“Can you at least tell me what it does?”
Lem frowned down at the talisman. Feiya had just handed him a cord of braided sinew hung with scraps of fabric and a small yellowed fang.
“All in due time.” Feiya’s coyly reassuring smile almost achieved its goal. Her eyes betrayed her, preoccupied as they were with scanning the darkened corners of the shop. She was on the hunt, and even more terse than usual.
“Out of sight, fang near a vein, yes? Parallel. When the entity manifests, draw its attention. Then,” she growled through a predatory smile, “it’s mine.”
“So,” she chirped, malice evaporated, “the surprise is intentional!”
“Do consider how it might behoove you to be a bit more forthright?” Lem offered cheerfully, shirt pulled over one shoulder as he tied the charm around his bicep. “People appreciate directness! For instance, a witch might clearly label her concoctions in order to assure others that… hrm. Feiya?”
His willowy companion had drifted off around a rack of hats, their broad brims embroidered with scenes of local myths and histories. Lem sighed, dropped his shoulders slightly, and allowed a frown to darken his face. He sidestepped in front of a fitting mirror.
“She’s not listening, is she, Lem?” he asked his reflection morosely.
“No, Lem, I don’t believe she is.” The mirrored image of Lem in the glass straightened, adopting a genteel tone. “Foregoing the pleasure of our company to go ask a spider for its gallbladder. Or some such.” Lem wrinkled his nose at himself. “Remember the rat?”
“How could I forget?” Mirror Lem mourned anew. “All that chittering, night after night. Daji said they preferred the ferns, but I think he just wanted an excuse to make noise when we were sleeping.”
They’d been tracing the Crushing Shadow for a few weeks, following a trail of property damage and strangulations across inland Ravounel. As best they could tell their quarry wasn’t a person, but some sort of magical force. Lem had picked up traces of hatred and want from the recent murder sites, not as acrid as one would expect from a mortal actor. They were attenuated—just not by time. With the most recent victim, they’d arrived right as her gaze became still and empty, yet even with violence so fresh, the emotions were wan and… dusty, was how he’d described it to Feiya. She had immediately agreed, then started down the path that had led to his strange new accessory.
An integral part of this was her nine-tailed fox’s repeated interviews with a rat. It was of utmost importance, Feiya had said, that the rat give the fang of its own free will. Mostly this had meant Lem got to practice the flute and forage for mushrooms for a few hours a day, and eventually Daji had returned triumphant from his protracted negotiations.
Feiya’s “other source” had revealed that, apart from the deceased’s, no flesh or blood were present at the killing. Lem had overheard Feiya mumbling in her sleep twice. The first time, she had mentioned “the lady’s dark and diaphanous wings,” and the second was something about traveling a path of stars. Then Lem shifted in his bedroll and saw Daji’s little red eyes peering at him over his pack. Since then, he’d done his best to ignore her troubled sleep.
Now, here they were in some packrat’s palace, searching hatboxes for traces of an invisible and apparently unliving force with a particular love for flattened tracheae.
“Come now, Sad Lem, your tenebrous friend seems to have it all well in hand,” Mirror Lem reassured. “Just make sure that little—hey!”
A flash of white flitted behind a neat stack of bones. Muddy pawprints led from the ossuary and back to…
Real Lem looked down. “I just washed my feet! Do you know how long it takes to style my hair?” he groaned. “‘Back in a town,’ I thought, ‘do something nice for yourself after weeks of rainy roads.’ Should have known.”
A vulpine snicker sounded from the bones. A pair of red eyes glittered between them, then Daji strolled out into sight, nine tails swaying languidly.
“But Lem, practice makes perfect. Consternation builds character. That is my gift to you—the chance to grow as a performer and a person.” The fox knelt, wriggled as if to jump, then paused. “It was both, by the way. They liked ferns, and I liked needling you.”
Daji launched himself upward with a little yipping laugh, landing both atop a bookshelf and above the pincushion Lem had thrown at him. There was a dejected pah, pahf as the makeshift missile bounced off the shelf and fell to the floor.
Feiya snorted in amusement. Daji and the affable musician clearly enjoyed their verbal sparring. Truthfully, Lem was better company than she was used to. He didn’t ask uncomfortable questions, and if she shied away from a topic, he never brought attention to it; he just steered clear in future conversations. With him, the shadows of her past weren’t quite so deep, and it was easier to tend the cold and righteous fire at her core.
Never to gutter, never to rage, a still and safe anger to burn ‘til the day.
That was why they were here, really. She had been tracing a ley line when she stopped in a village for supplies. She’d entered the provisioner’s to find a red-jacketed halfling gentleman consoling a weeping shopkeeper. Townsfolk were hauling a body out the door and, being a curious sort, Feiya asked some questions. Seems the insightfulness of her queries impressed Red Jacket and suggested she might be able to help.
She was going to say no. Then she’d heard a child crying upstairs.
Certain things could stoke that cold fire until it blazed through her, and no fuel was greater than a child’s distress. Her face must have twisted, because Red Jacket paused, gave her a curious look, then handed her a torn scrap of the victim’s scarf.
“What do you make of this?” he’d said. “You know, magically. I’m guessing you’ll pick up some of the same things I did.”
Then he’d quickly closed and opened one eye at her? It was oddly endearing.
Now they were traveling companions, at least until this Crushing Shadow was found—assuming Lem didn’t strangle Daji first. She could hear her two companions locked in another of their philosophical debates, this one on the relative merits of mortal works.
Lem was lifting a gleaming sword from its velvet cradle. “…Yes, mortal work, and mortals perish. Yes, steel, and steel rusts. But the meaning we attach to the steel, to the sword and whatever violence it wreaks, that meaning grows tall and wide as wild rose, becomes a vast and tangled thing of beauty and danger both.”
