The Best Laid Plans (and how to ruin them) Pt 2
Rosemary
She waved her arms and tried to barge into the middle before it all devolved.
But it was too late.
In the back lines, a herdsman uprooted a tree, then launched it. A bovine mother wielding a carrot whaled on a poor soldier trying to pull her calves away. Someone had thrown spices into a helmet. A soldier swung his mace, missed, and the inertia sent him tumbling into one of the few bovines with steel, a guard named Munar. Rosemary winced as metal went through flesh.
His squadmates rushed to his aid, but they too got caught up in another battle, just like the ones all around them. It was all pockets of fighting, here and there. And for once, there wasn’t an easy target for her to point and throw a spire of oak at, for nobody here was a target, yet everyone was at the same time.
This… this is crazy.
And to top it off, no one was winning.
The humans might have been armoured in steel, but there was something invisible summoned by the bovines. She could feel her bark prickling under its presence. And despite being so faint, she could hear it too, like a thousand bovines shrieking all at once at the sight of a Stalkerwolf.
Mana.
But what emotion was this, so primal and raw as it was?
It dulled any steel blade that approached them and pushed it aside. Had it appeared visible, the entire clearing would’ve been a smokescreen. And while it was indeed a boon for the bovines, the humans had actual armour, and the bovines were wielding vegetables and cooking pots.
It was a stalemate.
A group of calves shooting down the slide came hurtling through the front lines like catapulted ammunition, and they arrived in in a giggling heap. A group of humans broke off and bolted for them. Seeing that, so too did the bovines.
And then, a fierce clash, and crying children.
Through the pandemonium, the first human to charge stood still, watching her.
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Bendeit
Here she was.
The seductress, she whom commanded the great monstertree. No doubt she was the true evil, the true Classless monster who covered up the monstrosity underneath with a rather innocent disguise: a willowy lady, with skin of bark, flowing green hair, and a simple dress made of autumn leaves stitched together.
But he was no fool.
His hand almost tore the grip of his longsword in half. Faint alarm bells rang from his primary mana, and they reminded him of his wife, Gina, his children, Sam and Ina.
I do have a duty to them, don’t I? To come home safe, to provide for them.
Then his eyes drifted to the side, where a mind-controlled bovine mother shoved one of his Swordsworn to the ground and began stomping on him with her hooves. Two of his squadmates charged forward and bowled her over. They smacked her with the flat side of their swords until she went still.
These were all children, human or not. That foreign mana… he touched his heart, hanging his head down, as all around him the chaos reached its zenith in a whir of screaming calves and pots and pans.
I’m sorry. I have to do this.
He smoothed his moustache and stood a little straighter. His eyes blazed as he set his foot against the soil, and turned to face the seductress.
Time to end this once and for all.
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Rosemary
Rosemary was wading through the mess, trying to shout through the den of cursing and screeching.
“We aren’t hurting the children! They’re just playing on the Grove Hospes Waterslide!”
Everyone continued to hit each other.
“Oh, come on! Listen to me, idiots!”
Then it happened.
All the leaves in her hair stood up in unison, and she felt her bark crawling despite already smothered by a fog of bovine mana. New magic had arrived. Behind her, she could feel the sphere of her mana enclosing the Hospes shiver and lean away, for there was now an inferno that someone had set alight in the middle of the clearing.
It was the first man.
He was sprinting towards her, snarling, his mana spilling out in waves. And from the way her skin rippled, she realised something.
It would take a big oak spire to knock this one down. And he was coming fast.
“Lies and seduction! This is your end, vicious harlot! Your crimes with these children shall-”
Pop.
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Karra
What in Laarsh is going on?
Half the calves lined up behind her began to gather around the edge of the waterslide, so she said, “Get back from the edge.”
Then she leaned forward, and down below in the clearing, she could see a man pointing and shouting at Rosemary. He lifted up his sword, and the iron glittered. Then he leapt forward in a burst of mana, and even from her seat far above the rest of the battle, her fur stood on end. She saw Rosemary retreating backwards and tripping over.
The world slowed. The man, bearing down on her with a sword, death in his eyes.
The Stalkerwolf.
It was all happening again, wasn’t it?
That night, she remembered curling up and crying on the floor while Rosemary smashed the Stalkerwolf. She was weak, then. But Rosemary and Lepius had made her feel strong, and now… at their home, would she stand back and let them get hurt?
Come on, there must be something… she glanced around and patted the pockets on her dress.
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An apple.
