The ashraven’s shriek split the frosty air of midnight and Duu looked up. She could already feel the muffled steps of hide boots tromping up the steps from the caldera before she heard them. The people of Shadow Ridge had heard the warning cries as well, and were coming up from their bunkers and hiding places, preparing to defend the ridge of the caldera.
“Ho, treeshaper!” said an old villager, raising his bow, then taking up position beside her.
Duu eyed him suspiciously, “Aren’t you too old to fight?”
“Aren’t you too young?” asked the old man, voice whistling through three remaining front teeth, none of them next to each other.
The others, four or five dozens all bearing bows or slings, all either too old or too young clustered around her as if she was supposed to say something. Duu felt her cheeks flush and her neck grow hot at their attention and her voice dried up like a spike-blossom in autumn.
The old man must have realized she wasn’t going to find words, because he leaned down to speak to her, “Every one of us has been shooting a bow for as long as we’ve been alive, however long that may be. Now that Torun fella says this is supposed to be easier than hunting snow geese by a far sight. Well if what he says is right… well we got nothing to worry about do we? So what’s next?”
Duu nodded, the nervous sweat cooling in the night air. “Line up on the ridge,” she mumbled, not looking up, “And don’t shoot until they cross the yellow flag.”
The old man nodded but no one else moved.
Duu shuffled uncomfortably. She could talk to the old man, since he sounded a little like her grandfather. But the rest of the people were strangers. She wasn’t sure if she could muster the-
“LINE UP ON THE RIDGE AND STAY LOW UNTIL MY SIGNAL!” the old man hollered.
People jumped at the volume of his voice and bumped into each other until they stood roughly shoulder to shoulder along the ridgeline, rubbing sleep from their eyes.
“They need to stay low,” whispered Duu, sitting on the ground to stay under cover of the caldera’s natural lip.
“GET THE FUR OUTTA YER EARS AND GET DOWN UNTIL I SAY SO!” the old man relayed the order from Duu to the others, to the mountaintops, to the rest of the world.
They got down just in time for a missile to come screaming over their heads close enough that the trailing clay dust sprinkled their fur-lined clothing. A few of the younger ones – kids just as old as Duu – looked nervously to the elders beside them who might have been their grandparents.
“Thank you,” Duu whispered to the old man who now crouched beside her, arranging a bushel of hastily carved arrow shafts, some with flint tips, a few with iron, but most merely fire-hardened wood.
“Don’t mention it.”
“My name’s Duu.”
“Yeller.”
Duu nodded and smiled. She liked when names made sense.
Her smile faded as she heard the mountain begin to make a strange noise.
***
Screams and shrieks and animal snarls echoed all the way up to Rook’s private quarters, as the battle in the small tunnels echoed throughout the mountains, made particularly haunting by the way they bounced up the natural chimneys funneling past the northern peak.
Yaosen sat before the crackling fireplace in a meditative posture, soaking in as much warmth as he could after their hours-long stretches of scouting in the night air.
“I hate this,” Rook slashed her sword through empty air, pacing back and forth.
“This isn’t a brawl, where more bodies and stronger arms prevail,” said the monk without opening his eyes, “This is a type of war you’re unused to on this continent. Trust Torun on this. His plan is sound.”
“How can it be sound if the two best fighters aren’t even in the fight!”
“You can’t be everywhere at once. Would you go to the small tunnels? If so which one? Or the ridge? Would your one bow make a difference among the fifty already stationed there? Maybe you want to sit in the grand entranceway with Torun and wait there for Lu Gun instead of here? You’re a leader right now, not a fighter. And the most important thing for a leader to do is to stay alive so her people have a reason to continue the fight.”
Rook formed several responses, but aborted each one. In the end she growled and slashed at the air again. “Gah! Damn your foreign ways and your foreign wars. If only there were more of me.”
Yaosen shrugged, then scowled, then opened his eyes. “Perhaps there is a way. Not to make more of you, but for you to be in two places at once.”
