by Noah Layton
On the one hand I wanted to tell everyone about it. I wanted them to stay safe within their homes and out of the way of anything that might cause them any harm. That was my responsibility as their leader.
On the other hand, though, one mention of a giant monster in the area could send everybody into a full-blown riot. A tribe master may have had authority over his people, but I knew how revolutions worked; if the people see that things aren’t right for them, they’ll cut the boss’s head off, steal everything that isn’t nailed down and take off without a second’s notice.
And I really liked the idea of keeping my head.
I listened hard for a few minutes but heard only the corn stalks and the blades of grass brushing against each other in the warm breeze.
Heading up the steps and into the treehouse, I found Ariadne and Lara wrapped up together on the bed. They were completely naked, their wolf’s fur clothing strewn on the floor nearby.
No matter how spent I was, even after Santana had literally emptied me in the forest, the sight of them still made me realise how lucky I was. I had no idea how I had ended up out here, but they made it worthwhile.
I pulled off my clothes and climbed into bed with my wives, dropping into unconsciousness just moments after my head hit the pillow.
That should have been the end of the night. The next time I opened my eyes, daylight should have been seeping in through the canopy overhead while my Ariadne and Mara snuggled up to me.
Instead I was met by darkness and hushed voices.
‘Master… Master…!’
I awoke and sat up quickly.
‘What is it?’ I said groggily, making out the sight of Lara by the door.
‘There is something outside.’
Ariadne was pulling on her clothes and retrieving her knives by the bed.
Immediately I was alert.
I got out of bed and stepped silently over to the door. Halfway across I felt a light thud and a vibration through the ground.
The girls’ eyes went wide as we all stood perfectly still and listened.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Whatever was outside was gigantic, and some part of me knew immediately what was confronting us.
The creature that had attacked the caravans was right outside. It was circling the tree.
‘I think that the horses and the taurems are safe. We have not heard them. They must have taken shelter in the forest. It has already killed the piglets though,’ Ariadne whispered into my ear. ‘We heard their squeals.
My eyes clenched shut. I took a deep breath and collected myself.
I crossed lightly to Lara and whispered into her ear.
‘What is this thing? Can you see it?’
‘I’m not opening the door. I don’t think it knows that we are here… It is just circling.’
We were trapped, and there was nothing that I could do about it. All we could do was listen to the huge creature’s heavy breathing as it continued to circle the tree over and over again.
Minutes passed until the thudding stopped altogether. The breathing, though – the panting, heaving breaths that verged on growls – they continued, on and on, right outside of our door.
My heart pounded hard and my hands shook. I reached for the locket around my neck and felt the heaviness of the silver in my hand.
Suddenly the thuds began again. They grew quieter as the creature headed away from the tree. My mind turned to my citizens. They were probably cowering inside their homes.
We listened and listened, but there were no sounds of stone crumbling or people screaming, only the thudding of footsteps across our land as it headed towards the Eastern side.
Branches snapped beneath its feet with a series of brutal crunches as it moved into the darkness and away from us.
More waiting. We couldn’t go out straight away in case it was still watching us, and even then I would only peek out from the door to check the state of things.
When I was finally sure that we were alone, I opened the door and looked out to the field. Eri was in a top window of her house, and waved across to me. I waved back and signalled for her to get back inside, which she eventually understood.
Searching the land in the moonlight one last time I hopped off the side of my steps to get a look at Jeremiah and Santana’s house. Being confronted by monsters was something they were used to.
Their house was dark and the curtains were drawn over the small windows, but there was no sign of damage to it.
The pig pen was another story. The fence had been demolished completely, and the rest of the animals were nowhere to be seen.
I dreaded to think about the state of it, but that could wait till morning. Alorion was the only one that I hadn’t spotted for definite, but he was small enough to look after himself, especially if he needed to make a quick escape.
There was no way that we could all sleep at once. We took shifts trying to get some shut-eye before the sun rose, but it was few and far between. That thing, whatever it was, had been too big to let our minds settle.
Monsters only came out at night, and the next day couldn’t come fast enough.
Chapter Sixteen
The moment the sunlight began to illuminate the land I headed out the front door, fully-dressed and with my sword at my side. Sleep hadn’t exactly been in abundance, but I was wide awake as I hurried across to the Rourke house.
I glanced over at the pig pen on my way over. It had been demolished completely, the fences uprooted and the ground dug up in large cascades. There was no blood or any sign that there had ever been any piglets to begin with.
They had been devoured whole.
Jeremiah opened the front door before I got there.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked quickly. ‘Are you both okay?’
‘We’re fine, Jack,’ he said, giving me a nod. ‘We locked ourselves upstairs and prayed, just as we always have done.’
‘Is everyone else okay, Master Jack?’ Santana asked, appearing at her father’s side. Jeremiah made no indication of anger, so I guessed that she hadn’t said a word.
‘I think so. The only person I haven’t seen is-’
‘Jack, Master Jack!’
