Alexa Drey- Hero Hunting

by Ember Lane

  Lump moss…An emerald-colored moss that only grows on the eastern side of a rock. Lump moss can be found in a variety of habitats and doesn’t always need water to survive. Lump moss can leach liquids out of anything it comes in contact with. It can be used for drying sores and treating bodily fungus.

  Sour pea…Sour pea is a powerful anesthetic that can numb wounds while they’re being tended.

  Briar milk…Briar milk gets its name from the white secretion that oozes from it when squeezed or made into a poultice. It can be fashioned to stem bleeding, or cover a burn while the skin under it heals.

  Glenwyth glanced up at me. “It is the best I can think of. We need to remove the stone scales to give him any chance of survival, but I fear he needs a more powerful infusion.”

  I nodded, racking my brains for an answer. Then it came to me, a thought—an old ally that I’d long forgotten but still carried its mark. I walked away from the fire, knowing my friend would recoil from it, and I marched down the bank a little, until I found the perfect spot. I placed my palm, the one marked by the jaspur leaf, on the soil, and I called for them with my mind.

  I felt their surprise, their slow awakening, their confusion at my call, and so I withdrew it and asked again, but this time a plea for help with an explanation of why. I received nothing but silence for my troubles until I felt a slight rumbling in the earth beneath my palm. The rumblings became grumblings, as the trees moaned about the land, about what had happened to it. I heard some talk of war, and others of retreating, but then heard the voice of one brave, young soul, and I felt its arguments pushed to the forefront of the grumbles.

  Then, my palm nudged upward a little, as if a shoot were struggling to be born, and so I raised it and coaxed the jaspur up. At first it resembled a button mushroom, but soon turned into a billowing jaspur tree, its young, mauve leaves regal, majestic. A long vine of leaves dropped at my feet, and I thanked the tree for its gift.

  “You’re welcome. The shaman were mighty in this land. May they be mighty again,” it said. “I might make my home here.” I nodded and smiled at the tree. “It is mostly unspoiled,” it said. “Bring me the master of this place.”

  Signaling Lincoln over, he looked surprised to have a new addition to his surroundings, and downright shocked when I told him it wanted a word, but this land had clearly taught him to accept the odd, and he was soon within its branchy embrace.

  I knelt back by the boiling pot and gave Glenwyth the jaspur leaves.

  “I…I…” she stammered, her gaze falling short of meeting mine. “I…we…the elf, we thought the jaspur betrayed, thought it lost when Petreyer fell to the mutants.”

  I reached out to her. Something about her fragility brought out a rush of empathy from me. I sensed that she was, like me, unsure of her way. “Is everything all right with you, Glenwyth?”

  She scrunched her lips together, sucking her cheeks in and rolling her eyes. “How can I tell you that a lot has happened to me recently?” Glancing around at the mountain—“After that…”

  “That?” I shrugged. “Walk in the park.” And I grinned. “No way near as bad as waking in this land and being completely on my own. Loneliness, that was worse than anything.”

  It wasn’t quite the truth, but was no lie either. Yeah, getting trapped in the chimney was bad, horrific, and nearly destroyed me, but I remembered the excitement that I had felt seeing Star in the back of the wagon. Greman, all of them, were good companions, but you couldn’t beat someone your own age. I told her that, and she managed a smile.

  I heard Krakus cough, and a feeling filled my mind, flowing through every part of my being.

  Congratulations! Krakus has gifted you the skill Healing. Healing is a complex skill that has many subskills. Your overall progress in this skill is a measure of your grasp of the sum of your success with the subskills. Healing cannot be progressed in any other way.

  Congratulations! Glenwyth has granted you access to the Poultices and Potions healing subskill. You are a level 1.

  It appeared they were teaming up on me…

  “Now,” she said, “If it’s in any way possible to help the shaman, we must reverse his stone skin. My guess, given his age, is that the demon only partly afflicted him to keep him hovering on the edge of death, but never tipping over it. A true graveling is head to foot, through and through, stone. They can’t speak. They just rage and destroy. It is as though their inner self is attempting to break out, but is encased, entombed, in stone. It is like their own body is holding them prisoner.”

