Chapter 2: Typhon

"Are you certain that it wasn't just a dream?" Lena yawned and rubbed her eyes as we walked through the nearly empty market. The sun had just begun to rise and merchants were slowly setting up their stalls to begin their day.

"I'm certain. I need to see that clearing for myself. I have a feeling that the black metal piece is exactly where she showed me. I must find it," I said.

"Or," Lena paused, "we can simply tell our parents about what happened and they will take care of it."

"Do you think they will let us come along?" I asked. She shook her head. "That's why we are not telling them a thing. For now."

She yawned again. "All right, all right. Where are we going now?"

"To Gregory's. We need horses. It would be faster on a dragon, but Nephos will never agree to take us to Typhon without my mother's approval." I sighed. "And palace stables are guarded at all times."

"And the guards would alert uncle Alexios and aunt Emilia straight away if they see you run off on a horse." Lena nodded in understanding.

When we reached Gregory's weaponry shop, Lena froze.

"Who...is that?" she breathed, her eyes wide.

I followed her gaze. "That's the thief I told you about yesterday."

The thief was sitting on top of an empty barrel. His large frame hunched over a small table, making arrows. There was a huge case beside him already filled with hundreds of them. He couldn't have possibly made all of those, could he?

When he heard our voices, he looked up, then grinned when he saw me. "I was wondering when you would stop by. Here." He gave me a bag of silver coins. "For the potatoes and the apple cakes. I earned it all myself," he said proudly.

At the sound of his voice, Lena gaped at him as if bewitched. I snapped my fingers in front of her eyes, but she didn't even blink once.

"Lena?" I said, worried for a moment.

The thief turned his head to Lena and chuckled. As soon as he snapped his fingers, she came back to her senses, blinking a few times as if clearing a fog in her mind.

I frowned and regarded the thief with wariness. There was something odd about him, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

"Is Sophia with ya? I thought she was coming today." Gregory came out of his shop, wiping his hands with an old cloth.

I looked away from the thief. "She will come by later in the day. We are here for a different matter. We need to borrow your horses."

Gregory raised his bushy brows. "What ya need them for?"

"We need to travel to Typhon," Lena answered.

"Typhon?" the thief asked, sounding interested. "I am yet to visit that kingdom. Can I go with you?"

"Yes." "No." Lena and I said at the same time.

I shook my head. "Lena, no. He can't come with us."

"Please take him with ya," Gregory said. "He's making these arrows faster than anyone I've ever seen. I don't have enough silver to keep paying him. I'll give ya all three of my horses. One's a little old, but she can manage to Typhon if you're good to her." He reached for a rusty metal key in his pocket and threw it in the air. I caught it. "For the stables down back."

The thief grinned and jumped off the empty barrel he's been sitting on, abandoning the arrows. "I know the way to the stables. I'd fed the horses last night."

A lone arrow hung on his back along with a beautiful bow, and they swayed as he walked in front of us. I remembered seeing them yesterday when I followed him at the market.

"Don't you find it odd that he only has one arrow?" I whispered to Lena as we walked a few steps behind him.

She shrugged. "Must have used the rest of them up." Then she sighed dreamily. "Even the back of him is handsome, don't you think?"

"There is something odd about him," I whispered, frowning at the back of his head.

"Did you even hear what I said?" Lena asked.

"Here they are." The thief stopped walking and pointed at the wooden doors of Gregory's stables. They were locked by a large, rusty metal lock, a perfect match for the key in my hand.

When we unlocked the doors and stepped into the stables, two big brown horses and a smaller black mare greeted us. The poor mare's legs shook as she stood in her stall. I approached her.

"We won't take her with us," I said, caressing her soft mane. "The journey would cause her too much strain. She's barely standing as it is."

"Then two of us would have to ride together," Lena said, quickly glancing at the thief.

Lena and I stared at each other, silently arguing about the thief. I knew that she had taken a liking to him and wanted to ride with him, but I was against it. Gods knew what he was capable of. He was a complete stranger, and a thief at that. It would be better if Lena and I were together.

I groaned as I saw the stubbornness in her sea blue eyes. It meant she wasn't conceding anytime soon. As soon as she heard my groan of frustration, she smiled happily. She'd won this one.

"Thief," I said to the thief. He raised his brows at that nickname. "You ride with Lena. If you hurt her," I pushed fire through the palm of my hand, "I will burn you to flames."

His eyes widened in surprise when he saw the fire, but they soon changed to amusement. He chuckled, raising his hands in surrender. "You have nothing to worry about, human. I have no intentions of hurting her."

My brows furrowed at his choice of words. But one of them bothered me most. Human.

