Chapter 8: Chapter 8 – Camping, Dreams, and Terror

Chapter 8 - Camping, Dreams, and Terror

We had abandoned the newly blooded clearing about an hour past. Jax had continued teasing me about his new ‘sumptuous mistress’ for some time. I knew that he had started moving into pure bullshit when he started embellishing her with little details like her ‘ruby red lips’ and her ‘midnight dark hair’ and other more and increasingly lascivious details. I did not much care, though. It was fun just bantering with the guy. It took my mind off of the realities I was now facing.

I had just had a life and death experience. Real combat. Admittedly, I had not actually done much of anything. But I had come extremely close to a predatory monster. Watching it eat that Gob was going to haunt my nightmares for years. And I had been mere feet away from it at the time. I was still lightly shaking from the experience.

“What was that thing back there, Jax?” I asked.

“Like I said, mate. I never seen the like.”

That confused me, “Come on, surely you must have at least heard of something like it before? Featherless giant bird monster? No wings?”

He glanced at me, frowning, “It’s be not that uncommon. Some critter gets spat out from the Dungeon.” He shook his head, “The Shepherdess be always tinkerin’ with the beasties, they say.”

“The Shepherdess? Is that another goddess?” I queried.

He considered me for a moment before nodding, “Right. I be forgettin’ ye not be familiar.” It took him a moment as he collected his thoughts, “Ye may call ‘er a goddess, an’ some do, aye. But she not be one fer the kind. Only the three fer us. But ye be right in that they ain’t the only spawn of… er…” and here he glanced up to the sky, held three fingers — from pinky to middle — aloft, and then brought them to his lips, “the Watcher.” That was a religious gesture if I had ever seen one. And of protection, at that.

I really had no idea what he was on about, though. “Maybe you should give me the lowdown on this religion of yours. The short version, anyway. I feel like I’m playing catchup any time you start talking about them.”

There were three main deities, he explained obligingly, of the ‘kind’. This, I found out was his term for the various races of men, though I supposed that ‘sentient races’ would be better, nowadays. They were created or spawned, as he put it, by a being known only as the Watcher for the purposes of caring for, bringing order to, and helping the kind to raise in power. They were named Maeve, Ginna, and Bline, respectively. Besides them, there were two others. One was called the Shepherdess of the Creatures of the Dark. He did not know what her name was, but she was supposed to be responsible for creating endless varieties of monsters for the kind to contest against. Then there was the last, and youngest of the Watcher’s spawn, who was sometimes called the Lady of the Dungeon or else simply the Demon Queen. Here again, he did not know her true name or really what her aspects were save that she was associated with this Dungeon.

“Wait, so they are all goddesses?” I interrupted him.

He nodded, “Aye, so they say. Save the Watcher, mind. No one knows much about himself, though. Even if he be man, woman, or beast. May be you might glean more from a priest or sommat.”

I thought for a moment, “And you say he spawned them. Like… what? Gave birth to? Formed them out of clay? What?”

He chuckled, “And how would I know that, lad? Wasn’t there, now was I?” He gave me the side eye, “Formed them out of clay, he says. Ha!”

“Hey, man. Aphrodite was born from the leaking semen of Uranus’ gonads after his son, Cronus, cut them off and tossed them into the sea. So it’s a legitimate question,” I reasoned.

Jax looked at me, horrified. “What kind o’ sick, cursed religion do you people have where ye be from?” He shuddered.

I laughed, “Oh that’s just one of the older ones. Although the newer ones have some decidedly odd things going on, as well.”

“Older ones? How many do ye have?”

“Oh, something like four thousand, I think,” I replied. It had been a while since I had read up on it.

“Four thousand? How, cup me in the Hands, are ye supposed to keep up with so many?” Jax exclaimed.

“You don’t,” I laughed. “Most people really only know about the one they’re raised in. And besides, only about five or six of them are very popular anymore. And that has more to do with ancient wars and politics than anything else.” I sighed, “It’s a pretty complicated subject, actually.”

Jax snorted, muttering to himself, “Complicated, ‘e says. Imagine four thousand Ladies fair all falling by the wayside, forgotten like chaff because they’s unpopular. They’d never stand fer it, I’d reckon.”

I gave him a sidelong look. Yeah… Let’s not dive into that hole.

Sometime later, about the time that the sun was setting, we arrived at the road. The sun had dried up most of the water from the thunderstorm the night previous, but it was still pretty muddy, overall.

