Chapter 88: The Mountain of Forgotten Spring

"Alright," I said, once the last of the laughter had finally died down and the tent had gone quiet again. "Leaving all of that aside for a moment. We actually need to survive out here. Lee, would you mind telling us what you know?"

Something in the room shifted the second I said it. The easy humor drained out of the air, and even Theodore straightened up, all the mockery gone from his face in an instant.

Lee looked at each of us in turn, slow and deliberate, like he was deciding how much of himself he was willing to hand over to five strangers he had met less than an hour ago. Then he nodded, and settled back against the tent pole, and all of our attention fixed on him at once.

"I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been here," he said. "Time doesn’t work right in this place. You lose track fast. But I’ve kept count of the sleeps. A hundred and thirty-eight."

The number sat heavy in the small space between us.

"At least, I think I’ve kept an accurate count," he added, quieter. "Some days blur together. I might be off by a few."

A hundred and thirty-eight days. More than a hundred and thirty-eight nights of whatever this Realm threw at him, alone or nearly alone, in a tent held together with borrowed daggers and stubbornness. I tried to imagine it and found I couldn’t quite manage the full weight of it.

"I came here with five people," Lee continued. "I’m a commoner. So were they. We got pulled in together, same as you probably did with your own group."

Sera’s jaw tightened at that. I didn’t need to look at her to know why. Five people. Just like us.

"There’s a temple," Lee said. "Looks more like a castle, honestly, built up on higher ground not far from here. A man lives there. Calls himself Culex." His mouth twisted slightly on the name, like the word itself tasted wrong. "Almost two hundred people serve under him. Some willingly. Most not."

"Serve him how?" Mary asked, voice level, though I caught the careful stillness in her posture, the way she had gone completely alert.

"He hunts anyone who comes into this area," Lee said. "Doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, what you did to end up here. If you’re breathing and you’re not already one of his, you’re fair game." He rubbed a thumb along one of his scars without seeming to notice he was doing it. "He requires one beast, one real kill, per five people, every single day. Hunt it, bring it back, and in exchange, he gives you shelter and ood. A roof that isn’t made of borrowed canvas."

"And if you don’t hunt one?" Arthur asked, already knowing, I think, that he wasn’t going to like the answer.

Lee didn’t answer right away.

"There’s a Pentagram in his castle," he said instead, eyes fixed somewhere past all of us, somewhere none of us could follow. "A real one. If you meet whatever requirement he sets after some time, eventually, you get to use it. Go home. Actually leave this place behind."

"That’s the only way out?" I asked. "Through him?"

Lee nodded, slow and heavy.

"My group," he said, and his voice finally started to crack around the edges, the careful, guarded composure he had been holding since we walked in cracking right along with it. "We were doing fine, for a while. Hunting together. Making the quota. Then one day, my beast got away from me. Wounded it, but it slipped into a ravine before I could finish it off, and I couldn’t track it fast enough in the dark."

His hands had curled into fists on his knees.

"The others made their kills. We didn’t." He swallowed hard. "Culex doesn’t care whose fault it is. Doesn’t care about excuses, or bad luck, or a beast that got lucky. The quota is the quota. One beast per five people, every day, no exceptions."

Nobody said anything. The wind outside pushed gently against the tent walls, the only sound in the whole tent.

"They executed all four of them," Lee said, and his voice finally broke clean through, thin and raw. "In front of everyone. To make an example. Because I couldn’t catch one damn beast in time."

He pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes, jaw working, and for a long moment none of us moved, none of us spoke, because there was nothing that could be said that would make any of it smaller or easier to hold.

"I ran," he said finally, dropping his hand, forcing his voice back into something steadier, something he could stand behind. "That night. I ran, and I have been running ever since. A hundred and thirty-eight sleeps of running, hiding, hunting whatever I can find on my own just to survive one more day out here, away from him and everyone who serves him."

He looked up at us then, and whatever composure he had managed to rebuild cracked slightly at the corners again.

"So yeah," he said, with a small, exhausted, humorless laugh that didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes. "That’s it. That’s the whole story. He’s out there. His people are out there. And as far as I know, the only real way out of this Realm is standing inside his castle, waiting for someone brave enough, or stupid enough, to come and take it from him."

Sera’s hand found my shoulder, quiet and firm, and I realized my own jaw had gone tight enough to ache.

A hundred and thirty-eight days. Four friends dead because of one missed beast. A castle full of people either willing or forced to serve a man who apparently treated human lives like a quota on a ledger.

I looked around at the others, at Arthur’s grim, still expression, at Theodore’s uncharacteristic silence, at Mary’s narrowed, silent and calculating eyes already turning the information over into something useful, and finally at Lee himself, hollowed out and exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

Whatever this Realm had planned for us next, it was clear now that it wasn’t going to be simple.

And it definitely wasn’t going to be kind.

[You Are On The Mountain of Forgotten Spring]

[Threat Grade: 3]