Seven hundred meters above the ground, Karla was having a time on the mountain. Physically it was a demanding time, as the path broke away to steep cliffsides and craggy climbs. Emotionally, it was a rough time, because even after two days’ search, she hadn’t found Elia. And morally, well, so far nothing much seemed amiss.

“This is taking forever,” Karla groaned as she searched the cliffside for signs of life and persistent grumpiness. “Anything over at your end, Erik?”

“Nothing,” her grumpiest of pupils called, rubbing his hands. They were here after Karla had picked them up, and only them. “Just cold wind and snow.”

“Hngh,” Karla said.

“Hey,” Nathan called, “I found a way down! We can go now, we’ll find Otis soon for sure.”

“Hnnngh.”

Karla climbed one step further ahead. It was true that yes, she had promised they were searching for Otis and yes, it was more likely they would find the opossum bekki down in the valley. Descending the mountain for even one of her cute pupils was the least a mentor would do. It was what Elia would have done. She would have approved, if she had been here with her.

It was a long way down and she felt like staying here for a while longer, fully aware that she was grasping for an ever more elusive specter. It was just so hard to let go. After all, Karla had last seen her jumping off rocks mid-air in this direction.

Elia was not here. From hope to denial to truth, the princess had worked through it all and came to that simple conclusion. Maybe the snake had eaten her while Karla had been flailing to grab onto a ledge. She couldn’t blame herself for being stricken with fear at the time, or she would start taking even more tea-breaks than she already was.

And those were no fun without tea or Elia.

Tea must be consumed at five o’clock for a healthy pallor of the skin.

“My skin isn’t what’s important right now,” Karla muttered.

Unprincesslike contraction. A princess must wait for rescue. It is the role of a knight to rescue her from distress.

“But I am a knight! That’s how I’ve been tricking you all this time you stupid…”

The law of princesses didn’t beam any suggestions into her mind at that. But that only left her, princess-knight Karla, to lift herself out of this mess by the heels of her own boots.

“Karla?” nathan called. “Are we going?”

Karla felt her foothold start to crumble and stepped back. With a pained sigh, she returned to the side-path leading down the mountain.

“You’re right. We will find her down there with greater certainty than up here.”

She walked past them, pointedly ignoring Erik’s barely muttered ‘as if’.

But Nathan was not so kind. “Will you stop it, Erik?”

“I am being realistic.”

“She is alive.”

“She is dead. Face the facts, no one survives that much fall damage. She is spaghetti, she is–”

There was the sound of a quick scuffle, shouts and tumbling stones.

“Will you stop it!” Karla turned around, pleading, not able to bring herself to yell.

Brod pried them apart, as he had to do twice now. Her two students had been at each other’s throats for a while now.

“No more fighting. We need to go down and do this together. If you don’t stop, I’ll…” she racked her brain, finding no answer besides honesty, “I’ll cry.”

Nathan and Erik shared a confused glance.

“You will… cry?”

Karla nodded. “And it will be your fault. You will feel terrible. I GUARANTEE IT, FOR I AM JUSTICE.”

She added a sniffle. They seemed placated for the moment. Brod let them down again, though neither made any attempt to make up.

Karla nodded, satisfied for the moment. She turned to the path Erik had discovered – barely more than a few wooden stakes slotted into a cliff – and mentally marked the likely path Elia would have taken if the snake had gone after her.

They climbed down in strained focus, silence reigning for a whole ten minutes. The rocky ground had barely turned into a steep, grassy slope when Karla heard a voice from further behind.

“I bet your sister is dead too then.”

***

What goes up must come down, Karla thought as she wrenched a feathered arrow that was as long as she was tall from Erik’s gut. What goes down then must also come up. Eventually.

Erik struggled terribly in her grasp. He had just enough tenacity and luck to not bleed out from this kind of wound within ten seconds.

“Stop being such a baby.”

“I’m not a–“

“Baby,” Karla said as she wrenched the broken shaft from his body.

“–OWWWW-W-water. Need.”

She gingerly inspected the wound. “Sorry, there’s still a bit stuck in you. Wouldn’t want your wound to close around – there.”

With a finger-long splinter in her bloody hands, she relented and finally gave him his well-deserved ration of bowl-water which he drank greedily. Immediately, his guts were healed, though the same couldn’t be said of Nathan. He had peeked one of the towering giant archers at just the wrong time, and now his face spotted an extra orifice, leaking all kinds of grizzly fluids

It was the distraction that had allowed Brod to sneak up on him and snap his neck. But the damage was done. Bowl water only worked on live undead after all. And now, Karla was failing more and more to keep everyone safe because she was not Elia, she was not an expert in being a badass.

