The snow eventually cleared some time around noon. While that didn’t leave a lot of time left in the day for travel, the decision was made to set out from the fort anyway. Any progress made towards their destination was a good thing since it would mean a quicker return before the main bulk of winter arrived to blanket the continent. With scouts on high alert and ranging to the fore and rear of the wagons, the expedition resumed its trek northward.
Jadis admired the snow-covered landscape as she pulled the Behemoth wagon along the road. Winter had always been a favorite season for her, the beauty of freshly fallen and unblemished snow something she could spend hours staring at. Of course, that was an activity usually done with a warm mug of hot chocolate in hand while curled up in a fuzzy blanket. The experience was a bit different with hundreds of pounds of cold metal armor strapped to her bodies while dragging a giant wagon through said snow. Still, the view was pretty, and it had the added benefit of making it easy to spot the tracks of anyone or anything that might be around them in the forest. Not that they encountered any hostiles. The road was mostly clear. Mostly. There were other issues to slow them down.
“Another trap in the road,” Otto announced as he let the wagon catch up to his slowed horse. “Sofie is standing in front of it.”
“Pit trap?” Jay asked as she slowed her pace. “Do we need to go around?”
“No, it’s a snare of some kind,” he replied as Captain Willa rode up to join them from where she’d been talking with the rear scouts. “It should be easy enough to disable it.”
“Gunnar!” Willa shouted out a command after she’d heard Otto’s report. “Go take care of it with Sofie.”
As the buff elf leapt off of the wagon and jogged ahead, Willa addressed Jadis and her companions on the wagon.
“My scouts report seeing probable demon tracks behind us, but no sign of the ones who made them. The tracks didn’t follow the trail, they headed west.”
“That’s troubling,” Aila said as she leaned forward in her seat. “One of the locations we were planning to search is in the west. Haven’t there been other signs of demons heading in that direction?”
“Yes,” Willa replied, with Thea and Bridget echoing their agreement.
“Do you think it’ll be a problem?” Aila asked, her question directed towards Jadis.
“Knowing our luck?” Dys called over her shoulder. “Absolutely. It’s just a question of how big the problem will be.”
“Hopefully nothing too big for us to handle,” Syd said. "But we’re going to check the eastern destination first, so maybe this’ll work in our favor.”
“Maybe,” Willa nodded. “Depending on what we find in Sweet Pine Valley, we’ll spread our search out to the east and west as well. For now, though, I recommend continued caution.”
“Fair enough,” Jay agreed. “Until those fuckers we fought are caught or dead, we won’t be letting our guards down out here.”
Around that point Gunnar and Sofie signaled all clear and Jadis resumed her forward momentum. She would have liked to have pushed the pace, but Willa insisted on giving the forward scouts time to check for traps. Jadis couldn’t complain about that since they ran across several more traps throughout the remainder of the day. Later on, in between one trap disarming and another, Kerr jogged up next to Jay from where she’d been ranging around in the forest with a few tidbits of interesting information.
“I found tracks that definitely belong to that Legs guy. Mismatched boots.”
“Where?” Jay asked, her attention sharpened to a knife’s edge.
“Ahead, off the trail by a few yards. Obviously fresh since they were on top of the snow. I think he might have been scouting for us. No trace of anyone else though, and by the spacing of the prints, he was moving at a high speed.”
“Keeping tabs on us?”
“Probably,” Kerr nodded seriously. “With how fast that shitface can run, makes sense. If I catch sight of him, I’ll take a shot, but I doubt he’ll give me the opportunity. It’s tough to hit a moving target that runs as fast as you do.”
“If you do see him, call for us,” Jay told Kerr in no uncertain terms. “I won’t be falling for any more of their ambushes and I expect my girlfriend to be smarter than me and do the same.”
“Sure,” Kerr said with a wicked grin. “But if that’s the only requirement I’m pretty sure there are donkeys out there that would qualify to be your girlfriend.”
