Chapter Text
Dawn was breaking. A pale, cold mist drifted up from the marshes onto the causeway, birds were already shrieking as if possessed, and the two of them were exhausted and freezing after a night watch at one of the checkpoints on the Imperial Road. The worst kind of dog’s watch: from midnight until sunrise.
That was why, when Corporal Imre Takacs heard someone humming, he wasn’t sure if his tired eyes and ears weren’t playing tricks on him.
But no—along the forest road, a little girl was walking toward them. She wore a green coat, perhaps seven years old. Completely alone. She was quietly humming something under her breath.
The corporal nudged his companion.
“Ziemko, look. Where did that little one come from?”
“Damn if I know, probably from the town. They can’t even keep an eye on their own brats. We’ll have to escort her back to the guardhouse. The little shit will get lost, and then it’ll be our fault.”
The girl—fair-haired and pretty—came closer and stopped at a cautious distance, looking at them as though unsure. Wisps of fog still curled over the road, but now they could see clearly: she was a little elf.
She stood in silence.
Her large grey eyes stared at them without moving.
“Fuck.”
They looked at each other. The orders regarding nonhumans encountered in the forest were clear. It didn’t matter whether they were children or not.
“Hey, little one!” Private Ziemko Rusnak called out and took a step toward her.
The girl immediately turned off the road and slipped into the undergrowth.
“Stop! Halt! Stay where you are, or—” Imre shouted, taking his crossbow off his back.
“Have you lost your mind? It’s a kid. I’ll catch her in no time,” Ziemko stopped him.
He strode briskly into the forest and vanished at once among the dense shrubs. Imre waited a moment. For a while he could still hear his comrade’s footsteps and the snapping of branches.
“Ziemko?”
Silence.
And then—a brief struggle, followed by a scream. An inhuman scream, the scream of a man being murdered. And something like a wet rasping sound.
“ZIEMKO!!!”
Imre drew his sword and charged through the bushes. He didn’t have to fight his way far.
His companion lay at the edge of a black marsh, terror frozen in his eyes, his throat torn open, blood still pulsing out in waves. He was gurgling.
Imre instinctively looked around, but there was no animal nearby. No human either.
“Ziemko! What the— Fuck! Don’t die!” Horrified, Imre dropped to his knees beside him, fumbling with trembling hands at his pouch. He had bandages, clamps—just a moment, any second now—
But Ziemko had already gone silent. He lay still. The blood had almost stopped flowing.
He was dead.
The corporal knelt over him, hearing mostly the pounding of blood in his own ears.
After a moment, he heard something else.
Someone was singing.
He jerked his head up.
The little elf girl with the sweet face stood some distance away, on a patch of grass jutting out, separated from him by the mirror of black swamp water. The lower half of her face and her hands up to the elbows were red with blood.
The corporal stared at her as if turned to stone.
Then she looked at him with bright eyes and smiled—a chilling, predatory smile that froze the blood in his veins.
The corporal suddenly forgot about the crossbow on his back. Instead, every horrific story he had ever heard about that cursed forest flashed through his mind all at once. Seized by animal terror, he let out a hoarse scream and bolted blindly through the soggy brush. After perhaps two steps, something crunched beneath his foot. His leg sank so deeply that he nearly fell.
He jerked back and looked down: his right boot was stuck among something that looked like twisted branches. But they weren’t branches. They were the ribs of a rotting corpse. A skull, still covered in scraps of skin and hair, grinned at him with a deathly smile—just as ghastly as the elf girl’s. It was more than the corporal could bear.
The world went black before his eyes. His knees buckled, and he collapsed like a log among the tall grasses wet with the morning dew.
The fair-haired girl watched him for a moment longer, then turned away and vanished into the mists drifting over the marshland.
The sun was rising. The birds were still shrieking as if possessed.