A small sound escaped the prey’s trembling lips as he thundered from cover in a blur of dirty white fur and scything black talons.
He associated those three syllables with hunt-kill sensations: the pungent sting of urine in the air; the quickening percussion of a fluttering heartbeat; the cloying fear-musk screaming from their pores; the widening of their dark eyes as their gaze locks with his, a connection between predator and prey.
He would never know the significance of that frightened little noise. He would never know that the elf-creatures had characterised him as a soul-shaking rumble of deadly thunder, the booming echo of lightning lashing the wet ground.
To him, it was just a noise they made before they died.
His paw thundered like the hammer of a wrathful god into the first elf’s fragile skull, pulping bone and flesh. The echo of its snapping neck jarred up through his front leg from claw to shoulder, throwing the elf ten yards.
His claws snagged on skin, stunting the creature’s flight. It landed in a wet crunch of broken bones, twitching fitfully as it died.
His head swung to face his other prey, their harsh breathing and thundering hearts like a balm to the disease that was slowly killing him. His eyes were bleary red orbs, locking the two elf-creatures somewhere between fight and flight.
He opened his jaws and roared. A sound like a volcanic eruption tore from his chest. The fury of a predator king vomited forth in a deafening torrent through fangs that had snatched life from a hundred souls.
It was only natural that they fled.
The chase was brief and violent, and his instincts sang with exultant rightness. This was how things were supposed to be. This hunt was pure, lifting him from the ravages of sickness. Blood slicked his claws as he pounded across the wet soil, his breath like rumbling like a summer thunderstorm in his chest.
He tasted elf blood before the creature even knew it was dead. His fangs crunched through ribs and pierced lung and heart in the time it took for them both to hit the ground. He lashed out with leonine claws at the body beneath him in afterthought, spattering blood against a tree, painting it in wet smears.
His limbs burned, though unlike the pain behind his eyes, this was wholly natural. Welcome, even. It was the ache of taut muscles and expended strength, the kind to be slept off with a full belly.
The third creature actually turned. A yard of shining metal sang from its sheath, making a series of panicked slashes. Maybe it actually thought it could survive. Maybe this display of desperate aggression was intended to scare him off.
It did not.
The elf was in two pieces in as many seconds. Both fell to the ground. Both bled crimson fountains into the soggy earth. One tried to crawl away, raking its fingers across the earth in an effort to escape.
Even as the creature burbled a garble of broken syllables, Charandis bellowed another peal of thunder to the skies.
Everything was as it should be. Everything was normal again.
II
‘You said you were coming alone,’ he says, as if I am not even here. His teeth flash milky yellow in the afternoon sun, his white lips pulling taut against a dozen scars. His tone is even, but he doesn’t look happy. And those scars tell me that saying something… brash, would be unwise.
Very unwise.
‘Is this a problem?’ Alvantir’s voice is confident, yet his hand strays to the oval birthmark blotching his cheek. I know these men make him nervous, and I don’t blame him.
There are three of them, and underneath the swaying trees they look like kings. Their pointed helms rest in the crooks of their arms, glinting bright silver against the sunlight, each adorned with oval sapphires staring out like cyclopean eyes.
Their armour is… magnificent. I have never seen craftsmanship like this before; not even on the shoulders of strutting peacocks on the streets of Tor Achare. From steel cuirass to masterfully wrought sabatons, they radiate authority. They lean on their heirloom axes with a casual ease born of confidence; centuries-old weapons gripped by well-oiled gloves.
But it is what they wear upon their shoulders that sends my heart racing.
The dead faces of conquered lions glare at me from over their armoured spaulders. The pelts are draped like tattered banners over their armour, frayed in places like forgotten standards, ending in claws the length of my fingers. Their leonine faces snarl soundlessly, the empty sockets of their eyes still narrowed in silent fury.
It marks the greatest honour a Chracian can earn. It demonstrates the exultant heights to which a lowly woodsman like myself can rise.
I am… jealous.
