The silence that followed directly afterwards was almost suffocating. It was only then that I realized how hard I was breathing, my magic slipping away, replaced with fatigue. And I wasn’t alone. Everyone (except Alton, who looked more annoyed than tired) was catching their breath. One by one we popped the wax out of our ears (Nakoda did it for me) and looked around at each other. Lilian had hurried to over to heal Belkross from the injuries he’d sustained from the Gray God’s tentacles and the negative effects from the flames she’d blasted him with.
Nakoda shifted anxiously across my saddle, making me glance back at him. He had his hand raised. “Um, so does nobody care that Don is half of a baby unicorn?”
Oh. Right. That. I’d gotten so used to having my horn wrapped in cloth, that I suddenly felt almost naked having it out in the open. I shifted a little bit away from the group, trying my best to read their reactions to my true nature…
Finally, Lilian replied flatly, “That’s, like, the third weirdest thing I’ve seen today.” She shrugged. “Besides, I always kind of figured.”
Nakoda gaped at her. “You f-figured?!” He groaned. “Don! I told you we should’ve gone with the hat!”
“Eh, whatever,” Paco said while gently thumping Turtle’s head to keep the lizard from eating one of the decomposing Grays. Unlike the vines, they hadn’t disintegrated, but they were shriveling up. Regressing into normal, fungus-free corpses.
“You guys were useful,” Alton muttered, turning back towards the cave’s opening. He then added under his breath. “More than you can say for me.”
“It’s okay!” Nakoda called after him. “You tried!”
In appreciation, Alton flipped him off without looking back.
Lilian rolled her eyes and then turned to Seaweed Man. “Well? Is what you’re after here?”
The strange man glanced around and then shook his head. “No. If a sliver was here, it was destroyed in the fire.” Sensing everyone’s confused looks, he untied a pouch hanging at his waist. He untied the neck and pulled out a gem. It was polished green with red flecks across its surface. Said surface was cracked. Once everyone got a good look, he dropped the gem back into the bag where I assumed it joined others just like it.
“I don’t recognize those,” Lilian said, “but you can ask Aycenia, the dryad who watches over this island. She’s the one who sent us over here. She may be able to detect whether there is more of that substance located here.”
Seaweed Man returned the pouch to his waist, shrugged his bow back on, and replied, “It’s as good a lead as any, I suppose. I know there’s more around here somewhere. I’ve been searching.”
We left the cavern and found Alton searching through the treasure. We couldn’t take everything without risking being too weighed down. Nakoda and the others dropped a sizable amount of coin into my saddlebags and Lilian and Seaweed Man found a few magic wands that could be useful. I noticed Alton snag a new sword-a rapier-while Nakoda asked Seaweed Man, “Soooo how long have you been here? On the island, I mean.”
“Nearly two weeks.”
“Oh. Well, have you seen any other new people besides us? We just crashed onto this island a few days ago.”
“Yes. I know.”
Nakoda blinked repeatedly at Seaweed Man. “…You know? So…were you following us?”
“No,” Seaweed Man said, sounding as if he were growing progressively more bored with this conversation. “But I took notice because you’re all the first ones to survive in a while.”
“Wait a minute.” Alton shot Seaweed Man a questioning look. “So you’d know where Captain Kovack is?”
Seaweed Man frowned. “Kovack? Who is this Captain Kovack?”
“Once my best friend. And now a traitor.”
“How descriptive,” the strange man replied dryly. “No, I haven’t seen him.”
Alton scowled at him and marched off. Looking concerned, Nakoda nudged me after him. Everything smelled of ash and brimstone as we trudged back up to the ship covering up the opening to the cave. Alton had already slipped outside. I ducked my head so as to not bang my horn against the edges of the hole in the ship’s side. I then stopped dead, feeling my eyes go round with awe and horror. Thanks to the Gray God’s explosive demise, fire had bloomed across the land and left only ash. Everything was off-white, almost as if it’d just snowed. The revolting smell of mold was replaced with the equally as intense scent of sulfur. The sun struggled to shine through the clouds of smog above, ash raining down like snowflakes…
…Child…
The whisper was accompanied by the slightest breeze. It pushed through the ash in the air and touched my face lovingly. Gratefully.
