Tehlmar lurched to his left, just barely avoiding the tip of an Ubran spear coming toward him from his front. His right arm lashed out, the crimson blade in his hand batting the spear shaft away just as another spear came for him from the front-left. That one glanced off the small shield he managed to construct just in time from the blood flowing from his left palm, but the force of the hit was enough to send him staggering back and to the right. The other three Ubran royal guards pounced, forcing him to jump away, his constantly shifting blood barely keeping death at bay.
Tehlmar very much did not want to be here. His goals had been simple ones: find Arlette and get her out of this mess before she got herself killed. The former had turned out to be easier than expected; the latter... not so much. Though heavily injured, she insisted that they not leave the battle, claiming that she knew where the Emperor was hiding.
Tehlmar had given serious thought to just having his people carry her away unwilling, but like a fool, he’d still held hope that they could patch things up and doing that to her would have surely widened the divide between them even more. So instead, he’d gone along with her insane idea. After all, what were the odds that she not only truly knew the Emperor’s location but that she’d be able to find the specific tent within the sea of identical bland, unremarkable tents amidst this chaos?
The answer, against all expectations, was “depressingly good”, and it presented a problem. Now that the elderly Ubran ruler stood literally just paces away, he couldn’t just run. The opportunity to effectively end the Ubran invasion in a single stroke was just too important to pass up without at least taking a shot at it.
Arlette surely thought so. He knew that look in her eyes. He’d seen it before from people willing to sacrifice anything, even their own lives, to accomplish a goal. Luckily, she was too injured to fight, so she was hiding nearby and letting the rest of them handle things. But if things got worse, he wouldn’t put it past her to do something stupid instead of running away with him like a sensible person. He’d always known Arlette to be a fairly sensible person, one who was willing to take some risks for what she felt was right, but never something so absurdly suicidal as this. Had the Ubran conquest of her homeland, Gustil, really hurt her that much?
In the moment, it didn’t really matter. What mattered were the Ubran soldiers in front of him and his own troops, who were dropping like flies. The Emperor’s attack had turned a hard but doable fight into a nightmarish one. The dead and dying from both his and the Emperor’s guards littered the area, but one did not need to be a scholar to realize that more Drayhadans were down than Ubrans.
Not that each Ubran, royal guard or not, was equal to their elven counterparts. Tehlmar, especially, could take down all five of his opponents at once if he needed to, but to do so would use so much blood that it would tire him out to the point of uselessness afterward. For all its adaptability and lethality, the strain Tehlmar’s fighting technique put on his body was a huge weakness that could not be ignored. Fighting with much of your blood outside of your body would wear down anybody, and it put a time limit on his effectiveness.
He needed Palebane’s help to salvage this situation. The Chos was currently having the time of her life going one-on-one with the Emperor’s powerful bodyguard, Taras. If she didn’t finish her battle soon and come help, he’d have to start looking for a way to give up and retreat safely with Arlette. Given Arlette’s leg injury, escape would not be easy.
“The Emperor!” the farthest of his opponents cried out, causing all of his adversaries to screech to a halt. In a gap between them, Tehlmar spotted Arlette on the far side of the Emperor’s hiding tent, standing over the presumably dead body of another royal guard.
A litany of questions flashed through his mind. What in the world was she thinking? How had she gotten over there without being noticed? Where had the Ubran Emperor disappeared to?
Those questions became largely irrelevant as four of his five foes turned and dashed towards the only woman he’d ever loved. He could figure the answers out later. Right now, he needed to protect Arlette at all costs.
Spinning past the lone remaining enemy who stayed focused on him, Tehlmar crouched down and shot blood from his palms with as much strength as he could manage, expending much of his reserves to throw himself arcing high above and past the Ubrans before they could make it to Arlette. The ground rushed towards him as gravity did its thing and he twisted, lining up a semblance of a coordinated landing.
But then, in a flash, he wasn’t within the Ubran camp outside the walls of Crirada anymore. Instead, he found himself staring at a wooden ceiling he didn’t recognize with his body lying flat on his back. Though he couldn’t see anybody, what felt like a large hand gripped his ear with firm strength.
Utterly discombobulated by the sudden and instantaneous change of venue, Tehlmar reacted without thinking, striking out against the mysterious person gripping his ear. His blow landed instead on something incredibly hard and unforgiving. The sound of bone hitting solid wood rang out as a spike of pain shot up his arm.
“Ah! Shit!” he swore as a low chuckle graced his ears.
“Idiot. I knew you would do something like that,” a familiar voice snickered. “Trying to off my secret weapon immediately? Is that really how you thank somebody, you elf bastard?”
“Huh? Wha?” he sputtered as he pushed himself up with his non-throbbing hand and looked around. “What’s going-”
His eyes took in the chamber, with its starkly stylized Stragman modular architecture and ornamentation, as well as the grinning face of Akhustal Palebane standing beside a dark-skinned kneeling man whom Tehlmar had never before seen. The man’s muscular body strained against his plain and worn clothes, almost as if they would burst his attire apart with the slightest effort. But Tehlmar’s eyes were drawn to his weary face. The resigned sadness he saw in those eyes jumped out at him, refusing to be ignored.
“-oh... I see.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened. This sad giant had to be the man he’d heard about but never seen in the flesh, the one capable of reviving the dead. Which meant he’d died. And that meant...
“What happened?!” he demanded, shooting to his feet in desperation. “Is she alright?! Did she survive?!”
“You’re quite welcome,” the Chos replied with a roll of her eyes.
“Please-”
“Your crush survived, so stop acting like a wudrec pup who lost its mother and calm the fuck down,” she snorted.
“She did?” Tehlmar felt a thousand knots inside him untie all at once as his body went loose with relief. “She did. She made it...” he mumbled to himself as he sank back down to the floor. Why did he feel so exhausted all of a sudden? “How long since...?”
“A third of a season, give or take,” came the reply. She threw a large cloak at his feet, a nondescript garment made from various mostly brown furs sewn together. “Now, get back up and put this on so we can get out of here. I’m sick of this place.”
