Ah, the smell of impending violence. Like cinnamon... if cinnamon had been beaten to death with a shovel.
Clive trudged forward like a man sentenced to his own quest. Poor kid. Hair a mess, jaw clenched like he was always chewing secrets. I bobbed along on his back, tied to a leather strap like some macabre travel companion—because, well, I was.
A skull, in case you hadn't noticed. One eye socket chipped, the other glowing faintly with something mysterious and possibly malevolent—but let's not dwell on that.
"Do you have to storm around like a wounded bear with a vendetta?" I asked, just to break the silence. "Even the trees are starting to pity you."
"Shut up, Grimpel."
Classic Clive.
We reached a clearing that felt... wrong. No birdsong. No wind. Just breathing trees and twitching moss. My eye flared slightly—I couldn't help it. The scent of ancient spells saturated the air like stale soup.
Then they came.
Half-formed horrors emerged from the treeline—things with too many legs and not enough eyes. Some crawled, some walked backward, one laughed like my ex-wife (may she rot under a crumbling altar). These were Maedra's children. The forgotten spells she'd fed too much grief.
Clive stood frozen, as if realizing he hadn't brought enough rage for the evening.
"Hey, uh," I said casually, "you may want to use that fancy staff of yours before your spine becomes a chew toy."
He finally snapped out of it and slammed the thing into the ground. Violet fire erupted from the staff's tip and spun around him like a cracked halo. Impressive. Sloppy on the third rune, but impressive.
The creatures screamed and backed away—except for one.
A long-limbed wretch with a stitched face lunged.
I knew he didn't have time to cast again. So I did something... unusual.
I hummed.
It was barely audible—an old tone, the kind that calls shadows back into the ground where they belong. The stitched thing froze mid-leap, howled in pain, and combusted into petals.
Clive didn't notice. Good. That little hum? That wasn't in the bard's handbook.
He turned to me, breathing hard. "How many more?"
I tilted just enough to spot three more crawling from the dirt.
"Enough to make this very character-building," I replied.
He grunted and whispered another spell.
They burned.
And I smiled.
You see... every piece of his soul he pulls back into himself brings us one step closer to the gate.
He doesn't know.
He can't know.
Not yet.
But soon.