Era of Chaos. Thornholt. Prime.
The adventurers' guild hall in Thornholt occupied the ground floor of a wide wooden building, built around two rows of massive pillars, between which stretched sturdy oak tables covered with notches and cup rings from many years of use. The hearth by the far wall gave more smoke than heat, and the light from it fell unevenly, leaving the corners in dense shadow. Outside, the wind pressed through the gaps between the boards, and the lantern above the entrance swung, casting long strips of shadow across the lower edge of the clouded window.
The surviving adventurers had arranged themselves the way people sit after a rout: in separate groups, with gaps between them where others used to be. Bandages on arms and necks, on some worn over chainmail that hadn't been changed since the fight. Cups stood full or overturned, and no one touched either.
A man named Theodore Solt occupied a seat at the head of the table by the hearth and stared into the fire with a focused, distant expression. He was broader in the shoulders than most of those present and a good ten years older, with large, calloused hands lying flat on the tabletop. The patch on his right sleeve was torn at the edge.
"We didn't have enough people" — he said, without turning his head.
Someone at the far end of the table moved a cup and gave a brief cough.
"Good people. The kind with hundreds of kills behind them, not a dozen or two. Against a storm wyvern pack with the roster we had, we were walking into our deaths from the start."
He raised his gaze, sweeping the hall slowly and heavily.
"A job like this calls for an army. Regular troops from one of the powers, who march on order."
Slightly to the side, at the edge of the same table, sat a girl named Riana, her elbow resting against the back of her chair. She was short, with light, closely cropped hair and a wide graze across her left cheekbone, already dried. Her left hand rested on her knee, fingers loosely curled.
She rubbed her thumb across the pads of her other fingers and looked at Solt.
"I checked everyone. Personally. Before drawing up the plan. Everyone we took."
Solt turned his head toward her slowly.
"When I touch a person and connect with their deep consciousness, I can see every creature they have ever killed." — she said.
"That is my gift."
Several people at the table raised their heads.
She placed her palm flat on the table in front of her.
"Eight of the twenty-three had more than a hundred kills behind them. Five had clearly crossed two hundred. Two had passed five hundred. These were experienced people, Solt. Most of those we lost today had been hunting for years."
The fire in the hearth cracked, throwing out a burst of sparks, then sank.
Solt looked at her with a measured, even expression, and there was no hurry in his silence.
"So we underestimated the pack" — he said at last.
"We underestimated the pack" — Riana confirmed.
"But that's a different conversation."
She leaned back in her chair, the chair creaking under her.
"An army will come for the wyverns and stay here after them."
At the next table a chair scraped, and a man who had been sitting there since the conversation began rose with a sharp, angular movement. He was a large, dark-haired man with broad cheekbones and a bandage over his left shoulder, soaked brown at the edges. He looked at Solt and Riana with equal irritation.
"And did you establish the reason?" — he said.
"Why they came here at all? Why they're so enraged? Did anyone look into that before we went out there?"
Solt turned his head toward him.
"I did. They appeared in the mountains more than two weeks ago. We had enough time for observation before we moved out."
He placed his heavy palms on the tabletop.
"In those two weeks, the wyverns never established territory. Not a single proper den, no nests in the rocks. They kept to the crevices, moved between them, but laid down nothing permanent. They were waiting it out."
Riana listened without a word, her gaze drifting across the tabletop in front of her, lingering there for several seconds.
"Maybe they're running." — she said.
The man looked at her. For several seconds his face stayed still, then the corner of his mouth jerked upward in a short, sharp smirk.
He laughed, ragged and abrupt, and turned to the hall with his whole body.
"DID YOU HEAR THAT?!" — he shouted, sweeping his hand across the room.
"They're RUNNING! Half of the good people today aren't coming home! Rogdar was burning alive right in front of me while we held the line! Burning while we fell back! And according to her these things are just running from someone!"
His mouth closed, and the hall went quiet, pressed from outside by nothing but the wind. Riana looked at him steadily and said nothing.
He crossed the distance between the tables in one sharp step and planted his hands on the tabletop in front of Riana, leaning his weight onto straight arms.
