Entry Seventeen

  Consequences

  I waited for her in the meadow, though the stench of the pseudo-goblin bodies drove me to relocate to the far side of the clearing. Gradually, the internal fatigue I felt from casting spells faded. Apparently, my mana pool, or whatever it was, recharged sort of quickly. Catzilla arrived about twenty minutes later, looking winded, her coat matted with sweat.

  My heart began to beat a little faster. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what she was going to do. I didn’t think she would try to eat me, but hey, one never knew. She had sounded royally pissed when she’d left. The cat padded right up to me and then kept walking past, not even looking my way.

  “We finally meet. I’m Nate.” I didn’t bother to start a handshake because, well, she didn’t have hands.

  “Come,” she said in reply, still whispering into my mind rather than speaking aloud. Maybe she couldn’t speak aloud?

  I glanced back at the carnage near the cliffside. “I was going to loot them as soon as the smell, you know, kind of died down over there. I still need…”

  “You will not approach the hordlings.” She sounded calm in that ominous you-are-about-to-regret-your-very-existence way that only girls could pull off. “Come,” she commanded again, more quietly this time. For some reason that was even more ominous.

  We walked in silence back to the pseudo-goblin camp. There was a series of rock outcroppings that led down to the river, and we took them, hopping down carefully until we reached the riverbank. Even without the hordlings around, the place still stank like rotting seafood and very fresh excrement. Goblin-sized bedrolls were in semi-circles around three extinguished fire pits. Crude leather packs, half-eaten fish, and other less-than-identifiable things were scattered in the dirt around the camp. Suffice it to say—these creatures? Not neat freaks.

  As we navigated around the fire pits and other detritus, I caught sight of a large cage near the river’s edge beyond a small boulder. A pair of sickly, skinny quasi-bunnies huddled in it, shaking in fear. One had lost a leg, most likely to a hungry hordling, and both were staring up at me like I was a monster from their deepest, darkest bunny nightmares.

  “Poor little guys,” I whispered to them. “Never fear, daddy Nate is here.” I found and flicked open the simple metal clasp that was holding the cage’s door in place. Both bunnies shot forward, ramming the door open as they bolted for freedom. A white blur bound past me as Catzilla came out of nowhere and pounced. One massive paw found each of them, pinning them to the ground.

  “Whoa!” I jumped back. Her claws flashed, and both bunnies let out shrill, horrible shrieks. Blood flew everywhere as she slashed at them, tearing into them. She wasn’t going to eat them, I realized. She was just murdering them. “What the hell? They were harmless bunnies!”

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  She glared up at me as the quasi-bunnies twitched and stilled beneath her, her eyes flashing red as they caught the sunlight. She hopped into the shallow edge of the river, and a pink cloud bloomed downstream from her as the water washed the blood off her paws.

  “You are truly a fool,” she said, sounding genuinely disgusted with me. “They were captured by the horde and held in their camp. They are forever tainted and could not be allowed to return to the forest.” Before I could reply, she leaped out of the river and proceeded along its bank.

  She didn’t go far. I caught up with her as she stopped and pawed at something on the ground. In front of her, etched into the grey bedrock that formed the riverbank, was a pattern consisting of a series of interlocking circles and curving, serpentine shapes. The lines, etched with notches that made them look like thorny vines, arced around each other, intersected one another, and continued in an overlapping design about three feet in diameter.

  I reached up and touched my forehead. The pattern on the ground was an evil-looking version of the one that made up the band of Florian’s VR headset.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Looking at the engraving gave me a chill that slithered up my back to crouch at the base of my neck. Somehow, I knew that the thing didn’t belong here. It felt wrong, abhorrent, like that feeling you get in your stomach when you see a dead animal. I took a step back from it. “I think I have an idea.”

  “A rune of power, made for weavewalking,” she said, and again I nodded. “But this one is tainted, vile.”

  “Those goblin things, the hordlings, they made it?” I asked, forcing myself to lower my hand again.

  The cat mentally scoffed. “This is weave. No minor hordling can do such a thing.” She turned to me. Her fangs were bared, her eyes more red and murdery than they had been when she’d slaughtered the bunnies. “A weaver, a weavewalker, did this.”

  “Okay, that’s bad, but…”

  “The horde does not have walkers! Only Ilerians can navigate the weave and move between places by its power. For centuries, our wall has protected this last vestige of Ileria from the horde. What benefit is a wall if the horde can weavewalk beyond it and roam freely here in the Tishon Forest, or the Lillion Valley, or in the capital itself?” The cat took several steps toward me as she spoke, forcing me to backpedal. “I needed to observe this camp and wait for the weaver who is responsible for this. Now, one look, and he will dance away into the darkness before I can identify him!”

  “Oh. I can see your problem. Fear not, for I, Nate the Great, am here to help! That’s a killer storyline, by the way. Kudos to the writers.”

  The huge cat planted a massive paw on my chest and shoved me, sending me flying butt-first into the river. “Help? Help? It would have been better if you had died for Ileria or listened to my orders and let at least a few of the hordlings live to flee back to their master. I could have tracked them and found the Ilerian responsible for this abomination. But now? Now, Nate the Great, I must start anew with my adversary having every advantage.”

  “It’s just Nate… just Nate,” I said, shocked by the NPC’s sudden rage.

  The furious cat turned and bounded away downstream, still whisper-shouting into my mind. “Return to wherever you came from, Just-Nate. Your kind of help, I will never need!”

  I sat in the river, my bottom half going numb from the ice-cold water, staring at her as she raced out of sight. She was right. This game was incredible, but it was also way difficult. I’d totally botched the very first quest. To recap, I never found the princess, I nearly died, I alerted the hordlings, and then I killed them all when I wasn’t supposed to. Oh, and I got zero loot out of the whole experience. This was my week for failing quests. Suddenly, all I wanted was to do exactly what she suggested—go home.