I don't like getting woken up early. It makes me grumpy. Unfortunately, the front door of the cottage is directly under my bedroom, so I took it on the chin when someone started pounding on the door just after dawn. I was going to ignore it and wait for whoever it was to leave, but Boots woke up with all the excitement of a puppy, scrambled to his feet, and down the stairs to commence barking at the 'intruder'. With a grunt and a scratch, I levered myself out of bed and opened the window.

  "Hey!" I called out. I couldn't see the offender due to the porch roof, which didn't help my mood. "Hey, you! Stop that, you're waking everybody up."

  The pounding stopped, and moments later, a young man appeared from beneath the overhanging roof and looked up at me. "Sir, you have to come quickly. My house was attacked last night by a horrible monster."

  I wanted to tell him to brakk off and that I'd be there around lunch time. I really did, but I didn't think it would help my case with the council if I ignored the very thing I was claiming to want to do. "Hold on, I'll be down in a minute."

  I pulled on my pants, grabbed my shirt, and made my way down the stairs as quickly as I could in my groggy state. I opened the door as I was pulling the shirt on and hoped my display of haste would impress the peasant, a paladin so eager to help that he's willing to do it half-naked.

  "Is everybody okay?" The words came out of my mouth unbidden. Odd, since the last time something like this had happened was when a rival gang had firebombed my club's clubhouse. Then my words had been about the 1937 Triumph Speed Twin I'd spent three years restoring, and not the guys who slept in the upstairs loft. One was killed, and three were sent to the hospital. I cried about losing the bike.

  "Thankfully, yes, but it was horrible. It was so strong. I don't know why it didn't destroy the house and pull us into the night. There was nothing I could have done if it had tried."

  I brought the man into the kitchen and sat him down at the kitchen table. I wished we had some booze that I could pour into him—nothing like a few shots to bring someone back from a fright. Come to think about it, I hadn't seen any liquor in the village. Note to self, invest in a still.

  I gave him a cup of water, pumping out the rusty water first, and sat with him. Elanthe had appeared while my back was turned, and she'd immediately started comforting our distraught visitor. "What's your name? Is your family okay? Tell me what happened." She was so much better at this than I was. I realized that I was going to become dependent on her in dealing with the townsfolk.

  "I'm Louis. I live with my wife on the west side of town, right where the path leaves the village. We're the first farm one sees when coming out of the woods. Last night I was woken up by my dog growling. When you live in an isolated location, you pay attention to your dog. I got out of bed and began peeking out of the shutters, trying to determine what kind of animal it was. I couldn't see it, but I could hear it. 'Gashi, gashi', it kept repeating, while banging sticks together."

  Not being familiar with all of the animals in this world, I looked at Elanthe hopefully. She had gone pale.

  "Gashi, gashi? Are you sure? Did you see it?" she asked.

  "Yes, yes, I'm sure. Gashi, gashi. It said it all night. And I did see it; it was horrible. A skeleton walking around my farm—the undead come to plague us. It was so strong! It tore trees out of the ground as if it were weeding. It threw boulders as a boy throws a rock. It was so strong. It was so strong."

  Elanthe held the man as he broke down sobbing, just as the door opened behind me.

  "I thought I heard people in here. Did you get up early for a run today, Captain?"

  Elanthe's color went from pale to red. "Calista! Go put some decent clothes on!" She kept Louis's head pressed against her chest and glared over my shoulder.

  "Oh, pooh. Fine. I'll be back." The door slammed shut behind me.

  I didn't know whether to thank or curse the Light for my having chosen the chair that faced away from the back door, and wrestled with whether or not I'd start sitting on the other side of the table from now on. I sipped my slightly rusty water and pretended that I hadn't noticed anything while I waited for Louis to collect himself as Elanthe tried to comfort him.

  "You know what this is, don't you?" She nodded her assent.

  "A gashadokuro," Elanthe said, still holding Louis. "A giant skeleton made from the bones of those who died of starvation or in battle without proper burial. They wander at night, driven by eternal hunger. They're immensely strong and huge. Their bones rattle as they move."

  I set down my cup. "How huge are we talking?"

  "Ten meters tall, maybe even twenty." I did some mental gymnastics and came up with 30 feet at the low end. 30 feet tall! How the hell was I supposed to deal with that?

  "Strong enough to bite a man in half or crush him in its hands. They're nearly indestructible—you can scatter the bones, but they'll reform unless you find and consecrate every single one."

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Great. Just what I needed. A walking bone pile with a grudge and supernatural glue holding it together. I had a strong right arm, but I wasn't that strong. Or was I? I'd become a paladin of the Light since my last fight. How powerful was I really? This could be the perfect time to find out.

  "They hunt by sound," Elanthe continued. "The 'gashi gashi' is the chattering of their teeth. It's how they locate prey in the dark. They normally sneak up silently behind travelers, grab them, and bite their heads off. Louis saved his family by staying quiet."

  "Louis, is this right? Louis? Louis!" He came back to us with a start. "What did you do?"

  "I froze, I couldn't move, I was so scared. I hid and held my dog's mouth shut, and when dawn came, it was gone. Then I ran here."

