by Heath Pfaff
It took but a moment for my senses to locate our targets. Once I had them well fixed in my mind, and was certain they were not going to bolt before we were ready, I pointed out the location of two of the beasts to Malice. Once we made our break for it, they would also run and Malice would have to adjust her attack accordingly, but if she could get them within sight before they left their hiding place she would have them. We were far faster than any other animal when we needed to be.
Malice and I tensed, preparing to strike, that final moment before making our move seemed to drag on for an eternity. Neither of us carried a weapon. Our swords had been dulled and ruined while crafting our cabin, but each of us was more than properly equipped to kill. For, while we had left behind the world of battles, glory and war, we were still creatures crafted to rain death. As we prepared to strike, we each mentally prepared our bodies for the task, willing the claws that ended our Fell Beast arms to dangerously fine points. We exploded into action as one, each taking cue from the tension created in our bodies.
I felt my heart surge in my chest as I took my first step, pushing my body faster than any human body was ever built for. My eyes, cores of concentrated power burning like purple fire, adapted my body to the speed, slowing down my perception of the world around me so that it seemed like everything moved at a crawl. My powerful legs and arms complete with my reinforced bone structure allowed me to propel myself forward at a velocity beyond the human eye's ability to trace, though that mattered little since there was no one around to witness our hunt.
The distance between me and my quarry closed quickly, the small but dangerous herbivore only just lifting its head to see what was stirring in the grass as I fell upon it like a wolf to a hare. Its muscles bunched, preparing to leap away and run to safety, but I was far faster, and even as I saw the message to flee reaching the creatures legs, a tremble running through its tendons just beneath its flesh, I closed the final distance and severed the creature's primary artery in its throat, killing it before it could even register that it was doomed. I couldn't stop there, however, I needed to bring down at least one more. I fell back to normal speed, my heart slowing in my chest. It skipped a beat as it slowed, causing me to feel momentarily disoriented.
Ever since I'd pushed myself beyond my limits while in an effort to save Kyeia, I had felt that pang in my chest every time I came back down from full speed. It was my heart reminding me that I had strained it far past the realm of safety, and it would not put up with such abuse again. I did my best to ignore the signal of danger, knowing all too well where my limits were. I let my ears focus on the next nearest source of movement, another of the prey beasts. I had to work quickly while slowed down, but I couldn't locate my next target while at full acceleration. Sound was difficult to decipher at high speed, it blurred and stretched even to my sensitive ears. In the course of a fight it wasn't as much of a problem, but in a situation where sound was the only clue I had to my next target, anything beyond my immediate range was too distorted to make sense of until I took a moment to stop and get my bearings once more. A shifting of grass to my left alerted me to the next creature and I charged after it, my heart racing up to speed again.
This creature had heard me coming, and when I broke in to the grass near it, I nearly impaled myself on its lowered horns, but thankfully I had a significant mobility advantage. I twisted around its lowered horns, coming at it from the side and ending its life in a single smooth darting motion of my right hand. The world lurched back to normal speed, my heart twittered in my chest, and I took a deep, calming breath. From somewhere behind me I heard Malice's voice.
"I've got three, Lowin. How did you do?" She inquired, and I could hear the satisfaction in her voice. She had done well, and she knew it. She had also out performed me again. I wasn't jealous, but I was disappointed in myself. I felt that I was constantly struggling to keep up with my green-eyed friend. She was close to being as fast and strong as I was, but she had an unending stamina, driven by a stout heart -- a beast's heart - that gave her an edge in any contest of either strength or speed. She was also a more skilled fighter, and a better strategist.
"I've got two." I answered, picking up the carcass in front of me as I willed my claws to a safe dullness, and turned to retrieve the other animal. We had enough to last the winter, and it hadn't taken us nearly as long as I'd anticipated.
"Good catch. Bring them in and we will clean them so we can go home." Malice called back. I was happy to do so. I didn't enjoy hunting, particularly when Malice and I were not talking, which had been happening more and more frequently as the months passed. Going home would be a great relief. There, at least, I knew I could be alone.
I brought in my kills, and we worked over the bodies, retaining every piece that we could make use of and packaging them in a preservative spice that Wisp had prepared for us. The spice was a wondrous find, it grew in abundance not far from our home. Once wrapped and packed, if kept in a cool, dry place, the meat would stay good for as long as we would need it. With frosty weather coming fast, I knew keeping things cold wouldn't be a problem much longer.
After cleaning the animals and packing them away, we walked to a nearby stream and washed the blood from our hands, the cool water a poignant reminder of the just how close the coming winter really was. Malice was crouched at my side, and again I was taken by a desire to apologize for our fight those few days before, but once more my tongue stilled in my mouth, a useless piece of leather that did nothing but get in the way of my breathing. Instead of saying what I should have, I stood up and walked away from the river, shaking my hands to dry them. I'd found it was ponderously difficult to remove the water from my fur. Time, it seemed, was the best cure.
"Wisp will be glad to see us back so soon." Malice said as she stood to join me. ". . .and Kay will be happy to see her father home." She added, almost as if it were an afterthought, though I sensed Wisp had been the afterthought, and Kay the person Malice wanted me to be thinking about.
