled as bluish light pulses increased in intensity and a fragrant smelling phosphorescence spilled out from under the falls like a radiant mist, roiling across the ice with an additional fog-like carpet of smoke.  Begglar and the others, trailing a few yards beyond him, saw the mysterious light and quickly moved away seeking cover.

From between the columns of ice, the smoky glow suddenly flashed and extended outward into the misty night causing the gray fog to peel back and dissipate before it.  Arms of glowing smoke followed reaching out, pushing the fog bank further backward, unveiling the colors of the coming dawn painting the clouds above.

The smoky arms splintered and fanned out reaching towards the dead Moon Sprites like a large steamy claw, suffusing each white body and drawing them back toward the falls like floating flotsam and jetsam.  Audible cracks echoed across the frozen lake in the early dawn stillness as the Moon Sprites were drawn their bodies from their clutched prison.  These began to slide faster and faster towards the crystalline mouth of the waterfall, picking up speed as they went.  Within the rushing pull, a silvering ball, glinted along with dawn’s first light, racing backward toward the northern end of the falls, following the gathered bodies of the dead Moon Sprites as plumes of ice feathered their progress.

Begglar scrambled backward, trying to reach Nell and the others, retreating further from the mouth of the falls as the bodies slide by him, dusting him with a layer of shaved ice crystals.  The bodies closest in proximity to the falls slammed into the pillars with a mighty crash, one after another, until the impact and combined weight of the bodies finally fractured and punched holes into the waterfall curtains.  These and a white swirl of limp and writhing young sprites tumbled head-long into the glowing lights, now made brighter by the tears and cuts into the frozen walls of water.  The lights pulsed, misted and steamed but did not seem to menace the land beyond any further.

***

Mason and I emerged from one of the broken cuts between the standing pillars and sheets of ice.  The view was serene, and the beginnings of the breaking dawn shown brilliantly in the eastern sky.  Our company stood dumbfounded, just fifty yards out, gathered in shock to see us emerge so nonchalantly from beneath the frozen falls.  I could see they bore a sort of sled pallet with two figures upon it.  One of which I was sure was Maeven, and the other, as we approached them, appeared to be Will.

I knew Maeven did not have much time left, and I was glad to see that the group had taken the initiative to bring her.  What I was about to tell them, no one would believe, and I found it hard to believe myself.  Mason grinned at the mystified looks on the other’s faces as we approached.  He was eating this up, and I could not help but stifle a chuckle myself.  I would tell them what happened, but first, we had to attend to Maeven.

Begglar and Nell met us in advance of the others, and I called out, “It’s about time you guys showed up.  I thought Mason and I were going to have to fight the whole pack of Moon Sprites ourselves.  How’s Maeven?”

“O’Brian, you rascal!” Begglar scolded, but it was clear he was glad to see me.

“Bring Maeven and the others.  There isn’t much time.  We need to get her into the pools before the mirroring starts.”

Nell gripped my arm, pulled me aside and cautioned me, “Mr. O’Brian, you might not want the others to see what appears in those pools during the dawn hours.  You need to let us take her in privately.”

“Whatever it is, we can face together,” I answered, “I have just seen the beautiful pools myself.  What is it that causes this hesitation of yours?”

“Yes, you’ve seen them in the evening, but in the twilight hours, they change.  The images that swim around in the pools reveal what is going on in your world.  It’s how we Mid-Worlders have always known about your lands and the reasons why none of us ever seek to go there.”

“Why not?”

“Because your world, the Surface World, is full of monsters.”

Consciousness returned.

At first, Will could not remember ever feeling so cold.  And then the “other time” slammed into his memory with a shockwave transporting him back.  Images flashed mercilessly behind his tightly clenched eyes.  A moment of terror in a snowy wood.  Blood everywhere.  His father ravaged by wolves below.  His raw, frostbitten knuckles and fingers clawing frantically into rough, icy bark.  His knees and legs soaked by the snow, numbed by the pressure of the cold branch under his seat, and the cold black trunk he’d wrapped them around.  His head entwined in a frosted woolen scarf.  The sheepskin jacket, slightly too big for him, keeping his central core warm, yet he shivered with a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature.  He’d ducked his head to escape the terrible sights below but could not miss the sight of the bloodied snapping teeth of the wolves as they lept up to reach him and catch a dangling leg or ankle and pull him down to share the fate of his father.

Will gasped, opened his eyes momentarily and then clamped them eyes shut again, trying to bury those terrible memories back into the past, into the blackness once more, yet failing.

His dad, his father, his hero, his world, ripped away from him by a night of terror.  An ending that his young mind never saw coming.  Never even conceived was in the cards.  Like any young one, he believed that both he and his dad would be together forever.  It was unfair of life, of the One to allow this to happen to him.  And because of it, he could not forgive the One.  The One was unkind, no matter what his father had said.  His dad was dead.  His dad was wrong.  His dad was a fool to believe that the One was good.  How could the One be good when He allowed one of His servants to fall and meet with such a terrible end?  How could he forgive the One who would permit such a thing to happen to such a good and brave man.  How could he forgive the One, spoken about in the Ancient Text, for allowing so much pain into Will’s world?

