Chapter 008 Patrol
The corruption under my skin woke up before I did. It was a familiar itch, like ants crawling beneath the dermis of my left arm, hungry and bored.
I sat up. The air in the tent smelled of mildew and old sweat. Outside, the Fenwood was noisy-birds screaming at the sunrise, leaves rustling in a wind that felt too cold for the season.
I flexed my left hand. The black veins pulsing there were darker than they had been yesterday. They had climbed another inch toward my elbow while I slept. At this rate, I'd be dead by winter.
Good.
I grabbed my sword. The star-metal felt cold enough to burn, a grounding anchor against the rot eating my nervous system. I didn't bother with breakfast. Food tasted like ash these days anyway.
I kicked the flap of Aria's tent open.
"Get up."
Aria was burrowed into her sleeping bag like a larva. She groaned, a muffled sound of protest that suggested she was considering throwing something at me.
"Go away," she mumbled. "It's... what time is it? It's dark."
"It's not dark. It's morning. Get your boots."
She sat up, hair a chaotic halo of static and tangles. She looked at me with one eye open, the other still glued shut by sleep. "If the world isn't ending in the next five minutes, I'm going back to sleep."
"The world is always ending," I said. "We're going for a walk."
She flopped back down. "I hate you. I hate nature. I hate this tent."
"Five minutes, Aria. Or I carry you out in the bag."
I let the tent flap fall.
Ten minutes later, we were walking.
We skirted the edge of the camp, moving away from the safety of the ward-stones and into the deeper, denser treeline of the Fenwood. The air here was heavy, saturated with so much raw magic it made my teeth ache. To a normal human, it would just feel humid. To me, it felt like standing next to a high-voltage line in a rainstorm.
Aria walked behind me, kicking at roots. She was awake now, mostly because she'd tripped over a vine fifty yards back and the adrenaline had done the job of caffeine.
"So," she said, her voice cutting through the quiet. "Is this a bonding trip? Are we going to braid each other's hair and talk about boys?"
"We are patrolling," I said, not looking back.
"Patrolling what? Trees? Spoiler alert, Thalren: there are a lot of them."
"We are testing your reflexes."
"By walking?"
"By seeing if you notice what's tracking us."
She stopped. I heard the crunch of her boots on the dead leaves cease abruptly.
I stopped too and turned. She was looking around, eyes wide, hands balling into fists. The sarcasm had evaporated, replaced by the skittish tension of prey.
"What?" she whispered. "What's tracking us?"
"Nothing yet," I lied. "But if you don't stop stomping like a drunk ogre, that will change."
She scowled. "You're a sociopath. You know that, right?"
"Keep moving."
We pushed deeper. The light filtered through the canopy in sickly green shafts. Most people looked at a forest like this and saw majesty. I saw biology unchecked-a chaotic, screaming mess of things fighting for resources. Something skittered in the branches above us.
Aria stopped again, but this time she wasn't looking for threats. She was staring at a patch of moss on a fallen log. She reached out, her fingers hovering over the velvet green surface.
"It's breathing," she murmured.
I watched her. I shouldn't have. I should have been scanning the perimeter, checking the wind, doing my job. But I watched her hand.
The moss *was* breathing. As her fingertips came close, the tiny green fibers stretched toward her, like iron filings to a magnet. The tips of the moss turned a vibrant, glowing emerald.
My mark burned. A sharp, hot spike of pain that shot up my arm and settled in my chest. The Resonance. Her magic called to mine, soil calling to salt.
"Don't touch it," I said, my voice harsher than I intended.
She jumped, pulling her hand back. "It didn't bite me."
"It will. Everything here bites. Stop petting the scenery and focus."
"God, you're joyless. Do you practice in the mirror? 'No fun allowed. Stop smiling. I am Thalren, Duke of Bummer.'"
"I am not a Duke," I muttered, turning back to the path. "And you are a liability."
"I'm the Savior," she corrected, following me. "Or the Key. Or the battery. Depending on who's monologuing at me."
We walked in silence for another mile. The woods grew quieter. The birds stopped screaming. The insects stopped buzzing.
That was never good.
I slowed, drawing my sword. The sound of steel rasping against leather was loud in the sudden vacuum of noise.
"Thalren?" Aria's voice was small.
"Quiet."
The smell hit me first. Not the loamy, green scent of the forest, but something stale. Like old bones and dried lavender.
"Behind you," I said.
Aria spun around.
The thing dropped from the canopy with a wet thud.
It was a nightmare of architecture-rib cages fused with tree roots, a skull woven into a knot of vines. It moved like a spider, jerky and uneven, its limbs made of femurs wrapped in bark. A Bone-root construct. Bottom of the barrel necromancy, but effective.
