The Collection

Duty to the Darkness

Branches crackle beneath my feet as I make my way further into the woods. The sun is setting, and only a diminished tangerine glow seeps between the branches of the top of the trees. Night is setting in, and my eyes struggle to adjust as I stare into the darkness, trying to make out the contents of every shadowy cranny of the forest around me. It's all I can do from flinching at every movement in the trees. I nearly jump out of my skin as a crow swoops between the trees up ahead, mere feet away from me. A wind starts up, and suddenly the dwindling twilight of the forest comes alive like a fire, whispering, crackling and hissing at me to go back the way I've come. Every fiber of my being begs me to run. But I cannot. I have a duty to perform. My light chain-mail clinks with every step as it comes loose from the bundle on my back. I would stop to put it on, but I'm scared If I stop, I won't turn back. And so I continue, miserable, clutching my pack and fingering the hilt of the blade at my side as I feel the woodlands around me settle down but for the dancing branches of the trees. The inhabitants of the day make way, for the denizens of the night. I've heard tales of the nocturnal terrors of this forest. I'd dismissed them until now, but as I stand in the thick of the forest every tree leers malevolently at me, waving their limbs frantically I wonder if there might be more to those legends. It hadn't been the first time.

It started several summers ago, when the light of the sun still shone favorably on the surface of Krellius. When the crops started to sour, the stars started to dim, and the sky started to cloud over. The days of the reckoning, or so the mystics and prophets say. But I believe differently.

Something is stirring. Something dark. Something dangerous. Something caught up in every falling star that graces us by burning across the sky. Something sung in by the birds every morning. Something brought in on the wind like an old forgotten tale. Something that darkened our skies, poisoned our food, embittered our prophets and dimmed our hope. Something that made our nightmares come alive.

Something I must stop.

There is no choice here. 

There is only duty.