White-faced Deer 2

The first leg.

Gil Nobodi

Jan 06, 2026

Read Part 1

This story takes place in a world you can’t see, but whose light is always waiting for you.

Introductions

Early Night

Templum City

The runes alongside the wagon lit up as it began to lumber forward. Sparks shuffled off from beneath its skirting. Inside, the crew were sitting in bunk style cots. The black leather material offered comfort, despite the crowded conditions. Sara eyed the large basalt container, a grand stone coffin, stuffed into the center of the compartment. It was practically holding them hostage against the walls. They spoke from their cots. Bunks on the sides, three laterally across the inner wall. The white-haired mage lay on his elbow, his eyes darting between speakers excitedly as Sara asked for introductions by the new recruits.

“Dulcet.” Dulcet answered amenably.

The wagon jostled with a sudden bump. The inner roads of Templum were littered with uneven intersections. The city was in a constant state of expansion and construction. Some devotees of the creator spent all their waking hours dedicated to enriching the infrastructure of Templum. Others spent their days within the temples, praying or plotting.

“Prove it.” Sara challenged.

“My…name?” Dulcet questioned.

Another gentle bump. The bejeweled dream-catcher above Sara’s top cot jingled in a barely audible song. Within its threads a sapphire clinked against a small metal rod. Sara offered a hearty laugh, holding her belly.

“No! In your interview. You said you could ‘reach through things’.” Sara corrected.

Beneath her, Edward poked the rough leather of her cot. With a playful roll of his eyes he targeted Dulcet. “You don’t have to prove anything to her.”

“Actually,” Sara raised a hand while elbowing the spot where she assumed his finger was. “I’m the mechanic here. So, she kind of does.”

She raised an eyebrow and the corners of her mouth twisted into a slight smile.

“Sara, stop.” Edward chided.

“I don’t mind.” Dulcet interjected.

She rolled her legs over the edge of the cot and prepared to hop down. Another gentle bump along their way caused her to hesitate. The sound of chiming from Sara’s side again, the wide smile of the mage watching their discourse unfold, the way some of the others sat up to observe; Dulcet was overwhelmed with a sense of soft romance. A memory in the making she knew to cherish. She leapt from the side and landed beside the stone coffin. She bent over and felt the cold metal of the wagon floor, grazing her fingers in a small circle.

Dulcet started making a “fuu” sound, lightly biting her lower lip. As resonance began to build, her sight started to pierce the tiles of the wagon’s floor. A feathered hole soon appeared where she looked, invisible to the others. She clenched her fists, then released, several times. Dulcet continued to intonate. She looked up to Sara.

“Are you watching?”

“Ya,” Sara said, leaning over and taking full notice.

Dulcet reached a hand cautiously through the hole, until she was elbow deep. Sara’s eyes widened. She observed her reach directly through solid material. Sara shook her head in consternation. She mouthed some profanity before hopping down gracelessly, landing on the coffin and perching on it. She crawled over it to Dulcet’s side and observed the mystery, leaning over the stone container at the edge of balance.

They enjoyed the moment for a beat, before Sara started waving her hand ‘up’, indicating that was enough. Dulcet assented, removing her hand. As if radioactive, she held it away from herself and her intonations shifted to hard Z’s. The invisible waves rippling off of it began to subside and gradually, she relaxed the arm.

“I can reach through people. Leaves a bit of a mess, though.” Henry, the white-haired mage offered. Several sets of eyes shifted toward him. Sara cleared her throat.

“What about you?” Sara moved the focus to the other new recruit, the one in the cot underneath Dulcet’s.

He was laying on an elbow, watching. He hadn’t said much of anything yet. Anika had recruited him at the bar without an exchange of words. He looked dourly at her as he registered that this was a forced confession.

“I don’t know anything about wagons,” he looked over at Henry. “and I’m not a mage.”

“So, what is your deal?” Sara asked.

“I got in line because I needed currency.” He lamented. The man under Dulcet’s cot rolled off of his elbow and onto his back. Sara huffed.

The door to the driver compartment slid open. Anika walked through. She looked around the crowded room, then narrowed in on Sara, with a look of disapproval.

“Get off of that.” She ordered. Sara crawled over the stone box, back toward her cot.

