In no time at all, the sight of Trunian forces tromping through the village became as ordinary as the buzz of summer gnats or the gossip of old women. It took our befuddled hero a long time to learn the difference between the sort that would speak to you and the sort that would clout you in the head. It didn’t help matters that the old women would also clout him in the head too, as if it were the most natural thing in the world on account of Denor being the resident village idiot.

He also found good use of his translator when it came to understanding the Trunians, much to the surprise of anyone who had been paying attention to him. Before long, he’d be used as a walking translator as much as his grandfather, who, it must be said, knew most of his language from either disembowelling or making love to foreigners in his distant past. This earned Denor a grim sort of amusement from Ledo, who remarked with a wry smile, "Looks like you’re not going to be a cleaner or jester after all, lad. It might not change the world, but translators are always useful, so it’s something."

Ever since the battle and the almost immediate occupation of their lands, his father had been oddly quiet. When he did speak, he also sported some sort of unnerving joviality that feels all too brittle, like a calm before a storm. He had also stopped training Denor altogether.

"Why would me being a translator be useful?" Denor asked, genuinely puzzled. "Can’t they just get more of the thing that got shoved in my head?"

"It’s the first thing that’s entered your ear that hasn’t gone straight out the other one, so that’s an accomplishment," Ledo replied with the air of someone who had seen a genuine surprise for the first time in many moons. "Those devices don’t grow on trees, and it’s actually made you useful for a change. I was against it initially but Tycho talked me round."

Denor considered this, then said, "Well, I still want to be an adventurer like my grandfather, perhaps a freighter will hire me on as a translator and..."

"Ha! Like any Captain worth his salt would employ us," Ledo snorted. "They’ll allow us to live in this village and trade with them. But beyond that, the invaders couldn’t care less. Why should they? They won. It’s up to us to do the adapting by staying put and doing what we’re told, not them."

The words echoed in Denor’s head, and it was only partly because there was a lot of empty space in there. They were a beaten people, and they had nowhere to run. A truth as bitter as the cold wind off the northern mountains.

"What can we do, Ledo?" he asked, desperation creeping into his voice. "We can’t just stay here. I can’t just stay here in this village until I’m old."

Ledo looked at him, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. "The time will come," he said, his voice low but steady. "One day, the time will be right. But it’s not now. Patience, boy—patience. Right now, we’re licking our wounds and mending what we can. But the time will come. And when it does, we’ll be ready."

“So I just have to behave myself until the time is right?”

Ledo sighed. “I'd like to believe that you can this time. I really would.”

Patience, as anyone who’s ever been young knows, is a virtue easier to preach than to practice. Some days, Denor found it impossible to look at a Trunian without the urge to fling himself at them, armed with nothing but fury, which would be as effective as using a spoon to fight a bear. On such days, he fled the village as if the very air there was poison, hunting alone in the woods and hills that had remained mercifully untouched by their presence.

Ledo, for his part, said nothing about these frequent disappearances. The gunsmith could’ve used an extra pair of hands, but given that those hands were attached to Denor he knew he’d be better off asking one of the other village boys. Or girls. Or perhaps one of the dogs. He also understood that Denor needed to escape before the seed that they had planted began to sprout. The boy couldn’t die, and as he stalked various wildlife unsuccessfully and began honing his fighting skills further out of the sight of the occupiers, his mind would inevitably wander to grander prey: Temrit, Trunians, even Kilru. Little did Denor know just how devastating a lack of consequences could make a warrior.

Ultimately things could have been worse for Ledo, he had Denor to showcase that daily.

He just hoped that the boy would remember that the life of his entire family was on the line before he blew a gasket.

***

Spring was slowly giving way to summer, though on this icy planet, ‘summer’ was more a state of mind than an actual season. The days stretched out, long and hesitant, as if unsure of whether they really wanted to be here. The sun, when it showed its face, rose lazily in the northeast and took its sweet time setting in the northwest. Even the eternal mist that clung to Andron VII began to lift a little, revealing a sky that was a washed-out grey-blue, but blue nonetheless. The coniferous forests looked a tad less forbidding, with ferns adding hopeful splashes of green here and there.

Denor crept through the forest with his companion Charan, as Ledo didn’t trust the boy not to mess everything up if not supervised. Charan was an insurance policy so that Denor didn’t get them all killed. The reward for him doing so? Not being stuck on this icy planet with only Denor and Trunians for company.

