CHAPTER 17: CHAPTER 16: BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY.

The survivors gathered around the graves of their relatives and friends in the village cemetery.

No one spoke. Everyone only bowed before the graves of people they had known.

Each of them had lost three or more loved ones. Some graves had no names.

That was because they could not identify the body buried there.

At one grave a woman wept.

Her little daughter stood silently staring at the grave, unable to speak from shock.

A middle aged man placed a bouquet of flowers in front of a headstone.

Others stood over graves weeping and bowing.

Oliver and the sage stopped before Elinor’s grave. Oliver placed a bunch of autumn flowers there, the kind she had loved most.

The sage knelt to the ground, trying to keep his face steady but he could not hold back the tears for long.

He soon broke down over the grave and began to weep bitterly.

The irony was that the one patting his back was little Oliver, who was supposed to be the one crying now.

Meanwhile Tell hovered above the place, using all her strength to dig a hole and bury the body of one of the small autumn spirits.

Her small size and the hardness of the soil made digging very difficult for her.

After all her effort she had barely dug a little hole, not big enough to bury half the body.

From a distance the masked man noticed. He approached carrying a shovel over his shoulder.

When he reached them he started digging a larger grave and helped her gently place the body inside.

Working together, they buried all the spirits’ bodies in a single area.

When they finished he turned to Tell.

"I thought you didn’t bury your spirits here. You have special cemeteries in your city, don’t you?" he asked as he brushed the dirt from his clothes.

Tell lifted her head and tried to hide the sadness in her voice, but it was useless.

"Yes, we usually bury them there."

"Then why did you bury them here?"

"Because they were here, and because they died here. When the elders learn what happened here, I do not think they will bury them at all."

"You are the daughter of an elder, and now you are doing something that goes against what the elders of the autumn spirits will do."

"Who are you? You are not human from what I see. No human could kill the great autumn spirit when it is corrupted like this. You... you are not a hybrid either, are you? I do not think you are a mythical creature. What exactly are you?"

"At first I was just a traveler. And it seems you have the wrong idea, the great autumn spirit is not dead. It withdrew to its lair, but it is still alive. Your forest and your people are still in danger."

"Why are you telling me this? I do not think you are warning me out of pure goodwill, right?"

"Because I want to help you reach its lair. I want to end this before the corruption spreads completely."

"But I do not know where its lair is."

"Right, you do not, but the chief sage among you does."

She looked at the graves around them, then at the small spirit’s body they had just buried.

The masked man asked again.

"You will take me to them?"

"I will take you to them, but on one condition."

"What is it?"

...

The survivors gathered in the half ruined tavern.

Faces around the tables were exhausted and eyes half closed from sleeplessness and fear.

The masked man stood in their midst.

"Everyone, anyone who wants to leave this village and the forest I will help them do so. That is what I advise you to do. The great autumn spirit no longer protects this village and the beasts in the forest will attack you eventually."

Silence fell for a moment, then a voice raised from among the people sitting around the tables.

"Why do you want to help us leave? I still do not understand how you managed to defeat the autumn spirit. Are you even human? Can I trust you?"

Confusion showed on the others’ faces; they all had the same question. In another corner of the tavern the man who had lost an eye shouted.

"Do you doubt the man who saved our lives? With that power he could have fled and left us to die without risking his life to fight the great autumn spirit."

Some agreed with short words, others murmured with doubt.

"Of course I am grateful to him, but we still do not know why the great autumn spirit and the other spirits turned into monsters. Did this not happen just days after that stranger appeared in the village?"

Whispers spread through the tavern.

Another man stood up.

"Our ancestors lived under the protection of the great autumn spirit and we did too without anything like this massacre happening. But as soon as that stranger appeared the great autumn spirit turned into that monster."

All eyes in the crowd turned toward the masked man when the man pointed at him.

"You have seen for yourselves how much power he has, he is certainly not human. He did not even try to protect anyone; he only destroyed the great autumn spirit."

Amid the accusations toward the masked man, Oliver stepped forward to defend him.

"He had nothing to do with the great autumn spirit becoming that way."

But what Oliver said did little to reduce their suspicion of the masked man.

An old man’s voice rose from a corner of the tavern.

"Aren’t you the child he saved from the forest? Of course you will be biased toward him. You are the outsider the previous sage brought from the woods. I always knew you would bring ruin to the village. I even told the previous sage..."

The old man did not finish because the current sage rose quickly from his seat and punched the old man in the face with a heavy blow that knocked him to the floor.

The old man writhed in pain holding his nose.

Shouts rose. The man who had started the doubts tried to push the sage away.

"What do you think you are doing...?"

He did not finish before receiving a similar punch to his face.

The tavern fell silent for a moment.

Then the sage stood, his voice serious and stern as he wiped blood from his knuckles.

"This is not the time for such nonsense. If you want to stay here and die, do so, no one will care. But doubting the man who risked his life to save you and trying to blame a small child? That is unacceptable."

The old man struggled on the floor, holding his nose and trying to get up.

"Who gave you the right to speak? You were not even participating in the festival all the time, you were not doing your duties as sage like your father."

Tension rose in the tavern. The masked man slammed the table hard.

The table shattered under the impact.

He turned to them and looked at each of them.

"I do not care about your problems, nor do I care if you think I caused the autumn spirit’s corruption. I can kill everyone here without exerting any effort if I wanted to."

He stepped closer as he cast a brief glance at each person.

"Whoever wants to go with me, stand up now. Whoever wants to stay here and die, do so. I do not care. The choice is yours in the end. Do you want death or do you want to stay alive?"