Chapter Twenty-One: Proven

Chapter Twenty-One: Proven

Peach light filtered softly from the dawn sky. They had woken in darkness and been on the road with the moon still crisp in the black velvet canvas above. The feet of their familiars drummed a steady beat on the road. The ever-present smell of grass hung heavy in the air as the day began to form its heat.

Anticipation lay in the lines of everyone’s faces, in their postures. Today, they would reach Horizon.

Everyone was exhausted. The last three days they had set a brutal pace. Waking before dawn, riding as hard as their familiars could manage, briefly stopping for lunch, and then again until well after sunset.

They had made excellent time, bar a few interruptions.

Several times, they were ambushed by monsters and mana-beasts. More of the large scorpions that first attacked them were easily dispatched. Another giant snake was dealt with succinctly. A huge mole-like creature took a while to kill, but wasn’t much of a threat, all things considered.

Tom’s uplift to Hunter-Gatherer made a massive difference in their ability to detect the monsters before they attacked. With all the forced practice, he was becoming increasingly proficient with the sense.

He liked it to an old classmate who had trouble seeing for years before finally convincing his parents that spectacles would be worth the investment. The boy spent weeks marvelling at such mundane things as leaves on trees, cracks in cobbles, and rainfall. So it was now for Tom.

The detail he could see now was astounding. Tiny motes of life force and mana drifted up from the grass, carried gently about by forces he could not detect. The tiny specks floated up from the earth, and filtered down from the sky. He even began to notice it from the rest of the party, the shedding of life force at a glacial pace, and even the tiny little bits of mana that constantly span out from the imperfect vessels that were their bodies, which in turn made up their auras.

Darius improved at parsing the sensory information from Daisy in leaps and bounds, and soon he was able to use his familiar to reliably detect ambushes too. The creatures in the Grounds were outclassed. With so many of them relying so heavily on the element of surprise to hunt, when it was stripped from them they had no recourse.

It hadn’t all been smooth sailing though. They had encountered another pack of grass sharks, though it was slightly smaller than the last. They dealt with them with only a few moderate injuries, which Darius had neatly patched up before the fight had even ended.

Sus and Sol had picked up their hunting calls even further off, too, which helped. The vicious creatures still took a lot of killing, but it wasn’t such a close thing. Not having just fought a gale of wind sprites, and needing to fight a band of orcs straight afterwards, certainly helped.

Perhaps their strangest encounter was with a large pack of small wild dogs. The dogs seemed to be earth-aligned, and tracked them for nearly two days, yipping and calling to each other, popping into and out of the earth repeatedly.

Tom was fascinated by them. They never got so close as to attack, but were also never far enough behind that the party could relax. The first time they drew close, Tom got a good feel for them with Hunter-Gatherer.

Individually, they were weak. As a pack… well, they still weren’t much to write home about. Rosa made to attack them when they got close enough the first time, but Darius forestalled her.

“Pests,” he said dismissively. “These are not proper hunters. They are useful in ways, though. They will not challenge any of the true kings of the Proving Grounds.”

Rosa raised a questioning eyebrow at him. Darius shrugged. “We will know if we are in trouble if these leave the chase.”

As it happened, the wild dogs did abruptly stop tailing the party, and it was due to Proving Ground royalty.

Just over a day out from Horizon, the yips and barks began to quickly fade into the background. Darius immediately became tense, and the rest of the group was on alert shortly after. Then Darius relaxed, patting Granny on her shell, a wide smile spreading across his face. At the same time, Tom saw the cause of his elation through Sus and Sol.

A few miles ahead, a huge herd of wild horses was cantering away to the south. Tom was mesmerised. Even from such a distance he could appreciate the majesty of the creatures. They ate up the Proving Grounds with powerful strides, charging through the long grass with confidence.

There were hundreds of them, each much larger than a normal horse, each clearly moving much faster than even such massive creatures should be able to. Tom couldn’t imagine even a massive pack of grass sharks being able to challenge such numbers.

Aside from their stature, the wild horses of the Proving Grounds were the ancestors responsible for Horizon’s famed horse trade. The beasts had mild mana affinities and, as far as Tom knew, were the only mana-beasts the Monastery tolerated to any degree.

After explaining the situation to the rest of the party, they carried on, but Tom watched the regal beasts until they disappeared behind a soft haze of stirred dust and pollen in the distance.

When the dogs had left, Darius addressed them. “We are not far from Horizon now. We can increase our speed. The beasts should be fewer, now.”

Rosa needed no excuse. Coal stretched out ahead of them, just barely keeping formation with the group. She was locked in her saddle, stretching towards Horizon herself, as if it could bring them there any faster. The frustration that the rest of the group could not match her familiar’s pace was palpable.

Tom urged Sesame onwards, but the big bear was not built for speed. Luckily, he had plenty of endurance but Tom and Sesa, and Tanya on Dusty, were still the slowest.

The next day, they kept the same pace, and within hours, the terrain began to change. Flat, endless plains became gradual undulations. Soon after, the dips and peaks became more pronounced. The monotone green of the grass changed, becoming more varied. Trees and bushes and other shrubs dotted hillsides. The deep silhouette of mountains loomed closer. And closer.

