49 – Assault On The Plains

The first beast through the field edge was a wolf — dark wood under packed moss, four bundles of twisting roots for legs, leaves peeling back from the head to show green teeth.

Then a second. A third. They stalked toward the village.

“Duskmaws.” Alexandra glanced at Apple.

“I’ll be in the back.” The old woman was already moving. “Be careful.”

The leading Duskmaw growled. The other two barked.

The lead one came straight at her. The other two split wide.

Alexandra stepped into the lunge, inside the bite, and drew the sickle across the side of its neck. The blade caught on wood and she had to pull hard to free it. Dark sap ran down the moss. The Duskmaw landed, turned, and she was already moving, her feet landing in the uneven field without her having to look down.

The two flanking ones hadn’t committed yet. A subtle shift in weight, the outside left one lowering its front roots, and she sidestepped right. The lunge crossed empty air.

She opened a cut along its flank on the way past.

The third one barked and held its ground.

She kept moving. Stopping was the wrong answer with three of them. The leftmost one was about to feint.

It started to lunge. She didn’t bite. The beast stopped.

The lead one came back with its jaw wide open. She caught the bite on the flat of the sickle, turned it, stamped her heel down on the root nearest her foot before it found her ankle.

She was breathing hard.

She’d read about Duskmaws once, in a passage Louis had flagged in his field book. Iron rank at birth, Bronze by the time they uprooted themselves and moved. Pack hunters. Territorial but not stupid, they didn’t commit until they had an angle.

Alexandra frowned, and took a step to the side to avoid a leg-roots strike.

Far behind her, in the village, someone screamed.

A man’s voice shouted words she couldn’t make out. Metal rang against wood. The bell struck twice more, then stopped.

The lead Duskmaw’s head turned toward the sound for half a second.

She didn’t have half a second to spare either. Three of them were in front of her and she didn’t know how many were in the village.

She needed to end this fast.

Pushed by her new skills, she ran toward the lead Duskmaw. The beast moved to the side, but she’d been expecting it. She turned, and hooked her sickle straight into its mouth. The dog yelped as the tip of her blade sank into its flesh. Then, like it was a hook, she pulled her sickle back. The belly of her sickle severed the mouth into two, sending the beast to the ground.

Without wasting a beat, she threw herself to the side, rolled on the ground, and narrowly avoided the chomp of the next Duskmaw’s fangs.

She breathed. Hard.

Alexandra stood up.

The sound of battle coming from the village was intensifying.

She refocused on her opponents.

The first was lying in a puddle of sap.

The second one circled left. The third held back.

She went for the circling one, feinted high, dropped low, drove the sickle up under the jaw. It collapsed sideways, roots curling inward.

The third one bolted.

Not at her. Away, back toward the plains, the way they’d come.

She watched it go for one second, then turned and ran.

The village road was narrow between the stone houses. She passed a broken cart, a dead Duskmaw with a pitchfork through its flank, a door hanging off its frame. Voices ahead, two or three. A bark.

She came around the corner into a square.

Three villagers in the square. Two men with woodcutting axes, a woman with a long knife, working together, keeping the five Duskmaws from splitting them apart.

Alexandra’s feet slowed without her deciding to slow them.

One of the Duskmaws had a flower growing from the top of its skull. A single stem, straight and tall, the bloom open wide, petals the color of fresh blood.

The villagers were shouting. One of the men took a root to the shin and staggered.

She didn’t move.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

The flower was wrong. It was too red. Too still. While the beast beneath it lunged and snapped and circled, the bloom didn’t tremble. Not once.

“Hey!”

The woman in the square was looking at her.

“Stop fucking staring and help us.”

Alexandra snapped out of it, and moved. “The hell is this flower?”

“That’s the Yshant’s true blessing. Something reserved to a few chosen puppets,” a man grunted, pushing the beast in question away with a swipe of his axe. “Makes that dog a rank higher than it should be.”

“Silver.”

She took the initiative and ran for a beast that was about to lunge at the other man. The Duskmaw saw her coming and pulled back.

The fight turned into a standoff.

“Hurry. We need to help the others.”

The man who’d spoken first spat a bloody gob. “That blessed fucker is too thick. I can’t cut through its wood.”

Alexandra bit her lip. If only she’d gotten the herbicide from Maret. But it was too late for regrets. “Let’s kill the others first.”

They moved with the practiced efficiency of people who’d lived in the plains all their lives. Not as outnumbered, they could finally strike without worrying about being flancked by another beast. Axes cleaved through leaves and roots.

So much so that Alexandra only killed one Duskmaw, leaving only the blessed one alive.