As it turned out, the Ghostbarrows would have to wait a bit longer; the Weald was a huge place, full of nooks and crannies and twisting paths. Fawkes and Hunter marched hard for hours, stopping only for a few minutes at a time to catch their breath. When she was finally satisfied enough to stop and set up camp, it was already afternoon and Hunter was thoroughly exhausted.
“I have to get back to my world,” he told her as he was helping her build a campfire. “At least for a while. Grab a bite, stretch a bit, hydrate.”
“Could you stay for a while longer?” Fawkes asked, catching him by surprise. “Much as I’m used to it, I hate eating alone. Let’s sit by the fire, roast some sausages. Then you can go, spend the night on your side of the things. We won’t be getting back on the trail before dawn, anyway.”
“Uh… sure, yeah.”
So they sat around the fire, roasted sausages, drank some kind of strong, stiff drink from a flask Fawkes produced from one of her countless pouches, and chatted about silly, everyday things. It was a nice change of pace. Hunter didn’t regret sticking around.
So far, Fawkes had more or less been the image of dry wit and stoicism. It was interesting to see her wind down and reveal some of her other, softer sides. Plus, the sausages were delicious. So delicious, in fact, that they attracted some unwanted attention.
Biggs and Wedge were the first to spot the beast. “Big fur!” Hunter felt them chatter feverishly through their mental connection, raising hell in his head. “Big eyes, big mouth, big teeth! Hungry, hungry!”
“What the…?”
The next one to notice that they had company was, quite predictably, Fawkes. Before Hunter even had time to process what was happening, she was already on her feet and with her blade in hand–her blade which, again, she had drawn seemingly out of nowhere.
“Look alive, lad!”
Hunter was the last to spot the beast. Hiding in the tall brush and inching closer, the massive, russet-furred wolf was easily as big and as heavy as a full-grown man. It sniffed the air, drooling through its huge, scary-looking teeth. It stared straight at Hunter with big, golden eyes burning with intelligence and curiosity and hunger.
Hunter, being Hunter, did the first thing that came to mind.
He offered the wolf a sausage.
***
“You must be out of your mind,” Fawkes said as Hunter fed the big rust-colored animal yet another sausage–the last one. “Clearly, definitely, absolutely out of your mind.”
The wolf gulped down the roast sausages with gusto, its bushy tail wagging like crazy. It paid no attention to the still very much armed and alert woman. It only had eyes for Hunter–or, more accurately, the sausages.
“How did you know it would be friendly?” Fawkes asked, still equal parts suspicious and flabbergasted. “Is wolf-charming another of your transient tricks?”
Hunter was no wolf charmer, but this was no wolf either–not really. A hungry, two-hundred-pound pupper that reached up to his waist at shoulder height, that’s what it was.
“It was just a hunch.”
Well, that wasn’t exactly true.
It was certainly not just a hunch–Hunter didn’t feel suicidal enough to casually offer treats to hungry wild animals and expect them to eat from his hand. It was metagaming, an educated guess.
This was a special encounter, as the well-timed notification had informed him. It consumed one point of his Serendipity quality, and last time he’d checked, serendipity was just a fancy word for unexpected good luck. It was only logical that this wouldn’t be a hostile situation–wasn’t it? For the umpteenth time, Hunter wondered whether this was something that happened to everyone from time to time, or it was another perk of being a transient.
Seeing how suspiciously Fawkes eyed the animal, still on edge and ready to pounce, he gravitated towards the latter.
“Count your lucky stars it didn’t go straight for your throat," she said. “It may not look like it, but this is a goddamn direwolf. I didn’t even know they lived in these parts.”
“Direwolf?”
She nodded.
“Epicyon, as the loremasters call it. Like a wolf, but much bigger, much smarter, and much deadlier. This one, though, not so much. Must have been the runt of the litter.”