This Mid-World he had once thought of to be a personal gift to him—A way to reach out and be with his father, and spend time with him in a father-son adventure of their own– was actually a place of nightmares.  In the Surface World, his father’s body had been delivered with ceremony and military order, but still in a box and a black plastic bag.  Only pieces of him had been recovered.  The adults did not know he was listening.  He’d hidden under the tablecloth at the reception they’d had to honor his father’s service and sacrifice.  He’d learned about the raid, and the terrorist cell, they’d fought.  He’d memorized the strange Arabic characters, that represented the terrorist cell that had claimed responsibility for killing his father.  حزمة الذئب (hazmat aldhiyb) translated simply as “The Wolf Pack”.  Sounding something like ull-dee-boo.  He hated to an obsession.  He wanted those terrorists to pay for taking his dad!  He wanted them dead, dead, dead!  He wanted their wives dead.  He wanted their children dead.  He wanted to kill every creature in this Mid-World that dared pose any threat to Surface Worlders.  He wanted to stab and stab and stab that Moon Sprite creature, that nightmare from between worlds, to make it pay for the evil done to his father.  Something had to pay.  Someone had to pay.  Before he realized it, he was weeping and curled into a fetal position, still shivering from the memories and cold of the ice.

The creature had known his pain when he’d confronted it trapped in the ice.  Its eyes had flashed and fluttered and reflected back the pain he had felt and carried, amplifying it into a blind killing rage.  It had felt so good to stab something, anything.  To vent the horror and pain that had come to live within his soul.  It occupied his heart and mind.  He could not explain why he harbored so much rage.  Why he could not connect with others in any meaningful way.  His mind had grown dark with clouded thoughts of violence.  The violence he felt, demanded access to him.  It expressed itself in ways that might have disturbed him, back when his father was alive and had not been deployed into that stupid desert country full of towel-heads and idiots who covered their women and probably romanced their camels.  It angered him to think that his father ever wanted to help liberate such backward stupid people, who were raised to behave no better than animals.  If the One loved such animals, then He was stupid too.  Why couldn’t they just bomb those idiots back into oblivion and be done with the whole stupid war?  When he was old enough, he couldn’t wait to join up and bring some payback to whoever “The Wolf Pack” was.

His time in the Mid-World was only mental training for what would come in his real life.  If he could survive these nightmares, he could survive becoming the nightmare for those for whom his hatred had been reserved and seasoned and matured like fermenting wine in a dusty bottle.  His pent-up rage, expressing his fury behind a rapidly bucking automatic weapon would be pure ambrosia.  He would paint their greasy and stinking Arab bodies with bright red flowers.  He would cut their throats out with his K-Bar graphite blade, honed and sharp.  Their women’s ululation cries would shriek well into the night and become music to his ears.  They would finally know the pain he felt and lived with every day since that time the dark military car pulled up to the curb in front of their southwestern suburban home.

Seven years, his father had been gone.  Seven years of upheaval in his life.  Seven years since they moved to Texas from Minnesota.  He hated Texas.  The long, hot summers had been almost unbearable those first few years, but the memory of the cold deaths made them bearable.  His father had died in both places.  The Surface World and in the Mid-World, though, it happened first in the Mid-World.  Back when he still could read his father’s letters and prayed each night to the One that his father might make it safely home.  A prayer that had been denied.  A prayer that had only reached deaf ears.  This seed of anger and pain in his heart had become a garden of rage twisted briers and thorns.  How could the One love him this way?  O’Brian and his quotes from the Ancient Text made him so angry.  Will gritted his teeth, as the tears continued to spill from his clenched eyes and burn his cheeks with the cold.  Where was he?

Will’s eyes popped open with a start.  How long had he been down?  How long had he laid there on the surface of the lake?  Where were the others?  Where was the Moon Sprite he had been pursuing?  Was it dead?  The spear had stuck in its hide and the thongs had pulled him along with it as it crawled free of the ice hole that had held it.  It had bled that silver stuff and smeared the surface of the ice with it.  He had been pulled off of his feet and slipped into that mess and it had set him afire.  Strange now that there was no trace of it or of the Moon Sprite.  A foggy mist had spread across the ice and he could barely see more than five feet in front of him.  He figured he must’ve lost the spear, which was not good.  Not good at all.  He looked around him carefully, tracking for signs.  And then he saw it.  Footprints.  Two pairs from the looks of it, but even now the prints were fading.  Whoever had come by here had not stopped for long.  Perhaps they had believed him to be dead.  He couldn’t be sure.  With the footprints fading as they were in the frost, the tracks had to be fresh, so he reasoned that whoever made them couldn’t be that far ahead.  But the absence of the silver blood puzzled him.  There had been a lot of it, to have just vanished.  Perhaps the ice crystals that were skittering across the lake had covered it over, the same as they were even now filling in the footprints.  This misty fog was annoying and disorienting.  It was just low enough where he could barely see over the top of it, but it was building and massing and soon he would not be able to see anything.

