The Price of Another Season

A grand plan had been on the table for far longer than Ashen had been alive in this era.

It came up every season, just like the weather did.

Someone would mention it over tea, someone else would sigh, and everyone would nod gravely and agree that yes, one day, the tribe would leave this place and set out across the continent to find what remained of humanity.

And then they would go back to discussing the scarcity of salt.

“So,” Adam said, leaning back in his seat at the head of the long table. “The northern route again. Your thoughts?”

“Same as last season, Pops.” Ashen reached for a honeyed date from the plate in the middle of the table. “It’s the shortest. It’s also the one that walks us straight through the Narkal breeding grounds. So, short trip, very short lives.”

“Well, they are Narkals. It’s hard for them to change their breeding grounds. What about the southern one?”

“The mountain range? The children won’t survive the cold, and we still don’t have long-term countermeasures for that problem.” He popped the date into his mouth. “And the eastern route goes past the Sacred Beast’s forest. If we march two thousand people through her territory, I don’t think she’ll be as understanding as she is with a hunting party.”

“Hmm.” Adam stroked his chin. “So… we’re staying another season.”

“Seems so…”

Around the table, a dozen heads nodded in agreement, as though the matter had been settled after hours of heated debate.

It was a council meeting, technically.

Every few weeks, the people who made the tribe’s decisions gathered in the hall after the evening meal.

Adam and Anastasia at the head. The eldest warriors and the senior brothers. The women who ran the farm, the looms, the kitchens and the healing rooms. Vera and Joran from the ward chamber. Ezra. Rune. A handful of others.

The rest of the adults sat along the walls and listened in silence, sipping tea, occasionally whispering to each other.

Nobody here was seriously planning to leave anytime soon, but everyone liked to talk about it.

The truth was simple, so every adult in the tribe understood it.

Surviving in this region forever was a fool’s errand. There was no ally within reach. Not a single human tribe or a friendly demi-human outpost. Only Narkals, beasts, Oddities, the mechanical force, and worse.

One day, something would come along that the tribe couldn’t handle, and that would be the end of the Hunt bloodline.

But the journey to find other humans was just as deadly. Maybe more.

So, a long time ago, Adam and Anastasia had made a decision. They wouldn’t leave until the tribe was strong enough to survive the road.

And the first thing a tribe needed to survive was people.

Two hundred and fifty years had passed since the old tribe was wiped out, leaving behind two young survivors who had crawled into a hole in the ground and decided that the tribe would not end with them.

There was even a chance that they were the last of the human race. So it was out of the question that they’d give up.

And so, they started the project of increasing their members using Anastasia’s constitution.

She kept the count herself, in a thick ledger she never let anyone else touch. Every birth went into it, and every death too.

She had borne three hundred and twenty-two children with her own body, two at a time, every year and a half for nearly two and a half centuries.

Those children had grown, married, and had children of their own. Those children had done the same. Five generations, now six, all crowded together beneath the same glowing ceiling.

But the ledger had another column, and it was a long one because it was composed of the warriors who died.

That was the price of every meal they put on the table, every expedition, and every scouting run above ground.

Some decades were kind, and only a handful were buried. Some were cruel, like the two years before Ashen’s tenth birthday, when the tribe had lost fifty-three men.

Now, more than eleven hundred names filled the column of the dead.

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As of the last count, the Hunt tribe numbered two thousand, three hundred and seventeen souls.

It was barely enough people to march across a continent and still have a tribe left at the end of it.

The second thing a tribe needed was strength, and on that front, they had grown more than anyone could have hoped. Adam had reached the very peak of the Second Step. More than thirty others stood at the Second Step beside him. In a region where a single Second Stepper could hold back a dozen Catastrophe-class Narkals alone, it was a lineup to be proud of.

And resources… with the mana core humming in the ward chamber, the carriages, the silk, the mithril and everything else they had hoarded over the decades, they were covered there too.

So really, only two concerns remained.

One real concern, and one luxury pretending to be one.

◉

“What about Paradise?” one of the elder warriors asked, as he did every single season. “Is it still a rumor? Or did Orin, our divination guru, glean something at last? ”

The table went quiet.

Paradise was the name Adam’s old tribe had used for it. It was a region far to the south, where humanity’s strongest tribes had supposedly gathered, built walls and formed a resistance front against the Darkness.

There were rumors that they had even made alliances with demi-humans. And more than anything else, the rumors said that Paradise kept humanity’s System, the heart of the inheritance, the sacred stone itself.

But those rumors were hundreds of years old.

Adam had never been able to verify them, even back when he first heard them as a boy. And now? Even if they had been true back then, they might not be true anymore.

