Peaceful Wolverine The forest is dark and solemn — old, thick trees, standing far apart, stretching to the sky. Not like the new growth of the lower valley, Kreer thinks, with its skinny, spindly saplings and crowded undergrowth.
No, this forest has dignity and age, here on the high slopes of the Cresting Range, above his city of New Carha. He leans sideways, slowly, quietly, careful not to scrape the bark of his hiding place, until he’s precariously extended into space — enough to see past the leaves and canopy and glimpse the lights of his home. Three day’s worth of hiking into the hills, through jagged canyons and raucous, deep-cut rivers, but the brightness of the city still makes it feel close. The beacons of its tower are always lit.
He clears his throat softly and leans back, settling himself once more against the trunk. He is keeping watch halfway up a grandfather oak that soars over 100 metres into air from its base next to a rocky creek. The sky is cloudy. He can’t see the ground for the night’s dark. The mass of the air pushes fitfully, bringing a rising breeze every few minutes that escalates until even Kreer’s oak sways and the leaves of the canopy sound like a storm. He breathes deeply as it reaches a crescendo, filling his nose and chest with the crispness and forest scents.
Unlike the previous night, his first watch after he and his unit reached their assigned location on the slope, Kreer is wide awake. His eyes feel tight and dry, his rough woollen clothing and leather armour vivid against his skin. As the wind dies again, slowly, he strains his ears for a hint of movement on the ground below.
Last week, a family of hunters with long generations of history in the Cresting Range had been devastated by what they claimed was a mage of some kind. They’d come to New Carha, grieving and furious, and demanded that the local defence force intervene.
Kreer grimaces as he remembers trying to keep a blank, professional face amid the wailing of the grandmother’s report to his company coordinator. His ears had started to ring, and he’d struggled with the urge to cover them.
She said her sons had burst into flame in the night, screaming and flailing and scattering bright sparks as they burned. She said her brother and nephews, each of them tough, wiry mountain men, had watched their spears and arrows shatter against still air, and had been answered with shards of ice skewering them, the ground dropping from under their feet and closing around them to grind and crush as they fell, eruptions of sharp rock as they tried to pursue their attacker. In the end, they had run, and by the time they made it home several more of the clan were dead of grievous wounds.
Kreer shudders and offers a silent prayer to the deities of this section of the Crests. The Ompanowiths-in-the-pine-tree-fog… probably.
If it really is an arcanist, perhaps they can be reasoned with… All such manipulators of natural forces are unreasonable — madness always takes them, everyone knows this — but perhaps they can communicate… Perhaps it won’t go badly.
Or perhaps they won’t find anything. He shrugs to himself, offers another prayer to the deity of his own home. That the grandmother and her young, wounded granddaughters, the two burned, angry young men breathing shallow breaths — the family’s only survivors — were lying. Maybe they’d all fallen off a cliff all at once, and they couldn’t handle the humiliation. Kreer grimaces.
The wind rises again. The forest creaks and moans. It rises, gusting and lulling, until he can’t hear anything else. As it has all night, and the sun will soon begin teasing the horizon, and he’ll be done with his watch and climb slowly down and sleep the day away in his hammock, swaying gently beneath a lower limb. He blinks, his eyes going heavy at the thought.
A shattering CRACK breaks the night apart and Kreer nearly topples off the torso-thick limb he’s been getting to know. He strangles a scream and freezes, clinging with all four limbs. It is long moments before he can hear anything again.
The sound had come from about 50 metres horizontal distance, he estimates, barely daring to breathe as he strains his ears. A branch? No, it was too meaty, too substantial… as if an entire trunk had exploded.
Debris becomes audible, rattling off surfaces and hitting the ground.
His hands shake as he lifts his shortbow, opens a pouch at his hip and pulls out a freshly waxed string. It’s a task to bend his bow and stretch the string, and the muscles of his inner thighs start to tremble from gripping his branch, but he concentrates and manages it. A shaft is next, slipped gently from the quiver secured to the tree and nocked. Readied, he takes a deep pull of air, then leans out, looking downward.
