Walk The Path

Ilza walked at the center of the line, where the others could keep her between them. She was young for an elf, not yet into the fullness of her years, and it showed in the unfinished sharpness of her face, all angles that had not quite settled. Her skin was a dull blue, the color of deep water under a clouded sky, and it had gone ashen from the road. Two stag-like horns rose from her brow, small and still growing, branching only once before they tapered to points. Her hair was a tangle of dark moss and creeping vine that grew from her scalp and spilled down her back, and where flowers should have bloomed along it in the spring there were only shriveled buds that had never opened, because there had been no spring worth the name for a long time now. She was thin, thinner than an elf her age should be, and the rags she wore hung off her shoulders like they belonged to someone larger.

Her brother Demet trailed half a step behind her, close enough to grab her sleeve when the ground turned bad. He was still a boy, narrow and gangly, his limbs grown too fast for the rest of him so that he was always tripping over his own feet. His horns had barely broken the skin of his forehead, two pale nubs that he touched constantly when he was nervous, which was often. His hair was leaf rather than vine, thin yellow-green fronds that curled at the ends, and his skin was the same dull blue as his sister’s though paler, almost grey at the hollows of his cheeks. He wore the same rags she did, knotted twice at the waist with a length of rope to keep them from falling, and his bare feet had gone hard and cracked from walking.

Ahead of them the giant old woman pushed through the underbrush, and behind them came the human. The giant stood a good thirteen feet when she straightened, though she rarely straightened anymore, hunched as she was beneath the low canopy. Her grey hair was bound back in a heavy braid, and the third eye in the center of her forehead was half lidded and clouded with age, though it still moved when the other two did, searching the dark between the trees. She wore rags as well, great sheets of stitched and restitched cloth that had once been a tent or a sail or some other large thing, now made to cover her. The human was the only one armored. His plate was orcish make, scavenged and ill-fitting on a human frame, the dark metal pitted and scarred and bolted together at the joins where straps had rotted away. A great sword rode across his back, the blade longer than Demet was tall. His face was grim under a beard gone wild, and his eyes never stopped moving.

The forest they moved through had been something else once, but whatever it had been was long gone. The trees grew wrong here, trunks twisting back on themselves like things in pain, branches knotted together overhead so densely that the light came through grey and thin. Where the bark split, black rot welled up from the wounds and ran down in slow dark rivulets, pooling in the roots and soaking back into the ground. The smell was the worst of it, a thick wet stench of rot and death that coated the back of the throat and never lifted, so heavy that they had stopped speaking of it days ago. Things watched them from the deep tangle on either side. Ilza could not see them clearly, only the shapes of them, too many legs or too many eyes, low to the ground or high in the branches, turning to follow as the group passed and then melting back into the dark. None of them had attacked yet. That was almost worse than if they had.

To keep Demet’s mind off the watching things, Ilza told him stories. She told him of the old forests, the ones from before, when this whole region had been green and living and good. She told him how the dryads had walked among the trees back then, tall as the giant but barkskinned and gentle, and how they had tended beautiful groves where the light fell golden through real leaves and clear water ran in real streams. She made the words soft and turned them over slowly, the way their mother used to.

“Did you ever see them,” Demet asked. “The old forests. Did you see them?”

“No,” she said. “No one has, Demet. It was so long ago that there’s no one left who walked in them. All we have are the stories, and the stories are all we have of the old world. Legends, passed down and passed down until no one knows anymore what’s true in them and what got added along the way.”

“That isn’t quite so,” the giant said from up ahead, not turning, her low voice carrying back over her shoulder. “There is still one who remembers. An old one, older than any of us. When we reach Oldhome, you’ll meet him. He saw it with his own eyes, the green of it, before all this.”

“If we reach Oldhome alive,” the human gruffly said behind them.

The giant stopped pushing for a moment. “You shouldn’t say things like that. Thinking on death and ruin only draws it nearer. Speak of arriving safe and you make it likelier to be so. Speak of dying in here and you invite it to come.”

“It only makes sense to plan for the worst,” the human started. “A man who doesn’t reckon on the worst is a man who gets caught out when the worst comes, and out here the worst is always what comes, so…”

He did not finish. The giant had gone still, her great hand raised, all three of her eyes open now. The stench had thickened around them without any of them noticing the change, gone from the steady rot they had grown used to into something sharper and sweeter and far more foul, something that made Demet gag and press the back of his wrist to his mouth.

“That smell,” the giant said quietly. “That’s the plague. It’s in the trees ahead, in the ground, in the air. We can’t go through it. We’d carry it with us if we did, and there’s no carrying that and living. We have to find another way.”

So they turned back. There was no arguing it, and no one tried. They went the way they had come, slower now, the human watching their backs and the giant testing the ground with each step, and the light that had been thin all day grew thinner still as the unseen sun dropped somewhere beyond the canopy. By the time the dark began to settle in earnest they had reached a grove where the trees opened just enough to make a clearing, and the giant declared it the best they would find. They stopped.

The human gathered what dead wood he could and set to making a fire, striking sparks by snapping his fingers down into a nest of dry moss until it caught and a small flame climbed up. While he worked, Ilza knelt at the edge of the clearing and pressed her palms flat to the soil. She closed her eyes and reached down with the part of her that Jorduth had left in all the elf-kind, the green part, the growing part, and she called up life from the dead earth. It came slowly and it came wrong. The potatoes that swelled up through the dirt under her hands were small and pale and warped, knotted with strange lumps, the skin of them bruised dark in places as though something had pressed in from inside. But they were food, and out here food was food.

“Thank you, child,” the giant said, lowering herself with a groan to sit by the fire. “But go easy. Don’t pull more from your soul than you have to. The more it wears you, the thinner you wear, and the thinner you wear the easier it is for the dark to find a way into you. That’s how it gets in. Through the cracks in a tired soul. Better hungry than open to the dark magic.”

