Misty Glen, Silver Run region, Avriya

  November 2048

  Lucian

  It was at that moment when Lucian realized he should've listened to Noi.

  Maybe he should’ve realized earlier, when the gale became so strong it slapped his face and stung his eyes and every new step posed a risk of toppling him over and feeding him a mouthful of wet soil. Maybe he should’ve realized it when the rain came pouring down in torrents and the sky darkened and flashes of lightning followed by ominous crackles of thunder were screaming at him to turn around, go home before it's too late. Maybe Lucian should’ve realized that Noi was right to tell him to not go outside today when the dragon-spirit sat down at the Edge of the World Cliff with nothing to hold him in place if he fell off it, his feet swinging over the empty abyss between him and the Misty Glen River Valley far, far below. It was a breathtaking view, really, and at the time Lucian saw it, he thought that it made going outside in this weather all worth it. It wasn’t like it was this windy every day, so he figured he might as well jump on the opportunity to fly while he could.

  He no longer believed that he made the right choice.

  Only seconds ago, a rush had gone through Lucian’s body as he sat at the cliff's edge, one that made him dizzy with excitement and wonder. The view of a few particularly tall coniferous trees peeking out of the low-hanging clouds above the valley’s forest looked just like a scene out of a dream, and along with the fast-moving wind on his wings and back, beckoned and called to him, tempting him to just do it, just run off that cliff and jump, and then you’ll fly like you’ve never flown before. It was as if decades of earth-boundedness as a result of the Inferno curse were falling apart before his very eyes, bringing about the call of the void. It was tantalizing, really. Ignoring the call was proving itself impossible.

  Lucian moved his feet onto solid earth, and with the wind on his face, took a few strides away from the edge. Then he turned around, and with the air now blowing on his back, he sprinted towards it and took off…

  “OHMYGODOHMYGODOHSHITOHFUCKWHATTHEHELLISGOINGONDEARGODPLEASEHELPMEI’MGONNAFUCKINGDIEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH—”

  Yup. Lucian’s wings were just as useless as they were before.

  For a couple of seconds that lasted way too long, Lucian hurtled towards the ground at a faster and faster pace, thrashing and flailing about and miserably attempting to capture gusts of wind that were barely out of his reach. The wind, which his wings were slicing against instead of gracefully capturing as they were supposed to, whooshed in his ears, and both the air and the rain pelted against him, stinging him with each touch. After a while, Lucian fell through some tree branches that scraped against his body in an ever-so-irritating manner and hit the forest floor with a heart-dropping thud and a screech. A searing pain shot through him, he felt dizzy and discombobulated and oh my God, was that blood?

  That was the last thing Lucian remembered seeing before he blanked out.

  ***

  “Hello?”

  Lucian awoke to a little girl’s voice, his consciousness gradually returning to him. Still disoriented from the impact of the fall, he pushed himself up, wincing with every movement. Now that he had regained his sight, he was able to get a good look at the girl for the first time. She was wearing a lavender rain jacket and rain boots, and had long black hair, pale skin, and indigo eyes. He shivered.

  That girl looks like a ghost, but without the transparency…

  “Were you dead just now?” She asked him.

  Lucian nodded half-heartedly. “Yeah. I might’ve been.”

  “I’ve never seen anybody die and come back to life like that before,” the girl said. “How did you do that?”

  Lucian chuckled nervously. “Immortality?”

  The girl looked at him with fascination. “Can I become in-mortal, too?”

  “It’s immortal, not in-mortal,” Lucian corrected, raising his voice in an attempt to make himself heard over the storm. “And I’m sorry to tell you this, but it’s impossible for a human to live forever. It's not like I can just give you my immortality.” And even if I could, I don’t know if I’d go through with it, he thought. As convenient as it is to be immune from permanent injuries and long-term death, living indefinitely is really not all it's cracked up to be. There’s too much pain in it.

  The girl frowned. “Aww, that sucks!” She exclaimed. “I want to be immortal, too!”

  Lucian shook his head. “Sorry. Not possible.”

