Fei scrambled across the massive wooden beam on four mouse paws. She's made some improvements over the last week turning this body into something even harder to notice over time. A thick layer of squishy bone marrow spread between her toes with every step, softening the sound of any pawsteps on hard surfaces. Her bones were now a uniform color of blackish gray, as she'd discovered she could jump into the burnt out fireplaces to dampen the bright color of her bones. And finally she'd adapted her skull framing to look more like an onion around her head, lined with hundreds of little pin pricks that allowed her to see out, but other people couldn't see into. Not that she couldn't use the ember's customary viewpoint of looking in on their bodies from above, but that always felt so uncomfortable to Fei.
In this case, as she peered over the edge of the thick wooden beam at the top of the Barracks Sergeant's office, she was perfectly positioned to listen in on his newest conversation with his brother. His, ‘special weapon’, as Chris liked to call him.
“I don't like it Chris.” Doug was wearing the customary Princedom military green on his shoulders, marking him as an official member of the garrison. A single white line painted down the chest of his collar armor signified his immediate promotion to Staff Sergeant.
“I agree, but that's why we need to make sure this goes to plan.”
“We're going to be bait, Chris. You've heard what the brigands have been doing in the flax fields the last couple days!”
“Which is why I need your team there too. A force mage might not be enough for this convoy.”
“So you're going to just let them do this Chris? This is a stupid mission even if it works.”
“The border troops need that money Doug.”
“So have them come back here for a deployment rotation as they get paid. Or better yet, send the money forward with the next rotation. Not just some random convoy!”
“Sergeant! We are not in the position to negotiate this movement.”
“Oh, I'm just a Sergeant now? You're gonna try pulling rank on me like that?” Doug backed up from the table raising his hands up like he was under arrest. Fei took a better look at the diagram that he had been bent over up until that point, revealing a five carriage escort plan complete with position postings and names. Most of them were going to be Harrant's men.
“Yes, Staff Sergeant Harrant! You did in fact sign the line and join the army. Now get your head out your ass and realize that this thing is happening whether we like it or not!” The room went silent. Fei distantly recognized a couple of the other soldiers in the room looking up from their desks and half forgotten maps to look at the brothers.
Doug looked around at the room conspiratorially, then put his hands down to his sides to stand at attention in front of his brother.
“I'll toe the line when it comes, but there's things happening here that don't make sense brother. Even you can see that.” Doug said.
His brother waved him out of the position of attention. Fei was pretty sure that wasn't even the correct position to stand in for a sergeant anyways, but instead Chris merely beckoned his brother forward
“Follow me.”
The two left the room leaving the rest of the onlookers behind. Fei left her mouse body in the main office to tether up and into a small garden snake skeleton she kept waiting in the hallway. As the two started walking down the hall, she unbound the coiled body she had bundled up in a crack in the stone wall, and started sliding along the stone floor on an artificial bone stomach she had attached to the snake's rib cage. She alternated her view to focus on bones, and started looking ahead for random people walking about the keep just in case she needed to avoid turning the wrong corner, but no one seemed to be about. She followed the two, gliding silently across the ground as they walked confidently down the stone halls. When she had judged their direction of travel far enough, she deposited the snake body in another crack in the wall, this time wedged in a corner of the hallway where they had failed to perfectly join the stone bricks together.
Fei let her consciousness jump to another mouse hiding behind the study desk in Chris's own room this time as she watched the two brothers open the door and walk in. Doug took the study chair, while Chris sat on the edge of his bed, as she'd seen the pair do a couple of times before.
“What's going on here Chris?” Doug asked.
“Doug, you’re in this for real right? You're not just playing army cause someones paying you to be a snitch?”
“A snitch? You think I'd have the balls to be a plant right under the Lord Whisper's nose?”
“I think if there was anyone who could manage to pull something like that off, it'd be you Doug.”
“Damn it Chris, I'm not some type of plant.” Doug stood up from his seat, hands interlocked through his hair, he crossed the bedroom to look out the window. They were on the second floor of the barracks, and the faint outline of a carriage clattered down the street below on the way to one of their balls.
“What can I do to prove myself to you?” Doug asked.
“You can't. I just have to hope it isn't you. And you just have to kick in these rebel troops' teeth when they come knocking.”
Doug remained staring through the open window.
“I'll do my best Chris, but you're about to send me on a death run and you know it.”
