Prologue
Report on Resource Acquisitions, Cerasus Township:
I have found few willing suppliers who have any wood products, foodstuffs, or even livestock to sell. When I protest and inquire as to where a man may go to find supplies, they tell me to: ‘head to Avium Citadel where the Protector keeps it all!’ You know as well as I that even the most demanding taxes from the government in recent years could not be so costly as to empty the fields, silos, and warehouses to such barrenness. Yet, locals refuse to say other than that it has gone west, ostensibly, to Avium.
At this time of year, one would likewise expect a surplus of items looking for transport from Avium to Alba to the east or Pyrus on the southern coast. These too are absent, as are the goods one would expect to be in supply for the long winter season in the town proper. The Protectorate has proclaimed at the unusual bounty of the grain harvests in the Cerasus region, yet no evidence of that beyond the meager bushels we passed on the North Road is seen here.
Much of the migratory labor has returned to the citadel for winter or moved further afield for the final days of harvest before the cold; indeed, we observed a great many of these laborers as we traveled into the area. Their condition was bleak, and sickness was apparent among the ones clustered outside Primula.
Even recognizing the seasonal fluctuations in population one would expect this late in the harvest season, the lack of locals of meaningful strength or ability in Cerasus is conspicuous. At this time of year, there should be an abundance of people gathering the necessary goods to make it through winter and seeking jobs or passage to the Citadels with a trade caravan; I find it hard to believe that, as afforded by the locals who speak to me, so many have gone looking for work in the city and other regions so as to leave the area thus abandoned. That so many key aspects of the local economy, all that makes a town more than a cluster of buildings, are absent is most suspicious. I fear something horrible has occurred in this place, that I tip-toe among some grand conspiracy far beyond me.
Cerasus is abandoned, nigh lifeless. We will continue on to Serrula as planned, there is nothing for the Corp. here.
-Quartermaster Xerus, Dorylus Corps
The morning was curiously warm already despite the sun not having yet peaked over the foothills; the low canopy of the forest held the previous day's heat in oppressive stillness under the dense branches, protected from the cooler winds that tickled the highest boughs of the towering trees. Gentle steam arose from bedewed blades of grass in small clearings, raising as curious, twisting fingerlings into the calm early dawn air. It clung to and made phantoms of the young rebels panting silently behind muffling scarves as they rushed down the small path.
They moved with speed and precision, stepping clear of tangling shrubs and brittle branches with the ease of those who grow up in mountain forests. Hoping to both make themselves harder to track and to cut through the thick forest on a more direct route to the safety of Cerasus, the group had been running without sleep for two days in their dash to warn the town of the army's approach.
The ancient terrain they crossed had become more familiar in the pre-dawn hours, the certainty of their path cementing as memories of youthful hunts, chases, and trysts sprung to renewed life around them. They were home. In moments they would emerge south of the town, breaking through the last of the thickly forested hills that reached out from the Aurum range before descending to the golden plains stretching unceasingly to the west. The trees thinned abruptly, the path widening as they left the wild woods for the tame, stripped hillside that supplied much of the lumber used throughout the vast Grove empire.
The youths faltered to a stop in a copse of spindly trees too thin to be worth cutting. They removed the scarves from their faces and heaved air, some sitting heavily upon the torn soil to gaze affectionately at the spread of small buildings clustered at the head of the broad valley.
Cerasus Township clung to the base of the foothills, marking where the land transformed abruptly into the fertile farmland that stretched all the way to Avium in the far west. It was a substantial trade village of some 400 families and had originally been founded by those willing to brave the treacherous forests of the Aurum valleys for the lucrative hardwoods they could harvest there. Following the unification of the provinces of Populus and Prunus, it had grown significantly, becoming a strategically vital trading point between the Citadels of Avium and Alba and today possessed a renowned market square where all manner of goods were swapped for distribution across the entirety of the empire.
Recent generations had seen the people of Cerasus additionally blessed in the unrefined ores coming out of the range from prospecting parties wedging themselves deeply into the heart of the old, weathered mountains; a great many buildings still bore the scars of saws and wood planes on their pale facades, not yet having seen the deep chill of a true winter or the browning haze of a summer wildfire. The influx of wealth had seen the town grow explosively in the last decade as workshops and smelters began belching black smoke from the high side of town and entrepreneurial traders setup storehouses around a growing market on the town's northern edge.
