Kaelid walked until the village was long out of sight before he let himself stop thinking about it.
The road south wasn't much of a road at all past the first hour — packed dirt gave way to a footpath, and the footpath thinned out until it was really just a direction more than a route, the Death Mountains a jagged grey line on the horizon that never seemed to get any closer no matter how long he walked toward it. He'd expected that, at least. The chief had warned him the first stretch was mostly open plains and scattered woodland, easy walking, before the terrain started climbing toward anything actually dangerous.
Easy walking. Right. His legs didn't feel like they agreed. He'd never actually walked this far in one stretch in his life — the bakery hadn't exactly demanded distance running.
He found a lake a little before dusk, the water calm and dark under a sky just starting to bruise purple at the edges, and decided that was as good a place as any to make his first camp. He pitched the tent clumsy and slow, first real time doing it without his father's hands nearby to fix his mistakes, and ate bread and chicken from home — the same food he'd shared with his family two nights ago, except it tasted like something else entirely now. Heavier. Like a door closing somewhere behind him.
I can't believe I'm actually doing this.
He banked the fire low, checked his sword was within reach twice, and lay back against his pack listening to a silence that had nothing familiar in it at all — no bakery ovens ticking as they cooled, no Lily moving around upstairs, nothing. Just wind through grass and, somewhere distant, something that might have been an animal or might have been nothing.
He fell asleep faster than he expected to, and dreamed of nothing at all.
***
He woke the next morning to birdsong and the ache of a body that hadn't slept on hard ground before, and told himself that was a normal kind of miserable to feel. It was almost enough to make him believe it.
He didn't get the chance to feel it for long.
He felt it before he saw it — something working its way toward the lake, patient and unhurried in a way nothing hungry should ever be. He grabbed his sword and daggers, threw on his leather gear with hands that weren't quite steady, and climbed the nearest tree, watching a shape pick its way through the brush a couple hundred meters off.
Please be something I can actually kill.
It wasn't, or not easily. As it closed the distance, the shape resolved into something with a feline head and a body armored in thick chitin — a crab, or something crab-shaped, standing a full two meters tall on legs tipped with pincers sharp enough to open him like a tin can. Ordinary-rank, probably, if the size was anything to go by. Didn't make it feel any less like it could kill him. The only soft part on the whole thing was its head.
Shit. Of course it's this.
He had two daggers and a sword and no time to think of anything smarter. The monster sniffed the air, hunting for his scent, and Kaelid threw first — a dagger meant for its eye that caught the side of its skull instead, doing nothing but making it angry.
Its gaze found his in the branches, and then it was already moving, barreling toward the tree with enough force to take the whole thing down and him with it. He put his second dagger into its eye a half-second before impact, and the tree still went — half-uprooted, tilting hard enough that he had no choice but to jump.
He hit the ground rolling, came up under the swing of a pincer he barely saw coming, and slashed wild at the joint of its foreleg. It came off clean. The monster shrieked, thrashing, and the fight after that stopped being a plan and started being pure survival instinct. It came at him again before the stump had even stopped spraying, faster than something that size had any right to be, and he threw himself under the next swing instead of meeting it, boots skidding in wet grass. Dodge, cut. It surged forward, snapping wild with the pincer still whole, and he ducked inside its reach and opened a gash along its flank that didn't slow it down nearly enough. Dodge, cut again, his arm already burning, his breath ragged and uneven, until one of those pincers finally caught him across the ribs, hard enough to steal the air clean out of him and send him stumbling half a step sideways. He didn't let himself go down. He drove forward through the pain instead, closing the last of the distance before it could wind up for another swing, and buried his sword up to the hilt in its throat.
It went still. Kaelid didn't, not for a long moment — just stood there gasping, one hand pressed hard against his side where blood was already soaking through his shirt.
Fuck. Fuck, okay. That's blood. That's a lot of blood.
He wrapped the wound as best he could with what was in the first aid kit, hands shaking hard enough that it took three tries to knot the bandage right, and sat with his back to the ruined tree until his breathing evened out.
