Chapter 8: The Deep Briar
“Let me explain our situation in practical terms,” Elian said, his breath clouding in the freezing air while he cinched the heavy harness across Barnaby’s chest. “If we run into a Needle-boar, a Shadowclaw Bear, or anything else in this forest with teeth larger than my thumb, I will be relying almost entirely on luck and poor visibility. You, meanwhile, have four legs and a very healthy respect for self-preservation. If you break this lead rope and leave me in the deep briar, I promise you I will spend the rest of my afterlife haunting your feed trough. Your oats will sour in the sack. Your water will taste of regret.”
Barnaby let out a long, wheezing breath. He looked from Elian to the dense, waiting treeline, then back again with the bleak endurance of a beast who had survived a decade in Guild logistics only to be marched willingly into a forest full of creatures with strong jaws and predatory instincts.
You are a liability, architect. Elian ignored him and checked his gear for the fourth consecutive time, because there was comfort in repetition even when it changed nothing. A coil of hemp rope hung over his left shoulder. His heavy iron hammer rode at his belt. A hand-axe he had sharpened that morning sat at his hip beside two iron splitting wedges wrapped in cloth. In one hand he carried a heavy, wool-wrapped tin flask filled to the brim with boiling cherry-vanilla tonic.
He did not have a spear, a hunting bow, or a sword worth naming. That omission bothered him deeply in theory and comforted him entirely in practice. He had zero real training with any of them, and the prospect of waving an unfamiliar weapon at the local wildlife felt like an excellent way to speed up his own death.
At midday, while the weak winter sun strained uselessly against the thick canopy, Rylia stepped out of the trees at the edge of the clearing.
She looked rested, which on her carried an entirely different meaning than it did on human beings. Elian’s version of rested involved slightly less pain in the knees and perhaps a steadier temper. Rylia’s version suggested she had slept exactly four hours and woken up prepared to dismantle fortifications for light exercise.
She had left the heavy boiled-leather armor behind. A rough linen tunic covered her broad torso, leaving her thickly furred arms bare to the biting wind. The great curved steel hunting blade still hung at her hip with the easy familiarity of a tool she had trusted for years. Her pale blue eyes passed over Barnaby first, taking in the trembling mule and the heavy harness.
“You brought the burden beast,” she noted.
“Barnaby is a respected member of the expedition,” Elian replied. He offered her the flask. “Tonic. Brewed stronger than yesterday.”
Rylia pulled the stopper free, and sweet, dense steam lifted into the cold air. She drank from the tin flask without a flinch, acting as though the boiling liquid were merely warm. When she lowered it, her eyes had sharpened completely.
“Good,” she said, hooking the heavy flask to her belt. “Stay close to me, Elian. Step exactly where I step. Keep clear of the violet moss growing on the stones. And do not look into the hollows in the dead oaks.”
Elian stared at her for a beat. “I hear the instruction. I actively dislike the way you delivered it. What exactly happens if I look into the hollows?”
“You will want to walk into them,” Rylia said.
Then she turned and walked straight into the dense thorns and timber crowding the edge of the clearing, leaving Elian to absorb the implications of that answer on his own time.
He tightened his grip on Barnaby’s lead rope and drew in a slow, careful breath. “Eyes strictly on the path,” he told the mule. “We are following Wolf tracks and actively thinking about nothing else.”
Stepping off the overgrown road felt like crossing a physical boundary no map had bothered to document. The air temperature dropped instantly. The forest held a completely different kind of cold under the dense canopy—damp, heavy, and settled deep into the ground. It smelled of wet earth, pine rot, and ancient growth left undisturbed for so long that decay had simply become part of the soil itself. The trunks here rose vastly wider than anything near the road, their massive roots breaking the earth in steep ridges and solid walls. Rylia crossed them in a single fluid motion. Elian had to clamber over each one, dragging Barnaby behind him one exhausted complaint at a time.
They walked in silence for nearly an hour. Rylia moved through the heavy undergrowth with effortless, terrifying certainty, her thick fur brushing thorns aside without catching. She seemed to read the dense woods through scent, sound, and whatever else lived in instincts honed by years of surviving the Northern Vanguard patrols. Elian did what he could to keep the pace. Sucking mud tugged at his boots. Thick roots caught his soles. Low branches snagged his heavy coat. He tried very, very hard not to think about dead oak hollows waiting somewhere in the shadows with open invitations inside them.
At last, Rylia stopped in a dim, silent clearing where the heavy canopy pressed close overhead and the ground lay entirely bare except for ancient needles and dead leaves. A single, jagged tree stood near the center.
At first glance, it looked incredibly underwhelming. It was narrower than some of the towering pines around it, perhaps only a foot and a half across. Then Elian got close enough to see the bark properly. It was pitch black, almost oily in the way it actively swallowed the weak light. The trunk held itself with a kind of dense, compact tension that made the surrounding massive pines seem flimsy by comparison.
“Iron-heart,” Rylia announced.
She reached out and tapped the dark trunk with one thick claw.
The sound that snapped back was bright, sharp, and incredibly hard—much closer to struck metal than living wood.
Elian stared at it.
Of course it sounds like an anvil. Why wouldn’t the murder lumber sound like solid iron?
Rylia stepped back three full paces and planted her heavy boots in the dirt. In one smooth, blinding motion, she drew the great hunting blade from its sheath. Unsheathed, the weapon looked even larger than it had at her hip—a massive slab of scarred grey steel with a cutting edge broad enough to make Elian’s hand-axe feel deeply insulting.
“Back,” she ordered.
Elian did not need telling twice. He hauled Barnaby backward by the thick rope until both of them were half-hidden in the dense brush.
Rylia took one slow, deep breath. Her chest expanded under the linen tunic. Then she dropped her center of gravity and swung.