She was just bad. Just one girl. One princess knight trying her best.

“Did you get his weapon, Brod?” Karla asked.

The giant shook his head.

“Why not?” she yelled. “Why won’t you carry any weapons? Not the spear, not the sword I offered you, and not this. We can’t afford to be picky, Brod. I need your help.”

He scratched his cheek. “Can’t.”

“Why the heck not!?”

“Can’t,” he said. At least he had the decency to look ashamed.

And there it was, her most steadfast ally was handicapping himself for what? A promise? An Oath she could not see? Some stupid principle only privy to the giants of Morgenthal? Was this an island-thing? Elia had told her once how everything that lived on islands turned into pygmies, then severely chastised her for calling her a pygmy because ‘that was not a nice word’ or something along those lines, which her princess-law casually ignored.

Elia…

Karla slapped her cheeks. Now was the time to think about the present. And presently, her prospects were turning decidedly un-rosy. Yes, they had made it to the foot of the valley, but it was filled with trees.

Evil trees that bent their trunks like catapults and were just as happy to bury people like her in the ground as they were with eating the giant burning elk that roamed these parts. Karla had never seen an Elk before, but she was pretty sure that they shouldn’t be so placid about being perpetually on fire. They in turn predated on the hounds that were one and a half meters of bones, skin, and the threat of a violent disembowelment.

So, if Karla were to rank the ecosystem of this place, it would be trees, the creatures eaten by the trees, the giant worms that lived in those creatures’ stool, then Brod, then Karla, then everything else.

“I don’t like this place,” she said. “It’s not a very fun adventure down here.”

“Is bad place,” Brod said, nodding. “We search, but short. Leave before next snowfall.”

“We can’t leave, not without at least trying to find Elia.”

He arched an eyebrow. “We no looking for checkerboard-rat person?”

Dangit.

“We, um, are looking for both. Haha.”

If there was one windfall, it was that Brod did not judge. He simply contemplated or looked like he wanted to complain sometimes without raising his voice.

“Brod, sir, um, you’ve been on this mountain once before, yes? What is… what is your recommendation?”

He grumbled, mind working to the sound of gnashing teeth. “What do you want to do?”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Karla opened her mouth but found she didn’t have an answer. For a while, she just sat in Erik’s blood and thought.

“I don’t want to disappoint. To be a burden. I’ve trained and tried and trained again, but I haven’t caught up, I’ve barely moved, like I’m running in place.”

“You measuring yourself against the sun. She special.” He poked her chest with a meaty finger, the simple action almost enough to topple her. “You special too. In a way.”

“In a way. High compliments from the son of Herculon.” She snorted princessely. “But you are right. I should focus on what I want and what I can do. I want to find Otis and Elia. I want…” Focus. “That’s all I want. For now.”

He nodded. “Then we move. I carry, you block arrow. Shield good?”

She looked down at her shield. A wonderful thing, round and heavy, reliable metal. It had been nothing but a burden so far, but now it was time to pay off all the crooks in her back and more.

She stood up and noticed a raised hand.

“What about me?” Erik asked.

The giant looked between him, and the corpse of Nathan on his shoulders. “You… try not make Karla sad. Try stay alive.”

He gulped as they soldiered on.

***

They found her in the trees, one of the non-carnivorous ones. It was only because Otis’ black and white fur stood out in clear contrast to the greens and browns all around. The canopy had enveloped her in her fall, twigs giving away until she met a branch that didn’t. That was the one she was wrapped around, her body as loose as a goose (whatever that was).

“How is she still in one piece?” Ethan asked.

Karla squinted. “Maybe she’s just playing dead?”

“Look like dish-rag.

“Don’t say that,” Nathan gurgled, having recovered from his staring competition with an arrow. “She’s a good, hard-working opossum.”

“He is kind of right though.” Erik inspected the tree, which had the kind of bark that would dissolve under your hands and get in your eyes, and no branches whatsoever for the first half of the trunk. “How are we going to get her down?”

She was easily seven or eight meters off the ground and not for the first time did Karla wish someone with a hopping ability was here to help her.

“I’ll get her,” she said, and pulled on the first branch, which snapped immediately.

“That’s not gonna work,” Erik said. “You’re too heavy.”

“Shush up, Erik. When we get her down, you’ll apologize to her.”

“Not if?”

They looked up at the canopy again.

“We could always try cutting down the tree,” Karla said, even though the trunk was thick and they didn’t have a saw.