Ilza nodded and let the green part of her go quiet, and her hands shook a little as she gathered the small harvest. The human cut strips of jerky from a wrapped bundle in his pack and shared them out, and they ate the warped potatoes together with the dried meat, charring the potatoes a little in the coals first to take the worst of the strangeness off them. The giant ate nothing.

Demet finished quickly, licked his fingers, and then sat hunched and miserable. “I’m thirsty,” he said. “My throat hurts.”

“Aye,” the human said. “Mine too. Been dry since midday.”

“We conserve what we have,” the giant said. “There’s no clean water in a place like this. Every stream you find here runs with the same poison that’s in the trees, and drinking it would be the end of you faster than the thirst. So we make what we carry last.” She drew out her waterskin, a great thing that would have been a barrel in smaller hands, and she measured a small portion into each of their cupped palms in turn, no more than a few swallows each. Demet drank his at once. Ilza drank hers slowly.

And she watched. The giant passed the skin around to the three of them in turn, stoppered it again, and set it aside. She did not drink. Not a drop. Ilza had noticed it the night before too, and the night before that, and now she was sure.

While the human drew Demet aside to the firelight and put the great sword in the boy’s hands (showing him how to set his feet, how to hold the weight of it so it didn’t pull him over, the boy’s thin arms trembling under it), Ilza moved close to the giant and spoke low.

“You don’t drink,” she said. “You haven’t been eating either. I’ve watched you. You give it all to us.”

The giant smiled, and the smile folded her old face into a hundred creases. “I’m old,” she said. “I’ve had my fill of years and meals both. You three, you take so little. A handful of water to you is a mouthful to me, and there’s more of me to keep going than there is of any of you. It costs the same to keep me a day as it would to keep the three of you a week. So I’d rather it go to the three of you.”

“But you’re wasting away,” Ilza said, and her voice caught on it. “I can see it. You’re getting smaller. You can’t keep giving it all up like this.”

“I don’t mind,” the giant said. She looked across the fire at the boy struggling under the sword, and at the man’s hands steadying him, and her clouded third eye seemed to soften. “I truly don’t, child. If it means the rest of you walk out of these trees and reach Oldhome, where the dark can’t reach, where you can sleep a night without one of you keeping watch, then it’s a small thing to give. Let an old woman spend herself on something worth spending on. There’s not much else left worth it.”

There was nothing Ilza could say to that. After a while she stopped trying to find anything.

The fire burned down to a low red glow. The human took the first watch, settling himself with his back to a trunk and the great sword across his knees and his eyes turned out toward the black wall of the trees. Demet curled against the giant’s side and was asleep almost at once. The giant followed soon after, her breathing going deep and slow. Ilza lay on her back and looked up at the knotted canopy and did not sleep for a long time. Out in the dark the strange creatures had begun to move and call to one another, clicks and low wet cries and a sound like something large dragging itself through the leaves, near and then far and then near again, circling, always circling, and she lay and listened to all of it until at last her eyes grew heavy and the sounds blurred together into the dark.

A hand closed on her shoulder and shook her, and Ilza came up out of a thin and dreamless dark with her heart already pounding. The human crouched over her. The fire had burned down to almost nothing behind him and his face was lit only by the last red coals, but it was his eyes she saw first. There was something in them that had not been there before he sat his watch. Whatever he had looked at out in the trees through those long hours, whatever had crept up to the edge of the firelight and shown itself to him, it had left a mark behind his eyes, a flat haunted thing, the look of a man who had seen something he could not unsee.

“Your turn,” he said, his voice low and cracked. “It’s your watch.”

Ilza sat up and the cold went through her and she began to shake. She could not help it. Her hands trembled and then her arms and then all of her, looking past him at the black wall of the trees where she would have to point her eyes for hours alone while the others slept.

“I know,” the human said. “I know what’s coming for you. The waiting. The listening. Sitting there while he tortures you with visions and sounds. I know exactly what it is. But it has to be done. Someone has to stay awake. If we all sleep, none of us wake.” His voice dropped lower still, and it shook now too. “Please. Let me sleep. I need to sleep. Just let me close my eyes. Please.”

Something in the begging broke her. She had held together for days, for Demet’s sake, for all their sakes, and now it came apart all at once and she put her face in her hands and sobbed, deep and helpless, the sound of it tearing out of her before she could stop it.

It woke the others. Demet stirred and lifted his head from where he lay against the giant’s flank, his eyes wide and frightened, but the giant’s hand pressed him gently back down, and he stayed in his bed, watching. The giant herself rose, slow and enormous in the dark, and came to Ilza and folded down beside her and gathered the shaking girl against her side.

“There now,” the giant murmured. “There now, child.” She looked at the human over Ilza’s head. “Lie down. I’ll take her shift. Let her rest. I can go without sleep and deal with the consequences of being awake during the night easier than she can.”

The human’s face changed. The haunted thing in his eyes curdled into something hotter. “No,” he said. “No. Why should she be spared? Why should I sit there night after night with that, with what’s out there, and she gets carried through it? She can’t handle it. None of you can handle it. You think I can. I can’t. I sit there and it eats at me and I do it anyway, I keep doing it, more than any of you, more nights than all of you put together, and it’s driving me out of my mind.” His voice was rising. “It’s pulling me apart. Every night a little more of my sanity gone by his damned voice. A little more of my soul drank by his eyes.”

“Go to sleep,” the giant said, even and quiet.

“No.”

“You’re tired. You’re not yourself. Lie down.”

He stood instead. He pulled the great sword off his back. The rasp of it filled the clearing, and he stood over them with the blade in his hands. “She takes the next shift,” he said. “She takes it. I’ve earned my sleep ten times over and she takes the shift or so help me…”

“Don’t,” the giant said, and there was no comfort in her voice now, only warning, low and old and tired. “Don’t do this again. Put it down.”