  The girl pouted. “But that’s unfair!” She complained. “How come whenever somebody else’s head goes splat they die and become ghosts, but when your head does it, you die and come back to life?!”

  Lucian put a hand on the back of his head and felt something warm, wet, and sticky. With a shiver, he withdrew his hand, his eyes widening at the red substance smeared on his fingers and palms. Holy shit, was it that bad?

  “Did my head actually go splat?” He asked the girl.

  The girl nodded. “Yes, yes it did! As soon as you hit the ground, your head cracked open and blood spilled out of it and then I heard more cracking noises coming from you as your neck snapped and your arm broke and got all bendy and your leg twisted itself all the way around. Then you laid there, for like, ten whole minutes without breathing or doing anything, looking like a crumpled-up ragdoll. I thought you were dead for sure. But then your body fixed itself and you came back to life, so I thought you were a zombie until you told me you were immortal.”

  Lucian’s heart dropped. There was no denying it— he had “died” from the fall, that’s for sure. But the worst part about it was that some poor traumatized child had to witness all of it, and was now recounting his injuries and subsequent short-term death to him in graphic detail. He likely wouldn’t have been as bothered if the girl was actually a ghost who had already died, or a spirit who didn’t need to worry about death as much and may or may not be used to it, but this was a human child. She deserved to keep her innocence for the duration of her childhood, and Lucian might as well have stolen that from her with his own reckless actions.

  “Where are your parents?” He asked the girl.

  The little girl looked him dead in the eye. “The alive one or the dead ones?”

  Okay. So maybe she wasn’t as innocent as Lucian thought.

  “The alive one?”

  The little girl crossed her arms. “I’m not telling you!” She announced smugly.

  Lucian gave her a concerned look. “But we’re lost in the woods in the middle of the storm, and from the looks of it, you’re still very young,” he observed. “Shouldn’t you be going home?”

  The girl shook her head. “I’m running away from home.”

  Lucian gulped. Oh, so maybe she has an abusive family. I wouldn’t blame her for trying to escape if that was the case, he speculated. Also, it would be really hypocritical for me to stop her from running away when I myself have done the same before…

  “Why are you running away?”

  “Because my daddy treats me like a kid and wouldn’t let me go to the woods all by myself!” The girl complained. “He thinks I’m “too little” for everything. It’s unfair.”

  Lucian held back a laugh. So that was why she was running away? She believed her father was being unfair for trying to protect her, who was a child, no less? It was dangerous to be out in the woods all alone— Lucian knew that from experience. But at the same time, he could totally get the feeling of being trapped, of having unnecessary restrictions placed on him because he supposedly “didn’t know better.” It was suffocating, and the last thing he wanted was to impose that same experience onto her.

  With the rustling of the trees and the whooshing of the wind and the piercing raindrops on his skin, Lucian shuddered. He took out a wing and wrapped it around the girl, hoping he could offer her at least some protection from the storm. “We should really find shelter,” he suggested.

  ***

  So perhaps babysitting a strange child while being stuck in the middle of what he assumed were the Misty Glen River Valley woods was not on Lucian’s agenda for the day.

  But still, she was here, and he was not going to let any harm come to her, even if she could be a handful at times.

  “Are you a demon?” The girl asked the dragon-spirit while clinging onto his tail in an attempt to keep up with him while staying under his wing.

  Lucian stopped in his tracks. “Why do you think I’m a demon?”

  The girl pointed at his head. “Because of those!” She answered. “All demons have them, don’t they?”

  Lucian laughed self-consciously. “Just so you know, I’m a dragon-spirit, not a demon. Demons are not the only creatures with horns, y’know.”

  The girl looked at him mischievously. “But you have wings and a tail too, and demons have wings and tails.”

  “So do dragons!” Lucian shot back. He tried to pick up his pace, but felt something pull back on him, so he turned around. The girl was still there, holding him in place by the tail. He winced.

  “Would you please let go of my tail?”

  With her arms wrapped around his tail and her body on the ground and coated in mud, the girl gave Lucian a shit-eating grin.

