[Severed Divinity] 37. Ominous Shadow (Patreon)

What Isen had told Talis about there being people only he could find was aspirational more than anything concrete. Isen didn’t sense much opportunity at all in the destroyed town and had no reason to believe that survivors in hiding would trigger his sixth sense.

The collapsed building he’d decided to investigate was the first location to evoke anything obvious from the sixth sense, though it reeked of danger rather than opportunity. Better than nothing at all.

The interior of the three-story building was a confounding shadowscape, the missing roof and half-eaten upper floors coating the center of the first floor in blindingly bright illumination that left the shadows all the more impenetrable. The building’s first story looked like a small restaurant, with capsized square tables and broken wooden chairs. A thin bed had crashed onto the floor and splintered, having slid from one of the upper floors. The mattress was gray from soot.

Isen sniffed. He didn’t smell blood.

On instinct, he squinted his eyes and focused on his ability to perceive ambient energy. There was something here that he’d sensed from outside. He’d cleaned up a few lurking drayavin in Shevenar, but this felt different. More insidious, like a spider lying in wait, patient, not rushing forward in the brutish manner all drayavin so far had shared.

Then, he saw it—a figure in the corner, sitting under a fallen table. Small and humanoid, like a child. Dangerous.

Some monsters were bipedal, like the tier one wolven threats he had hunted in the depths. Isen didn’t question whether it was a monster or not—it wasn’t a real child, and it needed to die.

He considered getting in close to slash its throat or impale its vitals, but he felt a harrowing chill at the thought. He didn’t think it would let him get so close without retaliating, and he didn’t even know what it was. It was just watching him as he stood in the entrance.

Since the monster couldn’t be more than tier two, Isen knew it wasn’t intelligent enough to hold a conversation. There would be no reasoning with it.

So he tried to coax it out of the shadows, grabbing one of the chairs and lobbing it at the corner where the monster was lurking.

It disappeared, which sent Isen on edge. In the space where it had lurked, he saw a hatch in the floor that probably led to a cellar. Swallowing, the sense of danger omnipresent, he approached the hatch. If a monster sat on the door… perhaps there was something of interest behind it.

Isen wished he had the Shard of Erasmus in his right hand and an energy ball in his left, but even now, when he was alone in the ruined city, he held off. Unless his life was in imminent danger, he planned to rely on Druinala’s sword and the power of his tempered body.

With every step, he scanned the surroundings, waiting for an abnormality in the mist, but he didn’t see the monster. When he reached the hatch, he sliced out with the short sword, just in case the monster was somehow evading his perception, but cut only air.

He pulled on the hatch. It was locked.

“Hello?” he called out, speaking Eldrassin. “I come from Shevenar to help.” Not the most eloquent of statements, but Isen thought it sufficient if there really were people hiding. Even if elves had been sheltering in the basement for days, tier ones could survive longer than baseline people without food and water. If the drayavin had razed the city hours after leaving Shevenar, the longest these people could have been in hiding was five days.

Isen waited. Then, belying his expectations, he heard muffled speech on the other side. He couldn’t understand what was said, but any sign of life was enough.

He stepped off the hatch and waited, scanning the shadows.

The hatch opened and a half elf man with blistered lips appeared, standing on a set of stairs. He brandished a knife. Upon seeing Isen’s armored form, he relaxed, then started visibly shaking.

He launched into a veritable tirade in elvish, one that Isen struggled to follow. He can’t tell I’m human, Isen realized. Even with his helmet on, most refugees recognized him by now as the lone human tier two. With his ears covered in the Elven Lands, strangers would assume him a half elf.

“Stop,” Isen said. “Do you speak common?”

The man blinked. “I do.”

“Great,” he replied, switching over. “Again, from the start.”

***

Isen led twenty half elves out of the ruined building and onto the street. He’d already told the few parents to cover the eyes of the children—two girls and a boy, between six and ten—and carry them on their backs. That’s what they had done in the bloodiest parts of Shevenar.

Seeing the faces of the elves as they stepped into the open, Isen knew none of them were prepared for the carnage. He thought through what Talis had told him upon entering the city, about shielding young people from witnessing terrible atrocities. Isen thought that just because these people were older than him didn’t mean they deserved to be shielded any less. It wasn’t a question of age. Isen didn’t want to be shielded from horrors—he wanted to fight them.

Isen moved without thinking through the city. In his head, he was taking the elves back to the front gates, but that wasn’t where his feet took him.

The rescued elves didn’t complain at the rivulets of blood crusting over the cobblestones. They held their noses and looked down when they crossed an avenue strewn with dead bodies, but even then, they remained silent aside from wordless moans and the high-pitched sobs of the children.

Only when they reached what was evidently a tradesmen district did one of the women grab Isen’s attention by clearing her throat. “My brother’s shop is over there,” she said, pointing. She had a piece of cloth tied around her face to block out the smell. “Please… I need to see.”

Isen flinched, looked back at the others, then nodded slowly. The door was missing, the frame marred by three deep claw marks. Otherwise, it was mostly intact. Isen turned to the woman. “Are you sure?”

She nodded, her lips trembling under the makeshift mask, her eyes watering. The other elves held back, though one man, ostensibly the woman’s partner, squeezed her hand before standing back with their young daughter.

