Chapter 49: Arrival of Lord Millhaven
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month X: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 10th Month
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The Millhaven Delegation
During the end of the first week of the tenth month, the Millhaven delegation had finally reached the forest's edge.
They had taken the old eastern route, which was an old established road approach to Maya Village's territorial boundary from Millhaven's direction — the same road that August and their caravan had traveled years ago when they returned home to the village. It had still been significantly less maintained and considerably more dangerous than what it currently is. The improvements that had been made to it since then were made visible to anyone who was paying attention to their surroundings. Which meant that Earl Hugo Millhaven had done a splendid job in hiring workers and adding patrols to work on this old network of road to revitalize it with traffic once more. And now he is using that very same road to travel towards the village of Maya.
He now had finally seen it with his own eyes, the thing that he had only heard about for years was now standing defiantly in front of him, the Great Forest of Lonelywood.
The delegation he had with him was a considerable size. With four hundred soldiers in organized formation behind the Earl's personal retinue, two hundred support and logistical personnel, a complement of council members and minor nobles who had attached themselves to the official party, and a merchant group who had evidently decided that accompanying an earl on an official visit to a legendary forest settlement was worth the journey for the market intelligence alone. The wagons stretched back along the road in an organized line that would have been impressive to look at on an imperial highway and was now somewhat more impressive on this particular frontier route.
They stopped at the crossroads where the eastern road met the paths that branched toward the forest's interior.
Earl Hugo dismounted and looked at the tree line.
"I can't believe it is all true," he said. "They truly reside within the Great Forest of Lonelywood."
His most senior cavalier captain, a man who had been a professional soldier in Millhaven's military ranks since before the Earl's hair had started going gray and who had subsequently developed a finely calibrated sense of which moments to let pass in silence and which to acknowledge, and he chose to acknowledge it.
"Indeed, my lord. It is most fascinating even to old soldiers like me."
He said it with the honest delivery of someone who genuinely meant it, which was what that distinguished old soldiers from young ones. Young soldiers performed to impress. While old soldiers simply reported at what they observed.
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Alphonse Bertude
They had been standing at the crossroads for perhaps a minute when the forest made a movement, that caught their attention.
It was not dramatic. There was no crashing of underbrush or sudden emergence of something large and threatening. The tree line simply began to produce, from a section of its shadow that had not previously suggested that it contained anyone, it was a group of soldiers who were already in formation. They came out at a measured pace, they were organized without being hurried, and the fact that they had been invisible so far until they chose not to be was the first thing about them that commanded attention. The second was their equipment it was of such high quality, constructed from materials that were clearly not any standard issue of any kindom or noble house that Lord Millhaven knew of, with a fit and finish that suggested that it was custom work. The materials themselves had the particular texture and weight distribution that suggested that they were made from beast hides and other forest materials, the kind that would have easily blended with the forest silhouette in a way that any of the standard armor did not. Several of the Earl's retinue reached instinctively toward their weapons before the lead figure's posture and pace communicated that this was not an ambush.
The man at the front was Alphonse Bertude, commander of the patrol unit assigned to this stretch of the territorial boundary. He was not a name that appeared in any external military record. Two years ago he had arrived at Maya Village as one of the ordinary civilian migrants, dragged along by friends who had heard about the place and wanted to see it. Once he had seen enough of it, he had decided to stay. He worked his way through and had joined the village guard and had risen through it on the basis of the qualities that tended to produce advancement in organizations where merit was the relevant qualifications — steadiness, good judgment, and the specific competence that came from taking the work seriously regardless of whether anyone was watching. He was now assigned to one of the patrol units that covered all roads within the territorial boundaries, stationed near the recently constructed outpost that served as both a rest point for travelers and the first layer of the border security network.
Though he had been previously informed of the delegation's expected arrival. He had still taken time to confirm that the banners matched the intelligence his unit had been given before bringing his people out of cover, which was the correct thing to do and which he had done without being told.
Thirty-one soldiers flanked him — a larger complement than most patrol units operated with, because this unit was currently functioning as an effective border security, one that guards the entrance to the village rather than routine patrol. He assessed the delegation with the professional courtesy of someone who had learned to read the other force's composition, disposition, and likely intentions from the way it was arranged rather than from what it was presenting itself.
