When the children woke the next morning, they stayed in their groups and ate breakfast–bacon and eggs. While they ate, Hans and Tandis slipped away to set up one of the day’s activities. They faked the trail for a monster by stamping footprints into soft forest earth, using carvings Galinda made for the occasion.
“What monster is this?” Tandis asked.
“Most people call it a ‘ground dragon,’ but it’s not really a dragon. It’s more closely related to lizards, just bigger and meaner.”
When the earth was too rocky to make footprints, they simulated broken branches and scraped bark, like the ground dragon had lumbered through and paused to rub against a tree before continuing on.
“Are there ground dragons around here?” Tandis asked.
“Not at all,” Hans said, “but we covered their prints in one of the winter classes. The kids seemed pretty fascinated by it, so I hope a few will remember.”
“Were your classes like this in Hoseki?”
“Sometimes. You have less freedom when you’re just a staff member, but I still tried to be hands-on as much as I could. Things are less flexible in the Capital in general.”
“I visited the Capital once,” Tandis said, smiling at the memory behind her eyes. “I didn’t know cities could be that big, and all those people… If you added up every person I saw in my life until then, it wouldn’t come close to how many I saw in the Capital in a single day.”
“Yeah. It’s like a different world inside those walls.”
“The shops, the shows, the restaurants…”
“Maybe Roland will take you on a trip when all of this calms down.”
Tandis spun around immediately. “Why would you say that?”
“You two aren’t subtle. Everyone knows.”
“Really?”
Hans shrugged. “Small town stuff, I guess. People are curious and like to have excuses to talk.”
“Oh.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Hans assured her. “I believe the consensus is that you’re ‘cute together,’ but I don’t know if that’s in the meeting minutes or not.”
Tandis gently shoved Hans.
“What? People are happy for you two.”
“I know,” she said, blushing. “The attention is just embarrassing.” After a long pause, she continued, “I am happy though.”
“Yeah?”
“When the war started, I thought our lives were over. We didn’t have much, but we worked hard for it, and it was just… gone. But here, I’ve fallen in love. My daughter has dozens of new brothers and sisters, not to mention Quentin. It’s a future we can look forward to.”
Hans nodded. Gomi had been like that for him too, though his circumstances were less dire.
Satisfied with their fake trail, they returned to camp. While Becky and Roland taught bushcraft, making baskets from twine and sticks as well as handweaving gillnets, Hans and Tandis took one of the groups on an adventure.
***
“Okay, adventurers,” Tandis said. “The Guild has a job for you. A strange monster has been spotted dragging cows into the woods, so a group of farmers has hired you to find and kill it. According to what they told the Guild, the monster was spotted in this exact area, so your hunt begins here.”
Armed with wooden swords and shields, Chance, Loddie, Harry, and Harriot spread out to search the area while Hans and Tandis watched. After several minutes of scouring, Loddie shouted that she found something. The other children raced over to see her discovery.
“That’s a big footprint,” Harry said, frowning.
“What will you do now?” Hans asked the group.
“Look for more tracks!” Chance said, finding the next set a few seconds later.
From there, the momentum of the adventure overtook them, taking the young adventurers on a winding journey through the forest. When the terrain was no longer suitable for finding prints, the children struggled, unsure of what to do without tracks to guide them. Hans gently coached them to think about what other signs a monster that big might leave behind. With that coaxing, they spotted the scraped trees and the broken branches.
Where the excitement had dimmed as their frustration grew, a break in the case rejuvenated the children, sending them racing from clue to clue.
At a small clearing, Tandis stopped the group. As she spoke, Hans ducked behind a tree.
“Good job, adventurers,” Tandis began, “You’ve tracked the monster to its lair. Does anyone know what the monster might be based on the tracks?”
All four children raised their hands. Chase answered, “Ground dragon!”
“Very good! Now it’s up to you to draw it out of the lair and kill it. Good luck!”
The children huddled, formulating a quick plan of attack. Harriot and Loddie stepped into the clearing while Chance and Harry moved around either side. Each had their swords and shields at the ready.
“Oy! Monster!” Harriot yelled. “Are you hungry or are you a little chicken?”
Hans jumped out from behind the tree wearing a paper mask tied to his face. The paper was cut and colored–quite crudely–to look like the head of a ground dragon, a long, lizard-like snout with two rounded horns above its eyes.
“Rawwrrrrrr!” Hans yelled, doing his best impression of a large, cattle-eating monster.
