An Errant Shape

「 “An Errant Shape” is a fantasy short story. It is the first chapter in a continuous series that I am planning to release on this site. In my opinion, this is the best entry point for my fiction. Like the majority of my stories though, it contains profane language and graphic descriptions of violence, so it may not be suitable for younger readers.」

Part One

 
     The fog accumulated on the knight’s armor as he stood in a serene forest. He knelt to the mud and studied the tracks he found imprinted there. A wagon with a heavy load, ox drawn and accompanied by at least three traveling on foot. They weren’t even trying to hide their trail, but he couldn’t blame them for having their priorities straight by proceeding through the glen as fast as possible.
     A pained howl pierced the stillness from overhead. The knight looked up through the sea of conifers and saw a starback perched on one of them. Its fleshy wings were splayed to each side, combining with its back and three-pronged tail to create a red bioluminescent star.
     The knight looked around and saw more stars light up in the distance. He knew they would gather around him, waiting for their calls to draw in a predator that would leave them a feast of marrow. The knight’s armor shuddered and from within the yelping call of a lenshii in heat reverberated through the forest, shaking the needles on the trees near him.
     The starbacks scattered. The knight knew that if there was a real lenshii nearby, he would be dead if it found him. But lenshiis were slow and starbacks patient, so he began to follow the trail without dawdling.
     The wheel tracks wound through the valley. The knight followed it uphill, being greeted by the blinding light of the setting sun as he reached a shallow plateau. After struggling to pull himself onto its rocky surface, he observed that the forest thinned out in this area. The thieves probably chose to camp out here for that very feature, he thought. Less trees for starbacks to perch on and more visibility to see predators approaching.
     The knight kept his hand on the six flanged mace at his hip. The sun impaired his already poor vision, so he began to follow his sense of smell instead, deducing through the smoky fragrance of a campfire that his quarry was close.
     As the scent intensified, he crouched down and used a thicket of ferns to cover his approach. He hoped that the dark green paint he regularly applied to his armor would prevent the sun giving him away, but there was little that could be done for the clanging of the sabatons on his feet.
     The campsite came into view as he carefully crawled through the brush. He strained his vision to make out its features. The wagon was parked under a makeshift tent. Its now resting ox was hitched to a tree, and a small boar roasted on a spit over a measly fire. Two adult human men with beards drooping down onto their padded leather garb sat by the fire, chowing down on shanks of meat. One sat by a woodcutter’s axe and the other leaned on a pike stuck into the dirt. An elven woman sharpened one of the weapons strapped to her tall back with a whetstone next to the wagon, and a dwarf was setting up sleeping tents with a crossbow slung at their hip.
     He could hear one of the humans, the one leaning on his pike, yelling at the dwarf. “You’re wasting daylight preparing for something that’s not going to happen, Flakti!”
     The dwarf’s stout body rumbled, their rocky lips cracking apart to speak. The knight could smell their sulfur-filled breath enter the air. “You’d rather run through the wood under moonlight? A pitched tent is not taken by wind, iron-blood.”
     “Your proverbs won’t stop a lenshii from smashing our heads in, sand-eater. I’m not the only one who heard that call, right?”
     The knight saw the elf raise her lower set of green arms and unleash a flurry of gestures. He knew how to read a decent amount of northern elvish sign but was too far away to discern her speech.
     “Wh-What’s she saying?”, the man with an axe asked.
     “She’s suggesting you have some patience. The client is supposed to be here within the hour. If they arrive on time, we leave before moonrise. Otherwise, we should stay the night”, Flakti explained.
     “What about the lenshii?”
     “That was a mating call,” the axe man observed, “Slow bastards’ll be rutting until they pass out.”
     “I still don’t like it,” the pike man complained.
     “You’re welcome to leave, Scoira,” Flakti advised.
     Scoira grunted but didn’t move, continuing to clean his shank. The knight figured from their conversation that he needed to make a decision. The thieves were no elite force, but for their buyer to be willing to meet them in the wilderness implied that whoever was coming had significant security. He could not take them together; thus, he had to deal with the thieves and reclaim the wagon now.