He addressed the Earl directly.
"Greetings, Earl Millhaven. We are soldiers from Maya Village. We welcome you to the territory's northern entrance."
Hugo looked at him with the particular interest of a man who had been an ally of this village for years and was now getting his first direct encounter with what that alliance produced in practice.
"Ho. You lot are under August's command?"
"Yes, my lord. We serve under the Supreme Commander."
The title had settled into use among the village's security forces over the past year. It was not August's preferred form of being addressed and he had said so several times, but the security division had concluded independently that the village's military commander should be addressed by something that reflected what the role had become rather than what it had started as, and they had implemented this conclusion without particularly waiting for his approval. August had eventually stopped arguing about it, and had just accepted it as a matter of minor inconvenience…
"Very well," the Earl said. "Lead us to Maya Village."
Alphonse made a curt bow. He turned to his adjutant and issued the order to maintain position with the remaining half of the unit while he took the other sixteen to serve as their guide and escort. The adjutant acknowledged without needing further instruction because Alphonse had trained his people to not need further instruction.
He informed the Earl that the journey to the village from this point would take three to four days. The road improvements had reduced the travel time considerably from what it had been when the route was first established — the land bridges, the maintained surfaces, the organized rest points — but a delegation of this size moved at the pace of its slowest wagon, and the interior approaches through the Great Forest were not of the same quality as imperial an highway.
The Earl said he understood. The delegation formed back up and they began moving into the forest.
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Three Days Through the Forest
The Great Forest of Lonelywood did not present itself the same way from the inside as it did from the outside.
From the outside, particularly to anyone who had grown up with the legends about it, the forest was a thing to be feared in the abstract — a vast and dangerous wilderness that swallowed people who were not careful, home to creatures that even the Empire of Elms-Arkanus Imperial Military preferred to deal with at the end of a very long well supplied line of military rather than engaging it at close quarters. The legends were not wrong, exactly. The creatures were indeed real and the accompanying danger was real. But the specific quality of the experience from inside the territory, traveling on a maintained road with an organized escort, was something the legends had not accounted for.
The roads were better than expected. Not in the way that frontier roads were sometimes called to be the best as a form of optimistic reporting — it was genuinely good, because it was constructed with cobbled surfaces that handled weather cleanly and drainage channels cut at appropriate intervals. The road did not fight the forest. It moved through it in a way that the forest seemed to have accepted, curving around certain trees rather than through them; it was incorporated into the terrain rather than imposing it as a human controlled territory. The land bridges, which the escort explained were built specifically for the local wildlife to cross the road without interference from travelers moving along it, were engineering of a caliber that the Earl's cavalier captain examined with professional attention and found more sophisticated than he had anticipated from a settlement that was technically still classified as a village.
The wildlife itself was the element that consistently defied preparation. You could be told that large beasts moved freely through the forest alongside the road. You could understand this intellectually. But that similar understanding did not fully translate until you were sitting in a wagon and a creature the size of a modest barn moved through a gap in the trees thirty feet to your left, regarded you with the complete absence of fear that things felt when they were not afraid of anything in the local environment, and continued on its way without altering its pace. Several of the retinue handled this better than others. Some of the minor nobles handled it very poorly and tried not to show it, with limited success.
The camping grounds at the territory's internal outposts were organized and well-supplied. Rest points at appropriate intervals, with water access and shelter from weather. The outpost personnel managing these sites were professional in their conduct, which was to say they were friendly enough to be hospitable and focused enough to communicate that hospitality was not the primary function of the posting.
Earl Hugo watched all of it with the attention of a man who had been building the picture of this place only from what he could hear from the trade reports and letters and the accounts of people who had been here personally. And he was now currently updating the overall picture he had painted inside his head with the direct observation and finding out that it was significantly more than what the reports had conveyed in paper. He thought briefly about his own great forest, the Shadowfen Forest, which lay in a different part of the continent, to be exact a neighboring great forest of the Lonelywood's forest and which had its own dark reputation. He doubted it even looked like this from the inside. He doubted it very much.