I stand before the Phoenix King’s chosen blades; his loyal shields against which a thousand foes have fallen. The eyes of the White Lions are upon me, and all I can think of is how jealous I am.
‘You said you were coming alone,’ the lead elf repeats, his thunderstorm-black eyes locked on Alvantir. The sound of creaking leather reaches my keen ears. I know this to be his grip tightening on the oak haft of his weapon.
My companion dips his head. I can feel his aching desire to be anywhere but here.
‘I crave your pardon, kinsman,’ he says evenly, sweeping a braid of autumn-brown hair behind his ear. ‘He knows these woods unlike any other. Whatever you are looking for, he can find.’
He looks at me for the first time, and I see nothing but cold, pitiless scrutiny in those dark eyes. I fold my arms across my chest without thinking, shielding myself from his attention.
He nods, as if satisfied.
‘I am familiar with your friend,’ he says to me, directly. His voice is deep, worn raw and gravelly by distant battlefields. ‘But not you. Tell me your name, and we can begin.’
I incline my head as I speak, but I do not break eye contact.
‘My name is Korhil.’
The scene before us is repugnant in a thousand ways.
Chrace’s forests are famously beautiful, but equally dangerous. A woodsman does not roam beneath the evergreen canopy unprepared. This is why our axes know the kiss of a whetstone every day. This is why our tunics are oiled and treated every time we leave our homes. This is why our fathers spent endless years teaching us the manifold ways of surviving the forest. This is why we are Chrace’s proud children.
I step over a severed hand bedecked in fabulously expensive rings, fighting the rising urge to empty my guts. Blood paints the boles of trees in dried smears, and innards festoon the forest floor like wreckage wreathed in swarms of black flies.
The first body lies by a mossy boulder. His features are… gone, but I know him to be a noble by the fine cut of his bloodstained clothes. His arms and legs are bent in ways that defy reason, and the blow that snapped his neck was close to taking the head from his shoulders.
The second body sprawls near the roots of a powerful tree. This one died as he fled, that much is obvious. His chest is crushed, his broken ribs jutting outward in angles that speak of unthinkable strength. Whatever killed him came back after it had finished, and vented its wrath on the ragged corpse. The coils of vital organs decorate the gnarled fingers of clawing roots.
The third is in two pieces, and the upper half tried to crawl away. His spine is a jutting cord of bone, black with dried blood and alive with a carpet of flies. His legs bear the ugly lacerations of scything claws and…
And I have to look away.
When outsiders speak of Chrace’s wild and untamed beauty, this is what they mean. This is what they foolishly think they know. I have been a woodsman for a long time; long enough to know that I am the best at what I do. I have seen a wealth of unsettling scenes underneath this canopy; a menagerie of horrors that have actually made me want to run.
But this… this is something else.
Alvantir worries at the plain band of gold around his finger, a wedding ring he could barely afford. The look on his face tells me that his thoughts are awash with worry. He thinks of his stunningly beautiful young wife, and the son who he has tried to shield from the hardships of the
forest.
But beneath these thoughts, I know he is also thinking the same thing as I.
There is something in the air; something that lingers between a taste and a smell. It settles on my tongue and gathers at the back of my throat; a copper tang that speaks of old blood, and a musty reek that whispers of burial grounds.
There are too many flies. The drone of the feasting insects is loud, aching my ears and building a pressure behind my eyes. This is unnatural.
Alvantir meets my gaze. Both of us know what did this.
‘They were nobles,’ the lead elf says, breaking the uneasy silence. He hefts an axe that is almost the mirror of my own over his armoured shoulder, the lines and angles of his face tightening. ‘Lothern born and bred.’
‘Why were they here?’ I ask, with genuine curiosity. I know outsiders to be stupid at times, but this…
‘An adventure in wild Chrace? I neither know nor care.’ The words leave his lips laced with bitterness, biting like acid into the still air.
‘And why are you here?’
He laughs, a series of hoarse barks that are anything but genuine. ‘We are their shields against harm; their bulwark against danger. They were our charges.’