“Let me go in first,” Isen said.

This shop hadn’t burned down since it was entirely made of stone aside from the door, but it reeked of smoke and gore, which was everywhere. Isen’s breath froze as he beheld the scene of three people’s last, terrified moments.

There was a thin, blood spattered tablecloth draped over a counter. Tenderly, Isen dragged the bodies together, then draped the tablecloth over them. It was a man, a woman, and what might have once been a teenage girl, though it was hard to tell with the bloat.

Isen returned to the door to find the elven woman already looking at him and the covered bodies. Tears fell freely down her face. She entered the shop, but rather than stopping by the dead, she proceeded to a back room. The door was intact and locked. She withdrew a key from a satchel and inserted it; the door clicked open.

The interior was little larger than a locker. There was a metal safe and an intricately carved bow with inscriptions along the inner curve, along with a leather quiver filled with only three steel-gray arrows.

She turned to Isen and gave him a tragic smile. “The bow was our grandfather’s.” She wiped her eyes. “Can you use it?”

Isen had never used a bow before, but he’d admired Druinala’s. “Yes.”

She turned and knelt by the safe. “It’s yours if you use it to kill the drayavin that did this.” The safe popped open and she grabbed a skull-sized sack that clinked as she stood. In her other hand, she held the bow and quiver, her arm shaking from the strain.

Isen took them. They were heavier than he expected, especially the bow and the arrows, as though made from marble. He shifted the white fur pack to the left and put the quiver over his right shoulder, then held the bow in his left hand. It was awkward, but until he figured out a better arrangement, it would suffice.

When he exited the shop, he beheld Allezin talking to the other elves. The warrior turned to face Isen, his gaze stern. “It is remarkable that you found people, but you should have taken them to the front gates immediately.”

What a greeting. “I thought that’s where I was going, but I must have gone the wrong way,” Isen replied. He knew it sounded like a poor excuse, but it was, ironically, the truth.

Allezin’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly, and he eyed the bow, but made no comment on it.

“I saw a monster,” Isen continued, trying to change the subject.

“I know. These elves say that a creature had taken up position over their cellar door, preventing them from leaving. Ironically, the monster is probably what saved them. If they had left earlier…”

“Did they describe it?”

Allezin shook his head.

Isen adjusted his grip on the bow. “I’ve never seen a monster like it. Humanoid, small, like a child. Almost undetectable in the shadows.” He almost mentioned that he’d only seen it due to his enhanced perception from the radiant depths. He figured that was one more oddity better left unsaid. “I threw a chair at it, and it completely disappeared. No traces. Gone.”

If such wraiths stalked the depths, Isen thought he would have known about them. The ability to hide in the shadows wasn’t as helpful there, since everything was in darkness, but if such a monster had the ability to rapidly escape, or even move instantly within shadows… they’d be a powerful threat.

Allezin’s expression darkened. “Let’s return to the front gates.” He pulled out a strange shell with several holes bored into it and blew, producing a sonorous, resonant tone that sounded impossibly loud. Isen cupped his ears and gritted his teeth, but Allezin didn’t seem to care about his discomfort. The tier three simply stored the shell back into a pouch on his belt, then led the way back, motioning for Isen to anchor the back.

Allezin periodically roved ahead and cleared the worst of the carnage for the civilian elves, but the front gates were too gory to bother cleaning. When they reached the final turn before the gates, he instructed the refugees to close their eyes and grab hands, forming a chain from himself to Isen. Then he led them single file to the gate, kicking bodies away as he went.

Only when everyone stood on lush grass did he tell the half elves to open their eyes. “You’re safe,” he exclaimed in Eldrassin. The rest of what he said was spotty, but Isen roughly interpreted it as, “We’ll take you to join the refugees from Shevenar. Until then, take some time to say goodbye.”

Allezin walked away from the elves and gestured for Isen to join him. He pulled off his black-metal helmet; Isen followed suit. Allezin stared into Isen’s eyes for an uncomfortably long few seconds, then exhaled and shook his head. “How experienced are you at hunting monsters?”

Isen cocked his head. “I helped fight the tier three serpent in Shevenar.”

Allezin’s lips quirked. “I’m aware. Lumina told me how you distracted it and got yourself flung halfway across the city, coincidentally close to me. I also heard from the guards how you helped hold the line against the drayavin. They aren’t monsters, of course, but they’re close enough.” He paused. “Perhaps a better question is, how many different kinds of monsters have you seen?”

Isen didn’t want to answer that question. “Enough to know an anomaly when I see one.”

Allezin hummed. “I don’t think it was a drayavin raid that destroyed this town. The destruction wasn’t thorough enough.”

Isen’s jaw nearly dropped. Not thorough enough? “There were drayavin corpses, though,” he pointed out. “Drayavin were definitely here.”

“We primarily saw drayavin bodies on the spikes outside and around the gates. Even if the drayavin swept through and annihilated the town guards, their slaughter shouldn’t have been so one-sided. I think this was partly the work of a tier three.”

“… Someone from Dray?” Isen asked.

“No,” Allezin said simply, his tone airy and light, disconnected. His eyes scanned the horizon as though searching for truths in the wispy clouds. “This mage is Eldrassin.”