So that's what a real fight feels like, he thought, staring at the dead thing that had nearly gutted him before he'd even made it a full day south of home. Great. Fantastic start.
It would be days before the ache in his ribs let him breathe without thinking about it.
***
He didn't move much the next day. Couldn't, really — every breath pulled at the wound in his side, and the idea of walking with a pack on felt like a joke he didn't have the energy to laugh at.
He spent the day near the lake instead, rationing what was left of the bread, refilling his waterskin, and re-wrapping the bandage twice as the first one soaked through faster than he'd have liked. The crabta's core sat in his bag, small and cold and worth something back in a city he hadn't reached yet. He turned it over in his hand more than once, like looking at it might make the last day feel like it had been worth it.
One down. However many thousand left to go.
He tried not to think too hard about that math.
By evening the ache had dulled enough that he could sit up without wincing, and he allowed himself something close to a fire — small, low, more for the light than the warmth — and ate what was left of the chicken before it went bad. Tomorrow he'd have to move again whether his ribs liked it or not. Sitting still cost him nothing but time, and time wasn't something he could actually afford to waste, not with the road to Avalon still mostly ahead of him.
He slept lighter than the night before, one hand near his sword the whole time.
***
Two days after the crabta, the ribs still ached, but walking was bearable now, more a dull complaint than a real problem, and Kaelid pushed south again at a slower pace than he would've liked.
He smelled the goblin before he saw it — something rank and unwashed carried on the wind — and dropped low into the treeline on instinct before his brain had even finished working out why.
It was alone. Small, hunched, digging through what looked like the remains of an old campsite a hundred meters off, muttering to itself in a language that wasn't quite language. Green-skinned, knife in one clawed hand, nothing about it that looked especially dangerous on its own.
I could probably take it.
He didn't move.
He wasn't sure why, exactly — some quiet, ugly instinct that had nothing to do with the goblin in front of him and everything to do with the ones he couldn't see. Goblins didn't travel alone if they could help it. He didn't know that as a fact, not really, just something that sat in his gut and refused to leave, the same way you didn't need someone to tell you not to put your hand near a stove twice.
Where there's one, there's probably a den. And I don't want to deal with a fucking den.
He waited it out, still and quiet in the brush, until the goblin finished its scavenging and wandered off deeper into the trees, and only then did he let himself breathe properly again.
Good instincts, or getting jumpy. Guess I'll find out which eventually.
He gave the area a wide berth after that, adding an extra hour onto his walk just to be sure he didn't cross paths with whatever else might be nearby, and didn't stop again until well past dark.
***
By the sixth day, Kaelid was starting to feel like he'd actually earned something. The crabta was dead. The wolves — well, he hadn't met the wolves yet, but the goblin hadn't gotten the drop on him, and that felt like it counted for something. His ribs barely bothered him anymore unless he twisted wrong. He was, he decided, getting the hang of this.
Maybe I'm just built for this. Some people are.
He was thinking exactly that, a little too pleased with himself, when a shape came out of the underbrush at his flank instead of head-on — something low and quick, boar-shaped but wrong in the joints, and he never even heard it move until it was already inside his guard.
He almost turned a half-second too late.
The tusk caught nothing but air where his chest had been a moment before — he threw himself sideways on pure luck, no thought behind it at all, and felt the wind of it pass close enough to catch his shirt. He hit the ground hard on his shoulder and rolled through it, coming up fast with his sword already swinging before his brain had caught up to what almost just happened.
That would've gone straight through me.
The realization hit somewhere underneath the adrenaline, cold and clarifying. He didn't have time to sit with it. The boar-thing was already turning for a second charge, and this time Kaelid didn't wait for it to close the distance — he stepped into it instead, low and mean, and put his sword through the joint where neck met shoulder as it barreled past. It went down thrashing and didn't get back up.
He stood there a second, chest heaving, staring at the tusks that had come within an inch of putting a hole clean through him.
Almost got yourself killed being cocky. Nice going.
But underneath the scare, something else was sitting there too — quieter, harder to name. He'd reacted. Actually reacted, not frozen, not panicked past the point of use, just moved and then finished the job clean. Two days ago he'd needed a tree, a lucky throw, and blind desperation to kill something smaller than this.