"These are wyverns, Riana" — he said, and his voice was level only in the first two words.
"These are fucking wyverns. Give them another pair of legs — and you've got yourself a fucking dragon! And there are more than a dozen of the bastards out there! So stop talking shit and say it straight: you people couldn't be bothered to properly scout the situation before dragging us all out to die!"
Solt rose. His voice came out short, hard, and pitched in a way that cut across the hall without effort.
"She was there. And you know that. We were all there, all of us risked our lives, and you're not the only one who lost friends."
The man looked at him for several seconds, then took his hands off the table and went back to his seat in silence. He sat down heavily, set his elbows on the tabletop, and buried his face in his hands, staring at the wood in front of him.
Riana didn't raise her gaze. She looked down and slowly picked at the cuticle of her left thumb.
Solt turned to her after several seconds.
She shook her head, stopping him before he could start.
"I saw." - she said.
"I checked every one of them. Held their hands, saw the counts…"
She stilled her thumb and closed her fist.
"And still."
Solt said nothing.
"My gift may let me see things like that, but it doesn't let me see people's real experience." she said quietly.
They sat like that for several minutes, and the hall was quiet with them, under the crackle of the hearth and the dull pressure of the wind against the walls outside.
- - -
Without warning the door opened without a knock, letting in a brief gust of cold air.
The stranger entered and pulled the door shut behind him at once, moving without hurry, with straight posture and straight shoulders. He was of medium height, with dark hair tied back, and a high black collar that hid the lower part of his neck. The two-handed sword on his back stretched from his left shoulder to his right hip, and its blade was covered in runes densely, in several rows, with a visible inconsistency of styles: sharp, angular signs alternating with rounded symbols of an entirely different origin.
He walked through the hall to the counter, not letting his gaze linger on any of those seated, and stopped at its edge.
From the other side a woman who handled the reception and dispatch of orders came toward him. Her face was tired and drawn, and she leaned on the counter with both hands before speaking.
"There are no orders today." — she said.
The stranger let his gaze slide toward the board on the wall. There were no announcements on it: in their place hung a map with pencil marks and arrows explaining the scheme of the attack on the pack — positions, directions of advance, marked points in the mountains.
He looked at the map for several seconds, then turned to the woman.
"Have you hunted wyverns before?"
The woman exhaled slowly and gestured toward the hall.
"Everyone you see… less than half of those who set out this morning to attack that pack."
The stranger looked at the map again, at the marks in the mountains.
"How many of them?"
From the table came a short laugh. The broad-shouldered man with the bandage on his shoulder was staring at the tabletop in front of him, and the smirk that crossed his face was sharp and crooked. He turned his head over his shoulder without rising.
"A lot." — he said.
"What's it to you? Go find orders somewhere else."
The stranger turned to him, holding his gaze exactly as long as was needed, then turned back to the woman behind the counter.
She sighed and rubbed her forehead.
"They counted around twelve."
The stranger shifted his brows slightly and said quietly, barely parting his lips:
"Twelve… and where are the other two…"
He stepped to the board and raised his hand, running his finger along the map following the mountain ridge, pausing at the marks, shifting his attention from one point to the next slowly and methodically.
Riana had been watching him from the moment he came in, and her gaze was focused and tense. Solt sat motionless, watching with an even, closed expression.
The man with the bandage lifted his head from the tabletop.
He looked at the stranger for several seconds, and something in his posture first gathered itself and then snapped, and he stood with a jerk, catching the chair behind him, which scraped and shifted.
The man closed the distance to the stranger in several short steps and stopped directly in front of him.
"Didn't you hear me?" — he said, dropping his voice to a firm, low register.
"Do you even see what's going on here? Or is this just another job to you?"
The stranger turned to him. His eyes were black, his gaze cold and utterly calm, and that calm hit the man harder than any answering shout would have.
"There are people lying here, do you fucking understand that?" — he continued, raising his voice.
"My people. Rogdar. They were burning alive while we pulled back!"
The stranger looked at him without a change.
