Rune Mage Unchained (Broken System Book 2), page 14
That didn’t stop them from keeping a careful eye out for more troubles the rest of the day. If those terrible archers had wanted to kill the hundreds of humans that were trespassing on their territory so badly, then he had no doubt that they’d be back at some point to try again. Honestly, Benjamin wouldn’t be surprised if they had some magic of their own, too.
The fact that they outnumbered the centaurs four or five to one didn’t really help, he thought wryly.
Honestly, in terms of mass, the two sides were probably just about equal. Though he expected they’d triumph in any fight, it would make for a bloody mess that would kill an awful lot of people.
“Why don’t you just light a brush fire like that prick Ethan did to us?” Emma asked at one point while they were discussing how they might shore up tonight’s defenses. “They’re somewhere downwind, aren’t they? That would buy us more time, at least.”
Benjamin thought about correcting her, noting that they weren’t sure it had been Ethan who had laid that trap but decided against it. It wasn’t worth the fight in the fight in the same way that burning down dozens of square miles on purpose wouldn’t be worth avoiding a fight.
“This whole world is riddled with fae and nature spirits, Emma,” Benjamin explained, even though he felt like he shouldn’t have to. “The last thing we want to do is aggravate them, or really even attract their attention.”
“Why not?” she asked, “Maybe they’ll help us fuck these mages up.”
“Maybe they will,” he agreed, “but if we start burning down everything in sight just because we feel like it, I think it becomes less likely.”
They argued about it at length but reached no firm conclusions. So, it was ironic when two of their scouts ran back to report what they’d found in the road ahead near dusk. Despite doing their best to keep a low profile, it would seem that just mentioning the magical creatures had been enough to attract the gaze of the fae.
Matt and Benjamin conferred for a few minutes before letting someone approach the mystery figure. From this distance, in this light, only Raja could see any details about the person, and he described her as a ‘kindly old woman with strange skin’ standing in the middle of the road. That didn’t seem too threatening, of course, but he’d long since learned that in this world, looks could be incredibly deceiving.
As their scout cautiously approached the hooded figure in the road, everyone was on edge, but nothing happened. Instead, he came back a few minutes later with a scroll, which he handed to Matt.
Matt opened it up and glanced at it briefly before he handed it off to Benjamin and said. “We’re being invited to dinner by the Throne of the Sky Sea.”
“Shit,” Benjamin said, quickly breezing through the missive to look for any hints of what it was their messenger might want as he read it out loud to his friends.
“I was warned that you might one day trouble me, but I did not believe that the Arboreal Throne could possibly be correct, and yet here you are. As the first manthings to tread my trackless paths without the veil of darkness, you intrigue me. You are oddities, but even when my beloved children lashed out at you, you did not seek to slay them. This requires an explanation, and you are required to give it.” he said, digging for the important parts as quickly as he could, “Therefore, you shall be allowed to attend the sacred fire tonight, where we will trade songs about how this has come to be and what will happen next before your fate is decided.”
He quickly saw that it wasn’t a request. Just like last time, it was an order, and for some reason, he felt the headsman’s ax lingering above the final line of the short missive.
Benjamin crumbled it in his hand as he remembered the weeks-long walk back that he and Matt had endured. This time, he was giving the messenger a piece of his mind; there was no way he was listening to another one of these fae courts give him orders without at least the guarantee that they wouldn’t lose weeks of their time.
We just can’t spare it, he told himself as he stormed forward. We have a war to fight! We don’t have time for any more fae bullshit!
CHAPTER 14
STORY TIME
“I’m sorry, but we can’t just go with you because your Lord… or Lady said so,” Benjamin announced as he strode to the front of the caravan and stood in front of the old woman. “The last time I was summoned by the Fae, it took weeks to walk back, and we don’t have that kind of time.”
He realized before he’d reached her that her skin was not actually skin, but the closer he got, the stranger it got, and in the end, he had trouble believing he was speaking to a person made of dry mud.
“Why would it take you weeks to leave the arboreal realm?” she asked as more partially dried clay flaked off her face. “Surely she could have delivered you anywhere where her roots stretched if you’d asked.”
Benjamin opened his mouth, prepared to lay into her about how little she knew when he thought back to that moment. The message he’d been given that morning in the rose garden had been incredibly ambiguous.
Could he have just asked his hosts to take him back to his friends? He wondered.
He kicked himself for not even realizing that such a thing might have been an option. He’d never know, of course - but he definitely should have asked.
“Regardless, it doesn’t matter,” she continued. “The ruler of the Sky Sea, and the endless plains beneath them only needs you for a single night. The refuge we offer is only temporary, and after that, you may continue on your way.”
“Unless your master judges that we should be slaughtered, right?” he asked, feeling suddenly suspicious. “The way I read the note, that is an option too. There’s no guarantee of safety here.”
