Chapter 647: Time To Go

By midday he had seen most of it again.

Not all of it. The forest was too big for that. But he had ridden through the places that mattered, and he rode now the way a person walks through a house they are about to move out of, slowly, with his eyes on things he had stopped noticing a long time ago.

The first place was the Stormhorn's clearing.

It looked smaller than he remembered. The big body was gone. Fenrir had taken care of that, and the forest had taken care of whatever Fenrir left behind.

What remained was a wide patch of dark, packed ground where a lot of blood had soaked in, and a few long bones that the scavengers had decided were not worth the trouble. The crater from the Stormhorn's fall was still there, half full of leaves.

The altar stood at the edge of the clearing, exactly where he had left it.

Still glowing. The same warm, steady light, no brighter and no dimmer than the night it had come on. He got down from Fenrir and walked up to it and stood there for a while. He did not touch it. He had already given it what it wanted.

"You were a pain," he told the altar.

The altar glowed.

He remembered the horn going into his chest, and the sound he had not made. He put a hand against his right side without thinking about it. Nothing there now. Lin had seen to that. Under the skin, the bones that used to be there had been broken and put back together, and they felt different when he pressed on them. Heavier, somehow. More certain.

He got back on Fenrir.

The next place was a long ride away, and he let the wolf pick the path. Luton sat on his head the whole way, quiet, soaking up the afternoon. Every so often Damien reached up and pressed a finger against it, and Luton pulsed once, and that was the whole conversation.

The burned stronghold came up late in the afternoon.

He smelled it before he saw it. Old ash has a smell that does not go away, and Cerbe had been thorough. The trees that had made up the walls were black stumps now.

The ground was grey. But something was already pushing up through it. Thin green shoots, thick as a finger, coming out of the ash in rows as if someone had planted them. Wherever the demons' dead rot had been worst, the forest was growing fastest.

He did not go down to the lowest chamber. He knew what was there. A glowing altar, a cracked floor, the last of the Null runes burned out. He did not need to see it again.

He sat on Fenrir at the edge of the ash and looked at the green coming up.

Three strongholds. A hundred demons in this one alone. He had come into this forest with a handful of summons and a plan he had made up on the way, and what he was looking at now was the result. A place that had been full of something wrong and was slowly becoming a forest again.

It felt good. He let it feel good for a moment and then moved on.

The second base was smaller than he remembered, and the first base was smaller still. He rode past both of them without stopping. The altars there were glowing, as he had known they would be. He did not need to check.

The pond came after that.

He had not planned to go to it. Fenrir turned toward it on its own, down the slope, and by the time Damien noticed where they were going the trees had opened and the water was there. The same small hollow. The same clear water, the same pale glow under the surface.

The fishes were still there.

Long, thin, almost see-through, moving around in the light like they had no idea anyone had ever eaten one of them. He counted seven near the surface. More below.

He climbed down and crouched at the edge.

There was a room in his head with a table in it and the light coming in at an angle through the window. A plate. A hand putting something on it. He had been maybe six years old, and the fish had tasted like nothing else he had ever eaten, and someone at the table had laughed at the face he made.

He had never found out what happened to the people who laughed.

He did not look at that memory for long. He looked at the water.

Luton had come down from his head and was sitting at the water's edge, very still, not asking. It had learned.

"Not today," Damien said.

He stood up.

"Maybe not ever. But not today."

He left them where they were.

It was getting dark when he reached the place he had not planned to see at all.

He knew it the moment the trees changed. He would have known it blind. The shape of the ground, the way the roots came up out of the soil, the one huge tree that leaned slightly to the left. It was not far from the fifth altar, and the fifth altar was not far from where he had first walked into this forest with nothing at all.

Fenrir stopped without being asked.

Damien got down and walked a few steps away from the wolf and stood in the dusk.

It was colder here than it ought to have been. Or he remembered it that way. He had been a boy standing in this exact spot, with nowhere to go, deciding whether to sit down and stop. A boy with nothing in his hands but a title nobody wanted, sent out to die somewhere quiet.

He had not died.

He had walked into the trees, and he had lived, and he had learned how, and then he had left.

Now he was leaving again.