  “No.”

  Lucian sighed. “But I can’t move if you’re clinging onto my tail like that.”

  The girl rolled over, causing a jolt of pain to shoot up Lucian from the tip of his tail to its base as it twisted with her movement. She laughed. He crossed his arms.

  “Hey, so you wanna be fed to the wolves or do you not?” The dragon-spirit threatened. “Because if you don’t let go of me right this instant, I’d be happy to offer you up as a meal…”

  Suddenly a gust of wind blew by, almost knocking Lucian over. At the same time, he heard a gut-wrenching crack, and as soon as he looked up, a jolt of fear shot through him.

  “...fuck.”

  There was no time to think. In a panic, Lucian picked the girl, who had fortunately let go of his tail at this point, off the ground and made a mad dash, rushing her out before the tree could fall on her. It was a close call— too close. She had barely made it out of the line of fire by the time the tree hit the ground. He dropped her on the forest floor.

  The girl laughed. “That was fun!” She exclaimed. “That tree almost fell on us, but we escaped just in time! It was just like an action movie!”

  Lucian gave the girl a puzzled look. “You weren’t afraid of getting crushed by that tree?”

  The girl cackled. Then she grabbed a large stick from the ground and waved it in the air. “I’m not afraid of the forest!” She proclaimed, drawing a chuckle from Lucian. “The forest is afraid of me!”

  Before grabbing her hand, Lucian smiled at the girl’s display. I like this kid, he thought. She’s gonna go places for sure.

  ***

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  After an hour or so of wandering the forest, Lucian located an opening on the side of a hill to take shelter in. Exhausted, he stood upright, letting the girl riding on his back slide off him. After he picked up the child to save her from the falling tree, she insisted on having him carry her for the rest of their walk, and, not wanting to disappoint her, he agreed. At first the dragon-spirit carried the child on his shoulders, which quickly proved to be taxing on him, not only because of her weight, but also because she kept yanking on Lucian’s hair and horns, so he told her to ride on his back and grab onto the bases of his wings instead. The added weight, combined with the stormy winds and remaining rainwater dripping off the forest’s canopy, did not make it any easier to navigate, and Lucian did end up having his fair share of close calls with the numerous sticks and rocks that littered the forest floor, threatening to trip him over and bring his passenger down along with him. It was fortunate that the trees offered an additional barrier from the storm— he would’ve been completely helpless otherwise.

  “Are you sure there are no bears in this cave?” The girl asked.

  Lucian coughed up a flame into his hand, the flickering light floating just above his palm, illuminating the cave’s walls and cavern. “No bears,” he confirmed. “But if one does come out—”

  “You’ll punch it in the face?”

  Lucian laughed. “Yeah, something like that.”

  The girl took her “walking stick,” which was really just the large stick she had grabbed off the forest floor earlier, and snapped it on her knee. After the stick split in half, she knelt on the cave’s floor and began rubbing the pieces together. “Hey, look, I’m starting a fire!”

  Lucian smiled and shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re not gonna get a fire just by doing that,” he remarked. Then he picked up one half of the stick and began drawing a circle in the dirt with it. “But I do know a better way. Now, would you mind helping me gather some big rocks and placing them on the edges of this circle? We’re making a fire pit.”

  For the next ten minutes or so, Lucian and the girl searched the cave for rocks they could use to make a fire pit, assembling the stones into a circle on the cave’s floor. As they were building the fire pit, the girl took the opportunity to bombard Lucian with questions, and when it came to the more embarrassing ones, she certainly pulled no punches:

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lucian. What’s yours?”

  “Ha! I knew it— you are a demon!”

  “What? Why are you saying that?”

  “Isn’t that the name of Satan?”

  Lucian shook his head. “No, that’s Lucifer. You’re getting my name mixed up,” he corrected. “What’s yours?”

  After placing a rock in the perimeter of the rock ring, the girl quickly stood back up. “Juniper!”

  Lucian smiled. “That’s a cute name,” he complimented. Juniper pouted.

  “I am not cute!”

