Smoke and Mirrors (24)

Twenty-Four

Shade Bandits

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“This path keeps changing,” Sterling complained. If a look could freeze, the map he held would have been an ice block.

I sighed and marched up to him. “Look, let me see it.” I pulled the map from his hands and rotated it. Areas of the map were shaded, with the words Rebel Territory printed out boldly. Thankfully, we weren’t going there.

This particular map was different from other maps I’d seen. Unlike most maps, this map didn’t tell you how to find a place, but rather, how to identify where you were. For instance, each place was marked with a tallying system. Three strokes occupied a cluster of homes, two strokes marked a town, and so on. There were statues of different creatures beside each location to help us identify our surroundings.

This place was more than confusing. It was impossible.

Huffing, I turned and shoved the map towards Adrian, who was vigilantly scanning our surroundings. He always seemed to do that.

“Adrian, you’re better at navigating this place. Why don’t you figure it out?”

He looked down at me and accepted the map. He squinted for a moment and glanced around at our quiet, shadowy surroundings. Nothing made noise here, which was almost just as creepy as the shadows. Even the trees and grass looked as if they were made of shadows. One thing I continued to notice about the trees was the fact that they were all enormous in size, and most of them had large, twisting roots that made hollows under the trees big enough to hide a child or a small adult inside.

“This way,” he said. “We’re at Five, which is near the border gate. That means if five has shifted to the border, then most likely the castle is beside two or three, deeper in the kingdom.” He looked up at Sterling and I. “Make sense?”

We shook our heads.

A whoosh of wind suddenly broke the silence as it buzzed above our heads. All I saw was a blur of movement, a flash of yellow, and then it was gone.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Air Steamer,” Adrian replied. “The fairies brought the idea over from the human world. Haven’t you seen one?”

I wracked my brain for the term, but then realized he must have meant an airplane. Still, this was too small to be an airplane. . .

“They use them to survey the forests near the border,” Sterling said. “The king must have received my message. He’s probably looking for us through that thing.”

I nodded. It sounded to me like an Air Steamer was nothing more than a camera drone. Hopefully.

We walked on for a while in silence. I didn’t see any elves, which was comforting, but the silence was almost unbearable. My ears rang with the lack of noise. The only sound that accompanied us was the crinkle of the map, or the rustling of our clothes. The ground made no noise.

“Is it different for Shadow people here?” I asked. “Everything I touch is cold and wispy.” It was the weirdest sensation. If I touched a tree branch, at first it would feel cold, like mist almost, and then my hand would touch the actual branch, which was solid. But everything felt cold and wispy before I touched whatever was solid. “Is this place more, I don’t know, solid for the natives?”

Adrian nodded. “That’s just how it is here. If they want you to feel at home here, you’ll feel everything normally. If they don’t recognise that you belong here though, everything stays just as it is.”

“Who is ‘they’?” I asked.

He shrugged and opened his mouth to reply.

THWAP! An arrow sped past my face, cooling my cheek with a breeze, and embedded itself into the tree beside Adrian. Shadows rolled away in waves from the impact.

Shadow or not, that was very real.

“Get down!” Adrian shouted. He rushed to my side and shoved me out of the way just as another onslaught of arrows shot towards us.

I fell to the ground, grunting with the impact of the dirt.

“What on the inside is that?!” Sterling shouted, voicing my own thoughts.

My heart raced in my chest and I felt paralyzed from where I laid on the ground.

“Shade Bandits!” Adrian shouted, unsheathing something from one of the straps under his shirt that looked like a small pistol. Unlike a pistol, the end was squared off and wide, which made the barrel look more like a rectangle than the barrel of a gun

One of the bandits advanced forwards. It was a male, and his bow was drawn back, ready to fire. “If the three of you come with us, nobody has to get hurt.” His expression was menacing, and something about his eyes–other than their unnatural color–scared me.

Adrian scoffed. “Yeah, like that’ll ever happen. Let us alone and we’ll pass through here peacefully.”

The elf shook his head. “I’m afraid we can’t do that. A king and a lost princess? There’s no way I’m letting your group escape.” He pulled the bowstring back threateningly.

I inhaled sharply. How did he know me?

Adrian’s gun-shaped object had a trigger, and when he pulled it, out shot a long, steady stream of fire that was stronger and more intense than anything I’d ever seen before.

The shade bandit cried out and disappeared as the fire from Adrian’s gun hit him. There were four more elves circling us with bows however, so that wasn’t enough to save us.

Sterling lashed out with his mirrors just as another two or three arrows shot at us. Using long, sticky strands of mirror, he was able to knock the arrows out of the air before they hit any of us. He then wrapped his mirror around two of the bandits and lifted them into the air roughly, so that their heads whipped backwards and then forwards like a pair of ragdolls. He quickly knocked their heads together and they fell to the ground, unconscious.

