After a quick meal at the manor, Stephan left his reptile-slaying dagger with Hugh the blacksmith. The young man hesitated about charging for the reparations, but Stephan insisted, and they settled on ten pounds of grain from the baron’s stores as payment. Then Stephan followed Muriel and a group of twenty-four youths out of town.
The turbulent morning had drawn to an end, but they had plenty of sunlight left. Hopefully, more than enough to find the nightmare dungeon and kill a monster or two. Learning that the locals completely ignored the region’s stalkers of dreams explained the high number of monsters, at least to an extent.
A large portion of them could be nightmares themselves. If people feared flying river dragons, which Stephan certainly found a valid object of terror, it would explain wyverns. And the strange scorpion-lion fusion Muriel had described had gained another possible origin. One free of warlocks’ influence.
Would something similar happen back home if people feared wild beasts and conjured monstrous versions? What if they could crossbreed with normal animals?
The upcoming upheaval made the notion even more frightening. Enough so that the self-propagating cycle of terror seemed like something the lord of nightmares would have benefitted from, if not set up outright.
He had more or less admitted that he and the rest of his kind fed on fear.
“What are your eyes for?” Muriel cursed her new students. They were all able to find tracks much more easily than he could, but they couldn’t read anything from them.
“Stop playing around! We’ve already had this one,” she barked. “How can you not know which animal this is? Does anyone know? You stay silent, Steve.”
Stephan glanced at the ground. The prints belonged to an adult forest lion, and it prowled less than two miles away from the fort.
The south is truly wild. I don’t think we had anything more dangerous than foxes come within five miles of Brighthollow. Perhaps people here didn’t make that palisade just to protect themselves from other humans.
Stephan paid attention to Muriel’s lessons, noting that while the Ranger and Tracker classes managed to find tracks with ease, reading them was a completely different matter. It was almost funny; they could find the tracks he would have missed. Even the old and washed-out ones, or those overgrown with layers of creepers, and soon it proved more a detriment than a boon.
“Steve,” Muriel said, the pitch of her voice heightened with swallowed annoyance, “you take the Knights and the rest with you; I’ll stay behind with my new students. We have a lot of basics to cover, as they have to learn things in the wrong order. They already know how to see, but they don’t know what they are seeing.”
“Good luck,” he said, not really sure to whom, then led the larger party into the forest.
While the terrain was unknown, the trail they left behind was easy enough even for the blind to follow. But with Muriel gone, he knew his perception might fail him.
“Grace and Tia walk at the center of the group; the rest of us will surround them from all sides. Remember, keeping those who heal far from harm is the best way to ensure your own survival. Archers should be at the rear, away from the enemy…”
Not that we have any right now.
Stephan explained some of the things he had learned back at the academy. While he knew a lot of theory, he focused on the practical side, reassuring everyone that they would soon start training to improve their spearmanship.
And despite having enough swords, Stephan insisted on spears, which came from Baron Eldric’s stash. His Knights appeared strange compared to standard expectations—hide armor barely more than a leather jacket, decent spears, and wooden shields with steel rims and bosses didn’t really come to mind when people imagined Knights. Stephan hoped he would upgrade their equipment soon.
I wonder if there’s a limit to the number of Knights the gods can bless at the same time?
He believed the answer was yes; otherwise, the gods would have made everyone a Knight and humans would have pacified Fiendland already.
No, it’s more likely a lot of them died in the attack on Kingstown, giving the gods enough blessings to spare.
Stephan had never learned how many Knights the kingdom had, but he assumed the number was in the thousands, quite possibly over ten thousand, several hundred of which lived in Kingstown and pursued their political goals.
So, assuming only those in Kingstown perished, Stephan still believed he could have enough of them to conquer the south. Then there were the considerably more numerous Sentries.
More than half an hour passed in wandering, and Stephan reading the fresher tracks while speaking about the importance of formations, protecting people around you, and other things the academy’s lecturers hammered into his brain.
