Thieves, Heretics, and Outlaws
The night was black as pitch when they reached the bandit’s camp. It was situated on a slight knoll of patchy grass, ringed with torches and braziers that flicked gilded embers into the night. Several tents of hide and fur rested inside the fiery walls, and some were nestled in the great arms of the trees. The greatest of them stood in the center of the camp.
There, a massive oak rose high and broad, with a doorway cut into its thick gnarled bark. Inside, a staircase wrapped down into the earth where the captain of the bandit’s quarters were. It was there, Jakn and Martem were taken, deep into the earth, the smell of fungus and mold growing palpable until it was burned away when they entered a great circular room alit with several garish torches. Jakn was thrown to the ground and his back was stepped on by a hard bottomed boot, and Martem the same.
The captain sat in a throne of twigs and wood, accented with leaves and dirt and skulls of game they’d killed. Above the throne a giant boar’s skull hung from the wall, its maw barred and its teeth glinting in the flickering light. He was a monster of a man, with corded arms and a broad head. He wore leather to guard his torso, arms, and legs while he adorned a bone headdress that rattled as he moved. He leaned on a hulking double-sided axe when Martem came before him.
“The great huntsman has become hunted, Martem,” said the captain. “How the tides have turned since your last venture into these parts. I was beginning to think you’d grown scared of us, it’s been so long.”
“It appears they have,” Martem replied.
The captain circled them. “It appears they’ve stripped you of your weapons, old friend. What’s say I return them to you?”
“That would be kind of you, humble host,” Martem said.
The captain kicked aside Jakn. “Return Martem’s blade to his hand. We have unfinished business we must resume. And this time, you won’t wriggle away.”
Martem’s hands were untied and unshackled and his sword was thrown into his hands. He swung it loosely about. “Well that’s good,” said Martem, “because I had no intention of running.”
The captain kicked his axe into his huge hands, muscles bulging as they held the heavy iron. “I’ll see to that, huntsman. Trust me in that if there is anything you will trust me with.”
“I’m afraid trust, Yaren, is all to subtle a thing to dwell on these days.”
“Indeed it is,” said Yaren, beginning to step towards Martem. “Let us fight now, and end this talk. Never have words won a battle.”
Martem did not respond, only smirked and charged the great man, blade flashing in the torchlight.
The steel met with a clash and a scream as the edges grinded together. Jakn was thrown behind a border of bandits, his shackles biting his wrists. As he watched the men fight, he worked on prying his bonds with arkency. It took long, and especially since he had to be quiet and unsuspecting. Inside the ring of bandits Martem was pounding Yaren with blow after blow and swung this way and that. Yet with the duel wielding advantage, the bandit captain easily shoved each attack to the side.
For Martem, it was harder to block. Immediately after he’d parry the axe, the hammer would sweep around the other side. Most times, Martem was too slow to deflect it so he just ducked beneath it or dodged it by leaping to the side. The huntsman was definitely using more energy and it showed, leaving him heavy of breathe for the next ten minutes of their fighting. Jakn watched as Martem received a fist to the face and quickly looed down at his shackles, and slowly began untying the rope restraints after whispering the name of wind.
As he unwrapped the tightly woven rope, focusing hard and splitting his mind, he heard Martem’s blade crunch on mail. Then came Yaren’s scream as blood sprayed the dark ground and stained his grey ringmail. Martem’s blade was red with the blood as he made another attack on the same leg, Yaren’s mail chattering as he dodged the sweep doggedly. He stepped backwards with a limp, bracing himself with both hammer and axe as the huntsman charged him again.
Although this time, Martem was kissed with the iron of Yaren’s axe. It was on the arm though, slicing through what little leather armor the huntsman wore. He cursed as he took his hand off the hilt of the blade and continued using only his right to wield the blade. Yaren sensed his discomfort and took to the offensive, delivering a blow to his left arm, which caused Martem to holler and grasp his upper arm, his fingers growing sticky from the flowing blood.
