But he didn’t get that far. His legs gave out when he was still twenty paces from the fountain, forcing him to his knees. He hit the ground with a loud thud, knees aching as pain shot through them.
He forced himself up to his feet and spun around to face the beast. He figured he was going to die no matter what, so a few more steps would make no real difference. The second he stopped, so did the pounding of the beast’s footprints. He looked around him, but there was no sign of any monster or anything living at all, for that matter. Just a bunch of statues. He took a few moments to catch his breath after that, a bit confused as to what had just gone on and what to do about it.
“Oh, I must just have been imagining things all this time,” the young Sage said aloud, feeling instantly better as his fears were lifted. He listened for another moment to make sure the footsteps were gone, and then inhaled deeply. “I can’t believe I could let my imagination take control of me like that. Mental note: don’t practice mind control before bed,” he said with a nervous laugh, still not completely convinced.
At that moment, he heard the heavy thump of something taking a step closer to him, though he still didn’t see anything. His mood darkened again.
“Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t all my imagination.”
He waited several moments for the thing behind him to make another move, but nothing happened, and no sounds came.
“This feels like some sort of sick joke,” he said aloud to the air, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Yes, that must be it. I bet it was good old Mike. He’s always joking around, playing pranks on us all and doing other mean things. He thinks just because he’s thirty years older than the rest of his training class that he can boss us around!”
He stomped his foot and shook his fist at the air. As he did so, he became more and more convinced that he must be right.
“Well I, for one, am sick and tired of all the pranks he pulls day in and day out, and I’m gonna do something about it,” he shouted. He started marching back to his quarters to confront Mike. But there was a nagging thought in the back of his mind that maybe he was wrong, so he never took more than a couple of steps before his knees started to buckle.
If this is a prank, then where is Mike? he wondered. Surely, he’d want to see the fruits of his labors, and he would have come out of hiding to laugh at me now that he’s been caught. Suddenly, Gallian didn’t feel too confident anymore.
Gallian heard another thumping noise, but it was not Mike walking out of the shadows to laugh in his face. Which was lucky for Mike, because the young Sage would have pummeled him right then and there.
No, it was those terrible footsteps starting again. Thump, thump, thump, they came, taunting him and coming ever closer. Then they stopped. Gallian tried to tell himself that it was still just an illusion, but the hair on the back of his neck disagreed with that assertion.
Pulling on his face and blinking his sore, red eyes, he took a few more steps towards his quarters when the unmistakable sound came again: thump, thump, thump. Each footfall reverberated through the hall, growing louder and closer with each step.
“Okay Mike, you win, you freaked me out and you win,” he demanded of the unresponsive air, hoping desperately for some sort of response. If this was a trick, it was a very detailed one. Too detailed. That fact bothered him more than anything.
“Listen, Mike. I won’t say anything to our teachers this time, just please, come out here and end this sick joke. Come on, man, this is your friend, Gallian. You know, the young one of the group? Just, please stop, will you?”
Thump, thump, thump. The sound came again, ever closer and louder, shaking the ground as they crept onward. The steps kept coming, slow and steady. Sage Gallian knew at once that only a Master Sage, of which there were few inside the palace aside from the Guardian Sages, could create that kind of rhythm, but they were all asleep by this time of night, and none of them would participate in this kind of prank anyway.
He hated it when he was right, and he would hate it even more as time went on, but those footsteps definitely belonged to some kind of beast and not to a prankster. There was no other answer.
“Why do I have to be right so much?” Gallian asked the gods rhetorically, staring up at them through the ceiling. The footsteps were still coming for him, ever closer, but he still had some time before they caught him. Time he used to pray for help that didn’t come.
Thump, thump, thump. The sound continued. By this point, each footstep was deafeningly loud, and Gallian could start to feel the heat of the beast’s breath as it approached. It was still a good hundred or so paces away, but it was inching closer all the time.
“All right, Gallian, there’s a crazed beast after you, but don’t panic, at least not yet,” the young Sage told himself irrationally, not helping the situation much. “You may not be very good at magic yourself yet, but your masters are, and there are countless Sages around to help.”
He started walking in his original direction again, the sound of those thumping footsteps following behind him in their slow, perfect cadence.
In the dim light, he could make out what looked like a sleeping Sage hunched over near the edge of the fountain.
He burst forward towards the fountain and reached out to rouse the sleeping figure. As he pushed on the hunched over
