Sanctuary (1)

Warning: The perspective character has a near vore experience, and it's not the gentle sort. (I'm planning on the gentle sort for this series, but I'm a bad goblin so I have to tease first. It's the rules.)

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"How inconvenient," Rylinn Arud observed despite her racing heart. The day had been cool and cloudy until she saw the smoke rising from Tenser's Stand. Now the air was too sharp and too cold, but she didn't shiver. Rylinn crouched, trying to minimize the chances of being spotted from a distance.

From her perch on a rocky knoll south of town and the forest that bordered it, she could see that the fire was localized; not the doing of any raid or fumbling idiot. Rather, it blazed from the top of the stone bell-tower while the bell itself tolled at regular intervals, carrying across the countryside. Both were messages; cries for help to those who could, and warnings for everyone else to stay away.

Either raiders had done a quick hit-and-run, or they were still there, calculating their advantages, settling in, and waiting for any neighboring towns to send more entertainment. Rylinn thought she could hear wailing, but wasn't sure how to judge whether the sound carried the agony of loss or of torture. She figured they were ultimately the same thing anyway.

A sensible little voice itched in the back of Rylinn's mind: If Tenser's Stand was raided, then her cousin Ilar Arud, his wife, Sena, and their daughter, Avi, had likely all been murdered before their idiotic trial could end, and Rylinn should just return to the Arud Hall before she shares their fate. Her Uncle Alwin had already lost one of his twin sons, Davin, two years ago in an ambush in these same foothills. Losing Ilar would destroy what was left of him, but she could at least save herself if she turned back now. One survivor was better than none.

Like she usually did whenever she heard that sensible voice, Rylinn promptly ignored it. There may be a few more complications than usual this time, but breaking family out of jail wasn't new. She kept low as she descended the knoll and crossed the field, flattening herself against the nearest building and keeping an ear trained on the noises underlying the bell while she strung her recurve bow.

Use every obstacle, she reminded herself as she nocked an arrow and crept through the empty streets. Climbing onto a roof would be good. If she could strike first, shoot when the raiders didn't see her, and keep hidden - possibly jumping from roof to roof...

A door lay splintered in the road ahead, surrounded by rubble. Beyond it lay a broken bow, held together only by its string. Broken shutters hung limp on the second story, swinging and whining on their remaining hinges when the wind picked up, and Rylinn could feel her eyes widening when she realized where the rubble came from. Chunks of stone and wood were missing from the sills and walls beneath. An arm hung over the edge of the broken shingles, and a quiet stream of blood trickled into the street below.

So much for the roof idea, Rylinn thought with a frown. What kind of weaponry did these raiders have? Cannons? What half-witted band of ne'er-do-wells drags cannons around unless they're on a ship? Cannons were expensive to maintain, neither easy nor quick to transport, and she would've heard the blasts before she heard the bell. And the damage to this building was far too focused for such a chaotic weapon.

It was almost as if something big, at least twice the height of a man, had tried to climb the building. Rylinn took a deep breath, trying to smother the panic fluttering in her chest. Demon-giants riddled the stories of her childhood, and Ilar's trial was rumored to center around some manner of ridiculous allegiance with them. She could allow that they might possibly exist, but it was difficult to untangle which stories were supposed to be history or myth, and therefore, difficult to determine their nature. Mostly, they were used in a religious sense, to keep followers of the Aevra Hirin in line. But no one she knew had ever actually seen a demon, and anyone who claimed to always had something to sell. Some of those same swindlers were family - a detail that likely cropped up during Ilar's trial, if it didn't inspire it. But if this destruction was the work of demons, surely Tenser's Stand would have been utterly silent. Still, as she continued for the center of town she figured her best bet would be to avoid being seen altogether and to just focus on sneaking Ilar and his family out, provided they survived. There was little enough room to be a hero when her adversaries were human.

Three empty nooses hung from a great oak tree in the town square. Half a dozen bodies littered the ground, surrounded by the horrified cries of their surviving friends and loved ones - however many of them had managed the courage to come out of hiding. The fact that they were out gave Rylinn hope that the attack was over, but she also dreaded the possibility that she'd been too late to save her kin.

