Beastborne- Mark of the Founder Read online

  The rain drove him on, it pushed at his back and soaked his clothes. His boots were the only thing that remained dry. He had bought into the whole hipster trend when he moved to Seattle and the pair of expensive hiking boots had kept his feet dry this entire time.

  Every other part of him, however, was soaked to the bone.

  Despite the dreariness of the rainstorm, it seemed to have a stronger effect on the villagers that had decided to chase him. They never got close enough to see more than a fleeting water-logged glimpse of their quarry, and with the rain dampening their torches they eventually gave up.

  Hal kept going regardless.

  The trees became larger, the land more unruly, but no longer hilly. He thought he heard the sound of running water but through the wind, rain, and darkness he couldn’t locate it.

  He cupped his hands in a feeble attempt at catching the rain to quench his cracked lips and parched throat. His gait became leaden and clumsy. The uneven ground tripped him more often than not.

  Eventually, fatigue and fear claimed their due.

  Hal nearly collapsed when he finally found a reasonably dry section of underbrush beneath the sheltering roots of a large tree he could curl up beneath.

  Sleep fell upon him in an instant. His dreams were filled with more running. This time from terrible beasts. Monsters that reached out and wanted nothing more than to devour him whole.

  When he awoke, the rain had slowed to a drizzle and in the tiny hollow he had found, he was almost warm. As consciousness returned, he nearly screamed at the dozens of insects that were crawling all over him.

  Hal had not slept in a warm comfortable place, as he had first thought. But rather a nasty, dirty hole with a roof of roots and an oozy smell he couldn’t clear from his nostrils.

  Fear lent him strength and Hal quickly got to his feet, brushing and smacking at his arms and legs to rid himself of the crawling things.

  He shivered, more from the bugs than the cold, and immediately set off again. He hoped he was going in the same direction he was traveling the night before.

  It took him some time to find his bearings. How long, he couldn’t tell. The overcast, drizzly sky gave him no clues as to the sun’s position. But he did find the direction he was walking last night and, more importantly, he found a river.

  Whether it was the same one he had heard on and off throughout the evening, he couldn’t be sure.

  And he didn’t care.

  The river leaned down into a trough and trickled over a bed of bright river stones every color of the rainbow. It was barely five yards wide and shallow enough that he could wade through it up to his hips if he so chose.

  Hal dunked his head into the cold waters. Refreshed, he cupped his hands and drank his fill.

  For once, he felt a measure of safety. There were no ominous noises, no beasts to hunt him, no monsters like in his dreams. And no insane people chasing him.

  The guard had, quite literally, lost his florking mind when he saw the mark on Hal’s arm. And apparently, so had he.

  There was no explanation for his inability to speak properly or the strange, involuntary urge to mock the man. And with his sleeve ripped, it wasn’t going to be easy to hide it if he meant to venture into another village.

  Which he knew he needed to do if only to find some dry clothes and food. He wasn’t any good at foraging and the gnawing pit in his middle demanded he eat something.

  Hal smeared a handful of river mud over his mark. It was thick enough to block out the glowing light and he was filthy enough that it no longer looked out of place.

  It was pitiful protection against prying eyes, he knew. But he also could not think of a better solution. He knew there was one but every time he grabbed at it, the concept vanished.

  He needed to find a village to get some food and warm clothes somehow. And if these people were as backwaters as they seemed, they’d have their clothes drying out on a line.

  And while he was trading his dirty, soggy clothes for dry ones, maybe there’d be a pie on the windowsill.

  Yeah, right, he thought with a snort, rising to his feet. That’s about as likely as finding a door back to my apartment.

  If he had to survive in the wilds, he would be dead. If not by some random animal, then by eating something poisonous.

  And so, with a belly full of fresh water, Hal continued on. His stomach wasn’t fooled though. It soon began to grumble and groan loudly for something substantial.

  Halfway through that day, Hal came upon another village.

  This one was smaller, more like a farming community. Large fields in squarish patches ringed this side of the little village but he saw no crops. Only strange blocky impressions in the ground.

  This village, like the one before it, was tucked away amid sheltering hills. But the land between them was relatively flat and the forest butted up against several homes. Many of which, he saw through the gaps in the trees, did indeed have clotheslines full of garments.

  He had no way of knowing if the villagers here would be hostile. And after the last two interactions, he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to risk it.

  He was somewhere else. Somehow, someway, he was in a different land.

  What little instincts he possessed screamed at him that this was distinctly other. There were too many idiosyncrasies. Too many minor differences that added up to create an alien world that only looked like home on the surface.

  He could no longer deny that he was far from home. No matter how much he wanted to.

  Hal skirted the edge of the forest toward the closest homes while he waited for the light to fade to dusk. They were more rough timber one-room shacks than actual houses.

  It was less than ten yards to the nearest clothesline. Flapping in the faint breeze he saw a dark cloak, some white medieval-looking shirts, and dark pants that looked worse off than his jeans.

  The hills on either side of the small village cloaked the wooden shacks in gloom well before the sun fully set.

  Just enough light for Hal to see by. Hopefully, enough to grab some clothes and maybe some food if he was lucky.

