The Maiden of Moonfane Forge

*

She had been rained on. And she had soiled her dress. Her mouth tasted like mud and ash. She was lying in a pile of dirty bolts of fabric underneath some temporary structure of wood and broken plaster. She could see the stars, and moon, and wisps of cloud through a hole in the roof. She was cold and her dress was torn to shreds. Moisture had soaked through her underclothes to her skin. Yet, for all the discomfort and pain all over, her body felt light and insubstantial. She knew the sensation intimately. Had she been in Caster’s Slumber?

A soft, chuffing grunt caught Lily’s attention. When she tried to turn her body, the burning pain that shot through her was immense. The sound was followed by the warm sensation of breath exhaled across the top of her head, then a soft nose pushing behind her ear. Large hooves stepped over her and then the broad nose was pushing at her face and shoulder. Despite herself, Lily uttered a small laugh that came out like a sob, and raised her aching arms to wrap them around her panthegrunn’s broad, shaggy neck.

“Fae,” she whispered in a dry croak, burying her face in the placid beast’s hair. What had happened? She felt pain, but most of all she felt confusion. It was the distress of not knowing what was going on, or why she was where she was, that turned into soft sobs, which were muffled by Fae’s mane. It was a childish reaction, crying for no other reason than that she was confused and scared. But, as childish things sometimes bring comfort in times of duress, the tears and clinging to her panthegrunn soothed her, at least enough to begin thinking through her situation. It took time for her head to clear and her thoughts to sharpen. That was strange, for usually when she awoke from Caster’s Slumber, she felt mentally reinvigorated. The first thing she recalled was the attack on Moonfane Forge, and that sent a cold shiver down her spine. She had seen them out the window, the raiders moving through the streets, breaking into homes and attacking townsfolk. She had guarded her Slumbering Mage-Matron while listening to the sounds of fighting outside, fearful to cast any Barriers of her own, lest she fall into Slumber as well and leave Marigold unprotected. She had thought nothing could be as terrifying as the screams and cries that went on and on outside, for what had seemed like hours, until. ...

Lily remembered what had happened next, how the raiders had broken into their home, led by the woman with long raven-colored hair. Lily could recall the woman’s face perfectly; how beautiful it was. But that beauty was somehow tainted, first with indifference, then with rage. The woman had come to attack Marigold, and Lily had stood in her way, only to discover that this strange woman was another Barrier-Caster with skills far surpassing Lily’s. How easily she had cast spells that would have taken Lily’s utmost concentration. She could make Barriers move. And, then, Lily had been rising rapidly up off the ground. She remembered crashing through the roof of their home and screaming and then ... that was all.

With an effort, Lily calmed her rapid breathing and burrowed deeper into Fae’s thick hair. Her heart was pounding. Fae grunted softly, a rumbling sensation that Lily felt against her breast. Where was she? She must be outside the town because Fae was here, but then she remembered that the town’s Barrier had been down. Lily gazed up through the hole in the roof above her and knew that it had been made by her body falling through it.

She sniffed and dried her face on Fae’s shaggy neck, then leaned back so she could take the beloved panthegrunn’s broad snout in her hands and kiss her on the nose. “You found me, Fae. Thank you.” Fae chuffed a warm breath across Lily’s face and Lily smiled hesitantly. She had so many questions, but first she had to get out of this place. She was freezing cold, and starving, and parched beyond comprehension. She needed water. In attempting to protect Marigold, she had cast Barriers without thought. As a result, she had been in Caster’s Slumber with no one to care for her for an unknown number of days. Mages had died that way before. It was not unheard of. If a mage casted a spell beyond their ability and fell into Slumber with no one around to care for them and give them water or broth, they could easily die of thirst, or exposure. Knowing how lucky she was that she hadn’t did nothing to diminish her desperation.

It took all her strength to grasp Fae’s horns and pull herself shakily to her feet. Her shoes were gone and her feet were scratched and bruised. So too were her arms and legs, and likely her back, from smashing through first her own home’s ceiling, then this structure’s on the way back down. Her dress, her favorite dress, gifted by her family, hung in shreds off of her as she picked her way delicately down from the bolts of fabric she had landed on. She had a notion of where she was; there were little storage buildings like this all over the Trades District, where goods that had been sold were stored until they could be delivered to their buyers. This was confirmed when she got outside and began walking.

