Chapter Nine

The world was dark and blurry. Something buzzed lazily in the background, and I could hear and smell little embers somewhere nearby.

I moaned in confusion as I slowly but surely marshaled my thoughts.

The airplane. We’d been headed towards the land of the Wolves.

And then we dropped.

As I came to, I realized that I was on my stomach, cheek pressed against damp earth. From my lopsided angle, I saw chunks of red-brown metal sprinkled across the ground—the broken carcass of what had been my ride to the trial of my life.

Wolf technology wasn’t impervious, after all.

“Get up.”

I rolled onto my back and saw a silhouette of Lenora standing over me, crowded treetops decorating the background of my line of sight.

“Get up, prisoner.”

Irritation cut through my fog like a cup of Mom’s coffee. For a moment, I’d forgotten that my hands were still bound, and I fell over on my first attempt at getting to my feet. Only then, with my arms out in front of me, did I notice a sharp tear on the sleeve of my ragged shirt. In my daze, I hadn’t even felt the cut. It wasn’t long, but I frowned at the hundreds of little shards embedded in my skin.

It looked like glass.

“What are you waiting for?” Lenora asked impatiently.

I pushed off the dirt, rose to my feet, and spun around to face her. “Enough of this, already! I don’t know who you’re trying to impress, but this tough gal mask is a waste of all of our time. We just fell out of the freaking sky, and you’re still treating me like I’m the bad guy?”

Her hazel eyes narrowed. “But you are,” she said quietly.

“Ack!” a squeaky voice cried from behind Lenora. I looked past her to see a short, chubby Wolf wobble toward us. All of his hair that I could see was the color of a plum, and his long beard was braided in a dozen or so thick columns. His eyes were so light-blue that they were nearly white, and they were puffy, as if he’d just woken up.

Unlike Cain, he wasn’t armored. Instead, he opted for a long-sleeve shirt that looked like it was cut from a rainbow. Over that was a glistening velvet jacket decorated sporadically with images of gears that seemed to slowly rotate in synchrony against the jacket’s material. His pants and boots matched the jacket’s style. His hat, meanwhile, eerily matched his braided beard and his shirt: it was entirely made of curved wooden beams spotted with precious stones that spanned the color wheel. The beams were interlaced to form a knotted web of braids that, together, formed the shape of a top hat.

He opened a bloody palm to us, against which a spiky spore clung. But it didn’t quite look right. I blinked and looked at it again.

Some of the spikes were pure glass.

A hand covered in red armor entered my vision. Cain quickly tore the spore off of the other Wolf—Puck, I gathered—and tossed it into the pool of debris in which we stood.

Puck squealed again and jumped up and down on his tiptoes, waving his bloodied hand as if to ease the pain.

“You’ll be fine,” Cain said calmly. He then muttered something to himself, and bright, golden lights erupted from points on his armor’s shoulders and knees. “Is everyone okay?”

“We’re okay,” Lenora said, as if she could speak for me.

“Good. The adamite gel has evaporated, apparently, which means we were all out for at least half an hour.” He turned to Puck, who couldn’t seem to stand still. “Puck. The plane tracks its location, yes?”

“Kind of,” the smaller Wolf replied. “It has an internal compass, and it knows how far it’s traveled from its last rest stop.”

“Find the compass,” Cain commanded. “I’ll contact the Engine and tell them what happened. They will send another airship in short order.”

Cain’s lights let me take better stock of our surroundings. We must’ve crashed into trees, because bark, roots, and bushels of leaves peppered the ground alongside the plane debris. Just like the spore, some of the branches and leaves were partly made of streaks of clean, inorganic glass. Beyond our crash site, I saw only thick trees in every direction, each one a hybrid of shard and wood, no two of the same proportions.

We’re in the Wildlands. Where things don’t make sense.

I heard a deep sound from my right, something between a growl and a belch.

“What was that?” Puck shouted nervously.

Cain and Lenora quickly turned to the source of the noise. The growl-belch reached us again, this time louder.

And then another one came from the opposite side of the forest.

“Puck, Wyatt, get behind me,” Cain ordered quietly. “Wyatt, look to your left, Puck, right. Keep your eyes open. Lenora, get on the other side of them.”

“Oh Father, oh Father,” Puck whimpered.

“Quiet,” Cain whispered.

I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell Cain to release me, to tell Lenora to hand me one of her guns. But I gritted my teeth and obeyed the Wolf.

From my immediate right, I heard Lenora take a pistol out of her holster. Meanwhile, I heard Cain mutter something inaudible again, and with a click sound, I heard what sounded like the unsheathing of a sword or two. I hadn’t seen him with any weapons, but I shook off my confusion. Now wasn’t the time to learn the way of the Wolf.

Now was the time to survive whatever Creatures lived in this glass forest.

I crouched down to the ground, keeping my eyes on the trees. I felt around the earth until my finger pressed up against something sharp. I quickly looked down to find a slab of bark whose bottom third was mostly glass, still retaining the markings and irregularities that any of nature’s wood would show. I rose back to my feet and held my weapon in ready position with both hands.

