Chapter 84

 

The moonlight directly shines down onto the burly creature. The beast nearly reaches up to my waist in height. It has two red eyes that seem to shine in the dark. Its long, unkempt black fur makes me think it’s a wild dog. Its blood drenched teeth look like they can tear me into pieces in seconds. There’s saliva dripping from both sides of its mouth and if I might make a bold assumption here, I think I’m the reason it’s salivating. 

 

We’re just staring at each other in silence with neither of us blinking a single time, watching for each other’s movements. I slowly unsheath my sword and ready myself in case things go south. When I try to discreetly take a step backwards, the hound growls at me but I’m not letting it dictate where I can go. With each step back I take, the growling increases in intensity and on my fifth step, it leaps at me. 

 

Barely hobbling off to the side in time, I bring my sword down at its neck. However, the moment I make contact with my sword, the beast disperses into black smoke and disappears right before my eyes. Shivers run down my spine and this time it’s not due to the fever. Looking around in panic, I don’t see the hound anywhere nearby but I’m not letting my guard down that easily. Keeping my sword raised, I limp over to where my horse was but it’s long gone. I know the general direction he went but I don’t have any hopes of catching up to him. 

 

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse. I have no idea where I am in this gigantic forest, I have no idea whether or not I’m still being chased by guards, my left thigh and my right shoulder are badly injured and I think they might be infected, my leather pack is filled with drugs but no actual supplies I need to survive, my horse is gone, and I’m now being hunted by a fucking spectral hound. This is a story and a half if I somehow make it out of here alive. Sucking in a deep breath, I shake my head to clear my thoughts and think of the positives. I do still have a lot of drugs that I can enjoy if I can find someplace safe to use them. 

 

Once my mental state recovered a little bit and the brooding thoughts were thrown to the back of my head, I started limping towards the direction the horse went. On our journey to Ocean’s Rest, Wraine showed me all the various scout skills Quinn had been teaching him both back in Midriver and during the journey itself. For instance, he could take a look at the forest floor and find animal trails, tracking deer or boar we could hunt for dinner. He tried teaching me a few times how to differentiate tracks and all that but I never had the patience to attentively learn those types of skills. That was a mistake. 

 

After walking for nearly an hour straight, I quickly realize I have no clue where I’m going. I can’t find any tracks from the horse nor can I find any blood on the ground from its bite wound that I can follow. All I’m doing is following the initial direction he ran in and he could have turned at any time after he left my sight which could mean this whole thing is a wild goose chase. But what other choice do I have? It’s not like I can sit in one place and wait for someone to come and rescue me. 

 

I didn’t have the time to really think about this before with everything happening but now that I’m walking through a moonlit forest alone with nothing but my thoughts, I’m not even sure if anyone else from Candle survived. Those guards filled the air with arrows last night and it’s already a miracle I survived after taking two of them with my body. Everyone else could already be dead or jailed in Ocean’s Rest for all I know. Morbid thoughts flood my mind but I kind of feel like they’re at least worth pondering a little bit. 

 

What would I do if everyone else in Candle died? Would I go back to Midriver? And do what? The reason I left the farm was because of Augustine and the beatings, sure, but I also left because I didn’t want to live the rest of my life on an obscure farm. My dreams made me believe I was meant for some greater purpose that I still can’t envision yet. But I haven’t seen the city in my dreams in months at this point. 

 

If I don’t even see the dream city anymore, am I still meant for greater things? With everything that’s happened in the last year, I’ve been forced to temper my expectations and come to terms with reality after nearly dying multiple times. I know I’m not special in this world. I could’ve easily died back on the peninsula, back in the mine, or during the war with Reed, and I’ve come to accept that. At first that realization was discouraging and I felt lost for a long time, just being dragged along helplessly by the river’s current without being able to direct myself where I went. But then I had a thought, even if I’m not special, can’t I just become special? 

 

These thoughts started after the war with Midriver’s Finest and really only solidified when Alira declared war on The Wolves and I learned about the Old Master. His family was on the brink of ruin and he completely reversed their situation, becoming the king of Midriver’s criminal underworld in the process. Even Alira himself is a great example. Derriv, Bertrand, and Alira were all deserters like me and Wraine and they all carved out a place for themselves in Midriver, though their approaches differed greatly. Alira forced his way into Midriver’s underworld and dethroned its former king in an even shorter time than the Old Master took to establish his empire. 

 

It’s weird to look at these two individuals who are known for their vicious, cruel, and greedy natures and see them as role models. It’s even stranger that I’m trying to derive some sort of life principles using them as examples. But here I am. Even if everyone in Candle died, I think I’m going to go back to Midriver regardless of all else. That’s really the only place where a nobody like me can prove themselves and make a name for themselves at the same time. 

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If I want to get to a point in this life where I don’t have to answer to anybody and I can determine my own fate with my own hands, Midriver is my best opportunity. Whether that means I can become a king or not in this life, that’s still up in the air, but a king of Midriver’s criminals is still a king, right? I’m not special, I was never special, and my dreams don’t make me special, but I can become special and maybe then I’ll find out why I have these dreams. Err, well, used to have them anyways. 

