Kaleb prepared his equipment, double checking the belt strapped around his gambeson and wiping the warhammer clean for the tenth time. He knocked on the shield, as if that was a proper test for its durability, and scoffed. He was nervous, and who wouldn’t be. The meeting would be on the nearby hill not long from now.
He had been dropping hints for Judy, their elderly neighbor, for a while now, and he intended to bring it straight to her today. He wanted her to look after Jane while he was away.
He left his tent and went to Judy’s, knocking softly on the cloth ‘door’. “Who?” a voice extended.
“It’s me, Judy.”
“Oh, Kaleb, come in,” the old woman said, a smile in her voice.
Kaleb stepped inside and she was sitting on a rocking chair that her grandchildren had bought her, knitting a… something. “How’re you today, young man? And what’s that you’re wearing?”
“I’m good. Uhh, these are my traveling clothes. I’m going on a little trip.”
Judy narrowed her eyes in an attempt to get a better look at him. “To where?”
“Nearby town. I will look for my mother there,” he said, avoiding her eyes.
“You all think you’re such good liars,” the old woman said, snorting. “You’re not going on a trip.”
Kaleb watched the ground with interest. “No. Listen, Judy, can you just please look after Jane for a day or two. I won’t be away for long.”
For the first time in their conversation, Judy stopped knitting. She looked at him with her full attention. “And I suppose with how you’re dressed, whatever you’re going to do isn’t something stupid, right?”
Kaleb pressed his lips and stayed silent.
In a voice so slight and stealthy, she said, “Pray tell me, what should I tell your sister if you don’t come back within two days, or at all?”
“Like she cares,” Kaleb snapped.
“You can’t be that stupid.” She chuckled. “But I suppose you need something to tell yourself after all.” She paused, eying the ground like he’d done moments ago. “Listen, Kaleb, dear. You should think this through. I know it doesn’t look so good right now, but that doesn’t mean you should throw your life away just yet. Jane needs you, and your mother’s out there somewhere, and she needs you too.”
It was his turn to chuckle now. “Judy, I can barely cover our expenses now, and soon enough, they’ll pay us even less, and I won’t be able to do even that.”
“And if you die, do you think I can cover your sister’s expenses?” she snapped back.
He found himself pacing back and forth, his nerves jittery. “I’ve got to do something,” he said. “I’m out of options!” His voice rose to shout. “I’m desperate, alright? And I’ve got to do something. I won’t just sit and wait for a slow death. People are starving, Judy, begging on the streets. They won’t even let them into the city anymore. And every time it gets worse, I see myself right there, beside them, kneeling, begging, hopeless. Just do this for me, please. It shouldn’t be more than three days.”
“So you’ve thought about this already?” she said.
He nodded, determined even if afraid.
“I’ll pray for you, my boy.”
“Please do that, Judy.”
“You should talk to your sister,” she said, gesturing with her needle.
“Tried to, she wasn’t keen on listening.”
“You should talk to your sister,” she pressed. “She should be back any time now. Her, my idiot grandson, and their band of misfits. They think they can go anywhere. God knows we’re lucky there’s no slave trade in this corner of the world.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
Judy nodded and went back to her knitting.
Kaleb left the tent, and as if by providence, Jane was there with Leo, Judy’s youngest grandson. Leo waved a hand and greeted him then seemed to sense the mood and left them alone.
“Hey,” Jane said dryly. She was taller now, thinner too somehow. They didn’t lack for food, yet.
“Hey. Back so soon?” he said. It was still early in the morning, and Jane always wanted to hang out with friends on her off-school days.
“Yea. Mr Locker told us to ‘bugger off’. Multiple times.” She sneered. “He’s a bitter old man, you know that?”
“He did lose a son, Jane,” Kaleb said. And he wasn’t that old, as far as Kaleb remembered, maybe in his middle or late forties.
“Doesn’t mean he needs to be bitter and angry all the time,” she grumbled, digging at the muddy ground with her old shoes.
Kaleb couldn’t help but smirk at that. “Kettle…” he muttered.
“What?” Jane asked.
“Nothing. Nevermind.”
“Okay…” she said, letting out a held breath. “I gotta go.” And she started in the direction of Judy’s tent.
“Wait,” he said.
She stopped. “What?”
“Just gotta tell you something. I might be away for a couple of days.”
Jane’s near-permanent petulant scowl changed into something softer, hopeful. “Are you going to look for mom?” She seemed to notice his outfit for the first time too, scrutinizing it. “What’re you wearing?”
“It’s travel clothes,” he said, patting his gambeson. He stayed silent for a moment.
Jane nodded. “So? Are you?”
“If there’s a chance she’s near where I’m going, I won’t hold back for a moment, I promise.”
