AN: Following the J-Novel translations, I've decided to use "demons" in reference to Mazoku rather than "monster." From what I understand it's a more accurate translation and helps the atmosphere in this story.

Lina was no stranger to confronting terrifying things. From long walks in dark forests to bandits to powerful Mazoku, standing in the face of terror and giving it a good whack on the nose was something she was known for. And for the past year or so she had done it with the help of her steadfast companion, a man whose bravery she never doubted or questioned. One who continued to travel with her even after the loss of the Sword of Light, which left him a lot more vulnerable. So something about the way the color drained from Gourry's face when they found a staircase in the middle of the forest unnerved her as his body tensed in the manner that it did when they were facing a deadly enemy.

Lina looked at the stairs in confusion. If she had had to guess she would posit that they were all that remained of an ancient castle. Given the sheer majesty and size of the semicircular staircase Lina's heart raced to think of what a grand building it must have been in its prime and her only concern was that they had gotten on the wrong trail and ended up at a dead end. She glanced to the east and was reassured that, for as far as she could see the trail continued to go on (though admittedly, the forest was thick and she couldn't see that far). And then she looked beside her once more to see that Gourry was staring at it wide eyed with his hand on the hilt of his nearly useless steel sword as he shook his head slightly in disbelief and Lina felt her curiosity peak.

"Ever seen something like this before?" she asked.

"I have," he said as he started to walk away, "Come on, I want to get to the next town before the sun sets."

"What?" Lina said as she moved towards the staircase and grinned, "You don't want to see where it leads to?"

"No!" Gourry yelled with a firmness that erased any doubt that he was pulling a prank on her as turned and placed a hand on her shoulder, "It doesn't lead anywhere good. Let's get out of here!"

Lina wanted to dash up the stairs to tease him, but something about the look in his eyes stopped her. He was genuinely terrified! "Right." She said.

He started moving down the path and grabbed her hand as he did. Was it her imagination or was he shaking? As she watched him a million questions rose within her and she wondered if she could finally pry some information on his hometown as she asked, "So is this some superstition from wherever it is that you're from or…?"

Suddenly Gourry crumbled to the ground as he cried out in pain, and Lina felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up straight. People who were used to hiking in the woods were accustomed to the occasional fall and rolled ankle and even experienced and skilled hikers were not immune. And usually Lina would not think too much about such a routine accident. Except that Lina could have sworn that the ground had shifted beneath his feet for a moment before returning to normal. "Did you see that?" she asked.

He sat on the ground and tried to stand up and cursed as he did, reluctantly sitting back down as he cradled his ankle. "I think I need a Recovery spell."

Lina knelt down, "Better hope it's a broken ankle and not a sprain."

"Why?" he asked.

"Even with a Recovery spell, with a sprain it'll be a while before you can walk well on it."

"I really want to get to an inn tonight!" he said, his voice uncharacteristically tense as sweat broke out on his forehead as he pointed at the staircase, "I do not want to sleep outdoors with that thing!"

"Okay, okay!" Lina said as she started chanting a Recovery spell and decided to hold off on the interrogation afterwards. Because whatever it was she had seldom seen him so panicked!

Gourry remained alert and focused on the staircase as she did what she could for his ankle as the hair on the back of her neck started to prickle. They were being watched. She shuddered and wondered why Gourry wasn't calling whoever it was out. But by now they had been together long enough that she knew that he had to have a good reason. But what that reason could be started to terrify her and she was relieved when the spell was down. Gourry moved to stand up, but she patted his shoulder, "Let me help before you go and make it worse."

"Right." He said as he grabbed her for balance and she helped lift him up, albeit somewhat awkwardly (Sylphiel would be so much better at this, Lina thought bitterly).

He took a step forward and hissed a bit. "Must be a sprain." Lina said.

"We keep going." Gourry said as he kept an arm wrapped around her, and in a strange way Lina was glad for an excuse to be so close to him.