  Lucian tried to pat Juniper’s head, but she pushed him away. “Hey, don’t say that about yourself! You are cute!”

  The girl gave Lucian a nasty glare, causing him to flinch. Damn, if looks could kill…

  “FOR THE LAST TIME, I AM NOT CUTE! I AM BIG AND SCARY!” Juniper shouted, stomping her foot in protest. “MY DADDY IS THE HIGH MAGE AND I AM THE RULER OF THE UNDERWORLD! DEADLY MONSTERS FEAR ME, AND YOU SHOULD TOO!”

  Lucian stopped in his tracks. “Wait, your dad is Kai Dalton?”

  Juniper nodded, a serious expression on her face. “Yes. He’s really strong and knows how to fight, so you shouldn’t mess with him.”

  I already know that all too well, Lucian thought, shuddering at the countless recollections of him getting stabbed by the High Mage that flooded his mind. The stinging sensation of swords and other sharp weapons piercing his flesh was one he was all too well-acquainted with, much more than he would’ve liked to be. And Kai being Juniper’s father is gonna make bringing her home a lot more difficult, if she does choose to go home…

  “Lucian?” Juniper asked, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Yes?”

  “What does “fuck” mean?”

  Lucian almost dropped the bundle of sticks he was carrying for firewood, the question startled him that much. I didn’t actually say that out loud in front of her, did I?!

  “I- I can’t tell you that!”

  Juniper leaned closer, taunting the dragon-spirit with nothing more than a look. “You said it right before the tree almost fell on us. What does it mean?” She pressed.

  Lucian averted his eyes, fixating his gaze on the cave’s floor. “You’ll learn when you’re older.”

  “But I am older!” Juniper protested. “I turned five today!”

  Lucian picked up another rock, one that was big and round and a reddish-brown color this time. “I didn’t know it was your birthday today. Happy birthday, Juniper!” He congratulated her. “How did you celebrate? What gifts did you get?”

  But Juniper refused to get redirected so easily. “You still didn’t tell me what fuck means.”

  Lucian cringed. “It’s a word you’re not supposed to say,” he told the child.

  “Why?”

  “Because…” Lucian started, only to trail off when a proper explanation escaped him. “You know what, I’ll tell you. But promise you’ll never say it to anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Fine! Then I won’t tell you!”

  “No.”

  Lucian groaned. Goddamnit, what’s up with this kid?! He thought, racking whatever he had of a brain in an attempt to find a way out of the crisis at hand. How am I supposed to respond to that?!

  Fortunately, a solution to his predicament sprung to Lucian’s mind only a moment later, and along with it, a way to embarrass his mortal enemy, too. “You know what, I’ll let you say the word. But only once. And promise me that when you do say it, it's in front of your alive father, in a place with a lot of people, and that you yell it as loud as you can,” he told her, holding back a snicker.

  Juniper held out her pinky finger. “Pinky promise?”

  Lucian held out his own pinky finger, interlocking it with Juniper’s. “Pinky promise.”

  “So what does fuck mean?” Juniper probed.

  “Hey! Remember your promise!”

  “Sorry, I meant to say what does it mean?”

  “It’s something grown-ups say when they’re really mad, surprised, or scared,” Lucian told the child. “Normally, you wouldn’t be allowed to say it, but since you asked, I am giving you permission to say the word just once. That is if you follow my rules of course.”

  Juniper giggled. “Thank you, Lucian!” She exclaimed.

  Lucian placed one last rock on the ring and stood up to dust his hands. “You’re welcome,” he responded. Then he unloaded the bundle of sticks and dried-up leaves he had collected while inside the cave, dumping them in the center of the newly-constructed fire pit before placing a hand in front of Juniper. “Stand back,” he told her before breathing into the pit. A few flames caught on the kindling and began eating away at it, transforming into a full-blown campfire around a minute later. The fire danced and crackled and burned, filling the cave with a smoky smell.

