Friendship between Thistle and Argus

The storm found Alden three hours before nightfall.

It rolled in from the north without warning, a black wall of cloud that swallowed the treetops of the Bleak Forest and turned the last grey light into something closer to burial. Rain fell in cold, driving sheets, and the ancient oaks groaned around him like men in pain. Alden pulled his cloak tighter and ducked his head against the wind, Stormbreaker's hilt pressing reassuringly against his hip as he pushed through the undergrowth, half-blind, searching for anything that might pass for shelter.

He nearly missed the cave entirely. It was a low, dark mouth in a limestone outcrop, half-curtained by hanging moss, and he crawled inside with mud on his knees and rain streaming from the brim of his helm. He sat, breathed, and listened to the thunder walk across the forest canopy.

"You're dripping on my mushrooms."

Alden spun, hand flying to Stormbreaker's pommel. Crouched on a ledge of rock not five feet away, barely visible in the dark, was the strangest creature he had ever encountered. Small, no taller than a child, with skin the deep green of old moss and ears that tapered to fine points like the leaves of a holly bush. Its face was sharp with mischief, all raised brows and compressed grin, the kind of expression that suggested it had been quietly enjoying his undignified entrance for some time.

"I beg your pardon," Alden said carefully, hand still hovering near his sword.

"My mushrooms." The creature gestured to a cluster of pale fungi growing in a ring near Alden's boot. "You're dripping on them. They don't like it."

Alden moved his boot. "And you are?"

"Thistle." The creature dropped lightly from the ledge and landed without a sound, tilting its head to study Alden the way a cat studies something it hasn't yet decided to trust. "I know every root and hollow in this forest, every shadow and every sound that doesn't belong. You've been walking for hours. You've passed three Greyshade wraiths and two corrupted stag without knowing it." A pause. "You're either very brave or very ignorant."

"Some days both," Alden admitted.

Something shifted in Thistle's expression, not quite a smile, but the precursor to one. He sat cross-legged on the cave floor, studying Alden with luminous amber eyes, and what followed was a long, odd interview conducted mostly in uncomfortable silence, punctuated by Thistle asking questions that seemed unrelated, What do you do when you find an injured animal on the road? Have you ever broken a promise? Do you know the name of the King's steward? and watching Alden's face more than his answers.

At last, Thistle seemed to reach a verdict. He produced a small clay bowl from somewhere about his person, filled it with rainwater pooled in a hollow of the rock, and set it between them.

"You're honest," he said, as if pronouncing a sentence. "That's rare enough in the Bleak Forest to be worth something." He met Alden's eyes. "I'll guide you to the old castle. I know what you're looking for."

Alden hadn't mentioned the castle. He decided not to ask how Thistle knew.

They reached the castle the following morning, when the storm had settled into a cold, steady drizzle that beaded on Thistle's green skin like dew on a leaf. The structure rose from the tree line without preamble, massive, black-stoned, draped in forty years of creeping vine, and it wore its abandonment like armour. No banner flew from its broken battlements. No fire showed in any window.

But smoke rose, thin and deliberate, from a chimney on the eastern tower.

Alden found the old man in the great hall, seated before a fire that was doing its best against an enormous, damp space. He was ancient in the way certain things are ancient, not decrepit, but compressed, as if time had pressed everything unnecessary out of him and left only the essential. A beard the colour of old snow hung to his chest. His robes had once been fine. His eyes, when they lifted from the fire to find Alden in the doorway, were the pale, sharp grey of a winter sky before a blizzard.

"Another fool wandered in from the forest," the old man said. Not a question. Not quite contempt. Something in between.

"My name is Alden Stormrider." He stepped inside, water running from his cloak to the flagstones. "And I'm told you're Argus."

The name produced a stillness in the old wizard. "Told by whom?"

"A forest spirit with poor manners and excellent intelligence." Thistle materialised from the shadows at Alden's shoulder, and Argus regarded him with the weary recognition of men who have crossed paths before and found the experience unpleasant.

"The Shadowspawn banished you," Alden said. He kept his voice level, without pity, Thistle had warned him that pity would close every door. "They took your seat. They took the Council's ear. They left you here to rot and forget." He moved closer to the fire. "I don't intend to let that stand."

Argus's laugh was a short, hard sound, like stone splitting. "You're a knight with a sword and a weed for company. The Shadowspawn is not a man you can challenge to single combat, boy. It is a thing, old as the root of this forest, born from the kingdom's worst grief. I spent eleven years trying to drive it back, and it scattered me like chaff." He turned back to the fire. "Go home."

