The vast stone chamber was cloaked in a dim darkness. It was stark, lacking in decoration or grandeur despite its size that spoke of the skill of its makers. It was a far cry from the temples dedicated to her lady’s boisterous son, who unlike her lady, revelled in festivity and excess. 

No, her lady desired no such tributes. Silence was her joy, and faith her currency. The temple had been made to reflect that love of hidden depths over needless ornamentation. 

Still, she knew well that it was an unnerving place to some even amongst her own people, looming and empty and cold. But she cared not. She, like all those that walked in her steps found comfort in such things. From the dirt and the dark had they come, and for all their growth and advancement under the light of day, the hidden, dank places of the world still beheld an undeniable comfort to them. 

It was a comfort that had long given her a sense of being and purpose. A reason to remain steady in her faith and prayers. And so, it was the jarring absence of that comfort that struck at her so deeply. 

As it had been for far too long. 

She stared at the pit of fine, nearly water-like sand that stood centrally in the chamber. Once, it had been a wonderful thing, so full of life and power. She remembered how she would beseech her lady for vision, and the sand would dance in reply, forming into shapes and figures that were both cryptic and not. 

Confusing though it may have been at times, answers they still were. 

She received no such thing now. 

For years, the sand had remained listless, simple sediment gathered into a pool beneath the earth and for years she had prayed for a sign from her lady. For hope to be shone onto the doom she knew was coming. 

For years she’d received nothing but silence. 

It’d been nearly enough to break her, but still, she’d endured. Despite her fears and pains and mounting sense of hopelessness, she’d still endured. It was all she could do for her people. 

She had no means of preparing for a formless doom. No means of defending her folk. 

She’d thought that this night would be no different than the hundreds that had come before, and end in that all too familiar taste of disappointment. She sighed as the hour grew late and her vigil came to an end. She rose, her age eliciting a creak of bone at the movement. 

She sighed. For all her power, age remained an enemy that only the truly talented could hope to defeat. 

She turned and started to stride away to tend to her duties. They were many now, and would only grow as her people did. It was both something to take pride in and to fear, for paperwork was the bane of even the most powerful mage. 

She smiled at the thought, and thusly nearly missed the small whisper of movement that she managed to catch from behind her. She froze, her heart in a lurch, before slowly, she turned towards the sand once more. 

And there, she saw life and movement. 

There, she saw a sign. 

She collapsed to her knees and wept openly then. Revelation had finally come. 

◆◆◆◆◆ 

Ash awoke to the sound of rustling leaves and a wetness on his arm. He groaned as he rose to a seated position. A dull headache pounded away at his brain and his body ached as if he’d run a thousand miles. Where was he even? Why was his room so dark? 

And why did it stink so damn much? The air stank like the inside of a garbage can, but with a distinctly herbal tinge to it. Ash swore in irritation and fumbled about blindly for his phone only to find leaves and dirt in its stead. For a moment, he was confounded, but that ended abruptly as soon as his sleep-addled haze left him and he finally recalled everything that had happened. 

His heart-beat quickened at once and he felt a spike of fear shoot through him like a bullet. 

Goblins. Monsters. Arrows chasing him through the grass. They’d hunted him, those monstrous impossible things. Almost killed him. He looked to his arm. He couldn’t quite make it out in the dark but he could feel a dull throbbing from where the arrow had bitten skin. 

He cautiously pressed a finger over the wound as softly as he could. He winced as pain shot up his arm but it was a muted thing. And besides, he felt something spread over the wound. It both felt and smelt vaguely medicinal. 

Was he in a hospital? Ash scowled at the foolish line of thought. 

‘What kind of hospital makes floors out of dirt and grass, moron?’ 

No, he was definitely still in the wild somewhere. Had those... goblins, captured him? He remembered one of them dying to... earth. Just earth. It had surged forwards like a dagger and skewered the thing open like a shish kabab. It had been insane and only the pain throbbing in his arm ensured that it hadn’t been a fantastical nightmare. 

And what next? What had happened after the thing had died? Nothing. He’d blacked out. Had the rest of them died the same as the first one, or had they fled? Or fought off whatever had attacked them? 

Something had found him, eventually. Ash felt his hands brush past cloth or fur of some sort. He flinched away in fear before he realized that the fur was on him. It was a tunic or skirt of some kind wrapped around his waist. He felt around and felt some of it over his feet as well. 

Someone had dressed him, it seemed, even if the material seemed crude and wild. 

It only left him with more questions ringing in his mind. 

Far too many questions. Ash sucked in a breath in a meagre attempt at seeking calm but found only more fear and panic in its stead. He grit his teeth. He needed to move. His thoughts from earlier came rushing back to him then. Find safety. Shelter. Call the police, though that last hope sounded awfully hollow suddenly. 

Still, he forced himself to move. Ash wearily ambled through the darkness as quietly as he could manage, hoping to find a wall to navigate. He stumbled into a few objects as he went, and every loud thud felt earned a wince from him as he waited to see if anyone responded to the noise. No one did, and so he would continue until he finally touched against a wall. It felt like packed dirt in his hands. Ash followed its curvature around the space, careful in his step to ensure that he didn’t make any more undue noise. 

