The first day of the march was, more than anything, a recovery. A decompression, even. It had been barely forty-eight hours since I saw Ironseed’s corpse, and less than sixty since my second fight against the Musician. Everything between that moment and my leaving Zrimash had been a continuous, unending blur of stress and fear, compressing time into nothing but one action after another. That morning, getting up with the cold wind whipping at my face and being forced almost immediately to get up and start walking, was the first time in a very long time I’d been allowed to relax. 

And, despite everything, it was fairly relaxing. The cold wind dried the sweat from my body quickly, and gave an excuse to wrap myself up in a nice thick coat that was about five sizes too big. When it hit me that there wasn’t actually a party of ghouls hiding behind every patch of grass, that anxiety faded quickly into the background, leaving me to focus on the little things. Moving, for instance: as long as the journey continued, I would never lack for movement, and the steady beat of one foot in front of the other more than sated my constant need for movement. And when I didn’t have to constantly bounce around searching for stimulation, I could enjoy the scenery.

There was quite a bit of scenery to enjoy. The Urcos plateau had a sort of… quiet, empty beauty to it. It wasn’t like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or any of the other places that you would sort of associate with The Beauty of Nature, because there was nothing grandiose or exaggerated about it. It was more like a still life, a Bob Ross painting without very many trees (though there were a few, here and there). The sky formed an impossibly sharp line with the grass, the horizon dividing the world in half like a cut. The grass was a hundred different shades of green and brown and yellow all mixed together, shimmering constantly in the gusty wind. Above the grass, the distant outline of mountains, a huge wall of stone and snow that you could only just see through the haze, the huge monuments overlooking the little things going on down below. 

But no matter how much I wished that I could, there’s simply no way to make an unmedicated ADHD brain go completely blank for very long, so I still found myself thinking every so often. Those thoughts were scattered, to say the least. I thought about the Blackbird and the Musician, both mysteriously not present during the attack. I thought about the stonewose or ghouls or whatever they were called, how oddly human they were for a people who ate human flesh. My mind drifted far afield, imagining the lives of the Durkahns who would be born on Urcos and never leave it, and then condensed into the boundaries of myself, thinking about the way my body fit in those blood-soaked clothes. Which, for the record, I did very well. I was kinda pretty, which was kind of weird, but then again everything was weird. Everything was weird. That was a thought that I kept circling back to: the question of what the hell I was doing here and why. And along with that, the attendant questions about which of my two lives was a hallucination, why I knew more languages now than I had before, and so on and so on. Those questions, the existential ones, were the hardest ones to make go away. 

But nothing actually came from all the thinking I did, and I set up camp and fell asleep near a copse of trees with the same number of unanswered questions I’d woken up with that morning. At least I wasn’t worried as much about them. I didn’t even have any nightmares that night, or any dreams at all. 

It was late morning on the second day of travel that the trouble started. Up until that point we’d been following the main road, which for Urcos meant that it was a road wide enough for two wagons to pass each other without either one having to go too far into the grass. It was mostly flat, almost totally clear of grass, and had a minimum of switchbacks or undulations to make the trip from Zrimash to Yazthaan any longer or more difficult. 

It was also, as we quickly learned, being guarded. It’s a lucky thing that Sarnai had very good vision, because otherwise we might not have noticed until it was too late. Even as it was, it was a very close call. We were barely outside of pistol range, and well within rifle range, when she hissed at us all to stop, then pointed out the figures sitting in the grass about a hundred feet away. All of us dropped into a crouch and silently became more and more worried as we noticed more and more of them. They outnumbered us at least six to one, probably more, and even with Rook and me on our side, victory was far from certain there. 

For a tense minute, we huddled close and worked out a plan. The plan was simple: we would veer north, off of the trail, and go around them. It was workable. We slipped into the grass, now moving slowly, hunched over to keep our profiles down. 

The ambush came about two hours later. We were past the group on the trail by that point, far enough into the depths of the grassland that you couldn’t see the trail anymore unless you really squinted. All talk had ceased. We didn’t know how far our voices would carry, after all. I had forgotten all about the natural beauty of the environment again, the thought replaced with pure anxiety.

The problem was that the anxiety turned inward, and I started paying more attention to my own fear than to the surroundings. The first warning, then, was the sudden rustling of grass, followed a moment later by the sound of all my traveling companions hitting the dirt, and a moment after that by the crack-crack-crack of machine rifle fire. I dropped like lead bricks had materialized on my shoulders, cursing my lack of military reflexes, and also the bullet that had passed through my clavicle. 

Only a single bullet wound was old hat at this point. A single wound passage was easy to close, and my hand could stanch the blood flow enough that it all got pulled, magnetically, back into the wound before my shirt could get any wetter. I drew my saber on the ground, wishing that I had a revolver. All around me, the grass had burst into motion, as both sides maneuvered through the cover of the grass, looking for advantages over the other side.

