26 - Base

The forest was hushed again.

Luna walked slowly back to the place where she had dropped her things when she rushed headlong to Darren and Sarah’s rescue.

Frost still clung to the earth, crystalline and unyielding. Each breath tasted sharper than it should have, as if the air itself hadn’t yet forgotten the magic that had frozen it in the first place.

When she reached her makeshift camp, her bag lay exactly where she’d left it. She bent, brushing leaves off its surface, and let out a satisfied little hum. “Still safe. Of course it is. Who would dare rob me now?”

The smile that crossed her lips wasn’t boastful—it was impish. Her cover had been blown, true. Darren and Sarah had seen her freeze almost everything. But she decided it wasn’t the end of the world.

For tonight, she would sleep nearby, close enough that she could watch over them if needed, yet far enough away that they could enjoy the privacy of their little camp.

Before rolling out her sleeping bag, Luna turned toward the lake where Darren and Sarah were settling in. With a flick of her wrist, she released the frost that had spread across the forest earlier, undoing her spell.

The shimmer of ice cracked, groaned, and melted back into the earth, leaving the soil damp but no longer locked in winter’s grip.

Yet not all of it melted. The figures she had frozen—the so-called “bandits”—remained statues of ice. She had no intention of freeing them. They would stay right where they were, trapped and harmless, until she decided otherwise.

“Trash belongs on the side of the road,” she murmured smugly, then bundled herself into her sleeping bag. Sleep claimed her quickly, as though the night’s excitement had drained even her high stats.

Darren and Sarah, however, found no such peace.

The nine icebound figures loomed just beyond the ring of their campfire, silent witnesses in the dark. Their faces, locked mid-snarl, glistened in the moonlight like cruel gargoyles. The longer the couple stared, the harder it was to rest.

Sarah hugged her knees by the fire, her knife lying unsheathed in her lap. “They look… alive,” she whispered.

“They are alive, probably…” Darren replied grimly. He stood, sword drawn, as though expecting the ice to shatter at any moment. “I saw the breath leave them when she cast it. Their eyes—” His throat worked. “They’re still in there.”

The fire popped. The sound was too loud. Sarah flinched.

Eventually, she rose. “We should… at least move them away. We’ll never sleep like this.”

Darren agreed with a tight nod. Together, they approached the nearest frozen demon worshipper. He braced himself, touched the ice—and instantly recoiled.

A hiss of pain escaped between his teeth. “By the gods—it’s… cold.”

Sarah reached out cautiously and pressed a finger against the statue’s shoulder. She ripped her finger back with a gasp. “It burns.”

The surface wasn’t merely cold, it was beyond natural, as if the ice carried some otherworldly chill. It seared like flame but left no mark.

The two exchanged a glance, then both turned toward the small figure sleeping a short distance away.

Luna lay on her side, curled within her sleeping bag, her hair messy across her cheek. The peaceful rise and fall of her breathing clashed with the horror she had left behind.

“She did this,” Darren murmured, his eyes fixed on the frozen figures.

Sarah hugged her arms close, her knife forgotten for the moment. “Her name is Luna,” she said softly.

Darren gave a short nod, as though that confirmed what he already believed. “How long have you known her?”

Sarah hesitated, her gaze lingering on the childlike face. “Only two days.”

Darren froze, disbelief flashing across his features. “Two days? That’s all?”

Sarah nodded. “That’s all.”

The words hung between them, heavy with disbelief. Darren’s frown deepened, but Sarah’s gaze drifted back to the girl curled in sleep.

She should have felt unease—suspicion, even—at someone so powerful appearing from nowhere. Yet when she looked at Luna, all she saw was innocence wrapped in curiosity. Not a monster. Not even a soldier.

Her lips twitched faintly despite herself. Luna meddled, yes—but in the way of a cat nosing into places it didn’t belong. Curious, mischievous, impossible to ignore.

Darren, though, felt differently. His training as a knight demanded caution. His blood as a noble demanded judgment. Power on this scale wasn’t meant to exist unchecked.

But then he remembered Luna’s teasing advice, her playful words that had nudged him closer to Sarah. Without that meddling, tonight might have ended very differently.

He looked again at the girl, and something inside him shifted. Not fear. Not suspicion. Reverence.

“She’s…” His voice trailed. He didn’t quite know how to say it. Messiah, his mind whispered. A being touched by something greater.

As the fire burned low and Sarah eventually leaned against his shoulder, Darren stared into the darkness with wide, sleepless eyes. An idea took root in his mind, fragile yet insistent.

One day it would grow into something larger, a belief, a doctrine, perhaps even a religion. A goddess of Love and Wisdom, born not from temples but from meddling smiles and impossible miracles.

Luna, of course, slept soundly, utterly unaware.

