The Road Home

"No!"

Daxius threw his cloak down in frustration with a growl building in his throat. He roared, kicking the cloak away from him before quickly scrambling over to it to pick it up and dust it off.

The cloak, a gift from his older sister Magnolia, didn't have a speck of dirt on it. He always assumed it was magic anyway. He wrapped it around his shoulders again as he swallowed the lump in his throat and sighed.

"What would Maggie say if she could see me now?" Daxius shook his head as he sat on an overturned log. "Living in this godforsaken, cursed forest with nothing but the clothes on my back. Unable to leave. How, how did I fall for such a curse."

His elder sister had always looked after him, as long as he could remember until she had a child of her own and he was grown enough to fend for himself. Or, he thought he was grown enough. But here he was, caught up in a witch hunters' trap like a helpless witchling. And she didn't even know he was missing.

"What kind of witch hunter works with magic anyway! Hypocrites!" he called out to no one.

He had already tried every spell and counter-curse he knew. He had tried traveling in a straight line, he had tried traveling in spirals (clockwise and counter-clockwise), and he had tried throwing large sums of raw magic at the problem. Nothing could seem to get him out of the endless forest.

He had a feeling the greens and brown of the forest would be the last thing he would see before one of the witch hunters caught him. They would probably wait until he was too tired to function, falling asleep perhaps. They would sneak up on him, and take care of him when he was vulnerable and unaware.

He wasn't going to make it easy for them though. He still had his magic, even if he couldn't use it to escape this hopeless fate.

Who knows? Maybe I'll take a witch hunter down with me, or two.

The thought alone was enough to make him feel marginally better as he put out the fire again. It was a comfort-- but it was a beacon. This was a trap, but the trap was large. And if he could get some distance from here and hide before nightfall, he might be able to sleep with a cloaking spell on. Maybe up in a tree, surely he would hear if someone tried to climb into it while he was resting?

And he did just that. He avoided using as much magic as possible, just in case they were able to detect wards, and he only used an illusion spell to help him blend into the trees.

Not that his sleep was very restful, he awoke at every noise. And during the day, he jumped at nearly every noise too.

It was a month before he slipped up, and woke up near the tree he had simply rested against for a moment with a dagger at his throat that hadn't been there before.

But the witch hunter was young, and not killing him first and instead trying to toy with him was her downfall. He snapped his fingers and disappeared, starting her, only to flip her over and retrieve the knife that rolled away. He didn't kill her, but the spell he used to remove her fine motor skills was a death sentence to her witch-hunting career anyway.

It was another month before he was ambushed by several witch hunters at once, this encounter costing him his focus gem and giving him a shallow stab wound in the ribs. He would have counted it as a loss, except he managed to grab a teleportation crystal from one of the hunters as they fled from him.

Daxius didn't waste any time in crushing the crystal to cast a spell to return him to Magnolia. He arrived in a swirl of blue energy in her study.

"Daxius! Gods, where have you been? What happened to you!"

"H-hey Mags... I'm home." he flashes a quick grin her way before he finally lets himself collapse