Chapter 616: Arrival At The Last Altar
He read the essence within it.
The swamp was occupied.
Not sparsely. The essence signatures distributed through the dark water had the density of a habitat that had been developing without significant disruption, the mana beast population within it having the layered quality of an ecosystem with multiple grades occupying different depth ranges and territory sections. Some of the signatures were familiar in the way that things you could categorize were familiar. Some were not.
The not-familiar ones were the ones in the deeper sections.
He sat on Fenrir’s back and looked at the swamp for a moment.
He could go through it.
That was not in question. He had Fenrir, who did not care about swamp terrain. He had Cerbe, who made the ambient temperature argument for things that preferred water to reconsider their position in the surrounding area. He had Luton, whose relationship with liquids was categorically different from any physical creature’s relationship with liquids.
He could go through it and the things in the deeper sections would become aware of him and the engagement that followed would occupy some period of time and would conclude in the way that engagements in this forest had been concluding.
He also did not have to go through it.
He looked at the swamp.
He looked at the terrain to either side of it.
He looked at the swamp again.
"No," he said to no one in particular.
He gave Fenrir a direction change, a gentle pressure with his knee that the wolf read without difficulty, and Fenrir turned and began moving along the swamp’s edge rather than toward its center.
The longer way around.
Cerbe adjusted its path without complaint, the hellhound’s ambient heat shifting direction with the rest of the group. Aquila rose slightly to maintain its sight line as the terrain changed, the trees alongside the swamp’s edge being denser in places than the section they had been traveling through.
Luton rode on his head.
The route around the swamp was longer. Not dramatically, not in a way that added anything prohibitive to the day’s distance, but long enough that the sun’s position had moved by a measurable amount by the time the swamp’s presence in the ambient essence field had reduced to something in the background rather than the foreground.
He did not mind.
There was a reason he was not rushing.
He had been thinking about it throughout the day, in the spaces between the demon encounters and the mana beast hunts and the controlled experiment and the quiet riding through a forest that had become known to him over weeks. The thought had not been urgent, had not demanded specific attention. It had simply been present.
The intelligent demons he had killed knew things before they died.
That was the nature of intelligent demons. Not the foot soldiers, not the wild ones that destroyed everything available and stopped when nothing remained to destroy. The ones with the capacity for decision-making and communication, the ones he had found in the organized tier of the strongholds, the ones who could receive orders and give them and evaluate situations and respond to information rather than just to presence.
Those ones had communication mechanisms.
He had found evidence of it in the record-keeping, in the divided intelligence stored across multiple strongholds, in the systematic approach to maintaining the forest occupation that had organized itself far above what instinct could produce. The demons operating in this forest had been in contact with something beyond the forest.
Had been, past tense.
The strongholds were gone. The captains and intelligence tier were gone. The foot soldiers and scouts and aerial watches were gone. Every organized presence he had identified and been able to reach had been reached and eliminated.
But the elimination had taken time.
Time during which communications might have gone out. Reports that had left the forest before the reporting party ceased to be able to report. Some fraction of what had happened in the Forest of Twin Disasters over the weeks of his campaign through it had almost certainly reached wherever the demons’ organizational structure extended beyond this forest.
He did not know what response that had produced.
He was curious.
Not anxious. The anxiety would have implied uncertainty about his ability to handle whatever came, and his assessment of his current capability relative to the kind of response a forest of this remote nature would draw was reasonably confident. But curious.
If something was coming, he wanted to know what it was.
If nothing was coming, he wanted to confirm the nothing before he left.
And he was going to leave. When the seventh altar was activated and the full seal released and the Thing of Ruin at the forest’s center was accessible, his reason for being in the Forest of Twin Disasters would be concluded. He would leave.
But not before he knew whether anything was coming in response to what he had done here.
So he was not rushing to the seventh altar.
Not avoiding it. Moving toward it, making progress, arriving at it eventually on a timeline that had no urgency attached to it because the urgency did not exist. The altar would glow when he fed it blood. The seal would release when all seven glowed. The center of the forest would become accessible when the seal released.
All of that could happen in its own time.
For now, he was taking the long way around the swamp.
He rode through the afternoon.
The forest provided its usual content. Demons that Luton ate. Cores that Cerbe consumed. Occasional mana beast presences that he moved around rather than through when moving around was the lower-effort option. The ambient essence of the forest, which had been changing throughout his weeks here as the demonic occupation was removed layer by layer, now carrying the specific quality of a place that was reclaiming itself.
Richer than it had been when he arrived.
More present.
He thought, briefly, about what the Thing of Ruin would mean for the forest when it was unsealed. The demonic records had described it as something that brought ruin wherever it appeared. He did not yet know what form that ruin took or whether it was directional, whether it could be aimed and held rather than simply released.
He would find out.
That was for the center of the forest, after the last altar.
For now, there were trees and the sound of Cerbe’s ambient heat distorting the air and Luton’s weight on his head and Fenrir’s steady movement beneath him.
He was, as best he could identify it, content.
The terrain changed in the late afternoon.
The forest’s character had been shifting for the last hour in the direction that the record’s description of the seventh altar’s location had led him to expect. The ancient growth was thinning in a specific way, not the thinning of a forest’s edge where the trees simply ended, but the thinning of a transition, one kind of terrain giving way to another over a gradual span of distance rather than at a clear boundary.
The trees became less frequent.
The undergrowth between them changed character, the dense floor-level coverage of the deep forest giving way to something lower and more spread. The light changed too, more of it reaching the ground, the quality of it shifting from the filtered, directionless illumination of the closed canopy to something closer to direct.
Then the grass began.
It appeared at the edge of the last significant tree line, a wall of it that ran in both directions as far as he could read without elevation — thick, dense, the stalks growing close together in the way that grass grew when nothing had been moving through it for long enough that the natural filling-in of available space had run to its conclusion.
The plain was beyond it.
He could not see the plain yet. The grass was too dense for that, the wall of it blocking the view of whatever the other side contained. But the ambient essence character changed beyond the grass in a way that communicated open space, the specific quality of essence that collected in areas without the canopy overhead to influence its distribution.
The plain was there.
The grass grew just above his waist level.
Or would have, if he were standing on the ground rather than riding Fenrir. Mounted, the grass was at leg level, which was less of an obstacle than it might otherwise have been. He looked at it from Fenrir’s back and considered the straightforward option of simply riding through it.
Then he felt the movement.
Beneath the grass’s surface. Not visible, not directly detectable through sight or even through essence in any dramatic way. Just movement, the specific quality of things that lived in dense ground cover moving through the cover with the ease of long practice, the particular swiftness of things that were suited to this terrain in ways that he was not.
Multiple of them.
Moving in the pattern of things that had registered a presence at the grass’s edge and were responding to the registration.
He sighed.