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I crouch beside Bianca in the brush, staring through tiny gaps in the leaves to see the state of the ceremony grounds.
The dim twilight of dusk hides most of the horror, obscuring the worst of it in darkness at the edges, in the shadows of the trees, and covered, already, in fallen leaves.
There’s pure stillness among the bodies, not a sound. The wind is still and the air falls heavy on my shoulders, thick with the smell of soggy things and metal.
I move closer, and from across the clearing, I can see the vague and slow-moving shadows of Path and Dante. Path waves a signal at me, a fist raised high in the air, and I stop moving entirely. I stop breathing, and throw my hand back, planting it firmly against Bianca’s shoulder to stop her.
Movement.
Not one of us.
Rustling in the Northern corner of the grounds, footsteps. Like a flood, a horde of low, dark, long creatures burst through the trees and fill the courtyard. I can hear the snarling start, and I know before I can register what I’m seeing, that we need to move away.
“Mongrels!” Bianca breathes against my cheek. I can only nod, and I begin to very, very slowly lower myself to the ground.
She follows suit, and together we rest and wait for them to leave.
Minutes pass. We listen and listen, to nothing but the sounds of the dogs. Nothing in the forest moves while the pack is in the clearing. Soon enough, the mongrels' attention is redirected by a far-off noise that I can’t make out, and they’re off, ripping through the forest again, vicious things chasing the thrill of the kill.
When I lift myself back to my feet, Path and Dante are already out in the open. Dante has his hand over his face, and Path is staring directly across the clearing at me. The look on his face tells me that he’s forcing his vision into a tunnel.
I stare back as I step into the open, avoiding looking down and trying not to register anything around us. We’ve all seen dead people. But never something like this.
Not everyone we’ve ever known, dead in the dirt.
But my good leg catches, and I trip, and I fall. Immediately my eyes go down and my hands. I see faces. Frozen faces, slack and pallid. Colorless.
And I recognize them. All of them.
Before I know it, I’m on my knees staring around at the bodies and their faces. I’m in a crowd of people, I know everyone’s name, even if I have to think about it for a second. It’s not long before my lungs are heaving and it feels like my entire body is made of air and water, my muscles lacking solid shape, like I’ll melt into the ground and become nothing any second now.
I can’t breathe, I can’t stop looking. I drag my knees across the dirt, and I swear I can hear someone crying, sobbing. But my ears are ringing, like someone just shot off a gun right next to my ear.
I can see something glinting there on the ground, and in my mind, there’s a sound like metal clattering against the stones. I don’t know how I’m able to move, but I get close enough that I know what it is.
It’s the knife. The ceremonial dagger. “Purely ornamental,” but sharper than any knife that a Timber carries, and stained, now, with innocent Timber blood.
I scoop it into my palm, and the handle feels warm, smooth, heavy against my hand. I grip it tight.
In an instant, Bianca’s arms are around my head, one covering my eyes and one covering my mouth, and for a split second the darkness is silence and stillness and peace, and I take a deep breath and go slack as she drags me back towards the bushes.
Bianca lets go and I roll over onto my hands and knees, my shoulder pressing hard against the trunk of a small tree.
I vomit until my stomach is empty, and I keep my eyes open. I can see it all again when I blink.
Path is next to me, now. He kneels and wraps his right arm around my back, his left hand gripping my wrist hard, and I grab him back because there’s nothing else to hold onto and I feel like I’m melting away, like soon I’ll be gone.
“You have to be quiet, Lucky, we’re going to get caught,” Path says, talking so fast, but it sounds like it’s in slow motion and lost under the fading ringing.
Every single face I saw is running through my head so quickly that I can hardly make them out, but I know every name, and I realize that I was the one sobbing, and my chest… My chest hurts, my stomach hurts, and every part of me is writhing and tightening, under so much pressure that I can’t breathe again.
I still can’t speak. I don’t know if I’ll ever know what to say, anyway. I make a note in my mind that I never want to talk about it. I never want to talk about those people, or this place, ever, ever again.
“I found someone!”
Path stops and looks up, and then he’s gone from my side, and I hug the tree as if my life depends on not letting go.
“Gamma?” Bianca says from behind me.
“I-... I was watching. I wasn’t too far,” says Gamma, and I feel one oversized hand on my back. “Are you alright, James?”
“We-... We should never have come here,” I find my voice, a growl, darker and weaker than I had expected. “Why did I agree to come back here?”
