True to his word, my brother pushes his party to clear the woods immediately surrounding the pebbly outcrop we first emerged onto. Jellian, more careful now, stalks through the woods, disappearing for nearly twenty minutes before returning to where we wait. Despite the rumors of the mountain crawling with monsters, he relates that he only spotted a single one, something akin to a spiked bear sleeping in some bushes a mile or so into the woods.
Sneaking through the woods, I find myself relegated to the far rear of the group where the old, silent woman walks along behind. We follow Jellian in a haltering shuffle, quietly waiting for him to give the clear from ahead of us and moving one at a time to the tree or shrub he crouches behind. He moves up through the forest again, finding the next spot to navigate to, and we repeat the process.
When we find the bear monster, I am somewhat let down. From the description Jellian gave, I had expected a beast the size of a small hut, its snores shaking the air of the silent forest and warning off anyone oblivious enough to stumble by. Instead, the monster with yellow, patchy fur is hardly any larger than myself, and more than the spikes that stick from its shoulder blades and spine, the smell of rancid fish and spicy peppers repulses me even a hundred feet or more away. Halford removes his boots and approaches the sleeping beast with his shining sword held lightly over his shoulder.
The blade plummets down on the monster’s head like a star. The bear monster jerks a single time, a weak gurgling sound emanates from its bleeding snout, and then it moves no longer. I don’t collect any of the monster’s spines with my power, but in the pile of items left behind by my disenchantment rests a single pair of black leather gloves. Jellian claims that they are enchanted in some way, but without an expert in the art of enchantment, none of us can tell what it is they are supposed to do.
“Just how big is this mountain?” Bali asks that night as we huddle together around a covered fire, the night air sapping heat from us with each errant gust of wind.
“Big,” Halford replies with a shrug.
“That isn’t very descriptive,” Bali says.
“People don’t come up here.” Kapin rubs his naked palms against each other. He looks up to the tree canopy we crouch beneath, seeing the twinkle of stars peak through the leaves. “It feels like it will start raining soon.”
“Don't say that,” I moan. My jaw hurts from trying to chew the hard jerky we purchased in town before leaving. I set two pieces in the tin cup that is part of my dinner kit and let the meat soak for a while as I also try to see the clouds through the trees. Unfortunately, it feels like Kapin is right.
“That is good for us,” Halford says.
“Ice cold rain is good for us?” Bali balks as Jellian nods his head along to my brother’s words.
“We already established that the other groups won’t likely make it to the top of the mountain before tomorrow morning. If they have to spend a muggy night out on the slopes, then that should demoralize them at least a little bit. Better if they didn’t think ahead to purchase tents,” Halford explains.
“Which we did,” Kapin agrees, patting his pack that holds the tents. “Do you think that a little rain will be enough to make other groups turn back?”
“Only if they are weak,” Halford says.
“If they are, then it would be unlikely that they would have succeeded in the first place,” Jellian says. “If they didn’t have the foresight to prepare for a night in the wilderness, then they deserve the rain.”
“I wouldn’t wish the rain on anyone,” I say. I take one of my soaked pieces of jerky and chew on it. It’s not as flavorful as it was, but at least I can eat it without chipping a molar. “When are we going to set up for the night?”
“Soon,” Halford assures. “I don’t want us exposed during the night.”
The group nods their agreement. The only one of us that can see worth a damn in the dark is Jellian, and the man volunteers to take watch for the whole night. Halford shoots down that idea, he and Kapin will take shifts with him to make sure that nothing comes upon us in the night. Bali and I remain quiet while the boys hash out a watch schedule, setting up our tent against the flattest part of a nearby tree. I almost scream like a reaper when the silent woman appears out of the dark forest as we are closing the tent, setting up a blanket outside near the smoldering embers of our fire. I linger at the tent mouth for minutes, watching the woman as she stares up at the tree canopy from the blanket she lies on, unblinking. Across the smoke of the dead fire, Kapin and Halford argue about the best place to set up their own tent while Jellian watches them, paring a pear with a dagger.