Realisation is a shard of ice knifing into my guts. This is why these men are so grim and unwelcoming. This is why they stare out at the forest with narrowed eyes.
‘I am sorry,’ I say, and not because Lothern lost three of its spoiled children this week.
‘Charandis.’ Alvantir blurts out the name because he can hold it in no longer. Four pairs of eyes turn to look at him. Only one grasps the meaning of what is said.
‘What about Charandis?’ This is asked by another White Lion, the one with a sickle-shaped scar blighting his cheek. He sounds as if he is stung by that name being spoken in the presence of such an atrocity.
Every woodsman knows Charandis. He is Thunder, the King of Prides, the Child of Kurnous, the Hunter under the Canopy. A thousand romanticised poems detail the tragic fall of his pride, the clack of his claws upon the rocky mountains, the grace of his every movement, the mercy in his killing blow…
‘Charandis is no longer pure.’ There is no regret in my tone. Not even slightly.
‘A foul wind blew down from the Annulli Mountains last year,’ Alvantir elaborates. He clutches a small wooden token around his neck, a mirror of the one he carved for his boy.
‘You are saying the lion is tainted?’ This, asked by the third White Lion, sallow-faced and hook-nosed.
‘A child of Kurnous does not hunt like this. If this slaughter were pure, then why have only the flies come to feast?’
Silence. Droning.
‘Then our path is set? Thunder dies by our hand tonight?’ says Sickle-Scar.
‘No.’ My reply is coloured by my smile, brought unbidden to my lips at the look on Alvantir’s face. ‘Mine.’
‘I will restore your honour,’ Korhil said, still with that smile creasing his slanted eyes. ‘But more importantly, I will earn my own.’
Alvantir pinched the bridge of his nose, suppressing a heartfelt groan. The silence that met this wondrous announcement was filled by the frenzied buzzing of a thousand flies, ignorant of the staggering stupidity that just left Korhil’s lips.
‘You,’ spoke the senior White Lion, ‘are going to restore my honour.’ His tone didn’t make it a question.
Korhil unfolded his arms – noticeably big, eye-catchingly brawny – and laughed.
‘This is no longer about you. I mean you no insult, kinsman, but you have failed today. We stand in the aftermath of an evil you were duty bound to prevent. I will right this wrong. I will kill Charandis. And I will walk with you to Lothern with his carcass slung over my shoulders.’
So this was it. The glory Korhil had been talking about for years. Korhil did not see a gaggle of bereaved lovers and mourning relatives in the clotting blood of these dead nobles. He did not see lives cut short and ambitions slashed by a sick beast.
This was about the glory.
Bringing him here was a bad idea.
To say the lead Lion looked stung was understating things. White-lipped, he stood speechless for several long moments, his gloves creaking as he tightened and relaxed his grip on his weapon.
Finally, ‘You would stand in defence of the Phoenix King.’
‘I would.’
He sighed, a weary exhalation whispering through his teeth.
‘Then go, Korhil. We will camp nearby for two days. That is how long I will grant you. That is how long I will wait before I come and destroy this beast myself.’
Alvantir cleared his throat.
‘Come, Korhil. I will help you pick up the trail.’
A fool could find where Charandis’s claws had touched bare earth.
Alvantir silences the question about to pass my lips with a withering glare, his brow creasing in ugly furrows.
‘Fool.’
‘I can track him easily–’
‘You insulted Valeth.’
For this, I have no response. Valeth the Wyrmslayer. Valeth the Kinhammer. Valeth the Mighty. Why, I ask myself, do I live to regret insulting his honour?
This… puts things into perspective.
‘You don’t realise, do you? We stood under the gaze of Captain Ironglaive’s second.’ When I don’t respond, he continues. ‘The Phoenix King himself knows his name. This goes straight to the top. This is…’ He gestures weakly. ‘Big.’
I look at my closest friend walking next to me, our boots sinking into wet mud as we leave the White Lions and their charnel scene behind. He sees my perplexed smile.