Long bouts of practice and repeated pointing out from everyone nearby meant that our hero actually did creep without immediately giving his position away. At the edge of a small clearing, the boys froze, scanning the open space with the wariness of a pair of foxes sniffing out a trap.

“Does something feel different to you, or is it just me?” Charan asked.

Denor looked down at his trousers, but they were dry.

“Not that, idiot. I mean the atmosphere.”

Without a word, Denor ventured forward from the shelter of two pines, moving so quietly that even a passing Gurruk scout would’ve nodded in approval. You could almost say there had been a progression in his skills, but let’s not get carried away.

In the clearing, they paused again, senses on high alert. “I feel like something is calling to me, though not in words.”

“There’s plenty of trees nearby if you’re feeling that call.”

Charan scowled. “More like a pull that’s more felt than heard.”

Denor frowned but pressed on, knowing that whatever it was, he would find it. And when he did, well, it was probably going to be something calamitous, much like the graveyard last season, or the ravine full of Gurruks and the tomb and that damn raven that turned into a lady.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Thanks to his relative social isolation, Denor had yet to realise that this sort of thing didn’t usually happen to teenage boys.

Charan chose not to engage the boy further on the grounds that it might cause more words to come out of Denor’s mouth.

Both boys now wore a frown as they surveyed the clearing before them. These woods were as familiar to them as the back of their hands—more so, really, since they often had to wear gloves out here—but this particular path? It was as if the forest had decided to rearrange itself when he wasn’t looking, just for the fun of it. A rare case of turnabout where something chose to irritate Denor, rather than the opposite. The boy shrugged and trudged along, because it led him in the direction he wanted to go. The notion that it might also lead him where he needed to go was, as yet, blissfully absent.

“Is it just me or do these woods look different to you?” Charan hazarded asking a question to Denor.

“Did you hear something?” Denor asked, halting.

Charan shook his head.

“Did I?”

Charan raised an eyebrow. “How would I know if you heard something, Denor?”

“This reminds me of the advice Ledo gave me before I left,” the boy mused.

Charan realised that he had to ask the unfortunate follow-up question. “What advice was that?”

“He said Denor, you're as dumb as an Aurox and twice as ugly, if you find yourself lost in a strange place, I say keep walking! Or was that my grandfather? They tell me stuff like that all the time.”

So he did keep walking, but a little farther down the path, he halted, turning his head this way and that like a Trunian bolt thrower when things were too quiet. His frown deepened, furrowing his brow into something that could have passed for ‘serious’ if not for the fact that it made his youthful face look constipated. The birds, which had been enthusiastically squabbling over mates just a few weeks ago, were now quieter, their songs tapering off into occasional coos and chirps. But here, now, in this clearing? Silence had settled over him like a heavy blanket, thick and suffocating. His eyes darted left, right, up, down, which his brain had finally discovered were the four main directions. The forest appeared indifferent to his perceptions, and remained just as it had before. Except, of course, it wasn’t. The silence was too deep, something was wrong here.

“Tamet,” Denor muttered, not out of any real expectation that the trickster god would offer a hand (or a clue out of pity and a desire to speed along proceedings) but simply to hear something in the oppressive quiet. The name echoed strangely through the trees, traveling farther than it had any right to. But Denor knew better than to rely on Tamet for help. His lord was the most fickle of them all.

Feeling the need for some kind of reassurance, he raised his battered blaster before continuing down the path. Not that an unused blaster could do much against a particularly eerie sort of quiet, but it was better than nothing. And if there was one thing Denor had learned, it was that the difference between bravery and foolishness often came down to how ready you were to make a bad situation slightly worse. A skill that he had cultivated magnificently throughout his formative years, much to the irritation of everyone else.

Forced into dealing with Denor’s internal monologue, even the narrator now understood why Charan didn’t try to engage him.

They pressed on, confusion growing with each step. The forest seemed older now, older even than it had this morning—if that was possible, which thanks to the passage of time it was—as if these trees had been here since the first whisper of wind and the first drop of rain. Denor scratched his head, wondering where such an odd certainty had come from. But there it was, lodged firmly in his mind, growing stronger with every step he took. It all reminded him too much of the ravine the led to the ancient tomb, but he knew he was nowhere near that cursed part of the planet.

“This feels wrong,” Charan murmured, having drawn his own weapon in response to the change in atmosphere.

