Chapter 9

We planned to leave the next morning and make our way toward Reedwatch, though Ashlara reminded us more than once that it wasn’t our top priority. We were safer than we had been, but safety wasn’t the same as being safe, and if anyone recognized us, Hek and his men could still come knocking.

I finished the evening working through the focusing exercises under Mirri’s ever-watchful eye. I hadn’t managed even a flicker of magic yet, but my thoughts felt sharper, cleaner, than they had in years. That had to count for something.

I slept on the floor again, which earned me another round of Mirri’s protests. I assured her, as gently as I could, that it was what I wanted. She didn’t look convinced, but she let it go.

Breakfast the next morning was a plate of bacon and a bowl of cheesy grits, warm and filling in a way that stuck with me long after. Ashlara left as soon as we were done and returned carrying a new axe - dark metal, heavy, and viciously beautiful. A broad, curved blade on one side, a jagged spike on the other. It suited her so perfectly it might as well have been forged around her grip. It might have been, as I still didn’t know what she and the smith had discussed.

We stocked up on a few more provisions, then left Woodshome in the midmorning light. A few hours later we stopped by a narrow stream to eat, after which Ashlara put me through another round of sword drills. By the time we started moving again, my arms felt like half-set pudding.

The weather turned on us that night. Rain hammered us for three straight days - cold, needling rain driven sideways by a wind just as cold. Sometimes lightning tore across the sky; other times the world collapsed into a sheet of gray haze with no sky at all. Ashlara trudged through it like the storm barely existed, but Mirri shook so hard her teeth chattered, so I draped my cloak over her shoulders to give her what relief I could.

Even then, soaked to the bone and chilled through, Ashlara still pulled me aside at lunch each day to train. She was relentless - always pushing, always demanding more, waiting for a crack she could widen. But I refused to give her one. I’d made a promise to her, and to myself, and I wasn’t going to break it.

Eventually the rain began to taper off, leaving the sky a dreary, gray smear of clouds for another day and a half before the sun finally broke through. The warmth felt like a blessing. My clothes were still waterlogged, my fingers and toes pruned and white, but as the world slowly dried around us, I could feel my spirits rise with the temperature.

* * *

By the next day we’d mostly dried out. The air was warmer, the sky high and full of big, lazy clouds, like we’d wandered into an overly cheerful landscape painting. As we walked and Mirri continued my magical lessons, the conversation drifted toward gods. My only experience with one had been Mother Hunger and that felt like more than enough for a lifetime.

“Gods are basically ideas made real,” Mirri said. “They’re not born like people. They come from faith. When an idea gets big enough, important enough, it starts poking holes in the world in weird ways. Those weird little bits drift together, and when enough of them gather, they start to merge.”

I thought back to what Ashlara had said about the thing she’d fought. “The swarm form.”

“Right-O, Daddy-O,” Mirri chirped. “So, like, take night time. That’s a big, fuckin’ deal, right? Everybody knows it, everybody sees it, every single night. So eventually the night starts manifesting - owls everywhere, bats everywhere, maybe the moon looks bigger or brighter than it should. All that night-stuff gets pulled together. And once there’s enough of it, it doesn’t stay a bunch of pieces. It becomes a whole.”

“Mother Hunger was the idea of hunger,” Mirri went on. “So she manifested as things that are always hungry. And those hungry things started eating each other. But instead of just getting fat, they turned into something built to eat more. More mouths, more need. The more she ate, the hungrier she got, so she grew even more mouths. But she wasn’t just one thing at first. You said you saw a smaller one with her, right? They start as many, and become one. So even if you killed the big one, the little one would just keep eating. She still would’ve become a god eventually, just slower.”

“But it’s not always about eating,” she added. “If the night was pulling in bats and owls, maybe they wouldn’t tear each other apart. Maybe they’d just swarm, or all start roosting in one specific tree until the whole mess of ‘em started turning into part of the tree. Every god forms differently.”

“So once they become a full-blown god, then what?” I asked. “Do people worship them? Pray to them? Do they actually respond?”

Mirri snorted. “Fuck no. They do whatever the fuck they want. God of earthquakes causes earthquakes. Goddess of hunger eats things. God of lightning blows shit up because that’s his whole vibe. That’s what they are.” She shrugged. “Sometimes people can convince a god to do something for them, if they’ve got something the god wants. Toss the goddess of volcanoes one of her enemies, maybe she’ll melt a few of yours. But honestly, what can we offer that a god can’t already take?”

