Chapter 1
The four of us darted off into the darkness, approaching the encampment from all sides. I made my way carefully through foliage, trying not to make any noise, but it was hard to discern the crunchy twigs from the safe patches of grass in the dim lighting. As I crouched behind a tree, I made sure to angle my sword and shield so that they wouldn’t glint in the fire’s glow and reveal my position.
I peered around the tree to assess the situation now that I was closer. The camp was set in a clearing of the surrounding woods. Moss and fallen leaves sparsely covered the cold soil, wet from the drizzle that had haunted us since noon that day. I hated the way rain would seep into the cracks and joints of my armor and permeate into the clothes beneath. My helmet would usually help keep the rain out of my face, but the way it reduced my field of vision and limited the mobility of my head bothered me after wearing it for an extended period. Even now, body pressed against a tree in the dark, I tried to stretch my neck to work out the stiffness.
The five men sat around the fire, leaning either against fallen logs or their satchels. Several of them were talking in voices too quiet to understand from this distance. One seemed to still be finishing the meal they had prepared, greedily scraping the contents of a wooden bowl into his mouth, while others were fiddling with their belongings. One man sat scribbling in a journal with his back to the fire so that the flame could illuminate the pages.
And, on the side furthest from me, a man was examining a reflective metal gauntlet. It had veins of glowing purple light running along its surface, tracing the joints and edges of the material. Some of the other men kept casting glances in his direction as he used the device. He outstretched his hand toward a loose stone lining the fire and grasped, and the purple glowed brighter as a result. As he slowly lifted his hand up, the stone followed, even from the significant distance away. The stone hung suspended in the air, slowly rotating as the man adjusted his wrist. One of the other men commented something, and he responded with a single word answer.
I readjusted my stance, careful not to make any noise with the clattering of my armor. My legs were already sore from the hike we had made since early that morning tracking this thing, and the crouching wasn’t helping. I took a slow breath to steady myself and steel my resolve for what was to come. Though we had pulled similar maneuvers retrieving Artifacts countless times before, I couldn’t help but be anxious. With these sorts of operations, you could never be too sure what you were walking into.
I waited for the cue, and finally it came. The sound of the arrow slipping through the air was louder than the shot itself. I saw only the briefest of flashes as it flew through the air before hitting its target. It penetrated the throat of the man holding the gauntlet enough that its tip was poking out the skin on the other side. The stone that had been hovering dropped as he clutched uselessly at the wound, gurgling on blood in animalistic panic. The other men screamed, and one man with a dark hood pulled up was barking orders at the others. They all scrambled for their weapons. The one who had been writing in the journal nearly fell into the fire in his haste to stand.
I had already been running. I tried to keep relatively low to the ground to delay their noticing me for as long as possible, but one of the men spotted me and called out to the others. I could see Shoan and Selyn charging forward from where they had been hiding in the trees, too. I figured Mercina was still crouched in the bushes somewhere reloading her crossbow. The men in the camp were looking wildly around them to try to gauge the threat, but they had hardly gotten their bearings before we were upon them.
I charged with my shield at the man who had been eating. He had pulled a sword out of the scabbard that had been resting on the trunk beside him but looked terrified as I bounded towards him. He dove out of the way, trying to simultaneously spin and slash at me in a pirouette, but I had my sword ready to meet his. The momentum from my approach caused me to slide on the leaves as I tried to stop to face him. My stance wavered from the motion, giving him the opening to tilt the tip of his sword beneath mine, pushing my blade out of the way as he ran his edge toward my throat. From the crouching position I had fallen into from the slide, I pushed off, using the added strength to thrust my hilt forward, forcing his sword away. I swung to hit his arm with my shield, causing his grip to loosen, and I overtook the clash. He was on the backfoot, now, trying to keep my blade away. In one fluid motion, I brought my shield up to take the place of my sword and was free to slice at his stomach. They had apparently been settling in for the night, and none of them were wearing armor. He instinctively convulsed from the pain, creating an opening for another stab. When I pulled my sword free, he collapsed to the ground, hands on the wound to stop the bleeding, but in the dim firelight, I could see the dark red liquid pooling between his fingers. I left him be.
I looked at the others. Selyn was locked in combat with one of the men. He was keeping him at a distance, preferring more of a fencer style of fighting with careful, precise movements. I saw him feint an attack toward his opponent’s legs, but he simply backed away, leaving Selyn to try to close the distance. Favoring the ability to switch his sword between hands, he didn’t use a shield at all, and though I had been skeptical of his approach in the past, I had to admit it was surprisingly effective.
Shoan, meanwhile, was swinging his morning star around—a massive mace with a threatening bulb of spikes on the end. As the biggest of our group, he was the only one with the strength to use the thing effectively. He came from highborn origins, and the quality of his nutrition growing up probably played a role in his impressive muscle growth. I couldn’t help but be a bit jealous watching him brandish his mace with such languid ease. He was fighting the man with the hood, who seemed to be putting most of his energy into dodging the powerful blows rather than attacking.