“Hey, nice. You roasted those guys!” Adrian commented, shooting at another elf.

One of the elves jumped down from a tree above and pinned me to the ground.

I screamed. What else could I do?

Water suddenly ran out of the elf’s skin. I stared in shock as the water ripped away from him and scattered over the ground. The elf’s skin shriveled as if he was a thousand years old. His bright, yellow eyes caught my own with a frozen look of horror. With that, he fell over, dead.

I jerked back and pushed the body off of me.

Had I done that?!

“Woah,” Sterling whispered. His eyes were fixed on me, realising what I had just done. There was fear behind them.

I stood and held my hands up. “I–I didn’t mean to.” My heart thundered in my chest.

He turned sharply as a shadow dart raced past me and crashed into his forehead. The arrow melted into the skin there, as if it had never been real.

His eyes grew wide and he collapsed.

“Sterling!” I shouted. How would we finish our journey if he was dead?!

I hurried to his side and knelt beside him, but he was asleep. Or dead, a thought whispered.

Adrian shot the final elf with a steady stream of fire and hurried to Sterling and I. “Was he hit?!” he demanded.

My chin wobbled as I spoke. “Yeah–there. On the head.” I pointed to just above his temple, where I saw the dart strike. His pale, silvery-white hair was growing darker there. If the shadow dart was already doing that, there was no telling what else it was doing inside.

“Oh, flame. We have to get him somewhere safe–quickly.” He stood and grabbed him by the ankles. “I don’t suppose we can just drag him, can we?”

I blinked down at him. His pale lashes kissed his cheek like flakes of snow, as if he was just asleep and not possibly dying.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “But I’ll help carry him. You grab the feet, I’ll get the wrists.”

“No, no. I can get him. Can’t let the princess pull a muscle now, can we?” He hoisted Sterling over his back and we hurried on.

Eventually, we came to a place with a large tree. The roots were giant and gnarled, twisting in and out of themselves as if someone had created a doorway out of them. Underneath, the tree was hollow.

“Let me check it out,” I told Adrian. “If it’s big enough, we can put Sterling in there until he recovers.”

“No way. You’re not going inside a tree. Who knows what kind of creatures could be there! Just wait and I’ll–”

“I’ll be fine,” I replied exasperatedly. “Don’t worry.”

I slipped into the hollow between the roots and crawled deeper and deeper until I had determined that the small cave was definitely big enough. In fact, there was enough room that likely all of us could fit down there. Other than some small, fuzzy white creatures that left the moment they saw me, there was nothing there.

I climbed back out of the tree and motioned for Adrian to follow. “It’s all clear.” Adrian knelt down, Sterling on his back, and lowered his body to the ground. I slipped back into the hole and grabbed Sterling’s feet. “I’ll pull him in until there’s enough space for you to slip in,” I told him.

“Alright.” He pushed Sterling towards me and I pulled. Together, we were able to maneuver his body around the twisting roots and lower him to the dirt floor. Adrian slipped in after Sterling. “What now?”

I shrugged. “You tell me. Is getting shot by a shadow very dangerous?”

Adrian glanced at Sterling. “Depends on the weilder’s strength. Some are very powerful in these lands, others aren’t. The more powerful ones can put a person in a lifelong coma with a small blow to the head, or kill them instantly.”

I shivered. “What can we do to bring him out of it? What if this is permanent?”

He looked away. “There’s really nothing we can do other than wait and pray he sleeps it off. Shadow darts are nothing to play with. Some go insane after being shot with a dart.”

“Well, he was already insane, so hopefully that helps.”

Adrian snorted. “Wow, don’t you play the part of the worried betrothed well.”

I shrugged. “Just trying to diffuse the tension.”

What worried me though, was the fact that the strand of hair at his head was turning darker and darker. Just earlier it had been grey. Now, in the glow of light from the exit near us, I could tell that it was a very dark shade of black.

What was it like inside his head?

“He’ll have nightmares,” Adrian said quietly. “Horrible, dark nightmares. That’s what usually sends a person into insanity. They’re not fun.”

“You look like you’ve experienced them,” I commented, noting the bead of sweat breaking out above his brow, and the crinkle in his forehead.

“I have. Not as badly as Sterling, though. It didn’t knock me out, but for the next week, every time I’d sleep, my nightmares were awful.”

“What did you see?” I asked. “Are all shadow darts so bad?”

“That depends. You see, a shadow dart shows you your shadows. Your darkest fears that cover up your soul. The dreams change depending on what a person’s fears are.”

“Wow.” I glanced at Sterling. His tunic was dirty and a small cut bled on his hand, likely from the attack. For the first time, I noticed a long scar across his knuckles on his left hand. “I almost feel sorry for the moron.”