1 | Silk Flower Bark

Monsters don’t attack when the sun is this high.

Eli rolls over and spits blood from his mouth. His head pounds, and he glowers into the edge of the rabid trees where the creature retreated. A rustle of ferns and not much else greets him. Getting to his aching knees, he rubs his ribs where something rammed him at full speed. With all his magic gone, he’s lucky he didn’t break a rib.

“Where are you?” he hisses when he can breathe steady once again.

Monsters don’t come to this mountaintop when the sun is high and hot. No matter how the broken magic tries to obscure the sun, it still fears it.

Something big just sent him hard into the rocky soil of the mountaintop. Whatever it is, if it’s out with the sunlight and attacking, he can’t leave it. At night, it will come back with a vengeance.

What if the magic is worsening?

Heavens, he hopes not.

Though it isn’t much use, he breathes deep calls to the Order as he once did, hoping for the magic it should provide. It responds not, as it hasn’t for years, and he claps once, as he did when he was a child and was first learning to harness it.

Suffer, human blood, drown, drown, drown—

Wrinkling his nose, Eli glares into the distance and pushes aside the growl of a voice in the back of his mind, like an old man on the brink of death, as Eli’s years are dragging him toward. It has been as such for over a decade now, and he is both accustomed to it and filled with desperate frustration whenever the power which once welcomed him not only rejects him but seems to no longer exist in the slightest.

Considering, he rolls back his sleeve and presses his fingers to the center of his right palm. There is a dot there, a little blue thing that came when the Order cracked and has not left since. It came with the drawing of blood and has remained. What it means, he suspects has something to do with the change in magic but has never determined how. No one else he has met appears to know.

Sometimes, he wonders if it is part of the lost Order and will answer his call. But now, as ever before, there is no such luck. It glows the faintest shimmer at his pressure but otherwise responds not.

“Useless thing,” he mumbles, whether to himself or the Order, he knows not.

The ferns rustle.

Eli squints at the place. He was out here harvesting mushrooms to dry.

Tonight, perhaps he will have meat instead.

Retrieving his sickle from where it fell in the stinging ferns, Eli squints into the trees and takes a few steps inside, still rubbing his arm tenderly against his ribs. They’re going to be sore for ages. He hears nothing out of the ordinary. His hearing isn’t what it once was, not between the decades and the one time a blade cleaved apart the left side of his skull. His ear isn’t terribly pretty, and he’s never quite heard out of it the same since, but it’s far from useless.

Perhaps the creature has simply taken off.

Something so large should not be out in the sun, and certainly not this high up on the mountain. There is a reason Eli chose this abandoned monastery, after all.

Something is wrong.

Approaching the shifting ferns, keeping his body behind tree after tree so he does not get charged out of the blue, he catches the flash of pale fur among the dark ferns. Twisting his sickle in his hand, he rubs his thumb against the old leather wrapping the handle. The broken Order of the magic attacks all weapons made for means of war—it does not seem to understand a harvesting blade, and so Eli uses it for protection, keeping his old Warrior’s sword safe under the stone floor of the monastery building where he has taken up residence.

The blade is sharp, and he has used it on more than one occasion.

Recently, he has only had to use it on small things and viscous plants. A monster attack is…well, not new, but unusual.

The head of the beast slides into view, and Eli glimpses the slitted red eye followed by an otherworldly hiss of a noise. It does not sound correct for any animal.

Before he can get a good eye on it, the creature lunges, shooting from the turns in a blur of gray fur and something darker. Protected by the nearest tree and ignoring the ferns reaching out to sting him, Eli ducks around the trunk and takes the creature’s head clean off with a careful slice. Fern fronds rustle and recoil, and the monster flops dead against the soil. Squinting at it, he gets nothing from his Order but something resembling a title.

Hoofed Ram | Silk Flower Bark

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Frowning, he approaches carefully and sees what the Order has mutated. A mountain goat? Indeed, something resembling a mountain goat lays in pieces among the ferns. A matted pale fur is dappled with bunches of pink flowers he’s never seen. Two massive, curled horns are massed with spikes of wood as if the entire horns themselves have become part of a spiny-barked tree.

He’s lucky none of the spikes touched him, and feels his ribs for blood anyhow. None.

Lucky old man.

Eli nudges the nearest one with the toe of his boot, curious if he could use it for something. If it has taken on the attributes of a tree, Eli doesn’t know if touching it will poison him. Hooking the tip of his bloody sickly into the horns, he hauls it out of the shifting trees and ferns and into the courtyard of the monastery. Next, he does so with the body, finding much of it has turned to soil, but some fresh meat remains. Cutting away the mutated parts is enough—he has been eating half-rabid animals for years. If it were going to have an effect on him, he’d be long dead.

It’s morning, but mountaintops are the first places to see the sun. Long, blue-lonely shadows stretch fingers across the occasional cobblestones and packed earth of the courtyard. An ancient fountain sits in the center. It fills with rainwater when the sky decides to open up, crispy leaves the rest of the time. A well in the center has a long rope and a bucket, and still gives over fresh water for Eli all these years.