“Maybe I’ll check them out,” Jay shot back. “At least the donkey won’t poke my boobs with her horns in the morning.”
“A small price to pay for all of this,” Kerr scoffed as she motioned towards herself with exaggerated confidence.
“Eh,” Jay tapped at her breastplate with one gauntleted hand. “You keep waking me up that way and I might start to experience some buyer’s remorse.”
“Tsk,” Kerr shook her head. “What a baby. Do I need to have Sabina make me some blunted horn caps? Ones covered in fuzz to please your oh-so sensitive skin?”
“That does sound nice,” Jay mused.
“Fuck off,” Kerr laughed for a moment. Once she’d had her fill of banter and teasing, Kerr’s expression turned momentarily serious. “There’s one more thing you should know.”
“What? Don’t tell me your horns fall off in winter.”
Kerr shook her head, not engaging with the joke.
“I think someone else might be following us.”
“What makes you say that?” Jay asked, all signs of mirth gone. “Have you seen tracks? Is it the bandits?”
“I don’t think so, no,” Kerr replied with a frown. “And I haven’t seen any tracks. Not definite ones, anyway. Thing is, there are ways of covering tracks in the snow that are difficult to spot, but still leave signs that something passed through. It might be nothing, but I’m seeing snow movement in some spots that could be from someone covering their tracks. Or they could be nothing and I’m just seeing things because I’m paranoid about those bandit fucks.”
“Better to be paranoid and wrong than oblivious and dead,” Jay growled. A second later she let out a heavy huff. “Let me know if anything comes of it. Even if it’s just a suspicion, I want to know.”
“I’ll keep my nose to the wind,” Kerr agreed before stalking back into the shadows of the snow-covered trees.
After another hour of travel, the sun had dipped low enough to the horizon that it was deemed too dangerous to continue forward and the expedition stopped to camp for the night. Setting up their tent-wagon was more difficult in the snow, but Jadis’ team was definitely in a better position than the soldiers. Not that Willa and her men weren’t equipped for harsh weather, it was just that their tents couldn’t really compare to the wagon’s warmth and insulation.
The night passed quickly, with the only event of any significance being a small number of bone thieves stumbling upon the camp in the early hours of the morning before the sun had yet risen. The demons had the unfortunate timing to arrive while one of Jadis’ bodies was on watch, namely Dys, so they were dispatched with little disturbance to the others who were still sleeping. Once everyone was up, they wasted no time in getting moving again to make up for the time lost the previous day.
The closer the expedition came to the towering mountain range looming ahead of them, the more tension could be felt in the air. The bandits had fled north, after all, and the whole reason for Willa’s investigation was to locate those who were illegally mining eleria. It was a fair assumption that the bulk of the poachers, or whatever illegal miners were called, would have their main operation set up somewhere in the mountains themselves. It hadn’t been that long since Jadis had left the abandoned mining village she’d stayed at when she’d first arrived on Oros. Plus, Captain Renz of Bernd’s Blades had sent troops to verify her kill of the bone thief matriarch, too. With such recent activity, Jadis doubted Sweet Pine Valley was the primary location of the bandit operation. But that didn’t mean that the bandits couldn’t be there currently. And since the enemy had unknown numbers and levels of power, everyone was on edge.
Everyone except for one person.
“Here, try this!” Sabina said as she jogged up next to Syd.
“What is it?” Syd asked as she took the small blue object from Sabina’s outstretched hand.
Sabina had been cooped up inside the wagon throughout most of the day, only exiting it a couple of times to heed the call of nature before immediately immersing herself in whatever project was occupying her. It wasn’t until the day had mostly passed and the hour was growing late that she had popped out of the wagon to show Jadis what she’d been working on.
“It’s an enchanted bracelet!” Sabina explained proudly. “My first one! It’s not very good since it’s pretty hard to make accurate rune circles in a moving wagon, especially small ones, plus it’s not the best materials for what I was trying to do so I don’t think it’ll last very long, but it actually works! Proof of concept! Put it on and give it a try!”
