Willow's Arc

Chapter 10 of 12

The elders turned and walked back toward the village center. Their torches disappeared between the buildings, leaving only darkness and the sound of the beast breathing behind her. Willow expected them to attack. She expected threats or demands. Instead they just left, and that was worse. Willow worked through the night, laying a trail from the shrine to the village boundary. She pressed fresh boot prints into the mud at regular intervals, making it look like someone had walked this path many times. At the cypress shrine altar, she placed the crystal where moonlight would catch it. She stepped back and studied her work. The elders would see the prints. They would follow them here. They would reach for the crystal. And when they did, the beast would be waiting in the water behind the altar, just like it had been the first time she found this place. She pulled a folded letter from her pocket and set it on the altar beside the crystal. The handwriting was messy, ink smudged from her shaking hand. It named the three cultists who escaped Scaley's ambush and where they would be at dawn. She wrote it for Stryker to find after everything was done. The letter meant she wasn't planning to walk back out. She heard the first footsteps an hour before sunrise. The elders came with the three remaining cultists, all of them following her boot prints exactly like she knew they would. Willow stood at the altar with the crystal in her hand, watching them surround the shrine. The eldest stepped forward and held out his palm. She set the crystal in the mud at her feet instead. When he bent to pick it up, the beast rose from the water behind the altar. Chains erupted from the ground, wrapping around every cultist including Willow herself. The shrine's hidden mechanism had triggered, sealing them all inside with no way out. The crystal had been the lock, and she had turned it. The elders screamed and pulled at the chains. Willow didn't. She had known what would happen when she put the crystal down. The beast's eyes met hers one last time before it sank back into the water, free now that the crystal was no longer protecting the shrine. The trap had worked perfectly. She just hadn't told anyone she would be caught in it too.