Whoever had attacked, they must have favored hammers, Rylinn speculated, observing the bodies as she cautiously circled the square. Even the clumsiest swordwork left cleaner wounds. Nor did anyone seem to be shot with either arrows or bullets. Instead they had been crushed, or in some cases maimed. One man lay staring at the sky, his chest smashed flat, still clutching a pistol. Rylinn wondered at that. Raiders would have taken the gun, especially if they saw the gilding along the handle. Such technology was so new and valuable she considered taking it herself.

But she'd never seen anyone's ribcage so thoroughly collapsed. It made the man seem less real despite the horror frozen into his eyes. She forced herself away, checking the other bodies just long enough to make sure none of them were her kin before approaching the jail.

The door was open, and Rylinn found it as empty as it was silent. The place reeked of pails in need of changing, and of the contemplation of one's life being inadequately judged and sentenced by neighbor and stranger alike. Rylinn finished her search quickly, repulsed, and stepped back outside.

"Sasha!" A man cried, hobbling past the jail into the square. He looked no older than Rylinn, but not so old that she would've expected him to need a walking stick. She blinked as her assumptions fled, replaced with a sour sort of understanding. One of his legs was partially wrapped and bleeding, dragging behind him as he struggled and leaned on a tall, thick shaft of pale hardwood. The high end was tipped with what might have been sharpened bone or antler, glistening red.

Rylinn stowed the arrow back in her quiver and went to the man's side. "Here," Taking an arm over her shoulder, she helped him reach the site of the massacre. In his haste, and provided with a better means of support, he dropped the strange spear, letting it clatter on the ground.

"She's not here," he said, teeth clenched against the pain in his leg as Rylinn helped him search among the dead. "Hiding, has to be... Aevra, don't let them have taken her, please..."

"Wherever she is," Rylinn said gently, easing him down in the shade of the oak, "you'll be no good to her if you bleed out." She wasn't certain he had heard her. Sweat dappled his face, and he stared out across the square and up at the mountainous horizon beyond as if seeing through them. Looking to his injury, Rylinn felt there was little more she could do that he hadn't already done for himself. He'd had the sense to bind the gaping puncture wound in his calf, and tied another ragged strip of cloth below his knee as a crude tourniquet, but she could tell that even if he got to keep his leg, he'd likely never walk on it again. The muscles and the tendon that anchored them to his heel were shredded by whatever had skewered his calf, rendering his ankle useless.

Rylinn glanced back at the pale shaft he had dropped, and offered him her waterskin. "That thing's too big to be a spear," she said, finally admitting what she'd tried not to acknowledge. "How is anyone alive?"

The man leaned his head back against the trunk of the oak as he finished his drink, savoring the water as much as grimacing from the pain in his leg. "Two demons attacked when the hanging started. Disappeared just as fast. Was like they had a goal." He stared, memories of the massacre flitting behind his eyes. "Uglier than the stories say and twice as fast. How something so big can move like that..."

"What happened to Ilar and his family?" Rylinn asked. "Did they get away?"

The man gave her a strange look. "...Aye," he said after a moment, his tone grim. "Aye, they got away. They're what the demons came for. Summoned for it, had to be. Took them alive and headed north."

Rylinn frowned, glancing up at the empty nooses. "I thought the trial wasn't supposed to end for another week." It was a struggle to keep the ice out of her tone, and she wasn't sure she succeeded.

The man grunted and tried to adjust his leg to a less intolerable position. "What's it matter when they're guilty after all?" he asked, gesturing to the square. "To the Pit with the trial - just look around you. Clan Arud is worse than a den of thieves, they're in league with demons."

Rylinn accepted her waterskin back, gripping it in both hands to keep them from shaking from the weight of her new task. There were rumors, and it was either great or terrible for business depending on whom one talked to, but Rylinn could hardly imagine her own clan having any kind of actual pact with demons. Especially not Ilar, who was nearly estranged, he worked so hard to remove himself from the family business.

