Young Writers Society

Author's Note: The following work is a revised version of the first chapter of a short, seven chapter story I wrote back in 2015 when I first joined YWS. I decided to revise it for Stringbean and Vil's Revision Contest after being inspired by the other contest entries. If you want to read the original version, you can check it out here! If not, I hope you enjoy the little bit I've written of this story - even if I never end up writing more of it.

Chapter 1

As the long sword cut through the crisp, autumn air and into the hide of the monstrous wolf, Chi couldn’t help but glance over at her friends. She wasn’t sure why. She heard snippets of their conversation in between the wolf’s deafening howls. She knew that the two of them were more concerned with the Eiery’s fall armor collection than they were with getting mauled by the sharp teeth the size of Chi’s blade.

She should have taken comfort in that.

She knew she should. All that Chi wanted in life was to protect people. If they felt safe enough to have a conversation when she was fighting their commission for the day, then her goal was accomplished.

But…

There was a sudden flash of light in front of her. Her sword must have hit a vital point. Part of her wanted to yell Zarith and Oona’s names in the hopes that they would actually look. She almost did. She opened her mouth and gave them a last, desperate look. But before the words could slip off of her tongue, they finally looked.

Chi straightened. Green eyes alight with excitement and a smile dancing on her lips, she turned her gaze to the drops. A pile of gold coins and a fang. Nothing special, but nothing too bad, either. At the very least, they could splurge a little the next time they went shopping.

(In the back of her mind, she wondered the same question she always did at the end of a battle: why did monsters never leave behind anything besides drops? Why didn’t they leave bodies like humans did?)

She slipped her sword back into her sheaths.

“We’re set for the next month,” she said, crouching down beside the drops. Her comment was met with silence. When she looked over her shoulder at Zarith and Oona, her smile finally fell. The two of them hadn’t been looking to see what she had accomplished; they had been trying to see if they could return home.

A pit grew in her stomach.

She grabbed a fistful of coins and dry dirt with unsteady hands and shoved them into the leather pouch attached to her belt. The tooth - one of the wolf’s smaller, back teeth - quickly joined them.

Chi got to her feet. She tried to collect herself - tried blinking away the tears forming at the corner of her eyes, and tried taking a deep breath to steady her breathing. Gods knew she couldn’t risk being seen crying in the middle of town. But Zarith and Oona were already so far down the path that she couldn’t see them because of the twists and turns, and Chi felt alone in more ways than one.

She stepped out of the clearing and onto the path.

Then she paused.

She still felt like she wanted to cry. She wasn’t ready to face them yet. Knowing that the breathing exercises would remain useless right now, she turned to the one constant comfort she had always had in her life: the song. Her voice wasn’t nearly as good as the woman who had dropped her off at the orphanage fourteen years ago, and it had been increasingly difficult to remember the lyrics as she grew older.

But as the quiet, familiar words left her lips, she felt like she wasn’t quite so alone.

“That’s some pretty nice singing, you know.”

She stopped singing.

Hand going for her sword’s hilt, she spun around to face the speaker. There was a boy standing in the clearing. She knew his type; she had seen people like him a hundred times. Sometimes, they were happy to remain in the back of questionable taverns. Other times, they lurked in the shadows on the edges of forgotten alleyways. But, more often than not, they were exactly the kind of person who showed up uninvited on a commission to create chaos.

This boy was dressed in a black cloak; the cloak was littered with strange symbols that looked like ruins of some long lost civilization. The only thing she could see underneath the cloak was a sturdy pair of boots. When she looked up, she saw that the rest of the boy’s appearance was just as strange: the majority of the top of his head was covered in bandages. Even his right eye was covered. The only indication that any hair was underneath it was the tiny ponytail he had his black hair up in.

Most importantly of all, the boy had a scythe on his back - though it was currently wrapped in thick, dirty bandages.

Her grip on her sword’s hilt tightened.

