Chương 1: Chapter I: Iron Awakening

"Cael!" Orven Torr's shout pierced through the trees. It was five minutes before my shift, and the crack of pine giving way woke me properly. I knew the sound before I could see the tree: the first split, the widening tear, then the weight above deciding where it would fall. The timber hook sat across my shoulder and made the first step slow. Above me, branches stripped frost from the neighbouring trees while the pine headed towards me.

I had time to see the cut at its base, the weight turning through the crown, and the pale strip of earth where Orven had expected it to land. My mind measured all of it. Another day, another tree trying to fall on me.

"Move, boy!" I threw myself sideways as the trunk struck the slope. The snow-covered hillside vibrated beneath me, snow burst from the branches, and the hook tore free from my hand as I landed shoulder-first among the dead brush. I slid until a stump caught my hip, then lay there with wet bark dust in my mouth and blood trickling down my cheek. The pine settled across the place I had occupied with a long wooden creak, thick enough that Harl's cutting crew would have needed wedges to move it from my body.

Heat passed through my wrist, then it was a moment of deep and brief pain beneath my skin. It quickly subsided in place of my shoulder that began to burn. He came down the slope with his axe across one shoulder, swearing at me beneath his breath. He looked either irritated or concerned; probably irritated. His coat carried years of sap stains, and the glove around his prized axe haft had split again along the thumb. Orven had the philosophy that everything ought to be repaired until it becomes dust.

Tools, coats, boots, an orphan boy discarded by some frontier family. He looked at me, checked the fallen trunk, then crouched beside the cut he had made at its base.

"You're late," he said, then caught my jaw in one rough hand and turned my face towards the light. I pushed myself upright.

"I was nearly crushed."

"And now you're bleeding on company time." His thumb stopped short of the cut.

"Can you see straight?"

"You called after it started moving."

"Can you see straight?" He asked again.

"Straight enough to see whose tree just attacked me." Orven released my jaw and pressed two fingers into the exposed grain.

"Once the crown moves, stop measuring and run."

"It is not even dawn, Orven." I sigh. Steam rolled from his beard as he stood.

"I didn't awaken from working a nine-to-five boy, there's a reason there is only one awakened woodcutter in this town." The fallen pine separated us from the handcart. Orven held out his hand for the hook, though he watched my wrist rather than the tool.

"Close it." I made a fist. Pain tightened beneath the thumb.

"Again." I obeyed.

"Bone held." He took the hook anyway and pushed the lighter cart shaft towards me. Orven had been deciding such things for most of my life: when I was too sick to work, when my boots needed patching, and when the portion left in his cooking pot was supposedly too small to save. He was right though, there were probably only five or six awakened folk in Dunmere that weren't guards from the north, and he was one of them. When he gave me the heavier end of a log, it meant he trusted my back.

When he took it without comment, I knew to stop arguing.

"Just a surface wound, you'll be fine" he said.

"If you were Iron, you might have learned an ability from a jump like that." Orven hooked one boot beneath a loose branch and snapped it away from the trunk.

"That is what the charm sellers claim, anyway. Awaken Iron and every ache becomes hidden strength. They sell the same promise each winter. Trees keep falling the same direction."

"I was prioritising my living body. No one awakens in Dunmere."

"Good. Now pick up the log." I flexed my left hand until the worst of the pain settled into something I could deal with. Cold, cuts and strained joints belonged to the wage as surely as the timber did, though Harl's ledger offered no insurance. If I could still close my fingers around the hook, the injury would just be a minor handicap and no reason in Orven's book of work ethic to pause for the day. If I could not, I would lose the day's pay and probably be charged for leaving Orven short-handed.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. ⚜ ⚜ ⚜ We cleared enough branches to drag the cart around the trunk. The forest remained dark beneath the fading stars, and Dunmere had disappeared behind river fog and the low northern hills. I could still place the town by its morning work.

The sounds of ferries knocking against the Greywash docks, bakers feeding damp wood into ovens, charcoal burners coughing smoke into the cold, and Harl ordering wood carts to the north for building. Dunmere only had its access to the forest as its source of income. That, and the fact it was the only way to cross the Greywash. The regular cutting grounds thinned above us. Some of the guys from the yard called those woods old growth when they intended to work there, using Ironwood Forest mainly for maps and warnings.

The trees in Ironwood continued far deeper than any Dunmere man with an axe would ever risk going, although Orven never seemed as fearful as others of the deep ironwood. Orven used it only when explaining a boundary. He moved ahead of the cart and turned west rather than following the cleared track south.

"C'mon, we'll head west today," he said. I looked toward the thicker trees with some trepidation.

