it's best to ignore them. bad things happen if you don't.

not really whump, but this had to be written and was too short to stand alone.

. . .

The first time Will saw one, he'd stopped, dumbstruck and staring. Without slowing, Halt had grabbed his shoulder and pulled him along.

"Best get used to them," he'd said, voice low. "The sooner, the better."

"But why?" Will had asked, finally finding his own voice. "Why is it there? Are there more? What does—"

"It's there because it's there," Halt had told him. "And yes, there are more, and as far as we know, they don't mean anything. They just are, and you're not to touch them, or climb them, or get close to them. Do you understand?"

Will had nodded, but he hadn't understood, not really.

But he had become used to them. There were only a few in the forests of Redmont, and in the first year of his apprenticeship he learned not to stare, not to pass too closely, not to let temptation take hold in his mind. He always wondered, though. He always wondered.

In Grimsdell, they're everywhere. Even among the lights and the whispering, he notices them – always in the distance, but always drawing his eye, pulling him in. The ones in Redmont had been ageless but benign, somehow, and even the one he'd seen in the forest above Hallasholm had simply been stark. These, however, are eerie, menacing. They're taller, thinner, darker, like the trees themselves, but no moss grows on the stone, and the fog seems to hang thicker in the air around them. Each time he sees one, he looks away with an effort, but it's too late. Little by little, his hackles rise, and the rein on his imagination gets looser and looser. He'll wonder, later, if the Night Warrior would have broken him so badly if the stairs hadn't been there.

The next day, when he goes into the woods again, Alyss at his side, the lights are absent, as are the voices, but the stairs remain.

As they pass the first one – is it closer to the path than it had been last night? – Alyss tenses, just a bit.

"Is that—" she starts, but Will cuts her off.

"Yes," he says curtly. "And there are more. Try to ignore them."

"Why?" she asks. Not for the first time, Will realises that he doesn't have a good answer, but the one he has is all he knows to give.

"Because bad things happen if you don't."

He asks Malcolm about them, but only when the sun is shining broadly in the clearing, and birdsong fills the woods around it.

"Are the stairs yours as well?" he asks, but Malcolm purses his lips.

"No," he says slowly, as Will had known he would. "I thought about adding some more, at first, but it was a foolish thought, gone in an instant."

"So you...know about them?" Will hedges. Malcolm nods.

"More than I would like to, I think," he says, and changes the subject.

When the Scotti breaks free of their trap and takes off into the woods, Will isn't thinking about them. He's thinking of his quarry ahead of him, Horace behind him, and Alyss trapped in that tower with Keren the madman. But as they get further and further from the path, and the trees get denser, one looms into view off to his right, and he stops, turning instinctively towards it.

"He went that way," Will says in an undertone as Horace draws level. "Horace, head off in the other direction, and make plenty of noise."

Horace complies, and in the cover of his stomping and crashing and calling, Will slips across the tangle of winter-dormant undergrowth and snow-dusted roots, heading ever closer to the dark stone of the stairs.

"Why would you go towards it?" he mutters soundlessly. Maybe there aren't any in the highlands of Picta, and the Scotti simply saw it as a place to shelter? Maybe there aren't any in Picta, and so he doesn't know that he has to resist their call?

His pulse quickens as he draws nearer, and it's becoming harder and harder to keep his focus on reading the signs in the snow and fallen leaves. He's never been this close to one, and maybe it's just habit, just conditioning, just that damned superstition, but it's odd. It's wrong. The air seems to...to move, somehow, in a way that has nothing to do with wind, and with each step the sounds of the forest seem to move further and further away from him, like his ears are clogged.

If you climb up, you'll have a better vantage point, he thinks in a voice that isn't quite his. If you have to fight, why not take the high ground? Without meaning to, he takes a step to the side, off of his path, towards the stairs, then wrenches his eyes and mind away.

Focus! he tells himself firmly, in his own voice. You could be walking into an am—

And then the Scotti breaks from his cover and rushes him, a knife glinting in his hand.