With great effort, Tehlmar climbed back to his feet and donned the cloak before following the large woman as she left the room. Taking a peek back as he left, he glanced at the man as four Stragman soldiers grabbed Tehlmar’s bearded savior and led him towards another door on the other side of the room. What was his story? Not that Tehlmar cared beyond idle curiosity. Butting into the lives of sad people was more of a Sofie thing.
The cloak was one made for a much larger person than he, and so it not only completely covered his body but the hood hid his face so well that he had to use one cloak-covered hand to keep it open enough for him to see where he was walking. That was a good thing. If there were spies around—and there likely was at least one tracking the Chos’s movements and activities—he couldn’t have them recognizing him. Not after he’d taken advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
As the pair walked, Tehlmar found himself looking around through that small hole at the city they strode through, the area bustling with activity in the midday sun. This place had to be Kukego, the spring city site found in the west of the massive rainforest. Compared to the summer city of Krose, located beside and around the jagutepo tunnels of the northern mountain range; the autumn city of Pholis, built in and on the giant titan trees closer to the core on the eastern side of the forest; and the winter city of Hoxoni, located within massive underground caverns, Kukego looked downright normal.
From what he could tell, Kukego was located in an area with far fewer trees and overall foliage than the rest of the forest. The city seemed far less compact than the other locations, with buildings spread out as far as the eye could see. Not that he could see very far even with the wide berth the crowd of people were giving him and the Chos. Though less dense than the other cities, Kukego still was the home to millions of Stragmans.
“The wealth we took from the Ubrans has reinvigorated Stragman society,” the Stragman leader told him as they went. “It was enough to recover that which we lost during the... troubles last year. But just as much, our victory served to remind us of our pride as warriors. We Stragmans hold our head high once more.”
“That’s nice,” he replied.
Eventually, Tehlmar found himself in the Chos’s private quarters, plopping into a large chair lined with soft fur. He sank into it and released a long, tired sigh.
“Hungry? Thirsty?” the woman asked, as she walked past, a tray of food in one hand and a large glass bottle of wine in the other. Tehlmar noted the Ubran script on the bottle as she ripped the cork off with her teeth and took a heavy swig.
“I could go with a little alcohol,” he admitted.
“Box in the corner,” she said, guiding him with a pointed finger. “What’s with you, anyway?” his companion wondered as she reclined upon a long sofa, stuffing a large handful of meat into her mouth. “Why are you so glum? Isn’t this exactly what you wanted?”
“I don’t know,” he told her as he sat back down, his own bottle of wine in his hand. Using the still-open cut in his right palm, he drew forth some blood and created a corkscrew, then leveraged it to open the bottle before returning the blood to his body. “Maybe it’s just the confusion of all of this? One moment, I was fighting for my life, the next, I’m lying on the floor in a completely different place. I’m feeling rather disoriented. That, and my hand is killing me.”
He rubbed and gently squeezed the bones in his hand and fingers, wincing as he put pressure on his left middle finger and felt the bone within shift in ways it wasn’t supposed to.
“Fuck, it’s broken.”
Akhustal let out a loud laugh. “That’s what you get for attacking my club, you moron. But yeah, I get it. That musclebound pain-in-my-ass actually returns people to a time before their death, so for you, thirty-some days vanished in a blink.”
It was Tehlmar’s turn to take a series of large gulps. He let out a soft sigh of contentment as the alcohol filled his stomach. He had to admit, all other things aside, the Ubrans made some damned good wine.
“So what happened, after I... you know...,” he inquired. “The last I can remember, I was trying to stop the Ubrans from killing Arlette at the Emperor’s tent.”
“Ah, I was pretty busy fighting that blind bastard. Was having a grand time, too, until he just sort of burst into this black, rotting flesh. Can you believe it? It’s been so long since I’ve had a good fight, and that jerk goes and dies before I’ve had my fill! Ugh, life isn’t fair...
“But anyway, when I turned back, you’d killed the other Ubrans but were nearly dead yourself. I tried to stop you but you insisted on going after that woman even though it surely meant you would die. So you cut off your own ear, gave it to me to hold onto, and left. A giant image of the Emperor’s decapitated head appeared later above some of the stone rubble to the west of the camp, and the declaration of their Emperor’s death was the blow that broke those Ubran bastards once and for all.
“We spent days chasing them down and looting everything we could. Might have taken some supplies from Gustil while we were at it, heh. Some of the Ubrans made it to Redwater Castle and back to Obura, but they paid for every step with blood. Ahhh, that was a good time. I just got back yesterday.”
“So the war is over?”
“Just about, for now at least. The Ubrans still hold Redwater Castle and nobody in Nocend is happy about that. But neither side is really in a position to try to do anything about it right now. With the Emperor dead, I’m sure the Ubran Empire is in for some fun times. Same thing is happening in Gustil since their entire royal line all got wiped out and the country itself fell. Those cowardly Eterian Council members came back out of their hidey-holes now that the Ubrans are gone and they’re trying to re-establish control over their gutted nation, which I’m sure the remaining Eterian soldiers are delighted with given how those puffed-up merchants basically ran and hid while they threw their armies into the fire. The Drayhadans are back to their own insular ways, Kutrad’s licking their wounds, and who even knows what the Otharians are up to.”
“And what happened to Arlette? Where is she now?”
“How would I know? You think I care about that woman? She’s your obsession, not mine. I have real shit to deal with.”
“You know anything?” he pleaded. He took another series of large gulps.
“When I met her a few days after the battle, she was with the Otharians. That’s all I know. Now stop asking.” She shook her head dismissively. “Still can’t believe you’d try to throw your life away for that.”
Tehlmar felt anger begin to bubble up from deep within. “I’m sorry, do you have a problem with my decisions? From what you told me, you sure did a lot of crap yourself to try to save your husband.”
“Caprakan is strong and capable. This Arlette, on the other hand, she’s just so... so middling. She’s clever, I’ll give you that, but she’s weak. Somebody like that isn’t a good match for the man who once was the terror of bandits across the continent. You deserve somebody more on your level.”
“Didn’t you just say that she killed the Emperor?” he shot back through clenched teeth.
“An unguarded old man. I’m not going to applaud her for something any Stragman over thirteen could accomplish.”
“That’s the problem with you Stragmans; all you care about is how hard you can thump stuff.”
