The rumors were easy enough to start. Banditry and monster attacks along the roads were common enough that lost caravans and failed expeditions were in plentiful supply. It was a simple matter for Wreave to slip down in the wake of a raid, or to enact the raid herself, and plant the appropriate documents among the dead. Tattered maps, forged correspondence, little tidbits believably missed my looters and hungry beasts. Incident after incident, she kept at the work, keeping watch for the changes she would expect.

Slowly, her efforts began to bear fruit. As she skulked between the clutching thorn and tumor laden branches of the Twistwood, she began to observe more and more inquisitive parties enter the forest. First it was the pioneers, those who made a living with their ears to the ground, the kind that bought the best armor and sell-swords to guard their expedition. These she ignored. Their failure was guaranteed, and key to her plans even.

Next came the unwashed masses, the great seething hordes of hopefuls and dreamers swept up from tavern floors and street corners, hoping that somehow their second hand equipment and total lack of experience would succeed where professionals had failed. These she watched more closely, both due to the ease of avoiding their witless notice, and the increased chance of finding what she sought. She watched as they tromped deep into the toxic wilds, as they hacked roads, traded tall tales, and were ultimately killed, consumed, or convinced of their folly.

In time the flow began to trickle off, the swelling tide of doom drowning those scraps of hope she’d spread down the veins of the trade routes and into the hearts of the cities. Those places she could not go herself. How much simpler that would have been. As it was, she continued to haunt the woods and watch. Patience was, as they say, a virtue.

-=-=-

Sorana pulled out the tiny scrap of paper for the dozenth time that day, and stared up into the tangled branches of the twistwoods around her, trying to match the two together by the dim light of her lantern. This far into the forest, the trees grew into each other, eschewing the semblance of order in normal forests in favor of a snarled free-for-all in the canopy. Twining branches wove and tangled together, until the sky above her head was replaced by a roof of splintered wood and long dead leaves. Even though the wooden tangle sat several arm-lengths above her head, it still felt like the forest pressed in around her like some monstrous cave, occasionally creaking and groaning as the ensnared trees continued their battle to grow, slowly grinding and crushing each other to pieces.

The corpses had stopped several days ago, and she tried to tell herself this was a good thing. It surely meant she’d gotten further than any who’d come before. Never mind the habit spider-wolves had of binding up their prey and hauling them off to their nests, leaving nothing but abandoned gear on the forest floor, slowly pulled into the yearly churning of battling roots. She hadn’t seen any abandoned gear this far either, so surely she was fine.

She swallowed and hooded the lantern again, having convinced herself that she was on the right path again. She tucked the paper away, trying to ignore the empty space that welcomed it into her pack. She’d thought two weeks rations would have been enough. For all that the Twistwood was deadly and winding, it wasn’t actually very large, or at least that was what she’d thought. As she wandered the wooden caves within, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was somehow walking further than was possible. She didn’t feel like she was doubling back, or that the path was going significantly up or down, yet it continued to wend on and on before her.

Still she persisted, even if a part of her mind knew she’d used more than half her rations. She would just leave the forest hungry is all. Hungry and successful.

She would leave the forest successful, or not at all.

For a moment, she stopped and looked back. Would it be so bad, going back to that small bakery on the corner of Harvag and Main? To the crowded, chattering streets, the smell of flour and yeast and coal-fired ovens? The thought alone made her belly grumble. She closed her eyes and fought the urge to pick at her last remaining rations. She would not indulge herself, she would not give up, she would carry on.

She would be better than that.

She set her eyes on the darkness, and stopped. There was a figure just at the edge of the light. Her breath caught, and she fumbled for the small crossbow she’d brought into the woods. She was no house-bound Wielder, no magical warrior with dancing blade or blazing armor, so she had bought herself something simple and straightforward. She leveled it now, the light of her lantern swaying crazily as she tried to hold it by the same hand that braced her aim.

