Tales of Malteria: Unquiet Silence

In the Northarm they have a saying.

"The Bleakwoods are Unquietly Silent"

An oxymoron referring to the feeling of 

dread and tension one gets there.

Perhaps we forgot about such simple

sayings with the war, all the drama of the

past few years. But the Bleak did not forget.

And it did remind us.

The band of thirty levy militia slowly trod from the armies encampment at Unicorn Grove. The gentle cadence of rustling canteens, axes and bedrolls breaking the stillness of the crisp early morning air. Not even the crows dared to break the blanket of sleepiness which hung about the place in such pervasive sheets, mixing and clinging intimately to the autumn fog. 

           Carne yawned lazily, he had been with the reformed Army of the North for only a handful of months and was not yet used to the taxing hours of a soldiers life. He had pictured the whole ordeal as being significantly more dramatic when he had left Bluffpointe. At that time, companies of fighting men traveled through the village headed North to rebuff the Wardens threatening the capital. He was drawn to their expensive uniforms, the air of adventure they carried with them, and the loud sense of boisterous camaraderie they expressed while he served them ales at the villages inn. In his mind he had pictured himself, in a particularly grandiose suit of enameled armor with golden trim, holding aloft a tattered banner while leading a band of unstoppable fighters into the heart of a quavering warden shield wall. In his reality, Carne had yet to even see a Warden, even at a distance. It was all rather disappointing, he thought to himself, the regiment had gone out on these patrols into the border of the Bleakwood from the Camp to Grangers Folley a day and a half north, and the most excitement they had ever had was when a Dreamer staggered in front of the column a few weeks ago. 

          The Regiment entered the canopy of the trees, the regiment spread out slightly to allow for more freedom of movement over the numerous fallen logs and tangled bushes of nettles, which were harder to spot in the fog and in the dim morning light. Still the quiet was there, to a frankly unnerving degree. Back home, the woods were alive with the distant sounds of woodpeckers, croaking frogs or the buzzing of various insects. But this place was...Bleak... it certainly lived up to the name at least Carne mused as he navigated over a moss coated tree laying across the tiny forest pathway. The group marched on for hours, and with the growing day the shroud of fog began to dissipate, generally the pace would quicken at this point, but for some reason, today the Regiment came to a full halt, and then the signal came for the regiment to adopt a skirmish line.

          Carne's heart quickened in a mixture of panicked excitement, they had never been ordered in a fighting formation outside of the proving grounds. Hurriedly he moved into place, and strained to see what had caused this situation.  Through the brush and in the light pushing through the trees above them, he could see a bulky metallic form. As the regiment moved in closer, the form came more fully into view, and Carne bawked at the size of the creation. It was a warden golem/transport, wildly different than anything he had seen at home, it appeared as a hybridization of a beetle and a horse, it stood three men tall, with a yawning mouth that stood broken open, revealing a dark interior, its body was covered in plates of smoothed segmented metal. But for the awe that he felt at the splendor of the Wardens technology, he was quickly filled with confusion and disgust, for about the transport, lay several dozen bodies. Ripped asunder, in gory ribbons about the machine. He searched the assembled men for his commander, a Wave Guard called Hurlech. But the man was nowhere to be found, and then he noticed that they numbered only slightly above a dozen souls. Immediately he unsheathed his sword, his hand trembling horribly. 

         "What's Going on? Where is the Commander?!" yelled someone.

         "Bloody Hell! Where's the rest of the Regiment?!" replied another, coming to the same realization Carne had just reached. The remaining men, huddled closer together looking into the trees around them with horrible anticipation. Hoping that the others would come about in short order. Still the Silence persisted. A gentle breeze rustled the woods around them, like a phantasmal whisper. 

        "Did you see that?!" said a man next to Carne, in a harsh whisper. 

        "No. w..what did you see?" Carne replied, his throat dry, the anxiety manifesting itself as a feeling of a weight in his chest, tied tight to the back of his tongue. It felt almost sacrilegious to break the quiet, almost painful to speak words.