Or step in anything dangerous. Or pointy. 

Eventually, the dirt ended and he felt a curtain of rough cloth in its stead that had made him jump before he’d realized that it was a leather strip of some kind. Ash pushed and it gave way to more of itself. It seemed less like a single curtain and more like a thick bundle. Ash pushed forth anyway, and relief touched his thoughts when he spied a sliver of light pierce through a gap between the waterfall of fabric. A second later and he emerged into dull light and the scent of the wilds. Packed dirt slanted upwards to a man-sized hole, above which laid a bush. Thin rays of light pierced through the bush where it was thinnest at its edges, and that told him that he was on the right path. 

Light meant freedom, he hoped. 

Ash cautiously poked the leaves to ensure that it wasn’t filled with thorns before he slowly stepped through. The rustle of the leaves sounded painfully loud in his ears and he hoped against hope that there was nobody or nothing nearby as he emerged out the other end. 

He was in a forest, he realized as he straightened up and eyed his surroundings. Trees loomed around him, massive things reminiscent of the giant sequoias he had seen on TV as they stretched up high like skyscrapers of wood and leaves before disappearing beyond the dense canopy above. 

The cry of birds and beasts could be heard faintly from every which way and the scent of the wilds at its most raw assaulted his nose. He saw no goblins, thankfully, though neither did he see anything else of note. Not a single other sign of civilization at all. 

And yet someone had dug out what he recognized was the burrow or hideaway-of-sorts that he’d been stowed away in. Someone had... saved... him? He eyed the vibrant green-yellow medicinal paste spread over his arm. Perhaps, but he still wasn’t sure. Either way, he really didn’t want to stick around to find out. 

But where would he go? He had no idea how to navigate a forest, and the likelihood of running into beasts seemed far higher here than in the savannah that he’d found himself in before. Or goblins. Ash wearily eyed the numerous bushes and tree branches around him. There seemed an ample number of positions from which he could be ambushed and the memory of arrows whistling by him as he ran for his life left a shiver crawling up his spine. 

He did not want to relive that experience. 

The very idea was enough to leave him weak in the knees. Ash grit his teeth, paralyzed by indecision as he mulled over his options. It seemed like an impossible choice. Leave and risk danger, or stay and risk danger? Fortunately, the matter became irrelevant when the snap of a twig broke through his fugue. 

Ash flinched as if he’d been struck across the face and swerved on the balls of his feet. Across from him at the other end of the small clearing was a woman. A very dirty woman. She was older given by the faint streaks of grey that he glimpsed within her otherwise raven-black, bushy locks and the faint wrinkles that marred her face, though she was still far from elderly. Or ugly. 

She was perhaps middle-aged at best. 

She wore a simple set of what looked-like leather armour that covered her chest and arms, though it left her lower mid-riff bare, revealing sculpted abs that he did his best to not stare at. 

Similar leather armour covered her legs and feet. Sections of metal had been carefully laid over the leather to shield the more vital areas, though it was only sparsely used.  

Ash’s nervous gaze trawled over her body before finally resting on her eyes and he felt a bead of sweat snake down his forehead. 

They were twin balls of clear icy blue that alone stood clean in the landscape that was her face, and they bored into him with an unrelenting focus. Ash nearly stumbled back from the intense attention and it took an effort of will to tear his gaze away from hers. 

That alone was enough to set off his nerves, but the heavy-set boar that she hefted above her other shoulder with what seemed like very little effort was an entirely other matter. 

‘How ridiculously strong is this lady?’ he questioned with no small amount of disbelief as he swallowed a thick wad of spit to parch his suddenly dry throat. 

“You’re awake, huh. Took you long enough. Been sleepin’ like a log all throughout the night and well into the morn’.” 

The woman’s voice was hoarse, as if from disuse, but that wasn’t what struck him speechless. 

It was her language. He would have charitably described it as the butchered and mangled corpse of English but still not. It had a similar kind of intonation and pattern but was nevertheless foreign enough that he shouldn’t have had a clue as to what she was saying. 

But he did. His mind interpreted her words as easily as if he were a native speaker himself. 

“W-who are you?” he questioned, and then froze. The words that had left his lips had not been English. It had been the woman’s whatever-language. Ash was stunned. 

‘What the fuck is going on?!’ he thought, his mind left in a jumble by the oddity. 

The woman was either oblivious to or uninterested by his confusion as she retorted. “Nah, that ain’t how we’re playing this game, kid. I saved your hide and patched you up, so you answer my questions first. Your answers come later, if I’m feelin’ generous.” 

Her tone made it obvious that it wasn’t quite a request, and he didn’t want to test the ‘or else’ he sensed that she’d left unsaid. 

Though his thoughts and emotions remained in disarray from the impossibility of his language proficiency, Ash managed to muster the energy to shakily nod in agreement nevertheless. 

“Good.” she said as she strode over to the bush that hid the burrow and disappeared inside before returning a scant few seconds later sans one boar corpse. 

