B4 Interlude 22: The Weight of Silver — Strangspine, pt. 5

Tongues of flame reached skyward, each one a crackling lash that threw off shadows in the deep dark of the brush.

Spectres lurked there — things of fang and claw from times long past. Bronwyn wasn’t scared of them. Not anymore. It would take more than the weight of old failures to unsteady his footing.

Still, he hadn’t taken off his armour. His blade lay naked in the dirt beside him — a rippling surface of bluish steel, glistening in the light of their campfire.

There was a good reason for that. It had been two weeks since they’d left Earnsdale, the journey slowed by the roughness of the terrain and only a passable understanding of their surrounding landscape.

In that time, they’d been tested on four separate occasions — small groups of beasts charging out of nowhere. The ambushes might have worked if they were weaker, but he and his team were not green, nor were they weak. They had felled the beasts with ease, yet still, the signs were concerning. The simple fact that they were attacked at all said something was amiss.

Beasts, most of all, had a sharpened primal understanding of strength.

They should have known they were outmatched and given them a wide berth — yet they hadn’t.

He’d wished that they could have learned something from the ambushes, but so far, all they’d been able to tell was that some rabid madness had overtaken the beasts. Unlike what they’d expected, the small packs had been singular in species.

Unlike the ravening hordes they’d heard tales of from the villages they’d visited — and from the warnings Kaius and his team had given — these were different. The creatures that had attacked them had differed with every ambush. Still, for all the lack of danger, and for all his veteran mentality, Bronwyn found it hard to deny the weight the ordeal left on him.

With every settlement they visited, fear and despondency had grown thicker in the air, like some grand miasma wafting out of Strangspine to choke all who fell beneath its foul lair. There had been no excitement or smiles at the sight of Silvers come to investigate what the locals had fallen afoul of.

No — there had only been eyes dull with despondency and frowns lined hard, biting back unspoken questions. They didn’t need to be voiced for him to know what they were.

Why now? Why not a week earlier, when my parents in the next village over still lived? Why now? Why not when you could have saved my boy?

Old questions. Familiar questions. But ones that never grew easier. Fate and opportunity were cruel things, he had found.

He sighed, reaching for the teapot nestled in a pocket of glowing embers at the edge of their fire. The herbal bite of citrus and mint wafted in a steaming gust as he refilled his cup. It was clarifying as he sipped it, but not enough to banish his foul mood.

They would hit Tyne’s Rest tomorrow, and the weight of that anticipation curdled in his belly. He knew what he would find there — devastation, impotent guilt, and his own inability to turn back the clock. Another regret. Another pack of ghosts to haunt his dark nights.

A heavy silence in their camp was enough to tell him that his team felt similar. Dross had long since cleared away the remnants of their cooked meal — a simple fare of seared meat, bread, and cheese.

Julis was doing his best to pretend to read some treatise on magic, his eyes sliding across the page only to halt and climb back up as he re-read a passage he’d only half paid attention to. Even Yanira, usually the most unflappable of them, had a hard line to her mouth as she ran a whetstone over an old hunting knife she used to eat.

For all the circumstances bothered him — bothered them all — it was an old trial he was long used to. There was a method and a technique to nights like these. As much as he loathed to put in the effort when he would rather crawl under his cloak and stare sightlessly out into the black, he knew he could not.

Morbidity dulled the mind, sapped will, and blunted blades more surely than anything else. They all knew it. It was impossible not to, after more than twenty years in the field.

“Dark night it is,” he said slowly, chewing awkwardly through each syllable.

Yanira snorted, a smile breaking across her features as she shook her head. “Really, Bron? ‘A dark night’?”

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He waved her off, unable to suppress his own small grin. “I’m not a bloody miracle worker. It’s the best I had in the moment, all right?”

“A reasonable thing, considering the circumstances, I think,” Julis said as he snapped his book closed and leaned back on his arms. “It does get a bit old, doesn’t it?”

Bronwyn grunted in unison with the rest of his team. The mage didn’t have to elaborate further. They all knew what he referred to — the death, the bodies.

It was the one thing nobody ever wanted to do, that nobody ever warned you about when you became a Delver.