118 To the south 1

Note: This is not a poem.

Remian dreamed.

There were dozens around him, complaining and nagging, but he turned away and walked away from them all. He went south to look for his brother.

Because the fear in the voice of his mother overwhelmed

All the natter and chatter of the guys' complaints

Because the grief he saw in his father's eyes

Outweighed all the concerns of unsolicited advice

Because the trembling query of his youngest sister

Held to him a demand as firm as the laws of heaven

And the trust in the urging of the oldest of his sisters

Held so strong a faith that he would find the lost boy

That Remian would not, could not stay

And hearing his plans, Asda said, "Leave it to me.

The town, and the people, and everything. Leave it to me and my mother.

We'll do what we can, you can go find your brother.

So Remian went looking for Darian

With Mindy and Tim and ten adventurer teenagers on the Red Fang

Twenty boars and one hundred wolfcats on the ground

Three hundred lynxmice both on the ground and in the airship combined

And roughly five thousand Feelo-Wasps led by a new queen

Who suddenly decided to make a new hive in the Red Fang

And join in the search for their friend.

…actually, a lot of others wanted to come too, but Remian wouldn't bring them along. The Wilds were enough. The humans needed to rebuild.

But Remian told them to hold off on the forge and the industrials for now. It sounded like the pollution and the deforestation was what triggered the Beast Tide. It was different, Remian felt. The Beast Tide was not the same as the Beast Waves previously. The ones in charge were different. The objectives were different. That guy who controlled them; he didn't seem to be from the Coalition of Six. He seemed to be almost a Wild himself…

Awareness flooded in. Conscious recognition and consideration nudged aside dreams and sleep. Remian was awake before he realized it, his eyes closed, but his mind registering sounds and voices outside his cabin.

"Remian?" a soft voice called him.

Ah, right. That's why he woke up. Someone was waking him up.

He opened his eyes to see Mindy standing there with a bread on a plate. She was observing him a bit hesitantly.

"I'm awake." He assured her. "I just had the worst dream."

"Really?"

"I dreamed a Beast Tide attacked and destroyed the town and kidnapped my brother." Remian told her.

"That wasn't a dream."

Remian rubbed his eyes, still blurry and bleary from sleep. He blinked once, twice; but the scene before him did not change. There he was in the captain's cabin of the Red Fang, with Mindy in front of him wearing full Frontier Defense Force combat armor, her belt hung about with tools and a rapier, but bearing a plate of ham-and-cheese sandwiches as if it were perfectly normal.

She shouldn't even be here. She should be in school, with teachers like Dad and Mom, and classmates like Darian… he shouldn't be out in the Wildlands either. All of them should be safely in town, far away from Beast Tides and the Frontier, like Mandy said. She had a point. Darian shouldn't be out there, alone, captured by some half-wild man who somehow controlled a Beast Tide.

Mindy must have seen the guilt on his face. "Hey. Don't be so hard on yourself. It wasn't your fault."

"How is my brother being on the Frontier not my fault?"

"You were just trying to give him a better life. Nobody could have predicted that between an eleven year-old and Wulfgar, they'd end up going to the farm for shelter instead of the mines." Mindy chided. "No matter how careful we were, nothing could have prepared us for Wulfgar's idiocy."

Wulfgar. Right. The man was somewhere on the ground drinking mead by the gallon, moaning and beating himself up. Given his condition, Remian hadn't dared take him along, no matter how much he begged. He wasn't sure if it was out of concern for Wulfgar's self-destructive tendencies (an airship's deck was an excellent starting point for a suicide jump), or the temptation of joining him in self-blame and strong drink.

"Still. I call dibs on blame." Remian concluded, but then put aside the weight of that burden. "Now. Where are we and how are things going?"

"We're over the Golden Savannah, just about to reach the Speckled Highlands. The wolfcats report Darian's scent intermittently still headed south, south-west along the Beast Wave trail, but far, far past Craggy Falls. It's like Doom came up the same route, and just went back the way he came." Mindy shifted. "If we keep going the way we're going, sooner or later we're going to come up on Dragon Lake. We really might find ourselves facing Kor'ag-dras and Mal'thor-dras at this rate. But before that… we're going to reach Three Pines Peak by this time tomorrow."

"Three Pines… isn't that the Sun Eagle Lord's domain?" Remian remembered.

"It is."

"How long have I been asleep?!"

"All morning and half the afternoon."

"We made it this far in one day?"

"This is the Red Fang, not the Tug. Actually, for a military-grade airship, we've been taking it rather slow because we kept looking for trails, traces and scents of Doom and Darian."

"What about the rest of the Beast Tide? Any word from Song Chen?"

"Last we heard from Song Chen, they had dispersed and went about their merry ways. He hasn't raised any alarms, so I guess they're okay?"

"He mentioned a lot of them were headed west toward the mines."

"He did. But still, no word since. No news is good news, right?"

Remian went over to the desk and took out a crystal. He took a deep breath, meditated for a minute, calmed his emotions and then channeled mana into the communications crystal. The crystal shook and gleamed in response. A high-pitched humming came from it once, twice, a third time…

He waited for roughly ten seconds before there was a reply.

"Song Chen? You there?"

"Yes. I am here."

"What news of the Beast Tide remnants? Are they attacking the mines?"

"No." Song Chen hesitated. Then, "They are nesting."

"N… nesting?"

"They are building nests. Settling in." Song Chen confirmed. "They are making homes in the reforested zzone."

"But… but they're Tier 3's and 4's! Some of them are even Tier 5!"

"Indeed. By this time next week, Shadowflash Fief's average local Wild would be ten times stronger than the ones I faced when I first arrived."