by S. R. Witt
“Indira’s down!” Cringer shouted. “Let me stabilize her, and I’ll see to Saint.”
A hand landed on my shoulder, and I yelped in surprise.
“Relax, it’s just me. Mercy.”
“How bad is it?”
She sucked in a deep breath before continuing. “Not good. The witch fire got out of control, I think. It sucked a lot of power out of Indira, more than she expected. She’s bleeding from the nose and ears, but no one’s sure how bad it is, yet.”
I felt like an asshole for asking, but I had to know. “I meant, you know, my eyes.”
Mercy’s scaled thumb peeled my eyelid back. Her skin, her scales that is, were soft and smooth. It didn’t feel that much different from skin, though she wasn’t as warm as a human. “I’m no healer, but I think you’ll recover.”
“What does that mean?”
Mercy chuckled. “It means I don’t see anything wrong with your eyes. You just didn’t get the memo to close them like the rest of us. Indira thought she’d kill a few of the goblins, maybe blind the rest. But Bastion and Havelock killed the ones we were fighting, so she just hung onto the spell and kept pumping mana into it.”
Mercy leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear, “I don’t think she’s really a wizard at all. I think she’s a sorceress.”
That was new. “What’s the difference?”
Mercy adjusted my armor and straightened my belt sheaths. “Wizards learn their spells. They study formulas and books and master their affinities. Sorcerers, though…”
Mercy paused as if to be sure no one was listening in on our conversation. “Sorcerers gain their power from other creatures.”
Before I could ask Mercy to elaborate, Cringer’s voice rose over the moans of the dying. His words were alien to me, but they rolled like thunder and filled me with a sense of comfort.
A soft warmth washed over me and, for just a moment, the howling winter wind was held at bay.
BLESSING OF HARMONY
A healing energy flows through your body. You have received the Blessing of Harmony.
Regeneration: 10% health/second
Duration: Persists while in range of prayer
Bleeding status effect ended.
Mercy didn’t say anything, and I didn’t break the silence, either. We basked in the warmth of Cringer’s miracle and let its soothing warmth heal our injuries.
Bit by bit, the white blanket clouding vision broke apart and dissolved into patches of wispy fog. “Holy shit,” I said. “I think Cringer fixed my eyes.”
The dwarf’s intonations kept on rumbling, and more and more of the whiteness evaporated. Soon I could see Mercy’s face, and I watched her wounds heal with every syllable out of the priest’s mouth. A scratch above her eye vanished. A deep furrow on her left cheek sealed itself, became a faint pink scar, then disappeared entirely.
“Wow,” Mercy said. “That is something.”
Mercy and I returned to the remnants of our camp. I led my horse into the circle of firelight as Cringer finished his healing ritual. He sagged, and Bastion eased him to the ground before he could collapse into the snow.
The dwarf cradled his head and moaned, “I’m going to need a few minutes to recover from that.”
Indira blinked and sat up. A crimson mask of dried blood covered her face from nose to chin. “Ouch.”
We all chuckled at that because Indira looked as if she’d been run over by a truck. If that was all she had to say, Cringer had done a remarkable job putting her back together.
Mercy scooped up a handful of snow and helped Indira scrub the caked blood from her face.
Havelock stalked across the battlefield, stabbing any goblin who so much as twitched. He kneeled down every once in a while, snatching some bit of loot from a dead goblin to stow in his pack, then went back to looking for survivors to kill.
I stood around like a doofus, hanging onto my horse and blinking my eyes. They were still sensitive and burned from the little light remaining from our dwindling fire. It was awkward being the only one without a purpose, so I fidgeted around for a few moments before hauling myself up into my horse’s saddle.
“I’ll be back,” I said, pointing in the direction the monsters had come from. “Going to scout around a little bit, make sure no stragglers are sneaking up on.”
Bastion nodded and waved me on. He helped Cringer get some food from his pack and held the rations while the dwarf nibbled at them.
Before I could spur my horse on, Mercy called after me. “Hold up, I’ll come with you. There’s no sense wandering around in the dark on your own.”
I turned my horse in a slow circle and waited for Mercy to mount hers and catch up to me. We trotted away from the camp, following the trail of bodies and trampled snow toward their source.
“I don’t think this was all of them,” Mercy said. She pointed a finger at the horizon. “I see fires over there.”
The faint red streak I’d seen while standing watch still flickered on the horizon. It might have been a fire, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Let’s get closer,” I said. Anything was better than sitting around camp feeling useless while others did all the work.
We rode in silence for another 20 minutes. We crested a hill and looked out over the fields below.
My breath caught in my throat, and Mercy gasped.
Below us, spread on the plain like a field of glittering rubies, campfires burned as far as the eye could see.
“It’s an army,” Mercy said.
“Shit,” I said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Mercy yanked her horse’s reins hard to the right, and the mount wheeled back toward camp with an annoyed whinny. The archer’s eyes glimmered orange in the morning gloom, like embers before a conflagration. “We have to tell the others.”
It was dark despite the rays of early morning sunlight peeking over the horizon. We kept our speed to a careful trot, so we didn’t send our horses stumbling over a hidden gully. We rode side by side, picking our way back to camp, knowing we needed to go faster, but unable to push the horses any harder.
