The preview is finally here! Which means the actual novel release isn’t that far behind…ideally.
As usual, the first chapter is free, the second one you get access to if you are a 1$/month or higher patron over on my Patreon.
CHAPTER I
“There will be many, many corpses,” Jak said as he ducked under a branch, then stepped over a large rock. “And we must deal with them today.”
“I’m not looking forward to it,” Rylee replied.
“I suppose it is worth it, if it means we have a new home, and safety,” Niri murmured.
“Safety for now,” Jak said. “You have to remember that we will never truly be safe. Especially not while we have so small a tribe.”
“Do you really think we can find others to join us? We are a strange group: an elf, a magic user, and a man from a mysterious, distant land,” Niri said.
“I think I can convince people to join us,” Jak replied. “They already have a name for me.”
“Who?” Rylee asked.
“The Tolvar. They called me the Amber Warrior.”
“Hmm. I suppose the color of your skin is a little like amber,” Rylee said. “And you are definitely quite the warrior.”
They fell silent as they approached the clearing in front of the cave. Already, Jak could detect the various scents of the recent slaughter. Blood, guts, excrement. Fear. He could smell it lingering on the air, even now. As he caught this awful concoction of odors, Jak felt his body responding instinctively. His senses opening up, preparing to warn him of danger. Usually, if there were dead things around, the thing that killed it might also still be around. Even though in this case he was the thing that had killed, or helped kill, everyone here.
But other things could have shown up since he’d gone to get the women.
Slowly, they emerged into the clearing in front of the cave that was to be their new home. For a moment, they simply stood there together, surveying the carnage.
“This is truly impressive,” Rylee murmured finally. “I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of something like this. A single man wiping out an entire warparty.”
“It wasn’t a single man,” Jak replied. “It was mostly spiders.”
“But you thought to lead them here. To pit them against each other. And it worked,” Rylee pressed. “This is entirely your doing.”
“You two helped.”
“It was mostly you,” Niri said.
“Well, it’s done,” Jak replied, unsure of how to feel about this. He did feel proud about the bloody battlefield, but it also made him uncomfortable for a reason he could not articulate. “For now, we should explore the caves, and be wary. Other predators or scavengers may come up, and I imagine there must be more Tolvar out in the forest, those who weren’t here when the battle happened.”
“Oh...yes. That is true,” Niri murmured, looking around uncomfortably.
“Come on. The sooner we begin this work, the sooner we can claim these caves as our new home, the site of our new tribe,” Jak said, and began making his way across the field of death. Though the large bonfire had mostly gone out by now, a few fires still burned from where something large had crashed into it and scattered burning wood everywhere. Jak was grateful it hadn’t spread to the forest. He studied the area with a focused eye.
The clearing sat in front of a large rock wall that curved up into a broad overhang which shaded almost half of the space. In the rock wall were three cave entrances. The one in the middle was the largest, while the one to the left was the smallest, closer in size to the cave Jak, Niri, and Rylee presently called home.
Perhaps the greatest feature was the waterfall. It was small, about the same size as the one they had been making morning pilgrimages to, off to the east side of the cave complex, just out of sight enough to provide a little bit of privacy, creating a creek that was just big enough to possibly sustain some fish and other creatures.
He tightened his grip on his club as he spied a few blood trails leading into the caves. It was entirely possible that some of the Tolvar had survived the battle and, while he had been gone, come back and hid in the caves to heal. Or that wolves or other predators had come and dragged some corpses into the caves for a quick meal.
Either scenario meant combat.
“Stay behind me,” Jak said as he crouched and picked up one of the more intact burning sticks. He passed it to Rylee. “Use this to light the way.”
“I will,” she replied, accepting it.
“Niri, make sure no one sneaks up behind us,” Jak said.
“All right.”
Jak chose the cave to the right to enter first. He still had a memory of it stored in his mind from his previous run-through before going to get the women. This time, though, he would move more slowly. He walked into the tunnel, studying everything he could see in the daylight and the flickering torchlight. The floor and the earthen walls to either side of him showed signs of life. There were many footprints in the dirt, marks along the walls from hands and weapons, made in passing. It seemed a few Tolvar shared Niri’s proclivity for painting on the cave walls, though their paintings seemed much more crude by comparison.
