Chapter 1: 1: A Walk in the Woods

The Greyfeather Hills were known across the Kingdom of Gradia for their beauty. Smooth, rolling greens in the spring, gentle yellows and oranges as summer became autumn, and soft greys pinpricked with the fierce red of berries in the winter. Atop some of the higher hills, travellers were blessed with a clear line of sight all the way to the southern coast and the steel-blue sea beyond. Amidst the many woodlands of the region could be found an astounding array of plants and creatures living in wonderful harmony; tumbling through valleys and over rocks, swift yet tranquil, were slender streams and rushing rivers alike, the whisper of their bubbling and coursing suffusing the landscape like a calming blanket.

None of this mattered much to Wren, who was thoroughly fed up with the whole place.

“Go on a pilgrimage,” she was muttering as she trudged through a valley between two hills dotted with pink-blossomed trees. “Right at the beginning of spring, no less, when it’s still bloody cold and wet and - ugh.” Her booted foot came down on what had looked like a solid patch of grass and pressed it down a good ten inches, squirting cold, muddy water all over her as if she’d stepped on a sponge.

Wren fought the urge to sit straight down in petulant dismay, because all that would achieve would be an extremely damp rear end to match her foot. She settled for pressing her palms into her face (making sure to only push her skin upwards, of course, because her mother had been drilling into her since she was barely a teenager that she must take every possible step to avoid getting wrinkles, and after all what use would she be to anyone if she had natural signs of ageing on her face?!?!?!, heaven forbid) and letting out an impassioned groan that might have sounded a bit like a cross between a horse’s whinny and a goose’s honk to anyone who’d heard it.

“It’s fine,” she told herself. “Got one pair of socks that are just about dry. Just having a nice walk. Getting fresh air and… something spiritual or other. This was aaaaaaall worth it.” She shook her head and pressed on through the bog, muttering as she went. “Aaaaaaaaall worth it. All worth it.”

Because if it turned out not to be, well, that would just be incredibly irritating, and she couldn’t have that. Also - but of course this wasn’t the main thing on her mind, no, of course not - it would prove her wrong and her mother right, and that would not do. Not at all.

“Just a couple more days,” she told herself. “I think. Maybe.”

The fact was that she had no idea where she was. Somewhere near the south coast, which was good because a) that had been her planned route, and b) it meant she always had a reference point for the cardinal directions, so if she kept heading west she couldn’t possibly go wrong. Unless she’d somehow screwed it up so badly that this wasn’t the south coast at all but somewhere else entirely. Which seemed unlikely, and she really didn’t think she could’ve made a balls-up of that magnitude without realising, but then she was a city girl who’d never really been out of the capital in her entire thirty-two years of life - at least not without an awful lot of assistance. She’d never really had to do much for herself, although she thought it had generally been her mother that had forced all the help on her rather than letting her do things on her own - which was ironic, given how much her mother liked to complain these days about Wren’s perceived lack of independent capability.

Wren slapped herself in the face. “Stop thinking about your mother!” she muttered. “Come all this way to get away from - no, not to get away from her, you did this for yourself, but still, don’t let her follow you out here too…”

The funny thing was, it hadn’t even occurred to her when she left the capital that perhaps it was because she didn’t want to be around her mother. She’d genuinely thought she was doing it for herself, and yet the biggest reason she’d managed to motivate herself to keep walking was, well, to stick it to the woman out of whom she’d popped, all round and adorable (and, knowing her mother, immediately disappointing).

Still, if pure spite was what kept her putting one foot in front of the other, she’d take it.

