Dorri stood in the morning light with her back turned to the unhappy view of bodies being recovered behind her.
Their party had left Traton at first light, after Booth offered a stilted but obviously heartfelt blessing in the name of Voshell for the people of Traton who’d sponsored his Tilier training. Walking the road away from Traton and back toward the River Way would have been pleasant, had their destination been less grim. The sun rising in front of them had dazzled Dorri’s eyes, and she’d breathed air as fresh as mowed hay and as crisp as apples. Only the long shadows which stretched away from the light, like night clinging desperately to the woods, had reminded her that the trek possibly ended in danger and definitely in sadness.
As always, the gamer in her looked forward to the coming adventure, even as her more rational brain tried to remember that, fun as Redemption Wars combat might be, it was also serious business. As realistic as the gorgeous scenery and sensory input made the world, all the dangerous and deadly things were now that realistic, too.
A contingent of more volunteers from Traton accompanied them, including a cart and horse. Once they topped the hill which overlooked the pond and the sight of impromptu cairns along the road, Dorri and most of the others fell back to allow the villagers down the hill first. Booth went with them. The wood cairns were opened, and the bodies wrapped in heavy cloth and respectfully loaded onto the cart.
Lora had, after a moment’s hesitation, followed Booth down the hill. She didn’t pray over the fallen, but she moved among the living, offering soft words and gentle touches as they alternately worked and mourned over their task.
Dorri had remained near the hilltop, awkwardly clutching the cloth-wrapped scythe which Booth had asked her to hold while he worked. They’d left their captive bandit in the mayor’s custody, but Porter had returned the scythe to Booth.
The Scourge they’d questioned had said it was a key—but a key to what?
Dorri had withstood witnessing the collective grief down the hill for only a few moments. Then she’d turned away and begun scanning the surrounding terrain.
Someone needs to keep watch. We don’t know if there might be more Scourge.
The folk from Traton had not come unarmed on their somber mission. Trouble was unlikely. But Dorri needed to be doing something, and keeping watch was something she at least knew how to do.
Arra strode past, headed down the hill. “I’ll watch from the east of the scene.”
“Sure! OK!” Nildeyr piped up from behind Dorri. “I’ll just… watch the other side of the road up here.”
He obviously thought he was replying to Arra, but the tall, braid-bedecked woman didn’t so much as glance back.
Booth had suggested they wouldn’t want to do anything that risked drawing trouble’s attention until the villagers had recovered their dead and were well on the way back to Traton, and everyone else had readily agreed. Once the Traton folk were gone, then they could proceed with their search for the alleged ruins and whatever they might find there.
It took barely an hour to gather the Traton dead. They left the bandits’ bodies scattered along the forest’s edge for scavengers. More than one villager clasped arms with Booth before setting out.
“We’ll keep Traton safe. They won’t take us unawares again,” one said.
“It’s good to have you with us, Booth,” said another.
Booth, for his part, had showed up at the inn that morning looking well-rested and calm. Determined.
His family did that for him. Seeing them. Being with them. Knowing they’re alive and well.
The ever-present pain that dwelled in Dorri’s heart flared, inflamed by envy, but only for a moment.
It’s good. It’s a good thing, to be happy for someone else, even if they have what you never can.
Even if that someone was probably a digitized figment of someone else’s imagination.
“I won’t let you down,” Booth said now. Tense lines rode along his jaw and brow line. He paused and then added, in his stiltedly formal way, “By Voshell’s grace.”
And then the cart trundled west toward Traton, leaving the remaining six of them on the rutted dirt road beside the pond.
“So! I’m as thrilled as anyone else about the prospect of wading into freezing cold water.” Nildeyr spoke, unsurprisingly, more loudly and cheerfully than the situation called for. “But maybe it would be more sensible to scout the edges of this pond before taking the more direct route?”
“If there was any other way to wherever they were going, I imagine they’d have used it.” Booth’s tone was friendly, and he slapped Nildeyr’s shoulder as he said it, though.
It didn’t matter one way or the other to Dorri. She was here to get some xp, maybe do a little good that would cancel out how shitty she felt about some of the other things she’d done recently, and maybe get the chance to ask Lora about the Grove and her father, if she could ever work up the nerve. How exactly they set about getting from point a to point b was of little concern.
One by one they waded to the tuft of land in the pond. Once they stood dripping among the tall grasses, the size of both pond and island became more apparent. Grass quickly gave way to woods, both on the island and along the pond’s far edges, where trees tangled thicker and in places even bowed out over the water.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Ranger stuff. Guess I’m up.
Frowning with concentration, Dorri pushed forward into the brush which covered the island, shoving branches carefully aside and looking for signs that anyone at all might have come this way recently.
“Anything?” Nildeyr spoke from right beside Dorri’s elbow. She caught a gasp and breathed it out slowly.
[You rolled a 17 for Awareness.]
A pretty good roll.
The narrator didn’t speak. But Dorri’s vision sharpened and her attention shifted as if guided. A few feet ahead, the ground turned rocky beneath the grass. Despite being broken and overgrown, the rocky surface seemed unnaturally smooth.
“Maybe.” Dorri motioned ahead at what she’d seen. “Not ruins, exactly, but those may be old paving stones.”
Nildeyr squinted doubtfully in that direction. “It just looks likes rocks to me.”
Dorri quieted another sigh.
“Paving stones—like a road?” Booth asked from Dorri’s other side. He at least had the sense to speak quietly. “Can we follow them?”
Mildly annoyed and more than a little uncomfortable at being the focus of the questions, Dorri shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
Another quarter of an hour of stepping carefully through underbrush and ducking beneath branches, following the trail a series of additional Awareness and Natural Knowledge rolls led Dorri along, brought them to the island’s far side. There, the far edge of the pond receded. Any semblance of a bank dropped away into the water, which settled into a still, algae-coated bog between the trees.
