“Are you alone or do you have other survivors with you?” asked Raeln while On’esquin poked at the hole in his armor. “We’re trying to find four survivors.”
“I do not need friends,” the gypsy replied angrily, stumbling away. “Two on one, I have advantage…”
On’esquin responded with a sharp punch to the man’s forehead, snapping his head back. Blinking twice, the human’s eyes rolled back and he fell limply, dropping his weapon and flopping onto his back.
“Doubtful he is part of this,” On’esquin answered, smiling at Raeln. “The gypsies were not even a people in the days when the prophecy was written. Turess would have had no way to know of them. He is a survivor and little else. If this man mattered, Turess would have made note of him in great detail, as he would have seemed an anomaly to Turess.”
Raeln came up to On’esquin, eyeing the human sprawled out on the ground. He looked over the orc until he spotted the hole in the man’s armor where intact green skin covered the spot where the knife had been moments before. “You swore to me that you aren’t like them,” Raeln growled, debating whether to go back for his sword or strike with claws. “You are…aren’t you? He’s right.”
“Not exactly, though he did puncture one of my hearts, which is unpleasant no matter what magic is used to keep you alive. We can talk about it once we find our missing people. This man is clearly not one of them, so there must be more survivors. Leave him and we’ll continue on. You said they hadn’t been gone long. I would rather not delay.”
Raeln went and picked up his sword and belt. He held them a moment, strongly debating whether to draw the weapon and demand answers from On’esquin. The man had been evasive since they had met, but he had done nothing Raeln could think of to act against himself or the other survivors in Lantonne. In fact, he had helped them escape and worked harder than most to aid in surviving the winter. Finally, he tied the belt around his waist and marched over to On’esquin, keeping his hand off his weapon.
He stopped a few feet from On’esquin, searching the ground for the gypsy. The man was gone, leaving no footprints and barely any scent to say where he had gone. Raeln would have to spend a great deal of time hunting for him, but with the glowing mists moving through the mountains, he had no desire to do so.
“I have no idea,” On’esquin said, looking around furtively. “I turned to watch you, and when I turned back, he was gone. Slippery man, that one.”
“He won’t get far with his wounds,” admitted Raeln, heading down the path in pursuit of the other scents. It was already getting hard for him to pick them out, the night’s rain gradually covering their passing. “We need to hurry or they’ll lose us in the mountains. There are four scents that came through after the others.”
Raeln pushed on, jogging across the wider sections of the path and slowing to a cautious walk on the narrower. Soon the scents became stronger, but they mingled with the stench of the long-dead. Zombies had come through within minutes of those he was seeking. Not a large force, but enough to make the whole place stink of death.
Stopping on one of the narrower sections of the path, where the stones dropped off nearly a hundred feet to the woods below, Raeln scanned the area for any movement. He could smell zombies close, but he could not see anything in either direction. Looking down, he saw movement in the trees. There were bodies hanging in the upper branches, as though they had been thrown off the ledge.
“We’re close,” Raeln noted, pointing out the zombies. “Someone must have pushed them. That someone is who we want, I’m betting.”
Despite his desire to hurry, Raeln slowed to a crawl, trying to deal with the narrow ledge. Once, he had thought himself fine with heights, but nearly falling off a mountainside had shaken that belief. He managed to cross the path slowly by keeping his thoughts on the healer, though it took nearly a half hour, putting them far behind whoever had passed through before them.
At the far side of the path, Raeln started down a trail that went down toward the bottom of the mountain, but then stopped and sniffed at a second trail that went up. Both had lingering scents of the wildlings he had been following. He could not be certain which way was correct. Both were recent—possibly only a few minutes—but his ability to pick out smells was not as refined as he would need to be sure of his choice.
“We should split up and hurry,” he announced, pointing at the lower path. “Go that way and meet me back here in a half hour. They aren’t more than a couple minutes ahead of us, so we should find them fast, before someone else does.”
Taking the high trail as On’esquin jogged down the descending one, Raeln headed up a winding path that kept sharply turning through the trees. He could see little of what was coming, making him nervous that he might be walking into a trap. The scents were definitely getting clearer, and he soon could pick out the healer’s scent, as well as his children and one other. He could not be certain, but he thought the fourth was a fox who smelled remarkably similar to the children.
Raeln rounded another curve and slid to a stop, facing a nearby wall of mists that cut off the path. The dimly glowing cloud swirled around a cave entrance, pouring into the cave as though it were seeking something the same place he was. Other tendrils wrapped around the peak of the mountain, covering it as though searching for more ways inside.
The scent was strong now, telling Raeln he had gone the right way. That was little reassurance when facing the glowing cloud On’esquin had warned him about. The other wildlings had come through less than five minutes before. He probably could have thrown a stone and hit them if he could see through the mists. They needed him.
“He doesn’t know for sure that it’ll kill me,” Raeln told himself aloud, walking up to the edge of the mists. The wildlings were in that cave—he was certain of it. He could clearly smell them now. “Please be alive when I get there.”
Closing his eyes, Raeln ran into the cave, charging straight through the mists. Pain flared across his skin as though hot ashes had been thrown onto his fur, but the feeling soon passed and cooler air washed over him. When he looked around again, he was inside the cave, where the light of the mist was all that gave him any illumination. The flowing tendrils clearly lit the path ahead, though they mostly filled the passage. He would have to walk through them repeatedly if he were to get to the wildlings.