  "You did the right thing. Staying silent saved your life. What are we going to do about it, my lord?"

  I winced at the 'my lord'. You'd think you'd get used to a beautiful elf maiden calling you that, but somehow I felt all the responsibility of the role and none of the power when she said it. "We'll go take a look. Go back to your farm, and we'll be out soon."

  "Thank you, Sir. Thank you. Your presence is already a boon to this village."

  * * *

  "So Elanthe, what are we looking at here?" I had wandered around the grounds outside the farmhouse for about twenty minutes as she spoke with Louis' wife and three kids, all of whom were fascinated to meet a real elf but hadn't known that anything visited during the night. The dog instantly liked her and disliked me, a sign of good judgment, so I chose to let her handle the touchy-feely stuff while I tried to make some sense of the tracks that I saw.

  I found the ripped-up trees easily enough, and even one of the boulders that had been thrown, but nothing resembling the footprints of a 30-foot-tall skeleton. Then again, having lived in the city all my life, I'm not sure what I expected to find. If it didn't leave tire tracks…

  When she finally came over, I filled her in on all of my insights. "I have no idea what I'm looking at."

  She then repeated everything that I had done, and I followed her. She pointed out all the signs that were 'perfectly obvious to the careful observer' that I had missed and came to the conclusion that our horrible skeleton was one meter tall, not ten.

  "I got out of bed for a three-foot-tall skeleton?"

  "They're scared. You did the right thing. You still need to deal with it."

  "How do you explain the trees?"

  "It's really strong?"

  I stared at her and did my best to communicate my skepticism without words. It worked.

  "Maybe there are two of them?"

  "And the little one carried the big one on its shoulders?"

  She shrugged. "We should see where the tracks lead. Maybe we'll learn something more along the way."

  Given that her suggestion was more likely to yield positive results than my desire to crawl back into bed, we set off down the path into the woods.

  There was nothing creepy about the woods. No ghostly mist moving against the breeze. No mysterious lights to draw us off the path and into a bog where our bodies would get mummified, only to be found in a thousand years' time. It was just normal woods, from what I could tell.

  We would have missed where our quarry turned off the trail and into the woods if it hadn't been for the tree torn out of the ground, roots and all. Having left us a signpost, we did find where he turned and followed his diminutive path of destruction to the ruins of what I guessed was a church. I guessed it was a church, not from the structure, which was little more than a pile of rubble, but from the ancient graveyard that was attached to the building. Here, the trail stopped.

  "Well, tracker of mine, where did he go?"

  Elanthe circled and searched, and finally came back with her answer. "I don't know. The tracks disappear."

  "So our evil doer just disappeared into thin air?"

  "Yes."

  "How exactly do you think he did that?"

  "He's a magically animated pile of bones. Why should he do what you think makes sense?"

  The girl had a point.

  * * *

  "I'm cold. Will you hold me, captain, and warm me up?"

  "No. No, he will not."

  I'm glad Elanthe was here on the stakeout of the old graveyard with Calista and me. Without her, it's a fair bet that I'd have gotten distracted from my mission, and if our skeletal friend showed up, he'd have me dead to rights. I don't think Boots and Noctura would do much to prevent things, and with the effect Calista has on me, the few villagers who came for a show would have gotten one to remember. I had to tell them that she's an Amazon warrior and normally her people fight naked to explain her abbreviated clothing. That may not have been the most clever explanation to improvise, but, come to think of it, it's technically not much of a lie either.

  I sat with my back against the ruins and looked up at the sky. "It's way past midnight. I think this is a bust."

  "Gashadokuro only come out after two. It should be in an hour or so."

  "2 am? Seriously? That's a strange time." I tried to think of why two in the morning would be a good time for an angry spirit to appear. It came to me that that was when bars close and everybody is pushed out into the street. Given the number of closing-time fights I'd been in, yeah, that was a good time for angry spirits to appear. I wondered if I might have stumbled onto the explanation.

  I grabbed an hour of sleep and woke up more tired than if I'd stayed awake. I'm not sure what woke me up, but I knew in my bones that it was time to get moving and get to work. I noticed that about a half dozen young men from the village were still hanging out and acting like jackanapes, waiting to see what went down.

  The gashadokuro didn't disappoint us. The temperature dropped suddenly, as if all the energy in the air was drawn out. A low fog formed as water condensed from the cooler air, adding a sense of mystery to the area. I confess that between that and the moonlight lighting the scene, I was a little creeped out, so I did what I always do when I'm scared. I got ready to fight.

  I stood up and brushed some dirt off my pants, then placed the lanyard of my mace around my wrist. "I should probably spend some time practicing with this," I mumbled under my breath as I shook my arm out and walked towards the graveyard.

  It was there.

  It saw me.

  "Okay, shrimp, time to go back to sleep." My mace hung easily by my side as I walked towards it. I'd smash its oversized skull and go home. This would be a quick night.

  It cocked its head to the side and watched as I approached it. "Gashi, gashi."

  I hardly had time to get my shield up before it hit me like a runaway train and sent me flying into the woods.