Dullahan Choose Your Own Adventure Story - Part Four (Patreon)

We resume our talk with D in the forest, having decided to tell him about Kravik's strange behaviour, and D begins to open up to us a bit more.

With your eyes fixed on the dull, blue crystal which lay dead and quiescent somehow in his hands, you nodded. “I think I have seen something like it before. My best friend, Kravik, he’s a goblin and he works in the mines… Normally he’s so open and relaxed, but lately he’s been acting… odd, and…” You faltered, and then tipped over that last precipice of anxiousness. You told him the truth. “…and he’s been carrying something like that around. It glows when he holds it though, like these -” you added, reaching tentatively for the phosphorescent lines on his cheeks.

The dullahan’s eyelids unexpectedly fluttered closed at your touch and his lips parted just enough for you to see the sharp canines. His lashes, you noticed, were long and thick. The sudden urge to kiss him overwhelmed you, but you bit it back and withdrew your hand. Now was not the time to be thinking such things. 

Breaking the spell that had begun to form in the air between you, you finished rather blandly, “I don’t know what it is though, or why it’s making him behave differently.”

D frowned slightly and opened his eyes again with a slight curving to the corner of his dark lips. The wind ghosted through the trembling leaves and you fought off a shiver of your own. He seemed unaffected by the cold, and lost himself in thought for a moment, a crinkle to his brow and a light in his white irises. 

After a while, D turned to look at you and you sensed he’d come to a decision. “Nor do I. Magic isn’t something I normally involve myself with,” he said carefully. 

“Why not?”

He chuckled darkly. “I am… immune to it, but because of that, I am also insensitive to it. I have no feel for it. Most of my work is done from the shadows.”

You looked at him and thought he seemed terribly lonely. Taking his hand up in yours again, you squeezed it and he let out a shaky breath. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t talk about the work I’ve done in the past,” he said, “But suffice it to say that my name is what I do. I seek justice for those wronged. I’m not sure why Midnight and I were drawn here to this town, when I can’t feel the magic that’s clearly being worked here at all…” He shivered and added, “And to think that because I couldn’t sense it, I could have walked straight into that barrier on the mine. It could have been a trap instead of just an intangible door…” His frustration was evident, and as he spoke, his talons tightened around your hand, pricking the skin hard enough to draw tiny points of blood. When you gasped, he released you instantly and his green markings flashed the purest white. “I’m so sorry!” he hissed, anguished. 

“It’s fine,” you said. “I’ve given myself worse paper cuts than this.”

He looked like he honestly might cry at having hurt you, and you had to smile. “So what can we do?” you asked, hoping to distract him. 

“Tell me more about the mine,” he said, dark scowl back in place. “Who owns it, what do they excavate there, and is there anything nearby like a shrine or a temple…? Anything at all you can tell me.”

After a deep inhale, you told him all the local history you knew, which wasn’t much. The mine had been closed for over a century, but it was owned by the town, in the name of the mayor, and it was she who had ordered it re-opened when she’d been elected six years ago. The silver veins had still been rich and flowing in the deeper areas of the mine, and what was excavated had brought the town back from the brink of poverty. It had drawn trade and improved the lives of everyone - admittedly mostly the humans - who lived there. The mine was mostly worked by goblins, given their small, hardy stature and their strong constitutions, but there were a few orcs, and some of the smaller centaurs worked much as the pit ponies did, hauling up carts of ore on rails into the daylight. There were no ritual sites nearby that you knew of, nor any dwarven ruins. 

D listened attentively all the while you spoke, keeping his hand around yours, neither interrupting nor looking away from you, but concentrating hard on every word you said, as though combing through everything with his mind as you talked. 

When you had finished telling him everything you could think of, he nodded once, and let his gaze fall to the forest floor. He didn’t speak for such a long time that eventually you put your hand on his arm and he jumped as though you’d poked him in the ribs with a cattle prod. “D?” you asked. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I… I was thinking.”

“I don’t think I’ve got enough pennies to pay for all of them,” you laughed, and he smiled. 

“Maybe not,” he said. “Listen, thank you for telling me this. It’s given me a couple of ideas, but there’s something I need to do first. I will come to you tomorrow night, if I may?”

You nodded. “Do you know where I live?”

Bashfully, he looked away again, that stubborn, shorter section of his black hair dangling down into his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I… I saw you leave the inn tonight. I…”

“You followed me?” you asked, surprised but not affronted. 

