Beastborne

by James T Callum

  “I’m sorry, Noth,” he managed to say, though it felt like his throat was closing up. He didn’t blame her for hating him. Being a Reaper was all she ever knew. Whether his intentions were good or not didn’t matter. He had taken her away from that.

  Another guilty load to bear.

  Before Hal could try to say something else, Noth barreled into him and wrapped him up in a tight embrace. Borne several feet away by the surprising strength of the woman, Hal started to protest but stopped.

  Let it burn, he thought, looking through the curtain of Noth’s hair to the mixture already beginning to smoke.

  Hal wrapped his arms tightly around Noth and for a moment enjoyed the close personal contact. Something he didn’t realize he had been missing for so long. He suddenly found that he didn’t want to let go. His heart pounded so hard against his ribcage there was no way Noth couldn’t feel it.

  But he didn’t care.

  In a way, they both needed this. Hal tried not to read too much into it, he wanted to enjoy the fleeting moment for what it was. A tender embrace between two very different, but perhaps equally lonely, people.

  All too soon the hug was over, and Hal was quick to accept it. Her scent lingered in the air around him, vanilla, and a hint of spice that Hal found deeply pleasing. He could still feel the warmth of her, even though she wore her armor, on his skin.

  Shaking his head to dispel the schoolboy thoughts, Hal looked at Noth to find a distant, whimsical look on her flushed features.

  A moment later she was back, her eyes focused and set on Hal. “I forgive you, Hal for whatever that may be worth to hear. But I still need a purpose.”

  20

  Hal still didn’t know how to help her. Noth was a whirlwind of constant change. One moment she wanted one thing, the next it was entirely different. Hal still didn’t quite have his bearings after that surprising hug.

  All the while a dark voice in the back of his head told him he was reading too much into it.

  Before she had gotten sidetracked, Noth was telling him she liked to come out to view the night sky. To feel connected to something greater than herself. She wanted a group, that much was clear.

  But she also was mortal now and perhaps part of her desire for a group was an effort to reclaim some fragment of her old life when things made sense.

  “Please,” Noth urged.

  Hal couldn’t stand the pleading tone in her voice. He understood, perhaps more than anybody except Noth, what it felt like to be rudderless in a wide ocean. Everybody else seemed to know where to go and what to do while he floated, adrift.

  It was how he spent most of his life and only since coming to Aldim did he began to change for the better. But it was slow and he still – almost weekly now – felt like that.

  An improvement over the daily feelings of being directionless but hardly gone.

  It had only been a month and change since he first came to Aldim after all. People didn’t change that quickly. Not real people at least. Movies and books had people learning valuable life lessons in the span of hours and changing all their decades-long ingrained habits instantly.

  Never to relapse. Never to slip back into old habits. And if they did, it was never shown.

  That wasn’t normal. If it was, Hal realized he wasn’t normal. He slipped up. Made mistakes again and again. What change he was able to enact was slow and painful.

  “You like being part of something larger than yourself,” Hal said, “but is that because you enjoy working toward a goal beyond something you can do yourself, or because you want to feel that comfort of being in a group of like-minded people? There’s a difference.”

  Noth chewed on that for a while. They were still close, less than a foot apart. Hal’s [Health Injection] long-since turned to a gooey charred mess that would take him the better part of an hour to scrub clean.

  “What I’m trying to ask, Noth, is what do you want to do with the time you have? You’re used to thinking in terms of centuries, or millennia. Your life was endless and so you took the necessary steps of somebody who might live to see the rise and fall of countless empires.

  “But you’re mortal now. Time is limited. Even if you manage to live for centuries, that is still much shorter than an unending life. Things are different now. What would you like to see done? What would you like to accomplish?”

  As the sun crested the glittering western reaches, tall spires of crystal captured and fractured the golden morning light into a dazzling display. Hal saw it all, and wanting to share this moment with Noth still deep in thought, he gently grabbed her shoulders.

