Heart of Dorkness

I wake up to birdsong, and the faint sound of someone breathing nearby.

It takes just a moment to realize that I’m not home. The forest ground isn’t my mattress, no matter how thick the blanket I put down.

Sitting up with a yawn, I look around the tent and find Felix curled up in a ball at the far end. She’s awake too, but the way she’s moving around and yawning tells me she only just woke up. Did she hear me moving? That’s... likely.

“Morning,” I say.

“Hey,” she replies.

Breakfast isn’t anything special. I’m too lazy to relight the fire, and it would take a long time to manage anyway. So we have some bread which has started to harden, as well as the rest of the meat we had packed away. There are some sausages and such that are salted enough that I think they’ll hold until the afternoon, so those I pack back into our bags. We have fruit too, and some pastries.

I think the guy at the inn just tossed everything that was nearby into the bags. I can’t really complain, though, it tastes pretty good. Not as good as some of the food I get at home, but certainly different.

Felix helps me pack away the tent and we kick around the remains of our fire. I don’t want to set the forest on fire, even if it’s not the dry season just yet.

In fact, it’s a little cloudy today, with big poofy and low-hanging clouds above. The ceiling is low, which might be useful if we’re going to ambush the caravan.

“Okay,” I say. “I have something of a plan.” A plan I’d come together with last night.

“What is it?” Felix asks.

“Well, first, we need more monsters. Just these wyverns aren't going to be enough. I think... we’re going to fly past where the caravan is, first on the left, then the right, and we’ll ask some of the monsters we find to block the road ahead and wait on the sides.”

“An ambush,” Felix says. “I used to listen to some of the boys when they’d make plans to ambush people. They never let me help, because of my eyes, and because I’m a bit weak.”

I nod. “I guess that’s what it is, yeah. We’ll hit them from four sides. A wall of monsters at the front, two waves from the sides, and then us on the wyverns from above. Hopefully the other monsters can make it safer for us before we come down.”

“Can the wyverns steal the books?” Felix asks.

“I’ll have to see how the books are secured, but I’d guess not. I remember seeing some book shipments—they’re really heavy. We’ll need to clear the area around the cart or whatever, hitch it to a monster, and ride it away.”

“Can’t do that with people around,” Felix says.

“Exactly.”

We finish stuffing the rest of our stuff away, and Felix and I jump back onto the largest of the wyverns.

I might be getting used to the whole flying thing, because I don’t feel quite as terrible when we take off this time.

We gain more and more altitude, until we’re flirting with the bottom of the clouds. I point to the side, directing the wyvern towards a few columns of smoke in the distance. The caravan!

We keep high, the rest of the flight of monsters staying above the cloud cover. Hopefully, this high up, they’ll just think we’re some large bird. Then again, if they do spot us, I doubt they’ll be able to do anything.

The caravan isn’t huge, but it’s bigger than I’d hoped. I count sixteen wagons, and a few pack animals loaded down with bags. There seem to be two groups of guards, one at the front and one at the rear of the line, maybe ten guards in each. And for each wagon, I count about two workers.

They’re not on the move yet, but it doesn’t look like it’ll take long before they’re back on the road. They’re snuffing fires and, for the most part, look like they’re formed up already.

Good!

I direct the wyvern to fly us further out, and soon enough we’re swooping back down what has to be a few kilometres ahead of the caravan. I search the woods and open plains until I spot a pack of monsters. Large wolves again, a common enough sort.

We come to a bumpy landing, and I whistle the monsters over.

They’re a bit leery, but after explaining things a few times, I think they understand. The smartest of their pack is just a Terror, but it seems smart enough to have kept its pack away from the roads and the bigger caravans.

We move on soon, and only stop when I see another monster, this one a large moose-like creature, with spiked antlers and a body rippling with muscles. It takes a bit more convincing, but it does listen, and stomps off towards the road.

My ambush isn’t exactly going to be an organized affair, I realize. More of a free-for-all, with more and more monsters showing up.