The light swung across the figure, dispelling any initial notion that it might be a person. Even in the strange, twisting perspective of the forest caves, she could tell it was too tall, the almost-human curves of its torso easily two heads taller than her if not more. It stood on crooked legs, a thing of brown and blue-black, five red and silver eyes studding a head that belonged on some horrific avian predator, four arms hanging at its sides, tipped with claws. Great hair-clad tendrils snaked down from its head, their similarity to braids only adding to the eerie almost-human appearance of the thing, the bulbous eyes and spines adoring the ends almost seeming like some kind of ornament.

She wracked her brain for something, anything she’d read about that could match the description of the thing. There were many creatures documented in the Twistwood, most being half-mangled amalgams of animals one would find roaming a normal forest. Those had been old texts though, myths from the days after the house of Aravon fell, its blessed attuner turned towards one final act of spite. The years had not been kind to those misbegotten creatures, many falling prey as much to their own mangled anatomy as to their more fortunate brethren. In time, that twisting, warping madness had created a handful of truly successful accidents, until the stubborn, un-fellable twistwoods, and the dreaded spider-wolves were the majority of what remained.

There were stories, however. Stories of what had become of those who had never returned, stories that made her heart skip a beat and haunted her in the dead of night. It was said that it was Aravon’s attuner that had given birth to the lines of the wildfolk, those mixtures of man and beast that were greater than both. Even in turning their attuner against the world, Aravon’s attuner was just that, an attuner, still the same device that had birthed living things of beauty. Could it, in its rampant madness, do so again?

She swallowed, and spoke. “Do you, understand me?”

-=-=-=-

Wreave did, in fact, understand her. If she was entirely honest, she probably spoke the girl’s native tongue better than the girl herself did. Not that she would be revealing that just yet. Instead, she watched the girl for a few moments, decidedly un-threatened by her slewing grip on the crossbow, the weight of her lantern making any attempt at aim a fantasy. Without a word, she turned and walked away, her additional eyes easily keeping watch from all angles.

“Wait!” The girl abandoned any pretense of aiming, and scurried after her, prompting Wreave to pick up her pace. She didn’t have to run from the girl, not with her longer stride, but she made a deliberate effort to keep her steps casual and assured. She was simply going somewhere of her own volition, not in response to the girl.

As she moderated her pace, deliberately picking paths over the gnarled roots that would stymie or slow the girl enough to avoid breaking her own performance, she considered her next steps. The girl was certainly what she was looking for. Over the days Wreave had monitored her, she had demonstrated the perfect mix of desperation and focus, along with an inexperience that spoke of compulsion rather than reasoned behavior. This girl had come seeking Aravon because she needed it.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

And need made people useful.

She continued deeper into the territory she had prepared. Initially, she had been worried about eradicating the spider-wolves from her chosen stage, but a little experimentation with her venoms had yielded a concoction that functioned as a passable olfactory numbing agent. It had even given the additional benefit of confusing the spider-wolves' ability to track other scents, leading to a chaotic series of confused conflicts all around Wreave’s territory as wolves suddenly turned and attacked family members they could no longer recognize. She had actually noticed the wolves beginning to avoid her territory in a manner that seemed almost superstitious. A part of her wanted to devote some time to exploring whether there was in fact a developing proto-culture among the spider-wolves, but that was a question, however fascinating, for another time.

Light beckoned down the path ahead, and she felt a small note of satisfaction as the girl stumbled in shock behind her, before doubling up her pace to make up for lost time. It satisfied Wreave to know that her work had not gone to waste.

The scene before them was one perfectly orchestrated. The canopy above broke over a great ruin of a temple, the roots withering and shying away from its edges, their insatiable consumption of masonry and stone stopped by the influence of the place. It had been modeled painstakingly on the buildings other cities used to house their attuners, with special consideration given to the effect of the intervening years on architectural trends. Or so the Shaper said, at any rate, but he was an artist. So long as it had the desired effect, Wreave didn’t care.

She used those precious moments of the girl’s stupefaction to make her way to the temple doorway, before turning and fixing the girl with her frontal eyes. There, she waited, deliberately seeming like a guardian of the threshold as the girl collected herself and approached. She watched the girl, having to crane her head down slightly as the girl walked within reach of her and looked up at her. Brown and white eyes gazed up into silver and red, and the girl asked. “Is this real?”

On a whim, Wreave changed her answer.

-=-=-

“Not in the slightest.”