“Shame you aren’t a bard,” the boy added, a thoughtful look on his face.

His arms moved underneath his cloak. Knowing that he had to be going for some kind of weapon, Chi started to draw hers. But the moment he heard her blade scratch against its sheath, he raised one hand up in surrender.

Several seconds later, the other slowly drew an apple out.

“Who are you?” she asked. Her sword was halfway out of its sheath now. “How did you even sneak up on me?”

The boy took a large bite out of the apple.

“A mage never reveals his secrets,” he declared. “And to answer your first question: I’m a mage-for-hire.”

There was a touch of pride to his voice, but all that Chi could focus on was that he was chewing with his mouth open. She knew she needed to be focusing more on how a mage-for-hire wouldn’t be showing up out of nowhere, and that said mage-for-hire probably wanted to cause her harm.

But the least he could do was chew with his mouth closed! How was she supposed to focus on what he was saying when all she could hear was him chewing?

The boy crossed his arms.

“Well, more like necromancer-for-hire, but for some reason it just doesn't work on the resume.”

“Oh,” she said. That was certainly a...job.

As if this moment couldn’t get any weirder, the boy apparently decided that the apple wasn’t much to his liking. He threw it off into the bushes lining the edge of the clearing. She stared at it for a moment, trying to figure out if something organic could technically be counted as litter. Would it be compost instead?

The boy was suddenly in front of her.

Chi stumbled back.

“Were those two your friends?” he asked, tilting his head ever so slightly to the side. How did he move so fast? She knew she had gotten distracted, but still. She should have at least heard him approach.

She pulled out the sword a little further.

“If they were,” she said, “why would you care?”

The boy raised his visible eyebrow.

“I was just thinking you needed some new friends,” he commented. The pit in her stomach grew stronger, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t nod or shake her head. She just looked away when his single silver eye stared right into her face. Something about him made her feel like he could somehow glean more than he already had from a look alone.

“They’re my friends,” she slowly insisted. “I’ve known one of them since we pretended to be princesses and knights in shining armor - and since we decided we wanted to join the adventurer’s guild.”

The boy shrugged.

“Friends don’t always stick together,” the necromancer-for-hire pointed out. “Friendship starts simply enough. You have a conversation. You think that your friends. At some point, you spend so much time together that you start believing in the idea that friendship lasts for more than a lifetime.”

Chi can’t help but look at him again.

“But then you drift apart,” the boy continued. “Maybe it was some outside force. Maybe you just both grew up. Before you know it, you’ve lost your friends for good - but you’ve gained more along the way.”

Silver eye glinting in the light of the dying sun, the boy held his hands out and gave her a bittersweet but wise smile.

“The cycle repeats itself over and over until the day your coffin is lowered into a worm-ridden hole,” he said. “It's an unavoidable part of life.”

She bit her lip.

“You’re wrong,” she whispered. Who did this boy think he was, trying to tell her what her friendship is like? People did stay together. It wasn’t a stupid dream or fairy tale. Friends didn’t have to drift apart. They could always rely on each other - like Chi and Zarith had before either one of them had ever heard the name Oona.

Her gaze fell back down to the ground.

“I’m not,” the necromancer-for-hire insisted. “You lost your friends a long time ago, miss warrior. It’s time for you to move on - and to figure out what you really want.”

...What she really wanted?

Why would he ask-

She looked up.

To her surprise, the boy had vanished into thin air.

Slipping the sword back into its sheath, Chi let out a quiet sigh and ran her fingers through her alabaster white hair. It wasn’t chaos in the usual sense of the word - he hadn’t revealed that he was part of some evil plot - but Chi knew that she was in for a recruitment speech soon. That was how things like this always worked in the adventuring business.

She stepped onto the pathway.

She knew that if she ran, she would easily be able to catch Zarith and Oona before they reached the teleportation crystal. If she was lucky, she could even convince them to get a bite to eat with her before they returned to their rooms at the local inn.

Chi walked.