“Better that than you Drayhadans. How do you pick your mates again? Whichever woman can best recite pretty words somebody else wrote centuries ago? Or is it the woman who dances most daintily?” she asked snarkily, holding her bent arms out in front of her and pantomiming an awkward dance routine.
The image of the oversized woman, dressed in a traditional marchalna dress, trying to pull off any of the dozens of traditional dances that Drayhadan noblewomen practice for decades struck him as so hilarious that it overpowered all the anger and resentment her last statements had built up. He threw his head back and guffawed with all his might until a burp interrupted his mirth. Perhaps he needed to slow down the drinking a little.
“That’s more like it!” the Chos roared, showing a massive, toothy grin. “You shouldn’t be down right now! Hahaaa! Our plan worked! We won! That bitch Pyria thinks you’re dead! I heard she had your body burned to ashes and scattered to the winds! But she didn’t get all of it, AHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA! Oh, this is too good!”
Tehlmar couldn’t help but smile. She was right. He’d won.
The “plan”, as Akhustal called it, was not something he’d actively sought to accomplish so much as a contingency in the case that he did not survive the battle. It wasn’t like he’d planned to die, after all. But just in case, they had worked out a plan where she’d keep a small part of his body if things looked grim and then revive him later. The Drayhadans knew of the existence of the Stragmans’ superweapon and vice versa by now, so Tehlmar had fully expected Pyria to take steps to ensure he could never come back. Burning him to ashes was just the sort of thing he’d thought she would try.
The point of the plan was simple: if he was going to die, then shouldn’t he at least get something out of it? He’d hated his life in Drayhadal and the way his lineage chained him to obligations and responsibilities that he neither wanted nor felt he could handle. So what better way to escape such a life than to die?
Now, many days later, everybody in the world thought Tehlmar Esmae was dead. If he had any choice in the matter, that was how things would stay forever. He was free. Finally, finally free. There were no shackles on him any longer.
Well... almost.
Tehlmar’s “obsession”, as the Stragman leader called it, still had an unshakable hold on his soul. He could still remember every spiteful word and venomous look Arlette had thrown in his face that day; for him, it was still fresh, only a few hours ago. She’d rejected him ruthlessly, and it had been perhaps the most painful and humbling experience of his life.
Arlette had said, in no uncertain terms, that she preferred a life without him in it. He understood that fully. But even knowing that, Tehlmar found himself pondering ways to talk to her and try to convince her to change her mind. He knew full well what he was: a fool that couldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. To him, there was no point in coming back to life if that life was one devoid of the one person he loved.
A knock came from the entrance behind him. With a grumble about never getting a break, the Chos rose to her feet and went to answer the knock. His ears caught the sound of her conferring with somebody quietly, but he couldn’t make out any of the words. He didn’t really care, anyway.
“I have to go take care of something,” she told him a moment later. “Relax and enjoy yourself here, I’ll be back soon enough. And don’t leave, unless you want your sister to find out just how deeply she’s been tricked.”
Tehlmar didn’t need the instructions, but he appreciated the concern nonetheless. With a nod, he shifted his body around to get comfy and closed his eyes. Once she’d shut the door behind her, Tehlmar took another gulp of wine, luxuriating in its sweetness, and began mentally planning his route across the continent to Otharia.
Some indeterminate time later, distinct taps coming from behind the wall to his right broke Tehlmar’s pondering. This room, deep within the Chos’s chambers, had two exits: the one behind him from which they’d entered and she’d left, and one to his right. Tehlmar didn’t know what lay on the other side of that door, but judging by the layout he’d seen, his bet was the living quarters of her and her family.
The taps grew louder until they sounded like they were coming from just on the other side of the door. As if to confirm this, Tehlmar heard the sound of somebody fumbling with the door. It jostled slightly and then swung open.
A figure entered, struggling slowly forward. Tehlmar did a double-take. He’d met the man who “stood” before him before, but the difference between his memory and the present shocked him.
The Caprakan Bloodflower he’d known was a strong, fit man full of vigor, quick with a lively smile and even quicker with a quip. This person, however, exuded an aura of gloom. His body no longer appeared as a picture of health, his pale, sickly skin and thin, sagging body suggesting a life spent indoors with little activity. The cause for this seemed rather apparent from the way his legs dangled limply from his waist, his ankles bent at awkward angles against the floor, as if he couldn’t even move them into a more comfortable position.
That was because he couldn’t. Tehlmar had seen this sort of thing before, back during his Masked Battalion training. Somebody had cut the tendons in his legs. Now all he could do to move around was hold himself up unsteadily on two large crutches, using nothing but upper body strength to move under his own power.
While tendons and ligaments injuries would eventually heal, they took far longer to recover than any other sorts—scholars had spent centuries arguing over why and had yet to come to any sort of consensus. That meant Caprakan had at least several more seasons of this sort of life ahead of him.
Palebane had told him what his sister had done to her husband over the course of many days, but this was the first time he’d seen the result of Pyria’s handiwork firsthand. It was far worse than he’d imagined. Tehlmar scowled as he took in the multitude of thin scars all across the beastman’s body, his mind able to envision from the crisscrossing lines just how his sister had tormented the Stragman for days on end.
He disliked torture, as it made things too intimate and personal. He was the sort that preferred to just kill his enemies and be done with it. Pyria was the opposite. She relished that intimacy, and he knew she’d delighted in the opportunity to inflict pain on not just her hated enemy’s husband but on the Chos herself.
Caprakan looked with some confusion at the empty couch, where he’d evidently expected to find his wife. Then, he finally noticed Tehlmar. The effect was immediate. Eyes going wide and terrified, like he’d seen a ghost, Caprakan screamed a guttural shriek of terror.
“NO! NOOO!” he screamed, his body trembling so heavily that his crutches lost their purchase and he spilled to the ground in an awkward heap. One of the crutches broke free from his grip and skidded several paces away.
Concerned, Tehlmar stood up to help, but that seemed to only make the matter worse.
“Stay back!” General Bloodflower hollered, desperately scrambling with his hands to push himself back as far as he could. “Stay back, you...!” The man blinked, a semblance of sanity returning to his gaze as he quivered uncontrollably on the floor some paces away. “You’re not... no, you’re not... her... you’re not...”
