The Lone Wanderer

A charred landscape stretched in every direction: burnt tree trunks, half-molten boulders, and dried ponds. A gentle breeze blew from the north, lifting a cloud of ashes, tussling the few loose strands of hair that had escaped Percy’s ponytail, and causing the immaculate grey fabric of the robes that he had recently regenerated to ripple.

Despite the soft wind, the Whistling Woods maintained their eerie silence. Some of the trademark pines had survived farther out, but not close enough for Percy to hear their singing cones. Taking one laborious step after the other, he dragged his feet through a knee-deep layer of soot, carving a pair of narrow trenches as he walked.

“It’s almost like a different place,” he muttered, unable to mask the bitterness in his voice.

“Unrecognizable,” the crow perched on his shoulder agreed.

Micky could have chosen any other shape to assume: such as that of a Huehuan, a human, or even the colossal bird that he technically was: yet he’d opted to return to the nostalgic woods as the tiny, almost-mundane creature that he’d been the first time he’d flown here.

Six days had passed since the battle.

House Avalon had buried and mourned their dead: those that they’d been able to dig out of the cinders, at any rate: and moved the living and their belongings to the Guild. The few objects that had been left behind were unimportant enough for Percy’s relatives to survive without.

As Percy had predicted, his family had needed several trips to transport everything of value. After seeing them about three-quarters of the distance through the most recent expedition, he had deemed them safe enough to complete the journey without him, returning to the forest with a heavy load lifted off his shoulders.

Following his chats with Elaine and Archibald, he understood that nobody blamed him for the war. He didn’t blame himself either: not anymore: though it was undeniable that none of this would have happened if not for him. While he didn’t consider himself at fault for exposing Remior’s filth, he did consider himself responsible for cleaning it up.

But that was tomorrow’s problem. Today, he and his fellow aspect had allowed themselves to take a small break, because there was something that they needed to do.

Estimating that he had roughly reached the centre of the forest, he halted his steps, allowing his Sage’s Pond to unfold. Without Micky here, his senses would have stretched about four kilometres in every direction. With him, they had exceeded five, and that was only because the two aspects were standing at the same spot. If they separated, they could probably expand their sensory domain a little farther still.

Scanning every twisted corpse and scorched tree within sight, Percy engraved the images to memory so that he would never forget what his enemies had done, nor what his relatives had lost. The trees would grow back one day, but the deceased wouldn’t. Of course, most of the exposed corpses that hadn’t been removed from the forest belonged to House Asclepius’ mages, but that was beside the point.

Half an hour later, he and Micky felt that they had seen enough. Their enemies were probably rebuilding their strength and trying to master the new spell that they had stolen, so Percy and his fellow aspect couldn’t afford to laze around any longer.

Right as they were about to take off, a scrawny creature entered the boundary of their omnidirectional vision, causing Percy to pause. It was short like a human teenager, its wiry frame and sunken cheeks suggesting that it was even hungrier than the poor things usually were.

Percy had been frightened the first time he’d come face-to-face with a wood goblin, the piercing eyes that had gleamed within the dead of night, and fangs that had dripped with saliva having made quite an impression. However, he and Micky had slaughtered enough of them even before leaving for the Alchemists’ Guild to never think of them as predators again.

Given how much stronger Percy had grown in recent years, the starving creature now looked as cute and harmless as a stray kitten. Watching the demi-human repeatedly try and fail to dig anything edible out of the ocean of dirt and cinders, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity.

“Should we help it?” Micky asked, clearly feeling the same way.

Percy nodded. Enveloping himself within his willpower, he lifted his body off the ground, flying toward the creature while keeping his head low. He’d wasted enough time as it was, so he figured that this would be the fastest way to approach the demi-human without alerting it.

Once he was about a kilometre away, he pulled out every morsel of food that he could find in his spatial seal, piling it all on the ground. He made sure that the goblin didn’t see nor hear him, not wanting to spook it. It was close enough that its trained nose should take care of the rest: assuming that the acrid scent of burnt wood didn’t throw it off.

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Sure enough, it didn’t even take a full minute for the thin demi-human to catch a whiff of Percy’s sumptuous donation. Percy and Micky pulled away, observing the creature from afar as it rushed to the pile and sank its fangs into a preserved piece of chicken thigh, right before stuffing its face with almonds. It was admittedly an odd assortment of foodstuffs. In his defence, Percy hadn’t expected his snacks to end up in the clawed hands of a goblin when he stored them.

