Chapter 6

“Okay, what about this one Al- Wraine?”

“That one’s pretty useful. It’s called the Alara flower and they grow everywhere. I think most people consider it a weed but since it’s nice on the eyes, they let them be. For us though, the stalk and the flower will give you the shits but dig up the roots and put them in boiling water and it’ll make a nice little tea to keep you awake.” Wraine explained while digging up the small light blue flower with a pink stem. His leather boots are too big for him as well but he says they aren’t uncomfortable.

“Alright, that’s nice. How the fuck are we getting boiling water though? You can make campfires pretty easily now but what about the water?” When I finish speaking, he hands me half of the root he just dug up and puts the other half in his mouth.

“Boiling it in water is how you get all the good stuff out of it, but if you keep it in your mouth and just suck on it, you’ll still get most of its good stuff.” I shake the brown root in my hand a few times wanting to get it as clean as I can before putting it in my mouth. It has a bitter taste but it’s not too bad. After getting used to the bitter taste, I can pretty much forget that it’s in my mouth.

Alain and I, excuse me, Wraine and I have been traveling south from Misanth for about a week now. After burying his father, Alain thought that he might as well change his name just in case any Nasaaran soldiers at Mountain’s Toil were looking for a deserter named Alain who looked exactly like him. In memory of his father, Alain wanted to use his name and forced me to start calling him Wraine. He even knows how to write both Alain and Wraine in Informal. But that’s all he knows how to read or write, though he can count up to 100. While I on the other hand can only count up to ten by using my fingers, although he did teach me how to count up to 20 by using my toes as well when we were traveling. When he wrote both of his names in the dirt with a stick, I had no idea what I was looking at and it just looked like a bunch of squiggles to me. But apparently he wrote the names in Informal which he tells me is the most commonly taught language on the Alaulin continent. He even says the words when we speak are called Informal. I’m not too sure I believe him on everything. I didn’t even know the continent had a name until a few days ago. Hells, I didn’t even know the peninsula had a name either. All I knew was we lived on a peninsula, that’s apparently named Basteb, and it’s connected to a main continent, which I thought was named Main continent.

Over the past week while we’ve been heading south toward Mountain’s Toil, Wraine’s been teaching me a lot of things. Most of it has to do with the plants we run into and which ones we can eat or can’t. However, as we kept talking, he realized I didn’t know a lot of things that he thought was common knowledge and he’s been explaining it all to me rather patiently. I’ve even learned a lot of words I didn’t know before like that one word, “grandiose.” The only problem is he’s been a smug bitch the whole time and it’s starting to piss me off. It’s not my fault Augustine was the world’s biggest asshole. He kept all the wage free workers in his barn and made us sleep on straw next to the pigs. He even locked up the barn at night to make sure none of us ran away. We weren’t even allowed to see the fucking moon. There was no way he was going to teach us anything important. He wanted us to stay dumb and docile. Besides, is it really that important to know the world we’re living in is called the Old Realm?

Wraine also explained to me I wasn’t considered one of Augustine’s slaves. Orphans usually get picked up by someone in the village if no one wants to adopt them and then that person becomes the guardian until the orphan has their 15th winter at which point they’re free to go their separate ways. No one ever told me this. I also doubt whether Augustine would’ve followed the village’s rules. Maybe I should’ve visited Abermock before going south. If nothing else, I could’ve checked whether he was still alive and perhaps paid him back for all the love and care he’s shown over the years. Oh well.

It’s around midday when we stop next to a river for a break. After drinking our fill, Wraine tosses me his linen sack filled with the food we’ve foraged for this morning. I take a look inside the sack and grimace. He wasn’t kidding when he told me I was going to grow sick of this forage only diet. Even back on Augustine’s farm the leftovers he tossed to us were better than these berries. Regardless, it’s all we have and I randomly grab a handful of whatever’s in the sack and stuff it into my mouth. The taste itself isn’t bad but having the same fruits, nuts, and roots day after day is starting to take a toll on me. I’m brought out of my thoughts when I spot a deer drinking on the other side of the river. I don’t think I’ve ever had deer meat before, instead, I imagine the taste of a scrap of pork I’ve had in the past and my mouth waters.

“Your dad had to have shown you how to hunt at least a little bit right?” I ask with hope in my heart.

“Nope. He was a woodcutter through and through. My grandfather moved the whole family to Misanth 20 years ago after the last war with Ribieria when the last king cut taxes for all new wood hands and their families moving to the continent. I think he was a leather hand before in a small town and just wanted a fresh start. He croaked a few years when he ran into a bear while out chopping wood. There was a hunter in Misanth but he hunted small game like rats, rabbits, and birds. He used to start up a small fire near a rabbit’s burrow to smoke them out and then his dog would nab them when they came out. Just give up, there’s no way we can kill a full grown deer. We don’t even know how to skin a deer anyways.” Wraine said while gesturing toward the deer.

“I don’t care. I just want a taste, just a taste of deer meat. Doesn’t even have to be a deer, any meat will do.”

“I think deer meat is called venison. Anyways, if you want to give it a try, by all means. I mean, you can throw that axe of yours and if you’re lucky you’ll nick it’s artery.”

“... From that far away there’s a better chance that the deer breaks its ankle on its own. Wait, poison. What if we could poison it somehow? There’s so many poisonous things around us, can’t we just… I don’t know, get it to eat something that’ll poison it?”

“I know you’re desperate but use your brain for a second. If the deer gets poisoned, its meat will get poisoned, and if we eat the poisoned meat, well, we get poisoned. Besides, deer are pretty smart about what they eat. There’s no way they’ll ever eat something they think is poisoned so your only choice is to make your own poison that it can’t naturally recognize.”