Rain comes a few hours into my sleepless night. It starts as a trickle of pops against the oilskin roof of our tent that makes me almost jump out of my skin. The popping of the rain against the tent picks up toward a torrent as the temperature even inside the tent starts to fall. In the pitch black of night, I try to slow my breathing, almost screaming again as I feel the strong arms of Bali wrap around me from behind. She pulls me to her chest like I weigh no more than a child’s doll, and as I try to slow my beating heart and racing breath, I realize that she is still asleep. I contemplate trying to untangle myself from her, but as the rain freezes the air, the warmth of the woman is a salve to my wide-eyed terror of the night. It’s nice.
I only realize that I’d fallen asleep when something hard slams into the back of my head, releasing me from sleep into a world of disoriented pain. I hear the dying echo of a far off sound as the morning world comes into blurry existence around me, the glow of morning light illuminating the cowskin walls of our tent. Bali sits up, a hand massaging her forehead as she gives me an apologetic look.
“Two-and-a-half hells, what made you…” I stop as the sound comes again. It rings in my ears like a ghost, a scream that bounces through the trees planted in mists as it glides up the side of the mountain. The woman’s scream dies in a waning echo, and I can feel the bloody pain in it with my whole body. When I untie the door of the tent and peel back the flap, I see Halford standing in front of his own tent illuminated by a sunbeam, his chest heaving in unsteady breaths as his head whips about.
Understanding seeps into my brother’s eyes as the oil of sleep leaves him. Jellian slinks out of the tent behind my brother, silent like the mist that surrounds our campsite. Even only ten feet away on the opposite side of the dead firepit, it is hard to make out my brother’s features.
“Where’s Kapin?” I ask, crawling all the way out of my own tent and dusting off my knees.
“He was on watch,” Halford says back to me without looking. He closes his eyes, listening to the swishing of conifer leaves around our campsite, tilting his head this way and that.
Bali joins me outside the tent, her hand still rubbing the spot on her head where she slammed it into the back of mine. That, or I was the one who hit her, impossible to know.
“Should we call for him?” Bali hisses to my brother.
“You both heard that scream,” he states, assured that we did. “This mountain isn’t the place to start yelling.”
“You don’t plan to leave him to the elements,” Jellian says in a low voice.
“Of course not. Gather your things, we will look for him, and make our way toward that scream.”
“You want to go toward the death scream!” My voice is harsh as I whisper across the camp to my brother.
“That’s where Kapin would have gone.” Halford turns to look at me for the first time, a smirk on his face.
I look down at myself and realize that I am wearing only my backup blouse that I had brought along with me and some underwear. A blush burning my cheeks, I roll back into the tent as I hear Bali and my brother share a chuckling laugh. She is wearing even less than me, just the underwear, but she doesn’t seem bothered by letting the boys have a look.
The tent is a mess of fur blankets, wrapped-dried food, and discarded clothes. I find the leather trousers that I had worn the day before and give them a sniff. They smell like dry dirt and sweat, not good by any stretch of the word, but not too bad either. I’m on my back, legs kicking in the air as I try to hike the trousers up, when something heavy collides with the side of the tent and brings the whole thing crashing down upon me.
My kicking turns into flailing. Claws begin to rip into the cowskin hide of the tent as yelling erupts outside of my smashed tent. Something sharp rakes across my naked stomach, drawling three lines of stinging blood that freeze me in terror. The sound of cracking bone splits the air just over my head and the weight on top of me vanishes with a pained yelp.
“Charlene!” I hear Bali yell. I feel the woman start pulling on the leather of the tent, trying to find the opening.
“I’m alive,” I try to say, but the words come out as a hiss. The world is a tight press of cowskin that glows a muddy orange in the morning light. My hand comes up and I feel an echo of the day before, finding a bath of my own blood soaking my palm, far worse than the small scratch the day before had been. I kick my naked foot, finding the entrance of the tent, but the strain of the movement burns so bad I feel all my strength flow away. Tears press at the corners of my eyes as I lay in the collapsed tent.
A hand grabs my bare foot. Bali follows my leg up to find me, tossing the collapsed tent off of me as she checks me over. She sees the wounds on my stomach and grimaces, pressing her hand to the inch-deep gashes.
