22. Rukh

The forest canopy rustles and sways ominously with the winds. A gray sky greets us overhead, the greens of the forest having become muted in the dull light. Underneath my feet, I hear every leaf my feet trample. I feel every one of Annette’s exhalations deep within me.

It’s a typical day, but I feel something sinister in the air.

“I still don’t understand how I can’t source the evil behind your little friend’s murder,” I tell her as we stride casually through the forest.

“Are you still fretting about that?” Annette asks, as she ducks under a heavy branch. “Apparently, there are some things your powers can’t see. That doesn’t make you any less in my eyes. I’m sure it will happen in time.”

She smiles at me brightly.

“It’s not because you might think less of me,” I say. “I’m legitimately concerned about my ability to keep you safe, if there are things I can’t –”

“Shhhh.”

Annette holds up her finger suddenly. “Do you hear that?” she asks.

I shake my head, looking at her in confusion. “Hear what?”

She wears a look of disturbed curiosity at first, turning her head every which way.

Then something in her eyes changes suddenly. They widen considerably. “Whatever this is, please stop, Rukh.”

There’s a panic in her face now.

“I swear I’m not doing anything.”

And before I know what’s happening, she doubles over in pain, screaming on the ground.

“Okay, Annette,” I say at first. “This isn’t funny.”

But I realize it’s not some misguided human joke. She looks to be legitimately in pain, rolling over uncontrollably.

I jump in to try to help her as she twists her body through the leaves and dirt, ruining her favorite dress. But as I reach toward her, I feel my hands collide with something invisible.

I can sense her energy leaving her as the pain overwhelms her. Soon, she’ll be reduced to nothing at all.

“Annette? Please tell me how to help you, Annette!”

But I’m not even sure she can hear me anymore.

I touch the barrier once more and begin to pound on it, to no effect. I need to think.

I squint my eyes, looking around me. Everything has a trigger. I can sense the souls of invisible beings. Whatever the root cause of this problem, it must have a source.

Peeling my eyes across our trail, I look over every inch of the ground, even kicking aside leaves. I look at the trees.

I’m about to give up when I manage to find a very small, sparkling red gem fragment on the ground. It shakes and contorts wildly. I touch it, then grab it reluctantly, before realizing that it’s connected to something unseen.

I pull as hard as I can, trying everything I can, and find with a satisfied tug that I’m able to free the gem of its attachments. I only hope that I haven’t worsened the situation.

I look at Annette, who lies still with her eyes closed. She has stopped screaming and looks to be recovering.

She sits up. “What in all of Protheka was that?”

She rubs her temple, and I see that her eyes are bloodshot.

I’m puzzled by her confusion. “Something magical, I think.”

She shakes her head, eyes still shut. “Could you elaborate?”

“I think there’s something, or someone, in this forest,” I explain. “And I think they don’t want to be found.”

I help Annette up, and we find a safe clearing for me to treat her minor wounds. It doesn’t appear as if whatever happened affected Annette too much. She has cuts and scrapes from rolling on the ground, but they’re fairly minor.

But my morale is utterly broken.

“I’m sorry, Annette,” I say to her in the clearing, while squeezing the juice from an herb onto her scrape. “I feel like I keep failing you.”

“So you keep saying,” she says. “But I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

I hesitate.

“I think maybe magic can elude my powers,” I say. “And I feel like somebody is toying with us.”

She looks up at me, her concern prominent in her features. “You think the reason you can’t find them isn’t some kind of a personal block on your part? Whoever we’re looking for is hiding from you on purpose and knows what they’re doing?”

“I think there’s somebody out there who knows what I am, who’s protecting killers while killing innocents. And I think I haven’t seen it going on because it’s a type of magic different from my own, one I’m not able to see or interact with.”

“That’s a bold theory,” Annette says. “What do you propose we do about it?”

I shake my head. “I think you need to stay here and recover. I’m going to try to figure out what’s going on.”

Annette laughs as I turn my back to leave. “You never learn, do you?” she asks pointedly.

I return my eyes to hers, trying not to get lost in their emerald sheen. “Is it wrong of me to protect you after what just happened? Wrong of me to want you to keep you safe after you nearly died?”