Anika walked over to the head of the box, Dulcet moved out of her way as she approached. Anika looked into the carved holes at the head of the coffin. She put a hand on the edge and leaned close. She peered into it before speaking. Inside, there were some dim points of colored light, orange, blue, yellow, green. Specks. It seemed otherwise empty within.

“We’ll be exiting Templum in the next five minutes, the main road leads North to South. You need to decide which way we’re headed.” She waited for a response.

She knocked once on the stone. Nothing. Anika stood up from her leaning position with predatory half-lidded eyes. She took a step away from the head-end of the coffin, back toward the driver cabin. She stopped halfway across, holding a hand up and glanced toward Sara and Edward, her veterans. After a serious moment of consideration, Anika said

“We’re going North.”

The Ambush

Later that night

30 miles from Templum

Maneet woke, sitting sharply up from her cot against the wagon’s inner wall. She was slicked in sweat. Her mind worked as her eyes darted around the cabin. A severe ringing in Maneet’s ear informed her that something was amiss. Sprinting hoof beats. Their wagon ran on piezoelectric momentum, not horsepower. There were multiple horses. Charging the wagon, approaching either side. Harsh white lights flashed on in the cabin, earning Maneet groans and moans from her compatriots.

“Horses.” She said. Her eyes began to glow with dim golden outlines. “Five. Two on that side (pointing West), two on this side. One at the back. I can’t tell how many riders.”

Demetri rolled out of his cot on the opposite side of the inner wall and began rummaging through a thick sack underneath it. Shimmers of bright metal. He revealed two short swords and wheeled around to face the wagon’s rear doors. Sara pulled her blanket up further and winced.

Dulcet did much of the same. Henry hardly moved, his cot lay between Demetri’s and Maneet’s. He had been sleeping in an upright cross-legged position. When the lights came on, he hardly shifted. He sat now with a grim smile, eyes closed, and pointed eyebrows, furious, anticipatory.

The door to the driver’s cabin slid open and Anika stomped through. She brushed past Henry, who sat near the center, with barely a glance.

“Oh, you’re all awake. Figured I was going to do this on my own.” She smirked dryly.

“I’m with you.” Demetri held his swords up. Anika rolled her eyes in response.

“Please don’t hurt yourself with those.” She looked at her crew for a fractional moment. “Dulcet, right?” They made eye contact. Without being acknowledged, Anika continued, “I want you to-”

Sudden footfalls on the roof. Rough and loud, someone had just leapt from horseback. They all looked up fruitlessly at the ceiling.

“-deal with that.” Anika mumbled.

She looked back down at Dulcet, who was shaking her head in trepidation. “You didn’t say there would be fighting. I don’t…hurt people. I don’t even know how-”

“Enough crying, girl.” Anika’s tone sharpened.

“You’re going to show me that power you bragged about. Hop on that stone box, so you can reach.” Anika ordered.

Dulcet looked incredulously at Anika for a moment. In that short span of time Anika crossed the distance between them and held Dulcet up by the shirt with two firm hands. She pulled Dulcet up to a standing position and drilled a furious glare into her. A growl was rumbling in her throat, failing words. Dulcet hopped on the basalt coffin rather than remain in Anika’s terrifying grip.

“Now, grab his feet and pull him in here.” Anika ordered.

Dulcet hesitated again. With wide-eyed shock, she demanded, “I can’t do that! I said I could work on the wagon!”

Anika jumped on top of the coffin herself now. She continued to hold her in a heavy stare. “You’re going to follow orders, or you can leave with them.” She said this while pointing up at the potential bandit.

Dulcet moved her eyes in a trance. She intonated lightly. Subtle clouds moved within her iris, the ceiling began to grow a gap of invisible sphericity. Dulcet blew gently on her hands, covering them in a trademark concoction of piercing and morphic ether. With great worry, she gingerly reached up and through the roof. From the perspective of everyone else, she simply reached through the solid matter of the steel topped wagon.

Dulcet could fully see the attacker now. He wore all black: boots, cloak, leather pants, even a face mask of the same shade. Reluctantly, she grabbed one of his dirty boots. He noticed. The bandit saw pale hands reach up through dark steel and grasp him. He unsheathed a dagger with one hand and bent down to strike accurately. Before he could, Dulcet pulled.

As she pulled, the leather and flesh of the bandit became inextricably entangled with the metal of the wagon roof.

