Vedek

“What was that about?” Frost whispered to Cole.

“Kurtzkith is a fiend sworn to usurp all realms, but he antagonizes the Goddess of Death most of all. Rerume...he acted rashly.” Cole’s tone was uncertain. He could guess at the reason for Rerume’s actions, but the justification sounded hollow.

Vedek had to step forward to end their speculation. “Rerume suffered greatly from Kurtzkith’s minions. It is his entire reason for being what he is now.”

Frost and Cole looked to Vedek, then to Rerume.

“He has my sympathy if that’s true, but if he had killed that child I would’ve turned my own weapon on him.” Like his words, Frost’s tone was evenly split between forgiveness and contempt.

Vedek said nothing to that. He felt there was nothing he could say to that. He had to put Rerume’s behavior to the back of his mind. There was still the interior of the Outpost to take. He walked behind the others so that he could assess their wounds. Azeroth was bleeding heavily, but his orcish blood was already clotting the wound. Frost only had a cut along his brow, how he sustained that wound Vedek did not see. Rerume was not noticeably injured, which kept him at his position as their best fighter. Cole and Vedek were unblemished, but that was entirely because they stayed away from the melee.

The group assembled in front of the unlatched doors. Rerume put himself close to Vedek and spoke in tones only an elden fae could hear. “I would thank you if in the future you did not presume to know what my oath is for...”

Vedek made no reaction. He nocked an arrow to prepare for whatever was waiting on the other side of the door.

Azeroth and Frost each took a door and pushed them inward. When the gap between the doors was a meter wide a wooden bolt fired from the interior and embedded on the door’s edge. Vedek’s group scattered from the doors in time to miss the two bolts that fired after. Now they flanked the entrance with no view inside. Frost attempted to speak, but Vedek held up a hand to request silence. He turned his long ears towards the entrance and listened closely. He heard mechanical clicking, a groan of wood being bent, and three sets of feet shuffling to reposition themselves.

“Coatl Crossbows. Three of them.” Vedek announced to the others.

“Can you out maneuver them?” Rerume asked.

Vedek rubbed his bow with his thumb. “Potentially. Though I don’t know their positions, and they are ready to fire again. If I step into view they will hit me first.”

“We bait their attacks then.” Cole said. The boy’s eyes lit up with an idea. He took off his hat and set it on the tip of his javelin.

“I saw this in a stage play once.”

Cole slowly poked his hat into the the gap between the doors. Two sequential cracks from the interior produced two bolts that fired past Cole’s thin javelin. Cole quickly retracted his arm.

“That was only two.” Cole apologized.

Vedek gritted his teeth. He could hear the two spent crossbows reloading. They would not fall for that trick again. Should he risk being shot by the remainder if it meant knowing their positions and possibly firing an arrow of his own?

Rerume acted before Vedek did. “Mother, I beg your blessing.”

A vulture’s hiss sounded in the distance. Without hesitation, Rerume stepped fully into view of the attackers. The third crossbow fired. The bolt impacted Rerume just below his collarbone. Vedek had to act quickly. He stepped behind Rerume and danced his eyes across the room. Two of the guards were crouched behind a stack of crates while the third, the one who just fired, stood exposed adjacent to a corner on the right side. Vedek fired an arrow at the exposed guard, hitting him in much the same place he had struck Rerume. The guard stumbled back behind his corner. The other two guards were nearing a complete reload, but this development caused them to fumble. Vedek’s limbs moved on instinct and he felled them with two rapid arrows.

Rerume ripped the bolt from his chest before his blessing expired. The wound it would have left closed. Azeroth rushed past the duo to reach the two guards by the crates. They were not dead and struggling to finish reloading their crossbows. Azeroth’s fists were as fast as Vedek’s arrows and hard as hammers. A strike to the head forced each into unconsciousness.

The remainder of the group cautiously crossed the threshold of the room. Vedek kept his eyes on the corner where the third guard had collapsed, but he saw no motion there. He wondered how Longstep would’ve appraised his quick draw in that moment. At least the boy Cole whistled in approval.

Frost sniffed the air. “Something in here smells like me.”

“Another amarok?” Cole frowned.

“No, not a person. An object. Something that was mine.”

Frost sniffed harder. He sprinted to one of the crates, bringing his nose close enough to catch splinters on the tip of it. Using his cleaver, he popped the lid off and submerged his hands in the contents. Jewelry and other baubles were cast aside like worthless dirt as Frost dug. Pins and hooks from broaches and earings nicked his hands, but he was numbed by single-mindedness. He finally removed a wooden talisman tied with amber twine and painted with a sea green spiral. Frost rubbed his fingers across the rough surface, then held it close to his nose.