But the rage had him fully now, boiled up past anything that could be reasoned with, and his face twisted and he lunged, the great sword swinging up and forward toward them both.

The giant’s third eye opened wide. A ray of deep purple light lanced out from the center of her forehead and struck the man square between the brows. He dropped where he stood. The sword fell from his hands and thudded into the dirt, and he folded down beside it and was asleep before he touched the ground, already snoring, deep and slow and entirely gone, the rage wiped clean off his slack face.

For a moment no one moved. Demet stared from his bedroll with his fists clenched at his chest. The giant let out a long breath through her nose and the purple light faded from her eye.

“Let him sleep it off,” she said. “He won’t remember it kindly in the morning, but he’ll remember it. I’ll take the watch. You’ve had enough of a night.”

“No,” Ilza said. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and made herself breathe. “No, let me. You need it more than any of us, you said so yourself, you don’t eat and you don’t drink, you can’t go without sleep on top of all the rest. I can do this. I’ll watch. I’ll wake you when it’s your turn, I promise. Just sleep.”

The giant looked at her a long moment with all three eyes, weighing it, reluctant. Then she nodded slowly. She rose and crossed to where the human lay and took him under the arms, dragging him back to his bedroll and laying him out flat. She set the great sword down beside him within his reach, because they might need it before morning. Then she lowered herself back down by Demet, and drew the boy in against her, and within a few breaths, her own breathing had gone deep and even. She was asleep.

Ilza was alone. She drew her knees up and wrapped her thin arms around them and turned her face out toward the trees, toward the black tangle where the things still moved and called. The last coal in the fire gave out and went grey. The dark came in then, sliding closer from every side, pooling thick between the trunks and creeping in across the dead ground toward the small huddle of sleeping bodies, toward her. As it came she felt a slow cold dread begin to rise up from somewhere deep inside her, filling her by inches, the certain wordless sense that out there in all that watching black, something had taken notice, and something was coming.

It always started with the voices that sounded far away.

She heard them before she understood them, drifting in from somewhere out past the trees, faint and layered over one another. And something in her stirred at the sound, a remembrance she could not place, as though she knew these voices, had always known them, even though they were like nothing she had ever heard in her life. The not-knowing and the knowing both at once made her skin crawl.

Then they grew louder, and the anxiety came with them. It rose up out of her chest unbidden, an animal thing with no reason behind it, every nerve in her body suddenly pulled taut and screaming a single wordless command. Scream. Run. Get up and run and don’t stop. Nothing was right. Nothing in the whole world was right and she had to flee from it.

The voices kept climbing The sounds began to resolve into words, and the words were the demonic tongue. She had never been taught a syllable of it and she did not need to be. The mere sound of it hurt her, each harsh, sharp consonant dragging across her ears like the language itself had edges, like the words were slicing fine cuts into her eardrums from the inside.

She began to talk to herself. Very quietly, barely a breath, her lips moving over the words so as not to wake the others.

“It isn’t real. None of this is real. It’s just the fear magic. You’ve felt it before. You got through it before. You can do it again. It isn’t real.”

He laughed, and the sound of his laughter burrowed down into her ears and lodged there. She bit down hard on her tongue to keep from screaming, tasting blood, the pain of it a small bright real thing she could hold onto.

WHY DON’T YOU SCREAM, he said, and she could hear the smile in it. WOULDN’T IT BE A MERCY. CRY OUT. WAKE THE BEASTS OF THIS FOREST AND LET THEM COME AND TEAR YOU APART. WOULDN’T THAT BE KINDER THAN THIS. A QUICK END. A WAY TO MAKE THE PAIN STOP. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SCREAM.

She sobbed without sound, her whole body shaking with the effort of holding it in, the tears spilling hot down her face and dripping off her chin. She squeezed her eyes shut as tight as she could, until she saw colors swim behind the lids.

OPEN YOUR EYES.

The magic took her eyelids and forced them open against her will, peeling them wide no matter how she fought it, and his face was there in front of her, filling the whole of the world. She could not look away and she could not close her eyes. The sight of him burned, the image of him searing itself into her eyes like staring into the sun, like staring into something that should never be looked upon by anything living.

“It isn’t real,” she thought, clinging to it with everything left in her. “I just need to get through it. It isn’t real and I just need to get through it.”

Their eyes locked.

The forest erupted into flame. All of it at once, every twisted tree, the dead ground, the air itself, and her own body along with it, her rags and her skin and the moss of her hair all catching and blazing up together. The agony was total. It was everything. There was no part of her it did not reach, no thought she could think that was not on fire, and it did not end the way real burning ended, it simply went on, every instant of it stretched out and held and made to last.

He laughed and laughed above her, drinking it down, and she heard him telling her how lovely it was, how marvelous, how he could watch her burn like this forever and never tire of it, how exquisite her agony was to him.

And then he looked away.

In the middle of his rapture something pulled his gaze off her and aside, and she felt the loss of his attention like a held breath released. She turned her own eyes to follow where he had looked.

In that instant the magic broke. It went out all at once like a snuffed candle. The flames vanished. The forest fell back into its ordinary rotten dark, the trees standing whole and unburnt, the ground cold beneath her, her own body unharmed and whole and soaked through with sweat. The pain was simply gone, leaving only the memory of it ringing through her like a struck bell.

Something was stumbling into the clearing.

It was a fae. Small, no taller than Demet’s waist, with the long thin arms and legs and the wide startled eyes of its kind. It lurched out of the trees on legs that would barely hold it, and it was covered in wounds, cuts laid open across its arms and its narrow chest, bruises blackening its face, blood matting the thin growth of its hair. It took two more failing steps into the firelight and swayed there, looking at her, its huge eyes wide with terror.

