“The Shortcut.”
A dark-fantasy excerpt featured in Tales from the Magician’s Skull.
When a shortcut strands two travelers in a haunted ruin, a reluctant swordsman must follow his friend—freshly murdered and unnaturally reborn—into a cursed swamp where ancient love and unholy vengeance still stir. The Shortcut is a dark-fantasy tale of spectral possession, decaying empires, and the dreadful cost of loyalty.
The following is an excerpt from from Tales From the Magician’s Skull, No 13 in January 2025. In this issue, Anton Kromoff even adapted the short’s antagonist as a playable “Strange Specter” for 5E tabletop RPGs!
Illustration by Ger Curti.
“I think I see your town.”
Fazoul, his wide-brimmed hat drooping, rain splashing off his broad shoulders and into his face, turned to face Wells through the downpour. Thick gray clouds churned from horizon to horizon, belching fits of hot rain as they rolled low across the fens.
Wells, his robe and coat sodden and clinging to his thin frame, clutched his hood together at his neck and squinted through the storm. He pointed with a nod. Ahead of them, perched above the rippling swamps, sat a solitary wooden house, its roof sagging and broken, its steps and hitch collapsed in the mud. Shutters hung open, swaying in the waves of rain.
“You’re kidding me …” Fazoul muttered.
Wells shrunk in the saddle and absently stroked his mare’s drenched mane. “You said it would save us two days, taking this shortcut,” he said, his voice quick, keeping pace with the patter of rain. “Your map showed a town--”
“I know.” Fazoul interrupted.
“And that,” Wells said, pointing, “is not a town. If I’m not in Ghenno by--”
“I know, I know.” Fazoul shook his head, water spraying into the wind.
Wells frowned and peered through the curtain of rain at the dreary marshes beneath--and occasionally flooding over--the raised track.
“Funny name for this place, Denenor,” Wells said, whipping his reins, his horse reluctant to move down the hill toward the ruined house.
“All the towns and rivers in this part of the country have good Durockian names. But Denenor is ancient Lasinex. From dene, meaning city, and nore, for scavenger.”
He looked across the nearby fens, raising his head to the wind, the loose edges of his hood flapping against his cheeks and brow. “It’s been thousands of years since empire. Why hasn’t this place’s name vanished along with everything else?”
Fazoul chuckled as he hopped off his horse. “Guess no one’s been around to rename it.”
They called into the small house unanswered, tied off their horses and pushed through the rotten, rain-soaked door.
Fazoul explored the single room, lifting decayed rugs and pulling aside moldy curtains with his drawn sword. Out of the rain, Wells shed his hood and shook the water from his curly blonde hair. He crouched in a corner and watched Fazoul pace around a sagging hole in the floor beneath the ruptured ceiling.
“No one’s been here for a while.”
“Your keen pathfinder skills tell you that?” asked Wells, smiling.
Fazoul shook his head and looked up through the hole in the ceiling. Rain poured through. “I should have listened to my mother and avoided that no-good sorcerer’s son.”
Wells pulled off his gloves and rubbed his clammy hands.
Fazoul gestured toward him. “Get to it.”
Wells looked up, surprised.
“You get one going. You’re the outdoorsman.”
Fazoul set his wide-brimmed hat on the bench and sat beside it, the brittle wood and rusty nails squealing in protest beneath him. “Shall I start it with the wet wood or the wet curtains?”
Wells sighed in defeat before rising on legs still shaky from the ride. He closed his eyes. Tight. Then his body shuddered--as if struck with by a chill--and Fazoul was surprised to see the wet hairs on Wells’ arms and neck stand in the heavy air, charged. Wells stretched one hand toward the open hole in the floor, his thumb, fore, and middle fingers loosely pointing, while with the other he reached into his robe and clutched the small amulet around his neck. He gasped, as waking under a lover’s touch.
And where once Wells strained to flip a coin or enflame a candle--the veins at his temples pulsing, his hands gripped white--an easy electricity washed over him, now. The bright stain of a thief stealing a kernel of power--the most meager portion of the awesome might of Iax, the ever-god.
Wells tightened his grip around the amulet and, for a moment, it looked as though the sorcerer’s feet threatened to drift up off the rotten plank floor.
Wells opened his eyes and looked down the length of his arm, over his sleeve black with rain, past pointed fingers, and toward the yawning hole in the timbers. He inhaled, tightening like an archer about to loose. Then, with an exhale, shuddered.
Green flame erupted off the muddy earth beneath the hole. Enough to fill a brazier. Warmth filled the small ruin.
Wells leaned back against the wall, his head light, his cheeks flush.
“The flame won’t burn you, but it will warm you,” he said, his voice quiet and spent, breath short.
Fazoul watched his friend for a long moment.
“When you do that,” he asked, “does it hurt?”
Wells shook his head and let a weak smile creep across his face. “It feels wonderful.”
Wells dozed beside the hole in the floor, the light of the green fire dim on his face. His robe dangled from low rafters.
Fazoul slept in the corner of the small room, eyes flickering as Wells’ robe began to sway in the breeze between eldritch flame and wet weather. And as he drifted back into dreams of dry beds and cool stone keeps, he almost remembered someone else in the room with them.
Fazoul snapped awake, heart surging against his ribs, and jumped to his feet.
“Wells!”
He wasn’t even aware he’d called out his friend’s name. Only of the scant few feet that separated him from his sword, propped against the wall. And of the woman, radiant as a harvest moon, hanging in midair over Wells’ arcane flame.
Wells woke with a muffled yelp. But when he saw the spectral woman above him, he screamed a sharper, higher call and scampered backward across the floor, his soft palms and bare heels digging into the rotting wood.
