Drying the morning mist off his face with his small towel, Five watched as the small patrol moved along the valley below his cave. He had been spying on the group of Velspe soldiers for a few spans from where he sat curled in his blankets, leaning back against the corner where the entrance to his cave met the large wooden door, hidden from most of the wind in the early morning.

They picked their way south along a creek bed that ran through the bottom of the winding path the valley cut through the landscape below.

The spell he used to view the passes below his crag hidden home was a simple manipulation of the mists in the air, condensing the water into a large lens that floated before him, and could have the focus changed at the whim of the caster.

He huddled comfortably against the crude, thick, heavy wooden door that separated the rest of the world from his small home. It was comfortable in a way he would have found difficult to explain to his Pride, so much so that he had yet to even put on his boots, preferring to keep his sock covered feet snuggly wrapped in the blanket.

The door against which he leaned was cut and fitted by his own hands from the forest along the lower slopes of the range, and he had spent almost as much time building the doors to his new home as he had spent excavating the rock from the interior to turn a shallow cave into a spacious retreat from the world.

It was by any real estimation, a crudely built dwelling, regardless of the sophistication of his construction methods. But the stove kept the rooms warm and cooked his food well, the door and walls kept out the cold, the wind, and the rain. His bed… his bed needed a great deal of work, and he had, as with most aspects of his life, made plans.

Five’s hands were as rough as any of the infantrymen he had served with at the front, now. Magic may have been the tool he used to cut and shape the wood and stone around him, but he still had to do more manual labor than he had anticipated at the start of this venture. Had he attempted to do it all with the elemental forces at his command, it would have made more than enough noise in the magical spectrum to draw the attention of the mages of both armies from whom he and his Pride had fled.

He had refined the subtle nature of his workings these last few months. Necessity made for a good teacher. Like taking a huge breath, and every so slowly reading the breath silently, lest the monster under your bed hears you, and pounces upon you to take your soul… At least, that was the method, and thought process Five used to retrain himself toward a use of magic that was comparatively silent to those methods he had been taught and drilled in for the last decade.

Any fool with the Talent could destroy a stone wall, but it took skill, and patience, to use those same methods to break brick sized rocks from a stone wall and fuse them together, one at a time, to form a new set of stone walls. And to do so silently, in the magical realm, was a skill he had been practicing and honing here daily.

They moved slowly among the large tumble of stones that lined the shallow creek at the bottom of the valley so far below his new home. The small force of soldiers continued to pick their path carefully along the creek bed, moving with care to remain as silent as they could, and to simultaneously watch all directions for danger.

Were any of them locals to these valleys before this war? He wondered.

They moved slowly, and with great care. Water in the creek was lower than it had been in weeks past. The mists and fogs he experienced here near the peaks were not shared as rains in the lower passes in these hotter months.

Weather is weird, Five thought.

It was mildly surprising to him that Velspe had sent soldiers this far into Hamurian held territory. Five didn’t know if his people had lost this land in the back and forth of the incessantly moving tides that battle created across the landscape, or if the Velspe were scouting for a specific purpose. He knew he needed to investigate. Not knowing these things could cost him, dearly.

Five centered himself, released the water lens, and then drew in a cleansing breath, sending his senses out of his body to move closer to the patrol. This kind of delving gave a more thorough understanding than any magnification lens could reasonably deliver. It wasn’t standing far away and looking for details one might catch by happenstance, even with a water lens; this method was the equivalent of sneaking amongst the riders and poking about in their underwear, grubbing through their bags, checking the contents of their money pouches, and smelling their breath. At least, Four always claimed she received more sensory information like smells and sounds, sometimes even textures of materials, whenever she used this method.

He wondered where Four had scampered off to… though, he guessed she was in some port, looking for an inn that needed a new cook’s apprentice or some such. She had always talked about the ocean, and often cooked their meals for them; Four claimed cooking for her Pride calmed her nerves.

Who could say..? He wondered, his mind starting to drift as it became unmoored from its usual perch in his skull.