Shaking my head to gather my thoughts, I willed myself to focus on the task at hand. I had to focus on finding the piece of metal from that ghost's vision. It was more important than the identity of the thief at the moment.

I willed the fire to seep back into my skin and nodded. "Good. Now that that's settled, let us head to Kingdom Typhon."

~~~

The journey to Kingdom Typhon only took us two days since it bordered Kingdom Soleil. We had to stop several times to feed the horses and find a place to spend the night.

True to his word, Thief hadn't done anything to harm Lena. They seemed to grow closer within the two days of travelling together. They were chattering away and laughing on their horse as we entered the Dark Forest.

The forest got its name from the dark bark of the trees within it, which turned charcoal black from the fire caused by an eruption of the Twin Volcanoes many years ago. The trees were now completely healed after shedding their burned exterior with the help of Hecate who helped revive them.

As I looked around me, I tried to find the clearing from the vision, but the forest was vast, and every tree looked identical. Finding the metal piece now seemed impossible.

Suddenly, something caught my eye. A small girl peeked out from behind a tree and quickly hid behind it as soon as I met her eyes. What was a child doing alone in the Dark Forest? She couldn't have been more than four years old.

I climbed off my horse and took careful steps toward her. When I reached the tree and looked behind it, there was no one there.

I frowned. I was certain that I saw her.

A soft giggle came from behind a tree ahead of me. I snapped my head up at the sound and saw the red curls of the little girl duck behind it. Then she peeked out once again before running away, deeper into the forest.

"Wait!" I said and ran after her.

"Cassia, where are you going?" Lena called out. I heard her footsteps behind me, followed by another set of footsteps which I assumed belonged to Thief.

"Following that little girl with red hair," I said without turning, keeping my eyes on the little one's red curls as she passed tree after tree.

"I don't see anyone," Lena said, now running beside me and looking around.

"She's right --" I pointed, then dropped my hand. "There... She was right in front of me. She was running -- Where did she go?" I frowned, stopping in my tracks.

"I didn't see anyone either," Thief panted, dropping to sit by a tree to catch his breath. "Could we stop running for a minute? Let us appreciate the beautiful clearing here and take a short rest."

I looked around me and widened my eyes. This place. This clearing. It looked identical to the one I saw in the ghost's vision. "The little girl..." I whispered.

"She must have led you here," Lena finished, nodding in understanding now. "Another ghost?"

I nodded. "It appears so."

I approached one of the trees to my left where I thought I saw a glint of metal, but there was nothing there. "Search the roots of those trees," I told Lena, pointing at the ones that circled the clearing from the other side. "I will search this side."

We both carefully looked through the roots of each tree for that black piece of metal from the vision.

"There's nothing there, Cassia," Lena said after checking for the fifth time. "That ghost must have been mistaken."

I furrowed my brows, shaking my head a little. "But it seemed so real. This clearing looks identical. And the fear in her voice before she was dragged away by Gods know what... It has to be here. I feel it."

Lena shrugged. "We searched every single tree. It's not here."

"What are you looking for for so long?" Thief asked, still sitting against his tree, resting on its thick roots with his long legs stretched out in front of him and leaning his head against its dark bark. "The sun will be setting soon. I thought we came here to explore the kingdom."

I closed my eyes and exhaled sharply through my nose when I suddenly realized something. We haven't searched every tree.

Taking three long strides toward Thief, I stopped in front of his resting frame. "Get up." When he shook his head and refused to do so, I flung him to the side.

He yelped as he fell on the grass. "Hey! What did I do?"

"You," I said, taking a deep breath to calm myself as I bent down to reach for the very thing Lena and I had been searching for hours, "have been sitting on this the entire time! We would have found it much sooner have you gotten off your arse to help us look for it!" I huffed as I pulled the black metal out of the tight grip of the roots of the tree.

Standing up and rubbing the arm he fell on, he said, "You never even told me what to look for! How was I supposed to --" His eyes fell on the piece of metal in my hand and widened. "What is that doing here?"

I lifted it. "You know what it is?" I asked doubtfully.

He slowly nodded, not tearing his eyes off of it. "The Helm of Darkness."

"The Helm of what?" Lena joined us.

"The Helm of Darkness," he repeated, now meeting our eyes. "Well, a broken piece of it. It used to belong to Hades a long time ago. But when he abducted Persephone from Olympus using its powers, Zeus had taken it away from him and had its three pieces thrown into the human world. It has long been forgotten since then."

"The wearer cannot be touched, seen, or heard," I whispered, reciting a passage in a book I'd once read as a child.

Thief nodded. "That is its power."

"Pieces," I suddenly said, remembering what the ghost had told me. "Of course. That's what she meant! I must find each piece of the Helm of Darkness."

