Travelers to the Restan-Galean border city of Freedom's Reach, beware! During the final week of Ames, every citizen is inclined to look over their shoulder at all times and even the most reclusive will try to avoid being alone. Their behavior changes completely, which always seems to put off visitors, but they do so only out of fear for their own safety. For reasons that remain a mystery to all, people are known to occasionally go missing from the city at night. There seems to be no consistent frequency or prejudice for these occurrences; Restans and Galeans alike of all sorts have proven to be vulnerable. In some years, this may not happen at all, but it has been known to happen up to five times during one particularly traumatic year.
3E6. That was the year of the last spring I dared to stay in Freedom's Reach. It is certainly a harmonious and colorful place to live for most of the year, but after the week we had taken to calling Dark Ames. I was 22 back then, and had thankfully only seen three eventful years of this apparent curse. The disappearances had already been happening for five years, which lead many of us to believe that they began with something that happened during the Archknight Rebellion, but no one has any idea what. It's not like anything meaningful happened in Freedom's Reach at the time. The Archknight and his band passed through quite uneventfully, in fact. Everyone seems to be in the dark about the connection between Dark Ames and the Archknight Rebellion, but I'm certain it's out there somewhere. The problem, though, is that no one with the knowledge and resources to get to the bottom of this could be bothered to look into it initially. The spellwarriors would tell us that since it didn't happen every single year, we couldn't be certain that any magic was actually at work here. No experts from Galeon's end seemed to take the problem seriously either. The official position on both sides of the border was that since the disappearances had no pattern, we couldn't prove they were even related. We were on our own.
That was until that fateful year. We had all thankfully been spared the year before, so the tension that we had become accustomed to wasn't as heavy. After four days, everyone had grown tired of talking about it and just carried on with our safety rituals in silence. On the night of the fourth day, the first person disappeared. But he was a drunk tourist bound for his home in Beldor. He wasn't alone when he first passed through on his way into Galeon, but he was leaving alone. Perhaps this wasn't a Black Ames disappearance, we thought. Maybe he just stumbled back onto the road at night without thinking and would wake up embarrassed somewhere between here and Palon. We tried to stay calm, telling each other as firmly as we could that it wasn't happening again.
An 8-year old girl from the Galean side was gone by morning.
With a new day came newfound certainty that the curse was in effect once more. I stayed close to my friends for the rest of the week, knowing that there was only thing that each of the previous victims had in common. No one was to be alone. There were five of us together in Laurel's house and we had bought a treasure chest of drinks and snacks with the plan of whiling away the rest of the week playing games inside her fortified den. As the night ticked on, however, we had gotten a little tipsy and began to fool around. It was around that time when John crossed a line with Amir. Little Amir had always valued his space and John had been the most drunk at the time so he was acting more chummy with everyone than he normally did. He got angry when Amir began to back away. John started yelling at Amir, demanding that he admit that he wanted him to do what he was doing. An argument ensued during which John pushed Amir over. A hush had fallen over the room when he hit the ground. Suddenly, he was back on his feet and storming out. I was nearest to the door, but I was too stunned to stop him from leaving. If I had, I might have stopped him from being the third to disappear.
The rest of the night had been spent picking apart what had happened with John and Amir. We put him to bed and locked him in the guest room until we could decide what to do with him. Laurel and Akiha spent the better part of Black Ames' penultimate day arguing over whether John should get to hang around. Laurel was disgusted with him and wanted him out of her house, but Akiha tried to argue that he would be alone and therefore vulnerable if he left. It was hard to argue with either, to be honest. I didn't feel safe around him anymore, but was that any reason to condemn him to potential death? Not wanting to be dragged in to the argument, I ducked out as soon as I woke up late in the morning to visit my sister and her family.