Okay. Maybe I am getting somewhere.
He let himself grin about it, just for a second, before reminding himself exactly how that kind of thinking had almost gotten a tusk through his ribs five minutes ago.
He was more careful for the rest of the day.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
***
The wolves found him the very next day, instead of the other way around, which should have told him something before it actually happened.
Two of them, rotting things, flesh sloughing visibly off bone even as they moved, hunting in a pair across open ground with a kind of wrong, jerking speed that didn't match anything alive. Kaelid had his bow off his shoulder before he'd fully processed what he was looking at — new enough with it that his first arrow went wide, but the second caught one high in the shoulder, and the third took the other in the flank as they closed.
Not fast enough. Not going to be fast enough.
He threw a knife as they came, burying into an eye socket, and kept the second in hand rather than risk losing both — a decision that saved him a moment later.
One went down clean under his longsword, already weakened enough that the killing blow took less effort than he expected.
The other one didn't.
It caught his forearm in its jaw and bore him straight to the ground, weight and momentum doing what the wound alone hadn't managed, teeth grinding through leather and skin in a way that turned his vision white at the edges. He got his other hand free somehow, the second knife still gripped tight in it, and drove it up through the base of its skull with everything he had left.
It went limp on top of him. He shoved it off and just lay there a moment, arm on fire, staring up at a grey sky that hadn't asked for any of this.
I felt good yesterday. I felt really good yesterday. Funny how fast that goes.
He patched himself up as best he could, hands clumsier than they'd been after the crabta, and looted what he could carry — cores, a few fangs worth selling, though he barely registered doing it. Somewhere underneath the pain sat a colder thought he didn't much like: that this was the second time in a week something had nearly finished him, and he was still barely a week into a journey most people didn't survive at all.
He didn't stop again until well after dark, sore and short-tempered and increasingly convinced his family might have had a point about all this.
***
He didn't dare light a fire that night — not with an arm shredded badly enough that he wasn't sure he could fight off anything drawn to the smell of blood, let alone the smell of smoke on top of it. He went to sleep on an empty stomach, wolf meat sitting untouched in his pack because chewing it felt like more effort than it was worth, and woke to find, at least, that nothing had found him in the dark.
I feel like complete monstershit.
He chewed on wolf meat that did almost nothing to fix it, jaw working slow and joyless. He packed up anyway, because there wasn't really another option — sitting still didn't heal an arm any faster, and Avalon wasn't going to walk any closer on its own.
The walking was worse than usual. His forearm throbbed with every swing of it, wrapped tight enough to slow the bleeding but nowhere near tight enough to stop the ache, and his ribs had started complaining again too, like they'd been waiting for an excuse. He didn't make good distance. He barely made any distance he was proud of.
This was supposed to get easier. Nobody said anything about it getting easier. Guess that's on me.
Somewhere in the slow, grinding hours of walking with nothing to fight and nothing to distract him from how much everything hurt, the thought crept in that he hadn't let himself have yet — quiet, uninvited, and harder to shake off than any monster so far.
Maybe they were right. Maybe I really am going to die out here before I even get the chance to be anything.
He didn't have an answer for that one. He just kept walking, because stopping to find one felt like giving something up he wasn't ready to lose yet.
***
Two days after the wolves, he stopped to rest against a tree a little past midday — old, thick-trunked, moss climbing halfway up the bark, the kind of tree that had clearly been standing since before the village his family lived in existed. He didn't think twice about it. Trees didn't require thinking twice about, as a general rule.
This one did.
He'd been leaning there maybe a minute, eyes half-closed, arm throbbing in that dull, familiar way it had settled into overnight, when the bark under his shoulder shifted.
Not settled. Not creaked the way old wood does. Shifted, deliberate and wrong, and by the time his brain caught up to what that meant he was already moving on instinct rather than thought, throwing himself away from the trunk a half-second before something that should have been a low branch came down where his skull had just been.