“Here we are, lad. Now whereabouts did ye say ye found them artifacts?”

“Like I said, Jax, they were by a wagon rut about four hours back from where you found me,” I explained. “Uh… there was a pretty big rock nearby. On the right of the road… or the right if you are going that way,” I said, pointing. But then I looked around. Which side of the forest had we come out of?

Jax gave a firm nod, knowingly, “Sounds like a half-day mark. The closest one would be off that a way,” he pointed in the opposite direction. “We’ve over shot the mark a bit, then. Maybe an hour.” At that, he glanced at the sun just now beginning to dip below the horizon. “Let’s camp fer now. No sense in buildin’ a fire in the dark.”

I agreed with that sentiment wholeheartedly, and after the last couple of days, the idea of sleeping, even on the naked earth, sounded like bliss. I volunteered to collect some firewood while he set up camp.

We soon had a nice little fire going, or I should say, Jax did. I knew from watching some survival shows that you were supposed to use flint and steel by catching a spark on a bundle of tinder. What exactly ‘tinder’ was, though, was beyond me. So, I watched with some fascination as Jax stripped some bark off of a young tree and began rubbing it quickly between his palms. This soon gave way to a little fluff ball of wooden strands. He sat this on the ground and caught a spark on it from the fire starter kit. Bringing it to his face and continuously blowing on it, it soon burst into a small flame in his hands which he placed underneath the little tipi of wood I had assembled for him. When the fire caught, I applauded happily.

“What?” he looked at me, confused.

“Uh… congratulations on… making the fire.” Shit. He must do this every day.

He looked me up and down. “Uh huh… Jus’ wait ‘til I unroll the bed rolls. Ye’ll be creamin’ yer pantaloons.” He shuddered, “An’ that’s an image I did nay need.”

I snorted, “Hey, you’re the one that said it.”

Dismissing me, he reached into his pack and collected one of the helmets from the grave sites left at the bandit camp. When I commented on it, he simply shrugged, “They did nay need it anymore.” Upending it, he poured out a bit of the heavily spiked water from one of the skins into the basin formed at the bottom of the helmet. Then he scooped out a couple of jars of pemmican into it and set the helm next to the fire to boil rather like a saucepan. He dubbed this concoction ‘pemmers stew’. It looked… unholy. I ate it anyway. It tasted like dried meat, fat, and berries stewed in lighter fluid. Because it was.

“Gack,” Jax said, scowling over his portion. “Where did ye say you found this shite? These all taste off.”

“How can you tell?” I said, choking down my bile.

“Aye, it’s not just me, then. That’s good.”

After we finished eating, we sat for a while in silence. It had been another long day, and we were both dirt tired. Idly, I decided to dig out the little gem I had stowed in my pack. Jax had eventually refused my offer and settled on an even split of our take, saying it was part of being partners. I still did not know what had been bothering him about it.

Damn it all. Where is that little thing? Finding a grain of sand in a backpack is easier said than done. Frustrated, I looked back out to the road. My mind drifted back to the last time I had been here, dropped from the sky straight into a mud puddle. It felt like a lifetime ago.

That’s right. After I fell, I started playing with RPG commands. I looked down at the pack in my hands. And I have a ‘storage container’.

I sat the pack down and smiled. “Inventory,” I said quietly into the open air.

My pack highlighted momentarily and little ghost images of all the things stored inside swung up before me in a nice orderly list. I noticed, off to the side, there were buttons to sort by type, alphabetically, and by how recently they had been acquired. Ladies and gentlemen, the eighth wonder of the world.

In short order, I found the ghost image of the gem and went to grab it, but when I touched it, the image flashed and all of the ghostly apparitions vanished. The gem then lifted itself from the inside of my pack and came to rest in my hand. I just stared at it for a long while, hardly believing my eyes. I stand corrected.

“Jax,” I squealed, “did you just see this shit?”

“Hmm? What ‘er y’on about now?”

Quickly, I explained what I had done. Jax was completely flummoxed by this turn of events and demanded I show him. We were soon both giggling like school children as we played at making things hover out of our bags. Seeing the gruff bandit laughing so joyfully was so out of character as to be shocking, but I was just happy to see that the man could find happiness in something so simple. Apparently, this was not something Jax had ever been capable of before, and he had never heard of magic like it.

“Do you think it had something to do with your curse?” I asked.

He shook his head, “I do nay think so, mate. Many of the other bandits came to the life much older, and I never heard o’ the like from any o’ them.”

