Chương 15: Beyond The Road

For a few days after the accident with foreign mana, Arien was not allowed near the cows alone. Mari called it caution. Arien called it imprisonment, though he did not say that aloud. The pain in his mana channels made arguing difficult anyway. It had dulled since the first day, but every attempt to move mana still felt like dragging thread through a wound. Even Mana Sense, usually effortless, left a faint ache behind his eyes if he pushed too hard. So he behaved. Mostly.

He ate what Mari put in front of him, slept when she ordered him to sleep, and let Alia follow him to the pasture with all the solemn authority of someone two years older and therefore practically ancient. Worst of all, he did not experiment. That part was nearly unbearable. By the fourth evening, he was sitting by the hearth with a blanket around his shoulders, listening to rain tap softly against the shutters, and considering whether dying of boredom would count as a natural death.

Sari sat nearby, mending one of Wod's shirts with quick, irritated movements.

"You look like someone buried your favorite cow," she said.

"Fatty is alive."

"I know. I checked. She looked happier than you." Arien gave her a wounded look. Sari smiled faintly, then returned to the shirt. The smile did not last long. Across the room, Terry sat with his pipe unlit between his fingers. Every now and then, Arien caught his father watching him. Terry rarely addressed feelings directly, and apparently concern was no exception.

"You were lucky," Terry said at last. Arien looked up. Mari paused by the hearth, and Sari's needle stopped halfway through the cloth.

"With the cows?" Arien asked.

"With whatever foolishness put you on your back for two days." Mari's mouth tightened, and Arien lowered his eyes in his best approximation of childish shame.

"Arien was curious."

"That is what worries me." Terry leaned forward, elbows on his knees. For once, there was no humor in his voice.

"Curiosity is good when it makes you ask which mushrooms are safe. It is less good when you decide tasting one is the quickest way to find out." So that was Terry's theory. Arien saw no reason to correct him. Sari snorted.

"That sounds like every story you tell us."

"No. Most stories are about people who were already strong enough to survive being stupid." That made Wod laugh from the table. Even Mari's mouth twitched. Sari set the shirt in her lap.

"And what about the people who weren't strong enough?" Terry's gaze settled on her.

"Most of them never made it into the stories." He rubbed his thumb along the stem of his pipe.

"My grandfather nearly became one of them." That got everyone's attention. Terry rarely spoke about his own family. He told stories of kings, gods, cursed swords, and cities with walls higher than hills, but almost never about the people who had come before him. Even Wod straightened, while Alia edged closer to Mari.

"This one is true," Terry said.

"Or as true as family stories get. My father's father told it to me when I was still small enough to believe courage was something men carried in their shoulders." Terry finally lit his pipe. A thin curl of smoke rose toward the rafters.

"My grandfather was not a hero. Remember that. He was not an Explorer, not a knight, not some chosen fool with a shining destiny. He was a farmer's son with strong legs and a bad sense of when to keep his mouth shut." Sari's eyes flicked toward Wod. Wod gave her a flat look.

"So naturally," Terry continued, "when soldiers came through his village asking for men who knew the old forest paths, he volunteered."

"Why?" Sari asked.

"Because he was seventeen." Sari smiled, and even Wod looked amused.

"And because the soldiers had silver. And because someone told him they were going near the Widow Swamps." Lisa, who had been pretending not to listen, turned her head.

"The Widow Swamps?" Sari asked. Terry nodded.

"Not into them. No sane man goes into the Widow Swamps without good reason and better pay. But close enough. A Portal had opened somewhere near the border. Not a great one, thank the gods. Not enough for an army. But enough."

"For monsters?" Wod asked.

"For dead men," Terry said. The room went still. Terry's voice lowered.

"At first, my grandfather thought the soldiers were fools. They marched too slowly. Stopped too often. Checked every patch of mud, every broken branch, every place where birds had gone quiet.

"They found the first body before noon. A charcoal burner. Or what was left of him. The man had been dead at least two days, but his hands had clawed deep marks into the dirt." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Was he alive?" Alia whispered.

"No." Terry took a slow pull from his pipe.

"That was the problem." Arien felt that familiar pull settle over his attention. The ache behind his eyes faded beneath something sharper. Undead. Real undead. Not a tavern tale. Not a game monster with predictable weaknesses and loot tables. Things that had walked this world long before Arien was born.

"The soldiers dragged the body away from the road and set it on fire. My grandfather thought that was cruel. Maybe even sinful. Then the captain told him to watch the hands." His gaze drifted toward the fire.

"The fingers kept moving until the flames finally took them." Mari traced the sign of Sul over her chest. Sari did not. Arien noticed.

"They should have turned back then," Terry said.

"But soldiers have orders, and young men are stupid, so they went deeper along the old road. By evening, they found the Portal site."

"What did it look like?" Arien asked before he could stop himself. Terry studied him for a moment.

"Wrong.

"The trees leaned away from it. The ground was black and soft, though there had been no rain for days. Flies covered everything. There were bodies there too. Men. Horses. Things that had once been wolves. All of them dead." He paused.

"Most of them stayed that way." Sari swallowed.

"Most?"

"The first Zombie rose while one of the soldiers was checking the bodies. Slow thing. Clumsy. The soldier laughed when it tried to grab him." Terry's face hardened.