He turned pained eyes on you and nodded again. “It was late, and I didn’t want you to come to harm…”

“D,” you crooned, “That’s sweet, don’t worry, I’m not upset.”

Relief washed through him visibly, and he laughed nervously, showing his sharper teeth for a moment. “You make me nervous,” he said suddenly. “Like a little boy… it’s ridiculous.”

“Really? You?” you asked, astonished. “I can’t believe you’re intimidated by much… Least of all by me.”

“I’m not really,” he chuckled. “But anyway, look, it’s late. Let me walk you home, and then I’ll come to you tomorrow.”

“Can I do anything in the meantime?” you asked, standing and straightening your clothes. 

He shook his head, and then took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t… um…” he scratched his forehead and then forged ahead in a rush. “I shouldn’t really walk around like this…” He gestured at his head and added, “I’m too… vulnerable like this.”

Your heart leapt at the admission. “Vulnerable?” 

He smiled sweetly. “The only time we can really be killed or badly hurt is when we’re ‘complete’ like this.”

You blinked in surprise as the gravity of what he’d given you while you’d been talking settled into your consciousness. “Really? D, you didn’t have to do that for me… I wouldn’t want you to put yourself in danger because of me…”

He laughed and shook his head fondly. “I’m not in danger from you,” he smiled, adding playfully, “Am I?”

You pushed him in the chest and he stepped half a pace back, though you got the sense that he only shifted at all to humour you. He was… solid beneath that dark, military-cut coat. 

“Careful,” he said, his hand going to steady the back of his head.

You gaped. “You mean… I could literally just knock your head off…” 

He shrugged. “It’s not exactly… ‘well attached’, put it that way.”

A fit of giggles overwhelmed you at the silliness of the image and, still smiling, you said, “That’s so weird…”

Something came over him then, a shift in mood, like drifting clouds on a summer afternoon. “Come,” he said. “Let’s go.” He crossed to the open chest beneath the oak tree, knelt down with his head bowed, and simply lifted his head carefully off, placing it in the box with the careful reverence of a priest handling a precious relic. As he covered the chest over a few moments later, the familiar green mist began to rise, swirling and coiling around his empty collar like evening mists.

“Ready?” he asked you, his voice now more sonorous and coming from all around you. 

You nodded, and he walked you back through the woods, hardly speaking or interacting with you much, other than to offer his hand to help you down the rockiest part towards the main road. You had to pass by the inn, and as the sign of the Highwayman’s Secret creaked a little in the night breezes, the door opened and Erik stepped out onto the street, Valka at his side. The minotaur and banshee were instantly recognisable, and your heart leapt with a sudden pang of fear that D would be seen as Erik raised his huge arm to wave at you. 

You whipped around, but discovered nothing beside you but empty night air. “D?” you hissed. 

“Shh,” came an answering whisper from somewhere nearby. 

“How do you do that? I thought you couldn’t use magic?”

“I can’t use magic other than the tricks of a dullahan,” he said. “Your friend is looking at you strangely…” he laughed.

You nodded, and yelled a friendly goodnight across the road to your friends, and turned your steps for home in the opposite direction. 

Walking alone along the path, you took a big sigh. “You still here, D?” you asked the empty night.

“Yes,” came a voice from right beside your ear, and you jumped, making him chuckle. “Sorry.”

“You are very sneaky, you know?” you said. 

“Good!” he said. “I’m supposed to be. But I don’t want to scare you.”

“You don’t,” you said, pausing just outside the little porch that ran along the front of your wooden cottage. 

“Until tomorrow then,” he said, turning to go.”

“D?” You called him back with a single syllable, and he stood there on the road, the green smoke of his ghostly head swirling gently. He looked a little different now, but you could still make out the features of his sharply handsome face like this. Something burned inside you as you stared at him, a deep longing awakening in you that had lain dormant for some very long time. 

“Yes?”

“What are you going to do?” 

He sighed. “I’m going to lay some groundwork,” he said evasively. “Don’t concern yourself with it just yet. I’ll tell you everything I learn when I come to you tomorrow.”

He paused there a moment longer and you bit your lip. Everything inside you screamed that you’d barely known him five minutes, and that rising up to try and kiss him was a really, really bad idea. You weren’t even sure you could kiss him when his head was ghostly mist as it was in that moment. 

He murmured your name questioningly, and you swallowed, parting your lips gently. Split right down the middle, it took you a moment to decide whether to bid him a simple, chaste goodnight, or to reach up for his face.

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