Chapter One

Norn was angry.

He wasn’t just angry, he was pissed. His boot caught on yet another hidden root, causing him to lurch forward, nearly falling onto his face once again. The only thing that saved him from such an embarrassing fate was one of the many tall trees he was forced to pick his way through.

The forest was growing darker with each passing moment, and frustrating scenes like that were becoming more common. He would need to find someplace to hole up for the night. Hopefully, he could find a cave or some other hidey-hole so he wouldn’t be forced to sleep up in a tree. He hated doing that. It didn’t matter if he tied himself to the branch; he always felt as if he would roll over and fall to his death.

It made for a very long and restless night.

“Fucking Vic. Always making me do this shit…” Norn cursed as he braced himself against a particularly ugly tree. Its bark had mostly fallen off at some point in time, and the barren branches were twisted and broken in many different places. It was probably dead, but many of the trees in the forest had already dropped all of their leaves, so it was hard to tell.

Norn let out a wispy sigh as he cursed to himself once more through gritted teeth. He still had maybe an hour of light left, hopefully it was enough to find someplace to call it a night. He didn’t care much about the scouting he was supposed to be doing, they were already past the edges of civilization, and he doubted the patrols would have chased them out this far. Still, Vic had told him to see what was out there, and he knew better than to argue.

He had tried that… once. It took nearly two months to recover after the beating he got for questioning him. Norn’s fingers still didn’t bend quite like they used to.

Shaking his head with a grimace, Norn did his best to stop his wandering mind. He was still in the middle of an unknown forest with night quickly approaching. It wouldn’t do him any good for his head to be in the clouds when a goblin could sneak up behind him and poke him with a pointy stick. He had much grander dreams than to be turned into goblin shit.

He wouldn’t be a bandit forever. He had almost saved up enough coin to set out on his own, to chase his dream of being a florist. Ever since he was a child, he had loved flowers and all of the various colors and shapes and smells. It was something that he and his mother had shared between the two of them and also something he would never tell another soul about. Not while he was running with Vic and his crew, he already had a hard enough time as it was.

Maybe in the next few months, he would have enough to leave this life behind if they were lucky and found some underdefended caravan.

But he would have to get up this blasted hill first. The forest had been crawling upward for quite a while now, he hadn’t noticed it at first, but the further along he went the steeper the climb and the more his legs started to scream at him. He huffed and puffed as he crested a small embankment, a sigh of relief escaping him as he noticed the area in front of him had leveled out, at least for a bit.

It was a small area, no wider than two carriages and slightly longer than three, plenty big enough to set up camp… if he had a tent. All he carried was a bedroll strapped to his back, a small pack of dried rations nestled against a weathered water skin, and a heavily used short sword he had found in a ditch somewhere he couldn’t remember. Still, it was a somewhat defendable area with a steep embankment on the far side, boasting an overhang that could provide some protection from the rain if the skies decided to open up on him.

It wasn’t perfect, but at least it wasn’t a tree. He hated trees.

Norn walked along the ridge, looking for the best place to lay his head down for the night. He ultimately decided on a small recess with thick roots of some kind, twisted together in a spiderweb of gnarled wood that held back the hill above him. He poked around a bit, making certain that no other creature had claimed the spot before him, he would hate to fall asleep in some monster’s nest. Finding nothing, Norn unfurled his bedroll and started to gnaw on the dried biscuits he had carried with him.

When he finally finished his dismal meal, his jaw was just as tired as his legs. It was hard to eat without as many teeth as he used to have. It was just another thing he had Vic to thank for. He truly hated that man.

The last sliver of light had just faded over the horizon when Norn laid his head back atop his hands. It was dark now inside his little hidey-hole, and cold. Autumn was in full swing and had been for a while ; snow could be falling any day now, something he wasn’t particularly looking forward to. Not only did he hate the cold weather, but everything just looked so drab . He much preferred spring and summer, where the plants and flowers were in full bloom, painting the world in pleasant pastels of pinks and reds and greens…

A light pulsed above his head.

Norn squinted his eyes as he tried to pierce the darkness, the tangle of roots hanging only a few feet over his resting spot. He wasn’t sure that he actually saw what he thought he did, a flash of green light. It was so fast and sudden that he could have easily imagined it . He was daydreaming about what this forest would look like in springtime, after all. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities.

He waited for a breath, then two, then ten . The light never made another appearance.

He must have imagined it. Putting it to the back of his mind, Norn started planning his little flower shop. What kinds of flowers would he sell, how would he arrange the bouquets, and what would he do during the off-season? Flowers didn’t grow year-round after all. Maybe he could… Another flash.

There was most certainly something there.

He propped himself up on his elbows, bringing his face that much closer to the bottom of the overhang. He still couldn’t see anything. He thought for a moment about making a fire. He knew that, although it would provide light and some much-desired warmth, it would also alert anyone and anything that someone was here. He didn’t know if it was worth it.