“You smelled that little thing?” Cole was beside Frost, wishing to get a better view of the treasure.

“We of the Amarok have scents we never forget. Scents we could track in a blizzard. The scent of family is one of those.” Frost held the talisman high to the light so that the others could see it proper. It did not look special, but the way Frost regarded it made it seem priceless.

“This was taken from the trees in the Valley of Elders. The place in Fimbulvinter where the Amarok were first molded from tree-bark and snow. My ancestors made it and each generation since we left the Valley had held it in turn.”

“It’s a symbol of home” Vedek whispered. He supposed he was after the same thing.

“I thought you didn’t put value on physical possessions?” Cole asked with a sly grin.

“I said that there was little reason to die for them, not that they had no value.” Frost slipped the talisman around his neck.

Seeing Frost’s pleasure from being reunited with what had been lost made the others keen to dig through the crates for signs of their own possessions. Vedek had to restrain himself, instead watching from a distance. He worried about how to explain himself should his hands move too quick to snatch something meant for Fae royalty. He orbited the group like a close star, hoping to catch a glimpse of green silk or gold embroidery.

Cole was the next to find something. He unfolded a stack of clothes exclaiming that they were his traveling clothes. This was not as sentimental a product as Frost’s talisman. Cole even admitted that most of them were bought cheap expressly for this trip. “I needed something that breathed a little more. I was honestly expecting Athshin to be hotter.”

“You came at the start of our autumn: Season of Cool Winds. In three months it will be our winter, the Season of Rains.” Rerume explained.

“It’s still nice to have them back. Means I can spend my coin elsewhere. Just wish I could also find—”

The boy dove over Azeroth to grab an ochre colored satchel that had just been tossed aside. “My pack! My aunt made this when I first joined the academy.”

“That be a human aunt or elven?” Azeroth asked, stepping aside to reclaim the personal space Cole had breached.

“Elven. My mom’s youngest sister. She was a ranger for the town of Hollowing. This satchel is made from the second skin of a hodag.”

“A what?” Rerume sneered as if Cole had just sworn.

“A hodag. An earth drake. They live underground and come above to hunt. My aunt has to quell the local population because they go after children and undermine the foundations of homes. They have two sets of skin. This is made from the softer ‘underskin.’”

Cole gripped the bag tight. It had a texture not of leather, but of a glossy sheen almost like ice or tile. Vedek had hunted and killed a hodag a century ago. From its second skin he made a cloak. Hodag skin was valuable because it did not retain water, making it weatherproof.

Cole swallowed as he looked at the bag. “I killed a hodag once, when I was fourteen. It attacked my cousin and I. Nearly killed us both. My aunt is keen to make sure I never forget. That’s why she made me this bag, for her nephew ‘the hodag killer’.”

“A hodag is a vicious creature. They come as far north as where my tribe lives.” Frost said, new respect tinging his voice.

“How did you kill it?” Vedek asked.

Cole tilted his head back. He smiled to one side then exhaled all his breath. Vedek understood that he had given the junior bard a chance to tell a story, but it seemed one Cole held some discomfort for.

“The external skin of a hodag, the one made of green scales and bristled hair, is weaker towards the backside. I was with Morry, that’s my cousin. We were playing with throwing knives. I had been staying with my aunt through the winter and the first sign of snowmelt meant we were free to stretch our legs and explore the woods. The ground became unstable and we fell into a gully the hodag had dug. It was juvenile, which still meant it was bigger than either of us, but also meant its second skin hadn’t grown in all the way. Morry…”

Cole bit the air. “Morry was trapped under a boulder and the hodag was trying to pick at him.”

Vedek could picture a hodag snapping at a trapped youth with its spade-like talons, hoping to drag him into its flat face of teeth and tusks. Rerume and Azeroth had returned to searching through the crates while Frost and Vedek listened to Cole’s story.

“It hadn’t seen me. I...I just ran at it. Pure adrenaline, y’know? I stabbed its backside with one of the knives. I remembered a story one of the rangers had told me about how a hodag will bleed forever it you cut the internal skin on its tail. I kept cutting at the base of its tail while holding onto its back spines for dear life.”

Cole mimicked the action. Vedek nodded. That was how he had been trained to hunt hodags. They’ll often shed their tail if it gets trapped, exposing its docked “true” tail that’s thick with blood vessels. The longer Cole told the story the more comfortable he seemed with it.

“A hodag has a terrible cry when in pain, strong enough to deafen a dwarf.” Frost said.

Cole was eager for someone to contribute. It gave him a chance to react and improvise. “It was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard! I just remember being thrashed around like a baker preparing dough, my ears ringing with its roar (my aunt compares it to the brass horns of the ranger’s lodge), and my skin caking with its blood and scales. Still: I kept cutting. I honestly don’t know how long that moment lasted, or how I survived, but the thing eventually started burrowing to get me off.”

