They ran for hours, Shae bouncing bodily on the wide metal shoulder plates of Perun’s armor. He was a titan of a man, his six feet and seven inches of height amplified by enormously broad shoulders and a sturdiness of frame that made adult bulls look like frail kittens.
For Perun, carrying Shae, a man who’d be considered well-built when standing beside anyone other than himself, was no difficulty whatsoever.
Finally, as light began to fade, they stopped. Perun deposited Shae at the foot of a looming tree. It was not an Ancient, but all trees in this cursed forest were imposing in their own right. He tucked Shae against a small alcove created by one of the roots adjoining its base.
He wanted to get out of the Minadrel as quickly as possible. He’d grown up on stories about its dangers, and now he’d been brought to the damnable place. He shook his head, and removed his helmet. With a touch and a whisper, it melted into liquid metal that snaked away and rejoined his sword.
Shae’s body collapsed against the tree. Already a mess from his escapade through the river, he now bore a collection of new bruises on his hips, abdomen, and chest from Perun’s rough carriage.
He moaned absently; his body ached, and his mind was withdrawn and vacant, the world a meaningless swirl of dull pain and cloudy memory. His head lolled forwards, jaw hanging ajar.
Perun unclipped the pin below his neck that fastened his cape, then removed it and spread it over Shae’s still naked body. Perun knelt beside Shae and peered at his face. He frowned at the man’s unfocused eyes, at his hanging mouth, at his pale, clammy skin.
So this is the one, he thought, reaching behind his back and pulling a small vial from its loop on the belt at his waist. He sent me across the entire continent just for one man. Perun sat on his haunches for a moment, contemplating Shae’s face. It’s not like I have a choice in the matter but… I hope he’s worth it.
Perun waved a hand slowly back and forth in front of Shae’s face. Seeing no response, he took his face in his free hand, then tilted his head up. He squeezed open his jaws and poured the contents of the vial down his throat, then closed Shae’s mouth and forced him to swallow. Releasing his grip, Shae’s head lolled forwards.
Drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth, spilled onto the dusty roan cloak spread across his chest. Though Perun barely noticed the change in his state, Shae finally lost consciousness, his mind at last completing its hard-fought escape.
***
Shae raised his spear, deflected a stab coming straight for his heart. Another man, an ancient soldier clad in leather armor and an iron cuirass, yelled a war cry as he swung his sword downwards, sinister metal already coated in blood. Shae staggered backwards, unable to defend himself. An arrow struck his assailant in the side of the neck, ripped through the flesh, unleashed a spurting shower of blood. The man fell, his sword thudding harmless into the dirt.
Screams and shouts, cries of glory, mercy, and pain intermingled with the clash of metal on metal, metal in flesh, a red polyphony, the cacophony of close violence. Behind it all like an ominous thunder, the slow, throbbing duh-thump… duh-thump… duh-thump of war drums thudded in the distance.
Perspiration wet his forehead, tears of sweat streaming into his eyes. The acrid stench of men and death and shit permeated, hung hot and heavy amid the fighting, intruded on his nostrils. Shae’s eyes burned with the sweat, stung with the odor. He blinked them hard, found an unsuspecting back to plunge his spear into, and ran the man through, armor, cloth, and flesh giving way beneath the thrust. It was impossible to tell who was winning—who was who, even.
Men screamed, swung their weapons, and perished, their bodies becoming part of the gruesome terrain of the battlefield. Lines, formations, discipline—all had been forgotten once the real frenzy of gut-wrenching terror and indiscriminate killing had set in; and Shae, like all the others, had become lost in the delirium.
His vision jostled, a sensation that he’d noticed several times now, a gentle bobbing up and down that he couldn’t account for—he wasn’t running or moving, just standing in the center of the mayhem.
He swung around, searching for his next target. He felt the sweat, smelled the acrid pungency of shit, piss, vomit and blood all mingled together, but for a reason he couldn’t decipher, he wasn’t tired, his breathing not even slightly labored.
A bird swept overhead, cast a thick shadow over Shae’s surroundings. He looked up. An indistinct blot of brown against the sharp sun, then another; a host of blurs now, brown, black, and grey shapes flying overhead. They were glinting, he realized, and squinting, he soon made out human forms beneath the wings—polished steel plate armor reflecting dazzling light, long swords and spears held in their hands. Fifty or more of the winged warriors flew in formation high above, their great feathery wings—like archangels, he thought—temporarily hiding the sun as they passed over.
