Page 15 of Solivagant

JEREMIAH

He’d said he would come.

I pressed my arm to the altar for a fourth time and watched the blood find the grooves in the stone. I didn’t mind the wounds. Khorli would fix them. He always did. He just needed to get here.

The altar drank and gave nothing back. The shadows were still and silent. Empty. The air stale rather than charged with his proximity.

Secrecy demanded that we weren’t able to see each other every night, but he’d told me last night that he would come. Khorli never broke his word. Which meant something had broken it for him.

I wanted to find him, but I couldn’t cross into his world. I didn’t know how.

I’d never had to wait this long for him. My attention had always been focused solely on his imminent presence. I’d never really noticed how dark it was out here. How small I felt. Isolated. I’d never had to consider that maybe I shouldn’t look up into the too silent trees to see if there was anything looking back. Khorli wasn’t here to protect me from it if there were.

With growing helplessness and unfamiliar nerves for company, I waited. Until my blood was tacky and dark, and my eyelids too heavy to risk lingering here any longer.

He wasn’t coming.

It was time to go home, tend to my own wounds, and try to get some rest. All I could do was pray that he’d return to me tomorrow.

With a grunt, I stood, pulling my sleeve down over my arm, and turning back toward the path I’d come from.

I’d made it only a dozen steps when the first scream reached me. Then the second. I froze.

The woods around me were quiet. Too quiet. Too empty. But the screams hadn’t come from the woods. They’d come from the village.

Cold seeped into my chest. Beneath my bones. Deeper. Everyone should have been sleeping.

The screams didn’t stop. More joined, and I was finally propelled forward.

The wall scraped my palms as I went over it. The cuts along my arm split back open, but it didn’t slow me.

Everything was wrong. Windows that should have been dark and hidden were burning amber. Torchlight spilled into the cold night air. Doors opened and closed frantically.

I didn’t stop to think. Couldn’t. I grabbed my axe from the back porch and moved toward the light.

There wasn’t one set direction the chaos was originating from, but multiple.

Blood. Bodies. Death. Forms I almost recognized in mutilated heaps along wet stone paths. My neighbors. Shocking enough of a discovery, but what truly filled me with blinding fear was the next body I discovered. With limbs too long and blood too black to be human. It had my face.

Nausea twisted my gut, but I forced myself to continue, running to the town center where more gore awaited me.

There were more of them, those things that stole faces and voices. They all looked like me.

The villagers were dressed in sleepwear, with shoes untied or missing entirely as they fought with fire and whatever else they could grab at a moment’s notice.

More were injured than not as they burned, wrestled, stabbed, and maimed things that looked like me.

“Another one!” A woman screamed. The baker’s wife, Grace. She’d always been kind to me, but she looked at me now with fear. With hatred.

“I’m not one of them!” I said loudly, and it suddenly became clear to me that the creatures weren’t the only danger to me here.

She didn’t listen. The pitchfork came at me, and I barely dodged it, stumbling backward into the mud.

The next cry of pain was my own. Rusted metal buried in my shoulder. Pain, white hot and searing, remained as she pulled the weapon free.

Confusion filled her features. My blood was red, not the black ichor of the beasts.

“I’m not one of them,” I repeated, clutching at the wound. Her attention swiftly moved elsewhere, her husband barely shielding her from a twisted mirror of me. Only its eyes were too dark and its skin too oily.