“Yea.” Her sneer returned. “But you aren’t really going to look for her, are you?”
Kaleb gulped. “No, sorry.”
“Why do you hate her so much?”
“I don’t!”
“You do. Yes, you do,” she yelled. “Even she knew it.”
“Listen, if this works, if I get what I need from this trip,” he said, “we’ll be able to afford looking for mom, okay?”
She scoffed. “Yeah, right.” Then she walked away.
“I have to go now, Jane,” he said after her, glancing at the sky. It was about time. “I’ll miss you.” She didn’t answer.
The top of the hill didn’t expose the city too much to an observer. Kaleb could only see two buildings beyond the wall clearly as he crested it.
“Only the Lord’s keep and the Temple of the Risen are large enough to be seen from here,” a voice said. It seemed that someone had beaten him here.
Kaleb looked at the speaker. He was a young man, a few years older than him. He wore a gambeson as well, except it was covered in some kind of leather. But most importantly, he also wore spectacles, which prompted Kaleb to stare for a while, not realizing that he might offend him.
“I can operate without these,” the young man said, taking them off and then putting them on again. “I just prefer to keep them on until otherwise needed.” He pointed at his eyes. “They’re not really that bad.”
Kaleb nodded quickly and stopped staring. He approached the young man, who was sitting on the grass with a spear and a shield lying beside him, and extended a hand. “Kaleb.”
“Marcus.” He shook his hand. “You can call me Mark.”
“Alright, Mark,” Kaleb said. “It’s nice to meet you. Are we early?”
Mark shook his head and rolled his eyes. “No, but of course they’re late.” He glanced at Kaleb’s hammer and nodded. “Nice choice.”
“Yea,” Kaleb raised the hammer and inspected it. “Figured it would be effective and also not too expensive.”
“True that.” Mark bobbed his head. “Most of the fallen monsters have thick hides, or so I’ve read.”
Kaleb looked at him quizzically.
“Bought a book a while ago,” he said, spreading his hands. “Can’t help it. Tried and failed to work in a library to avoid splurging like this actually. But at least I know some things now.”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Think it’s gonna work?” Kaleb asked.
Mark raised his arms in frustration. “I don’t really know, and that’s what scares me. I don’t even know if we will make it.” He muttered something under his breath.
Kaleb inquired with a tilt of his head.
“Just thinking about my kid brothers,” Mark said. “Don’t know what’ll happen to them if I don’t make it back, who’ll look after them, even though Jake is sixteen, but… you know?”
“Yea.” Kaleb nodded. “I do, actually. Got a sister down there.” He gestured towards the camp. “Why don’t I tell you about her, and you tell me about your brothers. If one of us makes it back with their web awakened, and the other doesn’t… they could look out for them.”
Mark brightened up. “Yeah. That would be good. I think… it would make me feel better about all of this.”
It didn’t take long for the party Diego had recruited to trickle in one by one. Introductions were made, and people got to know each other, despite the anxiety. Diego was the last to arrive, accompanied by an albino quill in a multicolored garb, possibly for camouflage in the wilds. Kaleb assumed that he was their guide.
“Gentlemen!” Diego called as he crested the hill effortlessly. “This here is Master Beni. He is to be our guide.” He gestured for everyone to start moving together, certainly in too much of a hurry for someone who hadn’t bothered to arrive on time. “Come on, no time to waste.”
“Sure wasted enough of it,” someone grumbled.
They were herded to the road, which they would follow for a while before veering off into the wilds somewhere between Echelon, their city, and the town victimized by the skyfall. There, they could possibly find some monsters struck by wanderlust.
Diego mostly kept to his guide, forsaking venues of conversation with the other members of their hodgepodge party. However, halfway through their journey he seemed to notice one of their number who was waving around a sword, showing it off to another. Kaleb had noticed the man the moment he arrived back at the hill, so did everybody. He was the best equipped out of all of them. He wore the fanciest armor, though Kaleb couldn’t criticize the efficiency of well-crafted mail. He also had the sword for a weapon, which Kaleb hadn’t found as impressive. Apparently, neither did Diego.
“What the hell is that?” their tanned leader said, pointing at the sword the man, Alex, was brandishing. “I said to bring weapons for this expedition, not scrap metal.”
Alex chuckled. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. This,” he gestured at his gleaming blade, “is expertly forged steel. Nothing here could compare to it.”
Diego did that thing where he was instantly in your face, though Kaleb saw it as a spectator this time. He sort of ran-walked to Alex and leaned so close, their faces almost touched. “Do you think this is a fucking epic poem?” he growled. “You’ll be lucky if you can poke ‘em with that thing. You don’t even have a shield to cover your dumbass when you realize how useless your ‘expertly forged’ sword is.”