  “Yay! Fire!” Juniper cheered, bouncing on her toes. “Lucian, can we roast marshmallows over the fire and stay up late telling scary stories? I know lots of good ones!”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have marshmallows,” the dragon-spirit answered. “But yeah, we can totally stay up late telling scary stories. Promise me you won’t get too spooked to sleep, okay?”

  Juniper nodded. “Okay!”

  ***

  For the next hour or so, Lucian and Juniper sat by the fire, telling each other whatever scary stories they could think of. At first, Lucian tried to keep his stories tame and with a happy ending to avoid upsetting his audience, which Juniper was clearly unimpressed by. Apparently, she thought that his attempts at kid-friendly horror storytelling were “boring” and “for babies”:

  “And they all lived happily ever after!” Lucian finished after telling a story about a family who got lost in the woods and was chased down by a big, hungry ogre before escaping just in the nick of time. He figured it would be a fitting story for their situation, but Juniper did not approve.

  “Ugh, that’s so lame!” She complained, rolling her eyes. “I know lots of better ones!”

  “If your stories are so much better than mine, why won’t you tell me one?” Lucian queried.

  Juniper smiled, her eyes narrowing into a smug expression, as if to convey that she knew something he didn’t. “Suuuure you wanna hear it?”

  Lucian nodded. “Yes.”

  “Once upon a time, there was a girl whose name was Lucia, who lived in a small town by the sea,” Juniper began, her voice lowering to a chilling tone.

  “Any particular reason why this girl’s name sounds similar to mine or is that just a coincidence?”

  Juniper shrugged. Then she continued speaking.

  “Lucia was a very lonely girl, who would often get bullied because of the horns on her head. Her classmates called her “demon-child,” and every night, she would go home to cry in her room.”

  At that last phrase, Lucian’s apprehension grew. “Alright, this is beginning to feel like it's personally-targeted, but go on.”

  “One day, one of her bullies dragged Lucia out to a pier on the shore, claiming she was going to exorcize her,” Juniper continued. “She tossed Lucia in the water, where she drowned. The girl tried to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound. Soon her lungs felt like they were burning, and every time she gasped, more water flooded them, choking her slowly and painfully. She tried to reach out for help, but nobody was there.”

  “Now that’s just sad,” Lucian remarked. “Does anything happen after that, or is this whole story just about some poor girl drowning?”

  “Yes, something does happen after that,” Juniper confirmed before continuing with the story.

  “After Lucia drowned, her soul came back to seek revenge on her killer. She transformed into a big, scary monster with long arms who lived at the bottom of the sea. So if you ever see two pointy rocks sticking out of the water—” Juniper paused for dramatic effect— “beware. Those are the horns of the underwater demon, who will snatch anybody who dares sail over her territory and drag them into her watery lair, where they will die a slow and painful death. Rumor has it that the seafloor off the western coast of Avriya is covered in rotting corpses because she won’t stop her rampage until she finds the girl who drowned her, so if you aren’t careful…”

  The look on Juniper’s face was nothing short of alarming as she finally uttered the last four words of her story:

  “You. Could. Be. Next.”

  Lucian shuddered, not so much at the content of the story itself, but rather at how Juniper told it, as if it was more than just some silly tale about a fictional sea monster which was more-likely-than-not modeled after him, but could potentially be real life. Somehow he got the feeling that Juniper was sending a message specifically intended for him, something of grave importance that she wasn’t saying out loud yet still wanted him to know— but what?

  “Whoa, gotta say that you’re a pretty good storyteller,” he told Juniper. “Just wondering, when you were telling that story, were there any… hidden meanings in it?”

  Juniper shrugged. “Maybe there were, maybe there weren’t.”

  Lucian nodded. Alright, that doesn’t make me feel any better, he thought to himself. But I can always worry about that later. Maybe I’m just overthinking— Juniper’s five, after all. What is the likelihood that she’d be incorporating subliminal messages into a campfire horror story? Not high, I suppose. Better to just focus on the present at this point, hidden meanings be damned. Tell each other more silly horror stories and enjoy this night out in the woods, if you will. It always smells fresh after the rain, and this bonfire we’ve got going on here does complement it rather nicely, I’ve got to admit.