His vision jostled again; the world rocking, and again the thump-thumping of drums called to him. He was soaring now, one of the winged men, the plains unfurling below like a model terrain map. He made out pinpricks of soldiers, some in cloth, some in plate, all sorts of colors and armors and weapons all mashed together in a confused frenzy of death.
But from up here, the carnage seemed slower, less desperate. It was impossible to tell what was happening from above; each little ant moved a little this way or that, fell over, or carried on. The overpowering wall of sound from before was little more than a faint roaring, like that heard from a baseball game in a distant stadium. And still, the duh-thump… duh-thump of the drums boomed, an inexorable promise.
Then there was no battlefield, no plains, no lives pointlessly expiring—just trees, high and looming, thick around as skyscrapers. The trees tugged at something in Shae’s memory, but he ignored it and continued flying, swooping up through looping branches, tucking his grey wings and diving towards the forest floor, air rushing through the feathers.
He hugged himself with his wings and began to spin, winding in tight spirals like a falling drill-bit as he plummeted towards the earth, then unfurled them at the last moment and soared fast and low on the momentum, dodging and twisting away from boulders, between smaller trees.
His eyesight was keener than ever he could remember, his vision zooming in on the movement of small animals in the underbrush, picking out individual whiskers on a rabbit’s upturned face, tracing the passage of ants along an exposed root. The world shone with vibrant colors, greens and browns and greys all infinite spectrums in their complexity.
He laughed with the exhilaration of the flight. The forest fell away, and he found himself gliding high, high in the sky. He breathed in crisp alpine air as his eyes drank in the expansive mountain range unfolding below him. The drums sounded again, louder, demanding, a remnant in his ears. His breath caught; something smashed into his ribs, and Shae jolted awake.
***
The first thing he noticed was the ache in his legs: a sore, creaking feeling, like he’d been sitting in a deep stretch for far too long and now had to face the grim reality of getting out of it. Then, the blistering headache.
A dry heat pressed on him from above, alleviated by the cool rush of a steady breeze. Sunlight, its merciless glare unimpeded by branches and leaves, beat down on him from above. He jostled again, the sensation immediately familiar from the dream, and Shae noticed with a start that he was on horseback.
That explains the aching legs, he thought, air hissing through his teeth as his hamstrings and adductors spasmed. He was riding pillion behind a hulking mass of armor, metal plate, and leather that Shae took to be the back of his savior. Feeling the saddle underneath him, Shae realized that he was wearing clothes: a pair of leather pants and a plain beige shirt, the large, dusty cloak still wrapped around his shoulders. Oddly, the clothes seemed to fit him well.
Vague memories of someone tall and broad knocking Cïr flying and then carrying him away emerged in his mind, but they were fuzzy, out of focus, and in bits, like scattered puzzle pieces. A great claymore-like sword, a brown cape, a flying metal ball, and a pain that… he stopped the thought short. Thinking about it was like squeezing a shard of glass—any harder, and he’d bleed.
The great bulk of the man in front of him spoke without turning, his voice deep and bassy.
“Perun.”
“What?” Shae asked, but it came out in a croak.
Shae was sure he’d heard the man speak, but couldn’t make out what he’d said. It occurred to him that he was naked before and clothed now, so this man must’ve dressed him.
“My name. I’m Perun.”
The horse snorted, its head shivering convulsively as a fly flew from its nostril. Perun? He’d never heard a name like that before, but then again, he’d never heard a name like Cïr either. Should he thank him? Ask him about what’d happened? Where he was?
Perun had saved him, but he was still hesitant to ask a million questions straight out of the gate. He didn’t know anything about this man, his motives, or his intentions. And on top of all of that, he didn’t want to annoy him. The man was huge, and he wanted to stay well away from the wrong side of his temper.
Remaining silent for several long seconds, Shae contemplated the situation. Finally, he asked for a drink. Despite the sweat standing out on his face and back, his throat was parched and raspy as sandpaper. Maybe asking for a favor would be a passable first step in building a rapport with the behemoth of a man—plus he felt on the verge of passing out without something to drink.
"I’m Shae. Do you have—water?” He dragged the words from his cracked lips, the movement of Adam's apple painful in his throat.
Perun took the reins in his left hand, half turned to his right, and produced an oblong waterskin pouch from a saddlebag on the horse’s side. A long, flat, double-bladed sword of dull, rusty metal hung in two leather loops below it: the claymore that he’d thrown at Cïr.
He handed the waterskin to Shae without looking away from the rocky plains in front of them. Taking the waterskin from Perun, Shae noted the thickness of his fingers and the scars, large and small, that stood out on his skin.