The image of that enormous war camp, stretching across the horizon like an incoming tide of fire, stuck in my head. We’d only fought the advance guard, a tiny fraction of the force the goblins were bringing to bear. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of the damned things in that army.
Judging by the direction their scouts were headed, the army was coming straight at us.
And after they crushed us under their greasy heels, they’d move on to Frosthold and kill every man, woman, child, and mangy cur they could get their hands on.
“The Burning Throne was Corvus’ ace in the hole, but that army is the nightspawns’ end-game.” The wind tore my words into shreds of swirling fog. “We have to beat them back to Frosthold.”
Mercy didn’t respond, but the pale light of the sinking moon cast dark shadows into the lines of worry etched into her face. Those goblin scouts Bastion and I had killed, with Indira’s help, seemed so small now, so trivial. And all this time, the real army had been coming.
Mercy and I didn’t dismount when we arrived at the camp. We rode in a tight circle around the others, who seemed to be doing much better now than they were when we left.
“We need to move,” I said. “There’s an army out there. Those goblins we fought were its scouting party, and someone’s going to start wondering where they got off to when they don’t show up back at camp. They left quite a trail, so it’ll be easy for the main body of troops to follow it.
“I don’t think we want to be here when they arrive and find all their buddies chopped up and fricasseed.”
The rest of the group nodded and grumbled, not looking forward to heading out onto the trail with less than half a night’s sleep and a brutal battle under our belts.
“Don’t ask me to cast any more spells before I get a full night’s rest,” Indira said. “I’m burned out, and it’s going to take at least eight hours of sleep
to restore the mana I lost. And I think I pulled my magic muscle--”
Havelock grinned at his ex-wife and shot her a lascivious wink. “Want me to have a look at it? I think I can remember how to work the tension out of—”
The elf snarled and flicked a bolt of flame at the gnome. Havelock yelped and slapped at his goatee to put the fire out before his head could go up in flames.
Indira winced. “Now I’m really out of power.”
Cringer nodded. The ill effects of the battle were stamped into the wrinkles on his face. For a guy who hadn’t done any fighting, he looked like hell. “I’m in the same boat. We need to find some place to hole up after we put some miles behind us. We don’t want to be going into this dungeon of yours at half strength.”
What they said made sense, but its truth didn’t make me feel any better. We were on the run now, not in pursuit. Somewhere along the way, the script had flipped and we’d become the prey, not the hunters. We weren’t racing to stop something, we were racing to survive. “Let’s ride as far as we can. Hopefully, that will be far enough.”
Mercy volunteered to ride out ahead of the group to scout for trouble and help forge a trail for the rest of us. She disappeared while we loaded up our camping gear and got Havelock and Cringer situated in their saddles. Even after a day of riding, the gnome and dwarf had a hell of a time staying on top of their horses, even with the stirrups snugged up, which was one more thing to slow us down. Bastion rode next to the priest, and I stayed alongside Cringer just in case I needed to keep him from tumbling out of his saddle.
It made me wonder if we wouldn’t have been faster just walking. At least then we wouldn’t have to babysit the short guys to keep them from sliding off their horses and cracking their skulls.
The horses weren’t any happier being back on the trail than we were. The uncertain light of the coming dawn made footing treacherous, and the sun’s warmth raised a thick layer of ground fog from the rolling mounds of snow surrounding our little group. We followed the path left by Mercy’s horse for hours, but it never felt like we were making any progress. Our horses’ hooves left a trail in the snow any idiot could follow, and the rising mist made it too dangerous to rely on speed to keep us ahead of the goblins behind us.
We rode until the sun was high overhead. Mercy rejoined us, huddled inside her thick cloak and clinging to her reins like the strips of leather were the only things keeping her from falling over. She circled us once and then fell in alongside me. “How are you all holding up?”
Indira took that as her cue to complain. She reined in her horse and sagged in its saddle. “I’m done in. I can’t keep going. I’m going to pass out on this stupid nag’s back.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but the elf was right. It was time to stop. The rest of us weren’t in any better shape than she was. Our heads lolled on our hunched shoulders, and if it wasn’t for the horses keeping an eye on one another and their noses in the trail Mercy’s horse had carved through the deep snow, we’d have long since gotten lost and separated. The in-Game minimap floating in the upper right-hand corner of my vision told me we were on the right track, but we still had a long way to go.
“Let’s find some shelter,” Bastion suggested. “Nothing fancy. Just somewhere we can hide the horses and get out of the weather.”
Mercy pointed toward the rising sun. “I saw something over this way, might be good enough.”
We followed her through the snow toward a black smudge on the horizon. Thirty minutes later, the smudge grew into a shadow large enough to hide us all. It took another half hour to reach the shelter, and we all sighed with relief when we arrived.
It was an abandoned trapper’s camp, an old wooden shack with a roof bowed by snow and years of neglect. A thick copse of trees large enough to hide and shelter the horses sprawled away from the south side of the structure and a lopsided chimney jutted from the west wall like a bad tooth. Sure, it was a dump, but a chimney meant a fireplace, and that meant we’d have fire and shelter to rest. That dump looked like heaven to us all.
