The verdant groves of the southern Brellachian woodlands stretched as far as the eye could see, gnarled oaks twisting and turning, the canopy of leaves projecting a dappled blanket of sunlight onto the undergrowth. Glace Nextern wandered through, eyes and ears attuned for any possible quarry. Her leather boots trudged through the shrubbery, flattening fallen leaves and snapping twigs in twine. Her ginger hair was cropped boyishly short, and her green-coloured clothes did not interfere with her goals at all, though many would have looked at them and called them rags.

  Padding by her side was Rav, a scruffy, black and white sheepdog. He panted with joy to be out in the forest once more, though he halted to a stop when he heard the squawk of a bird up in the trees.

  A buzzard, she estimated, tawny-feathered and with a hooked beak. Now that was a rare find. She took an arrow from her quiver, nocked it onto her bow, and fired.

  The bird fluttered out of the way, soaring further into the leaves than she thought she’d be able to hit. Her arrow now protruded from the tree’s trunk, far out of reach.

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered, staring up at the arrow with her hands on her hip. ‘Rav,’ she began, looking over at the dog, ‘you think you can climb up there?’

  Rav didn’t respond, because he was a dog.

  ‘Yeah, me neither,’ she said. ‘Maybe I could throw a rock or something up at it, but I don’t want to break it.’

  She briefly rested a hand upon her chin, before her eyes widened with inspiration. ‘Sit,’ she said to Rav, who sat himself down, ‘good boy.’

  The tree had a thick trunk, and was at least three times her size, with the arrow near the top. Still, she was a spry youth, and though for many her age their tree-climbing days would be over, hers evidently were not.

  She clung to the trunk, hugging it as though it were a friend, and with all of her strength tried to shimmy her way up it. After a few seconds of doing this, a few branches were now in reach, which she grabbed for better leverage. She continued to clamber up the tree, throwing her body up onto branches and swinging her limbs around like an acrobat, until she reached the arrow. She grasped its shaft, and yanked it out, before repeating the journey down, letting herself fall when she thought she was close enough to the ground, landing in a crouch.

  ‘You see, Rav,’ Glace said to the dog, ‘you should never let anything go to waste. If you can retrieve your arrows, there’s no reason not to.’

  Rav continued to happily pant.

  ‘Alright, boy, rise,’ she called as she placed the arrow back in her quiver, and the dog rose to his feet.

  Footsteps sounded from the south, and she immediately slid behind a tree, Rav following at her heels. She watched as a troop of men in uniforms - steel armour with red cloth - marched past, perhaps a dozen of them. One of them glanced to his left, and locked eyes with Glace. He called his men to halt, and they each turned to look at her.

  She swallowed, and stepped out from behind the tree. The man started speaking to her in a strange tongue she could not understand, and spoke very fast and firmly. She could not tell where one sentence ended and the next began.

  ‘What are you saying?’ she asked him, and fully expected no response.

  The men looked around, nodded, and the man started to speak in broken Brellachian, a language she knew but was not her first. ‘Are you Brellach?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not from Brellach, no.’

  ‘But not Jorat?

  ‘Not from Jorat either, no.’

  ‘What are you from?

  ‘I’m from Earthwhisper, we’re a small tribe in the lands between Brellach and Jorat.’

  ‘Erg-wibger? What is that locationed?’

  ‘It’s just to the east,’ she pointed in her home’s general direction, ‘my family are there. Why?’

  ‘Thank you,’ the man said with a smile and a nod, and the group of them turned and marched eastwards.

  ‘Strange,’ she said to Rav once she was sure they were out of earshot, ‘I wonder what that was about.’

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  She continued to search the forest for another few hours, firing plenty of arrows and hitting no shots. Not a good day for game, she thought. No deer or elk or bears, just a few rabbits and birds, nothing that could sufficiently feed her family.

  Her parents had sent her off with the goal of finding food, and she would be damned if she didn’t return with something substantial. She’d hate to let down her father, or upset her mother, and to watch Grandfather Drope go hungry would bring an ache to her heart. Plus, there were her three brothers: Arkin, Trale, and Crond, all of which needed feeding as well and were far too young to go out hunting themselves.

  Just as she was reminiscing on her family, she found herself smiling, right before the ground beneath her began to shake.

  She looked around, bewildered, not entirely sure what one should do in case of an earthquake, and Rav readied himself into something like a battle position, though he was far from a threatening dog.