The night air was frigid. The icy cobbles were like needles in the soles of her bare feet. Lily leaned on Fae, who padded patiently along beside her. She had guessed her location correctly. She was somewhere in the Trades District a few streets up from her home. There was no light coming from any buildings and no people about, but Lily could see some illumination a couple streets over. Haltingly, painfully, she made her way there. Things always looked different at night, but it was made worse by the devastation she saw as she went. Entire houses had been burned to the ground, leaving a wrongness to the familiar streets. As she turned onto her own street and made her way up the hill to the cozy little house she and Marigold had shared for years, a sour sensation began to grow in Lily’s stomach. Passing more and more burned homes, she suddenly knew that hers would be amongst them. She could feel it. So, when she saw it, the dark, empty husk of crumbled timbers, she was not surprised, but, still, she was devastated. She stood staring at her lost home and felt empty inside. Had Marigold died? Had they killed her?

“How could anyone do this?” she whispered into the dead night. Tears rolled unbidden down her cheeks as she clutched tightly at Fae’s fur with her fingers. Yet, something felt wrong inside her, like the full weight and emotion of the situation was not reaching her. Instead, her body screamed at her for water, for food, and she couldn’t think or process until she found them. She looked around and saw nothing but emptiness. Even the houses that were undamaged appeared to have no one in them. Clearly the attack had been even worse than she’d been able to perceive at the time. Had they lost the battle? That could not be. Moonfane Forge had an entire garrison to protect them. Where was everyone? Where was help?

Home. She needed to go home to her family’s dairy. Things would make sense there. She could eat and drink, change her clothes, learn what had happened. Yes, she needed to go home. Like a thoughtless fog, Lily drifted through the strangely bereft streets of her town, barely recognizing them or herself, stopping only once to slake her thirst at a rain barrel. The water in it tasted stale and acrid. She moved on. Her panthegrunn followed. They met no one. Beyond the East Gate, some few animals roamed the dark pastures. It was the view of the stars that first told Lily she would find no solace at home either. She could see stars that would normally have been obscured by the silhouette of her parents’s house. It was gone as well.

Fae sat down on the little dirt path as Lily walked through what had once been the front garden’s gate. The garden, the house, everything, was cold, ashen ruin. Lily put her hand to her mouth as she nearly stumbled over the charred corpses of her little dairy goats. She stared at them in horror and backed away. Her bare feet found newly turned soil then, and this is how she discovered the three new graves; her parents and brother.

The barrier within Lily that had been holding back her emotions finally cracked open then and out flowed a cold, rushing sadness. She fell to her hands and knees and wailed in sorrow.

“No ... no, no, please! ...” She could not catch her breath, gulping air between sobs as she bowed her head and cried uncontrollably, tears falling to the soil where her draping hair brushed it. The grief was such that her shoulders hunched and she nearly retched when she had cried for so long that her eyes ran out of tears to give. Still, she remained, digging her fingers into the soil as if she could let them know that she was there and loved them. She needed to tell them somehow, one more time. It was not fair that she couldn’t tell them now.

It was the sunlight crawling above the trees of Bannerman’s Wood that snapped Lily out of her sorrowful trance at last. She had been staring blindly at the soil of her family’s resting places for she knew not how long. As if sensing it was time to move on, in that pragmatic way of animals, Fae came to her side and nudged Lily’s shoulder with her heavy head, prompting Lily to stand. She didn’t want to leave, but she knew she must. For now.

She rode draped limply on Fae back into Moonfane Forge and then dismounted and walked with her through the ravaged streets. She had no idea where she intended to go, but soon found herself in the center of town. The fires had been much worse here. Only some buildings still stood. Where once all the eateries and inns had resided, now there was a giant bird’s nest of charred and blackened timbers fallen at crisscrossed angles. Visual markers Lily had known her entire life were gone, leaving her confused about which direction she was even walking.

There were people out now, but they were few, and Lily could sense only fear and apprehension in them. No one spoke to her. They only glanced sidelong at her and the great panthegrunn at her side, as if they were ghosts who had forgotten to dissipate with the sunrise. Lily didn’t so much see the destruction of her home as she sensed the emotions of it. It was difficult to take in the fact that any of this had happened so quickly. As she went aimlessly up the street, she sensed the sadness and anxiety of Moonfane Forge’s people as a whole, the downtroddenness of them. It was like she swam in hopelessness. There was no sense of ‘tomorrow’ to be found.

Without knowing why, her emotional compass drew her up to the Silversmith’s District, which she found was mostly intact. There were more townsfolk in the area, and signs of normal daily activities going on. Still, even those were fractured and stabbed through with signs of despair and deprivation; a scorched food cart overturned in the center of the street, a woman quietly weeping in the doorway of a ruined shop, rats and carrion birds picking through rubble. Lily passed two little boys who sat huddled together against the wall of a building, their faces grubby and dirt-smeared. Lily had to stop and stare at them, certain she knew them. It dawned on her that these were two of the boys who had run past she and Marigold the morning Lily had practiced her Barrier-Casting on the little apricot tree. But where was the third boy? Could it be he was simply somewhere else, or? ... It began to truly sink in just how catastrophic the raid had been. They had lost, hadn’t they? Moonfane Forge had been ravaged and left to rot. Did that mean the garrison soldiers were dead? She hadn’t seen a one of them. Suddenly her heart caught in her throat. Where was Vetch?