The tribes could have moved, scattered, or even been massacred to the last child.

Despite all the talk and preparations, there was something Adam always said to end any real movement.

“I won’t march my family halfway across the world on a rumor, only to find ash at the end of the road.”

Nobody could argue with that one.

Ashen chewed his date in silence.

‘Paradise, huh…’

He had read every history of Seravelle he could get his hands on in his first life, so he knew that humanity survived this era, somehow.

He knew that, thousands of years from now, the humans of Seravelle would be living behind a vast wall, around a single fortress they called the Ashbastion with Paradise as the heart and capital of their vast domains.

But the records of the Reign of Terror were scraps and fragments.

Whether a place called Paradise existed right now, or whether it was the same Paradise of the present, or whether it was nothing but a dying tribe’s bedtime story… he had no idea.

So he kept his mouth shut.

“Then there’s the tree,” Iris said, and half the table perked up.

This was the other concern. The luxury.

“Three fruits,” she went on, a little dreamily. “Three fruits in fourteen years, and look what they did. The patriarch feels like a new man. If we wait for the next harvest, and the one after that…”

“We could plant the seeds,” Monica chimed in. “In ten years, we could have a whole grove.”

“Another harvest or two, and we’d have ten more Second Steppers,” an uncle added. “Maybe a First.”

Heads nodded around the table. It was a seductive thought. Staying meant growing stronger. It also meant more fruit, more trees, and more power.

For some of them, the status quo looked like the safest path in the world.

Ashen said nothing to that either.

‘At least this one’s a happy problem.’ He chuckled lightly.

The conversation drifted on. Someone brought up the salt again. Rune complained about Bram’s snoring. A child somewhere along the wall started crying and was quickly hushed.

Then Bram frowned and glanced down the table.

“Hey… where’s Orin, by the way? He never misses these.”

“Divinations,” Ezra said, sipping his tea. “He does them around this time every day, doesn’t he? He’ll be in his room with Nessa. You know he never lets her out of his sight.”

Bram nodded and reached for another date.

“...!!!”

And then, from somewhere deep in the tunnels, a woman screamed.

It was the kind of sound a person only makes once or twice in a lifetime, when something is torn out of them that can never be put back.

Every warrior in the hall was on his feet before the echo faded.

Chairs crashed to the floor, cups shattered, weapons that had been leaning against the walls were snatched up, and in the space of a moment, a flood of men was pouring out of the gathering hall and down the tunnel toward the sound.

Ashen was among the first. Lapis was a step behind him, her katana already in her hand.

The scream led them to a small room at the end of a corridor. Its walls were lined with shelves of parchment and ink pots. It was Orin’s room.

His wife, Nessa, was on her knees in the middle of the floor.

She wasn’t screaming anymore.

She was keening, making a low, broken, whimpering sound, like a wounded animal’s, rocking back and forth with both hands clutching the front of a robe.

And inside the robe, lying on his back on the stone, was Orin.

His eyes were open, staring at nothing. His face was pale and slack.

Blood had run from his nose, his ears and the corners of his eyes, and a long dark streak stretched from his mouth down his chin and across his chest.

Around him, scattered across the floor, were dozens of pieces of parchment. Every single one of them had rotted and crumbled into curls of black ash.

“...Orin.”

The warriors stood frozen in the doorway. Nobody moved for a long moment.

Then the women caught up, and Anastasia pushed through the crowd of men with her face drained of all color. She fell to her knees beside her son, laid both hands on his chest and poured her healing mana into him.

Nothing happened…

She kept pouring…

“Mother,” Bram said quietly behind her.

She kept pouring.

“Anastasia.”

Her hands finally stopped when Adam’s voice reached her ears. She sat back on her heels and stared down at the son she had held in her arms as a baby.

Her face didn’t crumple. It had gone too still to hold any expression at all.

Somewhere at the back of the crowd, a woman began to sob.

Someone gathered up the children who had followed the warriors down the corridor and herded them back toward the hall, murmuring softly.

Bram’s broad shoulders were shaking, and Rune had both arms wrapped around his waist from behind.

Ashen stood in the doorway, staring at his brother’s open eyes.

A memory suddenly resurfaced, taking him back to the edge of the settlement six years ago.

Orin had been testing the mana core from the Unborn Heir with a piece of parchment. As it rotted away in his hands, he looked up at Ashen with a jovial smile and said cheerfully, “Well. I suppose that’s you.”

He would never hear that cheerful voice again, or see that jovial smile.

He slowly raised a hand to his chest.

‘...It hurts.’

A slender hand found his sleeve and gripped it tightly, but this time, the woman who was his peace failed to bring him any.

‘It hurts, brother…’