Chapter Five: Fog
Hollis awoke to a bright light shining even through his eyelids. By instinct, he reached up to block it and accidentally knocked the hovering beetle in front of him to the side.
The beetle didn’t seem to mind. It course-corrected and was back hovering in front of Hollis in mere moments, bobbing up and down to get his attention.
Hollis got to his feet quickly as he gathered his wits, or those of them he had not bartered away.
The eidolon was gone, as were most of her glowbugs. The only one that remained in the whole field was the one in front of his face.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hollis saw the creeping tendrils of the fog bank as it slowly moved toward him. It really did look like a wave off the sea. It was the water’s ghost as it ebbed and flowed up over the seaside, pouring between the waterfront buildings and spilling into the streets.
Unlike the ocean, it was deathly quiet. Not even the wind disturbed it. All Hollis could hear was the occasional drip... splash… drip… of water falling onto the cobblestones of the nearby road from somewhere within the fog.
It sounded like it was dripping off of something large, something hidden in the deepest part of the cloudy brew.
And then he saw the lights. They shone through the fogbanks, diffused so that they looked like large glowing orbs. At first, Hollis thought he was seeing fireflies that had gotten lost, but they didn’t move like fireflies, which were dancers in the sky.
They bobbed up and down a bit at a time as they moved closer. And closer.
And every time they bobbed, Hollis heard a splash that he was beginning to recognize as footsteps of some kind or another. Some of the lights were a foot off the ground, others were high enough to be at eye level with him, but whatever height they were, they stayed constant… Except for the bobbing followed by the splashing as they moved forward one step at a time.
Hollis couldn’t look away.
Luckily, the little beetle wasn’t so easily impressed by the lights. He flew into Hollis’ eyeline and began flashing bright until Hollis had to squint and look away.
After he had blinked away the blindness, the little bug glowed bright and then used its will o’ the wisp ability to send a glowing copy of itself dancing off away from the sea. It was saying, “Go this way,” as best it could.
“Time to go,” Hollis agreed.
He ran as fast as his legs would take him, checking to make sure he hadn’t left any of his supplies behind.
He knew the layout of Beckett’s Sound like the keys on his old keyboard, but he had never run through it when it was this dark. Usually, the lighthouse across the bay would keep the town lit well enough at night, but with no one to maintain it, it couldn’t brighten the dark streets and ruins as Hollis passed them.
Luckily, he had bartered for the services of a bright and quick ball of light that stayed ahead of him and managed to be where Hollis tried to look. It practically read his mind.
The old armory, built into the husk of a stone building, was the first major location Hollis passed, but its windows were broken. With the fog coming, Hollis wanted somewhere airtight to stay for the night.
He couldn’t rush into the thickest part of the ruins. Even in the days when Beckett’s Sound was populated with explorers and townsfolk, those corridors were dangerous.
So it was beyond the town that he ran, taking note of the dark ruins all around him. The training area where new explorers would learn to fight was much as he remembered it, as was the archery range and the large bowl-shaped Greek-style theater with the large forges at its center. Once a place of art, it had become a place of craftsmanship.
He couldn’t run too far. Every path westward ended at the canyon, and the only way across that was the bridge at the trailhead. He couldn’t run into the forest at night. The fog might be preferable to the wild road without any backup.
And then he saw something that gave him pause.
It was a simple farmhouse, but unlike the other buildings he had seen, it did not appear to have been suddenly abandoned. It had been reinforced, with its windows shuttered and its door armored. Someone had tried to survive in that house.
The fields around it were overgrown, but they had once been cleared and worked to grow crops. He saw old animal stalls and other signs that life had been there not so long ago. Maybe it was only abandoned half as long as anywhere else.
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He ran up to the door and tried it.
It opened easily enough. The darkness inside told him that whoever had lived there once no longer did. As soon as the beetle slipped inside, he was right after it.
He slammed the heavy wooden door behind him. The light of his new glowbug friend cast around the room and showed that it had mostly been cleared out. Unlike the houses in the main part of Beckett’s Sound, where only valuables had been taken, most of the furniture here was gone, along with anything that had once been hanging on the walls. All that remained was a long bench and a wardrobe that would have been far too large to carry away, though someone might have tried since it was on its side and its doors were tied shut.
There were other rooms in the house, but they were much the same. No indoor restroom. No food in the pantry, no kitchen. They must have taken the fireplace stove with them. No furniture or useful items could be found anywhere, just a thin layer of animal droppings here and there.
He reentered the main room of the house and examined the wardrobe for a moment, contemplating whether he should sleep inside it.
There was a scratching sound above.
As Hollis looked to the ceiling, he realized that he was far from alone.