The bracelet was made out of leather and large blue scales, no doubt sourced from the frost drakes. Milk white claws were set in a circle around one large central piece of bone that had Sabina’s rune circle carved in the middle. An unfamiliar symbol had been carved into the middle of her circle and as Jadis examined it, the lines glowed ever so slightly. It wasn’t the most stylish looking accessory, but Jadis thought it had a sort of tribal charm to it. The size of it was such that it could just barely fit around one of her armored wrists, which meant it’d have to be used as an armlet for most anyone else, and even then, it’d be loose without adjustments.
“What’s it do?” Syd asked as she snapped the bracelet into place on her left wrist. “Some kind of—”
Jadis’ question was interrupted as her world began to spin around in an uncontrolled frenzy. The ground under her feet slid to one side and she found herself reeling as she tried to keep herself from falling off of the edge of the world and into the vast reaches of the darkening sky. A horrible, dizzying sensation made her stomach do flips and she had to exert all of her willpower to not retch.
“Are you alright!? What did you do!?”
Jadis heard shouts from behind her as she clattered and crashed against the upside-down world, hands desperately trying to grab hold of snow-covered ground that had somehow turned into both a wall and a ceiling at the same time.
Suddenly, everything went back to normal. Just like that, Jadis was lying in a heap on ground, her three bodies tangled up in the chains of their harnesses. The Behemoth had rolled up so that it was practically on top of her, though it had fortunately stopped before crushing any of her parts under the massive wheels. Syd tilted her helmeted head back to look up at Aila who was standing over her, a blue bracelet in one hand and a furious expression on her face. That fury was directed squarely at a rather sheepish-looking Sabina.
“Oops?”
The tongue lashing that Sabina received once they’d set up camp for the night was severe. Jadis didn’t interfere with the admonishment, though she didn’t add to it, either. The bracelet Sabina had made had turned out to be not a boost or enhancement of some kind but was instead the equivalent of a cursed object. Whoever wore the bracelet was immediately inflicted with a version of one of the debilitating spells Jadis had not taken, Tilted Mirrorland. Worse, the duration of the effect wasn’t a simple thirty seconds like the version Jadis had been offered but would instead continue for as long as the bracelet was worn.
“How you could possibly think that having Jadis put something like that on while she was pulling the wagon was an acceptable idea is complete mystery,” Aila repeated angrily, standing with her fists on her hips as she looked down on the ashamed smith. “What if the wagon had rolled over one of Jadis while she was caught in that spell?”
“I didn’t—”
“What if I hadn’t been able to get the bracelet off of her before Captain Willa and the other soldiers had gotten close enough to see what was happening?”
“I don’t—”
“What if we’d been attacked at the moment? There are dangerous criminals in this forest that could have been waiting for the right time to ambush us! Jadis would have been completely unable to fight back in that condition. That’s not even considering the any number of other dangers out here like demons that could have attacked us.”
“…sorry,” Sabina apologized meekly, head bowed to Aila’s wrath.
As the mage glowered at the smith, Kerr got up from where she’d been eating her dinner to snatch the bracelet out of Aila’s hand.
“What’s the point of this, anyway?” she asked as she examined the offending trinket. “Why make a bracelet that makes the wearer get dizzy?”
“I don’t know,” Sabina replied miserably. “It wasn’t supposed to do that, originally. I wanted it to be a protection against illusion effects and it just sort of ended up being that. When I tried it on myself, I didn’t think the effect was that bad. I guess I was wrong.”
“Hmm,” Kerr hummed as she slipped the bracelet on, wrapping it twice around her wrist to make it fit.
“What are you doing?” Aila grumbled as she watched Kerr snap the clasp on the accessory.
