“You people have gone mad. Suicidal too. I might even go so far as to say heretical!”

Captain Bodin did not care for our proposal, even after I spent the entire day figuring out how to make it work. A much more productive day than Lucius and Aisha, who had barely gotten past explaining to her what a bear was. He didn’t have the storyteller’s wit to work in the basic forestry education she would need, and his story nearly ground to a halt with questions upon questions. Rather than an enamored half-dream, Aisha had become somewhat confused by the whole affair, which at least prepared her for verbal combat with the captain.

“It’s not suicidal if there’s a good plan,” she said. The ship was being brought to shore. The sailors wanted to moor and interplay with a fishing village they had spied. The night of cold food left them with a hunger strong enough to ward off fear of the pirates. It was nearly all Bodin could do to keep the men rotating shifts on and off the ship, lest the Aillesterrans attack it in the night.

“Man does not have control over the realm of the gods. We are stewards of the land and visitors to the sea. I wouldn’t expect a Giordanan like you to understand,” he spat back at her, and then spat some more orders at his crew, as though without a recent tongue lashing they wouldn’t know how to do their work well enough.

Lucius stepped in. “Why don’t you bring your acolyte over and we’ll discuss it with them? Who prepares the deep oil you burn?”

A remarkably unassuming drunk of a man was summoned, though to my surprise I could not smell any liquor on his breath.(1) That did nothing to change the way he staggered and swayed. Captain Bodin introduced him as Honung, and I set my attention on him. “Tomorrow, I mean for us to depart from the sea lane. At the very least, we will have to snuff the deep oil, lest the paths be muddled.”

Honung scratched at his chin, a bulge of fat like a collar had been fitted round him to compress his face. “That’s a risky proposition, Mister Amurabi, Sir. We’re getting close to the homeland, yes, but we still have whale pods now and then.”

“Whales don’t attack ships.”

“No, but the whale hunters do,” Honung said.

Aisha leaned over to Lucius to ask, “He means fishermen?”

“No, he means the sea serpents.”

She twisted around to turn her confusion on him. “How big are they?”

Lucius glanced over his shoulder and nodded to the open sea. “Biggest one that’s ever been killed was over three hundred feet in length. Some say they get even bigger, big enough that when they wrap around a ship, their twisting body can snap the masts off. Even if they don’t break the keel or something, the sailors end up stranded and starve out.”

“Look,” I said to the dull-witted alchemist, “First of all, the chances of us being attacked are slim at best. And even if a sea serpent does decide to attack us, it will do so by constriction. We will have plenty of time to stab poison into it and save the ship.”

Honung snorted. “If you had such a magical poison. Even the grand cathedral doesn’t claim to have something like that!”

“It’s of my design. Now you must realize that if you do nothing,” I said, turning on the captain primarily, “you will be responsible for bringing the pirates safely to Hearth Bay! We can’t lose them, we can’t fight them off safely, this is our best bet, if your career means anything to you.”

Lucius stepped in and cut through the argument. “Captain, sleep on it. We can’t do it until tomorrow anyways. Who knows, maybe they’ll attack us tonight and save us the trouble.”

All involved grumbled and split apart. Rowboats were being arranged to the village and the crew could already smell the ale in the air from the local tavern. Perhaps they were dreaming of the odor, but they certainly did find alcohol to drink and used it to chase off the thought of the lurking pirates. Captain Bodin stayed aboard the ship, as he felt it his duty to do so. I too had to stay behind and prepare the poison. The privacy helped the process.

The three young ones, and most of the crew, escaped to the village of Walpole. It took barely an hour after arriving at the tavern with the richest scent of cooking food before the locals had Aisha up on a table singing and playing an instrument for them. Lucius and Sammy. The fare was little more than stewed vegetables with a bit of lard for seasoning, but hungry men made good eaters.

Between mouthfuls, Sammy said, “You know, I didn’t think you would be so open with us.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

The doctor paused to tie his hair back anew as he chewed down a mouthful. “We haven’t known each other for very long.”

“You gave your word to a Divine Beast, didn’t you? That’s reason enough for me. The point is to make you trust me, so that I can trust you.”

“Not much of a savage at all, are you?”

Lucius snorted and washed his stew down with some ale. “I learned that lesson the first time. Mankind… we’re nothing as far as nature is concerned. We’re the same as the rats hiding beneath the floorboards. That writer? Jacque? He was mistaken.”

Sammy arched an eyebrow to ask the question, his mouth occupied with food.

“He thought that the natural state for humans was alone and above any material needs. That all our wants would be satisfied by the bounty of nature. He could scarcely imagine why humans would be compelled to sacrifice their natural rights in exchange for civil rights, as he put it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard something so arrogant before. Alone in nature, it’s not humans that have all their wants satisfied. It’s not even bears. It’s dragons, and gods.”

