Chapter VI: Whiteout

It was a good thing that I’d spent all that time training with Miss Rook, because if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have made it past the second day. We hiked overland for hours each day, going up rocky switchbacks and circuitous paths, most of them no wider than two or three people standing side by side. There were stops, of course, but even then the going was rough.

Anna had the worst of it; the weight and the walking wore down her bad leg, to the point where she couldn’t stand to carry any loads by the morning of the first day. A bunch of us got together and divided her pack’s contents into eight parts, stuffing it into our own bags so that she could have an easier time.

It was eerie, traveling through the woods and the scrubland. Most people were too focused on continuing to move forwards to talk very much. A few of the military girls knew marching songs, but none of them were in the sections of the line near me, so I only got to hear them singing off in the distance. Every so often we’d stop or slow for seemingly no reason, and people would have to pass the news down from a hundred yards ahead that one of the pack animals had gotten scared, or Sir Margaret was busy receiving a report from the scout zeppelin. 

Fortunately, we weren’t the first large group of people to cross the Urcos mountains, so the path was somewhat planned out. Every day’s walk, about a dozen miles, there would be a large flat area where we could all set up tents and campfires. The food wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either, and I’d definitely had longer periods of worse diet during undergrad. 

The first few days climbing into the mountains were probably the worst. We had the most supplies to carry, with nothing having been broken or eaten yet, and my feet had to take the time to figure out how to walk long-distance. By the third or fourth day, I felt almost comfortable walking for hours each day, and the routine of setting up and unpacking our equipment every time we stopped to make camp was almost reflexive. Almost. Anna was much more helpful during that phase of the journey than her physicality would allow her to be during the march; her years of experience in Halflance’s household had given her quite the eye for management, delegating tasks to the members of our tent-group based on our own quirks. It became something of a competition to see which tent would be ready first, and we were generally ready ten minutes before anyone else, with our only real competitors being Miss Rook’s elite guards and Dr. Ironseed’s small group of veteran travellers. 

The terrain changed as well. We had started our journey in pine forests around Krassach, but those were soon replaced by hardy mountain shrubs, and not too long after that there was nothing but hardy mountain grasses and the occasional herb. Even still, there were long stretches of empty, lifeless open stone. The terrain changed too, from foothills that looked like mountains, to mountains that made the foothills look like anthills. The paths got narrower, and the camping places more cramped, as more and more of the landscape was taken up by towering mountain peaks or huge rocky cliffs. There were a couple of times when I’d hear commotions coming from somewhere up or down the line, only to hear fifteen minutes later that one of the pack animals had nearly fallen off a cliff face; on at least one occasion I had to act quickly to prevent Anna from doing the same thing. 

And of course, there were always more mountains off in the distance. They seemed to go on forever, impossibly tall and jagged, like the fangs of a long-severed jaw. Every day when we started off I grew worried that there wouldn’t be a space large enough for us all to stop at the end, and we’d be forced to make camp on the all-too-narrow mountainside paths. 

The pattern was broken on the morning of the sixth day, on a particularly treacherous campsite, where the ground was sloped just enough to make you worry. We were halfway through packing up our materials, Anna providing words of encouragement and advice while I stuffed prepared food and spare tent-stakes into my backpack, when a shout from outside the tent interrupted us all.

It was Sir Margaret, and standing next to her were two women I recognized: the pilots of the scout zeppelin. She waited a minute or two while the rest of the camp, or at least one person from each tent, trickled out onto the open stone to hear her. Then, with as much stoicism as you can have while you’re shouting at people, she explained the situation.

The scouts had seen a storm incoming, and a bad one. Bad enough that anyone caught outside in it would be at serious risk of death, and visibility would be damn near nothing at all. Normally the procedure would be to stay in place and hunker down until the storm passed, except for the fact that we didn’t have enough food to be delayed by a day. And the fact that the roughest portion of the trek was ahead of us, and the snowfall could turn it from “difficult” to “completely impossible”. So, then, the plan was to push on ahead, as quickly as possible, and basically force the storm to overshoot us by camping it out on the other side of the pass. The zeppelin, meanwhile, had enough speed and supplies to go around the storm, skipping it entirely.

When Sir Margaret and the zeppelin scouts finished their explanation, the whole camp went dead silent. We all sort of knew what this meant, and how difficult it was going to be, without having to say a thing. Some people, I think, just wanted to save their energy for the hike. 