It hissed, a sound like dry leaves scraping over stone.
Aria froze. She didn't scream. She just stood there, staring at the abomination as it reared up.
"Run?" she squeaked.
"No," I said. I stepped to the side, giving it a clear line to her. "Kill it."
She looked at me, betrayed. "What? That thing is made of people!"
"It's made of calcium and wood. You control wood. Deal with it."
The construct lunged.
Aria scrambled backward, tripping over a fern. The construct's forelimb-a sharpened tibia-slammed into the ground where her head had been a second before.
"Stop moving!" I barked. "Root yourself!"
"I don't know how!" She rolled, coming up on her knees, mud smeared across her cheek. The thing turned, chittering. It scented the magic in her blood. It wasn't hungry for meat; it was hungry for power.
It leaped.
Aria threw her hands up, palms open, a gesture of pure panic.
"No!" she screamed.
She didn't cast a spell. She didn't chant. She just shoved her will into the thing's face.
The result was instantaneous and grotesque.
The construct seized in mid-air, crashing to the ground a foot in front of her. It convulsed. Then, with a sound like tearing canvas, it bloomed.
Violent purple flowers erupted from the bone. Vines burst through the skull, shattering the jaw. Thorns the size of fingers ripped through the root-matter, tearing the construct apart from the inside out. In three seconds, the monster wasn't a monster anymore. It was a dense, terrified garden growing out of a pile of shattered bones.
Aria stared at it, her chest heaving. A single, perfect orchid was growing out of the creature's eye socket.
"I..." She swallowed. "I think I broke it."
There was a clicking sound from the trees. Then another.
I looked up. Three more constructs dropped from the branches, surrounding us. Bigger ones.
"Good," I said, stepping forward. "Now do the other three."
"I can't-I don't-"
One of them lunged at me. I side-stepped, bringing the sword down in a clean arc. The star-metal sheared through bone and root, severing a limb, but the thing kept coming, unbalanced and screeching.
Another bypassed me, heading straight for Aria.
She was still looking at her hands. The construct struck, its bone-claw catching her shoulder.
She cried out, twisting away, clutching her arm. Blood-bright red but laced with unmistakable threads of gold-welled up between her fingers.
The sight of it flipped a switch in my head.
The cold calculation vanished. The fatigue vanished. All that was left was a roar of white noise.
I dropped my mental shields.
"Get down," I said.
I didn't wait for her to comply. I drove my left hand-the corrupted one, the one I kept wrapped in leather-into the earth.
I didn't ask the forest to grow. I didn't ask it to sing. I told it to end.
I pulled on the thread of entropy that lived in all things. The inevitable slide from order to chaos.
A shockwave of gray expanded from my palm. It hit the constructs.
They didn't bloom. They didn't shatter. They just... stopped. The roots turned gray and crumbled to dust. The bones grew brittle and collapsed into powder. In a blink, the three monsters were gone, reduced to heaps of ash that blew away in the sudden wind.
The silence that followed was heavy. The grass in a ten-foot circle around me was dead, yellowed and withered.
I stood up, shaking the dust from my hand. The corruption on my arm flared, climbing another fraction of an inch. The cost of doing business.
I turned to Aria.
She was sitting on the ground, holding her shoulder. Her eyes were wide, fixed on the dead circle of grass.
"You killed the dirt," she whispered.
"It was in the way." I walked over to her. "Let me see."
She flinched when I reached for her, but she let me peel her hand away from the wound.
The cut was jagged, but not deep. What held my attention wasn't the injury, but the repair. Sticky golden strands were already actively knitting the skin back together, stitching the wound closed with unnatural speed. It was fascinating. It was horrifying.
I pulled a bandage from my belt pouch.
"It's healing," she said, her voice trembling. "Look at it. That's not normal. That's serial killer regeneration."
"It's efficient," I said, wrapping the linen tight around her arm. "Hold still."
She looked at me. Really looked at me. Her face was pale, freckles standing out like constellations against the white skin. I could smell the ozone on her, the scent of the magic she'd just released. It smelled like rain on hot asphalt.
"You turned them to dust," she said. "Just like that."
"Yes."
"And I made that one..." She gestured to the flowering corpse of the first construct. "...into a centerpiece."
"We have different talents." I tied off the bandage. My fingers brushed the skin of her neck. It was warm. Too warm.
For a second, I didn't pull away. I could feel the pulse in her throat, frantic and alive. I could feel the pull of the Resonance, urging me to lean in, to close the gap.
She didn't pull away either. She looked up at me, lips parted, waiting.