“There’s no violence at the sacred fire tonight,” she said with an amused smile that made a portion of her increasingly dry complexion flake off. “If the Lady of the Twin Seas wished you dead, then she’d bring the tribes together and crush you with that mighty fist. For now, all she seeks is understanding.”
Benjamin was unsure. In the beginning, he’d planned on finding some way out of this strange situation, or at least extract some guarantees. However, the messenger had been more than amiable.
While she might be lying, her answers had been fairly even-handed, and it was hard to see the harm. She wasn’t trying to pull him aside. She was asking for his whole army, such as it was, to attend whatever it was that was planned. While it was possible that this new throne might simply want the humans together in one spot so she could crush them, there was no reason she couldn’t do the same thing here if he refused to go along with them.
Could she crush them either way? Benjamin couldn’t say.
There would definitely be negative consequences if he refused her, but there might be positive ones if agreed to meet her.That was enough to make him lean toward yes.
After all, his association with the arboreal fae had been mostly positive in retrospect. If he and his friends were going to be out here waging a war, then good relationships with the locals were probably important. Just like that, he deflated, and all of his objections were gone.
“If we do decide to meet, then where must we travel?”
“Right through here,” she said with a wave. As she spoke, the wall of grass that surrounded the slender road they were on began withering and fell away, revealing a second path that proceeded straight toward the setting sun.
“Well… umm… That was easy,” he said uncertainly. “Lead on, I guess.”
The clay woman laughed again at that, losing more mass with each chuckle as clay and straw fell away. “I was made only for the journey here,” she said pleasantly. “Others will guide you back in my stead.”
As if to demonstrate, she took a step forward, and her now dry and solidified leg broke off mid-calf. Her body reformed to create a new foot, but with each stride, the process repeated, and she shrank at an alarming rate. Five steps there, just shy of the road she’d revealed, she broke into a pile of fragments and a cloud of dust and blew away in the wind.
Benjamin looked from the pile to the scouts standing there and back again. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he muttered.
“Me either,” the closest man to him said, crossing himself, “And I hope never to do so again.”
On that point, Benjamin could definitely agree, and he left them to go back and discuss the situation with his friends. That conversation was more complicated than he’d have thought and went on for several minutes. Emma argued it was a trap, Benjamin argued it was a risk worth taking, and Matt agreed with both of them.
“I don’t trust any of these faeries - whether they live in trees or not, but I don’t really see what else we’re supposed to do here,” he said with a shrug. “Except for that elemental they sent to test us, the woodland critters mostly left us alone. I figure the best case here is we work out a similar sort of agreement here, you know? Enemy of my enemy and all that.”
In the end, when Benjamin asked Raja what he thought, his friend only shrugged, which struck Benjamin as just about right. Shrugging was the optimum opinion with so many unknowns floating about.
With that decided, Benjamin told everyone what had happened and where they were going. That raised more than a few questions, but he answered them as they walked, doing his best to reassure everyone that it would probably be fine.
After all, they’d managed to visit a place like this before and come back fine, and none of the issues raised were enough to stop them from starting down the new trail. Regardless, those concerns were still everyone to keep everyone on edge, and Benjamin noticed that most of their warriors kept a hand on their weapons and a sharp lookout as they proceeded toward the sinking sun.
Benjamin tried to follow their example, but as vigilant as he tried to be, it was hard to stay alert when gazing at such beauty. From where he stood, partway up their rickety crows nest, he could see further than most, and he saw nothing to cause concern about the intensifying natural beauty.
His dad used to say that every sunset he saw was the best one yet, but this one really was, and it was enough to make him miss his parents, wherever they were. Between the burning sky and the fields of grass that danced in the breeze like ocean waves, though, even those thoughts weren’t enough to make him sad for long.
Things stayed normal until the sunset that had been painting the clouds in elaborate stripes of red and orange began fading. As purples replaced them, while the sun half sank below the horizon, fireflies started coming out. Well, at least he thought they were fireflies.
All of them quickly discovered that the lights that swarmed them in all the colors of the sunset weren’t insects at all. They were little glowing faeries that left glittering trails behind them.
Somewhere between the hard-packed road that led to the Rhulvinarian outpost and where they were now,they’d crossed the invisible line that separated the mundane world they were used to with wonderland. Benjamin didn’t mind that at all. Another trip to faerie land beat the hell out of their next bloody battlefield in his book.
There were other small fae creatures, lacking wings, who had climbed to the top of certain grass stalks and beckoned them on with lanterns. Some larger creatures, almost human-sized and made from straw, seemed to be fishing with hooks baited with light as well.
All around them, the flickering lights began gathering so thickly that they resembled a glowing river that was sweeping them forward to their destination. It was a cacophony of strangeness that only got stranger when he realized that the sun had never completely set. Instead, with its last red rays, it lit a fire in the distant fire ring, and minute by minute, they were walking toward it.
That must be the sacred fire, he thought to himself.
Its appearance did nothing to stop the night from darkening, though, and soon, the swarm of glowing lights that followed their caravan was competing with the stars in the sky. It was a beautiful, kaleidoscoping sight, and the group only left it behind when they reached the large clearing that had been set aside around the even larger bonfire.
