Eco|Knights

The sound of screaming filled my ear to the brim with pain. The sound of a mother yellowing at the top of her lungs, as if protecting a child with her life. Perhaps because that is what was happening. A red liquid soaking the soil for the plants to ingest. My hands trembled, not from fear nor anxiety, but something else.

This woman and her child were accused of murder by the High Council, yet had escaped. The guard who let them out at night had been taken into the barracks of questioning, but these two were sentenced to death by the hands of the Hunters.

The mother looked to be in her mid-40’s while her child was but 12. I, and four other Hunters, surrounded the two in the thick sea of trees, 8 miles out of the capital walls.

“By order of the High Council, Emilia Dourmaker and Gregory Dourmaker, you have been sentenced to death for the murder against your husband and his father, as well as the death of two Eco Knights and the tampering with their eco-devices for forbidden uses,” said a female Hunter with a black mask and red lines going down the eye-sockets and to the jaw, as if it were crying blood. “Zero, do it.”

I froze in place. Me? Why would I do it? I pulled a crescent dagger from behind my hip as I step forward. My body trembling at the idea of murdering a helpless mother and her child based on accusations.

“Is this what you want, Allan?! To kill innocent people for a crime they didn’t commit?” The mother shouted at me. How did she know my name?

Soon the area began to change and the Hunters around me grew further away and the women grew closer. “You tampered with things behind your knowledge. It is punishable by death,” said the female Hunter.
“Do it,” the mother said to me. “Allow yourself to kill people for daring to investigate pneuma outside the bloody academy! Follow your masters orders without question!” She kept shouting as I pulled back and then sliced her neck wide open. Blood hitting my face, more than it should have. It just kept coming out like a fountain.

The boy looked up at me with apathetic eyes as cold as ice. “You killed my mom. You’re a monster. A monster. A monster. A monster.” He kept repeating. The voice growing louder and louder as the area became darker until it faded to black.

I shut up from my sleep, drenched in sweat. It was morning already. The cool air and morning dew o the grass under me. It was unlike anything I was really used to.

The Seekers were all up, laughing and bringing food in. Toyoki throwing a deer’s carcass on the ground and pulling out a skinning knife as he began to cut open the body.

“Zero, you’re up,” said Kylith. “We should talk.” I nodded and walked away from the camp with Kylith until we were about 30 feet away. He was about 5’11”, and me, I was only 5’4”, so he towered over me. Well, everyone towered over me. I was often mistaken to be a girl by many, due to my feminine features.

“You’re Hunters, what’s your plan?” he asked me.

“My plan?” I asked. Did he mean what I planned to do with the thief?

“The one who stole the artifact,” he started as he leaned against a tree and folded his arms. His brown hair moving in the wind as he occasionally pulled it back behind his head. “We can only do so much, and we’re doing what we can, but you’re the tracker, not us.”

That was true, we were the ones supposed to track this man. “Well,” I started to say, “our eco devices derive much of our power from the artifact, since it puts out so much pneuma, so with that we can track its location by following the trail. However, I was given some details on the individual. They used shadow magic, so their pneumatic element is shadow. I believe they’re casting a shadow to hide their tracks, but all leads are pointing to the Northwest. If you can lead us there, we can take him out.”

“Northwest?” Kylith looked a little confused. “Ain’t nothing west of here but the coast on the other side of the Yupatchi mountains, so I hope you like the cold weather.”
“Is there a way around it?” I asked. He shook his head and told me that there was no way around it unless I wanted to search for this guy for almost a year. A year we didn’t have. The artifact had to be retuned as soon as possible.
“Right, sounds fine. You think you can take this guy down?” Kylith asked.
“It’s our job,” I replied as I looked over at the camp. The Seekers packing up and getting ready to move out, the Hunters a little slow in that regard since they were unaware of some schedule. The Seekers worked together like clockwork, like they all knew how long to eat, when to pack-up and when to move. “Just stay out of out way and we should be fine.”

We began to walk once more, heading northwest towards the Yupatchi mountain range. If all went well, they’d catch up to this individual soon and return home. But why would anyone want to steal the artifact? Clearly everyone has a motive, so what is theirs?

No matter how much I tried to come up with a reason, I could not come up with a single thing. Maybe when we find them then they will tell us everything we need to know.

We walked for minutes, which turned to hours, entering an open field with lush green rash and a cool breeze. Wild beasts roamed the plains and feasted upon the green of the land. A large beast with a round body, two tusks sticking from its mouth and white fur. It had a yellow eye, three, to be correct, with the center one starring right at me. Such exotic animals were foreign to me.

“Time to hunt,” Johan shouted. That was when the brilliance of his pneuma was to be displaced. He held his right hand out, revealing the gauntlet with the blew orb at the center. It glowed as the energy from the atmosphere gathered and he clapped his hands, placed them on the ground and the earth rumbled.

The beast that had been staring at me was provoked into a charge by a rock being thrown at it by Kylith and Jefferson, which seemed odd until earth surrounded the beast at the front, crashing into an earthen wall and soon fenced in by it, as it surrounded the creature on all sides.

This was the power of pneumatic creation, something learned only from the academy, but I was surprised Johan didn’t try something more aggressive himself, considering his past as a Hunter. I should ask him about that.