It wasn’t a secret that Alice liked Eve.
Whenever Orbahn’s party returned from their commissions around Root Hollow while they waited for Felix’s injured hands to heal, Alice made a beeline for the Secretary first.
Even if the stop was brief, only a few words, it had become something Orbahn and Dahlia could expect with certainty. They had seemed friendly from the very beginning, but after the Rank Assessments happened something unexpected shifted with them.
Dahlia had probed Patty for gossip, but the ward only shook her head. That was also an unexpected change around the Guild: Patty cut way back on gossip.
“Alice,” Orbahn raised the phone reciever. “Eve wants to speak with you.”
The expression on Alice’s face changed in an instant and she stood so fast the top of her head cracked against the ceiling beam. Orbahn winced. Danzig and his wife looked worried, but Dahlia and Felix burst into laughter.
The giant stumbled over and took the phone from Orbahn. Once again her expression changed as soon as she heard Eve’s voice.
Dahlia elbowed Felix in the ribs as Alice’s cheeks turned red and she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Felix whistled under his breath, and Orbahn silently agreed.
She has it bad… He thought. I really hope I'm wrong.
“I’m a bit nervous about tomorrow,” Alice said into the phone. “I can’t imagine what will happen…”
“You said the same before Rank Assessment and you did well,” Eve replied.
Alice giggled. “I guess I did.”
She glanced at the table and noticed everyone watching her. Her cheeks flushed and she turned her back to them.
“Um. I miss you,” Alice whispered. The other end fell silent and Alice thought her heart might plummet to her feet any second. Embarrassment crept into it’s place.
“I’ve…thought about you a lot too,” Eve whispered back.
Alice closed her eyes and sighed. Just hearing her voice on the phone sent tingles through her body. She had enough relationships throughout her life to know a crush when she felt one, and she never tried to deny it. Still... she wanted Eve to feel the same way she did, but the Secretary was so skittish. So Alice held herself back.
At the very least, she knew there was SOMETHING there.
That’s enough for now… Alice told herself.
Muffled voices on the other end of the line stole Eve’s attention and the Secretary bid Alice a good night.
Alice hung up the leyline phone and turned back to the group at the table that was pretending not to listen.
Felix yawned dramatically and stretched.
“Well! I’m beat,” he announced. Dahlia chuckled.
The group thanked their hosts for their hospitality and retired to their guest house shed.
___
In the guest house shed, under a warm lantern light, Dahlia and Alice sat on Alice’s bedroll. Dahlia’s finger slipped through Alice’s white hair and deftly plaited it.
“You’re an expert braider,” Alice said. “My mom used to braid my hair when I was little but she passed before she could teach me and I just never learned anything more than the basics. It always came undone so fast.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dahlia said. Alice shrugged.
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”
The hands braiding Alice’s hair slowed and Alice peaked over her shoulder. The pained expression from a few nights ago had returned to Dahlia’s face.
On the other side of the curtain Orbahn and Felix serenaded them with a quiet chorus of snoring.
“I got better at it in the circus, but before that I used to braid my little sister’s hair,” she said.
“You have a sister?” Alice tried to turn to face her, but Dahlia stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
“I did,” she said quietly.
“So she…passed?”
Dahlia shook her head and finished the braid. Once it was tied off Alice turned around to face her friend.
“The Godwin family took her away,” Dahlia said.
“My family used to be nobles in the North March. We didn’t have a lot of power, but we had a small holding outside of our estate. My sister, Liana, is a year younger than me. She was always a little odd… but as she got older she started saying some really weird and scary stuff…”
A dark shadow passed over Dahlia’s face that hurt Alice’s heart.
“Stuff like, how she was broken. How her body wasn’t right. That she was missing parts of herself. All the way to how… How she didn’t belong with us… how her real family was out there… How she could feel them looking for her…”
She let go of Alice's completed braid, but her restless hands picked up several pieces of straw and started to braid them together as she spoke. She couldn’t look at Alice as she spoke.
Alice listened quietly. She watched Dahlia’s fingers deftly weave the straw as she composed herself to continue. A twisted bitterness marred Dahlia's face and the girl's big green eyes turned red at the edges as she fought away the tears.
“The worst part of it all was that, in some twisted sense, she was right. Just days after her sixth birthday, they showed up on our doorstep: the Godwins. Lord Godwin, the ruler of the House, ignored all of us as he walked right up to my sister and took her in his arms. And she... was so… happy. She CRIED. She clung to him and wept and he cried with her. The other Godwins with him were crying too. It was so creepy. He apologized for taking so long to find her…"
The straw braid in her hands snapped, so she dropped it and picked up new strands to resume the movement.