“Question one. You a deserter, kid? Runnin’ from The Shield? Or a runaway from a village? Mhm, nah, there ain’t no villages near here. Maybe you’re a nutter instead? Explains why you were naked in the middle of Gods-damned nowhere.” 

“I... don’t know what the Shield is. And I’m not a runaway.” he answered cautiously. 

The woman barked with laughter, her rough gravelly voice echoing uncomfortably across the clearing. “Ain’t nobody that don’t know ‘bout The Shield ‘round these here parts, boy. You’re lyin’ and that makes me mad.” Her smile quickly faded to a frown, and she took an ominous step towards him. 

Ash clenched his fists and stood his ground. “I’m not lying!” he ground out. “I don’t know what this Shield thing is. I don’t know who you are, or where I am or how I got here! I don’t know how those things that had chased me could even possibly be real or how all of this even happened to begin with! I don’t know anything, and it fucking sucks, lady! I just want to go home!” 

The woman stopped; a thick eyebrow raised in genuine surprise as she gave him a good, thorough look. Ash saw a slight twinkle in her eyes before she huffed after a moment. “Yeah, okay. You’re not lying.” she remarked with a wave of her hand. She paused to wipe away a smidge of dirt from her fingers. “So, that’s some situation you got yourself mixed into. Not often you hear ‘bout someone gettin' dumped round these parts with no idea how they got there. Was it a kidnapping?” 

Ash staggered at the sudden and easy turn of conversation. Where before there had been the threat of violence in her voice, he now felt an easy and casual tone that wouldn’t have been out-of-place in an evening spent lounging with his friends. What the hell? 

“Uh, yeah. I think it might’ve been that. Only thing that makes sense.” he agreed with a weary nod. “Could you help me out by handing me a phone if you have one, uh, mam?” 

The woman shot him a strange look. “The name’s Myr, not mam, and I ain’t got a clue what a phone is. It some kind of tool or somethin’?” 

Ash balked. How could someone not know what a phone was? 

“You know, that thing you use to call people?” 

“Mhm, sounds like a magical artifact. I live in a hole in the ground, kid. I ain’t got nothin’ of that sort here.” 

Ash sputtered. Magical artifact? What was she on about? He opened his mouth to make his thoughts known when her expression grew severe. The woman’s hands shot up faster than he could even register and a slab of earth erupted by his feet that sent him tumbling off to the side. Ash landed in a heap, bruised and shocked but otherwise fine. He righted himself quickly enough to scramble away from the insane woman that could somehow churn the earth itself when he caught sight of what had caused her to act out. A massive lithe monstrosity with thick arms glistening with razor-sharp claws squirmed against the two pillars of earth that kept it pinned against the thick trunk of a tree. 

It bore a mane of brown fur with streaks of green splashed across its length. No, not streaks of green. He narrowed his eyes. Fungus. The thing had some kind of lichen growing on its fur that lent it a camouflaged pattern. 

Its face was a rictus of bestial hunger as its beady eyes fixated on Ash and then swivelled towards the woman, its maw open to reveal its tiny needle-like teeth. 

Ash paled at the sight of it. The thing had been nearly behind him! How had it approached so closely without him noticing a damn thing! It was nearly seven feet tall! Giants shouldn’t be sneaky. 

His blood curdled further as he eyed its blade-like nails and imagined the easy work it would have made of his fleshy body. 

“Hah! Sneaky bugger thought it could find an easy meal in my territory!” she remarked with a hearty laugh. “Odd though to see one this far from its territory. Must’ve been a runt driven away by some bigger beastie.” 

“W-what the fuck is that?” 

“Huh? This thing? Just a blade-sloth. You never seen one before?” 

“No.” And thank God for small mercies. 

“Well, can’t blame you. Real flighty fellas. Hard to find ‘em. Their claws and moss and such are real good for tradin’. Not much to be worryin’ about though, not for a real mage.” 

“Mage?” he questioned, taken aback. “Like... you?” 

“Yep.” the woman answered as she flicked a hand. A third pillar erupted from the ground and the blade-sloth soon shared the fate of the goblin from a night ago. Its head erupted in blood and gore as tonnes of stone smashed into it and Ash felt his stomach churn at the sight. He shakily turned away until he managed to settle his stomach. 

When he turned back, he found the woman stood a mere few steps away from him, a strong earthy scent drifting towards him from their proximity to each other. Ash almost flinched away then, but he didn’t. Because for all her strangeness, she had saved him twice by then. 

That had to mean something. 

The incomprehensibly strong woman who could move earth as if it were her own arms and legs. 

The mage, by her own admission. 

“Hey, you wanna stay over for a meal? Dinners’ on me. Thought it would be boar but sloth is on the menu today, apparently.” she said with a wry smile. Ash side-eyed the corpse of the beast slumping towards the earth and laughed shakily. “Sure.” 

She grinned and turned from him then to prepare her haul for eating. Ash watched her go and felt himself gripped by a chilling thought. 

He didn’t think he'd be finding a phone any time soon.