Three hearts as one

by BRK   

based on a story by HairyandBurly

When Saul’s village is threatened, he and his friends Jurgen and Hector must seek out the one man who might be able to help them.

Saul emerged from the lakeshore trees just as the sun slid from behind the one wispy cloud troubling the last winter morn before the equinox. Smiling in satisfaction, he fisted his bared arms on his hips and took in the familiar vista, basking in the sun’s welcome.

Below him, the deep, cold lake spread itself southwards and eastwards into its secluded vale. As always, its clear, glossy surface was a marvel in itself, perfectly reflecting the sky-reaching coniferous forest ringing its shores, the soaring, redolent boughs surmounted only by the brilliant blue expanse and, further up the slow-sloping valley to the north and west, the forbidding cliffs and low peaks of the Wildgoat Crags.

Standing there, the breeze riffling his hair and the world before him, Saul felt something in him ease and unclench. He wasn’t sure he understood it, but lately he’d been feeling an almost physical need to rove the wildlands of the shire, to walk among its beauties and observe the beasts it harbored.

This onset of wanderlust seemed to be distinctive to him. Boys liberated from being cooped up all winter seeking their childhood playgrounds—that’s what his mother would say; but he’d been out here in his solid boots and bearskins even in the gentle snows of Latewinter, and he’d been alone, not gallivanting with his boyhood friends, running and roughhousing amid the treetrunks and jutting boulders and scaring the bucks and beavers. Nor was a lumberjack of twenty-three summers still a boy, whatever his mother thought.

His father, from whom he had learned his love of lumberjacking and carpentry, probably assumed his wild-ranging was vocational. Naturally, Saul would have sought the affirming solace of that which provided stability and prosperity to his family and, through their contributions and labor, to the village and shire as a whole. It wasn’t that, either.

It felt right to be here, in the wild. It was like an attunement he’d stumbled across unlooked-for. Like settling into the perfect bed, or the way the lyre and flute of the senior elders came together at the feast of the equinox…

He smiled as he thought of what his best and closest friends would say if he tried to put it like that to them. Resonance with nature? A sense of something more and larger beyond the dependable, lifegiving routine of toil, kith, and kin? Ha. Hector, as cheerful as a lark and as stocky and no-nonsense as the tubers his family pulled from their lower fields, would merely laugh. And Jurgen, a journeyman at the village smithy and more superstitious than a knot of crones from a fable, would worry that the lower deities of the forest were defying the Truce of the Gods and seeking to infiltrate Saul’s soul for their own ends.

Saul shook his head, eyeing the mirror-clear waters below. None of that mattered. Only one question stood before him right now, and that was: How cold is that lake?

He decided that didn’t matter, either.

He grinned as he pulled his sleeveless linen tunic over his head and tossed it aside. Sleeveless tops were not uncommon for men laboring in the heat of summer, but lately, as Saul had grown stronger, they were almost always to be found on him, hot or cold, laboring or lounging.

Of course, his friends had been playfully chiding him for wearing the sleeveless tops all year long and in all weather, as if his stone-carved arms had no more to fear from the cold or rain than the eternal Granite Cliffs of Godsdwell. The constant exposure of such a visual revelation was truly a gift to the village, they teased; and of course all who appreciated such visions were duly grateful. Hector had even taken to calling him “Darai-ki,” much to Saul’s amusement—this was a relic-word of the half-forgotten ancient tongue that was supposed to mean something like ‘captivating and seductive.’ It was now employed exclusively by adolescent girls of the village squealing over mewling kittens and the well-built farmboys wrestling in the dewy grass during the semiannual Rites of Torsen.

Saul shook his head. The honest truth was that, apart from making his work easier, Saul just liked the liberation of having no sleeves—especially since his tree-harvesting work had swelled and strengthened his arms in a most gratifying and visible manner. His arms growing as they were, sleeves were just an encumbrance. Not that the other forest jacks, most of them (his father included) mightier in chest and limb than Saul from decades of stout labor, were disposed to gad about the village with their arms on constant display like he did. Even Jurgen wore sleeves when not busy pounding iron against anvils or stoking the blazing forge, and he had the granite size and concentrated power under his soft outer surface to give Olin, the smithy master, a proper challenge, should anyone propose a hammer-throwing contest between the two.

Secretly, Saul had to admit he did not mind being appreciated for his sturdy, well-formed shape now and again. With the attention garnered by Hector for his russet hair, bright eyes, and quick wit, and by Jurgen for his bearlike brawn and artless charm, the pride and praise helped fill an inward gap Saul wasn’t sure he understood.

The breeze kicked up a bit, tickling his hairy chest. The fuzzy, sworling expanse, a good match for the verdancy of his dark beard and shoulder-brushing locks, gave him a pleasant tingle under the airy fingers’ playful ministrations, and Saul took this as encouragement. Boots, leather breeches, and woolen drawers sailed after the tunic, and then Saul stood unencumbered, feet apart, arms akimbo, tall, strong, and (as the shire-bards would say) as naked as a basking gazelle.

Should he just dive in? Perhaps climbing the “princeling tree” would match his wistful mood. He considered the ancient cypress tree overhanging the nearest part of the lake. Below it, the waters deepened to form a natural depression perfect for bathing and, for young boys, a bit of roughhousing on a hot summer’s day. Past the tree the lake narrowed, feeding the high-banked little river that rushed down through the countryside, eventually to offer its fish and tiny crawdads to the anglers and mudders of Saul’s village as it wound past toward the southlands.

As weedy youths the three boys had climbed that tree a lot. The method had been to crawl out on that one bough it had that was way longer and thicker than the others and either drop into the pool, or, if you weren’t out here alone, try to wrestle each other off the branch and into the lake with a mighty splash, the size and extent of which determined who got the coveted and highly competitive title of “shire princeling”.

Grown-up Saul was eyeing that long, alarmingly thin-looking branch a little more uncertainly. He and the others had been reckless back in the day, climbing out there and wrestling on that gnarly old bough. More pertinently, Saul had put on a fair few stone of sturdy brawn since then, as had his friends. Looking at it now, that once-immutable bough didn’t look like it could take not-so-little Hector anymore, let alone him or Jurgen.

He let the sun warm his dangling genitals for a beat, biding his time. Then everything simplified, and he knew what he had to do. Saul geared himself up and then broke instantly into a dead run. He made three great strides and then leapt powerfully into the air, his heart nearly bursting from the invigoration as the shock of the water hit him and he submerged into the cold deep. He surfaced a moment later, laughing and shivering, and quickly got to work, swimming tirelessly in long, scooping swathes across the narrow lake and back.