  Glenwyth took the glowwort, a bowl, and a pestle and gave it to me. “Add a little water and grind that into a paste. We’ll use that to clean around the chunks of scale and skin.”

  “Is that it? Is it that simple?”

  “No, wish that it was. The skill is you, what you put into the mix. You must let your mana flow and meld with the mixture, but temper it, don’t over infuse it or add too fast. The poultice must work over time.”

  “How will I…” I made to ask, but understood that was the skill.

  “Just imagine what you need the mixture to do. What do we need the glowwort for?”

  I nodded and dropped a chunk of the fungus into the bowl, ladled some water on it, and began to grind. I visualized Krakus’s scaly skin and imagined the poultice spreading over it, killing all the bacteria, mold, fungus, any corruption it could find. At first, I felt no mana rush—like I’d felt when creating the glowspheres—but then my fingers started to tingle where I gripped the pestle, and the stubby, little thing began to glow, as did the glowwort mixture. Checking my stat board, I saw I’d drained forty mana into it.

  Congratulations! You have made your first salve. It will make for a powerful purifying paste. You are now level 2 poultice and potions.

  Glenwyth then instructed me on how to use the sour pea to make a numbing paste, the lump moss to mix a stodgy, sucking poultice, and finally she showed me how to beat the briar milk into a smooth cream. Just as she was turning and folding the liquid on itself, I saw it as a pink cream, and somehow knew that this was where we should add the jaspur leaves.

  “It is for you to do, not me,” Glenwyth whispered. “The lore of those trees is beyond me. The jaspur rarely reveals it secrets.”

  I took the pot, stripped the leaves from the jaspur branch and added them to the mixture, grinding them together. Slowly, the pink paste I’d imagined came into being as my mana dribbled into it, but then I saw black streaks swirl with every beat, and knew my shadow mana had joined the party. Glenwyth looked at me, her forehead creased in concern, but she said nothing.

  Congratulations! You have made your first unique potion. By mixing the opposing manas, you have created a salve that can destroy evil and nurture good…or the other way around—only time will tell. You are now level 3 poultice and potions.

  Poking my bottom lip out, I said: “Well, you never know.”

  I finally got to hear Glenwyth laugh. She set all the potions aside and then began tearing strips of cloth up, throwing them in the water. “Can’t hurt,” she muttered, and next she told me all about the time she’d stabbed Lincoln, and how she was mortified, and how she was having trouble getting over it.

  “When Krakus asked you about the katrox, I thought about when, no after, I stabbed Lincoln. It was…”

  “Same feeling,” I said.

  “Still tearing you apart?”

  “Every day,” I said, and knew I had another best friend. Well, second, after Star, she was my favorite…ish, after Lincoln, and Greman—Shylan or Cronis. Pog, definitely Pog. I chose not to think about it anymore.

  Glenwyth spooned the bandages out and piled them on a plate. I glanced at the jaspur and saw Lincoln kneeling within its mauve leaves. I guessed it had opened up to him.

  Aezal laid Krakus on Lincoln’s bed. Glenwyth looked his frail body up and down. He was a bag of bones, and the bag had seen better days. As Glenwyth leaned over him, he reached up and touched her forehead. I saw a subtle gl
ow pass between them, but said nothing, asked for no explanation, and accepted it was their moment. Glenwyth hesitated for just a minute, but then ran her fingers over his ravaged skin. “We’ll test it out on this one,” she said, and pointed to the scallop-shaped shell covering one of his breasts. “Let’s clean it with the glowwort.”

  I pasted it on and afterward we sat back and let it permeate his skin; let it sterilize the area. At one point, I thought I could actually see it working, but assumed it was probably a trick of the eye. After a while, Glenwyth pushed herself up, and we peeled it back. After we’d cleaned it up, Glenwyth dribbled the sour pea solution over it, then drew out her knife. As quick as a flash, she sliced Krakus’s scaled skin, and I gagged as its foul pus oozed out. “Lump moss,” she said, her teeth gritted.

