Predawn… A time that I had always thought so beautiful before. Back at the monastery, I used to rise early every morning just to sit and absorb the simple peace that seems to fill the earth just before the rising of the sun. The gentle mist hanging low to the ground, the dew still sparklingly wet upon the grass, the first tentative songs of the birds of morning… And just over the horizon, the first glowingly orange hint of the rising sun. For those who’ve experienced it, predawn can be an addictive time, as there is no better time during the day to simply sit and reflect, and prepare oneself for the coming day.
Today, however, I was not afforded the luxury of a little predawn meditation. My mind, and my feet for that matter, were fast taking me to places other than introspection. Time was not on my side this day… Somewhere ahead, Romo Lorudo, friend, ally, and the person who’d all but put Brie and I together, was being borne towards the monastery at Lothofran, by three Journeymen. And I was in hot pursuit.
For the past two days I had been following the trail of Romo’s abductors. Or rather, for the past day and a half. The better portion of the first day of my pursuit had been spent just trying to pick up the initial trail, rather than in the act of physically chasing her captors down…
Though I had come all but charging through the gates of Shilay after setting out from Kaeith’s mansion, I really didn’t have any idea of quite which way to run. True, I knew the Journeymen would be headed in the general direction of the monastery at Lothofran, but I didn’t know by which route they planned to seek it. My options at this point were rather limited; I could either run ahead to the monastery and await Romo’s captors there, or I could try to find their trail and tail them until a good time to rescue her availed itself to me. Running ahead didn’t seem like such a good idea for several reasons, not least of which was the fact that I had apparently been excommunicated from the monastery during my absence, and was now being actively hunted along with Brie and the rest of her group… I wouldn’t exactly be able to expect a warm welcome. That, and the fact that the Journeymen might not be going to the monastery at all kept me from trying plan A. Plan B, finding their trail and then tailing them, seemed a much more viable option, but at least at first it was no easier to enact than plan A. By the time I’d reached the edge of the plains just outside of Shilay, I had yet to find the first hint of a real trail to follow.
But, just as I was about to give up on plan B and make my way towards the monastery on my own path, God chose to send me a little bit of direction. As I stood on the southern end of the plains, a light breeze sprang up, stirring the tall grasses about my knees and sending flitting bits of pollen and dust sailing through the air. However, seeds and dirt were not all the wind carried with it this day… A slight, sharp odor pierced my nostrils, and somewhere in the back of my brain, recognition clicked… Something had been burned near here. Grass, it smelled like. But why would anyone burn grass in the middle of the plains? Surely no one was foolish enough to do something that might start a brushfire the size of a small continent…
Scanning the area visually, I was not long in finding the source of the smell. Some thirty feet from where I had stood, a large patch of grass had been trod upon rather heavily, as it was crushed into the earth in some places. As I approached the area, the smell of burnt grass increased, and I perceived, faintly at first, a dark, circular pattern on the ground… It had been burned into the grass, apparently by a sudden flash of intense heat, as the burn marks radiated out from a single point, black as night near the epicenter, and fading into lighter hues of gray as they expanded outward from the center of the circle.
Near the first circular mark was a second, occurring in much the same fashion as had its counterpart. Just beyond that one and a little to the right, so that the points formed the vertices of a triangle, a third circular burn pattern appeared. And in the center of the triangle formed by these three burn marks was a patch of grass that had been fiercely torn, as if by many pairs of feet belonging to bodies locked in an intense struggle. Someone had gotten into quite the little tussle here…
My curiosity, and moreover my suspicion aroused, I took a moment to examine the burn marks a bit more closely. There was something very familiar about that pattern…
Taking a quick glance around to be sure no one was within range of sight; I closed my eyes, and activated the SoulFire. The blue flames leapt into life about my body, but just as quickly as they appeared I shunted them off again, pushing my power back down into myself, into my innermost core. Opening my eyes again, I looked down… And there at my feet was the same jagged, roughly circular burn pattern that appeared in three other instances before my very eyes… The marks were caused by the SoulFire… The Journeymen… Romo had been through here!