"Just between you and me," she said as she stood up with a shaky smile, "not with our luck."

She stole a loaf of bread and a horse on her way north out of Tenser's Stand.

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Rylinn refilled her waterskin by the top of a short, broad waterfall, and watched the tan gelding quench his thirst next to her. He was healthy and well-groomed and had a particularly agreeable temperament. Overall, this was perhaps the nicest horse she'd ever stolen, and she found herself hoping his owner hadn't been killed in the demon-attack. After he finished drinking, she led him back toward the faded, overgrown road.

"Go on," Rylinn said, giving him a pat on the flank. He trotted south, not looking back, and she watched him go with a half-grin. She didn't care for lingering goodbyes, either.

It would be damn hard to take a horse much further anyway, she thought as she returned to the top of the waterfall. The old, dirt road had been steep in places, but the terrain would only become rougher from here. An old forest blanketed the region, steadily dwindling into sparser, sturdier trees as the foothills met the mountains. It would take days of hiking and climbing before she got that far, however.

Rylinn studied the tracks in the sandy bank, and quickly found the demon-giants' footprints. It had been relatively easy to follow the fresh trail up into the hills, but this was the first clear, whole look she had gotten of one of their prints, and the sight of them tied her innards in knots and made the world just a bit colder.

All the evidence of their passing could be there, and witnesses could attest to their existence, but it had not fully sunk in until now. They were real, in this world, and she was foolish enough to chase them.

She could kneel in one of those footprints, and the length of the print would still slightly exceed the length of her shin. Divots were cut into the sand where the tips of their claws had rested. One seemed to be putting more weight on its left leg than its right.

There were human prints, too, but they were tangled together so much that Rylinn had trouble figuring out whom they each belonged to. There seemed to be two different sizes, but they all kept so close together that it was hard to say for certain. The impressions were deeper on the forward ends, as if they were trying to move quietly and carefully, even for something so benign as stopping for a drink. The tracks moved off upriver and strayed into the trees, disturbing the leaf-litter in patches. One set of giant prints led the way, and the one with the limp followed after their captives, its prints overlapping all the others.

Their tracks kept close to the river, both winding ever northward and occasionally intersecting at shallow crossings. Rylinn didn't know how often demons needed water, if they needed it at all, but she doubted such a route was out of pure consideration for their human captives. Occasionally the tracks would end at the bottom of a rocky wall or outcrop, and after either circling to higher ground or scaling the wall herself, the giant tracks resumed near the top of the ledge. At one such place, it looked as if the giants had knelt, and the human prints reappeared before they all moved on.

Throughout the day, Rylinn could read no signs of trouble in the tracks. A few scuffed up leaves suggested that the captives moved quickly at a few points, possibly startled, but she'd been able to finally distinguish between three sets of human prints, though one of them seemed to be limping even worse than the demon who followed. Whether Sena or Avi was the one injured, Rylinn wasn't sure. There were long stretches where the limping human tracks didn't appear at all.

Rylinn followed their trail until sundown, climbing ever higher into the foothills. As night fell, she had a modest supper of raw wild onions, tubers, and a little chunk of the stolen bread. Though tempted to build a fire to warm herself and make her foraged meal more palatable, she knew better than to give her position away. There wasn't enough moonlight to even attempt tracking in the dark, and too many stories called night the bridge to the demons' native realm. She'd mind her distance and wait for an opportunity to rescue her kin in the daylight.

Exactly how she was going to manage tricking or fighting the same creatures that had destroyed over half a dozen people, she wasn't yet certain. Even if she managed to pull it off, that would just be the beginning of their problems. Crossing the realm was hard enough when traveling alone and relatively unrecognized. Forget being crushed or devoured by monsters, or even being caught and hung; disease and the elements could kill them if they weren't careful. If she couldn't act in the dark without the certainty of getting herself killed before those problems could even start, she would at least try to rest and seek answers with a clearer mind in the morning.