     The knight reached into the leather sack at his hip and retrieved a smooth grey pellet the size of an apricot. He stood up from the brush, confident they would not notice him in time. His arm bent backward; he wore no armor on his knees or elbows, but his arm bent even further than that advantage should allow. He slung the pellet forward and it careened into the campsite and right into its intended target: the campfire.
     A white flash exploded out of the orange flames, blinding all eyes in the vicinity. Thankfully for the knight, his vision, poor as it was, replaced itself in an instant. Amidst the confused yelling of the thieves, he charged.
     Scoira was first in his path. The man struggled to pull his pike from the dirt. The knight grabbed his mace with his right hand, holding it just above the pommel. He swung upward, using the full extent of his unnatural range of articulation to power the blow. The mace’s flanges smashed Scoira’s jaw and cut a crimson gash up his face and through his skull, exposing pink brain.
     He died instantly, slumping to the ground with his hands limply clasped to the pike. The knight surveyed his remaining foes. The dwarf’s sensitive eyes would keep them stumbling by the tents for a few more seconds. The elf was already charging him, but they still had some distance to travel. The other human was the most pressing threat, his axe already in hand, his vision returning, and him only being a few yards away.
     The knight ripped the pike out of the dirt and threw it at the man. The throw was weak but accurate enough. A spurt of blood burst from the man’s shoulder as the pike knocked him off his feet.
 The elf reached the knight. She held thin scimitars in both her top arms and katar push-daggers in her lower set. Her pink eyes flashed with rage as she slashed her swords in an X-shape. The knight kicked off the ground and managed to avoid their paths, but the elf anticipated his escape and lunged forward with both her daggers. They caught him right at the waist, sneaking under his plate cuirass, through his tunic until they were stuck half their length inside him.
     The elf sneered yet failed to notice that no blood, neither human red, elven amber, or dwarven yellow, poured out of the wounds she inflicted. The knight gripped one of her lower arms with his free hand and swung his helmet into her head. An ugly brown bruise flowered on her olive-green face as she fell to the ground.
     The knight raised his mace, ignoring the daggers still protruding from his waist, and swung down. Yet before the mace could smash its prey, a crossbow bolt streaked through the air and into the knight’s raised gauntlet. It did not pierce his wrist, but the denting impact slacked his grip, dropping the mace to the ground.
     The elf seized the opportunity to pull her knees to her chest and kick the knight off her with both feet. He tumbled backward onto the ground. He lifted his head and saw the dwarf reloading their crossbow, the elf skillfully leaping to her feet, and the human was still writhing on the ground, stifling screams as the pike stuck out from his shoulder.
     The knight lifted himself off his back. He would’ve risked the elf’s slashes and lunged for his mace, but she had already picked it off the ground. His foes were eyeing him cautiously as he continued to rise to his feet, probably hesitant to land another futile blow.
     However, their trepidation was not one-sided. The knight was not expecting any of the thieves to be skilled enough to disarm him. The only weapons at his disposal were the push-daggers and his own hunting knife. He could throw another flash pellet into the fire, but that was unlikely to buy him the same effect a second time. The disadvantage was now his own, yet his resourcefulness was not spent.
     The knight doubled over once more and reproduced the starbacks’ imitation of a wounded animal at an earsplitting volume.
     ‘He’ll bring the whole forest down on us! Shut him up!’, the elf signed to Flakti.
     The dwarf wordlessly raised his crossbow and loosed a bolt that flew straight into the knight’s helm. It found a weak spot in the seam around his visor and buried itself to the fletching. He fell to the ground, limp, and the howling ceased.
     “I-Is he dead?”, the human asked, a torn tent wrapped around their shoulder wound.
     “Clean hit to the head. Bastard must be dead,” Flakti gruffly claimed.
     The elf leaned over slightly and prodded the knight’s shoulder with her scimitar. Instantly his arm extended outward and snatched her ankle. He yanked her to the ground and dragged her toward himself. She was still armed, yet her flailing, disorganized blows didn’t even get past his plate. He hoisted them both back to their feet, spinning the frail elf around to dissuade Flakti’s bolts.
     Then he ripped one of the daggers from his waist and held it to her throat. “Everyone drops their weapons, or she dies,” he declared in a deep, resonant voice.
     The elf’s scimitars and his mace fell to the ground without delay, but the dwarf kept their crossbow trained on him and the human tightly clutched their axe.
