The clouds were darkening, the temperature dropping, and the breeze turning sharp and cool. Minutes ago, the sky had been a soft, generous blue, and the sun had warmed his skin as if the world meant him well. Now the light went grey at the edges and shadows grew long and thin between trunks, and the smell of the sea crept into the forest with a hint of iron. Life near the water, Halfdan thought: sunshine that changes its mind mid-sentence.
He moved quietly, the way Arash's instincts wanted him to move. Even without Install or Include, and with his MP leaked away like a coin purse with a hole in it, his body knew what to do.
He kept his breath shallow, his steps patient, and resisted the idiot urge to shout Lili's name into the trees.
He wanted to, his throat kept rising for it, but Brynhild's voice wouldn't leave his head. "Maddrifts often bring more than one calamity at a time. The forest isn't safe. No part of this island is safe, not for airheaded men, and even less for children."
The words carried the weight of something long learned and longer proved. The island didn't feel like a place where sound returned kindly to its sender.
Best not to tell the woods where he was.
The giant fight felt like it had lasted hours; his muscles said so, his heart said so, and his ego had draft legislation ready to confirm it.
In truth, it hadn't been more than fifteen minutes. In the thick of it, though, it had felt endless, enough time to be brave, to be foolish, to be both. But when the bow cooled in his hands and the giant lay like a hill knocked out of place, the sun had barely shifted along the cedar boughs.
Which meant Lili couldn't have gone far. Kids have small legs.
He jumped over some fallen branches, and the ground tried to trip him, then thought better of it. His body, which for sixteen years had treated every movement like a toll to be negotiated, simply… moved.
I could get used to this, he thought. Then, quickly, please, universe, don't punish me for thinking that.
He stepped over a fallen trunk and slid down a damp slope, boots skidding, moss smearing slick beneath his feet.
Birdsong came in fits, like the birds were checking the barometer in their bones and deciding silence was the smarter option. Leaves whispered. The undergrowth was a tangle of ferns and low shrubs that snagged at his trousers and leaked cold water into his boots. A storm was walking toward them over the sea, shouldering its way through what little sunlight was left.
He pushed a branch aside and found the path opening into a shallow dip where rainwater had once run, a narrow, dry streambed stitched together with pale stones. He followed it because it was exactly the kind of thing a child might follow, too. Water leads somewhere, and nine-year-old logic loves a somewhere.
His chest was still a little tight from the fight, the after-burn of power and fear. Install had turned the world into a slowed-down tapestry of motion and meaning; it had been like stepping into a story where the hero could read the wind. Now the tapestry was gone and he was just a guy with a shiny gauntlet and a teenaged body that hadn't yet caught up to the ambitions inside it. His heart still thudded fast. Half from running. Half from the angel with the wind in her voice.
He tried not to think about Brynhild's eyes. That went about as well as trying not to think about an itch.
Deep indigo, cool as pressed violets, but not cold. She'd looked at him with the kind of precision that measured and weighed, but without cruelty. And her hair… it had caught the light when the clouds thinned, gold laced with something paler, like brass wire sailors thread through rope.
And he'd had the ridiculous, intrusive thought that if he just stood behind her blade, nothing in the world could touch him.
Focus, he told himself, and had the decency to feel his ears go warm. Yes, Brynhild had moved like a line of poetry and smiled like a cliff edge looked at the sea. Yes, he had been briefly distracted by the fact that she existed in the same reality as him. He didn't need gut feelings to tell him he was being an idiot; he had a lifetime of evidence.
But he was not going to be that guy. He was already the guy who'd died twice; he didn't need to add pines after knight with wind sword to the list.
"Find the kid. Find Lili. Everything else can wait." He muttered and scrubbed a hand over his face.
The word, Maddrifts, sat in his mouth like a stone he hadn't decided to swallow. He didn't actually know what a Maddrift was, beyond "bad thing that spits out worse things."
He had no frame of reference. Nothing except one piece of evidence currently ruining the island's week: a giant that shouldn't exist. Lukka had said the word like it was both a curse and a duty. Brynhild had spoken it with the kind of respect you give storms you've survived twice.
He'd repeated it in confusion, and the air itself had shifted, like a room reacting to something outrageous being said.
