Turning Point (Part 1)

Eana watched her brother go as she and Gendra joined the group of adventurers heading toward the Hive. The light clatter of weapons and armor along with the footfalls of the group were the only noises as they approached the break in the trees that served as the main road to the Hive.

Eana hadn’t realized she was hoping for sun after the strangeness of the Chaos storm until above her she noticed the sky lightening only slightly from black to gray. Dark clouds, heavy with rain had begun to gather as the rescuers entered the trees.

Nobody seemed interested in talking, whether from the effects of waking so unexpectedly, the poor weather or the grim nature of their mission Eana wasn’t sure.

But overall? She felt good. Not happy, not excited, but purposeful. She knew what her job was and so did everybody else. She was here not as an accident or because she was the sister of somebody they all liked, but because they needed her.

It felt good to be needed.

The group began to spread out around her as quiet orders were passed. She saw Galvar, leader of Breakthrough, at the front and figured it might be coming from him. She and Gendra continued to stay in the middle but the other adventurers all gave a wide berth to them as they moved.

Chrys remained near them. Their bodyguard, Eana supposed. She had a sudden urge to tell the woman that she had been training as a warrior. That she had cleared rooms in an actual dungeon.

But she really didn’t want to get into how the rest of that whole adventure had turned out so she decided to just keep moving.

A voice rang out from their left, “One here.” Followed by the clicking of one of the hive Drones, some rustling, and then quiet again.

“Got it,” the voice said, and the group continued forward.

Some light chatter spread through the group after this first encounter. Men and women a dozen feet or more apart whispered to each other speculation on what had just happened.

“Why is everybody so worked up about that?” Eana asked.

“It doesn’t happen this far out,” Chrys said, “It’s well beyond the Hive’s influence. We’re on guard because that guy,” she signaled at one of the Scouts on the periphery, “told us that we needed to be. Never expected us to run into any of these things until we got closer.”

Eana just nodded, noting only to herself that Drones had chased her almost back to the edge of the node and this didn’t seem too different. But that was her. She was different.

And when she was around bad things tended to happen. As if on queue she felt the first heavy drops of rain slip through the tree cover.

“Stupid Tomme…” she muttered to herself.

Over the next hour it began to happen with more frequency. Somebody would call out, the whole group would stop and tense up, then they would call out that they took care of it. It began to happen with such frequency that the group had palpably slowed, triggering Galvar to shout into the surrounding woods, “We’re done stopping for this! Keep moving!”

As they got closer, Eana began to feel it. The air was different. She hadn’t been out this close to the hive since healing Galvar, but even then it had just felt normal. Now though, there was something else. It wasn’t stifling, though she saw no one in the rest of the group seemed to notice it like she did. It was more like she had entered into a stream with a current that could go any direction at all. It was like an invisible wind but less sensation, more emotion. And with it came the ominous feeling that it would try and sweep them all away.

A pair of adventurers broke off and ran ahead while the rest of the group closed in and crouched down.

“What are they doing?” Eana whispered.

“The redoubt is just ahead,” Chrys whispered back, “They’re checking to see if we can get better information before moving forward.”

“More prudent than I gave you credit for,” Gendra muttered.

“Going step by step, clearing each space on the way, making sure we don’t walk into any traps?” Chrys asked, “This is what we do every time we enter a dungeon.”

With everybody stopped and silently waiting, deep in the woods ahead Eana could hear it now. The sounds of fighting, the clicking of the bug men, and, distinct among the shouts and warcries that made up the larger part of the din, the screams of the wounded and dying.

Those were the people she was here to help. She wanted to call out to them, tell them to hold on.

Instead she whispered, “How long do we..”

“Shh!” Chrys cut her off. The woman seemed to be straining to hear something.

Eana did as she was told, suddenly anxious. The far off fighting combined with her pounding heart made it difficult to hear anything, but then there was something… faint.

“Group right! RIGHT!” A man’s voice shouted.

A deep staccato of insect clicking, followed by a chorus of countless others exploded from the direction the man had called from.

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Instantly the woods were alive with movement and light as the adventurers sprang into action. Skills activated, spells flew, and men and women rushed past to meet the oncoming bug men.

“Stay behind me,” Chrys said, unlimbering her shield and sword. She activated a spell that caused a bubble of energy to flash into existence around her, some sort of protective shield spell. Slowly it faded away from being completely visible to only showing up as a soft sheen, barely noticeable.

The battle was only partially visible through the trees. Occasionally a bug man Drone would charge forward out of the woods and get cut down expertly by Chrys. She saw more of them jumping between and among the trees, springing off the trunks and launching themselves at adventurer’s unprotected sides.

The men and women of the adventuring bands seemed well used to this sort of fighting however, and even where the drones managed to get in and grapple, there was always another bandmate to pull it off or sweep off a limb, freeing their companion.

It was the Hive Soldier that was taking some more careful work.

Eana caught glimpses of it, huge and gray with those expressionless eyes. It clicked endlessly as it swept about with heavy, armored arms, catching more than one adventurer and causing damage.

While several of the more powerful of the group kept the Soldier occupied, the rest of them cleaned up the drones. There must have been dozens upon dozens. Eana never imagined the hive could have so many. But even with such huge numbers the drones themselves weren’t too great a threat.