We packed up as quickly as possible, and before long were right back to the road. Sir Margaret and her squad quickly fell to the back of the line; experienced soldiers all, they knew how to keep up the pace of a forced march, and were on hand to catch anyone who was about to fall behind. They had their work cut out for them. 

We had to walk with speed, with purpose, no time to relax or stop to eat or drink for more than a minute. The first hour or two was alright, the greater pace feeling like exercise and giving a hint of an adrenaline rush to power me and the others forward. It was after the third hour that everything started to absolutely suck. 

Exhaustion hit hard and hit quickly, worming its way into my muscles and joints, seeping into my guts and filling my mouth with salt. My training with Rook meant that I was saved from the worst soreness and any injuries, but that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t rather have been taking a nap instead of trudging up and over hills, helping people spur on the donkeys and beetle-monsters, and stopping to give quick words of encouragement to my tent-mates whenever they started to flag. As time went on, those problems grew worse. The path tended up and up, towards the highest mountain passes. The people and the animals around me became more tired, to the point where I had to spend nearly an hour supporting Anna under her shoulder just to give her leg a chance to recover. 

The weather steadily got worse as well. Aside from the biting cold, which was pretty much the same as always, a steady headwind started late in the morning and refused to let up no matter what. The air itself was trying to force us to go back. The highest point of our whole journey was about halfway through that day, a narrow path carved between two high mountain peaks, where your lungs couldn’t get a grip on the thin air. Just then, a steady trickle of snowflakes started to drift down from a clear sky. The dark clouds ahead gave us a good idea of how little time we had. 

The second half of the race against the blizzard was more of a mad dash. We were all worn ragged, gasping for breath and propping ourselves up on the cliff face. Going downhill meant that we had a bit more of a reserve of speed to draw on, but even then it tended to be an uncontrollable downhill sprint that more often than not ended with someone getting run into. There were at least two broken limbs, if not more, and some of the beasts of burden had to be repurposed into medical transports. It was a good thing that we had already used up a substantial chunk of the supplies we had started off with. Even still, I had to fill my pack up to the brim to give the beetle-thing behind me enough extra weight to hold Anna. 

The huge, heavy storm cloud remained directly ahead of us, slowly growing more and more prominent in the northern sky. The wind attacked us in gusts and spurts, and the snowfall became heavier and heavier, to the point where every surface was covered in a thin sheen of snow. Little whirls and devils of snow would pick up sometimes, spinning and swirling through the line, blowing our clothes around and blocking our vision. With all the wind and the altitude, the cold started to become a serious issue. Even through layers of woolen clothes, my fingers started to go numb sometimes, my cheeks freezing under the thick scarf, my small size suddenly becoming a serious disadvantage as cold sank through me with hardly any resistance. 

The last several miles were a complete mess of tired, staggering people zig-zagging our way out of the mountains. One of the animals had to be put down after breaking a leg on the increasingly slippery stone below us. The sun was finally blocked out by clouds, the sky darkening to grey. It was only then that the path flattened out, the mountains becoming just a tad bit shorter, the expedition slumping and shuffling into a wide plateau where we could make camp. 

It was the slowest we’d ever set up camp since the first day of the expedition. Despite the terror of the rapidly-worsening storm driving wind and snow into us, the exhaustion dragged on my hands and limbs as I moved, draining my already limited reserves of focus. At one point I nearly fell asleep all together, the exhaustion overpowering the cold and the urgency of the situation until Anna stopped by to slap me on the shoulder a couple of times. 

We did eventually get our tent set up, hurling in all the blankets and food and anything else we would need so that we could seal the tent flap behind us and not go out until the morning. I was the last one in, collapsing onto where I thought my assigned section of tent was and preparing to slip into unconsciousness.

“Okay, is that everyone?” Anna asked.

One of the other women, Pravina the animal handler, said, “I think that’s everyone.”

Anna frowned, looking around the tent. “One, two, three, four, five, six, and I make seven. Someone is missing.”

My heart immediately shot into overdrive. If someone was missing, that meant that she was most likely still out in the snow. The entire tent went so silent that I could hear the heavy wind blowing against it, the sheets of snow flowing down on top of our heads. She wouldn’t be able to last long in this snow. 

“Who is it?” asked Unity.

It took a second for me to realize who it was. She was the only one in the tent group with red hair. “It’s Grenadier Noble, the quiet one. She’s gone.”