After eating everything it could fit in its stomach and dragging away as much food as it could carry, it headed south: presumably to deliver its loot to its nestmates and request their help to bring home the rest.

“I wonder whether they’ll manage to repopulate,” Micky said, speaking his thoughts out aloud.

“Depends on how many are left,” Percy replied, having not even considered the potential extinction of the demi-humans before.

It was a genuine possibility. The rest of the wildlife should return once the forest recovered, since the species living here existed elsewhere on Remior. The wood goblins, however, were unique to the Whistling Woods. Percy wasn’t sure how many the flames had caught, but the destruction of their habitat and the lack of food might just doom the rest.

With a new burning question in his mind, he decided to stick around and observe the enthusiastic creature a little longer.

“So that’s where they live,” he said once the goblin reached the roots of one of the larger trees in the outskirts of the forest, burrowing into a narrow tunnel that had been concealed by a bush.

“No wonder we never managed to find their hiding spots: they’re underground,” Micky echoed.

Percy and his former familiar had always sparred against the groups scouring the surface of the forest, with the creatures’ underground homes having remained a well-kept secret until today.

Obviously, House Avalon could have easily deployed a powerful Blue like Galahad to track the demi-humans down and eradicate them within a day or two, but there had never been a reason to go that far.

Even Red-borns would typically advance to Orange by fifteen, and any Orange with a common or composite affinity wouldn’t have much trouble defending themselves from the weak humanoids. Percy had only been an exception in his youth because of his inability to use his rare affinity properly.

The goblins weren’t a threat to anybody, so House Avalon and the neighbouring families considered them a mere part of the forest’s fauna: an attraction, even, due to their uniqueness. The poor things also made for decent practice dummies for their young mages, so they had mostly let them be.

Now that Percy had finally caught a glimpse of the demi-humans’ underground home, he couldn’t help his curiosity. Focusing his senses into the hole, he allowed his Sage’s Pond to unfold through the winding tunnels, mapping them out.

The thick layer of dirt and rock separating him from the goblin nest severely restricted the range of his senses, but he still had many ways to figure out what was going on beneath his feet.

His Soul Vision ignored the obstruction entirely, allowing him to easily spot dozens of additional goblins now that he knew where to look. His Mana Sense was hindered more severely by the earthly barrier, though it still fed some additional data into his mind. His regular sight, hearing, and heat vision were entirely useless in this situation, but he already knew what the creatures looked and sounded like, so Ea’s Gift was more than capable of filling the gaps in his vision with the dim light of the caverns, the smooth texture of their damp walls, and the guttural growls of their occupants.

Overall, his Sage’s Pond shrank by dozens of times as he forced it to worm its way through the underground complex, but that still spanned enough space to get a decent idea of how the goblins lived.

“Only a third of them are adults,” he pointed out with a frown. “They definitely have the numbers to survive, but only if they find a new source of food. Maybe we should have someone deliver supplies every few weeks for the next decade or so, until the forest recovers enough…”

Percy’s voice trailed off as he detected some faint mana signatures within the tunnels that didn’t belong to the goblins. Every single instance was at Orange, though the mana wasn’t neatly concentrated within small spheres, nor was it accompanied by proper souls. It overlapped with a barely-perceptible silver sheen, indicative of a plant’s underdeveloped spirituality.

“Interesting. I’ve no idea what this is, but if it’s at Orange, it can potentially be used as the main ingredient in a potion,” Micky: who had clearly also spotted the mysterious plant: pointed out.

Whatever it was, there was a lot of it underground, and Percy was sure that he had never seen anything like it on the surface of the forest.

Wishing to examine the ingredient from up close without scaring the goblins out of their nest, he searched for a spot that wasn’t too deep, and where the strange plant was concentrated but the demi-humans weren’t. Using his domain, he scooped out a huge cube of dirt and rock, surgically removing the ingredient before returning the block into the hole.

The mysterious plant was some type of moss that appeared to grow along the walls of the cavern. In Percy’s regular vision, it sported a bright, yellowish-white colour that was indicative of a light affinity. That much wasn’t too strange or interesting by itself. What surprised Percy the most was how closely the moss resembled the glowing eyes of the goblins themselves.

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that we found the green and red mushrooms growing out of the trolls’ corpses, and now this moss within the goblins’ den? And that both tribes of demi-humans seemed to actively consume and use the ingredients?” Micky asked.

“I’m gonna say no,” Percy replied.

Realizing how poorly they understood semi-sapients despite the few times that they had interacted with them, Percy and Micky agreed to spend another hour collecting samples to experiment with later, before leaving for the Fungal Spire.