“This will hurt,” she promises even before the blue light starts to leave her hands.
I nod, and when the healing magic flows into my wounds, I can’t keep the tears from slipping down the sides of my face. The healing is like an ache, I imagine it feels as it might if I stomached the wound to heal on its own over the course of weeks. The worst cramp I’ve ever felt squeezes my abdomen and I curl around my pain as the muscles in my core start spasming.
I try to look around, getting up is out of the question. Bali kneels next to me, her eyes scanning the area around us. She still wears only her underwear from the night before, but a nasty cut across her triceps drips dangerous color of dark red.
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
“You’re hurt,” I choke out.
“There is a group of them,” Bali says to me. The mist is still thick around us. My world shrinks to only things within eight feet of me, blurring away into white beyond. I try to listen for movement, but the pounding of my own heart in my ears blocks everything out.
“Where’s Halford?” I ask.
“He kicked that beast into the woods and ran after it,” Bali says.
“He left us alone?” The pain has relented enough that I start scrambling through the mess of the tent for my pack, trying to find the only weapon I had brought on this trip.
“We have Jellian,” Bali says. I look about as my hands dig, not spying the elf anywhere. Bali casts her hand out in front of her. “This might be a bad idea.”
“What are you…”
My words are stolen away as a gust of wind erupts from Bali’s palm. I rarely see the woman use the power granted to her by her Wind Essentia, at rank one the gust of air she can summon isn’t useful for much. A continuous stream of invisible air races away from her hand now, cutting a tunnel through the fog for a good forty feet. Bali maintains the torrent as she whips her hand in an arc, blowing the fog away from our campsite. My hand touches the hard steel of my crossbow and I turn away from Bali’s banishing of the fog to pull it loose from the furs, my attached quiver of bolts comes out with it.
By the time that she is done, Bali needs to support her hand with her other arm and sweat beads her forehead. She finishes her circle, the magic vanishing from her as she collapses to her hands and knees, panting. I throw one of the fur blankets over her before cranking the winch on my crossbow.
Magic exhaustion has never been a problem for me. The single ability that I possess requires very little magic, but each time that I use it I become aware of a vague reservoir of power somewhere inside of me being drained ever so slowly. Kapin is the only one in the party that regularly exhausts all of his magical reserves, so I know what is happening to Bali as soon as it begins. I fit a bolt as Bali’s arms begin to quake with the effort of holding herself up. Her eyes dart around in a confused panic as she looks out on the space of the woods she had cleared for us with her wind magic.
“I have your back,” I tell her as I bring my crossbow up. She nods, but I’m not certain if she can even hear me right now. It will take several minutes for her to recover, and in that time, we won’t have anyone that can heal injuries.
A flash of movement among the trees draws my eyes. I see Jellian duck beneath the swing of a muscled and clawed hand, rolling and spinning himself behind a tree as another claw attempts to stab into his back. The monster that chases him clings to one of the trees by its seven-toed back feet as its four forearms swing flailing after Jellian with a single finger that ends in an eight-inch long, hooked claw. The monster bounces through the trees behind Jellian as he flees from it, the powerful toes of its feet digging into the trunks of the trees like a baker kneading dough, one leg enough to hold up its gangly, monkey body. The monster’s head is upside down I realize, three black eyes trained on our scout while a mouth of serrated teeth chatters. The monster opens its mouth to scream, but I hear no sound come from its cracked lips. Jellian seems to, covering his ears and falling to his knees as the monster bears down on him.
Without waiting to think about it, I level the crossbow at the monster. The pair is only twenty feet away. I fire the bolt at the hideous thing as it leaps for Jellian. When the bolt sinks into its moss-colored torso I expect it to flip backward over itself in the air, but the bolt seems to bother it only a fraction as it falls toward Jellian. I do seem to have helped a bit, the finger-claws of the monster slash the air over Jellian’s head as it splashes into the dead leaves and mud of the forest floor next to him, skidding a distance away. Jellian recovers himself, his eyes lock with my own across the distance, and he nods to me.