He tries to draw the man away, tries to move the fight to a safer (hah) area, but whether by accident or design, the Scotti seems determined to do the opposite, pushing him and luring him and grappling him ever closer. At this point, the wrongness is impossible to ignore, even if it is just his mind playing tricks on him, and maybe that's why his balance is off, why his reflexes seem too slow, why his opponent always seems half a step ahead of him. Maybe that's why, when the Scotti lunges at him, Will doesn't realise how close they are; maybe that's why, when he takes a hurried, clumsy step backwards to get out of range, he doesn't transfer his weight smoothly enough; maybe that's why, as he tries to avoid the sweeping steel, he trips, or slips, and goes reeling back onto the hard, cold stone of the stairs.

It was always going to end like this, he thinks, then he's back on his feet and scrambling away. The wrongness is lessened, now, but it's still a desperate fight, and Will is less certain by the second that he can take this man alive without being killed himself.

The wrongness is lessened, but there's something else, now, the muffled silence replaced by ringing in his ears, the bending air now still but greying out in patches, the heaviness in his limbs now fatigue rather than restraint.

He goes down, but rolls in time to avoid a downward slash, and regains his feet in time to dance back and pivot to the side to miss a thrust and send his bent elbow smashing into the Scotti's extended arm.

Get back on the offensive! he imagines Halt saying, then Get back to the stairs! in the voice that isn't his, and in the moment he takes to shake off the compulsion, the Scotti tackles him, and the knife fight becomes a wrestling match.

Horace arrives in time to save him from a simultaneous strangling and stabbing, but when he drags Will back to his feet, Will's knees give out and he goes right back down. Horace follows him, talking too quickly to follow and pawing at his blood-soaked chest.

"It's not mine," he says, the sound oddly hollow in his ears. "It's not my blood," but Horace succeeds in tearing open his jerkin and shirt and makes a short, sharp noise.

And suddenly he feels it, the burning pain carved across his chest, and the warm wetness of blood seeping into cloth. He looks down, and there, just below his collarbone, is a long gash – perfectly straight, perfectly symmetrical, almost from one shoulder to the other.

"He never touched me," he says. "He never—"

"It can happen," Horace says, already bundling up his own cloak and tying it around Will's chest like a thick, lumpy bandage. "In the heat of the moment, it's easy to miss an injury."

"But he never touched me," Will insists. "He came close, but he never did."

"Apparently he must have," Horace says pointedly. "All right, that should hold for now. Can you make it back to where we left the others?"

Will stands and considers for a moment. He's a bit lightheaded, but that's probably adrenaline rather than blood loss, so he should be all right. "I think so," he says at last. "Just… stay away from the stairs."

Horace peers at him, a worried crease between his eyebrows. "What stairs?"

"The—" Will starts, but when he turns to look, the stairs are gone. In their place is a smooth expanse of undisturbed snow. "Nevermind."

"Did you hit your head?"Horace asks.

"Yes," Will admits. On the stairs. "But the stairs were there before that happened."

"What stairs?" Horace asks again. "We're in the middle of the woods, why would there be stairs?"

Will feels his eyebrows shoot up. "You mean you haven't seen them? The whole time we've been in Grimsdell, you've never seen a single one?"

"No," Horace says, looking utterly confounded. "Why would—"

"Nevermind," Will says again. "Let's meet up with the others, and get back to Malcolm's."

He avoids the fresh snow on the way out, but as they head away from the clearing, back towards the path they had left, something shifts in his peripheral vision, and he knows. Knows, but doesn't look back.

It's best to ignore them, after all.

Bad things happen if you don't.

. . .

sometimes, there are staircases in the woods. they have no reason to be there. some are part of ruins, some are simply there. some are stone, some are iron, some are wood and carpeting. don't go up them. don't get near them. don't look at them too long. some are harmless, others aren't. you can't tell by looking. so keep your distance.

(and yes, I am being perfectly serious. stairs in the woods are a common and well-documented phenomenon, particularly in remote areas. there's more in this world than we know how to explain, and it's good to remember that.)