by David Oliver
The trickle became a torrent as I kept biting down. Wedged where I was the cat couldn’t manage to get a better grip and end the fight and now time was on my side. Slowly but surely the cat’s movements began to slow and eventually stopped entirely, leaving me thoroughly mauled and liberally painted with blood.
It was at this point hindsight suggested that I should have left them the deer.
Groaning in pain I told hindsight to sod off and slowly shifted out from under the body of the cat, my shoulder screaming at me every time I moved it. With weary legs I picked up the hard-won body of the deer and slung it over my unmarred shoulder before setting back off in the direction of the cave. Weaponless and almost broken I had to trust to hope that I could make it back unnoticed by any more denizens of the forest and as much as leaving the mountain cat coat behind pained me, I didn’t have it in me to carry both. I continued the trudge back to the cave, completely unaware of just how far the sounds of the fight had carried, of how it echoed through forest and rock before finally reaching waiting ears.
Thankfully I reached the cave without any more misadventure and was able to restart the fire without too much trouble. As much as I wanted to collapse to the floor and rest I knew that infection from the cat’s teeth and claws could finish the job that it had started and so I set out again in search of anything that could prove useful.
Half of the plants I didn’t recognise in that place. Thankfully after searching in the waning light I managed to find some snow-covered willow, which I knew to have some medicinal properties. Staggering back to the cave I washed the wound out with snow and chewed on the bark before collapsing into a fever filled fugue.
I’m fairly positive that without the bond with Seya pushing whatever small amounts of healing it could my way I would have died in that cave. For two days I was feverish, in and out of consciousness and wracked with shivers. In normal times the cuts on my arms would have healed in a matter of hours, the deeper wounds in a few days. As it was the cuts only fully healed some three days after the mountain lion attack and my shoulder was still giving me problems a week later. I could barely remember how I had felt before meeting Seya and the many benefits she bestowed on me, but I imagined it was somewhat similar; weak, frightened and much more human.
Which I am sure is exactly what was intended.
Present day
I haven’t had much luck with caverns in my life.
I have a working theory that if an Imperator finds a cave or cavern then there is almost guaranteed to be some kind of evil beast within even if they weren’t hunting one, and as I ran through the cavern frantically brushing off the tide of scarabs that were threatening to engulf me despite my wavering seraph shield a small part of my mind grinned at having been proven right yet again.
The sound of rushing water filled the desperate gloom and before I could give my brain chance to consider the host of even more disturbing creatures that could live within its waters I drew breath and took the plunge, leaving the horde of beetles to angrily chitter on the stone walls behind me as I was swept downstream. The world disappeared, becoming only a battering of rocks and rapids as the river flung me through the bowels of the mine. My shield was the only thing that kept me alive, both from the percussive impacts and because of the layer of oxygen that I had trapped in there with me. Finally the river spat me back out into daylight and with heaving breaths I dazedly made my way back to shore before collapsing in a heap for an unknown time.
A thunderous rumble shook me from my exhaustion.
No, please no, I thought wearily. He can’t be that pissed at me.
The crashing grew louder and I threw myself to the side as a tail slammed the ground where I had been resting.
Goddamnit.
Cassius stood before me in all his demonic glory, armoured scales covered in blood and gore. He had given up on slaughtering the running slaves in order to come after me - that if nothing else cemented just how cunning the skyren personality within him could be, let alone just how keen its senses were to have tracked me down; I doubted that even Seya could have done that so quickly.
A howling roar split the air and Cassius pounced, flinging his several tonne body through the air with unbelievable ease. I flung my battered and bruised body aside again, wincing as I hit the ground. Rolling, I drew Asp from my side and sent a line of power hurtling towards the descending claws. Cassius twitched aside at the last second, the cutting line of energy scoring a mild line across his arm. He remembers, I thought grimly. He’s encountered Asp before.
