Out of the Woods
The long road back to Loshev: a flooded epicenter, a stranger's flask, and seven hundred years opening up behind Aldo's eyes
TL;DR
Riding out cost them a horse’s nerve, a crystal and very nearly Mikhail, who went under the mud at the flooded epicenter and came back out on a rope. But the road’s real weight fell on Aldo, who drank something Dwayne offered him and spent an hour seven hundred years back: a field, a whip, a rebel tortured over a name, and Vëné walking through mage-fire. He woke clawing at moss. In Loshev he lied to Kurvroc, gave the crown away, and asked aloud whether anyone had chosen them at all.
First seen
- Midnight milk: a hallucinogen out of Dwayne’s cache, and no ordinary one
- The sodden zone: a water-aligned epicenter with no border, only a middle
- The band-leader’s notebook: a riddle with a place-name in its misspelling
What changed
- The Twisted Grove is behind them, the Elder spent to nothing on their exit.
- Kurvroc believes a lie: nothing salvageable, but a cipher in the books.
- Aldo has seen the rebellion, Vëné standing in it.
- The crown is Mikhail’s, after a coin-flip Aldo rigged himself.
Left open
- Who chose them, and whether the Elder is a guide or worse.
- The stash the riddle hides in a barn at Ridh.
- Whether another mouthful of the milk is worth the cost.
Synopsis
They rode out through a path the Elder had withered for them, and the razorleaf closed behind. An hour brought them to the stone flats and the dead, and there was nothing to be done: the oil was gone, the ground would not take a grave, and dragging them anywhere would only feed the woods. A mixed band, no colors, no uniformity: hired explorers under an experienced leader. Kithul went east half a year ago to warn people off these ruins, and the party wondered whether that is what brought them.
They also settled what Kurvroc would hear: that the keep was cursed, and that the encyclopedias hide a cipher worth chasing. Not the trees, not the crystals, nothing about breaking it. Dwayne chose that stretch of road to admit Kurvroc had underpaid him and keeps him on promises of more work; they thanked him, and meant it, because he had probably kept them alive.
The things from the keep followed them all night and arrived at dawn, and this time they did not burrow away; they came on and kept coming until sunrise crested the treeline and the last wave crumbled into dry sticks where it stood. Dwayne swung at the big one with a sheathed sword, recovered, helped bring it down, and came away certain he had killed it; nobody corrected him. Aldo put a bolt through a creature and into Simone, who fled into the trees. The forest, they decided, reacts to them the way a body reacts to an irritant, though whatever drives it may have a bottom, and need time to fill again.
Two days at the old bandit camp, where the Valiant Few began. Dwayne wove a smoker and took a wild nest; sterilized, the honey was worth a charge on the medical kit. Aldo read the dead leader’s notebook and found a riddle-poem about straw and stalls and hanging hooks, and rid, spelled RIDH. In a barn near the Wyvern’s Tale in Ridh, an alchemist left something behind.
On the way home Mikhail and Koa turned aside into the sodden zone to test what the Elder’s map had claimed. There is no border to find, only a gradual wet, which let them walk it inward to the middle, where centuries of otherworldly water have rotted even the swamp plants. The middle lay further than the rope would let him wade, so Mikhail floated a small, poorly cut water crystal out to the epicenter instead. It glowed, took more than it could hold, and burst, and the sky came down. The mud pulled him under and would not give him back; Koa swam in, Nightstorm hauled on the rope hard enough to nearly finish the job herself, and he came into the shallows unconscious. Attunement, they now know, wants a large stone and a good cut.
The others waited with the books that could not get wet. Dwayne opened a cache he had hidden in the woods, possibly not even his own, and gave Aldo a bag of catnip and a flask of midnight milk. Aldo drank it. He was a Peren in a field under a whip; then in a back room hearing that the time is soon; then chained in an electrum-veined Mól keep while a man was tortured over the name Vëné; then the rising itself, Vëné shrugging off mage-fire like weather, and a cloaked figure laying a hand flat to the ground so that decay ran out of it, withered the hobgoblins and left the Peren standing. He woke digging into moss and nearly swung at the men holding him, and said little for the rest of the ride.
They came into Loshev after dark, over a bridge that shed another piece of itself under the horses. Aldo went to Kurvroc with the story of a ruin of a ruin and a cipher in the books, and Kurvroc, who did not believe him, bought it anyway. Told to the others, the vision joined up with what they had: Vëné, whom the Elder named as the one who chose them, and Telvanius, the historian who wrote the encyclopedias and worked for the rebellion while he did it. Which opened the argument: chosen by whom, and why believe it? Aldo, who has sold men the feeling of being chosen for a living, argued for suspicion, and they agreed to keep learning and be careful what they hand the Elder. Then he rigged a coin-flip and gave Mikhail the crown. Downtime settled into decoding, returning Fox’s volumes and a petition to the council about the bridge. And Mikhail went down with pneumonia and stayed down.