‘Speak of the devil…’
Alorion came scrambling through the grass towards me.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m perfectly fine,’ he replied. ‘Nothing like the branches of a tall tree to keep one out of harm’s way. This creature is gigantic.’
‘We heard it. Those were its footsteps.’
‘Have you seen its footsteps?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come look.’
He took off back the way he had come, dashing through the grass.
‘Find the animals,’ I said to Jeremiah and Santana. ‘The piglets might be gone but the horses and the taurems aren’t. They’ll be around here somewhere – probably in the forest.’
They got started immediately and I ran in pursuit of Alorion. He hadn’t gone far; he was following a trail around the tree that I called home.
I had been so intent on checking that everyone was okay that I hadn’t even noticed them. The footprints were gigantic; paw-shaped and at least three feet in diameter, they sank deepest were the claws were had dug into the ground.
‘So you were telling the truth when you mentioned monsters, huh?’
‘I never actually used the word monster, Jack. I have always tried to be ambiguous.’
‘So the thing that made this doesn’t qualify as a monster in your mind?’
‘Oh, no, it’s definitely a monster.’
‘Did you get a look at it?’
‘Four legs, patched grey and black fur… It was a wolf, a wolf that stands at least three yards tall and six in length.’
I gulped hard as I stood within the imprint of the wolf’s paw in the dirt. Dealing with regular wolves had been bad enough, but the sheer prospect of this thing actually existing terrified me.
‘Did you see
where it went?’
Alorion led me through the field to the eastern edge of the land. The paw prints were stamped into crushed grass in a straight line. It had deliberately come this way. There had been no meandering.
In the trees at the edge of the forest the ground had been viciously scratched at, as if it was trying to dig for something.
‘I’m guessing this thing wasn’t trying to take a shit out here,’ I muttered. ‘But what’s with the hole? What was it trying to reach?’
Alorion just shook his head. I looked about the trees and the shrubbery, and saw the line it had made through the undergrowth.
‘Wait… Wait…’
I jumped down into the hole that had been dug and shoved my hand down into the dirt, rifling about.
‘What in the name of the gods are you doing?’ Alorion asked. ‘I can get a shovel if it would be more useful.’
‘I think I know why it was here. The wolves that we killed back at the homestead, the ones that we brought back here; I bet…’
I found what I was looking for, or at least part of it; wrenching my hand out of the dirt, I held up part of the wolf’s carcass. It was impossible to say which part because of the state in which Lara had left them, but the stench made it immediately clear. After finishing with the carcasses, this is where they had brought and buried them.
‘The wolves,’ Alorion said.
‘Yep,’ I replied, dumping the remains back on the ground. ‘I think we just pissed off the mother.’
***
‘We’ve got a problem. I don’t know where to start with it, and I need suggestions.’
I had called everybody to a meeting in the map room, which was still acting as our temporary base of operations.
‘That thing that you all heard last night… We’re pretty sure that it was a wolf. Not a regular one, and not a feral one, but the mother of those that attacked back at Jeremiah and Santana’s homestead. That’s why it was out here. Lara and I killed a small pack of them a few miles from here. We brought the carcasses back and harvested them for resources. It must have smelled the buried bodies, which brought it here.’
‘But why didn’t it attack?’ Lara said. ‘Wolves are redemptive creatures. They work as a group, and they avenge their group. If the mother thought that her children were dead it would have torn everybody to shreds.’
I nodded at Lara and Ariadne. ‘Your outfits. I think it can smell the fur. That’s why it spent so much time circling the tree. It thinks that its children may still be alive.’
Lara looked down at her outfit and ran a hand through her hair.
‘I am such a damned idiot… This is supposed to be my area of expertise. Please forgive me, I had no idea that the mother would be out here. The wilds are enormous, and for a mother to actually be nearby… They have many children that split far across the land in packs…’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s done. It happened. There’s no point in regretting anything. Right now we need to figure out how to stop this thing from coming back here. Can we just get rid of everything that brought the mother here in the first place?’
‘That won’t work,’ Lara continued. ‘It’ll find the scent, find the remains, and when it realises that its children are dead it will come to the last place that it smelled the remains, and kill everything there – which is right here.’
‘We can’t just throw the remains into a river and let it drift off?’
‘If it loses the scent it is still likely that it will return here. Like I said, it knows that the wolves were here at some point… It knows that they are still here. It is out there in the forest, and it will return.’
‘So you’re saying we’re trapped?’ Tormus said.
‘We are surrounded on all sides by a single creature,’ Eri added.
Everyone fell silent as I racked my brain for a solution.
If we kept the remains, it would come back. If we got rid of them, it would come back with a much more pissed off attitude. Either way, it would return, and sooner or later it’s temper would probably reach boiling point.
‘How am I supposed to do this?’ I said to myself, overlapping my hands behind my neck. I had asked it out loud, and my people had seen a moment of weakness in my eyes, had heard it in my voice, but I didn’t care. I was too desperate for an answer.
