Chapter Forty-Five: Flotsam

Val and Tom journeyed with Scriber, Cub, Jace and Moth, until they reached the northern trade road. There they said brief goodbyes, eyes shining with meaning from stoic gazes.

They all knew what it was they were undertaking, how dangerous it would be. They were Hunters though, and they needed no reminders to take care. Their parting was heavy with things left unsaid.

Val set them on a more southern bearing, still heading east. She planned to get them close to where Tom’s unit had been on their Reaping, and to try and pick up the trail of the orcs from there. She would get them as close as she could, from Tom’s retelling, and he would have to try and narrow it down from there.

They would take at least three weeks or so to get to roughly the right area, as long as they’d already spent travelling to the Gathering. The need for urgency weighed upon the both of them.

Val began to train Tom again. If he thought she pushed him hard before, now she drew everything from him. He fell asleep every night utterly exhausted. The weeks became a blur of learning, fighting, and pushing their Idealist bodies to the limit to cover ground.

Sesame was the slowest of the group. The big bear could move at a mile-eating lope, but he hadn’t the endurance to keep it up for overly long. His huge, muscled frame was simply not meant for long distance running. When he started to flag, Tom would subsume him so he could rest. Every time, they pushed onwards, even faster than before.

Tom had grown to like having Sesame around, for his big, dependable presence, if not his insatiable appetite, but he was beginning to appreciate being able to subsume him more too. It made moving through rough terrain a lot easier, for one. As well as replenishing his stamina, subsuming him would also replenish any injuries on the bear too, drawing mana from Survival to slowly heal him. It meant they didn’t need to waste Val’s time or mana after every fight, just the occasional one when Sesame took a decent knock.

Smitten had no trouble keeping up. She could run for hours straight, her coat streaming in the wind, and still seem fresh as a daisy when they stopped. Scorn simply perched on Val’s shoulder, braced slightly as she ran.

Tom was slightly jealous at times of their smaller frames, meaning they could stay summoned in more situations, but then again, when he eventually raised Sesame to Supreme, like Smitten and Scorn were, he expected the bear would be a nigh unstoppable force as his familiar.

While Scorn had a formidable offence, and Smitten was an unparalleled scout with some healing and buffing abilities, Sesame would be a veritable monster, combining a near-impenetrable defence with a earthshaking offence.

He smiled as he thought of it, sending happy thoughts down the bond. Sesame sent him a confused thought back.

Don’t be silly. Already unstoppable.

After two weeks of pushing hard, they began to slow, and scout more carefully. They were well within the territory that orcs had been spotted in by other Hunters, now, even if they were still a week away from where his Reaping had reached.

They spent most days scouring for any signs or landmarks that Tom might remember, and Val jumped on the opportunity to train Tom’s tracking. He knew if he had been set to the task before his exile that he would have had no hope whatsoever. One spot in the Deep looked much like another, after all, especially when you were more worried for your life than remembering exactly where you had been.

After spending so much time in the Deep, after training so hard with Val, differences began to stand out all the starker to Tom. He had learned all the different types of trees, and bushes and shrubs. All the different flowers and herbs and mosses. He’d learned which grew where, and in what conditions. He’d learned to climb escarpments and trees with equal ease. Learned the easiest ways to move through underbrush, and the harder ones that left no trace of him passing.

And so when he cast his mind back to the fractured, hazy memories of his Reaping, the attack by the village-killer swarm, their flight, their capture, and his escape, certain fragments began to piece themselves together with renewed clarity.

An ash-sky moss growing on a tree, half-remembered, must have been further away from the river he remembered crossing. They didn’t like too much moisture. The stand of wood golems they fought would not have been so close to that escarpment; they would not root near uneven ground. And so on.

Slowly, he began to piece together his journey into a more comprehensible tapestry. By the time they reached their third week, he saw something he was sure he remembered.

He had recalled Sesame to make his passage through a tightly packed stand of thin trees easier, when suddenly, he had a flashback. He remembered marvelling at an old washer-woman who had slid through them like smoke, a few days after she had manifested Grace.

He called softly to Val, explained to her his memory, and where it fit into the journey. By his reckoning they were about a day or two south-west of where the village-killer swarm happened upon as they camped for the night.

Val tensed at hearing the news, and Scorn and Smitten both immediately stiffened, their noses working overtime and ears twitching frenetically.

“Goes without saying then, but we’ll need to be doubly careful from here out. Might be the swarm’s long gone, might be it’s not. But if it’s still in the area, and we’ve got orcs to contend with too..,” she said, trailing off. “Well, careful is best, eh?”

“Always,” he replied. “I’ll call out anything I remember. We were heading north east, and the swarm followed us a ways north once we ran too, I think.”

Val nodded, and they carried on.

As soon as he could, Tom summoned Sesame again. The bear had some sense of what he was thinking while subsumed, and was immediately alert too. His big, wet nose snuffed at the air, warmer now as they came into spring, trying to pick out any unusual scents. Between their three familiars, they had a good chance of picking up anything out of place.

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His thoughts were proven true, when an hour later Sesame perked up, trailing off slightly. Tom sent a quick message to Val through his wisp, speaking into it and sending the words to her where she was ranging slightly ahead.