The waterskin was leather and shaped like a bean; there was a thin cord attaching its neck to the wider base, and at its top was a cork, like that of a wine bottle.
He gripped at it, his fingers protesting, still not responding properly to his commands. Whatever the Kide had done to him was still having an effect that he didn’t fully understand, and willed it to fade.
Finally, he got the stopper out and drank greedily. As he relished in the sensation of the water, lukewarm but still welcome cascading down his sour throat, Shae took in the landscape around them. To the front, his vision was obscured by the wide expanse of Perun’s shoulders, but to his right, the land opened up for miles.
They were in what he could best describe as open highlands; verdant green plains were cut by rocky terraces, boulders, rolling hills, and dotted with sparse trees in ones and twos. Regular, familiar trees, he was relieved to see. Maybe junipers? He didn’t know enough about it to be sure, but the vista was breathtaking. It was what he imagined Scotland or New Zealand might look like, and he marveled at its openness, the sense of freedom it inspired, and the vast scale that his eyes could see but his mind couldn’t wrap itself around.
The sky was the light azure of a robin’s egg, expansive and splotched with white streaks of cloud-like carefree strokes from a painter’s brush. It felt somehow higher than it should, like the ceiling of the world was not nearly as close here as it was on Earth.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The sun, a yellow speck, bore down from above, and he squinted into it. He placed his hand above his face, his vision reduced to the gaps between his fingers. Peaking through them, he could almost swear that there were three little orbs up there instead of the usual one. Wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s happened so far, he thought. But maybe it was? How could there possibly be three stars that close to each other, and what effect would it have on the planet’s orbit? Not wanting to strain the limits of his mental ability, he put it from his mind for the time being and returned his gaze to the ground, marveling anew at the breathtaking landscape.
They weren’t following any particular path that he could see; there was no road, not even a game path ahead of them. The only indicator of their direction, or destination, was the looming snow-capped mountain range in the distance. It looked like the Andes, unfathomably tall and adorned by brilliant white snow in sheets and patches. The peaks seemed impossibly high, disappearing well above the clouds. The Andes were the closest comparison he had for them, but the scale of these mountains was on another level entirely. Shae thought that no one could possibly climb them—the oxygen would dwindle to nothing before you even reached halfway.
The mountains were akin to the trees of the Minadrel, and he wondered if everything here was this outrageously oversized, and why. Between and around the peaks that stretched up beyond his vision were more reasonably sized mountains. They were still tall, their spires high and proud, craggy spines of rock and ridge painted with trees and snow, but he could at least imagine himself among them.
The sheer size of it all hurt his head; the mountains looked far away, but at the same time they seemed so close that he could reach out and touch them. They reminded him of his dream, and almost as if on cue, the distant thundering of drums rolled across the plains. From behind them came a rumbling duh-thump, duh-thump, duh-thump, echoing booms in the distance. He cocked his head around, which sent a shooting pain down his neck and into his back that caused him to almost drop the waterskin.
The horse let out a quiet whinny, and Perun reached down to stroke the glossy fur of its neck. To his left, Shae saw the upper halves of the huge trees of the Minadrel in the distance.
They were a great ways away from the forest, but looking at it gave him a sense of impending doom. Where he’d first felt awe and wonder under their branches, now only the white-hot memory of Cïr’s mental attack remained, marking forever his relationship with the ancient trees.
Between the Minadrel and where they rode, the drums continued to beat their staccato cadence.
Duh-thump, duh-thump, duh-thump.
Images of the battlefield from his dreams flared to life in his mind, drying his recently wetted throat.
"The drums, is that…” Shae began, his eyes glued to the horizon hiding the source of the sound.
“The allied forces of Tanriel. They march on Eris; a day or two later and we’d have been caught between them. You picked a bastard of a place to turn up,” Perun said.
"Tanriel…” Shae muttered, then thinking better of it, stopped himself.
Turn up? It's like he was expecting me.
Perun grunted, then said no more. Shae had dreamt of a battlefield, and from Perun’s words, it sounded as if there was to be one. In the dream, he’d seen mountains, death, blood, and wings. He looked up, but there were no flying men. Nothing at all besides a few streaks of cloud in the pastel sky and the triplicate suns burning high above. Their destination was a mystery, as were Perun’s identity and motives, but the forest, Cïr, and the drums were behind him, and for that he was grateful.
An hour or longer passed in silence, and they continued in the direction of the faraway mountains, keeping to the low places between hills, under ledges and outcroppings of rock, putting their backs to boulders.