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Then again… If there was something here, and it was valuable… Maybe he would be able to afford a shop in the capital? He could sell his arrangements to the nobility , and they would give him their gold and their praise. Both things he hadn’t had much of before. The temptation was too much for Norn to resist.

By the time he had gathered enough wood to light a fire, Norn was slick with sweat , and an uncontrollable shiver ran up and down his body and through his limbs. His flimsy armor offered very little protection from the biting cold, the harsh wind cutting through it just as it did the leaf-bare forest around him. With a bit of effort, starving sparks blossomed from the flint held in his hand, the steel in his other screaming out into the darkness like a wounded animal.

It hurt his ears, but luckily the kindling had caught, so he wouldn’t deafen himself through failure. He stoked his tiny fire until it had grown into something a little less embarrassing, the orange and yellow flames rising nearly to his knees. He moved closer, rubbing his hands over the dancing flames, working the heat into them before he got to work.

He didn’t have any tools with him . The closest thing was the poorly maintained sword leaning tiredly against the berm beside him. Norn looked at it and shrugged his shoulders ; it would have to do. He started with short but forceful swings, chopping into the overhanging roots. His progress was slow and tedious.

He told himself it was because his sword was so dull and his range of movement was so limited from underneath the roots, but the truth of the matter nagged at the back of his mind. His strength was lacking, and no one had ever shown him how to handle a blade properly. Of course, he could have had one of the other men in his crew teach him ; a few could handle themselves passably, but they would have taken half of his coin to train him, and that was if they were sober enough to do it properly.

It didn’t matter. Soon enough, he would unearth this hidden treasure and wouldn’t need to know how to swing a sword. He would have more gold than he knew what to do with.

Those pleasant musings reinvigorated his exhausted limbs, sending his wary sword singing through the air, chunks of root and rock spattering him and the ground around him with every strike. He only had to stop and catch his breath once before the last roots fell away. As they did so, it was as if the floodgates had been opened. Loose soil poured into the little alcove, saturating the air with dust and an earthy scent that clung to the inside of his nose and lungs.

Norn was forced out into the open to claim a lungful of fresh air, hacking and coughing as long ribbons of snot and spittle trailed from his gaping mouth. It was a wholly unpleasant experience, something that he should have expected to happen, but he was much too focused on what was hidden above him to put much thought into anything else.

“Fucking hells…” Norn spat as he, at long last, took a deep breath that didn’t burn. He looked upon the pile of dirt that had nearly suffocated him. It was only a wagon-full or so, but with it so quickly filling up such a small space caused Norn to think, at that moment, that half the hill was falling atop his head. He was happy that that wasn’t the case.

He laughed. That would have been an embarrassing way to go.

Norn’s fingers easily sunk into the soft earth. It was much easier to dig than it was to cut through those roots. After ten minutes of digging and sifting through the mound, his fingers scraped against something much larger than the other fallen stones . He dove in with both hands, furiously brushing the dirt to either side as he dug like a fox on the hunt.

With a grin threatening to split his face, he uncovered a huge, round… thing. It was every bit as large as his head and, from the fact that he couldn’t lift it without a great deal of effort, was incredibly dense. Grunting, Norn rolled it out of the mound of dirt and toward his fading fire.

He eagerly stoked the flames, getting as much light as possible to inspect his newfound treasure. Mud caked its entire surface, making it impossible to see anything else.

“How’d I see it then?” he asked himself as he leaned back on his haunches, his tired and blistered hands resting on his hips.

Maybe this wasn’t what he had seen. It was possible, but he wouldn’t know for sure until he cleaned off the mud. Carefully, he poured a tiny bit of water out of his water skin and used it to wash off a small section of his find. He didn’t want to waste too much; it was only a day’s walk back to their main camp , but he knew better than to make the trip without anything to drink.

The water worked its magic, helped along by his hand brushing off the more stubborn pieces of muck. “Ouch!” Norn hissed as he pulled his hand back as if something had bitten it. “Shit, that hurts.”

He cradled his hand, a mask of pain painted onto his face as he moved it closer to the fire. He held it out to get a closer look, the flickering, dim light from the fire causing the blood that dripped from his torn-open palm to look like black tar.

“Motherfucker…” Norn cursed, looking back at the offending ball. There didn’t look to be anything sharp sticking out of the spot he had wiped clean ; he couldn’t even see any of his blood. From the amount still seeping out of his open wound, he would have thought that his blood would have been all over it, but nothing was there.

Cautiously, he scooted back over to get a closer look. He was careful not to touch it, just in case there was a small and sharp edge that he couldn’t see in such murky light. Instead, he leaned over the head-sized ball of mud, marveling at what he had managed to expose to the chilly night air.

An almost transparent, emerald stone shone up at him. The area he had cleaned off was only the size of his palm, but from that, he could see everything. Swirls of golden light churned deep inside the stone, tying themselves into knots before exploding into magnificent patterns of geometric perfection. He was mesmerized by the spectacle, so enthralled with the dizzying display that he didn’t even notice the jagged lance of stone that had exploded from its surface, not until the excruciating pain washed over him just before his world went black.