Siege State

Val took the opportunity to have Tom practice how to field dress, skin and harvest a kill.

The carcass was far too large for them to shift easily, so the dressing would be crudely done, but they also didn’t intend to take any meat, which made the prospect more palatable.

Within short order they had removed several large sections of hide, and Tom set about carefully fleshing it. Some of it would not doubt be ruined before they could get it back to Corin’s Grove, but they had so much it didn’t matter.

Val made a rough travois from two of its thigh bones, and began removing and cleaning its other bones and piling them up onto it.

She gave several of its organs: its heart, liver, eyes and venom sacs, to Tom to keep in his spatial storage. The drake’s fangs, and several of the shorter bones from its legs - only a touch longer than his spear, thankfully - went in as well. Val explained they would save them for Scriber; drakebone was an excellent base material for enchantments.

As they worked, they chatted excitedly about Tom’s new skills. Val was of much the same opinion as Tom was, but for different reasons. She was especially excited about his pinnacle. She had hoped for him to manifest some kind of self-healing, which his pinnacle did, albeit slowly. Her next hope for him was for a movement skill, and the slowing aspect of his aura would also help with that somewhat.

Overall, she was absolutely chomping at the bit to train him. She seemed to think he had a lot of potential. Tom was slowly beginning to realise it himself. He wasn’t stupid, on the contrary, he had always done incredibly well at every subject at the Academy. Years of being told he was not good enough had taken their toll, though, and he was still shaking off the shackles fully.

Soon enough, they had taken all they could reasonably carry. They hitched the travois to Sesame, and began the journey back to Corin’s Grove. The trek would take most of a fortnight, and then Val wanted to set out for the Hunter’s Gathering immediately.

The age-old meeting place of the Hunters, what they called their True Hall, was located right up near the Nails, in the north, just west of the great northern trade road leading to the vast Rust Sands. It would only take them three weeks and change to get there, and Val wanted to arrive with plenty of time to spare.

“Got some old friends to catch up with,” she explained. “And some I wouldn’t call friends, too.”

Tom was apprehensive about meeting other Hunters. If Val was wary of them, then they surely were deserving of a great deal of caution. He tried not to think too much about it.

Over the next few weeks, they made slower progress than usual. They had to account for Sesame and their travois, which was niggly to work through certain parts of the forest. Luckily, Val’s knowledge of the land allowed them to avoid having to backtrack too often. Winter had arrived too, finally, and although much of the deadfall had rotted away, they now had to contend with freezing drizzle.

Sesame accepted the burden of pulling it with no complaints. A vague sense of enjoyment flowed continuously down their bond: the bear enjoyed both helping them, and proving he was much stronger than them too. Tom wasn’t sure that was necessarily true, when it came to Val, at least. So many body temperings must have made her into an absolute beast.

Every so often, on their journey, Val would have Tom strike off into the forest on a tangent for some predetermined length of time, and then try to find his way back to them. He found it fairly easy the first few times, and yet still incredibly useful for cementing his progress with Hunter-Gatherer and mundane tracking.

After a few days, Val switched things up.

“Head south and east for a day,” she told him one morning, “And meet back up with us before sundown the day after tomorrow.”

Tom nodded his acceptance, and began to head off.

“Oh, and bring us back something nice,” she called to him with a mischievous grin.

He opened his mouth to query her further, but she just turned and strolled off through the trees, whistling a merry tune under her breath. Tom sighed. She never made things easy on him.

What does she mean by ‘nice’? he wondered. He supposed he’d figure it out one way or another. Val obviously wanted to put his new sense through its paces.

As he walked, he scanned the forest around him, searching for any concentrations of mana with Hunter-Gatherer. Concentrations of mana usually meant special plants or herbs, essences or the like, and those were usually pretty ‘nice’.

He found a few life essences and tucked them away. They weren’t particularly large, and he knew Val wouldn’t count them. Some uncommon, yet useful, plants that Val had previously pointed out to him were stowed away as well, though he knew they wouldn’t count either.

It was just after dusk that day, as he was setting up his wardpoles around the tangled roots of a tree, that he hit the jackpot.

As he placed a pole in the soil between two roots, he casually scanned the woods around him. All of a sudden, something caught his attention. A ‘dark’ patch in his sense, that still seemed to have some kind of shape to it. A large shape, at that. It was unusual, and it made him curious. It was almost as if something was hiding.

He finished setting up the wardpoles, and then cautiously made his way closer. The anomaly was situated on top of an old, thick log lying next to a large, spring-fed pool. Tom crept closer, silent as a ghost. Every inch closer made him surer and surer that the anomaly was some kind of creature, masking itself, hiding. He rounded a tree to peer at it.

And found himself surprised. Once again, there was a disconnect between his new sense and his old ones, and it took a second for his brain to catch up and fully process the sight.

It was a big, lazy looking frog. And its hide was covered in lurid, psychedelic patterns. Oranges, purples, yellows and reds all twisted and bled and curled and blended through its skin. Spray from the quietly gurgling spring below it caused condensation to form on it, and the water sent fractal patterns spinning and dancing through the low light.