The children didn’t hesitate. They jumped into action, bashing Hans with wooden swords from every angle.
“Okay! Stop! I’m dead! I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead!”
Tandis pulled the children away from the Guild Master lying on the forest floor, covering his head. “Good work, adventurers!” Tandis praised. “That’s a job well done. To compensate you for your bravery and hard work, we offer you these gifts.”
Reaching into her back pocket, Tandis presented a cluster of wooden medallions on string, each hand-carved by Galinda to look like Gomi’s bear-head crest. She presented each medallion like it was a prestigious military honor. The kids gushed over their new treasures and reminisced about their battle the entire walk back to camp.
***
Hans and Tandis repeated the quest experience for the other groups of children, leaving Hans covered in sword-shaped bruises from his many defeats as a ground dragon. A few quests in, Roland departed, leaving Becky and the remaining chaperones to teach the children how to make a simple loop snare for trapping rabbits or squirrels.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Shortly after the final group completed their quest, Roland returned to camp, dragging a doe. A few dozen yards from camp, he demonstrated field dressing the animal and talked about the different cuts of meat and uses for various parts of the deer. In addition to the obvious benefits of preserving the hide and meat, he talked about making candles from the fat, glue from the hooves, needles from the bones, and even sinew from the tendons.
He explained that he harvested all of these items when he hunted, but he rarely used all of those himself. Customers in town bought the materials to finish the processing with their preferred methods and often with the bulk of buying from several hunters. If you were alone in the wilderness though, knowing about these uses made you more versatile, especially in emergencies.
When Roland set to work dividing the meat into cookable cuts for the children, Hans instructed them to gather wood, challenging the campers to build their fires without help from an adult or anyone outside of their group. Some of the parties had minor squabbles as their members argued about how much tinder to use or how to arrange their fuel by size and density, but none of those disagreements boiled into actual fights, verbal or otherwise.
Once everyone ate and cleaned up, the children gathered around for another story. Before they could settle in, a series of howls calling and answering one another carried through the forest, sounding distant yet close at the same time.
All of the children froze, except for Gunther. He looked around, alert but not concerned or alarmed.
“Are gnolls coming for us?” one of the children asked.
Hans calmed the panicked chatter that immediately followed and said, “Remember when Mr. Roland showed you gnoll tracks yesterday?”
Heads nodded.
“What did he say?”
“Monsters want to eat us, so we gotta be smarter than them,” Gunther answered.
“More or less, yes,” Hans said. “Predators are everywhere in the kingdom. They might be bigger or smaller in different places, but they are still there. Mr. Roland used another word that everyone should remember: Respect. What does it mean to respect something or someone?”
One of the younger children shouted, “Listen to your parents.”
“That’s a kind of respect, yes. How about respect for something like a knife?” Hans pulled his hunting knife from his belt and held it in his open palm. “Who here is afraid of this knife?”
No one raised their hands.
“You’re not afraid of the knife? But it’s sharp and dangerous and could even be deadly. Why wouldn’t you be afraid of that?”
One of the older children said, “My brother taught me how to use one so I don’t cut myself.”
“Exactly! Wilderness is like a knife. It can cut you, but if you handle it with respect and understanding, it’s capable of amazing things. That’s the kind of respect Mr. Roland was talking about yesterday.”
Hans explained that building fire was part of respecting the dangers of the wilderness. All animals and many monsters feared fire, preferring to be as far from it as they could, thus discouraging them from bothering a campsite. Where Roland chose to field dress the deer was another form of respect. He knew that hunger motivated predators, so he butchered the animal away from camp and hung the food high in a tree away from camp as well. Any beast attracted to the smell of a fresh kill would follow it, but Roland’s precautions kept them from coming right into the middle of where everyone slept.
The children might not have noticed, but the adults rotated watch during the night. Most predators were opportunists, willing to kill for a meal but not so interested in fighting for one. If gnolls saw several fires, multiple people on watch, and didn’t smell fresh food, they would be far less inclined to attack–all because the Guild campers respected the potential for danger.
“Gnolls know my smell,” Becky said, “They’re afraid of it. Got that going for us too.”
Hans tried to build on her contribution but wasn’t sure how. He gave up and said, “Right, so we did all of those things because we know the knife is sharp. We’ll still be cautious, but we don’t have to be afraid.”