He thought about his father's face. He had not seen it in years and he could still see it. He had thought about it on the plainfield, and in the root arch, and on a hundred other nights, and every time it was the same. Not anger. Anger would have needed more energy than he was willing to spend on it. Just a plain, steady, patient fact. He would collect.

"Not yet," he said, out loud, to nobody.

The dark did not answer. It never did.

He walked back to Fenrir and got on, and for a while he did not say anything at all.

They made camp for the night in a fold of roots near the ring's outer edge, close enough to the center to feel the creature's presence at the back of his mind, far enough that sleeping was possible. Fenrir lay on one side of him and Lin, summoned back out for the night, lay on the other. Neither of them asked what he was thinking. He was grateful for that.

He lay on his back and looked at where the stars would have been if the canopy had let any of them through.

The decision was already made. It had probably been made before he left the ring that morning, and everything since had just been him walking up to it.

He needed to leave.

The blood was only half done. It did not need the forest to finish. The notification had been clear on that point, or at least it had not said otherwise, and he trusted it enough to try. If it was going to keep working on his body for days, then the days might as well be spent somewhere that had a bed and a roof and food that had not been killed by a slime.

His supplies were gone. Not low. Gone.

He had eaten fruit off a tree because it was the only thing within reach and he had been too tired to cook. That was a funny story in a forest. It would not be funny for much longer.

There was also the other thing, the thing the scouts had made impossible to forget. Someone outside had been watching this forest. Someone had sent eyes in, and the eyes had not come back, and sooner or later that someone would send something that was not eyes.

If he was going to be ready for that, he needed to know what was out there. News. Maps. Names. The kind of information that did not exist in a place where the only people he had talked to in weeks were demons he was about to kill.

And then the other thing. The slower thing.

The creature had called him weak.

Weak body. Weak blood. He did not like the word, and he liked even less that it was probably correct. He could not fix that sitting in a forest waiting for a notification. He had to go out and become something else.

He closed his eyes.

In the morning he got up early, and the first thing he did was go back to the tree with the dark green fruit.

It was a good tree. He had stopped for it two days ago. Now he stood under it and filled his arms, and when his arms were full he opened his mouth and said "Luton," and the slime came down off his head and took every piece into the Universal Space like it was nothing.

"More," he said.

He picked until the tree was empty. Then he went to the next tree and did the same.

Fenrir watched with an expression that, on a wolf, looked a lot like patience wearing thin.

"We might need these," Damien said.

Fenrir looked at the tree. Then at him.

"Shut up," Damien said, though the wolf had not made a sound.

By the time the sun cleared the canopy, Luton was holding enough fruit to feed him for a week, maybe more. It also held the cores, the jars of blood, the meat from the Grade Three it had delivered alive by mistake, and a few other things he was not going to think about right now. It sat back on his head and looked, if slimes could look, quietly pleased with itself.

He turned Fenrir toward the edge of the forest.

It was a long way. Half a day of hard riding, maybe more. The crack in the earth would be along the route for part of it, running back from the plainfield to the ring like a long scar. He would follow it out the way he had followed it in. There was something fitting about that.

He looked back once.

The ring was too far away to see. He could feel it, though. A slow, deep warmth behind his ribs, enormous and patient, still there, still waiting.

"I'll be back," he said.

He was not sure if he said it to the creature or to himself.

The warmth did not move. It did not need to.

Fenrir started walking.

The trees began to thin by afternoon. The ancient growth gave way to the older growth, and the older growth gave way to something almost ordinary, with a canopy he could see through and ground he could cross without a guide.

Cerbe had been summoned for a stretch and then sent back. Lin had come out and gone in twice. Aquila had taken the sky for an hour. They were not leaving the forest so much as peeling away from it, one layer at a time.

He felt the air change before he saw the edge.

Drier. Colder. Smelling faintly of grass and something else, something with no forest in it at all.

He slowed Fenrir.

The tree line was ahead, thin and bright. Beyond it he could see the long grass of the plainfield border, moving in the wind, and past that, a sky that was bigger than any sky he had looked at in weeks.

He stopped at the last tree.

Behind him was the forest. In front of him was water. An endless amount of it going round the forest in all angles.

He took a breath and let it out slowly.

The forest had given him what it had.

It was time to go.