Ding!
[Wind Wolf — Apprentice Realm — slain.]
[EXP +50]
[Soul claimed. Sea of Souls: 1]
[Soul Essence +1]
The last line was still writing itself when Nathan felt it hit, rising up through his chest the same way the cold had gone out of it, only backwards.
Warmth poured into the hollow under his ribs and ran down his right arm until the dead numb weight of that arm turned back into an arm.
Hiis fingers coming alive one by one while the grey at the edges of his vision pulled back and the trees sharpened and the ache in his knees let go so suddenly that he almost laughed.
Whatever Blade of Death had taken out of him, something had just put back—not all of it, but enough.
Beside him the wolf came apart, starting at the shoulder. Nathan turned his head in time to watch the grey spread out from the hole he’d made.
Running along the ribs and down the legs and up into the skull until the whole animal was the same dead colour, after which it lost its shape entirely.
The body broke up into fine drifting motes that lifted off the leaves and thinned out into nothing, and in four seconds there was no corpse at all, only a flattened patch of leaf litter, a scatter of grey dust already blowing away, and his river stone lying where the shoulder used to be.
Nathan looked at the empty ground for a while.
’It kept going. I stopped hitting it and the rot didn’t stop.’
That was worth knowing.
Whatever Blade of Death put into a thing, it finished the job on its own and left nothing behind when it was done.
His stomach chose that moment to turn over on itself. He hadn’t eaten since before the ceremony, having been too wound up that morning, and there had been nothing waiting for him at home afterward except two men in his bedroom.
’That was food. Two hundred pounds of it, and I rotted every piece.’
He filed it away without much hope. It seemed unlikely that anything he killed would ever be worth eating.
He stared at the empty ground, then at the screen.
[EXP: 50 / 100]
[Soul Essence: 1]
Nathan started to smile and felt it pull at something torn in his lip.
’Fifty. Halfway. From one animal.’
He’d been on this ladder for less than a night and he was already halfway up the first rung.
Somewhere in the capital there were boys his age with tutors and practice yards and a Legendary class, and one of them was going to sleep tonight in a bed with a canopy over it.
Nathan sat in the dirt with a chewed arm and one Soul Essence and felt something close to joy.
It lasted about six seconds.
The snarl came from the east—not close, far enough that the sound had time to thin out crossing the distance—and it was answered almost immediately by another one further north, and then by something lower that he felt more than heard.
Nathan’s smile died.
He looked down at himself.
He was soaked in his own blood now, layered over the older stuff, running warm out of his forearm and his ribs and his back and dripping steadily off him into the leaves.
He’d been standing in one place bleeding for the last two minutes.
’They can smell me. They could smell me before I even started bleeding.’
Something crashed through undergrowth off to his left—not near, but not far either.
’The wolf was a newborn.’
That thought arrived with absolute clarity. It had been a baby, and it had nearly killed him twice, and he had only won because a rock rotted its shoulder off. If the next one was grown, if the next one was Warrior Realm—
He didn’t finish the thought.
Nathan grabbed the stone off the ground, shoved it into his belt, and ran.
He ran badly. His hip screamed where the wolf had thrown him and his ribs opened wider with every stride, and he had no idea where he was going, only that it was away.
Branches came out of the dark at face height; he took one across the cheek and kept going.
He went down once, hard, on a root he never saw, and was up again before he’d finished registering the fall.
Behind him something took up the chase and then lost interest, or found the patch of ground where the wolf had died and stopped to investigate it. He didn’t look back to find out which.
He ran until the sounds behind him were only the ordinary noises of a forest at night, and then he ran a while longer, and then his body simply refused.
Nathan stopped with both hands on his knees, hauling air, and made himself look up.
The tree in front of him was enormous, not the one he’d buried her under, but a different one, thicker through the trunk than his house was wide, with a crown that went up and up into the dark and low branches heavy enough to hold something much larger than him.
’Up. Nothing that runs on the ground climbs.’
He was fairly sure that wasn’t true. He climbed anyway.
It was the worst thing he had ever done with his body. His left arm barely worked; the forearm had gone hot and stiff, and every time he closed that hand around a branch something in it ground and sent white sparks up behind his eyes.
He climbed mostly with his right, hooking his elbow over limbs, dragging himself up with his legs, resting his forehead against the bark between pulls and breathing through his teeth.
Twice he nearly fell.
Halfway up he found a fork wide enough to sit in, and he sat in it for a long moment with his back against the trunk before he made himself keep going. Higher was better. Higher meant fewer things that could reach him.
