Chapter 47: The Commander They Followed
The light resolved into a world, and the first thing Arthur noticed was that something felt different. His heartbeat and breathing wasn’t his own. Warmth spread through his chest from somewhere that wasn’t his body.
He looked around the village.
Then his eyes settled on the goblin coming out of the forest. The moment he saw her, the strange heartbeat grew stronger.
Arthur understood.
He wasn’t living inside her body but was sharing her heart. And then he saw goblin children running between the huts with wooden spears. An elderly goblin sat carving outside his door, a small horse shape emerging under his hands.
Two hunters were walking in from the forest with more than they’d been carrying when they left, and the third was already telling everyone how it happened.
Arthur felt the warmth in his chest. For a moment, he almost expected someone to call his own name before realizing it wasn’t Arthur this village knew.
Then the goblin he was connected to was carrying a bundle of firewood, her armor scratched in the way armor was scratched and her clothes worn in similar ways.
She was partway through setting her bundle down when she noticed an elderly goblin struggling with a heavier one, and she stopped, crossed to him, and took the heavier bundle from his hands without saying anything about it.
He thanked her.
She nodded and kept walking.
A child broke from the group near the hunters and ran toward her. "Commander!" The word carried the specific weight of delight rather than urgency.
She looked down and she smiled. She put a hand on his head briefly, and the child stood taller before going back to the group. Arthur felt how smooth the child’s head was and also the feeling of pride.
One of the hunters walked past, glanced at the firewood still balanced on her shoulder, and laughed. "Commander, if you keep carrying everyone’s firewood, we’ll have to stop pretending we’re stronger than you."
Several nearby goblins laughed.
The Commander rolled her eyes. "You already pretend."
The hunter placed a hand over his chest. "I’ve been wounded."
"You’ll survive."
More laughter spread through the settlement. Just then an elderly goblin marched over carrying a wooden bowl.
"And when exactly were you planning to eat?"
The Commander blinked. "...I was thinking about it."
"You said that yesterday."
"...I did." He felt embarrassment through his body as the Commander looked away.
The elderly goblin pushed the bowl into her hands. "Eat first."
She scratched her cheek with an embarrassed smile. "...Don’t tell the cooks."
"They already know."
The laughter only grew louder. Arthur watched the entire exchange quietly. Nobody treated her like someone above them.
They treated her like family.
...
The afternoon passed.
She repaired the wall.
She answered questions.
She carried supplies.
She checked on the injured.
The work finally slowed. The Commander stepped onto a smooth stone overlooking the settlement. She tied her long hair back. Pressed the butt of her spear gently against the ground beside her.
Then simply stood there.
Children laughed below.
Hunters returned through the trees.
Smoke drifted from cooking fires and she smiled. Not because anything remarkable had happened.
Because this...
Was home.
When a hunter made an error during a demonstration and looked at the ground, she did not correct the technique in front of the others. She waited, found him later, and worked through it quietly.
Arthur understood. They trusted her not because she was Commander. But because she had earned it. Then Arthur noticed a small goblin standing alone at the edge of the practice area.
A tiny wooden spear lay on the ground in front of him. He was looking at the other children, who were chasing each other through a drill that his arms were too short to execute at the same angles, and the expression on his face was the expression Arthur had seen on many faces before he had learned what to do about it.
The Commander had already noticed.
She walked over and crouched to pick up the spear, and then she gently placed it back into his hands.
"I can’t do it," the small goblin said. "The others are stronger."
She did not tell him that wasn’t true. She did not list his qualities or attempt to convince him of something he had not yet discovered for himself.
"Then we’ll try again tomorrow," she said.
He blinked. "Tomorrow?"
"And if tomorrow isn’t enough," she said, "we’ll try again the day after."
The small goblin looked at the spear in his hands. He held the spear tighter. The little goblin took a deep breath and stepped back.
Held the spear with both hands before throwing it. The spear spun awkwardly through the air before landing crooked in the dirt only a few steps away.