“Aycenia,” I whispered back. She didn’t speak again, and her power retreated back to the mainland. But the fact that she could now reach me all the way out here was notable. It proved, above all else, that the Gray God was truly dead.
The others joined us outside and together our group started heading back to Aycenia’s meadow…
…At least, that was the plan until we ran into a little, BIG problem halfway there. You see, we’d used the one of the Gray God’s massive tendrils to cross over into his domain. That tendril, like everything else, had burned up, leaving a roughly forty-feet gap between the cliff we were on and the main section of the island.
“Well,” Alton said, hunkering down and gazing across the gap, “damn.”
“Understatement,” Paco grunted. He stroked his goatee. “Maybe if we get the ropes across…?”
“Yeah!” Nakoda turned to Lilian. “You can use your eagle!”
“What good would that do for Turtle and Don?” she replied, frustrated. She then looked back over her shoulder towards the way we’d came. Her expression suddenly went from curious to incredulous before finally becoming resigned. She looked to Belkross. He shrugged and grunted, “Could work.”
“Alright,” she said. “I have a plan. We go back, grab the remains of that ship, drag it back here, and stuff it between the two cliffs, hopefully creating a makeshift bridge for us-but most importantly the animals-to cross.”
It took the rest of us a moment to recover from that. Finally, Paco asked, “Are we even strong enough to do that?”
Lilian pointed and me and then at Turtle. “We have a donkey-unicorn and a…Turtle. We’ll be fine.”
“But the ship’s rotting away.”
“That’ll make it lighter for us to carry.”
“But also more brittle. If we yank too hard, it could come apart before we even make it back here.”
Lilian crossed her arms over her chest and arched an eyebrow at the gunslinger. “”Well, do you have any ideas, Paco?”
“No,” he admitted through a yawn. He then mumbled under his breath, “I’m sleepy.”
#
It took us four exhausting hours to bring Lilian’s idea to fruition. Both she and Paco were right in their own ways. Pieces of the ship kept falling off as we dragged it towards the cliffs, but because of that (and the fact that it was already missing its lower half) its weight lessoned greatly, making the task go from impossible to simply very difficult. By the time we got it into position, the members who’d done the dragging (everyone except Lilian, Paco, and Seaweed Man) were all sweaty, gasping messing. But it was as a unified team that we all pushed against the ship and sent it over. It fell straight down. Its front and back collided with the edges of the cliff’s and the air was filled with the sound of splintering wood. But finally, twenty-feet down, the ship came to a grinding halt, though at an angle. But the work was far from over. I felt bad for the humans as they went to work lowering me down onto the ship’s deck using ropes. Once I was down, Nakoda slid down one of the ropes holding me and landed on my back. He untied me one rope at a time but held onto a few himself. While the others went to work repeating the process with Turtle, he and I hurried across the deck to the other cliff.
“I’ll be back, buddy,” he promised. He then jumped off of me and began climbing up the cliff. He’d anchor the ropes he had up above so that they could then be used to hoist me upwards onto the mainland, and then Turtle.
I glanced back and saw Lilian and Belkross coming over, likely to help Nakoda. Turtle was already halfway down. Lilian met my eyes and shot me a fond smile. I tilted my head a little. Now that she knew what I was, maybe she could help me master my magic to the fullest-
The last bit of sunlight left the ash-covered sky. Night fell.