His ears burned with the cold and wet, and there was an annoying sort of ringing and throbbing noise that he could not clear his head of.  And suddenly, the ringing noise became clearer.  It wasn’t ringing that he was hearing.  It was dozens of screeching noises, trilling with a liquid sounding gurgle.  The fog ahead of him seemed to bounce, somehow, as if it pulsed with some distant light.  Whatever was happening, it was just ahead of him.  He turned away, scanning the rising forests around him forming the Trathorn Falls basin.  He noticed the ledge where they had first observed the Manticore from a small bluff and break in the trees.  He scanned to the left of that trying to find the direction of the shoreline where the others waited for them with the wagon.  Perhaps if he could get a quick read and bearing, and fix upon a certain point, he might make it back to the shore before the fog made it impossible to see anything.  He had put a short sword behind his shoulders, between his shoulder blades, but too late found that it was an impractical place for drawing the blade out of its scabbard.  Because of this, he wasn’t entirely unarmed, but it would take some doing to get out of the trussed straps he’d put his arms through.  He started forward, towards what his best approximation was for the bank where the others were waiting.  He believed it to be somewhere between the two large fir trees, but he wasn’t certain.  He cursed himself for not paying more attention to those details before he had set out with the others.  He tried to keep his eyes on the tops of those trees, but the fog kept rising making it difficult.  If he could just go in a straight line he knew he would eventually reach the shore.  But the fog seemed to work against him.  If his eyes were not playing tricks on him this sinister fog must be.  In almost every direction he looked ahead and down the fog seemed to be flashing with ghostly silver light.

***

“Ease her down gently,” Christie admonished as Matt and James positioned Maeven upon the trough of the sled.

Begglar, Nell and Dominic helped to hold the sled steady so that it would not slip out from under Maeven until they had her secured.

Three of the others of the company had joined them on the ice, brandishing weapons suited to their body type and skill level, as they had learned from Ezra during their time in Azragoth.

They had yet to give their names, but one was the young woman who had rallied support and commitment to seeing this quest through.  Now there, standing armed and ready to guard Maeven against unknown dangers as she was conveyed across the lake to the falls, these three added courage and action to that commitment.

The others remained on the shoreline, guarding the supplies, anxiously waiting for the return of the company.  This journey to uncover the “lost stories” and finally reach the fabled land of Excavatia and somehow navigate through and survive the onset of civil war threatening these lands would afford many other opportunities for them to demonstrate their courage and commitment to this quest, so there was no judgment levied at those who chose to remain on terra firma.  Their times and battles would come.  Besides, if this seeming fool’s errand should fail, there would either need to be someone left to continue the quest or someone to come to rescue us all.

***

Mason and I watched as the young snapping Moon Sprites poured out of the fog, pursuing us at our heels.  We scrambled backward, slipping and sliding on the sloped surface flash-frozen by the mysterious pearl.  Trying to gain the edge of the clenched jaws of the falls, we jabbed at the ice using our weapons as ski poles to keep from losing ground.  In moments we were finally able to catch hold of an ice flow column, gain purchase and pivot in between the blue-white ice colonnades into the dank wet darkness.  The narrow crevices between the columns of ice gave us some respite from the onrushing creatures.  If they were to reach us, they would have to wriggle into these narrow gaps, and we would fight them in a line rather than in a mass surge.

I tossed the spear to Mason, who set down his bow with his left hand and caught it midshaft in his right.

“Jab at them as they come in.  Skewer as many as you can,” I directed, as I gathered the sash of the honor sword around my wrist and tugged at the sheathed hilt.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Mason said, “Look up there.”

He gestured upward toward the ceiling of the ice, and a frosted cornice of icy daggers poised above and before us.

Their points gleamed sharply and dangerously in the blue half-light.

“Good idea.  Let’s do it.”

We both swiped at the ceiling.  Mason jabbed the spearpoint upward wedging it between the rocky ceiling into a space along the icy sheet-edge, a suspended arsenal of daggers and cleaver blades.  I quickly realized that his method would be far more effective than mine, so I unwrapped the sash, sheathed my blade and joined him in the pulling and prizing with the spear.  The narrow slits where he and I slipped in behind the frozen falls flashed with strobe-light, as the Moon Sprites found the chutes and lunged into them.  Mason and I pulled harder and more desperately on the shaft, until finally we heard a cracking noise, and felt the weight of the ice release its bat-clawed hold on the rocky ceiling and come crashing downward.  Icy spears stabbed, clanked and thunked into the rocky floor, piercing and crushing and burying several angry Moon Sprites as they poured into the grotto.  Silver blood jetted outward, as the creatures twisted and writhed angrily, snapping at the air, even as the white fire in their silver eyes faded to black.

About five or six Moon Sprites extended out of the tunnel, their bodies pummeled and stabbed and cut by the ice.  We could not hazard a guess on how many more had been trapped in the gap, but we knew there would be more outside, still looking for ways to get in.  We moved toward the few that still squirmed and put them out of their misery with blade and point.  What little there was of the remaining light was poor and dim, a translucent bluish glow that hardly gave us any comfort, knowing that the others may still find another crevice between the rigid columns.

The noise of the collapsing cornice and the tinkle and clink of the ice seemed to linger and echo in the cave space behind us.  So focused had we been, that we had failed to notice that from within the cave, there was a bubbling noise, like a great cauldron of boiling soup suspended over an open fire.  Drips and trickles of drizzled water fell into standing water upon high notes that echoed and reverberated throughout the caves beneath the falls.  The recesses had seemed dark and ominous at first, but there was a change in the quality of the darkness.  Deeper within, something pulsed with a strange light, briefly illuminating the cavern walls about twenty feet away from us.

Without a doubt in my mind, I knew this must be what Maeven had spoken of before.  The Ghost Pools.

