Chương 105: Chapter 1.5: The Albino Doe

The cords tightened around the doe's legs, drawing them against the stone until she screamed again. The sound pierced my ears. Her rear hoof battered the rock. Her panic plain to see. Crimson fluid drained from the binding at her throat, thin at first, then quickly enough to fill one of the carved lines. I felt the timber hook shifting inside my clammy grip as I instinctively tightened my fingers until I felt a heartbeat in my wrist again. The Crimson Elf watched me rather than her.

"You crossed those human rocks for the cry of a strange animal. How... conscientious." His knife held on the bone white hide.

"Reckless fear so often dresses itself as virtue." Orven stepped farther across my body.

"The deer stays, and we leave."

"A bargain requires the human to have something of value to offer."

"Then take the morning," Orven raised his axe.

"You have spoiled enough of it." The elf's mouth moved with the beginning of an answer, and despite Orven seeming to want to leave, he leaped forwards. His bad leg shortened the first stride. His sap-drenched axe glided through the gap between him and the elf. The blade would have opened an ordinary man from shoulder to ribs. The elf shifted one foot. Orven's axe passed through empty cloth, and a pale hand touched the front of his coat. There was no magic explosion. I heard the fabric at Orven's chest break.

It was small enough that the doe's struggling almost covered it. The elf released him, and he staggered two steps and looked down as a well of red bled from his chest. His axe dropped into the snow. The split glove remained curled as if the haft were still inside it, while my legs failed to move either towards or away from the horrible scene.

"Run," Orven said, gravelly but fainter than when he commanded me away from that falling tree. He turned to look at me, and his hand lifted once toward the marker behind us. Return. The lesson had lived inside every boundary he had ever forced me to follow, and I finally understood when his knees struck the snow. When it was too late. I caught him before he finished falling. His instruction to abandon him was lost on me.

My hand pressed against the hole in his coat, though the hot blood came through my fingers at once. There should have been some pressure I could hold, some tear I could bind, some task he could insult me through while I bandaged poorly. His chest moved once beneath my palm and stopped. The elf withdrew his hand.

"He understood those human rocks of yours. It would seem you do not." Orven's blood had filled the split in his glove. I stared at it. The slack mouth, the weight across my knees, and the axe lying beyond reach. He had fed me, defended me, and taught me to navigate these woods. Now his body had become another thing I lacked the strength to protect. The Crimson Elf stepped around him, and I seized the timber hook and drove myself upward. In fear. In anger. In something.

The iron point passed close enough to graze the elf's robes before a force struck my injured shoulder. My arm crumpled like a twig. Snow hit my face, blood filled my mouth, and I rolled until the hook tore away from my fingers. I scrambled the ground to find Orven's axe or my hook, and found only red snow patches among the white.

"Grief," the elf said behind me, or in front of me. Or everywhere.

"Is such a waste of the potential of one... made like you." I pushed backward with my good hand. My left shoulder barely moved. It seared with white hot pain. Beyond the elf, the pure white doe fought the cords in short exhausted jerks. Her rear binding had begun to fray where it scraped the stone, though the elf did not look back. His attention followed the blood running from my cheek as if it were writing something he could read.

"The human child should have returned behind your wooden fences when he was instructed." His voice curdled the blood in my body. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. I stood still. The timber hook lay beside my boot. I drew my knee up slowly, hiding the movement beneath my coat, then kicked the haft hard enough to send it within reach of my right hand. The elf watched the effort with faint interest.

"Return to what?" I asked. My voice came out thick with blood and fury.

"You killed what little I could return to."

"There," for the first time, his expression opened into pleasure.

"The everyday self of a mortal ready to give it up for what is already of the earth." He crouched and placed two fingers against the pulse in my injured wrist. Heat answered beneath them, deep enough that my stomach tightened.

"Not all is lost, little human." I swung the hook at his knee. He caught my wrist before the iron touched him and twisted. Pain tore from my forearm into my shoulder, bright enough that the clearing vanished around it. I heard myself scream. The doe screamed with me, and the red lines surrounding the stone flared dark beneath the snow. The elf leaned closer. His eyes had lost their distant patience, fixed now on whatever moved beneath my skin.

"Yes," he whispered eerily.

"There is something in you after all... not made... nor borrowed... something I..." His sentence remained unfinished. The doe's rear cord parted, and her hoof struck the elf against the side of his head with a dull crack. Surprise broke his grip on me, and the black crescent in his hair tore loose before landing inside the blood-marked snow. The doe kicked again as she scrambled from the stone. Her second kick missed him, though the broken cord made a whipping sound as it flung through the air.

The elf's back contorted. He tried to speak, but the first sound broke in his throat. The calm vanished from him. What remained looked furious, wounded, and reminded of the fragility of the elven bodies. Orven's axe lay half-buried near my knee. I lunged for it, my left arm hanging useless at my side. The haft dragged against the snow until I found enough balance to lift it. The elf turned toward me, one hand raised and blood streaming from his nose, while the doe tore the last cord from her throat behind him.

The first swing caught below his collarbone. The impact jarred through my good wrist and nearly cost me the axe. He staggered into the stone, reaching for the shallow bowl as if the blood inside it could restore the distance between us. I pulled the blade free, struck higher, then struck again. He fell. And he did not rise again. The clearing went quiet around the sound of my own breath. The doe stood at the edge of the ruined circle with blood striping one white foreleg.

For a moment she looked at me, sides heaving, ears laid flat against her skull. Then she walked into the trees. Red prints followed her into the frost until she disappeared between pine trees. I let the axe fall and crawled back to Orven. His coat had already stopped steaming. I pressed my fingers beneath his jaw, moved them to his throat, then tried the wrist inside the ruined glove because there must be something left. But nothing answered. No matter how hard I checked. Nothing answered.

The cut remained unfinished somewhere beyond the marker, the cart stood empty, and a damaged working part of my mind began counting what Harl would refuse to pay for. Dead men did not complete quotas. Boys returning without timber did not become exceptions because they carried a body. The thought stayed until I hated myself for having it, then kept working because hatred changed none of the numbers. I looked from Orven to the trail and tried to judge whether I could drag him alone.

His weight had always been useful when bracing a trunk or forcing a cart through mud. In death, the same weight became dead weight in every sense of the words. Heat gathered inside my torn wrist, travelled beneath the elf's bloody fingerprints, climbed my forearm, and hit my chest. My knees folded. I fell beside Orven as pain sharpened through my shoulder, cheek and ribs, each injury offering brief reprieve before a heavier pain contorted the few good muscles left.

The forest drew close around the sound of my breathing. Something beneath flesh and hunger seemed to uncoil, more ancient than any strength I had earned. AWAKENING CONFIRMED Common threshold surpassed. You have advanced to Iron (early). The words remained until I understood each one, then blurred into the trees. My cheek had stopped bleeding. The torn shoulder still burned, though a dense pressure now held beneath the pain, filling bone and muscle like metal cooling inside a mould. Iron.

Orven's voice returned with the word, dry beside the fallen pine. If you were Iron, you might have learned an ability from a jump like that. I reached for his hand. The glove slid free when I pulled, its split thumb dark with blood and its leather softened by repairs that were probably older than me. I removed the other one, folded them together and pushed them inside my coat where the heat from my awakening could not warm them. Orven remained beside the ruined circle.

The Crimson Elf lay across from him, pale hair spread through blood, and the narrow black crescent waited between them in the snow.