The Elementalist

Chapter 4

For now, every morning, I'm to drill on what has been told to me by Lantos. If I get any questions wrong, he will lecture me again on the topic till I get the correct answer.

"How many elements are there, and what are they?"

"Four, they are air, water, earth, and heat." It is monotonous, but he hasn't tried to ask any trick questions so far.

This pattern of question and answer continues for almost an hour as we travel.

Today was a nice day, clear skies, warm, with a gentle cool breeze. Lantos says that we will make it to San'hallon by mid-afternoon if we make good time.

My brother, I smile at the thought, my brother had tied his dagger at the end of his quarterstaff. Making a very shoddy spear, but anything is better than nothing against a Beast.

Anyways, passing a split in the path transitions from an overgrown footpath to a well-trodden dirt road. We're close. A few more hours, and we should be seeing the torch boundary, possibly even some farms.

We walked for another couple of hours, exactly as I predicted the boundary, infusing the midday sky with a light orange glow where it meets the ground. They seem brighter than the ones back home.

As we got closer to the boundary, more details stuck out to me. The first was that the "torch" boundary was actually made of lanterns mounted on metal poles. Each pole stood at a distance that, at home, I would consider dangerous. Surrounding each lantern are wooden stakes driven into the ground in a perimeter. The ones directly beside the path were the most concerning. They were damaged, the spikes splintered, blunted, loose. The lanterns, their poles bend, scratched, and rent open. The lanterns are just barely lit, flickering out before relighting in an erratic pattern.

"Is this normal?" I ask nervously looking toward Lantos.

He kneels next to one of the spikes, examining something next to it. Speaking, "Damage happens, sadly Beast blood isn't as foolproof a deterrent as we like to believe." Coming to some kind of conclusion, he stands up facing toward San'hallon, speaking to himself quietly, "The damage is fresh and seems to come from something on the path. An older one then."

Turning back toward me and Daniel, he says, "They're preparations in place if this happens, so the problem has probably been taken care of already. Just keep an eye out, you know, just in case."

That just made me more nervous. From the stories told the one time the village lost a torch there almost stopped being a village. That San'hallon allows the damage to remain all morning was ... concerning, to say the least.

Daniel shifts his hold on his spear to a cautious position.

Moving forward, the grasslands abruptly shifts to farmland—a clear line of destruction intersecting the otherwise pristine and orderly golden fields of wheat and barley.

It was quiet. It was mid-afternoon. There should be people wrapping up work, children playing, and the calls of animals from their pens, but instead, it was silent.

Eerie.

The trail of destruction continued throughout the fields, sometimes swerving into a farmhouse and sometimes circling back on itself.

I can't imagine that every house was empty when the Beast came through, but I can hope. I'm too scared to check either way.

A few minutes later we notice a figure laying half-obscured on the path.

A man was lying halfway on the path face down half, his waist down obscured by wheat. A spear held in his hand.

"Sir, are you okay?" Daniel calls while running forward to help him before being stopped by Lantos, grabbing him on the shoulder