“Huh. That would mean that either this is an undiscovered magic that your Lady supplies, or it is unique to the pair of us.” I dismissed the idea, “I don’t see how that could be, though.”

“Whatever it be, tis convenient as a pair o’ tits.”

I agreed. I was confused, but I agreed.

A bit later, I was just snuggling into my bedroll for the night. The ground was hard, but I was exhausted and more than ready to slip into unconsciousness. Unfortunately, my menu decided to start blipping at me. Cracking an eye open, I saw a short litany of skill improvements that I had managed to accumulate over the day but that the menu had, for some reason, declined to notify me of until now.

Included were a couple of points in [Walking], which I felt were well earned. I did not really know what increasing my walking skill could accomplish, but if it meant less blisters, then I was all for it. There were also a couple of new skills. One was called [Combat Acumen], which, when I poked at it, explained that it was a skill related to knowing what to do in the middle of a fight, who to target next, the weakest link, and etcetera. It was only level one, of course, but I would take what I could get. The other was [Fire Starting], also level one. I would have to thank Jax for that.

I was surprised that the system let you learn skills without having to buy them. I would have to make sure, in the future, not to waste skill points on things that I could learn the normal way. Of course, that begged the question as to whether you could learn every skill the normal way. Probably not, I realized. You cannot just learn how to be immortal, after all, and I knew for a fact that it was an option.

The last thing to pop up was a notification letting me know that I had gained another ten percent loyalty with Jax. Unfortunately, it did not indicate what precisely I had done in order to earn said loyalty. Thinking back, there had been the beginnings of that common banter that guys go through as they get to know one another. I did not like to admit it, but I was still relatively new to the concept.

I had been a sheltered and shy boy growing up and realizing that the light-hearted yet constant teasing I had experienced from other boys was not some ubiquitous form of bullying had taken me an embarrassing amount of time to accomplish. It was just how men got to know each another. I liked to think of it as a sort of game. There were even rules to it. For instance, everyone had at least one certain topic that you were not to prod. I called it ‘the black ball’. Once you found it, you were never to bring it up again… unless, of course, you really needed some ammo. But it was considered a low blow. I had not found Jax's yet.

Resummoning my stat sheet, I saw that the loyalty meter had risen to a total of thirty percent. There was no indication of what that meant, however. I figured it was at least good enough to count on Jax putting me out if I were on fire.

Giving a mental shrug, I dismissed my screens and rolled over to finally get some rest.

I was standing in line at the grocery store, idly playing a game on my phone. It was one of those Bejeweled clones but with monsters. Pay to win, of course, like they all are. Naturally, I had not spent a dime on it — a fact I was mildly proud of. At this point, though, I had been playing the game for well over a year, and I was getting really tired of it. Still, I did not want to delete it after all the time I had spent leveling up my characters. It was something to do.

The line moved forward.

I heard the sound of arguing from the line next to me. Looking over, I saw two very pretty girls having a quiet dispute with each other. One had hair that had a metallic silvery shimmer, just past shoulder length, and from her expression, she seemed fairly pissed off. The other one, who was pushing their cart, had extremely black hair which curled lightly as it fell to the middle of her back and two thick horns which erupted from the top of her forehead and curled back around her skull until they finally curved up to their points, almost touching above and behind her head. They were otherwise completely identical in face and form. And despite their somewhat unusual appearance, they were dressed perfectly normally for a trip to the grocery store, like regular college aged girls.

I looked them over appreciatively, especially the dark haired one. I had always had a thing for girls with horns. She looked over and winked at me. Blushing furiously, I turned my attention back to my game.

“…and I say again that this isn’t fair!” the silver haired one was saying. “This one belonged to me. You can’t just change the rules!”

“I didn’t change anything, and you know it,” the horned woman replied, quite calmly. She began inspecting her nails, which I noticed were actually more like claws. Looking back at her near twin, she continued, “I am merely taking advantage of a loophole.”

“Next, please.” The line moved forward.

“And what a loophole!” the silver haired beauty quietly raged. “I shall have to discuss this with our Sister! She has never done something like this before.”

“Honestly, I don’t see why you’re so upset. What even does it matter anyway?”

“It matters because this one was mine!” she slapped the cart in frustration. I glanced down to see what they were buying. Sitting there, along with the obligatory stalk of celery and loaf of French bread, on a Styrofoam plate and wrapped in cellophane, was Jax, obliviously sleeping. I noticed a price sticker from the deli department was sloppily attached indicating he had been marked down to only $9.99 per pound. It seemed like quite the steal, if you asked me. “The proper observances were not met! Do you have any idea how humiliating this is for me?”

