The first indication that something was wrong came to us in the form of a strange sound. It sounded almost like a moan and, if not for Sasha’s immediate and fairly strange reaction to it, we might have ignored it as simply a trick of the wind blowing through the trees. Nothing but a form of auditory pareidolia, the phenomenon making people see familiar shapes in unrelated objects, only applied to sound. However, given that Sasha immediately sought to hide behind me instead of continuing to sniff around, we weren’t quite as ready to discard the phenomenon as random sound within the continuously occurring sounds of the forest, especially not when Luna, Lia and I all heard the same, including our individual attributions of emotions to the sound. Because if the noise were a random, if a little louder than usual, sound occurring in the forest, I would expect that we all recognised something different within it, just like we’d likely all see different shapes while looking at the same cloud.
Of course, I assume we hadn’t influenced each other, that my statement about the noise sounding like a moan filled with morose grief hadn’t pushed my daughters to reexamine what they had heard and decide that, maybe, what they had heard had been a tragic moan, not something entirely different. Given that some of this would occur in our subconscious, it was difficult to tell if something like that had happened, as any mental tools were just as susceptible to self-deception as our subconscious was.
However, in this case, given that Sasha reacted with fear and Silva immediately went to vigilant attention, ready to fight, while Luna, Lia and I all heard roughly the same noise, it was fair to say what we had heard was as real as a sound could be. Especially as I didn’t smell any Astral Power in the air, meaning what we had heard wasn’t magical, at least not in the way I usually understood the term. By now, I had long-since learned that just because I couldn’t detect something didn’t mean there was nothing to detect, as absence of evidence wasn’t evidence of absence, so we all switched from our casually vigilant mentality to one prepared for combat. Weapons were drawn, muscles were limbered, and we all kept our eyes peeled, banishing any distracting thoughts while ceasing to casually converse.
That shift in mental and physical stance was one we could now undergo with ease, while the formation we instinctively took was one of habit, with Lia leading the way, followed by Silva, Luna, Sasha and, finally, me in the back. Usually, I would have preferred to have somebody primarily trained in physical combat behind me, but given that the only option would be Sasha, that didn’t work. Maybe once Sasha was trained up and mentally on a level I was comfortable with, we could make her guard our backs, but that hadn’t come to pass just yet. So, I had to play rearguard, even if my skill set was slightly lacking for that role. I wasn’t really the person to engage an incoming threat outright, blocking their path with my body.
As we continued on like that, the tension in the air between us became palpable. Something was out there, the eerie sounds between the trees and the occasional strangely cold gust of wind all but confirmed that. However, no matter what we did, we could not determine what was spooking us. Stretching my extra-sensory perception for minds did nothing, and when I sent out pulses of Mind Magic, I couldn’t get any feedback. My magical sight showed me nothing but the ordinary forest, and tasting the air gave nothing away either; it was as if the forest we were in was perfectly ordinary.
But while that ordinary guise seemed to be true at first glance, our intuitions, honed by a decent amount of travel in dangerous areas, were all screaming at us, telling us this was dangerous. If we had any idea where the danger might come from, we could have turned back or chosen another path, but given that we just had that incredibly imprecise and almost vague sense of dread to guide us, there was little we could do. Hel, turning back might even cause some sort of punishment, like it did in the stories of Lot or Orpheus. We didn’t know what rules this area might operate under, making it difficult to plan accordingly. Thus, we simply continued with our previous plans and kept going.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“I think there’s something there,” Luna suddenly spoke up, making us all stop on a dime, immediately ready for combat. A brief glance showed me that Luna’s eyes were shining with silver light, indicating that she was using her divine gift to look for something.
“What do you see?” I asked, my own eyes now glowing with magic as I stared ahead, into the twilight of the moonlit forest.
“It’s faint, incredibly so,” she admitted, “Kinda like a mist between the trees but not really,” she explained as best as she could but, given that she apparently was barely able to make out what it might be, her explanations were vague at best, useless at worst. Other than the claim that there was something out there, adding another cause to our current caution.
Ahead, I could hear Silva cautiously sniff the air, likely trying to find anything amiss, but her stance shifted only slightly, her level of vigilance ratcheting up a single notch. Not that there were all that many notches left on that particular scale, we all were incredibly on edge, ready to fight at a moment’s notice. If only there were something to fight out there, a threat we could recognise and, eventually, overcome. But, at the moment, we remained ignorant, ignorant and increasingly paranoid about it.
To me, the area both Luna and Silva were focused on was entirely empty. Nothing there, not even the slightest trace of anything magical, and yet, both my companions were convinced that something was there. Moments later, as I was trying to figure out what might be out there, wondering whether it might be some sort of divine influence given that both Luna and Silva were the ones to detect something strange, I felt yet another gust of chillingly cold wind. Usually, that would be impossible, but my affinity for Ice Magic made me immune to all but the coldest of mundane temperatures, so getting chilled by a gust of wind during a somewhat tepid night in late spring was nigh impossible. It didn’t make sense, but at the same time, it happened, so something must be going on.
Frowning, I reached out with my Wind Magic. It wouldn’t necessarily help me detect what might be out there; any feedback I got could come from a tree or brush, but given the unnatural wind, I felt it had a chance of working.
At first, there was nothing, and we slowly continued on our way, still completely on edge and twitchy, ready to unleash on any perceived threat, be it real or imaginary. A tiny part of me wondered what would happen if a rabbit or something similar just happened to poke its head from its burrow, in how many pieces would we leave its body?
Luckily, for that imaginary rabbit, it wasn’t what caught me off guard. Instead, my attention was grabbed by my perception of the wind around us, especially when a gust just suddenly formed a few dozen metres behind us, just barely within my sphere of perception. Not entering my perception on the outside but, somehow, forming within it, as if there was an invisible fan pushing the air suddenly forward, an invisible, intangible fan, or, more likely, some sort of magical influence I couldn’t detect.
Twisting around, I saw nothing behind us. However, just because I couldn’t see didn’t mean I couldn’t act. And acting, in this case, meant attacking whatever might be there, which I immediately did. I didn’t need to see a target to strike the entire area behind me with a twin blast of Mind and Wind Magic, one targeting possible intangible creatures, the other seeking to disrupt mindless, but tangible objects.
The initial effect, other than alarming my companions, was somewhat impressive. Apparently, the continued state of threat had ratcheted up the power I channelled into the blast, pushing the attack to a level strong enough to break off branches and even knock over a single, likely already weakened, tree, making a bit of a mess.
However, my attack failed to show us the entity responsible for the strange gust of wind. I thought I briefly saw a distortion in the air as my magic passed through the area, but it was momentary, just a glimpse with nothing to follow up on, meaning it might as well have been a trick of the eye.
“Nothing,” I snarled, anger starting to seep into my mind, annoyance at the source of this vaguely threatening sensation slowly eroding my temper. Whatever this was, I wanted to blast it to smithereens, or, if that wouldn’t work, I wanted it to leave us alone.
Sadly, I doubted it would be easy to get my wish.
