Mothman. The dread in Siraj's voice sent chills down my spine. The Dark Elf was familiar to the man after all. A welcome surprise, but it also presented a mysterious puzzle. Max's friend was quieter than most, rarely speaking of himself and talking about what had brought him here. Unlike Max, who I could read like an open book, Siraj was an enigma wrapped in a riddle.

  During the fight, unlike Max, Siraj had reacted calmly. His movement spoke to experience in combat. A soldier? Or something else? When I wake up, Rob and I can run a search on these two and try to find out what is up with them, I decided.

  Out here, it paid to know with whom you were traveling. As we just experienced, we had to trust each other. After all, we were the only ones out here in the mist, to all intents and purposes. We were on our own.

  But relying on each other is hard if you don't know anything about that person, I thought. They could transform. They could weaken. They could just… disappear back to the material world. They could turn to the Shadow and…

  I shook my head. I refused to believe it. Siraj wasn't like that. I couldn't put my finger on it, but for all of his secrets and his not-so-secret capabilities, Siraj presented himself as a man of honor. No agent of the Shadow would be able to deceive me in such a way. Despite their often angelic presentation, the Corrupt would always smell like taint. There was an oiliness, a shifting rainbow of uncertainty that any trained eye would pick up. Siraj was, as far as I could see, solid to the core. There was simply a labyrinth to his innermost being—secrets I could only guess at. Until then, I could rely on him to at least handle himself in a fight.

  Not that Max was particularly terrible, either. For a greenhorn, an apprentice in the path of the warrior, Max had great instincts. He recognized the need to bring the creature down. And when I had been targeted, I recalled, he instantly rushed to protect me. I couldn't have chosen better comrades in this quest.

  As the adrenaline of battle ebbed, we struggled to find the motivation to keep moving, but somehow we managed it. Packing up quickly, we roped ourselves together once again and pressed on through the Mist. It was a dull, boring trek through knee-high sedge that bored small swamps and bogs or narrow, muddy paths that sunk between tiny hills speckled with dying flowers. The constellations that once had gleamed across the plains was doused, one by one, until all of nature was subsumed in the overwhelming grey of the fog.

  Once we found a river, we kept along its edges for a while, enjoying the relative noise of the dark water rushing over rocks. Beyond the river, there was nothing else much to see. It was a wide expanse of water, so the distant banks were firmly shrouded in mist. Our side remained empty of adventurers and other questing souls. Instead, we found remnants of fires, evidences of camps… and worse, markers of battle waged and fought. How had they ended? It wasn't easy to tell. All that remained were packs with fresh food and weaponry. No sign of any Dark Elves.

  "Some of them were not so lucky, huh." Max said. "They'll wake up… or… uh…"

  "You forgot, didn't you?" Siraj guessed sardonically. "Depending on how deep they were, how long they had lived here, they might have died. Or… were banished to the material world to live as a wandering spirit. Or find themselves trapped in a self-aware coma—or not. Or they could have died."

  "It really does depend," I agreed, smacking Max on the arm so that I could push past him to gaze up the river as far as my eyes could allow me.

  Thanks to the thick fog, I found myself triple-checking the maps and relying on guidance spells to ensure that we were, in fact, heading northward. My eyes, although able to pierce some of the fog, were still unreliable. Nothing could be trusted in this ever-shifting land to begin with. The Other Side was permanent, but it was controlled by unknown forces. And now the Mists of Merigor had thickened. Things had become more difficult.

  "Regretting anything yet," Max asked Siraj.

  "No." Siraj's answer was short. Almost grumpy.

  Perhaps he was even feeling the weight of our trek through the mist. If we reach… If we get there… then we have earned our much needed rest. I stifled my sigh and instead listened to the men mutter to each other, but Max had fallen silent at Siraj's monosyllabic grunt.

  "You?" Siraj finally asked.

  Max hesitated and then shrugged. After a moment, the younger man admitted, "This wasn't exactly what I signed up for. I feel like the payment should be more like a couple k. Not that I'm complaining mind…"

  "Mothman freaked you out?" asked Siraj.