Clearly there had been some sort of struggle at this point… Checking the area quickly, I found my first sign of real hope for Romo’s safe return… There was no blood anywhere in the grass… This meant she was probably still safe, and had been subdued by her captors at this point. Not that I thought poorly of Romo’s combat skills or fighting spirit, but one human against three SoulFire-backed Journeymen would’ve been the epitome of hopeless odds. I found myself wondering, however, why I hadn’t noticed any signs of struggle up to this point… But then I remembered that Romo had been captured while sleeping… It was entirely possible that she just hadn’t woken up until this point, although it was difficult for me to imagine anyone being able to sleep through their own abduction.
Near the area of matted-down grass, I found tracks. Three sets of them, to be precise, and all roughly the same size. They weren’t human in appearance, but that was merely because of the footwear… All Journeymen wear Tabi, or split-toed socks with cushioned soles, as their primary footgear. And since the tracks leading away from the site of the struggle had two rather large impressions near where the toes would’ve been on a normal foot, the logical conclusion was that they had been made by people wearing Tabi… The Journeymen had gone this way.
It struck me as odd, that they would leave such an obvious trail, whereas they hadn’t before. Up until this point, as I’ve said, I’d had one hell of a time figuring out which way they’d gone, and all of a sudden, here was this incredibly obvious, easy to follow trail… It just didn’t add up.
Then, all at once, it hit me. They knew I would be following them… Well, perhaps not me specifically, but they assumed someone would come looking for Romo, and now they were leaving a trail in order to egg whatever pursuit they might be drawing on… Which meant they would be prepared. This was not going to be fun… At the monastery, we taught more than just martial arts and spiritual techniques… We taught practical wilderness survival, and guerilla warfare tactics… Since we tend to fight with our bare hands, and the rest of the world has moved on to ranged weaponry, we’d had to adapt our combat strategies somewhat, to include ambushes, hit-and-run, and of course, traps… But not your run-of-the-mill traps, like pits filled with spikes or a log clamped down with a wire that will knock your head off when you trip it… More like traps of the sort that cut you in half or blew you into little chunks when triggered. Yeah, we were kinda’ nasty…
Thankfully, I didn’t encounter any wards or other such hidden nastiness during the first day of my pursuit. This was good for several reasons, most of them having to do with me not having to slow down or stop to disarm a trap, which would’ve cost me precious time in trying to catch up with Romo and her captors… Not that I wasn’t moving a little slower than usual anyway just out of caution, but at least I didn’t have to make any unplanned stops.
Unfortunately, although God seemed to have developed the habit of smiling upon me as of late, He couldn’t be helping me the whole time, as I quickly discovered in the early morning hours of the second day of following the Journeymen’s trail… This brings us back to the point at which I started… Predawn…
I was, at this point, running at a dead clip after my quarry. I was passing out of the lower plains of Shilay and on into the woods just outside of Kalisbourg, when all of a sudden a glimmer in the grass at my feet caught my eye. Drawing up short, my feet slid on the wet, dewy grass of the forest floor, and I very nearly when skidding right through the first of the Journeymen’s traps…
Kneeling down, I took a moment to catch my breath and clear my mind. Then, moving as quickly as caution would allow, I parted the grasses at my feet. There, strung across my path, was a thin line of wire, running to my immediate left and right. Following the wire to the left with my eyes, I found it to be attached to a rather large, leafy tree… It was just the same to the right… I had a sinking feeling I knew what this trap was… A Tanishukar.