A dark shape, barely noticeable in the trees’ shadows, darted across my vision. I raised my tethered hands and pointed. “I saw something.”

A bestial groan came from near where I’d seen a blip of the Creature. Then I heard a similar sound coming from behind me, and another one from my right.

For a moment, everything was quiet, save for the cool wind and the steady death groans of the broken airplane.

Then bellows erupted from all around me, and a black-furred gorilla galloped towards me on all fours.

In my peripheral vision, I saw other apes come out of the shadows. Lenora’s gun barked. Puck screamed. Cain yelled a furious battle cry.

The gorilla leaped into the air with another roar, and hot spittle showered down on me. As I pulled my piece of wood back, I couldn’t help but remember the times I made the same motion with my hammer, fighting the Wildland’s monsters at the edges of Polygon. My lips turned very slightly upwards as I swung the glass-wood bark at the incoming ape.

Because I was damn good at this part of the job, chained or not.

Glass shattered as my weapon greeted the Creature’s oversized jaw. I followed through the swing as the gorilla veered away from me, releasing a pained and bloodied cry. I’d hoped the glass would grow back, or something, but no such luck. I dropped the now-mostly wooden plank and turned to the down-but-not-out gorilla.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Golden light from behind me let me see the Creature in detail as it recovered. At first, I thought it was scarred all along its limbs and face, but then I realized that those were streaks of fine glass, each surrounded by bald, gray skin. I couldn’t tell whether the glass was somehow plastered onto the Creature, or whether the glass was as much a part of its constitution as its fur was.

Nothing makes any goddamn sense here.

I began peddling backward to buy myself time as the ape gathered itself, hoping that Lenora—

Rapid gunfire filled my eardrums as bullets tore through the ape’s chest. It fell onto its side, and with a few convulsions, it was no longer a threat.

I turned my head to Lenora, who stood hawkeyed with her pistol still in position. There was a second dead gorilla by her feet.

Puck let out a conspicuous sigh of relief. “Oh, Great Builder, that was terrifying!”

“Stay alert,” Cain said as he turned to face us. The swords he held in each hand glowed a fiery gold so bright that I couldn’t make out where the weapon ended and the light began. The lines on his armor were more prominent now, and I eyed those regions that jutted out from the rest of his suit.

Lenora pointed her gun towards the canopy as the leaves bristled. Meanwhile, I quickly found a branch that was made of enough glass to be dangerous.

“Back in posi—”

A throaty roar met the howls of gunfire as a pair of gorillas dropped from above, directly above Lenora. She might’ve been a good shot, but there wasn’t enough time to kill both of them and avoid being crushed at the same time. My eyes widened as one of the Creatures landed on her, even as a bullet opened its furry neck. I heard a nauseating crunch as she fell under its dead weight.

The remaining gorilla stood on its feet, pounded its chest, and screamed triumphantly as it eyed the fallen Soldier. It pushed its dead brother off with distressing ease and raised its closed fists.

Cain stabbed it through the chest with one of his radiant swords.

We all ran to Lenora, who was spread on the ground and gripping her left shoulder. Her face was contorted in agony.

“Where are you hurt?” Cain asked as he took a knee.

The Soldier groaned, and then replied, “Just…just my shoulder.”

Slow but steady claps came from behind us. Cain rose to his feet, and the three of us instinctively formed a semicircle around Lenora.

Five Wolves were slowly coming out of the depths of the forest and inching toward us. The one in the middle, the source of the clapping, came to lean casually against a nearby tree, while two Wolves stood stoically on each side of him. They all held long, wooden spears whose top half—including the tip—was coated in what had to be millions of little grains of glass. The Wolves were mostly naked, save for polished tree bark that wrapped around their forearms, groins, knees, and elbows. They all wore roomy hats that looked like upside-down soup bowls, and those, too, were glassed.

The Wolf in the middle was around my height and stood with the gait of a king. He had thin lips that bragged a ring piercing. Surprisingly, his beard, the color of coffee-stained teeth, was trimmed to extend merely an inch or so out from his face, although the rest of him was as hairy as any other Wolf’s body. His fangs, too, were far shorter than any Wolf’s I’d seen yet.

His dark blue eyes were full of arrogance.

And they were dotted with silver specks.

“Such quick work!” he said. His voice was deep, his tone mischievous as it was confident. “But you killed my pets,” he continued, this time with a hint of contempt. He wagged a finger at us. “What are we going to do about that?”

Cain took a step forward and braced his swords for battle. I stood back alongside a shaking, out-of-shape pilot and a groaning, out-of-commission Soldier.

The four lackey Wolves mirrored Cain.

Kill them, already, Cain, I thought eagerly. Use your damn Godlet.

“Leave,” Cain said simply.

The head Wolf laughed loudly and insincerely. “You come to my home and tell me to leave? Do the minions of the Great Builder have no shame?” His eyes narrowed, but his cocky smile remained. “Or do think that you are entitled to all of His droppings?”

Cain raised one of his swords. “Do not sully His name, Wild Wolf.”

“Again, your arrogance knows no bounds. I was not born in the Wildlands.” He laughed again, and the silver specks in his irises swelled until his eyeballs were spheres of faintly glowing silver. “But I’m here now. Away from your false god and His lying sheep.”