“The runt of the litter?” Hunter gaped, slightly startling the wolf, who proceeded to give him the stink eye and attack another sausage. “How big is the rest of the litter, then?”
“Direwolves can grow to be the size of a horse,” said Fawkes. “A big horse. This one’s probably been kicked out of the pack for being too scrawny, or for having too silly a color, then wandered all the way out here on its own.”
“Can we keep him?” he joked. “Please, please, pretty please?”
Fawkes shook her head in disbelief.
“What, as a pet? Are you out of your mind, lad? We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t try to eat us, now that you’ve fed them all the sausages. My sausages.”
Indeed, the direwolf was far less trusting of Hunter now that he wasn’t waving food at it. Slowly but surely, it started to back away from their campfire.
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“That’s right, you big oaf, shoo!” Fawkes shouted, waving her blade at it. “Shoo before I turn you into a new winter coat!”
“I don’t think russet's your color,” Hunter quipped. “You look better in black. It brings out the warmth in your eyes.”
“Didn’t you have urgent business to attend to in your world?” Fawkes grunted without taking her eyes off the retreating wolf, and she was right. At some point, he did have to hit the bathroom–and eat, and drink some water, and sleep, too.
With a final sniff the wolf turned tail and disappeared in the bushes. Hunter felt a bit disappointed. He’d always wanted a dog.
“Promise me you’ll be nice to it if it comes back, yes?”
“If it gets anywhere near the rest of my food,” Fawkes said, and her eyes shone with that trademark ice-cold glimmer, “the only thing it’s getting it’s a mouthful of steel. That’s what I promise you.”
Hunter didn’t find that hard to believe. Not hard at all.
***
When Hunter logged in the next morning just after dawn, Fawkes was already packed and ready to go. The wolf had been sniffing around the camp, she told him, so she had to spend the night on a tree. Understandably, she wasn’t in a good mood.
They made their way deeper and deeper into the Weald, hopping from one game trail to the other. It was a cold and wet day, and the morning mist never really lifted. It clung around their heels, making the ancient forest around them look even more eerie and unwelcoming than usual.
Like the previous day, Hunter and the two feathery bozos focused on scouting the surrounding area for anything out of the ordinary–which got him a point in Conjure Familiar and another two in Survival.
He couldn’t say whether it was thanks to his getting accustomed to the Weald or simply to his ever-increasing Survival skill, but Hunter had started to gradually become more and more aware of how much was going on around them, how alive the place was. There were squirrels and birds and insects and small rodents everywhere, and he also spotted the tracks and other telltale signs of other, larger animals.
He also got the distinct sense that there were other things about, presences that shadowed them and observed them from afar. In a place like the Weald, that was to be expected. They were trespassers. Whatever the things around them were, they were in their home turf. Hunter would prefer they kept their distance.
Somewhere around noon, Biggs and Wedge flooded his mind with a stream of excited chattering.
“Big thing, dead thing!” they projected through the mental link. “So very big, so very dead! Near, near, very near!”
“Fawkes,” Hunter relayed, “the ravens say there’s something dead nearby. Something big. Should we go check?”
The woman adjusted the straps of her saddlebags on her shoulder, frowned, and reached for her pistol.
“Yes. But let’s be careful.”
They didn’t have to veer too far off the path. What Biggs and Wedge had spotted lay at the bottom of a nearby dry creek. Lodged between two large rocks and partially eaten, the moose carcass was easily as big as a van. Were moose this big in the real world, too? If they were, Hunter had severely underestimated their size.
Biggs and Wedge had made themselves comfortable on the carcass, happily cawing and picking at strings of dead flesh with excited abandon. Besides them, there was nothing else in sight–no other animals, no predators, no scavengers, no nothing. Again, Hunter was unsure if that was an observation he made on his own, or the product of his 22 points in Survival, but that absence raised some serious red flags. What could have killed something this big, and why weren’t there any scavengers around?
In fact, simply asking himself that question was apparently important enough to warrant another Skill progression notification.
