Fate of the 57th Expedition

"Do you think we should turn around now? We can always head back; say we tried." The words came from Argus, who was about as old as he was cranky - that is to say, very. He stared into the small fire at the center of our camp - not too big, or it would attrack unwanted attention, but large enough to provide a measure of warmth and light.
"And leave the towns vulnerable?" Cinder argued. While Argus and Whitberry were the senior charters with the most experience, he, as the dutiful, rational thinker, was the leader - along with his Bond, Mina, our cartography expert.
"Vulnerable to what?" Whitberry argued. "Those fires were probably just caused by accidents at the foundries. And before you go talking about the eyewitnesses, half were children and the other half were smokesick."
"Either way, we can't go back until we're successful, whether it's securely mapping the outskirts of the towns or finding and ridding the creature that attacked them," Mina said dutifully.
The four of them began to argue more, making sure to keep their voices quiet. I shook my head, whittling at the stick I had found, because everyone knew that ashdew wood made the best spears, and it was about the time to carve a new one. Also, it probably looked cool, and I needed to impress the elder members of my company.
"You'd think they were squabbling university students, not professionals on an expedition," Kass said quietly to me. I smiled at her and nodded. Our Bonds both had jobs back in the Cities, but most charter's Bonds did, so we were often put into partnerships that complemented each other's skills. Both Kass and I had recently graduated from training a little less than two years ago, but had both of us had been on three successful expeditions. I, as a tracker, and Kass, as a field scholar, made valuable but not always essential additions to core expedition groups, so we were often sent on the semi-important but more grandiose quests.
"I think once you reach a point of professionality, you come full circle to bickering again," I whispered back. We grinned at each other, and Kass returned to softly murmuring commands at the quill and paper in front of her. She hadn't just inherited an increasingly rare scrivener quill - she had mastered the use of it, so much so that with only a few words from her, the quill would leap into action and draw a fairly realistic sketch of the animal she was cataloguing.
"Do you think we'll actually find the creature?" I asked after a while. One day we'd rediscover the ancient magics, and the spears we created - if we needed any spears at all - would be more deadly than ever. We wouldn't have to fear the eaglebears or the savage griffins, though maybe those spiders I've heard about would still give us grief. For now, the ashdew wood would have to suffice.
Kass stared into the dying fire as the argument reached a new volume. "I hope so, Ava." she said at last. "I mean, I don't think it'll be a pleasant experience, but can you imagine if we did?" Her eyes gained a new sparkle; she didn't just study flora and fauna, but the old folktales as well. If only they weren't so old, and we weren't recovering from such a devasting catastophe. But the skyshattering had happened over sixty years ago. Still, we couldn't just move on; that was the whole goal of the charters. Perhaps there was something here in the Outer Realm that pointed to a clue about the magics of the past...
I think I was more interested in magic than Kass; she was primarily fascinated by old folktales. In fact, she'd started telling ghost stories two weeks ago, even though traditionally we didn't start recounting the old stories for another three months. And this situation - one of a specter haunting and destroying many outlying villages - had many elements of those old tales.
Eventually Cinder hushed Argus with a final reprimand, the fire died, and we fell silent. I laid next to Kass - charters didn't use tents, only warding spices in a circle around our camp - but I didn't lean against her, nor did she lay her wing over me, and I didn't mind, even though it was a cooler night. Maybe one day, several expeditions from now, we'd feel close enough to curl up next to each other, but for now both of us felt like the action was something we should reserve for our Bonds.
Still, having her close by felt reassuring. I watched the night sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of some star sprites, but there were none out tonight. So for now I closed my eyes, the patterns of the constellations dancing in my mind as I slipped off to sleep.

A messy sketch of the 57th Expedition's journey:

Although the scroll itself is poorly sketched and fairly small, it was a unique mapping done by the group's cartographer during their stay at the cabin and, along with her other maps, provides a little bit of insight into the exact area of the cabin. Of course, that doesn't mean any group of has since been successful in finding it. Nevertheless, one could analyze it so see how clearly define the steps of their journey were.
Almost all expeditions in the chartership begin at the Intercity Cartography Station. Here, companies are assmebled based on the unique skill of their members. The company is briefed and spends a little bit of time training as a team, honing their necessary skills, and reviewing any maps or other information they will need on the journey.
Many of them may stop at outposts on the way as well. The charter outposts provide crucial places to rest, resupply, and pass on maps and catalogues to the outpost archives so less information is at risk of being lost.
Here is where the path of the 57th Expedition begins to differ, becoming unique, as all expeditions must eventually do. The forests and meadows they visited are well-catalogued, but, seeing as the exxpedition happened so long ago, it's almost impossible to decipher the exact trail they took.
But by whatever path, they eventually came to the cabin. And their records from that area are barely decipherable. All we know is that the cabin is where everything went horribly wrong...