“Lily? Oh, my goodness, Lily!” Lily felt the hand on her shoulder before she registered the sound of her own name. A young woman peered into her face, eyes full of shock and concern. “It really is you. Spirits, Lily ...” The woman embraced her and then held her by the shoulders at arm’s length to peer at her once again. “Lily? Are you hale? Oh, my goodness, you look terrible. What happened to you? Come, let’s get you indoors.”

Lily knew this young woman, though not closely. They had played together sometimes as children—she and Lily and Vetch—though their paths seldomly crossed nowadays. “Eike,” Lily said, as if to refresh the name to herself. She was the daughter of the grizzled older soldier Vetch was always with. That was it. “Eike,” she said again, and felt as if her tongue were covered in grit. She was thirsty again, and starving. How could she think of food when her family was dead?

“That’s right,” Eike confirmed. “You remember me. Of course, anyone would recognize you, especially with your great cat-yak beast with you. Oh, Lily, what in the world happened to you? Where have you been? Do you know that your name was included in the list of the dead days ago? Come. Do you have anywhere to go? Come with me back to our house. We’ll get you cleaned up and find you some clothes. Your dress is falling off in shreds. I think some of my sister’s old clothes might fit you. She’s closer to your height.” The young woman spoke with the kind of desperate rapidity of one seeing to an urgent concern, causing Lily to wonder just how bad she looked. Aside from her great hunger and thirst, she didn’t feel as if she’d sustained any great injury. Her legs carried her along; her fingers could clench and unclench, could they not? But then, nothing felt quite the way she was used to it feeling after a lengthy spell in Caster’s Slumber. It was as if she had woken inhabiting someone else’s body, one that was being pummeled from all sides by a sadness so omnipresent as to be almost a physical sensation. The young woman took Lily’s hand and led her along. Fae followed them.

“Panthegrunn,” Lily uttered.

“What?” asked Eike, looking at Lily with more concern than Lily felt was justified. Wasn’t it a mage like herself who was supposed to be the one helping people during a disaster like this?

Lily swallowed. “Panthegrunn. Fae is a panthegrunn. Not a cat-yak.”

Eike favored her with a tight-lipped smile, tipping her dark eyes back to the great charge-beast following them. “So, it is,” she agreed. “Does he, it, need food? What does it eat?”

“She,” said Lily. “She eats most things a yak would.” It struck Lily that Fae had likely gone without a meal as long as she herself had. Fae would have stayed with her once she found her.

“Well ... we’ll see about finding her some food as well, once we’ve taken care of you.”

Lily nodded vaguely. She followed along as though she were a little girl following her mother through the markets, aware that everything she held dear was gone. No. Not everything. She had Fae, and clearly parts of the town and its townsfolk had survived and were attempting to rebuild. But something still nagged at her and dragged her back from her diaphanous state.

“The soldiers. Where are the soldiers? I’ve seen none.” Lily realized her error in asking the question as bluntly as she had only after the words had left her mouth. Eike was a soldier’s daughter.

The young woman’s expression became neutral and firm. She took in a breath through her nose and released it. “The ones who lived? Some are still being treated for injuries up in the Silversmith’s Council Building. But most of them died defending us.” She clearly steeled her emotions as she stated this. Lily felt for her. This young woman would have known many from the garrison through her father. Certainly, she had lost people she cared about. She must have read Lily’s face, because she added, “My father survived. He was injured, but it’d take a lot more than that to kill someone with a head as hard as his, or so my mother put it.”

“... And Vetch?” Lily near-whispered, not intending her voice to shake as it did. “Is Vetch up in the Council Building, too? Is he alive?” Lily clenched her teeth and held her breath as she awaited the answer. Eike must know Vetch’s fate—her father and Vetch were good friends. But Lily feared the answer. She had already lost her parents, her brother ...

“Vetch is fine, Lily,” said Eike, and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “He and the remaining soldiers who weren’t too badly hurt left just yesterday morning to rescue Mage Marigold. A retinue also left yesterday, bound for the King’s Capital City, to ask for aid. My father went with them.”

“Wait. Rescue Marigold? Eike, I’ve been in Caster’s Slumber since the attack.”

Eike turned a sympathetic eye to Lily. “Oh! Oh, Lily. Then you don’t know anything of what has happened, do you? Come. We’re almost home. I will try to detail everything while we get you cleaned up and fed.”