"I don’t know about in your world, but here when a noble family visits another, they stay for a few days. They exchange pleasantries, dine together, go hunting and so on.
But as soon as she was in his arms Lord Godwin scooped her up and tried to leave.
Me, my parents, and all of our servants, tried to stop him…
So he called HER.”
A chill ran down Alice’s spine at the sheer hatred Dahlia spit out in a single word.
“The only Lady of the Godwin house at the time. She was eight years old, and no one had noticed her because she was so quiet. She stepped between my family and hers and commanded the entire house to kneel.”
Dahlia’s body shook with rage and fear. Alice could practically smell her friend’s adrenaline building as she recalled the past. The reaction to something vividly traumatic…
“The Lady’s power of domination is unlike any power I’ve ever felt. Your body betrays you and no matter how your mind rails against it, you can’t control yourself.
It’s like hands made of ice are holding you, turning you into a puppet inside and out.”
A cold, creeping realization started crawling up Alice spine. A truth she wasn’t sure she was ready to face was slowly making itself known. Orbahn’s protective behavior at the Guild kept returning to her mind along with Eve’s evasiveness and distrust. Her strong desire to protect Dahlia, Patty and Daryl. Her myriad of scars.
Her eyes widened slightly and she rubbed her wrists, feeling the phantom grip of invisible hands.
Dahlia, who was turning the woven straw braid into a bracelet, didn’t notice.
“You wouldn’t know what it’s like,” Dahlia shook her head. “To have your head forced to the floor against your will. To hear your parents screaming beside you. Begging from the same position you’re in, to give them back their child. To watch them struggle against that power with all their strength and desperation.
To see them break mentally…when they can’t overcome the power of a child.
The Godwins left with my sister and when the Lady’s power released us… my parents just laid there. I tried to chase after them, but I was just a kid and my body screamed against following them. Like all of my instincts told me to run and hide instead.
In the end… my parents never recovered from the loss and my sister never came back, not even to visit. We lost our holding because my parents couldn’t rule it any longer. And when I was old enough I left on my own to try and earn some money. They… they didn’t stop me.”
Dahlia let out a big sigh, as if she was setting down something heavy she’d been carrying a long time.
“I was too young to join the Guild so I joined the circus at first. The money was decent, and since they took care of me I could send all of the money I made home to my parents.
The circus also traveled the kingdom so I used that as an opportunity to find news about my sister. Not that I heard much. I never heard any news of a second ‘Lady Godwin’…
I… have no idea what happened to her…”
Alice wished she knew what to say. Instead, she reached out and squeezed Dahlia’s hand.
“I’ll help you keep looking,” she promised. “I know that sounds… not very helpful coming from me, but I’ll still do it.”
Dahlia smiled weakly and wiped her wet eyes.
“A lot has changed since you’ve shown up,” she said. “So I kind of believe I’ll find her if we look together.” She tied the bracelet to Alice’s wrist and moved from the bedroll to her cot.
“Good night.”
Alice stretched out on the bedroll and extinguished the lantern light.
“Good night,” she replied.
As she shut her eyes it occurred to her that the boys had stopped snoring.
____
The next morning involved unfamiliar work for Alice.
The adventurers walked the perimeter of the village: Dahlia inside, Felix on the walkway up top, and Alice with Orbahn walked along the walls on the outside. Orbahn explained the fortifications and how they worked as well as what they were looking for.
As they rounded the wall and climbed the hill, an even larger hill way out in the marsh caught Alice’s eye.
It moved.
“Ah,” Orbahn muttered as Alice brought it to his attention. “That’s a bog mare.”
The hill turned, and revealed a muddy head in the shape of a rotting horse’s head. Alice stepped back and gripped Orbahn’s arm. He laughed.
“Hey! Check out the bog mare!” Felix shouted from the wall.
“We see it,” Orbahn shouted back. He removed Alice’s arm.
“It’s okay,” he said. “They’re fairly docile during the day. The sun dries them out and slows them down.”
“That is hardly okay,” Alice replied. Orbahn laughed again and motioned for them to continue inspecting the wall.
The wall inspection completed without issues, and a muddy Alice and Orbahn met back up with Felix and Dahlia for a quick lunch. During, they decided that Orbahn and Dahlia would ride their horses back a ways along the trail towards Gilly River so she could search for the missing adventurers and their wagon using her Gift.