And then they gained the crest of a hill, and the change was even more dramatic. Before them, grapevines lay in neatly ordered rows, like quilts thrown over the gentle hills. Sus and Sol spied workers here and there, moving busily about the vineyards. A thin trail of smoke came from a small wooden outpost at the crest of the next hill.

Rosa turned in her saddle to flash a manic grin at Tom at the sight of civilisation. They were here. They had made it.

“Slow down,” Darius called to the group. Immediately he held up a warding hand towards Rosa’s stormy expression. “If we ride this fast into Horizon, we will cause a scene! They will think we are pursued!”

Rosa grumbled, but acquiesced when Darius assured her they would arrive before nightfall. The group slowed to a less breakneck speed. Rosa’s anxiety only heightened.

Tom felt for her. His own anxiety began to increase, too. If anything had happened to Rosa’s family, she would be inconsolable. He hoped fervently they had made the journey safely. He was nervous about meeting them, but also incredibly curious to gain more insight into his partner. She was a strange and beautiful human, and like all strange and beautiful things, he wanted to understand them. Knowing her family could only bring them closer.

They passed the outpost, passing a few quick words with the guardsmen there. They were shocked to see any travellers, much less all the way from Wayrest. Travel had become increasingly precarious in the prior months. They could not say whether any other groups had come from Wayrest; they were not the only guards assigned to this road, and though travel was difficult now, there had still been those who had made the journey. How were they to keep track of who was coming from where?

Tom felt that it was their job to know, but kept his thoughts to himself. Steel would never have tolerated such laxity in the Guards at Wayrest. He knew Rosa wanted to burn them where they stood, but thankfully she latched onto his gentle suggestion that they carry on and leave the guards to their work with alacrity.

The hills grew steeper, and the mountains drew nearer still. The ground grew rockier, and the air drier. The vineyards petered out. The trail became winding, and before they knew it, they were in the Barracho Mountains proper.

These mountains were wholly unlike the Nails that separated the Deep Green from the Rust Sands. The Nails were fairly regular and uniform. They were massive, hulking behemoths that forcibly split forest from desert.

The Barrachos were… nonsensical. Or at least they seemed so to Tom. He did not claim to be any expert on such things.

They rose from the ground steeply in places, and in others, slumped like a lush in his favourite seat at closing time. Some had jagged edges and tops, like trees struck by lightning, and others seemed smooth as pebbles. Tom was so engrossed in the scenery that he didn’t notice Horizon, at first.

The road wound around a ridgeline and into a valley. The ridge was shallow where the road crossed, though not much further on it sharply rose to such a height that scaling it would be impossible without specialised equipment or Ideals.

The ridgeline on the other side to them was sharp as a knife and almost as thin, casting a deep shadow across the valley floor in the late afternoon sun. A river glittered as it threaded its way down, crashing over into a waterfall at the end of the valley.

The mountain Horizon nestled into was absurd. It was enormous, by far larger than any single mountain in the Nails. On one side, it leaned crazily towards its neighbour, creating a near overhang of such staggering proportions Tom’s mind almost rejected it as fantasy. After seconds of vertigo-inducing staring, he tore his gaze away.

And there, at the top of the river valley lay Horizon.

Strange buildings, built square but with many semicircular archways and sloping, red-tiled roofs, stood cheek by jowl, fighting for space, up and up and up, until the whole city seemed a single, sprawling castle. For a crazy second, the tall red stone wall that wrapped it seemed like a massive foundation.

Tom could not fathom how narrow it seemed. Wayrest was sprawling compared to this. Though, he granted, they did not build so tall. He wondered if they dug into the mountain for space as well.

Horizon spread up the mountainside for miles, but eventually it yielded to slopes too steep for even Ideal-assisted architecture. With his owl’s eyes, he could just make out a thin, narrow switchback winding up the mountain behind it.

He followed the trail, and let out an involuntary gasp. High above Horizon, perched precariously on the steep mountainside, was the Monastery of the Bloody Dawn.

All of its buildings were built of stone so red they looked like blood. They sat in neat rows, long and low and chased with delicate, arching porticos. Where Horizon was a jumble, the Monastery was a statement. Horizon had clearly grown and adapted over time. The Monastery seemed ancient. Eternal.

The sun slunk towards the horizon behind the mountains, throwing peach light over the Horizon and the Monastery as their party rode through the river valley towards them. Everything gleamed red and rose. Oblique angles glittered gold. It was breathtaking.

Tom had lived in Wayrest his whole life. He had never thought to see any other places. Even Horizon, one of its closest neighbours, had seemed forever out of reach. And yet here he was. They had made it.

Part of him had still felt like these distant places were out of reach. Other parts whispered that he might not be strong enough for such journeys. Immense satisfaction wrapped his chest. This arrival was a statement to himself, an assurance, a vindication.

He had proven that he was strong enough. Proving Grounds indeed. He chuckled quietly to himself. Darius clapped him on the shoulder, sharing his joy. Somehow, Tom was certain the monk knew exactly what he was thinking.