“Calm down, I’m not Pyria,” Tehlmar said simply, keeping his voice as low and different from his sister’s as he could.
The Stragman let out a deep breath, then a second, evidently struggling to calm himself.
“My name is Tehlmar,” Tehlmar said as he strode forward and picked up the free crutch from the floor. “Normally, I would take offense when being confused with my sister, but your case deserves an exception.”
Caprakan tensed as Tehlmar held out a hand to help him up, but he eventually took it. “I know who you are,” he stiffly informed him as Tehlmar pulled him upward and slid the second crutch under the cripple’s arm.
“Are you alright?” Tehlmar inquired as the Stragman general steadied himself atop the crutches.
“I’m fine,” came the gruff response. “Where is the Chos?”
“She got called away on something. I don’t know when she will return.”
“Hmph,” the other man sniffed.
An awkward silence settled between them as Caprakan stared coldly ahead, his mind consumed by some unknown thought. Tehlmar slowly returned to his seat, torn between leaving the man alone and trying to say something.
It was a struggle he’d faced before, though never so directly. On the one hand, not only did he despise his sister and much of what she stood for, he hadn’t even lived with her or interacted with her since the day the Masked Battalion had arrived to take him away. He hadn’t even considered himself a member of the Esmae clan, so what did their actions have to do with him?
But now he was an Esmae again, at least in part. Against his desires, he’d found himself working with the very person he loathed in order to engineer the outcome he needed to enter the war and save Arlette. Maybe that made him complicit again. Maybe he should feel guilty about what she’d done.
Eventually, he reasoned that Akhustal Palebane was his most powerful and important friend, and so he should at least try to make good with her husband. While he didn’t believe himself connected to Caprakan’s current state, Caprakan surely didn’t see it that way, so he should at least try to express some remorse.
“Hey, uh,” he began, drawing a stern look from the Stragman, “I didn’t have anything to do with it, but she’s still my sister and so I guess I should just say-”
“Don’t,” Caprakan growled, his gaze turning from cold to fierce.
“But-”
“I don’t want your pity, and I don’t want your apology. Unless you can heal my legs, your words are meaningless.”
“I...” Tehlmar stopped himself before he reflexively apologized for apologizing. “Wait, you have somebody who can heal you, right? Why not just have him return you to back before Pyria ever got a hold of you? Why are you still like this?”
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“Because that method comes with a cost. I would lose as much as I have gained.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t care,” the Stragman said, slowly turning himself back towards the door. “Tell her that I am asking for her.”
“You could just wait here for her,” Tehlmar offered.
“No, I don’t want to see your face for even a single moment more,” the man replied.
Tehlmar sighed. Why did Pyria always have to complicate matters in his life? He had enough enemies already; he didn’t need her throwing more into the mix.
A passing thought floated through his mind, and he leaned forward, glancing towards the Stragman as the cripple struggled to close the door to the room while remaining upright.
“Hey, one more thing,” Tehlmar called.
The man paused, directing a harsh, silent glare Tehlmar’s way.
“I just wanted to know... do you think she’s happy with her life?” Tehlmar inquired.
“The Chos?” Caprakan returned, eying Tehlmar with suspicion. “What are you trying to say?”
“I just... don’t you think she’s unhappy like this? Surely you see it too?”
“She is the Chos, the most revered position in all of Stragma. To be the Chos is the highest honor imaginable.”
“And she hates it,” Tehlmar pointed out. “It’s stifling her, making her miserable. I bet she would rather do anything else. She isn’t really suited to the role, either.”
“The title of Chos is given to the strongest person in Stragma, and she is that without a doubt. That is how it has always been. Do not make light of our traditions. They are what keep us alive, whole, and one with Ruresni.”
Tehlmar chuckled. “I’m Drayhadan. I know all about tradition. Let me tell you: those sorts of traditions are just your society’s way of avoiding making hard decisions.” He took a quick swig as the other man scowled. “All I’m saying is... think about it. That’s all. Somehow, someway, she’s become something of a friend to me, and after everything she’s done for me, I wouldn’t mind seeing her be a little happier, you know? And let me tell you, nothing makes you happy quite like the feeling of being free.”
Caprakan Bloodflower grunted noncommittally, went to leave, then paused once more. “Don’t tell her how I reacted when I saw you,” he requested. “It’s better if she doesn’t know.”
By the time Tehlmar knew how to respond, the door had already shut and Caprakan was gone.
----------------------------------------
Obosall looked worse than he remembered. He’d visited it long ago, back in the early years as a mercenary for hire, before he’d made a name for himself. He remembered it as an odd place, a town on a border in more ways than just geographically. Founded just north of the border between the Republic of Eterium and the Holy Empire of Otharia to serve as Eterium’s gatekeeper city, its role for centuries had been very different than that of the other gatekeepers, and as such it was a very different sort of place.
Otharia’s isolationist preferences meant that Obosall hadn’t been able to flourish from the constant flow of trade in the way the other gatekeeper cities had. Instead, the bulk of its income was related to the relatively lush and fertile farmlands to its north. But agriculture alone could only take Obosall so far. Lacking an abundant resource to use for any sort of major industry, Obosall’s economy suffered and its population, therefore, paled in comparison to that of its contemporaries. In truth, to call it a city had been generous. In reality, it had straddled the border between large town and city, its designation changing depending on one’s charitableness.
That wasn’t all. Back when he’d been here last, there’d been a fairly sizable contingent of Eterian troops quartered in the area—not enough to call it a fortress, but almost. Those troops had largely been stationed there to raid Otharian territory along their northern border for whatever they could loot.
Tehlmar had participated in one of those raids once during his stay in Obosall, and the level of cruelty he witnessed towards the Otharians had shocked him. Tehlmar was no delicate flower unable to handle the ruthless nature of the world; his beloved sister Pyria had forced him to confront this reality quite early in his life. Even so, the Otharians had appeared so thin and frail, and they’d possessed so little even before the Eterians took much of what remained, that by the end of the raid he’d felt more like a bandit than a mercenary.