After a while he relaxed and let himself float on his back, enjoying the interplay of warm sun and cool water, letting his mind drift and his thoughts unravel. Even the push and pull of weight and buoyancy seemed to have hidden meanings and portents, and he let himself listen. Being in the water, and yet apart from it, felt had a certain resonance for him.

It was like that with the village. The village was in his blood. His parents, his siblings, his friends, the whole community of three hundred thriving souls were as much a part of him as his flesh and bones. He was Middle Village, and Middle Village was him, as a bee was its hive or the fox its den.

So why did his feet pull him away? What were the far mountains and stormy seas and chittering wilderland beasts to him? Even now, here he was, floating alone and serene in the wide Boarward Lake, lazily staring into the fathomless azure sky while back in the village everyone was teeming like ants, busily preparing f—

Saul’s heart tripped, his eyes widening as he realized what had just been passing through his half-conscious thoughts. The equinox festival! Startled out of his instinctive float, he began to sink, and was forced to kick his feet and hands just to keep above the coldwater surface. Even as the awareness raced through him, a distant bom-boom-bom had begun filtering up through the wind-ruffled trees, the beats coming indisputably from the direction of home.

The drums, he thought. Instantly he turned in the water and began swimming powerfully for shore, his heart pounding in guilty agitation. They’ve started the procession, he thought frantically as he swam. If I’m not at the festival, my mother will banish me to the Frigid Shores of Worldsend without batting an eye!

Clambering out of the lake, he hurriedly pulled clothes and boots on over his wet body and set out for the village at a pace he was sure his father’s fastest dogs would envy.

Fortunately for Saul, the morning procession that inaugurated the Festival of Pyera, also known as the Rite of the Spring Equinox, was prolonged and unhurried, and he was able to find his family and join the throng of villagers before they had presented their friendgift to the bearded priests of the goddess of fertility and balance, most compassionate of the Ten True Gods. As he moved through the shifting crowd he tried not to be self-conscious, despite not having had time to stop at the house for his festival clothes. His casual attire was a little conspicuous. Plenty of Middle Villagers labored without sleeves or even shirts, but not on festival day!

His outfit and wet, pushed-back hair did earn a raised eyebrow or two, not least from his diminutive but formidable mother. His father’s frown was more disconcerting. “I have been waiting for you,” the trim, powerful older man rumbled as Saul hurriedly joined them in the crowd, before turning away to eye the priestly dais. Saul grimaced, not sure he’d only meant today. His father was strong and hale, still shifting trees and raising barns alongside Saul and the other jacks; but Saul also knew Elias needed to trust in his son’s strength as well as his own.

The familiar drums rumbled on as Elias, his wife Katrina, Saul, and his twin sisters, Irene and Elana, worked through the eddies of chatting, gushing villagers and got to the front of the platform. There they presented their friendgift to one of the kindly, gray-whiskered priests (one of Hector’s many great-uncles, as it happened). It was a sturdy milking or weaving stool, hewn by Saul, crafted by Elias, sanded and sealed by Katrina, and painted by Irene and Elana. It was received with a nod and passed to the attendants behind him—one of which was distinctively larger and sturdier than the others. Saul smiled as he recognized the mountainous frame, the result of an ox-like union of thick muscle and densely layered body fat, and watched the man’s powerful arms straining the sleeves of his leaf-green festival robes as he set the carpenter family’s friendgift carefully aside.

As he turned back, Jurgen caught Saul’s eye, and Saul tossed him a cheeky wink. Jurgen merely gave his late, underdressed friend an admonishing look to accompany his pious nod, as though the big man were a priest and not a keen volunteer. As a youth, Jurgen had been moved by the purity and empathy of the Ten True Gods, in stark contrast to what he saw as an otherwise venal pantheon of demons and fallen deities. Ever since, a genuine gratitude to the Ten had been a part of his core identity. This had seeped through his daily life and reliably manifested in various ways, including assisting in rituals of divine homage whenever possible.

Saul walked away, feeling amused and chagrined in like measure. His friend had been annoyed, if indulgent, by his dress and tardy arrival. But if Jurgen found out Saul had almost forgotten to attend the festival while he was skylarking in the wilds, he would be genuinely upset—maybe even angry, if he decided Saul had risked invoking the wrath of the gods one time too many.

Saul lost himself in thought as he moved through the crowd that filled the large central marketplace area, ringed with thatched buildings and the occasional larger structure, empty for the day of stalls and carts to make way for the gaily-clad celebrants. He greeted the herbalist and the tanner and the others who approached him, returning their cheery festival hellos absently.

Neither Saul nor his family had ever been that pious. For his part, Saul had always been inclined to side with Hector, the more practical and humanistic of his friends, on matters of the divine. The gods, Hector said, were a myth and a legend, as derived from embroidered tales as the beast-demon armies of the North Wold, or the doomed lovers Pericot and Lorra. Rituals and festivals, such as the Rite of the Equinox, were excuses for community and celebration.

The cycle of the friendgifts was a good example. Basically, it involved honoring Pyera, in her aspect as the patron goddess of balance and harmony, through a village-wide exchange of goods and skills. Come the equinox, each family would offer something they had made according to their talents and resources in dedication to the beloved deity; the following dawn, the priests would then silently pass each gift to a family that needed or wanted it, wrapped anonymously in cloth at their doorstep. The village saw it as an ancient tradition valuing the wealth of a community and its holistic nature that were the gifts of Pyera and their own compassion. The friendgifts exchanged at the equinox festival were generally basic and useful things. Often they were handcrafted goods like the stool Saul’s family had presented, things like bread or clothing or tools, and as a rule were gratefully received. But the gifts themselves were symbolic; it was the sharing and Pyera’s grace that were celebrated.

Hector’s take was that the friendgift ceremony clearly traced to ancient and purely humanistic elements unrelated to the gods. It was a primitive recognition of the equality of day and night at this moment of the year, as he had once declaimed in a lengthy discourse aided by a bit of ale, and of a village’s responsibility to protect its own future and the bonds of compassion and unity that built it. Clearly, then, the concept of the festival was unconnected to any goddess, or to powers beyond those that mortals built and wielded for themselves.

At root, Saul figured Hector believed in people, not celestials, and he hadn’t had a reason to argue, content to join him in his affectionate razzing of Jurgen and others like him who looked for divine hands in matters where human kindness, venality, or ambition were ample explication.

Lately, though, Saul had been starting to feel like there might be forces out there beyond the natural artifice of man. Sometimes, out in the wilds, there had seemed to be more of a presence than he could explain. More… volition seemed to be under the surface, latent in the soil and trees all around them, than he could attribute to himself or others. Might that not be a mother goddess—a divinity empowering, or embodying, the Earth itself? He wasn’t sure about Pyera or the others, but for him, of the Ten True Gods, Mother Eia seemed the most potentially real, even if she dwelt for now only on the fringes of his perception.

