Nips kept watch from her bag, letting Lanie keep her eyes on what was before them. After her encounter with Tolus, she had a second wind. The sun was still above the mountains, but the shadows were growing longer. She judged that it would be less than two hours before the valley was draped in the shadows of the mountains. At that thought, a faint smile quirked up one corner of her mouth. She wouldn’t have been able to judge that before living Kyma’s life. Solar timekeeping was going to be more useful than she’d realized. The ground had been sloping gently upward for a while now, and it was getting steeper. The uninterrupted grass was starting to give way to scattered clumps of brush and tumbled boulders. Half an hour earlier, she’d even gotten a new notification:
The Spell [Steps of Akayma] has advanced to the Apprentice level.
You gain +1 Dexterity and +1 Wisdom.
The wind called by the spell will enhance your movement speed by an additional 10%.
Her calf muscles burned with the effort of running uphill, and she stopped to lean against the uphill side of a boulder and catch her breath. “OK, Nips. Hard decision time. Should we push on to the Way or find someplace to hole up for the night?” she asked.
“I haven’t seen any sign of those men, and you have to be exhausted,” Nips replied. He scanned the hillside as he added, “I’m sure we could find a sheltered spot if you want to rest.”
Lanie crossed her arms and chewed her lip as she looked over the hillside and their route to the pass. The trail wasn’t as obvious as the one cut down the side of her first mountain, but it was there, a lightly worn track winding between boulders and into the trees, barely wide enough for a wagon. She could make out spots where rocks had been moved to clear the way and stacked off to the side in low piles.
There were more trees up the slope, but they were in scattered copses, not the imposing forest of the valley floor. The pass itself was low enough to still be within the treeline. At least, the part she could see from her vantage was below the snow. There was no way to tell if it got higher farther in between the peaks. She had no desire to relive her first frostbitten mountain stroll.
Coming to a decision, she nodded. “OK, we’ll head a little farther up while we still have light and see what we can find. The dark doesn’t bother me so much, but I’d rather not risk freezing to death. Again. Hopefully, we’ll find someplace where we can have a campfire.” Kyma’s memories helped her yet again. She knew that a campfire would be seen for miles across the valley if she wasn’t careful to hide it.
As they went higher, the boulders got bigger, and the trees more numerous. The late afternoon sun threw long shadows across the slope, creating a chiaroscuro mosaic of shifting brilliance and encroaching dusk. Lanie found herself getting lost in the stark beauty of the scene. The snap of a twig from a nearby clump of trees pulled her attention back to reality in an instant.
The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as a feeling of dread rose in her. Watching the trees, she picked up her pace. “Keep your eyes peeled, Nips. I’m getting a case of the heebies.”
“The heebies?” Nips peered out of the bag, craning to see around the tall boulders that were more frequently lining the path. Between rocks the size of cars and clusters of trees crowding closer to the trail, there were too many places a foe or hungry beast could hide.
“Heebie-jeebies, the creeps, whatever. I feel like we’re being watched.” Lanie drew one of her daggers. She didn’t know much about knife-fighting, but it made her feel better to have a weapon in her hand. Something felt… off. She couldn’t put her finger on it, though. From lower down the hill, the path had looked more open. Now, between the rocks and the trees, she was starting to feel boxed in. The stark shadows created puddles of darkness that could obscure any danger. There was that feeling of wrongness again. There was something about the shadows.
Another snap and crunch of breaking wood spurred her to move faster. The path curved to the right to avoid a particularly large boulder. The shadow cast by the stone drenched the trail in a puddle of impenetrable darkness. Lanie’s gut screamed “Danger!”, and she froze.
That shadow was wrong.
Another rustle and a low growl came from behind her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of the shadow.
“Why did we stop?” Nips’ voice wavered. “There’s something in the trees back there.”
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“I can’t see through that shadow.” She looked around, paying more attention to the other shadows. Some of them were dark, like the one across the path, obscuring whatever lay beneath them. Others, though… There were two types of shadows around her. There were shadows that shimmered slightly. Those she could see through, the grass and stones beneath them clearly visible despite the shade. They felt right, real, true. The darker ones, they swallowed the light without a trace, as though what they covered had been redacted from the world.
“I thought you could see in the dark?”
Nips’ question sparked a memory, and Lanie pulled up the description of her first gift:
Shadow Sight 1:
You can see in darkness as though it was dim light. You can see in dim light as though well-lit. Shadows reveal their secrets.
“Shadows reveal their secrets,” she muttered to herself, looking again at the shadows around her, trying to make sense of them.