Anna muttered something profane under her breath. Unity said essentially the same thing, but much louder. 

Pravina folded her arms. “Do you think she just ran off to join one of the other tents?”

“If she were to do something like that, she would have done it before today,” said Anna. “And not on the night of the storm.”

“So what are we going to do,” said Pravina, quietly.

I hadn’t really spoken much to Grenadier Noble, to the point that I'd never actually learned her first name. She was a soldier stuck in a tent group with a bunch of servants and whoever I was supposed to be, so mostly she had done her duties in the morning and the evening and drifted over to the soldiers in other parts of the line. That didn’t mean I was going to let her die. 

“I’ll go out and find her,” I said.

Everyone in the tent turned to look at me, with expressions varying from disbelief to pity to fear. Anna sighed. “Emma… you aren’t exactly toughest of us. That is a very poor idea.”

“Well, is anyone else going to do it?” I asked. No response. “Then I’m going out to find her.”

I adjusted my layers, pulling down my sleeves, tucking my nose under my scarf, pulling my hood as far over my head as I could. Unity tossed me something, a pair of snow goggles. 

“You’ll need them-them,” she said.

I nodded and put them on. Without another word I unbuttoned the flap of the tent and slipped out into the storm.

The wind hit first, screaming around me like a stampede of screeching falts, the whirling and whipping at my clothes in little spirals and haphazard gusts. Visibility was almost nothing; the wind whipped the several inches of snowfall on the ground into huge and thick clouds, thicker than the thickest fog I’d ever seen, a terrible streaky mess of nearly uniform white. It was like being stuck in a washing machine full of white towels set to full blast. And yet, somehow, the cold was worse. Much worse. With the windchill slapping me across the face every few seconds, the cold didn’t just feel like cold, it burned, like ice cubes pressed against my skin, and even all the layers of wool and fur I was wearing felt like they weren’t doing much of anything at all. 

The sudden shift, not entirely unlike being tossed into hell, was so strong that for a second I forgot why I’d even gone out there, and considered going back into the tent. I wouldn’t have it. Wrapping my coat tighter around me, I started my search.

Yelling “Noble!” over and over again wasn’t the most effective way of catching her attention, especially not over the omnipresent roar of the wind, but it was also the only way. I had no idea where she was, and trying to find her by sight would be even more pointless than by sound. So I made a fuss of it. 

A few times I passed by other tents or scattered objects, telling me that I was still within our camp. There was no sign of Grenadier Noble anywhere around. I was running out of time. 

Suddenly, the constant cacophony of wind around me was interrupted by a single voice. “Emma, what the hell are you doing?”

I stopped in my tracks. “Miss Rook?”

“Yes,” she said, annoyed. “Now tell me what the hell you’re doing outside in this storm.”

The wind receded slightly, causing the snow in the air to settle down from utterly blinding to merely obscuring. Turns out, I had been standing about ten feet in front of the entrance to Rook’s tent, which she hadn’t even had to fully open up to talk to me. 

“One of the women in my tent group went missing,” I said, suddenly feeling very tired. “Her name was Noble, Grenadier Noble.”

Rook pressed her lips together and nodded slightly. “You’re too kind for your own good, you know that? I think I heard someone passing this way a little while ago. She’s off that way.” Rook stuck her arm out of the tent and pointed out towards what I now saw was the edge of the camp.

“Thank you,” I said, turning to leave. The wind started picking up again.

“Don’t die out there,” said Rook. “You’re much too good a student to lose your life to something this pedestrian, trust me.”

I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me, and walked out into the snow. The wind seemed almost angry that I was so daring as to walk out of the camp, biting and gnawing at my extremities. I kept shouting Noble’s name, even as the feeling started to set in that my words were being devoured by the swirling maelstroms of snow around me.

The cold was getting worse, too. My fingers weren’t able to move as quickly; all of my skin felt eerily chill, like I was just starting to dry off from a cold shower. I moved in a zigzag, trying to search as much territory as possible before I would be forced to turn back. Even still, desperation started setting in, seeping in like the cold, driving me to move faster, scream until my throat was try and hoarse and cold, to push through the storm like it was a rope pulling me back. 

My foot caught on something, a buried rock or a clump of solid ice, and I pitched forwards into the snow. The cold got into my mouth, into my nose, and I swore repeatedly as I fought to get back on my feet. There was fresh blood on the snow in front of me. I checked my nose; it wasn’t mine, and there were more drops trailing away into the storm. 

