The Leaf Chicken

The Darkwood did not welcome him. He had not expected a party.

Forty paces past the gate the canopy closed over completely, strangling what was left of the morning and letting it through in thin grey shafts that did nothing except make the shadows between them look worse. The air came thick and cold and smelled of leaf mould, wet fur, and something underneath both of those that was older than either. It sat at the back of his throat like a warning somebody had gone to the trouble of making physical.

What Gesbiek noticed most was the quiet.

The camp had never once been quiet. The camp was shouting and scuffling and the flat clack of practice weapons from dawn until somebody got hurt. Out here there was wind in the needles, and then nothing, and then wind again.

*The Darkwood only goes quiet when the predators are listening.*

"Thank you, Grandfather," Gesbiek said, out loud, to a forest. "Very helpful. Very calming."

He kept walking, because standing still had never solved anything and out here it would actively make things worse. The clan had shut the gate and dropped the latch. Nobody was going to open it again by accident.

In the corner of his sight the green diamond held its position, patient as a landmark.

[39m]

Twenty paces further the ground tilted under him without moving. Vertigo came through in one long swing and took the whole forest sideways with it, and Gesbiek got a hand onto the nearest trunk and hung there with the bark cutting into his palm, breathing.

The static crawled back across his vision. Broken glyphs went past too fast to be anything.

[REATTEMPTING BOOT SEQUENCE]
[HARDWARE INSUFFICIENT]

"That is not my fault," he told it.

He got the torn edge of his shirt out of the way and looked down at his own chest, which was a thing he had spent five years avoiding.

The crack in the Grey Shard was still there. It had widened. Not much, a fraction, the difference between a hair and a slightly thicker hair, but he had looked at that stone every day of his life and he knew every dull inch of it, and it was not the same stone it had been yesterday. Silver moved in the fissure, going bright with each heartbeat and dimming again, entirely indifferent to whether he approved.

The dead thing in his chest was coming apart from the inside, and something was leaking out through the gap.

Under all of that sat the hunger, which had changed as well. It was not asking for food any more. It was asking for something further back than food, something he did not have a word for, and it was asking loudly.

[24m]

"Yes," he said. "I am going."

* * * *

The smells arrived in waves he could not turn down. Pine sap. Rot. Animal musk laid over everything like a hand. Through the middle of it ran the copper and lightning smell of the beetle, which as far as he could tell was now coming from him.

He caught a foot on a root he never saw and went down hard into wet leaves, and got a mouthful of what the forest floor was made of.

[15m]

He pushed himself up. The marker pulsed on, unbothered by any of it.

Then a rustle went through a thicket of Sword-Ferns to his left. Sharp. Deliberate. Something that had decided to move rather than something the wind had moved.

[9m]

Gesbiek dropped into a crouch and went still. The turtle. Limp, small, uninteresting, no threat and no fun.

It occurred to him, halfway down, that this might be a serious error. In the Sludge Pits the turtle worked because Snarl wanted a reaction and got bored without one. Nothing out here wanted a reaction. Out here, lying very still and looking soft was less a defence than a serving suggestion.

The rustling stopped. Then resumed, closer.

[3m]

His hands went into fists on their own. What was it going to be. A wolf big enough to make the maths simple. One of the things with too many legs that he had heard about and hoped were exaggerated.

[TARGET ACQUIRED]

The ferns parted and something round and feathered came out into a shaft of light.

Relief hit him first, a warm stupid wave of it. A bird. Just a bird.

Then it kept coming out of the ferns, and continued to do so for a while.

The Leaf Chicken stood near enough three feet tall. It was not fluff. It was a compact arrangement of muscle wrapped in serrated scales that had taken the green of the surrounding undergrowth and were using it well. Every movement it made was short and exact, the way movements are when a thing has never had to reconsider one.

And set into its chest, glowing a muddy hopeful green, was a 1-Green Shard.

Gesbiek looked at it for a long moment.

Green meant life. Green outranked Grey. Which meant, if he applied the laws of the world he had been raised in with any rigour at all, that this bird was his social superior.

He was not entirely sure how a goblin was supposed to feel about being outranked by poultry, and he decided that today was not the day to work it out.

The chicken scratched at the earth. Its head came round in a short flat arc, and its eye found him.

It did not know what a shard was. It had a brain the size of an acorn and no interest whatsoever in the political situation. What it had was a set of criteria, and Gesbiek met all of them: small, slow, soft, and standing still in the open like an invitation.

It made a low cluck.

Then it came at him.

* * * *

Gesbiek's entire body made a unanimous decision to leave, and his legs, which had not eaten in four days, submitted a minority report.

He shoved backward off the ground, scrambling, arms going in directions that did nothing useful, and produced a sound that he would later describe to nobody at all. There was no outrunning a thing powered by a Green Shard. He got perhaps two paces.

The beak took him by the shoulder of his rags and missed the meat underneath by the width of the cloth, tore through it, and slammed him flat. The air came out of him in one piece. His vision filled up with black spots and the dusty smell of feathers, which was somehow the worst part.

He rolled. Talons came down where his head had been and opened up the forest floor, throwing dirt.

This was not a fight. A fight required two participants with opinions. This was a procedure, being carried out on him by a bird roughly the size of a medium dog, and if he ever came to write his own history there were going to be chapters he would want to lose.

He went on all fours instead of upright, which was faster and much less dignified, and found an Ironwood root arching out of the ground like a doorway. He got under it.