Dragging water out, he cleans his blade and frowns at the carcass. Leaves blow gently across the cobblestones. The last closest beast to this size he found up here was a rather large rat. There are the birds, of course, but they are small and mostly let him be.

Eli can’t imagine going down the mountain—what horrors would await him down there?

No, he is quite content to stay up here.

Well, not content, but there is little other place to stay with the world falling apart.

Cutting away what meat he can and considering the flower-rotted fur a lost cause, Eli leaves the horns to deal with later and heads back to the hovel where he has made his home. Giving a final glance into the trees, he pauses on the stone step to his door. Nothing is truly out of place—besides his sore ribs and the start it gave him, but he hopes larger creatures are not about to make a habit of finding him up here.

“Don’t be such a pessimist, old man,” he mutters and shoves his way inside.

He found this abandoned place long ago and managed to make it his home. What it used to be, he isn’t quite certain, but it resembles a monastery enough, carved into the side of this mountain. Certainly, it was a little community of sorts, for there is enough room between this little stone place he has chosen to occupy and the others clustered around it for at least a few dozen people.

It was covered in dust and clinging to the occasional bone by the time he found it.

Perhaps, it was abandoned even before the world fell.

Inside, he has a nice little hearth currently glowing with embers, a bed and a table to use as extra kitchen space if he needs it. Above, there is a second story to this place, but he uses it little. It is mostly rotten in what wood was used to build it, and he has no interest in tempting fate.

Up here, he has little salt to spare—just what he can trade for in the village down the mountain, and he has not been there for at least a year—and he must only collect fallen firewood or risk some rather alive and angry trees. Perhaps he will preserve the meat in the sun, drying it out. But there is little of it. He could cook it all up and have a good two days of stew before he would worry about it going bad. It is cool up here and in his cellar, anyhow—

A thump echoes agains the front door. Eli turns to give it a look as if it’s offended him. He fashioned the thing out of a fallen tree when he first arrived and it has served well, but no spiny-horned mutated mountain goat better be slamming its head against it.

An often-boarded up window sits alongside the door, and he does not wish to open it or the door itself and get the surprise of his life. Throwing the meat into the pot, he grumbles and heads up to the trapdoor leading to the second story, shoving it up with a good amount of muscle and swearing.

From the window up here, he can see down into the courtyard, at the ram’s head were he left it, and into the cluster of other buildings carved into the mountainside. To his right, there isn’t much to see. A short drop down is punctuated by an even farther drop after. Nothing has come up that side to his knowledge, and he doubts even mountain goats would have a hell of a time.

Otherwise, the monastery is empty.

There is no back door to this place save one, most of it built directly into the wall of stone. But there are tunnels to the other structures Eli discovered early on. Patting his belt for the knife that no longer rests there, he maneuvers back down the trapdoor, shutting and latching it firmly.

He eyes the sickle but is concerned to dull it in a fight unless necessary. Sharpening it is a pain since his whetstone was ground away to nothing a few months back. The fire poke will be easier, depending on the intruder.

His front window is open.

Did I leave it unlatched? “Of course, I didn’t.”

Grasping the fire poker—even if the other end is nearly too hot for comfort—he puts his boot to the chest under the window and shoves it aside with a grunt, ready to put all his weight into a swing with the metal poker—

A boy gasps and bolts back to the door in a scramble of limbs. Eli blinks and yelps. A human? Nearly more amused than flummoxed, he watches the kid yank at the lock on the front door, drag it open, and throw himself back outside.

In the ensuing quiet, Eli chuckles once, then considers he should not find this amusing. A moment later, he realizes the danger, sighs, and stalks after the kid. How did a child even make his way out here?

It isn’t possible.

He didn’t get much of a chance to look at him, but he couldn’t have been older than thirteen or fourteen. With how small he was, Eli would bet him younger.

“Where’d ya go, kid?” he asks, stepping onto the front steps now the only threat appears to be a skinny adolescent.

There’s a scramble around the side of the house. Eli sighs. “I’m not going to chase you, and I’m not going to hurt you. Come back around.”

Silence.

A rustle of leaves is heard across the courtyard, but it is only the slight breeze which tends to climb these peaks. Still, he wonders if something else indeed stalks him in the early morning. If a child managed to make his way up here, he may have attracted monsters. Perhaps he attracted the mountain goat, though the damn thing was far more interested in head-butting Eli when his back was turned.

“Child, come back here, now!” Eli hollers at a level he can’t remember when he last used. “I have food. Unless you want to be food for anything out here!”

For a moment, he considers the best option to chase the kid down without hurting either of them, but then a set of footsteps makes itself known. Two eyes peek around the corner of the house. Eli stares at them. When was the last time I spoke to anyone? When he took his harvest down to the nearest settlement. Over a year ago now, and he didn’t interact much. Seeing another person throws him off-kilter.

He doesn’t much remember how to speak to people.

“What are you doing, boy?”

The kid blinks, casts a glance into the center of the monastery, and steps out from around the side of the house. Eli feels his expression twist. It’s been entirely too many years since he’s seen his son’s face, but here it is staring at him, with the gray eyes, nearly-dark skin, and narrow face, and the same way of gazing at him as if he can pin him down with sight alone.

Without meaning to, he mumbles, “Abner?”