Cassius swivelled and his tail ripped the ground apart, pelting me with dust and stone. Only my senses saved me as I dropped to my knees underneath a swiving strike that would have cleaved me in two. Rolling forwards I sliced the length of his foot with Asp, the blade cutting deeply into his flesh. Bellowing in pain Cassius stamped downwards, the force of the blow lifting me from the floor. I cut again and found myself spinning through the air to crash into the water, the impact sending me to a much more pleasant place that didn’t have an angry lizard trying to kill me.
A blinding pain erupted in my shoulder and I gasped as my senses came back to me. Cassius’s tail spike was embedded deep inside my shoulder and the pain was overwhelming as he lifted me out of the water, his predator's eyes showing immense satisfaction at having captured his prey. Spluttering with pain I grabbed his tail and forced my little remaining seraph into the tattoo on my hand, burning the inscription into the meat of his tail and causing Cassius to screech in agony. Willing it to work I channelled as much seraph as possible, whilst holding the spike into my shoulder whilst he began to flail and flooding the skyren’s body with my intent. Frantic movement sent me clutching the tail and I pushed every ounce of seraph I could muster into Cassius before a flick of his tail dislodged me and sent me crashing through the undergrowth. In a tumble of limbs I hit the ground and knew no more.
Chapter 5
Reality
Nine days after I had found the cave I was fully kitted out in tough deer hide clothing. My rough rabbit hide shoes had been remade with deer hide and I wore deerskin trousers. They wouldn’t win any fashion contests but so far hadn’t fallen apart. There was a veritable store of venison in my cave, much of which I was smoking to ensure that it lasted. All in all I had plenty of food and stores but didn’t have a clear plan of action and so settled for ranging further and further afield in order to get a good view of the surrounding land. This was my furthest ranging yet; a good eight miles in an easterly direction from the cave, armed with spear, two bone knives, venison and a flask of water made out of hide and stomach lining. As I walked I began to notice a strange scent in the air, something that I couldn’t immediately place but it quickly became overwhelmingly pungent. Several of the trees seemed to have been liberally sprayed with it, much like how certain animals mark territory, and many of the trees had large and deep claw marks with several that had been completely shredded. I had no idea what I was dealing with but decided that knowing one’s enemy was the better course of action and so continued on.
Moving stealthily, I crept from tree to tree like Seya had taught me, my senses on full alert. Something was over the next rise. Something strange, unmoving and apparently dead.
I shuffled silently over to the ridge and looked down. Beneath me was the grisly scene of what appeared to have been an epic battle between presumably a human and what I could only guess was a troll. The ground was flattened for several metres in every direction and in the middle was the mighty creature. It was leaning forwards in an upright posture, held up by the four wooden spears that jutted the beast. My heart throbbed in anticipation and fear. Trolls were not something that I had come across in my training at the Academy...they were fairy tales as far as the average person knew. Who had managed to kill one? I had to track them.
It didn’t take long. One individual was lying in the bole of a tree and breathing heavily. I could tell by the sound of his laboured breathing that he was in pain. I crept closer,
sneaking into the glade and flitting like a shadow between cover, before freezing in shock.
Scythe was sitting against the tree.
Impossible. I had seen my friends dead. Watched them die. How was Scythe here? What was going on? I got so lost in the swirl of emotions that I didn’t hear the presence approaching until a spear tip landed at my back.
“Don’t move.”
I moved. Instinct flared and I spun, knocking aside the spear point as I dashed towards the treeline unleashing the full strength and speed of my bonded self. I snarled as I ran, the savage bestial side of me rising up. That couldn’t be Scythe! Scythe was dead. I heard her voice calling my name but ignored it. Ella was dead too. They were all dead. It was all a lie! I ran back to the cave and huddled back inside, content to sit within my nightmares, within what I knew was real.