  "It didn't freak you out?" asked Max. "I felt…"

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  The dark-haired warrior trailed off, and his gaze shifted uneasily around us. I realized that his hand now hovered over his sword, often resting on the pommel. I understood. My first encounters with the Dark Elves nearly drove me insane. In the material world, I'd drawn pictures—pictures of black, metal-skinned men, hovering in the air, with or without wings. I had drawn them over and over again, a subconscious desire to exorcise my fears by understanding them more. If I can draw them, I can know them. If I can know them… I can conquer them.

  Nowadays, I could handle a few on my own, but the first encounters with a Dark Elf was always unsettling. Their aura drilled darkness into your soul. Their bloody eyes, registering you, made you feel as though you were as vulnerable as a child.

  "Fear. Bone-deep, chilling fear," I finished his sentence quietly. "I felt it too, the first time I met one. I bet Siraj felt the same. You can't escape it, but you know the strong from the weak in that moment. The weak flee—or they are devoured. The strong are able to stand their ground. They are not vanquished."

  "I suppose there's that," Max mumbled.

  "I felt fear as well," Siraj said. "But thankfully my reflexes kicked in."

  "Thankfully," I echoed.

  "When its gaze met my eye… I don't know…" Max trailed off.

  "You have to remember," I pointed out, "that they are as old as the spirits in the Bureau of Guidance. Once upon a time, they had all been faithful kin. Then, there had been some kind of dispute."

  "Dispute?" Siraj glanced over at me. "I think some people have called it a rebellion."

  "That too."

  "Rebellion?"

  "The Fall… of the Rebel Angels," Siraj said.

  "You know quite a bit," I said. "Are you a religious man, Siraj?"

  "I wouldn't have said so necessarily. There were the stories told to me in my youth," Siraj replied. "Of Shaitan. Of the Fall… and of angels and demons. And, of course, other myths. I know quite a lot. I just didn't think it would be like this."

  "A curious soul?" I suggested.

  "Something like that." Siraj's golden eye glinted in warning. "A private soul as well who prefers to tread his own path."

  "Fair enough."

  He wouldn't say much beyond that, so I let it go. Instead, our conversation turned to other more lighthearted matters, exchanging stories about hiking trips we had endured. Then, the conversation turned to where we were headed. I had hoped to reach a specific waypoint by nightfall. A sacred place that would keep the men safe while I returned to the material world for refreshment.

  Thankfully, we reached the tell-tale bend in the river that I had been searching for, and fording the river cautiously over a rocky bed of stones, we drew near ever increasing slopes up to an ancient mound. Ringed about this ancient mound, stones bound with paper and marked with sigils kept the Mists at bay. The world brightened for a little while as we stepped into the sacred ring and gazed up a large monoliths that sat in a circle together, only lightly wreathed in mist.

  "The… what's it called!" Max said with glee, racing forward.

  "Stonehenge," Siraj said sardonically. "You really don't know much, do you, Max?"

  "Whatever." Max flapped a careless hand at him. "It's still cool."

  Several groups of psychonauts had already arrived. Short, black-haired dour men dressed in long white robes, bearing foreign staffs. Several wore tall black hats bound in white cording. Shinto priests, I guessed, lost in a exorcism. And there were soldiers and other groups of men and women, geared as they were, for combat. Some wore medieval pieces of armor. Others looked like they had stepped out of a war poster from the Golden Era. Others looked more familiar to me—dressed in the usual, white space military uniform.

  "People sure do look weird around here," Max noted. "Anyone else feel like that?"

  "You probably look weird to them," Siraj pointed out.

  "Well, it IS the Other Side," I said. "People from all time and space gather here. We are looking at souls from the past, the present, and the future."

  "Really?" Max whipped around to stare at me. "So you are from another time and place, right?"

  "And you aren't?" I chuckled. "But yeah, probably."

  "What time period?" asked Siraj.

  "Not saying," I smirked.

  I had my own secrets to hide.

  "It's a tale for another day," I added. "For now, let's see what's up. Usually we'd be able to see the Village from here."

  "Which way?" Siraj turned around and around as we hesitated on the edge of the mound by the outer most ring of monoliths.

  "That way." I pointed east. "No sign. I hope everyone's alright. We'll find out. Time for you two to gather intel."

  "What about you?" asked Max.

  "I have to wake up," I told them. "But don't worry. I will return."