Young Lucius fled from the spring time bear, only for it to pursue him. It innately sensed that he too was a predator, and the bear’s instinct was to preserve its territory. The two of them charged over hills and between trees. He couldn’t even find a tree worth climbing. The branches of birches proved too high, and the needles of the pines too dense.

With roars and growls at his heels, he fled back up the hills and into the mountains(2). He broke through the branches, finding himself ont on a caribou trail, let alone a human trail, but upon a rabbit’s path. Foliage ripped at him, tore at his eyes, and betrayed him. His foot didn’t land on dirt. His step went straight through empty air and off the side of a ravine.

Worse even than the claws of a bear, the word itself bludgeoned Lucius as he tumbled down across the rocks. One blow snapped his leg in half, ripping from him a scream of pain that echoed through the woods. It crippled him more than missing an arm, and left him writing upon the dirt without the strength to pull his own sword free.

The bear slowed and crawled down, picking its way from roots and rocks to get closer to him. In its head, the image of Lucius morphed from a competitor, to perhaps a meal. It forced the animal to think and consider, and force itself through the abstract mental transformation. Then a scent struck its nose. Its head jerked up. It bleated in fear and spun.

Before it had bolted more than three steps, a flash of moss green flew through the air. It landed on the bear with the force of a crashing ship. Earth flew up like cannon fire had struck it. A forest dragon, aged and proud, ripped the crying bear in half. Tooth and maw shredded entrails. Gnashing shattered bones. Bit by bit it swallowed the bear and filled its serpentine stomach until barely a third of the famished animal remained, spread among a mess of blood.

And then the monster was at peace. It licked lips. It cleaned its claws. It languidly looked at Lucius, broken upon the ground, and found itself disinterested. The thing didn't even bother to take meat with it, for it knew that anywhere it went, more could be found at a moment’s notice, always within reach of its claws. It simply had no need to kill the boy, for its stomach was yet full.

The lord of the forest left him there in the ravine. Broken, trembling, unable to breathe. It slipped back among the trees, sliding and snaking without so much as touching a branch despite a girth of two draft horses put together.

Eventually, Lucius could hear it no more, and began to take action once more. The ache in his leg throbbed as his stigmata tried to knit the bone back together. Blood had pooled beneath the skin, bloating the limb black as though with rot. When he set the bone, poorly, with sticks and strips of his shirt, he screamed again and was tormented by fear of another dragon coming. None did, and his gift from the goddesses endeavored to save his life.

It came at the price of emaciated him. It drained his stomach of its scant foot and cannibalized the fat from his body. When that was not enough, it ate at blood and muscle and organ and left him with a mind numbing ache of hunger. The only thing he could do to sate it was to dig at the remaining bear carcase. To strip muscle and fat and gnash it between his teeth. Unable to walk, he couldn’t even think of making a fire, so he ate it raw, and the more he did, the less he cared about propriety and etiquette.

He chewed the gristle from the knuckles of the bear to fill his stomach.

Exhaustion put him to sleep where he laid. Thirst forced him to crawl downhill when we woke. The movements of his leg still brought bursts of pain, amplified by shuddering fear. Every shadow, every groan of trees, made him see the dragon once more. His heart slammed from one side to the next within him, making his head throb with the emotions, but the needs of his body drove him through the fear.

Nasty with blood, brutish in appetite, and too aware of how short he would live, he stuffed his face into the first stream he found and tried to suck it dry. Mud filled his mouth until he coughed and sputtered, and had to move on to deeper water. It invigorated his body. It soaked into his clothes and weighed him down, but it feigned to him a full stomach, and so he drank more and more.

Like that, some unknown amount of time passed for Lucius. Days, weeks, neither me or him truly know how he survived in his desperate barbarism and fear. He never made it back over the mountains by his own power, for the dragons preferred those slopes and he didn’t have the courage to sneak past them. Something else eventually caught his eye, a remnant of civilization past which he hoped might still be real. He found a road. He found way markers upon them. Moss covered and weather worn, but undeniably human.

He followed the path, and walked straight over ancient foundations without knowing it, for trees had long since replaced the timbers and stone. One thing remained of the village that once was; the Lumius Temple that I had just arrived at.

Honung, we found out afterwards, had a malformation of the inner ear. He wasn’t a drunk, but the slightest change in thirst or sickness and he would lose his sense of balance entirely. The world would swim. I shall touch on him again at a proper time. It would not do to spoil the story at such a time. Bears are faster going uphill than downhill, due to the relative lengths of their limbs. I would have advised he run in the opposite direction.