He looked forward, through a fog of desolation and impending doom.
The forest was waking up, and the cool air was dissolving away into the swampy heat of the forest floor.
The stinking fog surrounded him and properly reflected his mood.
His presence would soon be known to the deadly Nians and that meant inevitable conflict.
Truth be told, they probably already knew he was here and had been watching him, waiting.
He just hoped they found him irrelevant, some useless outsider soon to die of his own spatial ignorance.
If he was any other outsider, he probably would stumble into a quick death. The forest gobbled up most men without much effort but Black did not qualify as most men and although he had already died once, killing him a second time would be a much harder task.
Black stared ahead at the rope bridge, a fickle mixture of braided rope and worn wood that spanned between two epic trees. Below him was a yawning void, the stuff of nightmares.
Looking down and viewing that void caused a vertigo that no man can accurately describe. It had a weight and gravity that pulled at even the steeliest of hearts.
Human beings are not accustomed to viewing ‘nothingness’ and walking above it was even more nauseating.
In the distance around Black then Nian trees rose like massive skyscrapers, he was but an insignificant ant when measured up to them.
Nia is a hard place to describe to someone who has never visited.
The renowned adventurer Raoulo had visited Nia during a more peaceful epoch and had written that Nia was “a world that grew larger with every step” and “the deeper you went, the smaller you became… until all of sudden you were a mote of dust clinging to a blade of grass”,
This was Black’s first time in Nia and he couldn’t help but agree with the dizzying appraisal. The trees were indescribably huge, with this fickle tree-highway appearing like a single spider’s thread tying to distant trees together,
Around him, triangular rays of sunlight fought through the assortment of gigantic tree limbs and massive leaves that crisscrossed at varying heights above him.
The forest world was a tapestry of massive emptiness and sprawling silence wherein most living things learned to stay silent in order to survive.
The humans in this place, the select few who had successfully adapted, were of the God Nia.
Nia was a blood-soaked, violent and unforgiving God whose vibrations were that of unrepentant aggression and slaughter.
The strong would survive only through constant incursion, and out of those select few would come a race of violent survivors.
Through the generations, the Nians had become an almost insect-like people, an unmatched force in their homeland.
Their backs and shoulders were massive, resembling the shell of a beetle; a people meant to climb, scurry and stab.
No army dared to march into Nia, not the knights of the One-Eyed God, not the Horsepeople of the Eternal Blue sky and not even the Laasters.
While visits from Laasters littered the history of Nia, they would only do so with a contingent of Nians to support them. It was suicide to bring an outside army here.
Only a couple of generations ago the Laasters had worked, yet again, to attempt to bring civility to Nia, to install a new regime that was open to trade and commerce with the outside world.
The bloody extinguishing of pockets of resistant Nians had come at great cost and, as far as Black knew, was still being overseen to this day.
Civility had been hard-fought and hard-kept in this land, the Nian God wanted nothing to do with it.
Civility was still the best form of control, it brought peace and wealth and the populational cowing of undesirable behavior. Once civility took control and became a part of identity, the populace would do all the dirty work.
The struggles of these Chiefs were constant, many Nians violently thrashed against what they saw as ‘outsider control’ but through tireless effort the tree highway had been built and trade posts had been established.
They were taught the common tongue and wealth slowly began to flow.
Iron came in and the highly valuable Moha Oak had gone out.
Non-Nians could now travel in the great forest, though always at the mercy of the Nians who found outsiders easy pickings from their vantage points amongst the higher reaches of tree branches.
Where are the other travelers and why haven’t the knights followed me in?
Black knew something had changed in the forest, and with the Laaster stronghold so far away, his people would probably have been the last to know of any political shifting.
With little choice he had continued deeper into the forest, he had considered turning around and leaving the forest and going back the way he came but that spelled another certain doom.
Returning that way meant a meeting with the Knights of the One-Eyed God. Black had stirred up that hornet’s nest not long ago and had barely escaped them once and would surely not survive another trip through their isolated land.
With little recourse, he moved the only direction the bridge allowed, his eyes facing down, the frighteningly strange landscape becoming dull and monotonous halfway through his first day.