Ilza was on her feet before she knew she had moved. She lunged to the human and seized his shoulder and shook him hard, and he came awake at once, the haze of the giant’s sleep-magic torn away by the urgency in her grip, his hand already closing around the hilt of the great sword as he rose.

The fae fell to its knees in the dirt at the edge of the firelight and lifted its thin hands toward them.

“Please,” it said, its voice high and broken and barely there. “Please, don’t, please let me stay and sleep, I’ll do anything, just don’t make me go back out there, please.”

“No,” the human said. He stood over it with the great sword held low, and there was no give in him at all. “Go back where you came from. Our party’s full. We’ve no room for you and nothing to spare. Turn around and go.”

“Wait,” Ilza said. She stepped between them, her hands up. “Wait, please. Let him stay with us. Let him come to Oldhome with us, it’s only a little farther, he can walk with us.” The words came fast, tumbling over each other in her need to get them out. “He’s another body. Another person who can take the night watch. Don’t you see. With one more of us the watches come round less often. The fear magic, the dark, it reaches in when we’re alone and tired, but with one more to share the nights it can’t, it can’t get to any of us so easy. He helps us. He’s worth keeping.”

Something smoothed over in the human’s eyes as she spoke. The haunted edge of them eased, just slightly, at the thought of it; fewer nights sat alone in the dark, fewer hours given over to Torvakul. For a moment the relief of it showed plain on his face, naked and wanting.

But he set his jaw and held firm. “We don’t have the food,” he said. “We don’t have the water. We’re rationing already. We’re going without as it is, the old woman’s starving herself to keep the rest of us walking. One more mouth and we all die slower instead of some of us living. That’s the truth of it. I’m sorry.”

The giant stirred behind them and woke, lifting her great head, all three eyes opening to take in the scene, the kneeling fae, the drawn sword, the girl pleading in the middle of it.

Ilza turned to her at once. “Please,” she begged. “Please, tell him. Let the fae stay. Let him come with us, he can take the watches, he won’t eat much, he’s so small, please.”

The giant looked at the fae for a long moment. Then she let out a slow breath. “He’s right,” she said heavily, and the words landed in Ilza like a stone. “I’m sorry, child. There’s not enough. There was barely enough for the four of us and there’s less every day. One more and we don’t reach Oldhome, none of us. It can’t be.”

“I can’t go back,” the fae whispered. It was shaking all over now, its huge eyes streaming. “I can’t. I can’t go back into the forest alone, it’s out there, the things are out there, they did this to me, please, I can’t go back, I won’t make it, please don’t send me back alone.”

“No,” the giant said quietly. “No, you won’t make it. That’s true.” She closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them they had gone flat and certain. She looked at the human. “Don’t send it back out to be played with for hours in the dark. Be quick about it. Put the poor thing out of its misery.”

The fae had only the time to look up.

The human stepped forward and brought the great sword down, and the blade fell through the small body and clove it in two, and what had been a living thing a moment before lay in the dirt of the clearing in two pieces, and was still.

The body had not lain still for more than a breath before it began to change. Stench rolled off it, a stench worse even than the forest’s, thick and sweet and rotten in a way that made the eyes water, and with it came black smoke, rising in oily curls from both halves of the sundered fae, seeping up out of the open wounds and the split flesh and pooling along the ground.

The human staggered back from it, his arm thrown up across his face. “Gods,” he choked. “Gods, what…”

The giant’s face changed. All the weary certainty went out of it at once and what came in its place was fear, plain naked fear, the most frightening thing Ilza had seen all night because she had not known until now that the giant could look like that.

“Up,” the giant said. “Up, all of you, now. It was plagued. The fae was plagued and we’ve cut it open and let it loose. We have to go. Now. Run.”

Ilza spun and dropped to her brother and shook him hard. “Demet, get up, get up, we have to go, come on.” The boy came awake confused and frightened and she hauled him up by the arm and barely let him find his feet before they were moving, all of them, breaking from the clearing into the dark trees in a scramble.

They ran. There was no care in it, no quiet, no testing of the ground, only flight, and the noise of it tore through the forest, branches snapping, feet crashing through the dead underbrush, breath ragged and loud. The noise drew things. Out in the black on either side, eyes began to open and light up, pair after pair after pair of them kindling in the dark and turning to track the fleeing shapes, and then falling in behind.

The giant went first, crashing a path through the tangle with her great body, snapping trunks aside, making a way for the smaller ones to follow. Ilza ran with Demet’s hand crushed in hers, dragging him when he stumbled. The human took the rear, sword out, glancing back over his shoulder.

They were being hunted. The pack came through the canopy more than the ground, great black cat-like bodies pouring through the twisted branches with terrible ease. Ilza caught them only in glimpses but the glimpses were enough. Long faces crammed full of jagged crooked teeth, far too many teeth, set at every wrong angle. Dozens of eyes scattered across each face with no order to them. Spikes of black obsidian thrusting up out of their bodies all over, along the spine, the shoulders, the legs, and at the end of each long lashing tail an axe-head of the same black glass, swinging, catching what little light there was.

They closed fast. As the first of them drew near the human turned and swung the great sword in a wide whistling arc, and the beasts shied back from the reach of it, scattering up into the branches, circling, pacing the runners from above and to the sides, waiting.

One came through the canopy directly overhead. Ilza saw it, saw it gathering itself on a branch above to drop down onto them, and without thinking she flung out her hand and reached into the wood with her magic. A branch twisted and snapped sideways and caught the beast’s paw, snaring it, and the creature lost its leap and fell.

It did not fall where she meant it to. It came down on the human.

The weight of it took him off his feet and slammed him to the ground, and the sword spun from his grip, and the pack saw it. They came down out of the trees all at once, the whole pack of them descending on him where he lay, and Ilza did not turn around. She locked her eyes forward and she dragged Demet on and she did not look back, not when she heard the shriek of metal as his armor was torn off him, not when she heard the wet sounds of the beasts beginning to dig in, not when his screams rose up behind them, raw and agonized and going on far too long. She kept running. She kept Demet running. She did not look back.