Historically, our order has used the Tanishukar traps to bring down large game. The trap consists of a trigger wire strung across the ground at a fairly low elevation. The wire is then connected to two posts, trees, or what have you. From there, it is run through a pulley at the base of each tree, up to a branch about mid-way up the bole of the tree. There it is bound around what can only be described as a top-like device, made to be set spinning at high velocity when the trigger wire is pulled on. And connected to the bottom of the accelerator (the top-like device) would be a slender, circular blade, honed at the outside to a razor’s edge. The accelerators were angled slightly differently on either tree, so that when released, one blade would shoot down at a forty-five degree angle, cutting the legs off of whatever had been unfortunate enough to pass through the trap, while the second would take a slightly shallower path… On an animal such as a Yarnak bear, this second blade would bite through the spine, immobilizing the animal. On a human, it would sever the head from the body at the shoulders…
The trap itself wasn’t difficult to disarm… And if you knew what you were looking for, it was fairly easy to spot. If I hadn’t been moving at a flat-out run and paying more attention to finding Romo’s captors than the road ahead of me, I would’ve seen it from much further off. However, for one without my training, the Tanishukar would be nearly invisible. I needed to disarm it before I moved on, so that no other travelers passing through these woods would trip it by accident. Especially if one of those potential travelers happened to be a certain someone who might have decided to follow me…
Moving to the tree on the left, I quickly shimmied up the side of the trunk. At a height of about fifteen feet off the ground (I was guessing, I was a little more than twice my own height off the ground at this point) I found what I was looking for. A circular saw blade attached to a conical device angled at what appeared to be a little less than thirty degrees. This was the blade that would’ve taken my head off. Gripping the bole of the tree with my legs, I reached out to the blade, and very gently gripped it between my thumb and forefinger with each hand. Then, slowly, ever so slowly, I eased the blade off of the accelerator, and hung it by the hole that had been used to attach it to the accelerator from a nearby branch instead of dropping it on the ground for some poor fool to step on. I did the same to the tree on the right, and then quickly snipped the trip wire on the ground. The instant the wire was broken, I could hear the whir of the accelerators springing to life, but they spun in impotence, as without their blades, they were harmless.
Satisfied that the danger in this area was removed, I charged on through the woods, although I paid a bit more attention to the road now than I had been moments before.
For a time after encountering the Tanishukar, my path was clear, and I made good time. The sun tracked slowly through its course across the sky, burning away the early morning mists and lengthening my shadow to the west as it rose above the eastern hills. I was now on the road leading into Kalisbourg, and I could see just ahead the skyline of some of the larger buildings of the town. However, I would not be allowed to pass through Kalisbourg quite as quickly as I’d hoped…
Just ahead of me in the road was an odd patch of dirt. Deciding that discretion was going to have to be the better part of valor this day, I slowed my speed greatly, drawing closer to this area with cautious steps. For an instant, I thought perhaps that I was just being silly, and that this oddity in the dirt was nothing more than the normal condition of the path… But then a light breeze blowing in from the north stirred the dirt, and I was instantly glad of my caution.
There in the midst of the road to Kalisbourg were five shallow depressions. Although not obvious even to the trained eye, they were definitely discernable, especially when the wind blew and dislodged several inches worth of dust covering the depressions. This then was the second of the traps I would encounter… A Shinaminugaesho… The exploding earth. This was no mere animal trap. The Shinaminugaesho, or Shingae for short, was a combat trap, meant to cover retreating Kyrie warriors… It worked on similar principles to the more modern minefields of the tech armies, but it was a bit less fancy.
In the construction of a Shingae trap, first pits had to be dug. In this case, there were five. At the bottom of the pits, homemade explosives were laid, connected to fuses that were then run out the top of the pit, and covered with a thin layer of dust. These fuses were connected to “tremblers,” which were pressure sensors that worked by being highly sensitive to vibrations within the earth. Each Shingae trap would have two tremblers placed at the outside edges of the trap as a whole, usually hidden in grass or some other obscuring material. The tremblers themselves consisted of a small hammer hung from a wire that was suspended by two small supports. The edge of the hammer was placed against a piece of flint, and the ends of the fuses of the explosives closest to each trembler were placed under the flint. Finally, the pits containing the explosives would be filled, and the tremblers set to their active mode, and the makers of the trap would then crawl away, to prevent detection by their own creation. When a person would walk through the area of the trap, the vibrations from their footfalls would trigger the tremblers, which would cause the hammers to strike the flints, igniting the fuses, and… Well… I’m sure you can guess what happened next.
