Eliska shivered and rubbed her arms together.

  The air in this Island didn’t chill her. The chill came from the inside. She couldn’t stop jumping and glancing behind her every time one of the Watchmen stepped on the bones underfoot.

  Every step they took in this wasteland startled her out of her skin. None of them could take a step without a bone snapping, crunching, or shifting in place.

  Yvan led the way. Eliska no longer had a staff, but she wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. Her magic was all gone.

  She cringed when she thought about how helpless she was. She didn’t even have the magic to get out of this Island if she really needed to.

  Marine jumped and screamed more than usual, too, which unsettled Eliska even more if that was possible.

  The Watchmen didn’t have the same problem. They didn’t notice anything—apart from all these bones.

  The lack of magic didn’t affect them at all. They didn’t miss what they never had.

  Eliska hugged her arms more tightly around her. Yann took a step closer on that side. He’d been hovering over her ever since it happened.

  She would have pushed him away before, but she couldn’t do that now. Relief overwhelmed her when the Watchmen moved her to the inside of their circle to protect her.

  How did they know? How did they automatically understand that she was helpless without her magic?

  The memory of all the rude things she’d said to them made her sick to her stomach now. She would never be able to take those words back.

  Yann and the other Watchmen put their jackets back on. That rain didn’t seem to damage the fabric. The group had nothing else to do but walk and keep on walking.

  The sky never lightened or darkened. No one could see the sun through the dense cloud cover. This place didn’t seem to have any day or night.

  Yvan didn’t explain to anyone where he was going or why he was going there. He just kept on walking. He didn’t check if everyone followed him.

  He stepped on bones for more than two hours before he came to a river. The bones lay in mounds right up to the water’s edge. The cloud and the desolate landscape made the water in the riverbed look black.

  Rien Dugas stumbled forward gasping in relief, but Yvan stopped him. “It could be another Dark river.” He turned to Eliska. “Can you tell if it’s a Dark river or regular water?”

  She turned her head away so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

  She shook her head. Everything hurt right now. “I can’t tell….but there are Dark forces here. You saw the way the rock falls turned into Darklings. They’re here, too.”

  Yvan glanced around, but before he could ask, Anríq stepped forward, went down on one knee at the water’s edge, and scooped some of it into his mouth.

  “It’s safe to drink,” he announced. “You should all drink some before we move on.”

  Yvan scowled at him. “You shouldn’t have done that. It might have been dangerous.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if it was dangerous,” Anríq replied.

  Yvan clamped his mouth shut. He didn’t stop glaring at Anríq while the Watchmen came forward and cupped the water into their mouths to drink it.

  Yann touched Eliska’s elbow. “Come on. You drink some, too.”

  Eliska didn’t want to stop searching the countryside for…..what was she even looking for?

  The horizon closed in on her even though it always stayed the same distance away. Her magic should have told her when something got close enough to threaten her. She didn’t even have that anymore.

  Yann wouldn’t leave her alone until she went forward and drank some water, too. He kept watch over her every second, but she couldn’t resent him for that.

  Her skin crawled with some unnamed horror lurking just beneath the surface. She would fly apart into a million pieces any second now—and not from any Dark forces stalking her. She couldn’t stand this.

  Yvan drank last and then straightened up to narrow his eyes at the countryside down the river. God only knew what he saw down there. Eliska didn’t care where the group went and no one else asked. The party was stuck here—probably forever.

  Eliska really hoped none of these people asked her anything—like where they were or where they should go or what the hell they should do in this hellscape.

  Yvan didn’t turn around to ask her anything, which actually made her feel worse. She was useless to these people like this.

  Everyone jumped when some of the bones resettled nearby. The Watch spun around only to see Yann rummaging in the mountains of bones lying everywhere.

  He found a human skull, used his glaive to crack it in half, and scooped the skull into the river. He used the skull as a bowl to gather some water and took it over to Marine.

  She retreated from him shrieking and snarling. “Leave her to die,” Rien grumbled. “She’s a fiend.”

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  Everyone ignored him. Yann held out the skull bowl to her. “Do you want some water, Marine?”

  She only screeched and bared her teeth. He finally left the skull bowl on the ground near her and went back to sit down next to Eliska.

  Marine waited for him to leave and then scuttled to the bowl, picked it up, and guzzled the water.

  Eliska turned her face away and gulped down the sting in her throat. She couldn’t even take care of Marine. Someone else thought of that. Some friend Eliska turned out to be.

  “I don’t see any towns or anything,” Yvan remarked. “We’ll follow the river. At least we won’t have to go looking for water. If anything is still alive in this place, it will come to the river to drink, so we’ll be able to find it. Let’s go.”

  The Watchmen stood up and formed a single-file line heading down the river. Eliska wound up near the back of the line with Yann and Vidal behind her.

  The group had to clamber over thousands of bones to make any headway. A vast carpet of human, animal, and what looked like Darkling bones all jumbled up together underfoot.

  Stepping on the uneven surface made everyone stumble, including Eliska. Yann came forward every time this happened. He held out his hands to her like he wanted to steady her and help her keep her balance, but he didn’t usually have to.

  His behavior both touched and infuriated her. He couldn’t hide his caring nature, now that she really needed someone to care for and protect her. He didn’t try to hide what he was doing and none of the other Watchmen treated his behavior as anything unusual.

