Tribes of Venara Page 6

  Why go through all the trouble of leading us hours away into the forest?

  Nolan was extremely unresigned to dying in such a fashion. Wasn’t he the same as some sheep being led to its culling? The more he thought about how easily it had been for Bron to kidnap them and then bring them off to be murdered in some discreet location, the more a rising anger began to fight through the fear that clouded his mind. There was no way that he’d let himself die when Thomas and Steph could still be out there somewhere.

  They’d only just entered the forest and had yet to run into any dangerous creatures. Nolan had a feeling that they planned on having some animal kill him and Jason so that they could just bring their bodies back and claim that it was an accident. Nobody would look into it, not now that the Netherwolf Tribe was on their doorstep.

  Bron eventually commanded the group to stop and split it in two. Nolan and Jason accompanied him and the young female warrior to scout out the area ahead. The remaining warriors stayed behind to guard the other women, all of whom began foraging for herbs.

  Jason started to say something but Bron shoved him to the ground and held him in place. The boy went limp as he whimpered into the dirt like a helpless child. He was then picked up by a fistful of musty fabric and set back onto unsteady feet.

  “Let’s see,” the young woman murmured. “Where should we go? You two, up front.”

  Nolan and Jason were forced to lead as the four of them continued their silent trek into the forest. It was mentally suffocating to walk through thick bushes and swathes of wildflowers and fungi with the knowledge that some frightening creature might suddenly jump out and attack them. During their previous outings the warriors of Nyla’s group had always formed a loose perimeter around the foragers, but this time was different. Nobody would save them if they were attacked by some heinous creature.

  Jason had begun to shed silent tears at some point. Nolan tried to comfort him with a weak whisper, but a leafy thicket a few steps to their right suddenly began to shake and a giant fox emerged along with the sound of snapping twigs and ruffling leaves.

  This fox was much larger than any of the other ones Nolan had seen thus far. Its fur was ruby red, its claws longer and finer than any in his memory. Its bloodshot eyes seemed to emit a chilling orange glow, and its razor-sharp claws were nearly half a metre in length. All in all, it appeared much more threatening than any of the others he’d seen.

  Bron’s eyes narrowed. “Demonic beast?”

  “Red foxes can’t demonize!” the female warrior called out in shock. She glanced at her companion. “What is this?”

  The massive fox—which was the size of a moose—turned its head at the exact moment that the woman had spoken out. It noticed her first and pounced toward her without warning.

  Nolan had followed his gut and tackled Jason out of the way just as the demonic fox had laid eyes on the barbaric woman behind them. She instinctively tried to avoid its pearlescent fangs but they found her neck before she could even raise her hefty axe to defend. Her finely muscled body crumpled to the ground, headless.

  The woman might have died in an instant, but Bron was no pushover. The moment that his lover’s head had been eaten by the fox he smashed the blade of his axe into its face and then used the force of the recoil to initiate a quick retreat. Enraged, the beast shook its head and let out a bloodcurdling roar. Bron’s head-on attack had only agitated it, for it merely left a long yet pathetically thin cut that didn’t appear to be bleeding.

  Nolan had never imagined that a person could move as quickly as Bron. It only took a handful of seconds and the burly man had vanished into the forest, the huge fox launching after him without missing a beat.

  Nolan scrambled to his feet and made to yank Jason up from the ground only to find that his friend had been knocked unconscious during their fall. Another loud roar reverberated nearby, followed by a horrifying scream of pain that could only have been a shrill mutation of Bron’s deep voice. Jason was dead weight at this point, but Nolan couldn’t just leave him.

  He ducked down and got one of Jason’s arms around his good shoulder and heaved him upward. It was difficult to keep him on his feet. Nolan gritted his teeth and set a slow pace, wading through a nearby bush with the boy’s feet dangling behind him. He struggled on for a few minutes before he realized that he wasn’t the only one giving off the sound of movement.