Later on, Tehlmar had learned that most raids, including the one he’d joined, were not orders from Crirada, but rather simply something the local soldiers did when they got bored or needed money. The moment his mercenary contract had expired, Tehlmar had left Obosall and never returned.
Until now.
The Obosall of today barely resembled the town he remembered. There was a wall around it now, for starters. It wasn’t like there had been anything to fear back then—the local wildlife had been tame and the Otharians even tamer. Things were apparently different now.
Tehlmar wasn’t sure what exactly had brought about the creation of a defensive wall around Obosall. Though he had yet to see the new Otharian regime’s metal beasts in action, he’d heard plenty of stories on his journey from Stragma to the Otharian border. If even a third of the rumors he’d heard were true, a simple wall wouldn’t do much of anything to stop them. Not that this would prevent a wall from being built; people tended to fall back on the techniques they knew, even when those techniques wouldn’t do much good.
But still, as he gazed upon the city’s surroundings, he got the impression that the Otharians weren’t the reason the wall was there. No, that dubious distinction went to the teeming horde of refugees trying to get as far away from the Ubrans as they could. Now that the war seemed over, the vast majority of these desperate people had left to return home, but Tehlmar didn’t need them to be here to be able to see just how large a group it had once been. A barren wasteland stretched as far as he could see. Nothing grew here now, and everything that had once grown here seemed to have been chopped down and burned for warmth in those dire nights.
Tehlmar didn’t blame the Obosall population for protecting what was theirs. He understood how hard it was to acquire anything in this world and just how easy it was to lose it. Still, Tehlmar couldn’t help but grin slightly as he imagined how Arlette would have scowled at the sight. He could tell that she’d been through her own share of hardships, but deep inside that hard shell she’d constructed around herself hid a softness that he lacked. It was one of the many things that endeared her to him. Another thing was how, though she’d scowl at the sight, she wouldn’t have harped on and on about it—not like a certain other person he’d come to know.
Getting inside proved easy, now that the throngs of hungry masses were no longer camped right outside the gates. Finding somebody who could get him into Otharia proved tougher—Otharia had never really been a place people wanted to go, and that was before a legion of death machines patrolled the border. But the toughest proved to be convincing the people he finally found to help him.
“We don’t do that anymore,” the man told him, the woman seated in the room behind him punctuating the dismissal with a solemn shake of the head.
“Why not?!” a frustrated and exhausted Tehlmar demanded to know. “I need to get across the border no matter what. I don’t care how dangerous it is!”
“Well, we care!” the woman shot back, standing up to join her partner at the door. “The trip was dangerous enough before the Otharians increased their patrol range south. If you left the tunnel now, you’d be killed within moments. It would just be suicide.”
“I appreciate your concern, but I can handle danger just fine, thank you,” Tehlmar argued, trying to avoid becoming miffed and failing. “I’ve been surviving deadly situations since you two were still sucking on your mothers’ teats.”
“No, you haven’t. Not like this,” the woman shot back.
“You’ve never dealt with an Otharian deathbeast, have you?” the man piled on. “You wouldn’t be talking this way if you had.”
“A ‘deathbeast’?” Tehlmar scoffed. “Really?”
“You’d call them that too if you saw what they can do with your own eyes. We’ve seen it firsthand. Everybody who lives here has. They know your every move, they come after you in the dozens, they run as fast as the fastest feeler, and they can kill you from a hill away with ease. If you try to cross the border, you won’t make it three hundred steps. You’d stand a better chance against a leviathan than against those deathbeasts. At least those aren’t actively trying to hunt you down. Give up. I don’t know why you want to get into that horrible place, but it’s not worth your life.”
Tehlmar didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so he settled for a frustrated sigh instead. “You said you made a tunnel, right? And the exit used to be alright before the Otharian... ‘deathbeasts’ started patrolling around it?”
“Yes, the last person we brought through was perhaps a good half a season ago,” the woman replied. “If he had come to us even five days later, it would have been too late.”
“Well, couldn’t you just push the tunnel farther?”
The man and woman just laughed, as if he’d asked something humorous, which he most definitely had not.
“Are you going to pay us?” the man asked.
“And can you wait a season?” the woman tacked on.
Unfortunately, Tehlmar had neither time nor funds since his resurrection. He desired to get to Arlette as soon as possible, and all his money was tied up with his old identity in the Esmae clan. He couldn’t claim any of it without revealing himself, and he would rather die again than do such a thing. With a growl, he turned and stalked off.
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That night, Tehlmar crept through the brush to the south of Obosall, his body low to the ground. Those idiots had no idea what they were talking about. Stealth was one of the Masked Battalion’s greatest masteries. He’d learned from the best, and he’d learned well. He would show those idiots. It would be easy. Even fortune smiled upon him, granting him an overcast sky to blunt the moons’ revealing light.
Dressed in dark clothes and carrying little more than a sword and a small pack of food, he moved silently, one slow step at a time. Unfortunately, being sneaky did not work when you had a large pack of supplies with you, so he’d buried most of his stuff off to the west of the city. He wouldn’t need that stuff anymore, anyway. Anything more that he needed once he got into Otharia he could acquire through other means, thus the sword.
The blade had been a gift of sorts from the Chos as he’d left Stragma. She’d framed it as “a real weapon, not that blood bullshit you rely on too much”, and though her words had been coarse, her true meaning had made it through. His blood weaponry was just too much of a burden on his body to be his go-to solution for every problem. He had to admit that she was right. He relied on it too often.
His well-tuned ears picked up the sound of something pushing through the underbrush up ahead and he ducked behind a large clump of bushes. Up ahead, perhaps five hundred paces away atop an upcoming hill, trudged a large four-legged... thing. Watching it move, Tehlmar’s mind immediately leaped to memories of insects, especially the large ones he’d had the “pleasure” of experiencing while in the Stragman rainforest. But there was something slightly off in the way it moved, as if it lacked that last bit of coordination that one saw from living beings. As the Battalion’s spies had reported from Crirada, the Otharian “deathbeasts” were hardly beasts.
Still, as he peeked through the bushes at the huge metal machine, he couldn’t help but wonder at just how it worked. To make something that moved under its own power was a legendary accomplishment in and of itself. To go further, creating something that could navigate uneven terrain without tripping over itself went beyond anything he’d thought possible.
