Of Mice & Magic: Book 1 Ravenspell

Chapter 20: Battle of the Weird Wood

The fierce wind that carves a mighty mountain can only polish a diamond, and thus reveal its inner light.

—Rufus Flycatcher

Unsure what to do, Ben stood with quivering legs, until he heard a voice from the back of the cave.

"How quaint," Nightwing said. "My little blood-sucking parasite has a friend."

Ben whirled just as Nightwing came swooping out of the darkness and grab Ben with his gnarled feet.

Nightwing swept over the Weird Wood, swooping between bushes like an ace pilot, diving between the fork of two branches in a twisted pine, bursting through the leaves of a low-hanging vine.

Ben should have realized how good he was. A bat that can fly through a hail storm without getting hit wouldn't think twice about flying through this twisted jungle. "I knew that she'd come back," Ben said, as if to a confidante.

"She couldn't resist," Nightwing said, "Without you as her familiar, she's just another vermin."

Nightwing came whistling toward Amber, screeching in the daylight, his voice sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Ben saw Amber on the ground, running for all that she was worth. She'd lost her only weapon, and now she was darting blindly along a low trail.

She peered over her shoulder, saw Nightwing swooping above her, and dove sideways into some brush.

Nightwing overshot her position and swooped up into the air, doing a barrel-roll as he hurtled back toward her.

"What do you think?" the bat said. "Shall I mush her with a dirt clod, turn her into a little statue that will only last until the next rain? Or shall we make a more permanent sculpture of her—a monument to her stupidity."

"She's not stupid," Ben groused. "She just doesn't know anything."

Ben turned and began to climb through Nightwing's thick fur, all eight legs trembling.

"What are you doing?" Nightwing demanded.

"I'm hungry," Ben said. "Your blood. I smell it in your veins, Master. It calls to me."

Nightwing gave a simpering laugh as he soared over the brush pile where Amber had taken refuge. "Come to take your rightful place at last?"

Ben only grunted in mid-stride. But it wasn't his rightful place that he was after. He needed to distract the bat, and he could think of only one way to fight back. He would plunge his little proboscis deep into the bat's flesh, and sever his jugular vein!

But suddenly Amber was out in the open, trying to run from the brush, and Nightwing hissed a curse.

Amber was leaping over a large round stone, looking up over her shoulder toward Ben and Nightwing, when she began to scream.

Suddenly the stone began to melt, like butter, and Amber was melting with it, mushing into a creature half mouse, half stone.

She cried out in a wail of grief, and with all of his heart, Ben wished that he were still Amber's familiar, that his magic power might flow to her.

Amber glanced up as Nightwing's shadow passed overhead. He seemed huge for a bat, as big as all of the sky.

She was all out of magic. She'd felt the last of it drain from her when she killed the snake-eagle, hurling her needle into its eye.

And now, she knew that she would die. There were monsters everywhere in the Weird Wood. She could see them running from the mouth of the cave, could hear them converging on her from every direction.

Her only hope was to run madly, race through the brush, and hope that it was thick enough to slow her attackers.

She rushed through a patch of sunlight. There was a sandy brown stone beneath her, and as the bat hissed, Amber felt her feet giving way beneath her, sinking into the stone, becoming one with the stone.

She tried to pull her knees up, to free herself, but she could feel her legs frozen, immovable. She was turning into stone! She could hear it, a sound like stones cracking and grating against one another, and she could feel it—the rock rising up above her knees, to her waist, climbing toward her chest.

Time seemed to stop. The bat was there above her, Ben desperately plunging his proboscis into the monster, as if it were a spear.

Nightwing was so sure of himself, so confident, that he flew with his eyes closed while his huge ears were swept forward.

No, Amber realized in a rush of insight. He's not confident. He's flying by sound.

The stone had risen to her chest by now, and would soon be at her neck.

Amber did the only thing that she could think to do. With one last desperate hope, she screamed, "Leave me alone!"

The sound that came out was louder than the whistle of a freight train. It blasted the brush, shook leaves from the trees. It bounced off the mountainside and hit the clouds, reverberating like a bell.

And it hit Nightwing like a cannonball.

The big-eared bat, navigating solely by sound, veered sharply and slammed into a tree, a tree whose branches looked like grasping arms, a tree whose trunk had knotholes that looked like eyes and another that looked like a gaping mouth, and whose leafless limbs looked like arms flailing uselessly at the sky.

There was the sound of snapping bones, and the bat flopped down in a broken heap, landing amid a wild cucumber bush whose trumpet-shaped flowers made little satisfied smacking sounds as vines and tendrils grabbed the bat and gently began tugging it down, into the dirt at its roots.

A mist began to rise from under the bush, a black shadow of smoke that lengthened and grew, like an enormous dragon. And then the wind began to whisper through it, and the shadow was borne, like a captive, out to sea.