Without even taking the time to become fully upright, I followed the trail at a jog. It was only forty, maybe fifty feet before I suddenly found myself at the foot of a huge, frozen boulder, jutting out of the snow like a castle rising from the hinterlands. 

I had to rest against the boulder to catch my breath. A distant howl, long and mournful, cut through the storm like a hot knife. That was probably bad. I climbed up the boulder, or at the very least got my legs up on it.

“Noble? Grenadier Noble?” I asked, not having the energy to raise my voice above normal speaking level.

“Farrier? What are you doing here?” The voice was slightly familiar, if reduced to a raspy whisper. 

“Rescuing you,” I hissed. “What happened?”

“Was going to visit someone in another tent. Got lost when the visibility went away. But that doesn’t matter, you have to get out of here and warn the others.”

“Warn the others about what?” I asked.

“Blankwolves,” said Noble, sounding increasingly out of breath. “A whole pack of them. They can probably smell us, and they’re definitely preparing for an ambush.”

I looked out into the snow towards where I thought Noble would be, with an expression of severe confusion. “The fuck is a blank—"

My question was answered rather quickly when something grabbed onto my leg and with irresistible force yanked me off of the boulder and into the air. I landed a few feet away, and through the thick snow could see something awful.

It was like a wolf, if wolves were the size of lions and had porcupine quills the exact color of an icicle. The blank wolf turned to me and opened a set of hungry jaws like a gigantic shark, and let out a loud bark. It was met by several other barks from nearby, hidden by the storm. Surrounded as I was, I did the only thing that made sense: I attacked. 

You see, I’m small, so the only real advantage I have in any given fight is my decent stamina and exceptional speed. Stamina isn’t worth jack if you get yourself torn in half, so that left me with speed. I launched forward with my legs, ducking aside of the huge jaws and latching onto the quills of the blankwolf’s back. The sharp tips pressed against me, trying to find a way through the fabric of my clothes and draw blood, but were held off. The blankwolf dashed in circles like a much smaller dog chasing its own tail, but I held on. 

I raked the tips of my fingers across the blankwolf’s face, again and again, until I hit something soft and wet. The blankwolf howled in pain, and I had just enough time to feel a rush of victory adrenaline before the blankwolf got smart and slammed me into the boulder. I heard something pop, which was probably not essential. 

The blankwolf whimpered and whined and ground its face against the snow in a desperate attempt to soothe the eye that I’d clawed out. For a second I thought I’d get some time to rest and plan ahead, a delusion which was nicely shattered when a second blankwolf emerged from the wall of snow. For a moment when I saw it I thought that I’d been hit on the head; its appearance seemed somehow indistinct, fuzzy and flickering like my eyes refused to focus properly when they were pointed at it. I glanced over at the other blankwolf, and realized that it looked the same.

All this thinking happened in less than a second, while the second blankwolf growled its most intimidating growl and stalked towards the edge of the rock. Just when I was debating my willingness to tear off my own hand for use as bait, something rigid and rather heavy clattered down the side of the boulder and off of my head.

“You can use it better than I can,” came Noble’s voice from somewhere behind me.

Normally I would have given her a sarcastic comeback for dropping a sword on my head, but in this case I was sort of fighting for my life. The blankwolf lunged forward, shark-jaws open, just as I jerked the saber from its leather scabbard. There was a flurry of movement as my reflexes took over, and by the time my conscious mind was able to process what was happening, the blankwolf was retreating backwards, eyes locked on me, a long red wound marking the side of its muzzle. I stood up, protecting my back from any possible attack by keeping it firmly pressed against the boulder, with one hand between my hip and the stone, and the other held out, a straight-bladed infantry saber pointing forward. For a second, the wind dropped, and the snow slowly flittered to the ground. Four blankwolves, huge and angry and with very sharp teeth, looked at me for a moment. Then they attacked.

Three of them charged at once, including the one with the bleeding eye. I leapt to the side, keeping my back against the wall and jabbing towards the nearest one with my sword. Two of them were suddenly out of range, but the third missed me by inches, just before the tip of the sword plunged into the soft flesh behind its jaw. It whimpered once and died, just pathetic enough to elicit a pang of guilt in my lower chest in the second before I had to jerk the sword out of the corpse to guard against its angry companions. 