With a jolt and a sudden lunge, the valley blurred closer in his mind, and the soldiers, thirty-two that he could see, coalesced into sharp focus as their line rode through the thickening trees on the valet floor. Tan uniforms, though not the crisp, and disciplined cleanliness he expected from the Velspe, these men had ridden hard for weeks, and looked more shabby, threadbare and unwashed than any platoon he had seen since the beginning of the war.

His vision slowly roved amongst them as they rode. Most were on horses, though three were mounted on the scaled, leonine beasts called lisks. The horses the other troops rode didn’t flinch at the proximity of the tiger-like predators that loped along beside them, so they must have been well trained to do so. Most cavalry Five had seen would have been one, or the other, but never a company of mixed mounts like this one. He had never seen the Velspe field a mixed cavalry like this, either.

This was new. Or maybe this is desperation. His mind turned the facts over and over again, all of these details just reinforced to Five that these were deserters.

Amongst the tan uniforms, he saw very few indications of rank. A tall, long armed, rangy woman that rode in the rough middle of the line had a set of blue piping along her shoulders, and what looked like a long staff wrapped in waxed cloth extending straight up from behind her left hip. A much thicker cloth wrapped bundle at her right hip confirmed for Five that this woman was a captain of an archer company, her longbow unstrung and wrapped for travel. Deadly at a distance…the better ones at up to 300 Strides…

All of the other bows he could perceive were the short, recurved cavalry bows, not the heavy longbow like the one this captain carried. And not every rider had a bow, either. Possibly only one in every three.

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The closer Five’s inspection of this group went, the more odd they looked, at least to his reconing. None of the soldiers flew the “Dawn Horizon '' banner of red with a gold image of the breaking dawn in the center. But, a patrol trying to move fast and stealthy wouldn’t be, either. They all just looked…shabby.

Scout groups often cultured a look of the weary traveler. Or of simple “People of the Land” types, herders, farmers, woodsmen, hunters, and charcoal burners, so as to blend in. And then there were the scout units that wore clothing to specifically match the terrain, to blend in even more.

But, this group looked like their clothes were tattered. Much of their kits were mismatched and torn.

None of the uniforms had any of the decorations nor insignia a group this size should have for its officers. There were at least five uniforms he could see that would denote officer ranks, but the insignias had all been removed. Five or six ranking officers to a group of less than a hundred? Maybe. Less than fifty, though? That’s unwieldy, much too top heavy with that many officers.

This was, the more he saw, completely odd. Mad, even.

A group of thirty four riders. Mixed mounts.

One rider was barefoot in his stirrups. One woman rode with her left arm in an improvised sling, the arm, Five could feel the breaks in the forearm in two places. Clean break, well set, mild infection setting in. She had the purple trim at the cuffs of her sleeves…

…NO!! Nononononono…!

He couldn’t reign in his alarm at the sight of those purple edged sleeves, she was a Velspian Wizard, fully trained and … she wasn’t reacting at all to his presence.

Five felt his body back up on his hidden home begin to relax; his heart slowing down after his frenzied panic sent the bloody pump galloping out of control. He could feel the burning in his lungs as they worked to keep pace with his panic laced heartbeat.

The Wizard wasn’t noticing him at all. MAybe it was her injury, and incipient infection that was keeping her mind from detecting his Delving.

That, he thought, was the most logical explanation. Or, maybe she was either poorly trained in the Spiritual Arts, and she just couldn’t normally sense a Delving.

He pondered this as his mind roved along through her belongings. She had two books in her saddle bags. One was in Velspe, which he was familiar enough with to know this was her personal journal. Most Wizards created and kept journals to chart their growth, and keep track of their spellwork. Greater planning and projects; peasants and the superstitious usually called the diaries ``spellbooks,” or sometimes “grimoires.” And, within a limited scope of understanding, they were right; but they were also woefully mistaken, and blowing a working journal up into some kind of dark, unholy, and mysterious text of forbidden and foreboding lore. Because, all people loved a good story.

Huh…people do love a good story.

Her other book was in Hamurian, which surprised Five; not many Velspians bothered to learn Hamurian. This book was old, and tattered, looked to have been oft repaired by whoever had owned it originally. He could see new stitching on the tome, and several spots where new pages had been inserted to replace where older pages had fallen, or been ripped, out.