Fei had heard enough. She hid her body back deeper behind the back of the desk, and allowed herself to follow the tethers back to the original body. Her vision cleared to reveal two small pinpricks of light that she could hardly see anything out of. Dei evidently preferred to use her other types of sight.
“-she doesn't know that Lord Branton is trying to buy out the excess wood to build a surplus. I think he's trying to starve the market before flooding it when-”
‘He never shuts up does he?’ Fei asked.
‘I'm starting to think he might just be lonely Fei.’ Dei said.
Julius's droning monologue continued in the background of their joint body. It was curious that she could hear him every time she caught him talking telepathically to Dei, but only when she was more or less sharing the body with Dei. Mind magic, weird stuff.
‘Really? You think that he's lonely? The dashing gray fox himself?’ Fei asked.
‘Well, considering he's both graying, and single. Yes.’
‘Hmmf. What do I know?’
‘You just here to gossip Fei?’
‘Nah, just got word that Doug is gonna get sent on a convoy with the pay wages for the southern front.’
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‘Doug?’
‘Oh, uh. Harrant.’
‘Ohhhhh. Really? Isn't this the third one this week?’
‘Yeah, they're sending out three different convoys with the same mission on the same day, but Chris isn't telling any of the guards about the other convoys. Add to that the fact that Chris told his brother that they're looking for a plant.’ Fei said.
‘Ah, they're just trying to weed out the informant.’ Dei agreed with Fei’s own assessment.
The two settled into a thoughtful silence as Julius continued talking in the background.
‘We'll hit all three of them at the same time.’ Dei decided.
The two of them discussed the details a bit more as Dei's statuesque body stood in the middle of the ballroom. The gaze from a man in green washed over them, then passed as the very Lord they were about to steal from failed to see the two planning right in his line of sight. After settling all the decisions on who would do what, Fei left behind the ball room as she traveled down the tethers towards the other embers scattered around the country, ready to share the news.
‘We're going to need more bodies.’ She thought to herself.
—
Cody walked down the main thoroughfare of Tallowton, his birth town. His parents had moved to the capital city almost two decades ago, when he was still a toddler, yet he still felt compelled to visit the nearby town every couple of years just to check up on things. In the beginning he had hated it when his parents used their precious little time off to visit the area, but then the stories had started to appeal to him over time. The schoolhouse they had met in passed him by on the left, small children filtering out of the small white building and into the street. And just like his parents used to tell him, the majority of the students rushed across the street to a conveniently placed market stall selling candied fruits despite the strange time of day.
Cody continued down the street, leaving behind the children and their sugary treats as he passed the guards post his dad had worked at, then the general store that they bought their daily bread from. They weren't exactly his own memories per say. These strange connections to buildings he had never really used himself, but after he had heard the same stories a half dozen times, the memories of these places started to feel like they belonged to him anyways.
He remembered the way his dad would lift him by the hands, allowing him to bounce from cobble stone to cobblestone with heaving leaps far larger than a kid could naturally take at his age. He remembered how his mom had bought him a candied apple at the stall down the road, and then he'd gotten upset because his parents made him share it with them. But most of all he remembered the sense of nostalgia, for a place he never truly lived in, not like they had.
He continued down the rocky road as it turned from a cobblestone mix to simple hard packed dirt as he came out the other side of town. There he would find their old house just on the edge of town, with its own small patio and a modest yard that his mother used for her garden. As it came into sight he looked over the old wooden fence that surrounded the grounds, an unpainted mess of interlocking triangular logs that made about as much sense to him now as it did when he was a kid. Still, he was a bit disappointed to see that some of the fence pieces had fallen out of their holes, giving the barrier a bit of a decrepit look to it.
Cody stopped at the open gateway into the townhouse garden debating whether he should visit to say hi to the current owners like his parents had always done. It seemed a bit awkward to him that his parents would bother the new owners of the house by stopping by every couple of years to catch up on things, but now he kind of understood why. There was a draw to step inside the old home, to see how it was doing, like a medical checkup or a date with an old friend. Still, he didn't want to annoy them all that much.
A strong wind carried over the area, pushing on the front door to the house which swung open lazily in the breeze. Perhaps he should at least close their door if no one was home. He crossed the small garden in less than a dozen steps before knocking on the doorway.
