Fractured Dreams

Chapter 2, Rachel Morris:

Chapter 2, Rachel Morris:

Rachel and the survivors of the dojo made it into the town of Cliffside. Darkness chased them into the streets. The few homes that sat on the outskirts of the cliff edge had been long abandoned before the group arrived. She could see little in the way of preparations for an attack.

The magistrate started shouting orders before they reached the city proper. Rachel shook her head. There was no way this town would survive an attack. All the defenses built by the town faced toward the sea. Even with the war raging on the far side of the island, little had been done to defend against an attack from the mountains. Now the inhabitants were about to become victims of their hubris.

With no walls, no towers, and not a single hardened position to defend, the flat of the cliff that overlooked the town was a loss. Rachel could see no way to save this part of town. The people that lived there must have felt the same way and deserted their homes and farmsteads at the first sign of trouble.

“If we survive the night, can I borrow your horse? I want to check on your home…” What Rachel really wanted to check on was to see if Lane survived the night. She cared little for the home of the rich woman who owned their souls for the next few months. She wasn’t even sure she owed a check to the strange older priest she’d saved from himself too many times to count. Perhaps she was more curious if the monsters were stopped by the wall, by the men too far gone to travel. If they could keep the horrors at bay through the night, there remained a chance for the citizens of this town.

The older woman looked down from her horse. “If we are still here in the morning, you can ride out and reconnoiter the area. We need to learn the size of the force that we face. We need to learn if they travel during the daylight. We need to learn what we face.” She slipped off her mount, her boots slopping in the puddles. She handed Rachel the reins. “Look after her tonight. I am going to get this city ready to defend…”

Rachel was surprised she didn’t add, “If I can.” Perhaps the words were unspoken. Standing on the cliff, Rachel looked down at the bay below and the fishing vessels that sat anchored waiting for their crews. There were not nearly enough boats to evacuate the city. When the attack came, it would be fight or die. Rachel could see no way out from that fact.

No help came from Zar. Rachel was in no position to even know if the word had been sent about the attack on the outlying settlements or if the town was going to face this new threat alone. She was more ignorant than the farmers that died in the first wave of attacks, and now she held the reins of a horse to watch over. As far as Rachel was concerned, it was going to be a long night.

She was not far from the tavern where she and Lane first met the citizens of the local community. If she hadn’t been so eager to start a fight, Lane might still be alive.

She shook her head. She would not hold herself responsible for his life choices. If she went down that path, her life would devolve into a series of second guesses over her own life choices. Rachel was a fighter. She lived by a strange personal code of self-dependence. If Harper thought it was her time to die, there would be little she could do to stop the end from coming.

At the tavern, she found the door closed and barred. Shutters on the windows made it hard to gain entry to the small single-room drinking establishment but not impossible. She broke open one of the shutters and wormed her way into the opening.

She was surprised to find a keg behind the bar, but the real reason for her petty crime was a shelter for the night. The horse needed protection, and it would make her heart warm to use the place she was arrested in. A little horseshit would do the place good.

A quick search and she found nothing to eat. The keg of beer beckoned to her. If tonight was going to be her last night on the earth, she might as well go out in style. However, she did force herself to wait until sunset. Better to be sober if anyone came to check on her rather than toes up drunk.

The sun set. The smell of smoke drifted over the fields, mixing with the fog that hung at ground level. If this was the time the creatures attacked, the atmosphere was perfect for a horror story.

It became difficult to ignore the grumble coming from her stomach. Better to go and test the vintage of the ale left behind rather than alert every creature in earshot where she and her horse waited the night away.

One sniff and she understood why, of all the kegs once stored in this tavern, this one had been left behind. There was barely enough alcohol in the mix to catch a whiff of it. The mixture sat little more than mash. Rachel needed to drink it through her teeth to keep the grain out of her stomach, and even then, she failed. It was better suited as feed for animals than human consumption. It only took a moment to find a flat basin, into which she poured a healthy serving of the slop for the horse.

Rachel watched the fields from a crack in one of the shutters. The fog and smoke made it hard to see, but she was able to pick out the unmistakable glow of farmsteads burning in the distance. From this distance, it was impossible to tell who had set the structures on fire.

That was, until she heard the unholy scream come from the creatures. They hunted, and it would only be a matter of time before the hoard found their way to the city. After that, all bets would be off. The cliff face would offer little protection from the creatures that would rain down on the city below.

Rachel instinctively reached out to pet the horse’s jaw. “It might be a better idea for us to keep running tomorrow.” She reached up and tickled the animal’s ear. “Better for us to run away and fight another day, right?”

“I’m curious, if you could escape, where would you go?” a deep male voice boomed from behind her.

Rachel spun her sword in her hand in an instant. There was no way a man snuck up on her. All the doors and windows she double-checked to make sure they were barred tight, and yet he somehow made it to the center of the room and stood, one hand resting on the bar.

The man behind the bar was huge. His bright red hair was hard to miss, and his silver staff was held at his side in the crook of his arm. The staff looked just like Lane’s, but she knew that weapon was still at the dojo, with Lane.

“Anywhere but here.” Rachel stood, her legs parted, ready to defend herself.

“I’m afraid that would do little good. The world has become out of balance. Demons walk the land of men now. This is going to grow much worse before it gets better.” The man’s voice sounded deep in his chest, like if he let out a yell, he could have blown Rachel against the wall with the force of his voice alone. This man seemed so strong, she was drawn to his side with every word he spoke.

