Widowed Creature's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Widowed Creature dug up the old chest at midnight, sure it held the map to Godwin's treasure. That treasure was his only cure. It could strip the curse that had turned him from a man into this thing: a bat-winged hound with blue eyes and teeth like broken glass. He clawed the lid open. Inside lay a folded scrap of human paper, crowded with ink marks. He stared at the marks and felt nothing click. The lines meant nothing. His cursed eyes could see the ink, but his cursed mind could no longer read it. Once he had read books by firelight, as a man. Now the letters were just black scratches on brittle paper. He pawed the map flat and pressed his snout close. Still nothing. He snarled and paced. A map he could not read was worse than no map at all. It dangled the cure in front of him and then locked it away. He needed eyes that understood human ink. He needed hands, or something that once had them. He remembered the stone mansion at the wood's edge. People whispered a scribe still lingered there, dead but not gone. A scribe would know letters. He clamped the map in his teeth and ran. The mansion rose from the fog, its windows glowing sick shades of green and purple. Widowed Creature climbed the cracked steps and nosed the heavy door open. Cold air poured out. Inside, a small ghost hovered over an empty desk, quill scratching at nothing. His hair floated white. His eyes burned pale blue, brighter than Widowed Creature's own. The ghost did not look up. "Another lost thing," he said. "The dead get so many visitors. None of them bring me anything worth reading." Widowed Creature dropped the map on the desk. It landed in the ghost's cold light. The scribe stopped writing. His pale eyes moved over the marks, quick and hungry. "Godwin's hand," he murmured. "I copied deeds for men like him, once." He drifted lower. "You cannot read this. I can. That makes us useful to each other, beast." Widowed Creature growled low, a question. "The treasure," the ghost said, tracing a line of ink. "It lies past the black tarn, under the split oak. The map is clear." He smiled, thin and cold. "But maps like this always carry a price in the reading. Godwin cursed his own hoard. Whoever takes it takes the curse's weight." His glowing finger stopped on a mark near the bottom. "And this word here warns of a guardian. Still living. Still hungry." Widowed Creature's ears flattened. The map was no longer useless. Now he knew where to dig. But the same reading that freed him had named a new danger waiting at the split oak. "Go, if you dare," the scribe said, and returned to his empty page. "Or stay dead like me." Widowed Creature took the map back in his teeth and turned toward the door.