But it hadn’t seen him, making all those aforementioned thoughts hilariously moot. It didn’t matter how impossible these things were if he could just waltz right past them.
The “deathbeast” crested a hill to the right and disappeared from view a few moments later. After counting to fifty, he continued forward, a wry, smug smile on his face. That grin stayed put until he made it another two hundred paces or so.
Tehlmar wasn’t prepared when a sound erupted from somewhere beyond the hill to his right, the ridge the deathbeast had crossed. It reminded him of the call of a bird native to the northern coast of Gustil, a short, whooping cry starting with a mid-range pitch and quickly cresting higher and higher before cutting off abruptly, only to repeat a fraction of a moment later.
The metallic, artificial quality of the sound unnerved him, but not as much as how the one whooping cry quickly became two, another call a little further away to the left answering the first coming from the right. Then another from straight ahead, the furthest away of the three. Then another, and another, and another.
It was a hunting call, he realized with a spike of fear. The deathbeast was calling in its pack. And judging by the change in the calls and the sound of something large and heavy crashing through the underbrush... they were heading for him.
How did they know of his presence? He was sure he hadn’t been seen by the machine as it passed, or it surely wouldn’t have kept going. So, how?
Tehlmar’s instincts screamed at him to bolt, and he hadn’t survived on the battlefield for decades by ignoring those instincts. Turning tail, he sprinted back towards the way he came, ducking behind the bush he’d hid behind the last time just moments before the deathbeast he’d seen before came bursting into view. His blood ran cold as he realized that it was somehow heading straight for him, its alien cry continuing to echo off the hills.
Tehlmar fled, his years of training overwhelmed by pure, animalistic fear. It knew where he was. Even though it shouldn’t have been able to see him, it definitely knew his exact location.
A second series of crunches, clangs, and whoops from what was now his right announced the arrival of the second deathbeast. That Obosall couple hadn’t been lying, they were indeed fast—far faster than he could hope to be... in a straight line, at least. Could those heavy-looking creations keep up when they had to change direction? He was about to find out.
Tehlmar ripped the palms of his hands open and produced thick, animated strands of blood from each hand. With a level of desperation he’d felt only a few times before, he used the two crimson cables to push off the ground and change direction with dangerous speed, sending waves of protest coursing up his arms with each wild shove. First, he shoved himself to the left with the rope in his right hand, then, with the one coming from his left hand, he threw himself forward and up into the air.
Tehlmar grunted as he felt something slice through his right side and a second something slam into his upper left arm, followed by three deafening booms going off all around him. The blows sent him spinning wildly through the air before crashing awkwardly and unpleasantly into the earth.
The wind knocked out of him, Tehlmar tried to get up but found himself unable to. His eyes closed, he waited for the incoming deathblow, but it didn’t come. Everything had become almost deafeningly quiet at some point, he belatedly realized.
Opening his eyes, Tehlmar found three hulking metal machines standing a hundred paces away, silent and still. They seemed to stare at him for a few more moments before, without a word between them, they each turned and went their separate ways.
A chuckle escaped his lips, a little wheeze that had fought its way through the pain in his side and his arm all the way to his throat and beyond. A second laugh followed, and then a third, until Tehlmar found himself cackling so hard he felt like he was about to suffocate himself.
The deathbeasts had stopped because he was back in Eterium. He hadn’t taken the deathbeasts seriously, thinking he could slip deep into their territory without issue, but the only reason he’d lived to tell the tale was that they’d caught him so close to the border. Had he made it any deeper, he wouldn’t have made it back across the border alive.
Speaking of which, Tehlmar traced the gash in his right side with his right hand. It wasn’t deep, luckily, just a grazing blow from... something. He wasn’t actually sure what it was that had hit him, given the lack of any sort of projectile lodged in his flesh. Still, he’d suffered much worse wounds in that area before. His left arm, on the literal other hand, was a different story. A large part of his bicep, from a finger’s width above the bone all the way to the outer edge, was completely missing, causing his left arm to fall limp to his side. The wound was semi-circular in shape, getting wider the farther the away it went from the bone, implying that even this terrible wound could have been much, much worse.
It was still a disaster as it was. A wound like this would take days to heal well enough for him to be able to use his arm again, and even longer before it was fully back to normal. He reminded himself that at least his blood control meant he wouldn’t bleed out, which was more than most anybody else could say.
With a pained grunt, Tehlmar pushed himself up onto his shaky feet and checked his supplies, only to find that his sword was missing. He must have lost it somewhere during his flight back across the Eterium border. Well, there was no way under the stars that he was going back to look for it. As much as he hated to admit it, that Obosall couple had been right. How had they put it again? He’d stand a greater chance against leviathans than against those metal monstrosities?
The chuckle returned. He couldn’t believe he was thinking this, but he had little choice now. He needed to reach Otharia before some new threat against Arlette presented itself, and that meant he had to hope that the couple were even more right than they knew. It was time to build a raft.
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Once he was satisfied with the final knots, Tehlmar stepped back to admire the totality of his work and nodded in satisfaction. Little more than a collection of felled young trees stripped of everything but their trunks and tied together with the strongest rope he could afford, the raft wasn’t much of a looker, but he felt confident it would float and hold together nicely. He didn’t need it to do much else.
Grunting with effort, Tehlmar pushed his handmade raft over the rocky shore and into the nearby sea. The task proved difficult, the trees repeatedly catching on the rocky shore, requiring him to heave with all his might just to move it a pace or two. It didn’t help that his left arm was still only half-healed; the skin and some of the muscle had regenerated, but the arm lacked the strength it once had and wouldn’t be back to normal for at least several more days.
Tehlmar didn’t have it in him to wait those several more days, and so, ignoring the voice of self-preservation in the back of his mind pointing out the absurdity of his actions, he gave one final heave and watched as the raft slid into the water. Picking up his hand-carved oar, he hopped on before the waves carried the fruits of his labor out of his reach.