A half-second later, the archer stumbled forward, catching herself on Aila’s shoulder. She wobbled in place, acting as though the ground beneath her feet had suddenly turned to slippery ice rather than furs and blankets. Her eyes blinked comically as her head spun around to look at everyone else.
“Woah, this is kind of fun, actually,” Kerr said with a laugh. “I mean, this would be awful in a fight, but it’s not that bad.”
“Let me try,” Eir said as she got to her feet. “My Resilience is lower than Jadis’ by five points. Any magic effects should affect me more.”
Kerr quickly pulled the bracelet off and, in a moment, Eir had it equipped. The priestess also seemed to lose her balance as she had to grab hold of Aila and Kerr, but as Jadis watched Eir was able to take a few steps forward, even letting go of the others and keeping her balance as she carefully walked in a shaky circle.
“Debilitating, but not insurmountable,” Eir commented before removing the cursed item. “Honestly, I’m surprised it had such a strong effect on you, Jadis. Your Resilience is low, but not non-existent.”
“Let me try it again,” Jay said as she reached for the bracelet. “Maybe it just caught me off guard since I wasn’t expecting it to be a negative effect.”
Snapping it onto Jay’s arm, Jadis immediately began flailing as she lost all sense of balance. The floor, walls, and ceiling of the tent shifted and flowed before her, no one surface staying in one place for long. She couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was seeing as the concerned faces of her friends and lovers spun around her. After a few seconds, the spinning seemed to lessen, if only slightly. Everything was still moving around her, but not so wildly. Jadis managed to catch sight of Eir amidst the confusing swirl of her vision and saw a glow emanating from her hand.
“I’m bolstering your Resilience with my protection spell. Is it any better?”
“A little,” Jadis called back. “But not much.”
As she spoke, Jadis realized she wasn’t entirely sure which of her selves had spoken. She was pretty sure it had been Jay, but when she tried to focus on which of her selves had the bracelet on, she found that her vision kept swimming and she couldn’t keep track. Frustrated and getting nauseous, Jadis closed all of her eyes.
Without sight, the spell’s effects were significantly lessened. She still felt some vertigo, but with no more distorted sight to confuse her, she managed to sort out which of her selves was which and pulled the bracelet off of Jay’s arm.
“I think it’s effecting me worse because I have three bodies,” Jay announced as she passed the blue bracelet back to Eir. “I’m not just seeing the world distorted, I’m seeing three different versions of the world distorted at the same time. Plus three times the dizzy effect, too. It’s too much for me to handle.”
“Oh,” Aila said, her anger abating. “That makes some sense, actually.”
“Good to know you weren’t actively trying to kill Jadis,” Kerr told Sabina with a pat on her shoulder. “Just almost accidentally.”
“I would never!” Sabina said hotly, the closest Jadis had ever seen to the smith showing a temper. “Jadis is my friend and benefactor! Plus she’s great at sex! I really thought it was just kind of a weird effect, I didn’t think it’d be so serious.” Her eyes turned to Jadis, her expression pleading. “I really didn’t mean to hurt you! I’m so sorry I put you in danger, I’ll do anything you ask to make up for it, really! I’m so, so, so, so sorry!”
“It’s fine,” Jay said as she rolled up from her awkward position on the ground. Putting a hand on Sabina’s shoulder, she smiled warmly at her. “I know you’d never do anything like that intentionally. There’s no way you could have known it’d have that strong of an effect on me.”
“All is forgiven,” Syd said as she finished untangling her limbs from Dys and one particularly stubborn blanket. “And I mean that. No more reprimands, alright Aila?”
While she still didn’t look happy, Aila took a deep breath and visibly calmed as her normal composure returned.
“Lesson learned, I hope,” Aila said as she moved away from the smith. “It’s your choice to forgive, in any case.”
“Which I do,” Dys said. But as she got to her feet, she gave a relieved-looking Sabina a wry smile. “Just hold off on giving me enchanted items to test until we’re camped next time, okay?”
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