Sorana stared at the strange creature for a moment. Abruptly, an incredible urge to laugh washed over her. It started as a snort, then a chuckle, until great peals of rolling laughter had her on her knees. It all made sense. It all made such perfect sense. She was so stupid. So unbearably stupid. Was she hallucinating? Had the spider-wolves stolen across her in her bedroll, bitten and wrapped her up without her even waking? Leaving her in some envenomed fever dream until they sucked her guts out?

She laughed until she could hardly breathe, until the edges of her vision grew dark, even behind the tears. She dug her fingers into the smooth stone beneath her, wanting to tear up a stone, to wail and scream now, but she was too hungry, too tired, too spent. All she managed, as she pressed her forehead to the cold, uncaring earth, was a single word.

“Why?”

She didn’t bother to look up at the creature, to see its mocking sneer. To see one of those wicked, taloned feet lifting up to gut her end to end. She she lay there and waited, what strength she had going to simply drawing her final few breaths.

“Many reasons,” the creature said. “But primarily because you wouldn’t have believed it.”

Sorana lay there and processed the words for a few moments. “What?”

“You are a cynic at heart, I can see that much about you,” the creature said.

Sorana blinked a few times, slowly hauling her head back up to look at the creature. It had abandoned its grim pose, and now lounged against the doorway of the temple, arms folded in such a human way that, for a moment, Sorana forgot about the multitudes of eyes and claws the thing had. “You told me, because I’m too cynical?”

The creature nodded. “You’d never have believed it long term. You would have had the time of your life, and likely bought anything I told you wholesale. For maybe the first month anyway. After that, people would start asking questions, and so would you. I can tell just by looking at you, that if someone asked ‘why you?’ you wouldn’t have an answer for them.” Those five eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t even have an answer for yourself.”

“I…” Sorana realized she didn’t have anything to say. She could see it clearly, now that it was described to her. What would she have said? That she set off alone, with too little food, a cheap crossbow, and a dream? When there were memorials or those who had perished fighting the Twistwood’s endless blight of monsters? The weight of it felt like it would crush her back to the earth. She was no one and she knew it. “Why?” She finally managed. “Why any… why… why me?”

“Because you’ll do.” The words speared her harder than her crossbow could have. Yet she could feel the truth of them as another despairing laugh bubbled up in her chest.

“Yes, yes that fits, doesn’t it?” The laugh forced its way out, little more than a sickly snort and cough. “So what? What do you want?”

“I want you to run errands for me,” the creature said. “I have things I need done, and I cannot show myself in public to do them. So you will do them for me.”

“In return for my life?” Sorana murmured softly.

“No, you will get to live your dream,” the creature said, the words drawing Sorana’s head up in shock. The creature stared back at her with a blandness that should have been impossible on such a monstrous face. “You will find the lost attuner of Aravon. You will heal the Twistwood, reclaim the legacy of the wildkin, and in all likelihood be remembered in statuary and song until the stars in the sky die out.”

“I… will?” She stared in a manner that she knew was stupid, but couldn’t manage anything else with her face. “What?”

“The intent was always for someone to discover the attuner and run my errands,” the creature shrugged. “All that has changed is the manner in which I will go about it. Rather than some noble chosen one, heeding the words of some ancient herald, you will know that you’re engaged in an arrangement of convenience.”

Slowly, Sorana levered herself off her aching hands, gently maneuvering herself around to sit on her knees. She didn’t feel quite up to standing yet. “So that’s it? I run your errands in exchange for glory?” She felt a twinge of disgust, but she wasn’t stupid enough to ask the towering arrangement of claws what would happen if she refused.

“Yes, simply put,” the creature said.

Sorana was silent a moment, but she knew in truth that there was no inner debate to be had. It was not the wondrous adventure she had dreamed of, but she had always known deep down that it wouldn’t be. She had only ever been a breadmaker’s plain third daughter, destined for a depleted dowry and the kind of marriage that would buy. So she had stolen the money for a weapon and a map, and gone off to die. And now she hadn’t, and she should probably be grateful for that.

Slowly, she levered herself to her feet. “Alright. I’ll do as you ask.”