  It was then I understood its purpose, to leach out Krakus’s corruption, to let the moss drink it down. Krakus had his eyelids clamped shut, the set of his mouth telling of his pain. We packed some of the mixture around it, and Glenwyth looked at me, and I knew we could do no more for now. She led me outside, and we took in the fresh, night air. Aezal was pacing up and down.

  “Anything?” he grunted.

  “We won’t know until it’s done,” Glenwyth told him. “But the corruption of the graveling curse runs deep, its roots have burrowed into his body, wrapped around his organs, invaded his meat. The next part will tell us if there is a chance.”

  “You mean he might die?” I said, not having anticipated nor even considered it might be a possibility.

  “The demon ended his spell, but the spell was the only thing that was keeping him alive. Best guess, he’ll either die or complete his transformation.”

  The Atreman fell to his knees and started praying.

  We sat out there for a while, waiting for the lump moss to leach the wound. When we went back inside, it had grown to a pile of greenish-brown goo. Glenwyth scooped it into a pot, then dabbed the wound down with one of the bandages. If anything, it looked angrier than before.

  “You must apply your salve—the briar milk and jaspur.” She looked down at the wound. “I will tend some more welts—the lump moss fed well. We need to remove as much as we can, it may well be his only hope.”

  Gingerly, I started to dab it on the welt, and as I did, it hissed and steamed, as if it were fighting with the desecration of his body. I spread more and more around; it bubbled and spat, but eventually began to set. I had soon covered the entire wound, and yet the bowl was still nearly full. I held back, watching the lump moss feed on his other wounds, saw it bubble up. Glenwyth spread more, then waited. After a while, we scooped it off, and then she urged me on. Before we stopped, most of his chest was set in the pink salve, then his neck and arms.

  Krakus opened his eyes, and I saw their true color for the first time. They were a mix of sapphire and emerald swimming in a glaze of tears. He nodded his assent to me, and bit by bit I covered the whole top of his body. When the bowl was empty, I staggered back, and looked at my stat board. My energy was nearly drained. Crashing into the cabin’s wall, I dropped the bowl, hearing it shatter on the wooden floor. Slowly, I slid down; unconscious before I’d even slumped to the floor.

  10

  Scarletite

  I awoke the next morning and screamed. Lincoln’s face was inches from my own.

  “Ssshh,” he said. “You’ll wake Krakus.”

  He held out his hand, a smirk plastered over his face. “Do you always just keel over and sleep?”

  I grimaced, my back aching, my bum cheeks raw. In truth, it was about time I actually slept in a bed, our brief stop in Merrivale being the last time I’d managed it. Glancing over at Krakus, I noticed Glenwyth was still sitting on the shaman’s bed, her back against the cottage wall, her legs bent across him. She was fast asleep. Narrowing my eyes, I saw that Krakus was still breathing, but shallowly, and in stuttering bursts. Lincoln pulled me up and out.

  The chill of the air and the warmth of the midmorning sun hit me at the same time, as Lincoln gently pulled the cottage’s door shut. “There’s nothing more that you can do for him.”

  “But…”

  “But nothing. Let Glenwyth do this; maybe it’ll heal her too.” His gaze lingered on the closed door. I bit my lip and nodded. He was right; this was Glenwyth’s task. Lincoln took my hand and led me off the stoop. “That’s a mighty fine tree you’ve brought to my village. Tell me, do they always talk so slow?”

  I blurted a laugh. This land might be strange, but no stranger of our acceptance that it was real. “Slow? That wasn’t slow.”

  “Oh.” Lincoln picked up a stone and skimmed it on the lake. “Oh, he told me he had to hurry with you. With me, he took his time. It was well into the night before he’d managed to scold me about the sawmills.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  We were walking along the bank, making our way toward his village. “I told him that I was determined to destroy nothing, to build in balance. He seemed to accept it, then asked about the sacred elf tree, well, I told him all about that, and he laughed and laughed—that took until sunrise. It was quite…surreal, that’s what it was. Let me show you something.” He took my hand and pulled me into the forest. “We’ll do this, and then go and see Jack.”

  “Jack?”