Any sane person would think that to go back to the source of your insane, unreal visions would be ill advised. Frankly I’m not too sure that I was sane at this point, (nor am I fully aware if I am now for that matter), and so I returned to the same site the next day, taking a wide and circular route that allowed me to approach from a different angle. The troll was still there. Still dead. The fake visions that definitely weren’t real however weren’t. Mildly disappointed that my brain couldn’t conjure up more distractions of my deceased friends I set off back to camp.
Imagine my surprise then that my visions awaited me in the cave.
“Calm, Calidan! Peace!” pleaded Ella as I brandished my bone knives menacingly towards her. I knew I could never bring myself to hurt fake Ella but the other part of my brain that had conjured her didn’t have to know that.
“I told you he wouldn’t see reason. You saw his eyes!” grunted Scythe, his ankle heavily sprained and leaning on a crutch.
“He looks the same as you and I did when we first saw each other!” Ella replied, holding her hands out towards me placatingly, “...just a little more savage.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I was too busy with surviving to not be savage. Doing what the voice said.
“Get out of my head,” I said, snarling. “You aren’t real! You’re dead, you’re all dead!”
“We are real Calidan. From the looks of it we have all been through the same thing,” replied Ella softly, continuing in the same tone that you would use to calm a frightened mare. “I thought you were dead. That Scythe and everyone...that Cassius was dead. I was tortured until I talked-” she broke off in a sob.
“It’s true Calidan,” said Scythe. “I didn’t believe it first and neither did Ella. We spent the first few hours after meeting poking each other to make sure that the other was real. We both woke up in the forest, in separate areas but came into contact when out hunting the same deer.”
Lies. Had to be lies.
Fake Ella approached slowly, like she would a wild animal. “Calidan. Please. We’re your friends. We aren’t going to hurt you.”
“But I watched you die. Piece by piece,” I whispered. “How can this be real?”
“We think what we all saw was fake. Part of the test,” murmured Ella, her voice soft and warm.
“Test?”
“Scythe and I are fairly sure that this is all part of the fourth-year test. That they sprung it early to catch us off guard. I don’t know what all that torture was about - maybe seeing if we can keep Academy secrets? But I’m guessing that it stopped when you broke and then you woke up here?”
I nodded, numb.
“The same happened to us. Please Calidan, we are real. Just touch me; you’ll know.” She came closer, arms spreading wide. I held myself rigid as she slowly, gently, embraced me in a hug. “It’s me Calidan. It’s Ella. I’ve missed you so.”
Slowly I felt the warmth of her, the realness. If this was insanity then it was a much better existence. Carefully I embraced my long-time friend, held her and breathed in her scent as my walls came tumbling down one by one. I embraced her as I cried. As I sobbed out all the pain and anguish until I could cry no more.
And then I slept.
✽✽✽
When I woke it was with trepidation, part of my brain wondering if it had been somehow tricked, that it would all turn out to be a lie. But no, there they were sitting by the fire and toasting some venison, my friends. My whole, unscarred, unbroken and thoroughly alive friends. That dawn is one of the happiest that I can remember. The feeling of contentment in having been proven so wrong, that my friends were indeed alive and that the others were likely alive and surviving somewhere around here - a thought that Ella and Scythe readily agreed with.
“Yes, I mean, why wouldn’t they be close by?” continued Scythe as he tore into some venison. “If this is the fourth-year exam then it would make sense for the entire dorm to be experiencing the same thing. To survive out here in what appears to be troll country.”
“I had been meaning to ask about that,” I said softly, “it definitely was a troll?”
Ella and Scythe nodded. “As far as we can guess anyway,” replied Ella. “It fits the description after all and was extremely tough to kill. It only slowed down after the third spear!”
“Hah, I’m just glad that not all the stories are true!” I exclaimed, before stopping at the unspoken question on their faces. “In the tales, you can only kill a troll using fire. They say its flesh keeps healing but burning it stops the regeneration.”