  A brief glance over his shoulder revealed the huge form of the massive fox, which was headed right toward him at a lazy trot. Its mouth hung open in a canine pant, its teeth so large that Nolan could see them clearly despite there being about a hundred metres between them. The fur lining its lips was matted and slick with blood.

  It would only take the beast a few leaps to catch up with them, but Nolan had come to understand that these foxes enjoyed playing with their pray, found amusement in giving them a sense of hope before ripping it away along with their lives. Clearly the beasts possessed a decent amount of intelligence, this one in particular. Nolan could see a twinkle of entertainment in its veiny, glowing eyes.

  When it saw him looking back in its direction, the demonic fox’s grin tugged up at the corners. It was actually smiling at him.

  Nolan ignored the cold shivers that jolted up his spine at the sight of that blood-slicked smile and threw caution to the winds. He dove into a huge thicket that he was passing by, the spindly arms high enough that even the demonic fox would be entirely submerged once it followed after them.

  It was a lot harder to lug Jason along once they were surrounded on all sides by leafy, overreaching arms that stabbed into them from every angle. For all Nolan knew these plants could be hiding spiders or centipedes or something else that could kill him just as easily as the fox, but what other choice did he have?

  The mass of foliage came to an abrupt end, which took Nolan off guard and sent him and Jason tumbling to the dirt. He wasted no time in hoisting his friend back up and dragging him along, heart pounding all the while. It was easy to tell when the fox entered the thicket, as the undergrowth parted like the red sea the moment that the furred beast stepped inside.

  While putting all his strength into fleeing, Nolan was alarmed to spot another creature up ahead. At first its figure was hard to make out since it blended in with the surroundings so perfectly, but crouched not too far away was a massive praying mantis, its body light green with venomous blue blotches spread about the surface of its plated exoskeleton. What caught Nolan’s notice wasn’t that it was tall enough to stand face-to-face with the demonic fox, whose head had just stabbed out of the thicket with its lazy, deadly grin to stare directly at the mantis. What drew Nolan’s eyes were its gleaming and inestimably sharp scythe-like arms, which were emitting a dim orange glow as it continued to consume a corpse that Nolan didn’t have time to look at.

  In such a do-or-die moment Nolan charged right toward the mantis, which was about eight metres away. The huge insect noticed them before they could get too close. It uttered a strange, high-pitched shriek as its wings shot out and lifted it off the ground with a heavy buzzing sound. At the same time, a prideful roar echoed throughout the forest. The moment that the two demonic beasts laid eyes on each other they entered into a frenzied state and charged at one another in what must have been some sort of territorial conflict.

  Nolan hugged Jason and dove to the ground, both of them rolling out of the way just as the two monsters collided. The fox bit down on one of the mantis’s arms with its strong jaw, severing the limb completely. The mantis slashed out with its other arm and the steel-like blade cut into the fox’s abdomen and gutted it in a single, clean slash. Though the fox had clearly been caught unawares, it sent out a strong swipe of its paw that savagely smacked into the mantis’s head, which promptly detached from its body and flew off into the forest.

  The two monsters stood for a moment more, unmoving as the surroundings were gripped by an eerie silence. The mantis was the first to fall, its one-armed body toppling to the ground in a twitching
mess. The fox fell a moment later, its entrails spilling out in a flood of gore that was much too intense for the unprepared eye.

  Nolan couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. He stood up with an incredulous look and gazed around at the bloodbath before him. Gentle warmth hugged his feet as the fox’s blood pooled over his ankles and continued on to brush against most of Jason’s right side.

  Standing there in a pool of demonic beast blood and scattered intestines, Nolan felt something tap against his toe and subconsciously stooped down to grab a small object that had been caught in the tide of viscous fox blood. His hand had been cut into at some point, though he was too disturbed to worry over getting some of the fox’s blood in his injury. Crouching there in the warm, dampening soil, Nolan didn’t know what to think as he considered the strange stone ring that stared up at him from the rippling scarlet stream.