  “A crafter—he can mend your clothes and the like. You kinda look a wreck.”

  I swiped him, but put no power in it. Elf tree? I thought—something else he was hiding from me. “So tell me, what aren’t you telling me?”

  He didn’t reply at first, but I saw the creases of anguish in the corners of his eyes. “Can we just drop it?”

  “Eh?” I said. “How can I drop it when I don’t know what it is?”

  He picked up his pace, weaving through the forest as though my questions would be left behind. “Joan was the same,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  He stopped in his tracks and put his hands on his hips. “Joan,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “She was the same. She always had to know everything.” And then he grabbed my hand and led me on until we came to a building that looked more like a timber, open-planned living and breathing temple. “This is my academy. At the moment, it is where I research the farming, lumbering, quarrying, etc. etc. It’s an odd way to learn stuff. See that table over there?” He pointed as he walked toward it. “There’s a piece of paper on it, it’ll be mining—level 5. I’ll pick it up, look at it. My mind will mull over the information on it for a predetermined amount of time—which is gradually getting longer as the level goes up—and then it’ll enhance my ore production by a further ten percent.” He grinned and picked up the paper, lofting his eyebrows. “Nuts, isn’t it.”

  “What is it, Lincoln?” I stood in the center of his academy, ignoring the peace and tranquility of the place. It reminded me of one of those places monks would sit, cross-legged, in silent contemplation. I gave him my best, hard stare.

  His expression broke, as if something that was pent-up in him had suddenly been released. “Look, it’s just a stupid surprise. I got you a stupid surprise. Can you just drop it until I can give it to you?”

  Lincoln had my complete, undivided attention.

  I walked up to him, slowly. “What kind of surprise?” I asked, an easy smile gracing my lips. Once in front of him, I looked Lincoln in the eye, then circled around him. “Care to tell me, Lincoln Hart?” I draped my arm over his broad shoulders. I had him. I knew I had him. He would spill.

  “Nope,” he said, grabbed the paper from the table and glanced at it for an instant. It immediately turned to dust, and he bolted out of that place. I chased after him, through the forest, along the river, and all the way to the tavern. Shylan and Cronis were already outside, supping ale. Flip was nowhere to be seen, and Mezzerain and Star were in deep conversation on the porch. Lincoln slowed to a walk. “By the end of the day. You’ll know my secret by the end of the day,” he said. “Good enough?”

  I could see he wasn’t for turning. �
��Good enough,” I said. “Ale?”

  “Not for me, yet, though I fear the wizard’s badgering is going to force me into a mug before long. He’s a bit put out that I called my guild The House of Mandrake, but the truth of it is, I didn’t.”

  “Who did?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  I stood there by the settlement’s fire pit and looked him up and down. “Oh, I think I would.” I noticed that folk were staring at me as they passed by. Suddenly, I became conscious of my tattered clothes and my mismatched boots—yes, I’d fallen asleep with odd boots on. “You mentioned…” I swept my hand up and down myself.

  “Jack,” said Lincoln. “We need Jack. Him and his son are our resident crafters. I take it you know how that all works?”

  “Nope. Not seen a crafter at work.”

  “Then this should just blow your mind.” He grabbed my hand again and walked me away from the tavern and past what was clearly the forge. It was then I remembered the lumps of ore I had in my sack.

  Hovering my hand over it, one popped out. “Look, I found a load of these all around the hole I blew in your mountain.”

  “Scarletite—it’s scarletite.” He scratched his head and shouted, “Bethe?”

  The coppery guardian floated over to him. I say floated over, but the truth was that she appeared to just appear, and yet it felt like she’d always been there. It was quite the peculiar feeling.

  “Lincoln? Are you ready to issue the day’s instructions?”

  “Forge? What level is the forge?” Lincoln asked, ignoring her question.

  “It is level 7.”

  “So, with mining level 5 soon completed, we can fashion this?” He picked the scarletite off my upturned palm.

  “No, afraid not. You need a level 8 forge. Though you can craft it into ingots without the smelter, the workshop is of a sufficient level. It will be painstakingly slow though.”