Broken pottery, bones, bits of flint and slate, vegetation, chunks of meat, burned wood, and discarded tools and weapons lay scattered randomly across the floor of the cave. There was a break in the right wall that led into a small cavern. One of the blood trails led there. Jak gripped his club more tightly, preparing for combat yet again.
He got up to the turn in the tunnel and peered slowly around it, revealing as little of himself as possible. The light was about as good, as a few small holes in the ceiling of the cavern ahead let some sun filter in. There was an unmoving shape near the center of the cavern. Jak waited several moments, then began making his way into the space. He quickly checked to his right and left, but no lingering Tolvar waited for him, no animals hid in the shadows to ambush him. The place was obviously lived in, not long ago likely a communal sleeping place. Several simple furs and bunches of some of the softer plants lay in heaps along the edge of the space.
Jak could see that the lump in the center of the cavern was indeed a body, and not breathing. He prodded it with his club when he got close enough. It didn’t react. He pushed it over onto its back and found a Tolvar warrior, quite dead. The reason was obvious enough: two deep bite marks on his shoulder and a gash across his stomach. He’d been hit during combat and a giant spider had bit him. He’d rushed in here in a panic and died. Maybe he’d had some antivenom stashed somewhere. If that was the case, he clearly hadn’t reached it in time.
Once he determined the sleeping area hid no threats, Jak returned to the main tunnel and followed it to its end. It ended in a split, one tunnel going right and leading to another cavern, this one a bit bigger. One went left and connected to the central tunnel. Jak went right and checked out the second cavern. It was much like the first, though it had the beginnings of somewhat more permanent residence. He saw larger clay pots and several baskets, as well as some basic furniture. There were a few shelves, sticks fitted and bound together with leather strips or vines, as well as a lot more beds. All of it was very crude, though.
Jak wasn’t sure how much of it they could use, but that was to be determined later.
There was so much to do.
He finished his inspection of this cavern and then moved into the central tunnel. It was fairly broad, almost a cavern unto itself, and it was obvious that several of the men had been living here. There were a few fireplaces surrounded by picked-clean bones, and ashes. A dead giant spider and a pair of Tolvar corpses lay near the other end of the tunnel, at the main entrance. He kept moving, checking out a little niche at the back of the primary tunnel, seeing that it seemed to have been serving as a place to store extra weapons and materials.
They walked together along the length of the central tunnel until they were back outside again, coming back out into the daylight, and then moved to the final passageway. It seemed mostly clear. They moved down it silently, following it to its end, where it turned sharply to the left. Something about it reminded Jak of the cave they had been living in. It opened into a third cavern, this one not too big, not too small. It had a single opening at the top and a shaft of sunlight spilled in like a waterfall of light, catching motes of dust in the air. The place seemed oddly untouched, just a bed and some weapons and the remnants of a fire and some meals scattered about. Maybe the Tolvar commander had been using it for himself.
“This will be our home,” Jak said as he looked around.
“You, me, and Rylee?” Niri asked hopefully.
“Yes. You, me, and Rylee. We will make our home in this cave.”
They stood there, looking around the cave. It was a little smaller than the one they had previously been living in, but that wouldn’t matter. Before, they had used that cave for everything, but here, they could store extra food, weapons, firewood, building materials, skins, and whatever else they might need in other parts of the cave network. This would be their personal space, their home. There was space for a large bed to accommodate all three of them, for Niri to paint on the walls, a hole in the ceiling to let out smoke from a fire, space for shelves and whatever else they might think to construct as they were making the place their own.
“I like it,” Rylee said finally.
“I do too!” Niri declared. She seemed to beam with happy energy as she walked around the cave. “It is wonderful! I love it already!” She ran over to Jak suddenly and leaped at him, wrapping her arms around him.
He laughed and caught and supported her easily. They shared a kiss.