Disarming this particular trap was nearly impossible. Its construction prevented approaching the trap by any means other than crawling, and to reach both tremblers in that manner would take far too much time. With no other option, I took up a rock and backing away from the trap, hurled it at the ground near where I suspected one of the tremblers might be located…
Even at the distance I stood away from the trap, the force of the explosions that erupted from my disturbance of the trembler threw me onto my back. My ears sang as if a choir had suddenly taken up residence in them, and I could feel small chunks of dirt pelting my body. I was on my feet again in seconds, however, and aside from that annoying ringing in my ears and a slight burning sensation from having been a bit too close to the blast, I was none the worse for wear. The Shingae was one hell of a trap, if you weren’t looking for it… But it also took a lot of time to construct. Two experienced men working quickly on it would still take about an hour… I figured that was about how long the Journeymen that had taken Romo had had to spend on this trap, as one of them would’ve had to keep an eye Romo, leaving only two to work on the trap. What had taken them an hour to construct had taken me seconds to destroy, and that meant I had suddenly gained time on them. Provided I didn’t encounter any more involved traps, I would be within seeing distance of them shortly. I hoped…
Luckily enough for me, there were no more wards on the way into Kalisbourg, and none within the town itself either. It was still too early in the morning for anyone but the farmers to be up and around, but I made it a point to stop and ask a passing plowman if he had seen a group of Journeymen pass by… Turns out it was well worth my effort, too, as apparently the whole town had watched the Journeymen I was after carry Romo through town, kicking and fighting the whole way, and pass over a hill in the direction of the farming community of Plausneu. Not surprisingly, none of the townspeople had tried to intervene, and I can’t say I blamed them, either… We might not be Knights, but Journeymen of the Kyrie are nothing to take lightly…
Thanking the plowman, I hurried on out of town, over the hill he had pointed out, and bolted onwards towards Plausneu. I was about halfway through the woods between Plausneu and Kalisbourg when I happened upon the rotting carcasses of two Yarnak bears. For a moment, I was at a loss as to why two Yarnak carcasses would be this far from the Valley of the Bear… And then I slapped my forehead with the heel of my hand as I remembered that these were the bears Brie and I had killed when I had reunited with the group following my escape from Jolenine. I had almost forgotten about that incident, as I’d been sort of wrapped up with other things…
Encountering the bears made me think of Brie again, and how much I already missed her. I have said time and again how strange it felt to develop such strong feelings for a person so quickly, but I no longer questioned them. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was falling rather deeply in love with Gabrielle, and I had never been happier in my life. Well… I was happy when I was with her, at least. Any other time I was generally trying to stay sane despite having my life flipped on its ear by all this garbage going on with the monastery… But whenever I was with Brie, or even just near to her, so that I could see her smile or hear her voice, all of my troubles seemed to just flit away like leaves on the breeze…
To this day, I still can’t understand how it is Brie and I got together as quickly as we did. I may be a bit self-efficacious, but I am not stupid. I knew very well even then that Brie at least somewhat returned my feelings. I was not so arrogant as to assume she had fallen as hard for me as I had for her, but I knew there was something there… And what struck me as funny was that, even though we both had feelings for each other, were it not for the prodding and advice of Romo, we probably never would’ve gotten together… If I’d never given Brie that unicorn back at the festival in Kalisbourg, so many other things might not have ever happened… And I had Romo to thank for that.