“How many gods are there?” My question wasn’t entirely academic.

“Oh, who knows, hundreds?” She waved a hand. “It’s weird. There are like five or six gods of fire alone. One for wildfires, one for cooking hearths, one for cremation, and some others I can’t remember. But for ****? As far as I know, there’s just the one. No god of dying in your sleep, or dying in a fire, or dying with regrets. Just the one **** god. I have no idea how the world decides when one god is enough and when it needs a whole set.”

* * *

The ground grew steadily rockier as we traveled, though the forest never opened up. If anything, the underbrush thickened and the trees stretched even taller, their branches starting high overhead and climbing straight upward instead of reaching out.

The incline became impossible to ignore. More stone jutted through the soil, and soon we were weaving around little waterfalls, ducking beneath rocky overhangs, and stepping up natural terraces of layered stone. It was peaceful here, alive with birdsong and the rush of water, but the hike was getting steeper and more demanding.

Mirri and I traded idle chatter while Ashlara scouted ahead. That ended abruptly when the orc glanced back, caught my eye, and pressed a finger to her lips. I stopped instantly, laying a steadying hand on Mirri’s shoulder as I mirrored the gesture. We crouched behind a broad, moss-covered stone and waited. Ashlara vanished deeper into the trees. Minutes slipped by, slow and heavy.

“Humans,” she whispered directly behind me, and I nearly leapt out of my skin. She’d been ahead of us. How in the hell had she…? “Three,” she continued, ignoring my shock. “Armed. Guarding a cave. We go around-”

The ground trembled, a low rumble rolling toward us from up ahead. It climbed in pitch, stretching into a shrill, terrible sound, like a woman’s scream, before abruptly cutting off with a strangled ****.

The forest fell utterly still. No wind. No birds. Nothing.

“No,” Ashlara hissed, fixing her gaze on me.

“She might need help,” I whispered. My eyes flicked to Mirri, silently begging for backup.

Mirri winced, uncertain. “I don’t like this, but… he’s right.”

“No,” Ashlara repeated, sharper.

“Three humans, right?” I asked. “Do you think you can take them?”

She scowled, already annoyed by the direction of this conversation.

“Do. You think. You can take them?” I pressed, meeting her eyes and refusing to blink.

“…Yes,” she admitted, grudgingly.

“Then there’s no problem. Between the three of us, we take them out and find the girl.”

“We don’t know if there is a girl,” she snapped.

“Then we sneak closer and see what they’re doing. If there’s no girl, fine, we circle around and figure out what that scream was.”

Ashlara let out a long, slow breath through her nose, clearly unhappy. Then she jerked her head forward. “Come. Quiet.”

* * *

We crept forward as quietly as we could. Or rather, I crept as quietly as I could. Ashlara and Mirri moved through the forest like ghosts, silent and deadly. I watched every step, carefully avoiding brittle twigs, loose bark, and exposed stone. Thank whatever passed for luck here that it wasn’t autumn - fallen leaves would have made stealth impossible.

Ashlara led us around a jagged rock face, and that’s when we saw them.

Three men stood before a dark, slanted opening in the hillside. The cave mouth looked like part of the hill had collapsed and come to rest against itself, leaving a jagged black gap in the stone.

Two of the men wore dark leather armor, lightly embossed and studded with brass rivets. It was cleaner and better made than anything I’d seen on the orcs so far. Each had a sword at his left hip, a quiver at his right, and a bow slung across his back.

The third wore metal armor, scarred and dulled with use, but clearly well cared for. A sword hung at his side, and he held a heavy crossbow at the ready.

Another scream tore from the cave. It sounded… wrong. Layered. Two voices overlapping - one deep and guttural, the other unmistakably feminine. The men in leather shifted uneasily. The man in metal didn’t. He stood rigid and severe, his eyes scanning the forest around him, his back to the cave.

Ashlara glanced back at me and shook her head, resigned. She slipped the dark-metal axe from her back and rested it against her knee. She raised both hands, all ten fingers spread. One finger dropped. A second’s pause. Then she dropped another. She nodded once.

A countdown.

She tightened her grip on the axe and slid away from our cover, circling wide around the men.

I wrapped my fingers around my sword’s hilt and silently counted down from eight. When I reached one, I nodded to Mirri and we broke cover.