"What's it to you what I think about it? go find somewhere else to take out your anger" — the stranger said, returning what the man had told him earlier, in his own context.
The man's arm went back, gathering a swing.
Riana by that point was already watching the stranger, and when the arm came up she rose as well, because the moment was precisely the one she had been waiting for since the second the stranger had started looking for answers on the map.
She stepped between them and placed her palms on both men's chests at once, to hold the distance between them, and at the same time, to quietly study the stranger's experience. Solt appeared behind them in that same moment, catching the raised arm.
The man lurched, swore through his teeth, and went slack, letting Solt draw him back.
Riana did not remove her hand.
The palm lay on the stranger's chest, and she had already used her gift, establishing a connection with his deep consciousness.
Her consciousness shifted, and the hall disappeared.
She found herself in a space without walls, without a ceiling, without any visible source of light, dark and wide, extending in every direction without limit. The stranger stood before her. Behind him began what she saw.
Hundreds of thousands — of human silhouettes.
The rows stretched deep into the space in dense columns, shoulder to shoulder, each silhouette in its place, motionless and faceless, and they extended so far that she could find no point where they ended, no matter how far she strained her gaze into that depth.
Behind them stood creatures.
Her gift always gave recognizable forms: boars, wolves, wyverns, griffins, all the things hunters dealt with. Here the shapes broke: too many limbs, joint angles in directions for which she had no words, body mass distributed across skeletons she could not match to any creature she had ever seen. There were even more of them than there were people, and they receded into the depth in that same dense, impenetrable wall.
Behind those stood others.
The size of each consumed several rows of the previous creatures, and their outlines blurred under direct gaze, refusing to hold. Some had multiple heads. There were around a hundred of them, and they occupied a depth in which everything she had seen up to that point already seemed small and near.
And behind them, in the deepest part, where her power could barely hold the thread of contact, stood three.
Three colossal silhouettes, each so much larger than everything else that the hundreds of thousands of people, creatures, and monsters behind her fit entirely within the shadow of each one.
Her consciousness could no longer sustain the weight of it, and her gaze shifted upward almost against her will, and she saw the stranger's neck where the collar had shifted slightly with his breathing, and beneath the edge of the fabric runes emerged, driven into the skin in dense rows and continuing deeper under his clothes.
The connection broke, and the hall returned all at once: the hearth, the light, the hum of wind in the walls.
Her palm was still on the stranger's chest, while her fingers had gone white, and she looked at him with wide-open eyes and a parted mouth. Her face reflected in full measure the depth of absolute and primal terror, shock, and fear she was experiencing all at once. The girl's breathing had stopped entirely, and her heart seemed to have stilled, while blood began to run from her nose.
Solt had already guided the man back to his table and was returning. He stopped nearby and spoke, addressing the stranger:
"I apologize for that. The day has been hard. For everyone."
Then he looked at Riana and was immediately horrified by the sight of his partner, who stood frozen like a statue with an expression of utter, madness-deep terror.
While he tried to bring her around and make her breathe, the stranger walked quietly toward the exit, and the door closed behind him softly, without a slam.
Several seconds later Riana was finally able to draw a breath, and immediately fell to her knees, while Solt held her by the shoulders and went down with her, trying to understand what was happening.
"Riana!" — he said.
"Riana, look at me."
She looked past him, somewhere into the space beyond his shoulder, and her gaze was unfocused and empty. The blood from her nose had reached her upper lip, and she didn't notice.
"What happened?"
Solt's voice went quieter and harder.
"What did you see?"
She didn't answer.
People exchanged glances across the hall. Someone rose from their seat, took a step in their direction, and stopped in the middle, not knowing what to do with their hands. Several people looked across the tables with tense, bewildered faces, and none of them moved. The man with the bandage on his shoulder raised his head from the tabletop and looked at Riana with an expression in which the anger had been replaced by something else.
"Riana?" — Solt repeated, squeezing her shoulders slightly harder.
She grabbed onto him.
