Mages of the North: The Adventure Begins

Chapter 13

Alvis led Floris back to Deadwood Creek where he found the decaying flower. He was a nervous wreck the entire way; his body wouldn't stop shaking and he kept looking around him as if he was expecting something to jump on him, which disturbed Floris a considerable amount. In all their years together, he had never seen Alvis like this. Nothing ever frightened him this much in the past, even when they fought the swamp eagle several months ago he wasn't this on edge. Whatever he found must be truly terrifying, which was something that both worried and intrigued Floris at the same time.

As they approached Deadwood Creek, Alvis became jumpier and jumpier with each step. The sound of a frog croaking nearly made him jump out of his skin. However, Floris was also starting to get a sense of something and he was beginning to understand why Alvis was so on edge. There was something else here in the swamp. Something...unnatural, and he didn't like it one bit. He started to feel as if every tree around them was watching them and a natural instinct told him to ready his bow with a poisoned arrow.

"Alvis...what are we dealing with? We're not alone here." Floris whispered in a calm voice, but his fingers tightened on his arrow.

Alvis approached some bushes then turned around to look at Floris. He swallowed nervously and reached for the bush, "No, Floris. We're not."

Alvis pushed the bushes aside to reveal a sight beyond disturbing and one that made Floris give an expression with his eyes that Alvis had never seen before. Floris' eyes went wide with fear and shock, and though his mouth was covered by his scarf, Alvis could tell his jaw had dropped.

"W-w-w-what i-is going on here?!" Floris struggled to say with fear being very present in his voice.

The woods before them were pitch black with everything around them rotting and decaying away. The ground was black as if it were scorched by a raging fire and the plants were black and withering as if diseased. The trees were dark and crumbling as if they had been dead for hundreds of years. Giant tree limbs littered the ground, limbs that were too big and too strong to be forced down by any creature. The swamp was...dying, and for reasons beyond explanation. The two boys stared at the sight ahead of them in silence, unable to think of any appropriate words to say to one another.

Eventually, Floris was able to snap himself out of his daze and pulled a glass jar from his backpack. He approached the blackened ground, being careful not to wander too far on to it, then knelt down and started collecting some samples in the jar.

Alvis watched for a moment, then kneeled down beside his friend when he saw he had that "thinking look" in his eyes, "What do you think, Floris? Any ideas on what could have caused this?" Alvis asked, desperately hoping for a sensible answer.

Floris remained quiet for a bit before eventually shaking his head and standing up on his feet, "No. All the logical conclusions I'm coming up with are leading to dead ends. At first, I thought this might have been a fire caused by lightning...but that doesn't add up. For starters, it's too wet here for a fire to even start due to all the rain we've had here lately. Secondly, we would have at least smelled the smoke from the village, and as tall as these trees are, we would have seen the flames from the village without issue. On top of that, the ground looks scorched as if a fire did come through here...but the grass and vegetation...it would have been burnt into nothingness. Instead, we're seeing the grass as if it's dying from some kind of...sickness or disease. It doesn't make sense and any logical conclusion I try to reach is met with a dead end. We're dealing with something I've never seen before."

A shiver ran down Alvis's spine and he looked at Floris with worried eyes, "You feel that, too, right? That...feeling of uneasiness?"

Floris's blood ran cold and his hair stood on end. He nodded at Alvis as he replied, "Yeah. There's someone...no, something else here...and it doesn't like that we're here, either. Hurry up and see if you can find anything else of interest and let's get the hell out of here! Plants, rocks, anything! Grab what you can and let's go!"

Alvis nodded and ran off to collect a few things as Floris instructed while Floris knelt down on the ground again to check something. He started digging with a knife and pulled a handful of grass out from the ground. As he suspected, even the roots of the plants were dying and rotting away, even with a plentiful supply of water from the nearby creek. This more than puzzled him and he was potentially looking at the biggest project of his life trying to figure out what was going on in this area. Suddenly, Alvis started calling his name in a panicked voice, "Floris! You should come see this!"

Floris stood up and ran over to Alvis who was standing atop a hill that overlooked Deadwood Creek. What he saw terrified him.

The water was as black as the void and the corpses of dead fish and other animals that drank from the creek littered the banks as far as the eye could see. For the first time in his life, he was truly speechless. With nothing to say, he was only able to observe the water and study it from a distance, but after a few moments of staring at the blackness in the water, he noticed something completely unnatural and bizarre. The blackness in the water was slowly moving upstream rather than downstream, which meant it was only a matter of time before it reached one of the two creeks that served as the villages main water source.

"We've got a big problem here, Floris." Alvis said, tightly clenching his fists and gritting his teeth.

"Yeah...this is bad. Let's get back to the village and warn them of what's going on." Floris responded.

Alvis nodded and started to walk away, but Floris slid down to the embankment with another glass container in his hand. He scooped up some of the blackened water, sealed the lid on it, then followed