***

Will could hear the slushing noises as several things moved and flickered around him, coupled with odd gurgling sounds, and the sawing of snow grit being sloughed over the ice surface below his feet.  The fog had thickened, and he could barely see but a few feet beyond him.  His heart raced, and his breath came out of him in smoky chuffs, as his eyes darted this way and that.  Paranoia threatened the edge of his thoughts and would soon win its campaign of panic.  He should run but wasn’t sure where, or what would happen if he stumbled.  He tried to remember the way the lake was before that strange pearl had caused it to freeze over.  It had been the edge of the evening when they first came out onto the surface, following the mysterious track of the pearl and the strange beasts stalking the scorched Manticore.  What time was it now?  He could not tell.  The fog blinded him even to the sky and the shadowy tree line he had once seen in the distance.  Where were the others?!  He scowled, angry at the thought.  They’d left him to die.  That was what he suspected.  The footprints he’d seen had passed him.  He’d thought he saw them gathered around the spot where he lay, but he couldn’t be too sure.  Those could just as easily had been his own footprints.  But no.  They had proceeded on into the fog ahead of him.  He hadn’t gone that far.  They had left him.  He was certain of it.  The others didn’t care about him.  They would just have assumed he was dead.  His jaw clenched in anger, the rage within him swirling and swimming to the surface.

‘But what about the others?’ he thought.  ‘My supposed friends!’

‘They let me go out alone.  Didn’t even care to help.’  He knew their names.  They’d given him theirs, and like a fool, he’d given them his.  Trust.

He’d also given his to Mr. O’Brian, but he’d been reluctant to do so, but despite that, something had felt right about it.  Perhaps it was something about Mr. O’Brian that had reminded him of his dad.  Though the similarities annoyed him, they also strangely comforted him.  A dichotomy.

His so-called friends did not like Mr. O’Brian.  They distrusted him, and said so privately on many occasions, but offered no specific reasons why.  Just a vague sense that he wasn’t up to the job of leadership and didn’t know where he was going and quite possibly was putting them all in danger.  There was no Excavatia.  It was only the stuff of legends, told to children to get them to go to sleep.  Adults grew out of that belief.  Mr. O’Brian was a fool.  ‘Perhaps he was’, Will thought, ‘but so was his father.’  And his father was now dead.  This Mid-World had held nothing for him, since the death of his father, so he had quit believing in it, and the dreams had eventually ceased.  He had not thought about the Mid-World for many years until one night he did and had fallen asleep with those thoughts in his mind and had found himself here once again.  Waking up on a beach.  Finding others gathering there having come through the portal themselves.  Disoriented by the trip, but curious about where they were and why they were here and why they each held an unlit torch.

More noises came across the ice.  This time the sounds of sloughing were louder, and the crunch and crackle were more pronounced.  Glowing light danced with phosphorescence upon the mist.  Whatever had been stalking him was getting too close, and Will, now lacking the spear he had set out with, drew out a wicked-looking kukri knife.  These creatures would pay dearly for following him.

***

The cadre of travelers stood upon the shadowy shoreline in the twilight, watching as Begglar and Nell joined and led the others back out upon the frozen lake.  Eight had gone out on to the ice, following the mysterious orb to confront the strange white creatures encircling the Manticore.  Only five had returned to shore, and of the five, Maeven, the warrior they had met, whom others referred to as “Storm Hawk”, had fallen and looked to be near death.

Mr. O’Brian and two others were still out on the ice, while four of the initial group assisted the team by pulling the sled bearing Maeven towards the distant cliff-face and chandelier of ice, the Trathorn Falls, now ominously silent.  With the sudden chill of the lake surface and the warm air, a mist arose from the lake and rapidly began to thicken to a dense white fog erase all traces of their leadership and fellow company from view.  They had been told to wait, armed and ready to make sure none of the strange white slithering creatures made it to shore or beyond.  But with the building fog, that prospect of succeeding in their guardian duties went from a tall order to an impossible task.

“We should’ve gone out there with them,” Cheryl said, scanning the frozen lake as mists rose and twisted across its surface, obscuring the view of what was transpiring out there.  Cheryl was a tall girl with Scandinavian features, fair-complexioned with golden blond hair, which she wore long and straight with a sort of molasses smoothness.  Her eyes were glacier-blue, in contrast to the warmth of her sunshine crown of hair.  Her nose had a light dusting of freckles and her eyes, usually bearing a twinkle of mischief in them, now were pinched shining only with a glimmering frost of fear and worry.

The young girl, named Miray, who had served as O’Brian’s look-out, back when they had entered the granary and collected weapons before embarking towards Azragoth, now held Cheryl’s hand contentedly, swinging side to side with a slight pirouetting motion, her toe tapping lightly on the frosty surface of the water’s edge.  She was still so amazed at how the lake had suddenly flash-frozen when she witnessed the giant pearl touch the water’s surface.   In that magical moment, she watched in wonder as the layers of ice sheets cascaded outward, spinning patchworks of frost like a giant quilt woven magically before her on a grand scale.

“Are you crazy?!” a young man, called Jaxon, turned to her, “They’re gonna get us all killed.  I don’t know why we had to leave Azragoth.  Ezra was just beginning to teach us something about surviving when O’Brian disappears and abandons us.  Next thing we know, he has gotten himself all tore up fighting some creature below the city after he promised to take responsibility for us.  How can we trust a guy who keeps abandoning us, rather than leading us?  I don’t mind admitting it, I am scared to follow this guy.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing.  Ain’t no way I am going out there on that lake of monsters.  Be a fool if you want to, but I am staying right here.”

“Well, I’ll go out there, fraidy-cat!” the young girl named Miray, snapped back at him.

“Man, please!” Jaxon shook his head, “Listen to this kid.  What are you, about five?”

“Six!” she stamped, putting her hands on her hips, “And already, I’m braver than you!”

