“It’s a two man job, that’s all,” Yori replied calmly, matter-of-factly. “This draeg might be a bruting beast, but he’s smart. I can’t snare him alone, I’ve tried. He’s been here for ages, well before we came. Avoids places with a single entrance, places where it’d be easier to ambush him. I think he’s been hunted before. There are scars and great gashes in the scales on his underside. The canyon has two entrances, so luring him in and trapping him won’t be a problem. Forcing him into pool is where the real battle will be.”
Yori had just described his plan in detail, how he and Wade would use strange black powders and fire to cave the canyon entrances in, something that seemed more like magic to me than anything else. It would then be my job to get the panicked draeg’s attention while the two of them snuck up behind and lit more powders to cause the beast to retreat toward the pool.
The edges of the pool are a sharp drop, and there is no shore or sandy area to speak of, simply a dark-blue hole that seems to descend forever. Yori said that as he had stalked the draeg over the years, he’d noticed that it couldn’t swim, so drowning it had become for him the best and perhaps only option.
The whole thing sounded plausible to me, my reservations notwithstanding, but Wade took a little more convincing. He tried suggesting other ideas, like trapping the draeg in Yori’s cavern, but Yori rejected that because all of the tunnels beneath the marshes are interconnected somehow and there would be no way to know if the plan had for sure succeeded.
I like to think that Wade was mostly worried about me, not that he ever said as much. But the way he looked at me as he expressed his concerns over the beast’s climbing ability, about whether or not I would be safe from it even all the way up here, just came across as more sentimental than he normally gets. It makes me worry about whether he, too, will be safe.
“This is going to work,” Yori says confidently, smiling and breaking my stupor of thought by placing his hand on my shoulder. “No one is going to get hurt, except the draeg of course.”
I smile back and then look down at the pool.
“You’re not as crazy as Wade made you seem.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve always been a little different. The others knew that, as did I. Made it easier to be the first to leave everyone and come here when the reapers appeared.”
“Reapers?” I puzzle.
Yori stares at me for a moment, a sudden wariness in his eyes.
“We should get going,” he says abruptly, climbing upward before I’m able to interrupt with an actual question.
The rest of the climb proceeds much quicker, at an almost race-like pace. I find a second wind matching Yori’s quickened ascent, slipping a couple more times but hurriedly pulling myself back up. At first I take Yori’s eagerness to keep going as a sign that he doesn’t intend to tell me more, but as I think about it, I wonder if it isn’t his own anxiety he’s avoiding, like talking to me had dug up things he’d been trying to forget.
Yori reaches the top and immediately scans the two entrances to the canyon below. I stand by his side and look as well. No sign of Wade. His job was to set the traps while Yori helped me make the climb. Until he shows up, Yori is to stay here, and I know just how I intend to use the
time.
“Do you not want to tell me about the reapers because you think it will scare me?” I ask.
“No,” he replies so quietly it might as well have been a whisper. “Because it scares me.”
“Are the reapers the creatures in the darkness that forced the rangers into hiding?”
“It was more than them,” he pauses. “There was a greater fear, something festering in the furthest reaches of the plains like a disease, a black plague. Hiding. Waiting. We sensed it out there, tried to track it down long before the reapers came, but we failed. Over time, we hunters slowly became the hunted.”
“What are the reapers then?”
“If the evil here is the shadow beneath your bed, then the reapers are the hand that reaches up and snatches you away down into the nightmare.”
“So you ran.”
“Most definitely not,” Yori replies defiantly. “I might not be a true ranger like the others, but I am no coward. I was a philosopher, a scientist, in the world we came from, and as the shadow grew, I saw before anyone else that all who remained in the south would fall into darkness. That’s why I came here, to find a new home for those without anywhere else to go, but no one would come with me. Rangers are stubborn. They’ll fight to the last man before they ever consider retreating.”
“What does it mean to be a true ranger?”
Yori gives a sarcastic laugh under his breath.
“That’s a good question. I think a lot of them forgot when
everything fell apart.”
“Like Severin,” I suggest.
He turns and glares at me, defensive and discerning like I’ve provoked him, though I don’t understand how.
“Severin isn’t the villain the others make him out to be.”