Chapter 15 Demon
Demon
Traversing the bog had not been easy before, but now that they were actively being followed, they had to hurry, too.
The sky was overcast, and a wet fog filled the space between the trees and bushes, making every step treacherous and every mistake potentially life-threatening.
They didn’t have the luxury of staking out the ground in front of them carefully anymore, and more than once, Kraghtol, who had taken the lead, found greedy mud slurping at his boots.
If it hadn’t been for Valir and Dagna, he would have been claimed by the swamp by now.
The one good thing about the difficult terrain and the fog was that they were effectively hidden from sight.
The bloodjackets in pursuit would have to follow their tracks, which, admittedly, was easy enough.
Neither of them knew how to cover them properly, and given the soft ground and dense foliage, Kraghtol wasn’t even sure if it was possible at all.
However, what was true for their pursuers was also true for them.
They were effectively blind and deaf and had no way of knowing if the orderkeepers were still far behind or just around the next corner.
And they were at an advantage, as Dagna pointed out after they had just been forced to backtrack their last half hour of marsh because of an impassable bog hole.
“Every time we do that, they are getting closer,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“If we assume them to be about as quick as we are, and at least somewhat adept at reading tracks, they don’t need to follow our wrong turns.
If there are tracks leading back the way they came, it was obviously a wrong turn. They just caught up a whole hour.”
Valir swatted a mosquito and made a disgusted sound as it splattered against his thigh. “Well, thank you for explaining the math behind our shitty situation. You surely have an equally clever solution for that problem, I presume?”
The noble’s mood had gotten sourer every day, and Kraghtol was sure he was about to snap soon.
“Pointing out a problem has merit, even if no solution is apparent, and —”
Valir laughed dryly. “You want me to point out problems, too? Gladly! There’s death by drowning in front of us, death by blade behind us, the fucking swamp is all wrong and creeping me out, and my head aches as if it is about to explode at any moment. Take a pick. Or do you want me to go on?”
Dagna might have been an unusual dwarf, but she was still a dwarf. And when she stopped and put her hands on her hips, she looked every bit like the other citizens of Bronzebreak they had met.
“Well, how about you start actually contributing at some point? All I hear from you are complaints!”
Kraghtol tried to tune out the erupting argument. Dagna wasn’t wrong, but then again, being here was especially hard for Valir because…
He stopped. There was this feeling again, the one he had already felt once, in Bronzebreak. There was a profound insight right here within reach. He took a deep breath and tried the thought again.
It was hard for Valir to be here because…
it was against his nature. Yes! He felt it too, just like it had felt in the dream!
The whole swamp was deeply upsetting for him, too.
But not all of him. The… Krasen part, his human half that had remained when the alchemical potion had hidden away all the rest, hated this place for its confusing and shifting layout.
The other half of him felt at home. It was an equally deep-rooted feeling, like when he had touched the fire and water columns in his dream.
His eyes grew wide. Humans loved Order. The Principle of Order, to be exact.
That was the important realization! What if every race had, what was the word?
Resonance! What if every race resonated with a specific Principle?
Humans liked Order. Dwarves Within. Aniriel couldn’t have broken the metal seal at all!
The strong and stable metal was surely associated with the Within Principle, so Elves resonated with Without.
And if the other half of him, the one that was not human, felt so good about this place, that meant… Orcs resonated with Chaos!
It was true. He knew it. And if it was true, they had tried to navigate the swamp all wrong.
He closed his eyes and tried to do something he had avoided for his entire life: to give in to the chaotic side of his mind.
It felt so wrong to let go of the guards he had built all his life in order not to let out ‘the orc’ within him, but oddly liberating as well.
A million fragments of sensory input flooded his mind all at once.
The voices of his companions arguing. A shivery feeling of fog on his skin.
Frogs croaking. The itch of a mosquito sting on his arm.
The brackish taste and smell of the bog.