“It’s okay Charan, if anything bad happens to you, I’ll be here to save you,” Denor replied.

Charan looked his companion up and down and sighed. “Denor, you’re scratching your head with your blaster.”

Denor shrugged. “What? I was itchy. Besides, the safety is—”

Shortly after, but prior to the completion of this sentence, there was a discharge, the smell of burning hair, and a great deal of consternation on the part of his companion.

After this unfortunate incident, the aforementioned ancientness soon weighed on them more heavily than the silence, stirring a fear that was far older and far deeper than anything Denor or Charan had felt before. At the latter’s beckoning they finally came to a stop, and the subsequent attempt to retrace their obvious steps failed. An icy shiver raced down Charan’s spine long before Denor had figured out what was wrong. The path that had been so clear behind them was now gone. Or maybe it had never been there at all. Yet when they turned forward again, it still stretched ahead.

“We’ve come this far,” Denor said aloud, though even he could barely hear his own words. The trees, it seemed, had decided that his voice wasn’t worth sharing, a sentiment that his long-suffering companion and audience in general agreed with.

With a defiant set to his jaw, Denor took the lead and marched onward. The path led him past a colossal fir tree—so large that he was certain he’d have remembered if he’d seen it before. Then the path turned sharply left, and Denor, stubborn as an Aurox with its mind made up, followed with Charan reluctantly in tow.

An ancient grey stone ruin loomed before them, so old it seemed to have sprouted from the earth itself. Clearly, it had once been a temple, but to which god? Certainly not Tamet; the god wasn’t one for temples or priesthoods. Perhaps this temple had tumbled through time itself, from an age long forgotten, to land here in their present. It sounded like a circus act, the Tumbling Temple of Tamet. The alliterative nomenclature was right there, but it would some time before Denor had the opportunity to join a circus troupe. Perhaps this temple even hailed from the lost empire of Vernia, from whose survivors the Andronians were said to descend. But of this, Denor knew next to nothing, and Charan had subsided into wary silence.

After a glance at each other and a wary nod, they approached the ruin with caution, noting how the massive stones were rough-hewn but fit together with uncanny precision, leaving no room even for a knife blade to slip through. The entrance, though partially blocked by a fallen lintel, still allowed for passage, especially if one happened to be a boy with more agility than sense. Since Denor’s levels of sensibility were so low, even his clumsy footing was superior to his sense.

“I think I’ll just wait outside and… stand guard, Denor,” Charan said, expressing his healthy fear of underground passageways. In fairness to the boy, he had been trapped in one as a zombie and forced to mine for six months, so even Denor understood that particular reluctance.

With a shrug, the our hero wriggled past the fallen stone, and as soon as he did, an eerie whistling filled the air. It wasn’t clear whether it came from some strange instrument or the throat of an even stranger bird, but it had the instant effect of raising every hair on Denor’s body. It was a sound that carried with it the sense of ancient, buried malice.

Any sensible child would have turned and fled the other way, but Denor was committed in the sort of fashion that infamous leaders are when they’ve made a catastrophic decision. Utterly unwavering, despite all indications that wavering might save them a good deal of trouble

The entrance led left, then right, then in and out before shaking it all about, this caused Denor to get turned around. Perhaps that was what it was all about? Then it opened into a vast courtyard paved with dark grey stones, laid as tightly as the walls themselves. Only a few stubborn bushes and saplings had managed to take root between them, with the inexorable nature of a plant that says ‘look out world, here I come’ before punching through solid steel. In the center of the courtyard stood an altar made of white marble, which gleamed in stark contrast to the gloomy surroundings.

Strange figures and symbols were carved into the altar, and atop it, the remnants of a statue. Only the feet and legs remained, but even that brief glimpse made Denor’s head spin and his stomach churn. If this ruin could evoke such a reaction from just the statue’s remains, he dreaded to think what the whole figure might have done to his senses. Some things, Denor decided, were best left lost in the mists of time.

As he stood there, transfixed by the altar’s strange carvings, he failed to notice one of the paving stones silently pivoting downward behind it. He might have missed it entirely, had it not been for a strange, hungry hiss that suddenly filled the air, pulling his attention away from the ancient altar and toward whatever lurked beneath the earth.

The hiss of a creature that looked at Denor and thought he’d make an excellent starter with an extra helping of death on top.