Maybe going out to assess a mangled, decaying body almost directly after dinner wasn't the best idea.
Hands on his hips and standing as steadfastly as he could, Lyall watched as James stepped closer to the body without hesitation. The hunter pulled on gloves, making Lyall wonder why the man was so unfazed and absurdly prepared for this, and began...rearranging the body. Better positioning it for proper mending. In the near silence of the forest, the stiff joints cracking was quite loud.
Once it was in position, James popped open the salt canister and carefully poured a rough outline around the wendigo. Then twisted the copper wire (that Caspar also happened to have lying around?) in braid-like knots around the wendigo's wrists.
Beside Lyall, his sister was fiddling with the settings of her camera (an old polaroid). She snapped photos every once in awhile each time James stepped away to collect the necessary materials. She cast Lyall a small, concerned grin.
"No one will judge you for turning around," she said.
Lyall scoffed and tilted his chin up at a defiant angle. "You would."
"You're right," she conceded, "I would."
"You were a doctor, right?" Caspar asked, standing at his other side.
Lyall blinked at him. Any hopes of more returning memories were quickly dashed, though, when Lyall himself recalled James mentioning it at the cabin, and his heart sank again.
"Years ago," Lyall said absently, turning back to study the grim state of the body once more.
"Why'd you stop?" Caspar gently pressed, tone so innocently curious.
Opposite of them, James seated himself an arm's length away from the corpse. He closed his eyes and took deliberate breaths, as though meditating.
Lyall pursed his lips as he considered his answer, then settled for, "I wasn't a very good one."
Hild turned a sharp gaze at the side of his face, ready to argue. A slow light grabbed their collective attention before she could.
A glowing, electric green stone rested in James's palm. As he muttered in a language that Lyall couldn't understand, a light that matched the stone pulsed through the salt and copper wires, then covered the body, almost like a green flame.
Lyall had to angle his head away just a little and squint to watch as the edges of the wendigo's form began to shift. James's voice was a low drone, guiding the spell. The light turned blinding, forcing them to look away completely.
The stone in his hand shattered. The light was gone, and the green flame wafted away like a cloud of mist in the breeze.
The wendigo turned out to be a frail man. Lyall guessed he would be about his own height. The body was fully restored as James promised, but still pallid and very cold-looking. The spell, though immensely effective, still left a scar through the torso, when he'd been run through.
Pulling his bag closer to himself, James unfurled a sheet and carefully layed it over the body, leaving the face uncovered.
Hild's polaroid shuttered loudly in the stunned silence, making Lyall jump. Just a little.
"...There he is," Caspar said, voice quite faint.
Taking a step closer, Lyall cautiously bent over the body, brows furrowing as he studied him.
"He's in rough shape," Hild commented, almost plainly.
"Yeah," Lyall murmured, "I think he wasn't well, even before..." He nodded to James. "...you, and." He turned his hand in a small circle over the corpse's face. "Everything."
James stood at the head of the body, looking down at the deceased man's face.
"Do any of you recognize him?" James asked. Though he looked mostly to Hild and Caspar for an answer.
Hild just shrugged a shoulder.
Head tilted sideways, Caspar stared intently at the dead man. Realization straightened his posture a bit. He gestured to the man's upper body area. "Can you...pull the sheet down, just a little?"
James raised a brow slightly, but leaned down beside the body and obliged, revealing the dead man's chest. All across it, scars formed crude, shaky letters, creating words unrecognizable.
Too intrigued now to be bothered by his dead-ness, Lyall knelt down to inspect. The scars were old, the skin around them grey and knotted. One incision site looked like it was once infected.
Hild scrunched her nose, visibly unsettled.
Caspar clutched at his sweater, over his own chest. "Those were self-inflicted," he murmured.
Lyall whipped around to look at him. "How do you know?" His tone was sharper than intended. He knew the answer the instant he asked.
"He stayed in town for about a week," Caspar said, "and not long before you moved in." And he pointed his chin to Hild.
Lyall frowned. "But how did you know him?"
There was no way Caspar remembered a stranger who'd been here for all of a week, some five or more years prior, but not Lyall. Not for no reason, anyway.
"He..." Caspar stared at the body again. "Was asking peculiar questions when he came by. Skittish, terrible tipper when he came by the diner, but friendly enough, I guess. If he wasn't out exploring the trail, then he was...holed up somewhere. I don't know, I don't think he booked a room anywhere."
Standing upright again and stepping back, Lyall re-assessed the writing on the corpse's terrible chest. He recognized a one as a rune that he'd found on Caspar's walls.
"Then one day," Caspar went on, voice dropping to a murmur, "he was just. Waiting at my house. Didn't say anything to explain himself, just. Ambushed me."
With deep concern, Lyall glanced back at his old friend, fighting the instinct to next examine him.
"Ambushed you how?" James asked.
A second delayed, Caspar looked at him. "Like, an attack. Physically."
There was a pregnant pause, but Caspar didn't seem willing to delve into more detail. Understandably, Lyall supposed, assuming it went very poorly. It must have. The corpse had plenty of evidence of that. Well, as far as he knew. Which wasn't by very much. For all Lyall knew, a lot of the damage could've been after that, but definitely before James.
