Met By Moonlight:

Chapter 9 : Fun and Games

Although we had fast, swift and reliable horses, Ciri and I did make a lot of stops along the way. The mages of the Lodge gave Ciri three days to arrive, which gave us enough time to explore, see and do things together. I had a contract along the road to our main destination and Ciri insisted that I do this contract, as she's always wanted to help me in a few of my contracts and now, she's finally gotten the chance.

The contract was quite simple. I was to find out what was causing strange occurrences in a nearby house, which has recently been rumored to be haunted and see what I can do to solve this problem. The house was small, had three rooms - the attic, bedroom and kitchen - and was surrounded by other houses with the same layout in the village, which caused the village folk to believe that this house is cursed.

We left our horses outside at the village's stables and started to look around the house. The house was full of cobwebs and had a breeze blowing through all the cracks in the kitchen walls. Ciri was terrified of spiders, but luckily spiders weren't present when we were investigating this house.

We found strange drawings, a drawing of a crib and a letter saying something about a wooden doll and started looking for these items. Ciri found the doll almost instantly and we went to the bedroom and found a crib. The first thing that came to my mind was to place the doll in the crib, so that's what I did. 

As soon as I placed the doll in the crib, the bedroom door shut closed, causing me and Ciri to almost get a heart attack by the sudden loud smash. There was a faint giggle and on the door, we noticed another note, with a drawing of a fireplace, which these buildings had in their attics. 

This is when I realized that it could only be one of three creatures who could be up to no good, either a Fogling (small creature,harmless, hides in fog to cover its movement),a Godling (human like creature, small, harmless, big eyes and likes to play around) or an Arachling (small, agile, eight legged, with a scorpion-like stinger, harmful when provoked).

It's not likely to be a Fogling, as there were no signs of fog in or around the house and was definitely not an Arachling, as Ciri wouldn't even have entered the building, as she always knows when there are eight-legged freaks around (especially spiders), which left only one creature, a Godling.

We went upstairs and found the fireplace as in the drawing. I went to investigate and a Godling jumped out, trying to provoke me, but failed miserably. It was still young, about 7 years old in age and the same amount of annoyance as a lot of humans that age, but fully literate. We asked the creature to leave and it didn't want to, yelling at us, throwing tantrums, as it loved scaring ordinary folk who attempted to find out what was going on in this house.

Eventually it went and hid in one of the closets and refused to leave. That's when Ciri told me about a certain concoction that she has read about in one of her alchemy books, which creates a stench that Godlings hate and we went to the village's herbalist to get the ingredients. I sat back and watched My Ciri mix these herbs together, and after about 10 minutes of watching, 15 minutes of cuddling and 5 minutes of waiting for the concoction to settle, we went back into the house, placed the mixture into the fireplace and candles all over the house and ignited them all. 

The fires were barely going and the Godling fled out of the nearest exit, cursing at us and telling us that we're nothing but monsters, as if we'd care about a creature, who was scaring off the folk who live here. The contract was now completed and we decided to get some food and drink for the rest of our journey to the cave.

It was even more amazing that I imagined the first contract Ciri would tag along on would be and seeing the smile on her face was the most amazing thing ever and all the way to the Southern edge of the continent, that was all we talked about.

A day's ride later and a bit of searching for the cave along the edge of the continent, we finally arrived, and what we saw then... It was a horrific sight, a sight not even the best of fortunetellers could've predicted or explained, something neither of us were expecting to see...