Krosa rubbed bleary eyes, peering out the window at shadows that had appeared and then lengthened to giants in the late afternoon sun . She had managed to spend nearly her entire second day under the curse in the library. Putting her book down, she took a sip from the cold, oversteeped tea that she had forgotten she had brought with her, hours before. Stomach rumbling, she stood and stretched. Muscles and joints complained at the motion, bruises that she had managed to ignore while engrossed in reading now served as painful reminders of the past three days.
Soft light sprang suddenly from multiple sources, as candles and lamps set around the great room lit themselves, the warm glow casting shadows along the shelves. Heading downstairs, Krosa once again found her way to the kitchen, and another meal. Idly, she wondered what had become of the giant, beastly man who had been so staunch in her defense. The Baroness had told her that he had mostly recovered from his wounds, which Krosa found astonishing considering she had seen the great tears and rents in his flesh with her own eyes. But she had also seen the broad scars that created a patchwork on his skin, so she supposed that injury was nothing new.
Apparently, he had set out the prior morning, before she had emerged from her exhausted sleep, and gone to look for any other refugees from the battle. Krosa found herself hoping that he was unsuccessful in his search, as it would mean another victim pulled into the curse. Probably beats being torn apart. She thought. Probably…
The more she thought about her only humanoid companion in her current situation, the more trepidation she felt. In the forest, she had felt safe with him. He had thrown himself between her and certain death, and shown her nothing but kindness. But he was also clearly twisted by the powerful magic of the curse. His fearsome appearance, clear comfort with violence, and what she had seen as barely contained rage, all combined to make him an uncertain ally.
In a way, he reminded her of her friends and mentors. The two men killed almost casually, although never without reason. She had seen Dyrik burn a living creature alive from the inside out, and crack a joke in almost the same breath. And yet she trusted them implicitly, despite not knowing a great deal about their past, and how many bodies lay in their wake. Perhaps it was only skin deep, and the appearance of the monstrous baron was what made her suspicious of him Or perhaps it was her ever-shrinking naivety that caused her to be more wary of strangers in general.
Thinking about it, she recalled her own outbursts of emotion and magic. She didn’t recall thinking overly much as she pulled plants out of the ground to ram them into the yielding flesh of her enemies. She had even exalted in their demise, as it meant she was able to draw another breath. When she had speared the rampaging aurochs at the hunter’s camp, there had been a moment of pure exaltation. She felt a chill run down her spine.
Is this what Gost and Dyrik had meant when they’d talked about how she would change if she went down the path of war and death they walked? Surely she couldn’t have changed so much in just a few months. Growing up in a village like Provints meant she’d helped butcher her share of domestic animals as well as wild game, but she had never relished their deaths. Then again, while she had joked about the rabbits who nibbled her garden being her sworn enemies, they had never tried to kill her.
There was another component to the feeling too. She had worked hard to gain the skills she’d used against the cursed monsters of the forest. Hour after hour of study, drill, study, drill, sleep, eat, study and drill again. Blisters on her hands had turned to callus, and the near constant ache in her head from exerting her magical will had subsided over time but never completely cleared as she kept pushing herself to grow stronger. When she had killed those beasts, it was a repudiation of what she had felt during the attack on the road, so many months ago. Then, she had felt useless, overwhelmed, and terrified. Helpless.
She had never felt that way before, and never wanted to again. So she had sought power, and found it, and when she’d laid low beasts that would have killed her without effort only a short time ago, it was…validation. Proof that she had made the right choice, that with enough time she could forge herself into someone who would never feel helpless again. If she died, it would be “with her boots on”, as Gost was fond of saying. She still hadn’t quite figured that one out but she felt that her revelation put her much closer.
Thinking of her mentor made her realize that she had spent nearly the entire day and much of the last in the library, completely neglecting her physical training. It wouldn’t do. Borrowing a spear from one of the thankfully not-sentient suits of armor that stood as decorations in the main hall, she proceeded to the front courtyard. Slowly, she moved through the basic exercise and stretches Gost had drilled into her, before moving on to more complex forms. Soon, her stiff muscles had warmed and loosened, and she was handling the spear confidently as she turned her attention to her footwork. Gost had repeatedly drilled her on her footwork, insisting on having her do spear forms on all sorts of terrain. The battle in the forest had driven home how important it was, as did, she realized ruefully, her own trick of tangling her enemies feet in roots and vines.