“More tricks?”
Yaosen smiled, “The oldest trick.”
“What do I have to do?”
“First you have to stop pacing.”
Yaosen walked Rook through the postures, the breathing techniques, the mindfulness routines. He wasn’t sure any of it would work.
It had taken the monk decades of spiritual study and practice, and even then, he didn’t walk the spirit world until he came to the Farwilds and the spirits chose to talk to him.
But when Yaosen finally crossed over and found himself standing in a dark reflection of the room his body sat in, he found Rook’s silhouette waiting for him.
“What’s wrong with you?” the astral projection of Rook stumbled backward.
Yaosen looked down at his own spirit form, then back to Rook, “You mean what’s wrong with us. Our bodies are still beside the fire, while our spirits are free to walk the spirit world.” Her spirit was strangely dark, while Yaosen’s was more blue-white.
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“It seems the same, just… darker,” Rook mused before realizing, “We are in the shadow realm. I didn’t know you could enter it from anywhere but the deepest caves.”
Yaosen shrugged. “The spirit world takes many forms depending upon who walks it, when, and for what purpose. It's no surprise, given your proclivity to shadow, that it often takes the form of a shadow realm in a place you find meditative. My guess is that you’ve walked it often, when you commune with the shadows, though you rarely distinguish between a physical journey and a spiritual one.”
“Is that your plan? To commune with the shadows?”
Yaosen nodded his spiritual head.
“They’re fickle. I don’t actually seek them out as a rule, and even if I did, why would they-”
Yosen had begun “walking,” and Rook had followed. They were suddenly deep within the winding tunnels beneath Shadow Ridge, as if a few steps had spun the earth beneath their feet and then lurched to a stop at their destination.
There were no shadow spirits to be seen, but the darkness was too thick to be natural, even for the spirit world. They couldn’t even see their feet on the stone beneath them. It was as if they floated through a void, the sounds of screams and battlecries – or perhaps the emotions they represented in the physical world – echoing through the barrier and reverberating through the darkness.
Laced beneath it all, Yaosen heard snickering.
He raised his voice instinctively, as he spoke, though it might not have been necessary in the spirit realm. “Spirits, your home is assailed. Why do you laugh at such disrespect from the invaders?”
The snickering grew louder, closer, more mirthful and more insidious.
“Our home is not a tunnel of rock and ruin. Your foe means nothing to us.”
Yaosen grimaced inwardly. Each spirit Yaosen had encountered in the Farwilds had clung to a specific biome as its home. And most great spirits Yaosen had read about ranged from prideful, to territorial, to fiercely defensive of their natural environment. Could it be that those stories were the only ones humans thought to keep? Could it be that benign, ambivalent, or merely mischievous spirits rarely warranted great legends or the recording in official ledgers?
“Leave this to me,” mumbled Rook’s silver-gray silhouette.
Yaosen gestured for her to take the lead.
“Alright, shadows, what do you want?”
“In exchange for your survival? Hmm, what could be worth more than life.”
“Stop toying with us, shadows. You know your price. Name it.”
“Something feels wrong about this,” whispered Yaosen, “It seems like they were expecting us.”
Rook waved him off with an ethereal hand, as the shadows waited.
“Name your price shadows!” Rook repeated.
“We want to walk in the light,” they hissed, “We want to be free of these tunnels.”
Rook scowled, “I didn’t realize you couldn’t. I thought you preferred the darkness.”
Silence from the shadow spirits.
Yaosen grabbed Rook’s arm, “We were wrong to come here. We should go. Now.”
Rook turned back to Yaosen, “They’re greedy bastards, but they’re offering us a chance at survival. Can you really put a price on that?”
“There’s something they’re not saying.”
Rook turned back to the shadows, “Help us stop the boneshifters, and you can walk free.”
“We want your word.” The shadows seemed too eager, almost desperate to Yaosen and he didn’t like it.
He opened his mouth to protest again but Rook was already saying, “You have my word.”