“Grab the glove!” the hooded man called over his shoulder, narrowly avoiding another powerful blow as he said it.
I looked over to where the man who had been using the device had been shot. He was limp against the trunk of a fallen tree, eyes open and lifeless. The man who had been writing in his journal was crouched over the body trying to slip the gauntlet off the lifeless hand. I rushed toward him, but he got it off just in time. He thrust his hand toward me as I was mid swing, and the device glowed a fierce purple. It felt like I had been hit by a crashing wave, and I was flung backwards by the force, sliding directly into a tree. The energy also jostled the logs in the fire, kicking up a large plume of embers, which cast dramatic shadows of the fighting figures on the trees. My armor mercifully absorbed most of the impact, but I gasped for air, having had the wind knocked out of me. The smoky smell of the enraged fire filled my lungs, reminding me of the camp we had set up nearby, to which at that moment I so dearly wished to return.
I jabbed my sword into the ground and used it to help myself to my feet. The edge was virtually unable to be dulled, allowing me to perform such maneuvers that would be harmful to any ordinary blade. The man fiddled with the gauntlet before using it on me again, lifting me in the same way the first man had lifted the stone. It was a strange sensation—as though I were submerged in water, with roiling pressure rippling across my entire body. I struggled to escape the effect to no avail, uselessly flailing my arms and legs in an attempt to find leverage.
With all the commotion of the battle, I didn’t even hear Mercina’s second shot. I saw only the long rod of metal zip toward the man before being swept up in whatever maelstrom of energy the gauntlet was generating and falter in its flight. The arrow hovered halfway between me and the man with the gauntlet, lazily rotating in the air. The logs of the fire were also caught in the effect, once again filling the air with embers. The flame angrily roared higher, and in the brighter light, I could see Mercina crouched behind a tree. I watched her sling her crossbow on the strap over her shoulder and dart towards the man, dagger brandished.
He followed my gaze and saw her approaching. He dropped me to devote his attention to the new threat, pain shooting through my ankle from the awkward landing. Judging by his inability to focus on multiple targets at once, he was clearly a novice in combat. Now unhampered, I loped toward him, trying to keep pressure off my foot. He was in the process of lifting Mercina when he noticed me. He spun around, throwing her at me. I dove out of the way as she flew overhead, landing in the dirt in a crumple. The fall looked painful, and I winced on her behalf, my ankle still twinging from my own fall. A gesture with the gauntlet caused those first waves of energy to stir the leaves around me, but I was faster. Diving toward him, tip of my sword extended, I caught him in the wrist, missing the gauntlet by a hair. I silently said a prayer for missing the device. He screamed in pain and tried to push me away with his other empty hand, but he couldn’t get a solid grip on my armor. I whacked him over the head with my shield, and he collapsed unconscious. I quickly bent over to work the gauntlet off his hand, and from so close, I noticed how young he was—he couldn’t have been more than 16.
“Sorry,” I murmured as I finally removed the device. He was already stirring, but clearly in a daze. He clutched his wrist, moaning in pain. I didn’t have it in me to kill the kid.
I closely examined the gauntlet. It was made from some highly reflective metal, comprised of a myriad of shifting pieces so that it could naturally flex with the wearer’s hand. The purple lines seemed to be wires extending out from the power source on the back of the glove to each fingertip, where a pointed mental node was placed. The whole thing looked like some kind of glowing metal claw.
We weren’t supposed to use the technology we gathered so that it would be in the best condition possible for when we eventually deposited it, but obviously we wouldn’t get that far if we were dead.
With no obvious controls, I tried grasping the air like I had watched the first man do, and the stone I was pointing it at vibrated. I experimentally lifted my hand, and the rock followed. I aimed at the man Shoan was fighting and hurled it at him. It was hard to tell how much extra power the device actually offered, but the leverage certainly contributed. I missed, but the shot whizzed over the hooded man’s head and shattered the trunk of a nearby tree into a cloud of splinters.
“Nice throw,” I heard Mercina sarcastically call behind me. She had pushed herself to her feet, though at a glance, she looked a little unsteady.
“Like you could aim better.”
“Um, yes,” she said. “Which one of us uses the crossbow, again?”
Ignoring her valid point, I picked up another rock and aimed at the hooded man. I waited until I had a clear shot without Shoan in the way and threw it, hitting the man in the leg. I had seen my fair share of gore in my experience, but the way the muscle hung off of what remained of the bone made me look away in horror. He let out a bloodcurdling scream before Shoan silenced him with a heavy blow to his head.
“Gods,” I muttered under my breath. I was debating whether I should try to use another rock on the last man, but Mercina had already snuck up behind him, fluidly slitting his throat with practiced ease.
The four of us stood scattered around the encampment, the only sounds the soft crackling of the fire and pained whimpering of the boy I had spared. It seemed the first man I had stabbed had already passed out. The flame had quieted down somewhat, letting the darkness encroach toward us from the boundary of the camp—it was our only source of illumination since the stars in the sky were still cloaked by the thick gray clouds.