They ran for a long time after the screaming stopped. They ran until it became clear that nothing was following them anymore, that the pack had stayed where it was, content with what it had brought down, feeding on the man in the dark behind them. Only then did the giant’s headlong crashing begin to slow, and then to falter, and then she went down, her great body folding and collapsing to the ground, and she lay there with her sides heaving and could not rise.

Ilza fell to her knees beside her. Demet stood swaying, hollow-eyed. And it broke over her all at once, what she had done, and she began to cry, deep wrenching sobs.

“It’s my fault,” she gasped. “I did it. I caught its paw and it fell on him, I dropped it right on him, it’s my fault, I killed him, it’s my fault.”

“No,” the giant breathed. She lifted one enormous hand and laid it over the girl, trembling. “No, child. You meant to save us. You couldn’t have known. You couldn’t.” But the words came thin and broken, dragged up between heaving breaths, and there was so little air left in her to give them that they faded almost to nothing, and her great chest labored, and she could not say any more.

And then, through the black knots of the twisted canopy far above, the first red light of the sun began to filter down, thin and bloody, falling in scattered threads across the forest floor, across the giant’s heaving side and Demet’s hollow face and Ilza’s tear-streaked one, and the long night was over, and a new day had begun.

“Let me rest,” the giant breathed. The words came one at a time, dragged up from somewhere deep. “I just need to rest. A little while. Let me rest, and then I’ll be able to go on.”

So they let her. There was nothing else to do for her anyway. She settled her great body against the dead earth and her labored breathing slowed and deepened, and Ilza and Demet stayed close against her side, the two of them pressed into the warmth of her, watching the thin red light move through the trees.

About an hour passed. The giant slept on.

Then Ilza heard it. A rustling out in the forest, off through the trees, the sound of bodies moving through the underbrush, and not trying very hard to be quiet about it. She went rigid. She turned and put her hands on the giant and shook her.

“Wake up,” she whispered. “Wake up, something’s coming, please wake up.”

The giant did not wake. Her breathing went on slow and deep and far away, sunk down too far into her exhaustion to be reached, and shake her as Ilza might she would not come up out of it.

The rustling drew nearer. Ilza grabbed Demet and pulled him with her, away from the giant’s side and back into a thick stand of twisted trunks at the edge of the clearing, and the two of them pressed down low into the cover and went still and silent and watched.

The goblins came into the clearing. There were perhaps eight of them, small and stocky and wrinkle-skinned, their long pointed ears twitching and their long pointed noses lifted to the air. They were clad in thick armor, heavy plates of dark scavenged metal layered over one another, far too much of it for bodies so small, so that they moved with a stiff rolling waddle under the weight. Each carried a pike longer than itself, the points notched and stained dark. At their head came one unlike the rest. Its grey wrinkled skin was painted over with markings in white and red and black, swirling shaman’s signs daubed across its face and down its bare arms, and it wore fewer plates and more charms, little bones and teeth and dried things strung on cords about its neck. In its gnarled hand it carried a staff of twisted knotted wood, the head of it bound about with feathers and more bones, and the whole thing seemed to hum faintly in the air.

The goblins caught sight of the giant lying there and began to snicker among themselves, a thick ugly sound, jostling and pointing. They did not see Ilza and Demet hidden in the trees.

“Quiet,” the shaman hissed, and they fell silent. It crept forward a few steps, peering at the sleeping giant with its small black eyes, and a slow grin spread across its painted face. “Look at our luck,” it whispered. “Out chasing a little fae through the dark, and what do we stumble onto. A giant. A whole giant, and fast asleep. The masters will be pleased. Oh, they’ll be pleased with this.”

It gestured with the staff, and the others spread out at its command, circling the sleeping giant, ringing her round on every side with their pikes lowered and leveled at her, the points hovering over her great body.

Ilza’s heart hammered. Her mind raced through everything and found nothing. She could not fight them. Eight armored goblins and a shaman, and her with no weapon and no strength left and a child to protect, she could do nothing against them, nothing at all. If she broke from cover now she only died with the giant, and Demet with her. And she knew, with a cold sick certainty, what the giant would want. The giant had given everything she had so that the two of them might live, had starved herself for it, had spent every last thing she carried on it. To throw that away now, to die for nothing, would make a waste of all of it. The giant would want them safe. The giant would want them to stay hidden.

So Ilza stayed hidden. She pulled Demet’s face into her shoulder so he would not have to see, and she held him, and she did not move.

The goblins began to stab.

The giant roared awake. The sound of it shook the clearing, and her third eye flew open, and from it lunged a bolt of red magic that struck the nearest goblin full on and tore it apart, shredded it where it stood, armor and flesh and all flung outward in pieces. The others screamed and drove their pikes into her, again and again, the points punching through the great body. She got a huge hand around the shaft of one pike and the goblin clinging to it, and she swung the whole thing up and around and smashed it into another goblin, knocking both of them sprawling aside. The rest kept stabbing.

Magic gathered and erupted from her third eye again, aimed at the shaman this time, but the shaman threw up its gnarled staff and the bolt broke against it and scattered into nothing. The giant snarled and gave herself over to it fully, to the frenzy, ripping the pike loose from the goblin’s hands and turning it on them. She drove it through one goblin and out the other side, skewering it, and swept it round to catch another. Her magic kept rising, but the shaman kept turning it away, again and again. However, the shaman could do nothing against the sheer strength of the giant, and the goblins were falling now, run through or crushed under her enormous hands, their armor buckling like tin in her grip. And still they stabbed her. Every moment she fought, more pikes found her, sinking into her sides and her back and her shoulders, and the blood came in sheets.