"We're already on the markers?" Orven glanced back, "They're guidance, we're only going a few paces in. A few of the taller trees will make up the time we lost earlier." The boundary markers appeared between the pines every fifty paces, old enough that frost had softened the carvings across their faces. Whenever one leaned or shifted, Orven made me help dig through frozen ground until it stood properly again.

Other cutters complained about the stones while drinking, then stayed carefully between them and the only Dunmere pub, The Cataract, while sober. The woods had taught Dunmere that disbelief and caution wore the same pair of lumberjack's boots. Wolves carried the blame for anything that vanished beyond the markers. Hunters, travellers, empty campsites, and blood frozen into thorn bushes after snow. The explanation kept children behind the palisades and men behind the stones carved into earth.

Orven never argued with, or commented on, the stories. He was more practical than that. He just checked the tracks, watched the branches, and returned before dark. We reached the final marker as dawn began pushing grey light between the trunks. Snow around its base had been disturbed, and a narrow trail crossed the boundary before disappearing into the deeper trees. I stopped the cart and crouched. The first marks looked like hooves dragged through crusted snow.

Then I found the blood, dark and fresh beneath a bent fern.

"A boar?" I asked. Orven touched two fingers to it. He rubbed them together, smelled them, then wiped them against the snow.

"That is a deer. He paused and looked, a momentary feeling of warmth coming from him and a suppressed smile.

"From the distance between them, a doe." A high pitched scream sounded ahead of us. It rose thin and sharp through the trees, close enough that goosebumps rippled through my body. I could not tell whether it came from a deer, a child or something whose pain had stripped the difference away. It was a wolve with a deer. It must be. When it came again, my fingers closed around the timber hook before I had decided to move. It was not a deer, it sounded distressed and stuck... not under attack.

Orven stood and looked past the marker. The blood drained from his face.

"That is not our fight."

"The deer is caught. It's a doe, you said."

"It is learning the hard way that these stones are not for crossing." He stepped between me and the trail. The cry came a third time, then broke into a wet choking sound. I pictured snare cord drawn into a leg, blood cooling under fur, and how little the carcass would be worth if wolves reached it first. I also pictured the unfilled cart and half pay for returning without a full load. Fear and logic were rarely friends, yet poverty had trained both to make themselves heard.

"We could look from the ridge," I said.

"If it is only a snare, we cut it loose. If it is worse, we leave."

"It is not trapped by a snare. The last sound told us as much." I stepped around him and crossed the marker. Orven caught my coat, held it for one breath, then released me. The anger in his face would have been easier to accept than the look he gave me. It was a look of knowing, of quiet resignation. He adjusted his grip on the axe and followed. The frost remained underfoot, as the air carried the copper thickness of fresh blood, and the trunks crowded close enough that their branches shut out the growing day.

I kept the drag trail ahead of me and counted the steps back by habit. Twenty-three to the split cedar. Forty-one to the stone. After sixty, the forest had turned enough that I could no longer see either. The trail entered a hollow between ancient pines, and the doe lay at its centre. She was white as bone, bound upon a flat stone with red cords around her legs and throat. Fresh blood filled symbols cut through the snow.

Some pointed toward her body; others opened toward the surrounding trees, their lines steaming as though the ground beneath them breathed. Her chest shuddered beneath streaks of crimson, and each attempt to move drew the cords tighter. A man stood beside her in dark robes, holding a curved knife above her throat. No, not a human. The stories I had been told had given Crimson Elves beautiful faces, but they looked nothing like High Elves.

The figure beside the stone looked intentionally human in body, although thin, with a face that had an unrecognisable age to it. Silver-white hair lay across one shoulder, held near his ear by a narrow black crescent polished like obsidian beneath moonlight. His free hand rested against a shallow bowl of blood. He turned slowly. He did not seem alarmed at our presence, only the displeasure of someone interrupting what appears to have taken quite a while to set up. Orven moved one boot in front of mine.

His axe stayed low, but loosened. I heard the crunching of leather as his split glove tightened around the haft. He had already counted the trail behind us, the distance to the marker, and the time the elf would need to reach my back.

"We saw nothing," Orven said, raising his free hand open to the air in front of him. The elf considered him, then moved his gaze across to me. It felt painful to maintain eye contact with him, like he was seeing something inside me and burning it with a fiery vision ability. His gaze rested first on the cut across my cheek, then lowered toward my wrist and his eyes sharpened.

"Nothing," he repeated, meandering. He looks at me, instead of Orven, "You saw much in these few moments, young one." The knife remained above the doe. Her rear hoof scraped against the stone, once, then again, and one red cord dragged across its edge.

"We will take our leave now," Orven said, taking a step backwards. The elf's attention stayed on my eyes.

"No." His smile carried the thin patience of a man correcting a child.

"You are not."