The key was to make sure that they couldn’t all put pressure on me at once. Having my back to the wall helped somewhat, but even then it was a challenge keeping focus on all four at once, especially with the snow whirling around and all but blinding me. Whenever they got close enough to be seen, I’d lunge out, leaving them with a bleeding cut on the muzzle or paw. In exchange, they’d attack with huge leaping bites and sweeping strikes of their claws. They were strong, incredibly strong, what with each one being at least three times my weight of muscle. A few times I was able to deflect their strikes with a sweep of my sword, but that plan would only work until the muscles in my sword arm failed.

The fight was interrupted by more howling, this time piercing through the snowstorm from somewhere off in the distance. Fear sank into me with the thought that even more blankwolves were showing up, until I realized what direction the howls had come from. The blankwolves were attacking the camp, a suspicion confirmed seconds later with the sound of a solitary gunshot. The blankwolves around me howled back in response, perhaps using the blankwolf word for “bite-sized snack”. And that was all the opportunity I needed. 

I dashed forward, sacrificing back coverage for space, whipping around behind the back of the only blankwolf I could see through the snow. As I passed, I swept across its back with my blade, drawing a deep wound across its back. It growled and charged me, but the accumulated cuts and slashes from our long fight made it sluggish and weak. I feinted to one side, making it look like I was going to circle counterclockwise around it, only to double back just as its jaws snapped past me. With a soft thump, I slammed the pommel of my saber into its head, sending it to the ground. I could have finished it off there and then if it weren’t for the other two blankwolves bearing down on me. Dropping into a roll (which I very nearly hurt myself doing, having only practiced it a few times to look cool), I felt the open jaws of one of the wolves snag and tear on my clothes as it leapt over me. 

Suddenly, there was another sound; a sharp and guttural scream, coming from the direction of the boulder. I and the last two blankwolves sparred for a short while, cutting and snapping and lunging, until the wind settled for a moment. The blankwolves held back, puffs of mist emerging from their jaws, blood slowly dripping into the snow. One of the wolves and I noticed it at the same time. Grenadier Noble had slipped off the side of the boulder and collapsed into the snow. We both had the same idea, and broke into a sprint. 

Wolves, and by extension blankwolves, are fast. As hunters, they have to be; if they can’t outrun their prey, they can’t catch their prey, and if they can’t catch their prey, they starve. So they’ve evolved for speed, with streamlined bodies and legs designed for the dash, body mass that emphasizes lean muscle over the sinews and fat that provide bulk to the large herbivores they hunt. Blankwolves are larger, much larger, meaning that the square-cube law works against them, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t terrifyingly fast when they can put all of their effort into it. 

I was faster. Less weight means less energy spent having to plough through the piling snow, which slowed down the wolf just enough to matter. I didn’t even look at the beast, or anything besides the snow and my own feet, until I had arrived at where Noble fell, throwing myself in front of her body and putting my sword in a middle guard. The blankwolf arrived half a second later, jaws wide. With the last of my effort, I counter-lunged, throwing my arm into its jaws. The sharp tip of the saber pierced the soft bone of its palate and entered the brain. The blankwolf twitched once, no longer having the strength to close its mouth, then died. I left the sword embedded inside it and turned to Noble.

“Still alive?” I asked.

“Cold, very cold,” she said. “How’d you fight them? You can’t see them…”

Noble was bigger than me, and I wasn’t a weightlifter. This proved to be a problem. “Come on, you have to get up, we have to get you back to the camp,” I muttered in between grunts of exertion. 

Noble pushed against the ground, sounding like it was even more difficult for her to lift herself than it was for me. With both of us working together, she regained her footing. She had to use me like an heiress of weak constitution uses a couch, but she was moving. 

One step at a time we pushed through the storm, though Noble’s eyelashes were frozen and the heat from the battle was quickly dissipating. As long as we didn’t stop, we’d make it to the camp before either of us froze to death, or at least that’s what I told myself. 

What I hadn’t taken into account was that there was one blankwolf I hadn’t dealt with yet. I heard it about a second before it arrived, paws crunching through snow, and didn’t have any time to plan how I was going to defend myself while acting as a living crutch and with my sword still stuck in the cooling corpse of another blankwolf. So, in the end, I didn’t defend myself at all.

The blankwolf slammed into me hard enough to hurt, tossing me through the air and into the snow. Noble ended up a few feet away, ripped out of my hands, but the blankwolf focused on me. The blood dripping down from its gouged eye gave me all the information I needed to know about why it made that particular choice. 

