Sightwitch (The Witchlands 0.5)

He released me, and the air around us seemed to gust colder.

The wyrms stopped screaming right as my feet slammed off the platform onto the ledge cutting forward. My escape was an overloud gallop, made all the louder by the pack’s jangle and clank.

“Maybe … they won’t … hurt us,” the man said between gasps. Already he wheezed, and we’d barely begun our escape. “Maybe they’re just curious!”

“Curious how we taste,” I barked back. “Faster!”

I don’t know why I added that command—it wasn’t as if he could move any faster. I blocked his way, and the pack slowed me down. Plus, my legs were half the length of his.

Ahead, the walkway cut left, curving with the ice before vanishing around a bend.

Please, Sirmaya, please be a tunnel on the other side—

A thud rattled through the earth. It shook right up to my knees, and a blast of cold seared over me from behind.

“Don’t look back!” the man roared.

I looked back.

A mistake, for the shadow wyrms had landed on the ledge, and with the flat, smooth stone beneath them, they were accelerating.

By a lot. Shadowy legs tendriled back and forth. Centipedes of pure darkness with no distinguishing features. Simply silhouette and hunger.

Briefly, as my gaze flew forward once more, I met the man’s eyes. They bulged and shook, the whites swallowing everything. I could only assume that mine looked the same—

I tripped. My left heel slipped over icy scree. My pack tilted toward the abyss.

This time, though, when the man grabbed the pack and yanked me upright, I did not say a word. I just pumped my legs faster.

I also did not dare look backward again.

We reached an inward curve in the ice, and the outward bend was approaching fast. So were the wyrms, though. Their hundreds of legs kept an endless vibration running through the stone, and with each breath that ripped from my throat, the vibrations shook harder.

“You called them shadow wyrms before!” the man shouted.

I offered no reply because by the Twelve, I did not understand why he was trying to speak. I could barely breathe and run at the same time, and he was panting much harder than I.

Yet still he continued: “So this isn’t Noden’s Hell, then? And those aren’t His Hagfishes?”

“No,” I huffed.

“That’s a relief—”

“STOP. TALKING.”

He stopped talking.

We hit the bend. The Rook had already swooped around—I took this as a sign that there was nothing dangerous ahead.

I was wrong.

A third shadow wyrm crawled over the ceiling, just like the one from before, and at its current pace, it would intersect with our one and only escape.

But there was a bit of gold to coat all the chaos: a doorway, almost identical to the one in the Crypts, waited a few hundred paces ahead.

If we could just get there before the wyrms got to us.

The Rook seemed to think the same, and, blessed bird, he gave a vicious screech before flapping right for the shadow wyrm on the ceiling.

A moment later, the wyrm screamed.

And its brethren behind us screamed too.

There it was again—that gut response. The urge to vomit welled hard in my throat, and I had to slow … then stop entirely, a hand planted on the wall to keep from losing my balance.

“Your bird is going to get itself killed!” the man said. He latched his hands firmly to my pack to keep me from toppling headfirst over the ledge.

“He knows … what he’s doing!” I answered between gasps for air, though I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true. What had worked in the Crypts might not work here.

I couldn’t dwell on it, though, just as I couldn’t stay stopped for long. The Rook had bought us a precious few moments with his sweeping and swinging.

I shoved off once more, picking up speed with each step, even as the wyrms’ shrieks pierced louder.

If the Rook could just keep that wyrm from crossing the ceiling for a few more moments, then we could reach the doorway.

So long as the ones behind us didn’t catch up.

As if on cue, the wyrms’ screams broke off and the man called, “Weren’t there two wyrms behind us?”

Oh, blighter.

“There was definitely a wyrm behind us,” he went on, but I didn’t make the mistake of looking back this time. If one wyrm was gone, then maybe that was a good thing.

Besides, the doorway was closing in. I could make out individual planks in the wood, and there at eye level was a slot for my knife.

Fifty paces and we would reach it.

Of course, the ledge on which we raced was also narrowing with each pounding step. Worse, the wyrm on the ceiling now scuttled toward us.

It was right as I groped the knife from its sheath—forty paces, only forty paces—that the earlier shadow wyrm catapulted from the ravine beside me.

All light winked out. In the space between one moment and the next, the world shrank down to me, the wyrm, and the sense of endless free fall.

This close, I could see what the creature truly was: a skeleton of black speckled with embers, as if bones had been dropped into a fire and left to burn. Smoke coiled off it in vast, eternal plumes of frozen darkness.

Then the sense of free fall hitched higher because I actually was falling.



Found in only the deepest, darkest places of the Witchlands, shadow wyrms are creatures of the Void. Few have entered their lairs and lived to tell the tale.

Something clamped—hard—onto my shoulders, and my fall ended as suddenly as it began. At first I thought the wyrm had reached me, had bitten.

Then I realized I was dangling, the ice wall at my back and a long, long drop before me. At my side, the wyrm still clambered upward.

Cold scored off it in vicious, mind-numbing waves.

I had no time to find out where it aimed before a strained voice called down, “I’m sorry! I know you told me not to touch you, but it was life or death—”

“HAUL ME UP,” I screeched. The shadow wyrm had not yet changed its course, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t.

“About … that,” the man panted, blocked from view by my pack, “with your bag and my angle … I’m not sure I can.” As if to prove the point, he jolted forward.

And I jerked down.

“Sorry,” the man called, his voice muffled by a steady boom that now drummed through the ice and stone. “The wyrms are … fighting each other … and … they’re tumbling this way.”

I had no choice—though fool that I am, I tried to think of some other way. This pack was all I had to sustain me. It was all I had left of the surface. Without it, I was truly on my own.

Another drop downward, and the man’s face appeared above the pack. Which meant he was about to fall.

That was it, then. This was my path and I had to stay firmly gripped upon it.