Jakn had unraveled the rope around his hands and focused now on his shackles. It would have been a perfect time to use earth arks, for the iron was of the earth at some point, and Jakn could have been able to break them apart by pulling the two away from each other. However, Jakn did not know the name of earth yet, and thought hard to come up with another solution that would work. He came up with three in the brief span of a couple of minutes, while glancing back up at the duel between Martem and Yaren.
At the moment he lifted his head, Yaren was bearing down over Martem, shouting curses at him as he hurled his weapons down upon the huntsman. Martem struggled to block each blow, taking two to the chest and one to the face, blood covering most of his face like a mask.
“You try to kill us!” screamed Yaren. “Scout us out like a lot of deer! You try and bring us back for money! You try to slit the neck of my brother! Bring his head back to your stupid little lords! Who are you to kill my brother before my very eyes and run away with his head in your bag? You are a dead man, Martem!”
With each word the captain shouted, came a hulking blow from either his hammer or axe. At the last word, Martem swung his legs around and knocked Yaren to the ground, the huntsman on his feet, looming over the bandit. “I believe you have it mixed around, Yaren,” he said, blade pushed into his cheek. He moved the blade down to his throat. “But you should be proud to know your bastard of a brother was worth fifty lire.” Blood began to well around the tip of his blade. “Reckon you’ll be worth a good hundred when I take your back. Either way, what are you more than thieves, heretics and outlaws? You’re nothing.”
Jakn watched closely as Martem leaned down, whispering to the captain. In a split second, Jakn undid his shackles after building up his ark supply, releasing the lock, which held together the iron cuffs with a click. Almost simultaneously, Yaren began to growl and then roared as he sprung from the ground, swinging his axe at Martem’s head. As if planned, the huntsman batted the axe from the bandit’s hands, and in one fluid motion, chopped off his arm and ran his blade through Yaren’s neck with a crunch. Silence poured over the camp as Yaren’s head rolled away down the hillock and his gnarly neck pumped out blood, the ground drinking the red ravenously.
Jakn began scampering away toward the tents where he believed Vena to be when he heard Martem curse and a bowstring thrum. He glanced back to see the ring of bandits unleashing a storm of arrows upon him, until he bristled with almost fifty, the iron arrowheads buried deep into his flesh. The huntsman leaned hard on his sword as he collapsed to one knee, coughing up blood as the arrows struck quivered on his back. Jakn met his eyes for a brief second and saw the light fade from them and saw his sword fall from his fingers. He crumbled to the ground soon after, but when the bandits checked over for Jakn, arrows nocked, he wasn’t there, only his shadow.
Jakn held Vena’s hand as they ran through the darkness of the forest, their shadows chasing them between the trees.
They hid, cradled, beneath the sweeping arms of an old pine. Its leaves were dark and prickly, but held them with fragile fingers as the winds whispered through the Aden like messengers. Having just seen the brutal deaths of both Martem and Yaren, Jakn was in a state of fragile stability, and every blink of his eyes he saw vision flash before the darkness. They didn’t linger, only came and went, retiring back into his subconscious, drifting into the endless darkness they cloaked themselves in.
He refused to tell Vena what had happened, and she had refused to tell him what they’d done to her. Instead, the both of them sat under the tree holding each other, knowing they were both alive, and therefore both safe. Although a certain tremor ran through Jakn’s veins as he watched the the canopy of leaves shift and dance. It was the trepidation that they were alone again, without guidance. With Martem dead, they had to find a way out of the Aden on their own, not knowing where they even were.
They were trapped in the wooden talons of a beast known only to few. It was alien to all others, a myth no more, a legend used to tell kids at bedtime. Always did it resemble fear and most of all evil. Jakn was sure they’d testify such claims before they were free of its grasp.
They’d fallen asleep last night rather quickly, their fear submerging them into their dreams. The morning had dawned upon them much the same as night had, dark and eerie, save for a red tinge that seeped through the gaps in the trees that told the sun bled red. And everybody knows that when the sun burns red, that blood has been spilt. It was deemed valid that morning.
They took to the road with empty stomachs and naked backs. Vena had been ripped from her lute when they’d taken her last night and her pack was burned along with the rest of their things back at their campsite. Jakn had been stripped of his weapons and he’d barely managed to retain his coin purse, being that he’d kept it in his pocket all the time. However, it was little use to them, being that they were lost in a wood without any lick of civilization for miles off.