Four of the guys started laughing, and the other girls smiled.

“Girl’s got a point,” a young man named Shawn grinned.

Jaxon gave him a snarling look and threw up his hands.

“Courage is just stupidity that somehow got lucky.”

“That’s a cynical attitude.”

“That’s a realistic attitude, sister.  O’Brian is afraid to lead us.”

“Perhaps, we’re just afraid to follow.”

“I know I don’t trust him.  What has he done to earn our trust?  Nothing.”

“We can’t expect more from Mister O’Brian, if we don’t give him anything, can we?”

“What do you mean?” another girl asked.

“None of us have given him even our names.”

“You know why,” a woman by the name of DeeAnn answered.

Cheryl turned to the others, “Yes, but we all gave our names to Ezra, didn’t we?”

“That’s different,” Jaxon folded his arms.

“Oh really?” Cheryl turned to him, “How so?”

“Well…,” Jaxon shrugged, “’Cause he was cool.  This Mr. O’Brian is weird, man.”

“Weird or not, he didn’t choose this gig,” a dark-haired, pale-skinned urbanite, named Teagan, spoke up.

“Do any of you even know my name?” a quiet man, older than the rest broached the quiet that followed.

“No, I don’t, and I don’t care to, gramps!” Jaxon groused, “You’ll probably die of old age before this thing is done.”

One of the other young men reached over and cuffed Jaxon on the arm, “Show some respect, kid!”

“Man, why you froggin’ my arm like that?”

A dark-skinned man with black hair and dark eyes dipped his head and nodded to the young girl, “She knows.”

The young girl nodded her head, “I do.  I know everybody.  I even know who is not…”

She covered her mouth, suddenly aware of what she had been about to do.  Something she had been warned not to do.

“Who is not what?” a young boy, not much older than her, asked.

Her eyes went wide, and she whispered, “I’m not supposed to say.”

“Well at least we all should know the names of each other,” a young woman spoke up, “Even at AA meetings you have to give your name.”

“You an alkie?”

“Shut up!” she glared at him, “I’ve got a name for you.”

Cheryl broke in, “C’mon guys.  At least among ourselves let’s try to behave decently towards one another.”

“Some of us already know each other,” a woman observed.

“I don’t even know why I am here,” a young man said quietly, “I shouldn’t be here.  I think I should be with another team.”

“You’re better than us?”

“I didn’t say that.  Just evidently more different than all of you.  I’m not really a team sports kind of guy.”

“Guys, we could get killed at this.  I know it is cliché, but did you see what happened to ‘Storm’ uh, that Mae…what’s her name?”

“Maeven,” several said together, almost in unison.

“What they’re doing here is dangerous, and we just seem to be playing at it.  Waving swords around like a bunch of dopes, who believe we’ve somehow woke up in Middle Earth following Gandalf the wizard.  We have no stake in helping those who might need it.  What does it even mean to save a story?”

“Well, I don’t know what you think it means, but O’Brian did say everyone has a story to tell, so that works for me.  We’re supposed to save someone here.”

“That doesn’t make sense.  Why would they need us outsiders to do anything?  We hardly know anything about this place.  This truly is a case of the blind leading the blind.  Which is the greater fool?  The fool or the fools who follow him?”

“With an attitude like that, why didn’t you go back when Christie took that other girl?”

“Hey, I am curious to see what goes on here.  I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place like this.”

“We get to ride horses here.”

“Yeah, I never could do something like this back home.”

A girl turned and glanced up to the trailhead leading down the embankment to the lake edge.

“Speaking of that,” she raised her voice, “Where are the horses?”

They all turned to look, and another moved up toward the road, “And not only that, guys, where is the wagon?!”

Cheryl rose with a start, unable to believe it, so she moved quickly up the embankment, joining the younger woman at the trailhead and confirming their fear.

The horses were gone.  The wagon was gone.  But as the others joined the two women, suddenly their nightmare worsened.

Worsened two-fold by the gleaming-eyed, black-furred, growling, slack-jawed, two-headed nightmares that emerged from the dark woods and thick brush, and trebled by the dark-armored and cruel masters who followed close behind them.

Try as they might they could not focus on more than the most immediate and imminent threat presented to them…

Row upon jagged row of immense yellowed, sharp and drooling wet teeth.

***

When the young girl had mentioned that there were some within the group that were not what they seemed, two members of the group felt it was becoming too much of a risk to remain.  It was time to make their move.  Quietly they worked their way up the embankment, while the others were engaged in a discussion.

It only took a few moments for them to unfasten the lead line and stringer, calm the horses, and slowly lead them further back away from the road’s edge and down to the path.

The horses nickered and pawed the ground as the two approached.

The other unfastened the two team horses from their tethering and quietly pulled the wagon in and down the trail, walking the horses away quietly so the others would not notice.

When they were about twenty meters away from the bend, both absconders mounted and rode onward, taking all the supplies and mounts with them.

They hadn’t gone far when they heard rustling in the brush and trees to either side of them.

“Are we being followed?” a male voice whispered.

“Could they have caught up to us already?” a female voice answered keeping her voice down to match.

“We don’t have much of a lead, but I don’t think so,” the male responded, “It’s something else.”

“Should we make a run for it?”

“Not just yet,” he raised a hand, “Listen a moment.”

They continued for a few paces more, listening as the sounds on either side of them matched pace with their travel.

“How fast can you drive that buckboard?”

