more human than bestial, and where paws should have been there were hands instead-or things that had once been hands, before the fae had deformed them.
Were the creatures fleshborn or faeborn? If they were merely animals that the dark fae had misshapen, they would be relatively easy to kill. But if they were true faeborn creatures, birthed by this planet’s malevolent power rather than by living animals, there was no telling what it would take to dispatch them. Some faeborn manifestations took on physical forms so real that they became dependent upon their flesh, and they died like true living creatures if their bodies were destroyed. Others flitted about the night in dreamlike wisps, the nightmare energies of their creation providing the illusion of flesh but not its substance. Against the latter species there was little defense but faith.
They all fed on man. That was the one terrible constant of Erna: all the creatures that drew their life from the consciousness of man had to feed on him in order to survive. But exactly what manner of sustenance a particular manifestation would require was anyone’s guess. Faith had seen some gruesome things in her life, in the aftermath of faeborn feeding, but she also knew that there were creatures who sipped from the emotional exudates of a man’s sleeping mind as delicately as a socialite sipped fine wine, their only spoor a shimmer of darkness at the border of his dreams.
Gazing into the crimson eyes of these beasts, she suspected they were not the delicate sort.
If they all rushed her at once the sheer weight of their bodies would bring her down, she knew; there was no way she could defend herself against so many. A cold sweat trickled down her neck as she prepared herself for the onslaught. At least I will go down fighting, she thought, her hand tightening about her sword. And I will take as many of these creatures down with me as God allows.
Then a new one stepped out from the shadows. It was taller than the others, but also thinner, and its proportions were disturbingly human. Its coat was not a mottled grey, but white-sickly white, crusted yellow about the edges-and its fur was stained with mud and worse. Its paws splayed out upon the ground like human hands, stunted and twisted but with recognizable fingers and even fingernails. And as she looked into the creature’s eyes she saw madness in their depths. Not some simple bestial madness, the rabid insanity of an animal brain pushed to the breaking point by having to live in this terrible environment. This was something darker. More frightening.
More human.
The others moved out of its way as it came toward her. Was this one their alpha, or something even more than that? Suddenly the beasts nearest Faith began to edge toward her, bringing her attention back to them; she swung her sword fiercely in their direction, trying to frighten them back. And indeed there was a spark of fear in their eyes as they backed off a bit, suddenly uncertain. But not in the eyes of the white one. The madness in that one’s eyes was a burning ember that did not waver even when the blessed steel sliced through the air right before its face. Could it not see the blessings that guarded her blade? Or did it just not care about such things? The latter would suggest that it was a fleshborn creature, despite its ghastly form. Which meant that it would be vulnerable to a simple physical assault.
She moved quickly-so quickly! — stepping into their ranks before any of them had a chance to respond. With one hand she swept her torch about her in wide, aggressive arcs, driving the nearer ones back from her, while her other hand tightened its grip about the blessed sword, preparing for a single blow. She knew that one was all she would get before the pack found its courage again and attacked her. She had to make it count.
A dark mass hurtled toward her from one side. She thrust her torch into the face of the wolf just before it hit her; it howled in pain as its jaws snapped shut about the burning brand instead of her flesh. But its body slammed into her with stunning force, driving her down to one knee; her ribs exploded in red-hot shards of pain. As she struggled to her feet again, the powerful jaws of another wolf closed about her left calf. She thrust the torch down in its direction, heedless of the flames that flared up around her own body as she did so. But this beast was not to be frightened away so easily. It locked its teeth tightly about her leg, and although it could not bite through the polished steel of her greave, its dead weight meant she could no longer maneuver freely.
Suddenly they were all rushing toward her, and if the ones in the front ranks had second thoughts about facing either her fire or her blade, the ones in the back ranks were not allowing them to hesitate. For an instant she was overcome by a terrible sense of deja vu, remembering the sheer mass of the peasant mob that had overwhelmed her companions. And she remembered the blow that had skewed her own aim just as she had moved to strike at the demon; whatever happened to her in this battle, she could not allow herself to fail like that again.
Muttering a prayer to the One God under her breath, she thrust toward the white wolf with all her strength, gritting her teeth against the blinding pain that followed. The sheer force of the move jerked the wolf on her leg several feet forward, and the jaws of others snapped shut on empty air where she had stood only a moment before. Startled, the white wolf began to back away from her, but the other members of the pack were gathered too closely behind it, and it was forced to stand its ground. As Faith’s blade pierced its flank it was clear she had failed to strike the killing blow she’d hoped for, but the wound was long and deep and crimson blood sprayed out of it. She put all her weight behind her sword, desperate to reach some vital organ. But the effort pulled her off balance, and even as the white wolf struggled to free itself from her blade she could feel herself falling. She dropped the torch and reached out to save herself, but it was too late. Powerful bodies buffeted her from both sides, and the fangs of one beast slid beneath her left bracer, piercing at the cloth and flesh beneath it. The ground rushed up to meet her even as the white wolf whipped its head from side to side, trying to jerk itself free from her blade And then there was impact.
And blinding pain.
The sound of a wolf howling.
And darkness.
If the region surrounding the Forest had seemed wild, its interior was chaos incarnate. Currents of creative and destructive fae collided at random intervals, setting the whole of the Forest alight with sprays of ice-blue power. Waves of emotional energy, raw and unfettered, surged across the landscape like angry surf. No living species could possibly establish a stable presence in such a realm, Tarrant thought, but that hardly mattered. Evolution would be driven forward at such a pace here that as soon as soon as any one life-form failed, a dozen new ones would take its place.
To his eyes it was beautiful.
The currents of power that surged about his feet might be chaotic in their manifestation, but they had the potential to become something else-something greater-and he wondered what kind of effort it would take to tame them, to force them to adopt a more ordered course. The creatures that hissed and howled in the darkness surrounding him might be warped constructs, but a strong enough sorcerer could redesign the faeborn ones, and the fleshborn ones could be urged toward a more reasonable evolution. Even the trees overhead, with their warped and tangled branches, could be forced to serve an ordered purpose. Twist the branches even more, divide them many times over to create a fine webwork of filaments, and the canopy would trap autumn’s leaves as they fell, creating a shield of vegetative detritus thick enough to cast the Forest into perpetual twilight. Would the constructs of the dark fae mature more quickly if they were freed from the threat of sunlight entirely? Or would that only increase the power’s volatility, making its creations even less stable, less likely to survive? To Tarrant they were all fascinating questions.
Deep within his soul he could feel an ancient hunger stirring, human ambition surfacing in the black pool of his soul like a drowning man gasping for breath. He had been a scientist back in his mortal life, and his experiments in forced evolution had produced many of the Terran simulacra species that this world now took for granted. But his current lifestyle as an itinerant predator did not allow for the luxury of a laboratory-or a scholar’s library, or any kind of permanent place in which to store the specimens that scientific experimentation required. He’d had to relinquish that whole part of his existence when he left Merentha, and since then his intellectual inquiries had been confined to a strictly internal landscape. It was one of the most frustrating facets of his transformation.
But this place could become his laboratory now. He could mold new species to his will here and test their adaptation, using the volatile currents to accomplish in a few generations what might take centuries elsewhere. His soul hungered for that kind of intellectual stimulation as powerfully as his altered body now hungered for human blood.