“Thank you,” she murmured, resting her head on his shoulder. “I love you so much. You’ve done so many nice things for me.”
“I love you too, Niri,” Jak replied, giving her a gentle squeeze. “You’ve done many nice things for me as well.” Supporting her with one hand, he turned and extended his arm to Rylee, who stepped up and hugged the two of them.
“I’m glad we are together,” she said.
“So am I,” Niri agreed, kissing Rylee on the mouth. “We should celebrate tonight!”
“If we have the energy,” Jak replied, letting her down. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Niri lost some of her good cheer. She sighed softly. “Yes, that is true. And I…” she looked down at herself, “do not quite have the body for hard work.”
“Well...it depends on the work,” Jak replied, reaching up and briefly cupping one of her breasts.
She giggled and blushed. “I suppose that is true.”
“Come on, let us get to work.”
With that, he turned and walked back out of the cave, already imagining what the place was going to look like once he had set his hand to it.
…
The day was indeed very long.
Jak could tell that the corpses bothered both women, Niri especially, so he took to the duty of handling those. Rylee and Niri seemed happy enough to spend their time gathering up every weapon, every piece of clothing, every tool, every waterskin, every bit of food that was still eatable, everything that the Tolvar had gathered that might be useful. Already, he was thinking ahead. As Jak stripped each corpse and then hauled it off into another clearing a little ways away that he’d scouted out, he was already considering what might need to happen if they actually pulled off making a tribe. It still seemed somewhat unlikely.
Almost everyone he’d met so far had been extremely hostile. Save for Niri, Rylee, and Nessa, and he supposed technically that crow, which seemed to have flown off for the moment, everyone had tried to kill him. Or almost certainly would have tried to kill him, had he not avoided revealing his presence to them for one reason or another. Rylee had said there were others like her out there, and Nessa had hinted at something similar, but after the slaughter he had just instigated, Jak was having a hard time believing it.
The sun moved across the sky and hours disappeared as he stripped and hauled body after body through the woods.
He took a break once to eat, consuming a pouch of berries and nuts that Niri and Rylee had found among the storage area, then drained a waterskin and got back to work. He got the human bodies out of the way first, given he wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the giant spider bodies. They were heavier and more dangerous to work with. He still had the antivenom in him, but he imagined it would be a real pain if he accidentally got himself caught on a fang. He kept at it, though, dragging them by their heavy limbs through the woods.
By the time Jak had finished getting all the bodies to the clearing, he was beginning to tire and the sun was starting to set.
Still, no Tolvar had showed up at the cave at least.
The clearing in front of the cave was bloody but otherwise had been cleaned up. He tracked down Niri and Rylee in the rearmost cavern along right side of the caves and found that they had gathered and placed all of the spare supplies and weapons and food from outside in there. There was a lot to sort through.
“We grabbed everything we could find,” Niri said.
“You both did great,” Jak replied.
“A lot of it seemed of low quality,” Rylee said. She was inspecting a spear at the moment. “My people unfortunately rely on quantity over quality. And it seemed especially true for this group. Most of these weapons might do in the immediate sense, but they’ll wear out quickly. Honestly most of them will be more useful for burning.”
“Then we shall burn them, and salvage what we can,” Jak replied. “For now, let us return to our cave. Tomorrow we can finish preparing this place for ourselves and move our supplies here. And claim it properly.”
Niri yawned. “I would much like to see our bed.”
“Me too. I don’t know how you managed to move all those bodies by yourself,” Rylee agreed, seeming to hold back a yawn.
“I suppose I just have a lot of strength,” Jak replied.
“Mmm...yes you do,” Niri murmured, running one hand up and down his arm, then slipping it down lower, resting it over his crotch. “Much strength…”
“Let’s get back to the cave,” Jak said, slipping a hand briefly under her wrap and groping her bare breast, making her let out a little noise of happy surprise.
They headed back out into the clearing. Jak was reluctant to leave the new caves after spending all day cleaning it out, but he knew the time was not yet right.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow they would really make it theirs.