And soon enough, without the support of the smaller drones, the Hive Soldier fell.

As if on cue, the two adventurers who had been sent ahead returned to report on the path forward, and those who had been injured approached Eana and Gendra for healing.

Heart pounding, Eana took to walking among the injured and passing her glowing hands across each of them. She saw in their faces that familiar emotional shift, that eager hatred, but this time with a clear goal and purpose in front of them it seemed they were able to push it down. To ignore it, at least in part.

Idris had been right. It could be done. People could learn to control themselves around her and just let her do what she was meant to do - help them. She tried concentrating on the feeling of her own magic but, as before, to her there was nothing unusual she could sense about her casting.

She avoided Tomme, though. Best to leave him to Gendra. Eana didn’t want to push her luck.

The Scouts, ironically, reported the way was clear to the redoubt where the men and women they had come here to rescue had taken up defensive positions.

Healed up and ready, the group continued forward - formation tighter now. Facing no further resistance, Eana began to wonder again why the people they came to rescue didn’t just leave. Why was it necessary for all of these people to come out and “rescue” adventurers? She just watched their small group dismantle a huge crowd of the bug men without losing anybody and..

And then they emerged from the trees upon a scene of complete chaos.

The “redoubt” was a place of semi-safety near the Hive the adventurers had been building piecemeal since they first started running the dungeon. Trees had been cleared and combined with earthworks to create a fortification that would keep out the curious, but even Eana figured she could climb the steep earthen walls if she had a little time.

To monsters that spent their “lives” in tunnels? It wasn’t even an obstacle.

Drones scrambled up in twos and threes, leaping over the sides in a flurry of limbs and insect clicking.

To the adventurers the walls seemed more of a hindrance than anything, given the ground slowly turning to mud under their churning feet. She kept glancing around the various ramparts, taking in the scene and expecting to see people slipping.

The adventurers who still held the top surpassed her expectations and, with precise movements and cuts, took down the bugs that made it over the top. But there were far too few of them. Here and there a monster would break through and run into the clearing amid the walls and leap upon one of the few who tended to the wounded, or even the wounded themselves.

The redoubt had a gap in the center of each of four walls. As they ran through the nearest one, Eana saw one adventurer, both legs missing, grapple with one of the drones and stab it to death as it attempted to do the same to him. There was no neat line of wounded waiting for treatment, no obviously safe space. Just blood and bodies and the screaming confusion of ceaseless individual fights for survival.

Eana understood now why they had not left. The attacks were so consistent, the breaches so terrifying for the wounded that none of them had time to breathe, much less run. She had a small moment of respect for the adventurers. Many of them could have run, but that would have meant leaving their wounded teammates behind. And it seemed things were not yet that desperate.

Galvar took charge immediately, calling out orders to the various bands that made up their small group, “Black Hats, Wolves, to the ramparts, Breakthrough and healers - organize these wounded, get them triaged and pass out potions. The rest of you clear out the bug man corpses and use them to help block off the gaps closest to the hive. Leave our retreat clear!”

Nobody questioned, they all ran off to their assigned tasks. The adventuring groups that ran to the walls found and manned every stretch of wall that, until the reinforcements arrived, had been empty. They began fighting almost immediately. The rest got to setting order about the camp and filling the gaps left by broken gates and hastily stacked detritus with the bodies of the fallen bug men.

They could do this, Eana thought.

“Find any with small injuries. Five or six healings needed at most and get to putting them back on their feet and back on the walls,” Gendra instructed Eana, “Potions will keep the near-dead from going further while we get things moving.”

She did so. The first was a man with a broken leg. Somebody had already set and splinted it, and with not more than a few muttered curse words at her as she healed him the man was up and back to fighting.

She moved on.

It was the same with most of them. Large gashes, concussions leaving men and women too dazed to fight coherently. She could heal them all, and while the repercussions seemed minimal, Eana felt that same charge in the air she had noticed before, growing in strength. She was wading in a river of some sort of energy out here, and the current followed her, pushing harder the more she used her powers.

There were places in the camp where it was less palpable. She moved there to heal whenever she could, which seemed to thicken the sensation there while it ebbed where she was before. She wasn’t sure what was happening, but it seemed best not to let it grow too strong.

But when Gendra noticed how much she was running from one end of the redoubt to the other she shouted, thinning patience obvious in her tone, “Stay in one place and let the wounded come to you! You’re wasting time with all this flitting about.”

Eana tried to argue back, unwilling to explain what she was actually doing, “I thought that if I could heal the adventurers on the walls, they wouldn’t need to -”

“Do as I say! There are people dying down here while you’re healing cuts and scrapes over there!”

There was no arguing it, Gendra was no fool. So Eana did as she was told.

But as order began to take shape around the camp and hope seemed to be returning, she realized Galvar had given no orders about what to do with the human dead. And just how many there were began to become apparent.

Galvar and the remaining members of Breakthrough, noticing the same thing and having distributed potions to the worst of the wounded who could not wait to be healed magically, began to collect the bodies in a row.

Eana counted almost twenty of them. Dressed variously in mail, leather, plate and even robes or the plain garb of former peasants turned adventurer, but all of them with the same empty, often mauled faces of death.

This was fast turning into the stuff of nightmares.