Two more weeks passed, dragging the timespan of the expedition to a month and a half. Argus and Whitberry grumbled a bit more, but everyone knew they had no actual intentions of abandoning the quest. And with their expertise, the expedition was relatively uneventful for the entirety of the two weeks - well, as uneventful as trekking through the wilds of the Outer Realm could be, but we were charters, and charters always made it through.
Except when we didn't. In fact, not three months ago we had been forced to abandon the search for a lost charter that had been separated from his company. He wasn't much older than me. But I tried not to think about that.
Then, one day, we came across a dark patch of trees. And as I peered into the shadows, I saw what appeared to be huge white cobwebs. With that, my blood chilled.
Spiders.
"There's a way around this, right?" I asked, still not sure how I had missed signs of the huge creatures. To which Whitberry shook her head and pointed to the thick canopy above us. The only way out of the trees would be cutting down a huge portion of the forest. So unless we wanted to take a detour that took weeks, the only was to fully get around the outskirts was...
"I suppose we'll have to add this to the maps," Mina sighed. That would be a headache. The map room was already complicated enough
"We're not going through that, right?" I clarified.
"We have a mission," Cinder said gravely.
"One that includes not dying," I emphasized. To which, of course, all of the older people sighed, shook their heads, and gave each other little smiles like they were saying, 'isn't she cute?'
"Calm down, Ava," Whitberry said. "We'd go around if we needed to. But we don't, because we have me." She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled very slowly, flaring her wings. One of the most unique things about Whitberry were those wings - the ones that were largely made of feather, something unique to her and her alone. She'd never told me why she had feathers, and anyone I asked just told me I should wait and see. She was certainly one of the best fliers I knew, but I had a feeling whatever was happening now was more than flying. So I paid close attention as a sudden breeze ruffled her feathers, shaking one free. Argus caught it, holding it out as Whitberry gently exhaled a tiny plume of flame - just enough to set the feather alight. Then she breathed in, breathed out in that slow, steady way. The lit feather zipped across the spiderwebs, catching some of them alight. The fire didn't burn out of control - it just smoldered long enough to burn a path through the layers of cobsilk, flurrying remarkable fast, far, and straight for something so tiny.
"There. I'll have to do that every twenty minutes or so, but we should get through the thicket before the end of the day," Whitberry assured us. "Just make sure sure to add this area to the maps so that future parties can navigate around."
"What...what was that?" I asked. "Was that magic?"
Whitberry said nothing, and Cinder merely called, "I want all partners to mount up with each other. If you need to, tie yourself to a dragon with a rope."
"Wait, was that magic?" I asked Kass, so distracted by my curiosity that I briefly forgot my fear of the spiders.
Kass's eyes were wide. Twenty years ago, the chartership was founded. Thirty years before that, the Ashes War ended. Forty years prior was the beginning of the Plague...Whitberry could be just barely old enough to still have a knack. I leaned closer to her. "You remember the stories of old magics - ones founded on the talents someone was most skilled at? You only developed that special knack at age fifteen, and some people are still old enough to have those powers. That means Whitberry..."
"Is at least one hundred and five years old," Kass murmured, doing the math quickly. "She must be excited to retire." She looked back, eyes sparkling with the joke. She knew what I had meant, but I corrected her anyway.
"Not just that. She still has a knack. She'd basically a wizard! A spellcaster! Don't you know what this means? She must have so much knowledge about the workings of magic! I have to interview her!" I suddenly found myself envisioning a world where everyone could so something as breathtaking as Whitberry - maybe something even more magical. Wouldn't that be...
"Ava! Kass! Pair up! Or do you want to get eaten by the spiders?"
That sent a chill down my spine, and I quickly hopped onto Kass. "They're not...close by, are they?"
"Well, they're not going to attack a group of dragons, that's for sure," Cinder said as Mina hopped onto his back. I followed suit with Kass, then asked if she minded me securing myself to her with some of the rope that was in my pack. She didn't mind, and I felt a lot better with the line securely knotted around my waist.
"Well, Ava, lead the way," Mina gestured to the path that had been carved through the cobwebs.
I swallowed, but it was my job as a tracker to direct the group across the thickets. Mainly I'd been leading them in a path that circled the outskirts of the border villages while avoiding the signs of the more dangerous animals - though I don't know how I missed the fact that there was a whole section of the woodlands overrun with giant spiders directly ahead of us. Actually, they left almost no trace except directly around their domain. Which was odd, as I would've expected some sort of sign - if not from the spiders, from the patterns of other woodland creatures. It was almost like they'd only been around for a few weeks - which was impossible, juding by the vastness and many layers of the webs around us.
Either way, as we'd trekked, I hadn't just been leading us in a general direction. I'd also occasionaly catch glimpses of someone who'd traveled here at least a few weeks before. Things like a hastily scattered campfire. A log chopped in half too cleanly. Bones that were licked a little too clean, despite only looking a few weeks old. The telltale grime of mushroom spores - ones that had died because their parent had been eaten too soon, and now remained on the ground because they had no nutritional value. Also, the fungus clusters I'd spotted several times only grew with a certain nutrient - one that was abundant in the feces of someone surviving on harvest corn rations. It seemed like someone sapient - perhaps a charter? - had been trekkling through these same woods, not too distantly from us. But there weren't any other expeditions in this secter - were there?