Instead of looking offended, Alex looked perplexed, searching his sword for any defects. “What’s wrong with the sword?”
There was silence for a moment, whereas Diego kept staring, and everyone else didn’t answer Alex, if they did know the answer that was. Kaleb reckoned the reason there weren’t any more swords was because of how expensive they were. When no one seemed to be about to answer the man, Kaleb cleared his throat, getting Alex’s attention. “It’s like uhmm… bringing a pistol to a warzone.”
“What?”
“It’s a sidearm, that’s what, you moron,” Diego yelled. “A very expensive one that could’ve been replaced with something much more effective!”
Kaleb noticed their guide scoffing and shaking his head to the side and wondered whether Diego was the one who’d noticed their sword-bearer in the first place. He certainly hadn’t given them much attention from the beginning aside from keeping them on track.
The incident soon passed by and they continued on their way. Not long after, they made it to the spot where they had to leave the road. That was when Kaleb learned that the previous long walk was the easier part of their trip. Offroading on foot was a nightmare, a painful one. By the time the sun had set and they started setting up their camp, Kaleb’s feet were aching and wouldn’t stop even after getting seated.
They started a fire and settled into their sleeping bags, a couple out of the ten of them standing watch. Kaleb had luckily pulled the last watch, so he was woken a bit earlier than sunrise to be on the lookout. It was as uneventful as expected. The guide had told them that it should be safe here.
Once the sun rose, they got moving again, and they were soon taking on a mountain. Diego informed them on the way that this mountain range might have become residence for some of their quarry. Each of them would have to keep their head on a swivel.
As they climbed a rocky slope in silence, Alex chuckled. “We’re on the hunt now, huh, guys?” He swept everyone one with his eyes as he walked and talked; and Kaleb had to commend his stamina. “Who do you think will awaken first?”
“Shut up, Alex,” Diego yelled from ahead, while their guide stared at him.
It wasn’t long after that Kaleb heard before he saw the argument. His eyes had been trained at the ground to avoid tripping and perhaps as a natural reaction to the exhaustion from the climb. He raised his eyes to see Diego embroiled in a debate that was a bit too heated for his liking. Diego gestured for them to stop and seemed to be pleading with their quill guide for something.
Kaleb could barely hear anything but he did catch some words from the thin, deriding voice of their guide. “...enchanter!” Diego on the other hand seemed to be trying to appease the quill but the latter wasn’t budging. A couple of words from Diego slipped into Kaleb’s ears. “...pay you…” Then there was “...madness” from the guide. Kaleb realized that he and the others were creeping closer, trying to catch more of the conversation, and their quill guide seemed to be getting riled up to the point that his quills stood up on end and the javelins on his back were bobbing up and down with his body. They were strapped to his body with a precariously tied leather strip that Kaleb suspected was designed to be easily disposed of in case you wanted to drop the load it carried. Diego had put down his appropriately heavy mace and shield to engage in the same body language attack that Kaleb suspected had worked on more than just one member of this party. However, ‘Master’ Beni cut the air decisively with a wave of his hand and turned back the way they came, walking down the slope. Everyone followed him with their eyes, their heads turning slowly as if registering how badly shit had just hit the fan.
Kaleb began to think of the consequences of this whole venture if he returned now. He’d taken 3 days off from his boss, who hadn’t been happy about it. Kaleb suspected that it wouldn’t just pass peacefully either, as perhaps the clayton thought he was getting back at him for the lowered wages. He’d also spent most of his savings on equipment. He was already wondering if he could use his job to resell them. He’d bought the warhammer at discount from his place of work, but the gambeson had been bought from an armorer.
Diego kicked the ground furiously as their guide got farther and farther away. “Damn it.”
“What do we do now?” Mark voiced their collective question.
Diego kept his silence for a while, glaring at the ground, then he raised his head. “We go on of course, what do you mean ‘what do we do now?’ We’ve come this far now, haven’t we? We’re almost there. We should be looking for one of the fallen monsters in these mountains. I bet there are many caves and gullies here, just good enough for a residence for one of them for sure. Let’s go.”
Surprisingly, people acquiesced. Perhaps they were as badly invested into this as Kaleb, but no one seemed to want to go back with their tails between their legs. But even though Diego kept reassuring them that their numbers were enough to give them an advantage, the stress in their not-so-merry group seemed to rise with the altitude. Yet no one asked the obvious question in Kaleb's mind. Why did he leave?
It took a lot shorter than Kaleb expected for them to come across something. One of their number yelled for everyone as he spotted something in their path, and word quickly spread around. It was tracks, tracks of something clawed and not too friendly. Mark was the most interested in what they meant. “I think these should be a Wapwet’s.”