The deep drums, which had been rumbling this whole time as the final friendgifts were made, suddenly burst into a loud, fast roll. Elana grabbed his brawny arm, beaming up at him in instant glee. “The unions! They’re starting the unions!” She and her sister dashed off like a pair of dragonflies, eager to witness the high-sun weddings that, according to long custom, always waited for one of the two festivals of the equinox. Marriages at any other time of the year were unheard-of, the blessing of Pyera in the context of equinox and balance being considered invaluable to a successful union.

Saul realized his slim, dark-haired mother was giving him a meaningful look, and it was not hard to guess what she was thinking. Before she could open her mouth to say anything, however, Hector appeared at Saul’s side, slapping him on the back. “Son,” he said in a loud, false basso, his expression full of mock reproval, “when are we going to see you up there, binding hands before Pyera and making an honest man of yourself?”

Saul grinned down at his friend, who looked good enough in his festival attire for Saul to feel slightly overshadowed. Like Saul, good food and heavy labor—in his case, working one of the larger wheat and tuber farms to the east with his many siblings and their widower father—had caused Hector to develop an impressively meaty, well-honed musculature. That the hands of nature had molded Hector with a shorter stature meant he presented a thicker and more compact figure, like he’d been compressed downward and kept all his brawn. Whatever he lacked in height, he made up for in width and breadth. While it was Saul’s arms that tended to catch the eye, when it came to muscle it was the bulging mass of Hector’s shoulders and chest that drew the attention of others. Though he did not play to this quite as brazenly as Saul, his tops were often sewn in such a way as to strain across his thick chest and powerful, iron-hard shoulders in a way Saul was sure was deliberate.

It wasn’t just Hector’s form that got a reaction. Though Saul knew their rugged charm, hard work, and basic decency outstripped mere callow beauty, he reckoned Hector, with his thick, wavy russet-brown hair, the boyish face and trim, well-shaped beard, and those bright eyes always full of mischief, came closest of the three of them to being objectively handsome. Especially today, as, unlike Saul, he cut a more than presentable form in his gaily-colored festival clothes. The dark blue and yellow stripes twisting down his top accentuated his physique and brought out the blue of his eyes. Saul took comfort in the knowledge that any pretense of respectability on the part of his impish friend was definitely a ruse.

Saul winked at Hector. “What say you, Hec?” he said, offering his elbow and nodding in the direction of the field where the union rites were taking place. “Shall we set up house and home together?”

He glanced at his mother, who was giving them both a stern look, though when she clicked her tongue in disapproval Saul thought he saw a twinkle in her ink-blue eyes. “Would that be a surprise for anyone?” she sniffed. “You two, and Jurgen, have spent all your free time together since you were wee boys. Maybe Pyera would agree to bless you lot. But if you ever do propose to someone, Saul Carpenter, I hope you do it more poetically than that!”

Saul couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing. Katrina held her stony expression, though her lips twitched, as well. “Come along, you two,” she said with a sigh. “The ceremony is about to begin, and we will all be there and at least reasonably proper and behaved,” she muttered, turning to join the happy, festival-garbed crowd that had been eddying around them, on its way toward the open commons and the witnessing of unions. “We’re not some Wildling family rooting in the hills, you know.”

“Nothing wrong with roots,” Hector said with a grin.

Saul and Hector followed her, close at each other’s sides. “Mother’s right, we should find Jurgen, too,” Saul said playfully, bending toward Hector. “Would Pyera bless us then, you think?”

“Forget the blessings,” Hector said. “It’s the feast I’m looking forward to.”

Saul pretended to be insulted. “How dare you! You’d rather bind hands with a beef haunch than me?”

Hector smirked up at him. “Absolutely. And don’t talk about Jurgen that way!”

Chuckling, they joined the crowd streaming toward the field of witness, ready to cheer for the unions and the annual renewal of balance and fertility.

It was during the feast that things started to go wrong.

Hector, Jurgen, and Saul had found a spot on the lawn near their families and were trading jibes over grilled riverfish on sticks and herb-roasted tubers from Hector’s farm, leather tankards of ale in easy reach. Somewhere across the crowded lawn, old Dett and his cousin Wersin were plying their lyre and fife, the ancient folk tunes wafting lazily among the villagers like friendly bumblebees. Tables were laid out with more food and drink than even hungry young men could find sufficient, and the delicious fragrances emanating from the spits set up near the fringe promised more savory pork and tender fowl for the satisfaction of all.

The afternoon had warmed, and Jurgen, easily the hairiest man among the younger generation of Middle Village (the elders were another story), had doffed his leaf-green robes, exposing a loose blouse with a deep V that revealed more hair on his thick, barrel-like chest than a summer day had sundrops. Hector had been getting plenty of needling from them, mostly for the way he’d been shamelessly flirting with the various young village women watching the unions longingly and clearly dreaming of their own hand-binding day; the young farmer was now returning the favor, playfully teasing Jurgen for flaunting his own manliness before the young ladies. “Are you looking for someone to go home and show your snake to, big guy?” he asked, nudging the larger man with his elbow as they sat beside each other in the grass.

Jurgen gave him an indulgent look. He was cradling his infant niece, giving his sister and her husband some time to enjoy the feast on their own, and Saul found the juxtaposition of gentle giant and sleeping child irresistible. He had his own kind of manly charm, Saul thought, though no one would call his round, unrefined face pretty, what with the large nose and stone-hewn features half hidden behind his mighty facial hair. “My snake stays in its cage until marriage,” the journeyman blacksmith said quietly in his slow, deep voice, “as you well know, little one.”

“Who are you calling ‘little one’?” Hector said with a grin.

“Stand up like a man and face me, then,” Jurgen said.

“I am standing up,” Hector joked.

Saul took a bite of his roasted fish. “Don’t poke the bear,” he said mildly as he chewed, repeating an oft-used refrain. Despite his startling size and power, Jurgen was wont to be placid and even-tempered—unless riled. Then, the gods help you. “Seriously, Hec, I think his beard is bigger than your entire head.”

As they chuckled, one of Hector’s brothers, Hettis, sat down with them. To Saul he very much looked the part of a farmer’s eldest son: plain, solid, hardworking, and responsible. “Did you hear the news?” he asked, crossing his legs and peering at each of them. When they looked at him blankly, he continued. “Something bad is happening up the valley to the northeast,” he told them. “Tendrils of smoke were spotted not long after dawn broke, more than could be accounted for by cookfires or preparations for the ritual.”

Guiltily, Saul turned toward the northeastern sky, feeling his shoulders tighten. He knew he’d been deep in the thickest groves and wouldn’t have seen anything, but having missed the smoke felt like an admission he’d been distracted from the things that mattered. Nothing was to be observed in that direction now but a few woolly clouds that might easily obscure the last vestiges of the trailing smoke.