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Baron Kinsley and the Carnivorous Flower
The journey wasn't perfect as there was an incident that occurred on the second day of the forest journey, and it was the kind of incident that became a story and a lesson immediately because its context was too perfect not to become one.
Baron Kinsley was a minor noble who had attached himself to the delegation with the particular confidence of a man who had never been in a place that did not accommodate his status. He had heard Alphonse's instructions at the tree line before they proceed inward — to stay on the road, to not touch anything, to not eat or drink from anything even it looked safe or clear as long as it was not provided by the escort — and had processed them in the way that certain men processed instructions they considered beneath the dignity of their stature, which was to say he had filed them as mere suggestions applicable to the less experienced members of the party.
He saw a very beautiful flower standing approximately fifty feet off the road on the second morning.
It was genuinely beautiful, that even his eyes were lured towards it and that was the point of it. It was called the Carnivorous Flower "Fluer", as it was known to everyone in Maya Village's territory who had received the standard briefing on local flora hazards, and was one of the more elegant solutions the forest had produced to the problem of acquiring nutrients. Its actual body lived underground, a root mass of significant size that connected to the visible portion through an elaborate network of vine anchors buried just below the soil surface. What appeared above ground was a single flower it was the kind of beauty that even the word beautiful was invented to describe of — it had exquisite colors that did not quite match anything in the standard spectrum, a shape that was simultaneously alien and compelling to look at, and it had a faint luminescence in the right light conditions that suggested something magical even before one understood that the magical element was the pollen it produced. The pollen was one of its main luring mechanisms. Released in a radius of approximately one hundred feet from the flower's visible portion, it carried a chemical compound that by passes on the threat-assessment centers of most sentient species to produce a state of mild but persistent interest in the source. In species with weaker constitutions, this interest became an unavoidable compulsion, as if they were being bewitched by its beauty. The plant did not pursue prey, it didn't have the capacity to do so. Instead it invited its prey to pursue it instead, and then it would close in on it.
The plant's actual detection zone was only five feet from the visible flower. A creature that wandered within five feet triggered its carnivorous response. The vines moved quickly to capture the prey.
Baron Kinsley wandered within five feet of the flower, compelled by pollen he had inhaled; he had not noticed it because he had not been paying the kind of attention that would have helped him to notice it. Five of his guards followed him because their job was to go where he went, not to evaluate whether where he was going was sensible. They were not particularly pleased about the direction but they were professional enough to follow without any complaint, they knew of the Baron's temper.
Unfortunately for them when they reached inside the flowers detection zone, the vines quickly came up and dragged their feet to the ground. While some of them were being dangled in the air.
The thorns on the vines carried a toxin designed to begin the process of rendering prey manageable for digestion. The toxin would, given direct access to skin or tissue, begin a liquefaction process that was similar to a Viper Anaconda's venom, it was not quick and it was not comfortable and it certainly did not produce a good conclusion for the target. What the vines encountered instead of skin was armor and thick padding, which gave everyone involved a few additional seconds of margin before the grip tightened enough to produce the screaming that alerted the rest of the delegation.
Alphonse was ahead of them on the road and heard the screaming and he had heard enough of such screams that he concluded what its origins were before he had received any verbal report, someone is in danger. He quickly began barking his orders.
"Formation A. Burn that thing to the ground."
The countermeasure training for this specific hazard existed because the Carnivorous Flower was a local flora that the patrol units encountered regularly and had developed standardized responses to. Three soldiers in the unit had fire element capability. They enhanced their blades with it and formed an encirclement. The plant was extremely vulnerable to fire — a design limitation that the forest had not corrected, presumably because until recently nothing in the forest had routinely used controlled fire as a tool to exterminate this flower. The vine sections were cut methodically, piece by piece, with the fire cauterizing as it cut to prevent the sap from the severed sections from becoming an additional hazard.
Within the next five minutes. The plant's visible sections became ash. The captives came down, some of them in ways that lacked dignity but all of them in one piece.