Everybody simultaneously stared at him with the same incredulity.
“It’s something that would stand between a wolf and a jaguar, except with hide as thick as some of the much bigger animals, and claws too long to keep withdrawn, as shown by what you see on the ground. I’m not much of a tracker, but they’re fairly common.”
Kaleb eyed the claw marks. The fallen beast seemed to have only 3 claws on each foot, but they also looked wickedly long, too long for the size of its feet. “From the book?” Kaleb asked him.
Mark nodded.
“Packs?” Diego asked in turn.
“I think it was unlikely,” Mark said.
“You think?” Alex interjected with a scowl. “I’m not laying my chances on that.”
Under the scrutiny of everybody, Mark looked at the verge of squirming, but he suddenly brightened up. “I got it. I remember now. They either went solo or in pairs.”
Diego leaned closer to the crouching bespectacled man. “Sure?”
Mark nodded again. “Yeah.”
“Good,” Diego said, a smile painting itself on his face for the first time since their guide abandoned them. “This is the perfect opportunity, everyone. At most, two of them. Whoever awakens first, gets the Blessed Body node, and helps the rest of us look for more.”
Kaleb remembered the description of the web. You’d supposedly begin with a few nodes available, and almost everybody had Blessed Body available in their first ones available. It would improve the health and strength of the awakener significantly, which would make them a much more effective warrior, and definitely much more likely to survive an altercation with a fallen beast too.”
They decided to follow the tracks, as cautiously as possible, though that thought was becoming less real as the tracks led them into a cave, which went deeper than expected into a network of natural passages in the mountain they were on. The black stone was mute except for the glowing moss that lit their path, and all one could occasionally hear was the dripping of liquid, which still made some of them jump.
The cave path menacingly led them to a large cavern, where they followed the tracks in the black dust to a small chamber carved by slowly running water. They encroached on it as slowly and as silently as possible, but Kaleb doubted they could sneak on something so wild. They couldn’t even sneak up on a house cat like this. Diego bulled on in the lead, and Kaleb had to commend his composure. He was the first to step into the small space and he froze in his tracks, but apparently not in fear. Their whole party got to see the beast laying in a drying pool of blood, torn apart. But…
“Not eaten,” Mark mouthed from his throat. “It doesn’t seem like something was hunting it to eat, yet its body seems so torn apart.”
Kaleb stepped closer. Huh? “Is it only me or does it look like it wasn’t torn apart by claw or fang?”
Diego scrutinized the cadaver closely. “Yeah.” He nodded. He glanced around gravely, and everyone stepped back as if only now realizing the gravity of this discovery.
“What do you reckon caused this?” Alex, the most flamboyant, seemed subdued as he said.
As if summoned by his very words, they heard clicking. They all turned together towards the direction of the sound. It was coming from the entrance of the cavern where they came from. “Fuck,” Diego said. Then Kaleb saw him glance at their faces, all of them, and he realized that he must have looked terrified. “Alright, stay together, stay calm, there are ten of us, okay? We ca–”
The sound got closer and louder, and Kaleb began to recognize it as the sound of wood knocking on something solid, maybe the stone.
“We better step out, we don’t want to be cramped here,” Kaleb said, even though his every instinct told him to lay down and hide.
They stepped out into the emptiness of the cavern, and then something humanoid popped out of the path they’d come from.
“The fuck is that?” Someone whispered.
Kaleb had the same question. It looked like a wooden puppet, ornately polished pieces of wood put together to form a human-like build, except its joints didn’t seem to be connected by anything that made sense aside from ball joints at the shoulders and hips. There was no visible glue or thread. If it was trying to look human, then its limbs and torso were too thin, yet somehow, Kaleb could feel that the wood was tougher than any of the same thickness. Its head was a slightly oval sphere of wood with no features. It was spinning erratically and periodically changing the direction of its spin while in the groove at the top of the wooden torso.
It slowly raised a hand and everyone flinched. Then it pointed at them with a narrow wooden forefinger. For a moment, Kaleb wondered if it was intelligent, if it could be reasoned with.
The moment ended at the same time its body fell apart, every joint finally surrendering to nature and letting the limbs fall off, except it was a bit stronger than that. The parts of the creature’s body had flown off slightly apart from each other, as if miniature explosions in its joints had propelled them in different directions.
Someone snorted a nervous laugh at the sight, and Kaleb wondered what the hell had happened. He also wondered whether they were off the hook.
That was until he heard it. The struggling sound beside him. The struggling sound of the first friend he made on this journey towards catastrophe. He was lying on his back, holding his chest, and choking on his own blood.