“I’ve spent my whole life in these woods,” Roland added. “I’ve never been attacked by gnolls. I’ve been stalked and followed but never attacked. I got close once, and they stopped pursuing when I left my haul of rabbits behind.”
“But what about the gnolls Gunny killed?” Loddie asked.
“Hunger can make any animal dangerous. People too. Winter is a different kind of wilderness, so we respect it in its own way for that very reason.”
“Thank you, Mr. Roland,” Hans said.
When a soft voice asked about the night’s story, the children forgot their fear and clamored to hear a tale they hadn’t heard before.
“I got a good one,” Becky said before anyone else could volunteer or protest.
Hans gladly gave her the floor and joined the children in the audience.
“Becki and I were out serving the forest, and we heard the strangest noise. It sounded like a tree falling over, but we never heard the tree hit the ground. We heard the creaking and the scraping and the cracking, but never the landing.”
The Becks followed the sound for over two hours, and it was constant. Creek, crack, fall, but no thunder from hitting the dirt. When they saw the movement of a tree falling oddly, forward but not over, Becky dismounted and Becki crouched as low as a boar her size could. The Druid used her forest walking blessing to creep forward. At first, the movement looked like something carried a tree upright through the forest, like someone balancing a spear in the palm of their hand, pointing straight up and wobbling from side to side.
“Who here knows what a treant is?” Becky asked. When all of the children raised their hands, she said, “Ah, so you’ve been paying attention to Mr. Hans. Well, that’s what I saw, an oak tree walking through the forest, arms and legs of wood, a face in the bark–just like in the stories.”
Becky had heard treants were friendly, especially to Druids, but she had never met one in person until then. If the stories about treants were true, sneaking up on the creature wouldn’t work. Every tree she passed could whisper a warning of her approach, so she opted for something very un-Becky-like: Diplomacy.
“Master Oak!” Becky called from a distance. “I am a friend of the forest. May I approach?”
The treant slowly turned toward the direction of Becky’s voice. “You may,” a voice bellowed.
She didn’t know if treants aged like regular trees, but when she neared, she saw that the treant had the presence of an old oak, a trunk as wide as she was tall and a looming canopy of thick branches. A normal oak that size would have been about 240 years old, but the way the treant conducted itself suggested to Becky that it was far older than that.
Standing in its shade, Becky said, “Welcome to the Gomi forest, Master Oak. What brings you to our woods?”
“Perhaps I am no guest. Perhaps these trees are my brethren and this forest is my home.”
“I doubt that, Master Oak.”
The treant leaned forward slightly, the tree-creature’s size making it feel like a tower slowly toppled in her direction. “Why?”
“The forest would have told me.”
The treant laughed with the bass of a large canvas drum. “You are a friend of the forest indeed. I am grateful for your welcome. My quest brings me through your lands. Your eyes reveal that my quest continues.”
Becky asked what his quest was.
“In your tongue, I am a Bard. I am collecting the songs of every forest I visit while I search for another of my kind.”
“You mean like a mate?” Becky asked.
The treant laughed again. “Perhaps, but I seek to answer a question: Am I the last treant?”
In its slow, halting speech, the treant said he had been walking for over a hundred years. Loggers–with the support of mercenaries–killed his family, leaving him alone in his forest. Having heard stories of treant families living all over the world, he left to join one. When he couldn’t find a treant family in the neighboring forest, he continued to the next. As the years passed, a different kind of loneliness filled the treant, the isolating feeling of being the last of his kind, utterly alone in every way possible.
“Before he left, he played me a few of his songs, but a treant’s music isn’t like ours. One song felt like the forest in the midst of a wet summer. Another felt like how this night feels, not warm, not cold, just pleasant and calm. Another song was a forest in the midst of a great storm.”
Soon, the treant continued on, and she never saw him again.
When the children went to sleep, Hans asked Becky where the treant went.
“He talked to the Lady of the Forest and then went into the mountains.”
***
Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):
Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.
Mend the rift with Devon.
Using a pen name, complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."
Expand the dungeon with resource-specific monsters for each of Gomi’s major trades.
Decide whether or not to pursue silent walking and snow walking.
Suggest growing mandrake elementals to the dungeon core.
Secure interior dungeon doors without trapping adventurers inside.
Find a way for Gomi adventurers to benefit from their rightful ranks in the Adventurers’ Guild.
Build a rest area in the dungeon to improve adventurer recovery.
Secure a way to use surplus dungeon inventory for good.
Coordinate a plan for dungeon assistants living permanently at the dungeon.