But what can I see?! It’s too dark! He tries to keep his inner voice from sounding frantic. If it is an arcanist below him, roaming and destroying… his face sweats, fast enough that drops gather on his nose and cheeks as he peers downward, all sleepiness now utterly banished. He can feel beads of moisture forming at his hairline.
Half of an hour passes. His clothes become soaked.
“Was that you, Kreer?!” a voice yells, faint but distinct over the natural rhythm slowly returning. Caller, in his tree 100 metres distant, at the top of his lungs. Kreer curses. Caller can’t help himself — he gets spooked. Kreer silently urges him to quiet.
“Kreer?!” Caller’s voice again, the timbre of panic carrying despite the distance.
Kreer swallows, tries to reply and manages only a squawk at first.
“Stay in your tree,” he howls. Nice and deep and calm, his voice is… sort of.
There’s a sound below — directly below, not distant at all — and his heart seems to stop. It’s a crackling, almost like sparks coming off a grindstone, or a mill saw catching an old nail in a log. His arse puckers hard.
He sighs, his breath catching, then leans to look in the direction of the screeching, sharp, very scary noise. Below, somewhere…
“Kreer?! What is that?” The shrill tone of Caller’s voice crosses the distance.
Kreer’s world goes white and he screams and hears nothing. He blinks and can make out only the afterimage of the forest, lit in an instant as though by a lightning strike. It was probably a lightning strike, he realizes in horror.
He waits, but nothing happens. His vision doesn’t clear. Perhaps I’ve died, he thinks. But no, he can still feel the tree. The rough bark is yet reassuringly solid, the tree is alive and unbroken from what he can tell.
The strong, distinctive burnt smell of a lightning strike becomes apparent.
His panic rises and falls as he waits. He has no idea what could have happened, whether Caller and Krish and Section Leader Erasmik are still alive. He smells no smoke, feels no vibration of explosions of arcane energy, but it remains impossible to be calm.
As his vision returns, he scans around him. As his hearing shifts from numbness to a pitched squealing, and from there slowly permits details, he listens harder than he ever has before.
Nothing.
He unstrings his shortbow, his hands clumsy, stuffs the string inside his vest, and begins his descent. His eyes have adjusted by the time he reaches his foot down and places it on solid earth, and he sweeps his gaze back and forth, lids strained.
The smell is fading with the breeze. There is nothing to see but the dark. Everything stays quiet. Kreer swallows, sighs.
“I don’t,” he says firmly to no one, “like it.” He pulls his short sword from its sheath, spares it a glance and rolls his eyes. As if it can help against fire and ice and lightning…
“I don’t like it at all.” He says it again and notes his hearing is almost normal.
He allows himself a pathetic whimper, then pats his own back reassuringly, then sets off in the direction of Caller and the others.
It does not take long to begin finding remnants of whatever received the sound. First small pieces, splinters and shards hard underfoot against the ground cover, then larger ones. He swallows hard, then steps to one side and carefully undoes his trousers. It’s a long piss, and his hands shake as he tries not to spook.
He rearranges himself and sets off again, heedless of noise. Can’t take the time to stalk properly.
“Kreer?” the hiss from his left nearly kills him. “Guh,” he grunts harshly. And that’s why we don’t hold it.
“Sorry.” It’s Krish, down from her tree to the north, daggers bared in both fists and glinting as she pads up to him. “Kreer, what do we do?” She is whispering, sensibly, and he has to focus to make her out.
He looks at her, his eyes straining. Her face is scared and young, pox scars standing out dark against paleness. Run right the other way, together, without stopping is what he wants to say. But she’s also angry — it’s all over her posture.
“We find the rest of the section,” he announces, too boldly, clears his throat and repeats himself much more softly. “We find the rest of the section, and Caller especially. Squirrelly little bastard can’t stay quiet.” He pauses. “Worried.”
She nods rapidly. Despite their training, they are within an arm’s length of each other as they resume their advance.
The forest floor becomes a mess.
“It’s a whole tree, a whole grandmother tree,” Krish pants, hoisting herself over a trunk. “That’s the height of two men at the base.”
Is that possible? Kreer wonders what a blast like that must cost the caster. Wonders what all this must look like for anyone in New Carha right now who happens to be looking up at the mountainside. Intermittent flashes, probably, booms echoing faint and distant. He shakes his head.