“Next, please.” It was my turn, finally. I began loading my haul onto the conveyor. Pizza pockets. Pot pies. Tater tots. An M16A2 5.56mm assault rifle. Corn dogs. You know. Bachelor essentials.

“You will just have to take it up with Her then. Honestly, it came as a complete surprise to me, as well. I mean imagine! Taking mine as some sort of prize? To tell you the truth, I would be furious if this bit of fortune hadn’t dropped into my lap.”

I could not see them anymore, as we were now separated by the partition of snacks and magazines. Nonchalantly, I glanced over at the Weekly World News. The headline read something about a bandit camp that had recently been slaughtered to a man. The rag blamed some secretive unnamed government organization and raved about the upcoming cover up that was in the works. In the lower corner, it also mentioned that they were featuring exclusive coverage of the recent marriage of Batboy to Queen Elizabeth II. The photo was horribly photoshopped.

“Ugh. Who even reads this crap?” I muttered.

“That’ll be $76.95,” the cashier said in a dead monotone.

Shaken from my reverie, I hurriedly dug out five potato skins from my wallet and handed them to the cashier.

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Sighing with extreme ‘I’m so done with this shit’ aplomb, the cashier said, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”

Looking around in confusion, I realized that I was indeed at a Wendy’s, after all. How could I have been so dumb? Everyone knew that Wendy’s did not take potato skins anymore!

The whole store erupted into laughter. Shivering in embarrassment, I fled the store. As I burst through the doors, nearly in tears and scolding myself for letting my emotions get the better of me, I happened to glance up at the noon day sky. It was a completely clear day, one of those blue skies that only ever really show up in the late summer, the air still and the heat shimmering off the pavement.

That was when the sky cracked. The whole of it, the entire dome of the sky, split cleanly down the middle and opened to a great eye. The size of a solar system.

Raw, indescribable terror seized me at the sight of it. Currents of souls whirled in the veins of the whites of that eye, themselves the size of Jupiter. The disk of its iris, black as the night sky, was only discernible from the pupil by the tiny motes of stars filtering through. Its stare was like being singled out and stripped bare by the universe itself. The whole landscape started to get sucked into that one enormous, impossible, glowing mass. Wind blasted me from behind, greater than any force I had ever before felt. My feet seemed to come unstuck from the ground, and I was slowly lifted up.

Suddenly, the woman was there — her horns crowning her head like the most regal of diadems while her hair whipped furiously in the wind — grasping me by my shirt collar. Yanking me down to face her, she screamed, “Don’t look at Him, you fool! Do you want to go mad?”

And then she kissed me.

Jerking awake, I stared up at the faintly speckled and yet otherwise mundane night sky. In my confusion, it took me some moments to get my breathing back under control.

What the fuuuuuuuuuuck? Was that? Groaning internally, I thought I should probably lay off of the pemmican. My stomach chose that moment to gurgle in protest over my recent greasy diet. What a dream.

The details were already beginning to scatter in my now conscious mind. The now muted experience of cosmic horror was all but forgotten in the dimly lit evening sky. But one thing I would for certain remember. Potato skins? Ha! As if.

Turning toward the fire in the hope of salvaging the rest of the night’s sleep, I noticed Jax on the opposite side. He was laying with his back to me, shirtless. I could see by the orange glow of the fire that he had a mild yet sickly sheen of sweat covering his body. I’m not the only one that crap is messing with.

Then, I heard him give out a low moan. Minutely concerned, I raised my head to get a better look. “Me lovely… yes… say ‘er again. What were our strength?” he whispered. That was when I heard that tell-tale rhythmic sound that every man knows oh-so-well. “What be our skill with the blade, yer sexy…”

My mind seized. Quickly turning around again, I began screaming internally. The man was using the Lady of Power like a phone sex operator! Lightly, I began beating my head against the hard ground in an effort to forever expunge this moment from my brain. I would fail.

The next morning was a quiet affair. There were ‘things’ on my mind that I did not want to talk about. Jax, for his part, also chose to keep his peace. We had both awoken at about the same time as day broke over the horizon. Both of us paced some distance away from each other, studiously avoiding eye-contact as is only proper, and we handled our morning business. I rubbed at my face. The 5 o’clock shadow that I had been nursing over the course of the last day or so was starting to develop into full on beard territory. I desperately needed to shave. Finishing my ablutions, I turned to retrieve my bedroll. Packing up camp was swift, as our gear was simple.

