B4 Interlude 23: Strangspine, pt. 6

Tangled and dense, the vast wall of bush slowly dispersed before them. The trail they had been following was overgrown, poorly tended to, and had likely been untouched since Tyne’s Rest had fallen to the invasion of beasts. After a long night of stories and reminiscing, they had set off first thing in the morning, closing the last few leagues between them and the first of the fallen villages they would encounter.

Like a regular forest, the bush was particularly punishing. Thick, crackly trees wove into living walls as the undergrowth and canopy merged into an almost seamless whole. Without the regular passing of travellers and hunters cutting back the growth, the hungry bush had quickly begun to eat away at any remnants of human passage.

Huffing in frustration, Bronwyn hacked at a branch with his sword. It was so bloody close he could almost taste it. Barely a dozen long strides ahead, he could see a wall of light where the tree line abruptly halted.

Thank the gods they had long since left their cart behind. There was no way it would have been able to manoeuvre through this mess. More importantly, they hadn’t wanted to risk their precious Dauntle. It was far too valuable a creature—intelligent, sturdy, and well-behaved—and, more importantly, they had no way of replacing it. None of them wanted to risk it falling under the sway of whatever madness had befallen the beasts that had been called to the Spine.

Thankfully, they’d simply had to cut it loose and give it their command phrase to return home. Dauntles had an almost mythical sense of direction and wayfinding capabilities, and the damn thing had run off at a fast canter straight towards Deadacre — as if it could smell the unnerving magic in the air. He wasn’t worried about it getting ambushed on the way back. After so many years with them, the damn thing was nearing level one-thirty. With its natural abilities, any beast that tried to take it for easy prey was in for a swift rebuke.

Smiling at the thought of the ornery bastard kicking in a dire wolf’s head, Bronwyn redoubled his hacking as Yanira did the same beside him with a large axe.

It didn’t take them long to punch into the fields that surrounded Tyne’s Rest, and they got their first glimpse of the ruin.

It was a sight of devastation. Fields that had once been orderly rows of wheat, potatoes, beans, and gourds were ripped to shreds, nothing left untouched in the entire circular span he could see. Edibles had been rooted up and torn into with mayhem, half eaten, the rest lying trampled and shredded — torn into with an unnatural fury. To his unskilled eye, the tracks were unintelligible, tearing across the fields in every direction with almost no similarity in sizing or gait. Hells, Bronwyn even spotted a few arrows scattered among the wreckage, broken into splinters by stomping feet.

At the field’s centre, worse awaited. A thick wooden palisade, wholly broken through in five separate places. Thick logs and earthworks scattered like kindling, while the houses visible within lay in ruins — their roofs collapsed and walls knocked in. Some were burned and charred, night fires spreading with the invasion’s chaos.

He thanked the gods he hadn’t spotted any bodies yet, though they no doubt waited deeper within.

The war-torn ruin was exactly as he had expected from the descriptions of the surviving villagers they had passed through. It wasn’t just Elder Humund; every story they’d heard told the same thing—beasts picking people off in the night before one of their fellow settlements sent out screams for help over their communication network, going dark hours later.

Scowling, Bronwyn looked away to his left, only to catch sight of something he’d forgotten to expect: Strangspine, visible over the horizon. It was as transcendental as the first time he’d seen it — an archipelago in the sky, floating islands of stone that washed the ground beneath them in the endless spray of a thousand waterfalls. Vines hung for hundreds of long strides beneath each floating stone, drifting in the wind like questing tendrils. Far beneath them, he could just barely make out mossy spires of stone — thin mountains that grasped towards the islands above like the fingers of giants. He knew that beneath them lay a jungle that dominated the surface of Strangspine.

While he didn’t know the full origins of the name, why it was called the Spine was obvious: the spired mountains that punched up towards the mirrored islands above rose like the vertebrae of some great beast, projecting in a line that cut through the frontier.

He knew it was still leagues upon leagues away, but the structures of the Spine were large enough that he could see them with ease. It had been easy to forget how close they were getting when it had all been obscured by the impenetrable bush that surrounded this face of the high-mana zone.

Bronwyn shook his head and turned his attention back to the ruin before him. Always so beautiful — yet the evidence of the dangers they could contain was plain. Nodding to Dross, he fell in behind the ranger with the rest of his team, trusting in the man’s expertise to pick out whatever he could from the dense mass of tracks the stampede had left behind.

They progressed towards the village slowly, Dross looking all around them with intense focus.

“What do you see?” Ilias asked, his expression serious.

“Madness,” the ranger muttered as he stood up straight. “What do you see?”

His hand blurred, pointing out feature after feature — a half dozen different depressions. Some as small as Bronwyn’s hand, others almost as big as his kite shield.

“Wolves. A dire bear. A fucking irontusk. Ripper fowl. Rockfang spiders.” The ranger spat, shaking his head before nodding to a patch of what looked like rotting gourds that lay smashed and shattered across the ground. “Even weirder shite. Pretty sure that’s from a blightstalker.”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

Bronwyn’s eyebrows rose. He’d known the effects that had caused the beast tide had been broad-spanning and non‑discriminatory on the creatures it had affected — but to have that much variation? Half of the creatures Dross mentioned were so bloody rare that he’d only seen them a handful of times in his entire career.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

The ranger nodded gravely. “As sure as I can be. There’s plenty more I don’t recognise too. Has to be dozens of different varieties of beasts, and… half of them are bloody solitary. And that’s not even getting at the fact that most of them should be fighting each other.”

Bronwyn frowned. Yet more evidence piling in favour of the effects being some sort of Controller. Deep in his gut, he only felt more certain that it was unlikely this effect was being caused by a classer. Yet that itself worried him — how had they managed it? Even with some immensely powerful artefact, or an entire cadre of mages working together, the span and severity of control was something else.

He hoped he was wrong — that there was a natural explanation.