So on through the hills she wandered, as noon turned to afternoon turned to evening. The sky turned orange-pink before her and royal blue behind.

~~~

As the light began to dwindle, she entered a patch of woodland where the trees were gnarled and lined with moss, and the messy nests of birds were clearly visible in the mostly bare creases between the boughs. She unslung her backpack from her shoulders, breathed a sigh of relief, and let it fall heavily to the ground; its fall was muffled by more verdun, pillowy moss.

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A different sound caught her attention.

A groan, one of pain and dismay. Human.

Wren froze, torn between curiosity and caution. Her body was telling her to stay away, that it might be a trap. Frankly, she was astounded she hadn’t already been robbed on her travels, as obviously unseasoned as she was. But another instinct, less cultivated but more earnest, wanted to help.

Or, at least, to see what it was so she could make an informed decision about whether to hightail it the hell out of there if there might be danger nearby.

So she picked up her backpack again and tiptoed towards the sound, trying to keep herself tucked away behind twisted trunks and poking her head out to look.

There, half-sitting half-lying with his head propped up against the base of a tree, was a man who was perhaps in his late forties or early fifties and who happened to have a three-foot-long branch sticking right out of his midsection.

Wren forgot caution and dashed over to him, also forgetting that she knew nothing about how to help someone with such a quandary as, er, impalement. “What happened?”

“Oh,” the man groaned, his eyelids fluttering. “You came to… to help me.”

“I, um.” Wren blinked. “I don’t know if I can help, but I -”

“I’m beyond saving,” he declared, waving dismissively. “Nothing can be done for me now, despite your noble intentions…” He burst into a fit of coughing that left the chest of his shirt splattered with little drops of red. “Or perhaps you simply found me so devastatingly… handsome that you couldn’t stay away. It’s happened before.”

Wren struggled for a moment to formulate a response that was both respectful to a dying man’s fragile ego and absolutely clear that she would in no way have been interested even if he hadn’t had a hole in his torso. Fortunately for her, the man ploughed on before she had to come up with anything.

“My name is Dachran,” he said, reaching for her hand. She politely but firmly declined, patting his hand down onto his own chest. “Dachran Mason. Who might you be, fair saviour?”

“I’m not your saviour,” Wren grumbled, sheer mundane dislike for Dachran’s attitude almost entirely overriding her shock and sympathy at the sight of a man on death’s door, “and I’m not fair either, for what it’s worth. Name’s Wren.”

His eyes widened. “That accent,” he murmured. “You’re from the Big Noise, aren’t you?”

Wren nodded reluctantly.

“I’ve never been,” Dachran said dreamily, a demeanour Wren suspected was more down to blood loss than anything else. “Is it as astounding as they say?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I hear there are a full eight dungeons…”

“More like twenty-eight,” said Wren, who in fact had very little idea how many dungeons there were in the capital other than that it was a lot.

“Ah!” proclaimed Dachran suddenly, making Wren jump. “Din! Great capital of our fair nation. What a wondrous achievement.”

“Look,” said Wren, “are you alright? I mean, not the stick you’ve got in you, more this whole… thing where you’re talking like you’re in a bad theatre production.”

Dachran’s eyes fixed on Wren for a moment. Then he let out a long sigh. “Ah, you’ve got me,” he said, in a voice that was suddenly much different. It was both less refined and far more endearing for the lack of pretence, far more natural in his mouth. His demeanour changed, embracing the slump of his posture rather than feigning uprightness. Wren immediately liked him far better. “I’m just a country boy, really. Not fancy like you lot up in the capital. I just wanted to feel like a proper gentleman in my last moments, you know?”

“Being a proper gentleman is… incredibly overrated,” said Wren. “I’ve met a few, and they’re all twats.”

Dachran laughed loudly and heartily at that - at least for a few seconds before descending into more blood-spraying coughs. “Noted,” he said. Then he took a deep, steadying breath, and when he next spoke his voice was closer to the artificial properness of before. “But, Lady Wren -”

“Not a lady.”

“Dearest Wren -”

“Nope.”

“Wren the traveller who happens to be the person with me as I approach the moment in which I shall breathe my last -”

“I’ll allow it.”

“Will you indulge me,” he pleaded, “in allowing me to share my tale with you?”

Wren’s eyebrows twisted quizzically. “Your tale,” she repeated.

“For,” pronounced Dachran, pushing himself up to more of a sitting position, “I have come far and seen much, only for my journey to end here with you. Will you hear this dying man’s final testament?”

Wren resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “But please don’t do the accent the whole time.”

Dachran squinted at her with apparent displeasure, but relented. “Alright,” he said. “My story starts not too far from here, on an afternoon not too unlike this one…”