Guardian(Part II): Soulborne

Chapter 2: Finn

Haemon froze the snow under him with his staff, then hurled the chunk of ice into the air. I drew my hand back, forming an orb of fire in my palm, then threw it at the block of ice, shattering it before it could land.

"Nice throw," Haemon complimented. "You're getting better at this. I'd still use the bow for longer-range targets, but the magic is perfect for enemies out of the reach of your sword."

"Yeah," I agreed. "We should keep going. The sun will be up soon."

We doused our campfire and gathered our things before we continued east. It took us three weeks to cross Camnora, and we only just crossed the border into Illondas in the night. We had to duck every time we heard someone coming, fearing that they could be patrols of Camnorish soldiers, even if they were only a merchant's caravan. We wouldn't take the chances that they were soldiers of King Heinrich, though. I was someone that he wanted dead, and for all I knew, everyone in his country knew my face. Now that we were in Illondas, we could act more freely. Not really, though. I was warned that Illondas wasn't very trusting of the Guardians, but not to the point where they would be executed on sight. I couldn't allow the fact that we hadn't been attacked to cause me to become arrogant, though. It was the people who hadn't attacked us yet. Over the past three weeks, since Haemon and I left Chardan, I remembered being ambushed by at least three packs of wandering Lost, a greater nightmare, and a carrion crawler that was scavenging a battlefield from three decades ago. In Illondas, we would be relatively safe from its people, but nowhere near safe from its monsters. When the sun finally came up, our snow-covered path became clearer and more visible. Eventually, we saw a stack of smoke above the trees of Illondas' western forests, and we began to make our way towards it through the icy woods.

"A campfire?" asked Haemon.

"Maybe," I answered.

"I'll fly ahead to take a look," Haemon offered. He blasted off the ground with his propulsion boots, and I watched him as he hovered right next to the smokestack before flying back and setting down in front of me.

"It's not a campfire," Haemon reported. "It's a village, or what's left of it. Something's there that needs to die."

"Woah," I gasped. "What makes you say that?"

"There's a darkness hanging over that village, but I can't tell exactly what it is," said Haemon. "I doubt we'll be able to continue without killing whatever's haunting that village."

"I see," I understood. "Let's check it out." We continued forward, eventually finding the village that Haemon found. At the bottom of the smokestack, a dozen small buildings were engulfed in flames. I walked into it and looked around, seeing the bodies of villagers that were burned so badly that their flesh had melted from their bones, and what was left was reduced to piles of ash that still held the shape of their bodies.

"Damn," I cursed. Haemon and I went and stood in the center of the village, and I looked around some more. I looked on the ground, seeing that there were large, three-toed footprints on the ground. I stepped in each of the toes. Both of my feet in front of each other were as long as each of them.

"Too small for a dragon," I concluded. "A fire wyvern?"

"Possibly," Haemon guessed. The three kinds of wyverns were fire, storm, and frost. They were demons capable of destruction on a rather large scale because of their ability to fly, breathe fire, ice, or lightning depending on the type, and their seemingly impenetrable hide. They were often confused with dragons, but only walked on two legs, had feathers instead of scales, and adults weren't nearly as enormous as the biggest size a dragon could grow to. The footprint I stepped into was large enough to be an adult's. My aura blade may very well not be able to cut through the hide on its body. Like many other demons, the head would be our best chance at killing it. We would inevitably get the chance to do just that. Wyverns always return to places they've attacked to pick at whatever corpses could be left.