‘Is there no possibility that we could kill it?’ Ariadne said quietly. ‘We have weapons. We have explosives left over from the attacks by the bandits. Some Arcane Blast charges, too.’
‘We dealt with the wolves for many months at our homestead,’ Jeremiah said. ‘They are not invincible creatures, but they require a lot of damage to bring down. And the more injured they become, the more ferocious they become. You saw that for yourself.
‘This creature that is approaching us is much bigger. It will require a much greater force to bring it down, but this would take a greater length of time to do – time that we do not have. If this thing senses that it is under attack, whether it is from a spell or a blade, it will become very angry very quickly.’
‘And it’ll rip this place to pieces,’ I said. ‘We can’t get rid of the remains. We can’t kill it… What the hell do we do…?’
Silence fell once again. There was no solution. The only way that we would survive is if we abandoned the land.
No, there was no way that that was even a possibility. I couldn’t consider it. We had finally reached a point of sustainability after endless amounts of work, and through utterly shit luck it had been ripped from us.
But how else could I keep my people safe? The only way was to split up, to abandon the land. I had tried to find a better solution, but there wasn’t one.
‘There is a way we could kill it.’
The suggestion hadn’t come from Ariadne or Lara.
It had come from Santana.
‘Really?’ I said, taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’
‘No,’ Jeremiah cut in. ‘I know what you are going to say, but it is not an option.’
‘It can be used, father. It does not have to be you that fires it. You only have to be the one that hands it over.’
‘Okay,’ I cut in, ‘if you’re harbouring some secret weapon in your house now would be a really great time to lend it to me.’
They both turned to look at me with wary expressions.
‘When I left the ruins of my old tribe years ago,’ Jeremiah began, ‘I took a cart and filled it with everything that I could salvage in the ruins of our tribal lands. By that point it had been abandoned and much of it reduced to rubble, but there were some things of value remaining. I took all that I could, most of which I used upon setting up camp at our homestead.
‘Among the objects were some papers, one of which was a schematic for a weapon. I had no desire to use it, but I could tell that it was of some value, so I kept it in an old lockbox… A lockbox that I have back at the house.’
‘What is this weapon?’ I asked.
‘It is a harpoon cannon,’ Santana said, her smooth, quiet voice sounding almost strange saying those words – even if I had heard her say much dirtier ones. ‘It requires a Defence Totem to construct and a large amount of iron, but its size would make it perfect for this situation.’
‘A harpoon cannon,’ I nodded. ‘But they can only be fired once, can’t they?’
‘That is correct,’ Jeremiah said matter-of-factly. ‘Unless you have time to reload, which we likely won’t. We could wait for the mother wolf and attempt to bring it down, but if we miss…’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay… Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to construct this weapon and use it tonight when this thing gets here. I’ll try and kill it. Everybody else will stay hidden at Tormus and Eri’s house. It was the only place the wolf didn’t pay any attention to when it came here last night.
‘If I kill it, we’re safe. If I don’t… Well, just try and stay hidden until the morning and then hit the road. Take the horses and make a run for Ichabod’s Cove. La
ra has a room there that you should be able to use.’
‘It’s not big enough for everyone,’ Lara laughed lightly. Her smile quickly faded as she looked at the table, unable to meet my eyes.
‘You don’t have to do this, master,’ Ariadne said. ‘We will be able to find another way.’
‘There isn’t another way,’ I said. ‘This is what we’re doing. That’s all there is to it. Any questions?’
There were none.
‘All right,’ I continued. ‘Santana, what’s the situation with the animals?’
‘Aside from the piglets, all are accounted for, master. We found the horses and the taurem scattered just beyond the treeline and managed to round them up.’
‘Good. Get them to the stables. Tormus, Eri, hoard any resources that you can in storage in your home. Lara and Ariadne, get changed from your outfits and bring them to me when you’re done.’
Everybody headed to their stations to carry out their jobs, and I took a second to catch my bearings.
I could very well have just handed myself a death sentence, but I had no choice. This was just another form of death that I was staring in the face, only it had a huge set of teeth that could rip me to shreds like a piece of paper.
‘Master Jack?’ Jeremiah said, appearing by my side and bringing me back into the moment. ‘I’m guessing that you’d like me to provide you with this schematic now?’
‘You’d be right.’
We headed to his home and up to the tiny attic space above the upper floor. In the darkness he retrieved the small box and unlocked it with a key from around his neck. He tapped the stack of papers and removed one from the inventory, then proceeded to trade it with me.
I pressed accept. Jeremiah paused before he initiated his side of the deal.
‘I made a promise to myself not to use violence after the war. I saw what it did to the land… But over the past few days I have seen my daughter partake in it, and I have seen it follow me. Even if you hadn’t arrived and it had been I or her that had killed the wolves, this creature that now terrorises us here would have come to us. It has followed us here, and the only way for us to stop it is to defend ourselves.’