Cole opened his hands explosively, dropping the pantomime dagger he had been holding. “My attack worked. The hodag ran away. Some rangers were trailing the noise and found Morry and I. They helped get the boulder off Morry and escorted us home. Along the way we found the hodag, half-surfaced and dead from blood loss. They toasted me proudly that night, after I got a hot bath, obviously.”

Frost and Vedek were both proud of Cole for his heroism, but Cole stopped their praise by sharply inhaling.

“With everything that happened to Morry, he lost control of his legs. He’s been bound to a chair or bed ever since. His mother, my aunt, has told me that she’s grateful for every day that I added to his life. Hence the bag.” Cole lifted the bag up as a conclusion to his story.

Vedek now understood the boy’s reservation with this story despite how positively it portrayed him: he had survivor’s guilt.

“Unfortunately it seems that the thieves also cleared out my money and books, but it's good to have it back.” He turned the bag upside down to comically demonstrate how empty it was. Something rattled out of bag and clattered on the floor. A polished wooden coin.

Cole chuckled as he retrieved it. “Scratch that, they left me one coin from Fae’Riam.”

Vedek looked to Rerume. The coatlmade had pulled free a sheathed knife. The sheath and hilt of the weapon were black like obsidian, but when Rerume unsheathed the knife itself he saw that it was as red as Rerume’s own scales. The design of the weapon reminded Vedek of medical instruments used by non-magical healers.

“What is that?” Vedek inquired.

Rerume turned the blade in his hand. He grunted in satisfaction. “It belongs to me. A tool of my sect. My previous mantel. Mercy made manifest.”

He looked through the open doors and out into the evening landscape of Athshin. “My sect were known as the Miserere Messorem, the Merciful Reapers of Dragons. We served an ancient contract to assist ailing dragons in leaving this mortal realm.”

“Suicide.” Azeroth grunted. Vedek caught the small head shake the orckin made.

“Not suicide. Mercy. A dragon had to already be dying to summon a Miserere Messorem. We served since the founding year of the Coatlmade Empire. Perhaps even before.”

“How does one mercy kill a dragon?” Cole asked, still hugging his hodag bag.

Rerume snapped the knife back into the sheath dramatically. “You cut out its heart. Always its heart.”

Before they would bring in the people of Saltspring, Frost and Vedek decided to canvass the outpost interior for any remaining guards. There were five rooms connected to this hallway. The first was a lengthy room stocked with trunks and bunk beds. The sleeping quarters for the guards. Vedek and Frost both counted eleven beds, which matched the number of guards they had seen. Frost drifted from bunk to bunk, snapping up resting weapons and sheathes.

“We can make use of these. My tribe taught the importance of collecting resources from attacked camps.”

“Your people are raiders?” Vedek asked. He was surprised by this revelation. Frost expressed distaste in the act of raiding and always spoke of his tribe as noble.

Frost frowned. He didn’t understand what he had said to imply that. “We don’t strike villages or cities. No, we scavenge from the camps of tribes that have been attacked by other sources. Roaming beasts. Goblins and wilder. Humans and elves.”

“Elves?” Vedek physically flinched at the statements.

“Not Fae Elves like yourself...At least not always. These were unaligned with the kingdom. My father said he had heard an old elden ranger refer to them as Tuatha.”

“Tuatha. Yes. You said ‘not always,’ have you been attacked by Elden Fae?”

Frost turned away from Vedek and spoke with a sigh. “It has never happened to my tribe, but we move yearly. I’ve heard stories of Amaroks being hunted because they settle ‘too close’ to the farms of Fae communities. I try not to think about it. Fae’Riam is a beautiful place, but it’s...what is the word...”

Vedek anxiously waited to hear Frost’s description. He had so rare an opportunity to hear Fae’Riam criticized.

“Insular! Hah, I knew I could recall it. I knew a dwarf that used that word once to describe his own culture. It seemed to work for the Fae as well.”

Neither wished to continue the conversation. Frost swiftly explained he would take the weapons he had found to the others. Vedek would keep examining the remaining rooms. He couldn’t hear anything that sounded like additional guards and there was little reason to think there were more beyond the eleven they had fought already. The only thing that he could hear was the muffled buzzing of flies. He hoped he would not stumble across the remains of the missing villagers from Saltspring.

The final room at the end of the hall was the source of the buzzing. Vedek pressed his ear to the door and heard someone talking to themselves in Shinar's Common. There was a thump causing a shatter. Vedek breathed deep, drew his bow, and kicked open the door.