Only after a few heartbeats did he dare to open his eyes again. Colors and shapes caressed his senses, and his focus jumped from one sensation to the next, for once not hindered by his will. The trees. His hand. The plants. The plants!
“I know where to go!” he exclaimed so loudly the other two fell silent.
“Excuse me, what?” Valir asked with irritation but stopped bickering.
“The Mandrakes. They’re friendly, like he said. There’s a pattern in where they grow and where they don’t. We just have to follow that pattern!”
“So, the ground is safe where they grow?” Dagna asked.
“Yes. No. It’s more complicated than that.” Kraghtol didn’t even know how to describe it. “They strive towards the center. I think I can follow them.”
He could — although even after multiple days, he still wasn’t able to say how.
He didn’t have the luxury of thinking about it a lot, since even though he was able to tell the general direction they needed to follow, he still had to stay vigilant for everything the swamp threw at them.
One wrong step would be enough to cost them precious minutes of lead at best, and their lives at worst. That they allowed themselves only the shortest of rests didn’t make the constant attention any easier, too.
With each passing day, the swamp became weirder.
The shape of the trees was all wrong, and their silhouettes in the fog often reminded Kraghtol of people twisted in pain.
Up close, they didn’t look any better, either.
Brambles and thorns grew out of oaks and willows, and at one point, they found a plum tree, with exactly one half bearing bright yellow fruit.
Food was scarce, but neither of them touched any of the out-of-season plums. Kraghtol didn’t recognize most of the smaller plants anymore, and for some herbs, he wasn’t even sure if they could exist outside the swamp at all.
The further they went in, the worse it got. Finally, after a crystalline dragonfly that scintillated in all colors of the rainbow touched him and exploded into a cloud of dazzling glass-like shards that dug painfully into his arm, Valir spoke up.
“That’s it. I have enough. Let’s turn back.”
“But the orderkeepers,” Dagna began before Kraghtol even had the chance, but was cut off by the noble again.
“Have you looked around? How is anything the orderkeepers can do to us worse than… all of this?! I’ll just pay their stupid fine, for all of you, if that means I don’t have to endure another day here. This is torture!”
Even the swamp animals seemed to pause in the silence that followed the sudden outburst, and Kraghtol felt himself trembling.
“It’s not a fee,” he stated flatly. “I’m wanted for murder. There will not be any fees, and you know that. I didn’t do it.” The last sentence was for Dagna, whose eyes had grown wide. “I can’t turn back… but you can.”
Another moment of silence followed, and Valir’s face reflected the turmoil in Kraghtol’s mind.
“Oh, come on now, you two. A few more days in the mud won’t kill you, Valir. We need to talk about the murder thing, though, Kragh.”
“Fine,” Valir muttered like a scolded schoolboy, and Kraghtol couldn’t help but feel a rush of gratitude for her pragmatism.
“Perhaps you can find something to soothe your nerves, Valir. This has to be a lot for you,” Kraghtol suggested as they went on.
Valir did, and Kraghtol wished he had kept his mouth shut.
During the rests, the noble resumed practicing the lyre.
He played perfect scales and simple, rhythmic patterns over and over again, as if trying to force some sense into his environment that way.
At first, Kraghtol wanted to say something about it, but he didn’t.
As tiring as it was, maybe playing like that helped Valir cope, and it didn’t make their situation worse, anyway.
The orderkeepers had obvious tracks to follow, so the eerie notes in the fog changed nothing.
If anything, it told their pursuers they were still alive.
It gnawed at Kraghtol that he had no information about the orderkeepers at all.
After having seen four of them enter the swamp, the uniformed people were little more than specters haunting his mind, always looming to burst through the fog at any moment.
Perhaps they had already broken off their pursuit.
Or perhaps they had lost their tracks and were lost or even dead.
All of that was possible, but he just had no way of knowing for sure, so he had to expect the worst. Even if that meant waking up every five minutes at night.