The beak hit the wood above him like a hammer. Once. Again. The whole root rang with it and splinters came down into his hair, and Gesbiek pressed himself into the cold mud and understood that he had not escaped anything. He had simply chosen the room in which it was going to happen.

His hand went out through the muck looking for anything at all and closed on something hard.

He pulled it free. A river stone, fist-sized, smooth on every side, worn round by a great deal of water over a great deal of time.

There was another stone exactly like it around his neck, and twenty more of them stacked for his grandfather two hundred paces from here, and Gesbiek did not have the leisure to consider what any of that meant.

He got both hands on it.

Above him the chicken drew back to put its weight behind the next one.

His chest went hot. The crack in the Grey Shard flared, and the silver came out of it in erratic bursts, and inside his skull the hum climbed into a whine that took the forest with it.

The air rippled.

Pop.

* * * *

Reality stuttered.

The Leaf Chicken hung in the air mid-lunge and did not fall.

It was not still. That was the part Gesbiek's mind refused to accept. It vibrated in place, jerking back and forth by inches, edges blurring and resolving, beak open on a scream that had nowhere to go. Dust motes stopped where they were. The wind cut off in the middle of a gust and left the ferns bent over and holding.

He was the only thing in the clearing still happening.

The 1-Green Shard in the bird's chest went on pulsing, slow and wrong, out of step with everything around it, like a heartbeat heard through a wall.

Blood came out of Gesbiek's nose and ran warm over his lip.

He had done nothing. That was the thing he kept arriving at. He had not willed this, had not thought a command at it, had not so much as asked. The System had simply broken under pressure and thrown the fault outward into the world, and he had been standing inside it when it did.

Something cold went through him that had nothing to do with the forest. What if it did not restart. What if he was left in here, the last moving thing in a stopped world, for as long as that lasted. What if it did restart and took him with it on the way past.

The bird hung there. Vibrating.

He had a rock.

Gesbiek got both hands around the stone, made a noise that he had intended as a war cry and which came out closer to a sob, and swung with everything he had left, which was not much, but which he committed to entirely.

He aimed for the soft place just behind the eye, because Zog had once told him that everything with a skull has one.

The stone landed.

CRACK.

Time came back all at once, and it came back angry.

Every scrap of momentum the world had been holding released in the same instant. The bird's own lunge resumed and drove it forward into the stone that was already travelling the other way, and the two forces met somewhere behind its eye and settled the matter between them.

The Leaf Chicken went sideways, legs going in four directions, and crashed into the ferns and thrashed there in a spray of green blood and loose feathers, and then stopped.

The shard in its chest flickered once and went quiet.

Gesbiek sat down against the root because the alternative was falling. The stone came out of his fingers and landed in the mud with a dull sound. Blood from his nose dripped steadily onto what was left of his shirt.

His hands would not stop shaking.

That had not been him. He needed to be clear with himself about that, because there was going to be a temptation later to remember it differently. The System had broken, and reality had gone with it, and he had been a passenger who happened to be holding a rock.

He was frightened of it happening again. He was more frightened of it not.

The forest went quiet around him, heavier than before.

He had won, though.

Gesbiek. The Grey Stain. Waste-scraper. Had killed a Green-Tier creature, with a rock, while crying, from underneath a tree root.

The bards were not going to want this one. But the bird was dead and he was not, and by the standards he had available that was the most successful morning of his life.

* * * *

His stomach announced itself into the silence, loud enough to carry.

The adrenaline went out of him all at once and left the hollow behind it, and Gesbiek turned his head toward the corpse.

The 1-Green Shard sat among the wet feathers, still glowing faintly. Warm. Full. The exact thing he had gone into the Darkwood looking for on the night he had eaten a piece of metal.

[CONSUMABLE DETECTED]
[RECOMMENDATION: HARVEST]

"I had worked that out," Gesbiek said, and crawled toward it.

The body was still warm. His fingers went in past broken ribs and things that were cooling and found the shard fused deep into bone and cartilage, and he got a grip and pulled until it came free with a wet tearing sound and a spray of green blood that steamed in the cold.

It sat in his palm, pulsing. Alive, in whatever sense a stone could manage it.

He brought it to his mouth and stopped.

There were taboos about this. Older than the clan, older than Grolm, older than anybody who could be asked about them. Zog had spoken about the shards the way people speak about weather and gods, as things that happened to you and were not to be handled. Nobody ate a shard. It was not that it was forbidden, exactly. It was that it had never once been on the list of things a goblin might do.

Gesbiek considered the list of things he had done in the last two days.

"You made the rule," he said, to nobody in particular, and bit down.

Copper and lightning, again, and a texture that refused to settle on solid or liquid and chose instead to be both while he was trying to swallow it.

Then the energy came in.

It went through him the way fire goes through dry grass, out from the middle of him into everything, and it burned off the hunger. Not eased it. Burned it, out of the roots, the whole gnawing hollow void of it gone in the space of a breath and warmth standing where it had been.

He swallowed, and swallowed again, and made a noise he had never made before.

[CONSUMING TIER-1 GREEN CORE]
[WARNING: UNPRECEDENTED ACTION]

Warmth spread out of the Grey Shard in his chest. The crack across it flared and the silver light in the fissure mixed with the green pouring into it, and the two of them went round each other, and something in Gesbiek's chest that had been dead his entire life shifted very slightly to make room.

He sat in the wet leaves next to a dead bird with green blood on his mouth and understood, dimly, without any of the words for it, that he had just done something the world had not left space for.

The forest went on listening.