‘Why is this a bad thing, Alvantir?’
‘Charandis will kill you.’
‘No, he won’t.’
‘What if he does?’
I laugh, and he knows why. He should know better than to say ‘what if’ in my presence. A bad habit of his.
‘Why does Ironglaive send his most esteemed warrior to Chrace, picking up after foolish nobles?’
Alvantir answers with a shrug of his narrow shoulders, ducking under an overhanging branch. ‘It is a different game in Lothern, Korhil. It is political.’
‘Nonsense is what it is. When I stand astride the White Lions, I will march to the defence of worthy charges. Generals, scholars, spellweavers; not spoiled children. Never spoiled children.’
‘They march in regiments, fool. You go where they tell you.’
‘But I’m about to kill Charandis. You think they would damn me to mundane duties like that?’
‘Why don’t you ask Valeth that question?’
I ignore this last remark, lowering my gaze to the ground, focussing on my task. The forest speaks to me in a voice I know well: a patchwork of muddy browns and vital greens, whispering morsels of secret knowledge.
My strength is my axe – it always has been. Tracking is Alvantir’s expertise, but it takes no master to follow the trail Charandis has left behind him. Here, a faded print twice the size of my hand. There, a claw mark, scored into the jutting root of a tree. The clumsiness of the lion’s passing is a testament to how sick the creature is. White lions move with a grace that matches their savagery. That is why the Chracian rite is such a hard test. Usually, finding them is hard enough.
Usually.
‘I have come far enough.’ Alvantir thumbs his wedding ring, giving me a look that I find hard to read. ‘I am not going to convince you that this is folly.’
‘No,’ I agree. ‘Because it is not.’
He sighs.
‘I will go back to Valeth for my payment. Be swift. And don’t die, fool.’
In the shadow of the forest, as the sun sets in crimson fire, we shake hands.
III
At first, he could not move.
This was something new. This was a fresh affliction, added to the dozens that already blossomed in his blood and bred behind his eyes.
It was impossible. His bones were shafts of ice, his muscles frozen in painful stiffnes
s. Breath vented between his locked jaws in volcanic hisses. Dreadful cold was beginning to settle on his guts. The thump of his heart was sluggish, beating without vigour, languishing beneath his ribs.
In the stillness of night, the lion whined.
Perception had steadily become harder to grasp as he awoke from slumber these last weeks. He always emerged from a realm of nightmares – where prey is predator – into a world of threats he couldn’t see, and dangers he couldn’t hear. Being aware of any difference between the two was difficult. So sometimes he would awake roaring, lashing out at shadows with extended claws and yellow fangs.
But not tonight.
Again, a whine escaped his jaws.
Maybe he would slip into prey-sleep. Maybe it would be for him that the ravens wheeled overhead. Maybe it would be his bones that the wolves gnawed upon.
But that didn’t happen.
The prey-scent was faint, diluted by distance. It reached him as a weak spice, hanging loose in the air, drifting at the mercy of gentle breezes. It spoke of something far away, alert yet relaxed; wary, yet oblivious. He tasted flesh, wet and tender, torn from the bones of something taken by surprise. The promise of a successful kill raced through his mind.
Normality. Rightness. Relief.
With a snarl of effort, the lion moved.
It was slow, at first. He clawed trenches into the ground in an effort to crawl forward, his muscles burning red hot under his skin. Agony came afresh with every beat of his heart, coursing fire through his veins, painting his vision in varying shades of murderous red.
But at least he wasn’t cold any more.
At least he would hunt again.
The lion staggered shakily to its feet, no longer mewling meekly at imagined predators. His perception was sharpening again, throwing his world into blade-sharp clarity. His eyes rolled in their gummy sockets, identifying his surroundings. His nostrils flared, sucking in lungfuls of nectar-rich prey-scent.
It was… that way. Beyond the trees. Out of the forest.
He reeled at first, his gait drunken and clumsy. Twice, he stumbled, and both times he vented his aggression on thin air, lashing out at nothing.
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