Chapter 10 Chapter ten

Chapter Ten

The second day was better. Not good, but better.

His body had made its complaints loudly and thoroughly on day one and seemed to have decided, as Corvin had predicted, that further protest was largely pointless. The deep ache in his legs had dulled to a background stiffness that loosened gradually as the morning ride progressed. His lower back still registered its objections at irregular intervals but with less conviction than the day before.

Small victories.

They were on the road before the sun fully cleared the horizon, Corvin having woken Ethan with a single quiet word and had the horses ready before Ethan had finished pulling on his boots. The morning was cold in the way that open country mornings always were — a clean, sharp cold that had nothing to do with misery and everything to do with the simple fact that the sun hadn't gotten around to warming things yet. Ethan's breath fogged faintly as they mounted and rode north.

The landscape had continued its gradual transformation overnight. The farmland was entirely behind them now. The terrain on either side of the road had become wilder — longer grass giving way in patches to low scrub and scattered rock, the tree clusters growing denser and closer together, the road itself narrowing further and losing whatever remaining pretense it had of being well-maintained. Deep ruts from old cart traffic had dried into hard ridges. In places the road disappeared almost entirely into the surrounding ground and only reasserted itself fifty yards further on, as though it kept losing confidence in itself.

"How often do people actually travel this road?" Ethan asked.

"Less and less," Corvin said. "Ten years ago there was regular traffic to the mining settlements in the lower Ashfen range. Iron ore, mostly. Good quality. Then a tunnel collapse killed fourteen miners and the operation shut down. Road's been mostly quiet since." He gestured ahead at a section where a tree had fallen across the verge and never been cleared, its trunk half-rotted into the earth. "You can see the maintenance stopped around the same time."

"Nobody cleared the road?"

"No reason to clear a road nobody's using."

They rode around the fallen trunk and continued. A pair of birds erupted from the scrub to their left at the sound of the horses, cutting steep angles into the pale morning sky before leveling off and disappearing north. Ethan watched them go.

"The villages between here and the mountains," he said. "Are people still in them?"

Corvin was quiet for a moment. "Some. The ones closest to the mountains have mostly emptied in the past three weeks. People don't need to be told twice when shadow wolves start appearing at the edges of their fields at night." He paused. "There's a village called Ashwick about half a day from here. Still occupied, last I knew. We'll pass through it."

"How long ago were you last through?"

"Six days," Corvin said. "When I was heading back to the capital to pick up the guiding contract." He looked ahead at the road with the steady, cataloguing expression that seemed to be his default setting. "It was nervous when I passed through. People standing in their doorways in the evening rather than going inside. Watching the north. That particular kind of quiet that happens when a community is collectively deciding whether to stay or go and hasn't made the final call yet."

Ethan recognized the description without ever having experienced the specific version of it Corvin was describing. He had seen different versions of it in his own neighborhood — the quiet before a landlord's deadline, the particular stillness of a street where bad news had just arrived and hadn't finished spreading yet.

Fear had the same texture everywhere, apparently. Even across dimensions.

They reached Ashwick shortly after midday.

It was a small settlement — perhaps forty buildings arranged along a single main road with a handful of side lanes branching off it, the kind of village that had clearly grown organically over generations rather than been planned, each building added where it made sense at the time rather than according to any overall design. Stone construction mostly, with heavy timber roofing, everything built low and solid in the practical style of people who lived in a place with cold winters and didn't have the luxury of building for appearance.

It was quiet. Not empty — Ethan could see movement in windows, a thin thread of smoke from several chimneys, a cart parked outside one of the larger buildings with its horse still hitched. But quiet in exactly the way Corvin had described. The kind of quiet that was actively maintained rather than natural.

A man was sitting on a low wall outside the building nearest the road — middle-aged, broad across the shoulders, with the specific kind of weathered look that came from working outside in all conditions for twenty years. He watched them approach without moving.

Corvin raised a hand as they drew level. "Davin."

The man on the wall nodded. "Corvin." His eyes moved to Ethan and stayed there for a moment. "Who's this?"

"Someone the palace sent," Corvin said. "Heading to the mountains."

Davin looked at Ethan for another long moment with an expression that was difficult to read — not hostile, not welcoming, somewhere in the complicated territory between the two that people occupied when they were too tired and too worried for anything simpler.

"They sent one person," Davin said. It wasn't quite a question.

"They sent the right person," Corvin replied, in a tone that somehow managed to be both completely flat and entirely convincing at the same time.

Davin looked at Ethan for another beat, then seemed to arrive at some internal conclusion and let out a slow breath. "There's water at the trough around the back for the horses. And my wife made soup this morning if you haven't eaten."

"We haven't," Corvin said, and dismounted before the invitation had fully finished landing.

The soup was thick and hot and tasted of root vegetables and something smoky that Ethan couldn't identify but didn't question. They ate at a plain wooden table in Davin's kitchen while Davin's wife — a small, precise woman named Orra who moved around her kitchen with the authority of someone who had never once been uncertain in that particular space — refilled their bowls without asking and said almost nothing.

Davin sat across from them and talked.

Three nights ago, he said, something had come to the edge of the village. Not shadow wolves — they had seen those already and learned roughly what to expect from them. This was different. Bigger. It hadn't come into the village. It had simply stood at the tree line to the north and watched, visible only because Davin's neighbor had been awake and had seen the shape of it against the lighter darkness of the sky.

It had stood there for nearly an hour. Then it had turned and gone back into the trees.

"What did it look like?" Ethan asked.

Davin wrapped both hands around his cup. "My neighbor said it was tall. Very tall. And that it didn't move the way animals move." He paused. "He said it moved the way a person moves. But wrong somehow. Like something that had learned to move like a person but hadn't quite got it right."

The kitchen was warm and smelled of soup and firewood. Outside the small window above the sink, the sky was a flat, pale grey. Somewhere in the village a door closed and the sound carried cleanly in the quiet air.

Ethan thought about level two of the dungeon map. The annotations he couldn't read. The things Aldric had described with careful, deliberate vagueness.

Something tall. Moving wrong. Standing at the treeline and watching.

It wasn't inside the dungeon anymore.

Whatever was i

n there had started sending things out.