She closed her eyes, wondering when she would meet the next condemned soul who would bring the total on her wall to one hundred. It could be days, weeks, or even months. Or it could be tomorrow.
2
Stranger in the Woods
Caramyn
Aglow of misty white light poured in from the single window, falling on Caramyn's face as she stirred with the dawn. Sunlight didn’t reach the forest floor often, and there was always a grey haze overhead. The chill of morning seeped into her bones like a damp cloth. She stoked the dying fire to revive the barely glowing embers, then placed a kettle of porridge over it as the flames flickered back to life.
As she fetched cinnamon bark and dried berries from her cabinets, it was hard to ignore the unusual pounding in her forehead, but she disregarded it as no more than a bad night's rest. She hadn't slept well, and her dreams had been strange,with broken images of a bloody woman, a weeping child, and a shattered crown.
In hopes to forget the visions as her meal warmed, she sorted through her collection of books piled on the wooden wall of shelves. Most were old tomes and spellbooks that were already here when she found the abandoned cottage the day she ran to the Woods, though many pages were missing or burned, and she could hardly make sense of the ones that were intact. She’d tried her hand at some Spellbound magic from the bits and pieces she could put together, but despite the legend that anyone—even humans—could learn simple rune and relic-based magic, she never could quite grasp it, and thought it probably for the better.
She pulled a pile of her own books closer to her and traced her finger down their spines, grazing it over a range of fiction and nonfiction works. Some she’d stolen from intruders, and others she’d bought in Havenswood. She had read all of them, but she hoped that perhaps a title would jump out to her a second time. Anything to pass the hours and distract her from the aching in her head.
Herbal Remedies Every Healer Should Know
Dragon's Breath and Blood Rites
Hunter's Recipes
The list went on.
Nocthar squawked. She took a bite of porridge straight from the kettle, sweetened with a handful of berries, and then put a hand to her throbbing forehead. She rarely got headaches, so when she checked her apothecary table for the herbs needed to soothe it, she realized it was lacking one needed for that purpose. The best remedy she knew would require some Pheonix Tail root, which grew close to the edge of the Woods.
"Come on, Nocthar." She sighed. “I have to take care of this before it kills me."
Opening the moss-covered door, she stepped out, letting the black bird fly out in front of her. With each step, the pounding in her head worsened. She pressed on, desperate to reach the edge of the Woods before the pain became unbearable. But the farther she went, the more ill she fell. Her body numbed with cold. Her joints ached. The outlines of tree branches against the sky twisted into curling, sloshing tentacles as the earth tilted, and she staggered. Distorted shapes and shadows pulsed in her mind as the pain reverberated like a drum between her ears. She could no longer tell how many paces she'd gone, or how long it had been since she left the cottage. The drumming was deafening, and darkness blotted her mind's eye, visions of the strange woman from her dream flashing in between. And then the voice came.
Of Vaerwynd blood you are not.Suffer the death of a flesh-cursed rot.If worthy to live, you should somehow prove.The ring only Vaerwynd can remove.
The forest blurred as Caramyn clutched her hand with a sickening revelation. The ring she’d taken from the men—it was a magic relic. A cursed one. How could she have been so damn foolish?
Stumbling, she tried to use her last bit of strength to remove the ring, but it was sealed to her finger like bone and skin. Drained of her strength, her body went limp and paralyzed. The bleak, nearly barren treetops above her swirled against a white sky, and she could do nothing but watch as her raven circled her cawing, helpless. She was falling down a tunnel, watching the opening above her grow smaller and smaller until empty darkness was all that was left.
Caramyn awoke to needle-like talons scratching against her hand, and the thumping of flapping wings. Nocthar was frantic, pulling at her hair and nipping her fingertips with his beak. She fluttered her eyelids and found that it was all she could manage. Her limbs were still useless and weak, and the forest continued to spin. But at least she wasn’t dead.
With a grunt, she tried to stand, to roll over, to even just sit up. But her body refused to obey. She hadn't even brought her bow. Only the hunting knife that never left her side.
Shattered gods. I’m an idiot.
She lay there, fighting to stay awake, studying the trees. She traced the outlines of the gnarled branches with her eyes, noticing the faintest cracks of sunlight fighting their way through the great boughs and tree limbs that cracked like veins against the skyline. And she realized…she was lying at the very edge of the Shadow Woods, just a few footfalls away from the tree line that marked the edge of the forest—the edge of her protection.
Nocthar's cries alerted her to something approaching. He took flight to investigate, a rush of wind from his wings stirring the leaves on the ground.
Caramyn tried once again to rise to her feet, digging her fingernails into the dirt as she pushed to no avail, her body cold and paralyzed with weakness. In the half decade spent in thesewoods, she had always been so calculating, so easily adept at recognizing a trap. And yet she had failed this time.
She turned her head to see silhouettes of riders along the outside of the tree line. "What’s that over there in the woods?" A male voice broke through the border of the forest. The thought of someone—a man—being here with her in this state pricked her spine like a dagger to the back.
The solid crunch of hooves and creaking of leather drew near. There were at least four, no—five. Caramyn wiggled her hand towards her belt to clutch the hilt of her dagger, but her grip was weak. She pulled it loose from her belt with two fingers curled around the handle but her feeble strength wasn’t enough to keep it from plopping into the dirt beside her.
As fast as he had flown away, her raven returned and snatched the knife up off the ground in his talons, only to disappear into the sky as the strangers neared.
Nocthar, what the hell? That knife was my only defense!
"It…it looks to be a young woman, Sire." This voice was different. And as gritty as sand against cobblestone, followed by the sound of someone else dismounting. Heavy footsteps, unhurried, grew closer and closer. Let him come near. Let him cross a single step over the line into the Woods. Let the Shadows come for him. For all of them.
But what if they didn’t?