Which gave her an idea. Reaching out with her will, she pulled at the short grass growing in the courtyard, and began to try to trip and entangle her own feet as she moved. The simultaneous use of magic along with the spear forms was incredibly straining, but she grinned as she struggled against her own will, trying to evade and entrap at the same time. It was of course nothing like fighting an actual enemy, since no matter how much autonomy she tried to give the grass, it was still under her control.
Until suddenly, it wasn’t. She felt the presence of the Baroness take hold, and the grass began whipping towards her with discernible menace, blades sharpening to a cutting edge, roots reaching up to grasp at her. The practice took on a new level of intensity as Krosa attempted to deflect and dodge, her careful forms falling apart under the onslaught. Soon, sweat poured off her in spite of the cool air, and her breath came in great heaving gasps as she fought the grass that now towered above her. Small cuts had opened on her arms as the grass scored hits, the wounds stinging far more than she felt was reasonable.
As unexpectedly as it began, it was over. Krosa found herself on her back, spear thrown halfway across the courtyard, and a blade of grass at her throat. Specifically, a grass sword blade the length of her arm, wielded by an apparition of green. The figure was human-shaped, and she felt it was staring at her for a moment before it fell apart, dissolving back into the ground from whence it came.
Shaking, Krosa got back to her feet. In her head, the Baroness spoke. “You learn quickly, child. That is good. But there is much you still do not understand about the manipulation of nature. Sit, and reach out with your will, and I will show you.”
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Obliging, Krosa folded her legs and sat. Closing her eyes, she reached out, connecting to the grass, then the small trees and shrubs, and the great vines that grew in the moat and along the walls. She breathed deeply, feeling air fill her lungs at the same time she felt light enter into pores that were not hers, feeding energy from the sun itself into her core. Reaching further, she felt the guiding will of the Baroness connect through the growing things around the keep.
As it did, she suddenly felt like her mind had exploded. Sensory input far greater than anything she had ever felt overwhelmed her, and she nearly broke the connection. But she held on, like a drowning man grips at flotsam, and soon the relentless sea calmed, and she was able to perceive what the Baroness was trying to show her. It was the Curse. Or at least, part of it. Her mind still reeled from the initial impact, and she could feel a trickle of blood running from her nose. From deep beyond the ocean that now tossed her in its waves, she felt a memory push through. Dyrik, leaning against her garden fence, rambling about magic.
“Now keep in mind there’s nothing wrong with pushing your abilities. It’s like holding your breath, you’ll pass out long before you die. Same thing, if you use too much magic you usually just kind of shut down. I mean sure, your nose might bleed a bit but that could just mean the air is too dry, or if you’re Gost, that you’ve been picking it too much.” The man in her memory dodged a lazily thrown turnip taken from the compost pile, then continued.
“So headaches are totally normal. Nosebleeds, sure it happens, no harm done. Lose consciousness? Well you went a bit too far but you usually have to be awake to do magic so the good news is you won’t go any farther and you’ll probably be fine so long as whatever you were doing magic against doesn’t kill you while you’re out. But sometimes, just sometimes, you miiight start bleeding from your eyes. That’s when you know you’re in trouble. You get the red tears, you know you’re about one spell away from melting your brain. Literally.”
Retrieving the turnip, the erudite mage had used some aspect of fire she had never seen him demonstrate before to make the vegetable, for lack of a better word, melt. He’d grinned in triumph at his demonstration. Then he’d thrown the remaining liquid at Gost, and the lesson had been put on pause for some time after that.
The memory grounded her, and reaching up to her eyes, she found them dry enough. This is not as bad as it seems, my eyes aren’t even bleeding! She scoffed unconvincingly to herself. Still though, it was bearable, and there was knowledge to be gained.