The right thing to do, the thing I needed to do, was to make use of my power and absolutely go for it. Get into a few sword duels, overwhelm the stonewose, give my friends a leg-up over the opposition. But… I didn’t want to. Even if I did want to, I’m not sure if I could have. I’d had my fill of blood and death, been glutted with it, drowned in blood and gore. Just like him. I didn’t want to be responsible for any more killing. 

Fortunately, I had an easy out; as long as I stayed on the ground, sword in my hand, face to the sky, nobody would attack me. In the waist-high grass, they wouldn’t even know I was there. I could pretend not to hear the hammering of gunfire and the shouts of pain and rage around me, and just… zone out for a bit.

That lasted until one of the stonewose, seeking to flank my friends, stumbled right over me. She was a small one, only a head taller than me, though with the same milk-pale skin and reddish eyes. Her outfit, Cassandran green, was stained with dirt, and her cap had a bullet hole going through it. Clutched in her hands was, instead of the machine rifles that most of the others had been issued, a standard-issue Blueroser bolt-action. 

There was a terrifying moment of stasis, where neither one of us knew what to do about the unexpected element. Would we fight, putting ourselves at risk? Ignore the other, and put our fate in their hands? That second was pulled out like taffy, adrenaline spreading it into a yawning gulf of time. Eventually, I made the first move. 

“Do you have a name?” I said, in Rochathan. They must speak Rochathan, I reasoned, in order to take orders from the reikverratr.

The stonewose hesitated. I could see her rifle move just an inch, in the direction of pointing it at me. She didn’t fire. “Chejthein,” she said. “Though people started calling me Draftchejthein. Don’t know why.”

I nodded, still looking up at her from the ground. “Why are you doing this?”

“It’s what I was meant to do,” her voice was quiet and raspy, and her tone was more frightened than anything else. “The tribe fights, and I fight with the tribe.”

“Would you do anything, just because it was what the tribe was doing?”

Cheythein shrugged. “The captain says we should fight for the giantess, and the captain’s a smart woman. It’s not like I haven’t spent my whole life fighting the well ones. At least now I have better guns.”

The well ones… I wasn’t sure whether that meant durkahns or humans or both, but she had pretty clearly defined “not stonewose” as synonymous with “healthy.” That wasn’t good, on multiple levels.

“I guess that makes sense,” I said. 

Chejthein suddenly raised her rifle, pointing it square at the center of my chest. “Not supposed to leave any well ones alive,” she said. “If we leave any alive, the blockade won’t work. Fear not; I will bless your butchered bones, and the afterlife will welcome you for your gift of food.”

My mind suddenly flashed back to the outpost that had been destroyed by stonewose, quite possibly the same tribe. The bones of the killed had been laid out and surrounded by marks in the dirt and decorated with a single brilliant blue stone. 

“Do you know who I am?” I said, affecting a cool-guy snarl.

She shook her head. 

I went out on a limb, based on the way the reikverratr had acted. If I was wrong, I’d get a bullet in the chest. “I’m the Alraune. You know what that means about your rifle, don’t you?”

Chejthein looked like she’d just taken a punch to the gut, nearly dropping the rifle entirely from sheer shock. “You…?”

“Me,” I said, nodding. “Now get the hell out of here.”

For a moment she was too frozen to move, staring down at me on the ground. Then she turned and ran, sprinting off into the grass without so much as a glance back. She would, at the very least, live to fight another day. And I wouldn’t have any extra deaths on my conscience, which was nice.

Distantly, at about that time, I became aware that the fight was over. No more gunshots rang out, and there were only a few quiet moans of pain to signify winners and losers. Feeling vaguely guilty, I stood up. The others were all in one cluster, which I jogged over to, past the bodies of a few fallen stonewose. I stopped short when I saw what they were all clustered around. Sir Margaret was wounded. 

“What happened?” I said, panic making my voice shrill. 

“One of them had a knife,” Sarnai said. “The wound’s shallow, but she’s bleeding. A lot.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Apply pressure while I go look through our bags. I think I saw some proper bandages in there.”

I nodded, immediately fitting myself between Rook and Sarnai at Sir Margaret’s side. The wound was like she’d described: long and broad, but not particularly deep. There was blood everywhere. Sarnai and I coordinated, carefully ensuring that my hands pressed down no more than a moment after hers shifted away, never letting up the pressure. 

“Emma? I’ll be damned, you’re still here after all. Where were you? I saw you go down during the fight and then—” Sir Margaret’s words were cut off as she groaned in pain.