“Oh, nonsense,” she says. “There’s no evidence that could have killed me. It was a migraine at best.”

“That was no migraine,” I argue.

“Either way, I’m safer with you, so I’m coming along. If magic is one of your weaknesses, then I need to be by your side.”

Eventually, after enough back-and-forth, she tires me out. Perhaps she is safer by my side than hanging back, but it seems like she only gets hurt when she’s around me.

“So this is where you found it?”

I take her back to the spot where I think I found the red crystal shard, hoping that it might give us some clue.

“You said something after you took me back,” she says. “You think that somebody didn’t want to be found?”

“It was just a guess.”

“Right. A guess based on what exactly?”

I try to gather my thoughts as best as I can. “That thing you ran into, it felt a bit like a trap.”

Having dug around on the ground, she finds the free-standing crystal shard. I want to tell her not to touch it, but it seems its magic is completely inert.

She closes her eyes, holding it tight. “Well, you’re right,” she says. “This is a trap.”

“But was it a trap designed for you or for me?”

She runs her fingers over the tiny gem in her fingers. “It doesn’t seem like it’s localized to anybody,” she says. “But this was meant for somebody magical. So it could be you, or me, or literally any dark elf in the area.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”

She ruminates some more, seemingly deep in meditation.

“And since this wasn’t targeted,” Annette says. “Anybody could have stumbled on it. I think it’s fair to say that it’s hiding something. You said it was attached to something? Do you remember where you pulled from?”

I move low to the ground, trying to find the attachment point. It felt almost like it was tied to something by string, but there was no visible string anywhere. Remembering the best I can where the gem was as well as where it was tied, I find myself staring at a seemingly innocuous tree.

“Is there anything special about this tree?” I call out to her from where she sits, several feet away.

“Let’s have a look, shall we?” She approaches the tree, then begins rubbing her hands over its trunk.

“Hmm… an ordinary-looking tree…” She takes some of its sap, then begins uttering several strange words, rubbing the sap on the bark.

“This tree is strange,” she says. “But in completely different ways than I was expecting.”

I watch as she roams the full width of the tree, moving her hands up and down its bark. It seems as though she’s looking for something.

Her hand grips onto a thin branch, and she pulls. A swirling mass of light appears suddenly in the tree’s hollow.

“What is that?” I’ve seen many magicks, all of them secondhand, but this seems unfamiliar to me.

“This is a portal,” she says. “I never thought I’d see one, either. They require huge amounts of energy to generate… energy well beyond the limits of most of us humans.”

Hesitantly, she reaches her hand toward the magical swirl. “What are you doing, Annette?”

“If we’re going to figure out where this leads, there’s only one thing to do. And that means taking a bit of a risk.”

I try to protest… try to pull her away. But as soon as her hand is close enough, the portal sucks her in, and her entire body disappears in the tree’s hollow.

“You’d better be right,” I growl, reaching my own hand toward the portal.

The world becomes a condensed array of colors, all branching and separating at random intervals. I have to close my eyes, as the spinning nauseates me tremendously. I can feel my body moving through space, even though part of me feels like I’m not moving at all.

Emerging between two towering tree trunks, I find myself face-first on the ground, feeling more exhausted than ever. Rain falls crisply on the evening ground, a familiar, moss-covered cabin just in view.

Annette studies the cabin, looking over every detail. But unlike the tree before, she never touches its walls, and I sense a strange disgust in her as she looks upon it.

I’m the first to speak. When I do, she startles, as though not expecting me to follow.

“This is-”

“The cabin from before, yeah,” she says. “Funny how that works out.”

I can feel my senses being blocked by something. I’m able to tell that there’s something within the confines of the cabin, but I can’t tell what.

Beyond that, an alarming array of my senses ignites at once. I can perceive a smell of loose chemicals and ingredients, all being mixed in harmonic chaos. I feel a sense of glee emitting from within the cabin.

And then I realize that this must be more magic. Whoever’s in this cabin clearly doesn’t want us to find them and that makes them incredibly obvious to me now.

I approach the house, pushing on the front of the door.

“We have to go in there,” I growl. Even the textures of the wood that make up the cabin seem strange and unnatural to me.