Rylinn gathered leaves, pine needles, and fern fronds, stuffing them under the twisted roots of a large, half-fallen tree before settling in among them and wrapping herself in her cloak. The foliage bedding would serve as a small barrier between her own body-heat and the cold ground, and the tree-roots and surrounding dirt and stones provided both a good hiding spot and a windbreak. She wondered if Ilar and his family were able to keep warm, or if the demon-giants were driving them further into the foothills even now.

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A ragged shriek pierced the dark, and Rylinn barely smothered the instinct to answer it with her own horrified scream. Delirious and fitful sensations gave way to raw, cold shapes in the dark and the knowledge that she was frail and alone in the most cosmic sense. She could feel a shape, huge and alien, gliding silently through the night nearby.

She had not taken kindly to being throttled awake by her own reflexes, and she trembled, caught between despair, furious cursing at whatever poor creature had just died so horribly, and laughter at the cracks she could now see so clearly in her own mind.

There wasn't enough room to draw her bow among the roots, and even if there was, she didn't want to risk making enough noise to draw the demon's attention. But she could feel, deeper than her marrow, that it was prowling closer. As if materializing from shadows, its footsteps rustled softly in the fallen leaves, winding between the old trees, more fluid and graceful than anything its size had any right to be. Still, for all its agility its steps sounded uneven. Rylinn drew her long-knife as quietly as she could.

A vast, humanoid silhouette glided across her periphery beyond the roots encasing her, and Rylinn covered her mouth with her free hand, choking back a whimper. A slight lurch interrupted the fluidity of its movement as it walked, favoring its right leg, and the shape of a deer hung upside-down from one huge fist, its chest and throat mangled and dripping. Moonlight reflected sharply off the demon's eyes, illuminating them like a pair of ghostly, malevolent stars. A glance was all it took, and Rylinn knew the dark hid nothing from them.

It didn't even blink as the unholy light of its eyes locked onto her and it dropped onto all fours. Leaves hissed and the ground shook as it barreled toward her. Rylinn almost thought the deer was screaming again.

Her head whipped back as the demon seized both of her ankles in one massive hand and yanked her out of her hiding spot. The force of it cost Rylinn her grip on her knife. She flailed, pressure rushing in her ears as she hung upside-down. All her arrows clattered against each other as they slid out of her quiver, and her cloak obscured her face before it slipped off her shoulders and landed softly in the leaves below.

"Haven't had enough in your little village?" Voices were mere vapor compared to the raw, unholy power resonating in the demon's throat. Its breath carried the metallic stink of fresh, hot blood, and she could hear the subtle flex of its jaws opening wide in the dark, inches from her face.

"No!" Rylinn yelled, hoarse from screaming her throat raw. "Yes! Shit - I mean no!" Feeling verbally as well as physically trapped, Rylinn could feel some of her terror channeling into indignant fury. She curled hard, bending her knees, hips, and back. She clumsily grasped the hard knuckles of the demon's hand, desperate to buy any last bit of distance she could from those glinting fangs. "Bastard! What kind of stupid question is that?" What idiotic last words, a distant - albeit unsurprised - part of her mind griped.

"One you failed to ask yourself," the demon replied. Hot breath washed over her head as the demon fit her skull neatly inside its jaws. Jagged shadows of the creature's fangs eclipsed soft shades of moonlight, and Rylinn's own shriek seemed amplified in the demon's mouth.

Her left hand released one of the demon's knuckles, flying toward its face. Panic stole the accuracy in her swing, but she could feel her nails brush the creature's eye and scrape the thick skin along its cheekbone.

Its jaws released her in an unearthly explosion; a howl like a thunderclap shook the night and robbed Rylinn's own lungs of breath. Its grip failed, letting her legs fall, and she let go as she swung upright. Rylinn hit the ground, her left hand finding her long-knife in the leaves, and she ran. Some detached part of herself wondered why she couldn't hear the leaves, the wind, or her own panicked breath. A keening note drowned out any sense of how close the demon was, and she could feel something warm and wet trickling from her ears and along her neck. Her skull, and everything in it, throbbed with aftershocks. The demon didn't have a voice so much as it had a phenomenon.