A somewhat familiar voice croaked at them like a ten ton toad. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

There in the canopy of the next tree over, two dim eyes peered down at them. Someone was impaled on the tree there, a big someone.

“Frey?” Karla asked. “You rat! You’re still alive!”

“Wish I wasn’t,” she said with a chuckle that turned into a cough. Some blood splattered the floor, where a puddle had already formed on the rock. “I fell after my stoneshield was sundered and aimed for the larger trees and hit this one a tad too square on. The trunk is in my guts and my flesh has mended around it. I am losing souls to stay alive by the second. Get me down.”

“Well, well. Karma is a bitch, isn’t it?” Erik had the look of an arsonist who had just discovered the beauty of an instant-lighter. “And why should we take you down, hm? You tried to poison us. Because of you, my sister is god knows where.”

“I did not throw the bomb.”

Karla frowned.

WE SHOULD LET HER STAY AND BLEED FOR US. JUSTICE! JUSTICE FOR THE LOVE LIFE!

“No, Justice, we can’t just…” Karla bit her lip. It was exactly her own thoughts. If she tried to imagine it, waves of pleasure rolled through her at the thought of enacting justice. “Technically, Elia was the one who attracted the giant snake.”

No justice then. The Elia shall not be harmed. BUT THE GIANTESS MUST BE PUNISHED!

“Maybe we can make her help us?” Karla raised her head, and called out into the canopy. “Did you see Elia anywhere?”

“Yes. On the bridge, before she ruined it all. Will you get me down now? I smell a storm approaching.”

Brod nodded. “Is true.”

“Will you swear an oath to never harm us and to help us find our friends?”

At that, his face contorted into a hateful visage. “Help you? You, the undead born under a lucky star, handed everything to them? You, the fools who know not what powers you are messing with? You have no idea what you’ve cost me. Get. Me. Down.”

Karla thought through, intensely and with dedication, for an entire five seconds.

“No.” The giant made a strangled sound. In the back of her mind, Justice cackled manically. “By the way, why exactly shouldn’t we cut down the tree, oh wise impaled giant of the forest?”

His voice came back hoarse with rage. “Because you are ten steps away from that thrice-damned scale-feathered sky serpent! Look down that ravine, you absolute imbeciles, you!”

Karla peeked over the dirt’s edge. Yep, that was a river of white scale-feathers, running all the way into one end of the forest and out of the other. They swayed in the wind like gentle fields of grass, even though there was no wind this far beneath the treetops. A small rat-like creature with an exposed skull sniffed against one of it, only for the scales to elongate into thin tendrils and snatch it away, dragging it squealing upstream.

That’s where the mouth is.

“Okayyy,” Karla said, voice betraying a hint of nervousness. “We will… not cut the tree. Nathan, can you climb it?”

“I’m more of a swimmer than a climber,” he muttered. “Do we have any rope left?”

“We might, if we – oh, how silly of me. I have just the magical tool for this situation.” Karla reached into her backpack and proudly presented her red rod. “I swear, sometimes, it’s like Elia really can see the future.”

“What does it do?” Erik asked. “Can it shoot fireballs?”

Nathan groaned. “Is it a wand of levitation?”

“Maybe it used to roast meat? Is good stick. Very straight.”

“Your guesses are all equally valid and equally wrong. No, my nakama, this is the one and only… something-pole.” Karla scratched her head. “I forgot its name. But it does exactly what we need it to, and we need it right now. Right… now. Now!”

She tapped the earth with it, again and again. It was not doing much besides building her frustration, thud by thud.

“Come to think of it, Elia never told me how to activate this thing…. oh, wait, I found the button. Alright, go-go gadget, power pole!“

The rod made a whirring sound. Then it shot a huge blast of golden light, the laser blasting through the tree holding Otis, the one holding Frey, and a couple dozen behind it in a straight line. Karla had to put all her strength into bracing against the recoil as she pulled it to the side, but it stubbornly refused as if she was trying to uproot a house.

“AAAH!!” she screamed as the beam just barely tore to the side, turning so many squirrels homeless.

Frey’s tree was sheared in two once, then again as the beam crossed its path. The top half of the tree toppled, and disappeared behind the ravine. “You incompetent, insipid Grugs, godsdammiiit!”

As suddenly as it had begun, the beam fizzled out. Karla still clung to it with an iron grip as if it were a dog about to run loose. Erik was the first to break the silence, as he had (understandably) been forced to duck under the chest-wide beam of disintegration.

“What the fuck!? Are you insane?”

