Chapter 45: Everything is exactly as wrong as I expected
You smelled the Wall before you understood it.
The novel had never mentioned that. The novel gave the Wall three Chapters and a fall, and never once mentioned the smell. Woodsmoke and tar came first. Then wet stone, horses, and boiling grain - the smell of any garrison. And underneath all of it, faint and constant, was something Encrid’s nose refused to identify for a full mile, until his brain quietly supplied the answer.
The forest.
The Great Green Forest.
Green, cold, and wrong. Like sap, if sap could spoil. It rode the north wind over the fortifications and settled into everything - cloth, hair, bread. In the weeks to come, Encrid would learn that Wall men couldn’t smell it at all anymore, and that this was how you spotted a newcomer - they kept touching their noses.
The Wall itself grew for two days.
On the first day it was a line. By that evening it was a presence, a grey stroke ruled across the whole northern horizon. And on the second afternoon, as the road climbed the last long rise and the land dropped away in front of them, it stopped being a thing they were traveling toward and became the entire world.
Two hundred kilometers of it. Encrid knew the number. The number turned out to be useless.
What his eyes actually took in was this - a rampart of black-grey granite, sixty feet high and forty feet thick, running from the western edge of sight to the eastern edge of sight without a single gap. It crossed hills. It crossed frozen streambeds. It crossed a marsh on stone pilings the size of towers. Every four hundred paces, a bastion bulged from its face. Every two miles, a tower rose above the walk, streaked with long black stains of old fire. Behind the endless parapet, small grey figures of the watch moved at their posts. Signal masts stood above them in a thin forest, and on every fifth mast burned a lamp of blue flame that did not flicker in the wind.
And beyond the Wall, filling the whole north, rising with the land, pressing up against the fortification like a green sea against a grey dam, was the forest.
Encrid had seen forests before. And he could tell because he had seen them before that this was not one.
This felt more like a single living thing the size of a country - canopy piled on canopy, swelling away northward in dark green mountains, breathing mist. Even at this distance, even in winter light, it felt like it was watching. Somewhere in its heart, the novel said, stood a tree whose crown broke the clouds. The forest was that tree’s shadow, and everything in the shadow belonged to it.
Yggdrasil.
The Tree of Life and the target of worship for the Root Elves - the Kaelarions and the Shoot Elves - The Alarions.
The group had stopped.
Nobody had ordered a halt. Every man and horse had simply stopped at the same sight. Gus’s mouth hung open. The silent boy had stood up in the carriage. Even Volk’s bandits, northerners all, stared like pilgrims.
Encrid heard Merta say quietly, to no one in particular, "Imagine having to stand up there and guard that place. Gods keep the ones who stand on that."
’Two years,’ Encrid thought, looking at the Wall - at the mad, magnificent, doomed size of it, and at the forest gathered against it like a held breath. ’The novel gave you two years. Then it opened you like an egg. Everything I’m looking at died on this stone or ran south with the fires behind it, and the King of Mercenaries carried the survivors out and became a legend, and the author covered it in three Chapters and moved on.’
His hands had gone tight on the reins.
’I liked those Chapters,’ he thought. ’God help me, I remember liking them.’
Because he didn’t feel like going there anymore.
The wind came off the Wall, carrying smoke and the green rot of the forest, and with it - sweet and ridiculous and human - the sound of a bell ringing somewhere in the fortifications, marking the ordinary hour of an ordinary day.
And the world lit up.
[ ✦ ✦ ✦ NARRATIVE QUEST TRIGGERED ✦ ✦ ✦ ]
[ THE WALL AND THE UNSEEN ]
[ ▮▮▮ CRITICAL ▮▮▮ ]
[ Quest Rank: ★★★★★★★ ]
[ Quest Difficulty: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ Narrative Value: ★★★★★★★ ]
[ The great shield of the north stands at the edge of its story. What was written approaches faster than it was written to. The narrative from this point is ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ Primary Objective: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ Secondary Objective: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ Hidden Objective: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ Failure Conditions: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ Reward: ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ ]
[ Note: This quest cannot be rejected ]
Encrid sat very still on his horse and read the wall of black bars twice.
’More than half of it is blocked,’ he thought. ’A rank-seven quest. And it won’t even show me the difficulty.’
The Sword Saint’s quest had also carried a seven-star narrative value, marking it as a main storyline event. This quest’s rank was also seven stars, which probably meant it was on the same level as a main story quest.
But the Sword Saint’s quest had at least revealed its difficulty as four stars. Encrid still had no idea how hard that actually was, since he had no scale to measure it against, but at least it was there.
This quest, however, didn’t even show the difficulty.
That could mean the difficulty was beyond anything he could imagine. Or perhaps his current abilities were simply too weak for the system to give him a meaningful assessment.
And then there were the objectives, conditions, and consequences.
Every one of them had been blacked out like a state secret.
It was almost as if the system had looked at what was waiting for them here and decided Encrid couldn’t be trusted to know about it.
Or could not survive knowing it, probably.
"Young master?" Gus was watching his face. "Is something wrong?"
Encrid looked at the Wall a moment longer.
"No," he said, and nudged the horse forward, down the last mile of road toward the gate. "Everything is exactly as wrong as I expected."
✦ ✦ ✦