Veilwood Forest - North-West Clearing
Lirael didn't breathe.
He had held his breath for twenty-three heartbeats and it was an elven thing to do and a very stupid thing to do when a dragon was about to breathe fire. But his cloak of living leaves had grown around him and the forest had fallen silent and if he breathed the thing in the clearing would hear him.
He was a scout of the Thornwatch, third branch, eighty-four years old. Like all elves in this world he had been born the same way humans were in a root-village that sheltered beneath the Mother Tree. He had tracked the Great One since he'd been thirty and all the hidden villagers knew the stories. The Great One was no mere beast, but a spirit serpent who was old when the first Zenithian stones were laid. He had once eaten a whole company of Zenithian knights during the Cleansing Year. Their blessed blades had crumbled on his scales and their court mages thrown fire and lightning and the great one had swallowed it. A calamity the forest tolerated for even calamities keep other calamities at bay.
Lirael had just seen him die.
Not to a hero but to things Lirael had no name for.
It had begun with odd humans, not Zenithians these had worn no color at all but white suits stained green, then darker shells and they were like beetles stood upright with metal skin. Lirael had thought them golems first, the southern empire sometimes bought golems from the dwarves in the mountains, hulking things of stone and bound mana.
These moved like people and spoke in a guttural tongue Lirael had never heard before, not Elvish, not Imperial Common, not even dwarvish. It sounded like stones grinding and they carried thunder sticks.
Lirael watched from the high root of an ironwood tree, body flat against the bark, as the Great One rose. He felt the familiar fear. The Great One's voice in his head, How dare you disturb the Great One, was the same voice that had made Lirael's older brother drop his bow twenty years ago and run. The Great One coiled to strike the small woman human who had touched him.
Then the beetle humans fired.
Lirael flinched. There was no incantation, no circle, no gathering of mana in elven magic even the slightest light spell needed three seconds of the air to shiver and shake as mana was pulled. These humans simply pointed their thunder sticks and the air cracked.
Blue trails, so fast Lirael could barely track them with elven eyes. They struck the Great One and his ancient scales, scales that had deflected elven moonsteel, sparked. Some bounced off, some did not, black blood hissed on the ground and the Great One roared, a sound that had made whole villages in root cellars, and these beetle humans did not run.
What are they, Lirael thought and for the first time in forty years of scouting his thoughts stuttered. Is that dwarvish? It looks like the boomsticks of the dwarves.
Lirael had seen dwarven boomsticks once, traded to the village for iron. The mountain dwarves were the only people in this world who knew metallurgy well enough to make them, long iron tubes that spat smoke and fire with a great boom, slow to reload, inaccurate. These were different, no smoke, no fire from the end, only blue light and they did not stop. Dwarven boomsticks fired once, then men spent half a minute reloading, these thunder sticks fired and fired and fired, like rain.
One of the beetle humans, smaller with a cracked face plate, ran straight into the Great One's charge. Any elven warrior would have been crushed but the beetle human's metal skin screamed and held, he was thrown, he bled inside his shell but he stood again.
They are wearing golems as clothes, Lirael thought wildly. No, they are wearing iron as skin. Are they inside the iron?
Then the Great One inhaled.
Lirael knew that inhale, every scout knew it. The forest around the Great One's throat would die first, moss smoking without flame and that was Dragon's Breath. The Great One had used it to carve the Southern Scar, a trench still blackened after a hundred years, when he inhaled you did not hide behind a log, but ran for half a kilometer and not died.
Lirael almost ran, his legs tensed but the beetle humans shouted at him something in their strange grinding language, short sharp barks, a warning even Lirael could feel, and they hurled themselves behind logs that should not have saved them.
The Breath fired. White, silent for half a second, then deafening, it erased a log, erased a tree and turned soil to glass. The heat hit Lirael even through his cloak and his leaves curled.
The clearing burned.
It should have been over, Lirael thought, the small humans should be ash. The Great One always won after Breath.