"Did he look like this when he attacked you?" James asked, gesturing to the corpse.
Caspar hesitated. Then bent down to uncover a little more of the body, revealing scarring on the ribs and a deep gouge in stomach that Lyall knew wasn't from the fight with James.
"Pretty much," Caspar uttered. "I gave him those ones."
"Did he flee after the attack?" James asked.
Caspar nodded. "Didn't see him again after."
"And you said he offered no explanation," James said. "He didn't say anything? Anything at all?"
He breathed in deep through his nose, brows pinching in thought. "Maybe he did. I..." He slowly shook his head. "...don't remember."
Taking another step back, Lyall pocketed his clenched hands. Staring at the blank face of the dead man, he wasn't sure if he wanted to set fire to the corpse, or simply throw up because of its still terrible-state.
Hild cast him an intent look before glancing down. Drawing as normal a breath as he could manage, Lyall forced his hands to relax.
Broken magic or no, there was still risk of it exploding if he wasn't careful.
"It sounds like his downward spiral had likely begun before he came to Curio," James said, still squatting by the dead man, looking down at his face. "It's unfortunate that this was his fate, but people don't become wendigos on accident."
James glanced up at all of them, as if looking for some kind of recognition.
"Wendigos are what become of people who consume other's souls," James said. "It's not an immediate transformation, but a gradual one. It's likely this man had killed several people long before he came to Curio - but if he targeted you, Caspar, it wouldn't surprise me if immortals might've been his original targets. Sometimes people target immortals with the intent of not only consuming their souls, but stealing their magic. Maybe he was doing both."
James looked back down at the dead man, his expression severe.
"He must've fled into the forest after his failed attack on you, Caspar," James said. "That was probably when he became what, ultimately, Lyall and I last saw of him. At some point, those who give themselves to feeding on the magic and lives of others are overcome with an inhuman, insatiable hunger. They lose their sense of humanity and become a creature of death... living only to feed. And, of course, they're especially drawn to those who've lived longer, and those who have magic."
James looked back up, briefly meeting Lyall's eyes.
"Had I not found you--"
"Yeah, yeah." Lyall waved him off. "Dire consequences and whatnot. Thank goodness our paths crossed and all."
"What a relief to see you're taking this seriously," James said flatly.
Lyall cracked a faint grin, then dropped it as quickly as he'd plastered it on.
The consequences truly would've been dire. He wouldn't have stood a chance on his own.
Hild looked between all of them, then swept an arm in James's direction. "And yet it didn't find you. Not for three weeks."
"And it only did," Caspar added, voice still small, "because your brother joined him that one time."
'Your brother' stung way more than it had any right to. Lyall suppressed a deeper, hurt frown at that.
"That was an oversight on my part," James said. "Had I known I was dealing with a wendigo on the front end, I would've use a different strategy and used less extreme measures to conceal myself. Apparently I hid too well."
"Nice to know that you have such skills at your disposal," Hild said, perhaps a little too amiably. She stepped around Lyall, likely for a different angle. She held the camera low and snapped another photo.
Lyall squinted at her, very briefly. Then looked back at the body once more.
"So, now..." He hummed. "...Do we bury him? Leave him for authorities to take care of? What? What did we decide?"
Caspar covered the body up to the neck again. "...I guess, since he's more or less presentable now." He stood and glanced to James. "I'll make a call?"
James picked up his bag, got to his feet, and took a long step back from the body, waving down at it with gloved hands. He whispered something with the movement and suddenly, all signs of footprints or disturbance around the body disappeared.
"It's all yours, now, Caspar," James said.
With a final nod, Caspar simply turned around and headed back for the car. James was quick to join him. Hild lingered a moment, probably since Lyall had made no move to leave just yet.
Lyall pursed his lips. "Scoop of the century, eh?"
Hild hummed, a little despondently.
"Well, even modified," he went on, "it'd still make a fascinating read."
She just sighed. "You still okay?" she asked, voice unusually gentle.
Glancing over his shoulder to the car, he confirmed that their friends were inside and out of earshot. Then turned back the other way and shook his head. "Not in the slightest."
Multiple times, any one of them could've very easily died. He'd just discovered a new brand of mutated human with godlike properties that used their magic radar to hunt down other mages. His friend's memories of Lyall were still largely lost, and thus whatever relationship they'd built before remained unrecovered. He still wasn't any closer to fixing his magic since the mystery writer turned out to be his sister, whom he was fairly certain knew even less than he did about that. Just this afternoon, he'd checked his wallet, and found that the one week spent at the inn really drained what he had left.
Glancing sideways, he met his sister's sympathetic gaze. Forcing a small smile, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and turned them both around. "There have been silver linings," he had to concede.
She leaned on him a bit as they walked. "You stupid sap," she said sweetly, "I think you're really glossing over matters that you really shouldn't."
He shushed her playfully. "Silver linings are all I have in this cruel world. Let me have them."
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