“I, n-no, it–“ Princesses may cry when distressed. “I thought it would get longer, I mean, it’s magenta, not red… Elia said–”

Before she could finish, there was a rumble that went through the entire forest. Burning elks and deer bolted across flesh-eating bramble bushes which in turn pulled themselves together into small balls of spiky distress. The ravine, which they had been partially standing on, cracked and buckled as a gargantuan streak of white roiled in its sleep.

“Get Otis-person,” the giant said. “We leave now.”

Easier said than done. Otis had fallen – still unconscious or dead – and was perched on a cracked bed of moss mere meters away from the twitching titan. Karla tried her best, sneaking close on carefully placed feet. She reached the opossum and hefted her onto her shoulder with her non-shield hand when the ground beneath her sagged, and she felt her foot hit something fleshy-soft.

She didn’t bother looking back, as she leapt and ran right towards Erik, who she flipped onto her shoulders with barely a grunt. Even carrying him and Otis both she was faster than either and by the look on Brod’s face staring past her, fast was a very good thing to be.

“Run, run, run!” she yelled as the valley came to life. Trees groaned and were uprooted, some fighting against the unstoppable force of fate, others snapping like matchsticks.

The ground they walked on seemed to betray them at every step. Karla jumped over a rolling trunk and ducked under a rock that hit a tree with so much force the tree splintered into a million pieces. But with every step hammering into the earth, every nearly sprained ankle, the white death was coming closer.

“Karla!” Brods voice came, his bellow barely audible through the death of a forest. “Here!”

She followed his voice and then his back. A cave cut into the mountainside, like a gash in the world. It was at an angle, but even then, it was still large enough to fit both of them without ducking.

The serpent came. It brushed along the ridgeline, feather-scales searching through every crevice for the disturbance. The gash was large, but not deep. They huddled together, climbing over each other as they squished their bodies further in like insects.

The tendrils reached, stretching until they were impossible thin and long. Karla was sure that even such a big snake could not keep track of every little scale. But still, one of them touched her shield, and within moments, dozens converged on her position.

They grasped it and even though they were thinner than her finger, she felt the tug pull her forward by inches. Immediately, she felt three pairs of hands pull her back, but even then the tug of war was uneven.

“Throw it away, Karla!” Nathan yelled.

“N-no!”

She lost a few more inches of ground. Desperately, she wedged her shoulder behind and outcropping and her feet behind a stone jutting out of the ground. More tendrils came. But this was not something she was willing to give up.

“We can get you a new one!”

She gritted her teeth. “It was a present. For my birthday.”

“Don’t be stubborn!”

“Elia gave it to me!”

“If you don’t let go, you’ll never see her again.”

Karla paused, pulling one last time with all her strength.

And then she let go. With a pained noise, she watched the white scales steal it from her and whisk it away. Silence returned to the valley, silence and sadness and loss.

Karla rubbed her eyes, trying to see the upsides, but it was damn hard this far down. The walls were pressing in on her, but this was a safe place, and she had seen a fissure through which they could go deeper.

“Hey Karla, where are you–”

She ignored everyone else, walking deeper and deeper into the cave. It was strange that it had caught her eyes, she didn’t have any significant bonuses to her senses after all. But she felt a pull and followed it, until a second cavern opened up behind the crack, illuminated by a pale streak of light falling in from above.

A dead man lay slumped against the wall. He was large, but without the strong proportions of a giant. His robes looked so smooth and without a hint of dirt, as if they simply declared that it was beneath them to come into contact with the earth. That didn’t help him though, as they were cut over and over, tinged with blood so fresh it could have been moments ago since he had died. He had died with a look of profound regret on his face, his heart carved out, and a spear lodged directly beside it.

It was a dull bronze, and glimmered in places like embers from a fire. Despite the fire and the smell of soot, its design was not typical of the 41st legion. It was much, much older, and looked to be made not for the hands of humans, but the hands of gods. And it had been used to slay one.

Brother traveling! How sad, to see your vessel like this, and you wrenched from it. We will get your justice. May we have your spear?

Karla had been thinking the same thing when a detail had made her pause.

There, on his right arm, one of the wounds had been sewn shut. There was only a thin line weeping red that hinted at the wound, and it was done in a buried-suture style Karla would have recognized anywhere.

“Mom.”

With a sudden thrill, she looked around. There, a discarded cloth and here, a broken needle. Her mother had been here some time ago. Either that, or some other reincarnated french nurse.

Karla smiled. Maybe this adventure wasn’t going so bad after all.