“Depends on how fast these two nags can pull it,” she answered, “You’ve got a stringer.  Getting those into a gallop together with your mount will be tough.  Better to set them loose.  Let’em run as a herd or split off.”

“What about the buckboard?”

“We’ve got to bring it,” she answered, “The false bottom almost unlatched when that Begglar fellow pulled the sled out.”

“Dergin and the others will be expecting that contraband, and you know what they’ll do to us if we fail.”

“Still, I feel a bit bad about leaving them.  They really don’t know what they’re in for.”

 

*Scene 01* – 00:00 (Writhing Waves)

The sinister silhouette tumbled, writhed and slithered toward us.  A Lovecraftian nightmare, all too real and all too dangerous for us to ignore.  We slowed our pace realizing that these things would be upon us in seconds and our weapons were woefully inadequate to defend us from the threat.  We had to get out of the fog.  We couldn’t fight what we could not see.  The young Moon Sprites were angry and hungry.  By whatever means of sensory function they had, we knew they would find us and savage us.  Equipped with hard black beaks, clacking and snapping wildly, each creature could bite and torque, twisting off gobbets of flesh.  These creatures worked in a frenzy, often causing victims to die from blood loss or shock, rather than from deeply wounded trauma.  Their white and silver bodies made wet slapping noises as they surged through the fog, and we backed away, struggling not to lose balance, but they were coming upon us very fast.

“We’re gonna die!” I heard Mason say as he tried to turn and run.

On any other day, I would have agreed with him and made tracks, but the sight and thought of those creatures getting the upper hand, and Maeven bleeding to death and this mission ending here did not sit well with me.  It made me angry and defiant.  “Not today, we’re not!”

“What’re you gonna do?”

“You ever pole-vaulted?”

“On ice?!”

“We have the spear and a bow.  Not much time and not much choice.  We either move away and get caught in the fog, or toward them and over them.  They’ll never expect it.  We deal with the cow sprite, and then the children.  Decide fast.”

“You’re putting this on me?!”

“Just asking you if you’ll join me in the attempt.”

They were almost upon us when I saw Mason nod and look me in the eye, “Let’s do this.”

I angled the point of the spear downward, just above the ice.  I had hoped when we vaulted to drive the tip into the ice without busting through while simultaneously pulling my body weight up by grasping one of the leather throwing thongs at the back of the spear.  We only needed to clear three feet in height and six feet in length.  Not a particularly difficult vault but running on snow and ice made it that much more of a feat.

Maeven’s recurve longbow was more than just a projectile firing weapon.  Its pointed wingtips where the woven string stretched tautly, called nocks, were capped with metal spurs, making the weapon versatile and useful as a brandishing weapon as well.  Its thickly curved staff and strong wood made Mason’s vault attempt with the bow not as improbable as it might have seemed.  The arced bows tapering from the grip to the upper and lower limbs were as thick as ram’s horns but vested with kinetic power.  Mason held his bow at the ready, the metal-tipped nock poised to gouge the ice.  Mason gripped the thick riser of the bow above the sight ready to pivot his weight over the bow.

The mad rush came almost at once.  Mason and I drove our instruments into the ice sheet and lept forward.

A slush of ice and writhing white eels passed under us as we left our feet.  Mason’s bow bent and it almost seemed as if it would give way, but its spring and power actually launched his body forward.

Much farther than I had expected.

Mason landed hard on the ice a good seven or eight feet, easily sliding past the last of the young Moon Sprites, but forward towards the waiting cow, sprawled at the base of the falls.  Mason spun, freeing his bow tip from the ice gouge and rolling upward with one leg extended for balance and one knee on the ice for counterbalance.

My effort was not so graceful.  The spear point jabbed into the ice, and I swung my legs forward, attempting to extend my reach as far as possible.  The toe of my shoe caught one of the bounding Moon Sprites in an enthusiastic leap forward, kicking it spinning back towards its matron, snapping wildly at the air, before landing with a wet thud on the ice.  My feet hit the ground not more than six inches from the tail of one of the straggler Moon Sprites, following the pack, and lunging forward to catch us.

Presently eyeless, yet with two flaring gill-like slits beyond the black beak, the one I missed stepping on, snapped from side to side, sensing motion and perceiving a scent of me somewhere close.  The water from the falls had frozen in layers, creating a smooth, barely perceptible slope downward towards the river outlet at the far side of the lake.  The momentum of these creatures drove them forward, and the slight slope encouraged their progress, albeit temporarily in the opposite direction of where Mason and I were now positioned.

Mason had drawn from his slung quiver, notched an arrow and let fly, piercing the hide of the cow sprite beyond.

My spear point had been driven into the ice, and partially punctured and splintered the ice sheet so that water poured out of the cut and fissure from beneath.  One young and angry Moon Sprite wriggled to my left, barely visible beneath the fog.  Ahead, the cow sprite, glared at me with angry, flashing eyes, the light from which was beginning to make me feel disoriented and slightly nauseous.  These were working in concert, for the Moon Sprite adult threatened to make me swoon, while the young one slithered hungrily towards me, its short nostril slits flaring.  I buckled to my knees, that strobing light pulsing into my temples until my head throbbed with pain.  That little brat sprite would chew my cheeks out and crawl down my throat to eat me from the inside.  A terrible thought, with the certainty of it, somehow planted into my brain and conveyed through those pulsing eyes of the adult.  Pure black hatred and evil pulling me into despair and toward oblivion.