Finally, I looked Jax over from the corner of my eye. I saw no trace of the beard I was now suffering with, though I did see a bit of peach fuzz coming in on his head.

“You’re a redhead?” I asked.

Jax looked up from washing out his helmet, “Oh, aye.” He rubbed at his head. “Usually keep ‘er shaved, though. Easier to wash.”

I nodded sagely. My own hair was beginning to show signs of that shiny patina that only shampoo can cure. And I had none.

He looked me over curiously, particularly focused on my patchy facial hair, “Yer know, I never thought to ask it, afore…” he paused as if mildly embarrassed, “What be yer kind, if ya do nay mind the tellin’? I never seen yer like.”

“You’ve never seen a human before?”

“Nay, I never have,” he said, shaking his head. Then giving a dismissive shrug, he muttered, “The world be wide.”

“I suppose,” I said, thinking. “While we’re on the subject, what is… your kind?”

Jax looked at me, slightly surprised, “Me? Why I be a lilim, o’ course.”

That brought us both up short. Questions started rapidly spinning through my head. Jax, meanwhile, had a look that said that whatever it was that had just come out of his mouth, it was wrong.

“Jax… does your goddess… uh, Bline,” I struggled to remember the name he had given her. “Does she have a reputation for screwing with people’s heads?”

From his expression, certain things were beginning to click together. “She be a goddess, mate,” he said as if that explained everything. But then he continued, “That be only natural.”

“Alright. At least that does help clear one thing up. Lilim is a race of some kind. For some reason, I was thinking it was more like a title.”

Jax said nothing to that, only looking at the ashes of the fire in thought.

“So, if you are a lilim now, then do you know what race you were?” I asked.

Slowly, Jax shook his head. “When I try to ask me ownself, I can only think, lilim I be. But the trouble is, I don’t know what that is supposed to mean.” As he spoke, Jax seemed to become increasingly distraught. I could sympathize. And that thought brought up a certain elephant that had been following me around for the last day. It took the opportunity to poke me on the shoulder insistently.

“Uh… While we’re on the subject. I do have one confession. That spell I cast on you that seems to be the cause of all of this? It demanded that I give you a new name.”

Jax was silent for a long breath. “Are ye telling me that ‘Jax’ ain’t even me own name?”

I sighed. “It would seem that it is now.”

He looked down at his pack for a bit, and without speaking, shouldered it and started walking. I watched him go, sadly. Shit. That was too much all at once.

After he had walked maybe twenty to thirty yards, Jax stopped and turning said, “Are ye coming?”

Hastily assembling my own gear, I hurried after him.

We walked silently for a time, each of us lost in the sea of the unknown. Neither knowing what to say. For my part, I felt that I should at least apologize. That would be a start, anyway.

“I’m sorry, Jax,” I began. “I shouldn’t have cast that spell without knowing what it would do.”

“Maybe,” he replied. “I were dyin’ though. I know that true.” After another minute of only our footsteps for company, he continued, “I suppose it better to be alive and different, than dead and gone.”

I looked at him, “Other than the name change, I don’t see any difference. Maybe you were a lilim all along?”

Smirking, he said, “No. I don’t know many things. But I know that whatever I were, that I were not. I know it in me bones.”

“Then they must look the same.”

“Could be.” Glancing at me he asked, “Do ye know what me old name was by any chance?”

I shook my head in the negative. “At the time, you were just a half-dead bandit that had fed me the once. I felt that I owed you at least something for that.”

“Ye saved me life because I fed yer?” he snorted. “Like the tales of the Faen, come down in disguise to test the metal o’ kind.”

“The Faen?”

“Helpers o’ the goddesses. And mischief makers,” he said by way of explanation.

Before I could continue what seemed to be my unending and ever increasing bevy of questions, Jax pointed, “That be the ha’ day mark jus’ there.”

Looking at where he was indicating, I realized that I recognized this spot. There ahead was the rock where my phone had been smashed, and as we approached, I saw the wheel rut where I had landed. It was mostly dry now, though you could still see the faint outline of where I had face planted. What water was left there was rippling lightly, perhaps from our footsteps. Of the chair, however, there was no sign. Mostly, anyway. There were still a few bits of plastic strewn about.