Lilian jerked to a halt, the smile frozen on her face. And then, just as suddenly, pale blue smoke began pouring out of one of her coat pockets. Belkross moved to help her, but the smoke buffeted him, sending his feet sliding across the deck. The smoke whirled around Lilian like a small typhoon finally coming together behind her into a tall, familiar, terrifying shape. The blue-eyed skeleton. “Aeshamaraaaaa.” The ghost’s lower jaw flapped out of synch with his words. As if the hinges of one side had been broken. “…Did you…come back for meeeee?”
Lilian looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes going wide. She pulled out a glowing locket from her coat as she did so. Her voice cracked only slightly as she slowly held it up towards the ghost. “You want this? Here.”
He took it. Tried to open it. But his bony fingers slid across its steel surface, and he just couldn’t. He struggled until it finally fell from his hands. The locket landed on the deck’s surface between the ghost and the girl.
He stared down at it, the orbs of fire in his eyes dimming…
But then he looked up, at Lilian. His eyes exploded with light, going from blue to white. He clenched and unclenched his hands as he leaned forward. His body pulled in the lingering ghostly flames in the air, making it expand, making him loom over Lilian like a…
Like a bear.
My heart fell into my stomach as I realized that the Gray God hadn’t been THE apex predator to beat on this quest. Just the warmup.
Respect to Lilian, because if I had been in her place, I would have frozen up. Instead, she tilted backwards onto the heels of her boots. She landed flat onto her back and thanks to the angle of the ship, she slid away from the ghost, towards Belkross. The ghost screamed after her, but then hesitated. It looked between her and the locket, torn between rage and desire. Prey and treasure.
Belkross grabbed Lilian around the middle as if she were a small child and bolted towards me. Or really, the cliff behind me. He jumped far higher than a human should have been able to, but he only made it halfway up the cliff. Just as he began to plummet, he rammed his sword into the cliff face. It caught, stopping his descent. Without missing a beat, he swung Lilian straight upwards. She scrambled but managed to catch ahold of the edge of the cliff and pull herself over. I then heard Nakoda ask her, his voice panicked, “What was that flash of light?”
“Ghost is back,” she practically screamed.
“The ghost with the locket?”
“Yes!”
“You give it to him?”
“I tried! He dropped it!” She then snapped, “Positive energy hurts ghosts. You’ve got unicorn magic! Think you can kill it?”
Nakoda stammered, “I-I don’t know. Maybe?” He poked his head over the cliff, saw the ghost. “But I…I kind of don’t want to. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy.” He then asked, “You open the locket-?”
“I was busy trying to not be murdered, Drake!”
Over on the other side of the ship, Paco, Alton, and Seaweed Man had finished scrambling to untie Turtle from the ropes. Paco aimed his rifle at the ghost. Said ghost had seemingly forgotten all about Lilian, because he was now on his knees, trying desperately to pick up the locket to no avail. “Please! PLEASE!”
Seeing this, the gunslinger decided NOT to take the shot for once. He pointed at Seaweed Man and Alton, “Go right! Turtle and I’ll go left!” He then jumped and slid across the deck like Lilian had.
The other men followed suit. Turtle rolled himself back into his shell and rolled after the gunslinger like a boulder. It was loud and ridiculous. The only reason why the ghost didn’t go after Turtle was because it was Seaweed Man who slid too close.
The ghost’s skull snapped to the side to face him. As if on reflex, Seaweed Man drew one of the wands that he and Lilian had found and pointed it at the ghost’s face. There was flash of light and concentrated force smacked into the ghost’s head, making it spin around and around.
Only for it to suddenly stop and return to facing Seaweed Man. A long crack now ran across the skull. “TRAITOR!” he roared, tongues of fire slithering out of his mouth. “PUINISH YOU!” The ghost grabbed Seaweed Man by the throat, pulled him in close enough to kiss, and vomited blue flames into the man’s mouth. Seaweed Man’s body twitched uncontrollably, making him drop the wand, and then his limbs fell limp. He then slipped from the ghost’s fingers and hit the ground with a meaty thump, pale blue smoke trickling from his open mouth.