Erin''s head felt like a spike had been driven right between her eyes when she woke up. There was a ball of pain implanted in her forehead, and the candlelight that flickered on the table in front of her did nothing to help it. She slowly blinked her eyes, acclimating herself to the room and looking left and right to get an idea of where she was.


    It was a small home. In her peripheral vision, she could see a bed behind her, and in the far corner, a cold and lifeless wood-fired stove sat. There were just two chairs at the table she sat at, and a man in a mask occupied the second one. He leaned forward, looking at her over the candlelight, his hands clasped in front of his face as he watched her.


    "Shades," Erin hissed as she tried to jump away.


    Errp. Thump.


    Her chair scraped against the wood floor, and she hit the ground on her side. She hadn''t noticed, but her hands were bound in front of her, and her feet were bound together. She had tried to stand up, but the ropes had made that impossible.


    "You''re awake, ''Thorn Queen,''" the man said as he stood, walked around the table, and righted her in her seat.


    When he was done, he sat down again, placing his hands back together in front of his mask as he looked at Erin. Erin sat in the chair, struggling to control her breathing and keep her panic down. She had been drugged, and this masked man had taken her to his home for some unknown reason. Panic was the least of the things she should do in that situation.


    "Who are you?" she demanded, struggling against her bonds.


    "What is more important to you is that I know who you are," the man said. "I know you well, Erin. I know who you work for. I only don''t know why you are here. Did the revolution finally send someone to see where we all went? Are we finally important enough to recover?"


    Erin stopped struggling and froze. She looked over the man but couldn''t see beyond the mask. She didn''t know how many operatives they had sent to Cragg Hollow, but none of them had ever returned. Who could he be?


    "If you''re with the revolution, then you wouldn''t have drugged me."


    "Let us be clear," the man said, tapping his finger on the desk. "I didn''t drug you. Felix, the barkeep, did. I merely saw my opportunity to get one of our operatives out of a bad situation and took it."


    "And then tied me up."


    "I did just that." The man chuckled behind his mask, grabbing onto it and bending over.


    As he did so, Erin saw the wrinkles on the side of the mask closely for the first time. They were more like veins than wrinkles, bulging out from his face and into the mask. A heavy weight settled in her stomach as he came back up from his laugh. What were the masks?


    "So, you''re one of us then. Why have you never reported back? What''s happening on this island?"


    The masked man looked out over his room and sighed. Erin couldn''t get a read of his intentions with his mask on. Was he trying to delay her until someone else got to the house? Was he working with the person who made the masks? There were too many questions. Too many unknowns.


    "There''s so much that you don''t know," he said, looking back at her. "So much that I can''t tell you, even if I wanted to. I''m just a ghost. That''s all that''s left of me in this. Once the mask goes on you, it''s like you''re a different person. There''s a will behind it that you have to follow, no matter how much you want to resist."


    Scrrch. Thump.


    He stood up from his chair, which scraped across the ground behind him before falling down. He looked down at Erin as he began to walk around the table. Every step echoed through the quiet room. Erin''s breath caught in her chest.


    "I wanted to report back," he said as he circled the table. "I wanted to get help. What was I supposed to do? Once I reached the island, the townspeople quickly found me out. Of course, they had no idea I was a spy, but one person without a mask was too obvious. They weren''t being sold, and the townspeople never seemed to be without their mask. No. They knew to come for me the same way they came for everyone we sent here. We didn''t have the mask."


    He stopped in front of Erin, and Erin tried to flinch away. She needed to escape her binds, but the ropes were too tight. Her dagger was nowhere in reach, and her bag wasn''t tied to her belt. She didn''t have the tools to get out and couldn''t grow dead things.


    "I want you to see, Erin," the man said, squatting down to her eye level. "I want you to know what you''re up against. It''ll hurt me. It might even kill me, but the revolution deserves that much."


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    Crack. Squelch.


    He reached up and pulled at his mask, but the mask resisted. He grunted as he pulled harder, and cracks began to split the mask at the edges. It was like the entire thing was glued to his face. Erin couldn''t take her eyes off the sight as he peeled away the mask bit by bit and dropped it to the floor.


    "It''s been years," the husk of what the man had been whispered as he looked up at the ceiling. "Years since I felt the light touch my face. Years since the air touched my skin. Is this what it felt like back then? I don''t even remember anymore."


    He fell to the ground, convulsing.


    "Come on," Erin said, wriggling and twisting against her binds. "You could have at least untied me first."


    She was horrified, for sure. The man''s face, when he revealed it, was dry and cracked. It was shrunken and drained of blood. The eyes were pushed back into the sockets, and his skin had been a sickly gray. In the back of her mind, she wanted to scream. Yet, that could wait. Right now, the man was convulsing on the ground and needed serious medical attention. She might not be a healer anymore, but every bit of her training was whispering to her. She needed to help.