“And we keep what we kill.”
“What?” asked Rook.
“We keep the boneshifter bodies.”
“You want… corpses?”
“Yesss.”
This was too much. Yaosen had to stop it. “No, Rook. You don’t-”
“Ok, deal.” Rook shrugged.
“You don’t have the right!” Yaosen snapped.
Rook ignored him. The shadows ignored him as well.
“Deal,” they hissed.
Just like that, their audience was ended. Yaosen felt himself thrown bodily from the void and awoke as his back slammed into a very physical wall, the snickering of the shadows still echoing in his ears.
He immediately looked to Rook, who hadn’t moved. A heartbeat ticked by, then another. Then just as Yaosen thought the shadowbender might never return, she lurched and sucked in a breath. She glanced around the room as if waking from a dream, her eyes finally settling on Yaosen.
“What have you done?” said the monk.
“What I had to,” said Rook, “For my people.”
***
A feline boneshifter hissed with pleasure as it dug its claws into Halvard’s bare arms, throwing its head back, preparing to sink its fangs into its quarry’s spine.
Fenri snarled and tore the boneshifter off. He threw it against the cave wall, its head making a sickening crunch before it slumped, dazed but quickly recovering.
Fenri wasted no time in sinking his already bloodied maw into the feline’s belly, ripping and tearing with everything he had, making sure it would never rise again to hurt Halvard. Something else must have closed on them, because Halvard roared and fresh hot blood showered over Fenri. He pulled himself from the entrails of his dead foe with an effort and brandished his claws to meet the next attacker.
There was none.
The hooting and howling of the attacking boneshifters was trickling off, a new sound, a strange sound, undercutting it. The boneshifters were listening now, trying to make sense of it just as Fenri and Halvard were.
The darkness was laughing. It was a chuckle that grew in intensity, as if the mountain were only laughing politely at first, before realizing just how funny the joke actually was. The mountain began to boom with laughter, and then the boneshifter voices returned.
Only this time, the boneshifters were not joyously hunting. They were snarling as if a new foe assailed them, and then screeching in fear and pain. By the time the laughter began to die down, their screams sounded distinctly human.
Fenri looked toward the several bodies that lay strewn atop one another in the choke-point of the tunnel. As his eyes glided numbly over the savaged corpses, they settled upon the face of the feline attacker he had just killed. Its body was a ruin, claws and the sleek black coat of a cat matted with blood. But in its stillness, the face looked just as human as feline.
The light – or the absence of light in the tunnels – seemed to slowly shift.
“Light a torch,” Halvard said absently as he listened to the last gasps of the dying boneshifters.
They had kept light low so as not to give their attackers an advantage, but their supplies – food, water, bandages, tinder – lay in a bag beside Fenri.
“Light a damned torch,” said Halvard.
Fenri was too numb to move. Halvard scrambled past him to the bag of supplies and began frantically striking the flint against his blade. Each wash of sparks illuminated the pools of black blood at their feet, on the walls, covering their bodies.
The torch roared to life, and a presence Fenri had felt creeping down his spine suddenly retreated.
The flare of the torch ruined his nightvision, and he was momentarily blind. When his eyes adjusted, the tunnel shimmered all around him like the wet inside of an artery.
The bodies of the fallen boneshifters were gone.
“What in the name of-”
A scream pierced the darkness, closer than the others. Then another scream, and another. These weren’t even a little altered by the animal throats or shifted maws of boneshifters. These were unmistakably human. These were their own villagers.
Fenri looked to Halvard, both of their eyes wide with fear and recognition.
“Out of the tunnels!” Halvard bellowed, “Get back to the village!”
Something new had come for them, Fenri realized. Something had turned on them. Something had betrayed them.
Halvard shouted the retreat the whole way as they ran, hoping that at least some of the other pairs stationed throughout the tunnels heard him over the screams of their fellow villagers.
But it was a long way back to the surface. And though the torch should have had enough oil to burn for hours, already the shadows seemed to close in around them.