Morning came gently. The first rays of sun painted the treetops gold, mist clinging to the lake until the waterfall shimmered like molten glass.

Luna was the first to stir. She stretched, arms high, a soft groan escaping before she rolled onto her knees and dusted herself off. With a bounce to her step, she padded toward the open tent where Darren and Sarah lay.

The sight that greeted her made her grin so wide she had to cover her mouth to stifle laughter.

Sarah’s head rested against Darren’s chest, her hair spilling like ink across his tunic.

Darren’s arm cradled her, one hand protectively cupping her head. His other arm was tucked beneath her neck, serving as her pillow. Their legs were tangled, their breathing synchronized.

“Ohhh…” Luna whispered, her tone both mischievous and smug. “Knight boy, you sly dog. And Sarah, my, my—sleeping beauty indeed.”

She tilted her head, imagining the scene just before slumber had claimed them.

Sarah likely drifted off first, and Darren, unable to resist, had watched her with tender eyes, his fingers brushing her hair until sleep pulled him under too.

For a moment, Luna stood in silence, simply basking in the sweetness. Then she shook her head dramatically, placing her fists on her hips.

“Really, you two… falling asleep like that, out in the open. What if I were a villain? You’d be doomed!”

Her voice was low, not loud enough to wake them. It was more a muttering to herself, the commentary of a spectator enjoying her front-row seat.

Eventually, she wandered toward the lake. The waterfall called to her, each crashing spray promising cool refreshment.

She longed to strip off her cloak and leap in, to float on her back and let the current wash her hair clean.

But she paused. Her gaze flicked back to the sleeping pair. Their peace was too fragile, too beautiful. She wouldn’t disturb it, not even for her own fun.

“Fine, fine,” she muttered. “I’ll wait. But I expect applause for my patience.”

She plopped onto a rock, chin in hand, and let her eyes wander. Inevitably, they drifted toward the frozen figures standing sentinel in the distance.

Her smile faded.

Nine statues, each cloaked in the same dark garb, each bearing the stitched sword emblem on the chest.

She studied them carefully now, with none of last night’s urgency clouding her judgment. Uniforms. Identical. An organization, not a ragtag band.

And where there was an organization, there was a base.

Luna’s lips curved upward again, but this time it was a sharper smile, edged with mischief. “Ohhh. So you have friends, do you?”

Her pulse quickened at the thought. A nest, hidden somewhere in this forest. More uniforms, more secrets, more things to uncover. She could already feel the thrill of the hunt crawling through her veins.

But a small flicker of doubt whispered in her mind. What if, while she was away, another group found Darren and Sarah? What if they struck while the two lay asleep, defenseless?

She bit her lip, then shook her head. “No. Last night, they didn’t move until it was dark. And if I stir up chaos at their base, they’ll be too busy to think about this spot.”

Decision made, Luna rose, brushing dirt from her cloak. She cast one last look at Darren and Sarah, still nestled in their peaceful cocoon. Her expression softened.

“Don’t worry, lovebirds. I’ll keep the unwanted guests busy.”

Her mist spell shimmered into being once more, curling around her like a second skin. With a playful salute to no one in particular, she slipped into the trees, leaving the lakeside camp behind.

Somewhere in the forest, answers waited.

And Luna, ever-curious, ever-meddling, was already on her way to find them.

The forest was different once Luna stepped away from the lakeside.

It wasn’t the trees or the sound of the birds—those were the same. What changed was the silence beneath it all, a tautness that clung to the ground, a current of danger that made her grin rather than frown.

Somewhere in these woods, men gathered. Men who dressed in uniforms, bore emblems, and moved with the discipline of something greater than common brigands.

And she was going to find them.

Mist curled around her ankles as she walked, following faint tracks pressed into the soil.

Her senses sharpened by her stats picked out the subtle signs, crushed leaves still damp, a broken branch no taller than her chest, the faint scuff of boots meant to tread quietly.

It wasn’t hard. These men had been moving in groups, and groups always left marks.

By the time the sun had fully risen, she had caught the scent of smoke on the wind. Not the faint, dying kind of a lone campfire, but the denser tang of many.

“Found you,” she whispered, voice bright with mischief.

Within the makeshift camp, unease had already taken root.

The man in his forties sat rigid on a crude wooden stool, staring at the empty places where his comrades should have been.

The night before, eleven had gone out under the command of a fellow level five knight. They had spoken of easy prey—a young pair moving through the woods. A boy and a girl. Nothing to fear, nothing to delay.

Yet dawn had broken, and not one had returned.

His jaw was tight, his calloused fingers drumming against his thigh. He knew that man. Reckless, yes. Brutal, always. But reliable. No matter how much blood had been spilled, no matter what chaos unfolded, the man had never failed to return by sunrise.