Lina took one last final look at the staircase and noticed some sort of rune carved onto the top of it but she could not make out enough details to identify it and figured that if she decided to investigate Gourry would die of fright. She shuddered for a reason she could not articulate and then started to walk with Gourry down the overgrown trail.

They were quiet for a moment as they worked to find a comfortable rhythm. And that was when it struck Lina that it was oddly silent. The birds were silent. Not even a cricket chirped. A sense of unease settled within Lina and she soon became desperate for something to distract her, "So, what sort of folklore surrounds stairs like that?"

"It's not folklore." Gourry said quietly as their bodies bumped and pressed against each other that, given the scare, felt more intense than it otherwise would have. "But something that happened back when I was a mercenary."

Lina's ears perked. He rarely talked about his past. "So you saw a pair of stairs like that before?"

"One time."

"Tell me!" Lina demanded.

He wiped the sweat from his brow as he shook his head, "Let's just focus on finding shelter."

His reply irritated her. "Well if it's as bad as you're making this out to be then it's impacting my safety!"

His eyes narrowed as he scanned the road ahead of them, "Only if we don't make it to shelter before dark."

"We're not going to make it." Gourry said, his voice brimming with soft intensity that chilled Lina to her core.

While she was irritated with him for not talking she also could not deny that something strange was going on, and if he was so spooked the last thing she wanted to do was sleep out in the open. She looked up through the forest canopy and tried to get a good read on the time. "We still should have a good hour before sunset. We can still find a town!"

"We can't risk it. We need to gather as much wood as possible and get a good fire going." Gourry explained, "Light and heat keep It away. We need to keep the fire going all night and stay close to it and not leave for any reason, no matter what we hear."

Lina looked at the clearing they were in and decided it would have to do. She did not think to question Gourry. He was being unusually commandeering and from their time together she knew that if he took the lead then he had a good reason to do it. So while they usually split the chores when setting up camp, that night they stayed close together as they gathered firewood and built a campfire. And while they set their stuff down neither of them got their bedrolls out. Somehow Lina felt in her bones that they would not be getting much sleep that night.

Once they got the campfire lit they sat down together and broke out their rations. Lina ate a roll she had saved from breakfast that morning and thought about how to pry what information she needed to from Gourry when he surprised her by saying, "I'll tell you what a man, who I considered to be a mentor when I was a mercenary, once told me. That there are things in this world that my sword won't protect me from, and I don't think that your magic will protect us either. Whatever It is, It doesn't obey the laws of our world."

Lina looked up at him. "What's that supposed to mean? Gourry, what's got you so scared?"

Gourry ran a hand through his hair as he stared into the fire as he ate his rations, "It wasn't too long after I'd left home. I was rather young and green. I needed cash so I signed up to become a mercenary. We were traveling a long stretch of wasteland, it was so remote that we'd been on the road for three days without seeing a town and it was another three days before we came upon the next one. There were no roads, no farms, nothing worth farming even. And then we came upon these stairs."

He finished eating and started to massage his ankle as Lina grabbed a stick to poke at the fire with as she felt a chill settle over them as the rest of the sunlight vanished. "Did you climb them?" she asked.

"No, I was towards the back of the formation." Gourry explained, "But one of the boys towards the front did."

Lina looked up at him as he bit his lip as his Adam's apple bobbed ominously, "What happened?"

"He was dead by the time I got there. His buddy was screaming that he'd warned him but that he went up anyway."

"And that killed him?" Lina asked as she dropped the stick she was holding into the fire. "Just walking up those steps killed him!?"

"Something cut him clean in half. Nobody could tell us what though. That was when the Captain got us together and told us that if we ever came upon a set of stairs like that to run like hell to the next town. But it was too close to sunset. So he warned us not to leave the campfire no matter what we heard."

"Did you heard something?" Lina asked.

"Singing. A woman singing, on the first night." Gourry explained as he glanced behind him for a moment. "Several men left to pursue her. We never saw them alive again."

Lina gulped, "So you mean…?"