She found Tom watching Sesame sniff around some deadfall, left by winter’s ravages and now feeding spring’s new growth. The bear eventually stopped, pawed at a section of new shoots, dug his claws in, and soon a slightly rusty breastplate tipped up out of the topsoil. Val picked it up.

“What do you reckon?” she asked him.

“Don’t remember we ran into any trouble here. Could be someone dropped it as they fled the swarm? Would have had to go all the way around it though…” he shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

Val gently placed the piece of armour back on the ground. Tom gave Sesame a brief scratch behind the ears before they made north east again.

The next day passed almost without incident, excepting one fight with a small boar. Neither of them wanted to attract any attention, and so Val and Tom, and their three familiars, put the beast down quickly and efficiently.

Its explosive charge from the underbrush didn’t even reach them before it was dissected by whisker-thin green beams, studded with obsidian, and melted with acidic breath. They left it where it lay, pink lightning flickering on its corpse.

The next morning was sunny and sweet. The Deep, wakening from its hibernation, was humid, and slowly filling with the fragrances of herbs and flowers springing to life.

Tom was enjoying the gradual encroachment of the season, when Sesame stood stock still, nose working like a forge bellows. Val looked at them curiously, then stiffened some half a minute later, as Smitten picked up the same scent.

Humans, Sesame sent him. Smell humans. Smell death. Lots of death. Careful.

He shared a look with Val, wordlessly communicating. He drew his spear from his spatial storage, and Val strung her bow with practised efficiency. Together, they crept forward, their familiars creeping with them.

As they drew nearer the scent, Sesame sent him updated impressions: death, older. Death older still. The passage of …one season? Two? The bear’s conclusions were imprecise.

As they moved closer still, Tom was hit with deja vu. He had definitely been here before. He remembered passing these trees, one fateful evening. He shivered, a single bead of sweat crawling down his back like an insect.

Cautiously, ever so cautiously, they drew into a clearing. As much of one as one could find in the Deep, anyway. And there they saw evidence of a night Tom wished he could forget.

A few small trees had been cleared to make more room, laid at the edge of the clearing to provide some modicum of defence. Now, after two seasons, they were already beginning to be reclaimed, moss and shoots sprouting in places, rot collapsing others.

Small divots pocked the ground here and there, some obvious, some less so, all standing out once he knew what he was looking at. Firepits, those that cooked a last meal for many of them.

They crept into the clearing proper. Here there was a leather bracer with a flower growing on it. There, a torn hauberk, half buried in sod. A broken spear shaft. An arrow embedded halfway up a tree. A shattered lantern.

Tom’s mind felt strangely calm. The scene was so …out of place. Everything looked peaceful. Spring sunbeams. Birds chirping happy songs. Grass waving at them lazily in a warm breeze.

It could not be the same place he remembered fighting for his life. Striving and straining and sick to his guts with fear and confusion. Watching people he had fought beside for a month struggle and die under harsh, white light, and crisp black shadows, and a glittering, rushing, sable tide of skittering legs.

And yet it was. What else could it be?

Tom had never thought to return here, and now he was, he was struck by just how different he was. He had spent that whole Reaping so twisted up with anxiety about manifesting that he had barely cared if he’d died doing so.

Now he was almost a completely new man. He was not afraid. Not worried about inconsequential things. He was powerful, and he would only grow more so.

There was a lesson here too, though. As much as his last stand against the orc hunting party might go differently, were he to do it again with his new powers, this encounter would not. Of that, he was deadly sure.

His skillset had absolutely nothing that could counter such a mass of spiders, each so potently venomous. He would get a buff from the first few bites, and then be swept under just like Markhart. He would probably kill even less of them.

He shivered at the thought. He had to get stronger.

Val straightened when it became obvious there was no immediate danger.

“This is where the swarm hit, I take it? Looks like it was a hell of a fight.”

He nodded at her. “Should we …look around?” he asked. “The orcs we ran into had some Wayrest-made weapons, and the leader had Markhart’s hammer. He …died here.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s. Might be tough to find any sign of orcs here, with the amount of panicking people fighting and fleeing through the woods, but we might get lucky.”

She began wandering about, inspecting the ground, the trees, the dishevelled leavings of the camp. Smitten cruised about to no apparent pattern, her nose pressed almost directly into the soil, whiffling noises issuing from her search.

Tom mimicked Val, and began searching through the wreckage. There was not much to find, and a hell of a lot to see, all at the same time. Most anything useful had been worn away by time, by this point. Still, he kept trying.

He caught a hint of mild confusion from Sesame. He turned, and found the bear nudging something along the ground with his nose, smelling it. Tom could sense the mana concentrated in whatever it was from where he stood. He strode over to see what he’d found.

It was a stone. An essence stone, from the looks of it, but not like any he’d seen before. It was dark, but opalescent, glimmering faintly with rainbow colours when the light hit it just right. The strangest thing about it were its facets.

Most essence stones ranged within a certain spectrum, from smooth as glass, to rough, just like a mineral or crystal. This essence, though, had hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny, reflective sides all over it.

“Val,” he called softly. Her head swung around. “Know what this is?”

She came over to them, frowning at it. He tossed it to her as she approached.

She snatched it from the air, glanced at it. Did a double take, and her eyebrows climbed toward her hair line. Then she looked up at him, slowly.

And grinned wider than a river.

“Guess it’s your lucky day, Tom,” she said, tossing the stone back to him. “That right there is a swarm essence.”