I’ll take what I can get though.

We add a bear monster, and a pack of frankly terrifying monsters called meat badgers who pop out of the ground and scurry over. They seem very interested in Felix, but I promise them plenty of fresh meat at the ambush location and they run off without too much trouble.

“You talk to them strangely,” Felix says. “Like they’re dogs.”

“That’s about how smart most of them are,” I say as we cross over the road and start looking for monsters on the other side. I see that pack of wolves from earlier already waiting in the middle of the path. Not where I told them to wait, but better than having them wander off.

I add another pack of dogs to the ambush, then a couple more cute critters. There’s this kind of monster that travels in flocks; they’re like geese, but with long, long beaks that end in a sharp point. They make these adorable honking noises when they chase people.

An hour passes, then two, most of that spent dipping up and down and looking for monsters I can convince to help in our ambush. Wasting twenty minutes on the lazier bore monsters was a bad call, but what’s done is done.

“Okay,” I say as we take to the air for the last time. “Now we just need to fly around and hit them from above when they break and start running.”

“Do you think we have enough monsters?” Felix asks.

I’m really thankful she’s not hung up on the morality of this. “I think so. We have about one monster for every person. That’s not counting the wyverns. We should be able to scare them off, at the very least. And if we see that it’s not working, we can try again. We’re... what, a day’s ride from the capital? Two?”

“I don’t know,” Felix says. “I never left the city.”

I nod, and then tug at the wyvern’s spikes. “Up, up!”

We move above, cutting a wide circle in the sky that eventually has us flying over the caravan from behind. They’re not moving fast.

I can almost tell when the guards at the front notice something’s wrong. All of the monsters in the middle of the road, the two packs of wolves, are a bit obvious.

I’m grinning like a loon as I watch my plan unfold.

“Hey, Miss Valeria, what’s that noise?”

“Noise?” I ask. I try to listen for something, maybe shouts from below, or the bark of the wolf monsters, but all I can hear are the beats of the wyvern’s wings, the hum of the wind and... and something else. Something like a heart-beat thrum.

I tilt my head back. It’s coming from above?

And then, from the grey of the clouds, I see it. A huge form, breaking out of the grey with the slow but unstoppable motion of the moon cresting the horizon.

An angel.

“Oh no. Wyvern! Fly!”

The angel descends until it is entirely beyond the bounds of the cloudy ceiling, and without anything obscuring it, I can see its full form.

It’s a disk, flat and round, like a gigantic coin made of rings hovering within each other. At its centre is a narrow rod, like a needle with a point on both ends, and a singular eye in its middle, an eye turned red by strain and grief.

“Faster, faster!” I shout.

A thunder-crack sounds.

One of the disks, the largest, which is as big around as an entire castle, has shifted in the time it takes someone to blink, it’s now perfectly perpendicular to the rest of the angel.

Another boom, and another disk appears in a different position, this one at an angle to the others. Then another, and the final disk is perpendicular to the last.

“Come on, come on! Move!” I shout.

“What’s happening?” Felix screams.

Below, the monsters are howling as they rush towards the caravan.

The angel’s disks spin, but then stop moving just as suddenly as they started.

Mouths open up all around the exterior of the rings. Human mouths, with strained lips and long teeth with no gums.

The world goes silent as the angel inhales. The monster’s howl’s fade. I called out, but my voice doesn’t produce so much as a whisper, and even the wild beating of my heart is silent.

Then the angel screams.

The shout flattens trees and shoves us ahead with a powerful gust of wind.

It’s not just a scream, even though there’s no denying that it sounds like a hundred people wailing in terror, there’s more to it than that. Raw magic and tender emotions. It’s a noise that has me wincing in pain, not just because it’s so unbelievably loud, but because it digs into my head and squeezes.

The monsters on the ground are torn apart, as if a giant’s scythe has sliced through them all from above.

I wince, the noise leaving my ears ringing.

A glance up and I see the angel’s eye locked onto us.

“No no no no no!”

***