In the pre-dawn light, all below was still and peaceful from the view of the panting band, the town enjoying the last minutes of deep calm before the sun peaked over the stooped mountains and began anew the menial stresses of life in the lesser-periphery of the Grove. From their high vantage, they could see flittering lights at each of the main entrances to the village; the largest, located on the furthest side of the settlement from them, was almost a bonfire and sat near what they guessed must be the new market’s northern gate. Around it, several figures moved lethargically, casting erratic, exaggerated shadows that flitted around as the flames fed merrily on well-cured spars of last year’s maple.
‘We… aren’t too late,’ a fledgling man of maybe fifteen summers with rough-cut blonde hair wheezed. He looked to his left, his brother, an almost identical lad two years his junior, stared with slate eyes at the expanse below; he twirled a scarlet ribbon absentmindedly in his hands as he pondered.
‘They’re drunk, stumbling drunk.’ The younger all but spat with disgust as he watched the scene. As if on cue, one of the lurching figures below was nearly pulled into the flaring pile, a stray branch catching a rough-spun sleeve and yanking its wearer insistently as it went into the blaze.
The second light, a fire at the western side of the town, conversely, appeared to be a small brazier; it was marking the Grain Gate in a muted and less-excited fashion than its counterpart and two figures leaned intimately against a modest guard booth nearby. The younger brother looked at it with interest before he turned to the other members of the party.
‘We need to hurry. We don’t know how close they are.’
A well-tanned girl with red hair full of leaves scoffed behind him. ‘They are long gone and well behind. We haven’t stopped for two days, and they don’t know the land like we do.’
‘They are much heavier too, and bigger,’ another of the group added quietly, ‘they must be held back with all that armor they lug around.’
‘Aye, we can sit awhile, I’m sure. I need a drink anyway.’ She picked a twig from her blouse and tossed it aside before looking about her person for a water gourd.
‘We need to go now; you are either naïve or stupid to think we could have lost them so easily.’ The eldest brother spoke with the authority granted by age in a youthful group. ‘Those weren’t foot soldiers we saw operating on the plains out there, that was Company Mellivora.’
‘You’ve said that a hundred times since you spooked us all into dashing into the woods, I call bullshit,’ a dark-haired teen with the broad chest of a lumberjack replied. He leaned his head back against the stump he had sat against and closed his eyes.
‘Idiots. Morons and fools.’ The young brother spat over his shoulder.
They were flagging; the longer they stayed, the harder it would be to get moving at all without falling asleep. A sight in the foothills directly opposite them and a mile or so northeast of Cerasus ended the conversation and provided an abrupt conclusion to their debate.
‘Quiet!’ one of the group hissed, placing an interruptive hand on the arm of the woman talking and pointing across the valley into the darkness. He dropped a deep hood and leaned forward to get a clearer look, revealing strong, sharp features and thick golden hair tied back as smiths prefer. He was both the tallest and the oldest, the leader by default of both his age and the status of his mother in the township. He squinted his eyes, unsure if he was seeing things after the exhausting flight to the valley-edge.
He was ready to relent to the theory when he was rewarded for his patience by a movement too dramatic for the serenity of the pre-dawn background. There, on the side of the hill and barely visible, a flare of some sort, the faintest of light escaping from the black trees before winking out and appearing elsewhere.
‘What is that?’ the red haired one asked quietly, ‘Fireflies?’
‘At this distance?’ the youngest boy sneered at her ‘don’t be stupid.’
The woman didn’t seem to notice; the boy’s older brother, rather, cuffed him sharply on the back of the head without a word.
‘Lanterns. They must be hooded. Someone is trying to hide out there.’
‘They’re… already here then?' The words were panicked. 'How’d they beat us?’
The leader turned to the final member of the party, a large young man in a tattered outfit of mismatched greens and browns. On his shoulders and strapped in place with two thick leather straps was a graven box he had been transporting since Alba almost a month before, he shifted under the weight but did not seek to rest despite the expenditures of the previous days. He nodded to the inquiring gesture.
