Chapter 28 #3
They worked in silence. Malick distributed the load across five packs with the efficiency of someone who had done this before. Food, rope, fire supplies, Arleria’s reagent pouch, medical wraps, waterskins. Everything else stayed on the cart.
Alsen couldn’t resist the thought that Luna would have figured out how to get the horse and the cart through. It would have been some absolute bullshit, but it would have looked dead simple after she explained it. And it would work just fine.
Or she should have seen this coming half an hour ahead.
Damn it, he missed her even more intensely now.
The strange feeling of incompleteness had come about an hour after they left with her belongings. It was subtle at first, but he had gotten used to her presence. With her gone, he constantly felt the need to look over his shoulder to check where she was.
He even missed the annoying noise she loved to make. She always did that when they traveled.
Alsen caught the thought and pushed it aside. He’d been doing that all morning. Pushing thoughts aside. They kept coming back.
The gap between the rocks swallowed them one at a time.
Kern first, then Arleria, then Alsen, then Malick, then Derell, who had to turn sideways to fit his plate armor through.
On the other side, the world opened upward.
The mountain loomed, its upper slopes lost in cloud, the path winding along its flank like a scar.
Snow appeared within the hour.
Not much at first. A dusting on the rocks, thin and crystalline, crunching underfoot.
The temperature dropped with every switchback, the wind growing sharper, the air thinning enough that Alsen noticed it in his breathing.
He adjusted his breathing automatically, pulling mana from the thinner air with slightly longer inhales.
Arleria walked beside him, her green cloak pulled tight, her breath pluming white. She’d been quiet since they left the valley. Not cold, not distant. Quiet in the way of processing a great deal of information and needing to finish with that first. “You’re scanning again,” she said.
He wasn’t. He fired a broad-spectrum scan ahead, sweeping the terrain in a wide arc. Truth be told, he should have done that more often, but he didn’t want to, because it would have looked like he was looking for Luna.
And, he would have been.
He detected her, too. Quite a bit ahead, already beyond the area they planned to stop for the night. Yeah, well, she didn’t have a cart to bother with.
“I detect nothing,” he said.
“Then why are you smiling?”
“Because I detect nothing,” he replied with his best poker face. “No wild beasts, no monsters, no threats.”
Arleria let it go. She most likely didn’t believe him, knowing when to press and when to wait. It was one of the things he liked about her. She filed information rather than demanding immediate answers, which meant that every filed question would eventually return with interest.
They climbed.
The snow thickened as the day wore on. What had been a dusting became a proper layer, ankle-deep in the sheltered spots, packed to ice where the wind had scoured it. Kern moved ahead, testing footing, marking the stable sections of the path with small piles of stones.
Without Luna, everything felt annoyingly difficult.
Alsen hadn’t appreciated the difference until now. First of all, they always had a blind angle now. Even walking behind the cart in her self-imposed exile, she covered the group’s blind spot. Now, even he could tell they had a hole in the observed area.
Everyone else had subconsciously realized, too.
Kern ranged further ahead to compensate, which meant longer gaps between his reports.
Derell, without a cart to drive, walked with his hand on his sword and his eyes fixed on every shadow.
Malick had stopped eating, which Alsen was starting to recognize as his combat readiness indicator.
They reached the shelf Kern had described by early afternoon.
A flat expanse of rock jutting from the mountainside, roughly fifty paces across, sheltered on three sides by cliff faces.
Snow had accumulated in the corners, but the center was mostly clear, scoured by wind that channeled through a gap in the rock above.
“We should only camp here on the way back,” Arleria said. “For now, we should press on.”
Nobody argued. They ate standing, dried meat and hard bread, washing it down with water that was already cold enough to hurt the teeth.
The view behind them stretched for miles, a tapestry of gray-green hills and valleys descending toward the lowlands they’d left days ago. The sky was the color of old steel.
After all that walking, he would have enjoyed a burnt mountain goat.
He could have also given it to Malick to cook it somewhat properly.
He would have even heated it up with magic if need be.
He’d gotten spoiled, he realized. Weeks of traveling with someone who handled every practical aspect of wilderness survival had left him addicted to the comfort.
