The sky serpent ascended. It coiled up like a spring and flashed up inside the clouds with a single bolt of lightning. Rusk watched the storm go, drowning field and forest, and hoped his parents wouldn’t suffer too much flooding. He almost went back to check, but then reminded himself his father never supported him in his endeavors, always finding something to criticize, and his mother supported him so much that turning back so soon would bring her great disappointment. He shouldered what remained of his supplies, faced his back to the forest, and began the long wade through the flooded field.

There was a point in the distance where crows and hawks gathered and circled round in the sky, so with no other destination in sight Rusk headed straight for them. On the way, as he plunged each footstep into at least an ankle’s worth of storm goop, he berated his younger self for not having much of a plan.

Just walk. Be a hero on the way. Simple.

With Iya Tarfell’s death hanging on him like shackles, he steeled himself and marched. The reeds and the water formed tangles of almost marsh that nearly tripped Rusk and always stayed his pace, but on he went. Toward the birds. Under the flock.

Rusk doubled over and puked.

The young man’s corpse was the only dry thing in the field. The sky serpent’s rain had rendered everything else sodden, but other than the wriggling maggots and the skin sunken by decomposition while it also stretched from underneath thanks to the flies crawling over piles of each other to find an exit, the body itself was bone dry. The young man’s hair wasn’t matted or limp. It was a brittle mass of straight crunchy strands.

Rusk heaved in breath, one inhalation at a time, covering his mouth and his nose as best he could with the back of his wrist. The smell. He’d never smelled anything like it. Not ever.

His stomach ached. His chest ached even more. His heart felt like it was curling into itself as it pumped. The blood was loud in his ears. The flies were louder. Now they swarmed, coming up through the maggots, spinning out of the ears, and the birds high above circled one last time before flying off in different directions, leaving Rusk with the stiff.

There was nothing he could do. He ran away. He ran without realizing, without feeling his feet hit the ground, without hearing the gasps of shaky breath as he went. The field was a never-ending expanse in front of him, all grasses bent by wind and reeds flying loose in the breeze. Rusk didn’t know how long he’d sprinted before he tripped over nothing, or maybe his own feet, and rolled down to the wet ground to tumble over himself and crash in a heap of pain and soreness.

He stared at the sky.

The sky was clear.

Perfectly blue.

Not even a cloud.

Not one.

And then Rusk laughed, and he didn’t know why, or over what, or at who.

He picked himself off the dirt one vertebra at a time, slowly rising until he was in a seated position, arms out behind him to keep from falling back down.

“Some hero,” he mused to himself. His own words instantly sobered him.

When he stared back through the field, he didn’t know which direction he’d come from. He couldn’t see the corpse. The birds were long gone. There was the sun, and there was the earth, and there was him. And that was it.

He closed his eyes and faced the sky. Then in a hitch of breath he bent over his knees and cried. His snivels sounded inhuman to his own ears. The whines and whimpers he made were pathetic. In that moment he hated himself, or whatever had come over him, and he couldn’t figure out which was worse.

He stared at space for a long time, until his eyes were dry and his nose stopped running, and then he dragged himself back up to his feet.

“Fire. Soaked. Second thought, bath then fire.”

He picked a direction and marched. He couldn’t get the corpse’s hollow face full of larvae out of his head.

As luck would have it, Rusk came upon an actual village not long after that. And the village was full of monsters. Naturally.

Maybe there was something to this bad luck thing.

Rusk dashed to action. He pulled the Elva Bow out of thin air and it came to him automatically, without any resistance. It approved of this charge. The Elva Arrows materialized in his quiver as well, and one even abruptly made itself present between his fingers, ready to be knocked.

The first monster was a little girl, but not the same one from the forest who told him that Sanctuary awaited, and she came at him all claws and teeth, so he felled her with the first arrow he loosed. Something had changed in him. He didn’t feel bad when she flopped to the ground lifelessly.

Then he discovered why.

Her body became flies and buzzed away in a swarm that had a mind of its own.

Another assailant, this time a burly man at least twice Rusk’s age, came at him with an axe. Wood carver. He’d be strong. Rusk scrambled out of the way of the heavy blade and tried to circle around for a better vantage point, but then there was a hand around his ankle and he was half tripping half kicking to get it to let go.

The woman who had grabbed his ankle smiled with fangs and her hair swayed like water as she dug in her heels and yanked. The blade of the axe zoomed for Rusk’s head, and the only reason it didn’t strike true was he shifted his weight just enough to throw the woman who had his foot off balance.

An Elva Arrow appeared in Rusk’s hand, and instead of wasting time trying to fire it, he stabbed the axe wielder with its tip as if it were a knife instead of a projectile. The man didn’t fall, but he did drop the weapon, and that too became flies the moment it hit the ground.

Rusk wondered if he were going crazy. Then remembered it wasn’t good to wonder about things in the middle of a warzone.

Because that’s what this was. Warzone. Not brawl.

The woman with the teeth started clawing up his leg. He’d fallen on his side. He had to roll to avoid the man falling toward him, and the way he jerked to get the woman off of him made something pop in Rusk’s hip. A searing pain stretched long down his leg, from within instead of the outside. His ankle started tingling. So he stomped his other foot into the woman’s face and when she let go with a yelp that sounded very much like an angry dog, he twisted around and scrambled away from both of them.

Before his eyes they turned to flies.

He wasn’t killing them. No. They were monsters. It would take more than one hit for them to die for real. So they must’ve been illusions, or magic, or something Rusk had never encountered before, or hadn’t known it if he had.

The flies buzzing around his head were maddening. Even more so than the monsters.