Thrlyona Leafwind's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Thrlyona Leafwind had turned back from the Ashfen Sprawl twice, and she would not do it a third time. She was an elven ranger, and turning back was not what she did. She had decided, alone, that the blank spaces on Kaveldeth's maps were the point of her life's work. She meant to be the first ranger to walk every untamed corner of these wilds and put them on paper. So when the soft ground inside the Sprawl dropped a third time and swallowed her marker stake, she cut a new one and kept walking north. She noticed the tracker on the second day out. Something heavy was matching her pace behind the tree line, never closing, never falling away. She tried the old tricks. She doubled back along a creek. She climbed and waited an hour in a pine. The bent ferns appeared again at dusk, fresh, the size of a man's chest. Whatever followed her was bigger than a bear and patient in a way bears were not. Ahead, the forest thinned into a flat marsh of standing water and reeds, half a mile of open ground before the next ridge. If it caught her there, her bow would not be enough and her legs would not be enough. She stepped onto the marsh anyway, because going back meant going toward it. The mud sucked at her boots. Fog drifted low across the water in long, slow sheets. She was halfway across when the reeds behind her went quiet, and then bent, and then split. The thing that came through was tall as two men, its limbs tangled like wet roots, its body the color of rotted moss. Fog clung to it. Two orange eyes opened in the dark of its face. It moved into the water without slowing. Thrlyona dropped her pack, drew the ring she kept on a cord under her shirt, and shoved it onto her finger. A trader in the foothills had sold it to her as a ward. She had never tested it. She had never needed to. She planted her feet and faced the creature. It lunged. The ring went hot against her skin, and the air between them shoved back like a held breath let out, throwing the creature sideways into the reeds. It rose, slower, and came again. She backed toward firmer ground and let it close, and the ring shoved it again, and again, until the metal burned her finger black and the creature finally sank below the fog and did not rise. Thrlyona stood in the water a long time, listening. Then she pulled the ruined ring off and dropped it in the mud. Her ward was spent. The Sprawl still lay ahead of her, unmapped, and now something in it knew her scent.