They pushed past the shelf into the upper pass. The path narrowed again, cutting along a ridge where the mountain’s western face dropped away into a valley choked with clouds. The wind hit them sideways here, cold and wet, carrying ice crystals that stung exposed skin.
Kern returned from ahead. He crouched beside Arleria. Alsen closed the distance to hear.
“Wreckage,” Kern said. One word. His eyebrows added the rest.
“Show me,” Arleria said.
They followed him along the ridge and around a bend where the path widened into a natural alcove. The mountain had carved a depression into itself here, a sheltered spot where the wind dropped, and the snow lay deeper.
A wagon lay on its side in the snow. Half-buried, one wheel shattered, the other pointing at the sky like a broken finger.
Cargo had spilled across the depression, crates and barrels and bolts of cloth, all of it buried under weeks of snowfall.
The snow around the wagon was disturbed in patterns that had nothing to do with the weather.
Arleria knelt by the wagon. She ran her hand along the wood.
Claw marks scored the side panels, deep gouges in sets of three, carved through the wood like it was paper.
The spacing was wrong for any animal Alsen recognized.
Too wide for a bear, too narrow for any large cat.
The marks ran parallel, almost methodical.
“This is one of the missing caravans,” Arleria said. “The Havers company. They disappeared six weeks ago.”
Malick circled the wreckage. “No bodies.”
Kern pointed. Drag marks, almost invisible under fresh snow, led away from the wagon and uphill, toward a narrow ravine that cut deeper into the mountain. “Something pulled the cargo. And the people.”
Alsen fired a scan. The spell radiated outward, feeling through rock and snow and air.
He caught residual magical signatures, faint and smeared by time, clinging to the claw marks like an afterimage.
“Whatever did this have a magical component. The signatures are diffuse, similar to that mountain beast from the foothills, but different. Colder. More structured.”
“Structured how?” Arleria asked.
“The residue has patterns. Repetitions. Like it’s part of a biological system rather than an external enchantment.”
“So, a creature that’s naturally magical.”
“Multiple creatures. The signatures overlap.”
Derell looked up the ravine. The walls narrowed quickly, the snow deepening between them. Dark rock rose on either side, slick with ice. “I’m not walking into that.”
“Nobody’s asking you to walk into it, don’t worry,” Arleria said. “Kern, how old are these tracks?”
“The drag marks are old, heavily snowed over. But there are fresher prints. Days old, maybe less.” He pointed at a series of indentations in the snow near the ravine’s entrance.
Three-toed, deep, with marks between the toes that suggested webbing or membrane.
“Whatever these are, they’ve been coming back to this site.
Scavenging what’s left, or using it as a waypoint. ”
Arleria stood. She looked at Alsen. The look held a question that went beyond tactical assessment.
He answered it. “We should follow the tracks. Carefully. If we find the nest or the source, we know what we’re dealing with. If we find the drakes, even better.”
“And if whatever left those claw marks objects to our presence?”
Alsen smirked. “Then I blow it up.”
Derell grunted. That was either approval or indigestion. With Derell, both were equally likely.
If Alsen were to be honest, the best course of action would have been to fetch Luna to handle this. To have an actual evaluation of the environmental hazards. He could blow up the enemies, sure, he could even fly around the terrain, but he had companions.
After Sonja’s death, the death of a companion wasn’t an unimaginable taboo. That could happen, he knew, and he really didn’t want it to be Arleria.
But he couldn’t go to Luna to ask her to come back to make sure Arleria was going to be safe. Well, he could, but he would never hear the end of it.
They entered the ravine in single file. Kern first, bow ready, arrow nocked. Derell second, shield up, sword drawn. Alsen third, power pre-molded and ready. Arleria fourth, her hands already traced with the faint pink light of a detection spell. Malick brought up the rear, warhammer in both hands.
Luna would have been at the front. She would have moved through this ravine with bored ease, which would have given everyone confidence to do the same.
Like this, it felt really dangerous. Alsen stretched his senses further, compensating.
The scan pulsed outward in steady intervals, mapping the ravine’s twists and the rock formations on either side.
Nothing yet. Cold stone, old ice, the fading echoes of magical creatures that had passed through recently.