He stopped at last where the branches thinned and the leaves opened up, on a limb broad enough to lie along, maybe sixty feet off the forest floor.
Nathan sagged against the trunk and stayed there until his heart stopped trying to leave his chest.
Then he started cleaning himself.
He stripped handfuls of leaves off the branches around him, big flat ones, still damp from the evening, and used them the way he’d have used a rag.
He wiped his face first; the leaves came away black. He did it again, and again, until they came away only dirty.
He worked down his neck, over the seam on his throat that shouldn’t have been there, and down his arms, scrubbing at the dried crust until it flaked off him in dark chips.
The forearm he saved for last. He couldn’t do much for it. The punctures were deep and ugly and they’d stopped bleeding freely, which he decided to take as good news.
He tore a strip off the bottom of his tunic, packed a wad of clean leaves over the worst of it, and wound the cloth around, pulling it tight with his teeth.
Then he sat back.
He was cold and half naked and sixty feet up a tree in a wilderness he couldn’t name, but he was clean—or close enough that nothing would smell him from a mile out.
The moon came through the gap in the leaves, very large and very white, lighting the whole canopy silver, and
Nathan tilted his head back against the bark and looked at it because there was nothing else to look at.
He had seen this moon a thousand times, from the yard behind the house, mostly, while he waited for the wash water to boil; from the roof when it was too hot to sleep inside and he’d climb out the window and lie on the warm tiles; from the lane, walking back late, kicking a stone ahead of him the whole way home.
She used to leave the shutter open for him.
That was the thing that came to him, sitting up there, not the killing, but the shutter.
She’d leave the one in the front room cracked so the light fell across the floor and he wouldn’t have to feel around for the table in the dark when he came in.
This morning he had walked up a hundred steps and stood in a temple.
This afternoon he had a mark and a name and a whole hall of people looking at him. Tonight he was in a tree.
He looked down at his own hands in the moonlight, split nails, bark rash, somebody else’s dried blood still under the thumbnail where the leaves hadn’t reached.
’I’m hiding in a tree so animals don’t eat me. Like a rat in a wall.’
The anger came up slow this time. It didn’t burn the way it had in the clearing; it settled in low and got comfortable, and Nathan let it.
’You’re asleep right now.’
He could see it, the clean room above the temple, the crimson eyes, the thin gold crown sitting on a table somewhere while the man who wore it lay under a real roof, warm, with guards at the door and no idea whatsoever that he had missed.
’You sat in that room and decided we were worth it. Both of us. For being certain. You never even said her name. You didn’t know it. You still don’t.’
Nathan’s fist closed on the branch.
’I want you up here. I want you in this tree, bleeding, with your arm chewed open, listening to things move around underneath you in the dark. And when you finally come down, I want you to find out that nobody’s looking for you either.’
The moon didn’t have an opinion. He sat with it a while.
Then, somewhere in the middle of all that, a different thought surfaced.
[Soul claimed. Sea of Souls: 1]
Nathan sat up straighter.
He’d read that line and half skipped it because the fifty EXP had been shouting louder. He pulled the screen back up, found it again, and read it properly.
Sea of Souls: 1.
’The wolf. I have the wolf.’
And then the rest of it came back to him, the description he’d read while sitting in the leaves next to his mother’s grave, the words he’d been in no state to think hard about at the time.
Marked souls may be raised to serve, or rendered down into Soul Essence.
Soul Essence may be spent to raise stats, to mend the host’s body, or to take for the host’s own use an ability belonging to one of the host’s undead.
Nathan went very still on that branch.
’Raised to serve. An ability belonging to one of my undead.’
He looked out at the black forest below him, at the moving dark where things were still hunting, and thought about a wolf that crossed nine paces in a stride and a half, that planted a paw and turned its whole body around it, that carried wind on its flanks and pulled the leaves up off the ground when it walked.
’It was faster than anything I’ve ever seen. And I couldn’t touch it, not once. It grazed me four times before I even had a weapon in my hand. That speed.’
His breath had gone shallow.
’I could take that.’
He didn’t know the cost. He didn’t know if one Soul Essence was a fortune or a copper coin.
He didn’t know whether a newborn wolf’s speed was worth having or whether he’d be better off saving whatever it was for something bigger.
But somewhere inside him, apparently, there was a wolf.
And he wanted to go and look at it.
Nathan straightened his back against the trunk and stared at the screen hanging in the dark in front of him, sixty feet above a forest floor, bleeding through a leaf bandage.
’Alright. So how do I get in?’