"Then three more rose behind him." The room seemed to shrink around the fire.

"Zombies are slow most of the time," Terry said.

"Smash the head, and they stay down. But in a crowd, or in mud, or when a man panics, slow is fast enough."

"What happened?" Wod asked.

"The captain pulled the soldier clear. Lost two fingers doing it. After that, no one laughed." Outside, rain whispered against the shutters.

"They tried to burn the bodies, but the smoke brought more. Dead things from the trees. Dead things from the ditch. A horse with half its belly open. A woman with no eyes. The soldiers formed a ring, shields out, blades low, fire behind them, and still the dead kept coming." Arien could almost see it: mud and smoke, men struggling not to slip while corpses pressed toward them with patient hunger. Nothing about it resembled the clean fantasy battles he remembered from games.

"Were there Explorers?" Sari asked. The question came too quickly. Terry's gaze lingered on her.

"Aye." Her expression sharpened with unmistakable hunger.

"They came near midnight. Ten of them." Both Sari and Wod leaned forward.

"Ten?" Arien asked.

"That is how the Guild sends them. Ten to a team. Even the soldiers stopped shouting when they saw them." He drew on his pipe.

"One carried a spear that shone blue at the tip. One wore armor made of overlapping scales. One woman had a cloak of feathers, and every time she moved, the wind moved with her. The rest he remembered only in pieces. A silver mask. A black axe. A staff with no flame that still gave off heat." Sari's eyes shone in the firelight.

"They must have been incredible."

"They were. But not like bards make it sound. They did not look excited. They did not boast. They barely spoke. They looked at the dead, the wounded, the soldiers trying to hold the line, and the Portal beyond the trees." He tapped the pipe against his knee.

"Then they moved."

"What did they do?" Wod asked.

"Cut a path.

"Just enough to reach the Portal. Fast. Clean. Without wasting a step. That was the first time my grandfather understood the difference between a man who could fight and a man whose work was fighting things that should not exist." Arien felt a chill despite the fire.

"The captain shouted after them. Begged them to help the wounded first. The woman with the feather cloak looked back at him and said, 'If the Portal stays open, there will be no wounded to help.' Then she continued toward it."

"That's cruel."

"That's the world," Mari said quietly. Sari turned on her.

"So we're supposed to just accept that?" Mari's hands stilled over the bowl she had been cleaning.

"We are supposed to survive long enough to complain about it." Terry gave her a brief look. Whatever passed between them had clearly been discussed before.

"The Explorers cut their way through to the Portal," he said.

"Then, one by one, they stepped through."

"What happened inside?" Sari asked. Terry shook his head.

"No one knows." The rain seemed louder against the shutters.

"The moment the last of them crossed, they vanished from sight. The Portal remained, but it showed nothing of what lay beyond. No voices. No steel. No spells. No screams." He looked into the fire.

"Nothing." Alia edged closer to Mari.

"The soldiers kept fighting outside the Portal. The dead kept coming. Men bled. Men prayed. Men died. Beyond the Portal, there was only silence."

"How long?" Wod asked.

"Long enough for my grandfather to start wondering whether Sul would receive him in the heavens, and whether his mother would ever learn where he died.

"Then, all at once, the dead stopped."

"Stopped?" Arien asked.

"Dropped where they stood. Every last one of them. As if someone had cut strings no one had known were there."

"And the Explorers?" Sari asked.

"They came back."

"All of them?" Terry was silent for a breath.

"Eight.

"The woman with the feather cloak was bleeding from one ear and carrying a broken sword that had not been hers when she went in. One of the others was laughing softly to himself and would not stop." He knocked the ash from his pipe.

"The tallest of them only said, 'The anchor is dead. Burn the bodies before sunrise.'

"The Portal folded in on itself behind them. No thunder. No great light. Just a wound closing."

"And?" Sari asked.

"Then the soldiers counted the living. Sixty-eight had marched out. Twenty-six came back. My grandfather was one of them."

"He came home with silver, a scar from wrist to elbow, and no more interest in old roads. His father called him lucky. His mother called him blessed. My grandfather called himself a fool for the next fifty years." Sari's gaze stayed fixed on the hearth.

"But he saw it," she said softly. Terry's eyes narrowed.

"That is what you took from the story?"

"He saw the world."

"He saw men die."

"He saw Explorers."

"He saw enough to stop wanting more." Sari picked up the shirt again, but did not start sewing.

"Maybe he stopped too soon." Mari set the bowl down harder than necessary.

"Sari."

"No, really." Sari's voice stayed low, which somehow made it worse.

"Every story ends the same way. Stay home. Keep your head down. Be grateful if nothing worse happens. Is that supposed to be wisdom?" Terry looked older in the firelight.

"For people like us," he said, "nothing worse happening is not a small thing." Sari opened her mouth, then closed it again. For once, she seemed to have no answer. Arien watched his father differently after that. Terry was more than a farmer who smoked by the hearth and filled the evenings with stories. He knew when to plant, when to harvest, when a cow was sick, but he also carried the lessons of people who had gone beyond the familiar roads, survived, and decided that home was enough.

Arien could respect that, even if he could not make himself want the same life. Across the hearth, Sari stared into the fire as if it were a road.