Then, it was gone. Not running, just gone. There and then not, the way a candle snuffed out.
The forest on the far side was exactly as it had been. Empty. Still.
My hand had found Guruk’s arm without my deciding to put it there.
“That was…,” I started.
“Yes," he answered.
“That was the…”
“Yes”
I stared at the far bank for a long moment. The squat body, the long limbs, the gigantic eyes. I had never seen the imp face-on before. But Guruk had told me what he’d seen, during the incident at Inara’s pen. The same event that had brought me here.
The imp had been there.
Guruk crouched to the ground, his attention fixed on something caught in the lower branches of the nearest tree. He worked it free carefully and stood, holding it up between two fingers.
A scrap of dark fabric. Small, palm-sized, torn at the edges. In its corner, a glint of metal, a clasp, gold, shaped like a hook.
I knew that clasp.
“Guruk.” My voice came out oddly even. “I've seen that before.”
“Yes,” he said.
“The night I arrived.” It was coming back in pieces, impressions more than images. “I was wearing a cloak. My character’s cloak from the game I’d been playing with my friends. When I woke up in your house it was gone, and you said you’d removed it, but you described it, you said there was a…”
“A gold clasp,” he said, turning it over once. “I’ve been thinking about that cloak since the gnome village. Since Pell described a small creature moving east at night.” He folded the scrap and put it in his pocket. “I believe the imp brought you through the veil. Or at minimum, was present when you came through. The cloak may have been,” he chose his next words with care, “taken from you in the process.”
I stared at him.
The meadow’s scorched grass. The shadow in the bracken on the valley path. Pell’s small night-traveler. The deputy at the map stall. The cloak scrap on the branch.
It was all the same thread.
“It’s been watching us,” I said, a certainty filling me. “Since before we left.”
“Since before that.” Guruk clenched his hands into fists. “I believe it was watching us before we left the village.”
Berry made a sound, not alarmed, exactly, but intent.
I reached into my pocket and closed my fingers around the eight-sided die.
Eight possible outcomes. Eight directions the game could go.
I had been treating this as a quest with a destination: find my friends, reach the falls, see what was there. But quests hadantagonists. I had known that logically since we’d established the deputy’s role, since Guruk had told me around the fire last night. But seeing those eyes across the gorge, the deliberateness of that stillness.
The imp had looked at me. Not at Guruk. At me.
Whatever this was, it knew I was here. It had known since the beginning.
“I see now,” I said, my voice coming out steadier than I expected. I squared my shoulders and turned east, toward the path, toward the falls. “Then let's not keep it waiting.”
Guruk fell into step beside me. I felt the solid weight of his presence without looking at him. We had agreed last night; no more carrying things alone.
“Guruk,” I said, after we had walked a minute in silence.