 

The cool night breeze feels amazing when it gently brushes up against my burning forehead and it gives me a few seconds of comfortable relief. This little moonlight stroll of mine has been wonderful and after sorting through my messy thoughts and feelings that have been accumulating for months, I feel a sort of clarity that I’ve been missing for awhile now. Or perhaps that’s the fever clouding my thoughts and in my feverish stupor I’ve deluded myself into believing I’ve reached some sort of emotional enlightenment. It might actually be the latter seeing how I seem to think The Wolves’ Old Master and Alira are good role models. 

 

After the night breeze passes by me and the cool sensation on my head wears off, I’m forced back into reality when I start shivering uncontrollably. It’s so damn cold. I can tell my back’s covered in cold sweat and the hand holding my sword is clammy as all hells. I’ve been keeping an eye out for the spectral hound this entire time but after I dispersed it the first time, I haven’t seen it again. Maybe when it turned into smoke that was when it died. But there’s no way I’m putting my sword back without knowing for sure.  

 

I’ve seriously underestimated adventurers this entire time. I thought anyone with a sword and quick feet could easily become an adventurer but I’ve been proven wrong quite a few times already. There’s so much more to adventuring than I initially thought and I never expected knowledge to play such a major role. We lucked out back at Lahrein when Wraine and I smoked out that goblin nest and ended up suffocating the whole cave. Now that I look back on it, it’s obvious now everything alive needs to breathe but I doubted myself back then because I didn’t know enough about goblins. Just like now I don’t know enough about ghosts, or hounds, or ghost hounds. 

 

I’ve also been keeping my eye out for Uphrona leaves but even after walking this whole time, I still haven’t found any. I’m starting to question what she meant exactly by writing, “one of the most common flora available in the Nasaar Kingdom,” in her journal. Would she still consider the plant common after walking through a forest, the plant’s supposed natural environment, for over an hour and still being unable to find it? Although I haven’t found any Uphrona leaves, I’ve been able to fill myself up with Vifmess leaves, Salpa berries, and Alara flower roots. It’s incredibly reminiscent of when Wraine and I trekked across the Basteb peninsula for a month eating nothing except what we could forage in the wild. 

 

As I’m munching down on a handful of Salpa berries, fighting against my teeth involuntarily chattering from my shivers, I hear movement from something running at me from behind. I immediately pivot on my good leg and raise my sword high, ready to intercept anything. Something massive and black instantly leaps at my face and sends the both of us crashing to the ground. Seeing the familiar red eyes glaring at me furiously as the both of us fall to the ground, I grin back and stick the tip of my blade into the hound’s chest mid fall. The moment my back hits the ground, my sword makes contact with the hound and the beast evaporates into black smoke which covers my face. 

 

I forgot to hold my breath in case the hound dissolved into smoke again and I had a coughing fit before realizing the smoke disappeared as well immediately after it appeared. After turning my head a few times to check my surroundings, I relax while still laying on the ground before groaning at the pain. That was not a gentle fall and I hit the ground pretty hard, jostling both my shoulder and my thigh wounds. After the pain fades, I take a few deep breaths while closing my eyes to rest for just a moment before shooting back up in a sitting position. I need to get out of this forest first if I want to sleep. 

 

Oh gods. Slowly standing back up, I kept moving towards where I was headed before I was so rudely interrupted. Not half an hour passes before I’m attacked again but this time I’m much more prepared and I disperse the hound before it can reach me. The next attack happens around 10 minutes after the last attack and I start to get worried. The entire time I’m hobbling forward, I wrack my brain, trying to remember everything about ghosts from the games I played with the other kids back in Abermock. 

 

Fuck, all those games had us chasing each other around until the ghosts killed everyone in the end. The ghost dog hounds me the entire night and the interval between attacks kept shrinking until he would show up every minute after I turned him into smoke. When the sun rises and night turns to day, I have a tiny flame of hope in my heart that the attacks stop because I’m completely exhausted from being forced to defend myself the entire night without a moment of rest. The ghost dog hasn’t been able to land a clean hit on me all night but I’ve been getting sloppier as the night went on and my body is covered in bruises and shallow cuts. My hope is shattered when the hound materializes from thin air right in front of me under the sun’s morning rays and leaps at me with all its strength. 

 

The force from its charge knocks me over and sends the both of us flying out of the woods and into a huge clearing, different from the one I woke up at yesterday. As I scramble to get back on my feet to defend myself, the hound looks away from me before turning back to look into my eyes. Its red eyes seem… sad, completely contrary to the blind rage it showed just moments ago. After looking into my eyes for a few short moments, it turned into smoke and disappeared. Confused, I look over where it turned its head towards and in the middle of the clearing is a small hill with a large tree growing from it. At the base of the tree is a person sitting with his back leaning against the tree’s trunk with a black dog laying down on its stomach next to him. 

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