Shae noticed the way Perun led them, always following the most inconspicuous route; cautious, even stopping occasionally to scout ahead with what looked like a pirate’s monocular. Absently, he thought of what might be the cause of the husky man’s prudence. Perun had dealt with Cïr easily—anything he feared would likely end Shae in a heartbeat.
His thoughts turned to his life back home: his car, his apartment, the gym. He missed the gym, the solitude, and comfort he found there, and he missed his family. They were the ones he missed most of all, and the thought of his sisters alone, fending for themselves, worried him greatly.
What would they think? That he walked out on them like their father? Jen would throw a fit if her big brother went missing. Despite the severity of the situation, he almost smiled at the thought of her throwing a tantrum at the police station, the flustered faces of the policemen trying to reason with the world's most stubborn and fiercely loving fourteen-year-old sister.
How’re they going to take care of Mom if I’m not there to make money? Jen works, but Alex is only ten. If I’m gone, who’s going to pay the bills? Shae felt a knot tightening in the pit of his stomach.
Looking around at the expansive landscape surrounding him, he remembered his last experience camping. He’d only been twice, when his mother was healthier, and had loved it. But camping trips always ended, and never involved monsters. How did I even get here? Did I die—have a heart attack or something?
That didn’t seem likely, given his health; he was a bit of a caffeine addict, but he couldn’t imagine that being the cause of all this. Damn. Probably no caffeine here, either. And probably no Marine Corps. That’d be something though—a medieval Marine Corps. His friends, his family, his plans for the future: was all of that gone?
The scenery was beautiful, and the thought of wielding powers like Perun’s or Cïr’s was alluring, but he didn’t belong to this world. His life was back home, on Earth, not in this fantasy circus of miracles and nightmares. There were responsibilities that needed his attention, and people that relied on him. I can’t afford to just fart around here. I need to get back.
His thoughts were interrupted as Perun drew firmly back on the reins of the horse, causing Shae to jolt forward.
“Whoa there,” Perun said.
The roan neighed, reared up, its nostrils flaring. Shae lost his balance and almost tumbled backwards, snatching at a connecting strap on Perun’s back plate. He hung on as he leaned back, the violent motion making his vision swim.
“Easy boy,” Perun said, “Easy.”
The roan lowered to the ground with a sharp clacking of hooves, rocking Shae forwards. His head bashed painfully against Perun’s armor, and he bit his tongue, hot blood and the taste of iron filling his mouth. Before Shae knew what was happening, Perun was off the horse and pulling him down with one big arm. Instead of helping Shae down to his feet, Perun hefted him over his shoulder like a sack of grain.
Shae winced as his bruises flared to life against the hard plate armor, and coughed as the air left his lungs. Certainly not a gentle man, this Perun.
"I can walk, you know,” Shae said, his voice strained by the metal stabbing into his abdomen.
Perun huffed, then bent down. Shae slid off, found his feet on the rocky dirt, and readjusted the large cloak that Perun had lent him around his shoulders.
"This way,” Perun said as he took the horse’s reins in his hand and began briskly walking towards a patch of scattered boulders on the side of the knoll in front of them.
Shae jogged to catch up to the larger man’s retreating figure, his aching body protesting the effort. He looked around but didn’t see anything besides Perun, the horse, and the expanse of plains and rolling hills.
“What is it? Is something wrong?” Shae asked.
He scampered behind Perun, who’d slowed to a crouched walk. Beside him, the horse breathed heavy, ragged breaths, and stamped the ground with its forelegs, tossing its head.
Perun said nothing. He skirted the side of the nearest boulder, a plain, grey rock reaching several feet over their heads, and flattened his hand, patting the air beside him in a universal signal that Shae recognized to mean “stay low, and stay quiet.”
He led them between the boulders until they were surrounded in a copse of them, the irregular rocks forming the best cover they were likely to find in the empty valley.
Perun removed his sword from its fixture on the horse’s saddle and touched the metal with one finger.
"Divide,” he said, his voice a low whisper.
From the tip of the blade, a strand of liquid metal poured outwards and pooled into an orb that grew to the size of a large bowling ball, floating in the air. Shae watched in silence as the sword shrunk significantly, seemingly in proportion to the amount of metal that was removed to form the orb.
Shae watched in awed silence as the metal flowed and spun, captivated by the blatant display of magic.
“Harden.”