  2

  Under the failing light, Hal crept out of the woods. He kept as low as possible, moving between the walls of swaying laundry hanging out to dry. Every footstep felt impossibly loud as it crunched on the dry grass.

  So far he only found bed linens and women’s clothes. Up ahead he saw the dark cloak he spotted from the forest and made a beeline for it.

  The brown cloak was in direct view of an open window. And on its sill was something that looked a lot like a pie. Hal crept closer to the cloak, but his eyes – and his stomach – could only focus on the food another five or six yards away.

  A distant echoing boom resounded and he found his vision drawn up and over his left shoulder to the dark, bruised sky. He managed to catch the tail end of a flash. Then another series of dull explosions, like distant fireworks, and more flashes.

  Isn’t that out of order? He thought, entranced by the spectacle. The lights came after the sound. It should have been reversed.

  The booming flashes of light came again. This time, he paid closer attention. Two booms, three flashes, two booms.

  A signal. It was too regular to be anything else.

  It repeated again a few seconds later.

  Hal turned his attention back to the cloak and pulled it free from the line. In the flash of the signal fireworks, Hal looked back to the pie. All thought of taking it flew from his head at the sight.

  A young woman stood at the window watching the sky, a heavy knife in her hand to cut the pie. In the bright revealing light of the fireworks, she saw Hal.

  Her expression sprang from one emotion to the next. Worry, confusion, then anger when she realized Hal was stealing, and finally wide-eyed horror when she caught sight of his forearm.

  And the glowing golden light that stood out in stark contrast to the gloom that fell between each flash of the night sky.

  In the hours since Hal
covered it in mud, the masking stuff had dried and cracked apart. When he went to pull the cloak down, the gold light of the mark shone clear through the dried dirt.

  He didn’t wait for the woman to recover her wits. Hal turned and fled back toward the forest. All thought of getting any food or more clothes abandoned.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Hal saw the woman cock back her arm. He was already halfway to the forest. There was no way she could hit him from that distance.

  The woman didn’t seem to agree.

  Hal watched in horror as the knife flipped end over end toward him. Its graceful arc put it on a collision course with the flapping blankets of laundry.

  At the last second, the wind shifted like some cruel joke. The knife that should have gotten tangled up in the sheets, sailed clear over the dozens of yards right for Hal’s back.

  Hal dropped to the dirt as fast as he could.

  The blade sliced through the air where he was standing a heartbeat before. It made a dull thump somewhere in the treeline. The distance worked in his favor. It gave him time to react, no matter how impossible the woman’s throw was.

  The [Broken Woman] uses Knife Toss.

  The attack misses.

  He scrambled to his feet, the flash of text vanishing before he could focus on it. Hal tried to find the knife but gave up when he didn’t see it after a few seconds of searching.

  He didn’t have the time.

  The small village came alive with the sound of shouts and a chillingly discordant horn that sounded throughout every home.

  Any guilt he had about stealing the cloak vanished.

  What’s petty theft matter if they already wanted to hurt me or kill me?

  Once he was beneath the thick boughs of the forest, Hal took a moment to don the cloak. It was rougher than anything he’d ever felt but he immediately felt warmer.

  It struck him as odd that the effect was so complete and stark. Body heat simply did not work like that. It was almost like….

  Magic, came the unbidden thought, and he pushed it roughly away. But it came back with a vengeance as he made his way deeper into the woods with no course in mind beyond putting as much distance between him and that last village.

  If there was magic, and he was marked, shouldn’t he have some way of defending himself? He was as weak as a toddler compared to everyone else.

  Rather than feeling like he was in an epic movie, he felt scared and alone.

  Night came swiftly in the covered forest.

  A steady downpour tried to drown him. Thankfully, the cloak held up. His feet ached, and he was covered in at least two dozen bleeding scratches and bruises from slips, falls, and stray branches.

  No movie, video game, or book ever prepared him for how impossibly dark it gets when there are no street lights, no moon, and no stars. In the depths of the forest, it went beyond simple darkness to an abyssal ink.

  He couldn’t see his own hand in front of his face.

  Fear was the only thing keeping him going, yet the worry of stumbling into a dry gully and snapping his leg or worse finally forced him to stop. He hadn’t heard any signs of pursuit for at least an hour.

  With the cloak about him, he was reasonably dry and it was large enough that he could prop up against one of the massive tree trunks and tuck up beneath the brown material.

  His second night was less miserable than the first. Though he had nothing to eat for two days, and little to drink, he was dry and relatively warm.

  Blissful, dreamless sleep claimed him that night, and the following morning he awoke to the distant baying of hounds. It would seem they were going to give up after all.

  In his groggy, half-asleep state Hal thought it was another nightmare and he tried to go back to sleep. But when the baying came again, this time even closer, he recognized the danger he was in.

  His eyes shot open with the burst of fear-laden adrenaline. Rather than leaping to his feet and continuing his panicked flight from the day before, Hal stared down three feet of gleaming steel pointed at his face.

  Trailing his gaze down the subtle curve of the blade to the young woman that held it, Hal wondered just how he could get away.

