Path of Dragons 7 - Chapter 30 - Forest Hills (Patreon)

For Elijah, teleportation was not an unfamiliar process.  He’d experienced it on more than one occasion – first, with Roots of the World Tree and its predecessor, and then when he’d been transported to Ka’arath for the Trial of Primacy – but this instance felt subtly different.  It was characterized by a similar darkness and suspension in nothingness, but it felt smoother than ever before.  It was like piloting a speedboat across a placid lake as opposed to sailing on the open ocean. 

Regardless, it only lasted a split second before Elijah appeared in an unfamiliar place.  Upon arrival, the first thing he noticed was the Branch of the World Tree, which was far less developed than the one back in Ironshore.  It was like comparing a sprout to a sapling, though when Elijah accounted for the differences in the ambient ethera, the contrast felt significantly more substantial. 

“H-hello?” came a timid voice. 

Elijah looked up to see a mousey girl with straw-colored hair.  She didn’t quite look malnourished, but it was clear that food wasn’t plentiful enough to put any real meat on her bones.  He gave her his best smile and said, “Hi.  I’m Elijah.  Would you like something to eat?  I have some extra fruits in my bag.”

“Uh…where did you come from?” she asked. “And why are you here?”

“I’m here to see my friend Ron.  He asked me to come by,” Elijah answered, recognizing that he was on thin ice.  “He’s a Healer, and –”

“I know him.  Everyone here does.”

“What’s going on here?  Are you okay?  Like I said, I have food.”

“I’m not supposed to take anything from strangers,” the girl said.  Only then did Elijah realize just how young she was.  He’d assumed she was the Envoy of the World Tree, but if she was more than eleven or twelve, he would have been incredibly surprised. 

“That’s fine.  I certainly won’t force you to do anything,” Elijah responded evenly.  He’d never been great with kids, and his long isolation hadn’t helped.  He could barely get along with adults, much less children.  “Can you tell me where to find Ron, then?  I’m here to help.”

She bit her lip, then glanced back at the door.  Vaguely, Elijah realized that he was in a classroom, not unlike what one might find in an elementary school.  There was a chalkboard on one wall, and in the corner, he saw an old metal desk.  There were even a few computers lining one wall, though he saw no school desks around. 

“I…um…okay.  Stay here, though.  I’ll…uh…I’ll go get somebody.”

Then, she hurried toward the door, leaving Elijah behind.  Obviously, he could have simply gone wherever he wanted.  It wasn’t as if anyone could stop him.  However, he didn’t think that would help their impression of him.  So, he focused on Soul of the Wild, and he was surprised to find that his senses didn’t extend past the classroom.  He had no idea what was going on, but until then, he didn’t think there was anything on Earth powerful enough to curtail the effects of what he usually considered to be his most powerful spell. 

It was odd.  He usually depended on it so much that the lack left him feeling almost blind.  He wasn’t in danger.  He felt that down to his core.  Yet, he still took appropriate precautions, shifting into the Shape of Venom and slipping into Guise of the Unseen.  A second later, he climbed the wall of the classroom and skittered across the ceiling.  The cheap fiberboard tiles were barely able to support his weight, so he was forced to grip the grid of the suspended ceiling to keep from fouling the entire system.

There, he waited until only a few minutes later, he saw a familiar face. 

When Ron entered the room, he did so with no small degree of wariness, and when he didn’t see anyone inside, he called out, “Elijah?  Are you here?”

At that, Elijah dropped to the floor and shifted back into his human form.  Doing so forced Guise of the Unseen to cancel, so to Ron, he probably appeared out of nowhere.  The Healer flinched away, leveling his wand in Elijah’s direction, but the second he recognized him, Ron’s shoulders relaxed.

“Did you really need to do that?” he asked, relieved.

“I mean, yeah.  Kind of.  I get here, and my senses are all blocked.  I wanted to be prepared for an ambush,” Elijah explained.  “What’s going on?  Why do you have a little girl guarding the Branch?  And where’s your Envoy?”

“It’s a long story,” Ron said sadly.  “Come with me.  We don’t usually stay around here for very long.  It’s too dangerous.”

“But not too dangerous for a little girl?”

Ron shook his head.  “Iris wasn’t supposed to be here, either.  Come on.  I know you’re probably not in any danger, but the last thing we want is attention.”

Elijah nodded, then followed Ron out of the classroom.  He’d expected to exit into a school hallway, and that was mostly what happened.  However, said hall was missing its roof and one of its walls, exposing it to the open and frigid air.   

“What the hell happened here, man?” Elijah asked, looking around.  Finally, Soul of the Wild had been unveiled, so he’d instantly gotten a good picture of his surroundings.  And it wasn’t promising.  The school was almost entirely destroyed, with only the classroom and its immediate area having survived.  The rest had been reduced to rubble, and even the playground – with a jungle gym and swing set – had been twisted all out of shape. 

“That’s part of why we’re in trouble.  This isn’t the place to talk about it, though.”

Ron led Elijah from the ruins and into what remained of a small town.  As they strode down what looked similar to the main street of thousands of American towns across the country, Elijah was reminded of a similar setting he’d encountered years before.  Back then, he’d met a bear guardian who’d been standing sentry over a powerful natural treasure.  But Elijah felt nothing of the sort this time around.  The entire place was deserted, and rightly so.  Most of the buildings had sustained significant damage, and because the whole area was covered in a thick blanket of snow, it looked much more forlorn than most places Elijah had visited.