They found a dirt track a couple hours into their walk, their stride slow and pained and dogged. It was rough cobble, paved over several times it appeared, but ravaged by the elements until dirt and moss had begun to infest the stone and overrun it completely. Their tired, leaden legs padded along the track, their heavy eyes watching the massive trees march past them like solemn soldiers retuning from a war, a dirge playing in their ears to sustain their body.
Hours seemed to drift by, floating away into the shadows like the waves in the middle of an ocean, the constant whispering incessant so that it dulls the mind in a kind of trance. Such was fueled by their lack of food, driving them to a near insanity after the first day of traveling. Such insanity was propelled by the frigid nights, dark as ink, and cold as ice, biting deep into flesh and bone, chilling the marrow blue and white. It was on the third day that hope trickled into their grim hearts and dry mouths and barren stomachs, their bodies a drear desolation lit only by such a feeble hope.
It was a stag.
Surprisingly enough, through all the grueling and terrorizing hours of walking in the shadows of the towering forest, they’d not come upon any animal. Nothing to hunt or kill to feed themselves, only the bark from the trees to temporarily fuel their bodies to keep walking in the scarce hope that food might provide itself from the depths of the forest. Such charity had come prancing into a small glade, the creature’s antlers wide and broad, white coat gleaming silver in the sparse sheen of light. It seemed as if a gift from Aymr’s very hand. Jakn thanked the Divine and Aymr himself as he approached the animal, yet soon realized, he had nothing to kill it with.
Then a spark danced through his primal and desperate brain. Arkency.
He immediately glanced down at his hands and saw them ball tightly and closed his eyes. In a short whisper, he uttered wind’s name and felt the arks come out from behind their inconspicuous veil. There they danced through the darkness of the forest, like fairies in a children’s story. Jakn gathered his thoughts and focused his mind hard on the stag and all things around it. He’d never done anything of the sort, and he knew that much too, feeling as if walking into the strange and alien currents of ocean and being swept up in instinct. It all came to him in a flash and his body followed its path, the light shining ahead, urging him to chase.
He chased it until the end.
Jakn opened his eyes when he heard a crack and a snap and a violent crunch. There in the glade he beheld is doing, the stag contorted up against the tree with its head spun and its legs broken. It appeared to be dead, from the relativity of its ominous stillness and its vile position. Jakn extinguished his link between the arks and felt his heart thump like a hammer in his ribcage, beating madly as if it was trapped. Never had he used something of the kind before, and it came as a brutal shock to witness it.
Either way, however distraught at the stag’s appearance, the two of them would be eating tonight. And that was an encouragement all in itself.
The day swept by hastily, the long darkness blanketing the forest in a single great entity. The stag was skinned and cook over a modest coruscating flame, slowly baking the meat until it crunched at a certain crisp when their teeth sunk into it. They ate their fill, and slept with bloated stomachs and warm hearts.
They woke to quite the opposite.
They woke to the Ever Winter and all its madness.
The trees creaked and cracked in the icy winds, bowed low like humble lords in a high court. Their dark leaves danced like an angry sea at storm and their limbs split like bones and crashed to the snowy ground. Indeed, the forest floor was shrouded in snow, as well as the rest of the Aden. From the dark skies, rushed a tempest of snow and ash that whipped in the freezing winds. The forest was under siege from the Ever Winter itself, and Jakn and Vena were caught in the heart of it, beaten into the ground by the icy fists of the wind and snow and deadly temperature.
Before they could notice what was occurring, a thunderous crack shook the earth beneath their feet and they felt the ominous stillness before the plunge and heard another ear-splitting crunch and split as if the world was suddenly ripped in two. From the heights of the wood a violent stagger shuddered with the stormy canopy, and then there was a startling groan and Jakn caught the slight glimpse of a great pine leaning toward them, arms outstretched to block its fall, screaming as it fell to its inevitable doom.
Jakn didn’t see the tree hit the earth. Only felt its thunderous rumble beneath his feet.