Between them, hovering over the hole in the floor, the woman was pale and translucent, her blue glow muted against the green flame. She was young, thin, and smooth. Naked except for the long fine hair that swam around her head as though swirling in a bath. Her eyes, featureless but for hard white pupils burning bright against her blue body, searched the small house. And as her gaze passed over the men--unseeing--her fingers lingered in the folds of Wells’ student robe, hung from the rafters to dry. Like a woman in the water, she wrapped herself around the robe, her limbs and body passing through the sodden wool, her hands dragging through the material, turning and pulling it under her vaporous touch.
Every muscle and sinew in Fazoul’s body coiled tight, ready to spring. But even as he let his sword sing out of its scabbard and as he braced his back against the wall, he found his heartbeat calming the longer he looked on the woman. Her face was sad. Her expression and her body tired. But there was something desperate in the way her eyes searched the room. Something lost and piteous.
He relaxed. His scabbard fell from his hand, clattering on the rotten boards.
Her white-hot eyes turned and found him.
Fazoul’s heart leapt again. His breathing short. But he found himself unable to move as she drew closer. As she slid up to him, her feet floating just off the floor, her sad face and blank eyes regarding him without expression.
She touched his shoulders. An electric rush ran down his arm, standing hairs on end and sparking between flesh and nail and the metal of his sword’s cross guard. Not since he was a boy studying swordplay with the princes had a blade felt so useless in his hands. She drifted closer, her naked vapors pressing through his clothes and against his flesh. Her hands passed across his chest and arms, her ethereal thighs against his waist, her head curled into his neck. Fazoul closed his eyes as his body raced--pumping with furious blood, ragged breath, and hot arousal.
She pulled away, smiling faintly in the dim green light of the fire and her own low blue glow. As she moved away, her hand lingered on his chest, sweeping his skin and hair over his heart. Fazoul caught his breath as her touch passed. His heart pounded.
Her eyes took in the ruined house with new recognition, seeing it for the first time. Fazoul watched her gaze drift down the length of his blade, across their scattered gear, and, finally, over to Wells, huddled in a corner across the room.
Wells rose to his feet, fear fading as she drifted closer. Her hair flowing behind her in the humid air, she reached out and ran long insubstantial fingers through his blonde curls and around his cold ears. She pulled herself close to him until her breasts passed against and through his shirt and into his chest.
There, and all at once, her smile faded. Her expression drew tight and she pulled away. Wells looked to Fazoul, panic and nerves taking shape in his eyes. But Fazoul just shook his head. The woman drew her hands together and, reaching through Wells’ shirt, pushed his small amulet into view. Myopic, she bent close until her eyes were mere inches from the silver-wrought pendant.
She flew backward. For an instant, Fazoul could see a look of struck horror on her sad face. But that sorrowful fright vanished as quickly as it appeared. Her hot eyes narrowed, streams of painful blue-white light issuing to either side. And her body bent forward in midair, stabbing toward Wells. Fingers, long and wicked, stretched from tiny open palms. Her face became a mask of anger and rage and hatred, her mouth stretching wide in a soundless fury answered by the echo of a distant scream, faint and terrible, rolling through the door from miles away.
Her pale blue glow surged until it filled the small cabin.
She flew at Wells before he or Fazoul could react. With one long-fingered hand, she grabbed him beneath the chin and lifted him off the floor, fingers passing though his skin and bone like vapor, into his mouth and throat. The other she plunged into his chest. Fazoul watched as Wells opened his mouth to scream but found no voice. And as she pressed her face close to his friend’s, he saw her speaking but heard no sound. Just the ringing echo of that distant, smothered scream.
With a quick stroke she pulled her hand from Wells’ chest. Held tight in her fiercely-glowing fingers, a beating spectral heart. It pulsed, quivering. Its blue-white glow dull between her enraged fingers.
The color drained out of Wells. The woman released him, his body crumpling to the floor as his eldritch flame sputtered and went out.
Fazoul, unthinking, charged the floating specter. But never turning to face him, she darted through the air as a fish turns and darts away from a spear. The rotting door shuddered in its meager frame as she passed through it, into the night rain, plunging the dying house into fresh dark.
Fazoul burst though the soaked wood and ran barefoot across the road, chasing her down into the fens even as she alighted over it like a sheet on the wind. Rain beat on his head and shoulders, ringing dully on his drawn blade. Night closed in around him as she fled further and further over cattails and grasses. Stumbling in the marsh, he fell to his knees and lost sight of the specter. When he struggled to his feet again, her blue glow was faint and tiny across the receding fens.
Fazoul stood, breathing hard and holding his sword ready. Still as a statue, he sank into the swamp up to his calves. Hot rain soaked his hair and thin shirt. And when the specter’s light was finally gone, lost among mists and tumbles of low clouds and the dark shapes of hillocks rising from the wetlands, Fazoul hung his head and squeezed his eyes tight. He screamed until his throat was burned and raw, tears mingled with rain.
He trudged back across the road and up the steps into the ruined house, mind blank, chest heavy. Wells’ flame extinguished and the light of the enraged specter gone, the room was almost pitch under the cloudy night sky. Fazoul knelt beside his friend and pulled him onto his back. Wells’ skin was already cold and pale. His chest still. Fazoul let his sword fall to the boards and pulled his friend close.
Wells’ eyes opened slowly. He reached up and gripped Fazoul’s wet shoulder with weak, cold fingers.
Fazoul looked into his eyes, dumbstruck.
“What did she do to me?” Wells struggled to say, breathless.
Keep reading!
To finish the story, order or download the rest of “The Shortcut” in Tales from the Magician’s Skull, No. 13. This issue also features stories by Cullen Bunn, Anton Kromoff, Stephen Wilson, and a comic by Jake Allen.