  The same actions enraged her. She hated herself for needing help and she hated him for being the one to give it. She shouldn’t need help, especially from some imp Watchman.

  He was the helpless one. He was the defenseless one. If he was that, she must be a complete waste of space.

  Now she didn’t even have the magic to vanish herself off the face of the earth. That’s what she should have done to spare these Watchmen the burden of taking care of her.

  She revolted even against the empty feeling in her hands. If she lost her staff in the Coil, she could have picked up any of these bones and used them instead. She could channel her magic through a twig, a piece of broken furniture, or even a rock.

  Her skin crawled at the feeling that her magic was gone. She kept trying to look around and find it to make it come back.

  She wouldn’t be able to leave this Island, which meant she would never get her magic back. She would be an imp for the rest of her life. She couldn’t imagine a worse fate.

  Marine trailed the group at the end of the line. She kept her distance as usual.

  The party traveled for two hours. The sky stayed the same color. It never lightened or darkened to show the time of day.

  The river curved around a few corners. The group had to climb over mounds and down them to follow the river’s contour.

  The Watchmen stumbled along in a dazed trance. Eliska couldn’t relax for anything. She would never be able to relax ever again.

  The group topped another rise. Everyone stopped at the top when they heard bones rattling and the group saw movement ahead.

  A cluster of ten waterbuck came down to the river to drink exactly the way Yvan predicted. No one moved or even breathed while the group watched in silence.

  A large buck led a herd of three females, three tiny fawns, and two junior bucks. The two young bucks were fully grown but not as big as their stag leader.

  Niyazi broke the silence by whispering, “I’ll go. Stay here.”

  He raced away down the rise in the direction from which the Watch had come. He vanished behind another mound.

  The waterbuck spotted the Watch and glanced up at the hilltop where everyone stood waiting in breathless silence.

  The Watch must have been far enough away because the waterbuck didn’t run. They kept a wary eye on the Watchmen, but the waterbuck continued to drink until they all got as much as they wanted.

  The waterbuck raised their heads again, studied the people in the distance, and then left the river one by one.

  The creatures started to pick their way over the bone piles heading away at a right angle to the riverbank.

  They made it fifty feet before Niyazi sprang out from behind a different mound. He must have skirted the area, used the mounds as cover, and come out behind the herd.

  The creatures startled, but not fast enough. He hurled his battle axe end over end through the air and struck down one of the junior bucks.

  The others bolted into the landscape and left Niyazi there with his prize.

  He waved up the hill to the rest of the Watch. Yvan started the long climb down the hill.

  Niyazi wrenched his axe out of the fallen buck, hefted the creature onto his shoulder, and carried it back to the river to meet up with the Watch.

  He squinted at the bone fields when he got back to Yvan. “Where do you want to do this?”

  Yvan checked the sky. “It’s impossible to tell when night will come and we’ve already been out here for hours. We might as well do it here.” He kicked some of the bones away. “Some of you get to work gathering the larger rib bones. See if you can use them to construct some kind of shelter for us—and clear a flat place here by the water for Niyazi to work.”

  Yann passed Eliska to join his fellow Watchmen in following Yvan’s order. Eliska hung back. She didn’t want to get in the way and she had no idea how to help the Watchmen construct a shelter.

  If this ever happened to her before, she would have just aimed her staff at the bones and magicked them into a shelter. She could have constructed an entire house in a few seconds.

  She didn’t even know where to begin to construct one without magic.

  The situation got even worse when Niyazi dropped his buck on the ground next to the river, pulled out a knife, and started skinning and gutting the animal right there in front of her.

  She didn’t help construct the shelter and no one asked her to. She stood off to one side, completely useless.

  That left her all the time in the world to watch Niyazi slice the hide away from the creature’s legs and start skinning down the body.

  He stripped off his uniform shirt and jacket and laid them aside to keep them clean while he gutted the animal. He cut open the belly and scooped out all the entrails onto the ground.

  He got blood all over his chiseled arms and smudged it on his face when he wiped the sweat off his forehead.

  Eliska tried to look away, but fascinated horror made her keep watching him. She never would have been able to do something like that.

  She never would have been able to stick her bare arms all the way up inside a dead carcass, cut its esophagus and windpipe, and then gather the internal organs in her bare hands to pull them out.

  She’d hunted for her survival almost every day of her life. She’d never gotten a speck of blood on her hands or her clothes.

  The sight made her sick, but it also made her admire Niyazi in ways she never would have dreamed before.

  He didn’t shy away from any of it. He even got blood and muck in his hair.

  He eventually had to move the buck onto the bone piles to keep it clean while he finished butchering it.

  He noticed her watching and grinned at her, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t joke around about how he could do this just as well with his hands and a knife as she could with her magic.

  The process took a long time, but in the end, he wound up with exactly the same result.

  He went down to the river and started washing his hands. In the end, he stripped off completely naked, dove in, and washed his whole body before he climbed out and put his clothes back on.

  Eliska tried to look away from that, too, but she wound up watching him anyway. She couldn’t get over the fascination of this whole process.

  These Watchmen did know how to survive. They knew more about how to survive than she did.

  Niyazi shook the water out of his hair while he pulled on his shirt. Now the party had something to eat tonight, thanks to him.

  End of Chapter 2.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

  I post new chapters of The Corrupted Coil series on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday PST.

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