A subtle sense exists in most of us. Awareness of the other dimensions of existence, while being unable to see it or touch it. I have the dubious privilege of seeing, and on occasion, even brushing against such things, and surviving them. One day, I fear my curse-granted skills will not save me.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  They chose a spot beside the well. The well was closer to the Umbregrin by a small amount. The hole went deeper than any length of rope they had. Perhaps a spirit came up from it, from time to time. Dragos tried to rationalize it away, and minimize the creeping sense of dread in his throat.

  Once the shrine was stacked, stone on stone, into something waist high and flat, Dragos set about making sigils. Chinhua carved little figurines from discarded chunks of fresh-cut wood. The man who’d joined them, Qillien, hunted for flowers to decorate the shrine.

  That dawn, Dragos woke to the sense of something ghosting over him. He hadn’t been the only one. A few of the others had a haunted look as they went about their chores. As the day wore on, the sense of pressure increased. It was like the first time he descended the mountain with Mirel and his cohort, the air heavy to his breath, dragging on his limbs.

  Even the sun’s warmth couldn’t quite penetrate the chilling sense that something closed its fist around them.

  The night’s meal passed with stilted talk. Fish supplemented the pottage. A fresh set of shelves had been built, lined with clay jars brought with them along the Aluta Pass. The fat and protein from the fish revitalized Dragos. The aches of healing bones dulled with the warmth of good food.

  A sliver of moon glimmered through the trees, the argent wink catching his attention when he moved. Chinhua sat beside him, her bowl set aside. She leaned into his shoulder, and he put his own empty bowl down to keep her closer.

  A sickly fear rose as he looked around the lean-to and the others gathered close beneath the tarps. Firelight flitted over the faces he’d quickly come to know. Octavian usually was the first to suggest everyone rest up for the next day’s work, but even he sat gazing out into the dark, a cup of hot pine tea steaming in his hand.

  The woods around them calmed into deathly silence. No pine martens skittered. No birds chattered to each other in the trees.

  “Why did you have to bring up forest spirits?” Bassus snapped.

  Dragos's gaze whipped over to the man, who sat with his elbows balanced on his knees.

  Bassus flicked a gesture at the moroi viu in cavaler’s disguise and huffed, “Now you’ve got everyone scared of shadows.”

  Chinhua’s arms crept around Dragos's cuirass, fingers clinging to the buckles, and shot back, “As if the shadows never bite.”

  No one had a response for that. Quillien spoke up. “We’ll look for other things to add to the shrine tomorrow.”

  “I’ll ward the well,” Dragos murmured, unsure if that would help. “If we had a way to get iron… Everyone in the north knows to hang horseshoes or use iron spikes at the cardinal points.”

  Octavian wiggled a finger in his ear, wincing. Bassus scratched his arms, one, then the other. Chinhua twisted her apron in her hands, as if wringing water out of it. Each person reacted to the oppressive air as it built, and built.

  Dragos closed his eyes and looked past the world, into the spirit river realm.

  A blackness darker than void swelled beneath them. With bright horror, he saw a new tributary form, rising straight for the well.

  The well cap rattled, an echoing thunk of wood on stone.

  Collectively they lurched. Someone screamed.

  Dragos shot to his feet, ripping Chinhua to hers. He spun for his box and said, “It’s too late. We have to go. Now!”

  “But…” Octavian said, his rise slower, more reluctant. A few others didn’t have that rational reserve, snatching the torches prepared for nighttime eventualities and thrust them into the fire. Chinhua included.

  A silvery light glimmered on the ground.

  “Witchlight!” someone shrieked, thrusting a lit torch at the small sparks.

  Dragos's gaze flicked over the distant glow. Luminile vr?jitoare. Light that did not illuminate. A false light that lured people to stray from their paths in the dark. The Umbregrin’s power made itself known in motes, one of them over the stone cairn built for the corpse. He knew where it was, saw where it sat.