It was “The Tale of Seven Heavens, and Thach Below.” It was a book used to train the Shamans that made up the clergy and doctors for the bulk of the Hamurian population. Five thought it was an odd reading choice, but everything on this small caravan of misery was odd.

Another rider had several knives along his belt, but no actual sword. In fact, the knives he had looked like kitchen cutlery, not daggers. Several riders carried cudgels, or staves. One woman in a yellow and brown uniform carried two cudgels, one on each hip, and a long staff strapped to her back. A few riders had long thin metal rods where swords should have been on their hips.

He counted only three visible mess kits, some random scattering of cooking supplies amongst the riders, and only one rider looked like they were carrying a ration bag with anything in it. Velspians preferred a very specific type of flour for all of their cooking. Their ration flour was a coarse grind of wheat; not at all the fine ground powder of Hamurian flour, but the Velspe cooks certainly made the pebbly granular stuff work.

These people definitely were deserters.

They were looking for an escape from the war. This could be bad, not just for Five and his remaining hidden here in his mountain home, which Five put as his highest concern, but for the villages to the south, where these men were headed. Deserters tended to turn to banditry very quickly as a means to survival; at least those that survived long enough to do so before one or the other army caught them.

If their departure had left enough of an impression on their commanders, then they were being pursued. And in pursuing the deserters, Five’s home might be found.

As hard as he had worked to live unobserved, a concerted effort to find people down in the valleys below his stony home might send seekers to his very door. Which he would then have to kill. He had killed plenty in his time in the Army of Hamuria, but that wasn’t the point. A small force sent to find the deserters, once he disposed of them, would be noticed as missing after a while, the Velspe Command thinking there may be a Hamurian contingent in these valleys, which would lead to another, larger, group being sent. WIth scouts being sent out ahead that may find traces of his presence.

OR, and this was another thought to pursue, the Velspian Command might consider the second missing group as either deserters, or that the first group had killed the second, neither prospect they could let stand, which would lead to the aforementioned expeditionary force.

And here was a depressing thought… Even if I do nothing, these scouting groups may find traces of me in the valleys below, and these traces lead them here. Maybe every possible path available would lead to my discovery.

Which would lead to more, and still more men turning up at his metaphorical front door, if not his physical front door.

He had to admit, as good as he was at his trade, he was not Six. Six would tear the mountain to rubble to kill one man, or an entire legion, if he had been ordered to, or felt so compelled. And as impressive as it may be to have the strength to kill… a mountain…it would be noticed, Five was quite certain.

He needed to head this mess off as soon as he could.

Five didn’t like the idea of leaving his home; as hard as it may be to spot from the lands below, it wasn’t by any stretch impossible to find. Even if he built an enchantment on his door to hide it from anyone who didn’t already know it existed, which would take a few days, the glamour would fade in a day or two at most. Unless, he mused, he made his door into an Artifact, and set the renewal condition to catching the rays of the rising sun. He couldn’t just slap his door and scream at it, making it an Artifact through a petulant act of will, that kind of whimsical nonsense was for storybook heroes, and bad romance stories sold in the Southern Traders’ square of Aurel. But, he could make the door an Artifact of Glamour that would be self-renewing, if he worked out the geometries of the inscription just right…

Still, that would have to be a project for when he returned. He couldn’t allow this caravan of misery to get too far ahead of him; catching up to them would take at least a day as it was. That would put it too near the village of Garn’s Creek. There were many families in Garn’s Creek, and very few able bodies to defend it. Certainly not enough to defend it from not quite a full Velspian fighting unit.

He considered how mismatched and patchwork the unit looked.

Then he thought about two lisks running loose, without trained handlers, in the town.

He began to curse.

Not the magic imbued use of ill intent that accompanied subtle, and horrific results, but just the flagrant use of “bad vocabulary” that the masters would always frown upon, and the soldiers he had served with used daily to weave in a tapestries of syllables, wrought with feelings, and fraught with crude, sexually, and sometimes comedic, imagery.

“...fuck…” was as good a place to start as any.