Like a cat, Jellian springs back to his feet and jumps a good four feet backward to the intersection of two trees. “Idiot thing,” he yells at the monster as it gets back to its feet. “Come at me you mockery of life. See if your mindless barbarism is a match for the wit of one of the chosen.”
The monster screeches silently at Jellian, and I feel that it might understand his words to some extent. It uses a predator's speed to regain its feet, and sprints at the man. Jellian covers his ears again as the monster roars, and falls to a knee, alone and defenseless in the middle of the forest.
The monster senses the end of the struggle. It’s speed accelerates, and it makes its deadly mistake. As the monster leaps through the gap between the two trees where Jellian had lured it, strands of invisible wire pass through the creature, mincing it as thoroughly as any blade could. Chunks of wet meat and black blood splash to the forest floor in front of Jellian. Though his ears bleed, he smiles and rises back to his feet. The strands of cutting wire created by his Trap Essentia glisten with gore where they stand suspended between the trees.
I start cranking my crossbow again as Jellian jogs over to me and Bali. “Where’s my brother?” I ask him as I fit another bolt.
“I can’t hear you,” Jellian says in response, pointing to the blood drying on the outsides of his ears. He looks at where Bali shivers underneath the fur I had thrown over her. “I’m guessing that I won’t be hearing for a while.”
When I look back up from setting the crossbow bolt again, I’m startled to see the old woman in the blue habit standing in the middle of our destroyed camp with her hands clasped in front of her. She studies me with a quizzical eye, but I can’t spare her a moment of attention just now.
“Stay with Bali,” I say to him.
“What?”
I point at him and then at Bali. “Stay!”
I stand, sparing myself a second to cinch the ties on the front of my pants as I look around the campground. There is a splash of blood covering the ground in front of the boy’s tent. The severed arm of a monster identical to the one Jellian had just killed lays steaming in the cold morning air just to the south of the campsite. The old woman catches me surveying the ground, and with a shift of her head that I almost miss, she nods in a direction away from the campground. I sprint that way.
“Charlene!” I hear Jellian call after me.
The dead leaves of the forest floor slope downward as I run from our camp. I slip once, the bolt on my crossbow fumbling out somewhere into the mass of leaves beneath my bare feet. I leave it, grabbing another from the quiver and fitting it as I run through the trees. Hidden points stab into my soft feet as I run through the woods, but I ignore them for the moment. I hear Halford and his battle long before I catch sight of it.
Scrambling up an incline in the direction of my brother’s yelling, I come over the rise to find him facing off against two of the monsters while three more lay dead at his feet. A nimbus of golden light surrounds my brother--the power he attained through his Avatar Conflux--and I watch as the shallow cut across his forehead slowly stitches itself together.
“Halford!” I call to him, but he makes no sign that he hears me.
The two monsters hang from trees above my brother, screaming silently, though it doesn’t seem to affect my brother the same way that it had Jellian. My brother’s chest is bare, white scars standing out across his chest and back, while new wounds have painted his fair skin a dark red. His huge sword rests on the ground behind him while his huge hands hold the hilt, waiting.
“Come at me!” he yells at the monsters. They feint diving at him, but don’t leave the safety of their trees. Their serrated mouths chitter in rage at the lone swordsman beneath them who has cut down three of them by himself so far. I know the beasts must truly be mindless, the wisps of golden light that peel off of Halford knit together the cuts they have left on him. The longer they wait to attack, the more he recovers. Halford, however, does not know the meaning of the word patience.
With an alacrity that should be impossible for a man as large as my brother, he dashes forward, his huge sword spraying leaves into the air behind him as he charges one of the trees the monsters cling to the trunks of. With a single, impossible slash, he cleaves the trunk of the tree in half. The monster whoops in surprise, the first audible sound I’ve heard any of them make, as it jumps from the falling tree to splash into the dead leaves. I have to duck out of the way of the collapsing tree, and my panicked yell alerts the monsters to my presence.
The one still in the tree swivels two of its three eyes in my direction. I try to keep my crossbow pointed at the beast as it leaps between the trees in my direction. Behind it, the other monster comes up in front of my brother, putting its body between him and me.