Jax bent over to pick up one of the pieces, “What be this? I never seen the like as it.”

How do I explain plastic... “Uh… it’s made out of oil, I think. It’s pretty versatile but not very durable.” Looking around, I continued, “This is were I found the ‘artifact’, alright. But it seems to be gone. Someone must have taken it.” Out in the distance trees, I heard a faint crash. This place was starting to get to me.

Jax sighed, “That would be the luck, then.” He tossed the broken bit of plastic to the ground and stood. “Three days from anywhere, fortune lands, so of course, scavengers be upon it afore ye can blink.”

Not knowing what else to say, I asked, “What do we… wait, did you say three days?”

Nodding curtly, he pointed in the direction we had come, “Aye. Three days that way be a little hamlet by the name o’ Darvinton. Not much to ‘er. Just some huts pushed together to make something in the wild. There be nothin’ past that save the mountains. It be weeks ter get to the settles o’ kind again. Or so they tell. I never been. And that way,” he pointed in the opposite direction, “ain’t too much better. Not fer a ways, anyway. About three and a half days, maybe four, is a village called Kemry-in-the-moors. It be no much, but it do have an inn at the least. Past that a ways be Bradfirth, and what passes fer the local governs.” He spat, “Bunch a pricks, the lot. But if ye want a city proper, we must to Bradfirth.”

“But so remote? And with all the monsters about, you would think people wouldn’t build so far out. A day, at most.”

Jax dipped his head, “Aye normally. But this be the Allenwood. None’d build here in the middle of it. Lucky to have the road, really. Plus, them fuckers in Darvinton are a bunch o’ mush headed fools.”

I smirked a bit at that, “Well, if they’re all fools, then what does that make your friends back at that bandit camp?”

Giving me an expressionless look, Jax simply replied, “Dead.”

Mortified, I started, “Ah, jeez, Jax. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean…”

Jax began grinning before I finished. “Bah, I’m just jestin’ ya. They were a lot o’ rat bastards the lot of ‘em.” Somewhat quietly, he added, “And so were I.”

I did not know how to respond to that admission. To tell the truth, I still did not know Jax all that well. From the sound of it, he seemed to be experiencing some survivor’s guilt — a phenomenon I had heard of, but never had to deal with — and was covering it with humor. Giving a mental shrug, I figured I would let Jax come to terms with whatever he was feeling on his own. But if he wanted to talk about it, I would listen.

Jax continued, “But to answer your implication, we were in the middle o’ the wood in part by necessity, as I’m sure ye can guess, and in part by way o’ the nature o’ the curse.”

“How so?”

“As outlaws, ya see, while we can nay gain power from the Lady, we also be of no interest to the Dungeon. That confers a certain degree of, shall we say, indifference from Her creatures,” he explained.

Before I could address the several questions that came to mind at this new information, a deafening sound ripped through the morning air, “BO-AH-AH-AAAGH!”

Looking around wildly, I shouted, “What was that?!”

Jax started trembling with dawning realization, and uttered with a shaking voice, “No. No, by Maeve.”

My question was soon answered, however, when a gigantic red frog about the size of a baleen whale crashed through the trees and onto the track.

Waiting not a scant second, Jax yelled, “Run, lad!” And following his own advice, he pelted past me in a dead sprint.

The frog turned toward us and leapt into the air, landing a scant thirty yards from me. I did not need any more encouragement than that, and tripping a bit before I could get my feet to obey me, I began my own panicked flight.

Already panting, I shouted, “What is that thing?”

Jax looked back at me briefly and yelled, “A Dungeon Mo—” He never got to finish his sentence. At that very moment, a pink tongue as big around as an anaconda shot past my shoulder and caught Jax by his waist. Before he could even scream, his body was jerked back and disappeared into the gaping yet toothless maw of that too-big-to-be-real amphibian. In a blind panic, I veered off the road, trying to break off its line of sight, and I hoped, its ability to snag me with that tongue.

I did not make it far.

Just as I took a single step past the tree line, a weight thudded into me — jerking me to a sudden halt. Terrified, I grabbed the nearest tree trunk, irrationally hoping that I could keep that monster from swallowing me whole. I had always been known by my friends as a gentle giant. I was a big man with big arms and a fairly strong grip. For all that, I might as well have been a screaming child clutching at his bedsheets as his parents bundled him off to his first day of school. With a shriek of pain, my arms were ripped from around the trunk, and jerking through the air, I met darkness.

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