The Wolf flicked his wrist toward my Wolf escort.

And he flew through the air as if hit by a train.

I watched with horror as Cain’s back slammed against a tree. He somehow managed to keep hold of his weapons, and when he rose back to his feet, his eyes, too, were orbs of silver.

I was ready to cheer for a Wolf, something I never thought I’d do.

Then a glassy log rocketed toward him and shattered against his temple.

Cain’s helmet must’ve saved his life, but he still rocked back a few imbalanced steps. Then his swords left his hands on their own accord, spun around, and pointed directly at his eyes. They hovered there, not quite still enough for comfort.

Cain grabbed the handles of his swords, but they wouldn’t budge.

Lenora’s gun went off, and one of the lackey Wolves went down.

“Grab them all!” the leader growled, though he never took his focus off of Cain. “Hurt them!”

One Wolf walked steadily toward me.

I could’ve run. Lenora was broken, Puck was incapable, and Cain was battered, blinded by the light of his own weapons, and one maniac’s Godlet away from losing his head.

I suddenly felt very alone. Home was so far away. I was standing around a wasteland that was supposed to be my ride to the Builder’s Mountains, and we’d already been ambushed by gorillas made out of freaking glass. And now Wild Wolves.

The Military wasn’t coming to my aid. My parents had no idea what was happening to me.

Lenora, Puck, and Cain were hardly my friends. But they were the only allies I had, pathetic as that might have been.

And these glass freaks were certainly my enemy.

I sprinted towards the incoming Wolf as fast as I could with my bound hands, keeping my branch held high. He bared his shaven fangs but continued to saunter towards me.

I swung my weapon at his neck, but he parried my blow with unexpected speed and…and grace.

This barbarian knew what he was doing.

With his free hand, the Wild Wolf grabbed the chain that bound my handcuffs together and pulled me towards him. Then he head-butted me with that stupid hat of his, and my vision went red as countless shards of glass cut into my forehead, burning as if a swarm of bugs had opted to eat my face for dinner.

I felt a tug on my wrist, and my weapon was pulled from my hand with indomitable force. Before I could wipe the blood from my face, a hairy fist struck my jaw. He was far stronger than those prisoners back in Polygon. Stars danced across my gooey red vision. For the second time tonight, I was too disoriented to act.

At least I’m not in the clouds this time.

After a hard push, I tasted dirt and felt the pressure of a foot on my back.

“Don’t move,” he growled from above. “Or I’ll shatter your knees.”

“Psh off,” I managed to mutter, my mouth awkwardly muzzled against the earth.

“Let us go,” I heard Cain say. “We have no qualms with you.”

“But I have a qualm with you, minion,” the leader replied acidulously. “The Mind of the Builder is a fraud, as is your entire people. You thank the Great Builder for saving us from Apocalypse. But He is not the savior you claim Him to be, and you and your kind are deceivers. The Children of Apocalypse are alive, warrior.”

“Your heresy is not my concern,” Cain said. “You see the Humans in our company, yes? Do not infringe on our matters.”

“You embarrass yourself,” the Wolf responded, and I could hear his toothy grin. “Begging for mercy, like a dog. You call me a heretic. But I wonder if you’d believe your own eyes, if they set sight on a Destructor. Come to where the Glass Forest meets the caves, warrior, and see for yourself.”

“Our Military will end you,” I heard Lenora grunt.

The Wolf laughed again. “Ah, the daughter of the Human tyrant. Yes, the spoils for which we came.”

I heard something break, like the snapping of a cracker, followed by Cain’s screams.

“No, get off me, get—”

“Muzzle that bitch! Let’s go.”

As soon as the pressure was released from my back, I pushed myself to my feet and wiped the blood and dirt from my eyes, although my forehead still hurt like hell.

The Wild Wolves were gone.

So was Lenora.

Cain was on the ground, holding his left thigh with both hands. Blood leaked over his armor in four or five little streams. Puck was standing alone with his arms crossed, shaking in terror.

I walked up to Puck. “Tell me there’s a medical kit from the plane somewhere around here.”

His jaw dropped as he examined my face, which must’ve seen better days. I pointed at Cain, whose screams were abating. “For him, not for me.”

Puck nodded. “Right. Right. What about Lenora?”

I shook my head. “We can’t take those animals right now. Cain’s the only one here with a Godlet. If he dies, we’re done.”

I saw Puck’s puffy eyes dart back and forth as he searched the scene. Meanwhile, I ran over to Cain, whose bright swords were sprawled out on the ground, pointing toward him.

He was taunting us.

“Hey,” I said, standing over him. “You alive?”

He didn’t look away from his leg. “Did you…” he took a pained breath and tried again. “Did you know about Lenora?”

I swallowed. “No. But if she really is the Ruler’s daughter, we have to go get her. Or else my trial will be a moot point.”

“Moot point?”

I scanned our crash site. Burning debris, fallen trees, and a forest kissed by glass.

“Yeah. Because if anything happens to the Ruler’s daughter, we’ll already be at war.”