It was greener in the lowlands than it had been in the mountains, but the deeper in they went the less verdant it all seemed. The sky rarely sported any vibrant sunshine, each day rife with a thick bed of clouds. The grass was grey, and the trees seemed gnarled and struggling against the environment.
Riley and Kim rode together for a time, only halting at a crossroads that split north and south. Kim stirred in her saddle, Iosef sitting impassively behind her. “I’ll be heading south from here. I know for a fact that some pretty strong critters like to stalk this region, and might be a little too strong for you.”
“Right,” Riley said, nodding. He wanted to get stronger, but fighting enemies with a bounty of Essence wouldn’t mean much if he died before he could get close to killing one. “Then, what’s to the north?”
“Dunno. Haven’t ventured too far that way. But from what I recall, it’s not so bad. Only...” She shifted uncomfortably. “Head too far in a northwestern direction, you might end up in the Sulphur Swamp.”
“Sulphur... Swamp?”
“It’s what the name implies, yeah. Went their once and decided ‘never again.’ In spots like that, the landscape is as dangerous as the monsters who life that way.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out a bound parchment, which she promptly handed to Riley.
Adventurer’s Map.
A map drafted by Hedge Knight Kim. The linework, while crude, provides a decent overview of the region beyond Hangman’s Gaol, with several points of interest dotted across the patchment. One region is marked by hazy black pencil scratches, labelled ‘Sulphur Swamp.’
Maps are vital tools for adventurers of any world. But it is up to the discretion of the adventurer if they trust the map more than their own eyes.
“I gotta get stronger on my own, I know. But... I hope we can work together again, Kim,” Riley said, pocketing the offered map.
He could almost feel Kim’s smile through the plate of her helmet. “Of course we will, don’t be a drama queen. But, hey, next time we meet I’m expecting you to be... ten, no, a hundred times stronger!”
Riley smiled behind his mask. “Yeah, we’ll become legends. Won’t we Arubis?”
Arubis maintained her usual placid smile. “It is my dearest desire to see you grow mightier.”
They shared a wave, and Riley found himself seated stiffly as he watched Kim’s outline fade further and further into the horizon. He let out the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. Alone again, essentially. For as much as he liked Mesquard and Arubis, their utility was limited for fighting threats.
He wheeled Scarlet around and put his heels to her, grunting as he was rocked about the saddle. He was only slightly more used to riding, after a few days of doing so, and he knew the chafe was gonna kill him well before any monster did. They went north, where the trees grew more numerous and the road more untamed.
It was not long until Riley saw the first of the dead bodies.
Corpses had been left hanging from the branches of tall trees, blackened by the elements and having been partially devoured by a myriad of predators. Some of them, Riley noticed whenever he stole a glance toward them, had wooden signs bolted to their body.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
DESERTER
THIEF
HERETIC
Vergoll, Riley was quickly coming to understand, was not a nice place. The current strife and existential threat posed by Chaos hardly helped of course, few nations could weather such an enemy untainted. But being willing to lynch criminals and display them in this way spoke of a culture that had indulged in this sort of thing for a long time.
He rode on. A smell of decay hung rife in the air, pungent even through Riley’s mask.
Eventually, the deeper along the road he went, the more the roadside became clustered by short, gnarled trees. He slowed Scarlet to a trot, keeping a firm grip on her reins.
Arubis shifted behind him. “This region is known as the Gravewood. A region of forest lying beyond the town of Brace. It is... dangerous.”
“Dangerous, huh?” Riley murmured.
A branch cracked somewhere in the distance. Wood creaked and groaned. Riley grimaced and scanned their surroundings. Somewhere, in that impenetrable darkness of the foliage, he could swear he felt eyes on him. “Might be worth exploring,” he said.
A tree moved just as Riley and Scarlet trotted past.
The realisation of this only struck Riley seconds later. He hopped from Scarlet’s saddle, nearly falling over as he did so, and landed with a thud in a wide-eyed panic.
One of the trees was indeed moving. It created and groaned, pulling its roots from their moorings to stand on a quad of gnarled legs. It was only a few heads taller than Riley, but felt taller than a mighty oak as it shambled his way.
“A ciern!” Arubis gasped.
Riley stared at it, fumbling and drawing his shotel. The ciern lumbered closer. There, embedded in the wood and nearly camouflaged by the texture, was a human corpse staring back at him.
He rolled aside, narrowly avoiding a crushing blow from the ciern. The strength of its wooden limbs was such that it punched a deep furrow in the road. Riley’s shotel thwacked against the wood, cutting a chunk from it, but the ciern scarcely noticed.
A horrid wheezing sound, like the last rasp of a dying man, sounded from the depths of the creature. It swept his way, dense wood slamming into Riley and knocking him over. A dull ache radiated in his side, and he scrambled upright as the wooden monster rounded on him.
“It is a living tree that feasts upon flesh! To best it, you need to kill its core!”
Riley nodded and aimed his staff, firing two bursts of Spikes from the ground. Rocky shrapnel exploded upward, many of them slamming into the Ciern and tearing trips of bark from the creature. It reeled, sap and clotted blood oozing from the fresh wounds, but quickly recovered and marched upon the wizard.
He had to admit, he felt more of a kick from the magic this time. Hammer did damn fine work.
This time Riley focused his strikes on the fresh wounds, each blow ripping away a chunk of the ciern’s hide. Yet it pressed on, impervious to pain, swinging and stabbing at Riley wit his spiked limbs. Glancing blows caught him, cutting into Riley’s armoured coat and the flesh beneath. He grit his teeth and endured.
A hard swing cleaved through a portion of damaged bark, and the human corpse suspended in the clutches of the tree. The ciern scuttled back, oozing from many wounds, Suddenly it split open in the muddle, revealing that its whole body could split in two, creating twin rows of wooden teeth that could crush a human body.
Within that wooden shell he could see an organ pulse and throb, a misshapen parody of a human heart. Another burst of Spikes pelted the ciern, driving it back and giving Riley the means to press on. He yelled at the top of his lungs a he rammed his shotel down, skewering the mass. Blackened ooze poured from the wound, the ciern shrieking and writhing.
It wilted and went still, the colour leaving the wood until it had become a blackened husk. Riley huffed, staring down at the remains of the creature. A man-eating tree. The thought alone made him shudder, and he examined his surroundings with newfound fear.
Riley stumbled from the ciern and flicked ooze from his smoking sword. “God damn,” he huffed, now fully aware of how much he was sweating under his mask. It wasn’t just the exertion, the sight of the shambling tree, and its half-digested lunch, had filled Riley with a fear unlike anything he had known before.
The other monsters had wanted to kill him, but this one wanted to eat him. That thought alone made goosebumps roll down his skin. The 2300 Essence for killing it had done little to soothe him.
A thought occurred to him, and he slowly lifted his staff. He had done as Stark had asked, using the Essence crystals to absorb the Scrolls. He held his staff aloft and tapped into Sense Life.
In the distance he could see points of light moving about. Some as tiny as squirrels or rabbits. Many, however, were as large as the ciern had been,
Others were larger still.
“So that’s why it’s called Gravewood.”