The two men in leather jolted in surprise, fumbling for their swords. The man in metal reacted instantly, calmly leveling his crossbow at me - and then was driven into the rocky ground by a large, green hand that gripped the back of his armor and pulled him back and off his feet. He rolled just in time to avoid her boot crushing down where his breastplate had been.

I swung at the man on the right. He staggered back, finally yanking his sword free. I pressed him, but he caught my blade and in my rushed attempt to dodge his counter, my foot slipped. I went down hard, landing squarely on my ass.

He lunged to finish me - and then spun sideways as a rock the size of a beach ball smashed into his head.

To my left, Mirri grinned, two more stones of similar size hovering lazily at her sides.

The last man in leather took one look and bolted.

To my right, Ashlara and the armored man traded blows in a brutal flurry, axe ringing against steel. She drove him back, and one of Mirri’s stones slammed into his chest, knocking him flat. The warrior orc stepped in and brought the haft of her axe down across his face. He didn’t get back up.

* * *

I hauled myself up from the ground and took a shaky breath. My hands were trembling, and no amount of willing them to stop helped.

Ashlara gripped my shoulder far more gently than I would have expected and leaned close. “Come,” she whispered, already easing toward the cave’s mouth.

I followed, moving on instinct more than thought. Mirri slipped in behind me silently.

The cave interior was rough, uneven stone, much like the outside. Moisture beaded along the narrow walls, water dripping steadily as the tunnel sloped deeper. Along the left wall sat three travel packs and a scattering of gear, stacked neatly and kept mostly dry despite the damp. From farther in came a man’s low voice, words echoing and unintelligible, layered with soft, feminine sobbing.

The chanting grew louder. The sobbing twisted into another two-toned scream.

Ashlara stopped and looked back at me. For the first time since I’d met her, her expression wasn’t hard or focused. It was uncertain. Afraid.

We pressed on, carefully navigating the uneven floor. As our eyes adjusted, a sickly green glow became visible ahead. I clenched my sword’s hilt until my knuckles bleached white. Every step forward made my skin crawl.

About fifty feet in, the passage opened into a wider chamber.

A human stood near the far side, wrapped in dark red robes embroidered with silver sigils. His voice droned in a language I didn’t recognize, certainly not English, and nothing else I’d heard. A few feet in front of him, two large concentric circles were carved into the stone floor and inlaid with silver.

Within the circles lay a woman, curled tight in the fetal position, sobbing quietly.

A shaft of sunlight pierced the ceiling, offering a weak wash of natural light. But it was nothing compared to the ghastly green flames filling the inner circle. Flames that engulfed the woman completely.

The man’s chant rose, and the fire surged, leaping from the woman to him. As he drew the green flames into himself, her body began to warp. Limbs stretched at impossible angles. Her face distorted. Her back bulged and shifted, like she was silly putty, warped by an angry child’s hands.

“He’s killing her,” Mirri whispered, horror etched across her face.

I pointed to myself, then gestured left. I pointed to Ashlara, then right. Her skin had gone pale, but she met my eyes for a heartbeat, then nodded.

We slipped into the chamber and split, moving as quietly as we could.

The man noticed the orc warrior first. Or maybe he saw us both and chose her as the greater threat. Which, to be fair, she was.

As the flames receded, he snarled, “You will not stop me! Die!”

We broke into a run.

His jaw unhinged impossibly wide, and a torrent of green fire roared toward Ashlara. It struck her mid-stride, hurling her across the chamber. A wall of stone erupted between her and the flames just in time, glowing red as it absorbed the heat, beginning to sag and drip like melting wax while she scrambled for cover.

I sprinted harder, lifting my blade the way she’d taught me, ready to strike.

His twisted face snapped toward me. Green fire still poured from his mouth, and the world dissolved into flame.

I heard a scream, maybe mine, maybe someone else’s, lost in the roar. My skin burned and froze at the same time. Fire licked over me, incinerating what little clothing I wore. The tip of my sword glowed red… then white.

I thrust blindly. The blade was torn from my hands. The fire veered suddenly to the side.

I slammed into the man, tackling him to the ground. I grabbed his head and wrenched it away from me, forcing his face toward the stone wall. The green flames continued to pour from his mouth for several agonizing seconds, turning stone to lava, before finally sputtering out.

I stayed on top of him, chest heaving, tears in my eyes, pinning him there - terrified he’d start again.