An air of unease permeated the air as the expedition continued its trek northward towards Kalters Wall. The frost drake attack from the evening before had been a potent reminder that there were still significant dangers prowling the forest, even if one discounted the threat of roaming demons. However, that wasn’t the only reason everyone was showing more caution than before. The evidence of people of unknown origin and intent was the foremost topic of discussion that morning, and not in a good way.
“They could be the people Vraekae sent the soldiers to search for,” Eir said with some hope. “Since the tracks were relatively fresh, that would mean they are nearby. Perhaps they will be able to accomplish their mission quickly, then?”
“Perhaps,” Aila replied distractedly. “Perhaps not. They could be bandits, scavengers, mercenaries who chose to roam further than is wise to hunt down demons, or maybe even civilians who never followed the evacuation orders and have somehow survived without aid or backup. Those tracks could mean just about anything.”
“W—what if they’re c—cultists?” Thea asked quietly, a question Jadis could barely hear over the sound of the wagon wheels.
That question was answered by a tense silence. While Jadis couldn’t see the looks on everyone’s faces as she pulled the wagon along, she could tell that suggestion had hit a nerve. She’d heard a lot of possibilities tossed around the camp that morning after Kerr had reported her findings to captain Willa, but none of the soldiers had brought up cultists as a potential explanation. Had there been a reason for that? Was the suggestion somehow taboo? The question felt like one of those situations where she, as a soul foreign to Oros, was lacking some context.
The idea that the tracks could belong to cultists had certainly never crossed Jadis’ mind, but now that Thea had said it, her thoughts couldn’t help but circle the concept curiously.
“You mean cultists who worship Samleos, right?” Dys made a likely guess.
“Yeah, no shit,” Bridget said with a sarcastic huff. “Er, I mean, of course,” she quickly amended her tone, bailing on her sass. “What other cultists are there?”
“Well, it is technically possible to obtain a cultist class without worshipping Samleos,” Eir said, her tone decidedly unhappy. “It’s just not likely.”
“And even if they were cultists worshipping some false god, that wouldn’t be that much better than actual Samleos followers,” Aila added dryly.
While Jadis didn’t know all that much about organized religion on Oros, she had gained enough knowledge from recent discussions with Eir to know that Samleos wasn’t worshipped by the temple or people at large. Since Samleos was actively working to destroy the world via his demons, no one was particularly interested in paying him any homage. Rightfully so, in Jadis’ opinion, having briefly met the terrifying entity. She’d only been in his presence for a few seconds and it had been the scariest moment of her lives, former and current. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to go to an afterlife dominated by such a figure.
Then again, there had been a lot of crazy, self-destructive people back on Earth. Jadis didn’t have any trouble at all making the assumption that those kinds of people probably existed on Oros, too. So, while the common person loathed and reviled the God of Death, Destruction, and Corruption, and the temple used the deity almost exclusively as an antithetical figure in their teachings, the idea that there were some people around who wanted to worship Samleos wasn’t surprising.
“Would the demons leave the cultists alone?” Syd asked as she briefly looked over her shoulder at her companions riding the wagon. “Or would they be in just as much danger?”
“Samleos offers protections to those who willingly follow his ways,” Eir answered with a dark look on her normally smiling face. “His demons would be dissuaded from directly harming his cultists, but they would never be safe. Just as any demon would trample and crush its lesser kin in its haste to destroy life, they would not hesitate to do the same to a cultist.”
“Sell your soul to the Corruptor for safety,” Bridget sang as though she were quoting a nursey rhyme, “Demons find your flesh still tasty.”
So the prevailing wisdom was that being a cultist of Samleos would get you some small measure of protection from demonic attack, but ultimately not much. Of course, that could just be the perspective of a people who hated Samleos and his demons, and for good reason, but still a biased opinion. Not that Jadis doubted their assessment. She’d seen how demons acted around each other, completely heedless of each other’s safety and with zero concern for even their own wellbeing.
Even as she had the thoughts, Jadis’ thoughts drifted to the demonling hanging in its cage on the front of her wagon, its neon blue eye watching them even at that moment.