What—
The tree wasn't a tree. Or it was, mostly, except for the parts of it that had just torn themselves free of the trunk and reoriented toward him with a slow, grinding hostility that had nothing plant-like about it at all — bark-skinned limbs, roots peeling up out of the earth like fingers uncurling, something that might once have been a face set deep in the wood where the trunk split.
He didn't have time to be afraid of it. He barely had time to get his sword up before the next blow came, and this one he didn't fully dodge — caught it across the shoulder instead of the head, and the impact alone was enough to put him on the ground, breath gone, ears ringing.
Get up. Get up, get up—
He got up. Barely. A root lashed out at his legs and he cleared it on pure panic, rolling hard, sword still somehow in his hand, and put everything he had left into a cut across what looked the closest thing to a joint the creature had — the place where a limb met trunk. It didn't come off clean like the crabta's leg had. It had barely come off at all, but just enough to make the thing stagger, wood splintering with a sound like something screaming underground.
That was the opening. He drove forward toward the split where its face should have been, sword raised — and never got the swing off. A root whipped up from beneath him instead, coiling around his throat before he'd even registered it moving, and hauled him off his feet.
The world narrowed fast. Bark-rough fiber crushed in tight, his own hands scrabbling uselessly at it, sword arm pinned useless at his side as the thing lifted him clear off the ground and squeezed. Spots crawled in at the edges of his vision. Somewhere distant and getting further away, his lungs screamed for air that wasn't coming.
Fuck no. Not like this—
He got his sword arm free through nothing but blind, animal desperation, dragging it up against the crushing pressure at his neck, and drove the blade into the root itself rather than waiting for a cleaner shot he wasn't going to get. It didn't cut clean. It didn't need to — the grip spasmed, just enough, and he wrenched himself free and hit the ground gasping, vision swimming, no time to actually recover before the creature was already reorienting toward him again.
He didn't let it. Still choking down air, black spots still crowding his vision, he closed the distance instead of waiting for it to close first and drove his sword into the split where its face should have been — and felt roots already snaking up around his ankles before the blade was even halfway in, more of them uncurling from the earth to grab at his legs, his free arm, anything they could reach.
He didn't stop. Couldn't afford to. He threw his whole weight behind the hilt instead, driving deeper as a root wrenched his leg out from under him, another closing hard around his wrist, the ground itself seeming to hold him in place while the creature thrashed and tried to buck him off the blade entirely. He held on anyway, both hands locked white-knuckled around the hilt, sinking it the last few inches through sheer stubbornness after his legs had already gone out from under him — and felt the exact moment something inside it gave.
The roots went slack all at once. The whole thing toppled sideways with a crash that shook the ground under him, dragging him half down with it before the dead weight finally let go.
Kaelid didn't move for a long time after that. He couldn't, honestly — every breath dragged through a throat that felt crushed half-flat, on top of a shoulder already screaming from the first blow.
His shoulder was screaming, a deep, grinding pain that felt worse than the ribs and the arm combined, and when he finally forced himself to check it, the skin had already started purpling dark under torn fabric — not broken, he didn't think, but close enough that it hardly mattered right now. Every breath pulled at three separate injuries instead of two.
That was Ordinary-rank. That was supposed to be the easy tier. And it almost had me because I leaned against a fucking tree.
He sat with that for a while, back against the actual ground this time, nothing at his shoulder blades but open air, and didn't trust anything that looked remotely like scenery for the rest of the day.
***
He didn't get far the next morning. Couldn't, not really — his throat still ached raw every time he swallowed, his shoulder had gone a deep, ugly purple overnight, and the arm the wolf had chewed through two days ago was somehow still the least of his problems. He'd stopped counting how many separate places on his body hurt sometime around midday and just started walking instead, because counting wasn't fixing anything.
He found the river a few hours before dusk, and for a moment just stood at the bank staring at it like it might not be real.
Water. Actual clean water.
He half-fell more than knelt at the edge and washed the wound on his forearm as gently as he could manage, watching days-old blood lift away in thin red threads that the current carried off downstream. It was healing. Slowly. The bite marks had scabbed over ugly but solid, and underneath the grime his shoulder looked less like a fresh injury and more like the start of a very bad bruise, which — after everything else the past week had thrown at him — felt almost like good news.
