It was the king’s orders. The king’s. Three years had passed since the boy came to the Kari mountains. His parents went missing that night, and there was a price put on his head. When he first fled to the mountains, he heard in a nearby town that the kingdom's official story of his parents' deaths was something about a horse drawn carriage, a mountainous pass, and heavy snowfall. He didn’t believe a word of it--they were murdered. 

The mountainous wind howled into his ears. The cold was setting in, making every thought a struggle to maintain. The thin boy grimaced, huddling under an oversized coat as the wind and snow blew around him. The boy, despite his skinny state, had grown much taller in the three years since his ninth birthday. He survived on the mountains with a solitary hermit called Timbu after discovering the bounty on his head. Timbu taught him how to fish, how to trap, and how to get by in the mountains. In the first few years, it was easy to hunt and get by. But in the last month, dangerous predators seemed to have migrated into the mountains, and Timbu never returned one morning. Forte could not figure out why. It was no longer safe in the mountains, and he was alone.

How could the portly, generous, warmhearted king have done such a thing? Once he confirmed that it was without a doubt the King’s orders, he would find his revenge, hitting him where the man hurt with a method more painful than those used by the most skilled assassins. But he was in no place to challenge the King at the moment. He was too weak, he had no connections, nothing. His family must have done something awful, he mused, for the King himself to order their assassination while covering it up as a transportation accident in the Kari mountains. The same Kari mountains that he was in right now. He would have his revenge, eventually.

But that was wishful thinking. The boy’s early years as nobility were all but forgotten. Forte’s mind was racing near delirium as the weather beat down on his frail body. His lungs hurt, breathing in the icy wind as he tugged on the adult sized winter coat wrapped around him. He had no more family, no one he could trust. The king wrote him off as dead or incapacitated. Soon he would starve to death. Forte had nothing left, nothing but the cloak on his body and his father’s old ring, which had rusted over time through wear, as it was coated in sweat and grime. As it was too big for Forte’s small shivering hands, he had fastened it to a string and tied it around his neck like a necklace. The brown adult sized cloak he was wearing, given to Forte by a passing monk years ago, was wearing thin. Then, with a sudden gust of wind, the cloak was violently torn from Forte’s shaking body. The boy’s eyes watered, as the cold grew unbearable and stung his eyes. He managed to grab the dirty cloak before it was blown any further. Night was falling, and he could no longer escape the wolves in this mountain. The same wolves that had been stalking him for days.

An hour passed. Forte was in the first stages of hypothermia. He could’ve sworn he saw the gleaming eyes of wolves, testing his boundaries, curious and hungry. Finally, as he nearly dozed off, they emerged. Three wolves rose from the foliage, partially camouflaged by the tall trees around them. Night had truly fallen. Forte felt a chill—a survival instinct kicking in for he who was about to die—as he shot up and grabbed a tree branch, his hands shaking. “Get away! Go! Scram!” he shouted, waving the stick at the approaching eyes. The leftmost wolf pounced, and the rest followed. Forte swung the branch in an arc, but it broke upon first contact, leaving the first wolf to nip at his left arm, which left a bloody indent in the boy’s forearm. Luckily, the nerve remained intact. The second wolf leaped up and bit into his shoulder, teeth digging in deep and dragging the boy onto the ground with sheer weight. Forte nearly lost consciousness as he was slammed into the snowy ground, head bouncing off the ground as the wolves closed in on him. Just as the wolves were about to attack him again, they froze in place. And then Forte heard a trumpeting roar coming from deeper in the forest, from what sounded like a dragon.

And so it was. But not quite. What emerged from the shadows of the forested mountain was not the majestic creature Forte had half expected in his delirious state. A twisted and vile creature paced out on its two hind legs, creating dulled thuds in the ground beneath. The creature’s head was gnarled and serpent-like, its body emaciated and its hide was a scale-less hue of deep dark brown. It was a wingless wyvern, and it had stalked this pack of wolves for hours. The wyvern snarled, and the wolves attempted to drag Forte back with them for a couple feet before abandoning the boy and turning tail. The wyvern set chase, hunting down the wolf that was dragging Forte and viciously biting at its neck. The two other wolves glanced at their former companion struggling vainly under the wyvern before fleeing.

Forte, who laid panting on the ground from the wolf attack, slowly crawled to the nearest shrubbery as his forearm and bloodied legs seared with pain. He mustered up the last of his strength and grabbed his cloak, pressing it onto his arm wound for a few seconds as it soaked up some blood, before curling it up and tossing the bloody rag onto a bush a few feet away. Forte shot out his right hand and dug under the snow for a handful of dirt. He then rubbed the dirt and snow onto his left forearm’s ragged wolf-bite wound while his eyes teared up in pain.

Further into the forest, he heard the final anguished howl of the wolf. The wyvern was pacing back with the carcass in its mouth, heading in Forte’s direction. It was searching for him, an easy meal. Forte didn’t have the chance to cover his body with dead leaves to completely mask his scent. He had bloodied his cloak and thrown it away to act as a decoy for the wyvern, because he knew from bedtime stories from his early childhood that wyverns mainly tracked by scent. Hopefully the dirt on his forearm would mask the scent of his blood.

The wyvern gently placed down the wolf carcass in the middle of the forest clearing, and then headed towards the bloodied cloak thrown by Forte on the bush. It tore at the cloak, expecting to contact flesh with its bite. After a minute of fruitless attacks on the cloak, the wyvern spat the cloak onto the ground and sulked away. It picked up the carcass of the wolf and slowly dragged it back to its den, far on the other side of the mountain. Forte let out a long sigh, clearly visible against the cold air. A single tear dripped down the face of the boy, as he began sobbing. He was weak. He could not face the perils of the Kari mountains. Dangerous animals had migrated into the mountains recently, as the village on the bottom of the mountains that had once shooed them away was destroyed and abandoned for reasons he did not know. Large carnivorous animals followed the recent animal migrants, and even more dangerous predators, like the wyvern, followed their large prey. The Kari mountains were no longer a safe haven for Forte.

And yet he could not go to any villages—they still had old missing person notices, issued by a mysterious benefactor, of the pudgy boy who mysteriously disappeared. A sizable 50 gold reward was being offered for anyone who found the “missing” boy. He knew that if he was found, he’d be dragged to the dungeons or killed. But three years had passed, and it seemed he had to take the risk. His arm was infected by grime, and it was a matter of time before he succumbed to the cold, the monsters, or his infection. On the bright side, his once pudgy stomach was now flat, and maybe he wouldn’t be recognizable. It was a gamble that Forte had to take.

And so he descended the mountain, hiding every time he felt those gleaming eyes on him, sometimes for hours. He ate nuts and berries, and the occasional rabbit he could hunt. He cooked over fires and napped during the day, when the nocturnal predators were asleep, and fled for his life during the night. On one such chase, Forte’s leg was injured. And so he forged a small makeshift cane out of a tough tree branch. With the predators retarding his pace, it took him a month and a few days, but he finally managed to limp to the bottom of the mountain with his makeshift cane. He stepped out of the forest and into the ravaged village.