The first Fae to charge me regretted it almost immediately, my hand shot out towards the shaft of his spear, putting force towards his feet and pushing him back. While he was stunned, I jumped on him, my rusty blade coming from underneath my cloak. I swung my arm in a wide arc knocking back the next guard that stood closest to Rea's mother. Her shriek filled the air as I rolled past the now scrambling guards. my back was against the stairs going to wherever Rea disappeared to. One guard rushed towards me thrusting his spear towards my direction. I managed to deflect it and grab the guard by the neck of his armor. I slammed my skull down upon his, the mask thudding against his head. The other guard took this opportunity to aim a kick at the back of my legs. I spun around and backhanded the Fae to the ground. The last guard drew a short sword and held a shield on his free arm. We circled each other as the other guards groaned and tried to sit up from their current injuries. The fae made a few lunges in my direction before he began swinging from a downward angle. He twisted the blade with each swing, trying to confuse me on the direction he was going to strike from next. I punched his shield, throwing the Fae of balance which gave me a chance to rush towards him. I grabbed his sword arm and brought it down on my knee as hard as I could. Clanging metal as the fae's sword fell onto the ground. I twisted his arm around my leg and dropped my full weight onto that shoulder. A loud pop as I rolled free from him, leaving him howling out in pain. My whole body felt stiff as if this was the very first time I was moving.
"How dare you!" Rea's mother screeched stooping down to pick up a discarded weapon.
She stabbed at me with reckless abandon, her face twisted by absolute fury, her dress dirtied from the scuffle.
"Mother enough of this!" Rea's exhausted voice echoed behind me.
"Rea! This man is a brute!!" She exclaimed scurrying over to where she stood. Her anger now replaced with worry.
"He only needs a guide; you were the one who jumped to assumptions. Maybe if you weren't completely crazy like grandma, we wouldn't be in this mess. Now relax!" Rea said pushing her dotting mother away from her, she turned to me with fire in her eyes.
"This is all your fault, everything was perfect till you came and swept her off her feet." She shrieked jabbing a spear towards my direction.
I reached out and grabbed the spear almost pulling her off her feet. I glared at her as i snapped the weapon in two.
"Are you done?" I growled taking another step towards her.
She scoffed and scurried out of the room. I looked over at Rea, who was now reorganizing a large leather backpack. Her red hair flung over her shoulder as she adjusted the straps.
"Are you ready? We will have a very long journey!" She asked with a chipper tone.
"We can leave whenever you are ready Rea, I'm perfectly fine leaving whatever mess this is turning into behind us. Your mother is mad." I rasped adjusting the now cracked mask.
Rea stood up and approached me, examining the makeshift mask. Her hands brushed the cracked surface and with a smile she pulled something out of her bag. In her hands she held a faceless mask made from ivory. the eyes rimmed with a black stone. On the forehead was a Diamond of the deepest blue. She placed the mask in my hands; it glowed and pulsed slightly in my hands. The wind blew as I dropped the old mask and put on the new one. The mask hugged my face, its cold stone like texture was nice on what skin I had exposed. The mask seemed to attach itself to me. Rea smiled.
"I had a feeling that mask would accept you! It's a family relic long forgotten. I hope it serves you well John." Rea smiled as she turned back to the backpack. We gathered everything left that she needed and begun heading out towards the front of the city. Rea's mother tried to keep her, but Rea while soft spoken seemed to be an expert at handling her mother. We left the gates of the city behind without too much more issue. Turns out the guards who got thrown around decided that it would be too much effort to try fighting again and decided to hide out in the local inn. Becoming a local legend who faced off with the village guard was not on the checklist of things to achieve today. The sun hit our faces once we stepped out, the woodlands seemingly peaceful for the moment. Birds sang, the wind blew softly across the grass, trees danced with the flowers in the wind. The peaceful goodbye we received from the Woodland Fae, a hopefully journeys start, I thought, thinking back to that day.
"John I was thinking, and you do know that you are in every right undead, yet the sun or light magic doesn't harm you in any way. Most undead can't even leave the shadows." Rea said dancing around my slow-moving frame.
I thought about what she had meant. In truth I wasn't entirely sure what I was exactly at this point in time.
"If I were to guess, I was cursed by the Dulhan, for some reason the conditions of that curse changed. Which honestly shouldn't be the case, curses shouldn't just change. I died fighting a Dulhan, my party betrayed me, and I watched them get cut down. Those are very specific conditions, not to mention we were summoned here by Oscar's family so there's another variable, one of the things in this life I get to figure out now is why I am the way that I am. The other is can I return to normal. I do not wish to be in this form till the end of my days." I replied genuinely pondering the question.
"Which means if we can figure out if it's a spell, a curse or something else we could possibly deal with it?" She asked with a puzzled look.
"To be honest I'm not sure, the first part is just identifying what my condition is exactly and to move forward on that. To be frank I have no idea on the amount of time that passed from the time I fought that Dulhan and now. It seems to be a great amount of time though. Enough for swords to completely rust away and cloth to rot." I said scratching my plantlike chin.
"Well, there wasn't anything left for us to find there, right?" Rea asked.
"If there was it was long gone before I even got up to move around. The town was destroyed by the Dulhan, He ripped through that place like a demon. I'm not even sure there were any survivors. It's not like Duskbarrow was a small village. It had the makings of a frontier fort; trade was good here and yet the Dulhan was strong enough to kill the guild master and any who stood in its way. Our best bet is maybe looking into Dulhan's themselves; they are an exceedingly rare S class monster." I said pondering our choices.