If there’d been anyone in the shack, they could have ambushed us with ease. We were too weary to scout the place and too numb from the cold to care about possible danger. The horses stayed put when we dismounted, plumes of frost leaking from their nostrils as they watched us walk away.
The front door was narrow but sturdy, and it took a few minutes to chip the ice off the latch to open the damned thing. The door swung in, and I offered a lazy bow to the rest of the group. “Your accommodations await.”
Havelock was the first through the door, waddling toward the cold hearth on bowed legs. He groaned as he eased down next to the tiny fireplace, then dug around in his backpack to produce flint and steel. “I don’t care what anyone says, I’m lighting a fire. If they track us down from the smoke, you can blame me.”
We were all too exhausted to argue. Indira looked like she was about to pass out on her feet. Bastion nursed a broad bruise on the left side of his face, and a plethora of other injuries I couldn’t see judging by the streaks of blood frozen on his armor. Cringer had the thousand-yard stare of someone who’d been through hell in the past twenty-four hours. Mercy and I had come out the best in that fight, but the harrowing run from the goblins had left us exhausted from adrenaline spikes and overexertion.
Unfortunately, for all of us, we didn’t have time to sit around nursing our wounds and sleeping until we were good and rested. Every minute we weren’t moving, Corvus was getting farther ahead of us, and the goblin army was getting closer to Frosthold.
I had to break the bad news to the troops. “We’ll try and get as much rest as everyone needs. But we can’t stay here as long as we’d all like.”
I left before anyone could argue with me, too tired to argue.
The door banged closed behind me, and its echo interrupted the horses’ foraging. The mounts stared at me from the edge of the wooded copse, grinding their square teeth on whatever food they’d found. There were furrows in the snow where the poor bastards had rooted for the few edible shoots of grass that had survived the killing frost, and they’d stripped all the bark from the trees’ lower branches. I collected their reins and led them deeper into the trees, where they’d be harder to see from anyone passing by the cabin and would have better forage. The wind had drifted the snow around the trunks of the trees on the outer edges of the copse, leaving a good-sized patch of open grass in the center.
“Here you go,” I said and looped the horses’ reins around tree trunks. The animals gathered together for warmth and lowered their heads to munch on the exposed vegetation.
There was peace, even here. The horizon to the north was an uninterrupted vista of wind-smoothed snow. It was beautiful, and if I weren’t in the middle of trying to save Frosthold, I wouldn’t have minded spending a few days resting up and recovering from our ordeal.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.
Hoping the rest of the party had dozed off so I wouldn’t have to talk to them, I squared my shoulders against the freezing wind and walked back to the house.
The four of them sat in a loose circle in front of the hearth, their backs to the fire and their stony faces staring at the door when I stomped in from the cold. They didn’t look happy.
Great.
“We have to talk,” Indira said, her voice grave.
“What’s up?” I tried to keep things light, though I knew this conversation was headed south in a hurry.
“I don’t think we can do this.” Indira chewed on her thumbnail for a moment. The rest of them, Bastion included, grunted in agreement. “It’s too far. I’m exhausted. We all are. We can’t keep pressing on like this.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d expected the group to ask for more time to rest, but I’d never imagined they’d want to call it quits. “You can’t be serious. We’re more than halfway there. It won’t even take a full day’s travel.”
Indira blew out a frosty sigh. “Look, out of c
haracter, okay? We all agreed. It’s late here. It’s late where Cringer and Havelock are, too. I’ve got work in the morning, and Cringer has to go to school. We need to take a break. Honestly, I think we need to turn back after we log back in and forget this whole quest. It’s gotten way out of hand.”
Havelock grinned and winked at me. “That’s not the only thing that’s going to get out of hand if we stay out here. You should see the way she’s been looking at me.”
Indira raised one burning finger at the gnome, and he shut his mouth so fast his molars clicked together.
I couldn’t look at any of them. I stared at my feet and listen to the wind sighing across the snow outside. I imagined I heard my mother struggling to breathe even with the machine working her chest. What would happen if I failed here? How long would it take the monsters to take over Frosthold and kill the rest of us?
If I had to reroll, I doubted I’d come back as a thief. Bastion and I would be separated. We could find each other again, sure, but Invernoth was a vast virtual world, and leveling was not fast. It could be weeks, maybe months before we were able to join forces again.
Failing this quest and losing this character would be the same as losing a job. My family would run out of money. We wouldn’t be able to pay my mom’s insurance premiums. She wouldn’t be able to get the treatment she needed.
She’d die, sooner rather than later.
“I can’t quit this.” I took a deep breath and plunged on before they could interrupt me. “I know you don’t want to hear about my problems, but this isn’t a game to me. It’s my job. Not just to saving Frosthold, though that’s a big part of it, but keeping this character and earning money in DWO. If Frosthold falls, if we get killed by those goblins out there or the nightspawn snuff us out, then I lose everything.”
It didn’t cut much ice with Indira. Bringing crass commerce into her little fantasy world just pissed her off.