  About ten metres away from her, the ground split open, and from it emerged a creature. A thick, wormlike body countless times the size of her, with a writhing mass of legs on either side, its eyes blood red, with an insect’s pincer before its gnashing mouth.

  A bratchetworm. She couldn’t believe it. A real, live bratchetworm, in the flesh, just like from the stories.

  Glace took a moment to stare in awe before it, also like in the stories, barrelled towards her, and she only narrowly ducked out of the way, the creature smashing into the ground and letting out a horrific screech.

  She ran as far as she could, Rav following behind, as the creature reared back up and looked around for her.

  In the story of Rescarl the Mighty and the Bratchetworm, a personal favourite of hers growing up, the bratchetworm locked onto its targets, and did not return back to its burrow until one of them perished. That part seemed to be true. She just hoped that she could say the same its meat being delicious.

  She pierced the creature twice with a pair of arrows, and it did not even flinch in pain. Arrows still in its underbelly, it dived for her again, and she only barely managed to dodge out of the way.

  Rav had disappeared from her vision at this point, and her heart started to race even further imagining something happening to him.

  She shot a few more futile arrows at the creature, a few of which stuck in its chest, and the rest fell to the floor, none of them leaving as much as a dent.

  What happened in the story? She racked her brain for how Rescarl defeated the worm as she once again dived out of the way of the creature’s sharp maw. It wasn’t his blade that defeated it, she recalled, but his bow. There was a specific place he shot it - maybe its eye?

  Another shot flew forward, right into the creature’s eye. No visible effect. Maybe she needed to shoot all of its eyes, all six of them, or maybe in its mouth, she pondered as she reached for her quiver for another arrow, only to find that there were none left.

  ‘Fuck!’ she muttered to herself, sprinting away to try to build as much distance between her and the creature as possible. A pile of arrows had now accumulated beneath it, but she saw no way of retrieving them. Then, the bratchetworm lifted up its enormous body, and revealed Rav on the other side, trying and failing to scratch and bite at the creature.

  ‘Rav!’ she cried, and jolted forward. The dog continued to try to attack, and the bratchetworm had seemingly shifted its focus onto him.

  Glace slid under the worm, kicking up dirt and covering herself in muck, and grabbed a singular arrow from the ground. In one fell motion, she practically kicked Rav out of the way, throwing him to the side and, more importantly, to safety, before firing her arrow right into the creature’s mouth.

  It paused mid-dive, and Glace suddenly remembered what happened in the story after Rescarl killed the bratchetworm. She ran towards Rav, picked him up, and ran as far as she could.

  Behind her, the bratchetworm exploded. It collapsed with a bang into around ten chunks of meat, red and warm like a mammal’s, each one about half the size of her.

  After wiping some mixture of blood and dirt off her clothes and Rav’s fur, she picked up a singular slab of meat and began to walk back to Earthwhisper, her home.

  ‘You see, Rav,’ she said to the dog as it walked beside her as though nothing had happened, ‘it’s always best to retrieve your arrows where you can.’

  The dog barked.

  ‘We can’t have all of it, Rav, it’s too heavy, and there aren’t that many of us that’d eat it. It’d all spoil before we got to it. Best let nature feed from it.’

  She whistled jaunty tunes as she wandered back from her hunt, in no rush at all. The sun still hung in the sky, the birds still twittered above her, and she had enough meat to feed her family for weeks. She thought wistfully of the looks on each of their faces when she brought it back, imagining her mother’s smile, her father’s firm nod, her brothers’ shining eyes, her grandfather’s-

  Fire. As she reached the familiar clearing in the woods her family, and all the other families to make up Earthwhisper, called home, she smelled only fire. Smoke choked the air, crackling could be heard getting closer and closer, and soon she reached her home.

  No one was screaming when she arrived. It was far too late for that. Every building had fallen to ruin, burnt to ash. Their crops blazed, turned to irrecognisable cinders. Bodies lay strewn across the ground, each one someone she recognised, each one some she wished she could cradle in her arms and heal with whatever methods she could, each one far past the point of saving.

  The only living creatures were the men in red and steel from earlier, holding pitchforks and handfuls of glistening jewels.

  One of the men turned and looked at her.

  She dropped the slab of carcass, and sprinted away.

  Earthwhisper had been destroyed. Glace Nextern was without a home.