Chapter 20 | Part 5

Eldric found the body at first light.

He’d gone to check the perimeter, a habit so ingrained he did it before eating, before speaking, before acknowledging that the sun had risen. Maris heard him leave and come back. The time between was too long.

“Nobody move,” he said from the rim of the ravine. His sword was already drawn. “Dulint. Come up here. Just you.”

The others waited. Maris counted heartbeats. Thirty-seven before Dulint’s shadow returned to the rim, and even from below she could see how his posture had changed. Stiffer. Older.

“Balin, stay with Maris and Xandor.” Dulint’s voice carried the particular flatness he used when he needed everyone to obey without questions. “Don’t come up.”

They came up anyway.

The Frost Giant lay twenty paces from the ravine, face down in the frost-bitten grass. Maris had felt the presence tracking them for days, the patient shadow at the edge of her perception. She’d assumed it was another Frost Giant from the ambush, a straggler following their scent, waiting for the right moment to strike.

It would never strike at anything again.

The giant had been killed with precision that made the ambush look clumsy. No wasted cuts. No defensive wounds. Whatever had done this had struck once, from behind, severing the spine at the base of the skull. The giant hadn’t even had time to turn around.

But that wasn’t what made Dulint’s face look like carved stone.

A message had been cut into the giant’s back. Not carved, not scratched. Cut. Deep, deliberate strokes through leather and flesh, the letters formed with the care of a calligrapher working in wet clay.

GIVE US THE BEACON.

Four words. Common trade script. No dialect, no flourish, nothing that identified the author. Just a demand, inscribed on a body left close enough to find.

“Not a giant,” Eldric said. He was studying the ground around the body, reading tracks the way Maris read visions. “Look at the prints. Boots, not bare feet. Two sets, both the same size, both the same stride. Military training. Moving in formation even out here.”

“Giants don’t write in trade script,” Xandor added. He hadn’t looked at the body directly. He was watching the treeline. “And they don’t send messages. They send war parties.”

“So who?” Balin’s voice was tight. He was looking at the carved letters with the expression of someone trying to understand a language he didn’t speak.

“Someone who wants the Beacon,” Maris said. “Someone who knows we have it.”

“Someone who found us before we found the fragment.” Eldric crouched by the nearest boot prints and measured them against his hand. “These tracks are old. Two days, maybe three. They’ve been watching us since before the cave.”

Dulint was silent. He stood over the body with the pack pressed to his chest, the Beacon pulsing inside it, louder now, stronger, as if the fragment’s integration had turned up the volume on a signal that was already too loud.

“The fragment changed the broadcast,” Dulint said quietly. “Made it stronger. Wider. More… specific.” He looked at Maris. “You felt it. In the cave. Something noticed.”

“Something was already noticing,” Maris said. “This just made it easier for them to find us.”

Eldric stood. “We move. Different direction than the Beacon wants. We need distance, cover, and a place to think.”

“The Beacon won’t like that,” Dulint said.

“The Beacon doesn’t get a vote.”

They buried the tracks as best they could and left the giant’s body where it lay. There was no time for decency. The two sets of boot prints led away from the body in a straight line northwest, unhurried, confident. Whoever had left the message wasn’t running. They were waiting.

They walked fast through the morning, angling east where the Beacon wanted north, trading speed for cover in a stretch of dense forest that swallowed sound and light. Eldric led, setting a pace that left no room for conversation. Maris focused on putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to think about the face in the vision, the words carved in flesh, the things that hunted them now.

At midday, they stopped long enough for water.

“These aren’t bandits,” Eldric said. He hadn’t sat down. “Bandits are opportunistic. This is a retrieval team. They know what we’re carrying, they know what it does, and they want it intact.”

“How do you know they want it intact?” Balin asked.

“Because we’re still alive.” Eldric scanned the canopy above them. “A team this skilled could have taken us at any point. They killed the giant to show they could, and they left a note instead of an arrow. That’s professional restraint. They’re giving us a chance to hand it over.”

“And if we don’t?”

Eldric didn’t answer that.

Dulint pulled the pack open and looked at the Beacon. The fragment sat beside it, both pulsing in unison, and the seams on the Beacon’s surface had widened slightly since the cave. Through the largest gap, Maris caught a glimpse of something that didn’t look like metal. Dark. Textured. Wet.

She looked away.

“We can’t give it to them,” Dulint said. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it wants. But I know giving it to people who carve messages into bodies isn’t the answer.”

“Then we need to move faster than them and farther than they expect.” Eldric tightened his pack straps. “East, not north. Get away from the Beacon’s heading, find somewhere defensible, figure out our next step.”

“The Beacon is pointing north,” Xandor said. “Toward the next fragment. If we go east, we lose the trail.”

“Better than losing our lives.”

The druid looked at Dulint. The old dwarf looked at Maris. Maris, still exhausted from the vision, still tasting blood, still seeing that dark face behind her eyes, looked at the ground.

“The person in my vision,” she said. “The drow. He’s connected to the Beacon. I don’t know how. But every time the Beacon gets stronger, the vision gets clearer. If we stop pursuing the fragments, we might lose the connection.”

“And if we keep pursuing them,” Eldric said, “we might lose everything else.”

Silence.

“Compromise,” Dulint said finally. “We go east for now. Put distance between us and the hunters. But we don’t abandon the heading entirely. We arc. East, then north, then west to reconnect.” He looked at Eldric. “Slower, but alive.”

Eldric considered it. Nodded once.

They moved east through the forest, five people carrying a burden they didn’t choose, pursued by something they didn’t understand, following a signal they couldn’t explain.

Behind them, the message on the giant’s back dried in the sun.

Ahead, the Beacon pulsed and pointed, patient and relentless, toward the pieces it needed to become whole.

End of Chapter 20.5 —> 21.1: The Black Garden: The Borderlands