Her hands closed on his jacket on both sides, her fingers clenching the fabric with such force that her knuckles went white, and she pressed her face against him, and from her throat came crying, broken and sharp, completely uncontainable, and she sobbed, holding onto him with both hands, and her body shook in heavy, uncontrolled tremors, and not a single word came out of her.
Solt held her. Tightly, with both arms, pulling her against him, and she kept sobbing, and there was nothing he could do about it, and so he raised his head and looked at the adventurers gathered above them, with the lost, helpless expression of a man holding something whose nature he didn't understand. The adventurers looked back, and none of them said a word, and the hall held nothing but the fire in the hearth, the wind in the walls, and what Riana could not stop.
- - -
By late evening the hall had almost emptied. People left one by one, in pairs, some with a bottle, some in silence, and at the table by the hearth only Solt and Riana remained.
Riana sat upright, holding a cup of ale with both palms, staring at a single point on the wood in front of her. The cup had long since stopped being cold, but she held it. Solt sat across from her, his forearms resting on the tabletop, and he was silent, knowing she would have answered on her own if she could.
He exhaled heavily through his nose and looked into the fire.
The first jolt came from below.
The floor shuddered, cups shifted, a hook with a tag fell from the wall. Several people jumped to their feet, looking around.
The second jolt came several seconds later, just as brief and directed from below upward, sharp.
The third.
The ground struck in salvos with pauses too even for anything natural, and in that regularity there was nothing Solt could connect to ordinary ground movement.
Voices rose outside.
They all went out at once, and the cold night air settled on the skin immediately after the warmth of the hearth. The people of Thornholt were already standing along the street, heads raised, gazes turned toward the ridge.
It was flashing there.
The bursts of light were too brief and too localized, sharply synchronized with sound that reached here with a delay: dull concussions in which sometimes a strike could be recognized, sometimes an explosion, sometimes a roar.
He stood and watched the ridge.
Then he lowered his gaze and saw Riana beside him. Her arms hung at her sides, her fingers moving slowly and methodically, tearing at her cuticles, and she looked toward the ridge with the same expression that had stood in her eyes since the second the stranger left the hall.
- - -
They rode out at first light.
A group of seven climbed the mountain path in silence, and by mid-morning reached the crest from which the valley below opened up.
Solt stopped first.
The rocks were gone.
Where massive stone formations with crevices had stood, sheltering the pack, there were craters now. Several small ones lay at the edges, with fused rims and collapsed sides, sinking several meters into the earth. At the center was one large one, covering several hundred meters across, and at its bottom lay fused stone, still retaining heat in some places.
No one in the group said a word.
One of the adventurers, who had gone around the right edge, raised a hand, beckoning the others.
Solt walked over and looked down.
The head of a storm wyvern lay on the rocky ground at the edge. Large, with wide brow ridges and scales that had taken on the grey tint of death. Its neck had been torn, with ragged edges and exposed vertebrae splayed outward under pressure that had come from inside out, and across the entire surface of the tear there was not a single mark that any blade could have left.
Solt slowly lowered himself to one knee and looked into the wyvern's eyes.
They were open. And in them stood what he had already seen once, a day ago, in the guild hall, on Riana's face.
The same primal, undisguised terror.
"It was him…" — the voice came quietly, from behind him.
Solt rose slowly and turned.
Riana stood two steps away, looking at the head. Then she raised her gaze and looked him in the eyes.
"It was him."
Solt stood and said nothing.
He looked at Riana, then at the head, then back at Riana, and tried to assemble from those two points something that held together. The man who had come to the guild the previous evening with questions about wyverns had left and not returned. That same night the mountains had struck in salvos, and by morning there were no bodies left of the pack and no signs of presence — only craters in the rock and a head with a torn spine, in whose eyes stood the same terror he had seen on a living human face.
He took his gaze off the head and didn't look at it again.
The adventurers stood in silence, some looking into the crater, some at the head, some motionless with their gazes dropped to the ground at their feet.
Solt looked at the ridge, at the fused rock, at the sky above the valley, which held nothing but clouds.
Whatever had come here that night, it was gone. And had left behind exactly as much as it wanted to leave.