The branox fell underneath her blade, and the crackle in the air finally stopped. Imogen cut down a few more scattered branox, but then they were gone. There had been dozens upon dozens of the creatures.
Benji looked over to her. “I imagine you would have been formidable when we dealt with these in the past. We struggled with them. Of course, we never had any Leier with us. Your people didn’t care much for magic, even then.”
“How did you deal with them before?” Imogen asked.
“Sorcery was out, as it only led the branox to chase them. We had others who had particular skill.”
She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t.
He started forward and tapped his feet on the ground. With a rumble, the earth behind them began to soften, and the branox bodies were swallowed by the forest. Imogen felt a faint stir in the air, almost as if the wind were trying to talk to her the way it talked to Benji, but then it was gone. A sense of dampness filled the air, and a hint of foul odor lingered, but less so now that Benji had trapped the creatures beneath the ground.
“What do you mean, we?” she asked.
He looked over to her. “It was a magical ‘we.’”
She frowned. “Were you alive then?”
He had said that it was hundreds of years ago, but she had no idea how long ago it really was. She knew that some magical beings lived an impossibly long time, such as the El’aras. She had met those who had survived for centuries. Even the Sul’toral were old, though they had supposedly been held in prison for much of that time. Imogen didn’t know if that was true or not. All she knew was that magic could allow someone to live far longer than those without.
“Keep moving,” he said with a grumble.
Imogen chuckled, mostly at the irritation Benji showed, but there was a part of all this that left her intrigued. Maybe he had been alive back then. What stories might Benji have?
They hadn’t gone much farther before the ground dropped off, creating a massive gash in the forest floor. There were no trees, as if they had been ripped free and tossed down into the pit formed below them. It seemed impossibly deep, stretching far below them, swallowing up any of the remaining daylight in the forest. She had only the imagined sense of how deep this stretched, nothing more than that.
It was enough for her to know that whatever had been here had been powerful—and possibly far more so than Benji had imagined.
The air stunk with the stench of rot and decay. There was a haze far down below, making it difficult for Imogen to see much of anything, and it seemed as though there were shadows moving beneath them. The rest of the forest was unnaturally dark, and she struggled to make sense of what she could see.
“What happened here?” Imogen asked, walking along the rim of the gash. It looked like the earth itself had simply dropped, similar to how Benji used his power to swallow the branox.
“This is where they had been,” he said, his voice a soft whisper. “This is where they were released.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They should not have been held in a place like this.” Benji sniffed at the air and turned. “Could they have been so foolish?”
“Who?”
“I told you that the branox were destroyed centuries ago. No queens should have survived. We made certain of that.”
“You were a part of it, then.”
Benji held her gaze for a long moment but said nothing.
“Were you involved in hunting the queens?” Imogen asked.
“I saw them.”
She thought she understood what he was getting at. He may not have been involved in fighting the branox before, but his Porapeth abilities had certainly been used.
“Obviously they were not all destroyed,” Imogen said.
“For them to have repopulated in such a way suggests that a queen went missing.” He turned in place, sweeping his gaze all around. “They had hives like this before, though not in places like this. Typically, the hives were situated where magic had gathered, allowing the queen to feed as she created her progeny.”
Imogen couldn’t feel the same things Benji could, though she was aware of some unpleasant sensation pressing on her. “Are you sure the forest itself didn’t have some power?”
“I had not thought so,” Benji said. “But my sight has been blurry.” He leaned forward, breathing in. “It was why I had not seen the real danger of your brother breaking into the crypts. I should have known when I first found it, but I didn’t see it. I should have taken more time to look and listen. That fucker is responsible, I’m certain of it. They all came out of here. They would have formed a hive underground, like wasps or ants but worse.”
“Worse because they feed on magic,” she said.
He looked over to her. Darkness ringed his eyes—a hint of fear and something else. Anger? She couldn’t tell. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was sadness.
He tapped his foot, and the pit slowly began to fill as the ground moved around them. Benji’s power gradually seeped across, as if whatever he did was caught by the darkness below.
“I see something down there,” Lilah said, leaning over the edge. She clutched her silver necklace in her fist like she was keeping herself safe with it.
“Bones,” Benji said.
Imogen looked over to him. “What kind of bones?”
He breathed out slowly. “This is a hive. They have to feed. These are the remains of the dead.”
“Not their dead, though, is it?” Imogen asked.
She joined Lilah, looking down into the pit and trying to make out what was down there, but even as she stared, she wasn’t sure what she saw. Bones, certainly, but there were hundreds of them—far more than she had ever seen in one place. It looked like a massive graveyard, and with the bones piled up, it was almost as if somebody had dumped the bodies here.
“Not their dead,” Benji said. “They would have needed those with power to feed on.”
