Calliane’s eyes carefully surveyed the silent forest around her and her team. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t spot anything suspicious amongst the bare trees and barely blooming bushes in the area. Spring had only just begun, and the forest lacked the dense foliage it would grow later in the season. There was little place for anything to hide.
Still, her feeling of unease didn’t go away. Calliane was an experienced sentinel, close to reaching Adept at long last. In fact, she was confident that this expedition, her twenty-fifth since she had joined the sentinels three years before, would finally be the one to put her over the edge.
If she made it back alive, that is.
“What’s wrong, Calli?” A gruff voice asked behind her.
She turned back, her eyes still narrowed as she surveyed her surroundings. “I don’t know. There’s just… something wrong.”
Kurrid, her team’s defender, gave her a smile as hard and sure as his platemail. "Relax, Calli. There’s nothing out here that can evade your spirits, you know that. And even if there was, you’ve got me to protect you!”
Calliane relaxed a little, giving her old friend a small nod. With his combination of the gifts of the guardian, animist, and metal, Kurrid was essentially the apocryphal immovable object, a living wall no enemy had ever succeeded in breaching.
But still, her stress didn’t fade entirely.
“We should keep moving,” Arla suggested.
“The sooner we find this battalion, the sooner we can leave,” Curtis agreed.
The team’s two primary damage dealers spoke confidently - but Calliane didn’t miss that they held their weapons at the ready, Arla’s bladed whip making soft whispers of sound as it swished back and forth in her hand, while Curtis held an arrow ready to his bow.
So. She wasn't the only one who was nervous.
The Arboreal Wastes were considered the least dangerous of the five great Wastes that sentinels across the Realm guarded against, but Calliane and her team knew well that perception was only due to its relatively recent formation. The small stretch of dense forest wasn’t as ominous as the winding tunnels of the Umbral Waste, or as striking as the massive crater of the Lunar Waste, but it was nonetheless host to innumerable dangers. All Wastes drew in hostile outsiders from the Darkened Worlds, and the stretch of temperate woodlands known as the Arboreal Wastes were no exception.
The fact that the forest seemed to draw in outsiders primarily from the Chained World, known for their ability to organize and fortify if left unchecked, only increased the danger. Nearly fifty sentinel teams just like Calliane’s had to constantly patrol the thick, dangerous forest to root out the dangerous monsters before they could reach a critical mass, while another two score sentinel teams patrolled the edge of the wood in an effort to prevent the outsiders from escaping into the heartlands.
Despite the dangers inherent to the position, sentinels were recognized across the Realm for putting their lives on the line to contain the unending danger of the outsiders, and most of Calliane’s team, like her, were minor nobility in the young bastion city of Elliven, doing their duty to ensure that the Waste remained contained.
“You’re right. Let’s go,” Calliane finally conceded, turning back to the path ahead of them. She felt for the magic engraved in her soul years before by her gift of the sorcerer, and manifested a pair of spirits in the air before her. They were barely visible as wavering shapes in empty space as she sent them both flickering through the trees to search for any threats.
The cadre briskly continued down the narrow path, alert for any sign of the band of gnolls they had been dispatched to handle. The disciplined monsters were common leaders for the lesser creatures of the Chained World, and if the reports were true, these gnolls may have managed to suborn an ogre into their ranks.
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Their preferred ambush tactics made a band of gnolls dangerous enough, but if they truly had the raw power of an ogre on their side, only a decisive strike from the sentinels would give them the advantage they needed to seize victory. All of which meant that the team was heavily reliant on Calliane’s abilities to both forewarn them of any danger and to give them the advantage they desperately needed.
Even if they lacked the physical mass to be threatening on their own, the spirits Calliane could summon through her sorcery were nearly invisible and all but intangible, making them ideal scouts for the little band. The immaterial beings had been key to their team gaining their reputation as an efficient strike force, capable of finding and destroying mid-sized groups of outsiders and other monsters before they could bring their own power to bear.
But Calliane only made it a few steps down the path before she was abruptly reminded that nearly invisible and all but intangible did not mean her spirits were actually invulnerable. The sentinel gave a sudden scream of pain and fell to her knees as the sensory feedback of her spirits suddenly terminated in a burst of shrieking static. Not once since she had first passed the Scholar’s test and gained her gift of the sorcerer had something managed to actually destroy her spirits, and the twin sensations of their dissolution were like red-hot needles in her brain.
It took Calliane an unacceptable amount of time to get her bearings after the shock, and nearly half a minute passed before she managed to pull herself together.
Wait, Calliane realized as she collected her thoughts, why didn’t Kurrid help me?
It was the stalwart man’s ability as a healer, through the gift of the animist, that elevated him from a simple defender to the lynchpin of the team. She didn’t know if his spells were sufficient to ease the pain of her spirits’ destruction, but she had expected him to try, at the very least.
Silvery fear shot down Calliane’s spine at the same time a ferocious roar jarred her into motion, and she staggered to her feet - only to see what had become of her team.
Curtis was already down, his body as twisted and broken as the remains of his bow. Even as she watched, Arla’s bladed whip, which could tear through even a gnoll in a single motion, was itself ripped apart, followed shortly thereafter by its wielder.
Kurrid, who should’ve been protecting his team, was fully occupied trying to hold off an abomination unlike anything Calliane had ever seen. The massive man was utterly dwarfed by the monstrosity, his abilities as a healer and defender alike clearly pushed to their limits.
Calliane lifted one hand, reaching into her mana reservoir as she called on her most powerful attack. If she could buy Kurrid even a moment to bring his metal abilities into play, he should be able to make enough space for them to flee.
The gift of the raptor had been Calliane’s first gift, the totem that bore it a present from her father on her sixteenth birthday. Augmented by the sorcery she had gained from her second gift, Calliane could call upon the spirit of the raptor to summon an immense hawk. Whisper had been her closest companion for years, even before she had met Kurrid and the rest of her team, and he had only become more potent when Calliane reached Initiate level and picked up the gift of fire.
She felt her mana reservoir plummet as she pumped every bit of power she had into calling up Whisper, and a snarl crossed her face as the bird, resplendent with plumage of pure flame, appeared on her arm. But before Calliane could command her most potent summon to attack, he gave a brassy shriek of alarm and simply dissipated, just as her simpler spirits had earlier.
The sentinel barely had a moment to gasp in surprise before the sensory feedback seared through her mind, another bolt of shrieking agony that sent her to her knees. Calliane struggled to right herself, managing to look up just in time to see the abomination sink its teeth into Kurrid’s skull and simply rip the man’s head off.
Then a bolt of very cold, very material pain cut through the phantom agony of Whisper’s disappearance. Calliane didn’t have a chance to see who had attacked her from behind. She didn’t even have time enough to shed a tear for her fallen friends before everything went black.
#
Leagues away from the Arboreal Wastes, sitting under a broad oak tree, a tall, slender man looked up sharply from the book he was reading. His eyes, an eerie shade of yellow, locked on some distant point in the sky. There was a problem, visible to his senses like a knot in a carefully sewn bolt of cloth, though few others in all the Realm would be able to perceive such a thing.
“Something’s changed.”
The empty air around him did not respond. His eyes were a warm hazel when he stood, snapping his book shut with a sigh. He suspected he would not have another chance to read it for a long while.
Then he began to walk.