“Rockriver Ferry?” Jurgen asked.

Hettis nodded. “The village council has sent some scouts on horseback to gather news. They’re afraid Rockriver Ferry has been attacked.”

“Of all days,” Saul said. Jurgen touched his mouth and heart in a ritual gesture to Eia, and Saul was almost tempted to join him.

By early afternoon, they knew more. The scouts returned with the first push of refugees, having taken the shortcut through the Gorge of Steles, stumbling as fast as they could. More followed. There were no carts, no animals, nothing that would slow their flight—just their crying children and the clothes on their backs.

Middle Village gathered them in, joining them to their feast without any hesitation. As they fed the newcomers, ministering to their wounds and comforting their crying children, they heard the shocking news. Rockriver Ferry, the northernmost of the shire settlements, had been brutally attacked by a vile army that swarmed over the levees at the very break of dawn. The townspeople had been caught utterly unaware and completely defenseless. The blackhearted host routed the settlement and farms but took nothing, only destroyed. They had sacked and gutted the village and viciously massacred the inhabitants. Not only was there no mercy, but they seemed gleeful in their work, as though death and bloodshed were the motive and means for the attack.

Barely a quarter of the village had escaped—maybe less. Most of the wounds were from scrabbling over the rocks of the gorge to get away, but one or two were marked with axe-wounds over which the Middle Village shaman could only shake her head and silently cry as she conducted her rituals of peace. Others seemed broken in grief, reliving the slaughter of children or parents before their eyes in the shock of sudden mayhem.

When asked who had done this to them, the newcomers shook their heads. “They weren’t human,” they whispered. “Demons,” some claimed. “Creatures from beyond mortal lands,” others said. Rumors spread through the festival gathering of the unknown malevolent legion exterminating everything in its path, each more outlandish than the last. Distorted men. A plague from the gods. Hulking humanoid creatures with green skin and large tusks protruding from their lower jaws, licking the blood from their axes with evil satisfaction.

Nothing of Rockriver Ferry now remained. The last of the stragglers moaned in dismay as they collapsed in the Middle Village green, the locals gathering around them in compassion and alarm. Not even the natural stone jetties that had given the old river-crossing its name were left.

The implication was clear. If they had been able to rout and destroy Rockriver Ferry so easily, they would hardly be inclined to stop there. Their unknown nature and origins, and their malevolent obsession with death, not spoils, were more terrifying than any other part of their story. Tendrils of panic started to curl through the villagers, and some wondered aloud if dark gods had deliberately loosed the creatures with an unholy mandate to scour the shire of humans, one thriving village at a time.

Some of the Middle Villagers were doubtful at first, unsure what to make of the tales the refugees were telling. Some calamity had befallen them in the darkness before dawn, but demons? It was difficult to believe that monsters could have broken free of the bedtime stories and the ancient share-bard yarns to cut down actual, living people with their black claws and cruel scimitars. Surely there must be some more mundane explanation.

But the descriptions piled on top of each other, each marking the same wide mouths, the same yellowed tusks, the same lank hair and bile-green skin. A few of the villagers had snatched up fallen axes as they fled, and when examined by Jurgen and his master, Olin, they proved to be made of a black, eerily unreflective ore unlike anything they had seen. Jurgen whispered to Saul that he did not think this strange metal could be smelted by normal means. Some force other than forging in a smithy had contributed to their making, though what that might be he dared not say. Magic, Saul’s mind supplied. What else but dark, demonic magic?

The news about the axes hushed the little crowd on the green, the villagers in the festival garb looking amongst each other at a loss. “What will we do?” Hector asked, and Saul was sure he did not know.

The master cooper of Rockriver Ferry, a tall, slightly anemic older man with a short gray beard, stood and faced the Middle Village council, all seated cross-legged in the ivied grass. He was the highest-ranking of the refugees—neither the council leader, nor the shaman, nor the two priests had survived.

They were in the Circle of Menhirs, a quiet, ivy-strewn depression between two barley farms near the edge of town that had been set aside by distant ancestors a hundred generations past or more for the shared guidance of the community under the open sky and the watchful eyes of the True Gods. For as long as living memory reached, such guidance had been provided in Middle Village by an elected council, of which Hector’s eldest uncle Hatchin, Jurgen’s master Olin the blacksmith, and both of Saul’s carpenter parents happened to be members.

According to custom, attendants were allowed at such meetings to assist the councilors, usually apprentices or younger members of the family. Most of the time Hector and Saul did not bother, but today the three friends and all the other attendants were present, each visibly sick with fear at what would be revealed and what might be decided. More of the village and a few of the refugees gathered beyond the tall stones on the slopes of the little hollow, muted and watching.

The cooper, Kestin, looked the thirteen councilors over, ignoring the young attendants and the crowd beyond. He had arrived with blood smeared across his face and tunic, Saul remembered, and the latter, he saw, still remained, darkened and dried. He wondered whose it was, and whether they were human or demon.

Kestin lifted a stained burlap sack. “I did not show this before,” he said, “not wanting to cause panic. When I heard words of doubt and disbelief, however, I knew you needed to see the danger you face with your own eyes.” Opening the sack, he reached in and pulled out a grisly prize, holding it aloft for them by its thick hanks of greasy black hair. A few of the councilors gasped quietly, and murmurs passed through the outer crowd. It was a hideous green head, its protruding lower tusks glinting in the cold afternoon sunlight.

“These came for us, a thousand strong,” the miller said. “Now, they will be coming for you.”

“Put it away, if you will,” Elias said gently, glancing at the stunned and muttering villagers. The cooper did so and sat down on the ivied grass. A hush fell.

“What are we going to do?” Dett, the Middle Village miller, asked finally, rubbing his silver beard anxiously.

No one answered at first. “They won’t be here tomorrow,” Elias assured the worried councilors after a moment. Like the blacksmith, Olin, Elias had left the shire in his younger years to serve in the armies of the southland kings, returning stronger and sager than the wild youth he had left as, with a pale three-inch scar across his thick, hairy chest.

“The terrain is too difficult for a heavily-equipped force at arms to move at speed,” Elias continued. “They’ll have to go around the Gorge of Steles; the winding shortcut through the rockspikes the refugees took is no route for an army. And unless I miss my guess, these creatures are plodders, not runners. If anything in the tales is true about beings like them, they are not built for haste even under ideal conditions. We’ll send more scouts to make sure, but I reckon it should take them two days, maybe three, to get here.” He eyed each of the council members in turn. “That gives us time.”

“Time to do what?” Dett pressed. He looked around at the others. “What can we do?”