He was about to flee to warn Elder Saria that the Great One had returned to hunting when the forest shook.
Not from the serpent, but from east.
Trees shuddered, birds that had not fled the Breath now fled this, a rhythm of thud, too even, thud, thud, thud.
Four things stepped into the clearing.
Lirael's mind went blank, he forgot to breathe again.
They were spiders, no, walking houses. In this world, the most advanced thing was a dwarven steam cart in the mountain holds and even that was a rumor. Zenithia had horse carriages and war wagons. Nothing like this, six jointed legs as thick as a young ironwood, ending in wide pads that gripped mud without sinking, taller than the Great One's head, gray and scarred, a high mast on top, spinning, looking around with a red eye. They had no mana glow and Lirael reached out with his scout sense, the faint mana sight all Thornwatch are taught, and felt nothing, no spirit inside, no elemental binding, just cold, dead, silent metal, not golems, something else.
What are they, what forest spirit makes houses that walked?
Then the sides of two of them opened and more beetle humans poured out, twenty of them and Lirael realized with a cold drop in his stomach that the walking houses were not spirits, they were carriages. The beetle humans lived inside them, rode inside them.
Then they killed the Great One.
There was no duel, no heroic challenge, no blessed blade through the eye but the walking houses lowered their own, bigger thunder sticks and all of them, beetles and houses together, fired.
The noise was like the end of the world. Not one crack but thousands, without pause, blue trails turned to solid rain. The Great One, who had taken a direct hit from a Zenithian grand mage and laughed, thrashed as his scales shattered, black blood sprayed, he tried to swipe a walking house leg and the leg bent but did not break, the joints compensating, stepping sideways like real spider.
Lirael watched, mouth open behind his leaf veil, as the creature that had haunted him for his entire life, that his mother had warned him about as a child, was torn apart by things that did not use magic at all.
Great One's throat glowed again, trying to gather Breath, one walking house pointed its own throat at him and fired a single, larger blue light point-blank into it. The organ inside burst, the light in the Great One's eyes went out.
He fell, a school-bus length of ancient spirit flesh, crushing trees, shaking the ground where Lirael lay. Dust and ash covered Lirael's cloak. He did not move. He could not.
They killed him, he thought, a looped thought. They killed the Great One with thunder that looks like dwarven boomsticks but is not. Without spell, without sacrifice. Like he was a boar.
Shock turned to a different, colder fear.
If they can kill the Great One so easily, what can they do to us?
The Thornwatch had survived Zenithia because Zenithia feared the forest's spirits. The Great One, the Tiger, the Mother Tree, they were our guardians as much as our dangers. Zenithian knights did not push deep into Veilwood because the Great One ate them. Now the Great One was dead and something else that ate Great Ones was here.
Lirael watched as the white-suited humans and beetle humans gathered around the corpse. They cut it open with a small sun they held in their hands. They pulled something out, a pulsing amber light the size of a heart. Lirael felt it even from fifty meters. Mana, pure and dense, like the heart of the forest itself.
They took his core, he thought. They are harvesting.
He had to warn them. He had to warn Elder Saria. Not just the Great One was dead, but these new humans, humans who wore iron as skin and rode walking houses, who killed without magic and took spirit cores like hunters taking antlers. And they spoke no language known to elf or man.
Lirael slowly, slowly, let his living cloak release him from the root. He slid backward one inch at a time, until the clearing was out of sight. Then he turned and ran.
He ran faster than any human could, feet barely touching moss, cloak streaming, tears of shock drying on his face. He ran toward the hidden village where lights glowed faintly under the roots of the Mother Tree, where children still thought the Great One was immortal and his mother would be grinding moonroot.
Behind him the walking houses began to move again, carrying the strange amber heart back toward a gray scar in the forest that had not been there a week ago - a place where more thunder slept.
And Lirael, for the first time in his eighty-four years, did not know if the forest would be enough to protect them anymore.