Chapter Sixty-One: The Secret

Chapter Sixty-One: The Secret

All of the short stories within this storyline had gone by quickly, but this one even more so because I wasn’t even in the main plot. Anna, Kimberly, and Camden had taken care of that. Dina and I had been in small snippets of screen time.

That was about to change.

I could hear the sounds of travelers in the night—more than forty people by my guess—making their way through the woods toward us. They were screaming, praying, pleading...

And dying. Every few seconds, I would hear the echoes of a man screaming along with the sickening sound of him being stomped to death.

It made sense, then, that when I finally saw the fleeing survivors of the Lord’s Glory settlement, it was mostly women left. There were only five men among them. Camden wasn’t there.

There were nearly thirty women. There were dozens of children with them ranging from infants to teenagers. The babies and toddlers cried inconsolably.

Theodore Akers walked to the edge of the broken gate.

“Who goes there?” he called out. “Are you of the Lord’s Glory settlement?”

One of the women moved to the front of the group. It was Anna.

“Please,” she said. “Our homes are destroyed. Please help us. The Lord’s Glory settlement is gone.”

Theodore hesitated. The monsters looked like young women to his eyes, after all. He wouldn’t have known if these were more of the same.

“Look to their feet,” I shouted. “The women that attacked us had cloven feet.”

This was news to most of the men in the camp, as well as some women. They had been completely fooled.

Theodore looked back at me with a furrowed brow.

“Our attackers had the legs of deer or goats,” I said. Hoping to convince him. “Look at their feet. If they are human, you will be able to tell.”

Theodore wasn’t sure.

“He tells the truth, Theodore,” Esther, his sister, called out. “They are the Cloven Women of legend. They have the feet of a doe. They lure careless or violent men from campfires and kill them unseen.”

The other Akers family member who had seen the beasts' true nature chimed in in support.

Theodore relented.

“Well come in,” he said. “Hurry. And show us you are human.”

The refugees did. They began running in.

I spotted Douglas backed into a corner. He would make eye contact with me every time I looked at him. I suspected the script need us to clear the air before the Final Battle commenced. Douglas had a confession to make.

As NPCs began roughly rebuilding the gate, which amounted to stacking things back in front of the entrance, I approached Douglas.

“What did you mean when you said this wasn’t what you wanted?” I asked.

Douglas was distraught. “I couldn’t have foreseen this, brother. I only wanted to do as our great-grandfather did. I was charged with protecting this land. He said Grandfather Theodore was too weak to do it.”

“What did you say?” Theodore yelled. He joined us as soon as I had initiated the confrontation. Many other Akers joined him.

“I... Grandfather,” Douglas whimpered. “I was doing as I was told! I only made my wishes to help us!”

Theodore looked at him with disgust.

“My father?” Theodore asked. “He showed you the well?”

Douglas nodded.

I wasn’t sure if my character knew about the properties of the well, so I didn’t say anything.

“We had it sealed,” Theodore said. “You opened it back up?”

Again, Douglas nodded. "I only wanted to push them away. It doesn’t listen,” he said. “I can’t figure out how to ask it to do what I want. I do not know what to offer it. I asked it to turn their milk sour and it did, but then they slaughtered their milking goats as diseased and you offered them some of ours. Everything I did to run them away, you ruined!”

“You fool. The powers of that well are not to be meddled with.” Theodore said. “My father spent his life and his fortune at that well and all it brought us was heartache and pain. It always takes just as much as it gives. No more, no less. You have doomed us.”

Douglas, like his great-grandfather before him and Hesper after him, had taken to offering things to the waters underground—to the Unknowable Host. Like Hesper, he could never get what he wanted. In a sense, he would always break even.

Theodore approached his grandson and struck him upside the head.

Ann shook her head. “We had to leave him. His leg is broken. He thought hiding was his best chance of survival.”

“Dammit,” I said. “Did you hear about the well?”

Anna nodded. “We’ll go with you,” she said.

I nodded. “I think Carousel wants you to. The NPCs are saddling up five horses.”

“What happened with the cult?” Dina asked.

Anna shook her head. “The leader has been trying to get their deity to listen for years, but the results are only so-so. He thought the land was cursed. He figured that if he did some ritual to cleanse the land, his god would listen to him again. He was going to sacrifice us as virgins.”

We had a brief laugh at that.

“Camden freed us just as the monsters attacked. It was a bloodbath. They were disappearing left and right. There were originally two men for every woman. They scattered. I don’t know how many survived.”

“Just for the record,” Kimberly said, “I thought of plugging the men’s ears earlier but none of them would talk to me.”

Guess they got what they deserved.

The battle was set. Douglas and I had mounted horses. For our protection, we brought with us three women randomly chosen from among volunteers. Kimberly, Dina, and Anna all volunteered. We were briefly On-Screen for this moment. We needed some explanation for why they were coming with us.

We reverted to Off-Screen as the NPCs moved into place and the monsters regrouped to attack.

Between us and the gate, a line of women held their weapons. The men stood behind them ready to step in if my prediction was wrong.

I could still hear through the wax somewhat, but the NPC men couldn’t. They were method actors.

On-Screen.

The newly rebuilt gate crumbled in one hit. It wasn’t a barrier at all to the monsters.

There were whispers in the air, but as long as I pretended not to hear them, they had no effect on me. As far as the audience was concerned, I couldn’t hear anything.

After none of the men were affected, the Cloven Women decided on a direct assault.

They moved in through the gate a few at a time. They stared at our formation. With the women in front, they hesitated to do anything.

They began whispering again, but not to us. They were communicating with each other.

Soon, the wooden walls of the fortress were inundated with heavy blows as the Cloven Women tried to break them down. The walls consisted of heavy sharpened logs driven deep into the ground. They were much sturdier than the gate. They wouldn’t last forever, but they would buy us time.

The monsters approached the front lines of NPCs. When they did, they were met with a flurry of swinging weapons warning them off.

I sensed an internal struggle in the eyes of the Cloven Women. Their lore said they were protectors of women, but then they had a trope that stated they would act outside of the rules of their lore. They demonstrated that by attacking the settlements. That was against their nature as Esther described it.

They were supposed to punish young men who chased after or otherwise harmed women. They weren’t meant to kill all men. But they had thrown that part of themselves to the side under the influence of the Unknowable Host. After all, it was the Host's power that had brought them here, pulled straight from a fairytale.

Would they be willing to harm a woman under the deity’s influence or would their original nature prevail?

Despite a desperate rage building in their eyes, they resisted.

They refused to harm a woman.

Kimberly, Dina, and Anna all received a buff from my Cinema Seer ability. It was a three-point boost. Two in Grit, one in Savvy.

The women began driving back the monsters. The Cloven creatures had no choice but to move back as their sisters continued trying to break the walls of the fortress.

As soon as they were clear of the now open gate, it was time for the rest of the plan to go into motion. I willed my horse forward. I didn’t actually know how to ride a horse. Luckily, as I had learned earlier when driving the wagon, these horses were NPCs. They didn’t need me to tell them what to do. I just had to hold on.

That was quite difficult to do.

Douglas and I were out the gate right behind a few of the armed NPCs. They gave us just enough room to squeeze through and make our way out.

The horses were more than happy to get away from the Cloven Women, so they ran fast and free in the direction of the well.

I thought we were home free until I learned something the hard way: the Cloven Women were fast too.

In fact, they were as fast as a deer.

The race in the moonlight was on.