Poor, Lost Soul
In the dead of night the Wand’ring Man goes stalking the world for prey. ‘Round ev’ry corner, 'hind ev’ry tree A light will his presence betray. Those impish wisps, his wicked lamp herald The Lost One’s arrival. And should he lay his hands ‘pon thee, from that rest there is no revival. So be wary, my children, when walking alone in strange lands beyond thine own home. The Lord of the Lost may be following thee to snatch thee up from whence thou roam.
The swamp remained shrouded in fog from the waning heat of the day as Debrun pushed his delicate craft between the trees. He’d crossed paths with the returning tide of hunters not long ago, but none had been able to give him even the slightest hint as to his sister’s whereabouts. All they’d had to offer him was advice to turn back, or to perhaps check and see if she had returned home of her own accord. All had gone unheeded.
Oh Rosamie, I never would have let you go, had I known... he thought as he peered through the dense blanket of mist for any signs of another boat’s lantern - any shape at all that might seem artificial amongst the warped tree trunks and tufts of reeds.
It had been only a passing comment; a joke at the girl’s expense. The young Bufogren hadn’t thought much of his disparaging remarks about his sibling’s hunting prowess, but apparently she had taken it personally. She’d stolen a craft and snuck out through the docks, leaving nothing more than a note declaring her intentions to remain away until she had proven herself not only his equal, but his better.
Perhaps she went this way? Nothing.
She wouldn’t have gone this far, surely. He turned around.
I don’t remember passing this tree…
There was still no sign of his sister, and even as the fog lifted, the darkness worked to turn the familiar hunting grounds into an impenetrable maze of seemingly identical trees, shrubs, and algae-coated waters. The lantern mounted at the prow of his little boat did little more than make it even more difficult to see anything in the inky black beyond.
Debrun had been rash. Incredibly so, in fact. Trackers and seekers trained for years before braving the depths of the swamplands for prey or missing persons, yet the panic of discovering his sister missing had allowed him to forget this fact and forge out on his own. As he passed a suspiciously familiar cluster of fallen logs for the fifth time in a row, just how grievous an error he had made was rapidly becoming clearer.
Suddenly, a light shone in the distance! The warm, orange glow of a burning lantern flared out from behind a twisted trunk some thirty meters away. Without hesitation, Debrun swung his boat and its direction and began to paddle furiously. Whether it was his sister or a search and rescue team was irrelevant to him at the moment. Whichever it was, it wasn’t further isolation in the dark void of the nighttime swamp.
“Hello! Who’s there?” He called to the light. “I’m over here!”
There was no answer, and as Debrun neared the backlit tree, the light winked out.
What?! His heart began to pound. “Hey, whoever you are, why did you turn out your-” He rounded the last bend, only to be met with more empty swamp. The green blanket over the gently rippling water was unbroken. There had been no one here.
Was he going mad so quickly? Debrun had heard many tales of lost hunters chasing phantom lights to their doom, but those had surely just been tall tales, filled with morals about caution and preparedness. Certainly they were relevant to his current predicament, but it was a bit late to be learning those particular lessons.
He sat in the darkness, attempting to calm himself and come up with a serviceable plan. Instead, another thought plagued his mind. What was it that had caused those lights? In the stories, it wasn’t just madness or ghosts or… or whatever. It had been…
Another light appeared. And another. And a third. These were different colors from the first. Blue and green and purple. Unnatural colors for flame. Unnatural colors for light in general. Clarity reached Debrun at last, latching onto his heart and dragging it down into the depths of his stomach.
Wisps.
Strange, ethereal beings of unknown origins. Some claimed that wisps were the spirits of others who had died in the swamps, lost for lack of light in life and so shedding it in death. Others believed them to be wholly natural entities, but with a mischievous streak that saw them leading the unwary further from civilization and safety. Still others tried to claim that the wisps were good omens, capable of leading one to great fortune. This last group was largely ignored. The fact that there were no reliable first-person accounts of the outcome of following wisps did not lend their stories much credence.
