by Ross Turner
Another tiny blur of motion struck him in the darkness, this time square on the shoulder, sending him staggering backwards.
Then another, and another, and yet another.
They struck his chest and his face and his back, coming at him from all directions in great, sweeping arcs.
As they came faster and faster, and in greater and greater numbers, forcing Alistair to dive and dodge this way and that to avoid them, Marcii suddenly realised what they were.
Birds.
An entire flock of them, all swarming around the old man and swooping down to barrage him endlessly.
There were so many of them that even in the dark of the star scattered night they seemed to block out the vast blanket above.
Speechless and filled with fear, Marcii and Kaylm scrambled through the freezing, slippery slush and threw themselves into each other’s arms.
“What’s happening!?” Kaylm cried, his eyes growing wide as the massive flurries of birds began screeching deafeningly with every sweeping dive and arc.
But Marcii had no idea.
“I don’t know!” She replied, only able to watch as Alistair tried desperately to defend himself from their merciless assault.
The young Dougherty scrabbled around for a moment to find a patch of untouched snow. It took her a minute or two, but she eventually managed to find some in a ruined house and packed the white powder instinctively onto her wounded ribs. She winced when the ice touched her exposed skin but she ignored it and turned her gaze back to the sight unfolding before them.
Come to think of it, aside from Alistair’s wolves, Marcii couldn’t recall ever seeing a single creature in Ravenhead, not even since the very first time she’d come here with Reaper. She racked her mind, but her efforts turned up nothing. She couldn’t remember seeing a single animal, which only now, as she thought on it, seemed strange to her.
Reaper had always had to leave Ravenhead to hunt game for food.
She supposed she hadn’t thought it was bizarre before because of Raven’s curse.
But, she’d lifted the curse? Or at least, she’d thought she had.
And yet still, only now had the birds returned.
The answer hit Marcii like a great blow, knocking the air from her lungs.
How had she not realised before!?
All of a sudden, darting for the cover of what remained of the nearest buildings, Alistair dove into a half standing pile of rubble and stone. The swarming flurry of birds continued to dive and swoop, though now their target had managed to find shelter from their ceaseless attacks.
It didn’t last long though.
Alistair wasn’t given time to recover.
He dashed from building to building, keeping low to the shadows and the cover of stone as much as he could manage.
But soon enough even that couldn’t protect him.
Much larger, more loping shapes stalked through the darkness towards him, cutting off his escape and looming in all around the old man.
He bled from a hundred small cuts and cursed loudly at the sudden onslaught.
Thwarting his retreat and forcing him from the cover of darkness and stone, the very wolves that were once his to command advanced all around him.
They surrounded the old man in perfect, practiced silence.
As much as they might never have wanted to see him again, now they were taking orders from their new Alpha.
“What the…?” Alistair repeated into the night furiously, unable to find words for his disbelief, cursing ceaselessly to the wind.
The wolves the size of bears drove him out into the light hanging beneath the stars and the army of birds bombarded him once more, swooping and diving and drawing evermore blood from yet a hundred more tiny cuts.
Between them, led by a force much greater than themselves, the birds and the wolves forced the old man Alistair back. Driving him out of the shadows and herding him into an open clearing, they trapped him between them, from all sides and indeed from above too.
He was barely two dozen feet from where Marcii and Kaylm crouched, still recoiling away from the sight, in between the wolves now so dutifully protecting them.
“It’s Her…” Marcii breathed suddenly, her voice filled with shock and awe.
Without any need for further explanation Kaylm understood and Marcii’s words hung in the air like floating paper lanterns in the darkness.
“She’s saved us…”
Chapter Fifty-Five
A deep crevasse opened beneath Alistair’s body, splitting the very earth with an almighty creak. The old man was so focused on fighting off the birds and the wolves that he hadn’t even felt the shaking beneath his feet.
His legs disappeared beneath him into the ground itself as the earth swallowed the old man whole. He struggled desperately to fight off the birds and the wolves, and yet also keep from falling deep into the chasm beneath him.
Indeed, it seemed as though the world itself was pitted against him, for Mother Nature had decided such.
She was not putting up with this any longer.
She absolutely refused.
Struggling and fighting with all his remaining strength, Alistair groped and clawed at the freezing, slushy ground, trying desperately to keep himself from plummeting into the dreadful abyss below.
His fingers raked and tore at stone and earth, but wolfish jaws clamped themselves around his hands and birdlike beaks continued to commit their aerial assaults.
He cried out in pain as he fought to cling on, but it was of no use.
His hands and his fingers bled out onto the cold floor and hot streaks of red streamed down his face.
Battered and ruined, even with his unnatural, and yet at the same time strangely natural, inhuman strength, he could not hang on any longer.
The wolves ceased their snapping and snarling as their former Master Alistair slipped off the ledge and down into the black abyss below.
Surging high up into the air in great, flowing masses, the vast flock of birds danced victoriously as one beneath the stars.
