Monotony...

It had been three days since we left Tegi, and we had travelled south-west ever since. According to Sigmir, we had crossed roughly half the distance to her tribe and I was seriously wondering if the game-developers had truly thought their game through. If not for the company, I would be mad with boredom. Day after day, mile after mile, we travelled through the same sort of forest, with a few different types of trees around us. From time to time, the forest was broken up by snowed-in meadows and frozen-over rivers but that was rare and it did not change much.

Adding to the boredom was the fact that I had yet to fully learn to suppress my aura as a being of the first Divide, scaring animals away from us, preventing attack and taking away even that slight break in monotony.

With that monotony, it was not a big surprise that we jumped at the prospect of excitement we felt when Ylva told us that she smelled something strange. She tracked the strange scent through the forest until we happened upon a large clearing. There, we found the source of the scent and the reason for its strangeness. Strewn across the clearing were multiple corpses, giving off a penetrating smell, a mixture of blood, decay and the resin-like smell of nymph-blood. No wonder that Ylva had called the scent ‘strange’.

We inspected the bodies, trying to puzzle out what had happened here. The corpses were a mixture of sylvans, looking like dryads or maybe nymphs, and wolf-beastmen. The sylvans were using their normal garments out of living fiber, but obviously it was now dead and decaying, contributing to the smell. The beastman were clad in leathers and looked less like warriors and more like hunters, armed with bows, daggers and the odd spear.

Judging be the fact that there were corpses from two distinct factions and some of the sylvans had weapons still buried in their bodies, I could make an educated guess to the happenings here. They had fought each other, one side winning but probably not by much. After their win, they had left the scene in order to avoid possible reinforcements, not even taking the time to bury their dead.

“They look like the nymphs in Tegi.” Adra remarked.

I inspected the nymphs again, this time more closely and had to agree, they did look just like the ones we had killed before.

“Well, it’s not a big surprise that some of them survived the destruction of Tegi. I guess they are now homeless.” I said with a little smile. There was no love lost for them, not so much because of their ruthlessness, sacrificing everything they got their hands on in an almost industrial fashion, but because of their stupidity.

For one thing, they never thought their actions through to the end, I had thought about their methodology quite a bit and was never able to deduce their end-game plan. They had literally built their city on an ticking time-bomb and even without my intervention it would have ended in catastrophe. Something like that would make sense if it was one being’s doing, using a city as henchmen to do their bidding and dropping them once they were no longer useful, leaving them to clean up the consequences, but it didn’t look like that was what happened there.

And that was part of the other thing that I disliked about them. If it had been one being’s action, used to create a power-reservoir for personal use, for example something used for a great working of magic, I would be able to respect that. Ruthless but focused on a goal. But no, they had squandered the power they had raised, wasted it on ridiculous acts of arrogance. Heating their city-area to spring-temperature in the siberian winter? Lighting it up like modern-day New York? I was just unable to fathom it, there was no use, other than the stroking of one’s ego by doing something just because they had the ability. And that funnelled back to my first point of annoyance, they did not have the ability. In a way, they were a perfect example for the inclusion of pride as a cardinal sin.

Now, it looked like they had simply migrated a bit south and were trying to carve out a new area for themselves.

As I was lost in thought, Ylva and Sigmir were looking around a little further in the woods and a surprised shout ripped me from my contemplation.

“We found something. Come over and look.” Sigmir called out.

Adra and I moved over, curious about their discovery. Sigmir and Ylva were standing together, looking at footprints in the snow and combined with the splattered blood, it was enough to make me want to know more. The blood was red so one of the beastman had managed to get away.

I looked over to the other two and asked with a slight smile, “Want to find out more? I’m curious.”

Sigmir just shrugged, but Adra looked eager. I think there was a part of her that was feeling some responsibility for the events in Tegi. Just why she did was beyond me - it was not as if she had assisted in the creation of the problem, or caused it to blow up in the stupid dryads’ faces. I was a lot more responsible than she was but I knew that I had not actually done anything, just stopped it before it became worse. Maybe she had some sort of survivor’s guilt, I had read about that in books before and it did not sound entirely rational, why would one feel guilty about not dying?

Again, my train of thought was stopped short, this time by the need to follow the others. Following the tracks was easy enough, even I could have managed to do so, they simply led through the forest in a relatively straight line, away from the fight.

It did not take long for us to find the end of the tracks, a dense thicket of evergreen shrubs. Ylva growled a little, letting us know that something, or more likely someone, was hiding in the shrubs and that it was the source of the tracks we had been following.

Adra moved forward but was held back by Sigmir. “Let Morgana or me lead. If they fought with dryads, you might scare them. And a scared, cornered animal will attack, even if it kills itself doing so.”

I realised that there was wisdom in Sigmir’s words, if I had just escaped a fight and someone who looked even remotely similar to my attackers was following after me, I would be liable to do something reckless.

Looking closer at the shrubbery, I did not want Sigmir with her large frame to be forced to struggle through it so I moved forwards before she could. My smaller frame was handy sometimes, for example when it came to getting into tight spots.

I made my way into the thicket and found a rather small wolf-beastman curled up inside. Well, he was larger than me, but not by much and he did not look good. As I was reaching toward him, he twitched and snapped at my hand. The simple act of moving seemed to take a lot out of him and he shrunk back. I had seen documentaries of animal handling and felt I should try something similar. Talking in a calm voice, I tried again, this time not reaching for his face but his body, not causing a reaction this time. When I sent out my magic, I knew the reason why. He was burning up and had lost a lot of blood, there was just no strength left in him. I also found the reason for his blood-loss, a deep gash in his back, no longer bleeding freely but the blood-soaked clothing attested to the fact that it was a bad wound.

If I wanted to sate my curiosity about the happenings in the clearing, I would have to save his life. After a short deliberation, I told the others what I had found and created a rune-formation, mainly composed of blood-runes, funnelling a lot of my own power into the healing in order to make it as easy as possible on his system. Simply throwing a regeneration-spell at him, might heal the wound but take all his remaining strength to do so, leaving me with a perfectly healed corpse.

It did take a little while, but as the pain left him, he calmed and soon settled into a deep, sleep. I checked my Astral Power and realised that I had quite a lot left and I doubted that we would move further today so I simply stretched my Eisblumen-vines and ripped out enough of the shrubbery to allow Sigmir and Adra comfortable entrance.

It was a dry, protected space to spend the night in, after all - no need to waste it.