Alice and Felix would work on the wells in town that needed repair.
“Ugh. No more. I can’t,” Felix wheezed as Alice pulled him over the ledge of the well. There were quiet a few wells around the village. They were deep and far too narrow for Alice so she’d been relegated to holding the rope to lower Felix down. After being sent down six wells, the fae boy had been coated in an unfortunate layer of grimy moss, repair clay, and some mysterious viscous black residue.
“Spare me please.”
“I’d take turns with you if I could,” Alice said. A thin man named Ben, coated in similar grime, who had been taking turns with Felix shrugged his shoulders. According to Danzig, he was the one use usually cleaned and repaired the wells.
Alice wouldn’t consider him the picture of health.
“All’s left is tha biggun in the square,” he said in a thick country accent. Danzig and his wife had a bit of what Alice would call a twang but Ben and several of the other villagers spoke in a much thicker accent that sent shivers up Alice’s spine and reminded her of the home he ran away from.
This place and that place aren't the same... don't overthink it... she chided herself.
“I can go down for that,” she volunteered. “That well’s pretty big.”
The man looked Alice up and down and shook his head.
“Is bigger sure… but how do me and the whisp pull you out once you down?”
“Whisp?” Felix furrowed his brows and shook his head. “Ugh. It’s fine, Alice. Let’s just get this over with.”
“I suppose the sun is setting soon,” Alice agreed. She collected the bag of repair tools and the bucket of clay mixture they were using for repairs and the three of them headed to the village square.
Schlepping tools, hauling water barrels, and even lowering two full grown men into a deep well… With just a small flare of her Gift it became a simple matter. Now that she understood how her power felt flowing through her, calling upon it became as easy as thinking. But she still didn’t understand it fully.
The ropes in her hands stopped sliding down into the well and a reassuring tug prompted her to let go. She peered over the ledge as Felix held up his lantern.
And promptly exclaimed, “What the fuck!?”
“Oh, that ain’t right,” echoed the other man over Felix’s shoulder.
“What’s going on?” Alice called.
Like the other wells in the village, the large one in the center was dry to the gravel aquifer floor, save for a small layer of a thick fluid that glistened like water but felt, according to Felix, a bit like a thick glue.
“There’s a big-ass hole in the side of the well,” Felix shouted. “Mortar isn’t going to fix this mess.”
Alice drove a stake from the tool bag into the ground and tied off the ropes she used to lower Felix and the villager before she peered over the side again. Follow the newest chapters on novelping(.)com.
“Can you see into the hole?”
“Sorta?” Felix replied. “It’s pitch black inside, so it’s probably pretty deep.” The lantern swayed as he tilted his head back to look up Alice and the villager, Ben, grabbed Felix’s shoulder.
“I jus’ saw somethin’ shiny,” he said. “Wave it again.”
Felix tilted the lantern again. “There’s something in the hole.”
He stepped closer and drew his dagger, and dragged it across the entrance of the hole. Thick viscous residue came off with his blade.
“Ugh. Gross- uwah!”
“Felix!” Alice screamed as she leaned over the well.
The fae boy’s shocked scream echoed up the well, and his body quickly vanished out of sight. The lantern fell sideways, casting a strange glow on the walls of the well as the villager reached into the dark hole Alice could now see. The villager had a grip on Felix’s arm, but the dark hole in the wall was pulsing and writhing, trying to swallow them both.
Alice gasped as the sludge on the floor of the well began to rise up the villager’s legs.
The lantern light went out.
Horse hooves thundered behind her and someone called out Alice’s name, but the woman had already vaulted herself over the edge of the well.
She hadn’t considered the depth of the fall. For a normal person, it would’ve probably killed them. At the very least, one could expect to shatter their bones.
A sharp pain rattled up her legs as she landed at the bottom, but Alice’s bones didn’t shatter. And she, once again, didn’t die. But there was no time to marvel at her abilities. The sludge on the floor had mostly pulled the villager into the mass in the breached well’s wall.
Felix was no longer visible at all.
Alice rushed forward and drove both arms into the sticky, writhing tar and her skin instantly burned. A sickening smell belched from the creature each time Alice’s arms moved the fluid.
“Fuck. Please be okay,” she muttered. “Please. Please!”
Her hands gripped flesh and she pulled but the tar creature wouldn’t give up its prey easily.
Alice called upon her gift, flaring the divine magic within. In the dark she saw the shine that rolled over her skin. The tar creature reacted strangely, turning hard like a non-newtonian fluid when Alice pulled. The bodies inside could easily be pulled in but even with her freakish strength she couldn't pull them out.