As he got closer, details began to emerge. Centaurs in war paint, clay men and women in clothing made of grass and beastmen, ranging from small hyenamen to giant tortoisepeople, were all in attendance as well. In fact, the only difference between this gathering and the last one he’d attended was the surroundings.
There might have been fewer of the ethereally beautiful fae, and there was no diffident stagman waiting to lecture him on etiquette, but what stood out the most was the setting. The Arboreal throne had lived in a tree palace so large it blocked out the sky.
By contrast, this was closer to a Native American camp. There were a few dozen structures that had been assembled around the edges of the clearing, and coals were being ferried to various places to cook food on smaller grills. The tree castle appeared to have been growing since the dawn of time, but it would only take a few hours to tear this place down and move on. He wouldn’t have been surprised if this place was pulled down every morning and rebuilt somewhere new each evening.
Benjamin wondered whether that was just their culture or if the wars with the Summoner Lords had impoverished them. Before he could decide one way or another, a pack of three-foot-tall prairie-dogkin boiled out of the holes of a nearby mound. The creatures blocked their path and began busily directing everyone to their proper places around the fire.
Despite how casual it all looked, it still seemed that everything had a very prescribed protocol. Horses needed to be tethered here, wagons parked over there, and then the group was divided by gender and status and placed in small clusters around the camp.
“If this is an ambush, then dividing us up would be the first order of business,” Matt rumbled.
Benjamin could see anger and frustration building in his friend’s expression, but he did his best to calm Matt down.
“Relax, man,” he sighed as the four of them were escorted to the rugs that marked the area around the largest of the tortoisemen on the far side of the fire. “These guys hate the dudes we’re killing almost as much as we do. It’s going to be okay.”
“Greetings, manthings,” the tortoiseman said in a deep, rumbling voice that was more felt than heard. “I am Brauchus, the storyteller.”
Benjamin nodded, introducing each of his friends in turn. Before this was even done, simple skewers of meat and wooden cups of water were being handed out by nearly-uniform clay servants with generic faces that differed only in the patterns that were daubed in browns and reds across their clay skins. In fact, they were so fresh that their skins were still slick and slimy and left clay on the skewers where they had held the ends.
Benjamin wondered how long they lived for, anyway. How old had the messenger woman been when she’d met them? Years? Months? As the night wore on and stories were exchanged, he increasingly suspected that the answer was days or perhaps even just a single day.
The realization struck him as bizarre; however, whenever he tried to bring it up with their host, the turtle simply parried the question with a nonanswer. “The servants of the earth are eternal,” he’d said, or “Nothing ever really dies. Not in the way you mean.”
As they sat together, Emma commented on the beautiful patterns of the mats they were sitting on by the fire, and their host launched into a story about what the patterns represented and told them about the first blade of grass and how it came to conquer the world. Later, Matt asked about what they were eating, a topic that Benjamin had been doing his best to avoid for obvious reasons, just in case he didn’t want to know the answer, but the closest that the storyteller came to any factual information was telling them the story of the slowest rabbit.
As a choice, it made Benjamin smile. Honestly, he’d accepted an interrogation, but instead, so far, there had only been conversations and stories.
No one had asked anyone near him a single question so far. He did more listening than speaking himself, and instead focused on devouring the delicious shish kabobs that had been roasted to perfection.
“So when will we meet your boss anyway?” Matt demanded finally as most people had finished eating and cups of mulled wine were being handed out with bowls of candied fruit. “This Throne of yours.”
“That comes later,” the tortoise said cryptically “but I can tell you how she came to us that first night, so long ago,” before moving back and beginning another story. This one was about how the stars in the sky are nothing but embers that had escaped from the sacred fire on previous nights.
Benjamin listened with curiosity, still unable to decide if the teller thought that these stories were literally true, or if he knew that his creation myths couldn’t possibly make sense. He said nothing. He just listened and drank from his cup as the world grew increasingly hazy.
As pleasant as the evening was, and with the way everything was slowly bleeding together, it took him longer than it should have to notice as his mind was slowly becoming unmoored from the real, rational world. He looked down at his now nearly-empty glass and then back up at his turtle host, before he looked around and saw that most everyone else, human and beastkin alike, had already succumbed to the narcotic effect of what they’d been drinking. Only the tortoise and the clay men that served them were still fully awake. “Did you drug us?”
“I only gave you a gift so that we could better understand one another,” the wizened old turtle said, nodding slowly. “Now we will dream of each other, and there we will find the truth.”
There was the faintest commotion, or maybe Benjamin imagined it. He wasn’t sure. Matt either sat there already asleep, or he roared to life at the revelation that they’d been drugged.
“An ambush!” Matt yelled, trying and failing to rouse those around him as the stripes reached out from the mat Benjamin sat on to grasp him, pulling him gently down into the earth.