"We found their bodies the next day, hideously mutilated." Gourry said as gooseflesh broke out on her skin, and she glanced behind her to make sure that no one was behind her, "Their swords were melted down to nothing."

"Damn." Lina said as a sense of vulnerability settled over her. She was never a big fan of camping, but now she really disliked how exposed she felt. She scooted closer to Gourry as she said, "But you had the Sword of Light. I mean, that can't exactly be melted down…"

"It didn't need to get within range of the sword to make an impact." Gourry said.

"So you confronted It?"

Gourry was silent for a long moment as Lina's flesh crawled and something shifted in her stomach. Finally he said, "I got stupid."

"Wh…what does that mean?"

Gourry's eyes glistened with a strange mix of guilt and fear as he explained, "That next night I heard a kid crying."

"What?" Lina said.

"It made no sense, you know? The closest town was two days away. There were no homes, no one in the company had kids with them. There were no other campfires, and it was cold out. There was no good reason for a kid to be out there wandering alone at night. And that's what my mentor told me when I decided to go and investigate."

"You went out there!? Alone!? After what happened to those other men!" Lina exclaimed.

"Yeah, that was stupid, even for me!" Gourry said with a wry half smile as he nodded, "After what happened the previous night no one else wanted to risk it. But I had the Sword of Light. And I was a bit full of myself. I said that if there was even the smallest chance that an innocent little kid was out there then I would risk my life if it meant saving him! But really…really I just wanted to be a hero to feel better about myself."

He made a face as if he realized he had revealed too much and he took a bracing breath before continuing, "So I headed out. I knew it was the wrong decision as soon as I left but I was too cocky to turn back. Everything felt wrong. There was some strange smell…"

His voice trailed off a bit as he seemed to inhale deeply, and Lina found herself sniffing the air and wondering if there was anything out of the ordinary. If there was she couldn't detect it, but it was a small comfort. Gourry's senses were better than hers! "Gourry…"

"It's not here. Not yet." He said in a hushed voice that sent shivers down her spine, "But then It was. And as I got closer I could hear that this thing was calling for his daddy and his brother. Somehow It knew how to get under my skin to draw me in. But the closer I got the more my senses were screaming at me to turn around because something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what. And then it hit me what was wrong."

"What!?"

"This voice…it sounded like a younger version of me."

His voice hung in the air ominously as Lina gulped and moved as close to him as she could, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder and leg to leg. She didn't even threaten to punch him when he wrapped an arm around her. They both needed the security of knowing the other was close. "Well you're obviously alive, so how did you escape?"

"I started taking steps backwards. It was in my line of sight, walking away from me. There was a full moon that night, but damned if I know now whether or not that was a good thing."

"Why?"

"Because when It turned to attack me I could see It's face."

"What was wrong with Its face?" Lina whispered and she grabbed his knee, digging her fingers into his skin.

Gourry shook his head as he took a few deep breaths as if forcing himself to bury a horrifying memory, "It wasn't human."

"How wasn't It human?"

Gourry shook his head as he raised his voice, "I don't want to remember!"

To Lina's alarm she could only conclude that if it was so terrifying that he couldn't describe it without breaking down then she didn't want to know! "How did you get away?" she demanded to know.

"I don't think It had expected me to back away. So it was dumb luck really. Whatever It is may be very powerful but It also has to abide by some strict rules about how It operates." Gourry said. "It turned around and suddenly jumped, well, it wasn't a jump. It was like how demons teleport, only it didn't blink in and out of sight. One moment it was ten feet away, another five. The air in front of it did something strange. Some sort of shockwave that cut right through the Sword of Light. By then it was weak enough to only scratch me up, but if I had been closer I truly believe I would have ended up like that kid on the stairs. And then I heard a high-pitched sound screaming sound. A human can't make a sound like that. So I turned and then I ran, I ran so fast back to camp! Whatever it is, it gets stronger the further we are from safety and weaker the closer we return to it. I got back to camp and didn't look back."

"Did you ever hear It again?"

