The writing of RAW IV has begun and here is the first chapter.
If you are a Patron at any level over on my Patreon, you can also read the second chapter here.
If you are a 3 or 5$/month patron, you will be able to read future chapters as they are posted on my Patreon.
I’m aiming for a mid-to-late August release for Raw IV.
Jak found evidence of his target along the outskirts of the woodlands.
He crouched in the shadow of a large boulder, staring at the trees and dense vegetation ahead of him, considering his options.
This was Ara Forest, a place he knew he was not welcome.
His tribe now numbered over one hundred people, almost twenty of them elven, and every elf had told him the same thing: non-elves were not welcome in their home forest. Stories of incursion by the exiles who had come to call the Dektyr Tribe home ended the same: elves eventually arrived and forced them to leave.
What changed was the severity of the response. The most recent of his new tribemates, a human woman and her half-elf son who had been exiled after years of an awkward stalemate of protection due to her status as a skilled healer, had said they were very nearly killed by the elves who found them when they had been hiding in the forest.
Given he was fully intending to try making peace with them, he was reluctant to risk a violent encounter.
On the other hand, he really wanted to find the exile he’d been seeking for the past two days.
Finally, with one more survey of the immediate area, Jak left the relative safety of the boulder and began making for the treeline.
Something about the forest set him on edge, and as he drew closer, it occurred to him that it was the differences. Ara Forest looked different than Avat’s. The trees were of a contrasting breed, their coloring strange and almost, but not quite, familiar. Their tops were sharper, more pronounced, their profiles narrower.
The forest floor, he saw as he slipped within the woodlands, was denser. There were more places to hide for predator and prey alike. As he began hunting around for the trail again, Jak let his senses open up, taking in the strange new forest around him.
Sights, sounds, scents.
Secrets.
All of it feeding him crucial information and helping shape the world around him.
Paying attention, listening for that tiny twig snapping, that branch being shifted, the soft huffing of an animal, smelling the scent as the wind shifted, catching the barest hint of movement among the vegetation, anything could provide a wary hunter with that one crucial second of warning needed that meant the difference between brutal death and survival.
There.
He saw the imprint of a bare foot, a bit narrow, an elf.
The one he was tracking. The trail made for the northeast, heading away from the core of the forest, thankfully. As Jak began following, eyes continually roving over the landscape around him, he found his thoughts drifting uncertainly, like a branch tossed into the sea.
Things were different now.
Not all of them. In some ways his life had taken on a reassuring regularity.
After killing the Tolvar war chief and helping Ripper and his small tribe of karn exiles retake their village, he had been ready to go on the hunt for allies in the war against the Tolvar that had been transforming from embers and sparks to true flames.
Except other things had demanded his attention.
Just a few days after that, a sickness had hit his tribe and spread through it like a wildfire during a drought. It was nothing truly serious, just a cough and a fever and lethargy. Just about everyone had fallen ill over the course of the following days, and it was very random who was affected and how. Rylee just had a cough and mild fever for a day, while Niri had been unable to leave their cave for very long for several days in a row.
He had begun to seriously worry, but Rylee reassured him again and again that she would be fine. Sometimes people got sick. But with pregnancy, he’d tasted fear in a way he never had before. To make matters worse, as one of only three people who had never gotten sick, (Nessa and Kes were the other two), he’d been run ragged just trying to keep up with the normal day-to-day affairs of the tribe. Gathering water and food, provided security, and hunting down plants to help relieve the suffering of his people.
As the sickness had faded and regular life resumed, Jak still found himself running around Avat’s Forest, dealing with problems.
A few particularly dangerous beasts had been found that needed to be put down.
Sometimes someone went missing and had to be tracked down.
Rylee would need a rare plant.
One of the builders or toolmakers would need a rare rock or gemstone or wood.
He’d also taken on the project of setting up a second defensive outpost, this one to the northwest, in the spot that Ripper and his people had originally holed up in.
This string of projects and tasks had revealed in him something Jak was still grappling with. Within him were two core desires.
One was a man who wanted to lead and conquer, to keep pushing, to take the fight to the enemies and bathe in their blood.
The other was a man who wanted to sit by the fire with his tribemates, to hunt game to provide for his people, to lay in his cave with his bond-mates and talk quietly for hours, to stare at the shadows dancing on his cave ceiling as he laid awake at night, listening to Niri and Rylee and Nessa as they slept around him.
That second man was who he had settled into after the sickness had forced him to stick close to his village or risk losing it, and after spending several nights staring long into the fire, considering this, Jak had decided this was the man he wanted to be.
If he was given a choice, he would chose this life.
But he knew that he was not being given a choice, and although the victory at the old karn village and the lack of a serious response from the Tolvar for a few weeks had given him the illusion of peace, even a temporary one, it had been shattered several days ago by another large attack. They had handled it, but it had rekindled the blazing fire of war that had been ignited in him during that final attack. He needed to act.
Stepping out of his cave the morning following the attack, Jak had felt the change in a number of ways, but mostly he felt it as he looked up at the trees surrounding his village and, for the first time, truly realizing that they were dying.
The long decay had begun.
The transition between summer and winter, life and death, had commenced.
It was still a ways off, but now it was on everyone’s minds.
And the chill wind that blew through the village that morning seemed to herald the call of responsibility, of the coming war.
Like a shadow cast over them all.
And so he had stepped up his efforts to find more tribemates, no longer waiting for them to come to him, or for his people to stumble across them while out hunting or foraging. Instead, he organized small search parties and sent them out to track down potential recruits of all kinds. And this was how he had nearly doubled the size of his tribe over the past month.