Alistair fell for what felt like days, months, years even, plummeting endlessly.
In reality though, he fell no more than half a dozen feet, before Mother Nature once again intervened.
Suspending him in a state of terror, dread even, which was altogether appropriate, She began moulding and reshaping his body, for indeed it was Hers to do with as She pleased.
She drove and forced him into the very essence of a mere acorn.
Alistair writhed and struggled against Her all the while, refusing right down to the last moment to give in.
It made a satisfying change however for him to be cast and shaped against his will; it had for so long been him doing so to others. He’d spent years so unfairly ruining their lives, with only greater and greater ferocity and less and less concern as time had worn on.
All at once, the second Mother Nature had sealed the tiny nut, trapping Alistair inside of it, the earth shifted once more, shaking and trembling terribly as it did so.
The crevasse that had opened up so abruptly, searing the land, knitted itself back together with surprising ease.
The wolves, upon instruction from their new Master, paced back and away as the ground closed before their eyes. She did not need to tell them what was next to come for them to heed the sound of warning, so evident in Her gentle words.
Almost immediately, once Alistair had been safely sealed within the seed, and the seed had in turn been wrapped within the earth, a sapling sprouted from between the ruined cobblestones.
Within moments, without even the whisper of a sound, the sapling grew from a mere infant and into a youth. It reached up with keen eagerness towards the black sky above, littered all over with dazzling, spotted memories.
The small tree wrenched its roots through stone and soil without effort and grew in size and height tenfold, several times over.
Moments turned to seconds.
Seconds turned to minutes.
> Before Marcii and Kaylm’s very eyes, and the eyes of all the wolves gathered around and the birds circling above, and indeed also the limitless gazes from those lost up amidst the stars, a vast oak tree came into the world.
They stood to behold the enormity of the sight before them.
Its trunk grew to be so thick that the young Dougherty doubted that even Reaper’s arms would have been able to reach all the way around it. The branches and the leaves stretched out so far and were so high off the ground that she didn’t think the huge demon would even have come close to reaching them.
Soon enough the oak tree towered above everything else, swamping the buildings all around it.
Even Raven’s Keep paled in comparison to its sudden, vast size.
Growing to be what was certainly a century old oak, and yet even more, in just the space of what felt like a mere few heartbeats, Marcii gazed up in astounded awe.
The trunk was lined vertically with countless creases and ridges, each running from the last and merging into the next. The huge tree was stained here and there by time that had both weathered it, and simultaneously not touched it.
The leaves must have been at least half a dozen feet across each, and probably would have wrapped around Marcii like a blanket, had she been able to get up high enough to brush against them.
The young Dougherty’s astonishment was short lived however, for yet again she found herself shocked and stunned beyond belief, when the beautiful, gargantuan tree suddenly burst aflame.
Bright and searing, more brilliant and more intense than anything Marcii could possibly imagine, the sight of the burning tree illuminated the blackened night all around them with vivid flashes of orange and red and yellow.
The colossal tree blazed and flared and reduced to smouldering ashes in mere seconds, its bark and leaves burning through so fast that Marcii could not believe her eyes.
Not that any of this was leaving her anything but speechless.
A swift breeze scurried past and flitted between her and Kaylm. It swept up between the pack of wolves, taking the enormous mound of fiery ashes with it as it went. It carried the remains of the tree up in an enormous, spiralling helix, whipping them through the air in beautiful, intricate red and orange patterns, illuminated so against the night.
Then, almost as if its work was done, the wind ceased its displays and scattered the tree’s ashes off into the night and all over around the world, as if it had never been there at all.
As if the old man Alistair had never even existed.
But exist he still did, only now he was doomed to wander the earth forevermore, and think endlessly on his sins.
Marcii shuddered at the thought.
It was a notion too dreadful to dwell on and she tried her utmost to push it to the very back of her mind.
Left suddenly in overwhelming darkness, it took some time for Marcii’s eyes to adjust to the night again.
And when they finally did, at last altering back to the starlight, her gaze settled upon a small figure that had appeared before her, outlined as a silhouette against the slushy ground.
“Vixen.” Marcii breathed, as ever unsure what else to say.
She realised all of a sudden, and with flurrying guilt, that Vixen had been the only one she hadn’t felt when she’d freed Malorie from the storm.
But though it was clear that Vixen knew what was troubling Marcii, she seemed not to mind. Instead, pacing across the littered clearing and straight up to the young Dougherty, she reached up to hug her.
Marcii knelt down and embraced the young orphan girl, though Vixen was anything and everything but.
Of course she had felt her, Marcii suddenly realised, for Mother Nature swarmed through her veins with every heartbeat.
A bout of tears flooded Marcii’s cheeks and her heart felt heavy with thick emotion, as she realised all of a sudden that this was goodbye.
Vixen stood back and smiled one last time.
It was an expression that Marcii had seen the young girl wear so infrequently, though she had never until now understood exactly why. And now that she did, she couldn’t help but fight back yet more tears.