Debrun watched as the spectral lights danced through the trees, drifting a ways off before returning to waver in view, seemingly waving at him to follow them. On one hand, everything he knew about these creatures - however limited and tainted by hearsay and speculation - suggested that to follow their lead was certain doom. On the other, there was a very real chance that he was doomed already, just as soon as his lantern ran low and his energy gave out, leaving him helpless to the predators lurking beneath the water’s surface.
Steeling himself, the Bufogren whirled his boat in the direction of the wisps, whispering prayers to every god he knew that he was not making a colossal mistake.
He rowed, the wisps drifted onward.
He rowed some more, the wisps drifted onward.
His arms burned as he rowed faster, desperate to catch up with the fleeting motes of light, but they continued to drift on the edges of his vision, weaving between the trees and taunting him with their agility.
From time to time, the light of his lantern fell upon some threat or another. The sleeping form of an alligator, a cluster of nulspore pods hidden in a patch of algae, a nest of venomous watersnakes, all treacherously near to the path the wisps navigated, but somehow just out of range of their follower. Any one of these could have spelled Debrun’s end had he stumbled across them in the dark, yet the wisps had seemingly ensured that he had narrowly escaped that fate.
At long last, the wisps stopped, congregating around a particularly large tree in the center of an otherwise clear section of swamp. Dozens of other wisps were already swirling around the area, creating a veritable rainbow of flickering, fluttering lights that weaved through the tree’s branches, creating a truly beautiful display. A display which Debrun completely ignored. His focus lay squarely upon a motionless form wedged in the crook between two boughs, directly above the signs of a scuttled hunting boat.
It was Rosamie. The wisps had led Debrun to his sister! Paddling forward, Debrun leapt up to her position in the tree, leaving his own boat to gently cruise forward and beach itself on its massive roots.
Her eyes were closed, and in her arms she held the corpse of the largest poisson-lance Debrun had ever seen in a vise-like grip. The snapped end of a hunting spear was lodged in the beast’s skull, and its head was covered in blood. Joy turned to horror, however, as the boy realized that not all of it belonged to the dead fish.
As he stood by, unsure what to do, Rosamie’s eyes fluttered open. It took several moments for them to focus, but in time they managed to lock onto her brother’s sparsely-lit face.
“I sure showed you, eh, brother?” She whispered, wiggling the gargantuan creature in her arms.
“Yeah, you… You sure did.” He said, trying his best not to sound as panicked as he felt, if only for her sake. One of the fish’s eponymous pikes had broken off and was jutting out of his sister’s side. He knew better than to pull something like that free, but he wasn’t sure if he could move her in this state, assuming he could get her to let go of her prize.
“I’m gonna feed this to the whole family when we get back…” She said quietly, her eyes drifting closed again.
Debrun tried to formulate a sentence in response, something cheerful and reassuring, but after three false starts, he gave it up as a bad job. She’d drifted back into sleep, anyway.
For the next hour or so - though it felt like an eternity - the poor boy did what he could to help. He screamed into the darkness, waving his lantern around. He cleaned the wound slightly, careful not to touch the impaled spine. He even tried once to move Rosamie, hoping he might be able to slip her into his boat and begin paddling somewhere safer, but she began to cry out in pain the moment he shifted her weight. In the end, the two were left stranded in the giant tree, surrounded by the dancing wisps.
And then the lights went out.
In a single instant, every single wisp had disappeared without warning. Debrun’s lantern had gone out sometime during the last hour, unnoticed amidst the dozens of other light sources, but it left them now in utter, oppressive darkness. Even the stars and fireflies seemed to have winked out of existence. It took an age for Debrun’s eyesight to readjust, and even then it was all he could to to make out his own hands directly in front of his face.
Quietly and carefully clambering down to his moored boat, the young bufogren flicked open the glass panel of his lantern, pulled out his firestarter, and struck flint against steel.
A lantern lit some hundred meters to his left.