“Evacuate,” ground out the surly innkeeper, Gunther. He seemed to stand out from the others, partly because he was the only councilor not to have a grown child or younger kinsman in attendance behind him. “It’s the only choice we have.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Middle Villagers were a hardy, square-shouldered folk, cheerful in times of peace and determined and unbending in the face of adversity. It was said that Middle Villagers were stronger than the stone of Block Quarry and the rocks of Rockriver Ferry. Flight did not sit well with them.

Hector, Jurgen, and Saul, each standing behind their respective elders, exchanged worried glances. Saul didn’t like the idea of evacuation. Things happened in such disarray. People got separated, lives got changed. The idea that he might be parted from his friends filled him with dread, and he could see the same worry in Hector’s ice-blue eyes and Jurgen’s glinting brown gaze.

Suddenly Saul wished he’d taken Hector and Jurgen skinny-dipping with him that morning, instead of wandering the woods alone. Facing what lay ahead without one last bonding moment with his friends hurt his heart.

Elias gave a slow nod. “I agree we should prepare to evacuate,” he said cautiously. “As a fallback.”

Lidda, who owned the largest of the three cattle farms to the south, looked up at him sharply. “You have another option?” she sneered. “A way to turn back a horde of bloodthirsty demons?”

“Let him speak,” Katrina said. Her glance at Elias suggested she anticipated what her husband was about to suggest, and did not like it.

Elias reluctantly nodded again, surprising the cattle farmer. “And what could that solution possibly be?” she demanded.

Elias pursed his lips. “Winslow,” he said at last.

The elders all sat back from him, reacting to the name with shock or disgust. More noises of dismay passed through the crowd without, quickly shushed.

Gunther spat on the grass beside him. “We agreed never to speak that name,” he said, staring daggers at Elias.

The younger three exchanged confused glances. “Who is Winslow?” Saul asked into the charged silence.

Gunther answered, not taking his eyes off Elias. “A member of our village, once,” he said bitterly. “The council sentenced him to exile twenty-one years ago.”

“What for?” Hector asked.

“Witchcraft,” Gunther hissed.

More murmurs. Hector looked dubious, but Jurgen, who believed fervently in only the most proper rites and reverence to the True Gods, was appalled. “Witchcraft?” he repeated.

“Experiments gathered from unholy books,” Gunther seethed. “He claimed it was all to our benefit, at first. Spells and potions from the forbidden past that would help our crops and strengthen our chattel. But he wanted more, forgetting the village’s needs for his own. What he pursued,” he sputtered, “was nothing short of heretical behavior in defiance of the gods, exposing us all to the dangers of their wrath. Only the gods, not men, may tamper with the order of nature.”

Jurgen nodded in automatic agreement, not noticing Hector’s dubious expression as he reacted to Gunther’s and Jurgen’s righteous superstition. “What happened to him?” the young blacksmith asked.

“Some, who considered themselves this warlock’s friend,” Gunther pronounced acidly, eyes still on the placid Elias, “defended him, arguing that this man’s abilities could serve the community and that there was nothing unholy in those books.” He paused and looked as if he might spit again, then continued. “Fortunately, wisdom prevailed, and he was sentenced to the highest punishment possible, exile from hearth and well for as long as he should live. We forced him out in the wild that very day, and the councilors present vowed never to speak that name again.” He gritted his teeth. “If it were not for that heretic, my only child would still be alive and standing by me at this very moment.”

Saul was shocked. Valla’s strange death, twenty-one years before when Saul was a mere babe, had always been presented as a vague accident with few details. From what he had heard, one day she had been out collecting berries by the river, and she never returned. Had this Winslow done something that had caused her death?

The council and all present shifted uncomfortably. Elias remained calm, his expression sympathetic but firm. “If we are threatened by demonic creatures, both unfamiliar and deadly,” he argued, “why should we not seek help from someone who maintained a keen interest in the forbidden and the unknown?” He looked around the circle. “Before we abandon everything, should we not at least try to save our lands and homes?”

“At the cost of the gods’ wrath?” Gunther shot back. “So that they might lay us waste in place of the demonic horde?”

Ledda eyed Elias shrewdly. “You speak as if you know how this man might be reached.”

Elias pursed his lips. “When his exile began, I brought him food and supplies. And… I continued to return to him,” he admitted. “I never really broke contact with him.” He paused, and all were watching him somberly, some with understanding, a few with surprise or anger.

“When my son was three years old,” Elias went on, startling Saul at this unexpected inclusion in the narrative, “he had a fever that would not abate. The normal remedies failed, and we thought he was going to die. Winslow—”

Gunther hissed, guessing what was coming, but did not interject. Saul’s heart pounded as Elias continued, his voice steady and firm. “I sought out Winslow,” he confessed, “and he provided an elixir that saved my son.”

Olin, the huge blacksmith, looked between Saul and Elias across the circle. His eyes, usually half-hidden by his impressively thick brows, were wide and round and fully on display. “We thought that was a miracle of the gods,” he said in awe.

“It was exactly that,” Elias said firmly.

The councilors were staring up at Saul now. His friends were, too, and probably the whole town gathered on the slopes beyond. For a moment, Saul didn’t know what to think. As a child, his life had been saved… by an infusion of magic?

He looked down at his father, noting how tense his broad shoulders were as he sat with his back to his son. A rush of love and gratitude filled him, and reaching down instinctively, he gripped his father’s shoulder in thanks. He felt Elias’s tension ease as he moved his hand across and clasped Saul’s grip in his own.

As Saul looked around at the circle, something hot in his core stirred him to action. “I agree with my father,” he announced, feeling a surge of rightful participation owing to his inclusion in the story. Heartened, he went further. Let Gunther threaten him with exile, too. This was what his father needed, and the village, too. “I will go to Winslow,” he said, loudly and clearly.

Saul tried not to look at his friends as he said this, not wanting to see their dismay or disgust, but his eyes drifted to them of their own accord. To his amazement, Hector’s eyes were dancing, as though delighted more fables were stepping from the storybooks—now even his best friend was “magical”!

The determination was there, too, and that was all about what Saul meant to him. As children it was impossible to separate them, and Saul knew Hector would have said it was only truer now that they were men. “I will go with you,” Hector said, smiling.

Jurgen, unsurprisingly, looked conflicted, but he wasn’t going to be the one to deny his bond with Saul or Hector, or to let the pair of them march off into the wild without his protection. The burly journeyman nodded solemnly. “We will go,” he agreed.

The three friends were silent as they left the village behind on the old quarry track, each occupied with their own thoughts. They were dressed for the woods, Hector and Jurgen having swapped their festival clothes for more ordinary gear. Each carried a small pack with supplies to last a few days in the wild as needed. Hector’s feet crunched on the stony road, but Jurgen, walking on Saul’s other side and matching the other’s pace despite his longer, more powerful legs, tread so lightly his boots could barely be heard. Anyone who expected this towering and well-insulated youth to lumber through the woods like a rabid bull should see him hunting, Saul thought—the man tracked his bucks as silently as Elias, or even Dett.