About as wide as Tehlmar was tall and one and a half times as long, the collection of logs was just that: some logs and nothing else. He had no real knowledge or experience with this sort of thing—the Casm, not his Esmae, were the clan that liked to mess with water—and so he’d elected to not build a mast or sails or anything of the sort. Besides, he didn’t even know if any of the techniques he’d seen, all designed for smaller freshwater lakes, would even be useful on this choppy sea. That was because nobody dared to try anything like what he was about to try.
He’d chosen his departure point with care. Near the western edge of the Otharian border, the land dipped eastward, curving in for leagues before turning back west and even returning north slightly. From here on the Eterian shore, he could just barely see the fuzzy hint of Otharian land lit beneath the three moons many leagues off to the southeast. That spot, the closest Otharian land that stood a chance of being outside the deathbeast search area, was his destination.
Hour after hour passed as Tehlmar paddled, pushing his raft ponderously closer to his goal, but progress came agonizingly slow. The sea proved far choppier than even the largest lake he’d seen, its waves battering him and pushing him about, currents constantly threatening to pull him farther away from land, and perhaps most annoying of all, his raft liked to spin as he pushed it through the water, forcing him to keep moving about the craft as he paddled.
And yet, for as hard as it was for him to make any headway, as the sun rose above the horizon, Tehlmar found himself about two-thirds of the way to his destination. Though he’d readied himself for his inevitable demise, the only thing to attack him through these many hours of nocturnal labor had been the sea itself, leading him to wonder if the tales of leviathans were overblown? He didn’t doubt their existence; he’d seen proof himself several times in his life. But perhaps they were far rarer than people thought, or perhaps they simply didn’t find morsels as small as he worth eating?
It wasn’t more than a quarter of an hour later that his hopeful musings were torn to shreds along with his raft.
The first sign was an almost imperceptible swell beneath him, his platform rising just ever so slightly in a way that did not match the waves. In almost any other situation, he wouldn’t have even noticed it, but after hours upon the sea, his nerves had heightened to the point where even the smallest discrepancy was enough to set alarms blaring in his head. For the fifteenth time that hour, he tensed up, his eyes darting back and forth looking around the surface of the ocean for threats and his legs falling into a half-crouch, ready to move at a moment’s notice. Like the other fourteen times, he found nothing and was about to go back to paddling. That was when the first tentacle emerged from beneath the waves.
Aquamarine blue with light green speckles, circles protruding from its hide, and easily five paces thick except for the short end where it tapered off, the tentacle flashed out of the briny drink with astounding speed and wrapped around one half of the raft with startling speed. Only the fact that he’d already been on edge allowed Tehlmar to leap out of the way, barely avoiding both the first rubbery appendage and the second that shot forth from the opposite side to wrap around the other half of the raft.
Keeping an iron grip on his oar with his left hand, Tehlmar extruded a large crimson axe with a blade over three paces long from his right as he landed atop the second tentacle. He needed to save his floating platform before this creature—whatever it was—destroyed it! Otherwise, even if he survived this encounter, he’d die anyway, trading a death in a monster’s belly with drowning leagues away from the nearest shoreline.
As he swung his weapon down towards the tentacle upon which he tenuously perched, the entire mess of wood, sea beast appendage, and elf suddenly was pulled beneath the waves. Tehlmar’s axe struck true just before he went under, the blood blade biting into the tentacle about halfway—enough to hurt but not enough to get it to let go. The tentacle writhed in agony, throwing his half-submerged body up and off to the side, twirling through the air. Tehlmar had just enough time to pull his blood back within his body and take a large breath before he splashed into the ocean.
That was when Tehlmar first glimpsed the true form of his aquatic foe. More than a hundred paces long, with a bulbous and baggy body terminating in a massive, sharp-looking beak large enough to cleave him in two with a single chomp and six tentacles set in a circle around it to pull in its prey, the creature seemed like something out of a nightmare. An eye, larger than Tehlmar was tall, sat just above the beak. Its furious gaze pointed in his direction.
Tehlmar was not the world’s best swimmer by a long shot, but he knew enough to move around. At the sight of two more tentacles heading his way, he churned through the water, shooting upward as fast as his hands, feet, and buoyancy could take him. It wasn’t enough. He had just enough time to take a second breath before a tentacle curled around his lower legs, squeezing them with crushing, vise-like strength, and pulled him swiftly down.
His heartbeat pounding in his ears, Tehlmar tried to reform his axe to cut his way free, but found that, to his horror, he could not create anything! His control over his blood ended when the blood merged with the seawater all around him! If only he still had his sword!
Tehlmar glanced at the oar, which he had somehow managed to maintain a death grip on this whole time. Grabbing onto it with his right hand as well, he turned it so the thinner end pointed down towards the monster’s body and stared back at the creature with a mix of determination and resignation. If he were going down for good, he was going to make sure that this fiend regretted it until the end.
By this point, the leviathan had pulled the raft down to its mouth. Opening its bird-like beak wide, it took a massive bite out of the mangled bunch of tree trunks, crushing the wood into splinters with relative ease. Perhaps deciding it didn’t like the taste, however, it spit the pieces out and continued to pull him closer.
Tehlmar saw an opportunity. As he neared the leviathan’s open mouth, he struck out with his oar, using the large flat side to bat a large splinter from his destroyed raft jagged and pointy side first into the bottom of the beast’s nearby eye. The water fought him, so he couldn’t get any real power behind his strike, but he managed to get just enough oomph into it to drive the wood hard enough into his foe’s sclera to puncture the surface.
The thing released a pained, furious shriek as it thrashed about, the blast of sound striking him with such force that it nearly knocked him senseless. So discombobulated was he, in fact, that it took him a moment to realize that he’d slipped free of his adversary’s grasp during its wild flailing. With a grin, he turned towards the surface for another breath of air, and a chance to make a real weapon this time. Perhaps a spear, to blind it for good?
Amid this chaos, Tehlmar couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed. Yes, he would almost assuredly die here. Yes, this beast was a terrifying predator from beneath the waves. But he’d met worse. As one of the survivors of Zrukhora, he was one of the very lucky—or perhaps unlucky—few to find themselves face to face with a god who’d destroyed a city and live to tell the tale.
