Chapter Two:
A Justifiably Extreme Reaction
Jym, as luck would have it, had just come upon what he was seeking. “Ah hah! There you are my little beauty, knew I left you somewhere.” Gangrenous hands clutched tightly to a pearlescent handle for a moment before finally freeing the sturdy blade of a hunting knife from the back of one of the ‘lower priests’. Carefully he cleaned the blade, polished the grip and placed it alongside a set of four smaller blades intended as much for throwing as for stabbing. Jymgreen lovingly called them his family.
Sensing he was no longer alone, Jym jumped to his feet and looked for the newest comer to the action, last as they were. A chill ran through his bones and tickled his spine a moment. Fear was an uncommon feeling for him and uncertainty almost unknown. He chose a stance and stuck to it, if it worked. . . sometimes even if it didn’t. Crouching lower into the shadows he had chosen to sit and clean his ‘Darling’ in, Jym moved along the walls as rapidly as he could though he quickly became certain something was resisting him, like walking in sand or against a strong wind.
A whisper in the darkness, sliding through the thickening shadows beside and past Jym as if on a breeze of its own design, informed him of his coming doom. As the whispering, slithering thing within the darkness slid past his face Jym saw two cold sapphire blue eyes. One of which he was certain winked at him slowly. With a blood curdling shriek of terror Jym ran as fast as his stunted and twisted legs could carry him.
Laughter, terrible in its hollow quality, followed swiftly behind him until at last, out of breath and coughing up blood once again, he arrived at the relative safety of the trio’s camp. His arrival was heralded by laughter as well, though it came from the lips of his companions. “What has got you going on this time Jym? The spooky silence of a charnel house no longer to your liking?” Leira finished her rebuke of his antics with a wink, unintentionally sending him into another fit of uncontrollable coughing and choking.
Davien, having been pretending to be occupied with packing his personal mess kit, smiled thinly to himself. The briefest flash of blue crossed the depths of his normally inky black eyes. Poison me, you superstitious little shit.