The shaman saw the way of it. Half its band lay dead or broken in the dirt and the giant was still moving, still killing, and there was no profit left in it.

“Back,” it shrieked. “Back, leave it, retreat, go,” and it turned and fled into the trees, and what goblins still lived broke and ran after it, scrambling away through the underbrush as fast as their armored bodies would carry them, until the sound of them faded and was gone.

The giant stood swaying in the empty clearing. Then her strength left her all at once, and she collapsed, her great body crashing down to the earth, with three pikes still standing up out of her where the goblins had left them buried in her flesh.

When she was sure the goblins were truly gone, that the sounds of their fleeing had faded all the way to nothing and were not coming back, Ilza eased out of the cover and stood, drawing Demet up with her.

One of the goblins lying in the dirt of the clearing began to make a noise. It was not dead, only broken, and it lay there twisted and stirring feebly, a low wet gurgling coming out of it. Ilza looked at it.

“Look away,” she told her brother. “Don’t watch.”

She turned Demet’s face aside. She crossed to the thing and picked up a pike from where it had fallen, and she raised it and drove the point down into the back of the goblin’s skull, putting her weight behind it. The noise stopped. She let go of the pike and left it standing there and did not look at what she had done.

Then they went to the giant.

Demet began to cry the moment he was close enough to see her properly, the wounds all over her, the dark blood soaking out into the ground beneath her in a spreading pool, the three pikes still standing up from her side and back. There was no saving this. Anyone could see there was no saving it. The giant was dying.

Ilza came and knelt beside the great head and laid her small hand against the giant’s cheek and stroked it, and the tears came up and spilled over and ran down her face, and she did not try to stop them this time.

As she knelt there a memory rose up in her, unbidden, from the not-so-long-ago.

She remembered her mother’s face close to hers, her mother’s hands gripping her shoulders hard, her mother’s voice low and fast and frightened. “Take Demet,” her mother had said. “Take your brother and go with the giants. The giants will get you to Oldhome.” She remembered the smoke on the horizon, the word passing through the camp like a sickness, that the red raiders had found their trail at last. The nomadic tribe, the elves and fae who had wandered the great plains for as long as any of them could remember, had been discovered, and it was only a matter of time before the raiders ran them down, and Torvakul himself was said to be not far behind. There had been no choice. They had been lucky, even, in the worst of it, to fall in with a band heading for Oldhome (a dozen humans, half a dozen dwarves, four giants), and the elders had sent the young ones away with them, two dozen elf and fae children loaded up and hurried off while there was still time, away from the camp, away from whatever came for it after.

That was two months gone now. Two months and a world of road behind them, and so many of those original group were no longer with them.

She had never seen a giant before that day. None of the children had. When the band had come up over the rise and she had seen those four enormous shapes striding closer she had been afraid, truly afraid, and she had shrunk back and pulled Demet behind her. The giant woman of the band, this same woman dying here in the dirt, had seen the fear on her face and crouched down low to be smaller and said, “don’t you worry, little one. I’ll keep you safe, you and your brother both. Nothing’s getting past me to you.”

That had not eased her fear, not really. So the giant had tried something else. “Would you like to ride up on my shoulders,” she had asked, “and see the world the way I see it?” Ilza had shaken her head and stepped back. But Demet, Demet had looked up with his huge eyes and said yes, and the giant had gathered him up so gently in those enormous hands and set him high on her shoulder, and he had clung there terrified for a moment and then, slowly, his face had opened up into wonder, and he had begun to laugh, wide-eyed, pointing at everything, calling down to her, “Ilza, Ilza, come up, come see, you can see so far, you have to come see!”

She had held out a while longer. But in the end she had caved, the way she always caved for Demet, and she had let the giant lift her up too, and she had sat on that broad shoulder with her brother and looked out over the whole of the plains rolling away golden to the edge of the sky, farther than she had ever seen in her life, and despite everything, despite all that they were running from, she had smiled.

The memory of that smile brought it back to her face now, even here, even kneeling in the blood. A small sad smile.

And the dying giant, looking up at her with her three failing eyes, smiled back.

There was life in her yet, a little. Ilza saw it and she bent and wrapped her arms around the giant’s great cheek as far as they would go and held her. She pressed her face there, and asked, “What do I do? Please. Tell me what to do now. I don’t know what to do.”

“You reach Oldhome,” the giant breathed. “That’s what you do. You get yourself there, and your brother. And you bring this.” Slowly, with the last of her strength, she moved one huge hand and uncurled the fingers. In the palm lay a small coin. It was etched with the face of a woman, a female angel, the features worn but serene, and it gave off the faintest hum, so faint Ilza felt it more than heard it. “Take it. When you’re lost, when you don’t know the way, you pray to Avadryn over it, the mother of light, and she’ll show you. She’ll guide you to Oldhome. It’s how I’ve found the road all this time. Take it now. It’s yours.”

Ilza took the coin. It was warm in her hand.

“Now go,” the giant said. “Both of you. Go now. The goblins will come back, and bring more with them, and I can’t stop them this time. I’m dying anyway, child. I’m already gone. Don’t waste it staying. Don’t let me have spent myself for nothing.”

Ilza could not make herself move.

“Listen to me,” the giant said, and something gentled in her ruined face. “I’m proud of you. Do you hear me? You’ve done so well, better than I had any right to hope, carried yourself and your brother through all of this. And you’re close now. So close. Only a few more days of walking and you’ll be there. You can do this. I know you can. Now go, and don’t look back at me. Go.”

So they went. Ilza took Demet’s hand, she stood, she turned, and walked away into the trees. She did not look back. Demet wept the whole way.

As they walked on alone into the twisted forest, the coin humming faintly in her closed fist, Ilza wondered, with a fear that sat cold and heavy in her chest, whether she could really do this. Whether she could get the two of them all the way to Oldhome, just her and her little brother, alone.