  Chapter Seven: The Glade

  The ring appeared to have been crudely shaped from simple stone. Nolan cleared away most of the blood with his robe until could see that some words had been etched into its dull, grey surface. The characters had faded to the point that even the ring’s creator wouldn’t be able to read the engraving that they’d left behind.

  Why had such a thing been in the fox’s stomach? Nolan couldn’t see why that monster would be interested in eating a small piece of stone. The first explanation that came to mind was that the beast had eaten the ring’s previous owner, who must have been wearing it.

  Nolan subconsciously kept the peculiar object, slipping it onto his left hand’s index finger since his filthy robe had no pockets. After that he strode over to stand between the two monstrous bodies and simply beheld the grim scene with absentminded fascination.

  Look at these things. I can’t believe this shit is real.

  Before the man had attempted an escape Bron had said that the huge fox was a demonic beast. From what Nolan had heard over the past several weeks, the bodies of these dead monsters held an extremely high value. Nearly every part of a demonic beast’s body was an invaluable treasure to the people of Redfox Village. Its flesh and blood would strengthen one’s body upon consumption, and its organs and bones could be fashioned into armours, weapons and medicines. He had once heard Quin mutter that he wouldn’t be able to kill even the weakest demonic beast, a sure indication of how difficult such resources were to obtain.

  If he could present some of these materials to the village head then there was a chance he and Jason might earn the right to stay in Redfox Village without any hassle.

  Nolan looked at Jason and then peered into the surrounding forest. What am I thinking? This stuff won’t matter if Jason and I get torn apart by some monster.

  He attempted to gather his wits. Jason was lying in a puddle of blood that extended all the way over to where he stood between the two dead creatures. The right side of the boy’s face was beginning to bruise over, his robes soaked through while some strands of his greasy hair gently floated in the still liquid.

  Nolan had only managed to take a single step toward his friend before a terrible burn flared up in his left hand. His first thought was that he’d been stung by a huge hornet or some other crazy insect but then he remembered that he’d cut his hand earlier while fleeing for his life. Still, how could his injury suddenly become this painful?

  He couldn’t believe it when he glanced down to see that the ring had somehow come off of his finger and was in the midst of drilling into the open cut on his hand. After it burrowed straight into his palm, an icy stabbing sensation ran up his entire arm that hurt so badly that it made him seriously consider cutting his hand off with one of the mantis’s arms.

  Within seconds the ring had already wormed its way past Nolan’s elbow. There was no hope of containing his screams despite the fact that he was scared to attract one of the countless predators that filled the forest. Teeth gritted, he fell to the ground with a gory splash and began to writhe and spasm. This was easily the worst and most frightening pain that he’d ever felt in his life.

  Nolan’s willpower crumbled once the ring made it past his shoulder and began to head for his heart. Streams of tears disappeared into the dark fox blood that covered his face as he hollered and cried out in anguish, his reality turned torturous. Soon his voice had gone hoarse and his throat had grown sore, but still he croaked and cried as the ring continued to carve a path straight for his heart. Vision swimming, he finally fainted, unable to bear the pain for another moment.

  Nolan woke up in a syrupy puddle of thick blood with his left arm feeling like an icy spike had been nailed into it from hand to shoulder. Much of the gore had been absorbed into the soil and some of the blood on Nolan’s clothes had dried. He couldn’t have been unconscious for too long, but even so he was lucky that some wandering creature hadn’t stumbled upon him when he was out cold.

  He forced himself to his feet and turned to get a look at Jason’s condition, but there was no sign of the unconscious boy.

  If he woke up, he definitely wouldn’t have left me here. He felt a chilling, sinking feeling in his gut. Had something dragged him off to some unknown location? No, if that were the case then he would have left behind a trail of the demonic beast blood that he’d been laying in.

  Nolan froze as a tickling perturbation crept up his back. Something had seemed off from the moment he’d woken up, and it clicked as soon as he shifted his focus from the mess at his feet to the curious backdrop that he had yet to take notice of.