     ‘Listen to him!’, the elf signed.
     “If you want to make a deal, there needs to be give and take,” Flakti firmly declared.
     “Her life for your surrender,” the knight reiterated.
     “You’ll just club us when our weapons are down. No. The deal is that you let us leave without a fight. Take the wagon. Even if it’s not what you’re here for, you can sell it to the people coming here; they don’t care who delivers it.”
     The knight looked from Flakti to the human and smelled the air. The dwarf’s emotions were difficult to discern over their noxious sulfur, but the increased sweat and ammonia emanating from the human clearly broadcast his fear. Yet instead of concentrating on deciding whether the safety of letting them run was worth more than the bonus his employer promised for killing the thieves, the knight focused on a third scent that was wafting into the clearing, one that smelled like soil and mold.
     “You can keep her with you if you want insurance,” Flakti replied to the knight’s silence.
     ‘No! Tell him I go with you,’ the elf furiously signed.
     “You can keep her as a hostage until you ride out of the forest and then let her go. Easy as that.”
     The elf signed something more in protest, but the knight did not pay attention to her. Instead, his sight fixated on the area behind the wagon, where the sky was a deep red, and something’s black outline rose and shifted in the trees’ shadow.
     “Sh-She’s right! This bastard killed Scoira and you want to tuck tail and run?!”, the human protested as the shadow grew in size and definition, sprouting a pair of velvet-covered antlers.
     “Would you like to fight the immortal knight, lumberjack? With that wound?”
     Below the antlers emerged a round face dominated by concentric folds of cartilage that turned the massive creature’s head into a tailored funnel for sound. The knight could now confirm it to be a lenshii, creeping toward them so stealthily that even the ox did not notice its approach.
     “But we can’t leave her with him!”
     The elf tried to sign something, either a warning or another protest, yet the knight pressed his dagger closer to her throat to stop her. The lenshii emerged fully from the tree-line, dragging its bark covered, grub-like body out of the ground with two immense, gangly hands.
     “Would you like to take her place?! Shut up and—” The lenshii wrapped its fingers around Flakti’s entire rocky body and lifted them into the air. The dwarf screamed in the timbre of screeching chalk as the animal bashed their head into the ground. Their hardy exoskeleton saved them from instant death, but the concussion silenced them as the lenshii ripped their thorax and abdomen apart.
     The knight, elf, and lumberjack remained still and silent as the blind lenshii nibbled at Flakti’s exposed yellow flesh with the beaks on the tips of its fingers. However, the dwarf’s scream had awoken the wagon’s ox, which bellowed and pulled at the leash that tethered it to a tree. The lenshii dropped its food and crept toward the ox.
     The knight knew he could not drag the wagon out of the forest by himself. That was the only concern in his mind as he unsheathed his hunting knife and threw it at the lumberjack from over the elf’s shoulder. It careened through the air and sunk into the lumberjack’s thigh. He shrieked and the lenshii immediately corrected its course to pursue his scream and the renewed scent of blood that accompanied it.
     The lumberjack cupped his mouth to stifle his screams, but the lenshii already knew it was pursuing wounded prey. He began to limp away from the camp, making a genuinely impressive effort of it too. Yet both the knight and the lenshii knew he was already doomed. Lenshiis did not understand the concept of exhaustion. However slow they were, they could track their food’s sounds and smells for leagues on end, keeping up at a constant pace until their legs gave out. And the lumberjack could not hope for the creature to break off to consume the body of Scoira and Flakti; lenshiis were territorial and preferred their meat fresh.
     After the lenshii crept off the edge of the plateau, the elf signed a message, ‘Let me go. Please, take the wagon, I don’t care. Just let me leave.’
     The knight shoved his dagger into the soft bottom of her jaw, up through her wooden skull, and into its resting place in her brain. Her limbs spasmed as he lowered her to the ground. The knight looked from her body, to Scoira’s, and to Flakti’s. He lamented internally that they were killed so roughly. It puzzled him that humans like his employer preferred their trophies to have unmarred faces. Nonetheless, he walked over to the lumberjack’s abandoned axe and resumed his work with no further interruptions.

「This is a work of fiction. Any references to real places, real people, or historical events are used fictitiously. Other characters, names, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.」

Copyright © 2021 Matthew Cammarano
All rights reserved.