The heavy steel hit the Iron-heart with a violent crack that punched through the quiet clearing like struck thunder. Elian flinched so hard his teeth clicked together. He fully expected the steel blade to burst apart or rebound violently out of her grip.
Instead, the entire tree shuddered.
Rylia pivoted through the massive follow-through and struck again, then again, each heavy blow landing with brutal, terrifying precision. Her shoulders, back, and hips moved together in one brutal line, making the immense weapon seem much lighter than it had any physical right to be. On the final strike, the dense trunk gave way with a shrill, screaming tear, and the severed length crashed to the earth hard enough to jar the ground straight through the soles of Elian’s boots.
He stood perfectly still, looking from the fallen black trunk to the clean-faced stump, and then to Rylia, who barely seemed winded.
She calmly wiped a streak of black sawdust from the heavy blade with her thumb and slammed it back into the sheath.
“It is down,” she said. She gestured toward the length she had cut, a solid eight feet of murderous building material. “Transport it.”
Elian walked over to the log and crouched beside one heavy end. He set his boots, bent his knees properly, and hauled upward with absolutely everything he had.
Nothing happened.
The black wood might as well have been anchored to the earth with pure spite. He strained until his lungs burned and dark flecks swam across his vision, but the log stayed exactly where it was, completely indifferent to his effort and entirely unimpressed by his intentions.
Rylia folded her thick arms and watched with open amusement. “It is dense, Elian.”
“I am learning that intimately,” he wheezed, straightening up with one hand braced hard against his lower back.
He looked at the black trunk. Then he looked at Barnaby. Then he looked at the uneven ground between them and the distant road—a terrible mess of exposed roots, jagged stones, and soft mud patches that would catch a dragged log every few feet. If he simply tied the hemp rope around one end and forced Barnaby to pull, the front edge would bite deeply into the first obstacle it met, and the mule would wrench himself half-lame trying to tear it free.
Raw physical strength had already formally announced its limits.
Leverage, however, still had work to do.
Elian unbuckled his heavy tool belt and set it down carefully in the needles. “I can’t lift it,” he admitted. “So I won’t. We make it move differently.”
He took up the sharpened hand-axe and dropped to one knee at the front edge of the log. The Iron-heart fought every single cut. The steel blade barely bit into the black grain, and each tiny shaving required far too much physical effort to free. He kept working at it anyway, slowly chopping away the sharp lower corners and forcing the flat end into a blunter, rounded shape. Cold sweat ran into his eyes. His shoulders began to ache and shake with the effort. By the time he finally finished, the front of the heavy trunk possessed the sloped curve of a river barge prow.
“That solves one problem,” he muttered.
Next, he drove the two iron splitting wedges deeply into either side of the log, hammering them in far enough to create solid, unbreakable anchor points. He looped the thick hemp rope securely around the trunk with a reinforced timber hitch, running the long trailing length back to Barnaby’s heavy harness. After that, he cut three straight branches from a fallen, rotting soft pine nearby. He laid them in the dirt directly in front of the log, parallel to one another, building a crude rolling track beneath the newly shaped front end.
Barnaby eyed the entire mechanical arrangement with profound alarm.
I object to being attached to whatever this is.
“Barnaby,” Elian said, patting the mule’s dusty flank once before stepping clear of the tension line, “walk.”
Barnaby leaned into the heavy harness with the deeply defeated expression of a worker whose supervisor had produced a plan too ridiculous to safely fail. The long rope drew taut. The timber hitch clenched like iron. The rounded front of the massive log slid smoothly up onto the first pine branch and, with a heavy jerk that successfully transferred into forward motion, rolled forward.
Elian’s entire face lit up.
Yes. There you are.
As soon as the heavy trunk cleared the rear branch, Elian ran back, snatched the wood up, and sprinted to the front. He dropped it down again ahead of the creeping log, then repeated the brutal process, actively turning three dead branches into a continuously shifting track that kept the Iron-heart rolling smoothly over roots and soft mud instead of digging violently into them.
Rylia watched without saying a single word. Her white ears tipped sharply forward. Her pale eyes tracked the tension in the rope, the exact placement of the pine rollers, and the smooth way the shaved prow climbed, settled, and kept moving. The open amusement had completely vanished from her expression. In its place was something far more focused.
Elian paused just long enough to wipe the stinging sweat from his face with his sleeve. “It deeply lacks elegance,” he said between heavy, ragged breaths, “but it strongly beats carrying the damn thing over my shoulder.”
“You are physically weak,” Rylia stated.
Elian barked out a tired, breathless laugh. “An observation so painfully obvious it barely qualifies as news. I spent ten years sitting at a desk. My primary combat skill is filing invoices.”
“But you are not useless,” she finished.
She stepped closer, easily towering over him, and touched one heavy claw lightly to his temple.
“You understand weight,” she said. “You look at a thing far too heavy to move, and you find another way to force it to move. That matters here, Elian.”
The words landed in his chest significantly harder than he expected. Sudden heat moved up from his ribs to the back of his neck, completely ignoring the freezing wind cutting under the trees.
Well. That is dangerously close to genuine praise.
“Thank you,” he said, and he found he could not quite keep the tired, honest grin off his face.
“Since you now appreciate the system,” he said, hauling another branch into place, “are you planning to help, or shall I list your contribution as decorative oversight?”
Rylia smiled then—a look sharp and bright enough to catch the little remaining light that filtered down through the canopy.
“I will carry the branches,” she decided, a deep rumble of amusement humming under the words. “Lead on, Elian.”
And with that, the three of them—one exhausted former clerk, one massive Wolf Kin patrol leader, and one deeply unhappy mule—began the slow, brutal work of bringing the Iron-heart home.