Terror grips my heart as the four-armed monster leaps between the trees in my direction. I feel like time slows as the battle fever comes over me, and I breathe out a long breath, following the monster’s bouncing approach with the tip of the bolt in my crossbow as I empty my lungs of air. I feel as if in that moment the resolution of the world sharpens into a deadly anticipation. I notice the eyes of the monsters aren’t black, but a deep purple as the monster jumps from its final tree toward me. I see more than sixty feet away my brother watching the monster approaching me, slinging his greatsword over his shoulder as he points directly at me.
“Duck!” he screams, fear leeching into his own voice.
I fall to a knee, knowing what he is doing, but not needing the intervention. The monster is less than six feet away from me then, its path set as it falls through the air at me. It would be impossible to miss.
My finger pulls back on the release of my weapon, the bolt is loosed and lodges itself neatly into the space between the monster’s three eyes. I see in the suspended moment the pseudo-life of the creature vanish from it as it falls toward me. Even dead, the weight of the monster might crush me when it makes impact.
Faster than the eye can track, a flash of light in the shape of a six-foot ribbon springs into existence, its trail leading all the way back to where my brother had been standing an instant ago. The ribbon of light cuts straight through the corpse of the monster as it falls toward me, bisecting it. The two halves of the beast land to either side of me, and I am painted in a viscous blood as thick as molasses.
I gag, needing to use my hands to scrape the monster’s blood away from my face so that I can breathe, so that I can see. Halford stands over me, his face a rictus of brotherly disapproval. I don’t know what it is that he is angry at, that I put myself in the path of a monster, or that I made him use such a powerful ability--the dash of light that was granted him by his Swift Essentia, something he can only use a single time in a day. Back where he had been fighting, the body of the other monster is already collapsed to the ground, steaming.
As I rise back to my feet, I realize that I taste bile in my mouth, and start spitting to try to get all of the monster blood out of my mouth. My brother plucks the crossbow out of my hands while I sputter, as if I am a child, and shakes it at me.
“Why did you get this?” he demands.
“What?” My hand gropes to where the waterskin I normally carry would be before I realize that all my supplies are back at the campground.
“You think that you need something like this to protect yourself! What are you trying to say about me, huh!” The man’s breathing is heavy, his blood-stained chest rising and falling in fast rhythm.
“Give me that back,” I demand of him as I clean my face with the sleeve of my red blouse.
Halford grunts and shakes his head. He drops my crossbow to the ground as he turns and starts stalking down the rise away from the dead monsters.
“We need to go see if the others are alright,” he says over his shoulder.
“You don’t want me to break down these monsters,” I shoot back at him. I bend and scoop my weapon up from the ground. “That’s the only reason you want me around, right? So that I can break down monsters you kill.”
“We can do that later,” Halford says back to me, not rising to my provocation. “After we make sure everyone is alright. After we find Kapin.”
Bali was on her feet when we arrived back at camp, digging through the collapsed tent for her clothing so that she could strap on her armor. Jellian stalked around the perimeter of the campground, whispering secret inscriptions to himself while he set traps around the campsite.
“These will last about an hour,” he says to Halford as he stalks into the camp.
“That will have to do,” Halford replies. “When can we move?”
“I’ll need a few minutes,” Bali says as she starts strapping her armor pieces over her clothes. “My mana is drained anyway. It might be best for me to stay here.”
Halford tsks. “It’s a risk either way. How long until you are recovered enough?”
“A few hours. The forest floor is too thick for me to hear the stone rhythm, so the recovery will be slow.”
He looks back at me, his eyes studying. “Stay here with Bali,” he tells me.
“You don’t want me to help you find him?” I ask.
“No,” he growls. “You will slow us down and we need to move faster than you can manage.”
The words stab me. I always knew that I wasn’t really part of the team, but until now Halford had always let me pretend. “Alright,” I say.
“Traps are ready,” Jellian says, tossing a stick aside as he looks to my brother.
“Top speed,” Halford says back to him with a nod.
“He probably ran off toward that scream earlier. This way.” Jellian darts into the trees and Halford races along behind him, powerful legs eating up the ground.