When he came into town nobody thought he was a problem. He was quiet and mostly kept to himself, except for when he would come down for his meals every night and sit in the dining room, looking out from under his dark hood. It was at this time of the day that Mauryn felt like she shouldn't take her eyes off of him. She wasn't sure why, she just had this nagging feeling that he was up to no good. She didn't really mind though; as long as her customers paid their rent and either kept to themselves or didn't cause any trouble in her inn, she was okay with them. It was when some of the town’s children began disappearing that she started to worry. It started off with a few kids at once. One of the first children to be taken was her son. He had been eight years old and he went out with some friends and didn't come back; none of them came back. Some of the townspeople started talk about wolves and bears coming down from the mountains, or wizards coming into Aurind all the way across the mountains from Doriel. At first she believed them and told her other kids to stay indoors. At first she hadn't paid attention to the Drifter. After a few more disappearances, she noticed on the days when children went missing he wouldn't come down and sit at his usual place in the corner.
Her suspicions grew worse as he started to show up less and less, and then he started taking long walks out into the woods. Soon he would go on walks, and be gone for a few days on end, and still children were disappearing. Then one night as she climbed the stairs to her children's room she heard a wail. She raced up the remaining stairs and burst into the room. There on the edge of the window crouched a man cloaked in black, his face hidden behind a dark hood.
"No," she screamed,” not my babies!"
She dropped the candle and made a quick dash for the window, but the man was fast. Like lightning his hand darted in and out of his cloak and Mauryn stopped in her tracks. She looked down to see a small dagger protruding from her right shoulder. Her shoulder and mind went numb as the pure white of her night gown slowly turned a bright red, spreading like ripples in a pond emanating from the point of contact with the dagger. She looked up, a mild look of surprise on her face. Time stood still as she watched her crying children borne away by an unknown man. As she watched him jump, she could have sworn he looked at her and flashed her an evil rictus. She fell to her knees and started to fall forwards.
"B*****d!" Mauryn shouted out, bolting up right in bed. Her breathing was heavy, and she peered carefully around the room picking out every detail. Her heart was pounding in her chest as if she had just run a long race and there were drops of sweat rolling down her chest, congregating in the crease of her breasts and finding their way down to the mattress below. She clutched at her shoulder and fell back to the sheets. Lightly fingering her scar, she remembered the searing pain that had lanced through her body, more so from the loss of her children than the knife which pierced her skin.
She sighed, that was all far behind her. It had happened years ago and she now had other kids to tend to. She looked outside again to see soft rays of the yellow sun cresting the tree tops.
"Well," she thought, "I should probably get up and start the day. I won't be getting back to sleep anytime soon."
As she slipped down the stairs she recalled what had happened in the ensuing weeks. As soon as she was able, she went to the village council ordering that they hunt down this man and bring him to justice. They had turned her away and had said that they would wait until he came back before taking him and hanging him for his treachery. Mauryn wasn't satisfied, but what could she do: it was the council's decision in the end. Their word was final.
She eventually grew past it, and months had passed with no sign of the drifter. After a while people had even forgotten there was a stranger years ago who had taken their kin; all except for the parents who had lost children. Now everything was back to normal and her new children were between six and eight years old, and were quite a handful in keeping reasonably happy.
Word came back to tell them of a mysterious man who was traveling the countryside, asking people to join his cause. He said that the time for a revolution was here, and that it was the peasants and common people who should take up the reigns of the country. No one has ever seen him other than at night, or as a cloaked figure, with a dark hood. No one knew where he would show up next for he always left a town just as he had come, alone. They said that he had yellow eyes that glowed, and seemed to pierce and search your soul for your deepest desires and your darkest regrets.
A few weeks after the stories came, a man came into town. Mauryn felt something was similar about him, but she wasn't sure what. He booked the room above the dining hall. He came down every night for supper, and he sat in the corner looking out from under his dark hood. It was after the disappearance of a child that she realized that the stranger had come back.