After a while, Hector, never one for the quiet even when working alone in his own fields, started singing quietly to himself. “When a bear, a steed, and a fox went a-courtin’ a wizard, monsters on their minds, under the gods’ baleful eyes…” he crooned, to the tune of the ancient drinking song “When Three Good Maidens.”

Saul snorted, and Jurgen tsked good-naturedly. “We may feel the gods’ baleful eyes sooner than we would like,” the big, bearded man remarked calmly, as they left the grass-choked path at the cleft boulder, per Elias’s instructions, and turned into the pathless forest. “Not everything is a jest, young master parsnip-granger. This Winslow we’re seeking isn’t a fraud, Hec, he’s a heretic.”

Hector shrugged his hefty shoulders. “Could be both,” he argued reasonably.

“And yet,” Saul said, “my father says I owe that heretic fraud my life.”

They walked further, the ground under their feet now beginning to slope decidedly upward, dipping lightly and then rising again. They dodged a strapping young fir that had risen directly amidst the winding path, Jurgen eying it as if considering whether it might be an omen as they passed.

Hector reached behind him and pulled an apple from his pack. “So how far do you reckon it is to this hut your father marked out, Saul?” he asked, taking a loud bite.

Saul did not answer right away, having fallen back into his thoughts. They were headed west, following the seldom-used track Winslow had taken into exile 21 years previously, toward the low mountains the shirelings called the Wildgoat Crags. Elias had pulled out a map of the region and marked the location of the hidden gorge where Winslow had last been seen, twelve whole months before, and told him the signs and markers to seek along the way to guide him to the wizard’s rustic lair. And he had told Saul something else, something he hadn’t shared yet with his friends.

“Two years or so after Winslow was cast away, he vanished,” Elias confided. He had told Elias during one of his visits that he would eventually need to leave the shire to gain the knowledge he sought. There was only so much he could learn from the few grimoires he owned, he said, though he gave no details of what he meant. One summer he abruptly disappeared without a goodbye, returning to the shire almost a full decade later.

“When he returned,” Elias went on, his expression stern but troubled, “he was… different. More erratic. More aloof. More misanthropic. He remained evasive regarding his previous whereabouts, but it was clear that what he had seen and learned had changed him to the core.” When he lived in the village, his attempts at witchcraft had been peculiar, shocking even, but, in Elias’s judgment, harmless. After his return, though, his wizardry was on a whole different scale, and his experiments far more disturbing and gruesome. Elias would not admit it at the village gathering, but it appeared Winslow had really delved into the occult. This break in Winslow’s behavior and personality had made Elias increasingly uneasy, and his visits had been less frequent.

“What I’m saying, lad, is that you must be careful,” Elias advised him quietly, a strong hand on his shoulder. He glanced around to make sure no one overheard, then continued, “The Winslow that returned, the Winslow I met a twelvemonth ago, before the last rite of the equinox…” He trailed off, then resumed. “I don’t know, son. He may help us. But he is not the boy that I—well, he is not who he was, when we were as young as you and your lads. If he does not help from compassion, appeal to his pride as a wizard.”

Saul felt Hector and Jurgen looking at him and belatedly registered Hector’s question. “We should be there by midafternoon,” he said finally. “What we’ll find, I don’t know.”

A lot can happen in a twelvemonth, he thought uncertainly.

Hector took a thoughtful bite of his apple, the sound seeming to travel far through the sunlit woods.

They found the hut as promised, a sturdy but simple one-room shack nestled in the corner of a hidden gorge behind the twin-trunked knotty pine. What they did not find was an exiled, possibly deranged wizard. Saul’s heart clenched as he took in the empty dwelling. “Pyera’s tits,” he cursed. Jurgen looked up sharply at him from where he crouched in front of the crude hearth, and Saul frowned guiltily. “Sorry, Jurg,” he said quietly.

“How could he not be here?” Hector groused, lifting up the thin straw mattress with his belt-knife and finding nothing but dust on the bare floor beneath. “I mean, really. Where does a hated exile have to go?”

Jurgen was studying the sparse remains of white ash dusting the uneven slate fundament. “He has been gone a while,” he guessed. “A month at least, possibly more.”

Saul stood in the doorway, bare arms folded over his chest, turning from the room to frown at the narrow grassy verge and rising slope outside the hut. “He might have left signs,” he said at length, his voice strained.

Hector looked up, confused. “Huh?”

“Signs,” Saul repeated, looking at his friends. More urgently he added, “If my father were still coming to visit him, even if it was only on the equinox or something, he would have left markers for my father to find.”

“If the old bat was still sane,” Hector countered. “And if he wanted to be found.”

“We’re missing the seeding ritual,” Jurgen groused, rising to join Saul at the entrance of the hut and eyeing the lowering sun unhappily. The rite was held at midnight on the equinox, the whole village celebrating the coming of spring with traditional prayers and a ceremonial first sowing. “It’s damned disrespectful not to give thanks to the True Gods.”

“Our parents will pray for us,” Saul assured him distractedly as he laid a hand on the big man’s shoulder, his eyes roving the slope beyond the little shack for anything strange or significant. “On our behalf, I mean,” he added hastily, turning to Jurgen with a small smile.

“You were right the first time,” Hector muttered, and Saul thought he probably was—their families would be praying for them. Who deserved pleas for grace more than a trio of reckless fools in search of a demented mage? It occurred to him that with the threat of the demon horde, the seeding ritual might not even be performed that night, but he kept the thought to himself.

Hector joined Jurgen and Saul by the door. “Now what, Darai-ki?” he asked, using the cutesy nickname to lighten the mood.

Saul didn’t react, but Jurgen thwacked the side of Hector’s upper arm with the back of his hand in remonstration. Hector pretended to wince from the burly man’s strike and held his arm as though he’d been hit by a log.

Saul ignored them both. “Come on,” he said tightly after a moment. He glanced up, noting the sun’s position as Jurgen had. “Let’s split up and search the dell, before we lose the sun. Even the full moon won’t help us much in the high forest.”

Some time later, Hector found himself prowling the narrow, twisting defile behind the shack, feeling exasperated and uncertain. The sun was still out and bright, but had lowered enough to darken the shadows in the low gorge, making it difficult to see anything “magey” amid the wild blackberry shrubs and coniferous saplings.

“What am I even looking for?” he complained aloud. Something caught his attention in the corner of his eyes, and he glanced up in time to see a corner of gray cloth some ways ahead, just as it vanished silently behind a knot of trees halfway up the crowded slope.