She was saving it for later, but there was no later. She grabbed it, and in her mind, she begged for the meanest, most destructive thing she could get.
From the lands of her flying castles and horses, her imagination responded.
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Comet
One day, long ago and for the first time in her life, the calves were allowed outside of the tents at night.
Elders had brought out grass blankets and covered the calves up from chin to toe, and they giggled at the novelty of the twinkling lights above them, only stopping to listen as the elders pointed out constellations here and there: the Merlion, the Spoon, the Solace. Then they would giggle, and make jokes. Karra remembered lying at the edge of the gathering, her mother wrapped around her, and listening as the elders chastised those still giggling.
She didn’t really understand why this night warranted breaking their curfew.
Then it began.
It wasn’t long before the entire camp erupted in gasps, for streaking against the sky was a moving star. Behind it blazed its tail, and how it shined.
A comet.
Then, it was gone.
That was what her mana gave her.
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Her world narrowed down on Rosemary as the sword began its descent down.
There was no urge, not even an infinitesimal one, to drift off and enjoy her daydreams – this was Rosemary. She wanted to push her away from danger, away from the man with the sword, and her emotions welled up to a geyser inside her and charged up her imagination with energy. Later, a lady named Giseil would call it her wellspring.
Her very first.
And her focus narrowed like a lens, down to Rosemary, just Rosemary, Rosemary, Rosemary.
And the apple in her grip shone white, the pure white of the comet she recalled from her memories.
In her hands, it was cool to the touch. It was no true comet streaking across the sky, for no comet was alive without the night to give it shine, but this imitation was good enough. Her arm wound back and the calves stopped whispering to stare at her. Their mouths were opening.
Her eyes flashed.
A comet arrived.
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As if summoned, an apple streaked across the sky. If it were night, perhaps bovines from far away would shade their eyes and tell their children to remember this day, for next year the same comet might pass again.
But it was day. And this comet was on a collision course.
The comet struck the earth. The apple struck the forehead of a human sergeant.
And there was a cry from far above, like the avenging song of angels.
“Don’t hurt Rosemary, you iron tin-man!”
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Rosemary
The man fell to the ground like a sack of peas.
So did the… apple.
Its momentum lost, the apple descended down, then landed without a fuss. The superheated air around the silver apple blurred it, and she thought it fitting, for there was no way what she was looking at was something real and concrete. It… was just an apple, right? What the hell had even happened?
Then she heard Karra’s shout.
She looked up, then back at the apple, which was flaking away the silver on the surface to reveal a simple red coat, and a bruise on one side. When Rosemary managed to get up to her shaky legs, she reached for the apple and pulled her hand back, expecting it to burst asunder in her hands. It had to be some fashion of bovine secret weapon.
No. She held it up to the light after she gathered her nerve, and it turned out to be just that.
An apple.
Rosemary stared up, jaw agape, at the bovine hurling insults from above.
How did you do that with just an apple, Karra?
The calves lined up behind her at the summit, seeing Karra, began tossing down vegetables and branches too, cheering and counting points. Two points for a headshot, one point for a body. A carrot struck her head to cheers of “Two points!” and laughter from above.
How she wished she could laugh too.
It turned out she didn’t need to wait long.
She looked down at the unconscious man, and now that she could see him clearly, she wondered what was going on with the human’s face – was that a massive moustache? Surely not. It was as if a slug had draped itself across his face, and she felt something tickling her at the sight of it.
And right then, the grove doors slammed open.
From behind it stumbled out Lepius, who had only heard the commotion late from inside the grove. His face was etched into a rictus of misery, as if the world was sinking into grey muck and he could do nothing but watch. A half-eaten mushroom fell onto his head.
“Two points again!”
Rosemary couldn’t help it.
She burst out laughing.
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minutes later
Bendeit
Even in Bendeit’s dreams, his failure drowned him.
He had tried to go beyond his duty and save those children, even when the logic was there all along: retreat to gather all the allies they had, tell the House that it was at best a beast, and at worst a cult, then launch a complete and decisive attack with reinforcements from Lyndeira.
Instead, he had panicked like a greenboy.
That memory: his sword raised, as he charged blind and dumb into the enemy’s territory. Bless the Deity, it made him cringe. What was he thinking? It was that foreign mana… he stamped it down, growling at it. From now on, he resolved onto to listen to the duty above him, holding his reins, and nothing else.
The bovines could save themselves.