“Slow down,” he says. “Just… wait.”
Krish stares at him, perched atop a fallen limb, leaves caught in her hair. Her face is not at all calm.
Kreer wonders how to say it. Fierce and young… she’ll think me a coward. He sheathes his sword and takes a deep breath.
“We should wait. A caster like this, an arcanist who can do this… they’ll be burning themselves up. They’ll be dying, Krish. That’s what the City does in these situations—”
“He killed that whole family!” Krish hisses. “That’s a family like mine! And Caller’s your sister’s son!”
“Right,” he snarls, “good call, Krish! That’s smart, so let’s go get ourselves burned, too!”
She curses him and leaps to the other side of the trunk. “That’s great,” he calls after her, his voice rough. “We can do like the stories, just meet the lightning with our swords and our frowny faces!”
“Piss off!”
Kreer puts his hands on his hips. If we go uphill, we should be fine. No half-crazy arcanist is wandering up the hill.
“That blast came from right below me,” he says softly. Krish is climbing something else, making a racket on the other side of the fallen branch. He shrugs. Didn’t hear me. We’ll just keep going this way.
Of course, that was a while ago—
Krish’s shout cuts him off mid-thought. “I see someone!” He hears her stringing her short bow. As fast as she is with her daggers, she’s better with the bow. Maybe that will be enough, if she’s fast and accurate.
Kreer throws himself at the huge branch in-between them, lunges to its top just as Krish looses an arrow. “There!” She shouts, nocking another shaft even as she speaks. She is above him and he can’t see. Krish has excellent night vision, anyway. She looses another arrow as he climbs up next to her.
“Stop,” he hisses. “We need to change position!” He crouches.
“You stop! Circle around and find them!” Krish yells at him. Another arrow flies into the night at nothing at all that Kreer can see.
A cry. A yell in a high-pitched voice. “Got him,” Krish growls, baring her lips in a grin. Kreer rolls forward off the branch, finds good footing amid the mess, and reaches up for her. “Well placed! Now, get down!”
She opens her mouth, and Kreer sees flames at the back of her throat. He has time for only a moment of stupefaction.
The fire erupts from inside her, spilling its way out rather than finding its way in. It everywhere all at once and Krish has no time to scream or flail. In a moment, she becomes a pillar of flame. In another moment, the flames are so bright and hot that Kreer screams, reeling away, blinded once more. He takes only a step before tripping and sprawling painfully over the debris. A broken piece of wood pierces the web of his left hand. The fire cooks the back of his legs as he thrashes desperately to his feet.
The roar is too loud to hear his own screams, but he feels them flinching and stuttering as the hot air claws his throat.
He snatches at a branch with his wounded hand, careless of the splinters pulling at his flesh, and hoists himself up, dropping clumsily to the ground on the other side. And again, and again, gasping and fleeing the fire. It follows like a living thing, but eventually the wreckage of the great tree reveals a gradient at its border. Kreer slows his flight, leans to place his hands on his knees and take careful, sobbing breaths. He spits, and again, wipes at his sooty face.
“She was a good kid,” he whispers. They’re all good kids. Honour to help train them.
He can feel every inch of his burns. The hair on his head and face and arms is gone. His trousers are tattered. He dropped his bow and sword as he fled, and now fumbles at his hip to undo the knot fastening his quiver — his arrows are useless, the flights burnt to nothing. He looks behind him at the inferno, howling and growing, spreading to the smaller, damaged trees that had grown under the shelter of the huge grandmother, then turns away, limping, to create more distance.
The sound of crying is so faint at first that he mistakes it for himself. It’s low and halting and intermittent. He pauses, panting, shaking, takes a deep breath and holds it.
There… that’s a child crying…
He lets his breath out explosively, grimacing at the pain in his mouth and throat, and wonders what to do. I could go the other way. I could still make it…
But he looks down at himself, at his injuries, at the amount of exposed skin, raw and glistening and black at the edges. Kreer heaves a sigh, coughs as gently as he can, tears standing out at the corners of his eyes.
He turns toward the sound. It feels like a long time before the crying gets clearer and closer. It isn’t constant, forcing him to stop and listen for minutes on end before the child cries again and he can make progress.