He splashed water over his face and neck too, wincing as it found the raw skin where the root had nearly finished what the wolf started, and let himself sit there a long moment with his back against a rock, doing nothing at all.
Thank the gods. Not that I believe in any.
He refilled both waterskins, checked what little food he had left — not much, and none of it good — and allowed himself, for the first time in three days, something that wasn't quite fear sitting behind his ribs.
He was still alive. Bruised down to the bone in more places than he wanted to count, but alive, and the river meant he was getting somewhere real instead of just further into nowhere.
He made camp early that night, right at the bank, and slept harder than he had since leaving home.
***
For the first time since leaving the village, nothing tried to kill him.
He noticed it almost immediately — an odd, hollowed-out kind of quiet to the day, like his body had braced for a fight out of pure habit and then didn't know what to do with itself when one never came. He kept the pace slow, following the river south for a while before it bent away from his path, and spent a good portion of the afternoon actually hunting instead of just surviving whatever found him first — a pair of rabbits, easy and almost embarrassingly simple after everything else this week, that at least meant a real meal instead of wolf meat gone tough and flavorless.
Huh. Almost forgot hunting could be this boring.
He ate well that night for the first time since leaving home, the rabbit cooked properly over a real fire he didn't have to second-guess, and took stock of himself while it cooked. His shoulder still ached but had faded from purple to a duller yellow-green. The bite on his forearm had scabbed over solid enough that he trusted it not to reopen if he had to fight again. Even his ribs, the oldest injury of the bunch, barely complained anymore unless he twisted hard.
Guess I'm actually healing. Didn't think that'd take this long.
He thought about the past week without really meaning to — the crabta, the goblin he'd let walk away, the boar-thing's tusk missing his chest by an inch, the wolves, the tree that had nearly strangled him to death for the crime of leaning against it. Six days. Four things that had genuinely tried to kill him, one that he'd avoided entirely by not being stupid about it.
If this is what "easy" looks like this close to a village, I really don't want to know what's actually waiting deeper in those mountains.
He didn't have an answer for that either. He banked the fire, checked his sword was within reach out of habit rather than fear this time, and slept better than he had any night since leaving home.
***
The land started changing before he expected it to — the open plains giving way to gentler hills, then to something that almost looked like farmland at the edges, small clusters of cultivated fields he hadn't seen since leaving his own village. It meant people. It meant he was close.
I'm almost there.
He picked up his pace without really deciding to, some old, tired part of him suddenly impatient after eleven days of nothing but forest and monsters and his own company. The road reappeared underfoot sometime past midday — real road this time, packed and maintained, wagon ruts worn deep enough to mean regular traffic — and for the first time since leaving home he passed actual people. A farmer driving a cart gave him a long, appraising look at the state of him — torn leather, healing bruises, the general air of someone who'd clearly walked out of somewhere dangerous — but didn't stop to ask, just nodded once and kept moving.
Guess I look about as rough as I feel.
He kept walking, following the road as the hills flattened out into open country again, and it was late afternoon, the light gone long and gold, when he crested a rise and saw it.
Avalon.
Even from this distance the walls were enormous — white stone stretching further than he could track in either direction, layered thick with generations of warding rather than ever rebuilt outright, high enough that whatever lay behind them was mostly guesswork from here, though he could just make out towers and rooftops crowding close against the inside of the wall like the city had long since outgrown whatever space it had originally been given. It looked less like a settlement and more like something built to survive a siege that never quite ended.
He stood there a long moment just looking at it, pack heavy on his shoulders, every ache from the past eleven days sitting quiet and forgotten for exactly as long as it took to actually take the sight in.
I made it. I actually made it.
The gates were still a few hours' walk off, close enough to reach before full dark if he kept moving, and for once that felt less like an obligation and more like something worth hurrying toward.
He didn't stop again until he reached them — a lone kid at the base of walls built to keep out things far worse than anything he'd fought this past week, eleven days and four near-deaths removed from a village that had never once believed he'd make it this far.
He had no idea yet how much further there still was to go.