Jak paused as he heard something, his hand going for his adze.
Something shifted in the bushes to his left. He waited, still as a stone, watching, wary.
After a long moment passed, the gray blur of a rabbit suddenly shot out and away, fleeing into the undergrowth.
He resumed his journey, hunting for the elf known as Lekken.
Most of the recruits that they’d gained came from stories the newer tribemates had to tell. People they had seen while on their way there, evidence of camps in valleys or groves or small copses, tales of exiles trying to go it alone.
Three times now he had heard of an elven exile who saved others in dangerous situations, then disappeared.
Curiosity and practicality had pushed him to grab his survival pack, kiss his bond-mates farewell, and strike out to the north.
Someone like this would be a boon to his tribe.
Thoughts of peace and alliances weren’t far from his mind, either. As he stalked through the trees, still getting used to the new scents and general vibe of Ara Forest, he lamented over the difficulties so far.
Although the peace made with the nymphs and Ripper was invaluable, he knew that more was needed. Much more.
And so far no one had been able to make any real progress with regards to a broader alliance.
The elves were mysterious and elusive, shut up in their forest, refusing entry to all not like themselves.
The karn were divided, not just between those who were under the control of the embyr and those who weren’t, but even farther between those who believed in the ways of Redtooth and those who did not.
The valt clan lived on the entire other side of the island and may not even be there anymore.
Tracking down the mysterious Lekken seemed to be a decent first step in finding his way into the Jari Clan of the elves. He still wasn’t entirely convinced that he shouldn’t just walk into their village and ask to speak with their leader about the obvious danger threatening to consume the whole of the island, but every elven exile he’d spoken to said this would be a very bad idea.
Jak stopped again. The trail he had been following had ceased abruptly.
He drew his adze and slowly looked around, paying careful attention to every detail of his surroundings.
For a reason he did not quite know, he felt positive he was following Lekken. Just a feeling, something in his gut saying it was so.
If this elf was as evasive as the stories made him out to be, then he was no doubt aware that he was being followed.
Jak was good at tracking and moving stealthily through the forest, and he thought himself an expert at it, but based on some of the things he had seen his elven tribemates do, he knew the general level of tracking and stealth was higher among elves.
So someone known for it might be even better than him.
Finally, he saw evidence that his quarry had climbed a nearby tree. He looked up. The leaves and branches were dense, hiding much.
Jak decided to try for the honest approach and put his adze away.
He could sense someone nearby, even if he couldn’t see them.
“I know you’re here,” he said, “and I just want to talk.”
The silence that persisted went on for long enough that Jak began to wonder if maybe he was sensing something else.
And then a slim figure dropped from a tree to his left and landed lightly on the ground.
It took a lot of willpower not to draw his weapon again and shift into a defensive stance. Instead, Jak turned to face this man.
He was indeed an elf. He was a little taller than the average elf, slim, built of lean, compact muscle. His blonde hair was cut very short, and the smear of ash around his eyes gave him away. Jak had distant memories of his old tribe applying warpaint sometimes. All the stories of Lekken had described him with a dark slash across his eyes.
“You are the Amber Warrior I’ve heard so much about,” he said.
“And you are Lekken,” Jak replied.
The elf looked mildly surprised. “I have saved enough of my people that it does not surprise me that my description has reached your ears, but my name?”
“Jayna told me about you.”
Lekken stiffened slightly. Jak noticed he was holding a strangely shaped stick of some kind, and something was slung over his shoulder. It was familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. He knew, however, that it was a weapon of some sort.
“And how is Jayna?” he asked.
“She lives. She’s happy. We found her some suns ago at the edge of Avat’s Forest, leading a small group of exiles. She joined my tribe,” Jak replied.
Lekken seemed to be studying him closely, no doubt trying to read him for lies.
“I see. Why was she exiled?” he asked.
“She didn’t say beyond the fact that she ‘displeased the Xentan’.”
Lekken bared his teeth. “That seems to be happening more often now…” He refocused on Jak. “Why are you following me?”
“I want you to join my tribe,” Jak replied.
“Why should I?”
“We seek peace for the island, and we could use your help. Everyone who has spoken of you has talked of your great skill as a warrior and a hunter. We have several of your people at our village.”
He tensed again. “And how do you treat my people?”
“I treat them as my own: well. They are not treated any differently because they are elves.”
“Hmm. And how do you propose peace for this island?”
“Kill the Tolvar, and probably the embyr tribe in the west, and make peaceful alliances with all others.”
Lekken laughed bitterly. “If you think you can make peace with the karn who inhabit this island, you are sadly mistaken.”
“I already have made peace with a group of karn. And I am mated to a karn. And, just in case you have heard the rumors: no, I cannot control karn. They work with me of their own will.”
Lekken stared at him for a long moment. He seemed not to be able to decide what to say in response to that. “If you truly wish for me to join your tribe, then I have a requirement. Something I need to do right now. And if you want me to consider your request, you’ll help me.”
“What is it?” Jak replied. He was used to this by now. Everyone always wanted something from him, and it was usually help finding or killing something.
“The Tolvar have been taking my people captive. I don’t know why. But it does not matter. Some were taken this morning. One managed to get away and found me, told me about it. I’ve been tracking them ever since. I think I’ve almost found them. Help me free them and kill the Tolvar who took them captive and I will journey with you to your village, and seriously consider your request.”
“I accept these terms,” Jak said.
“Good, follow me.”
The two men headed off into the forest.