“Kind of cold for autumn,” he muttered to himself, thankful for his Cloak of the Iron Bear.  It kept him comfortable, but he was still aware that the temperature was well below freezing. 

“It’s always cold here,” Ron stated.  Then, he added, “But it’s getting worse.”

He went on to say that the area was growing far colder with every day after the Trial of Primacy.  The obvious conclusion was that the rise in the density of the world’s ethera was responsible, though he did make a point that it was in no way a scientific observation.  Either way, it made sense to Elijah.  From his experience, thicker ethera tended to create more extreme climates.

In any case, he followed Ron through the town for another few minutes until they reached a large, fortified building that appeared to have once been a hardware store.  Along the way, they’d passed a few carefully concealed people that Elijah never would have known were there if he hadn’t had Soul of the Wild on his side. 

When Ron led him inside, Elijah was surprised to find that the hardware store had been divided into a bunch of rooms.  The inside of the building had no true walls, just old shelves and curtains.  However, the interior of those spaces had been arranged into home-like areas. 

“Home sweet home,” Ron said with a note of bitterness.  “Makes me wish for the Nexus Town.  At least we had good, sturdy walls back there.”

A few moments later, Elijah found himself in what appeared to be a common area.  It was in the center of the hardware store, and there were a dozen or so people going about everyday chores like washing clothes, crafting various things, and just congregating with one another.  They all looked up at his arrival.

“Take a seat,” Ron offered, gesturing to a pair of old metal chairs in the corner.  “I’d offer you something to eat or drink, but we’re on short rations for now.”

“I have some fruit from my grove,” Elijah said, already dipping his hand into his satchel.  Ron was well acquainted with what was on offer.  He’d eaten plenty of grove berries back in the Trial.  So, he accepted the offer with gratitude, calling for someone to act as a distributor.  As it turned out, the person who answered was Ron’s daughter, Hope.  She was a pretty girl, maybe sixteen at most, with brown hair and wide, expressive eyes.  However, just like the girl who’d met him by the Branch, she looked a little malnourished. 

She accepted the offered fruits – they were like overgrown strawberries – then set about passing them around.  As she did, Elijah asked Ron, “So, what’s going on here?  You didn’t say it was this bad.”

Ron ran his hand through his hair, answering, “It wasn’t this bad when I left.  Not as cold, at least.  But things have been getting worse and worse over the past couple of weeks.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that in your message?”

“Didn’t want to worry you.  We’re surviving, even if it’s not easy.”

Elijah felt like that was up for debate.  Everyone he sensed had clearly suffered from what Ron called short rations.  They weren’t starving – not exactly – but they weren’t far away from that mark.  In addition, most of them felt weak. 

“Where are the fighters?” he asked.

Ron frowned.  “They’re…they’re gone,” he said.  “Some split away and went off on their own.  Others died well before the Trial.  It’s been just us for a while now.  Most of these people are too weak to travel far.  We have kids here.  Elderly.  But like I said, things are getting worse.  Even if we survive the winter, there’s something else we need to worry about.”

Then, he went on to explain that in the nearby forest, there was a settlement of goblins, though he made certain to make a distinction between the ones like Ramik and the others in Ironshore and the savage, territorial creatures in the forest. 

“I don’t know what it is, but they’re extremely violent,” Ron stated.  “They’re sapient, I think.  They have a Branch, too.  Mostly, they keep to the forest, but that means we can’t really hunt.  The weather’s too cold to grow crops, so…”

He gestured to the people who’d already begun to devour the fruits.  Most ate in tiny nibbles, as if they wanted to preserve the experience of eating for as long as possible, but a few had already finished their meals. 

“What about the Branch?” Elijah asked.  “Where is the Envoy?”

“Dead,” Ron stated.  “They’re pretty much all-powerful around the Branches, but away from their domains, they’re no stronger than anyone else.  Jack stepped up to help defend the school – that’s where we originally settled – but the monsters were too powerful.  We ended up killing them eventually, but he didn’t make it.  Neither did the school, which was why we moved here.  The goblins keep the area mostly safe from monsters, but they’ll kill anyone who wanders into what they consider their territory.  Which is just about everywhere in the forest.”

Elijah frowned. 

The way he saw it, there were only two viable outcomes for the situation Ron had described.  The first was to simply evacuate the population to a better area.  That came with a host of issues on its own, which led him to consider the second solution – he needed to deal with the goblins. 

If those goblins either weren’t around or if he could negotiate some sort of truce, then the humans of Forest Hills would be able to hunt in the nearby wilderness.  They’d still have to deal with the cold, which wasn’t ideal, and supporting a population with hunting alone wasn’t really all that viable, but for now, it seemed like it was probably the best answer. 

But he still wasn’t sure, so he said, “Okay.  I’m going to go check things out for myself.  Maybe I can talk to these goblins or something.  I don’t know.  But I need to see what’s going on with my own two eyes.”

“They won’t talk to you,” Ron predicted.  “I can guarantee that.  We’ve tried to negotiate before, and they attacked our messengers.”

Elijah shrugged.  “I get that.  I do.  But I might be successful where they weren’t.  If it’s like you say, then we’ll consider another option.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Ron agreed.  “Just act quickly.  These people are at the end of their ropes.  We’re not going to start keeling over in the next few days, but they’re losing hope.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Elijah said, rising from his chair.  He didn’t have anything else to offer, so he wasted no more time before leaving the makeshift community behind and striding away from town.