The Silencing of Esteria

Chapter 6

Toland stood on top of the hill furthest away from the edge of the forest that overlooked the sheep pens. There were four pens in all, each containing about 20 sheep. From here he had a good view of everyone out on watch.

On his way here he had felt ready to face the night, and in his own thoughts he was brave and maybe even a little heroic as he went off to face an ancient evil of the night. However, now that he was out in the cold and the dark, alone, such thoughts quickly dissipated.

The sheep slept peacefully enough though, and if they couldn't smell anything that troubled them, he was probably safe.

He had slung his shield over his back, and it scraped against his shoulder as he fidgeted. He took it off occasionally and hefted it onto his arm, but he was not accustomed to the weight of it and he quickly put returned it to his back.

About an hour into his watch, he put the shield on the floor and rested it against his leg.

The other members of the watch patrolled about sporadically in an effort to keep moving, holding their torches out to examine the cracks of darkness as if the wolf could burst out at them from anywhere.

The sheep startled.

Toland whirled around, knocking over his shield.

He cursed and scrambled for it, throwing his arm into the strap and bracing against it.

When he realized he couldn't see what was happening he lowered his shield and looked over the top of it.

At the bottom of the hill, on the side away from the forest, a girl in her nightclothes was getting to her feet.

Toland blinked a few times, but she didn't disappear back into his imagination.

Her hair sparkled in the moonlight, straight and smooth and purest platinum. She also wore a sword belt but there was no hint of a sword anywhere about her.

She turned and looked back the way she had fallen from and held out her arms to catch a man wearing a blue dressing gown as he came tumbling out of the air.

His legs hovered in the air for a second, only visible from his knees up, then they were severed, dropping to the floor and started bleeding into the ground.

"Jaran!" the girl screamed and began frantically trying to stop the bleeding.

As she lowered the man onto his back Toland also saw that he was missing his right hand and that too was still bleeding.

The girl frantically shoved her hands against the wounds, but she had no real idea of what she was doing and ended up just getting covered in blood herself rather than actually helping.

Toland suddenly realized he was standing there, watching dumbly and snapped into motion.

He threw away his shield and grabbed the backpack of supplies and ran down the hill towards the two strangers.

The girl whirled around at his approach, finding him immediately in the darkness. She had a feral look in her eyes, like a hunted animal, made even more terrifying by the almost luminous nature of them. He stopped, afraid that she might leap at him.

He held up the backpack.

"I... I can help," he said, gesturing to the prone man.

She visibly relaxed and he approached the man, opening the backpack and pulling out the thin cords, looping them around the severed limbs and pulling them as tight as he could.

As he cut off the arteries in the arm, the blood subsided to no more than a small cut, but he when he looped them around the legs he couldn't pull them tight enough to stem the flow. He pulled and yanked with all his might, but he couldn't get them tight enough.

He stood up and screamed at the top of his voice, "DAD!"

But when he turned around, the girl had stepped around him, grabbed the cord and with a small flick of her wrist, tied in tight enough to stop the flow.

Toland blinked in surprise and then took another look at her.

She tied off the other leg with similar ease, but she didn't appear to be strong at all, she wasn't muscled, not to that extent anyway, if anything she seemed slight of frame, like the daughter of a noble that had never lifted anything heavier than a bouquet of flowers.

"Lift the legs up," Toland managed, and reached for the bandages.

She did as he said and he wrapped the limbs as best he could.

Then he heard the pounding of footfalls coming over the hill. He glanced back to see the villagers charging over the hill, his father well in front, screaming at the top of his voice with his massive two-handed axe poised above his head ready to decapitate anything and everything in his path.

The girl staggered backwards, frantically looking about her for anything she could use as a weapon. She leapt the 10ft to the edge of the sheep pen and yanked out one of the wooden posts of the fence, snapping off the portion of the fence it was attached to, and placed herself between the villagers and the man on the floor, the mud-covered point somehow becoming a terrifying instrument of war in her hands.

Toland stood up and shouted, "Stop! Its okay, there is an injured man here."

His father stopped screaming upon seeing Toland and lowered his axe to his side but did not slow down.

He ran right up to Toland and grabbed him into a hug, breathing a sigh of relief.

Then he saw the injured man properly.

"Where is it? Did you see it?" Rin asked, letting Toland go.

The others had arrived now, each had seen the man and were scanning the horizon for any sign of the wolf.

"No," Toland said, "It wasn't the wolf. It was... Well... I don't know."

He looked over at the girl questioningly, but she just glared back at them, not lowering her stake.

"It looked like magic," Toland put in.

His father somehow managed to look even more unsettled than before.

"If the wolf smells all this blood he might be drawn here, we need to move him."

"We need a stretcher, he's lost so much blood, if we carry him and one of the bindings come loose, he could die before I get it back on."

"If the wolf comes and eats him he'll be dead as well. Everyone, grab a bit of him, as gently as you can."

The villages did as they were told, some grabbing limbs or stumps and other pushing up underneath him.

"Careful," Rin coaxed, "Careful... And slowly, back to the village."

The girl ducked in between them and stood underneath the man, supporting him with her head and her hands, and suddenly he was all but weightless.

As they headed off home, Toland looked around for where he had dropped his backpack. As he found it he also noticed a square object dropped on the floor.

He walked over to it and picked it up, then almost dropped it as it opened up, revealing fifty or so pages.

He got control of it and looked through it. He had never seen a book in real life, but by the description of them, this had to be one. Except this one didn't have script written on it, at least not like he had ever seen before. It was a lot of detailed patterns and runes like those of the charms and wards he used to decorate the things his father made.

He also saw that big chunks of pages had been torn out.

He put it under his arm and hurried after the rest of the villagers.