The other personnel in the patrol unit quickly performed a medical check that confirmed if they were exposed to the flower toxin in several of the guards. Alphonse ordered that they administered antidotes from the standard kit that every patrol unit in the territory carried, this standard kits existed for such a reason, and sent a notification to the village ahead for the healers to be prepared for arrivals who would need follow-up treatment.
The Earl looked at Baron Kinsley for a long moment before he spoke.
"This idiot seems to have wandered off the path. How arrogant of him to take this forest lightly after ignoring your explicit instructions."
Alphonse, who would also have liked to say several things about the Baron's decision-making, held those things back and offered an alternative instead; it was not his place to admonish another man who isn't even his peer.
"While that may be true, my lord — this particular plant carries a pollen that actively induces nearby beings to approach it. The Baron may have been more affected by it than a person of stronger constitution might have been."
The Earl processed this, but still didn't understand. "Then why did the others remain unaffected when we passed by earlier?"
"As I've said those with a sufficiently strong constitution could either ignore the pollen entirely or notice its effect and resist it. The detection range of the plant itself — the point at which it triggers the vine response — is only five feet. The pollen's effective range is approximately one hundred feet. A person who notices that they are experiencing an unusual interest in a specific direction and acts on that awareness accordingly will typically remain outside the danger zone." He paused briefly. "But it is the constant awareness of our surroundings that truly matters in the end."
"I see." The Earl looked at the smoldering remains of what had been a very beautiful flower. "Can they be cleared from the road approaches?"
"That would be difficult, my lord. They serve a function in the forest's ecosystem as both prey-capture mechanisms and natural barriers. Removing them would require logging them into the village system and a vote from the council on whether removal was necessary. We also do not cut or remove plant life here without authorization — what appears problematic from one perspective is often performing a function from another." He kept the next thought to himself, which was that the forest's opinion on the matter was also relevant and was not a consideration that most people from outside the territory factored in, and that introducing that consideration to a delegation that had just watched one of their number nearly get digested by a flower was probably not the best-timed educational moment.
The Earl turned back to the Baron, who was being administered to by his own healers and looking considerably less confident than he had at the crossroads.
"You all have heard the man's explanation. From this point forward: your greed and your arrogance have no place in this forest. If you have heard the legends surrounding it, then take them seriously — they exist and persist in all oral teachings and stories for a reason." A pause. "And see to Baron Kinsley before he expires on my diplomatic visit."
The delegation reformed their ranks and they continued their journey on the road to Maya village.
Behind them, the root system of the Carnivorous Flower was already beginning its slow recovery. The forest noted the fire and returned to its other business. It had seen worse.
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Arrival at the Village
They came out of the forest on the third day, and the gate of Maya Village appeared in front of them.
The first thing the delegation saw was the wall, which was not the rough timber palisade that the legends described and that most of them had unconsciously been picturing. It was a proper fortification — stone at the base, reinforced timber above, with watchtowers at intervals that were manned rather than being a decorative, and a gate that suggested it was operated by people who had thought carefully about what they needed it to do. The imperial garrison flag flew alongside the village's own banner above the gatehouse, which communicated several things simultaneously to anyone who understood flag protocol.
The reception at the gate was organized and warm in equal measure, which was the specific combination that suggested a community that had been doing hospitality long enough to know that warmth without organization was chaos and organization without warmth was just a garrison checkpoint.
The injured members of the delegation were met by healers who had been prepared for their arrival by Alphonse's advance notification, which was exactly the kind of operational detail that told you something about the quality of the communication systems the village ran. The Baron and his guards were taken care of with the efficiency and the careful kindness that characterizes healers who are actually good at their job rather than performing competence.
The celebration at the gates was for the Earl and the rest, and it was genuine — the village had been preparing for this visit and the preparation showed in the way that people showed up for things they had chosen to take seriously.
Earl Hugo Millhaven stood at the gate of Maya Village and looked at what the inside of the walls contained, and the picture he had been building from letters and trade reports and the accounts of people who had been here was updated one final time into something that matched the reality.
He had known, in the abstract, that this place was extraordinary. You could understand a thing abstractly for years and still have the direct experience of it arrive with more weight than you expected.
He stepped through the gates of Maya village for the first time.
And the festivity had already started.