“So, that thing’s gotta be Dimerian, right?” Selyn asked, breaking the silence. “That is their schtick, gravity and time manipulation.”
“These people didn’t look Dimerian,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, their clothing is too plain.”
“Maybe they’re Scavengers like us,” Mercina said, crouching down to pick up the journal that the boy had been writing in. She wiped the mud off the front cover with the back of her hand and flipped through the pages.
I stared at the gauntlet in awe. I had never seen anything quite like it. Dimeria was supposed to be a kingdom that specialized in technology that manipulated the forces of nature, like gravity and time as Selyn had said, but they were highly isolationist, and I had only heard legends about what they were capable of. Having never seen them or their devices myself, I had always wondered how exaggerated the tales of their feats were, though I gave them a bit more weight after witnessing this incredible gauntlet in action.
Either the gauntlet came from one of their labs, or it was an Artifact left behind by one of the countless Interlopers that passed through our dimension. Most of the advanced technology people got their hands on came from these advanced civilizations, abandoned either by accident or by force, leaving kingdoms like Dimeria to recover what they could and reverse engineer the devices.
Before our first contact about eighty years ago, we had been a quiet agrarian society, our most advanced piece of technology probably a trebuchet or something equally primitive. Feudal lords and nobles alike had seized control of their own pockets of land, but distribution of resources necessitated trade and commerce between cities—it had been a peaceful time, from what I had heard. Having lived my entire life in a world dominated by the Interlopers and their activity, I dreamt of what life had been like back then—wondered what I would be doing if not Scavenging.
No one was quite sure why our dimension attracted so much activity. I had heard the Artificers in the lab back home speculate that we were somehow positioned between a cluster of advanced neighbors in interdimensional space, causing us to be a natural detour along their journeys. Others thought that that initial activity in the past, our continent chosen by pure chance, drew others’ interest in our dimension, which had a cascading effect where other civilizations’ presence here garnered continued interest.
Naturally, kingdoms nowadays tended to specialize in certain types of technologies, since understanding the workings of one would make it easier to figure out how similar Artifacts worked. They wouldn’t dare share these discoveries with one another, since every hoarded piece of knowledge could prove to be an advantage in battle, leaving our continent fragmented.
With all this technology lying around for the taking, the kingdoms organized groups of Scavengers like us to find what we could and return it to the lab for analysis. Our world was left in an odd state where the crude technology our civilization had developed ourselves, like swords and bows, were surrounded by wild devices like this gauntlet that we had claimed from the Interlopers.
Our kingdom, Andyet, specialized in advanced materials, including the metallurgy that crafted our armor and weapons—impossibly strong, yet remarkably lightweight. Still, it was sometimes daunting to have little more than a sword against foes wielding things like gravity manipulation.
I was staring at the gauntlet lost in thought when Shoan interrupted me. “Caroone,” he called, tilting his head toward the boy on the ground. Selyn joined us, and the three of us crouched by the boy, who looked terrified to see us looming over him.
“Please,” he begged, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Don’t kill me.”
“He could report back to whatever kingdom he’s from that Andyet is plundering their men,” Shoan pointed out. “Political tensions are already tense.”
“Come on,” I said. “Everyone is plundering everyone. It’s just that no one wants to address it since it could spark a war, so we just keep playing this game.”
Shoan frowned, but the boy spoke before he could respond, “I’m not from any major kingdom. We were from a small town east of here. Scavengers, yes, but not from Dimeria. I won’t say a word to them about this.”
“So you’ll just waltz back into town with your entire team missing and play dumb?” Selyn said. “Sounds like a plan.”
The boy looked wide eyes between us, clearly at a loss for words.
“Surely we can let him go if he’s not from a major kingdom, then?” I urged.
“For what it’s worth,” Mercina said behind us, still flipping through the journal, “it looks like he’s telling the truth.”
The boy vigorously nodded.
“Where did you find this gauntlet?” I asked, holding it up. I could see all four of us reflected in the shiny panels.
“We took it from another Scavenger group. No idea where they got it.”
The boy winced with the pain, his wrist still oozing blood. I walked back to my bag, slipping the gravity gauntlet inside and retrieving a bandage, which I began wrapping around the boy’s wound. When I was done, I offered him a sip of water from my flask, which he eagerly gulped. I could see Mercina giving me a look for wasting our resources on this enemy.
“I am sorry for our attacking your group,” I said, knowing he didn’t hear me the first time I had apologized. “I wish things could be different.”
“Ever the romantic,” Selyn said with a sad smile.
“Can you make your way back if we leave you here?” I asked the boy, who nodded in response.
Mercina held up the journal. “I’m keeping this, though,” she said.
The boy wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse.
Shoan approached her as she continued looking through the journal. “You okay? Looked like a nasty fall, earlier.”
She worked the joints of her right hand and wrist. “This arm took the brunt of the fall. It’s a bit sore, but I should be good by tomorrow.”
Testing the weight on my ankle from my own fall, the muscle was still a bit tender, but I agreed with her assessment.
We quickly gathered our things, giving the camp one last search for any Artifacts the group may have found, and set off into the night.