Use every obstacle, her last shred of rationality echoed as she tore downhill through a copse of closely-grown, younger trees. The rest of her mind struggled to process that the demon had not reflexively bitten her head off. She could still feel how easy it would have been.

The effortless, panic-induced rush drained out of Rylinn as she ran, terror-fueled desperation giving way to helpless, trembling despair. The weight of the inevitable crushed her chest and sank into her limbs like a nightmare even as she continued to weave through the brush. Was this how that man with the pistol felt? She regretted not taking it, even if it hadn't helped him. Sparing a glance behind her, she saw no hellish pinpoints of light, no pale fangs, no dark, hulking shapes aside from the trees, ferns, and rocks. The world was gray and dark and close, muffled into silence as the ringing in her ears died.

Little shards of moonlight reflected off the surface of the river, and Rylinn turned sharply as she met it. She scrambled upstream along the narrow bank, hands in front of her to protect her face from leaves, twigs, and the occasional root when the bank turned into a ledge, forcing her to run along the shallows. She could hear what the splashing was supposed to sound like only in her mind. Her boots and trouser-legs were soaked with chilly water by the time she saw a soft, warm glow through the trees ahead.

Rylinn's vision blurred, and she felt a sob escape her chest, though she tried to muffle it with her hand. Some part of her was a little child all over again, consumed with the need to cry for help. The older part of her, however, knew that such selfishness would only get the people ahead killed.

The silhouette of a man appeared through the trees ahead, crossing the glow in the distance. He paused, and Rylinn knew he saw her as he hurried toward her.

"Run," Rylinn tried to say. Whether it was a whisper or a sob, or whether she even managed to say the word correctly, she couldn't hear. The man didn't change direction. "No, you idiot, run away!" she begged, hoping her voice hadn't risen enough to attract the demon's attention. It had to be nearby, she knew. It must have let her run, must have been toying with her, and now she had led it to other people. The demon couldn't have inflicted a worse death on her.

She turned, running back downstream on the slim hope that the demon might not have followed her far enough to know about these other people. If there was any chance to lead it away, she had to take it.

The man caught her arm, pulling her back, and Rylinn tried to jerk free. She didn't want to hurt this person. He'd need every advantage he had. "No, get away, a demon's chasing me," she tried to warn him, and her breath caught when she recognized his features in the moonlight. "Ilar..." He had grown a beard, which clashed with her memories of him when she was a kid, but it was him; the worry-lines in his brow always stood out more than Davin's. His mouth was moving.

A massive shadow moved behind him, accompanied by two cold, unblinking points of light.

Rylinn stepped around her cousin, holding her knife ready, braced between Ilar and the silhouette of a demon-giant looming just a few strides away. The top of Rylinn's head didn't even reach the creature's hips.

The demon crouched slowly, resting its wrists on its knees, calm and resilient as a mountain. Rylinn could feel its steady voice vibrate through her own chest despite the complete lack of sound, but she still couldn't decipher its words.

Ilar rested his hands on her shoulders, squeezing gently as if to emphasize a point. His left hand moved along her arm, gripping the hilt of her knife and easing it out of her shaking fingers.

The ground trembled, and Rylinn tightened her grip on the knife again, pivoting to face the first demon as it shouldered branches aside and stormed toward them. Rylinn tried to back into the river, trying to pull Ilar with her, but he stood fast, gripping her shoulders. The deer corpse still hung from one of the giant's fists, and only one of the demon's ghostly eyes shone in the dark, fixed on her. Its unholy voice rumbled through the night air like a vile promise, but it trudged past, heading for the glow of the firelight upstream.

She couldn't feel Ilar's voice at all, though he turned her to face him. He looked earnest and frustrated as his lips moved.

"I can't hear," she tried to explain. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she hugged Ilar, shaking as she clung to him. As the panic left her, the details of the day returned to the forefront of her mind. "Your angry demon friend shouted me deaf," she tried to joke through a relieved sob.