My Colony Became a Living City

Chapter 14 - Two Weeks Early

Chapter 14 · 1,430 words

The stag's antlers were wrong.

Torven saw them first, jutting above the undergrowth at the eastern forest edge like branches from a tree that had grown in a direction it shouldn't. But branches didn't have that asymmetry. The left antler branched three times, each tine curving inward at an angle that suggested bone growing under pressure from inside the skull. The right antler was shorter, thicker, and branched five times in a pattern that had no natural analogue.

Then he saw the eyes.

Four on the left side of the stag's skull. Two on the right. The extras were smaller than the primary eyes, set into the bone at irregular intervals, and they were all open. All six. The primary eyes were clouded with death, but the secondary ones still twitched, residual Blight energy firing the nerves in a body that should have been fully dead.

The town guard had formed a perimeter around the carcass. Six guards, weapons drawn, standing in a loose circle, weapons ready for a carcass that still twitched. It wouldn't stand. The guard who'd found it, a young man named Keldan whose hands were still shaking, had put a crossbow bolt through its brain an hour ago.

But the body was still twitching. Small muscle spasms rippling through the hindquarters, the Blight-taint in the nervous system firing randomly as the tissue broke down. The fur was matted with a dark residue that smelled like copper and rot, the same smell Torven had noticed on the displaced goblin, but stronger. Much stronger.

The countdown board stood in the town square behind them. Eleven days. The painted numbers looked absurd against the reality of the stag's corpse.

Torven's rule literacy engaged before his emotions could catch up.

A Harrowing scout. Blight-tainted, corrupted beyond normal mutation, found within half a day's march of Ashmark. The creature's level of corruption suggested it had been traveling from the Blight boundary for days, maybe a week. Which meant the boundary was closer than anyone had calculated. Which meant the main wave, the actual Harrowing, could arrive significantly sooner than the board indicated.

The board was a countdown to the System's best estimate. The estimate was wrong.

Ysolde arrived while he was still studying the carcass. She pushed through the gathered residents. There were twenty or thirty now, drawn by the commotion, their faces tight with the specific fear that comes from seeing a threat you can't categorize. She walked to the perimeter, nodded to the guards, and studied the stag.

Torven watched her face. She was recalculating. Her jaw was set, her eyes moving over the carcass with the methodical attention of a soldier reassessing a defensive timeline. Every assumption she'd built her evacuation plan on, the time available, the route's viability, the window for staged withdrawal, was being rewritten in real time by the thing lying dead in the undergrowth.

A resident touched the stag's flank and pulled his hand back. The dark residue came away on his fingers, glistening.

"It came from the east," Keldan said. His voice was too loud for the quiet that had fallen over the group. "Found it in the snare corridor. Was already dead when I got there but the muscles were still" He stopped. Swallowed. "The extra eyes were still moving."

Ysolde didn't answer him. She was looking at the tree line. The eastern forest, which had been deteriorating for weeks, leaves curling brown at the edges, the metallic tang in the air growing stronger, now looked different. Advancing.

"If the vanguard is this close," she said, to no one in particular, "the main wave could be days away."

The words landed like a physical blow. The residents who'd been maintaining the strained normalcy of the past two weeks, the fragile equilibrium of a town split between two survival plans but still functioning, felt the ground shift under them.

A woman near the back of the group, Brenn, Torven recognized her, a mother of two who'd argued calmly for evacuation at the last council session, made a sound. A noise that came from the throat when the mind can't process what the eyes are showing it.

By the time Torven walked back to the town square, the panic had started.

It didn't begin as a roar. It began as a crack, a hairline fracture in the social order that had held the town's split together. The supply house door opened and closed as people rushed for provisions. A family near the baker's shop was arguing in voices that carried across the square: the father wanted to leave for the caves immediately, the mother was saying the children couldn't survive the route, the eldest boy was standing between them with his hands out, trying to physically hold the argument apart.

Bramel found Torven near the well. The trapper's face was gray.

"People are coming to find you," Bramel said. His voice was flat, the voice of a man reporting facts he doesn't want to be true. "The ones who argued against infection last week. They're coming to your door."

Torven nodded. He'd expected this. The timeline compression changed every calculation. Ysolde's evacuation plan required time, time to organize, time to stage the withdrawal, time to move five hundred people through monster territory. The Harrowing didn't care about their timeline.

An uninfected resident, Brant, one of Dorrik's logging crew, who'd stood with Ysolde at the public gathering and argued that infection was a violation, was walking toward the supply house. His jacket was off. His arms were bare. His hands were shaking.

He wasn't the only one.

Torven watched from the square as the first three volunteers arrived at his door. They stood in a line they hadn't organized, three men who two days ago would have called him a violator and a threat. Now they stood with their palms out, waiting for him to cut them open.

Ysolde was visible at the guard house window. She was watching. She didn't move to stop them.

The council called an emergency session. It lasted forty minutes and produced nothing. Othric suggested accelerating the evacuation. Elara pointed out that the evacuation route was now more dangerous than it had been yesterday. A third council member suggested sending a rider to Valdris for reinforcements. No one reminded them that Valdris had already said no.

The session ended without a vote. The council retreated to their offices. The town did not.

Torven stood in the supply house doorway and watched the line grow. Five volunteers. Seven. A woman, Silla, young, maybe twenty, a friend of Nemi's from Bramel's first infection group, pushed to the front. She wasn't from Bramel's network. She'd heard about the collective through the town's whisper-system and come on her own, terrified but determined. Her hands were steady when she offered her palm. Steadier than most of the men's.

Behind the supply house, Anwen was setting up cots. She'd heard. She always heard.

The countdown board read eleven. The number was a lie.

Torven looked at the volunteers. Looked at their faces, tight with fear, their eyes moving between him and the tree line to the east, expecting Blight creatures to walk out of the forest at any moment. Some of them might. The timeline compression meant the vanguard was already moving, and the forest between Ashmark and the Blight boundary was thinner than anyone had believed.

He could recruit carefully. Take the volunteers who understood what they were choosing, who had the emotional bandwidth to process the implications, who gave consent that was informed and calm and clean. It would take days. Maybe a week.

The Harrowing might arrive in three.

Or he could accept every volunteer who walked through that door. Infect them quickly, integrate them fast, add their fragments to the collective's capability before the timeline compressed further. The consent would be compromised, driven by terror rather than understanding. Each infection would create a debt he couldn't repay. But each fragment would make the collective stronger, and the collective was the only thing that might keep this town alive.

His wound pressed against the inside of his skull. Twelve years old. The foster brother he couldn't reach. The adults who had a plan and couldn't coordinate fast enough to make it work. People died because the response was too slow.

He looked at the next volunteer in line. A man he recognized, Ulmar, Brant's brother, one of the loggers who'd argued for evacuation. Ulmar's jaw was clenched so tight the muscles twitched.

"Do it," Ulmar said.

Torven drew his knife.

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