Her hatchling demon definitely showed that it had both a sense of self preservation and some form of altruism, since it had actively tried to help Aila when she was injured despite having no reason to. The discrepancy in behavior between the demons she killed and the demon she carried with her was an irritating mystery, one she was determined to get to the bottom of. Maybe once she had resolved her avatar sense or whatever it was called, she’d get some guidance on the issue that way.
Putting aside her thoughts on demons, hatchlings, and cultists, Jadis reoriented her thoughts onto what the tracks meant. The nature and demeanor of the people who’d made them was, ultimately, completely unknown to them. The only thing that could be reliably assumed was that whoever they were, they had to be strong.
It wasn’t everyone who could travel into the demon infested Great Southern Forest. Any group who did so would have to be of a level capable of handling attacks from demons, and large numbers of them, too. And if they were people who’d been in the area for a long while, that meant they’d have to be of a high enough level to sustain themselves in hostile territory without aid from civilization.
Jadis had been able to do so, but she was also far, far stronger than the average person of a comparable level. She’d also gotten damned lucky on more than a few occasions. Most people wouldn’t have either her strength or her good fortune. So it was safe to assume that whoever had made those tracks was of a relatively high level. Maybe not Noll numbers, but high level.
Then again, why not Noll levels? How would they know? A demonic invasion was prime time to gain lots of levels, after all. The bonus experience demons offered would make faster leveling possible in a way Jadis was already well familiar with. Most people played it safe and didn’t take crazy risks like she did, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other people out there who were willing to throw caution to the wind and power level like her.
And that, Jadis realized, was the real reason why everyone was tense. If a group of high-level people were out in these woods and they were unfriendly, they could be looking at a battle far worse than just a bunch of frost drakes. Even with the backup her companions offered, Jadis didn’t think she could beat Noll in a fight. What if he were hostile?
What if he was hostile and there was more than one of him?
Those ominous thoughts kept Jadis company throughout the rest of the long day. Despite the dour mood and the troubles they’d had the night before, they made decent time and travelled a good distance closer to the mountains. The expedition only stopped a few times to deal with demon attacks, but none of them were anything beyond small groups of demonic aberrations drawn to the noise of their wagon, quickly and easily dispatched.
Kerr kept up her scouting, though she reported back to the wagon more frequently than before. She didn’t find any more humanoid tracks, though she did see signs of more drakes. Whether they were the same drakes they’d just killed or a different pack, she couldn’t say.
For the last hour of travel, Jadis pushed them to go faster than she had before, forcing the guard wagon to pick up the pace a great deal. The reason for her haste had nothing to do with fear of drakes or unknown stalkers in the woods. No, instead her pace had picked up in a mirror to her mood. She recognized where she was.
“There it is,” Jay announced as the wagon slowed to a stop. “I knew it was close.”
There, cutting a line through the tall trees and bisecting the cobblestone road, was a wide river with an arched stone bridge.
Jadis had been to the bridge before. In fact during her original egress from the mountainside village, she’d stayed the night in a log cabin on the other side of the same river. And there, in the dying light of the winter afternoon, she could see that the familiar log cabin was still standing.
“The Silverbank River,” Willa said as she rode her horse up next to Jadis’ selves. “It’s a good thing the bridge is still standing. It would not have been easy to ford this river otherwise. It runs deep.”
“Definitely,” Jay murmured her agreement.
She honestly wasn’t sure if her wagon could ford a river considering how heavy it was. She wasn’t even sure The Behemoth wouldn’t cause the arched bridge to collapse when she tried to pull it across. But hopefully she could rely on the solid stone construction and stable architecture of the Empire.
As they watched, maybe a hundred feet back or so, the two horseback scouts Willa had kept riding ahead of them all crossed the bridge. Jadis noticed they did so cautiously and with their weapons drawn. Not a bad idea, she realized, since the narrow crossing would make for an ideal ambush site. Once the two had crossed over, a figure popped out of the cabin, causing both men and Jadis, to jump slightly before reigning the reactions in.
“All clear,” Kerr shouted from the cabin door. “Come on over!”
“Need to put a freaking bell on her,” Dys grumbled as they began the process of crossing the river.