Thinking of Romo brought me snapping back to the present, and leant my feet wings as I charged on towards Plausneu. Unfortunately for me, my concentration had not fully returned from thinking about Brie, and in my somewhat reflective state, I missed the tripwire laid out across the floor of the forest outside of Plausneu…
The whirring of the accelerators of the Tanishukar I had just tripped reached my ears mere instants before the first blade came tearing through the air toward my knees. Even as I moved to dodge, I knew the second blade was bearing in just as quickly on my neck. I was going to have to do something… And fast.
Thinking back to the first Tanishukar, and how the blades had been arranged, an idea came to me as to how I might avoid both blades at once… The timing would have to be perfect, though…
Pushing off with my feet, I threw my body into a backwards dive. My feet cleared the ground just as the lower blade came slicing through the air beneath them. The first blade cleared, I now need only worry about the second. And if it had been angled as had the one that I had found on the first Tanishukar just outside of the plains of Shilay, then my head should have been low enough to clear it.
Unfortunately for me, the blade had been angled a bit lower than had its earlier counterpart, and as it whined through the air towards my head, I perceived just in time the difference in trajectory. Jerking my head backwards violently and twisting it to the side, I managed to avoid having my head taken off, although I did not escape injury entirely.
Just when I thought the blade would pass harmlessly over my head, it wobbled suddenly in the air, as if struck by a passing breeze, and in that instant, it slashed deeply across the left side of my face, digging in just to the side of my nose and across my eye socket, clear across the left side of my forehead, and then it passed on into the trees…
Biting back the howl of anguish that threatened to rip forth from my lungs, I landed on my back and rolled quickly to my feet. My hands almost immediately flew to my face, and as soon as I had reached my feet, I instantly sank to my knees again, so great was my agony. Blood ran freely down the side of my face, and I could feel that my flesh had been sliced nearly to the bone.
Fighting the pain down for an instant, I forced my eye open… For a moment, I thought the blade had cut through it as well, and I had lost the vision in my left eye… But then I realized that everything seemed dark because my eye was covered in blood. The blade had missed my eye by a hair’s breadth, and for that at least, I was thankful. Now I just had to stop the bleeding…
Ripping off the right sleeve of my tunic, I folded it over thrice, and pressed it against the side of my face. Though the touch of the cloth sent new waves of pain lancing through my head, I knew I had to keep the pressure on in order to force the blood flow to that part of my face to slow down. The wound was not so deep as to have an unstoppable bleeding problem, but I still needed a way to close the wound… And I couldn’t bandage my head, because I was about to go up against three Journeymen, and I would need all of my faculties. Loss of one eye at this point, no matter how temporary, could be deadly. But how to close the wound without a bandage?
As if guided by fate, or more to the point by God Himself, my right eye fell upon the thin line used as a tripwire for the Tanishukar… And suddenly an idea came to me. This was going to hurt like nuts, but one does what one has to do.
Taking up the line, I continued on through the woods, pressing the sleeve of my tunic over my eye, until I reached a small clearing. I remembered hearing a brook, or some form of running water near here when I had gone running by to catch up with Brie and the others on my way out of Plausneu. I stood there a moment, ears primed… And vaguely, somewhere in the distance, I did indeed hear again the sound of running water. I headed off in the direction of the sound at a brisk jog, and soon came upon a clear, narrow stream running through the woods.
Kneeling down beside the stream, I gently dipped my tunic sleeve into the water. As I moved it from my eye, a fresh gout of blood ran forth from my wound and dripped onto the ground, but I ignored it. I held the arm of my tunic down in the stream for a few seconds, and then after it had soaked through, lifted it again and pressed it to my face, flushing some of the blood from the wound. Then I bent at the waist, and looked into the water with my right eye… The surface was clear, reflective… And the current was just slow enough that I could make out my own reflection pretty well… I sighed. I didn’t want to do this, but I had to.