“Hello? Anyone home?” As he knocked on the door, it pushed even further open revealing the dark insides of the home with perhaps a bit less clutter inside than he was expecting. The kitchen table was cleaned off, but visibly dusty like it hadn't been used in a week or so, and the floor just inside the doorway was full of leaves that must have been brought in by the breeze. Just what had happened here?
“Hey mister!” A kid called from behind him. He turned around to look at the child, leaning over the fence as she balanced herself on the tip of one of the triangular stakes running through the posts. “Whatcha doin in the Tremmer's house?” She asked.
Cody took one last look into the dusty insides of the old home before deciding no one was there, and returned to the fence to talk with the girl.
“Nothing important, just visiting my old place.” He said.
“Oh? I don't remember you ever living here mister!”
“It was so long ago I don't even remember it either. Where's the Tremmer family gone off to anyways?” He asked.
“Them? I think they went with the masked folks one night.”
“The masked folks?” Cody asked.
“Yeah, you know! The two weirdo's that call themselves preachers and hang out in the woods? My mama told me not to mess with them, but she says that about everyone. I think one of them is called Lord Tails.” The girl started giggling as she recounted the man's name, but Cody was starting to get concerned. He’d heard something or another in his briefs about the recent sightings of masked folk around the area, but he didn't remember the specifics. Still, if the capital guard was mentioning these people, even in passing, something bad might be happening here.
“Kid, can you-”
“My name’s not Kid! I'm Catcher!”
Cody raised a hand up towards the bridge of his nose, a habit he might have picked up from his dad if he ever really thought about it. “Okay, Catcher. Do you know where the masked folks go in the woods?” he asked.
“Not really.” She leaned back on the fence post, holding herself up with her arms despite the awkward angle. “But I think my friend said they've seen them hanging around the big stone thing out in the woods.” The post under her feet shifted suddenly, twisting in its too wide post holes as the triangular piece rotated away from Catcher. The girl’s legs were suddenly thrust forward until her butt slammed into the post with a dull thud. “Ow!”
Cody tried to reach out for her as she rubbed at her butt with one hand, but the girl seemed to notice him and swung her legs out from the fence, leaping away. She eyed him warily as he stopped trying to help her, suddenly aware of the change in mood.
“No touching mister! My ma told me not to accept help from strangers.” The girl spun and started running down the road towards main square.
Cody almost followed after her before he realized she probably didn't know anything else he wanted to hear. Instead he cupped his hands to his mouth and called after her, “My name's Cody! Thank you!” She disappeared down the street as several other travelers on the road turned to look at him strangely. He ducked his head a bit at their gaze. “Sorry.” He said, quite a bit softer this time.
He took one last look at the childhood home. Abandoned for some strange reason he couldn't understand, and he pushed downward. He lurched into the air, arcing towards the nearby woods where he started searching through the orange leaves.
‘Big rock, huh?’
The orange sea below him swayed in the breeze as he started searching for answers.
—
It didn't take him long to find what he was looking for. A strange oblong obelisk speared through the treetops, visible for at least a mile all around it in the afternoon sun. Thing was, no one was there when he arrived.
As he stood atop the large stone pillar, the area below struck him as uniquely abnormal, like one of the most obviously man made clearings he had ever seen as the trees uniformly avoided the clean cut circle. Even the tree branches cut off where they would have entered the dividing line around the obelisk, growth looking like an oddly stunted limb wherever the trees reached towards the clearing. Below, a series of leaf piles spread out from the pillar, arranged in consecutive circles that grew in size as they pushed out from the center. But no one was here for him to ask questions.
Cody looked out over the clearing's edge until he found a relatively thick tree in the area that looked like it could support him. A few quick bounds later and he settled into a decent enough seat atop the center of its boughs. Not the most hidden of places considering it was still a birch tree, but it was still a bit more hidden than sitting atop the pillar. And so he waited.
The hours passed as day turned into night, and even the moon refused to come out that night, less than a sliver of light in the sky far above. As darkness fell, Cody took the time to think about things, mind wandering back to that night where he had lost his friends to a freak force mage. Had he found them because Cody had been too loud in his conversation with Tom by the window? He knew it was unlikely he was the sole cause, but that was still what worried him most about the situation. What if it was his fault?
His thoughts spun, eating away at him as he waited, and waited, and waited through the night. Until he eventually started to see lights bobbing their way through the tree leaves. Someone was coming.