In the air, the orb coalesced into a cylindrical rod. As soon as it had taken shape, Perun snatched it in his fist and slammed it into the dirt beneath him. He glanced up, squinted into the horizon for a moment, then knelt and hastily tied the reins around the magically crafted pole. When he was finished, he looked at Shae and spoke in a whisper.
“He’ll bolt. And if he does, we’re through,” he said.
Nodding, Shae peeked through the corridor between the two nearest rocks. One was roughly spherical and stood just high enough to cover the horse. The other was a tall, oblong rectangle. Perun crouched along the edge of the spherical rock, leaving the horse behind to get a better view of the plains beyond.
Shae usually took the lead in most situations, but he was happy to follow Perun for the time being. He was clearly far, far out of his depth. Since his utter helplessness in the face of whatever Cïr had done to him, and because of his complete and total lack of knowledge about this new world, he was resolved to learn as much as he could.
Shae wanted to become competent as quickly as possible— the gnawing feeling that he was at the mercy of everything they encountered weighed on him, and he wanted to change his circumstances as soon as he could. Whatever lay ahead of him, he’d need to learn how to deal with it if he was going to have any chance whatsoever of returning back home alive.
Perun slowed and looked back over his shoulder to check that Shae was following, a move that required him to turn nearly all the way around due to the bulk of his frame. Catching up, Shae stopped just behind him.
He could smell the combined scent of their sweat, their sour odor; could hear their heavy breathing as they leaned against the cool rock, feel its smooth grooves under his fingers. His hips and knees ached from crouching, and he dropped to a knee in the cold dirt.
“Look,” Perun said in a low voice, pointing to the spot where the green valley became a line against the grey backdrop of the mountain. There, the terrain dipped into a gentle depression and fell away beyond their vision.
Shae looked but saw nothing. A short tree, a clump of brown that could’ve been a bush, the jagged outline of a boulder, and the flat line of green continuing until it was cut off by the rock on either side of him. He glanced up at Perun, but his hard brown eyes were laser-focused on the ridgeline in the distance.
Then his eyes were drawn to a slow shifting on the far side of the ridge: a dark dot peaking over from the other side, outlined against the flat backdrop of the looming mountains. Another dot emerged beside it, then another. And another.
A tide of brown blobs crested the rise now and began to move over it, down what he soon recognized as the sloping embankment of the rolling hill they’d been staring at.
Like paint oozing over a canvas, the light green of the land was slowly consumed by an ever-growing tide of brown shapes. He saw a dust cloud begin to rise behind them, brown smoke drifting up into the sky, and despite the great distance, he could make out a sound like low, rumbling thunder.
In a flash of realization, it dawned on him: he was looking at a huge herd of bison— or whatever this world’s equivalent was— like what must’ve roamed the American Midwest in the early 1800s. They stampeded over the plains at an oblique angle to where he and Perun sat crouched, observing, the ground trembling underneath them. Like a mild earthquake, tremors ran through the dirt beneath their feet and traveled up their bodies, vibrating in their bones.
“Are those bison?”
Perun looked back at him, his eyebrows momentarily drawing together before he placed a gauntleted hand over Shae’s mouth and stared at him pointedly.
He didn’t know what the matter was with talking; the bison were far away, and he didn’t think they’d cause them any trouble with the direction they were heading. And it’s not like they were aggressive anyway, right?
Perun raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “You’ll shut up now, right?” then lowered his hand slowly, keeping his eyes locked on Shae’s. He curled his hand into a ball with one finger, his index, pointing up.
Shae looked quizzically at the hand. Then everything grew dark, as if the suns had suddenly hidden behind their mother’s skirts, drawn the blinds over the windows. A shadow passed over them, covering the rocks, the dirt, the plains, plunging the world into inky darkness.
Perun’s face split into a humorless grin, and Shae’s stomach dropped, the blood draining from his face.
He looked up.
Directly overhead, blotting out the sky, was the pale-ivory belly, scaled and bulging, of something. Something soaring, its two leathery wings opened wide, the span difficult to measure so high above.
Sunlight shone subdued red through a thin membrane of skin, and long spears of bone, spine-like fingers extending down from the thick tops of the wings, protruded out several inches from the bottoms in spinous barbs.
A tail thick as a bullet train and capped by a sleek bundle of spines swung lazily back and forth. The dragon’s thin, scaly lips were pressed tightly together in a line; a scaled, angular head plowed through the wind, short spikes protruding from the hard ridges of its face in a cruel, beautiful symmetry.
The dragon opened its jaws, and just as its shadow passed over them and continued speeding soundlessly across the plains, it released a high, long, vibrato roar.