Fortunately, even though it was almost too wide for the bridge, the giant wagon made it across without causing the stone to crumble. As the soldier’s crossed behind them, Kerr sidled up next to Jay and pointed at the cabin and the road beyond.
“More tracks,” the archer said as she leaned on her bow. “Some of them recent, made in the past day, some of them much older. Can’t tell how many for sure because they’re partially obscured, but I’d say more people than the ones I counted on the hill. A dozen, maybe.”
“Where do they go?” Jay asked as she glanced inside the open door of the cabin.
“All around,” she said, motioning to the surrounding forest. “But the most recent ones are headed north. They were in a hurry, too. Moving fast. Something spooked them.”
“No prize for guessing what,” Syd said dryly.
“Anything else?” Aila asked as she hopped down from the wagon seat.
“Yup,” Kerr nodded before pointing at the side of the cabin. “Traps.”
Before Aila could approach the location Kerr had indicated, Dys stepped in front of her. Keeping her and the others back, she cautiously stepped up to the side of the wagon to check out what Kerr had found.
A thick layer of dead pine needles lay on the ground beside the cabin, right under the window that faced the river. Picking at an edge that Kerr had left revealed, Dys pulled back a woven blanket of sticks and vines to reveal a pit had been dug and covered up. The pit was as wide as the cabin and more than ten feet deep, with wooden stakes lining the bottom. Jadis wasn’t sure a fall into the pit would be immediately lethal to most demons, but they sure wouldn’t be happy if they did. She knew she wouldn’t be.
“This definitely wasn’t here when we stayed in this cabin before,” Jay said as Captain Willa rode over to check the trap as well. “If it had been, one of us would have fallen in.”
“When did you stay here?” she asked after getting off her horse to examine the trap more closely.
“Late spring, early summer,” Syd said after thinking about it for a moment. “So it’s been a few months.”
“Then we can assume whoever dug this did so in recent history,” Willa concluded. “Presumably the same people who left the tracks.”
“Definitely,” Kerr confirmed. “Some of the tracks I’m seeing here match the tracks I saw on the hill back there. And they knew where to step to avoid this and other traps without disturbing them.”
“Something to keep in mind as we travel the road tomorrow,” Willa said with a frown. "We’ll have to do a thorough check for more before we set up camp.”
With a plan in place, the expedition set about searching the area and setting up for the night. Several more traps were found, mostly pit traps, but some snares and deadfalls as well. None were magical in nature, but by the sturdy and well-designed construction, Kerr pronounced that whoever had made them likely had a skill helping them. Fortunately, most of the traps were placed further out around the cabin and not directly next to it, so they were able to set up camp after disabling only a couple of them.
Once camp had been made and the evening meal of frost drake stew had been served, the group talked about what was likely to come the next day. At the speed they moved at, they were likely to arrive at the next prominent landmark by evening, which was a worry all its own.
As Jadis knew from her own experience, north of the river stood an abandoned fort. Five roads met at that fort, giving the place the rather unimaginative name The Crossroads. When Jadis had last been there, the place had been a wreck. Bone thieves had haunted its empty buildings and the stone tower had been partially destroyed. But the walls had still stood tall and if the place was unchanged, it would still make for a good defensive position. Considering the direction the tracks had gone, there was little doubt in everyone’s minds that whoever these mysterious people were, they were using the fort.
“Alright, I’ve had enough of talking about what-ifs,” Jay finally said as she excused herself from the fireside.
They’d spent the whole dinner discussing possibilities on what could be waiting for them at The Crossroads and how they should handle it. As important as preparing for the future was, Jadis could only spend so much time planning for dozens of different eventualities before her eyes started to cross.
As her three selves retreated into the wagon tent they’d set up across the road from the cabin, Syd leapt up onto the front of the wagon and took the demon hatchling down from where it had been hung in its round cage.
“What are you going to do with that?” Sabina asked as she followed Syd into the tent, a few of the others only a couple of paces behind her.
“Interspecies communication,” Syd informed the perplexed smith with a smile.
Opening the lid of the container, Syd allowed the demon hatchling to wriggle out and onto the palm of her hand. Grinning down at the squiggly creature, Syd addressed the demonling with a silly tone she normally reserved for small animals.
“Who’s ready for their reading lessons?”
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