Little noise, save a few bugs here and there, broke up the silence. The expanse between trees sometimes taking hours to traverse.
Just a long bridge with emptiness below, an optical illusion of normally sized trees in the distance, with a huge highway of crisscrossing branches high above.
He couldn’t help but zone out, and when that happened the flashbacks of his recent death would come in shockingly surreal bursts.
As far as he knew, he was the first Laaster to come back from death. He assumed it had taken a lot out of Gaia to perform that miracle. He wasn’t even sure if his God had survived the process. He had heard nothing from her since his awakening
He had been on a boat with his brothers and father when the sudden explosion had hurled him into the crashing waves of the sea.
All he could remember was sinking while his bloody stumps flailed uselessly in an effort to swim back to the surface.
When he woke up he was naked and confused, face first on a beach at the border of the one-eyed god’s land and the Multi-Man’s forest. Stranger than the vast distance he had traveled, were his new arms.
Black pulled up his sleeves and looked at his arms as he walked, still amazed at their function and craftsmanship.
A silver metal now encased (replaced?) both arms, they were riveted into shoulders with built-in sections for flexibility much like a Knights armor.
He flexed his fingers and bent his elbow – some strange magic was at work, perhaps it was Gaia who moved them
Had Gaia enchanted the arms or was this all a dream… had he died and now walked the land a frightful phantom?
How they got there and how they worked was a complete mystery.
The awful sound of the explosion still shook rare moments of sleep, that Erth-shattering BOOM! Erth had heard nothing like it before, but Black suspected they would become familiar with the terrible sound very soon.
Laasters were not emotionally affected by death and killing; it was bred into them, part of the genes that Gaia had manipulated from common stock, but that explosion was a horrifying sound even to him, and with it came a certainty that the age of the Laaster was coming to a violent and explosive conclusion.
Thousands of years vying for power and control had evaporated just like that aboard a couple of boats clumsily headed for Nyminia.
Gaia could not be reached anymore, here visions no longer guiding him and that gaping hole was another reminder of just how alone he truly was.
He did not know if his brother and father had survived but he found the prospects slim.
Black shook away the memory, no time for that now. He would get to bottom of that mystery, but first he needed to get home.
The Laaster Citadel was many many miles from here, and the first leg of that sprawling journey required he first get through Nia, then if he somehow survived that, get through farmlands of Tepin, and then either a boat through the Nyminia sea perhaps or attempt to negotiate his way across the Golden God’s pass.
Black felt ragged and just thinking about the journey drained what little strength he had left.
Outside of a couple of the large Nian flying bugs, he hadn’t eaten in days.
He was sure he looked deathly as well. From what he could tell, his entire body was covered in horrible scars. His black hair covered his face in a greasy and tangled mess, his dark clothes were ripped and dirty, stolen from some farmstead he had stumbled across in Eyer territory.
No shoes, no food, no water, and no answers.
The few people who had seen him at the Castle of the Eyer averted their eyes from him, which told him all he needed to know about how grizzly his injuries had been.
He looked like he felt, destroyed with a hole in his chest, some rotten mark deep down inside
He lifted his gaze from his thoughts and was surprised to see that the bridge was nearing the next mammoth tree. Each step bringing the giant sentinel of a tree ever larger, another marker on the way to the Nian capital.
Branches sprung out all directions above and below the highway, their leaves occasionally breaking free and floating sinking like boats to the forest floor.
Black smelled the fire before he saw it.
A security force?
We’re these border guards or some wayward travelers like him?
He had no weapons other than his metal arms, and even those he was still getting used to; his fists had unknowingly sprouted blades during his fight at the Eyer. Black had been just as surprised as the Knight of Blades when the blood started flowing out of his stomach.
Another strange adjustment to add to the list, the world was changing and he was merely a microcosm of that. Big things were in motion, Black could sense the Gods were at work on some final act.
Black mulled his choices for the tree encounter but much like a soldier running into a line of archers, he had no choice but to walk straight into whatever outcome lay ahead and count on his training.
2 hooded shapes huddled at a fire pit.
They didn’t look like threats but who knew out here.