Imogen continued making her way around the pit, staring down into the depths of the darkness to make sense of what was below, but she couldn’t tell anything more.
She needed to go down there.
“Help me down,” she said to Benji.
“You do not want to do that,” he said.
“If the branox are gone, there’s no reason for us not to. We need to see.”
Benji sighed. “Hold steady.”
She frowned at him, then felt the ground tremble underneath her feet. The dirt flowed, and she slid down. The strange sensation stopped once she was at the bottom of the pit. Darkness had swallowed her, and the only light streamed down in thin shafts from above. The air stunk, carrying with it a filthy odor of rot, mud, muck, and death.
Imogen was no stranger to the last one. Having studied with the Leier as she had over the years, she had come to know death. It was a part of her training, part of who her people were. It was something she had been taught to bring into the world. And as Benji had said, death was a part of life, nothing to be feared. In this case, what she detected was unnatural. She stopped at one of the bones, which was larger than she would’ve expected from any human.
“I need light!” she shouted.
No response.
Imogen wasn’t sure if Benji had the ability to cast light down or not, but the rim above her began to glow softly. It looked like a faint trace of fire was burning, though it did so with a pale orange, almost white light. It cast eerie shadows down the dirt slope into the pit.
The remains of the hive.
The walls were scored, as if the branox had crawled out by digging with their claws. They had burrowed through stone and dirt, even ripping through some of the deep roots of the trees. It left a jagged, horrific ruin in the middle of the forest.
The shadows danced on the walls as she stepped forward, and it took her a moment to realize what she was seeing: bones, as Benji had claimed. Dozens of them. They glimmered with the reflected light, and there were more than she had first counted.
; The one in front of her was enormous, like a leg bone, but from a giant rather than a human. She nudged it with her sword, and it didn’t move. Her blade clanged off it, as though it were made of iron or steel. She moved forward, tapping on the bone again, and heard the same sound.
Not just a giant, but one that had what seemed to be metal for bones.
She picked her way carefully through the hive, finding skulls, arm bones, ribs, and spines. The remains of countless creatures.
She found no clothing or anything recent. Nothing to suggest what had been here.
Only what was left.
She retched from the smell, despite how much she tried to fight it.
After picking her way through and finding nothing more, she yelled up at Benji. “Get me out!”
The earth trembled underneath her and lifted her up, bringing one of the bones with her. Imogen poked it with her sword and shoved it over the side until it fell off. She landed next to Benji.
“What were they?” he asked.
She described the bones of the massive creatures that had been below, a haphazard collection of bones that seemed as if the bodies had been dumped into the pit. Benji frowned, staring down into the pit.
“No… not the ogaran,” he whispered.
“You know of them.”
“They live under the ground. In tunnels.”
“Tunnels that must have extended beneath the forest.”
Benji nodded. “I didn’t see…” He moved away from her, and she could practically feel the troubled feelings radiating from him.
It explained why these creatures had been here, but not other things.
“How many are there?” she asked.
“You saw the bones better than I did. I don’t know. Perhaps dozens, though it looks to be more.”
Imogen cast a glance down the pit. There were more than that, all sacrificed to feed the branox.
“I’m not asking that. How many branox would come from a hive?”
“Many,” he said.
“And now that they have moved on from this one?”
She thought she knew the answer, but she needed to know for certain what they had to be worried about and whether there was more the branox might do. It couldn’t be that they would just escape and find more magical users to feed on. She expected something more. Something worse.
And that was what she feared most.
“They will reproduce,” Benji said. “And then they will feed. And then they will reproduce again.”
“How many people will die?”
“Too many.”
“We have to stop them,” she said.
Benji leaned forward and took a deep breath, wrinkling his nose as he inhaled the stench from down below. Imogen got the impression that he needed to take in the foulness of the pit to show him just what she had seen. She doubted that he really needed to smell it.
Finally, he looked over to her with haunted eyes. “If the hive has fed and moved, it may already be too late.”
Chapter Twelve
Benji led them along a trail through the forest using a speed Imogen had not seen from him before. He had been moving with an urgency ever since they had come across the remains of the ogaran. It was more than just seeing the hive. That had been part of it, she was certain, but there was something else that bothered him.
He hadn’t seen this in his possible futures.
The bones Imogen had found belonged to creatures unlike anything she had ever seen before, ones that must’ve had magic and been enormous. And the branox had cut them down as if they were nothing.
How could they hope to stop them?
Whenever she tried to question Benji about it, he ignored her. He was bothered, but it was more than just that.
“If their numbers are what you fear, we won’t be able to get through the branox to stop the queen,” Imogen said.
“If we don’t stop the queen, there may not be many who can. It was a different time when we faced the branox before. There were others who knew how to fight them.”
She sighed and looked around. It might have been Imogen’s imagination, but the forest seemed to be growing thinner around her. “Something’s happening,” she said, looking over to Benji.