  “So,” Lucian spoke up after a few moments of silence, “wanna hear another story?”

  ***

  Lucian did not sleep well that night. Kind of ironic, considering how the dragons of folklore typically slept in caves and he was supposed to be part dragon. And when he last checked, he was more than certain that the campfire got extinguished, so no risk of forest fires there.

  And it wasn’t like the stories he and Juniper told each other were particularly horrifying, either— most of them were your standard, run-of-the-mill urban legends and tales kids typically told each other during their sleepovers. Alright, maybe some of them were true, like the story Lucian told Juniper about a fire-spirit who bragged about being more beautiful than Blanche, and as punishment, got the piece of her core responsible for self-regeneration destroyed and her face burnt off. In shame, she hid in the Grand Crater, which was the spirit realm’s largest volcano, and still haunts it to this day. While telling the story, Lucian omitted the part where he personally encountered her on a lava-collecting mission, which he was on because Blanche needed the cooled lava to build compounds for the spirits higher on the pecking order. Of course she didn’t do the building herself, but ordered her spirits to take on the dirty work for her, typically low-ranking ones like Lucian. More often than not, he was the one who got sent to the volcano because hey, he was a fire-spirit and a dragon; he should be able to handle the heat and fly out of the Crater if anything went wrong. Also because lava-collecting was deemed dirty work due to its dangerous and unpleasant nature, and what better candidate was there for that type of labor than a filthy insubordinate like Lucian?

  During Lucian’s expedition, he encountered the Faceless Magma-Dweller and carried her out of the volcano on his return flight, believing he could find the missing piece of her core later and get her face back himself. While he normally would’ve asked for permission first before doing such a thing, it wasn’t like the Magma-Dweller could talk, so he only did what he knew he would’ve wanted someone else to do for him if he was in her place. And who could blame him for interfering? Blanche’s punishments were way too harsh, and even if he wasn’t around yet to have seen the spirit before her self-imposed exile to the volcano, something told him the statement she got her face burnt off for was completely true. Unfortunately, Lucian’s mission to rescue the Magma-Dweller failed miserably after he got caught spying on Blanche in an attempt to uncover whatever it was she did to make cores. As punishment, he got tossed into a pit of venomous snakes, and the Magma-Dweller was thrown back in the volcano.

  Not that he told Juniper any of that, of course. Better to end the story after the first part so as to not destroy the element of doubt; let her believe it was all fiction and spare her the depressing details of reality. Perhaps part of him felt guilty for exploiting a real spirit’s pain by turning it into a campfire horror story, but just living in the spirit realm for as long as Lucian had served as a goldmine for these types of tales. Sure, it was a hellish goldmine, one full of toxic chemicals and waste and collapsing tunnels, but a goldmine nonetheless.

  But still, minus the spirit realm parables about Blanche’s assumed supremacy, the other stories were rather cookie-cutter, more or less, featuring the usual batch of suspects for the “scary story” genre— monsters and ghosts, vengeful apparitions and haunted houses, creepy dolls and clowns, pretty much. Nothing the fire-spirit and Juniper told each other was any more frightening or grotesque than your average campfire horror story. So why was he so nervous? Perhaps it had something to do with the protagonist of Juniper’s story about the sea monster?

  Lucian shook his head. No, it couldn’t be. He had no reason to be scared of some made-up tale when he’s gone through much worse in real life. She probably just modeled the protagonist after Lucian to get a reaction after him, nothing more, nothing less.

  Above an opening in the cave, the night sky peeked through, dotted with the lights of a thousand stars that reflected themselves in the pool of water below. The rain had stopped and the storm had long died down by now, leaving behind a stillness that was both tranquil and eerie. A few stray stalactites dripped down from the top of the cave, casting shadows on the rocky walls. Juniper, with her knees hugged to her chest and her head rested on her crumpled-up rain jacket, was sound asleep.

  Lucian figured he’d stay awake. Somebody needed to watch over Juniper, and it's not like he needed sleep to survive, anyway. He could always rest later if he wanted to.