More afraid of Anika than him at this point, Dulcet continued to pull down on his foot. His blood started to run down her arms.

He screamed terribly and fought against her. The pulling back caused threefold damage to his foot as it scraped through dense steel, through which it had been woven like a mottled fabric. When his foot was free again, it was useless.

Adam, the dismissive misanthrope that had dodged Sara’s questions earlier in the night, quietly mouthed a few profanities before backing further against the wall.

“Oh.” Was all Anika offered in recompense. Her expression grew repulsed as she looked over Dulcet, whose face and arms had been well splattered in crimson.

“AAH!” Dulcet screamed while staring back and forth between her saturated (but unharmed) hands and arms.

“Enough, go sit.” Anika nodded toward the inner wall. A boot still lay on the box, mostly empty. “That was…not what I expected.” Anika admitted. She looked over her remaining crew with a mundane eye, while seeing the ambushing bandits with a mysterious secondary sight, offering only thin blue outlines projecting on the walls in the silhouettes of living things.

“I’m ready.” Henry said, opening his eyes.

“Oh. I don’t think this is worth your life.” Anika stated.

Henry ignored the estimation and got up. He crawled on top of the container next to Anika. “I wouldn’t stand this close.” He warned.

Anika shook her head while simultaneously hopping off. She looked precariously at the container, estimating its conductivity, but was not entirely familiar with the type of stone. Before she could ask Henry anything, he was groaning in pain.

Electric blue jagged lines ran along his exposed flesh and sank under his clothes to roam painfully. He started to loudly growl while every muscle flexed in rapid cycles. His smile grew wider than ever.

“Raauggh!” He screamed while lifting his hands to the ceiling.

The lightning rapidly discharged, running up his arms from every part of his body and stripped his skin in burning lines up to his hands. From his smoking hands, the shocking light ejected through the roof.

The thin silhouettes of life that Anika saw of the rolling figure, lost in pain, dissipated to nothing. Similarly, three of the closest horses flanking the wagon struck out into strange poses before falling.

“He’s dead.” She claimed.

“We’re going to have to open those doors to hit the others.” Henry responded. His voice was normal in spite of the refracting pain and minor wounds.

“You thought you were the only mage here?” Anika scoffed. She lifted a hand and snapped her fingers together. Two glowing silhouettes fell from the last running horse.

Henry squinted, “Did that do something?”

Anika rolled her eyes. “Get off that. I’m ordering you not to do anything else. If you killed them, that means you nearly killed yourself.”

“You aren’t wrong.” Henry laughed, returning to his bed, which was now significantly soiled with smeared stains. Dulcet was attempting not to spread them but was shaking like a wet dog from the panic.

Suddenly, From a mist to blurry outlines,

seven more horses slowly came into focus along the walls of the cabin in Anika’s pseudo-sight. Her lips fluttered through a frustrated breath.

Anika knocked roughly on the coffin. “Listen Mr. Deer Mask. If I have to do this by myself, I won’t have the energy to move this wagon, we’ll be dead on the road, and that’s even more dangerous than our current predicament.”

After another insistent knock, violet smoke poured out of the breathing circles carved in the coffin, smothering those nearby. In a few seconds, a man stood at the rear of the wagon, posed as if he had always been there. His white-faced deer mask was adorned with the same small antlers they had become familiar with. Wordlessly, he turned around and opened the steel rear doors that should have been tightly locked. Silently, weightlessly, he grabbed the rim of the roof with one hand and floated up, out of sight.

The White-faced Deer sat casually on the edge of the wagon’s roof. The dead bandit had rolled off. From the crowded woods on either side of their path, seven horse riders closed in on the Gem-wagon’s position. A clear leader among them was garbed in black and red. He held a scimitar out to one side and waved it while yelling orders to his subordinates.

The White-faced Deer relaxed his sensory distortion field. When the field dissipated, the enclosing gang began screaming to one another chaotically. Scouts at either end insisted back and forth to one another. Their leader sat up straight in abject terror at the realization and halted their steed immediately, calling the others to pull back. The Deer waited a moment to be sure of a full retreat. Then, he rolled gracefully back into the wagon as if gravity were cradling him with intent. Without ado, the mist reignited and he was gone, sucked into the basalt tomb. The crew was left with their questions, their horrors, and quite a mess.