“We are nearing the edge of the forest.”
“You’re leading us away?”
“The branox are leading us away,” he said. “I’m only following them.”
Near midday, they reached the outskirts of the forest. Imogen breathed a sigh of relief as they did. There was something comforting about leaving the forest and the way the air shifted and changed, but there was also an unpleasant sensation that tingled across her skin. It felt almost as though some part of the forest lingered even though they had left it.
Benji stared out into the distance, a deep frown on his face. Periodically, he would squint like he could see something far away, but then his eyes would darken. The silver within them swirled in ways that she thought were more imagined than real. She wished she understood what it was he saw.
“They’ve moved this way,” she said.
“Do you feel it?”
Imogen had felt something when she used Tree Stands in the Forest, but it was faint. “I don’t know what I’m feeling.”
He crouched down, tracing his fingers through the grass, and whispered softly. His breath drifted into the wind, and then he straightened and looked at her. “They passed this way not long ago, though I wonder if we will be able to move fast enough to catch them.”
“You could,” she said, nodding to Benji.
Imogen could travel with Lilah. They could keep up as much as they could, but neither of them was magic like Benji, who could glide across the landscape.
“Even if I reach them, I’m not sure I would be able to do what needs to be done.”
“You could,” Imogen said.
He frowned. “Perhaps out of the forest, it might be possible, but we will need your blade. My role in fighting the branox has never been that of a destroyer.” He said it with a hint of distaste, as if he couldn’t even fathom the idea of actually being asked to kill these creatures. “And I am not entirely sure if I could do it.”
“How many branox are there?”
“Many.”
They needed to find the branox before they procreated again. Which meant finding where they were traveling to and the magic they pursued, but doing so was going to be a challenge.
“This is the wrong way if they need magic,” she said.
Benji nodded. “One would think so. They must have detected something. Or been driven here.”
He started forward, gliding across the ground. After a while, Benji shuffled closer to Lilah, and he began whispering to her, trying to demonstrate magic.
“The damn Society believes that magic is simply their patterns and spells and incantations.” He practically spat as he talked. “There is so much more to magic than that. If you learn it the right way, you can have far more power than any Society member does.”
Lilah nodded. “I don’t know if I want that.”
“Then don’t. I’m just offering you the possibility. You get to decide whether you take it.” His tone made it clear that he didn’t care. “But if you want to learn, I can show you some of the basics. We can start with specific shapes. When you use them, you can place that connection formed within you into parts of the world, then empower it in ways that permit you to access magic you can scarcely dream of.”
Lilah stayed quiet for a while. “I would like that.”
As they walked, Benji demonstrated a few different shapes, talking Lilah through it. Imogen listened at first before realizing that none of it was applicable to her and didn’t matter. Her sacred patterns were nothing like the ones Benji taught her to make with her hands, where she had to push her connection to sorcery through. Even if they were, she didn’t know if it would make a difference. She wasn’t trying to learn that kind of magic.
Sorcerers used other methods to create their
spells, though she didn’t know all that was involved. Some of it had to do with patterns like Benji taught, but the Society also used incantations and items from the world to create magic.
It was late in the day when they came across a village, which sat on the edge of a narrow path, quite a ways from the forest. The mountains were still far, but they now appeared closer than they had before. Benji had paused periodically, interrupting his lessons with Lilah to pat the ground or wave his hands in the air as if talking to the wind.
The messages he received told him that the branox were still moving this direction.
“We need to be careful,” Imogen said as she unsheathed her sword. She had stopped flowing through the sacred patterns as they walked, and she looked over to Lilah. “You may need a barrier.”
Lilah licked her lips before nodding.
They moved forward, making their way into the village.
It was empty.
“Where are they?” Imogen asked.
They walked through the street, pausing to listen, but there was nothing to suggest that anyone was here. In one house, she found a loaf of bread in the oven, the crust burnt after being left behind. In another home, toys lay scattered on the ground, as if children had departed quickly. A dog barked at them from one of the houses, trapped inside. Everything looked as though the people had fled in a hurry.
“If the branox claimed them, would they be dead?” Imogen whispered.
“The branox would not have done so,” Benji said.
She frowned in thought. “You said they needed to feed… I see. No magic.”
He nodded. “No magic.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
The tavern proprietor in the last village had claimed that the war had emptied the villages, but what if that wasn’t it at all? What if instead of the war, this was tied to the branox?
The small village consisted of only several dozen houses, a few shops, and a temple in the center. They reached a stream on the far side, which ran through the village and likely headed back into the forest.
She sighed. After having spent the last night in the forest, Imogen wanted nothing more than to rest in a bed, but certainly not one in a place like this.
Unseen (First of the Blade Book 2) Page 12