    "And." She grunted, pulling her wrist higher from the binds. "You had to make sure they were really tight. Had to bind my legs too, just to make sure I couldn''t walk away and find a sharp object."


    A wire-tight line of pain cut into her wrist. Already, blood seeped down her hands, making them wet. She kept her gate closed. The blood could heal later. Right now, she could use it to slip out, maybe. She struggled against her binds for a few minutes until she got one hand free.


    The pressure was immediately gone, and she opened her gate.


    Energy twined out from her heart along her limbs. The cut on her wrist glowed green as she bent over and untied her feet. In moments, she was out of her binds and kneeling on the floor next to the man. However, she was too late. His convulsions had stopped, and he lay unmoving on the ground. A smile cracked his withered face.


    "Take a breath," she said as she closed her gate and eyes.


    She focused on her breathing. In and out. She needed to put together the bundled information she had. The townspeople wore those creepy masks. They had wanted to put one on her. There might still be agents of the revolution running through the town with their own masks on. The masks appeared to drain away at people. They had some will that was forced on the people who wore them, though she had no idea what that meant.


    "Okay," she said, looking down at the man''s face.


    Again, what stuck out most to her was that his entire face was drained. A line ran along the man''s face where the mask had pressed into it. More veins than she thought possible in the face were like the roots of trees across it. The eyes, as she had noted before, were pushed back into the skull by the stretched and dried skin.


    "I don''t know who you were," she said to herself as she looked over the man. "But thank you for this much."


    She assumed that the mask was part of a curse. That was the first possibility. Someone had been cursed to be able to put masks on people and drain them. The second possibility was that this was something entirely new for Erth. Maybe a magic from another world that had made it through the portal. She had never heard of anything like that, but the nightsea was vast.


    She stood up and found her things. They sat near the door, propped up against the wall. She slung her back over her shoulder beneath her robes and put her dagger back into her belt. She looked back at the man lying on the floor before she left.


    "I can''t leave him on the floor," she whispered. "And I should bring the mask with me."


    She went back to the man and picked him up off the floor after a few tries. It was a major effort, but she was able to carry him over to his bed eventually and lay him on it. She didn''t have the strength to do much more than that, so he just lay splayed out on the bed, but it was better than being on the floor.


    She turned to find the mask on the floor, but it was gone.


    Tap. Tap.


    A chill ran up Erin''s spine as something crept across the floor. It was like the sounds of crab legs climbing across a stony beach. She didn''t like that sound one bit. She drew her dagger from her belt and opened her gate.


    "Of course, the mask keeps going," she whispered as she looked over the ground. "Why wouldn''t it?"


    The house''s shadows now seemed much longer than they had before. In the candlelight, each shadow was large enough to hide a full-grown man, not just a mask. Erin''s heart raced in her chest as her eyes darted between shadows.


    Drip. Drip. Drip.


    After the liquid hit her shoulder, she had about half a second to roll forward. She had been so focused on the ground that she hadn''t thought to look up. She rolled into the nearest wall and hit hard as something fell to the floor behind her.


    Thump.


    "Hiss."


    Erin came up with her dagger and saw a mass of pink and white on the ground before her, advancing with waving tendrils as it approached. Crab-like legs scuttled the creature forward, and she could see the cracked carapace that had once been the mask on its back. Two long black eyes on stalks found her own.


    "Shades," Erin whispered as the creature scuttled forward.


    She immediately darted to the side as it charged at her. The creature''s flesh made a squelching noise as she fell on her side next to the door. Her hand was already digging into her bag, pulling out a pouch by instinct alone and throwing it at the creature.


    "Thorn''s Grasp."


    She reached out with her will and funneled energy into the pouch before it could even reach the creature. Vines exploded out from the pouch as the bag fell on the creature. They wrapped around it, with more and more vines appearing each second to catch hold of every tendril. Black thorns dug into the creature all along its body. In moments, it was subsumed by a mass of green and black vines.


    Crunch.


    The creature''s shell broke as the vines grasped tight around it, and Erin backed herself against the wall. Never in her life had she seen such a creature, and she didn''t want to go near anything like it again. A horrible realization cut through her panic as she panted in the candlelight.


    Every townsperson they had seen had one of those masks on their face. Every single one of them was infected with one of those things. They weren''t masks. They were monsters.


    Erin took a moment. She put her fist up to her mouth until it was completely covered. Once she was sure that the sound would be muffled, she let out a long, muted scream. For a good thirty seconds, she screamed into her fist until every stress of the last few minutes was let out of her. When she was finished, she took in a deep, long, calming breath.


    "Alright, let''s get to work."