  A quick glance as the woman’s piercing blue-gray eyes told him she wasn’t about to fall for any tricks.

  He kicked himself for ignoring the earlier warning. But he had been so exhausted. Nobody expects to randomly find themselves alone in a savage world. Not any normal modern-day adult.

  This was his third day without food and the constant exertion was taking a heavy toll on his unfit body.

  Being tired, afraid, with a dozen aches in places he didn’t know he could ache in, not to mention starving and severely dehydrated, played a massive impact on his ability to think clearly and muster any strength to keep going.

  The woman was still holding the blade, its tip a clear threat, but she made no move to use it. She eyed him with those sharp, intelligent eyes that took in the filthy, disheveled mud-caked man before her.

  As she looked over him, her eyes inevitably fell to his left arm. The cloak’s roughspun fibers let out just enough light from the mark to draw attention to it. Under the shade of the forest canopy, it was fairly conspicuous.

  She barked a command in a foreign language, melodic and lilting. Even her rough tone could do nothing to strip the music from her words.

  Seeing his obvious confusion, she spoke again in a different language. Every syllable was filled with a guttural sound. Seeing the lack of Hal’s comprehension, she spoke in a third language, this time in clipped sentences.

  Of all the languages, the last one sounded closest to English. The utterly foreign words, however, made it impossible for him to grasp what she was trying to get across.

  Hal spread his arms out wide, shrugged his shoulders, and shook his head. “What say.”

  He cringed.

  The way her face screwed up at his idiotic, foreign words told him enough. Though if she did speak his language, he imagined her reaction would be no different.

  There would be no overcoming this language barrier. He had to admit, this was about as good as he probably could expect. She wasn’t hurting him or locking him up. Nor had she run away in fear.

  Attempting to communicate was never a bad sign.

  Eventually, like every other person, she focused on his mark. Hal watched her inch the blade toward his left arm. He kept very still indeed, aware that the slightest twitch might set the girl off.

  Sharp eyes flicked toward Hal as she fell into an easy - and impossibly deep, to Hal’s limited mobility – squat and moved toward his outstretched arm. She paused halfway there to regard his brown eyes.

  “Heljei,” she breathed in awe.

  “Hairgel?” Hal asked.

  The girl looked at him and with her free hand pointed to her eyes with her index and middle finger. She pointed to the dirt, then to Hal. The closest Hal could get out of the miming was that he had… dirty eyes? Rude.

  Brown, answered his awakening brain. Heljei means brown eyes? Why would that matter? While Hal wasn’t the most observant at all times, especially not in his present state, but looking back he couldn’t recall a single dark-eyed person in either village.

  Every other human he’d seen, including the one in front of him, possessed bright and colorful eyes. He even recalled a few with impossible colors like lavender and rose.

  Bent over his arm, her free hand pulled up the rough cloth of the brown cloak and her reaction was the same as every other. The gold light from the mark dazzled her eyes and she stared with great awe at it.

  If he had any hope of escaping, now would be it. While she was distracted.

  Hal tensed, readying himself to slip out of her grip and spring away as fast as he could. He certainly wasn’t going to wait around for her to skewer him with that sword, or worse, wait until those baying hounds found him.

  The slight twitch of his muscles alerted the girl and she tightened her grip. It wasn’t painful but it might as well h
ave been an iron manacle about his wrist. At the same time, she angled her blade toward his heart, resting the flat of it on her raised forearm.

  All it would take was a casual lean from his captor, a few inches, to kill him. Embarrassed at being so thoroughly foiled before he ever got the chance, Hal relaxed and leaned sullenly against the tree at his back.

  With a nod that told him she expected no less of a sensible reaction, the woman withdrew the threatening blade. Even without it aimed at him, Hal was certain she could cut him down before he rose to his feet.

  Hal watched her as she became enamored with the mark once more. The light seemed to fill her bright, wide eyes. She looked around the same age at him, mid-twenties, but that was where the similarities stopped.

  She wore an outfit that, at first glance, looked like a thousand leaves sewn together. But upon further inspection, he found they were cunningly worked leather plates. They overlapped and were perfectly colored to give the appearance of individual leaves.

  Most of her skin was covered except for the fingertips at the end of her gloves and her face. She had a slightly plump cherubic face with golden blonde hair. A single red thread was wound throughout a thickly plaited cord of golden hair that ran down the side of her face.

  She was beautiful. Shorter than Hal but lean and strong like a gymnast, readily evident even under the camouflaging armor she wore.

  She caught Hal staring at her and her lightly tanned skin flushed. From the way her blue-gray eyes narrowed to dangerous slits, he knew that was no blush of embarrassment. It was anger.

  He did his best to paint an innocent look on his face and smile but it didn’t lessen her scowl. She jerked his arm and pointed at the dirtied mark, caked with dried blood and mud, while she let loose another stream of urgent-sounding words.

  All Hal could do was shake his head. “Me no know what do! Bright color, why?” He jabbed a finger at the golden mark, suddenly angry. Doubly so because the words that came out of his mouth weren’t the ones he intended to say.