She stopped at the foot of a great twisted trunk and opened her fist and looked at the coin. The worn face of the angel woman looked back at her. She did not know the right words, had never been taught any, so she only closed her eyes and held the coin to her chest and prayed the way her heart told her to. “Avadryn. Mother of light. Please. Show me the way. Show me where to take him.”

The coin answered. The hum of it rose, swelling warm against her palm, and behind her closed eyes a vision bloomed: a face, an angel’s face, but a man’s this time, calm and shining and turned toward her as though he had been waiting. And as the face faded something settled into her soul, a quiet certainty, a pull, a knowing of which way to walk that had not been there a moment before. She opened her eyes and turned toward it. That way. Oldhome lay that way.

She took Demet’s hand and they went on.

But the forest did not want them to. As they pushed deeper into the underbrush the leaves and branches seemed to sharpen around them, edges hardening, thorns lengthening, until every bough they pressed past drew blood. Thin cuts opened on Ilza’s arms and her face and her hands, stinging, and Demet, smaller and slower and worse at shielding himself, came away worse, his thin blue skin laced all over with red lines.

“Ilza,” he gasped at last, stumbling. “I can’t. I can’t go any farther. Please. I have to stop.”

He was cut up far worse than she was. She looked at him and her chest ached. “All right,” she said. “All right, we can stop. Just for a little. Come here, let me see you.”

She sat him down against a root and tore strips from the hem of her rags and began to clean and bind the worst of his cuts, working as gently as she could, murmuring to him the whole while. And it was as she lifted the rags away from a deep cut across his back, turning him a little to reach it, that she saw it. And the sight of it stopped her heart cold.

From the wound on his back, thin and faint but unmistakable, rose a wisp of an oily black smoke.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no…”

She knew that smoke. She had seen it pour from the body of the fae in the clearing, had heard the giant’s fear, had run from it through the whole long night. The plague. The forest had been cutting them open with its sharpened branches and somewhere along the way it had gotten into him, into one of those cuts, and now it was in him.

“We have to go,” she said, hauling him up, hearing her own voice climb toward panic and unable to stop it. “We have to get to Oldhome, right now, as fast as we can. There’ll be someone there, a healer, an angel, someone who knows how to fix this, they can cure you, we just have to get you there fast, we just have to hurry.”

“I can’t walk,” Demet said. His voice had gone small and strange. “Ilza, I can’t. I don’t feel right. Something’s wrong inside me. Something’s wrong…”

So she crouched down and pulled him up onto her back, his arms over her shoulders and his legs hooked through hers, and she stood with a grunt under the weight of him. He was heavy, and her legs shook and her cut arms burned. But there was no other way, and she would not leave him. She could not. She loved him far too much to even let the thought of it form. She set her jaw and started walking, carrying her brother on her back into the trees.

To keep him with her, to keep them both moving, she talked. She told him stories as she walked, the old stories, the ones he loved. She told him of the old forests again, green and gold and living, of the dryads tall as the giant tending their beautiful groves, of the archons with their bright insect wings drifting between the trees, of whole communities of elves and fae who had lived in the branches in those days, in peace, in the light, before any of this. She told it soft and steady, one foot in front of the other, using it as a shield against the pain of the brush around her. Every once in a while, Demet would feeble ask a question.

But over time the answers stopped coming. His weight grew heavier and stranger on her back. His breathing turned to a low constant whimper, and then to groans, and then he began to writhe against her, his body twisting in pain, and the sounds coming out of him were terrible, sobs torn out between groans, the helpless crying of a child in agony with no understanding of why.

She could not carry him any farther. Her legs gave, she went to her knees, eased him down off her back, laid him out on the dead ground, and bent over him.

He was beyond answering her now. His eyes were open but they did not find her, rolled back and fixed on nothing, and his whole body was wracked and rigid with the pain, his fingers clawing at the dirt. From his ears, both of them, black smoke was drifting up now, steady, thicker than before.

She remembered the fae. She remembered the giant looking at the small broken thing and saying, “be quick about it, put the poor thing out of its misery.” There was no Oldhome close enough. There was no healer. There was only this, and her, and him.

She was sobbing before she understood what her hands were doing. She wrapped them around her brother’s throat. He began to thrash beneath her, his body fighting even past all the pain, but she pressed down through her tears, sobbing the words out, over and over.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Demet. I’m sorry. It’ll be over soon, I promise, it’ll all be over soon. You won’t hurt anymore. You won’t have to suffer anymore. I’m sorry. I love you, and I’m sorry.”

His thrashing slowed. His hands fell from her wrists. He went still.

She lay back on the dead ground beside her brother’s body and let it take her, the grief, all of it at once, sobbing up into the twisted branches above her with her shoulder pressed against his and no strength left to hold any of it in.

As she lay there the light began to change. The thin red threads that had filtered down through the canopy all the long terrible day were dimming, pulling back, going grey and then greyer, and a cold understanding settled over her along with the failing light. Night was coming. And night meant the voices, the climbing dread, Torvakul’s face filling the world, the fire that was not real but that hurt as though it were. This time there was no giant to take the watch, no one to talk her through it, no one at all. She would face it alone, and she had nothing left to face it with.

She was not going to make it. The knowing of it sank into her plain and quiet. She had failed. After everything, after all of it, she was going to die out here in these trees, and she was going to die in agony with his face in front of her, drinking her down. There was no one left now to give her the mercy that had been given to the fae, to the goblin, and to her own brother.

Her demise would not be quick.