Mason saw me slump over onto the ice, saw the wriggling young Moon Sprite nearly upon me, and responded by putting an arrow right through a silver eye of the matron Moon Sprite adult, driving the shaft deep into its skull.  The cow’s other eye fluttered, flashed once more, and then went completely black.

Something happened with the young Moon Sprite at that moment as well.  It was almost on top of me when suddenly it paused.  Its back arched and it whipped its head downward toward its matron, lying still on the ice, one eye jet black and opaque, the other eye gushing silver around the feathered shaft of a buried arrow.

My head buzzed with a ringing noise.  Tinnitus that sounded insectile.  My skin crawled and itched.  As my head began to clear I realized I had fallen and there was at least one remaining Moon Sprite too close for me to be anywhere prone.  I flailed for the honor sword, panicked when I could not find it, but then realized that the pulling to my left, indicated that the scabbard was beneath me and tugging on my belt.  I rolled to my right, hoping that I was rolling away from the Moon Sprite, and groggily made my way to my knees.  The Moon Sprite was still to my left, its head raised up on an arched neck, its nostrils flaring, and two darkening spots appearing upwards behind its clacking beak.  Suddenly the darkening spots blinked, and reappeared, with the faint glow of silver on them.  Eyes.  The young one had just been given eyes with the death of its matron.  I don’t know how I knew this, but I was certain of it.  That little mouthy white slug was about to be able to see us.

But not if I could help it.

My hand found the hilt of the honor sword and I drew it forth with a metallic wring, catching the sash and winding it as quickly as I dared.  The blade began to scintillate, and the foggy mists began to clear away from the blade, bringing that remaining Moon Sprite into relief.

I lunged with a sharp slash, partially cleaving its head from its body, sweeping it into the air like a limp dishrag.

And then we both heard it.

The sound of the other Moon Sprites turning back and heading our way.  Wet slaps, splashing and screeching noises, clicking and clacking black beaks, falling upon one another to get back up the slope and tear us apart.

From the far-right and behind us, something else moved swiftly our way, with the sound a steel marble might make as it is rolled across the surface of a wooden table.

The Pearl.

Something was happening with the Pearl.

*Scene 02* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

*Scene 03* – 00:00 (The Pool of Bethseda)

Far across the lake, where our company of travelers waited along the shoreline, a mist was rising off the lakebed, making the progress of our fellow fighters difficult to discern.  More and more of our companions were beginning to arm themselves, preparing to join us out on the ice.

Shadowed in dappled moonlight and mist, the travelers murmured as they scanned the frosty surface, noting a figuring growing more solid as it approached at a run.

Begglar stood along the shore leaning upon a quarterstaff with brass caps on the ends, serving as both a walking staff and a bludgeoning weapon.  Begglar watched the approaching figure, noticing his gait and the shifting of its body weight as it ran toward them.

“It is a male,” he muttered under his breath.

“Dominic?” Nell asked, hopefully.

“T’isn’t he,” Begglar sighed.

Nell made a slight high-pitched but soft sound in her throat, revealing her degree of worry.

“Begglar!” the voice came between breathy panting ahead of the runner out of the rising mists.

“Aye!” Begglar hailed him, “Here lad!”

The figure came angling toward their location, catching his breath as the others reached for him and guided him up onto the shore.  He sank down panting, clearly winded from the run through the frosts.

When he finally gathered himself together his first word caused them some puzzlement.

“Sugar,” he said, “Do you have any?”

Nell looked from the young man, up to Begglar who shrugged, and they squatted down to him, trying to understand the question.

“Why do ya want sugar, lad?”

“I need to know if you have any in the supplies.  Christie asked for it.  They’re bringing Maeven.  She’s been hurt and Christie needed sugar for some reason.”

“Aye,” he nodded, rising back up with the staff to aid him, “I’ll see to it.”

“Tell us about the others, son,” Nell pressed, “O’Brian, James and Dominic, and the other boys.  What’s happened to them.  Are they coming?”

“Dominic and James are helping Christie to bring Maeven to shore.  They should be here soon.  They others…” he trailed off.

“Out with it, lad,” Nelled asked more urgently, “what’s happened to the others?”

“They’re still out there…fighting those weird creatures…,” he took in another ragged breath, “O’Brian and Mason went to find Will.  He went off towards the falls.  O’Brian told us to go on and attend to Maeven.  There is a fifth one they went after.”

A young girl, Miray, by name, announced the approach of Christie, James, and Dominic carefully carrying Maeven, in an odd sort of way.  “There they are!” she cried, almost weeping with joy to see their shadowy shapes emerge from the mist.

Three other men and four women rushed out to help gather them in towards the shore.

“We were so worried about you all,” one exclaimed.  “What took you guys so long?” another asked.

“That was a foolish thing to do!” another groused.  “Let us help you there,” another offered.

But Christie ignored them, attending to her patient, careful not to let the dressing become displaced, assisting Dominic to keep Maeven’s torso beneath the wound, bearing part of the load herself.  As she came, she called out to Nell and Begglar, “She’s lost a lot of blood.  Did you find the sugar?  We need to start a fire quickly.  I need the wood ash.  The sugar will help but only to form a paste and some antiseptic benefit, but ash would work better.”

Begglar handed her a ceramic jar, with a metal clasp that he twisted open, as they lay Maeven down on a bed of grass near the bank.  “Sugar,” he said, “I keep potash from the campfires also.  I think it will suit your needs.”

He turned and headed back to the wagon.