“That was no rabbit,” Hector muttered. He crept quickly up the slope to get a closer look. Reaching the edge of the little depression he saw his quarry passing through the trees not fifty feet ahead in a crouch. To his amazement, he saw that it was a girl, no more than 13 or 14 years of age, unkempt and nervous, furtively collecting fat spring mushrooms in a deep, closely woven basket.

“A Wildling!” he whispered in surprise. Everyone knew about the small, rarely sighted bands of wary outsiders, always keeping far from the settlements and avoiding any villagers that strayed into the remote woods and glades they roamed, living off plant-roots and snared coneys. He’d never much thought about them, though, any more than he thought about the bright-mailed southland kings, or the island folk that spoke with seals. She was dressed better than he’d have expected, in a simple green shift that had been carefully mended, and on second glance her ashy-brown hair was more kinky than disordered, not that it would meet the standards of his brush-happy sisters.

The girl, either hearing him or sensing his presence, looked up sharply. She met his gaze for the flash of a second, then turned and fled, dropping her basket of mushrooms to roll around in the meager undergrowth.

“Wait!” he yelled, hurtling after her and almost tripping over the basket.

He chased the young Wildling through the trees, soon finding himself short of breath as he went. Though powerfully built, Hector was not used to doing a lot of running, especially flat out over uneven terrain after a day of hill-climbing, while yelling after Wildlings pelting through the forest. “I just want—to—” he called out, panting, as she darted past a thick copse and almost out of sight. He took a breath, dodging a large spruce as he rounded the copse. “—ask for—directions!” he finished.

He rounded the bole of another huge tree to suddenly stop dead, literally face to face with an older boy glaring at him with the ferocity of a predator at bay. Hector stared at him, trying to catch his breath. The lad was dark-haired and younger than him by five years at least, though he was well past Hector’s height and leanly muscled. He’d be a good grappler, Hector thought, sizing him up in the instant he had to react. Though wild-looking like the girl, his clothes were dirty but mended and intact. His face was long and handsome, despite the angry expression he bore on it just then. Several paces behind him, the girl lingered next to a large boulder, scared but glaring.

Before Hector could do anything, the boy had reared back with his fist and landed a brutal haymaker on Hector’s jaw that sent him careening right back into the big-boled tree. Hector turned his head to gape at him, his face throbbing with pain. He’s stronger than he looks, Hector thought in surprise, instinctively taking a step back.

He tried assembling his scattered thoughts to speak, but the furious, overpowered Wildling wasn’t giving him any time to recover. Grabbing Hector by his sleeves—Ha, Saul was right about sleeves all along! he thought blearily—the boy pulled him forward and held him in place with one hand, cocking back the other for a final blow. The fist was in motion, Hector having barely managed to squeak “Wait—!”, and then there was pandemonium.

As Hector blinked his eyes into focus, he saw that Jurgen and Saul had heard the commotion and come running. Jurgen had the boy immobilized, both arms held fast in his immutable grip, though the Wildling was still putting up a creditable struggle. Across the tiny clearing Saul was on one knee in front of the girl, trying to reassure and calm her, though his urgency was undercutting his natural charm.

Hector felt a rush of deep gratitude and affection for his friends. “I swear by my head, you are the best of men, young master iron-wrangler,” he said, massaging his sore jaw. “A minute sooner would have been preferable, though,” he added.

“We love you too,” Jurgen said blandly, untroubled by the struggling youth despite his unnatural strength. Hector smiled—only he and Saul would have recognized that rare sardonic note in Jurgen’s normally stolid tone.

“It’s all right,” Saul was saying, palms out placatingly to both Wildlings. “We mean you no harm. We’re looking for the man who used to live in the hut back there, a wizard named Winslow.”

The boy stopped struggling, craning to stare at Saul with what could only be called angry curiosity. At a glance from Saul, Jurgen slowly released him.

“What do you want with the old mage?” the dark-haired youth asked, rubbing his arms where Jurgen had held him in his grip.

Saul rose cautiously to his feet, palms still out and low. “Our village is in danger,” he explained. “A horde of monsters is headed our way, and the elders believe Winslow can help. They sent us to find him.”

A skeptical look came over the youth’s face. He eyed the villagers in turn. “Why should we help you?” he asked them after a long moment. “Villagers hold no love for our people.”

“You are always welcome to share my meal and hearth,” Jurgen said unexpectedly. When the young man looked up at him doubtfully, Jurgen added simply, “All Eia’s children are my cousins.”

The youth looked at him blankly. “Who is Eia?” he asked, confused. Jurgen’s jaw dropped slightly, momentarily taken aback, and Hector had to suppress a laugh. I’ll have to remember that expression, he thought. The day our Jurgen met his first honest-to-goodness heathen!

“The monsters do not only threaten the villages,” Saul said. “The horde will lay waste to all the shire if they can, settlements and wilds alike.”

The Wildling considered him uncertainly. Saul moved to stand before the sinewy young man, the lumberjack broader and bulkier than the Wildling youth if not much taller. “I am Saul, son of Elias,” he said. He wondered if his father’s name would be known to the Wildling, Elias having come this way often once, but the young man showed no sign of recognition. “This is Jurgen and Hector,” Saul added.

The boy was calmer now that he was not actively protecting the girl, though not any more trusting of men he considered outsiders. “I am Olric,” the youth said, his chin held high. “This is my sister, Greta.”

Saul inclined his head in greeting. “Will you help us, Olric?”

Olric considered, his expression troubled, then nodded slowly. “I will take you to him,” he affirmed. “His cave is not far, only a short distance higher up the mountain.” He glanced at the eastern sky, then added to Greta, “Go back to the others. I’ll return… in the morning.”

Hector frowned. Why in the morning, if the cave was so close? Greta, for her part, seemed distressed. She, too, checked the eastern sky, pulling her twisted hair behind one ear. “Brother, I’m not sure it’s wise—” she began.

“I will be all right,” Olric told her, though Hector thought he heard a quaver in his voice. Hector was certain he was afraid of something, but he didn’t know if it was Winslow, or them, or something else. Reluctantly, Greta nodded, and they hugged in parting.

“Thank you,” Saul said to them both. Nodding to Greta, Olric and Saul headed up the loamy hillside before them, presumably making for Winslow’s latest abode. Hector and Jurgen fell in behind, Hector rubbing his throbbing jaw as he went.

The cave was indeed not far up the slope, though the ascent became both steeper and rockier as they went, and the blazing red sun was already burning into the distant horizon as they found a level path that led into a dark, deep-looking slot in a lichen-reddened cliff-face. To the east, the round, dark-featured moon seemed to be gathering indigo and stray stars about itself, seeking the bright intensity that only true night would give it.

