Chapter 162: Two tusks (1)

The horde spent the entire night pulling away from the Wall.

The roamers neither flee or scatter.

It simply withdrew,, until there was a strip of empty ground two hundred paces wide between the foot of the stone and the front of the mass. The body ramps stood alone against the Wall, like heaps of refuse left behind after a market day.

The noise changed as well.

For four days, the sound of the horde had come from everywhere at once. A flat, endless roar that seemed to rise out of the ground itself.

Now it came in pieces.

Sudden bursts of screeching. Long stretches of low, uneasy murmuring.

Then, for minutes at a time, almost nothing.

It was almost as if someone was commanding them to act in such ways.

The soldiers on the parapet did not rest. They could not. No one knew what the silence meant.

And in some ways, it was worse than the fighting.

Encrid stood at the edge of the Fifth Bastion all night with his arms folded and his bandaged forearm throbbing.

Gus stood on one side of him. Rael had come over from the ninth mile around midnight, his ribs strapped tight and a Master’s Star burning in his chest, and he stood on the other side.

None of them said much.

At the first grey light of the fifth day, Rael finally spoke.

"Something’s coming."

"I know," Encrid said.

He had felt it for an hour.

Not through Attunement. It was far too distant for that.

But he felt it -he doesn’t know if it was the effect of the system or his narrative relevance - he felt a sense of terror approaching from the forest.

And not long before, he also felt it through his feet.

It was a rhythm.

Slow. Heavy and Far apart.

A long pause. Then a single deep push against the ground, so faint that at first Encrid had thought he was imagining it.

Then another pause.

Then another push. A little stronger than the last.

It reminded him of the tremors from the day the horde had first appeared, when the workers in the trenches had felt the earth shake beneath their boots.

But those tremors had come from thousands of bodies moving at once.

This came from one.

✧ ✧ ✧

The sun rose behind a low sheet of cloud.

For a while, the northern horizon looked exactly the same as it had every morning since the siege began. The trampled killing ground. The broken treeline. The Great Green rolling away beyond it, dark and endless, under a grey sky. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

Then Corr, sitting in his chair with the glass braced on his knees, went completely still.

"There," he said.

Encrid looked where he was looking.

Far to the north, farther than the eye could clearly see, two thin, pale lines stood above the forest.

At first, they looked like dead trees. Two white trunks rising out of the canopy, stripped of their bark, curving slightly toward each other at the top.

There was nothing strange about dead trees in the Great Green.

Except that there had been no dead trees there yesterday.

And except that they were moving.

They rose and fell with the same rhythm Encrid had been feeling in his feet.

Rose.

Paused.

Fell.

Rose again.

With every rise, they were a little closer. With every fall, the ground shivered.

"How far?" Encrid asked.

Corr did not answer right away. He was doing the calculation in his head, the way nineteen years of looking at things in the forest and deciding whether to run had taught him to.

"Six miles," he said at last. "Perhaps seven."

"And we can see them from here."

"Yes," Corr said quietly. "Above the canopy. From six miles away."

Beside Encrid, Gus had stopped breathing.

Encrid could feel it through Attunement. The complete stillness of the body standing next to him.

"What are they?" Gus whispered.

No one answered him.

They were tusks.

Encrid had known the moment Corr said ’there.’

He had heard Kass describe them in the Council chamber, ten days before the horde arrived. Two tusks, both rising above the treeline. He had heard Corr describe them from his sickbed, half-conscious, his voice breaking.

But he had never allowed himself to imagine what they would actually look like.

He was looking at them now.

The system did not wait for him to finish looking.

A window opened in the center of his vision.

There was none of the usual flickering. It appeared cleanly, as though it had been waiting a very long time for this exact moment and had nothing left to hide.

[ ✦ ✦ ✦ NARRATIVE QUEST UPDATED ✦ ✦ ✦ ]

[ THE WALL AND THE UNSEEN ]

[ The great shield of the north stands at the edge of its story. What was written approaches faster than it was written to. ]

[ Quest Parameters Restored ]

[ Primary Objective: Prevent the fall of the Wall. ]

[ Secondary Objective: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]

[ Hidden Objective: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]

[ Failure Conditions: The Wall falls. ]

[ Reward: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]

Encrid read the Primary Objective three times.

For a year and a half, this quest had sat in his status window with every single line blacked out. He had guessed what it wanted from him.

And on that guess, he had built a school, a guild, three trenches, sixty siege machines, and a seat on the Council.

Now the system had finally written it down.

Prevent the fall of the Wall.

It was the very thing he had been trying to do from the beginning. Seeing it in plain words should have felt like confirmation.

It did not.

Instead, it felt like the system had waited to tell him until the one thing that could make him fail was already standing on the horizon.

Beside him, Rael spoke.

"I’ve been out past the stakes a thousand times," he said.

His voice was very calm. The kind of calm a man’s voice becomes when he is trying very hard to keep it that way.

"The biggest Gorehorn tusk anyone ever brought back to this Wall is hanging over the mess hall door at the fifth mile. Nineteen inches."

On the horizon, the tusks rose again.

The ground shook.

"I don’t know what that is," Rael said. "But it isn’t anything I’ve ever cut a core out of."

✦ ✦ ✦