He drifted further into the emptiness of his Imagos. Around him was the realm he was so used to, simple grey walls, and a few other little things to remind him of duty. He looked up at the statues of his wife and children, the uniform ranks of his Swordsworn, the shield that hung above all the rest, its inscription the only thing with colour: protect.
Failure. How would he apologize for this? The thought was about to lull him to true sleep until a question stirred his subconscious.
The voice of a woman.
He sent a prayer to the Deity, asking that the female voice was that kind elf, Healer Pel, back in Terstein, that one of his five hundred had managed to drag him through the hordes of mind-controlled bovines and back to the city.
But the Deity did not smile on him today, and he deserved it.
“It is a real moustache, High Priestess be blessed.”
That enchanting voice. In his Imagos, he pictured himself with a snarl, a fist raised to the heavens, and it forced him to wake, to look up at those round eyes, and proclaim: “I am the dutiful man of the Deity! Your crimes will be punished by him one day, witch!”
And so he did.
There was silence. Good, he thought, let them be stunned by my faith. My duty.
Then someone was giggling. He heard the shuffling of at least three heavy boots behind him.
“Can someone fill him in? You, with the blonde hair.”
One of his subordinates, Swordsworn Franc, knelt before him. There were vague senses he could pull from now, the senses that told him which way was up or down. More of it trickled in – he was sitting on a chair, in a wooden room, and four people were in front of him, a bovine, Franc, and two… subspecies of the elves? They would certainly be favoured within those circles for their appearance, so much like the trees those pointy-eared folk loved so much.
One was the seductress. She was radiating the mana of home like an inferno gave off heat, and the other he couldn’t detect.
Franc started, “So, um, apparently-”
“Sergeant Bendeit or sir, else I shall have you do fifty wall-runs!” he said, and didn’t take his eyes off the witch as he did, “You think you’re getting away with punishment just because we’ve been captured? Do you want to do fifty wall-runs, Swordsworn?”
“Sir, no, sir!”
“Good. Now, brief me, Swordworn. How deep in the pot are we? Have they hurt you?”
“Sir, it all seems to be a misunderstanding. This was apparently an impromptu waterslide… ah, festival? For the bovine children. The tree’s just a big functioning waterslide, that’s why it was moving last night. It’s not a dungeon beast. No one’s really hurt, most only got bruised, sir,” then he stopped for a breath, and ended with, “… and those two live here, sir.”
The two strangers nodded at that.
They… were not a cult?
Bendeit mulled it over in his head, going through the excuses like a glassmaker over a pane, trying to spot pores or voids or any imperfections. How all-encompassing that answer was. It explained the screaming children, the cooking food, the bovines.
“That seems… excusable. Doesn’t it just fit perfectly, huh?”
The enchantress said, “Sergeant Bendeit, we could’ve killed you. And your men. We are letting you go back to where you came from, if you do not raise a sword to us again.”
His eyes swerved around and back to the woman. He had only just insulted her, and the fact that she addressed him correctly, with his proper title, made him lower his voice just a little.
Most civilians gave him no similar honour. They just called him Guardsman, or Bendeit.
Franc fidgeted in front of him. Bendeit noticed he still had his sword and armour, and that he hadn’t been tied up. Then it all came together. Her warm smile, her mana of home, the same as Gina’s, her screaming for the fighting to stop.
He hung his head.
So, I was wrong. Hot-headed and wrong.
And his men too, injured all because of his own brief reach for heroism.
Maybe I will be demoted back to a Swordsworn. It is only fitting.
And the tension, the one that rose from Deitfreid’s jokes in the morning, returned with a vengeance. He wanted to curse himself in front of the Deity, curse the way he let that foreign mana grab his reins so easily – just the sight of calves crying shocked him from duty? Something he devoted his life to?
The anger threatened to boil over into something ugly.
Then, the lady tree leaned down. And what a gift she gave him.
Through her mana, he could see his wife and children. It was so clear it could’ve been through the kitchen-side window, and there was that little smudge there too, just like in real life. All three of them were in the kitchen. And, as always, they arguing over supper – Gina was smirking as she held the steaming loaf of bread higher than they could reach, Sameil and little Ina incandescent, squealing “Give, give, momma!”
The tension fled at the sight.
What am I doing? Sergeant Bendeit, wake up!
He had been holding his wrists behind him, expecting them to be tied. They were not. So with those hands, he covered up his burning face, smoothed his moustache, and tried to block the reality away from him for just a moment. Just to compose himself.
Let him see his wife and children a little longer before he had to deal with it all.
I’ve really messed this up, huh?