Removing the arm of my tunic from my face and laying it aside, I took up again the line I had taken from the Tanishukar. It was a fishing line, thin and light, but with a very high tensile strength… Reaching into my bag with my other hand, I retrieved a knife that I had brought along to cut the salted meat I had bought back in Shilay. I took a deep breath… Then another. And another. God help me, I did not want to do this…
Deciding finally that being frightened wasn’t helping my face or my chances of finding Romo any, I shut my left eye tightly, and staring down into the water, I lifted the line and my knife to the left side of my face…
What followed brought more than a few tears to my eyes, which really hurt coming from the left eye, and caused me a few new nicks and cuts, but in the end I had sewn the wound over my eye pretty well shut, and managed, with some fumbling of fingers, to tie the line off as well. Getting my makeshift stitches out again would take some doing, but I could always go to a hospital later. For now, I needed to find Romo.
Standing beside the stream, I dabbed at my face a bit more with the torn arm of my tunic, trying to get up as much of the blood on my face as I could. After a few moments, I determined whatever was left was dried on and would need to be washed off later, and returned again to the area where I had tripped the Tanishukar. The trail picked up again and turned suddenly to the west, away from Plausneu and deeper into the forest. I followed it cautiously now, as I had no desire for any more scars than the two I had already… The one on my chest from my chemical encounter in Jolenine, and now the new one that would soon form on my face.
After an hour or so of walking, I perceived, just above the tree line, a wisp of smoke. Someone was burning something up ahead… Likely it was a campfire, and if it belonged to who I thought it might, they were about to be very sorry they’d lit anything at all…
Moving as quickly as maintenance of silence would allow, I drew near to the area from whence the smoke had originated. There, in a small valley, I found three pup tents and a small fire burning in their midst. Slowly, I crept down into the valley, and crouched near the back of the closest tent. I could hear, from the tent furthest from me, the sounds of a struggle… And then someone… No, not someone, Romo, screamed.
That did it. Heedless of the danger, I stood, and charged across the open space between myself and the tent from which the scream had originated. Bursting through the flaps of the tent, I stopped dead in my tracks, horrified by what I saw. There, in the midst of the tent, lay Romo, her clothes torn in several places, including a few that decency does not permit me to mention… A man clad in a Journeyman’s uniform kneeled over her, pinning her down, while another stood before her, fumbling with his belt…
Every man, no matter what atrocities he has seen or even committed himself, has one thing, one act that is so vile, that no matter how often he hears of or witnesses it, it drives him to the point of a killing rage. Mine has always been rape, and now, just as it always had, the mere idea of someone doing that to another human being, let alone someone I cared for, brought a searing rage bursting forth in me.
I howled in anger and betrayal. Even to an enemy, the Kyrie were supposed to be better than this! We were supposed to stand for more! This bastardization of the morals and laws we had been taught, this blatant disregard, by Journeymen yet… It had to mean it had all been bullshit… Journeymen would not act this way without the consent of the Elders… Everything we’d been taught, everything I’d been told, about honor, compassion… All of it lies!
Reaching into myself, I called forth the SoulFire, allowing it to burn through my veins, the blue fire of my power and the white hot fire of my rage intermingling to mold me into an entirely new creature… Lashing out with my left leg, I caught the Journeyman standing over Romo on the right side of his face as he turned to look upon this howling intruder… He never even had time to register who I was, as his skull caved in under the force of my blow, his brain spattering the inside of the tent with warm, wet gray matter.
“
“Get up,” I growled. “Stand and face your death like a man.”
“Like a man,” my foe smirked. “And it was ever so manly of you to kill my friend by striking from behind… While his pants were down yet.”
“On your feet,” I howled, and made as if to leap at him… But fate would not permit me to wipe the smirk from that smug bastard’s face this day… For just as I prepared to strike, a sudden blow to the back of my head sent shards of white light shooting into my vision. And as I fell to my knees, my mind registered two things before the darkness rose up to claim me… First, I had forgotten to account for that third Journeyman, and my carelessness might have just been the death of me… And second, I had failed… Failed Romo yet again… First I had let her brother die, and now I was letting her down as well… And Brie too… I had failed them all.