        "An eye, a single blue eye several paces back, into the trees" the man replied to him. Carne's mind raced, his heart quickened still faster, he could practically feel the blood rushing around his veins at a breakneck pace, he turned to see how the others were doing and in a moment the rushing blood slammed to a halt. For he now counted only ten men standing in the clearing, where only moments ago had been nearly a dozen and a half. No one had moved, there had been no sound of it and no one had said a thing. 

        "By the wolf, there are more men gone, we need to leave this place now!" he whispered, battling with his own anxiety to form the words. It was plain by the look on the faces of the others that they had not noticed the disappearance of the others either, and in a cascade of agreeing nods the group began to move back the way they had marched, running now, carelessly through the forest, desperately trying to reach the edge and get away from this awful machine and its carnal pit.  Looking around him as they ran he counted again,

Eight

He unhooked his bedroll and heavy fur shoulder wraps, hoping to free up as much weight as possible as he desperately clamored over a wet, dew soaked tree. The rest running ahead of him.

Six

The plodding of his boots into the sodden ground of the forest floor seemed to echo like thunder around the woods, he ran as hard and as quickly as he possibly could, but it seemed as though he was moving in slow motion. His chest burned, but he had to keep going, he was among the others now, having finally caught up the rest of the group. 

Four

Coming to a small stream, Carne plunged straight through, his fear driving him on wards, forcing him to throw out the ramifications of wet gear and sickness and cold. Climbing and splashing out the other side, he trudged through the slick sides, and began climbing up the slurry and river rock embankment. He turned to help the others up the side. His hand reached into empty air.

One

Utter hopelessness, he was barely coherent of where he was or where he was running too. He simply wanted to be home in Bluffpointe now, safe and sound in the inn pouring pudgy old farmers a pint. He stopped running now, his lower body was totally soaked, covered in thick mud and sand. He was freezing, and his legs and chest burned with the exertion. He weakly held his sword out, and for a moment contemplated taking his own life, but couldn't bring himself to task.  Then in an impossibly brief moment, he felt himself pushed to the ground by a incredibly powerful force, his sword skidding a short distance away.  Carne looked around wildly, looking for the source of the hit. Finally he gazed upon it, an unnatural creature, as large as a moose, and totally hairless with ashen greyish white skin, formed tightly across a lanky dissented  skeletal frame, culminating in limbs capped with humanoid hands featuring half meter long protrusions of sharpened bone where fingers should be. Its head, almost featureless save for a single gently glowing blue eye high where its face should be, set just between two angular fleshy antlers, which seemed more like unrealized limbs than horns. 

Carne had never seen a creature of this sort in his life, never had he even heard tale of such a monster. It moved in unnatural perfection, in total silence, as it lankly moved over to him, playing with its prey. It brought a hand of sharpened bony staves up for the kill, Carne was utterly paralyzed with fear at the reality of his impending death. But in that singular eternally long instant, a lengthy metal tube slammed into the side of the creatures head. Before the monster had even fallen, a Warden cloaked in purple wielding some sort of complicated crossbow, emerged from the foliage, and taking a vial from within its cloak collected glowing blue ichor as it flowed from the tube which protruded from the beasts skull. 

        Carne lay on the ground, covered in the ichor, his own urine and several layers of caked on muck, his body vibrated with the improbability of his being alive, and so he merely lay on the ground, stunned. Watching in grim horror and expectation as the mysterious warden gathered the creatures blood before dipping a finger into the mixture and bringing it to his lips. Its eyes shined a bright yellow for a moment before fading back to normal, and look of obvious worry etched itself across his face. The warden looked over to Carne, and clutching a short blade, contemplated on weather it should finish the beasts work, but the moment passed in short order. and the warden merely stood up. It spoke to him in its own language, which even if Carne had been coherent enough to process speech would have been pointless. 

        The Warden grabbed him by his shoulders firmly and shook him once, before pointing to the beast, saying "Farron"  and then pointing in the direction he had been running "Lutherics". With that the Warden spoke once more in its own tongue, and turning Carne in the direction of his camp, pushed him gently onward. Carne was too drained to argue, to bother even asking questions. He merely staggered onwards, and onwards until finally reaching the edge. 

         The immense relief, the unfettered trauma of the experience hit him in a wave, and he collapsed to his knees. The intensity of his grief and horror, poured out and joined the silence of the Bleakwoods in a cacophony of unquiet silence.