They were about four miles away from the fort when Stephan caught movement to their right. He stopped and raised his clenched fist.
“What does that mean?” Alfred asked.
Another thing to teach them…
“Hold and stay quiet,” Stephan said as the rustling grew louder. “Those closer to the source of the noise, step forth and line up your spears facing the danger. The rest of you, guard their backs.”
The Knights obeyed quite literally. The first half came forward and formed a small wall of spears and awkwardly held shields. The rest turned around, looking the other way.
“Those of you facing the enemy hold; the rest fan out in a looser formation. This is a prime ambush location. Don’t watch in just one direction but make a half-circle, watching out for anything that may approach. But you need to be ready to join the other group just in case.”
They did the best they could, and Stephan realized he too was fumbling. He knew what they needed to do, more or less, but lacked practical experience and the words to explain his thoughts. Before, he was surrounded by well-trained or veteran soldiers who knew what to do, not fresh recruits.
He wanted to do more, but the foliage parted, revealing the beast ten yards away. It was a bear, a huge bear standing over twelve feet tall, walking on two legs, with patches of scales covering its head and the center of its torso.
Then, things strayed from everything Muriel had told him about wild beasts. The bear didn’t roar in challenge. It didn’t drop on all fours to close the distance or flee. Instead, it rushed toward them, lumbering forward on its hind legs at an impressive speed.
“It’s the Forest Lord!” someone shouted.
The youths were terrified. They were a moment away from fleeing in terror when Stephan ran in front of them.
“Hold!” He sprinted towards the monster, which opened its giant maw, but instead of a normal mouth, what greeted Stephan was a viper nested where the bear’s tongue should be. It lashed out like a toad’s tongue, lunging at Stephan with open jaws and glistening fangs aimed at him.
He angled his shield and deflected the blow. The sword came down, and the snake’s head fell to the ground, squirming and thrashing. The bear still charging Stephan didn’t roar, nor showed a sign of pain as the remains of the viper’s body whipped back into its mouth. Its claw swiped at Stephan, who at once realized what kind of lunacy it would have been to make the other Knights fight the monster.
He hacked at the arm just as it came for him. The blade hit fur and bit into flesh, then the force launched Stephan away to the side as easily as Stephan could throw a kitten.
The bear followed, nearly as fast as Stephan’s flight. It raised its massive paw for another attack. The claw was about to reach him when Stephan struck a tree with his shoulder and spun, his shield flying aside. The bear missed. It struck the tree, its claws sinking into the wood, where they got stuck.
Stephan healed himself and rolled between the bear’s legs. The tree squealed as the monster pulled its limb free, showering the forest with woodchips and splinters, but before it could turn, Stephan chopped at the back of the monster’s leg.
The sword bit deep, the blade reaching bone. Then the beast spun; muscles clenched, it wrenched the weapon from Stephan’s hand.
Stephan saw the blow just in time to cross his arms in front of himself. The paw struck like a boulder from a trebuchet, launching him once more, this time back towards the group. Instead of following through with another charge, the bear limped forward slower than a man could run, but still faster than a normal walk.
Stephan landed on his backside, sliding and tumbling on the forest floor while healing the wounds beneath the armor.
Fight or flee?
His sword kept sawing at the bear’s ankle with each step the monster made, completely ignoring the wound. It was unstoppable; a nightmare, a stalker of dreams unleashed upon the waking world, but still, outside its den, it had to obey some rules.
If we run away, it will follow us to the fort.
“Spear-wall!” Stephan shouted as he got up and turned around, but the Knights and Sentries didn’t know what to do.
“Gather and point your spears at it! Form up around me.” He ran over to them and snatched a spear from a Knight whose name he didn’t know.
“You,” he told him, pointing at Grace and Tia, “guard them with your life.”
The youth’s face was white, but he still nodded and moved back.
“Shouldn’t we run?” Grace’s voice shook.
“We can’t,” Stephan muttered. “We’d lead it straight to the fort, and it might attack the people in the fields.”
No, they had to kill it before it caused harm to the innocent.