He made sure to make noise as he got closer, he didn’t want to spook anyone.
One head turned, an old and wizen face peering out of a dark and tattered hood, the other traveler did not budge.
The old face gave a smile.
“Greetings”
Black nodded and looked to the other shape, he could see long brown hair, a woman.
“Care to warm up?” the old face asked.
The sun was going down and the forest was cooling, the only warmth now coming from the unknown churning of biological forces happening deep below on the sunless forest floor.
He could see they had a spit on the fire so he sat down instinctively.
The highway was attached to the tree and a little alcove had been burrowed in a small part of the tree where the fire burned harmlessly. These trees didn’t burn, no fire could ever generate enough heat to even risk hurting these wooden giants.
The old man offered a bit of lizard or bug that was burnt to a crisp.
He took it and nodded in thanks.
“What brings you here, Traveler?”
Black finished chewing and appraised the silent and sullen girl again before replying to the old man.
“Just passing through…”
The old man laughed, “just passing through Nia…”
Black offered nothing else.
The old man nodded to himself, comfortable to let it pass.
He had the Nian features. A wide flat face, pale and grizzled but fewer lines of war than the typical Nian. The Nian people didn’t smile much but this old bloke seemed moderately upbeat, possibly a merchant or politco.
The girl finally turned and looked at him. She was wearing climbing claws, unlike the old man. She must be his protector, a daughter, or granddaughter perhaps.
She looked hard at him, she had the Nian face as well, young and grizzled.
Black could think of no role harder than being a Nian woman. He couldn’t fathom how mothers could survive this place, let alone keep infants safe in a hellscape like this.
She looked him over and then turned back to the fire.
He had found farming gloves in the village just before he left the Eyer. Along with the jacket, it kept his arms somewhat hidden. It wouldn’t be long before the tale of the metal armed murdered spread before him. The Knights had not believed he was no Laaster and he feared that perhaps they were right, that whatever people saw in him instilled anger and fear.
“Well traveler, a little advice. Turn back, Chief Ohllo’s forces are on run and the forest is devolving into blood…”, there was a fresh crack of defeat in his voice. “A beast, Tremble, has taken control and his purges know no bounds, especially not for ‘flatlanders’.
The old man’s sad eyes looked at him, “I’m afraid you’ll need to turn back.”
Black’s stomach knotted up…. Fuck, it’s worse than I thought…
He knew things weren’t good here but he had been hoping for somewhat better news than the government has collapsed and a monster is purging everyone…
Black stared gloomily at the fire and sputtered a few words out of cracked lips, “any safe passages?”
The old man laughed, “You climb?”
Black expected that answer. He wondered if his new hands could act like the climbing claws that the Nians used.
Nians didn’t use the bridges; they climbed, scampered, swung and jumped among the trees like camouflaged bugs.
Walking on the bridge in wartime was a death sentence.
The old man and the girl were at least 7 days walk from the Eyer exit, and he was too old to climb and thus make the trek among the treetops. This poor girl was his escort but she was just as exposed as he was down here.
Perhaps they have scouts in the trees keeping them safe.
He peered up but it was dark and he could see nothing.
The old man laughed knowingly.
“Nians don’t attack at night, too easy to fall.”
Black nodded, Nians feared one thing above all else – death on the forest floor.
Most Nians didn’t speak as clearly as this old man, they spoke hard and sharp, neglecting prepositions. He must have been quite high-up, someone important, a relic of the dying era.
He continued to ponder this situation but before he knew it he had nodded off.
His nightmares were dark and distant and when he woke the pair was gone, he was alone again but this time armed with some piece of insight.
The forest was at war and he was on the losing side; he was walking straight into genocide. These people had pent-up anger against the outsiders and no one represented forced Nian civility more than the Laasters.
He ran the options in his head again, perhaps an army of Eyer Knights chasing him through wide open farmland could actually turn out to be a better course of action.
Nah, I’ve come too far. Getting killed by Nians is as good a plan as any for now.
It was with this thought in his head that he noticed the small fresh specks of blood near the smoking embers.
He cursed to himself as he felt the three knives pierce the back of his jacket.