  Her eyes went wide for a moment but she let him guide her around to face the sunrise side-by-side with Hal. “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.

  “It really is,” Hal agreed.

  After a few moments of the scintillating display, Noth said, “I want more of these.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Noth gently bumped Hal’s shoulder with her own. “I want more moments like this. Quiet mornings, beautiful sunrises, a world holding its breath. I want more. I want a home. A place I feel welcome, known. Safe.

  “I want to have friends and family. I want to feel pain and sorrow, love and longing, rage and passion! I want to feel alive and share my life with those I care about…” Just as she was gaining steam her voice drifted off.

  Noth’s next words were barely above a whisper but loud enough that Hal could hear her, as close as she was to him. “I want somebody to care about me… and I want to care for them.”

  Without conscious thought, Hal looped an arm over Noth’s narrow shoulders and brought her into a side-hug. He said nothing, and after a moment of Noth looking at him – they were nearly the same height after all – she laid her head on his shoulder and they watched the dawn greet the world in silence.

  After the spectacle was over and the sounds of the caravan waking up began to wash over them, the pair broke apart. Neither looked at each other directly as if whatever spell had been holding them was now broken and the moment of closeness was passed.

  Hal was the first to get his voice back. “There’s always room in our wagon for you, Noth. I can’t promise that you’ll like everybody you meet or that you’ll have the family you want. But unless you try, you’ll never know. We’ve missed you.”

  That last part gave Noth a start, she narrowed her eyes fractionally at Hal as if she wasn’t sure she believed him. Whether she knew that he meant he missed her, or she doubted the entire thing, Hal couldn’t be sure.

  “I would like that. The dwarves… they are very loud sleepers. That is not normal, is it?” she asked.

  With a chuckle, Hal shook his head. “No. Well, maybe for them. But definitely not for other peoples. Are you just getting up for the day?”

  Noth nodded. “I like getting up early when nobody’s around…” She cast a sly sidelong glance at Hal. “Usually. What about you?”

  “I thought I would get an early rise today too,” Hal lied.

  “Then perhaps we can talk more over breakfast,” Noth said with an edge of eagerness to her voice Hal had rarely heard before. “Breakfast is one of my favorite meals of the day.”

  “One of?” Hal asked, heading to the table and gathering up his supplies.

  Noth followed him and watched what he was doing with curious, bright eyes. “Yes, I also love lunch and dinner too. Recently, Durvin told me of this wondrous thing called Brunch. It is when you have breakfast for lunch. I would dearly like to try that sometime. To think… breakfast at lunchtime.” Noth shook her long flowing black mane out. “Mortals are so inventive.”

  It was hard not to laugh. In the span of a few minutes, she went from a very somber and serious woman to sounding like a hobbit. Hal nodded along, listening to her melodious voice. She rarely was excited about anything and he would not take this away from her.

  There were so many wonders left for Noth to discover, Hal realized. Things she might have dismissed as a Reaper or simply didn’t under
stand without the emotional context of being mortal.

  That reminded Hal, and as he finished up putting everything away, he turned to find Noth staring at him. After a moment he recovered and said, “Noth, what is your Class now? You were a Reaper before but it was never clear whether that was a race or a Class or… something entirely else.”

  “Oh, it was both, I guess. There was very little distinction. I could no longer be a Reaper than you could. Ashera explained Classes to me and the distinction between a Fabled Class and a normal Class. Though my Status simply says it is a Class, does it say that for you?”

  “Yeah, I’m not from Aldim so I don’t really understand what makes something a Fabled Class or not. My guess is a rarer, stronger Class than normal. But how that’s judged, I have no idea.”

  Noth placed a fingertip to her pursed lips and struck a pensive pose. “Then I think I have a Fabled Class. It has many strengths and few weaknesses and I have asked nearly everybody in the caravan if they have heard of it. None of them have, so it is definitely rare.”

  Walking side-by-side they headed to Hal’s wagon. “Well, what is it?”