They paused at the cave entrance, looking to Olric, who was staring tensely at the tableau of earth and sky before them. To Saul he seemed agitated and feverish, ready to jump, or fight. Something inside him was straining, as if he were experiencing some great exertion beyond the simple climb they’d just shared—though if anything he seemed stronger and haler than ever, his muscles looking thicker than Saul had thought they were in the uneven forest light. His facial hair, too, must have been hidden in the shadowy woods, but here in the light of the red setting sun the bushy sideburns and thick brows caught the light and seemed afire at the tips.

Saul placed a hand on Olric’s shoulder and felt the burning heat of his skin even through the rough cloth. The muscles under his hand seemed to be bunching and twisting in a way that felt unnatural to Saul. The boy let out a sharp grunt, as though experiencing some kind of painful disruption.

“Olric! Are you well?” Saul asked, alarmed.

Olric wrenched his shoulder free and nodded toward the cave. His eyes caught the dying light in an odd way, as though they were pulling in the last threads of the sun even as it escaped the world. “He is here,” he snarled.

Nodding, Saul turned and faced the cave. Olric led the way, with Saul, Jurgen, and then Hector following behind.

The cavern was large and penetrated deep into the mountain. The light ebbed and was all but vanished past the first turning, heightening their other senses. Saul could hear their own footsteps and Olric breathing, which seemed to be getting raspier and more rapid. Almost reflexively, he reached out his hand behind him and found Jurgen’s already waiting to take his. He knew without seeing that Jurgen had offered his other hand to Hector as well, the three of them finding this path together.

Saul was worried they would be groping in the dark the whole way to the sorcerer’s lair. But after a certain distance and another turning or two, some of the recesses started flickering with fat, eerily burning candles that did not seem to melt—at least, no wax dripped from their niches and alcoves, and none had died for want of fuel, not that Saul could see. Even so, he kept Jurgen’s hand in his as they crept deeper into the cave, and Hector, behind him, did the same.

They rounded another bend, the cavern now black apart from what the candles showed, their light dancing in the little air movements of the cave. Saul glanced up to see Olric looking of uncertain size in the wavering light, the flickering glow making his shoulders and back seem broader than Saul knew them to be.

Abruptly, the passage opened into a vast cavern, ablaze with torchlight. They stepped forward, awed and unnerved. Stone shelves lined either flank of the huge space, Saul’s guts twisting as he saw they were filled with the arcane and the gross—skulls and other bones, some too large or gnarled to be human, jars of what looked like blood and intestines, piles of cloths and artifacts, thick tomes and ancient scrolls, plus stacks of sealed chests and other containers filled with who knew what.

The floor beneath them was inlaid with deep carvings, almost like channels through which some liquid was meant to flow, the lands between them painted in reds and violets and inscribed in what seemed like gilt letters in the torchlight. At the far end was a stone altar more than large enough for a man, a tome open nearby on a waist-high stand as if some sorcery were in progress, not meant to be interrupted by interloping villagers.

Before the altar stood a man regarding them cooly. He was wizened and frail, his face drawn and his skin papery, and his limbs and torso seemed to possess little meat. If this was Winslow, Saul thought, a man he knew to be his father’s age, sorcery could not have treated him kindly. His eyes were bright and sharp of focus, though, despite this physical enfeeblement, as he regarded each of the three in turn. “Who dares intrude upon my work?” he asked, almost as though he were pretending to be an evil mage from the storybooks to unsettle them. Not that Saul was sure he was pretending.

Olric had halted ahead of them and to the side, as though directing the man’s attention to the three villagers. For his part, Saul’s attention was fixed on the steely-eyed, prematurely aged wizard, and his on them. “This is Winslow,” he heard Olric say in a husky voice. He sounded hurried in his speech, as if he was not permitted much time to interact with them, and all of it had now elapsed. To the old man he added quickly, “Sir, these are men of the village. They were seeking your help. They gave names. Saul son of Elias. Hector. Jurgen.”

Winslow was eyeing the three men like a hawk. He had not looked at Olric once, almost as though he were disregarding the Wildling, flitting between the three youths. At Elias’s name those dark, deadly eyes lighted uncomfortably on Saul, his cool gaze undergoing an almost imperceptible change. Saul couldn’t quite read the wizard’s expression. Was that curiosity? Disdain?

Suddenly Saul, pinned under that raptorlike glare, was aware of grunting and ripping sounds to his right. Startled, the villagers turned to see Olric was… changing? What had so far been fleeting, impossible impressions of the Wildling’s physique being altered, becoming beefier, larger, could no longer be denied. Olric’s once leanly muscled body was now swelling before their very eyes, his tunic straining beyond its capacity, the seams already ripping at the shoulders and arms. Before they could understand what they were seeing, the Wildling was ripping free of his tunic in a rage, his body seeming to boil as it swelled with muscle, bone, and more. Casting the ragged cloth aside, Olric turned his snarling face their way, and Saul stared in shock into yellow, wolfish eyes, luminous in the shadows of the cavern.

“What in the name of Pyera is happening?” Hector hissed. Jurgen made the ritual gesture, touching his mouth and heart.

Saul swung to face Winslow. “What is wrong with him?” he cried.

Winslow gave them a mirthless smile. “You have come for sorcery and salvation, yokels from the village that betrayed me?” he said over the groans and popping sounds of whatever was happening to the Wildling youth. “Behold!” he commanded, wild eyes glittering in the torchlight.

Helplessly, the three villagers turned to stare at Olric transforming and devolving before them. “Behold!” he repeated. “This,” he shouted, “is the magic that you have sought!”

(More to come)

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Love/shift by BRK Maxfield has very mixed feelings about leaving the city and all his tech behind to spend the summer after graduation halfway up a mountain in the family’s backwoods cabin—just him, his dad, and a whole lot of secrets. 11 parts 68k words (#57) Added Dec 2017 Updated 27 Apr 2019 55k views 4.8 stars (38 votes) No comments yet •Muscle Growth•Muscle/Strength•Always Shirtless•Man Scent•Gradual Change•Transformation•Size Increase•Hair Growth/Getting Hairy•Age Difference•Incest•Father/Son•Werebears•Supernatural•Complete •M/M

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Lycan-cock by Harvey Church After a late night drinking, Luka wakes up with a strange bite mark. He doesn’t think much of it until the moon comes out to awaken the beastly urges dwelling inside of him. 4,605 words Added Oct 2022 20k views 4.8 stars (33 votes) No comments yet •Cock Growth•Huge Balls•Ball Growth•Huge Cock•Self-suck•Cum Milking•Hyper Cum•Straight to Gay•Muscle Growth•Muscle/Strength•Man Scent•Increased Libido•Transformation•Plausible Size Difference•Size Increase•Anthro/Furry•Werewolves•Halloween •M/M