"Fortunately we reached town by the end of the next day." Gourry said. "And I merely hoped to never encounter anything like that again. And I never had until today. But Lina, please, whatever you do tonight stay close to the fire. I don't know how It does it, but It knows how to lure people out. It knows where we're vulnerable."

Lina leaned her head against his chest as he held her tighter, "Trust me, I'm not going anywhere."

They were quiet for a moment, but the silence quickly became unendurably eerie. "What do you think it may be, Lina?"

Lina exhaled. "With all I've read I've never even heard of something like this. I did see a rune on the staircase. Perhaps it's a portal to another world, governed by laws of nature different from our own? And occasionally something from that world preys upon our own for reasons known only to them? And…"

Lina gagged as threw her hand over her mouth as she felt as though she would retch as a pungent smell of rot and decay rushed through the campsite. And then she nearly jumped out of her skin as she heard someone whisper in her ear, "You could be greater than Luna if you defeat me."

"Do you hear that?" Lina whispered as her hand dug into Gourry's knee once more.

"Don't leave the fire!" He said softly.

There was a deep, rumbling sound of laughter followed by the voice threatening, "Luna will be so furious if she found you had the chance to take me down and you let it slip by! She'd be so mad at you she'd make what happened after the projections look like…"

"Shut up!" Lina snarled as Gourry tightened his grip on her.

"Tell me about Zefiel City." He said.

"We grow grapes…" Lina said as she started talking about her hometown as the voice outside hurled threats at her. Even as she focused on talking her shoulders grew taunt and tense as she did everything she could to ignore the verbal onslaught as the minutes tricked by thick and heavy like molasses.

"LINA!" a woman's voice rang through the night, causing Lina to jump out of her skin. It sounded just like Luna! "What do you think you are doing sitting comfy around a fire when there's a predator on the loose?"

Lina stood up, "Sis!"

Gourry stood up and put his hands on her shoulders and held on tight, "That's not your sister!"

Lina shuddered and her teeth gnashed as she ran her hands through her hair, "You don't know her! She's scarier than whatever is out there! If there's even a chance…"

He held on more tightly as he said, "There isn't."

Footsteps pattered from outside the camp as Luna yelled, "Lina, I swear if you don't get your butt out here…"

Lina moved to flee from the safety of the fire, and Gourry grabbed her and pulled her to him, "You'll have to go through me first!" he yelled, and Luna laughed manically in response as Lina buried her face in his chest as she fought to get herself under control as she wondered what to do. Whatever It was was close enough that she could hurl a spell at it. But what if it really was Luna?

"Look, Lina, she's not coming. She can't. Because she's not your sister!" Gourry said as he stroked her hair. "Damn, It's about one hundred feet from us. But It can't get any closer!"

"Who are you going to believe, that dumbass you call your protector or me?" Luna yelled from just outside the camp, "So help me, Lina, if you don't get out here I will give you the beating of a century for being such a wussy little…"

Lina started chanting as she continued to keep her face buried in Gourry's chest as the thing impersonating Luna continued to taunt her. Once she got to the end of the chant she pulled away from Gourry and turned to see a figure whose silhouette resembled her sister standing among the trees. But she didn't hesitate. "Blast Ash!"

Lina cried out as the light of her spell illuminated It as she stepped back towards the fire, close enough that the heat singed her backside. But the fire felt preferable to getting anywhere closer to the being with such a face. A face where the mouth stretched impossible wide where the nose should be as they eyes recessed into shadows so deep that it was hard to fathom how It could see. And while Lina had faced plenty of demons with terrifying faces, the bloodlust It emanated was different. Worse somehow. Twisted as it was, demons did have their own morality and they fed off human pain to source their power. But this? Lina had the feeling It didn't feed. It hunted for the sheer thrill of it. It literally grinned from ear to ear as her spell hit It dead on and It blinked out of existence.

She and Gourry grabbed each other's hands as they stared out into the forest. "Did I get It?" she asked.

"Let's not risk it." He said, even as his senses didn't register any sign of danger. Still. Not even a cricket chirped.