“I was… taking cover,” I said. “Hiding. Didn’t want to get in the way or have another breakdown or anything like that.”

Sir Margaret nodded, wincing, just as Sarnai returned. “Lucky,” she said. “Your thoroughness with our packing may have just saved you. Emma, you can take the pressure off, it shouldn’t take long.”

I did so, and Sarnai started wrapping the bandages tightly around Sir Margaret’s stomach.

“Hmm. Interesting. It looked worse at first. I think she’ll be up and moving in a few minutes.”

“I really do not feel like I will be able to go anywhere for a long while, but I shall choose to be optimistic and trust your judgement, Myrna.”

“Myrna??” I said.

Rook only sighed. I got the feeling that if I ever actually used her first name, I would regret it. “You’ll need to be moving soon, trust me,” she said, ignoring me. “One of the stonewose escaped, which means they’ll be coming after us sooner rather than later.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She mentioned something about a blockade? I think that means they’re trying to prevent us from doing exactly what we’re doing.”

Rook glared at me. “You talked to one of them?”

“The one that ran away, yeah. I was the one who scared her off.”

She scowled, making a groan of disappointed. “I should have known. Emma, damn you, I know you aren’t a soldier, but you have to understand… by letting that stonewose go, you may have put all of our lives in danger.”

My chest went cold. I’d made a mistake, but at the same time, there wasn’t anything else I could have done. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t kill her.”

“I know,” she said. “But there were alternatives. Letting her go to inform the others was not one of them.”

I shook my head. “No, I just… I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of it, enough fighting, enough… all of this, I can’t do it any more!”

Sir Margaret, the bandaging complete, sat up slightly, leaning on her backpack. “Emma, I know that you aren’t used to this level of violence, but you have to understand that our enemy does not feel the same way. They will kill all of us if it’s what suits them.”

“There is pacifism, and then there’s poor decisions,” Sarnai said. “If you had at least detained her, we could have… come to an agreement, or kept her as our captive.”

“But doing that would have required I fight… and I don’t know if I can fight anymore, either.”

Sir Margaret nodded. “I understand the feeling. We can talk about it more later, once we’re out of danger.”

“And when the hell do you plan on being out of danger?” Rook said. “The grassland around us is swarming with ghoul patrols, and now they all know we’re here. Chances are that there are more ahead of us; we can’t outrun them, and we definitely cannot fight our way out, trust me.”

The group fell silent, Sir Margaret leaning back and suppressing what I could only imagine was some pretty intense pain, Rook crouching down and looking angry at the world while Sarnai scratched her chin in deep contemplation. I was feeling a lot. Guilt for being the one to put us in this mess. The cold sensation of trauma rising over my head in a wave. Fear for the others, who didn’t have the benefit of healing right through bullet wounds. 

“I think there’s another way,” Sarnai said, looking off to the horizon. “The mountains. I know the accursed don’t go there, and I remember there being another trail to Yazthaan on the far side.”

Rook and I followed her gaze off into the distance. The mountains were still where they’d always been, tall and snowcapped, with sharp peaks. “You really think they won’t follow us?”

“I think they’d be mad to try.”

“And what exactly does that say about the people who are deciding to go up there anyway?”

Sarnai shrugged. “We can move quickly, more quickly than they can, I think. If we’re lucky, and we stay in the valleys, and move quickly, we could cross the mountains in a day, two at most. That ridge is relatively thin compared to its length, while still making for quite the barrier.”

“It’ll be dangerous no matter what,” Rook muttered. “Cold and rare enough on the plateau bottom, the extra few thousand feet could be deadly.”

“Myrna,” Sir Margaret said with a hint of admonishment, “I’m sorry to have to say this, but everything we’re doing out here is going to be dangerous, and they aren’t going to stop being dangerous until the battle is won, or we’re all dead. Cold and thin air can kill, sure, but getting shot in the chest and eaten by stonewose will kill you just as surely if not more so. I say we make a run for the mountains, and fight as little as possible.”

“Obviously I’m going to vote for the option that doesn’t involve any more killing. We go for the mountains.”

Sarnai looked into Rook’s eyes, like it was a warning. “That’s three to one. Would you like to make any more disagreement?”

Rook shook her head. “If we spend any longer debating, the ghouls will find us before we’re done, trust me. To the mountains.”

SaffronDragon

This chapter and the next one were originally intended to be one long chapter, until the events got away from me and I realized that splitting them up would be better. If you want to go directly into what was originally the second part and you don't want to wait two weeks for the next release, you can click the link below and join my Patreon for only $3 a month. I also have a patron-exclusive discord server and several exclusive short stories there. Patreon is my only source of income right now, so any support you can give is so incredibly appreciated. Otherwise, I'll see you in two weeks for Chapter XXX: The Cold Shoulder.