“Hold on, I’m coming!” he shouted and plunged into the mists again.
This time the sensation of falling into snow or being battered with ice assailed his body, making Raeln shiver and slow his pace as his muscles trembled. The cold rapidly turned back to heat, varying every few feet within the glowing cloud. Through it, he attempted to use his nose more than his eyes to find the path.
The scent came to an abrupt halt, and Raeln looked around in confusion, wondering where the wildlings were. He should have been atop them, but he stood waist-deep in the mists that flowed through the tiny passage in the mountain. The scent around him indicated they had been there seconds before, but no trail led away.
Slowly, the mists that came up to his waist began to make his legs ache, the pain spreading through the rest of his body. It felt as though his bones were on fire, but Raeln had nowhere he could go to escape.
A rumbling crash around Raeln gave him only a second to shield his face as the cave collapsed. He fell to the ground, curling into a ball to attempt to minimize how badly crushed he would be, assuming the collapse did not entirely fill the cave. Then the sounds were gone, replaced by a creaking that seemed very out of place.
Opening one eye tentatively, Raeln found he was not in the cave anymore and the mists were rapidly receding. Around him were the walls of a small unlit home, covered with artwork and sculptures in a style he had never seen before. Lying near his feet, two men in loose cotton clothing lay staring at the ceiling, the pale look of their skin telling him they were long dead.
Raeln slowly uncurled and tried to grasp what he was seeing. At first he believed the mists had somehow snatched him, taking him somewhere else, but then he looked out the open front door and saw the hillside leading up to the cave he had entered. All of the scents he had followed were gone, swept away with the arrival of the house, complete with its own scents.
Stumbling out of the house, Raeln stared in complete confusion at the mountainside he had climbed to get there, then turned around and regarded the house that now sat where the peak of the mountain should have been. Nearly fifty vertical feet of stone was gone, creating a flat plateau atop the mountain, occupied only by the slightly leaning home and the mists that were rapidly retreating down the back side of the mountain.
“Did you find them?” called out On’esquin as he came up the path, but Raeln could not find words to answer.
The orc lumbered up to the door of the house and looked at it suspiciously. He gave Raeln a queer look and then marched into the house, glared at the contents, and soon came back outside. “Mists?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Raeln answered, barely hearing himself speak as he stared at the home. Even the construction style was foreign to him. The men inside wore armor with insignias he had never seen before. After years of military training, he had thought he knew all the insignias used in the region.
On’esquin reached back and closed the door of the home and then smiled at Raeln. “You surprise me yet again,” he noted, patting Raeln’s shoulder. “You got lucky that it didn’t touch you. The mists connect different times and places, but they destroy anything that does not have the power to resist them. No mortal being can touch the mists and not be torn apart. Even the Turessians, myself included, risk being destroyed if the mists catch us.”
Raeln looked around until he saw the mists far below on the mountainside, sweeping away toward the south to rejoin with the main cloud. He rubbed the bracelet he wore nervously—which was hot to the touch for some reason—wondering what had just happened and where the wildlings he needed to find had gone.
“The man…his children…” Raeln managed, staring in dismay at the house that did not belong. “Where did this come from? Where are they? I had them…I was right there.”
“Judging by the sand and style of structure, I would guess the Corraithian desert. The people you sought might be there, though they will likely be in worse shape than the bodies I saw inside. Most mortals are torn to pieces and scattered across the area in a fine red mist where the cloud chooses to spit them out. No matter what we might wish, they are gone, Raeln. There is nothing we can do. Pray these were not the ones we needed.”
Memories coming to him in a rush of the mere minutes he had spent with the kind wildling man and watched his children suffering through their stay at the slave camp, Raeln felt as though he had lost another person in his life. The plaintive eyes of those children came to mind, making his chest hurt. He did not even know their names, but he had dearly hoped those people would be unharmed and he could be the one to save them. Now, the man and his children were as dead as those down in the valley, despite their struggle to escape. He had failed them twice.
“Your search is over, On’esquin,” spat Raeln, his sadness immediately replaced with anger. “There are no other people here, and the four that survived the battle are gone. Your prophecy failed us. We’re going back to the camp.”
“It’s never that simple with prophecy,” countered the orc, setting off down the way they had come. “Prophecy is not what most would tell you. It is a glimpse of one possible solution to a problem, complete with one or more ways it can be resolved. If our four companions are dead, we might be able to replace them. Failing that, we try without them. The prophecy only tells us the most likely way for us to succeed, not the only way. In truth, Turess may have known that we would likely die without their help, but that does not mean we cannot find a way. More importantly, six of us were not going to stop the Turessian army without an army of our own…there may still be time and ways to remedy this.”
Grabbing the man by the back of his armor, Raeln spun him around and jabbed one of his long claws into On’esquin’s ribs where the gypsy had cut him. On’esquin did not as much as wince, meeting Raeln’s glare calmly. “You owe me answers,” Raeln growled. “I’ve followed you from Lantonne. I’ve followed your search for people that are already dead. Everywhere I go, I see more death and destruction, but I never get answers.”
“Do you honestly believe the best place to discuss our plans is in the middle of the mist clouds, surrounded by the dead? I will answer now if you wish, but from a tactical mindset, I would assume finding shelter where we will not be found might be prudent.”