“Um, Lanie? I know you’re trying to figure something out, but perhaps you could figure a little faster? Something is moving back there.”
Distracted, she replied, “Working on it.” She took a few tentative steps forward to the edge of the dark shadow. Her eyes told her there was a boulder to her left, it's shadow obscuring an open trail before her. Her gut was telling her something different. She zoned in on that feeling, leaning into a sense that she hadn’t realized she possessed. Her awareness spread out. She closed her eyes to focus on it better.
It was fuzzy at first, like a signal trying to break through the static of her expectations. Slowly, it resolved into an image—the world painted in shadow and light. She couldn’t ‘see’ with her eyes closed, but, somehow, she knew where the shadows were, could sense their shapes in her mind, could feel what lay within them. And what she could feel didn’t line up with what her eyes had seen.
There was a shadow in front of her, but it wasn’t the large, irregular form of the boulder that had hidden the path. It was a long, thin shadow, tipped with a sharp leaf shape. She stretched out her hand, eyes still closed, and felt for the object casting the shadow. She flailed for a moment, waving her hand through empty air, feeling like a fool. Her heart raced. The sounds of a hungry predator still came from the trees behind her, and she questioned her sanity for still standing here and not running.
Then her fingers found sharp metal.
Carefully, she felt down its length. Metal transitioned to wood. She wrapped her fingers around it and yanked, pulling free the spear that had cast the true shadow. She felt a thread of magic snap, and she opened her eyes just in time to see the illusion of the trail and boulder break apart into a thousand wisps of fading flame.
“Oak and Thorn!” Nips exclaimed. “That wasn’t a glamour!”
She was facing a pile of stones at the side of the actual path. The spear had been jammed into them, angled just right to pierce the chest of a traveler running from the sounds in the trees. It was a simple spear, hand-made with a bronze head, wrapped with a leather thong to hold the head firm. It was a little different from the spears Kyma had learned with, but it still felt comfortable in her hands.
The trail didn’t turn here, and there was no boulder blocking the way for it to curve around. It had been a trap. An illusion. If she had hurried away from the rustling and growling along the path her eyes had shown her, she would have impaled herself on the hidden spear. What she saw now meshed with what her new awareness told her. The shadows were where they belonged.
She turned to face the trees. Putting the dagger back in its sheath, she gripped the spear with both hands. Several long seconds passed, but there were no more sounds from the copse. Lanie closed her eyes again and sought outward with her new sense, fumbling to interpret what it was telling her. She found the shadows of the trees, felt their shapes, searched among them. There was no sign of whatever beast had been stalking them.
She let out a long breath. “I think the animal sounds were part of the trap.”
“I hope so,” Nips said, “I’d hate to find out we’re dealing with both a homicidal illusionist trap maker and a fangy wild beast. I don’t think my heart could take it.”
“Well, don’t relax. Whoever set this trap might still be around.” She glanced up at the sky, judging the time. “Let’s see if we can slip through that Way without any more surprises. I don’t think camping out here is such a good idea anymore.”
Using the spear like a walking staff, Lanie started up the trail once more. This time she went more slowly. She alternated between scanning the area with her eyes and focusing on her new awareness of the shadows around her. Using it was strange. She couldn’t sense objects, only the shadows that they cast. She had to learn how to interpret the new input.
“So… how did you figure out that it was a trap?” Nips asked.
She started to answer, but stopped herself. She shook her head. “I’ll tell you about it later. This hill might have ears. Go ahead and check that compass again and make sure we’re still headed the right way.”
Nips dove into the bag and came back out with the compass. “It’s pointing ahead and slightly to the right. That aligns with what Gidul told us.”
Lanie nodded. “Good. Now we just have to hope it isn’t too far.”
All of her new endurance and health regeneration did little to ease the burn in her calves. Walking uphill was painful, and Lanie decided that all of those hikers who did it for fun were insane. But, she trudged on. She walked for another half an hour before the sun finally slipped below the peaks, covering the land in the shadow of the mountain.
Now that she was paying attention to it, she realized that her shadow awareness let her feel what was around her. It was a subtle feeling. She only realized that it was there because she was looking for it. Whatever the shadows touched, she could sense, like a bubble of perception stretching out around her. She estimated that she could feel out about ten, maybe twelve feet away before the sense dropped away. If she focused on a particular spot, she could stretch it out a bit farther, but that took effort and active attention.
As she played with the limits of her new ability, she became aware of the shadow of something moving just off the trail, paralleling their path up the mountain. Its shape was humanoid from the waist up, but below the waist it was multi-limbed like an insect, with a tail like a scorpion.