Her guide once again reached out, and began to show her various parts of the cursed land, and Krosa wondered as she “saw” the grounds around the castle through the plants that grew there, the more as her mind went further and further out. Some places appeared as voids in her awareness, and the Baroness explained that those were areas of rock and water, and how to tell one from the other.
Krosa could do none of this on her own, that much she knew. The baroness’s power was beyond her comprehension, but being lent that power was teaching her more in these few brief minutes than she could gain in a month of reading books. A feeling of intense gratitude took root in her chest as she gathered in all that she could from the experience.
As she let the information soak into her for later analysis, she felt something odd. Sending a questioning thought to her new teacher, she felt the Baroness focus intently on an area next to one of the hazy voids in the mental map that indicated a river.
The connection broke.
Krosa fell backwards onto the hard packed ground of the courtyard, mind reeling and tiny spasms shaking her muscles as she recovered. The shock of the sudden and almost violent change in mental states caused her head to ache as she once again checked her eyes for blood. Good, just regular tears, no problem. She could still feel an echo of the baroness in her mind, the fear and rage echoing like a scream. She still saw what had caused the flood of emotion to overwhelm her senses.
Yashik. She had known as soon as the Baroness did, the information setting the link they shared on fire. He had appeared strangely on the mental map, not a void like the water or rock, but not a vibrant presence like the trees and other growing things. But the identification had been clear, and it had also been clear that something was horribly wrong.
The baroness screaming in her mind compelled her to her feet, then she was walking, then running. Out the gate, towards the place on the map where the mighty Yashik lay on the banks of some nameless stream. That was all she had glimpsed of his situation, and as she ran she realized that she had left the castle without any weapons or supplies, such was the sense of urgency that the baroness had conveyed.
The spear she had been practicing with hummed through the air and planted itself like a sapling next to the path. Something had thrown it from the courtyard with perfect accuracy, and more strength than any natural human. She didn’t even slow as she grabbed it, twirling into a carry that was most conducive to running, and sprinted down the overgrown road. She felt energy flow into her, more of the baroness’s magic at work no doubt. Her feet flew over the leaves as she left the road and began to dodge through the trees.
Her sense of the life around her made the dense forest almost as easy to run through as an open road, Tangling roots and vines seemed to move out of her way, guiding a path around boulders and other obstacles. The urgency that had compelled her out of the castle began to fade somewhat as she gained distance from the powerful green mage that had rooted there, and she could now discern the grief-ridden panic of the baroness from her own gentle concern for her new acquaintance.
Even though she had hardly met him, she’d found him decent, polite, and willing to face down demons in her defense. She also suspected that he had been doing so for years, all alone out here in the woods. The thought of the beast horde overrunning her little village ran through her mind like a wildfire, brief but devastating. Determination from her own will now strengthened her steps as the compulsion from the castle faded. He had saved her, maybe more than she even knew. So she would save him, if she could. Some puzzles were complicated, but not this one.
It was not long before she felt that she was nearing the correct place. The sound of rushing water falling from a height could be heard, and she steered towards what was clearly a waterfall. Soon she was able to catch glimpses of the foaming rapids spilling down from the hills above to drop precipitously into a small pool that had formed to hold the water in the mountain’s embrace one final time before releasing it to the wide world below. She stumbled down a rock-strewn path, clumsy in these last moments before reaching her goal.
And there he was. Tangled with the corpse of a large, gaunt, but seemingly un-cursed bear, Yashik lay in a shallow eddy, the only sign of animation coming from the gentle nudges of the stream as it passed by. The water had washed away much of the blood that must have once covered the giant man, but that only served to emphasize the gaping wounds that seeped slowly from all over his body.
Krosa froze at the sight, taking in what she felt sure had to be the corpse of her only human companionship inside the curse. Forcing herself to get closer, she inched forward, cautiously stepping across smooth stones slippery with moss and algae. The water struck at her legs like a wip of cold, icy and clear, it made her pay a price in warmth for daring to cross it. But that discomfort was forgotten, when she saw the mighty chest move, ever so slightly.