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“Something’s not right,” I said.
“Is there another way to get to the crossing?” Valerian asked.
“There are a couple of back roads and less travelled paths, but they’ll take longer. Night will fall before we reach it.”
“Colbolt won’t move forward, so we have to go back.”
I shifted my positioning on the seat, arching my back and pulling myself up to get a little more height. “Or we have to figure out why he won’t go forward.”
“What are you doing?” Valerian asked.
But I didn’t reply. I couldn’t reply, because I had just seen something up ahead of us, something standing directly in the middle of our path. It was a shadow, a figure wreathed in darkness, a figure that seemed to be sucking the light out of the world around it, but somehow stood apart from the darkness entirely; a figure that was easily eight feet tall, or maybe taller still.
I was about to dismount and head out toward it, when Valerian grabbed hold of me and made me sit down in front of him again. “You’re not getting off this Maukibou,” he said.
“There’s something out there, and I’m going to figure out what it is,” I said.
“All by yourself?”
“Whatever it is, it’s scaring our ride and it’s in our way. I’m just going to tell it to back off.”
“And it’s going to listen?”
“It had better.”
Valerian sighed. “I know you trust in your own abilities, but that kind of recklessness is going to get you killed one day.”
“You think it’s reckless, I like to think of it as no-nonsense decision-making.”
“It’s reckless, and you’re not doing it.”
Then it hit me. We were downwind from the shadow in the road, and when the scent reached me, I knew—and Colbolt knew—that this thing was bad news… because itreekedof dark magic.
The same dark magic I’d smelled on the Souldirge.
The same dark magic Valerian had an affinity with.
The same dark magic I had encountered in my dream.
That foul odor oozed off this thing, tainting the wind as it reached my nostrils and rooting me to the spot. It wasn’t until I felt Valerian’s hand on my shoulder that I snapped back into my senses. “Are you alright?” he asked.
“We have to go,” I said.
Colbolt started to buck and whine. He agreed.
“Go?” Valerian asked.
“There’s something out there.”
A pause. “I can’t see anything.”
“I can…”
I could, but only partially. The shadows were dark, and thick, and while this creature was even darker still, it stood motionless at the very edge of my vision. I couldn’t get a read on exactly what it was, or what it looked like; it was as if it was stuttering, sometimes melting into the shadows, and other times overlaid jarringly.
For a moment I thought it could’ve been a Wenlow; those accursed monsters who once freely roamed the forests and mountains of the Winter Kingdom. But I had never heard of a Wenlow with a crown of jagged antlers on its head that was easily two feet tall.
“What is it?” Valerian ventured.