“Can we do that? It won’t work for the deer but what if we run into another goblin? I know we haven’t seen anything dangerous since the blood moon two weeks ago, but we can still prepare for it. Can we make a poison to smear on our weapons?”

“Well I have no idea how to do any of that, you’re better off finding an herbalist, maybe they’d know. The only reason I know a lot about these plants is because my dad personally ate or made an animal eat most of them to test them out. I know for the most part what will happen if it gets into your stomach but I have no idea what’ll happen if it gets into a wound. But hey, if you’re willing to test this stuff on your own body then go ahead.” Sighing heavily, I give up any thoughts of having meat or poison anytime soon and we keep heading south.

After about an hour of walking from the river, we came across another burnt village. Over the past few weeks, we’ve come across two other villages burned down, not including Misanth or Vilnau. This will be the third one we’ve encountered and just like all the other villages, there’s no one in sight. I think we’ve gotten used to this by now since seeing the blackened remains of where people used to live doesn’t dampen our moods anymore. After clearing the village of any people, we search around for anything we can use. In the second village we came across, just before this one, I was able to find a leather string that I could use to tie my hair back.

My hair isn’t particularly long and only just reaches my shoulders but I’ve decided to let it grow. Apparently, Wraine’s father, the former Wraine, let his hair grow long because his village had a superstition that long hair warded off evil spirits and misfortune. I don’t know how well that superstition holds up because of what ended up happening in the end, but that story from Wraine stuck with me and I thought I might as well. It might also have to do with Augustine forcing all his slaves to keep their hair short and using the cut hair as tinder. He let us at least keep some hair because he might’ve thought bald slaves weren’t pleasant to took at. I originally wanted to use the string to carry the goblin’s arm from one of my belt loops but at some point it started rotting and Wraine pointed the sword at me, telling me it was either my life or the arm. He’s incredibly dramatic when he wants to be.

Not finding anything, we move past this village with no name and keep moving south. We started from Misanth, which Wraine tells me is close to the northeastern corner of the peninsula and our destination is Mountain’s Toil, which is south from Misanth and located directly in the middle of the Basteb Mountains, which separate the peninsula from the rest of the kingdom and the overall Alaulin continent. It’s not a difficult journey, but it does take quite a bit of time. If we started going toward Mountain’s Toil from where we were ambushed, we’d only take about three weeks to get to the town. But since we went in the opposite direction, we’d need to travel for around four and a half weeks from Misanth to Mountain’s Toil. In other words, I still have more than three weeks left of this forage only diet. Did I mention how miserable it is?

As we’re walking through a small forested region, I notice the air around me chill instantly. Looking at Wraine, he stops walking and looks around. After a few moments, we notice fog starting to cover the area. It comes in slowly at first but before we know it, the entire forest floor is covered with fog and it rises rapidly, covering up to our knees in seconds. Both Wraine and I have talked about this before, but whenever we run into odd situations or whether we think there’s danger, we stop ourselves from talking and only communicate with our eyes and hands. Looking into his confused eyes and seeing him pointing toward a nearby tree with two branches, we dash toward it and quickly climb up until we’re each sitting on a branch. This turns out to be a good decision because the fog keeps rolling in from seemingly nowhere and engulfs even the tree we’re sitting in. I can barely see Wraine beyond the fog but I can see he has his sword raised and I raise both my shield and axe.

We stay sitting on the tree branches and just wait. I can hear my heart starting to pound and nothing else. I don’t even know what to listen for in this situation but I’m listening for anything at the moment. Right when I’m about to say something to Wraine, I hear a sound. It’s incredibly far away but I think it sounds like… stomping. As it gets closer it gets clearer and it’s definitely stomping. Something big… something heavy. Something’s running toward us and without realizing it, my forehead is covered with sweat. I keep listening closely to the stomping that’s growing increasingly closer and I look toward where I think it’s coming from, squinting my eyes for a glimpse of anything. After a few more moments, I can finally see an enormous shadow coming from my right. Based on where it is, it should pass right in front of me without a problem. Waiting in anticipation, my ears nearly burst.

Whatever it was, it just screamed at the top of its lungs. There’s something bestial in that roar. Whatever it is, it’s not human. It’s nothing like anything I’ve ever heard in my life. I can’t take anymore of that sound and I cover my ears, still holding my weapons. It doesn’t help as it roars again and I can feel my eardrums straining. That’s when it runs past where Wraine and I are sitting. When it’s running past, its sheer force rips through the fog, dispersing it and giving us a clear view of something beyond monstrous.

The animal, or the monster, I’m not even sure which it is, is massive and could tower over the tallest levy I saw. Its body is a mass of gray, closer to a handful of wood ash perhaps but slightly darker. Just seeing its body and the word “heavy” naturally comes to mind. Its ash colored body is covered in impossibly thick muscles, from the arms, to the legs, to its wide back. I can see how every one of its muscles contributes to its run because it moves on all fours like a deer but its arms are bigger and longer than its legs, giving it a unique sort of… charging movement. The most notable characteristic I can see on this… creature is the scars covering its body. Augustine wasn’t the type to use whips and preferred using his hands, but his wife loved using whips. His wife despised the slaves especially the female ones. She wouldn’t even consider dirtying her hands and instead used a long, leather whip to abuse the female slaves from afar. When I helped treat those poor women afterwards, the new scars overlapped the old ones and created a horrific image that’s still burned into my mind even now. But this creature’s body looks as though it has been whipped for centuries. Maybe its strange color is due to its scars? Right as it’s about to pass our tree, it turns its head to look at us.