–

Isaiah slept deep within Oldhome, in a hut no larger or finer than any other, because that was the kind of rule he kept. He was the last of his kind that anyone in the village had ever seen, one of the few angels left in all of Gyra, and the years sat heavy on him. His skin was a deep weathered brown, lined at the eyes and mouth, and his hair had gone fully white, cropped close to the skull. His eyes, when they were open, were the solid burning gold of his kind, no pupil and no iris, only that even unbroken light. His wings were folded close about him as he slept, the way another man might sleep beneath a blanket, and the feathers of them had once been white as well but had dulled over the long years to the grey of old ash, ragged at the edges where some had fallen out and never grown back. He was thin. He gave too much of his own portion away to sleep anything but thin.

He woke all at once, sitting upright with a gasp, his sweat soaked through the thin cloth he slept in and standing cold on his brow. For a moment he only sat there, gold eyes wide and unseeing in the dark, feeling something. Then he rose, and pushed out through the hanging cloth of his hut into the night, and the moment he was clear of it his great grey wings snapped open and beat down hard and he took flight, rising up over the sleeping rooftops of Oldhome.

He flew to the walls. They ringed the village, raised from whatever the people had been able to scavenge and haul and lash together, and he came down lightly atop them and stood and looked out over the corrupted forest beyond. The trees stretched away into the dark in every direction, twisted and close and black, and from them he could feel it, the thing that had woken him, pressing in against the walls like a tide against a sea-wall. The fear magic. It pushed at the boundary of Oldhome, searching, testing, and he could feel the weight of it, heavier tonight than it had been, leaning on the wards that held the village apart from the rest of the world.

He dropped down from the wall to where one of the night watch stood his post. The man was an old human, his face turned out toward the trees out of habit though he had no eyes to see them with; the sockets had been gouged hollow long ago, and dark blood wept slowly from both his ears and ran down his neck, the price his body paid for standing watch where the fear magic was strongest, where a man’s own ears turned traitor and fed him the voice of Torvakul all night long.

The man felt the displaced air of the angel’s landing and turned, and lowered himself stiffly to one knee, and pressed his fist to his ruined eyes. “Blessed are the wings that shelter us,” he intoned, the old words worn smooth with repeating. “I thank you, lord of light, for watching over Oldhome through the dark. I thank you for the wall, and the night, and the morning to come.”

“Rise, friend,” Isaiah said gently. “You needn’t kneel to me. How has the night been.”

The man rose, swaying a little. “Worse, lord,” he said. “It’s been getting worse, these past few nights. The magic’s stronger. It leans on us harder. It used to wash up against the wall and fall back, but now it stays, it pushes, all night long it pushes.” He turned his hollow face back toward the trees. “It’s like his eye is turning this way. Like he’s started to look at the forest, really look, after all this time of passing it by. I feel him out there. Fixing his gaze on us.”

“I know,” Isaiah said quietly. “I feel it too.” He laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “You’ve served well. Better than well. Tomorrow you’ll have an extra ration, taken from my own portion. You’ve earned it twice over.”

The man’s blind face crumpled with gratitude and he caught at the angel’s hand and pressed it. “Thank you, lord, thank you, you’re too good to us, too good.” But then he held on a moment longer, and his voice dropped, and the gratitude in it turned to something more desperate. “But if I could ask, lord, not the ration. Id give up all my rations for just one thing. Could I have a night. Just one night off the wall. One night where I don’t have to hear him. Any time at all without his voice in my ears. That’s all I want. Please.”

Isaiah was quiet a moment. “We’ll see,” he said. “I’ll see what can be done.” Which was what he always said, because there were never enough bodies for the wall. The man knew it, and they both let the kindness of the lie stand between them. Then the angel stepped back, and his wings opened, and he beat up into the air and out over the wall, out into the corrupted forest itself.

He flew low over the black canopy, following the pull of the thing that had woken him, until he came to a place where the trees opened a little and something was happening on the ground below. He could see them from the air, the obsidian beasts, a knot of those great black spike-backed things crouched and tearing at something on the forest floor, feeding, their too-many eyes glinting and the axe-blades of their tails twitching as they ate. Isaiah folded his wings and dropped, and as he fell he gathered the light in him and loosed it, a lance of pure burning gold that swept across the clearing and struck the beasts and flung them away shrieking, scattering them off into the dark trees, leaving what they had been eating behind.

He landed beside it, folded his wings, and looked down.

There were two bodies, or what was left of them. The beasts had been at them a long while. There was little left that the eye could name, only torn heaps of gore steaming faintly in the cold, one larger and one smaller, side by side. Unrecognizable. Whoever they had been, whatever they had hoped, it was all spent and scattered here in the dirt at the bottom of the corrupted forest, and no one would ever know their faces.

Something caught the thin light. In the ruin of one outflung hand, closed in the fingers, a small glint of silver. Isaiah crouched and reached into the gore and worked it free, and held it up, and turned it. A coin, worn smooth, etched with the serene face of a woman, an angel, humming the faintest hum against his palm. His coin. The one he sent out into the dark, now and again, with those who set out for Oldhome, to help them find the way.

He looked down at the two ruined shapes for a long moment.

“You got so close,” he said to them, softly, almost kindly. “So close. And yet so far. Just a day short of the wall.” He closed the coin in his fist. “I’ll tell you something, since you can’t hear it now and it costs me nothing. Even if you’d made it. Even if you’d walked up out of these trees and stood at the gate. There wouldn’t have been room for you. There hasn’t been room for a long time. We turn them away more days than not now, and we’d have turned you, too.” He was quiet for a breath. “But you brought my coin back to me. That’s something. That’s not nothing. So in return I’ll give you the only thing I have left to give.”

He rose, the coin warm in his hand, and spread his great ragged wings against the dark.

“I’ll hope,” he said, “that Torvakul goes easy on your souls. That he takes his time turning his gaze elsewhere, and lets you slip down quiet into the long rest before he thinks to find you there. It’s a poor blessing. It’s the only one this world has left. Go gently, if he lets you.”

Credit: Grant Howard

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