Christie began to unpack Maeven’s wound and wipe some of the blood away from the edges of the gash.  She gently shook the thick granules of sugar into the wound which dissolved into the pooling blood but caked a little along the descending edges forming a kind of viscous paste.

Maeven moaned and murmured something that was not quite intelligible, but Christie continued working to spread the sugary paste along the sides and edges of the wound, while the others, who could bear to looked on.

Begglar returned with the ashes in a wooden staved bucket with a wire handle and metal strip bands binding it together.  He set the bucket down next to Christie, and put a metal scoop inside.  Christie nodded to him and then scooped the ash, sprinkling it generously into the wound.  James knelt beside her, holding Maeven’s hand, stroking her forehead to keep her calm.  Christie smiled to herself, noticing James’ particular gentleness and attention towards Maeven.  She wondered but said nothing.  She busied herself with unfastening the tourniquet to see if her ministrations had made any difference.  Maeven’s disorientation disturbed her and she hoped it did not signify that she had gone fully into hypovolemic shock.  The white grayish ash in the wound reddened into a pinkish color but appeared to have staunched the bleeding for now.  How much blood had she lost?  One and a half liters, maybe two.  Dangerous in either case.

Maeven muttered again, trying hard to say a word and strange phrase she had been repeating since they had lifted her off of the ice.

“Pulls.  Take me.”

Christie and James had thought that Maeven was indicated that they were pulling her too hard as they were carrying her, but even now, laying upon the ground she kept groggily insisting with the repeated phrase, “Pulls.  Take me.  Siloam.  Take me.  Remember Bethseda.”

It didn’t make sense, but Nell bent down to hear her this time, holding her other hand.

“Pulls.  Take me.  Siloam.  Bethseda.”

Something about those last two worlds seemed oddly familiar to her, and then Nell’s eyes widened.

“We’ve got to get her back out there.”

Christie jerked her head up, as did James and the others focusing on Nell.

“Didn’t you hear her?”

The others stared, blankly, the words seemed nonsensical but vaguely familiar as if they stood on the far edge of memory.

“Siloam.  Bethseda.  The healing pools under the waterfall.”

James’ jaw dropped.  “Of course.  Both were names of pools where figures in the story of the Ancient Texts received supernatural healing.  The Pool of Siloam, where the One has sent a blind man to wash and receive his sight, by following instructions.  The Pool of Bethseda, said to have been stirred by the angels of Heaven with remarkable healing properties.”

Begglar and Nell nodded and urged the others to assist them to bring Maeven back towards the wagon.  On the underside, beneath the planked bed of the wagon, Begglar pulled two wooden staves outward and lowered a small sled bound to the underside down to the ground.

*Scene 04* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

*Scene 05* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

“What is this?” Christie queried.

“It is a sled, lassie,” he offered, as if that answered everything, “We all travel through snow country.  Our buckboards come with a sled underneath in case we ever got stranded in impassable snow with supplies that we could not leave behind.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Have ya naught been listenin’?” he shook his head in exasperation, “We’ve gotta take her back out there.  The falls are frozen now.  There’s finally a chance ta get inta tha Ghost Pools, after all these years.”

“What does that have to do with Maeven?!  We’ve just got her to shore.  I’ve treated her wound.  She needs to rest and recover.  We’re not taking her back out there.  Those creatures on the ice nearly killed us.  She doesn’t need to be in this!”

Begglar put his hands on his hips.  Being of portly girth, it looked almost comical as he stood, glaring down at Christie, with her insistence, and he with his sureness that this idea of mystical pools offered Maeven something more than her medical expertise could offer.  “Like it or no, lassie.  Maeven’s requesting the Ghost Pools, and we’re deliverin’ her there.  Ya can stand aside, or be goin’ with us, but we’re takin’ her there.”

Christie clenched and unclenched her fists, ready to smack Begglar into the forthcoming week, but she saw a determination in his eyes that she had not seen before now.  Begglar had done everything she had asked of him.  Produced the sugar, brought forth the ash, and she could not afford to resist him at this point, should Maeven get any worse.  She had done all she knew to do.  Maeven was now in the Hands of Providence, and Begglar and Nell, who had known Maeven far longer than she had, and had much more of a history to their friendship, deserved the chance to try to participate in saving Maeven as well, however, misguided it might seem to her.  Perhaps Maeven could sleep on the sled as they dragged her back across the lake.  At least she might cease straining herself if she felt they were taking action on her strange requests.

*Scene 06* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

*Scene 07* – 00:00 (Silver Sight)

Out on the surface of the lake, the four Moon Sprites hung slouched over the ice, slumped into the pockets where they had been slain.  No silver mercurial blood splattered or marked their death.  A gathering of frost encrusted their bodies, as the wind picked up over the surface of the lake.  Their hoary heads, once full of writhing white tentacles with black beaks on the ends, were now devoid of those writing limbs.  Marks of worm-like northern passages in the snow were rapidly covered and swept by the wind, erasing all traces of the trek of the surviving Moon Sprite brood.

Four adult Moon Sprites had perished in a semi-circular ring out on the lake, as they had moved in to kill the Manticore that had foolishly entered their waters.  Now, these dead adults would be avenged by nearly sixty of their hellish progeny.  All slithering silently under the lake mists towards the Falls.

Each of these new broods had something they had lacked while attached to their matrons in each nest.  Eyes.

Each of these writhing, disgusting creatures now had an individual pair of flashing silver eyes that made their approach across the frozen lake look like the onrushing charges of a lightning storm.