  “Dark Knight. I have not had… much time to use it. I mostly practice it late at night or early in the morning when few are around. It has strange powers that I still do not fully understand. I would not want to alarm anybody.”

  Hal opened the door to the wagon, finding most of the group inside asleep except for the koblins who were awake and sitting under Hal’s folded-up bunk playing cards with Vorax.

  “Psshhkoh, you’se no sneak-swipe,” Lurklox said, pointing an accusatory mitten at one of Vorax’s purple tendrils snaking off to the side and trying to steal from a pile of cards while another tendril held a fanned out set of cards before the treasure chest.

  Noth smiled seeing the koblins. It was hard not to.

  “You can have my bunk,” Hal said, motioning to the only folded up bunk. He wasn’t about to ask Noth to sleep on the floor.

  He wasn’t getting much sleep lately anyway.

  He used to be a heavy sleeper, often going 10 or 12 hours if nothing woke him up. That could have also been the depression. Now he was lucky to get 4 hours a night. He was never sure if it was nightmares or something else that awoke him but whenever he did wake up, he never could fall back asleep.

  Noth started to protest but Hal held up a hand. “Or you can talk to anybody else who might want to give up their bunks. Not counting the koblins-” He waved at them, and when the koblins saw him they threw down their cards as one and ran to him and into him.

  Vorax, sensing an opportunity gathered up all the dice, cards, and coin on the ground. With one sweep of his pseudopods, he dumped it all into his waiting, velvet-lined maw.

  Knocked over by the overeager koblins, Hal tumbled back out of the wagon and luckily missed the narrow steps to land on the somewhat hard partially crystalized purple grass. “Hal-savior!” they cried as once. “Is time now for new-day-tasty-noms?”

  21

  After the commotion of the koblins, it didn’t take long for Hal’s group to wake up. Ashera was the first one up and the first one out to go make breakfast. Nobody tried to stop her, most of them had given up on that. It was futile and on a more selfish note, her cooking was amazing.

  Nobody wanted to miss out on whatever Ashera would make.

  They gathered around the campfire Ashera set up with a large metal ring. She used a gargantuan wok to saute vegetables and all sorts of things like bacon, eggs, sausage, and anything else she could find.

  The last to wake up, despite Elora already being up was Komachi. The tiny pobul-otter-thing snoozed peacefully in Elora’s arms, bundled up like a baby. Only when the mouth-watering scents of breakfast wafted to her little black nose did Komachi wake up.

  And when Komachi woke up, especially to the scent of food, she let everybody know. She squonked loudly – a strange need-filled noise somewhere between a honk and a squeal – and scrambled with surprising strength and eagerness toward the food. Utterly heedless of any danger to herself.

  The food was all Komachi saw for the first few moments – and often until Elora or somebody took pity on her and fed her a morsel – but eventually, she would calm down. Sometimes she acted like she had been starving for days when everybody in the camp knew that Komachi ate better than most of them.

  Hal wondered if it was all a ruse and she was awake the entire time but simply didn’t have the energy to walk around until she ate. More often than not she was seen being carried or riding somebody.

  Sometimes she’d leap from one passing person in the camp to another to get to where she was going instead of just walking there.

  There was always a line for Ashera’s food. It was understood that she would serve her wagon first but then anybody who wanted some were free to have it and so lines began to form well before Ashera was finished.

  With their plates full they returned to the side of their wagon, where an emerald cloth awning covered a small table in a bit of shade. It was a crisp morning that hardly required it but with the recent weather, it was better to be safe than sorry.

  No matter how good Ashera’s cooking was, nobody liked soggy rained-on food. Nobody remarked on the extra place at the table for Noth. She was welcomed back as if she had never left. The smile she tried to keep hidden from everybody kept cracking the surface of her calm exterior from time to time.

  She was enjoying herself. That much was clear. And while Hal still wasn’t sure how he might begin to help her to find a purpose, this felt like a good start.

  “Komachi!” squealed the eponymously named pobul. She scarfed down her plate faster than even the hungriest dwarf could and went back for seconds, thirds, and even fourths.