He started going for his walks again, Mauryn didn't tell anyone about her discovery that he had come back. She wanted to go and find some things out before she went to the council and they sent out someone else. She waited until she was fairly sure what day he would go out, and when it came she was ready. She had placed a few bad steps in, a long time ago so that she knew when someone was coming up or down the stairs. It was on a hot summer night when she heard it. She was lying in bed just thinking about the stranger and when he was going to make his move when she heard a quiet sound, barely audible over the crackle of her fire. She wasn't sure if it was one of the stairs, or if it was just her imagination. It came again. She got out of bed and silently crossed the room. She went to her dresser where she stripped down and quickly changed into her husband's hunting clothing. It was simple tunic of light brown leather with a few blood stains on the right forearm from skinning mess-ups. The pants were just black wool, a common dress item for the people of her region where she lived. She heard the door leading outside close.
She snuck out of the room and down the stairs. She grabbed the long bow above the fire's mantle. It wasn't a fancy weapon. It was made simply out of a yew tree, with a flax spun string, but it did its job well. She went outside and looked both directions. At first she didn't see anything, but then there was a flicker at the corner of the house down the road. A figure darted across the road, and she instinctively knew that it was him. She started up the street, always staying a few houses behind him. She had done a lot of hunting as a girl, and she knew the tricks of tracking, and of how to shadow your quarry. He turned to go around to the back of a house, and Mauryn did the same with the house she was at. She made it around the house just in time to see him disappear into the forest. She ran down the line of houses, to about where she saw him go into the underbrush, and then turned to go closer to the trees. When she had reached the tree-line, her eyes fervently searching the ground for any sign of her quarry, she quickly spotted a light footprint in the dirt. Without a second thought, she ducked under the branches and continued her search.
She was following the footprints for quite a distance. She had gone maybe a few miles when the footprints suddenly stopped. She looked around, wondering what had happened. Did she miss something, was there some vital sign that she had overlooked? That was when she saw the big oak. It was just off to her left, less than fifty yards, and she saw a dark form climbing up the first low branches. She stood for a second, wondering how he got over there. She looked up and saw that almost all of the lower branches between her and the oak were about head height, and looked strong enough to support the weight of a man. She pulled herself up and saw that they formed an almost perfect bridge, which was invisible from underneath because of smaller protruding branches. She ran along it with ease, and leaped from the last few branches to the oaks lower branches. They were just within her reach, and she grunted as she pulled herself up. The branches weaved their way around the huge tree, almost as if making a stairway, and she slowly began to climb. Quite abruptly, she came to a stop, there was a wall of branches right in front of her which obviously would not part to let her through. She turned around and thought about giving up when she slipped. She almost fell off the branch she was on, which was a good hundred feet off the ground, and she pulled herself slowly back onto the ledge. It was as she was sitting there catching her breath and reminding herself how lucky she was that she noticed a peculiar symbol etched into the trunk. She crawled closer, and as she reached out to touch it, her skin connected and a hidden doorway swung into the massive tree, showing a stairway leading down into darkness. She swallowed her fears reminding herself that she had come this far, and descended into the depths.
“How far down does this go,” Mauryn thought to herself as she made her way down the seemingly never ending stairway. “I must be below ground by now.”