I was on my back, the blankwolf pinning me down, its paws crushing my chest with hundreds of pounds of weight. I tried to roll it off, shove its paws aside, but it knew how to keep prey down, rolling and shifting to counter every move I made. The blankwolf licked its lips and bristled its quills, rearing back for a killing bite which could tear my head off in a single strike. 

Desperate and without any better ideas, I punched it right in the mouth. My sleeve was torn open by one of its teeth, sending a shock of cold down my arm, but there was no time to slow down. I fought with everything I had, clawing at its wounded eye, kicking it in the stomach, punching it in the throat, yanking at its ears, and generally making sure that this blankwolf had a very bad day.

The blankwolf seemed more pissed off than actually injured, dodging my desperate attacks as best as it could in between snapping at my face. My death was inches away. One good hit and the major arteries of my neck would be open, bleeding out in an instant. I knew that, and I was pretty sure that the blankwolf knew it too, and it had the upper hand. As long as I could keep causing it pain, it wouldn’t be able to drive down for the killing blow, but the cold and exhaustion was rapidly sapping my ability to do that. Even adrenaline could only take me so far, and I started to get the feeling that my heart bursting would kill me before the blankwolf did. 

I grabbed it by the throat and started to squeeze. It pushed down, jaws open, breath misting in great plumes. This was a battle of strength. A battle, of course, that I couldn’t win, this being 110 pounds of very tired definitely-not-a-girl versus 350 pounds of angry wild animal. The shiny fangs that spelled my death slipped closer and closer against my every effort, until I could see the individual serrations and smell the carrion on its breath.

Then the wind settled for just a moment. My senses were overwhelmed with a slam of air and a sound like a thunderclap against my ear, a spray of fine warm mist covering my face. The blankwolf fell over, landing on my arm, while at the same instant I turned to look for the source of the sound. 

Off in the distance, maybe sixty feet out, was a woman. She stood out against the snow in a full-body outfit of black and navy blue, with a ruff of fur around the neck and a full cloth mask covering her face. There was a rifle in her hand. There was just enough time for her to flick a two-fingered salute in my direction before the wind kicked up again and blocked her from view. 

I collapsed onto my back. I suppose, if I had wanted to, that I could have tried to shove the corpse of the blankwolf off of my arm. But I was so tired, and everything was starting to feel so warm and pleasant, I might as well have just drifted off to sleep. Laying back, it was like the snow was a soft blanket, beckoning me to sleep… forever…

A gunshot three feet away from me snapped me out of it. “Get up, Emma. You aren’t dying today,” said Lady Halflance. 

“Oh, yeah,” I mumbled. “This is what dying of hypothermia feels like, doesn’t it?”

There were others there besides Lady Halflance, though she was the one with the gun. She and one of the soldiers rolled the blankwolf off of my arm, then pulled me to my feet. The two of them working together were able to drag me towards the camp, my feet leaving little furrows in the snow. 

“Who killed the last one?” I mumbled.

The soldier holding up my left arm chuckled. “I think you did, Miss Emma. And you’re damn lucky for it.”

I shook my head, trying to banish the cold and exhaustion. “No no no no no… The woman in black, with her face covered, with the rifle, who was that?”

“You can’t just shoot a blankwolf like that, you know,” said the soldier.

I ignored that statement, assuming that I was either hallucinating or that she was. I twisted my neck around to look at Halflance, who looked back at me with utter confusion. “Halflance, did you find Grenadier Noble? Is she alright?”

“She’s going to be fine,” said Halflance, absentmindedly. “But… Emma, are you telling me that they aren’t invisible to you?”

“What? No! What?” That would explain why they looked so flicker-y, but it failed to explain basically anything else. 

“Why do you think they’re called blankwolves?” Halflance said. 

I tried to offer an explanation, I really did. My mouth even took the initiative to make a series of disjointed noises that I’m sure were supposed to mean something. Gathering my thoughts, I formed a perfect summation of the situation, complete with a logical explanation of my motives. 

“That’s it, I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to pass out now.”

SaffronDragon

Thank you all so much for reading the chapter, and I hope you all enjoyed it! Remember to favorite, leave comments, leave a rating or a review if you haven’t already, because those are the things that motivate me to keep writing more and keep writing well! If you want to support the author, read several chapters ahead in all of my stories, as well as gain access to a discord community where you can speak to me personally and read several exclusive short stories, subscribe to my Patreon at patreon.com/saffrondragon