The two of them looked at each other. “That would explain much of what we saw,” said Scythe slowly. “I engaged it with a sharp piece of wood, hit it in the eye before it knocked me away and caused me to sprain my ankle stumbling like a fool on a rock. It tore the spike out and after a few moments the eye looked as good as new!”
“Shit” I breathed. “This is going to make things more difficult.”
“What if it isn’t dead?” questioned Ella. “What if the flesh can only heal when whatever has hit it has been removed? It ran onto our spears, drove them deep. Perhaps if those spears were removed the troll would wake up?”
It seemed impossible, but we had all seen impossible things. “Fire seemed to slow the regeneration of that skyren back in the desert,” mused Scythe slowly. “It could well be possible.”
“In that case,” I replied, “we need to prepare properly if we are to find the others. We obviously can’t carry flaming spears everywhere we go, so let’s put our heads together and think.”
After some tinkering we came up with a relatively workable solution. By placing hot coals on top of a small log, it soon burnt through into the middle of the log, creating a method for carrying fire embers. We wrapped kindling and animal fat around some of the spears in the hope that if we had a few minutes before a fight we could spark the spears to flame. It wouldn’t last long but hopefully the fiery tip would be enough to inflict some permanent damage to an inquisitive troll.
Leaving Scythe well stocked with water, wood and food, Ella and I set out in search of our friends, aiming to continue what I had started and walking in ever increasing circles from our location. For three days we scoured the countryside and found no sign of human presence but plenty of indication of trolls. Fortunately Ella was almost as skilled as Cassius in moving through the natural world, and far more skilled than either of us when moving in a city, and so we moved like shadows in the night, ensuring that nothing was aware of our presence. Or so we thought.
I hadn’t heard the strange howling since my first few nights in this place and naturally assumed that it was the sound of a troll. It was strange then that when I heard a troll roar for the first time, it sounded nothing like what I had heard. We tracked the beast by the grunts and bellows that resounded through the small valley that we had come across. Small streams crisscrossed the ground and plenty of fir trees provided good cover - a decent place to hole up if I hadn’t found my cave - and precisely what Rikol had thought before an angry troll found his scent and chased him up a tree.
It was shaking the giant fir furiously; the tree creaking ominously. Rikol was trapped a
t the top and looked utterly miserable, wrapped in a fur pelt but without any noticeable weapons. He was stuck up there until the troll got tired or we intervened.
“What do you think?” I whispered to Ella. “Wait or attack?”
“Attack,” she replied. “Trolls aren’t exactly the cleverest of creatures, it could have been shaking that tree for a day now for no reason other than it just enjoyed it!”
Together we set about rewrapping our spearheads and nursing the glowing embers into life, ensuring as we did so that we were downwind of the troll - trolls, it was rumoured, had an excellent sense of smell.
We conferred silently about our plan of attack, arguing back and forth in whispers until a plan had formed. It was, like all good plans, very simple. Kill it before it knew that we were there.
Drawing on all of my expertise in hunting and my supernatural skills in remaining quiet, I sprinted silently towards the troll, hoping that its grunts and roars would cover the minute sound that my feet made. With my flaming spear held loosely in my hands I jumped, arcing through the air before slamming the fiery point of the spear through the beast’s head and with enough force to pin it to the tree. Dead.
“Calidan?” Rikol’s voice trembled as he sat in the tree, peering down at who had saved him. “Is that you?”
“Rikol!” I called, “Come down, it’s safe.”
“How? You’re all dead!”
I grinned wolfishly before proceeding to coax my friend down. Ella emerged from the tree line shortly after with armfuls of dry wood. We were taking no chances. An hour later we left the valley with a stunned Rikol and leaving behind a burning troll corpse.
I would say it was the smell of success, but I wish it wasn’t. Burning troll is not something you get off your skin.
Unbeknownst to us, we weren’t the only people aware that Rikol had been trapped at the top of the tree. Large blue eyes watched us leave, a glimmer of recognition filling them. Recognition...and hatred.