  He shrugged his peddler’s box on over his cuirass and thrust his helmet on his head. Taking Chinhua’s hand, he ducked out of the lean-to. The clatter of rocks caught his breath. The woman beside him spun to raise her torch that way.

  Dragos opened the pouch at his hip. The sword would be useless. He let go of her hand to slide his gloves on, buckling them. She glanced at them, then up at him. As much as swords unnerved people, his taloned gloves seemed to draw a primal fear from some.

  She took a step away from him, gaze fixed on the dark blades illuminated by torchlight.

  “Strigoi dislike iron more than bronze,” he explained. “We have to run for the trail.”

  The well cap rattled again, louder. Something beneath it struck with greater force this time. Old leaves rustled. Wet splatters and scraping echoed from the forest depths. From the oboo, a soft groan whispered between the trees.

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  A heavy step crunched twigs.

  Chinhua started for the winding path toward the road, her urgency barely reined in. The others crowded around them, a few surging forward, down the path. Witchlights congealed on the ground, and figures dug up through them all around the clearing and beyond.

  How many people had come to this well, thinking it a blessing? How many people had settled, perhaps made lives and families around it, until the spirit river went through its natural rhythms and disrupted the order of life and death?

  They ran. A few dashed, their torchlight gleaming between blackthorn. Behind them, something slammed upwards. Dragos glanced over his shoulder to see the heavy, ancient wooden slab fly, flipping in the air to clatter on the ground.

  Pure void roared out, darkening even the brightest torch. The campfire vanished. Everything behind him disappeared in the black current. A hazy film rose in a spray over the sky, hiding the glittering stars and the crescent moon.

  He kept close to Chinhua, whose quick steps were not quite a run, but skittering rush, following the main group. Octavian and Bassus took the rear, torches muffled in the Umbre-blackened air.

  Too late. Too late.

  The words he’d said beat like a drum in his head with every loping step he made. Torchlight bobbed, the flash of people in motion ahead. He couldn’t tell who was who in the blur of motion and dulled lick of fire. Only bodies, still alive, running like a terrified herd.

  Silvery bones thrust through the bramble, the skeletal fingers grabbing a racing figure ahead of them. The shriek—it was Duala, Octavian’s girl. She disappeared into the thicket with a crash.

  “Duala!” Octavian burst past Dragos, elbowing him aside. Without a thought, he dove into the thicket, torch bouncing away. He thrashed in the ragged hole, limbs tangled in a mess of greenbrier, its thorny stems tearing at his skin.

  The forest was not lit with the glow of their muted torches, but with sound. Crashing. Cracking. Shuddering leaves and heavy steps, slower than theirs, and yet somehow ahead of them as much as behind.

  Luminile vr?jitoare winked. Silver figures of bone pushed through the foliage. One by one, the settlers racing ahead vanished, whether by escape or the grab of the undead, Dragos couldn’t have said. He staggered to a stop with Chinhua, who turned back. She thrust her torch at Dragos and pushed into the tangle to grab at Octavian, who stubbornly tore at the long, looping stems that bound him.

  Bassus stepped in and grabbed Octavian by the arm. Both of them hauled him out of his bonds as he snarled, “Duala is in there!”

  “She’s gone, brother,” Bassus said, his head up on a swivel.

  Along the path, two figures shambled from the camp. Silver bones walked with no muscle to drive them, the Umbre’s glow not offering light to the trail around it, only the figures it inhabited.

  “She’s lost,” Dragos murmured, holding up the torch to point at the coming danger. Octavian’s tears glistened in the meager light. “Stay close. My talons will hopefully keep them from taking us.”

  The woman beside him choked a whimper. Seeing the creatures behind them, she spun and ran. Not the hesitant jog from before, but a sprint of blind panic.

  “Chinhua!” Dragos barked and dashed after her.

  He lost track of Bassus and Octavian. He followed the flutter of her scarf until it flew away into the pressing dark. He’d almost caught up to her when something baleful surged through the thicket. A bony hand grabbed her, and she jerked, her feet flying out from beneath her.