‘Jasmine is waiting for our report, and this,’ he moved to stand beside the man and jabbed at it with a thumb, ‘Pacos has done us the favor of getting this here, we need to make sure it gets the final few miles.’
‘And,’ he continued, directing their attention to the town below, ‘no one knows about the soldiers on the northern highway, let alone the ones we have brought straight home with us. We need to warn them and get to safety before we are caught up.’
The young one turned an admiring eye to his brother, then set his face resolutely to resist him. ‘We may be too late if the fireflies across the way are soldiers. Maybe they are waiting for us already, got around us somehow.’
‘How could they? They aren’t from these mountains like we are, how could they have even navigated it that quickly without directly tracking us?’
‘Don’t underestimate them,’ the tall one warned, ‘the Unitarians are clever as well as cruel, they have secrets we cannot begin to understand. We need to go now.’
‘But if it’s an ambu-’
‘No. No more questions. We have been ordered to take the package and our observations into town, nothing else.’
‘We’re running out of time.’ The redheaded girl was anxious now, peering into the waning darkness and wondering if she was truly seeing lights or if that was the straining of her eyes. ‘We need to get home.’ She reversed course. ‘I want to be home.’ She stood quickly and turned expectantly to the one beside her, he nodded.
‘We’re going. Now!’
They entered the town at a pitched run. One of the two at the western entrance, the brothers’ aunt, was startled by their appearance and nearly dropped the sweetened bread she had just dug out of a bag to share with her partner-in-watch. She listened to their breathless, incoherent babbling until she heard the name ‘Jasmine,’ then pointing them in the direction of the bakery. She watched as they fled into the town proper with a backwards thanks.
The woman didn’t hear anything at all; two arrows flying from the darkness much faster than any utterance and striking both her and her partner high with supernatural synchronicity. They dropped silently onto the roadway, unnoticed by the group already turning down a small alleyway and obscured by kicked dust.
The man expired on the way down, the arrow springing from his heart in a bloom of gore and felling him in a limp, backwards tumble. The second was not as well-placed by a half inch and caught the woman high in her right lung as she turned back from the youths. She collapsed poorly, her knees giving out, hugging the wound tightly as she gasped and sputtered airlessly, eyes rolling about and seeing only a starless night above.
Two clicks in the darkness. Then two more.
Soldiers dressed in dark-slate armor flood over the fallen guards in total silence. They walk purposefully and with a low, wide-stepping stance, weapons and gear carefully wrapped in muffling cloth and darkened with soot to hide the bright steel.
They hardly glanced at the woman as they slipped by, and she stared up at them in bafflement. Despite the obvious quality of their weapons and armor, they looked ragged and run-down, their padded boots splattered thick with dried mud and tiny burrs clinging to their clothing. Their hands, faces, and necks bore scratches from sharp branches and hanging thorns; their eyes were sunken, black rings, thick from many nights without sleep. They had been on the trail for days, the woman thought, her brain firing furiously as air fled her collapsed lung at the behest of inflowing blood. Her heart sank, slowing in her chest as she began to comprehend.
Sharp blue eyes bore into her and she falteringly focused upon them with her own. A soldier leaning down to peer at the dying woman at her feet. The guard was caught in the beauty of the trooper, finding herself awed by the cold disinterest of the gaze as her lifeblood warmed the cold earth under her neck. The soldier had blonde hair. A bit of it caught the brazier’s light as it danced in the early morning breeze, slipping away from the mass she kept bundled in her tight cap. She’d always wanted to have blond hair, like her mother had, like her sisters. Strange last thoughts.
A light snick accented the overwhelming silence. The world plunged into inky darkness, a bucket of sand dumped over the brazier, cold steel passing through her pulsing throat.
she kept bundled in her tight cap. She’d always wanted to have blond hair, like her mother had, like her sisters. Strange last thoughts.
A light snick accented the overwhelming silence. The world plunged into inky darkness, a bucket of sand dumped over the brazier, cold steel passing through her pulsing throat.
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