  At a glance, Hal estimated that Komachi ate roughly half of all the food his wagon ate. It seemed an impossible thing, but the sheer volume of food she scooped into her ravenous, adorably furry maw said otherwise.

  She also had a penchant to swipe food off of each person’s plate. It was interesting to see that, as one, they all set aside some of their food for Komachi’s coffee-brown grabby paw to swipe.

  It was a little bit like an offering, Hal thought. One that the pobul eagerly accepted as if it were her due.

  “We’ve got a couple days of travel yet until we reach this area you described,” Angram said, pulling out a small rolled-up map. Before anybody could begin to move their plates aside, Angram snapped his nimble elvish fingers and the scroll unfurled.

  It hung in the air as if pinned to a board right next to Angram’s smirking face. He motioned with a fork to a small red dot. “This is where we are right now,” he said, nodding deferentially to Hal. It was, after all, Hal’s [Explorer’s Map] that showed their relative position and filled in the map around him with labels of areas and places of note.

  “And we need to get here, at this clover-looking nexus of three lakes. Then we’ll make a beeline straight south back into the Feltin Plains and south into the Dorner Mountains. There’s a mountain pass we can use to cut through closer to the Shiverglades.”

  Mira waved a speared piece of diced and roasted potato on the end of her fork as she pointed at the map. “Can’t we just keep going south through the mountains and into the Shiverglades? I mean, it sure seems easier than going all the way around to the west. Not to mention… Hal’s raised quite a bit of fuss in Murkmire. Those guys looking for him aren’t going to give up that easily I imagine. If there’s a well-known way into the Shiverglades, what if they’re waiting for us?”

  That was something Hal constantly had on his mind. What if Rinbast was waiting for him at the entrance to the Shiverglades with an army? It was one of the few untamed lands in the Fallmark region. And a rather obvious destination for somebody looking to set up a rival Sanctum without leaving the continent or passing right next to Rinbast’s seat of power.

  Now that Hal thought about it, that he managed to get away from that area was nothing short of a miracle.

  When H
al came back to the present, he found several faces turned his way. He would never get used to that. Hal looked to Angram, one of the most accomplished Rangers in their group. He knew the southern areas of Fallmark very well.

  “How likely will we be able to find a way through the mountains into the Shiverglades?” Hal asked.

  Angram’s answer was immediate and expected, “Nearly impossible. The Barrier Peaks are justly named. They permit nothing in or out. Short of a dwarven tunnel between the two, there are only two land routes in or out of the Shiverglades.” He pointed to the one westward and the other eastward.

  “With any luck, assuming the Founder – Rinbast – has grown wise to what’s going on and wishes to put an overt end to it, his likeliest location for an assault would be on the eastern end. It’s well-known that Withermere is sympathetic to our cause and holds no love for Rinbast.”

  “That was our original plan,” Elora reminded everybody. “We were supposed to go south from the Emerald Strand, straight into Withermere and then to the Shiverglades.”

  Ashera rested a comforting hand on Elora’s shoulder. “Yes,” she said with a faint smile. “But life has a way of twisting our path forward. If not for going to Murkmire we would have never met Mira, Giel, Noth, or Rondo. Hal most definitely would not have gained as much strength as he did. And above it all, a lurking threat would have remained below Murkmire, while we were blissfully unaware. What havoc might that thing have wrought if Hal didn’t stop it?”

  Noth gave Hal a look. Of all of them, she was the only one who knew the true story behind Shae’kathoth and Thirty-seven, Alquist, as Hal named him to the others.

  It was a secret about Hal’s origins and those of the Founder, Rinbast, that he planned to take to his grave.

  Some secrets were too big to ever let out.

  Luda leaned forward, her third crystalline “eye” at the center of her forehead gleamed brightly in the early morning light. “And I would have likely been killed by some horrible beast, if not the Founder himself,” she added in. “I have not forgotten your kindness in granting me refuge.”