Whatever a Maddrift was, it dragged monsters and lost things into places they didn't belong, and it is apparently common knowledge.
It sounded like a tide gone wrong, like someone had been doodling on the fabric of the world with a knife.
He lengthened his stride. "Just find the kid," he told himself. "Get the hell out of the haunted broccoli. Reevaluate your life choices over soup."
He bent to look at the ground where the streambed rejoined the path. Small footprints, toes pointed a little inward, heel faint and light, someone quick, not heavy; a child who liked to skip when no one was watching. Lili. He let out a breath he hadn't admitted he was holding. He followed. For the next stretch, the forest bent toward the ocean, the wind carrying salt and something older, wet rock and the ghost of rot from fallen leaves going back centuries.
He kept a mental tally of MP out of habit, a recently developed one. Four points sloshing around like lonely marbles in a jar. Not enough for another Install. Enough for Include in a pinch, for a minute, maybe, just enough to land shots that mattered, just enough to make a mistake with style.
His mind kept replaying the fight without asking permission. The way Brynhild's sword had carved the air, not against it. How Lukka's claymore had seemed to enjoy itself, roaring heat in careful arcs. They'd dispatched an A-rank threat like two people late to a dinner reservation, and he'd contributed a solid five to ten percent of the total competence on display. Even if he'd had unlimited Arash, they would have wiped the floor with him; he could admit that without it making him smaller. If you spent sixteen years having your own mana bled out of you while other people learned how to be strong, you learned the luxury of admiration. He wasn't angry about their power. He wanted to live long enough to earn power that didn't expire when a timer hit zero.
A gull screamed somewhere above the canopy, a raw string-scrape sound. Then, another sound, close, soft. Not a gull. A voice, lilting. He went still.
"-and then you said we'd go when the lilies came, and I said that was silly because lilies don't come, they grow, and you laughed, and I laughed, and then we both laughed twice more to make it even-"
He took the last three steps carefully and looked into the clearing beyond the brush.
Lili stood on a shelf of moss and root like a little priestess, pale hair tangled and bright, pink eyes enormous in the grey light. She wasn't talking to herself. She was talking to the man who loomed before her, two and a half meters tall, easy, with shoulders like the sort of architecture you put statues on. His hair was a pale blond that might have been golden if the world had given him sunshine; his eyes were that fevered wrong red that didn't belong in anyone's face, never mind a human. His skin looked like it had been made by hands that understood stone better than flesh, coarse, weathered, cracked with thin lines. He wore a ruin of armor that might once have been magnificent: leather gone dark with age, plates pitted and scarred, and at his waist a belt of heavy bronze links big as a man's fists, each link engraved, the whole thing half-buried in grime.
Alcides, Halfdan thought with a lurch, though he had no reason to be sure. It has to be him. The way Lili stood, not afraid, a little hunched like she was worried for the man, not for herself.
Alcides breathed in once, and the sound rasped like stone dragged across frost. He had that stillness some dangerous beasts have when they are listening to themselves decide what to do. Lili reached a hand across the space as if she could close it with fingers. Then the man's gaze slid to Halfdan as if pulled on a chain.
His head turned toward him. The barest thread of whatever held the man together sang in the air, frayed, raw. He saw Halfdan the way a starving dog sees another hand reaching for its bone. The muscles along his jaw jumped. The red in his eyes seemed to thicken. He sucked in a breath, and the sound scraped. He took a step. The ground acknowledged it with a small quake.
Halfdan moved without meaning to, a half-step forward and his hands up, palms open away from his body, the universal language for I'm not a threat; please prefer not to kill me, and Lili found a little scream from somewhere and flung it at the man in desperation.
"Papa, no! He saved me! He's my friend!"
The giant man, Alcides, Halfdan reminded himself, twitched. Sanity, if that's what you could call it, flickered behind his eyes like a candle in the wind. Something in the massive frame shuddered. For a heartbeat, the wrong red eased, and you could almost imagine what his face would look like without the madness: handsome, yes, and kind in that way big men sometimes are when the world stops asking them to prove it. Then the thread snapped. He wheeled with a sound like a stone splitting and was gone through the trees, moving with a speed that made nonsense of his size. The trunks shook after him.