  He and the dead demonic beasts were near the edge of a large glade that was encircled on all sides by a small and peculiar forest. The leaves and trunks of the trees that surrounded the huge swath of verdant, knee-high grasses were completely grey and lifeless. What screamed for Nolan’s attention was that even the sky was an eerie and inanimate grey, a blank, cloudless slate.

  He was one hundred percent positive that this wasn’t the same forest he’d just been in. Everything outside of the glade was completely devoid of colour and not a single sound reached Nolan’s ears.

  A sudden rush of vertigo sent him falling onto his hands and knees, where he failed to fight down a flood of acidic vomit. What was wrong with him? The strange setting should have been the first thing that he noticed upon waking up. How did he get here? The demonic beast corpses were in the exact same positions as before, as if they hadn’t moved in the least. He couldn’t help but relate the situation to the first day when he had woken up in the forest near Redfox Village. Was this some sick joke? Was God out to get him?

  Nolan tried to calm down as he waited for the fog around his mind to clear. He needed to get a better understanding of his surroundings, and to confirm whether or not there was anything dangerous lurking in the woods.

  At least it’s quiet enough to hear if something’s out there.

  He was near the fringes of the expansive clearing, which was at least a few hundred metres in diameter. There was a cabin off in the centre of the field that was squared in by a waist-high wall of plain stone that extended out to form a large courtyard in front of the dwelling’s face.

  Since he was nearer to the treeline, Nolan decided to get a quick look into the forest. It took half a minute to get to the very edge of the glade, at which point the complete lack of sound caused his uneasiness to soar.

  Once he was sure that there were no creatures lurking immediately beyond the ashen trees, he took a few timid steps forward. He was immediately shocked by a frigid feeling of pins and needles that seemed to prick every particle of his body. Without warning a strange wind-like force knocked him off of his feet and sent him tumbling backwards. His vision spun as he propped himself up on an elbow and made to stand, surprised to find that he’d been repulsed over four metres away from the closest tree.

  He had no idea what to think about what had just happened, so rather than disturb himself with in-depth thought he temporarily marked the forest as off limits and turned back. He passed right by the demonic beast corpses and headed for the cabin, his body aching fr
om the inexplicable wave of invisible force that had just sent him sprawling.

  Is Jason somewhere nearby?

  It wasn’t long before he stood at the entrance to the courtyard, which afforded him a perfect view of the property. The log cabin would have been one of the biggest ones in Redfox Village, as it was large enough to have at least three rooms of moderate size. There wasn’t a single window that he could see, only an ordinary wooden door at the centre of the barked wall, which was as dark as coal.

  The entire enclosure was paved with the same grey stone as the low-riding wall, which made for a neat and modest front yard. On the left side of the square was a large circular water fountain that spouted a glistening umbrella of the clearest water that Nolan had ever seen from the generic wedding-cake-shaped pillar at its centre. It had a depth of about one metre and the jets of water boasted an upward reach of at least four times that length, with small rainbows floating all throughout the resulting mist. This paradise-like fountain was completely out of place in such a plain courtyard.

  Up against the far wall sat a knee-high slab of sleek black stone that stretched at least five metres from end to end, and about half as wide. The entire block was filled in from corner to corner with a mixture of tiny white text and innumerable hard-to-make-out etchings of people in various stances and awkward poses, like ancient carvings on the walls of a long-forgotten cave.

  Since there were only a few things to see in the courtyard, Nolan approached the door to the cabin. Should I knock…? He tried the wooden handle but it didn’t budge. Since he couldn’t get inside, he decided to make use of the fountain to wash the blood and grime from his body as best as he could. He promptly stripped out of his tattered and bloodstained robe, and began to scoop water onto himself before scrubbing the stains from his skin. No matter what part of his filthy body he dipped in the fountain, not a trace of dirt or blood could be seen in the crystalline waters.