I smiled at the thought of my daughter, and then frowned, remembering a time just a few weeks before when I'd overheard Kay telling Wisp that sometimes, "Daddy is scary, like he's real angry. Why doesn't he smile?" Wisp had told her that her daddy did indeed smile, quite often, but Kay had seemed unconvinced. After that, I had made an effort to spend less time in Kay's presence. It wasn't done out of spite, I simply didn't want to frighten my own daughter. Perhaps, I thought, in her great innocence she could see the monster that dwelt inside of me, the shadow of the beast that was responsible for her mother's death. Certainly I saw that same beast in every pool of water and shaving mirror I gazed into.
"I'm not so sure." I said beneath my breath, addressing Malice's last statement. Maybe Kay would be better off without her father. Certainly her mother would have been.
"What was that?" Malice asked, coming up behind me on her quiet, pawed feet.
"Let us make good time getting home." I replied. "A warm fire, and my own bed sound nice right now."
She walked past me grabbing up her heavy pack, which was now full of supplies for the winter, as she went. She looked back over her shoulder at me, her green eyes dancing in the light of the fading day. Her expression seemed sad, and I knew that she was not happy with my reply. I grabbed my own pack, and we started our return trip in the same silence in which we'd first embarked. We stopped to nap a few days later, having walked until our considerable energy was depleted. I lay down upon the ground, my head upon my crossed arms, and fell quickly into sleep. That night I dreamed as I hadn't dreamed in a long time.
I was at a cabin deep within the woods, lost beneath an oppressive canopy of green, which itself was lost beneath the cool dark cloak of night. I swung around, trying to take in all of my surroundings, but I was confused and disoriented. The cabin looked familiar to me, though it was not the place I called home, was it? I had seen it at least once before.
It came to me in a flash. I had once dreamed such a cabin, but now it was in a terrible state o
f disrepair. The logs composing the walls were misaligned, and the front door was torn from its hinges. I felt compelled to enter that house, and so I walked nearer, coming up onto a porch that was overgrown with the rampant plant life of the forest. The paws of the Fell Beast, whose legs were now mine, trod carefully across the broken wood that composed the porch so as not to misstep and fall through the rotting timber. I noted as I neared the door that a long length of chain with a great shackle at its end lay bent and distorted, broken and cast aside, on the ground near the entrance to the cabin. I remembered with a chill the fierce creature that had once been chained there, and wondered if I might find that horror, now freed from its bindings, hidden within the broken house I approached.
That thought made me hesitate, though I found that I couldn't stop moving entirely. My legs carried me forward of their own accord, propelling me towards the dark interior of the broken cabin. As I drew near the door, about to take a footstep within, my legs stopped. I felt a mixed sense of relief and distress; relief that I had stopped, and distress that I was not turning to leave as I so desperately wanted to do. I felt at the very core of my being that I wanted no part of what lay within that damned building.
"Who is the monster now, boy?" A voice said from inside, and my eyes scanned the darkness, searching for some source of the ill-boding words. My eyes, normally so adept at picking out shapes within the dark, seemed only the eyes of a normal man, struggling against the deep black of the night. Finally, though, I saw the silhouette of a man sitting in a chair, highlighted against the faint light entering through a window. I recognized the voice. It was the voice of the man with the legs of a bear who had spoken to me in my last dream concerning the cabin in the woods. My legs took another step forward.
"Who are you, and what is this place?" I asked the man, my heart racing in my chest.
"You know me." He answered quietly, and after a moment's pause, he spoke again. "You know me."
I realized then that I did know him. His voice, though I was certain it was the same voice I'd heard in my dream before, I knew from somewhere else. My legs began to move me forward again, stepping further into the darkness.
"I don't want to be here." I said aloud, as if my words might stop my legs from doing what they intended. They did not. I knew the voice that spoke to me from the darkness, and I did not wish to see its owner.
"They're coming for us, boy." That voice said once more, and then it was silent, as my feet carried me one step at a time, excruciatingly slowly towards the speaker.
A candle atop a small table flickered to life next to the sitting figure, and I attempted to jump back in horror. I could do no such thing however, as my legs refused to let me. Sitting upon the chair was Brutal, the Broken Sword commander from Lucidil's army, whose life I had ended in order to save Malice. He had the upper body of a man, unmarred by the limbs of the Fell Beast that he'd carried when last I'd seen him, but below his waist he had the body of a great brown bear. I couldn't remember if the man in my dream had been Brutal last time, or whether this was some new and terrible perversion of that first dream, but it seemed to me now that the man had always been Brutal. Most terrible of all, half of Brutal's head was missing, great wounds marring the once familiar face, and leaving gray ichor to flow freely from the obviously fatal wound.
"Who is the monster now, boy?" A growling voice asked from the darkness beside me, throaty and terrible. I turned to face this new voice, knowing what I would see before my legs cooperated enough for me to do so. A beast with the upper half of a bear, and the lower half of a human man sat crouched upon the floor, its maw caked red with blood, the remnants of Brutal's face clasped in its massive paws. "You know me." It said, the words distorted by its toothy mouth.