“Then I should stay here and die?” Rachel relaxed a little. For some reason she felt her weapon would have little effect on this man who stood behind the bar.

“The brave one dies once; a coward dies a thousand times.” His eyes never left her. She felt them judging her as he spoke nonsense. “Why do you think you will die?”

“You didn’t see them attack the training camp. The outer wall never even slowed them down. We barely got out alive.”

“If a wall did little to stop them, what did work?”

Rachel hadn’t thought about that. Once they blocked the doors, the survivors were able to wait out the attack until the sun rose. The sun didn’t even need to be up—it had been overcast—yet the monsters retreated from the daylight. “The torches did little to slow them down, but it seems they fear the sun. If we could harness the sun as a weapon, maybe we could beat them off.”

“And to kill them?”

Rachel thought a moment. She knew a few of the monsters fell during the battle, but their outer scales turned arrows away. The riders were easier to take out, but the creatures they rode were so fast. “We need to separate the riders from the scaled creatures.”

“Sounds like the start of a plan…” The redheaded man watched her as she lowered her sword. “I think it is time for you to sleep now.” His booming voice became soft-spoken, and Rachel found it hard to keep her eyes open.

“I think I need to sleep now.” She slumped her body against the wall and let gravity take her to the floor.

She woke with a start. The man was nowhere in sight. It only took her a moment to check the doors and windows to find they were still barred from the inside.

She slept until first light. The clouds still hung heavy over the farmland outside, but she could see a lighter gray on the east horizon. “Come on, horse. Let’s see if we can find any survivors out there. Then we need to come back and get ready for tonight. If the monsters didn’t come last night, they will surely come tonight.”

The horse resisted leaving the comfort and safety that the four walls of the tavern provided, but Rachel coaxed the animal out with a slap on the ass. She jumped in the saddle quickly, as she knew it was easier to control the animal from the back more so with the reins. Now she just needed to stay on. She was not what a person would consider a mounted fighter by any stretch of the imagination. Her second foot barely in the stirrup, the horse took off at a brisk canter.

Rachel needed to hold on to the saddle to keep from falling off, but before the creature reached the first destroyed farmstead, she learned better to control the animal. Not good enough to fight but well enough to keep from falling off if the animal got spooked.

The horse was skittish this morning. Every noise and movement caused its head to twitch like the animal would bolt. The farther afield Rachel rode, the more damage she found.

Every building had been set to the torch. She was no farmer, but the crops looked mostly ruined, trampled into the ground. The mud of the field made counting of attackers impossible. The prints mushed into a single mass of mud and vegetation.

Still the clouds rained on her. If not for the rain, the fires from the burning buildings might have caught the fields on fire and ravaged the land even more.

From a distance, she spotted the once-white walls of the dojo, turned black by fire. Her heart sank. She knew it was too late, that everyone in the house and training building must be dead. There was no way Lane could have survived the attack. However, she came this far, so Rachel forced herself to travel the last few hundred paces to be certain. She had found the wounded Lane buried under a burning building before. There remained a chance she might still find him alive.

The horse slowed. Rachel assumed it knew his home and sensed the death that had been brought to his safe stable. Rachel felt the same. She never felt particularly safe in the barracks of the fighters, but she didn’t think the building would ever fall from the outside.

The creatures the monsters rode ignored the walls of the building and attacked everyone not protected inside the building. Now that building lay in ruin, the three stories fallen into a heap of smoldering rubble.

Rachel slid off the back of the mount and tied the reins to the ring at the front gate section that still hung on its hinges. The other lay on the ground. She pulled her sword and stepped into the walled courtyard.

Once inside, the understanding came quickly, she’d wasted her time. Lane, or someone, went to great lengths to make sure the building had been destroyed. Not only the main house was burnt to the ground, but the rooms built into the walls had collapsed as well.

They must have used some accelerant to make the fire spread in the rain. That was when she stumbled on an empty bottle that had been tossed into the sand yard of the training pit. She picked it up and at once noticed the sweet smell of alcohol from the dregs left in the bottom of the glass bottle.

She tipped it up and tasted the powerful drink on the tip of her tongue. “I hope you drank some of it before the attack. This must have been a great bottle of hooch,” Rachel said to herself. She tossed the bottle back into the yard and marched back to the gate and the waiting horse.

Reins in hand, she looked in the four directions. Cliffside lay to the south. There was nothing left to stop the monsters between the mountains to the north and the small city.

Rachel scanned east and west. She spotted nothing but smoke from the smoldering fires that lay in either direction. With the horse, she might be able to reach safety before the monsters attacked. She might be able to outrun them when they struck tonight.

She shook her head. She was a fighter. It was not in her mind or body to run from a fight, no matter the odds. It was time for her to return to Cliffside and tell the magistrate what she learned and start preparing the city for the attack she was certain would happen tonight.

No walls would stop these monsters, but maybe a solid roof and door would slow them down. She needed to work with a smith. As a child, Rachel would watch in awe as a hare would escape her dogs in a patch of briars. The spines would keep the dogs from eating the rabbits that made their nest deep inside. She had an idea for a weapon that might help even the odds, but they would need to hurry to make them in time. The twin moons would rise before she knew it. Time was not a commodity they held in abundance.