Chapter Text
[100|Fully Prepared]
Your back is to the merry fire, watching shadow dance. You cannot look at the sky, at the night high above with the two moons and stars unfamiliar, so you watch shadow and wait the hours out until a single sun brings the color of morning.
It comes; barghest-fur bedding tightly bound to a pack burdened by a merchant’s trade, ash kicked onto ember, and weapons readjusted with sure hands.
You move on, through a forest you have never walked before, looking for a signpost or a path traveled. You find none. No matter. There is nothing else to do.
[104|Thirteen]
A fortnight and a day, that’s how long you walk along the river’s shore. Flora, fauna. It’s strangely mimicked to what you know, but the beasts that attack are without cohesion, without intelligence beyond base reaction. You cull them with spell and blade and arrow; no thought, no strategy.
These encounters are easy, worth nothing really, not even time. Bears and wolves. Bears and wolves. It is so peaceful, so untouched by war’s hand, by migration, by soldiers, by bandits.
You wonder at the lack of variety. Not a single boggart or brownie or sprite. You wonder if this is a land without magic.
[105|Downer]
The hut is abandoned; you do not think it by design. A table is turned, a chair broken, smoke lingers to air and covers spill to floor. There is nothing of worth here. Nothing fancy to salvage, nothing locked to open. There is no food, no stores of water. It gives you hope though; it is the first sign of civilization since walking this land.
Night has chased you here and so you settle in, noising about the remints of another’s life. Rustic. Poor. A trapper’s waypoint, perhaps. You make yourself comfortable.
You don’t sleep, but you meditate in idleness tensing muscle and counting heartbeats.
[104|Academic]
Human, male, and very dead. Cut flesh, deep, lines unbroken by rudimentary padding. Robes. Boots intact, birch staff broken, no traveler’s pack. Stolen or never there to start?
Blooded earth and broken grass, patchwork patterns of a fight. Three assailants. Heavy prints, heavy armor. Brittle brakes in a tree, ice shard thrown wide, no prints near point of impact. You checked.
Back to the body, young enough, fit. You go through his pockets, find nothing.
Still.
Toes angled, heals square, metal boots turned east. No wheels digging deep, no horse; on foot three alive, they walk in formation.
A trail to follow at last.
[102|Your Eyes Only]
Tents aligned with soldier’s precision, a cluster of fifteen near riverbed and three easily seen higher on the cliff. Cast iron caldrons over fire pits already bubbling away with supper. Despite the river, it smells of a meat not fish. The campsite is almost empty, not near enough personnel to account for the supplies before you.
Strategic, practiced; you watch and you wait.
Human. They’re all human. An army, then. Not a guild. Platemale overlaid with mage’s robe, adorned with sword-and-wings, gold thread, red dye. Five archers, fourteen swords, nine shields, and two war-hammers; so nice of them to broadcast their proficiencies.