I'd only briefly mentioned these signs to Kass, because they hadn't seemed relevant to the goal at hand. I myself had barely given them any regard until, three feather rotations into the cobwebs, I spotted a little divet in the cloud at the base of the tree. One populated by small, red-petaled flowers - blooms that were not native to this particular forest biome, that often sprouted when exposed to ingredients prominent in a charter's healing salves. A tussle, perhaps, and a spill? There could be other reasons for their presence here, of course. But combined with everything else - including those strange, black marks on the trees...
"Kass," I whispered. "I think something's wrong."
That was, of course, the perfect moment for a string of thick, white webbing to wrap around my arms, pincers to snap the rope connecting me to Kass, and huge, black shapes to carry me away from the party and into the forest.
I screamed. There's no need to explain what the creatures looked like. They were jet black spiders with grey feet, and they were enormous and fast. They probably would've dragged me into their maze of webs and tunnels if I hadn't been clutching my spear so tightly; as it was, I only just managed to stab the one dragging me - right through the abdomen. It wasn't even a very good stab, barely puncuring skin and falling out as quickly as it had gone in, but it caught the spider off guard just enough to make it release the webs that were attached to my arms.
I hit the forest floor hard, almost hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Thankfully, at that moment Kass leapt over me, exhaling a burst of flame at the spiders who were scuttling toward me. Then she grabbed me and crashed blindly through the forest, burning spiderwebs before us and periodically slashing at the arachnids pursuing behind. Somehow I managed to get on her back, though I had lost my spear and probably my knife in the chaos. As it was, I could barely cling onto her, whimpering in fear (though if anyone asks, I never whimper) until we crashed out of the thicket and into the clearing, the rest of our party miraculously behind us (or maybe not miraculously, because it's not that hard to track a dragon crashing through the woods).
At some point, the spiders must have given up the chase - which was smart, because if they had emerged into that clearing to face off three dragons they would have all been incinerated, or ripped apart if the dragons had run out of fire, which they might have already, depending on how hard they'd fought the spiders.
I slipped off Kass, laying on the ground as I recovered from my terror and panted like I'd just sprinted a thousand spans.
"Are you okay?" Kass asked me. I nodded breathlessly.
"Told you I'd get us through the cobwebs," I said when I got my voice back, standing shakily. It was only then that I got a good look at our surroundings. A relatively small clearing overgrown with moss and grasses. But I didn't miss the streaks of black in the white ground - and that was before I noticed the old, relatively small, decrepit cabin. Strangely enough, although it was dragon-sized (barely), it seemed to have been built using ground dweller techniques, with dead and boring planks nailed together instead of grown from living, twisting branches.
Before anyone could do or say a thing, the door creaked open, and out stepped a specter of a man. He was taller than I was and made of swirling darkness, glowing red irises, and a shadow that writhed across the grasses of the cabin's 'lawn'.
Oh, tails and talons. Falls below, stars above. We'd found him. We'd actually found the specter.
Cinder leapt into action. Oh, how I wish he hadn't. But he was our leader. He was out of fire from fighting the spiders, but that didn't stop him from charging the specter, mouth open and roaring. He was normally such a calm thinker, slow to act but effective when he did. Maybe he thought the only way to save us from the creature was to sacrifice himself in a brave charge that would kill the both of them, completing the mission with as little bloodshed as possible.
The specter waited in the doorway of the cabin calmly. As Cinder approached, he stretched forth a hand. As soon as they connected, Cinder dropped to the ground. His fiery orange scales were drained of all color, his body of energy, leaving the Specter standing taller in the doorway. He looked at our group, doing nothing - and when his eyes met mine, I just about had a heart attack.
It was Kass who saved us. Maybe it was her expertise of old tales, or maybe she was pulling this ploy out of the abyss. Either way, she bowed her head and spoke in a loud, clear voice. "Mister Specter, forgive Cinder's impulses. He always did get easily frightened, and reacted a little too hastily." She winced at the lie, but continued. "As are ambassadors from the people of the Inner Realm, we are here to negotiate with you. And if it is alright, we would like to stay here for a while, learning of you, your kind, and their ways. We can find our own food, require little shelter, and will never attack you if you never attack us. Please, let our interactions become a bridge between our peoples rather than another case of needless bloodshed. Let us find peace."
I don't think the Specter agreed with everything she said, but he paused, eyes roving between everyone in our company. Again, when his gaze fell on me, I felt that jolt of fear. But I remained still. Even Mina, who had tears streaming down her face and a hand over her mouth - she and Cinder were the only actual Bonds in our party - made no noise. And after what seemed like an age and a day, that Specter gave a slow nod of his head and retreated into the cabin, beckoning us inside.