Tom stood for a while, merely watching. The frog was one of the most incredible creatures he had ever seen. He had a hunch that it was a powerfully attuned mana beast. Dead things didn’t register as an absence to his life-sense, as all things, even dead ones, had small amounts of living things on them. Breaking them down, turning them into sustenance, feeding the cycle.

The big frog showed as nothing. Nothing at all. Tom decided it must be some ability it had, and to him it made sense. Keep its presence small, absent, so that predators passed it by, and if any did stumble across it, it had its undoubtedly poisonous colouring to warn them away.

It would surely have an essence, and never having heard of such a frog, he was certain that essence would be rare. Surely a rare essence would count as ‘nice’?

Tom made his decision. He would kill the frog and take its essence. He hadn’t found anything else that he thought could meet Val’s criteria, and he didn’t want to leave it to chance as to whether he stumbled across something as he tried to find Val and Sesame again tomorrow.

He was a Hunter, after all. He would hunt. And, besides, he really wanted to lick it. A frog so obviously poisonous would surely have an insanely powerful debuff in its poison. He practically vibrated as he took his spear from his spatial storage.

Carefully, oh so carefully, he wound up to throw. His spear sat perfectly balanced, cocked in his hand, his whole body tense. He counted his breaths, calming himself, waiting.

A shrill cry of some distant animal echoed through the night. Tom released.

The spear flew like an arrow, stabbing into the frog just below its head and bursting from its other side. It was dead before it knew what had hit it. It slumped atop the log, bright, orange blood running in sticky rivulets from the corpse.

Tom wandered over to it, and inspected it more closely. He felt sad at having killed such a beautiful beast, and a little put out that it had died so quickly and easily. Such was life though; it wasn’t fair.

He climbed atop the log with it and, using a rag, worked his spear free of the body. Then he used the sharp point to cut into it just below the head. Somewhere behind the head or in the chest cavity was where the essence stone was usually located in beasts, and the frog proved no different.

In short order, Tom had popped free a stone, covered in orange blood. He used the same rag to pick it up, and washed it in the pond. Discarding the rag, he inspected his treasure. The essence stone was black, with a very, very, faint iridescent sheen. He was incredibly disappointed, having pictured some marvellously coloured essence to match its hide. It wasn’t very nice, after all that, but hopefully it would do.

He turned back to the corpse, hopping back onto the log with it. He spent a few moments admiring the beautiful colours, before reaching out and running his hands over it. Most poisonous frogs, he knew, secreted their poison through their skin. It felt greasy and slick.

He watched his wisp, waiting for the notification of Sweet Suffering activating. Suddenly, he became aware that he had been watching it for a very long time. Or had he only been watching it a moment? And why was his wisp pink and brown and black? He was certain it was usually the other way around.

He panicked, knowing something was wrong, and made a frantic half turn of his upper body while his legs still straddled the log before freezing, looking about for the source of the danger. Danger? His gaze locked onto the tree he had initially crept from behind. Suddenly, he was sure he had crept from behind it many times. More times than he’d realised.

And it wasn’t just a tree, it was a shadow. A shadow that he’d crept from. A shadow of many things. The Academy, a Reaping, his mother, his father, the Council. He had crept from it, and now he was in the light.

Sitting on the log, next to the spring-fed pool, he felt horrendously exposed. Like anything could swoop down and snatch him. That was what happened when you crawled from the safety of comforting shadows. You got snatched. Snatched right up.

But the corner of his eye caught on something, and was drawn.

Hazy fractals. Dancing patterns of light cast through shimmering mist in a winter dusk.

They were beautiful. They reassured him. Supported him.

You would never see them, if you never slunk from a shadow, safe and content. Even if the light was harsh, exposing, it illuminated as well. Revealed beauty. Encouraged.

And yet you couldn’t know one without the other. His thoughts became circular, spiralling, gyrating things, spinning endlessly in revelations. He was lost, and he was found.

A long time later, his thoughts slowed. Slowly, they took shape again, and they seemed ugly, angular things, meant to capture the beauty of the world and lock it into ugly, understandable forms.

Then even that was gone, and Tom slowly came to.

It was light. Or morning, to be more precise. Blearily, he blinked gummy eyes at a scene he had been staring at for hours.

Mist over a pool. It seemed mundane. It felt almost lewd, when compared to the rapture it had been, like throwing open the curtains in a seedy brothel. He shook himself, trying to retain as much of the all-encompassing feelings he had been shown, while banishing the carnal sight in front of him. He turned, tired, and fell off the log in shock.

A great cat lay next to the frog corpse, its eyes half closed, purring and softly pawing at the rotting wood. The fright sent adrenaline coursing through Tom, and that chased the last of the frog poison from him.

He had almost died. While he sat in a stupor, this predator could have mauled him, destroyed him, and he doubted he would’ve even felt it, let alone minded. Only the fact that it had chosen to investigate the bleeding frog corpse instead of him first, had saved him. He shivered.

He left the big brown cat lying by the frog corpse, its short hair glistening with moisture. It would come to eventually.

He had learned his lesson about antagonising things unnecessarily. And maybe more, besides.