She came to a door after a good ten minutes of walking constantly down. At first she didn't know what it was, but then as she felt around she found a doorknob. She twisted and not surprisingly, it opened. It was fairly dark but from the wave of cold air that hit her, she could tell that she was in a huge cavern. She was blind for a few minutes, but she soon gained her vision, and looking around she spotted a torch in a bracket to her left. She took it in her hand and lit it with a bit of tinder which she always kept handy. She squinted past the warming rays of fire-light to try and get her bearings. She had been right, it was a huge cavern, but she hadn't quite expected what she saw. There were huge pillars every hundred yards. It was vast. It seemed as if there could have been a whole civilization living down here. Then she thought it may have been the dwarves. She knew that they existed in the mountains, but she never thought that they would have ever come this far out into a country other than their own. But they may have been here long before we were she thought. They could easily have been here for centuries before the arrival of the humans. This catacomb was obviously ancient. The evidence of how old this place was was all around. There were a few pillars that had crumbled to nothing more than a pile of debris, with some large chunks with intricate designs on them. On some of the pillars that she had a closer look at there was writing. What she had thought was just there for looks, she saw was in some cases actually script. She couldn't read it of course, but she knew it was some lost and forgotten language, that only the philosophers of Iggule, or some other university would know anything about. She thought that she should take down a bit of it, so that if she ever met a real philosopher, then she could show it to him. She used a piece of charcoal and a leather strip that she always carried with her. This is what she wrote:
Nallononen dipalandiriel aiya manuva, ortane maituvalent nef aear silailye elen,
palon elye auta i lome, Lauine ve linte yuldar avanier,
ageruaen rido eglanalli lornthar ilyemar, dimalata bandiello coieva armel,
thang nuquerna tenn'idu. *
She looked around again for a sign of the man, but she didn't see anything. She started to walk around in a straight line from the entrance, so that she could easily get back. As she walked, she almost forgot about the man she was looking for as she admired the beauty of her surroundings. The pillars were huge in themselves. They were clearly made of marble, and they stretched so far up that she lost sight of their tops to the darkness. She was walking with her bow ready and drawn, her best arrow notched to its position. She came to a door suddenly, as if it had appeared by magic. She looked around to see if there was any sign that he had gone through this door, and then she saw a footprint halfway into the door. She opened it, and for its size it swung open effortlessly. She stepped inside another dark room, although this one was smaller, she could tell. As she went through, the door closed behind her. She whipped around, but there was no one there. She decided to keep going forwards, even though her way out was potentially blocked. She moved forwards, keeping her eyes peeled ahead of her, eyes trying to pierce the dark. She was so focused that she didn't see behind her as a dark form stepped out of the shadows, looked at her with yellow eyes from under a hood, and flashed a row of bright teeth in a wide grin, as he stepped back and the darkness engulfed him.
Ingo had been taken when he was seven from the forest. He had been one of the first kids to disappear, as he was taken with Tim and a few others. They had been out in the woods playing hero and goblin when a man had suddenly shown up and asked them if they wanted to go on a real adventure. Of course, they were young and had been eager to follow someone willing to show them some excitement, so they followed him further and further into the forest. He led them to a huge tree and then the tree opened up. They went down a long flight of stairs and through a giant hall. The man didn't give them any time to gain their sight, but Ingo could tell by the way their footsteps echoed all around that it was huge! He eventually gained his night vision and was surprised at how well he could see. He then took them into a chamber, where there were a few doors. It looked all the world to him like the entrance to a maze, and after taking one door, and then some obscure turns, he knew that they were in a labyrinth. He was getting more and more worried as they went further into the depths, until they came to yet another door, where the man put them into another huge room and closed the door shutting them inside.
The other kids started screaming to let them out, and calling for their parents, but Ingo knew to stay calm. He had an uneasy feeling, as if something was about to happen. He grabbed his friend Dima and dashed into the dark. He kept running along the wall until the other kid’s cries had receded into the distance. He paused to catch his breath, and as he waited with Dima, he sighed. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe there was no immediate danger at the door. He was just about to turn back when they heard faint screams echoing in the distance.
"What's going on?" Whispered Dima
"I think I was right to run," replied Ingo, "there's something back there that's making the others scream like that."
"What kind of thing?"
A roar dispersed the screams. It was so loud that it could be heard over the other children, and then the screams died down into complete and utter silence.
"I don't know what it could be, but whatever it is, pray that it never finds us.”
![[send message]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/mail.png){kind=small}
![[befriend]](https://www.writerscafe.org/images/friend.png){kind=small}
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Flag Writing