“That’s not very helpful,” Lora murmured.
Dorri grabbed a stick and dipped it into the water, testing its depth. Unlike on the road side of the pond, the island’s edge had no slope.
“There’s more of a drop-off here. But look.” Caught up in interpreting the clues the game fed her, Dorri unselfconsciously pointed out her findings—smaller patches of mostly-dry land protruded from the water, mossy lumps in a loose cluster which curved off to the right. “The road continues that way.”
Or so the rolls are telling me.
“There’s dry land over there, on the other side. I think we could make it across.” Without waiting for a vote, Nildeyr nimbly leaped from the island to the nearest stone. He made it look easy. As he glanced back over his shoulder, he added, “There’s definitely stone underneath the moss. It’s a little bit slick.” And then he leaped just as easily to the next nearest stone.
“He’s a trained acrobat.” Dorri glanced around at the others. “The stones are probably more than a little bit slick.”
Lora smiled. “We’re wet already. Just if you must fall, try to do so gracefully and don’t hit your head.”
No one moved across the scattered fragments of old road as nimbly as Nildeyr, but the crossing went uneventfully enough. On the far side, drier land stretched to the southwest, away from the brackish overflow of the pond. Still frowning in concentration but more sure of herself, Dorri cast about for a bit. She didn’t realize until she straightened and looked back that the other five had all stopped and watched her.
Momentarily self-aware and flustered, Dorri stuttered, “There’s more here. Paving stones. Road.”
Nildeyr grinned and came running to “help” as Dorri picked out the patches where covering earth had worn thin and smooth ancient stone showed through. In truth, the tell-tale pavers grew simple enough for any of them to follow, the further into the wood they wound. Nildeyr practically skipped along them, like a child running ahead of his parents at an amusement park.
“Don’t get too far ahead,” Booth chided, eventually. “We have no idea what we might be walking into.”
As Nildeyr glanced sharply back, irritation flashed across his face.
Dorri, walking only a few steps behind Nildeyr, felt a flash of irritation, herself. She added, “This old road is clear enough that any number of people could have marched through here in the past few days, and the grass would have sprung up again. There’s no way to tell whether a lot of Scourge have passed this way, or none at all.”
Nildeyr swung his annoyed expression toward Dorri. She was startled to feel a flicker of hurt when it touched her. But then Nildeyr’s expression smoothed. He stopped where he stood and waited for the rest to catch up, Dorri out front, Booth and Lora behind, and Karon with Arra bringing up the rear.
“Will you show me?” Nildeyr asked, boyish eagerness once lilting in his voice. “What kind of things are you looking for?”
Dorri blinked. His attention was like a beacon, and she shrank back from the light. “Gray stone. Grass that’s been trampled?”
Behind them, Lora laughed, a quiet sound like small bells.
“This does answer one question,” Booth remarked. “No one this far back from the road would have heard the fighting yesterday.”
“Two questions, perhaps.” Lora still sounded amused. “Has the failure to return of those we stopped yesterday been noticed? If it wasn’t known that they were coming, then perhaps the rest haven’t thought to go looking for them yet.”
“Which buys time for Traton.”
“Assuming the remainder of these Scourge haven’t slipped around in some other direction and aren’t already enroute to Traton.” Karon spoke with mild matter-of-factness.
That led to a moment of somber quiet. Feeling a trace more urgency, Dorri led the way forward.
“What do you make of them, Karon? ‘The Scourge of Batzieh.’” The way Lora asked sounded, as it so often did, as if she already knew the answer and was testing to see what the other person would say.
“Batzieh is one of the dragon-gods. Greed and gluttony, I believe, were her domain.”
Dorri tried to recall what the narrator had said the night before.
The Never-Ending Hunger. Something like that.
“If this organization claims to be the scourge of an evil entity, then one would think that makes their cause one of good,” Karon continued.
“I would not care to float such a theory to the good folk of Traton,” Lora replied. “And it’s equally likely that they mean ‘scourge’ as them being a weapon of Batzieh.”
“Mmm.” Karon inclined his head. “Point ceded.”
“Whatever they’re doing, the end doesn’t justify the means,” Booth interrupted. “They murdered innocent people.”
Quiet fell behind Dorri, save for the sound of footfalls and grass rustling. Nildeyr ghosted Dorri’s steps so closely that eventually she started pointing out the things she noticed, at least until she grew too self-conscious and fell again into an awkward silence.
The road led them to a small clearing, where the traces of old road pavers broadened into what might have once been a circular courtyard. Little remained—a hint of what might have been a stone bench, low ridges that could have been walls or perhaps a fountain.
“I don’t think there was any city here,” Dorri ventured. “It seems too small. A single home, maybe?”
To her eye, there seemed little evidence of even a modest-sized building.
“There’s a larger pile of rubble over this way.” Nildeyr whispered, as was everyone else, though it seemed foolish given the emptiness of the clearing and the woods around it. “A shed maybe?”
He wandered a few steps in that direction. Dorri fanned off to approach the middling pile of broken rock from a slightly different angle.
[You rolled a 23 for Awareness.]
Details wove together and crystallized Dorri’s understanding of what she was looking at—uneven stacks, but all of it roughly the same height. Variations in the shades of gray, some old and faded but other darker, as if somehow protected from weather for centuries. And, as her perspective changed, a gap revealed itself.
“Nildeyr!” Dorri hissed, still struggling to piece together what she looked at but instinctively knowing she wanted him not a single step closer to it. “Come back!”