One Word Prompts 2021

Compass - The Compass's Treasure

"We're lost, aren't we?" she said as they trudged over another fallen log. The two of them had been on this dirt trail for hours now. It petered in and out, overgrown in places, disappearing over large stone outcroppings in others. Occasionally, they saw fallen ducks— piles of stones made to mark trails—or what her partner had assured her repeatedly and nervously were ducks and not simply natural collections of stone. But the last one they'd seen was well over half an hour ago.

They were in another overgrown section. Logs were plentiful, the undergrowth dense. Every step either tangled in vines or squishing into squelching mud.

"No," her partner said. He waved their map at her, "We are not lost. We have a map."

"But we don't have a compass. And you haven't even opened the map since this morning. We're lost." This was a fool's errand and she shouldn't have agreed to come. Worse, she'd known as much before they'd set out. She'd said as much to his face when he'd brought his stupid compass to her.

He waved the compass in his other hand. "What do you call this?"

"Broken." And it was. It had to be.

"It's not broken. Look!" He held it up in front of her face again. The needle drifted back and forth about five degrees.

"It's not pointing north," she pointed out again, just as she'd observed back in town when he'd first showed it to her. And it wasn't. It still wasn't. She didn't know how someone could break a compass like this, but it was.

"But it points in a consistent direction," he said, spinning the casing in his hand. The needle drifted around its casing, keeping its five-degree wobble the whole way round.

"It's still not north," she said again. "You can't use that for navigation."

"But it has to be pointing at something!" he said.

It was a dumb kind of logic. The kind made up of intuitive sense yet not grounded in any facts. The kind she hadn't been able to dissuade him out of.

"There are only two kinds of compasses," he continued. "The kind that point north and the kind pointing to treasure!"

She shook her head. She'd heard all this already. He was convinced the stories of magic compasses and hidden treasure were real. Worse, he was convinced this was a compass of the second kind. But even if it was, who was to say it was even pointing to something on their continent?

And even if it was just a day or two's hike from town, then what? What kind of treasure was it? Was it guarded by monsters? Down a forsaken cave crawling with spiders or worse? Did the compass point to some singular treasure or just a place a mage had once left a treasure? Would they find themselves in an empty cave long since looted? Or would they find themselves at a bank, staring at a treasure well claimed and legally protected?

Her foot sunk into a particularly squelchy mud puddle. She grimaced. She should have just let him go by himself. Let the wolves and the bandits get him.

"Look, it's been pointing—" he stopped mid-sentence, frowning.

She rolled her eyes and glanced back at his probably broken compass.

The needle turned slowly in its casing, faster than the five-degree drift it had been doing since he found it, though still not that fast. Around them, the trees rustled in the still air. The rustling was accompanied by the crunch and crash of logs snapping under great weight.

The two of them spun with the needle, keeping its point facing ahead of them. Their turn matched perfectly with the direction of forest noises. Noises that drew closer even as they circled.

And with a crash, an enormous gold claw stepped out of the dense foliage, followed by the rest of the giant, gold lizard. Its ridged head, crowned in long sweptback horns, towered over the tree line. Its feather-tipped tail twined through the trees, taking down as many as it touched.

Her partner shifted the compass, pulling it left and right. The needle turned with the movement, lining up directly with the beast before them.

This had to be wrong. It couldn't possibly be pointing at it. She pulled him back a step, tugged him closer to move the compass again. It swung true.

The beast looked down on the two, very small humans before it. In a booming voice, it announced, its head held high with pride, "Behold, humans! You stand before Velragaurd! Great Dragon of the Golden Dawn! Treasure to the World!"