There they are. He spots half a tousled head of hair, just visible around the corner of a boulder half-supporting a tall fir. The child is tucked into a pocket in the tree’s roots. Kreer freezes. He can’t bring himself to move until the little boy cries again — weaker and quieter, but still full of pain and fear.
“I’m—” his voice, gently couched, catches roughly and he is instantly caught in a violent coughing fit that feels like it’s tearing his chest apart from the inside. The little half-burned head snaps toward him, a ravaged face shining in the night, eyes like an owl’s.
No! He desperately tries to stop coughing, both hands up and waving. Please don’t burn me! Wait!
A little hand raises, and he forces a word out at last.
“Wait!” With a final agonized swallow, he manages a controlled breath, slumping to one knee. “Wait, please. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m too hurt, anyway. Please. Please, wait.”
The hand stays raised. Nothing happens. Kreer takes a gasp of air.
“What’s your name, little one?”
The child stares at him. Kreer stares back. He can see most of the boy now, and wonders how the small body continues to function. Burnt, from both fire and lightning — patterns of spiking, branching red lines trace from his right hand up his arm to shoulder and neck, touching his ear. The boy’s left arm is blackened and shrivelled, curled tight and useless to his chest. His legs are cut and bleeding in many places, alongside more burns. His only clothing is a tattered undergarment.
A broken arrow shaft stands out from his left side, flexing fitfully up and down with the boy’s breathing.
Kreer inches closer, carefully drawing to within a couple of arm’s lengths and settling himself on a smooth stone poking out of the roots. The child is staring at him, face a mask of filth, crusted and raw.
“You look cold,” Kreer whispers. He swallows. “Would you like my coat?” He motions to his coat. Burned, but the leather and fleece are still warm.
The child speaks, too low for Kreer to make out. He leans closer, grunting.
”… ’s yer name?” spoken so softly Kreer squints his eyes.
“Kreer,” he answers. “Kreer Smithson of New Carha City Watch.”
The boy whimpers, looks down at himself and flinches, letting out a small cry. Kreer’s chest tightens hard.
“I have you, little one,” he whispers, shrugging out of his coat. He leans forward, tries to place it as carefully as he can. The child moans and twitches as he does so. Kreer has a flash of inspiration, hooks the coat’s edges on the roots surrounding the boy rather than resting the rough fabric on hurt skin.
The little boy is shaking as Kreer leans back and sits again on his rock. His pupils are uneven, Kreer notices.
Is it getting colder…? He swallows. Not long now.
“Do- do you-” the little boy swallows. He can’t have seen more than eight or nine winters. His voice is high and shrill. Kreer wonders where he came from. What happened to his family.
“Do you have,” coughs, “a little boy like me?”
Kreer stares at him. Then, a slow smile spreads across his face. He closes his eyes and breathes for a few moments.
“No,” he says finally, not opening his eyes. “My girls… I have five daughters, little one. Strong and clever and hard-working. My special girls… So proud of them.”
There is no reply, and after a minute he opens his eyes. The boy is staring at him. There’s an unnatural light in his feverish eyes, shining blue and illuminating his sockets at the edges. Kreer’s smile fades.
“You don’t have a little boy like me?” Angry, now. Loud, clear, and a rough undertone deeper . There is mana left in this arcanist, then. Oh, well.
Kreer swallows and looks down at his right arm, at his hand braced against the ground and fixed in place by a thick, rapidly growing rime of ice. At least I’m not burning. He watches moisture pulling itself out of the air to adhere to his skin, crystallizing and puncturing him as it swells and reaches.
“I’m scared,” he admits to the child. “But I’m still glad you aren’t alone. This isn’t your fault. It’s just the arcana.”
“I,” the boy says, breathing hard again, teeth clenched tight and bared, burned skin cracking and oozing, eyes blazing with light, “I hate you.” His voice rises to a shriek as the ice reaches Kreer’s face. “I HATE YOU!” He screams it again and again, but Kreer hears him only faintly. The cold burns all over, although he’s not feeling pain anymore.
He closes his eyes and the lids freeze shut. He can’t move his face, but the smile grows in his mind as everything else fades.
My special little girls…