“Jesus christ!” She hissed. “GIVE THEM BACK!”
She raised her leg and slammed it against the wall of the well. The whole structure shuddered as cracks radiated around the edge. A large chunk of wall broke away under her foot and the tar creature lost half of the wall upon which it was resisting. Without it's anchor point, the creature oozed to the right like a thick mud.
Alice felt its grip on its prey loosen and pulled again as it tried to re-establish an anchor point. Both the villager and Felix came free of the creature’s ooze and Alice tossed the two of them behind her as the swirling black mass reattached to the wall and attempted to pull back its meal.
Despite being "this biggest well in the village" it had suddenly gotten a lot more difficult to move.
A rush of divinity pulsed through her, and Alice called upon the shield she discovered during the Rank Assessment. The creature’s sticky tendrils bounced off the barrier.
“ALICE!” Orbahn’s voice echoed down the well. When she looked up she saw quite a few heads staring over the side. How long had he been calling her?
“What’s happening?”
“Some black…oily…ooozy… THING swallowed Felix!” she shouted. “I got him back, but it’s not letting us leave!”
“Black ooze is a type of slime!” Dahlia shouted. “They’re weak to fire!”
“Great! I have none!” Alice shouted back.
“Incoming!” someone shouted, and tossed a blazing torch into the well. It fell through Alice’s shield, and burned at her feet.
“Listen to what I tell you to do,” Orbahn shouted. “It’s gonna hurt a lot, but don’t be scared!”
One: Understand the nature of fire. It’s hot. It burns. It pushes back the dark. It makes it hard to breathe and lets off smoke.
Two: Feel the energy that flows through fire. Fire IS energy. Fire is the flow.
Three: Take its essence into yourself. This is where it hurts. The fire will burn you from the inside. Don’t let it go yet. Take it in. Let it burn.
Four: Direct where you want it to go with your mind...
“And Five: Command it with the name given it by Nature! ‘Flame’!”
“FLAME!”
The faerie words roared from Alice’s mouth as a raging inferno. The once damp and dank well burned hot as an oven and the scent of phantom cinders singed even the noses of the people watching from above.
She burned. Inside and out the fire consumed all of her. She wanted to send it away.
The fire of the torch sprang to life and the shield disappeared as she commanded the fireball at the black ooze.
The creature went up in a fantastic blaze and Alice brought up her shield once more to protect against the flaming flailing creature. Thick, acrid smoke that smelled like burning tires billowed from the creature, turning the well into a chimney. Alice covered her nose and mouth with her cloak and strained her gift, pushing the shield larger as she tried to force the creature back.
Eventually, the slime retreated into the hole in the well’s wall, and the light of the fire burning its flesh revealed a deep cavern as it fled.
Once the light of the fire vanished, Alice wasn’t sure if the creature died or if it simply went too far into the cave to see. She dropped the shield protecting the three people at the bottom of the well.
The villager groaned as Alice shook him and once he roused he slowly got to his feet. Felix didn’t wake, but when Alice performed VERY CAREFUL chest compressions, the remnants of ooze escaped out of his mouth and he shuddered and gasped for air.
The boy’s skin was burned and peeling and his uniform clung to him in various stages of decay. The villager was covered in gnarly blisters that threatened to burst.
Alice’s own arms blistered and burned, but they couldn’t just stay at the bottom of the well. So she removed her cloak, and created a sling for Felix. Orbahn, Dahlia, and several villagers pulled the rope from above.
Slowly, Felix left the well.
Once he was up and over they dropped the sling back down for the villager, and finally for Alice.
When she reached the ledge, an army of hands rushed forward to grab her. Twenty or so faces circled her, staring in awe.
Dahlia pushed through the crowd and wrapped her arms around Alice’s waist. Tears streamed down the girl’s face as she buried it against Alice’s stomach.
“You idiot,” she cried into Alice’s stomach, staining her tunic with tears. “You fool. You just jumped. You could have died. How dare you? Just last night you promised….” She sobbed and gripped tighter.
“I’m okay, Dee,” Alice huffed, trying to breathe under her friend’s crushing hug. “I’m sorry. I am. But right now we need to help Felix.”
Danzig, his wife, and two others had brought cots to use as stretchers to carry Felix and the other wounded villager back to their house. Orbahn, Alice, and Dahlia followed close behind. And behind them the rest of the village followed, singing Alice’s praises.
They called her a hero.