I stood up and stepped back.
"Can you walk?" I asked, my voice flat.
She blinked, coming back to herself. The vulnerability in her eyes hardened into disappointment, then defensiveness.
"Yeah," she said, scrambling to her feet. "Yeah, I can walk. Thanks for the bedside manner, Doc."
"We need to get back. The noise will draw more of them."
We walked back in silence. She didn't look at the flowers she'd made. I didn't look at the dead grass I'd left.
***
The camp was in turmoil when we broke the tree line.
Xyl was running around with a ladle, looking distressed. Vorn was sharpening a knife that looked suspiciously like a cleaver.
The Chronicler met us at the edge of the wards. He looked at Aria's bandaged shoulder, then at me. His expression was one of exhausted patience.
"You took her outside the perimeter," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Field test," I said.
"She is bleeding, Thalren."
"She is healing," I corrected. "And she killed a construct without passing out. I call that progress."
"You are reckless," the Chronicler sighed. "This is not a soldier you are training. She is-"
"Aria," Aria interrupted. "I'm right here. Hello. I have a name."
"We have a problem," a new voice cut in.
Vahr stepped out from behind the command tent. He looked grim, his usual easy-going demeanor stripped away. He was wiping grease from his hands with a rag.
"Scouts," Vahr said. "Zephyran picked them up on the wind. Forty, maybe fifty of them. Crown insignias."
The temperature in the camp seemed to drop ten degrees.
"Where?" I asked.
"Three miles East. Moving fast. They'll be on top of us by mid-morning tomorrow."
"Fifty?" Aria asked. "Fifty people?"
"Soldiers," Vahr corrected. "Not people. Soldiers."
"We need to move," the Chronicler said, turning back toward the tents. "Break down the camp. We leave in the hour."
"If we run, they'll track us," I said. "We can't outpace them with the wagon."
"We are not fighting fifty Crown soldiers, Thalren," Vahr said. "We have a cook, a scholar, and a girl who just learned how to make moss glow. We run."
The group dissolved into arguments. Xyl was shouting about his sourdough starter. Vorn and Vahr were debating routes.
I grabbed Aria's arm-the good one-and pulled her away from the noise, toward the edge of the clearing.
"Hey!" she protested. "Personal space!"
I pulled her until we were out of earshot, behind the supply wagon. I let her go and pinned her with a look.
"Listen to me," I said.
"I'm listening. Fifty soldiers. We run. I got it."
"If we are overrun," I said, ignoring her. "If they breach the line. Do not let them take you."
She frowned, rubbing her arm where I'd grabbed her. "Okay, cryptic. What does that mean? Fight to the death?"
"No. You surrender, they will bind you. They use iron cuffs etched with suppression runes. Then they will take you to the Citadel." I kept my voice steady, clinical. "They will put you in a chair designed to amplify pain, and they will extract every ounce of magic from your blood until your mind breaks. It takes weeks. You will wish you were dead long before you actually die."
Aria went still. The color drained from her face again. "Okay. That sounds... bad."
"It is worse than bad. It is an ending I wouldn't wish on a rabid dog." I took a breath. "So if they take you. If I cannot stop them. I will find you."
She looked at me, confused hope sparked in her eyes. "You'll come rescue me?"
"I will kill you."
The silence stretched between us, tight as a bowstring.
Aria stared at me. Her mouth opened, then closed. She looked for the joke, the sarcasm, the lie. She didn't find one.
"You..." She laughed, a short, breathless sound. "You're serious."
"Deadly."
"You'd just... put a sword through me?"
"Yes."
"Without hesitation?"
"Hesitation would be cruel."
Her face closed off. The hurt was there, deep and sharp, before she covered it with a sneer. She stepped back, putting distance between us.
"Right," she said, her voice dripping with ice. "Can't let the battery fall into enemy hands. Gotta protect the asset."
"Aria-"
"Save it. I get it. I'm the mission. If you can't deliver the package, destroy it to keep it from the competition. Spycraft 101."
She turned away, hugging herself. Her shoulders were shaking, just a little.
"Thanks for the heads up, Thalren. Nice to know where I stand."
She walked back toward the fire, head high, spine stiff.
I watched her go. My hand drifted to the hilt of my sword, fingers tracing the cold metal.
*She thinks you're a monster,* a voice in my head whispered.
*Good,* I answered back. *Monsters scare people. And fear keeps people alive.*
I looked at the dark treeline where fifty soldiers were marching toward us.
I would keep my promise. I would burn the world down to keep her safe. And if I couldn't save her, I would give her the only mercy left in this godforsaken kingdom.
I turned and walked toward the perimeter. There was work to do.