Debrun looked between the distant light and his own hands for a time, wondering how he had performed this magical feat, when suddenly he realized the implications of that light: Someone was out there! He clambered back up into the tree, screaming and crying out for help the whole way, but though the orange glow did grow brighter and nearer for a time, it eventually winked out. He hardly even had time to feel defeated before a new light lit, however, this time to the right. Although he was mystified as to the nature of this drifting light source, the poor lad had little room to harbor doubt at the moment, and he continued to call for help in the lantern’s direction.
This happened several times, with Debrun’s voice growing more and more hoarse with each repetition, but he dared not stop. Though it seemed like some kind of sadistic trick, each new light as a new chance - however slim - of salvation. For as long as the lights appeared, there was hope. This hope was dashed when, at long last, the bearer of the lantern appeared.
A humanoid figure with elongated proportions rivaling those of a Bufogren stepped out from behind a tree and into the clearing. It wore clothing similar to those of the guides of the human trade caravans that had visited Debrun’s home from time to time, with a worn tracker’s cap and a flowing coat that trailed into the muck of the swamp. In one extended hand it bore a steel lantern, whose light shone directly onto its featureless head.
The figure trudged through the muck with seeming difficulty, though its boots left nothing disturbed in their wake. It approached the tree with purpose, eyeless face locked onto the spot where Debrun’s sister rested.
Without even thinking, Debrun dropped down to her branch with his fists raised, prepared to fight off this ghastly being despite the utter terror beating in his chest.
“B-back into the forest with you, hideous spirit! Nul take us both before I let you have her!”
The figure stopped, seemingly appraising Debrun as it lowered its lantern slightly. A tear formed in its face, like a sculptor slicing a wire through a block of clay. From this cut, a voice like the last gasps of a dying man wheezed forth.
“Brave words,” it hissed, “but it is not your time.” Its unburdened hand lifted to point at Rosamie. “It is hers.”
Debrun’s fists tightened, he feared his heart might spontaneously stop beating, but he held his ground. “I say again, Nul take us both before-”
Without another word, the figure’s hand shot forward, passing entirely through Debrun’s body without impact. The Bufogren’s mind went blank as an icy chill shot through his entire body in an instant. His mouth hung open, unable to continue his cry of defiance, until the figure’s hand retracted, drawing some spectral trail with it. Heat crawled slowly back into the lad’s body, but he was already losing consciousness. His eyes drooped shut as he dropped down into his boat below with a thunk.
The god known as the Lost One looked over the unconscious form of the foolish frog-man.
“Your brother is brave, but quite stupid.” He said, looking to the small soul in his outstretched hand.
The spirit of Rosamie nodded meekly, passing glances between her fallen protector and her apparent captor.
“It is often so,” he wheezed, not used to speaking at such lengths while manifested in the mortal realm. “The living do not comprehend my purpose. Nor should they.”
Rosamie nodded again, her gaze lingering longer on her brother this time before turning to meet the god’s gaze with a worried expression on her ghostly face.
“I meant what I said; it is not his time. I will ensure that it remains so.” The god moved towards the boat, but paused. “Hmm… Perhaps you’d like to aid in that endeavor?”
-----
Debrun was discovered the following morning, still unconscious at the bottom of his boat as it drifted back into town of its own accord. His tale of his sister’s death at the hands of the Lost One was met with much sadness, but it was only one of a number of such tales throughout Bufogren history, and there was little that could be done but mourn her passing and use her story as a warning to others.
These efforts were of little comfort to the lad, whose guilt over his sister’s death weighed heavily on his conscience. Many tried to console him, reminding him that there was little any mortal could have done in the face of a god, but it was many months before we was even a shadow of his former self.
For the rest of his days, Debrun harbored a grudge against the Lost One, but he retained a soft spot in his heart for the wisps, who had at least allowed him one last moment with his sister before her passing. He spotted them many times from that day onward, though never in the numbers of that first night. All were a particularly alluring shade of pink, and he took to collectively calling them Rosie in his sister’s memory. Whenever he felt lost, or when danger threatened to cross his path, he could always count on a wisp to lead him in the right direction.
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