The silence that followed was long. The fire popped and hissed. Outside, the rain tapped against the ancient stones.

"Then you already know how it thinks," Alden said quietly. "Eleven years of study. You know its weaknesses even if you never found the strength to press them." He drew Stormbreaker and set it flat on the table between them, not as a threat, but as an offering. The blade caught the firelight and held it, humming faintly with something that wasn't quite warmth. "I have the sword. Thistle has the forest. You have the knowledge. None of us is enough alone."

Argus stared at the blade for a long time. His expression was the expression of a man doing an arithmetic he'd long since stopped believing would sum to anything hopeful.

"You're either extraordinarily determined," he said at last," or extraordinarily stupid."

"Some days both," Thistle said primly, from the corner.

Argus looked at the spirit. Then at the blade. Then at Alden's face, reading something there that he did not name aloud. He pushed himself slowly to his feet and reached for his staff.

"We leave before dawn," he said. "And if you die in the first hour, don't expect me to carry you."

They went deeper into the Bleak Forest as three, and the forest received them differently than it had received one. Thistle moved ahead like a green ghost, bending branches aside, steering them around hollows where Greyshade wraiths coiled like cold smoke in the roots. When a pack of corrupted wolves, their eyes blank white, their fur shot through with black veins, surged from a ridgeline, Thistle threw handfuls of powdered something into the air and the creatures scattered, howling, into the dark. Argus did not comment, but he watched the spirit with marginally less suspicion than before.

For three days they pressed inward, and the forest grew stranger. The trees thickened until their canopies met overhead and no sky showed at all. The light became a permanent grey-green dusk. The sounds of birds vanished, replaced by a distant, rhythmic pulse, not heard so much as felt, low in the chest, like a second heartbeat that was not one's own.

"That's it," Argus said, on the morning of the fourth day, stopping dead on the path. His voice had lost its gruffness and found something grimmer in its place. "We're close now."

They found it in a clearing where no tree grew and no grass lived, a space of bare, black earth at the precise centre of the Bleak Forest, where the darkness had weight. The Shadowspawn was not what Alden had imagined. He had imagined something terrible but comprehensible. This was neither. It was vast, a churning mass of living shadow that rose and rose until it eclipsed the canopy, dozens of limbs articulating from its body like the legs of some enormous, dreaming thing, each one thick as an ancient oak, each one ending in something that tore the air where it moved. Its presence was not merely physical. It pressed against the mind, cold and enormous, filling every thought with a low, wordless suggestion of despair, kneel, end.

Alden's knees wanted to buckle. He did not let them.

"Now!" he shouted.

Thistle's magic went first, a cascade of green-gold light that wrapped the Shadowspawn's nearest limbs and tangled them, slowing their terrible sweep, filling the clearing with the smell of crushed pine and living earth. The creature recoiled, confused by something so small, so stubbornly alive. Argus's voice rose behind Alden, deep, guttural syllables in a tongue older than the kingdom, and his staff discharged arcs of cold white fire that drove the shadow-mass backward, step by thundering step, shrieking with a sound like tearing iron.

Alden ran.

He ran straight at it, Stormbreaker raised, and somewhere in the running he stopped thinking about the size of it or the weight of what would happen if he failed, and thought only of the people behind the forest's edge, the villages, the children, the quiet lives the Shadowspawn had been slowly swallowing since before he'd been born. He swung the blade and felt it connect with something that was not quite flesh and not quite nothing, and the sword sang with a clear, terrible note, and the light that poured from it was not fire or lightning but something older, the clean, absolute light of a thing being unmade.

He pushed it in with everything he had left.

The Shadowspawn shrieked.

Then the light took the clearing.

Alden came back to himself on his knees in the black earth, gasping, both hands wrapped around Stormbreaker's hilt where he'd driven it into the ground to keep himself upright. His arms shook. There was blood on his face from somewhere he couldn't identify. The clearing was empty of shadow. The sky, the actual sky, pale and cold and inconceivably beautiful, showed through the canopy overhead for the first time in who knew how many years.

He heard Thistle land lightly beside him. A small green hand settled on his shoulder, and said nothing, because nothing was needed.

A moment later, Argus's staff tapped the earth nearby. The old wizard stood over him, looking down, his expression unreadable. Then, very slowly, the gruffness left his face, not replaced by warmth exactly, but by something that had room in it for warmth, someday.

"On your feet, Stormrider," he said. "Heroes don't kneel in the dirt."

Alden laughed, a raw, breathless sound, and got to his feet.

The kingdom waited beyond the tree line, and the three of them walked toward it together.