Sometimes, when she was out in the Tiers, she felt him. It was worse when the fog ribboned through the levels that made up the old and decaying ruins of What Was, settling wetly over the lichen coated buildings. It stilled the rustling vines that the Hunters used as ladders to hoist themselves from one elevation to the next, or slide down bottom first to the lower parts. Most days she loved the fog, especially knowing how beautiful the landscape would become as the sun sliced through.
The Tiers were what remained of the old city, hundreds of years ago, barely visible now and only a 'city' insofar as the memory of such a place had been passed down in oral histories. Out here, they were most often alone. Survival was a lonely thing, and to meet people was more often than not a worry, a time to run, fast and hard, knowing where the vines could take you. Worry raced a body into the dark corners of the Tiers where safety was assured, into warrens and holes where one might tremble like a rabbit until it was safe to nudge out into the muted light.
The other Hunters said she was gasping at shadows, a decade old expression, born from the plague years where the dying would look over the shoulder of the living, sucking in air frantically, as the shadowy figure of death lurked as flesh in the room. She fingered the dagger in her belt, the wound leather slimy with the wet air. The hair on the back of her neck pricked. In the tier above her she heard the muffled creaking of a vine. There was no breeze to shake it in the murk, no Hunters around to prank her. Her hand closed tightly around the hilt as she took a step across the space, lightly, her boots barely disturbing the layers of moss and leaves that long ago had swallowed up broken glass and bones.
Last week she thought she had seen him. She had been hunched over the rounded cap of a new boletus she could not identify. These were always thrilling finds for the Hunters, tasked as they were with both finding food and medicine in the thousands of mushrooms that grew in the Tiers. For the last decade, no task had been more important than finding a cure for the plague that had wiped out their numbers more than any disaster ever had. Had the intruder experienced this too?Seasonally, the sickness swept through the clans, never as devastating as the first time, but when a people is decimated so badly, any loss is painful.
For years her work had been training new Hunters, as so many had died that their knowledge had become like a leaf eaten away by cutters, pockmarked with holes, a fragile thing. She thought she knew everyone out here hunting, but there, hunched over the boletus, inspecting its trembling pink gills, she saw a figure in the periphery of her sight, something she at first hoped was a deer, but saw to be the shape of a man who disappeared quickly into one of the tunnelled hallways dripping with water, rats and blind things that loved the darkness. If he had known her, he would have stepped forward to greet her.
'Hello?' she had half called, standing with her knife in one hand, and clipping her greeting quickly, feeling stupid for leaving herself vulnerable like that. If he had been a friendly, then he would have approached her, and if not, she doubted she would still be alive. Her flesh was worth something to people who did not know what to feed from in the Tiers, or had gotten a taste for it in the devastating years after the city's long ago fall. They were few and far between, all told, but still, the Hunters were always careful. She cursed herself for being so incautious. If their numbers were what they were, she wouldn't have even been out here solo.
Now, her heart was the flapping of a moth in a spider's web, her palms guttating in the way the plants would when the soil is too wet, her mouth dry. It was how she felt each time she realised his presence. Two days ago she had seen a ring of parasols beheaded, the caps kicked clean off, vicious and unlike anything a Hunter would do. They'd cut them clean off if edible, circle away from them if they had no use. Poisonous or not, all fungi were gods to the Hunters. He was not a Hunter, but something, someone else. He was making it difficult to do her job. Hunters moved quietly and methodically, sectioning the levels into grids mentally so they did not double back on themselves. They worked clean territory, decided on by the nightly fires, so that they weren't working over themselves, ruining their chances of finding the miracles in moss and soil.
He was confusing the work, and then some. What did he want?
If he was not coming for her directly with bow or blade, what was his play? Her fingertips fizzed, wanting to draw the knife but knowing it would only pointlessly cut through the fog.
Somewhere, a fox squealed, going about it's own foxy business, although her nerves worried a warning at her that was fox-like too, shrill and pointed.
She heard a footfall and rounded so that a wall was behind her, as much as it could be called a wall - more of a crumbling structure held together by roots and decaying mortar. To her right was a dizzying open space, the exposed skull of the building, and to her left, a corridor.
'Come out', she growled, low and firm. The fog uncurtained, and he took shape at last, and her worrying at the knife so much so it cut the web at the base of her thumb, and dribbled down her forefinger, before she drew it at last.
I wrote this story for the Inkwell prompt WORRY, playing around with an antagonist. I then forgot about it in my drafts so it's past the due date. Hope you enjoyed. Images from Unsplash.