"No," a familiar voice interrupted. "What you must do is hand over that piece to me."

I turned in the direction of the voice and widened my eyes in confusion. "What are you doing here?"

The very merchant who sold me freshly roasted potatoes every time I visited the Soleil Market stood before me with a determined glint shining in his eyes, and they were trained on the piece of metal in my hand.

"Give that to me and no one will get hurt," he said in a low voice, raising his hand with his palm facing up, as if expecting me to simply place it there.

I hid the Helm of Darkness behind my back. When the merchant met my gaze, I said, "Explain yourself. Why did you follow us?"

He sighed and dropped his hand to his side. "I heard you two speaking about your dream this morning at the market." His gaze briefly shifted to Lena before returning to me. "You weren't even aware that you spoke of the very piece I've been searching for. I had to follow you to see if you found it. And to my surprise, you did."

"If you think that I will give it to you, then you are wrong," I said. "Now leave, and I will spare you. For the sake of our past."

He sighed once more, then shook his head. "It didn't have to come to this."

After one loud whistle from the merchant, seven burly men came out from behind the trees in the forest and stood in line beside him. They looked like a group of bandits.

Lena groaned. "Do we have to fight them now? But I wore my favourite dress today."

One of the burly men laughed. "Step away then, girl. We wouldn't want to get your pretty dress ruined, now would we, fellas?" The rest of them burst out laughing in response.

Lena rolled her eyes, then rolled up the sleeves of her dress. "Just try not to get too much of your blood on me."

One of them stopped laughing as soon as he saw the dangerous glint in her eyes. When he looked around at his comrades who were laughing at her words, he cracked an uneasy smile, then pretended to laugh along with them.

I pinned my hair up and rolled up my sleeves as well, cracking my neck from side to side. "Let's get this over with, shall we?"

"Try your best not to harm them too much," the merchant said to his bandits. "We only need the Helm piece."

The seven men nodded and trained their eyes on me, before beginning their attack. I dodged the first one as he charged like a bull toward me. He crashed into the thick tree trunk behind me head first, falling to the ground as he lost consciousness from the impact.

Lena spun me around just as another bandit tried to snatch the Helm piece from my hand. Then she punched him in the nose and wrapped one leg around his neck, sending him to the ground as she somersaulted away from me, just before the next bandit attacked.

I ducked as he reached for my hair, intending to get hold of it, and just as fast, I sprung up with my fist up, hitting him right under the chin and sending his head back. When he stumbled backwards, I spun with one leg raised and connected my foot with the side of his head all while keeping a tight hold on the heavy Helm piece in my hands. He fell with a loud thud.

I heard a battle cry behind me as another one charged toward me. I moved to the side and hit him hard in the back of his neck just as he passed by, in the very spot my father taught me to hit to make someone lose their consciousness in an instant.

When Lena and I had all seven men lying on the ground of the clearing, we set our gazes on the merchant.

He widened his eyes in pure shock as he regarded his defeated bandits with his mouth agape. "H-how...t-this...what?" He looked up at us, confusion written all over his face.

"Take your bandits and leave," I said, rolling my sleeves back down. "We tried our best not to harm them too much. I can't promise the same if this happens again."

The merchant swallowed and nodded slowly.

I turned toward the forest, in the direction where we came from. "Let's go," I said to Lena and Thief, looking at the shiny black piece of the Helm of Darkness. "I found what I was looking for."

As we were walking through the thick forest, Lena said, "Where do you think the next piece is? You said that ghost was dragged into the ground after she showed you her vision. I doubt she would return to show you the other locations."

Thief cleared his throat. I ignored it. "I don't know," I responded, holding the Helm piece up and seeing my own frowning face in its reflection. "Perhaps there was something else I'd missed in the vision. Maybe she'd left another clue."

Thief cleared his throat again.

"Do you think they could all be in Typhon? Scattered in the Dark Forest perhaps?" Lena pondered.

Thief cleared his throat louder this time.

"What is it?" I turned to look at him. We all stopped walking.

"I think this might help," he said, raising a torn piece of browning paper in his hand. "It fell out of a bandit's pocket when you sent him flying into a tree."

I widened my eyes and took it from him. "It's a map," I said.

"A map?" Lena asked and looked down at the paper. The three of us were now huddled around it.

I nodded. "A map of Asterin. And look at the two red dots on it." I pointed.

"One is in Kingdom Typhon," Lena gasped. "Right over the Dark Forest. Do you think...?"

"The location of the Helm piece, yes," I said. "The merchant must have known that it was here, but didn't know where exactly to find it."

Thief pointed to the second dot. "And this must be where the other piece is."

"Only one way to find out," I said.

Lena chuckled. "Looks like we're going to Kingdom Gora next."