The ground was mostly rocks and pebbles, so Hunter wasn’t able to spot any tracks or footprints. What did stand out, however, was the fact that the humongous moose hadn’t been killed there. Judging from the long streaks of dried blood and loose pebbles, something–something really big–had dragged it there from elsewhere.
“Uh, Fawkes…?”
The woman threw him a sharp glance and brought a gloved finger to her lips, silently shushing him, then pointed at an outcropping near the edge of the creek.
At first, Hunter saw nothing; just a few boulders, half-covered with bushes and shrubs. Then, much like one of those magic eye optical illusions you had to go cross-eyed to figure out, he saw it; there was an opening among the rocks and plants, a dark hole that presumably led to some kind of burrow or foxhole.
If burrows and foxholes were big enough for small African elephants, that was.
“Tell the two feathery fools to keep their beaks shut,” she drew close and whispered in a sharp, rushed voice. “We have to leave this place–fast.”
By the time she finished her sentence, it was already too late.
Something stirred in that burrow and let out a deep, resounding growl Hunter felt all the way to the marrow of his bones. The Weald around them fell silent, and as the owner of the barrow and the moose carcass walked out in the open, Hunter felt his knees turn to jelly.
The great bear rose, pushing itself to its back feet. It was easily over twenty feet tall–an ursine titan that made the ancient firs around it look like saplings. Its shaggy fur was the color of winter earth, its long tufts flowing along invisible patterns.
This was no mere beast. This something else, older, primordial. I turned its gaze on Hunter, eyes like searchlights. Its aura washed over him, overpowering him completely.
Too awed to pay attention to the cascade of notifications that flashed at the edge of his vision, too stunned to turn heel and run, Hunter stood there frozen, his mouth slightly ajar.
Somewhere a million miles away, Fawkes shouted something in his ear. She grabbed him by the collar and tried to drag him away, or at least shake him back to his senses. No luck. If there was a force in the world that could make Hunter tear his eyes from the harsh gaze of the primordial creature, Fawkes was not it.
The bear’s lips curled back, exposing giant fangs. Its bellow made the earth rumble, and Hunter heard an impossibly deep voice resound in his skull. It was the kind of voice that would make him feel the fillings in his teeth vibrate–if his Elderpyre avatar had any, which it didn’t.
“SPIRIT-SPEAKER. I SMELL THE STENCH OF HERNE ON YOU. HORSES AND HOUNDS AND STEEL. WHERE IS YOUR HUNT, MORTAL? DARE YOU HUNT THIS ONE ALONE?”
Hunter understood he was expected to answer, but speech was far beyond his current state. Hell, forcing himself to remember to breathe was all he could do.
“SPEAK,” the bear titan roared, and the air itself crackled with poorly-contained fury. It took one huge step closer, and then another. It was enough to tower over Hunter and eclipse the sky. “SPEAK, OR DIE.”
Even if he could speak, Hunter had no idea what to say. Spirit-speaker? Herne? Horses? Hounds? Steel? Hunt? Fuck a duck, what the hell was all that about?
He just stood there and stared, mortified–which apparently pissed off the bear even more. It took another giant step, let out another deafening roar, and lifted a massive paw full of wickedly curved claws, each one of them easily large and sharp enough to tear Hunter open from his throat to his groin.
The impact of the blow was so absurdly forceful that it sent Hunter flying, the shock so powerful that his body didn’t even register the pain.
A large dark figure rushed between him and the bear. Someone screamed something. Fawkes? Hunter couldn’t make out the words.
“Ah, shit,” he caught himself thinking as time was slowing down, mind was slipping in a numb fugue state. “Here we go again.”
The bear’s shadow fell heavy on him, and he saw its titanic paw rise for a second blow. As it swiped at him, there was nothing he could do; nothing but close his eyes and brace himself for the world of pain and anguish that was very rapidly starting to catch up with him.