Tehlmar still felt shivers run down his spine at just the memory of it. A being of fire and fury and death, the god had appeared to Tehlmar not as a mere beast enlarged to massive size but as something far beyond the realm of mortal beasts and people, an engine of unparalleled destruction. One glimpse of it had been all he’d needed to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that any and all resistance would be completely and utterly futile. Even his strongest strike as Jaquet, a very powerful blow that could cleave ten men in two, would not have even scratched its hide.
This leviathan, on the other hand, bled. It reacted to him and treated him as something worth acknowledging. It felt like there was a small facsimile of a fighting chance, however incredibly tiny that might be. Given the right powers and the right team and the right timing and location, he could imagine this beast’s death. He could not say the same for the god. Not even the combined power of all the soldiers in Zrukhora had been able to so much as inconvenience it.
As probably the only person to be able to compare the two greatest legendary beings of Scyria, he couldn’t help but conclude that the leviathan was little more than a pale shadow of the god. Not even the fact that he’d survived the god’s attack on Zrukhora and he was going to die here in the middle of the ocean to this lesser legend changed this determination.
He wasn’t moving, he realized. Try as Tehlmar did to swim up for air and a weapon, he realized after a moment that the light on the surface above him was not getting any closer, even though he could feel his body rising through the water. Confused, he looked down and blanched. Perhaps as a way for getting back at him for his disparaging thoughts, the leviathan had opened its beak wide once more and was sucking him in. He could see its huge body behind it inflating like a waterskin as it took in more and more water, slowly dragging him down into the whirlpool forming around its mouth.
Already, Tehlmar’s breath was running low. He could feel his heart pounding in his head, his lungs getting closer and closer to exploding with each useless stroke. He wasn’t going to make it to the surface, he realized. He had seen the sky for the final time. With this realization came renewed determination. He turned about, intent on inflicting as much bodily harm upon the sea beast as possible in retribution for claiming his life and his last chance at love. That was probably why he saw it before the leviathan did.
Rising from the murky depths beneath the leviathan came a darkness, a void that Tehlmar’s mind had trouble comprehending. Though his brain was low on air, that wasn’t the reason he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. It was simply that it was so big that he couldn’t even see it all at once. It was a maw, a gaping maw ready to swallow the world whole.
As teeth larger than the impenetrable gates of Crirada clamped down upon the leviathan’s bloated body from behind, carving it into two pieces as if it were made of little more than soggy bread, Tehlmar’s error in judgment became clear. This being, this massive, impossible creature so large that he could not see more than a small fraction of its body at once, was a true leviathan. The beast that had been about to eat him was a mere pretender, nothing more than a snack for this ruler of the sea.
Tehlmar found himself pushed back and up by the combined pressure of the true leviathan’s jaws closing and the water pushed aside by its ascent. Desperate for air now, he swam upwards, though he found himself unable to take his eyes off the impossibly massive teeth as they opened and shut a second time to take in the other half of the false leviathan just paces beneath him. He stared with horror and wonder at the closest tooth, a mammoth triangle bigger than a four-story building. There was no escaping should this impossible being decide to open its mouth one more time, but it did not. Perhaps it didn’t think him large enough to eat. Perhaps it didn’t even know he was there at all. Either way, Tehlmar had been saved by his own insignificance.
Slowly, with the ease and nonchalance of a being living an unchallenged existence, the leviathan turned to the side. Just that simple act generated enough of a current to send Tehlmar reeling off to the side for dozens of paces, his body spinning wildly out of control. As he spun, the current pulling him along, he managed to catch glimpses of its titanic form as it passed.
A mouth large enough to engulf a small town in a single bite; an eye larger than the largest of the three moons hanging in the sky, one that seemed to take in all that could be seen; a body that seemed to go on forever, unimaginable strength rippling below the scales; a long, jagged fin that rose up like a mountain range from the leviathan’s back... Tehlmar found himself unable to do anything but be in awe of what he witnessed as the behemoth’s passing pulled him helplessly through the sea. It wasn’t until the leviathan turned downward to dive back into the inky waters below that he remembered he needed air, and he needed it desperately.
Sadly, the sparkling surface above him was quickly fading out of reach as he found himself caught in the leviathan’s wake, the strong, turbulent current pulling him deeper and deeper. He flailed about ineffectively, his body helpless against the force tugging him down. His vision dimmed, his mind started to cloud as air began to spew from his lungs. But then, the magnificent being before him casually flicked its tail fin, a gargantuan fan so large that he could not see its top and bottom at the same time, with a power inconceivable to his fragile mind.
The sea erupted, a towering wave blasting forth from the surface and rushing southeastward with tremendous speed. Trapped within the turbulent waters, Tehlmar spun and spun uncontrollably, swept along for the ride even as the last of his air escaped his lungs. His last thought, before he blacked out, was that he needed to rethink his opinions on gods versus leviathans.
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Tehlmar came to with a hacking cough, salty brine spilling from his nose and mouth. His body convulsed and heaved as it fought to clear his lungs of the offending liquid, only for a wave to crash over him as he gasped, filling his mouth with seawater once more. Sputtering weakly, he pushed himself against the sand, barely getting his head above the froth coming and going all around him.
Blinking against the bright light of the sun beating down against his back, Tehlmar slowly crawled forward, one elbow at a time, until he could collapse against hot, rocky, and blessedly dry sand. There he lay for hours, his only movement the slow rise and fall of his chest, as he just took in the joy of solid ground and readily available air. Finally, as the sun laid down to sleep for the night, he managed to rise to his feet.
Before him, he found an unfamiliar shore, one that he knew was not a part of the Eterian coastline. Somehow, he’d made it to Otharia, and, judging by the fact that he was still alive, he was far enough south to avoid the deathbeasts as well. Rolling his stiff shoulders, Tehlmar left the beach and headed south.
He’d revived from the dead, crossed the continent in a matter of days, survived an attack from a pack of deathbeasts, crossed the sea, fought against a ravenous tentacled monstrosity, witnessed a true leviathan, and somehow made it to Otharia’s shore intact. Now the only tasks he had left were to track down the woman he loved and then convince her to accept that love after years of lying to her face.
A wry, tired smile crossed Tehlmar’s lips. Sadly enough, it felt like the hardest part of his journey was yet to come.