Until now.

The knight ground his teeth. “What have you done, fool?”

He tried not to imagine the worst. Tried not to picture his comrade sprawled in the dirt, his body stripped of dignity by some rival order.

But the longer silence stretched, the more he felt the truth clawing at him. Something had happened. Something greater than the disappearance of a squad.

And then the fog came.

It rolled in quiet, creeping between tents and trees like a living thing.

At first he thought it was smoke, perhaps a fire untended. But as it thickened, as the air grew heavy with dampness and the hairs on his neck stood on end, he knew better.

This was no accident of nature.

The man rose sharply to his feet. His instincts screamed—forty years of life, twenty of them spent on blood-soaked fields, left no room for doubt. This fog was a product of magic.

“Men!” he barked, voice cutting through the haze. “Report!”

No answer came.

His scowl deepened. Again, he called, his tone sharper, authority laced with impatience. “Report, damn you!”

Silence answered. Only the faint hiss of mist against canvas.

The man cursed under his breath, reaching for the torch by his bed. A spark of flame danced in his palm, fire magic bending obediently to his will. The torch caught, flaring bright, and he stepped into the fog.

The cold hit him instantly. Not biting like winter, but deeper—unnatural. It sank into his bones, stiffened his joints. He gripped the torch tighter, forcing his boots forward through the damp soil.

Every breath clouded before him.

Every heartbeat echoed too loudly in his ears.

The camp, once bustling with low voices and the clang of steel, now felt like a graveyard.

He passed one of the outer shelters and saw the shadow of a man standing in stillness. Relief flickered. At last, someone had remained at post.

“You,” he snapped, his tone sharp to mask unease. “Report! What in the nine hells is—”

The torchlight caught the man’s face.

Or what should have been his face.

The breath caught in the knight’s throat. The figure before him was no longer flesh and blood but ice—perfect, unyielding, frozen mid-step. His eyes were wide with terror, his mouth parted as if his final scream had been stolen.

The torch trembled in his grip.

He staggered back a step. His instincts screamed louder now, echoing in every nerve, Run. Leave. Escape.

But he did not run. He couldn’t. He was the highest rank left alive in this camp. If the others had fallen, it was his duty to see who dared strike them. To understand what kind of power walked among them.

The fog thinned suddenly, cruelly deliberate, unveiling more.

What he saw rooted him in place.

Statues. Dozens of them. Every man he had called brother, frozen where he stood. Some sat mid-meal, bowls locked against their lips. Others gripped swords that would never finish their arcs. One had fallen to his knees, arms raised in futile prayer.

All turned to glassy ice.

The knight’s mouth went dry. His torch felt pitiful, its heat drowned by the frost crawling across the camp.

A sound reached him then—a whisper. Not words, not truly. Just the faint scrape of something alive moving through the mist. He spun, torch high, searching.

And then he saw them.

Eyes.

Not glowing, not monstrous. Human eyes. Yet the sight of them hollowed his chest with fear. They peered at him from the fog, calm and unblinking. It felt as though they looked through him, past his flesh, into the marrow of his bones, the echo of his soul.

His hand flew instinctively to his sword, but the hilt felt impossibly far, his body sluggish with dread.

The torch dropped from his grasp. The flame hissed, smothered by frost before it even hit the earth.

The last thought to cross his mind was simple, absurd, This is no child. This is death itself.

The cold swallowed him whole.

The fog shifted then, peeling back like curtains on a stage.

From within stepped a small figure. Her cloak stirred as though in wind, though the air was still. Her hair clung in damp strands against her cheeks, eyes bright with the same impish light they always carried.

Luna.

She placed her hands on her hips and surveyed the scene, a satisfied smile tugging at her lips. The camp lay silent under her frost, broken only by the brittle crackle of ice creeping through wood and canvas.

“Well,” she murmured, tilting her head, “that was easier than I thought.”

Her gaze drifted over the frozen stillness—tents glazed white, crates locked in silence, the last man’s eyes wide and unblinking.

She barely spared him a glance. What caught her attention instead were the smaller details, the matching uniforms, the emblem stitched into cloth, the neat rows of supplies stacked with military precision.

A grin tugged at her lips. “Well, if you’re all going to just stand there…” She rocked back on her heels, tapping her chin as though pondering some grand moral question. “I suppose it would be rude not to look around.”

Her fog swirled tighter, playful now, curling around the edges of chests and supply sacks as if pointing the way.

With a sparkle of excitement in her eyes, Luna darted deeper into the camp.

Her small hands tugged at lids and flaps, rifling through whatever the frozen worshippers had left behind.

Weapons, food, maps—every discovery was greeted with a hum of delight, as though the base were less an enemy stronghold and more a treasure trove waiting for her.