The farther I got from the valley and the closer I got to home the less my mind conjured images of my imminent demise. Sure I was still afraid that my former mentor would catch up to me but keeping that level of paranoia day after day just wasn’t possible. At least for me.

I was also looking forward to going home. It had never been my intention to visit so soon after leaving but now that I was forced to go back, I wanted to see Gan, with everything that had transpired over the last two months it put my life in perspective. I was going to tell him how I felt. Whether he reciprocated my feelings or not didn’t matter anymore, I needed to let him know. I didn’t want to die in some far-off place with either of us left wondering.

Slowly the land changed from the thick forests – that I had grown to love in my short time away from home – to the flat farmlands with their crops in full growth. I was much farther south on this return trip and there were no signs of the droughts that the Bershal Magistrate had mentioned. It was my guess that I was in a different lords’ land but I honestly knew little about the territorial borders of the nobility on the mainland.

My lack of knowledge was probably going to need to be corrected if I wanted to roam about helping people. Then again, the Order had a seal from the King. Not that I even knew who the king was or where the imperial capital was located. I was a sheltered child, I realized. What I had thought of as home and a decently sized city was not much more than a backwater village with little to offer. It seemed odd to me that my father had decided to settle there. Surely he could have made more money in a larger town. Then again, going by our house and assets, I was starting to think my father wasn’t a very good merchant.

I pushed these thoughts to the back of my mind as I caught sight of the first red rock pillars in the distance. A smile split my face, pulling on the scar on my cheek but the minor pain was worth seeing the nostalgic sight. I estimated two more days before I made it to the village.

***

After finding a town I recognized, I got directions to my home from one of the locals. I thanked the man as I took the road northwest. When the town finally came into view in the distance, the sun was low on the horizon but I was maybe half an hour from the outskirt of town so I pushed my horse for the first time in days.

She happily moved into a trot and then into a canter as I urged her on. She was much happier after healing from my rough handling during my escape. The border marker whizzed by as I inhaled deeply the scent of warm rock and sand. It was a unique smell but something I found comforting after being away.

I slowed the horse down as I got closer to town, idly noting how quiet it was. I chalked it up to it being close to dinner time. But as I passed some of the farms, there was no sign of anyone working the fields. That was puzzling, but the thing that got me worried was the lack of other smells. With it being this close to mealtime, there should be an array of smells of cooking or even wood smoke in the air but all I could smell was desert.

Worried that something had happened, I sped my horse back up to a trot and drew my sword, scanning the quiet houses as I rode past. There was no sign of movement or noise anywhere and that only made me more nervous. My father’s house was near the south end of town so I headed there first.

The gate was closed so I dismounted my horse and tied her to a nearby post. With my sword at the ready, I pushed the wooden gate open. It creaked on the hinges but the inside of the yard was clear. There should have been at least a servant nearby to greet guests but there was nothing. And when I say nothing, I mean nothing. No sign of a fight or struggle, no furniture, just nothing. Like someone had grabbed everything that wasn’t nailed down and ran off with it.

Slowly I could feel a black pit of worry form in the bottom of my stomach. I let the gate slam closed as I got back on my horse and rode it hard for Gan’s family's house. I was in such a panic that I didn’t even bother tying my horse up as I leaped off her and ran through the gate to his home.

What greeted me was more of the same. An empty and quiet courtyard devoid of anything that could be carried away. Running past the empty courtyard, I threw open the front door and yelled, “Gan!” There was no answer. I knew there would be no answer but still, I had to try.

For the next hour, I tore apart walls, floorboards, and furniture that must have been too heavy to take in the search for any clue at all. Unlike whatever had transpired in the town, my passage looked like the home was ransacked by thieves. Finding nothing, I left. By this point, my mind was drawing up darker and darker scenarios by the minute.

First, it was bandits but I dismissed that due to the lack of damage or blood. Then I thought maybe a bandit army that had simply kidnapped every person in the town without a fight. That seemed unlikely though, given the fact there were around a thousand people in and around the village. A real dark thought intruded at one point, maybe it was those occultists. They had dark magic, perhaps they put the entire town into some demonic trance and led them away for some foul ritual?

These and more thoughts went through my mind as I went in search of my horse. Thankfully she hadn’t gone far, munching on some grass a few homes down. I led her back to my father’s home and tied her up in the stable before fetching some water. I performed the same search on my former home but found nothing. In frustration, I kicked a rock as I stood near the stable. I was running my mind through anything that might tell me what happened here.