Various birds and rodents had made a home in the rafters above, which were mostly exposed. They stared down at him but didn’t make a peep. Only the quiet ones would have survived the fog, it seemed.
A family of raccoons had frozen mid-climb as they were crossing from one side of the roof to another. They stayed still as if that might stop Hollis from seeing them. They seemed to insist they were invisible.
He glanced around the room. It was strange. Why were there no animals on the floor? If this was such a refuge for them, why did they stay in the rafters?
He didn’t know, but he had his theories.
He pulled open one of the doors of the wardrobe, and the beetle quickly flew over to shine into it. Luckily, there was nothing but a random folded scrap of paper inside, so he strained to lift it upright.
With great effort, he managed to. [Drudgery lvl.5]
He had forgotten that the collective name for the skill associated with manual labor was Drudgery. He had done a lot of preparation for it back on his homestead.
He scooted the long bench over and used it to crawl onto the oversized wardrobe, high enough to reach out and grab the rafters if he needed to get even higher.
On that wardrobe, he stayed, lying on his back with his new pack as a pillow. His perch was large enough that he didn’t fear it toppling.
He stayed as the fog rolled in. He couldn’t hear it coming, exactly, but he felt it in his ears. It was a pressure change. He had to yawn to readjust.
Not much else changed through the night. The raccoons found their bravery and began investigating him, but only from afar.
He rested his hand on his stomach, and the little beetle flew up and landed on his finger, its light lit dimly. They stared at each other for a long time. It was their first chance to really meet since their spirits had been intertwined.
“Thanks for snapping me out of it back there,” he whispered.
The bug couldn’t speak. He brightened his tail for a split second in response.
Hollis glanced at the northern wall. “I think that whatever was in the fog is outside.”
The bug brightened itself again.
“Have you ever seen what it is?”
Its tail dimmed a bit.
“So that’s bright for yes, dim for no,” he said. “You really did get human intelligence, didn’t you? Try not to be too impressed with yourself. That bar isn’t as high as you’d hope.”
Then, in response, the little bug worked its light magic to recreate the glow reflected off Hollis’ face, creating a haunting vignette, like his own face staring back at him.
“Will o’ the wisp,” Hollis whispered, thinking about legends of travelers led astray by ghostly lanterns in the distance they believed to be their fellow man.
He found that ability so impressive that it took him a few more seconds to realize what the little bug was saying.
“Wait a second, were you saying that I was one of the humans with low intelligence?” he asked, stifling a laugh.
The bug brightened for a moment.
“That’s a neat trick you have there,” he said. “Suppose I’ll need something to call yo—"
Something moved outside. A stack of rocks, once part of a wall or fence, must have fallen over. It would have had some help.
The raccoons above disappeared into nothing but squiggly outlines one after another, first the parents and then the babies.
The beetle dimmed itself completely.
For a long while, Hollis neither spoke nor slept. He waited. It was all he could do. Daylight would come, and relative safety would come with it.
His hunger sang loudly to him, and all he could do to satisfy it was fantasize about all the animals he could hunt in the morning. Rabbits and fish. Foraged berries would be a treat, too. Those must be plentiful in these parts, with few humans or creatures to harvest them.
The beetle did sleep, however. While his mind stayed alert, draining his faculties, Hollis could feel restfulness radiating off the bug. It wasn’t much, but it was clear the connection they had worked both ways.
Hours into the night, an uneasy feeling overcame him.
[Vigilance lvl. 6] You smell moisture in the air. You smell the sea. You hear something scratching the floor beneath you.Hollis was afraid to look down, but he did anyway. He held the beetle over the side of the wardrobe and willed it to give a light. It understood well enough.
A faint light spread from the beetle’s tail and lit the room, revealing that the house was filled nearly two feet deep with fog. He could see it creeping in from holes in the walls, pouring in from the other rooms.
The wooden bench beneath him moved ever so slightly, causing the scratching sound, but Hollis could not see what was moving it.
He watched the bench the rest of the night, praying to the wild gods of Periapt that the fog would not rise and that he would have no fight ahead of him. His hands rested on his hatchet either way.
When sunlight came poking through those same holes the fog had leaked in through, and Hollis saw the last tendrils of its ghastly presence drain away, there was nothing left on the floor for him to fear.
He checked the front room for anything that might have been hiding in the night, but left the backrooms as they were. He didn’t wish to see anything the fog might have left behind.
As he walked out of the farmhouse, he looked over at the beetle on his shoulder and said, “Willo might work as a name for you, you know. Because of the whole will o’ the wisp thing.”
The bug lit up a bit, and Hollis took that as agreement.
He and Willo set out into the morning light in search of food.