  Dragos leaped, fist rising, torch high.

  Talons bit into the elbow joint of the skeletal form. The Unspoken abomination’s arm separated, leaving the sickly glow of its grasping fingers on Chinhua’s arm as she lay on her back. Dragos caught the flash of torchlight in her wide eyes.

  Dragos swung it, smashing fire across the revenant’s skinless grin. Without pause, he punched, iron blades cracking its unnatural skull. He thrust the torch into its chest, shoving the monster back. Pivoting, he drove a boot into the thing’s pelvis.

  It folded, its intact hand grasping for his leg. Dragos snapped his foot away and slashed with his fist. Its skull dislodged and flew like witchlight to disappear in the understory.

  Without a head and arm, it still flailed unerringly after him. It was not sight, hearing, or feeling that drove the wraith. Instinct of the spirit river flowing within it spread and spilled like water over a floor, and it would not relent until its parent river returned to the depths of the earth.

  While he was fighting, Dragos caught hints of others. Lights in the black, shambling closer. Surrounding them.

  Someone shrieked, “Nerostit?!”

  Bassus and Octavian turned to fight as Dragos did, but without iron, the first solid touch crumpled them. Octavian’s fist lodged in a sagging jaw. Bony fingers wrapped around his wrist, and slowly he sank to his knees.

  Dragos slashed his torch at the headless skeleton, then drove his fist into its ribcage. He didn’t stop, instead stepping in and twisting. With a mighty throw driven by momentum, he flung the rattling bones into the thicket.

  Skeletal fingers wrapped around Bassus’s neck. Dragos's heart skipped, throat clamping at the sight of everyone on the ground. Fading. Faded? Dead?

  He threw himself at Chinhua, to stand over her wide-eyed body, torch up, bleak hopelessness slithering into his veins like poison. Duala rose from the thicket, the dark glow of the Umregrin saturating her flesh. Her clothes sizzled as she stepped out of the shrubbery and onto the path.

  Dragos swallowed against the horror and pivoted, calculating where his nearest enemy was. He was no great fighter, but he’d do what he could before the end.

  His end was coming. Of that, he had no doubt.

  The thing that stuck in his head, though, was Chinhua. This was not reincarnation. The revenants were locked into a cycle of death and unnatural rebirth, no doubt rising when the Umbregrin did and sinking back into their forgotten graves when its tide receded again.

  No time to formulate a spell. No starlace to counteract the pure spirit of the river below. Dragos exhaled his terror and waited for the inevitable.

  The first one he parried easily with the swipe of his torch. When more came, the sweep became an arcing rise and fall, the slash of his talons compensating where the torch couldn’t. The entrapped beings were not fast, but they were untiring. Predictable but numerous.

  He thrust a torch in Dulala’s unseeing eyes. Slashed Quillien’s slack, witchlight-tinged face. Bone fragments littered the ground around him. Fell on Chinhua, whose open eyes stared at him, the faintest glimmer of tarnished silver in their depths.

  Dragos's breath hitched. Instead of defending, he drove into the horde, lashing out with a roar of despair.

  Their touch felt like prickling. Needles finer than hair stung into his skin where bone gripped him. A surge of hatred blistered in his chest, and he battered the hand that touched him.

  In the dark of his mind, beyond the shadows that outstripped the night, he felt it. The roar of the river, calling.

  Calling.

  He fought against it, but there was no light to reach for. No precipice to grasp.

  Into the darkness he fell.

  Moroi viu: A living person lacking a soul. Someone strange, atypical.

  Luminile vr?jitoare: Light that did not illuminate. Witchlight.

  Oboo: Stone burial mound.

  Umbre: Shadow.

  Nerostit?: Calruthian word for all things unnatural or strange, synonymous with Unspoken. Places, events, and situations can be referred to as this, as well as beings.