The pain is anger before I have anything to say about it, and I’m angrier than I’ve ever been. I wipe the tears from my cheeks and spit at the ground to try to rid my mouth of the taste, then turn back and follow Path into the clearing. I slide the dagger into an ill-fitted sheath on my belt and clench my fists tight at my sides.
I only barely register that Gamma and Bianca remain in the foliage behind and watch me as I step over bodies and gently nudge fallen weapons out of my path. I make my way to where Path and Dante crouch, carefully pulling on branches in a pile of debris. Finally, Dante yanks a stick out and the pile collapses, revealing the crumpled shape of a Timber huddled beneath.
“How did you see him?” Path asks, moving the loose sticks off of the man’s body.
“I saw his foot. It was moving,” Dante says, and carefully shifts a few branches away from his face and frowns hesitantly. “It’s Smokes, Path.”
“Do you think we give a damn who it is, Dante? As long as he’s alive,” I chastise him, and we all pause as Smokes stirs. He opens his eyes slowly and comes awake only when they’re completely open.
“By the Great Chain…” He breathes. “Wh-...Where am I?”
Suddenly there’s a whistle, and Path whips around to look at Bianca. I follow his eyes and catch the sight of her raising a single fist into the air.
“There’s no time!” He hisses, and hooks Smokes’s right shoulder, already dragging him out of the open. I don’t ask, I just do the same on his left and help. We’re hidden again, Dante slipping in behind me, his hand on my shoulder as we all crouch in the shadows.
I watch Gamma and Bianca from across the open space and listen to the footsteps and rustling grow louder.
Suddenly, on my right, a group of ten or so men, tall and lithe tribals wearing their armor and old-traditional Yu’mee warpaint, storm into the open.
Beside me, I can see Path’s entire body tighten in pure panic.
“Old-traditionalists!” He hisses into my ear. “We have to get out of here.”
I wait, watching them spread out in a circle, kicking bodies out of their way and turning them over, jabbing them to make sure everyone is dead. I wait until they’re all turned away from me, and I raise my hand, fingers spread, high into the air, for Gamma to see.
Abort, I tell her. Retreat. Mission over.
I hold for several moments, as long as I can. It’s all I can do because I’ve lost their shapes in the trees and I can’t tell if they’ve seen the signal.
I crouch back down. Behind me, Dante begins to back away from the clearing, but I hold up my hand, flat, fingers together.
“Wait,” I breathe, almost without sound.
We wait.
In the following seconds, the pack of mongrels from minutes earlier are back, bursting full-speed into the moonlight. Several among them howl in delight at the sight of live and fighting prey, and the tribals ready their weapons and begin whooping in a mixture of Kolmabi and Chao, fighting off the first few as they barrel into the circle of ten.
“You got a weapon, Dante?” I ask.
Dante’s hand jumps around the pockets in his armor, and he frees a 6-inch basic field knife from its place on his chest.
“I guess,” he says. “It’s not nothin’.”
“Anything is better than nothing, kid,” Smokes says, his voice heaving with the strain of walking.
“You got one, Lucky?” Path asks.
“Yeah,” I reply, my hand gripping tighter around the handle of the ceremonial dagger.
“Good.”
The first mongrel makes it through their line and knocks one to the ground, shaking its head back and forth as its teeth rip into his limbs.
“Now!” Path says, and grabs Smokes’s arm again, dragging him halfway to his feet. Dante slips his shoulder under mine and helps me take the weight off my bad leg. I follow, fighting the barely-reduced limp.
“What about-” Dante begins.
“We’re splitting up!” I tell him harshly, keeping my voice low to hopefully avoid drawing any of the dogs after us.
Path stops and shoves Smokes ahead of him, turning and raising his axe high, bringing it down hard on the dark figure of a mongrel, moving so quickly and smoothly through the shadows that I hadn’t even seen it.
He rips the blade out of its head and rushes to catch up with us, taking Smokes’s weight against his side again. Without warning, Dante breaks away from me, too, and I hear the sound of snarling behind me. I stop and turn, and there are three circling him in the underbrush. I lunge and lose balance, knocking one to the ground and pinning it beneath me. The blade slides easily into its throat and in an instant, it lies still.
Dante slashes through the greenery at a second one, slicing a diagonal gash across its face as it tries to dash for his leg.
As I turn to get the third, Path’s axe swings past my eyes and buries into the skull of the one I was looking for, mere feet from my face.
Dante helps me back to my feet and we’re moving again, deeper into the darkening woods.81Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡffqvHiL8tu