They stared out into the forest for a few more minutes before they returned to the fire. Gourry threw another log in and it sparked and cracked as they both took a deep breath, feeling raw and exposed. Lina rubbed her hands together as she laughed nervously, "Of all things to be terrified of. My sister! So silly of me. Ridiculous!"

"There's nothing silly about it." He said as he sat down. She stared at him for a moment as she warred with her feelings of vulnerability and foolishness and her simple desire to sit on his lap so he could literally have her back. And then he grabbed her hand and somehow she ended up sitting just in front of him, not so close that they were touching, but close enough to be assured that he was there. "Do you have a hairbrush?"

Lina decided it was a good idea, and she reached into her bags to pull it out to hand to him. Brushing each other's hair would be a great way to pass time, and literally ensure they would have each other's back. Gourry quietly started running the brush through her hair as she worked to calm herself as Gourry started to hum to himself as she stared into the fire. But just as she was starting to relax, the smell of rot returned.

"Gourry…." A high pitched whiny voice wailed through the trees, and Lina felt as though she would vomit with anxiety.

"Just ignore it," he whispered, and whether it was to himself or to her she could not tell.

"Gourreeeeeeeey!" the voice said again, "Come out and face me!"

He tensed as he stopped brushing her hair and Lina wondered if he recognized the voice. She also wondered if a Dragon Slave would be more effective.

"Goooooooouuuurrrrrreeeeeeyyy!" it hissed as he haltingly started brushing again, "If you don't face me, she will die."

Gourry exhaled but continued to brush her hair quietly as the voice continued to threaten, "I mean it! If you can't face me like a man she will die! You can't protect her! If you don't leave now by this morning she will die!"

Lina started chanting again and It laughed, "You fools! Her magic can't protect her!"

Lina turned around and hit It with a Dynast Brass anyway, for all of the good it did. Soon It was back again, taunting her this time. And so began one of the longest nights of their life as they endured Its threats as It kept watch outside of their campfire. But as distressing as the threats were, Gourry was right when he said that It couldn't get close enough to their campfire to do them any real harm. Lina tried a few different spells, and each time It took them dead on with no apparent damage. Eventually Lina gave up trying to harm It.

If they could keep the fire going through the night. Lina stared at the pile of wood they'd gathered pensively and started to fret about whether or not it would last the night. And by the time Gourry threw the last log onto the fire Lina glanced nervously at the sky and hoped that the sun would come up before the fire went out.

By the time the sun rose the last of the embers were burning. Lina looked out to the edge of camp to see that It had gone. "Do you think it's safe to leave?" she asked.

"Let's give it a bit more time, just to be sure." Gourry said.

Lina felt torn between wanting to make sure It couldn't hurt her and wanting to get to an inn as quickly as possible. And when they did finally decide to chance it Lina's fear peaked as they left the campfire. But if It was still watching them it appeared as though It couldn't touch them as they continued down the path.

Once more Lina supported Gourry as he walked on his sprained ankle through the woods as swiftly as they could. Lina had no idea how far they were from the next town, but she knew she had no desire whatsoever to camp out again. Relief burst like a dam when the forest started clear and she saw a marker for a town up ahead. "Looks like we're almost there." Lina said.

But as the town appeared, Lina could hear a faint whisper of a voice warn, "You will never fully escape me. I will find you again."

Lina didn't even bother to look behind her. She closed her eyes and shook her head and took Gourry and headed straight for the inn.

AN: This was inspired by spending too much time on the r/nosleep thread on Reddit. I started seeing reports of creepy things that happened around stairs deep in the forest. Granted, I love hiking and have been to some remote areas and for a time I was a geoscience major and we really went to some nowhere places then, but I have never seen stairs in places where they shouldn't be or heard stories about them so I honestly think they're a recent invention of folklore, but a very effective one all the same. I hope this captured a fraction of the creepiness factor!

Anyway, I now have more ideas than I can keep up with. Hoping to get the third chapter of The Power of Justice out soon, but we'll see.