A random memory of my father bubbled to the surface. It had been about a year ago and I caught him in the privy, doing, not privy things. When I had asked him what he was up to, he replied, “just fixing something.”

At the time I was angry at him for arguing with me again so the memory quickly faded into the background of my mind. It only seemed out of place now because I was trying to think of anything odd. It was odd because my father never fixed anything in his life. In fact, he said, “it was a merchant's job to sell, not to fix, leave that up to the craftsmen.”

With no other hints or clues to go off of, I walked around the back of the house to the privy room. It was actually two separate rooms, one with a wooden tub and the other for relieving yourself. It was getting dark so I had to light a candle to see as I went inside. I scanned the walls in both rooms and the floor for anything out of place but couldn’t see anything in the dim light of my candle.

Thoughts of digging up the floor – covering the waste pit – in either of the rooms made me gag so I would leave that as a last resort. I moved over to the wall I remembered seeing my father near and began tapping at it. The stucco gave a dull thud as I moved along until I suddenly heard a hollow thunk.

The only thing of real substance I had was the metal tube I had taken from the occultists' cave so I smashed it into the hollow part of the wall. The thin layer of stucco caved under my strike and I pulled it away, revealing a hole. I had to reach down into the hole but when I pulled my hand back out, I had a small notebook and some strange rolled-up paper. The paper was strange because it looked like it was coated in a clear substance. As I unrolled it, I could see it was a map. It was the most detailed map I had ever seen and included a scale on the side with some unknown symbols.

There was what looked like a wax circle in red with the word “followers” written in my dad’s handwriting. Turning the map over, I found a key, also written by my father. What surprised me was those same sets of six numbers. The follower note had a set of numbers as well. I flipped the map over again and I noticed the map had lines running through it in both directions and the numbers indicated a location on the map. I was starting to get a bad feeling that my father wasn’t a merchant like he presented to the world at large. Was the entire town vanishing, his doing?

The thought made me ill and I rolled the map back up and shoved it in my pack to look at later. I needed to get out of this town until I could think things over. Staying in this ghost town felt wrong somehow.

I turned my horse west out of town and began walking her along the path. Riding any quicker during the night would be a death sentence. I was near the edge of town and a guard shack when a dark figure darted from behind it. I saw the sword but couldn’t react in time to the darkly clad and masked man, that for some reason reminded me of Gan. My horse, frightened by the unexpected motion, jerked sideways, likely saving me from a deadly wound.

My attacker's blade sliced into my hip and I felt his blade strike bone before it shattered from the impact. Had my horse not shifted, the blow would have gone straight into my belly and spilled my guts along the ground.

I grunted from the impact but clenched my teeth tight to fight through the pain as I whipped my sword out and across my attacker's chest. My blade caught him just below his rib cage and cut deeply into my attacker's chest cavity as I pulled it up the man’s body. I tried to adjust my blade to miss the rib cage but the man jerked and I felt my blade catch. It didn’t shatter but the impact had to have damaged the sensitive weapon. By the time the man stumbled backward I had left a gash from his torso to his collarbone. On its own, it may not be a deadly blow but the man tripped and fell backward making me miss my second strike.

That second strike would have ended the man’s life but I would have to hope the first one was enough. I was already urging my horse into a wild gallop through the night. If there were more attackers nearby, I was in no condition to fight them.

I could feel a river of blood flowing from my hip and every step the horse took caused agony to flare in the wound. I nearly dropped my sword from shaky fingers but somehow managed to get it back in its sheath, cursing the fact that I would have to take the stupid thing apart and clean the blood out again.

As the horse pounded down the path in the dead of night, I did my best to stem the blood from my wound. I was getting light-headed from blood loss and barely caught myself before tumbling off the saddle. If that happened, I was as good as dead. If no attackers came to finish me off, I would die from blood loss in the desert because I had no strength left to pull myself back on the horse.

Making a decision, I took my hand off the rein and dug some rope out of my pack. I tied my wrist to the pommel of my saddle as securely as I was able to with one hand. This way if I fell off, at least the horse would drag me to the nearest town. My mind started to wander and my eyes began to feel like lead. Darkness had claimed the trail and soon claimed my consciousness as well.