The little goblin immediately looked at the Commander.
Not proudly.
Nervously.
Waiting.
She looked at the crooked spear...
Then raised a thumbs up.
"Better than yesterday."
The little goblin blinked.
Then...
He smiled.
A real smile.
Arthur felt hope. Not because the throw had been good but because tomorrow suddenly felt possible.
...
The Commander sat and the children gather around.
"Commander..." One asks. "Will you always protect us?"
Silence.
She smiles. "As long as I’m standing."
The children cheered.
One of them grabbed her hand.
Another laughed.
For one perfect moment...
The whole village forgot the world outside the trees.
Then—
The scouts came back.
Two of them. The third was being carried.
Fear swept through the village.
Three packs of Storm Wolves, one scout managed before the tribe’s healer reached them. The third scout was already receiving care, so the tribe had that much time before the question became immediate.
The Commander was already organizing before she had finished hearing the report. Not shouting, not issuing a sequence of commands that would then have to be repeated. She moved to the first thing that needed doing, and because she moved, others moved, and because they knew which direction to move from years of her having shown them, the settlement became organized without requiring the moment where someone had to be told twice.
Children with bandages. Hunters with sharpened weapons. Elders preparing the positions they knew to prepare because they had prepared them before.
Arthur understood the difference.
Nobody waited for orders.
Everyone already knew what to do.
The battle was short but brutal.
The Commander was everywhere, not staying in any one position long enough to become a fixed target, always toward wherever the line was beginning to give. She saved three goblins in the first exchange and two in the second and she did not count them.
The Storm Wolves eventually withdrew.
The tribe cheered while relief washed over Arthur. Only moments later did Arthur realize, he was no longer certain where his thoughts ended... And the goblin’s began.
Then the Storm Wolves froze.
Not regrouping. Not wounded. Frozen in the specific way that things froze when they had encountered something that their instincts had very direct opinions about. Arthur recognized the quality of it. He had felt it through Vedas, felt it in Melo’s small shaking body, felt it rolling off the wyverns in the sky above the convoy.
The sky disappeared.
Not darkened. Not covered. Removed, replaced by a presence so large that the sky simply became whatever this was, and what it was had no name in the language Arthur knew.
Through the body he was inside, he felt the terror of something encountering a force so far above it that the usual categories of danger became irrelevant.
The Commander turned.
She did not look at the thing above them. She looked behind her.
Children running. Elders moving as fast as they could move. Injured hunters being carried. And one small goblin, the one from the practice area, who had his spear gripped in both hands the way she had taught him and who was running but kept turning back, and his face was wet.
"Commander!" the child called.
She was already facing toward the presence above.
Arthur felt everything she felt.
The fear of the terrifying presence before her.
The horror that she might die.
And then the knowledge that if she runs away, those behind her will be killed. She planted her spear in the earth and he felt his heart hammered.
Terror clawed at him.
Yet beneath it. Something refused to yield. Arthur didn’t know anymore.
Was that courage his...
Or hers?
The attack came and she blocked it and Arthur felt her body beginning to give way under forces it had not been built to receive, and she held the position and blocked again.
She wasn’t trying to win.
She was buying time.
The last small goblin reached the edge of the forest.
He turned back. Still reaching.
She saw him.
She smiled, and Arthur felt the smile from the inside, and the thing he felt was not sadness. It was relief, the specific relief of someone who had done the thing they came to do.
She whispered one word.
"Good."
She gripped her spear and threw it, and it caught the child’s clothes at the exact angle that pulled him forward and off his feet and into the safety of the trees, and the trees closed around him, and he was gone.
She relaxed. Not surrender. Completion.
The lightning descended.
Arthur felt her final emotions in the last moment.
Relief.
Peace.
Pride.
Not a single regret. The last thing present before the darkness came was a thought that did not belong to him.
They’re safe.
Arthur reached out instinctively. Not to save her but to stop her from disappearing. His hand passed through the memory.
Then...
Everything vanished.
And darkness came.
Comments