Lem didn’t think Feiya was listening, but that never stopped him from talking all the same.
Illustration by Firat Solhan in Pathfinder Player Core.
“That is one of this great symphony’s mysterious movements!” Lem was winding himself up, gazing into the blade’s mirrored surface, talking as much to his reflection as to the witch’s familiar. “What may we mortals work that outlasts and out grows us? How privileged those few who see how the first stone they lay grows into a road, hear their song a continent and a lifetime away. Why, it reminds me of…”
Daji was weaving toward Feiya between the skulls and candlesticks of a high shelf.
“I walked away after the first sentence.”
He hopped down to sit in front of a black cloak with a vaguely sinister air, and cocked his head at it.
“Smells dangerous.” He nosed the dark fabric, which rippled in a disappointingly fabric-like manner. “Alas. Your new friend talks a lot, by the way.”
“Friend? But yes, he does. I think I like it? It’s comforting. And he makes me laugh in a way that feels good.” Feiya chewed on her lip. “You make me laugh like a cat who’s not done with their dinner. And that usually feels good, too. Mostly.”
She walked her finger under Daji’s chin and gave him a scratch. He made his I am pleased sound, though he’d never admit it. They sat a moment, just the two of them, in the quiet. It was almost like those first days, together in the snow.
“You’ve come far, little one, and she’ll lead you farther still,” purred the fox.
“…Why is it quiet?”
Feiya turned to see the cloak strangling Lem.
It was wrapped around his neck, a sooty version of that eight-legged fish he’d been trying to explain to her the other day, and he was scrabbling at it to no avail.
She reached into herself for the cold anger that was always there. In her mind's eye it rose from the depths, trailing mist, and curled into long and wicked needles to jab into the minds of those who had wronged her. She snarled, and an invisible fang streaked toward the belligerent garment.
It ricocheted harmlessly off the utter void where the thing’s intent would have been, if it were a thinking, feeling creature.
“Daji!” She yelped, and her familiar responded with his own hungry growl.
Woe, woe, for the snuffing of a short-burned flame, the flower plucked before it blooms.
Red and black flames licked slowly at the edges of Lem’s darkening vision.
Enough, Sad Lem. Ideas?
Not a one! Oh, but I think he has some.
Daji was crouched on some taxidermized creature, his nine tails waving slowly back and forth, that bright red coloration crawling across his fur. His eyes glimmered bright as dying stars.
“A creature in sharp artifice will gnaw a limb to aid its flight,” said the fox, words smoldering and spreading. “A last gasp caught twixt death and life can tear as tender as a saw.”
One of Lem’s ragged breaths splintered, somehow, and then each splinter spread knife-like wings to launch itself at the cloak twisted about his neck. It writhed as the magic tore through stitch and seam. Fabric turned rotten and brittle, and the tightness around his neck eased.
The thin trickle of air into his lungs was all it took. The curiosity, the wonder, the desire to live and find out rose from his throat. He fumbled with numbing fingers, but his flute was unreachable. Still, he wasn’t without tools.
A single clear note sounded from his pursed lips. It shimmered against the ear, brittle, a raindrop brimming with the vast waters of mortal emotion and experience. Even standing as he was in death’s threshold, he marveled at how the smallest part of something could reflect the beauty of the whole—
echo of malice pale stitched heart wounds reflection of right that’s it—
“Feiya!” he rasped. “Not possessed, an echo! Recall the sound, remember your—” He stopped, unable to name the thing he had seen in her eyes that first day. He’d carried it himself, once.But as the note faded, Lem saw the realization spread across her face. She stepped forward, lifted one cool, sharp claw—she had claws?—in front of his face, then sliced it downward. The tip bit into the writhing fabric of the cloak.
His bicep went cold, and that little yellow fang on the sinew thong ripped its way through his shirt. It, too, splintered, and suddenly he was surrounded by whizzing shards of bone, all tearing through gaps left by Daji’s spell. Between the talisman, the magic, and Feiya’s claws, the malicious thing was nothing more than gray tatters, some silver, and a few rapidly darkening red gems.
Lem slumped to the floor and took in a ragged breath.
“Maybe ‘all in due time’ could happen a bit sooner?” The gleam of candleflame across dully metallic nails caught his eye. “And since when did you get so pointy?”
“I’m not certain. It’s been a while.” Feiya lifted her hand to watch her nails lighten and retract. “Thank you for that final piece of the puzzle. I thought it was possession, but when you said to… you know.”
“Yes.” Lem’s bushy eyebrows scrunched together. “Feiya, I can only guess at what’s happened, and I truly don’t mean to pry, but with the strangling…”
A newly lengthened nail pressed against his lips, but Feiya’s expression was calm.
“It’s alright. Thank you,” she whispered, smiling slightly, “friend. Now, we should probably leave before—”
A shadow fell across the shop door’s stained-glass window. The key turned in the lock with the smoothness of an old habit, and a stout man stepped into the building. One look, and his face was rapidly darkening with anger.
“Mmm,” mused Lem, surrounded by shredded garments, bone fragments, and broken glass. “Bit late for that.”
About the Author
Andrew Mullen has been freelancing for Paizo and other publishers since 2017. He brings a keen interest in language and the interplay of geography and culture to his work, as seen in the Magaambya section of Lost Omens Character Guide, the xulgaths in the Extinction Curse Adventure Path, and numerous other monsters over the years. As a full-time parent, his daughter is his most important monster.
About Iconic Encounters
Iconic Encounters is a series of web-based flash fiction set in the worlds of Pathfinder and Starfinder. Each short story provides a glimpse into the life and personality of one of the games’ iconic characters, showing the myriad stories of adventure and excitement players can tell with the Pathfinder and Starfinder roleplaying games.