I turned to flee, and my legs responded. I ran until I was free from the door, and off of the porch, but I skidded to a stop just seconds later as I came upon Wisp standing in the middle of the path. She was naked and badly beaten, bleeding from the stumps that ended at the points where her wrists should have joined her hands. I ran to her, and grabbed her to me, pulling her close.
"What has happened?" I asked her, feeling the tears flowing from my eyes.
"It's all burning, Noble. It's all going away." She pointed over my shoulder with one of her bleeding stubs, her eyes wide in terror, and I turned to look. As I turned, the small cabin burst into flames. The bear-headed man stepped out onto the porch, his fur burning, and his skin crackling and splitting.
"They're coming for us!" The dying creature screamed into the night.
I came violently awake, starting so hard that I even woke Malice who was sleeping some few feet away from me. She was immediately alert, rising to her feet even as I did. I saw her reach for the sword that no longer hung at her side, and only then noticed that my own hand was at my hip, grasping at empty air. I had worn a weapon for far too long.
"What's the matter, Lowin?" She asked into the night, as her eyes scanned her surroundings and found nothing out of place.
I grabbed my pack from the ground and tossed it over my shoulder. A sense of terrible urgency was burning in my stomach, coupled with an unshakable feeling of dread. "We have to get home. Now."
"What, why?" Malice asked, obviously concerned by the note of panic in my voice. She was grabbing her own pack as well, obviously deciding it was better to follow my lead, than to wait for an answer before acting.
"I had a dream. . . A vision that. . ." I began, unsure how to explain what had happened in such a way that I might still sound sane.
Malice seemed to relax slightly. "We all have nightmares. We've seen, and done, some terrible things. You have to learn to live with. . ."
"No, Malice. I swear to you this was more than a mere dream. We need to get home as fast as we can." I told her, beginning to run through the woods in the direction that lead home. I was tempted to push myself as fast as I could go, but I knew that I could never maintain those speeds over the length of time that would be needed to reach the cabin. Malice dashed after me.
"Lowin, calm down." She reached out an arm to stop me as she spoke, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me to a halt. "It was just a dream."
I turned to face her. The expression on her face had softened until I could barely see the remnants of anger and sadness I'd become so accustomed to in recent months. It was obvious by the glint in her eyes, and her relaxed posture, that she was concerned for me, but did not feel the sense of urgency I was trying to convey.
"Please, if ever we have been friends, do not stop me now. Let us go, as fast as we can, and if we should reach home and find that all is well I will be the fool of us, and you can laugh and tell the others how brave Noble was terrified by a nightmare. If I am right, though. . ." I pleaded with her, knowing that I would go on whether she chose to accompany me or not, but desperately wanting her to believe in me.
Malice looked a little hurt by my words, though I wasn't sure why. "Of course we are friends. I will always be here when you need me, Lowin. If this is that important to you, then we shall run until we can do so no longer."
"Thank you." I said to her, confused by the depth of feeling behind her words, but in too great a hurry to think more upon it. I turned back to the path and began to run as fast as I dared. The road was dark, lit only poorly by the sliver of blue moon that hung in the sky, but my eyes were good in the dark, better than they had been in my dream, and I could easily make out any obstacle in my path. I wondered, only briefly, what would happen if I returned home to find that my dream had been nothing more than a nightmare. I dismissed that notion in an instant. I'd had many nightmares over the years, but the two dreams involving that cabin, and the half-men who resided there, were not of the fabric of normal nightly visions.
"Would you tell me of your nightmare?" Malice asked, as we ran. I was hesitant, but I did so, not eager to remember the details of that vision any longer. However, I knew I owed Malice what explanation I could offer. We'd slept maybe an hour in the last five days, and w
hile our bodies were powerful and needed little rest, we were exceeding even our extraordinary endurance, and we still had far too go.
I watched the green-eyed warrior's facial expressions from the corner of my eye, unable to take my attention entirely from the road. I noted that her face went through several different emotions during the retelling of my dream, and ended in a state of semi-shock. She seemed to pick up her speed then, and I had to push myself harder to keep up with her pace.
"What's wrong?" I asked her, sure that something in my story had profoundly worried her.
"I dreamed I was walking through a forest, and I thought it was fall, because there were so many bright reds and yellows all around me, but I realized as I was walking that the trees were actually on fire. Just before you woke me up, I heard a voice yell, 'They're coming for us!' It didn't worry me in the dream, or even startle me for I have had many dreams of fire before, but you woke me up just after that." I couldn't tell in the dim light of the moon, but I thought the color may have drained from Malice's features. "I thought it was a peculiar dream and nothing more, but your dream. . ." Her words trailed off.
My heart was hammering in my chest; each beat a drum pounding on the inside of my ribs, brought on by a combination of fear and exertion. There were two good days of travel still ahead of us, but I had every intention of reaching the cabin before sun-fall of the next the day. We churned the earth beneath our feet as we pressed on.