Marcii absently pulled some of the twigs and foliage from Vixen’s hair and cupped a hand around her warm, soft cheek. She held the young girl’s tawny brown gaze for as long as she could manage, returning her smile fondly, her expression affectionate and thankful and regretful all at once.
As ever, in one moment Vixen was there, and in the next moment she was gone, never to return, for she was no longer needed.
Marcii was left kneeling upon the cold, hard ground, littered with death and suffering. Her loving gaze searched for Vixen’s tawny eyes, but found only darkness. And her hand remained outstretched into the empty air, icy and biting, searching for the soft, warm, reassuring touch of Vixen’s cheek.
But, again, she found nothing.
There was only the cruel chill of darkness for her to touch, and the infinite bite of emptiness to swarm through her.
Chapter Fifty-Six
It took many long weeks to clear away the scattered bodies left behind in the wake of the final Dreadhunt. The empty streets of Ravenhead literally ran with blood and it took many more months to finally clean the deep red from the stone.
The decaying carcasses and the rivers of sticky blood attracted vermin of all kinds. Soon Ravenhead swarmed with scavengers, picking skeletons clean of rotting meat and stealing away with anything small enough for them to carry.
Marcii had well and truly lifted Raven’s curse it would seem, as vermin and vultures poured into the not so abandoned town.
But, it is often said that things must get worse before they can get better, and there is truth in that.
Once the streets were finally cleared and the cobblestone roadways were cleaned, eventually the scavengers grew tired of searching for meals, for their efforts were growing less and less rewarding with every excursion.
However, though the state of the town was vastly improved, the aftermath of Malorie’s storm still lingered. Those few buildings that had still had four walls and a roof before, now lay in ruins afresh.
To her dismay Marcii also found, when she ventured up there, that even Raven’s Keep had not wholly survived. Fortunately, the high tower was still standing, but an entire side of it had been ripped out, leaving a vast, gaping hole in its side, like a wound that would never heal.
Between them, she and Kaylm did the best they could to restore as many of the buildings as they could manage. But they had no expertise and no materials, making the task almost impossible to complete with any semblance of longevity.
Then, one day, after many weeks and months of struggle and hard graft, a sight appeared on the horizon that the young Dougherty had once upon a time dreaded.
The land seemed to shift and move as if it were alive.
It was only as the flowing mass moved closer that Marcii realised it was an army, teeming with people she had once known. Tyran had turned the people of Newmarket against her, and indeed against anyone he claimed to be a witch.
But, even after everything, she had freed them from his dreadful tyranny.
They had rebuilt their home from the ground up, stripping it clean of cold steel and returning it to its former innocence.
Fruits and vegetables and meats and produce once again filled the stalls of Newmarket, flowing through the streets like blood rushing to and from the beating heart of commerce.
So grateful were they to Vixen for opening their eyes to the devils they’d become that the people rallied together to return to Ravenhead, bringing with them carts of food and drink for the journey.
It took them more than a week to make the trip. Their carts were slow and they were forced to navigate the entirety of Ekra’s canyon.
Of course, they had no way of knowing that anybody lived at the bottom of the canyon, but Ekra sensed their movements, just as she had always sensed Marcii’s. A contented smile played across her aged face as she watc
hed them set about their work.
Upon discovering that Marcii and Kaylm were alive, but alone, the liberated people of Newmarket devoutly made the journey back home, only to once again return to Ravenhead with more supplies.
They brought wood and stone and tools and the craftsmen to go with them. Such devotion Marcii had not seen in anybody but her closest friends for a long time. It warmed her heart and suddenly gave her a flickering faith that there might be hope for the human race yet.
Within a year, after countless long days of grind and toil and many hands making lighter work, Ravenhead was almost unrecognisable.
Houses had been rebuilt from the ground up, complete with sturdy stone walls, set glass windows and solid, protective roofs. An army of workmen then set their hands to an entirely different array of tasks to that which they’d originally been assigned, barely a few months ago.
Carpenters worked their fingers to the bone crafting new tables and chairs and cupboards and dressers.
New cobblestoned roads were laid, paving the streets afresh and setting the foundations for what Marcii hoped would be a bright, peaceful future.
Once the work was done about half of the workforce from Newmarket remained in Ravenhead, whilst the others all returned home to see their children and their wives, showered with Marcii and Kaylm’s gratitude as they departed.
Those that remained were mostly young and had no families, and were more than anything just looking for new and exciting lives to lead.
It seemed as though everything had come full circle, right back from when Leonard had first settled there, so long ago.
The entire movement made Marcii think of something Reaper had once told her, seemingly such a long time ago now.
Her memories of him, and indeed of all her friends, Malorie and Raven and Midnight and Vixen, were indeed the fondest she owned.
She almost felt guilty that she did not miss her family in the same way as she missed them.
But then, she supposed, there was nothing she could do about that now.
The enormous demon Reaper had told her once not to apologise for things that were beyond her control.