I was happy to see that Marie and her children had been safe so far and the five of us spent a rather pleasant afternoon together. Unfortunately, I never really got along with the Galean woman that she had recently got married to so when she got home, it became clear that I wouldn't be riding out the rest of the week with family. So, I returned to Laurel's with a heavy heart, hoping that she and Akiha had already sorted out their argument. But along the way, I ran into Akiha, who told me that Laurel had gotten tired of arguing with her over John and sent them both away. The two of them had gotten separated, but I could tell that Akiha wanted to find John. I couldn't very well leave her to try alone, so we searched together for nearly an hour before finding him... and something baffling.
John had been sitting against a brick fence and staring at the moon in a fugue state when a sticky, looking tendril scooped right off the ground and began to pull him through the air. We tried to chase him, but whatever had him moved faster than humanly possible. We followed the drops of goo that had dropped from the tendril in John's struggle, but the trail seemed to end at a hill just outside the city, directly to the west. It took me a few minutes, but I managed to find footprints that seemed to lead down the southwestern side of the hill. We wandered through the borderlands until we nearly walked off a cliff. At the edge, we saw what appeared to be a bunch of people standing together, but slightly apart just a bit further to the west.
When we crept up to these figures, however, we found out they weren't people, but statues of people. They seemed to be carved in almost lifelike detail of something partially translucent. They appeared in countless different colors. The nearest was red and seemed to depict a short, thin man. Thinking he looked like hard candy, I pressed my hand to the statue. It was sticky. Certain I must be crazy, I licked one of the fingers of his outstretched hands. It tasted like strawberries. I had been about to report this to Akiha when she suddenly began to back away from a yellow statue nearby, which depicted a beautiful, somewhat familiar woman. She pointed out the bracelet carved into the statue's wrist and told me that she made it. I looked closer and saw the distinctive charm that Laurel was known to wear.
I suddenly began to look closer at the strawberry man in front of man. His arms were outstretched and one leg was bent. It almost looked like he was treading water. When I studied the face more closely, I saw the same face that I did when Amir fled from John. There was a lot of fear in his expression, but also pure agony. Akiha and I looked together and nodded in mutual understanding. We had found where the people who had disappeared from the city were being kept, and their fate was beyond comprehension. Whoever did this must have gotten to Laurel before we found John, but where was he? None of the dozens of statues that were arranged in this horrible display looked like him. Eventually we found a copse hidden among the trees at the edge of the cliff and argued for several minutes about going in.
We agreed that it didn't seem to matter at this point whether either of us was alone, but we were too scared to split up now. So, we slipped into the copse and crept between the shrubbery in silence, following a sweet smell deeper in. We finally found a decrepit cabin, a shack more like, that had only the dimmest of light escaping its solitary window. When we looked in through the window, what we saw made us run all the way home. Inside, there was a large, bubbling cauldron with what appeared to be a thick, green fluid. We then watched in horror as John was lowered into the cauldron by a chain latched to a shackle on his ankle. He kicked and screamed wildly the whole way down and managed to catch the lip of the cauldron. But the hot metal burned his hands and he quickly lost his grip. We didn't see what happened next, but I'm sure it was something we should be glad not to have seen.
Akiha spent the last day of Black Ames hiding in my house, fearing any possibility of having been followed. I kept my airwave transmitter ready to call for help at a moment's notice, but we made it through the day without anything else bad happening. Afterward, I called the spellwarriors and tried to lead them to this menagerie of candied people, but the copse, the shack, and all of the statues were gone. I had to let them into my memories to confirm that I wasn't making any of this up, but there weren't any closer to finding whoever did this than they had been before.
At least this got the peacekeepers on both side of the border to take us seriously. The spellwarriors and HDL have returned every year since then, but they still have yet to figure anything out. I hear they've had some casualties themselves, but I wouldn't know. Akiha and I both left Freedom's Reach that summer. Seeing how all of our friends have suffered, the lives we had before seemed long gone, so we both retreated for safer ground. Akiha moved to Rashara while I returned to my hometown of Beldor. I might return some day to visit my sister and the friends who remained in Freedom's Reach, but I will never again set foot anywhere near there during the last week of spring's final month.
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